Tech Won't Save Us - Why Tech Makes Us More Insecure w/ Astra Taylor

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Astra Taylor to discuss how capitalism creates insecurity to sustain itself, the way tech is used to make us more insecure, and what it will take to change that.Astra Taylor is a writer, filmmaker, and political organizer. She’s the author of The Age of Insecurity and co-founder of the Debt Collective. Her next book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, written with Leah Hunt-Hendrix, comes out in March. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.  The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.  Also mentioned in this episode:Astra wrote about the Insecurity Machine for Logic Magazine and the Dads of Tech for The Baffler.Find excerpts from The Age of Insecurity in The New York Times and The Walrus.Become a supporter on Patreon to join our giveaway.Support the show

Part of my argument for how we get out of some of the messes we're in and change things so that we have more of that sort of material political security that we're talking about is that we actually have to face our vulnerability. And we have to say, OK, we're all insecure. Therefore, we need each other. And let's band together to fight for a world that meets our basic needs. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get to this week's guest, I just wanted to let you know about a little holiday giveaway that we're doing here on the show. So as you know, the show relies on the

support of listeners like you to keep making it, to keep having these fantastic conversations like the one that you're going to hear in just a minute. But if you have been on the fence for a while or considering becoming a Patreon supporter, now might be the time to do it. Because if you support the show before the end of the year, the year, by December 31st, you will be entered into a draw for one of five signed copies of Joanne McNeil's new book, Wrong Way. Remember, she was on the show just recently. Or five copies of my book, Road to Nowhere. So that is 10 books that you have the chance to win. And in order to enter, you need to sign up to become a Patreon supporter.

And of course, if you're already a Patreon supporter, you will have the option to enter into that draw as well. But what better thing to do at the end of the year than to support a show that hopefully you enjoy very much and also get a chance to get a new signed book in the process. So give it a thought. If you want, you can pause the show right here,

go over to patreon.com slash techw't save us and become a supporter, or, you know, just keep it in mind as you're listening. collective. I've been meaning to have Astra on the show for a while. We talked about it about a year or so ago and just had some scheduling issues. And I was so happy that we reconnected and could finally have her on the show to talk about her new book and, you know, some of the other work that she's been doing over the years that relates to technology, the tech industry, some of the subjects that we talk about quite often. And I think that this was an important conversation to have because it relates to a lot of the topics that we've been talking about, you know, over the past year and even longer, especially when you consider the difficulties that a lot of people, that workers

face and how the tech industry can make those things worse. As the title of Astra's new book suggests, it is about insecurity, something that more and more people, I think it's fair to say, are feeling in their lives and something that we see the tech industry and their new kind of innovative, quote unquote, business models making even worse. So I was thrilled to have Astra on the show to dig into the book, to dig into her perspectives on these issues. You know, we talk a bit about some Canadian political stuff, because Astra also a Canadian and this book deals with some Canadian issues, but I'm sure you won't mind that. You love hearing a little bit about Canada. So I don't want to make this intro too long, but I'll also just say, obviously the holidays

are upon us. So whatever it is that you celebrate, I hope you have a really great time or able to spend some time with friends or family. And thanks so much for the fantastic year. Tech Won't Save Us wouldn't be possible with all of your listens and support. And I think that 2023 has been really fantastic for the podcast. And of course, you know, you're a big part of that. So thank you so much. With that said, if you enjoy this week's conversation, make sure to leave a five star review on the podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want a chance at winning one of five

signed copies of Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way, or one of five signed copies of my book Road to Nowhere, while supporting all the work that goes into making the show possible, you can join supporters like Yuto in Tokyo, Keith in Cary, North Carolina, Mo from New York, and Peter in New Haven, Connecticut, by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Astra, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm so happy to be here. Ah, I'm so excited to have you on the show. You know, we've been, we talked about it in the past for a bit and then took a break, but then, you know, you had this new book out based on, you know, some massive lectures that you gave up here in Canada. And it was, I thought, the perfect opportunity to finally have you on the

show and chat. So I'm happy to dive into that. And I'm sure so much more. And so, you know, let's start with the concept of these lectures and this book, which is really insecurity. Why was this the thing that really drove you? And why did you feel compelled to explore this, you know, in much greater depth in these lectures? Yeah, I just want to say I'm so happy to be on your show. And it's true. We talked about it years ago. And, you know, especially thanks for having me when this isn't an explicitly tech focused book, though, I chat about tech a little bit in it. The idea to write about insecurity actually was prompted from a conversation with Ben Tarnoff, who's one of the founding editors of Logic Magazine. I'm probably someone who's familiar to your listeners, who was

putting together an issue of the magazine with the theme of security. And so he called me up asking if I might want to write for it. And, you know, I just remember saying in response, well, what if I talk about the way that capitalism is actually an insecurity generating machine, the way capitalism actually needs insecurity as much as it needs inequality. And so I ended up writing a piece for Logic called The Insecurity Machine that had a very tech focus because that was actually the raison d'etre of the magazine, right? As that article wrapped up and went out into the world, I had this lingering sense that there was more to explore and that it was a sort of framework that I could apply to other realms in addition to tech. So looking at basic material

conditions from housing and healthcare to things like education to human psychology, I just felt like it was one of those pieces that could actually be expanded. And the opportunity presented itself when I was invited to give this year's 2023 Massey Lectures in Canada. The challenge was essentially, you know, write a short-ish book in a matter of months so that they could have copies on hand. And then I got to deliver the five chapters or five lectures in five Canadian cities. And I did that in September. And so it was one of these concepts that kind of emerged out of sort of two prompts or invitations. What I'm trying to show in the book is that insecurity is really central to the way that capitalism operates and that we need to be rendered insecure in order to be exploitable.

And so I sort of use that as a lens to explore various social dilemmas. And it's one of those concepts for me, it spans the personal and the political and the economic and the emotional. And so, you know, it just kind of was able to sort of take it in all these different directions that I found pretty fun as a writer. Yeah. And the book is fantastic. Like, as you say, it's not a totally kind of tech focused book, but there's so much to delve into there. And, you know, I found it really great as well, obviously being Canadian, but also knowing a whole lot about the States and writing about the States often, the kind of interplay that happens in the book and in that work between concepts in Canada and things happening in Canada and relating them to the

United States as well. Like, I feel like I don't see so much of that. And, you know, I'm sure because, you know, you needed to relate it to a Canadian audience because you were up here, but I'm also hoping that, you know, maybe Americans pick it up and learn a bit more about things happening up this side of the world as well. Yeah, it was, it's my most Canadian book for sure. And, and that was, you know, really actually part of the pleasure of writing it was knowing that I'd have these lecture stops where I'd literally be speaking to people in Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory. Or I'd speak to people in Halifax and wanting to make it sort of resonant and relatable for those specific audiences, but also universal. And so a big chunk of it was excerpted in The New York Times when it came out.

And my editor, after he read the book, he was like, oh, it's really interesting. Let's definitely read an excerpt. It does have a lot of Canada in it. But, you know, I think it's really important, actually, for Americans to learn more about Canada and not just invoke it as this idealized place. Right. You know, so there's a rather long disquisition about the crisis of the public health system. I think that that's important. But also I did try to also pierce that veil of Canadian smugness throughout the book too and say crisis of indebtedness in the United States that I, Astrid Taylor, have been organizing around. But guess what? It's really bad in Canada too. So hopefully the lessons sort of flow both ways. And then in terms of the tech stuff, I mean, I used to write a lot more explicitly about technology ever since my first book is The People's Platform and Taking Back Culture and Power in a Digital Age. It came out in 2014. And what I've done since then is try to just not silo tech as its own thing, to just write explicitly about tech, but to show that it's a facet of every aspect of our lives, right? Because it's part of our work experience, it's part of our education experience, it's part of healthcare, it's part of our social lives, it's part of our romantic lives. And to just, you know, sort of put it in there without cutting it off or reifying it or pretending that it's somehow separated from these other social fields. Yeah, well, you know, you talk about tech, you know, and how you've been writing about tech for

a long time, which I don't know, might surprise some listeners, maybe not, maybe they're familiar with the People's Platform, maybe not. You know, I read the book, I think a little bit after it was released, but I found it a really great one. But that year as well, you know, you were also writing with friend of the show, Joanne McNeil, you know, a piece in the bathroom called The Dads of Tech, I believe it was, you know, and I feel like that was a time when Silicon Valley itself was still very kind of idealized, you know, a lot of the reporting was still very positive on it. So I wonder kind of what you were seeing in that moment that was making you kind of look at this industry or these technologies in a different way than, you know, I think the public was still largely seeing them at that time. Yeah. It's interesting to think back to that moment. I mean,

it's almost hard, I think, sitting here today in 2023 to remember just how over the top and utopian some of the rhetoric about the internet was specifically about social media and about the potential of these new tech companies to disrupt the old media monoliths and sort of get rid of middlemen. So there's this whole idea of disintermediation that we as citizens or as cultural producers or just as amateurs in whatever field would suddenly have this direct connection to, you know, one another, to our audiences or to potential sources of income. And then it was going to be, you know, radically democratizing and all of that. So I started going to a lot of these conferences and reading a lot of the tech books. And the basic analogy at the time was sort of Napster. We're going to Napsterize everything, Napsterize democracy, Napsterize these other industries. And so the analogies came from the cultural, the cultural field,

and they were being extrapolated to the sort of political and the social and the economic. And as somebody who is a cultural producer and knows a lot of artists and knows a lot of musicians, I was like, hold on, this isn't happening. Like, you know what we've got? We've got like the old guard of Hollywood and the cable industry, and we've got this new corporate guard of Google and Facebook and we've got, and they're not disintermediating anything. They're just new mediators. So we have double the gatekeepers and they're collaborating in lots of ways and they're engaging in vertical integration. Like, what are you people talking about? But it did make me then

wonder, okay, well, you know, what is salvageable here? And is the problem tech itself, or is it the underlying business model? And so what I tried to inject into the debate back then was just a bit more political economy. You know, the problem is not technology, it's economic incentives and the business model structuring it. And the fact that so much of our technical experiences is actually funded fundamentally by advertising. Now we talk about surveillance capitalism as one way of describing that. But just the conversation was just, it was so full of shit, man. And these people would get on stage and write these books, and they'd write the same book over and over

about how everything was changing for the better because there were these new companies. And I was like, no, no, there's a lot of continuity here. Like a lot of these debates are debates we've had before around other media. And ultimately, you know, I was making a socialist case for state investment in culture, communications, infrastructure, the public good, all the things that listeners of your show know really well and conversations that have advanced in really interesting ways. But yeah, it was a lot of debunking. And so the piece that you mentioned, the Dads of Tech that I wrote with Joanne is definitely one of the more fun things I've ever written because it was just us sort of lampooning the misogyny of the tech world. And I just have

to say every single guy we criticized in that piece got in touch with us and told us we were wrong. Like in Silicon Valley, like billionaire investors, you know, they were like, read this article in the Baffler and got their feelings hurt over it and had to reach out. I love that because when you think of like, you know, what so many of these powerful figures in Silicon Valley are like into today, where they've been like very radicalized. They, you know, are increasingly embracing these like right wing politics. And the question is like, was this always there? Or, you know, is this something new? And it's like, they've always been these people.

I will say about two weeks ago, I was at a coffee shop in New York, and I looked up and I realized it was like, another table was one of the guys we were most vicious about. No. Anyway, I think it's a good piece. People should read it. It's fun. Yeah, absolutely. I will include it in the show notes for people to go check out.

I guess kind of related to that, I think when we talk about tech, there has been a big recognition, especially in the past few years, even if it wasn't so much on the radar or not as many people were recognizing it in 2014, that in the past few years, there's been a real kind of, I don't know, wake up in the impact of the tech industry on the world that we're inhabiting. And I feel like the recognition of how it propels insecurity has been a really kind of important part of that. And that of course comes out in the logic piece that you wrote, but also, you know, the lectures that you prepared. What do you see in the way that these technologies are connected to these business models that allows them to be used in this way? Right. So I think actually, you know, I can actually channel a bit

of the people's platform here because what I was, part of what I said at the introduction to that book is we need to emphasize continuity as much as change. So in that book, I talk about how the old forces of consolidation, centralization, commercialism are still present. Those, those problems from the old media model are still present in, in, you know, the, the digital landscape and that continuity is really essential. So in this book, The Age of Insecurity, it also takes that view of like, okay, what actually within the kind of capitalist paradigm has been consistent? And one of the analogies I make is between this sort of digital revolution and the enclosure movement. So the enclosure movement, of course, again, your

listeners will be familiar as sort of the dawn of market society, the dawn of capitalism as we know it. And, you know, for the period of many centuries through thousands and thousands of acts of parliament, millions of acres in England were enclosed, you know, literally turned from once common fields and forests into privately owned property, enriching the landlord class. And this pushed people off of their homes, you know, changed the mode of production because people could no longer sort of provide for themselves and their families through subsistence agriculture. So people were made insecure. And as a result of that insecurity, you know, had nothing to sell but their labor.

And this was really conscious. I mean, when you read the commentary from enclosures, they say this is their goal explicitly. And one of my favorite quotes in the book is a landlord saying, when you're doing this enclosure business and you're putting up your fences and your hedges, don't plant trees that bear fruit because the idol will be tempted to eat for free. And so capitalism begins with what I call the manufacture of insecurity. So that manufactured insecurity is there at the genesis because you don't have people who have nothing to sell with their labor unless you have insecurity first, right? And so that displacement. And so what I say explicitly in the book is the enclosure movement,

right? That privatization has been rebranded. It was rebranded as creative destruction in the book, is the enclosure movement, right? That privatization has been rebranded. It was rebranded as creative destruction in the 50s, and then it was rebranded as disruption, right? Disintermediation. There's sort of these tech buzzwords that are really about keeping that engine of manufacturing insecurity going. And so now what enclosures have is just more digital tools in their arsenal. So workers can be tracked. Delivery workers, it's getting to be the holidays, thinking about all these people racing around delivering packages, but it's radiologists, it's white collar workers being tracked on their computers. I mean, these are the kinds of tools that these enclosures could only, they couldn't even have dreamed of them, right? But it is, the continuity is essential. And I think this is

part of the project of, you know, not fetishizing tech is to be like, okay, what's really new here? Like, yeah, it's old wine in a microchipped bottle, but like, let's get real. The goals are the same and the power dynamics are actually, you know, really familiar. And that helps us resist the kind of self-mythologizing. The guys do. The guys that Joanne and I attacked in our article, the dads of tech. I feel like what you're describing there really speaks to how this industry

and I'm sure capitalism more generally benefits from us not understanding those histories, right? And not understanding the connection between what's happening now and what's happening then and the real through lines that exist that show how these are not novel things. When we talk about how surveillance is being rolled out in the workplace or how employers are using technologies against workers to disempower them and devalue their labor, these things happen again and again. It's just like a new fresh coat of paint, a new fresh set of technologies that they're deploying, right?

Yeah. And a lot of work is done to obscure that history. I think part of the reframing I'm doing in these lectures is to say insecurity really is at the center of this. Because when some of us who rail on about the economy day and night, we tend to emphasize some of its pathological consequences, the concentration of wealth and power, just the obscenity that poverty exists in a world where there could be abundance. But I think this aspect of insecurity is really useful because it helps us understand that it's not just the disparities. It's not just the fact that there are a couple of these billionaires, many of them tech billionaires, and people who are struggling to stay housed or stay fed. But the fact that even people who are kind of managing to get ahead a bit or quite a lot, feel like they can never rest. They feel perpetually insecure. And that is not

an accident. Again, to go back to those enclosures, why did they not want those hedges to bear fruit? Because they had a theory of human motivation, which is like you have to keep people insecure to keep them struggling, to keep them striving, to make them more controllable, to make them more efficient and pliable and docile workers. And that is also language that reverberates through the centuries into the present. Absolutely. I feel, you know, you can look at what Elon Musk says about, you know, workers in the United States being lazy and how Chinese workers work harder than them and how, you know, people doing remote work aren't really doing work. These things stick around time and again, right? They just take a different form. Sometimes they're much more explicit and sound quite similar to what we were hearing long ago. You know, obviously the concept of insecurity is,

you know, one that people will have heard about, but if they think about, you know, narratives that we've been hearing from the political left or just in political discourse in recent years, you know, what they've probably heard people talk about much more is inequality, right? And the growing gulf that exists between the rich and the poor. How does talking about insecurity kind of reframe or change some of those debates? And how does it make us think about the problems that we face in a different way? I think talking about inequality is really essential. And it's been such a core theme of my political work as an organizer with the Debt Collective, which is a union for debtors

that I helped found in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. And in my writing, my writing about technology, I mean, it's a big part of the people's platform is that we're seeing that these technologies that people are cheering is democratizing or actually accelerating the concentration of attention and money in the hands of the people who own the platforms that we use every day. Inequality is really key. It's also essential to my work on democracy. You know, inequality undermines the democratic project, the small d democratic project in big ways. But I think it needs to be supplemented

with attention to insecurity. And that's because inequality gives us a snapshot in time. Inequality says, here are the gains captured by the 1%. Here's, you know, how everybody else is suffering. Look at the various income differentials. Here's how deeply unequal this moment is. Insecurity, I argue in the book, actually has two things that kind of supplement that. The first is insecurity actually always looks forward. It anticipates what's coming. And that's really important because as human beings, we live in time. And so I might be okay right now and go, gosh, I've got a fridge full of food. That's cool. And I actually have a place to live,

but if I'm afraid I might lose my job. And so I won't have that fridge full of food and I might not be able to renew my lease, then I'm going to be insecure. And that is an incredibly valid perspective for millions and millions of people right now. This is essential to the political debate that's playing out in the United States right now, where there are all these sort of economists who are like, but by these metrics, the economy is doing great. And I was like, yeah, but in reality, people are like, my rent keeps going up. I don't know if I'll be able to live in a year if I'm, you know. Take a look up from the spreadsheet. Yeah.

Right. Like, and so, you know, I say even that any insecurity is how the point on the spreadsheet feel. And that's really important because one thing I've learned as an organizer is that economic issues are always emotional issues, right? Financial issues are always about your feelings. They try to tell us that these are separate realms and they're not. You know, I think, you know, there needs to be a revolution of economic thought and behavioral economics that does not cut it.

This is not about nudges. This is really about affect with an A and fear. And the right knows this. The right taps into people's fears, taps into people's insecurity, taps into people's fear about losing status down the road. Right. Losing position about what Barbara Ehrenreich, who is one of my favorite writers, you know, the recently passed away author called The Fear of Falling, which is something she said, you know, it is a heuristic that can help us understand people at different gradients of that inequality graph. Because, you know, in the United States today, you know, a simple medical emergency can push a middle class family into homelessness, right? Medical debt is the leading cause of foreclosure. But even in a place like Canada, where there is a more robust social safety net, but a tattered one,

you know, people are increasingly anxious, especially because of the cost of housing, or the cost of groceries, or the fact that they don't necessarily trust what remains of the welfare state will be there, you know, when they're older and in need of more support. So I just, I think it's something, you know, that can're older and in need of more support. So I just, I think it's something, you know, that can help us understand the world and people's emotions better. And that that can help us be better organizers, because ultimately, that is what I'm about. You know, it's like, how do we not just diagnose the problem, but organize people to solve it. And inequality encourages us to look up and down. So we look at Elon Musk and we look at

the unhoused people. And that's really important. I mean, it's sick that we live in a world where that gulf exists, but I think insecurity can help us look sideways too and be like, okay, we're not exactly the same, but you're afraid about what's coming down the pike. And so am I, and maybe we can build some solidarity together. You talk about how it causes you to look forward, right, to what is coming. But I guess part of the book as well is, you know, looking back to how we got to the point we are today. And, you know, you talked about how manufacturing insecurity is really key to the capitalist project. But it feels like we used to be largely in a period where there was a bit more security, you know, the welfare state was more secure, and there were kind of more protections for people when they did fall down. And that had to be really

destroyed in order for us to get to this point where we do feel such great insecurity in the present, I guess. Yeah, it's true. I mean, the one thing I am trying to do with this book is also rethink what security is. And security is a word that I don't necessarily love. It's a little tainted. And I think that's very much for me related to the fact that I sort of came of age politically under the shadow of 9-11, where there was suddenly a lot of talk of national security and homeland security. And, you know, it's not a word that the left really talks about that much these days. You know, it's a word more often invoked by the right. And, you know, it's not a word that the left really talks about that much these days. You know, it's a word more often invoked by the right. And, you know, to me, it conjures

a lot of negative things, you know, policing, militarization, border patrols, and all of that. Nevertheless, I think material security, the security of the welfare state, that kind of security is really important. And it's important for left-wing people to talk about security in that register and to acknowledge how important it is to people. And so, yeah, I mean, the way we structure our economy under capitalism can make us more secure or less so. And obviously there's lots of problems with the mid-20th century welfare state, but it was a really important intervention. I mean, a really critical one. And one thing I learned that I wasn't aware of that sort of is something I sprinkle in there is that during the construction of that welfare state, and this is true in Canada and in the US, talking about

insecurity and security was really, really key. That's how the architects of the welfare state and how the movements, the labor movements demanding the construction of the welfare state and how the movements, the labor movements demanding the construction of that welfare state framed their intervention. They said, insecurity is a plague on people in this world where we could live better. FDR went on and on about security. I mean, obviously we call the most famous sort of, you know, welfare program that we know of, it's social security. And it's a product of that history. You know, it's more sort of evidence that actually it's something that speaks to people, right? That folks were less mobilized by, you know, invocations of inequality in the moment than insecurity,

because they had just lost everything in the Great Depression. They had just experienced a devastating world war. They felt this uncertainty that events beyond their control could bring and the havoc that could be wrought on their families. And so they wanted security. They wanted stability. They wanted that ability to look forward. So I think material security is really essential. And what I try to explore in the lectures a bit too is then, okay, but what does that do for us on that emotional level? And I look at a lot of empirical data and studies that have shown that when people have that baseline of material security, it increases tolerance, open-mindedness, that it is positive, again, for small d democracy in that it makes people sort of less prone to anti-immigrant sentiment, sort of authoritarian appeals.

And so there's all these sort of personal and political benefits that come from the public provision of security. And I think that's really important for us to emphasize in this moment, you know, when authoritarian is on the rise again. Absolutely. And it also kind of makes it very clear or really draws my attention to how the tech industry and, you know, the people in charge of it have used that insecurity against people, right? If you think about in the aftermath of, you know, 2008, 2009, kind of, you know, the really difficult period that people experienced then, you know,

how many people lost their homes, lost their jobs. And then of course you had the tech industry coming in and saying, we're empowering you, we're giving you freedom by carving your work out of employment protections and all this kind of stuff through the gig economy, right? And how they have been able to do that time and again, by using this, the supposed possibility of technology for empowerment to actually disempower and, you know, make people more insecure, I guess. Yeah. I mean, one of the big ironies of corporate America, right, is that they go on and on about entrepreneurial risk taking, but they're always foisting that on the workers, whether that is by, you know, actively undermining the welfare state or through creating gig economy conditions,

you know, or, you know, whatever, a few decades before it was creating gig economy conditions, you know, or, you know, whatever, a few decades before it was just moving towards using, you know, contractors and things like offshoring, right? But meanwhile, the sort of corporate bottom line is insulated from risk, you know, and, you know, we saw that in 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic when, you know, there's just massive intervention, the economy, much of it going to subsidize corporate America. So yeah, that is definitely one of the dynamics that I'm pointing to here. The other thing is that their argument, maybe we could call it their ideology, again, goes back to that question of motivation, right?

So they actually say that by repealing that social safety net, right, by creating a dynamic, disrupted economy where, you know, we're all entrepreneurs of the self, right, we're all little LLCs on our own competing with each other, that we're being the best we can be, right? Because if we were to invest in public provision, in a robust welfare state, in material security, they say, then people will get lazy, right? Then people will shirk. And so there's been this rhetoric, again, going back to enclosure movement, that this is actually a sort of project of public morality, in addition to sort of market efficiency, right? That this makes us good and productive. And it's just bullshit, right? Like that this makes us good and productive.

And it's just bullshit, right? Because there's all sorts of evidence that people are motivated by all kinds of other things. The desire to cooperate, the desire to create, the desire to learn, the desire to take care of each other. And that actually a kind of desperation is inefficient for lots of reasons.

But I think that part is there too, like in the rhetoric, they're not just like, oh, we want to make a lot of money. They're like, and it's good. You know, and you'll be better people as a result of us destroying your financial lives because you'll be scrambling and that's virtuous. Yeah. And you know, it makes me think of like the general narrative of Silicon Valley around work, right? That you need to work long hours and you need to be willing to like give yourself to the job and, you know, not have much of a personal life because otherwise, you know, you're not going to get ahead, you know, in the kind of the meritocratic narratives that they have. But, you know, as you wrote about, you know,

many years ago, the people who tend to succeed in this industry are, you know, the people who already have kind of a leg up, right? 100%. Yeah. I mean, you know, or, or they succeed because they've done something, you know, that doesn't, doesn't necessarily, you know, benefit humanity, but it's like a hack or they managed to get sort of sold, you know, and absorbed by a bigger company at the right moment, right? Like because they privatized the commons, they engage in some act of taking something that was collectively built. I mean, the internet itself, obviously, is the creature of immense public investment, and they privatized some corner of it. This is, I think, just one of these old stories that we're just going to have to be constantly debunking. And for me, as an organizer, as a writer, and as a writer, I'm very much about cultivating a sense of entitlement among ordinary people.

And it's like, no, you're actually just entitled to public care, to food, clothing, shelter, the basic necessities of life, and society will not crumble. To go back to the example of billionaires, I mean, what do billionaires often live off? It's called unearned income. It's just like the fruits of their investment. I mean, what do billionaires often live off? It's called unearned income. You know, it's just like the fruits of their investment. You know, I mean, they're not out there like living from the sweat of their brow. So it's always, you know, what works for me doesn't work for thee. And that incredible hypocrisy. But, you know, security is, you know, I think there'd just be lots of salutatory effects. And what I also try to go into in the lectures, too, is the fact that according to international human rights law, we actually have a right to, we have a robust right

to material security and securities written into many domestic constitutions. And I found that really interesting as an organizer that it's not a right that we often invoke on the left. Again, you know, I think the left doesn't talk about security very much, but it's there on some pages and it's something that we could lay claim to. And I think there's some potential, you know, power in that and that we should, you know, be more vocal about the fact that this kind of material security is something we're entitled to. And then it would actually, you know, and to go further than just saying, well, hold on, it's not going to be a bad thing for society, but to say, no, it's going to be a

good thing because again, it's going to make us healthier. It's going to give us time to participate politically. And because again, empirical research shows it makes people more tolerant, more open-minded, less authoritarian, and less afraid. And those are consequences that we should be very keen to see manifest as reality. Absolutely. And I feel like this is probably a bit more in like the Canadian wheelhouse sort of a thing that, you know, obviously it's a book that deals a lot with Canada. And I found that fascinating. But when you wrote about how the judges kind of interpreting the Canadian constitution tend to focus on kind of the negative freedoms that Canadians have, but often not, you know, enforcing kind of the positive

freedoms or not wanting to kind of bring that into, I don't know, the legal framework or ruling on it, I guess. I found that really fascinating and hadn't kind of realized it necessarily. Yeah. I mean, this is, I really, again, I got really into Canadian constitutional law and, you know, one of the cool things about, right. I mean, it's the cool thing about podcasting too, right? Is you have this excuse to like contact people and be like, hey, do you want to chat for an hour and I'll speak your brain and learn from you. But again, you know, this, this right to security is found in many domestic constitutions. It's very explicit in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And it is directly inspired by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the lead author of which was actually a socialist Canadian, this guy, John Humphrey, who is a character I'm very fond of.

So he was an instrumental player in helping to insert the left wing social movements to help construct the Canadian welfare state. Then he goes and he's a very progressive influence on the United Declaration of Human Rights, very inspired by Latin American socialist countries and by the Canadian example. And he makes sure that woven into the Universal Declaration are positive and negative rights, meaning so the right to be protected from a tyrannical state, but also the right to the things we need to survive. So, you know, the right to have a speedy trial, right, to not be illegally detained, those are these kind of negative rights, even to free speech, right, to not have your speech be censored. What we might think of as civil liberties, but then the right to housing, healthcare, you know, labor union, right, well remunerated work, security in old age, and in disability, those are the positive rights. And those are positive rights to security,

specifically. Fast forward to the rights to security, specifically. Fast forward to the early 80s, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, and there's Section 7 of the Charter. And it says that Canadians have right to security of the person is the way it's phrased. And there's an ongoing, really interesting legal debate over what the hell that means, because it's not like laws are ever just self-evident. They're also the terrain of political struggle, right? There have been justices and lots of lawyers and lots of activists saying this means a robust positive right to security, like right to housing, right to welfare benefits, you know, right to healthcare. And because those are actually rights Canadians do not have.

Americans like to think of Canada as the land of the welfare state, very romanticized. And it does have a more robust welfare state and tradition of welfarism. But Canadians as people have a right to remarkably little in that positive sense, unless we can manage to rest the Section 7 right and then view it with a kind of deeper meaning. And again, we have, you know, this isn't a pie in the sky or like ridiculous interpretations and interpretation. A lot of legal scholars and justices agree with, but it just goes against the market grain of our society at the moment. And so I wanted to take some time in the talks and talk about some of the litigation that has tried to push the envelope and say, you know, a right to security should mean a right to healthcare.

It should mean a right to housing. So over the years, for example, activists and literally activist lawyers have managed to get the right to security to mean the right to be in a tent if there are no shelter beds available, right? So they've pushed it to mean that, but they haven't quite pushed it to the point where it means the right to housing. Youth climate litigants, right? So these kids who are suing governments around the world have been engaging in some interesting legal arguments saying that a Section 7 right to security should mean the right to a habitable environment. What is security if the climate is on fire? And they're making really interesting inroads too.

I mean, they haven't won, but in one recent decision, a judge said like, hey, they're making some credible points here, right? Just enough, they give them kind of grounds for an appeal. You know, I think it's really important to kind of always have your eye on, well, what are the struggles trying to make real these ideas you're promoting? And when you look, there's actually, you know, quite a lot of inspiring stuff happening. But I think this is, you know, I just think it's like, yeah, we should be like, we have a freaking right to security, you know, quite a lot of inspiring stuff happening. But I think this is, you know, I just think it's like, yeah, we should be like, we have a freaking right to security, you know, and that means the welfare state, but also this larger context, I think, of the environment is also really important. But it's something that a lot of Canadians don't know about,

don't think about, and certainly you don't, you know, a lot of us aren't thinking about the Declaration of Human Rights, but that's the thing with rights, like they're on the page, but we have to fight to make decisions that have been positive, that have maybe pushed the actual political system and our governments to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have. In contrast to, I think, how many people often see the US Supreme Court as this kind of conservative, kind of backward influence, especially under the current judges that are there. So I felt like it kind of added some nuance to that discussion, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, again, it's, it's said the U S is like a low bar. I feel like, you know, if I could just say one thing about Canadians, but never compare yourself to the U S like, but it's true that the U S Supreme

Court has become this bulwark of reaction, you know, captured by these six ultra conservative judges, but it's also just the American political system is full of these veto points that make progressive reform really, really, really hard. Whereas the Canadian jurisprudence is, you know, has more openings. And this is why I think this is an interesting frontier to push even further. In contrast to the sort of originalist, which is bullshit in the US, right? I mean, it's not an originalist interpretation, but this idea that this fantasy that we should hew to what the wise founding fathers thought about everything. In Canada, there's this doctrine called the living tree doctrine, which is that the constitution should branch and grow and change. And that's a beautiful image and something people shouldn't take for granted. As someone who straddles both worlds, I'm like, it can get so bad. Grow that tree. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like somewhat related to this

is a discussion that you have in the book around insurance. And I feel like when we think about insurance today, it's often like, this thing that I have to spend money on that costs way too much and doesn't deliver nearly the benefits that I think I should receive from it. But that how, you know, when the idea of insurance was really kind of new, it was it was quite a radical thing provided by the state to give you this degree of, you know, the type of security that we're talking about. Can you talk to us a bit about kind of, I don't know, the origins of that and how it's been transformed and whether it can be taken back. Yeah. So, you know, you have to write five chapters for this because there's

five lectures. And when I got to the fifth lecture, I was like, okay, well, what am I going to write about? And I had this one idea that I've been wanting to write for so long about insurance. It's really fascinating, I think. But I just feel like even saying that sounds so boring. Like I felt like this is risky, you know, going to get up and give a lecture to a thousand people and be like, hello people, I'm talking about insurance today. Precisely because it has such a bad connotation, right? I mean, I was just picking out what horrible online marketplace insurance plan I want for 2024. And like, I don't want it. It's terrible. The deductible is like $9,000. Like it's a nightmare. But the word insurance once had a

really radical ring, you know, in the early 1900s and late 1800s, as people started to fight for workers' compensation and programs and other schemes. I mean, the idea of social insurance was transformative. It's the idea of pooling risk as a society. Really, at the heart of the question of insurance is, what is risk? How do we share it? Who is culpable? Or is nobody culpable? And before social insurance didn't really begin with these worker compensation schemes, it was always the worker's fault because the bosses had all the power, right? So if something went wrong, it was on the employee. And there were these societies where workers attempted to pull risk and take care of each

other, take care of widows, take care of families that are going on hard times. But ultimately saying what you have to do before this can become a public program is actually reconceptualize risk, reconceptualize accidents as something that just happens, that is sort of statistically unavoidable. It's not really on the shoulders of one individual person. And then only when you kind of have that paradigm shift of saying, actually, this isn't really, you know, one person and their punishment. This is just inevitable. When you have industrial production, bad stuff is going to happen. We should try to mitigate against it, but also we should protect those, you know, who fall

or wound themselves or something like that. Only then can you start implementing these programs. And so this idea of pooling risk of sort of is really powerful and it relates to insecurity because at the heart of that is like, yeah, we're all insecure. We're all, we could all be the person who falls, who cuts themselves, who is in a car accident, you know, who gets an illness. And so let's take care of each other. Let's create these insurance programs. And so I think there's just something, you know, really sort of poignant in that image. And we forget, you know, we've, we're so acclimated to conceiving of risk in that way as something kind of impersonal that I don't think we appreciate necessarily what a leap it was and how much work went into starting those programs. But then of course, you know, prevention

is a better approach and there are all sorts of ways to prevent workplace accidents by, you know, safety measures, by not overworking people, by not rushing them, maybe by using like digital trackers or whatever it is that's like causing people to feel harried. You know, we can prevent a whole lot of climate disasters by reining in fossil fuels. That's something I write about at length in that chapter too, is just the paradoxical role of the modern insurance industry in climate change. So, I mean, altogether, the insurance sector is enormous. They are sitting on trillions of dollars of assets. These are assets that they pulled ostensibly to pay out claims. But guess what? A lot of it is invested in fossil fuel infrastructure. So they are paradoxically literally invested in the things that they're going to be paying more claims on down the road. That right there is a parable about the pathology of treating insurance as a private

good instead of as a commons or as a public good, which is one of the core things at the heart of that chapter is like, is risk something that we should, that is privatized, or is it something that we approach communally? Yeah. I thought it was just another one of those really good illustrations of kind of how much things have been eroded over such a long period of time, right? That we see insurance, which is this thing that should be about providing us security as just another way to kind of rip us off and take money out of our pockets and stuff like that. Right. Yeah. Well, we see it that way because that's what it is a lot of the time. Yeah. It's like that perception's not wrong, but if we are stuck in it and we go like, ugh, insurance, I fucking hate my insurers. I mean, we're actually not thinking about what

it would mean to pull risk in a socially productive and caring way in that chapter. I mean, I try to bring it to life by telling the story of Kafka, the novelist, who we all know is a brilliant writer and artist. And he was, but during his lifetime, he was mostly known as an industrial reformer. And I mean, he was really appreciated as such because he, you know, basically worked as a kind of cog in the machine of the workman's office of Bohemia or something. It was like one of the early workers' compensation programs. And his mission at the job was to stand up for workers as much as he could. And he wrote all of these very, very dull but detailed papers about the mistreatment of workers and how the working conditions precipitated the accidents.

He even designed machinery that would protect workers' hands more than the machines that were being used. So he actually did some work that scholars say actually saved lives during his day. And as much as he's sort of famous for having hated his job, right? When we think of Kafka, we're like, oh yeah, he hated his job and he just wanted to be willing to write. But he actually was really fascinated by insurance because he saw the social implications and cared about them. He just like, you know, he was just up against the monolith. He was up against bosses that were basically determined to blame the worker at all costs and by a state that was deeply resistant to the idea of standing up for poor people. So Kafka is a fascinating guy for sure, but his interest in an investment

in social insurance just endears me to him all the more. Yeah. It was one of those stories that really fascinated me when I was reading the book, one of many. I want to pivot back to something that we were talking about earlier. You know, obviously, you brought up the people's platform. And, you know, we were talking about technology. You know, I think there's a lot of discussion today around the role that kind of social platform, social media plays in making people feel more insecure in their lives. I wonder how you reflect on kind of the impact that that has had on people. That's a big question. I'm curious what you think, because I feel like you're more in the discussions and probably in the data than I am right now. I mean, I, you know, I quote some studies in passing in the book about detrimental effects of social media, particularly on young people and on old people, on younger people's self-esteem, just how quick these platforms are to show them, you know, harmful content. I mean, literally content that is encouraging, you know,

self-starvation and self-harm and even suicide. And then older folks who are often pushed down these sort of conspiratorial wormholes who seem to lack the skills to decipher, you know, sort of what's credible information from what's a scam. I mean, there's no doubt that these social media platforms, you know, that part of their business model is, you know, assaulting our self-esteem. But again, that's not new. Like, that's what advertising has been doing for decades. And so I think here, you here, this lens of continuity is really helpful. And this is why going back to 2011, 12, 13, when I was writing The People's Platform, why I was like, really think that we're going to have a revolution here when the business

model of these platforms is advertising? Because by design, an ad assaults your self-esteem or makes you feel like you lack something, right? You know, I say in the opening lecture of this book, no advertisement will ever tell you that you're okay and that it's the world that needs changing. No, it's always going to tell you that, you know, you're not enough or to stay cool, you got to buy this or to stay young, you have to take this pill or whatever. I mean, that's just, it's banal to say it, but also they wouldn't spend literally like trillions of dollars a year on this shit. If it didn't kind of work, it doesn't work. It's not a science, right? And we can all laugh at the bad ads we get and how inappropriate they are,

but bring me a person who hasn't bought something that they were targeted by, like, show me someone. Oh, totally. I'm sure it happens all the time, right? This is where I think I'm not ahead of the curve of the conversation on this front. I just think it's worrying. And I see it myself. I see my own attention span kind of diminishing, my addiction to my devices, increasing despite my awareness of it. And again, this is what progressive tech critics have been saying this whole time.

It's like, yeah, these are addictive by design. It shouldn't be just up to us to impose our habits of self-control and our digital Sabbaths and things like that. In the section where I am talking about social media and its effects on people's psychology and self-esteem, part of what's maddening about these dynamics is like the more damaged people are by these devices and these platforms or just by consumer culture in general, the more a market opens up to ostensibly like solve these problems. Right. And so this is, you know, into this gaping hole of despair, you know, flows the wellness

industry or, you know, self-care or self-help, which is like promises people some solace. And, you know, so that's, you know, that's one of the ingenious things about capitalism, right? Harms create new markets. And so actually, you know, I never read self-help books, but I read a few writing this book That's one of the ingenious things about capitalism, right? Harms create new markets. And so actually, I never read self-help books, but I read a few writing this book because I was like, I'm talking about insecurity and psychology and people's feelings. And what was striking to me is quite a few popular authors talk about people's sense of lack or of never having enough or their desire to do things like be creative, right? To not live to

work, but to work to live, but they just never take that political step, right? The problem is always you when it's like, no, the problem is capitalism. And, you know, these are just not, you know, you just can't self-care or meditate or exfoliate or breathe your way out of the crisis. But of course, you know, these books never take that extra step because that would be, you know, to sort of like undermine the conditions of their own success. Yeah. And I think the connections to, you know, again, the fact that this sort of stuff has been going on for a long time, it's just now happening in like a different way through the tools that are available to these companies and to the system in order to, you know, continue kind of pushing us in this direction, continue to making us feel terrible

so that we buy things and, you know, all that. It's not much of a surprise, I guess. In the book, one of the things that you talk about, I think, when you start to get more toward, you know, how we address these sorts of issues is the concept of decentralization. And, you know, obviously this is discussed in a much broader remit than just technology in the way that we would understand it. But obviously this is a concept that is very much of interest to people in the technology space. And I feel like there are divided opinions on as well, where in some circles, there's a view that, you know, if we just have more decentralized technology, everything will be better. And then there's also the way that companies have taken advantage of decentralization to kind of recenter

their power structures and stuff. So I wonder how you see kind of decentralization helping in this way. And if you also have concerns about how it can be co-opted by powerful institutions that exist out there already. I mean, I think this is a tricky thing. I don't think that there's a one-sized fits all answer because you can have sort of anti-democratic versions of decentralization and disempowering versions, and you can have democratic and empowering versions of centralization. And so, you know, again, I think, you know, we have to look to the context and have to look to sort of the political agenda and the economic paradigms, right? Like, and I also think they're not necessarily opposed. You know, you could have a situation where there's centralized funding going into communities where

communities have democratic determination over what kind of cooperative businesses they want to start or something like that. I'm just pull an example out of the ether. I mean, you know, but it's like where there's centralized funding streams and a, and a mechanism for ensuring equality in conditions on whether where the funding goes, but there's still community determination, the room for experimentation room for democratic deliberation. So it's a bit of a false binary, but I do think we have to be really alert, especially in the United States with its weird federalist system and its fetishization for state power, states' rights, local control, local school boards hijacked by Moms for Liberty, that the right has used a project of devolving power

to the states and to the local level to pursue a right-wing agenda, because it was the federal government that was often trying to pursue things like the correct application of civil rights law. I just think it's really, it's tricky and that we actually have to be sort of more precise about what it is we're talking about. I am someone who also thinks, again, I obviously like the word democracy. I like experimentation. I, you know, I wish, I'm not sure I'm ready to reclaim the word innovation, but I don't, you know, in theory, maybe we should, but we have to do it within a framework that pursues equity and security, you know, and justice. You know, I just, I don't think like one category alone, like, oh, centralization or decentralization gets us there. I think it kind of has to be more

nuanced than that. You know, I guess I'm inclined to think there's sort of basic things that we need as human beings that should be sort of guaranteed by a central authority, meaning in this case, the federal government, right? Like we have a right to healthcare now, you know, but I don't think that's irreconcilable with some level of community control, right? Or, or for example, you have public healthcare and you obviously have healthcare workers, like shouldn't doctors in the community have some say in how a local hospital is run? So again, an element of decentralization mixed with central funding where, you know, funding is equitably distributed, you know, based on need and not just the ability to pay. So yeah, I think it's interesting. This kind of gets a little bit into the terrain of a book I have coming out in March that's on

solidarity, where there's a chapter where we talk about what a solidarity state might look like. So sort of something beyond the welfare state and a solidarity state might look like. So sort of something beyond the welfare state and a solidarity state would create feedback loops that encourage solidarity. And I think some element of decentralization or democratization is key to this because we want citizens to feel invested in public goods, right? So the welfare state sort of dispenses with services from on high on a charitable model, like the state giveth. Right. So then the state can take it away. A solidarity state would be like, this is actually like public as it belongs to you, the public be invested in it.

Right. And thus help protect it. I think breaking that binary would be essential to that project. Yeah, I love that. And I love your recognition of decentralization as well and kind of, you know, the nuance that is inherent in it and looking at where power is and how decentralization doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, you're taking power away from, I guess, the forces that we wouldn't want to have it, right? Right, but there is also resilience in decentralization.

There can be experiment in decentralization. It's just like not to make a fetish of anything. I mean, decentralization under really unequal circumstances is bad. Like you could argue, for example, that American K through 12 public schools are decentralized, right? The funding is based on local property tax. Then there are these local school boards. That is, you know, and nobody, I think, who's got an objective analysis would call American public education democratic.

You know, and to me, it could use a lot more centralization. We should equalize funding per student. Yeah, I'd like to see some controls implemented there. I don't know. So I just, I think it's one of those debates that I think it just needs to be much more context dependent and example dependent. Like, what are we talking about? Totally. No, I think it just needs to be much more context dependent and example dependent. Like, what are we talking about? Totally. No, I think it makes perfect sense.

And, you know, to wrap up our conversation, we've been talking a lot about the insecurities, you know, the way that this works in favor of capitalism and the system and how it really harms a lot of people out into the world. You know, after doing all of this research, you know, putting these lectures in this book together, you know, what have you learned about the best ways that you think that we kind of combat this and, you know, increase the kind of good kind of security that we want for people? Yeah, maybe I'll end by actually going back to the beginning of the book where I contrast what I call manufactured insecurity, which is the insecurity we've talked about in this interview

with what I call existential insecurity. So I think that there's a case to be made that we are just inherently insecure and byproduct of being mortal, we're pretty helpless at the end of our lives as well. And the fact is we need care throughout our lives. We're all dependent on infrastructure and communities and supply chains that are so far beyond our own, not just control, but we can't even conceptualize them. They're so massive and integrated at this moment. So that existential insecurity is there. It's something I think we will never escape. And, you know, the manufactured insecurity is kind of layered on top of it. That I think we can mitigate and reduce to a dramatic degree. So part of my exit, I guess, part of my argument for how we get out of some of the messes we're in and change things so that we have more of that sort of material political security that we're talking about is that we actually have to face our vulnerability and we have to say, okay, we're all insecure. Therefore we need each other and let's

band together to fight for a world that meets our basic needs. And at the heart of the word insecurity and also the word security is etymologically, if you go back to the Latin, is the word cura, which actually means care. And so I think that recognition, we're all insecure, we all need care, can be the kind of basis for a politics of solidarity, right? A recognition that we're interdependent, that we, again, are mutually vulnerable, and a kind of basis for this reimagining of what security can be. Security as not just something that is defensive, militaristic, market-driven, but that is collaborative and caring and sustainable. Ultimately, those are just nice words, but we need to fucking organize to do it, which is another big theme of the book. I learned a lot writing the book. I learned about Canadian legal systems, movement and I learned about Kafka and I learned about all this stuff. But when I was

actually out on the road, giving the lectures, give the lecture, and then there would be like a 45 minute Q and A and every Q and A was just like, what do we do? And you know, what I felt was people know that we're facing a bunch of shit right now, that they're intersecting crises. You know, they don't need to be convinced of that. But what they don't really know is what to do about it because it's not like they learn organizing one-on-one in high school or college, right? You know, unless they're lucky enough to be in a labor union at the job and a good labor union at that, or maybe someone who's just like hyper-politically engaged, or maybe one of the tiny percentile of people who's like an attendance union, like they don't have much firsthand experience of organizing. And so when I came away from those

lectures, you know, each Q&A almost became like a symposium on like organizing. Yeah. And I just, I felt like just a lot of appetite for actually trying to do something to improve things. So that was actually, it was like a really heartening experience because by the end I was like, oh, I'm not really convincing you people of anything. We're actually onto the really hard question, which is like, okay, what are the next steps that we take together

so that we can build the world that we all deserve and are entitled to? Exactly. And that world requires organizing, not just new technologies delivered to us by some big tech companies, as they would want us to believe. Astra, it's been great to speak with you. You know, I'll be looking forward to your new book coming in March, I'm sure. But thanks so much for taking the time. It's been great. It's been really, really, really fun. Thanks so much for having me. Astrid Taylor is the author of The Age of Insecurity and a co-founder of The Deck Collective. Tech Won't Save Us is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.