Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. This is the story. I'm Kara Price.
Speaker 1: Today I want to spend some time discussing how the
Speaker 1: Internet has shaped us as individuals. I was exposed to
Speaker 1: the Internet very early on, with both a techno optimist
Speaker 1: for a father and attending a school in the early
Speaker 1: two thousands that insisted every student have a laptop starting
Speaker 1: in fifth grade, I was bred to be chronically online.
Speaker 1: I started thinking about how this influenced me after reading
Speaker 1: a new book called Searches Selfhood in the Digital Age.
Speaker 1: The book is by Jahini Vara, whose debut novel, The
Speaker 1: Immortal King Raw was a Pulitzer finalist in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: But before diving into creative writing, Vara was a tech reporter.
Speaker 1: She worked at The Wall Street Journal in the early
Speaker 1: two thousands, when Silicon Valley was rapidly becoming the force
Speaker 1: it is today, among the first to cover companies like
Speaker 1: Facebook and Oracle. VARA's curiosity for tech stayed with her
Speaker 1: through the years. In twenty twenty one, she wrote Ghosts,
Speaker 1: an experimental essay where she collaborated with a nascent version
Speaker 1: of chat GPT to intimately write about her sister's untimely death.
Speaker 1: When Vara was a teenager. When she wrote Ghosts, being
Speaker 1: Vulnerable with your chatbot of choice wasn't yet a thing.
Speaker 1: In her latest book, Searches Self Food in the Digital Age,
Speaker 1: Vara fully dives into how technology has impacted her life
Speaker 1: in the most intimate ways. She shares the Amazon reviews
Speaker 1: that she writes to hold herself accountable when buying from
Speaker 1: the site. She asked chat gpt to review her chapters
Speaker 1: as she writes them. All of these exercises to help
Speaker 1: her answer a question that haunts many of us. How
Speaker 1: have we been shaped by the Internet? And that's where
Speaker 1: I started my conversation with Wahini Vara. I wanted to
Speaker 1: start with something very broad, your relationship to the Internet
Speaker 1: growing up and how that relationship has changed since then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I was born in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 2: so I was in middle school when I first encountered
Speaker 2: the Internet. It was at the home of like these
Speaker 2: family friends where the daughter was my age. She sort
Speaker 2: of like pulled me into this room with one of
Speaker 2: those beige desktop computers and was.
Speaker 3: Like, I have something to show you, and.
Speaker 2: You know, opened up a little window, pressed some keys,
Speaker 2: tapped a button and that like screechy AOL log in
Speaker 2: sound started going like that, and it turned out she
Speaker 2: was showing me what AOL was and what AOL chat
Speaker 2: rooms were. Where at the time, for those who can
Speaker 2: remember this, like you would just go into these rooms
Speaker 2: in these little kind of windows on your desktop screen
Speaker 2: and usually kind of like pretend to be whoever you
Speaker 2: wanted to be, like a version of yourself, but not
Speaker 2: really your actual offline self. And I found that really enchanting.
Speaker 2: I found it kind of miraculous. I was like this
Speaker 2: nerdy middle schooler. We had just moved to a suburb
Speaker 2: of Oklahoma City from Canada. I had very few friends,
Speaker 2: and it felt really exciting to like get to go
Speaker 2: online and be whatever I wanted to be without like
Speaker 2: the encumbrances of who I was offline.
Speaker 1: You start as someone who is like playing with the
Speaker 1: early Internet to now being someone who is a tech reporter,
Speaker 1: a teacher, a novelist. Why, after all this time being online,
Speaker 1: do you choose to write a book about selfhood in
Speaker 1: the digital age.
Speaker 2: So the thing that I understand now that I didn't
Speaker 2: understand then is that this idea that I had back
Speaker 2: then that the Internet was like this safe space for
Speaker 2: self exploration, self expression, where like I didn't have to
Speaker 2: worry about the kinds of power dynamics I had to
Speaker 2: worry about in my middle school halls. Right Like, there
Speaker 2: was a way in which that was true and beautiful,
Speaker 2: and there's also a way in which it was an
Speaker 2: illusion then, just like it's an illusion now, because actually,
Speaker 2: anytime I was engaging with a technology company's product, I
Speaker 2: was providing that product with information about me that they
Speaker 2: could then use to go get more wealth and more power.
Speaker 1: And in the book you describe how your own personal
Speaker 1: and professional trajectory unfolded alongside the tech boom of the
Speaker 1: nineties and early two thousands.
Speaker 2: How So, when I was in middle school the eighth grade,
Speaker 2: my family moved to Seattle, and we lived in a
Speaker 2: suburb of Seattle that was one town away from the
Speaker 2: town where Jeff Bezos and his wife Mackenzie were building
Speaker 2: Amazon out of their garage, and they would go have
Speaker 2: their meetings at this Barnes and Noble on Bellevue Way,
Speaker 2: which was the same Barnes and Noble where I would
Speaker 2: like go and sit on the carpet and read magazines
Speaker 2: and books. I was very aware of Amazon at the time,
Speaker 2: I was also aware of Microsoft because one of its
Speaker 2: co founders, Paul Allen, was engaging in this big campaign
Speaker 2: to buy the Seattle Seahawks and was putting a lot
Speaker 2: of money into this local political campaign that was bound
Speaker 2: up in that, and so I got access to the
Speaker 2: early use of tech money to influence politics, just by
Speaker 2: virtue of growing up in Seattle. I then went to
Speaker 2: college at Stanford, and I arrived there right after the
Speaker 2: founders of Google had built Google out of Stanford. My
Speaker 2: senior year of college, Facebook shows up on campus. I'm
Speaker 2: one of the first, like, I don't know, five thousand
Speaker 2: or so users of Facebook, because I happened to be
Speaker 2: there when Facebook was just getting started.
Speaker 3: It was still really new. Nobody really knew what this
Speaker 3: thing was.
Speaker 2: But it took off super super quickly, and by virtue
Speaker 2: of being the news editor at the time, I edited
Speaker 2: our papers first stories about what Facebook was and how
Speaker 2: it was growing so fast. We interviewed the journalist who
Speaker 2: interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, and already then he was talking about
Speaker 2: like creating this space where people could connect, which is
Speaker 2: kind of still the rhetoric he uses now, And so
Speaker 2: I kind of like fell into this world of Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley while being at school.
Speaker 3: And then I graduated from.
Speaker 2: College and my first job was as a tech reporter
Speaker 2: at the Wall Street Journal, where I had previously interned,
Speaker 2: and there I ended up in the San Francisco bureau.
Speaker 2: I happened to be the youngest person in the office
Speaker 2: because I was the newest fresh college grad working there.
Speaker 2: And so I ended up saying to my colleagues and
Speaker 2: to my bureau chief, Hey, there's this new company called Facebook,
Speaker 2: and we're not really covering it. I think it's worth covering.
Speaker 2: And because they were a private company and actually not
Speaker 2: that influential yet in the grand scheme of things, my
Speaker 2: editor kind of finally relented and was like, Okay, fine,
Speaker 2: if you want to cover this Facebook company, go ahead
Speaker 2: and cover them. And then fast forward a couple of years.
Speaker 2: I ended up becoming actually a little disillusioned, as maybe
Speaker 2: too strong a word, but maybe not with the state
Speaker 2: of the tech industry at the time then, like it
Speaker 2: felt like these companies like Facebook were already growing really fast,
Speaker 2: and you can imagine this future in which that speed
Speaker 2: and wealth and power became a problem. And I think
Speaker 2: we were having a hard time contending with how to
Speaker 2: write about that journalistically. And so what I did was
Speaker 2: I just I took a leave of absence and I
Speaker 2: went and studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Speaker 2: And I thought I was sort of like leaving this
Speaker 2: tech stuff behind entirely, but apparently I hadn't mentally, because
Speaker 2: I ended up writing this novel about a tech ceo
Speaker 2: who takes over the world. It ended up being kind
Speaker 2: of like my way of trying to contend with the
Speaker 2: stuff that I couldn't contend with in journalism.
Speaker 1: So tech has been inescapable for you, yeah, for much
Speaker 1: of your well for all of your life, it seems, actually,
Speaker 1: So eventually you would be among the early users of
Speaker 1: chat GPT with a version that looked very different from
Speaker 1: the one we know today. Can you tell me how
Speaker 1: that came about and also how it inspired you to
Speaker 1: write Ghosts, which ultimately became a viral essay back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: So back in like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, I was
Speaker 2: starting to read about this technology that OpenAI was developing,
Speaker 2: which was first called GPT, then GPT two, then GPT three,
Speaker 2: And so when GPT three came around, I wrote to
Speaker 2: Sam Altman, I had previously profiled him for this magazine
Speaker 2: called California Sunday, so I had his number. So I
Speaker 2: texted Sam Altman and I said, hey, I heard that
Speaker 2: you're working on this thing.
Speaker 3: Would you give me access to it so I can
Speaker 3: play around with it?
Speaker 2: And he eventually gave me access to it. It worked
Speaker 2: differently from chat GPT back then. So the way it
Speaker 2: worked was the interface was this kind of web app
Speaker 2: where you would type some text and then hit a
Speaker 2: button and then it would just sort of keep writing
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 3: It would kind of complete.
Speaker 2: That text, and it did that in a way that
Speaker 2: was often kind of like more interesting, I would say,
Speaker 2: than the text that chatchypt produces. It would be more surprising,
Speaker 2: what you might describe as more creative. And the thing
Speaker 2: that came to mind was that it was promising that
Speaker 2: it could provide language for us when we find ourselves
Speaker 2: at a loss for language. And as a writer, there
Speaker 2: aren't that many things where I find myself at a
Speaker 2: loss for language. But a thing that I have always
Speaker 2: struggled to write about, to talk about is the death
Speaker 2: of my sister when we were in college from cancer
Speaker 2: and my grief over it. I think it's like an
Speaker 2: incomprehensible thing to me that happened, And so I wrote
Speaker 2: this sentence that was when I was in my freshman
Speaker 2: year of high school and my sister was in her
Speaker 2: junior year she was diagnosed with e in sarcoma. And
Speaker 2: then I hit the button and it produced this text
Speaker 2: for me that was like, had nothing to do with
Speaker 2: me or my sister.
Speaker 3: Really, it was a story kind.
Speaker 2: Of from the perspective of somebody whose sister had been
Speaker 2: diagnosed with ing sarcoma in high school. But the last
Speaker 2: line of the little story it produced was she's doing
Speaker 2: great now. So it took like this essay that I
Speaker 2: wanted to write about my sister's death and kind of
Speaker 2: wrote something that was the exact opposite of what I
Speaker 2: was interested in. So I kept trying it over and over,
Speaker 2: and each time I would like delete the what GPT
Speaker 2: three had written and add more writing of my own.
Speaker 2: And what I found that was that as I wrote more,
Speaker 2: this technology did a relatively better job like kind of
Speaker 2: matching the subject and tone of what I was writing,
Speaker 2: such that there were these lines that it came up
Speaker 2: with that it generated that sounded to me like if
Speaker 2: a human had written them would be really well written lines,
Speaker 2: you know, like lines that moved me that I thought
Speaker 2: were really intellectually engaging. And yet ultimately it wasn't expressing
Speaker 2: my experience on my behalf.
Speaker 1: And so by the end of it, why do you
Speaker 1: decide to write the whole thing yourself?
Speaker 2: It kept not describing what it was like to be me,
Speaker 2: to be my sister having this experience right understandably, like
Speaker 2: it sounds silly in retrospect, but of course, like this
Speaker 2: machine that's built to put words one after another based
Speaker 2: on statistical predictions about which words should come after which
Speaker 2: other words was not going to somehow reach into my
Speaker 2: soul and express the thing that I couldn't express. And
Speaker 2: then furthermore, like even if it could, I think, for
Speaker 2: me as a writer, what is important is the actual
Speaker 2: act of writing, as the attempt to take something confusing
Speaker 2: and try to articulate it right. And so you know,
Speaker 2: there is it turns out there is no machine that
Speaker 2: can do that for me, right, because the thing that
Speaker 2: I'm trying to do is the act of writing it.
Speaker 3: And so ultimately I was the one who had to
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 1: After the break how to resist big tech stay with us?
Speaker 1: So from your perspective as someone who's been a tech
Speaker 1: journalist for a long time, who teaches creative writing, but
Speaker 1: who also thinks about these things on a really philosophical level.
Speaker 1: How do you engage with but not give yourself completely
Speaker 1: over to these seemingly innocuous technologies.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't have a great answer to that question.
Speaker 2: I think that there's a way in which no matter
Speaker 2: what we do, even when we're using these technologies, say
Speaker 2: we're doing Google searches for how to is this big tech?
Speaker 2: Or we're chatting with chat GBT about all the problems
Speaker 2: with chat GBT, or we're organizing our friends on Instagram
Speaker 2: or Facebook or whatever meta owns social network, right to
Speaker 2: take political action. All of those things are really beautiful
Speaker 2: acts of like of self expression in some ways, of resistance.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And it's a fact that those are legitimate forms of
Speaker 2: self expression, of community building, even of resistance. And yet
Speaker 2: each of those actions that I just described benefit the
Speaker 2: companies that we are attempting to resist.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So when I search in Google for how to resist
Speaker 2: big tech, Google then knows that I'm interested in resisting
Speaker 2: big tech, and it can target messages to me based
Speaker 2: on knowing that fact about me, when I organize friends
Speaker 2: on social media for political action, Meta then knows my
Speaker 2: political orientation and can target messages to me based on
Speaker 2: what it knows about my background. And so any self expression,
Speaker 2: any community action that takes place in these platforms that
Speaker 2: sort of necessarily bound up with them. Interestingly, I'm finding
Speaker 2: this with my book as well. Like I published this
Speaker 2: book thinking of it as a critique, I still think
Speaker 2: of this book as as being a book that contains
Speaker 2: a critique of big tech and uses big technology companies
Speaker 2: products to make that critique.
Speaker 3: But a lot of the headlines that.
Speaker 2: Have appeared about my book and some of the interview
Speaker 2: questions I've gotten have said things like, you know, this
Speaker 2: author collaborated with chat GBT to explore her selfhood. Or
Speaker 2: I've been asked questions like, so what did chat GBT
Speaker 2: teach you about yourself that you didn't already know?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And so it turns out that my book itself, which
Speaker 2: I constructed as a critique, the life of the book,
Speaker 2: like the public life of the book, turns out to
Speaker 2: also be bound up in that that sort of complicit
Speaker 2: relationship that we have with these companies, which at first
Speaker 2: I found really upsetting and now I find kind of
Speaker 2: kind of fascinating.
Speaker 1: The description of collaborating with AI has become a very
Speaker 1: common way of describing how we interact with it. At
Speaker 1: face value, it makes sense, especially in cases where someone
Speaker 1: is approaching it to work through something that in the
Speaker 1: past would have happened with someone else, like a creative
Speaker 1: idea or an emotional problem. So what do you think
Speaker 1: of this description of collaborating with a large language model.
Speaker 2: You know, there's an extent to which we talk on
Speaker 2: Google and we talk on Meta's social media platforms about
Speaker 2: like the problems we're facing, our deepest, darkest secrets. But
Speaker 2: my sense is that people are going even further with
Speaker 2: CHATDBT and products like that in doing that because they
Speaker 2: have the impression that they're talking to something that is
Speaker 2: like another right, but doesn't have the baggage of actual
Speaker 2: human beings.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So we might be talking to chat GPT and feeling
Speaker 2: like it's using the language that our therapists might and
Speaker 2: giving us good advice.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But whereas with our therapist, we pay our therapists, and
Speaker 2: our therapist's job is to help us understand something about ourselves,
Speaker 2: and they have training in order to do that well.
Speaker 2: Chat GPT's job is to get information from us, is
Speaker 2: to get us to keep using the product, to like
Speaker 2: the product, to use it more and more. And so
Speaker 2: I think that's why that term collaboration is really problematic.
Speaker 2: It's a term that people like Samul and the CEO
Speaker 2: of open Ai are using a lot.
Speaker 3: I think partly.
Speaker 2: Because they used to say things like AI is going
Speaker 2: to take over all our jobs, are going to be
Speaker 2: any jobs left. Nowadays they talk more about collaboration. They say,
Speaker 2: don't worry, AI is not going to get rid of
Speaker 2: all of us. What's going to happen is that it's
Speaker 2: going to be a really helpful tool we can use
Speaker 2: in our daily lives. It's going to be a collaborator.
Speaker 2: It's going to be helpful, It's going to be useful.
Speaker 2: They use language like that a lot, which I think
Speaker 2: is meant to kind of defying the threat of AI
Speaker 2: taking our jobs, right or AI consolidating more wealth and
Speaker 2: power in the hands of people who already have it.
Speaker 1: Given that you did use artificial intelligence at points in
Speaker 1: your book, and I can imagine that tech companies would
Speaker 1: love to claim that you collaborated with AI and it
Speaker 1: helped you explore your selfhood. Do you think they can
Speaker 1: do that?
Speaker 2: Well, It's complicated because using artificial intelligence products in the
Speaker 2: book helps me show what the promise is that these
Speaker 2: companies behind the products are making to us, and what
Speaker 2: we as users do in response to those products, like
Speaker 2: how we engage with those products in response to those promises,
Speaker 2: and also help me show how those promises fall short
Speaker 2: and how ultimately the way in which we're engaging with
Speaker 2: these products is bound.
Speaker 3: Up in the exploitation of us.
Speaker 2: That was what I was interested in showing by using
Speaker 2: the products in the book. A critical reader will read
Speaker 2: the book and see that, For example, when I ask,
Speaker 2: you know, image generation products from companies like Microsoft and
Speaker 2: open ai to generate images to go along with stories
Speaker 2: I'm telling about my mom's childhood in rural India, like,
Speaker 2: those images are not factual representations, unbiased representations, representations that
Speaker 2: bear any relationship with the reality of my mom's experience.
Speaker 3: Right, Like I think, I think.
Speaker 2: I expect readers to see that and think, Okay, I
Speaker 2: see that. I understand what's happening here, right, I understand
Speaker 2: that there's a critique here.
Speaker 3: I don't believe that these.
Speaker 2: Products, due to any significant extent, help with self expression,
Speaker 2: help with you know, communication with others, and so that
Speaker 2: was not something I was particularly interested in exploring. However,
Speaker 2: I was interested in the promise these companies were making
Speaker 2: that their products could do that.
Speaker 1: Yet we seem to be moving more towards a future
Speaker 1: where people believe that their self expression is bolstered by
Speaker 1: these products. How do we resist the belief that these
Speaker 1: products are actually like aiding in our self expression.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there's a bigger problem that these
Speaker 2: companies are exploiting. I think there's a bigger problem in
Speaker 2: society in which the kind of like dominant cultures are
Speaker 2: held up as like and dominant sort of ways of
Speaker 2: expressing oneself and communicating are held up as like the
Speaker 2: best ways. So, for example, chat GBT they have this
Speaker 2: kind of style guide that's public and they open a
Speaker 2: eye does and they explain how chat GPT works, and
Speaker 2: they say that chat GPT is built to sound kind
Speaker 2: of like a colleague, you know, at an office, presumably
Speaker 2: like a white collar office. It's meant to be polite,
Speaker 2: it's meant to be empathetic, it's meant to be rationally,
Speaker 2: rationally optimistic, I think is the phrase. So they are
Speaker 2: all these ways that chat gypt is built to use
Speaker 2: language that itself is political, right, like the fact that
Speaker 2: they're saying this is how chat GPT should talk, and
Speaker 2: the way it should talk should be like this sort
Speaker 2: of like, you know, the language tends to be American English, right,
Speaker 2: like like office building, white collar American English, because chat
Speaker 2: GPT talks that way, and because chat gbt is held
Speaker 2: up as something that can help us with our writing.
Speaker 2: What chat GPT is really doing when we go to
Speaker 2: chat gbt and say, hey, I wrote this, can you
Speaker 2: help me make it better? Which is embedded with this
Speaker 2: assumption that we also have in our broader culture that
Speaker 2: like a certain kind of like corporate, white collar, like
Speaker 2: you know, white guy in the cubicle next door kind
Speaker 2: of language is like the best kind of language to use.
Speaker 2: I write in the book about how my dad has
Speaker 2: this habit of like writing me emails and then having
Speaker 2: chat GPT edit them and then sending me the edited version,
Speaker 2: And he wrote this perfectly well written, well reasoned email
Speaker 2: to me at one point in which he uses this phrase.
Speaker 2: You know, he says something like you have to talk
Speaker 2: to people to understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 3: Then only can you.
Speaker 2: Can you write well about their experiences something like that.
Speaker 2: The chat GBT version inverted the then and the only,
Speaker 2: So the chat GBT changed it to you have to talk,
Speaker 2: you have to spend time with people and understand their experiences.
Speaker 2: Only then can you understand what they went through. And
Speaker 2: the interesting thing about that to me is that then
Speaker 2: only is a very common and very correct construction in
Speaker 2: Indian English, and my dad's from India. Only then is
Speaker 2: American English. And so chat GBT is like purportedly improving
Speaker 2: my Dad's English, but what it's actually doing is just
Speaker 2: turning my Dad's English into American English. And there's this
Speaker 2: like value judgment embedded in that that that American English
Speaker 2: is a better English, right, And so I think when
Speaker 2: we turn to these kinds of products and think that
Speaker 2: they're improving our self expression, like that's not actually what
Speaker 2: they are designed to do. They're designed to like use
Speaker 2: a certain kind of language, and so yes, they can
Speaker 2: turn our language into that, but of course, like I
Speaker 2: both question the usefulness of that in self expression, and
Speaker 2: I worry that if there's a future in which, like
Speaker 2: we all start to talk like that, it's going to
Speaker 2: be like culturally problematic, politically problematic, they're all kinds of
Speaker 2: issues that are eyes.
Speaker 1: If that happens, I want to go to another I
Speaker 1: think very important piece of your book, which you know
Speaker 1: has to do with the handwringing over AI taking jobs
Speaker 1: of creative workers. To what extent do large language models
Speaker 1: threaten our current definition of what a novel is? And
Speaker 1: do you think it's important that people like yourself, people
Speaker 1: who write both fiction and nonfiction, consider the way in
Speaker 1: which large language models might affect not only writers, I think,
Speaker 1: but more importantly readers and what readers expect from the
Speaker 1: written word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I love that question because I think
Speaker 2: a lot of scholars of the novel would argue that
Speaker 2: what makes a novel a novel is its novelty and typically,
Speaker 2: like I think, as a culture, historically, what we've celebrated
Speaker 2: in the novel is like finding new ways to express
Speaker 2: ourselves as human beings. So I think AI has come
Speaker 2: along at a moment in which that has been complicated
Speaker 2: by commercial changes to and commercial pressures on the book,
Speaker 2: on the novel and other forms of literature, where the
Speaker 2: publishing industry has become more and more consolidated and dominated
Speaker 2: by just a few companies that do you know, want
Speaker 2: to turn a profit, and because of that, are increasingly
Speaker 2: publishing things that.
Speaker 3: Are going to do well on Amazon.
Speaker 2: And finding that the things that do well on Amazon
Speaker 2: on our books that are not particularly unconventional, that do
Speaker 2: like follow certain well worn paths, Like if the goal
Speaker 2: of a book isn't to find some new way of
Speaker 2: expressing something, but rather to like follow a formula, that
Speaker 2: is something that I think a large language model could
Speaker 2: be trained to do.
Speaker 3: That said, I think all kinds.
Speaker 2: Of readers, including readers of the sort of genre books
Speaker 2: like romance and fantasy that are thought of as following
Speaker 2: certain genres, have a lot of room for experimentation. Like
Speaker 2: they want to see something new, they want to see
Speaker 2: something human feeling in what they're reading. They want to
Speaker 2: know that there's an actual human being behind the text.
Speaker 2: And so I think I think like the future of
Speaker 2: books is really going to be determined in some ways
Speaker 2: by readers more than writers, because they're the ones who
Speaker 2: buy the books and create the market.
Speaker 1: And so to sort of answer the question about how
Speaker 1: one exercises autonomy in an age of increasingly less agency,
Speaker 1: just because we're all sort of trapped in this bubble
Speaker 1: of technology that's been created around us that we now
Speaker 1: have to use. It's about kind of insisting on the
Speaker 1: type of stories, information, images, movies, TV shows, poetry, whatever
Speaker 1: it may be, insisting that it's human centered and human created.
Speaker 1: Like that seems to be where the autonomy lies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the thing that I find really exciting
Speaker 2: is like, we as human beings, as communities, can create
Speaker 2: whatever future we want, right Like, there are certain futures
Speaker 2: that big technology companies are invested in moving us toward,
Speaker 2: but we can be invested in something totally different. In fact,
Speaker 2: we can be invested in something that's in resistance to
Speaker 2: what they want for our.
Speaker 3: Future, and we can build that.
Speaker 2: And Yeah, I think it has partly to do with
Speaker 2: the things we choose to engage with, the things we
Speaker 2: choose to spend our time.
Speaker 3: On, how we.
Speaker 2: Choose to connect with friends, with family members, with community members,
Speaker 2: right Like, all of those things are important.
Speaker 3: We can also think about our choice of products.
Speaker 2: Right An example I like to give because it's an
Speaker 2: easy one to wrap our heads around is Wikipedia.
Speaker 3: Wikipedia is the seventh most.
Speaker 2: Visited website in the world, and it's run by a
Speaker 2: foundation It doesn't cost that much to run it, relatively speaking,
Speaker 2: and it's built on volunteer labor. But that volunteer laborer
Speaker 2: I don't think of as exploited labor, because everybody is
Speaker 2: sort of coming together to provide this communal service that
Speaker 2: everyone can benefit from, and nobody is trying to make
Speaker 2: a buck off of it. What I mean is there
Speaker 2: is no corporation behind Wikipedia that is trying to use
Speaker 2: Wikipedia as a tool tom.
Speaker 3: As wealth to a mass power.
Speaker 2: And so there are lots of different kinds of entities
Speaker 2: like that building technologies that we can think of as
Speaker 2: potential models. We can put our funds together, as communities,
Speaker 2: as individuals, as workers, as users.
Speaker 3: We can build things.
Speaker 2: In new ways and not have them be bound up
Speaker 2: in you know, technological capitalism in the way that our
Speaker 2: dominant technologies are right now.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And I think, what's one of the things that
Speaker 1: I find, I don't know, I guess so deeply disconcerting
Speaker 1: is this idea that publishers are now allowing for the
Speaker 1: training of large language models on their pre existing content.
Speaker 1: I think, again, you know, where does autonomy factor in?
Speaker 1: It's now like a new point of contention for both
Speaker 1: union workers and well, mostly union workers actually to say, like,
Speaker 1: to what extent do I get to participate in the
Speaker 1: way in which my company does business?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think that's something that's really hard about this,
Speaker 2: because you know, I hear sometimes from people who are like,
Speaker 2: you know, I am a teacher and I don't want
Speaker 2: to use AI, but my district says that we should.
Speaker 2: Or more commonly, I work at a company. I have
Speaker 2: questions about AI or concerns, but my bosses that I
Speaker 2: need to use it.
Speaker 3: Right, What then do you do? And listen?
Speaker 2: I think they're perfectly legitimate uses of these products, of
Speaker 2: products that sort of fall under the AI umbrella, by
Speaker 2: the way, But for those who are interested in resisting
Speaker 2: use of these products, who happen to get paid by
Speaker 2: institutions that say, no, you have to use these products,
Speaker 2: like that puts you in a pretty tight spot. I
Speaker 2: think autonomy is very bound up in knowledge, right. I
Speaker 2: mean I write in my book a lot about like
Speaker 2: these gaps and knowledge between big technology companies and us.
Speaker 3: But one meaningful thing that we.
Speaker 2: Can do is collect information about how these companies actually
Speaker 2: function as ourselves, questions about like what these companies are
Speaker 2: promising with their products, what they're actually delivering what we're
Speaker 2: delivering to them, and how they might make money from that,
Speaker 2: how that might help them a mass more power. Right,
Speaker 2: Just to sort of like ask ourselves questions and understand
Speaker 2: the dynamics that are underlying our use of these products,
Speaker 2: I think is a really valuable thing to do because
Speaker 2: I think you know, for many of us, once we
Speaker 2: understand these dynamics, we feel that we're in a better
Speaker 2: position to enact individual or collective resistance.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I thought was so interesting
Speaker 1: about your book is like, in a certain way, it's
Speaker 1: sort of a self help guide for people who are online,
Speaker 1: right in that like you're asking the reader to think
Speaker 1: about the history of themselves online because you're considering the
Speaker 1: history of yourself online. And so, what are the most
Speaker 1: profound ways in which the Internet and the kind of
Speaker 1: ensuing AI powered internet. H How has it changed your
Speaker 1: life and your idea of selfhood?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: These products have given me sights of self expression, of
Speaker 2: communication and communion with other people, have allowed me to
Speaker 2: gain more information about the world about myself, have made.
Speaker 3: My life more convenient. All of these things are true.
Speaker 2: And with each of those things that I just mentioned
Speaker 2: there is a significant cost, and that cost is really
Speaker 2: hard to see, and so I think experiencing life with
Speaker 2: these products. But I think, even more importantly, just like
Speaker 2: writing it all down in this book has helped me
Speaker 2: to clarify for myself, like just how bound up the
Speaker 2: things that I get out of these products are with
Speaker 2: the exploitation of myself and of all of us and
Speaker 2: our planet. And the reason I wanted to write about
Speaker 2: this wasn't because I thought anybody should care, particularly about
Speaker 2: my own experience. It was that I know that other
Speaker 2: people are like me. I know that there are other
Speaker 2: people who know all the problems with Amazon and still
Speaker 2: use Amazon, who know about the problems with Google and
Speaker 2: still use Google. And I wanted to talk really frankly
Speaker 2: about my own complicity as a way to kind of
Speaker 2: like open this window for all of us, for readers
Speaker 2: to have a conversation about our collective complicity and figure
Speaker 2: out what to do about it, because I don't think
Speaker 2: I come out of the book with an answer to
Speaker 2: the question and now what we should we do about it?
Speaker 2: In part because I don't think that I want to
Speaker 2: be this sort of like single authority figure, like a
Speaker 2: kind of like you know, twin to a Sam Altman, right,
Speaker 2: who has so much conviction about his about the future.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be standing here saying and here
Speaker 2: is the one single future we should move toward, and
Speaker 2: here are the five steps we should take to get there.
Speaker 2: It want us all to be interested in our own complicity.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for talking to me, and I
Speaker 1: just I think your book is such an interesting exploration
Speaker 1: of digital life and one that I think if someone
Speaker 1: isn't thinking about, they're not thinking enough.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me. This was a
Speaker 3: really interesting conversation.
Speaker 1: For tech Stuff, I'm Cara Price. This episode was produced
Speaker 1: by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Tapia. It was executive produced
Speaker 1: by me Oswa Wasshan and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and
Speaker 1: Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode
Speaker 1: and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join us on
Speaker 1: Friday for the week in tech Oz and I will
Speaker 1: run through the tech headlines you may have missed. Please rate, review,
Speaker 1: and reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com.