Clean

Using Tech for Good with Baratunde Thurston

Published Apr 4, 2022, 6:53 PM

Advocate, technologist and comedian Baratunde Thurston joins the show to talk about his podcast How to Citizen and how, with a little work, we can make tech live up to its potential as a tool for positive social change.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and How the Tech are Yet Today, I have a special treat for you. There's a big treat for me too. I got to sit down with Baratunde Thurston. He's a comedian and activist technologist. On top of all that, he hosts a show called How to Citizen. The show's third season focused on technology's role in our world and our our ability to citizen, as he calls it, and also about how some really remarkable people are working hard to see that technology lives up to its potential to facilitate positive change. Anyone out there who has listened to tech Stuff for any length of time, y'all know that I often focus on the dark side of tech, from unintended consequences that can be harmful to outrighte malicious misuses or abuses of technology, and how that impacts people. Well. I like to think of Barrattunda's attitude as a balm for the cantankerous perspective I typically have of tech, and so sit back and enjoy this conversation that I had with Barrittunde Thurston. You're gonna learn a lot, including some stuff you might not know about me. I want to welcome my guest, Bartunde Thurston, someone whom I have admired for many years. I have admired his comedy work, I've admired his perspective on tech, and I admire him in particular because, whether he remembers it or not, he once rescued me from the worst day of my professional career. WHOA welcome to the show. Yeah, that good to be here, Jonathan, Me about this rescue mission? I don't know about Okay, I'll set the scene. It was south By Southwest two thousand sixteen. It was in between you getting inducted into the Hall of Fame and me trying every taco at Torches. And I had been assigned to moderate a panel for which I was severely underqualified to do, but I had no had no option. And it was for a now defunct, anonymous GEO located social networking site called yik yak, And for those who do not remember, yik yak was a service that allowed people to anonymously post messages and people within a certain radius of that person's physical location could see those messages and post their own, So I had I had to submit every single question I had to the two co founders ahead of time, and that made me feel like I was kind of restricted in what I could ask. I wasn't confident in what I could do. So by the time we get to the panel, fly up sweat is evident. It's undeniable. Uh. I'm sitting there. There's way more people than I expected to be there because this wasn't part of the official south By Southwest panel uh that you would find in the other locations. This was in some bar off the main drag, and I get through my questions pretty quickly because I'm getting monosyllabic answers and not really any follow up. So after thirty minutes in an hour long slot, I opened it up to the audience because I have nothing else to go to. And I don't know if you remember, Baritone D, but you were the first person to stand up and ask questions, and you held those co founders accountable. You you asked them about the consequences of unleashing a tool that allowed for anonymous posting in geolocated areas. Uh. And the potential effects that could have on populations in those communities, specifically in colleges and high schools. And they gave very uh unsatisfying answers. And at the end of this I was shaking. I was so upset with myself. But I came up to you and I thanked you for your question. You were incredibly gracious, and then I slunk off to hide and shame and that fueled the stress dreams for the following six years, which is not even a joke, but um, but I was so thankful you were there because I appreciated the fact that you asked the tough questions and you were you were adamant about getting answers, and when clearly there were none, then that precipitated more questions from the rest of the audience. You. I remember there was a teacher who came up after you and started asking very tough questions, and I thought, man, I wish they had asked Barratt toun Day to moderate this panel. It would have been a much better panel. Oh, so thank you for remembering that. I actually do remember it now. It was It was at a bar right off Congress Street in downtown Austin. And they had to. I think that had a robotic bartender, which I also recall. Um, I looked up that service just to get a visual memory, and yeah, it was like a yak was there logo. They went out of business in tween. They literally just came back. I looked it up and it was like three hours ago from Yahoo News. Yeack yak is back, baby. So we can do this all over again, Jonathan, We can do this well this time. This time, I feel a little more prepared. That was that was Babe in the Woods, Deer in the headlight, Jonathan, I'm slightly better now. Yeah, no joke. So that kind of brings me to talk about How to Citizen, which is already a phenomenal podcast before you got into the the specific role of focusing on text role in this idea of making citizen a verb and uh and this concept of becoming more socially responsible and active in a positive way. And first of all, I absolutely love the show, and I love the tone of it, and I love your perspective. So uh, congratulations and thank you for that. Well, Um, thank you, and you're welcome for that. I mean, this season really is uh an outgrowth of of moments like the one that we shared in sixteen. I was at that south By Southwest to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, Baby Baby, and I gave a little acceptance speech like four minutes, and I made a lot of jokes about brand activations at this arts festival as well as tacos and whiskey and beer. But I also remember saying the folks, like the assumption that tech is just going to create goodness in the world, We've got to stop that, and we could actually be accelerating bad things in the world, you know, at scale, and codifying our history and sort of forcing history into our future under the guise of machine learning. If what we teach those machines is all of our mistakes and our biases and all that kind of stuff. And and now that's that's like a common perspective, you know, on tech, but in we're just kind of entering the discordant, skeptical realm about what might happen with all this disruption, and this season of How the Citizen is a follow up to that, and it's like, okay, so what else can we do? You know, what else can we build? Who's out here not yik yakking all over our commons, but you know, creating something, if not perfect, at least more perfect and helping us be more of a union, not just in the US, but kind of just as human beings all over the world. So it's been a I needed that season to remind me that it's not all like insurrection and Nazis out there and team depression and body shaming, that there is so much more good we can still do. Uh and and the future history is not yet written. I could not agree more. I am in that same need or that positive spin. A few years ago, I used to host a show called forward Thinking, and the whole premise was that it was an optimistic view of the future, largely through the lens of technology and talking about the the promise of tech or the potential of tech and through that optimistic lens. And I do largely consider myself an optimist. I just unfortunately I am an optimist who also feels like I've been put through the ringer for the yeah and and yeah you think back, like I've heard you speak about this too. Like. I also was an early active participant on the Internet. I was in college when the Worldwide Web became a thing, and I thought, oh, that's never gonna take the place of tell net. Um now that Oh I want to hug you right now. I met my wife through tell net. That's how That's how I met my wife. Yeah, not many people know that, but yeah, I met her through a tell net chat room. Uh. And yeah, this I thought, the whole web thing like it. Thanks forever for that page, this prompt situation, command line entry Universe. The slash key is my friend. It lets me do anything. But yeah, listening to that, like when we cast our minds back to that and we think about the potential of of what we were seeing and this idea of a platform that could allow for instantaneous global communication and collaboration, um, as well as things like commerce down the line. Once that restriction was lifted, everyone was sure that the Internet was going to solve all problems, including eliminate conflict, because now suddenly there would not be these barriers to communication, ignoring places like China and North Korea, even if even if that problems were the old true everywhere else and um, And of course it didn't turn out that way, but it's not a big surprise. I mean, I look now at the landscape. I look at something like like Facebook, you know, not just meta but the specific platform of Facebook, which is supposed to be this this globalized social network that connects for parents, and well, yeah, yeah, we're we're listen. You and I are of a certain age. I think I'm two years older than you are. So um. But yeah, I look at that and I think, well, of course that didn't turn into a really you know, benevolent, um useful tool that has nothing but good in it. It started, or at least it evolved out of a project that was ultimately about rating the appearance of female students at Harvard an age old human space, which always brings out the best in our species. Yes, and you can't have huge expectations, is I guess what I'm getting at. But the promise is still there, right, the promise that we could have have this democratized approach that removes barriers that traditionally stood in the way of people connecting to each other, or people connecting to a career, or people connecting to contributing to their communities. That's still there. It's it's easy to lose sight of that because we've seen all the bad. But I love that your podcast is looking at specific cases where people are making substantive changes two. Uh provide this this opportunity to actually use tech to make real benefits two people all over the world. And one of the the ways we've been asking that question, UM, it slows down the process. Tech is often about speed and efficiency and and results, but not necessarily with a very clear question like results for what faster at what? Um? So faster at extracting value to generate advertising revenue, cool, faster at dismantling you know, social ties or respect for various types of community interests. Yes, we're crushing it at that UM. But if if the question is baked a little differently, and it's about creating a healthy community, Uh, if it's about citizen ing as a verb, which is kind of the premise of our show. It's like, what if what if tech didn't make it harder to citizen but made it easier? Then you gotta ask what does it mean a citizen? That sounds very very cool, very abstract, very hard to pin down, and so we we tried to define our terms and repeatedly, so citizen means you show up and participate, So, like, do these technologies allow people to show up and participate in their various circles of community. Uh, two citizens to invest in relationships with yourself, with others and the planet around you. Do these tools and platforms that help us get in touch with ourselves? Do they help us connect with other people in a relationship fashion, not just a transaction? Do they eliminate this mythical separation between us and nature or create greater justice? And the third and of the four is that it helps us understand power, to citizens, to understand your power, money and presence and ideas and physical strength, but also communication strength and attention and in particularly you know, So it does this technology strip us of our powers? Or uh make us further aware of and capable of wielding our power. And then the last of these four nicely balanced pillars is that to two citizen is to um prioritize and take account for the collective interests, not just the individual self interests. And so if you're doing all that previous stuff just for your individual self, you're finely tuned social path and you could be very well funded by venture capital and go up into the right on all the charts, um, but you wouldn't be citizen ng you know, you'd be hyper investing in a in a iv IT life, which has its place, but is it should not take up all of of the space that that we occupied together. So yeah, we found all these people who are doing different pieces. We found all these people who are doing different pieces of that kind of citizen ing, and even with a platform like a social network, building them differently, you know, with different kinds of considerations. And so it's just a good reminder like, oh, yeah, we got choices, you know, um, and then you have to ask, you know, grace, So we have choices, do we how much are we able to exercise them? What barriers stand in between us in our ability to create those types of opportunities in large scale and not just have them be kind of cute demonstration projects. Uh. And that's a tough secondary question absolutely. Uh. I. I have covered many times in the past, some various projects in various stories that we're incredibly exciting, an inspirational and unfortunately also momentary. Yeah, that there was no lasting effect or or presence, and that um, you run the risk of it suddenly becoming something performative or that someone like me who covers tech for a lot starts to get really cynical. When I start seeing moves, even moves that are sincere and earnest in their motivations, you start to question simply because you've been encountering the dark side for too long, which is why I you know, I when I listened to season three, which by the way, everyone absolutely should. Everyone should listen to all of them. How does citizen that come? But especially your audience here with tech stuff. I think you know, I've listened to one of your recent episodes about the history of like Web one and Web two. Oh yeah, it was just it was a great time machine, and so I think, you know, if you like the time machine element and revisiting that, whether you were as it or not, there's value to it. We do a little bit of a version of that in our season three and then start chipping away at the assumptions about how a lot of this stuff needs to work, and it's kind of this global It ended up being a global expedition, you know, from Argentina to Spain to Taiwan, two prisons in the United States, uh and multiple cities and types of venues all around. So it's very very cool. But I'll finish letting you plug my podcast please contin Oh well, I was going to say, like, I love how you start with an episode where you're talking with your sister, which was beautiful. It was a beautiful conversation in such a wonderful tribute to your mother. Um. I absolutely loved it. And then you follow that up with the what I would call the tech Stuff episode of How to Citizens With with Scott Galloway, where you are defining the problems uh. And I was listening to that, I was like, oh, man, I'm so glad that he doesn't have my job, because I would. I don't know what i'd be doing right now, but he does it better than I do. There's plenty of work out there for all of us, man, right. And then and then the later episodes, you know you're you're talking with these extraordinary people who are spearheading incredible projects. And that's where I really feel that Tech Stuff Listeners, if you have been listening to me for a while and you know you've you've especially with the news episodes, it's almost impossible to avoid the dark stuff because that's the stuff that tends to rise in the public consciousness. Listen to this show and get involved because there are ways you can do that, and it helps and it makes a better world. And those are all things I want to see. We'll be right back with more from Bariton day after these messages. When we look out for one another and when we take actions that are not us purely in our own self interest, everyone benefits, not just the individual. And that's what always blows my mind is that, yes, you can act selfishly, and you can act selfishly in a way that benefits you, but when you act in a way that helps others, you too benefit. Like that's an everybody wins situation and makes you it makes you feel good. So there's that selfishness um and it's it's something I often forget until I'm doing it. I'm like, oh, yeah, it feels good to be around others, it feels good to do something with others, it feels good to do something for others. And then recognizing maybe maybe that comes back to me in a literal or direct way, or maybe I just I'm getting high off the endorphins of that kind of social hit, you know, the same kind of feeling like when someone likes your posts or or shares your content online. You can get that in a in a much healthier way, you know, through engaging with with our fellow humans. Uh, And then you think about the sort of collective interest, like how does public health really work? How does national security work? How does how do cities and communities of all sizes work? We're not meant to do everything by ourselves, and I think we've just over indexed on the the independence strain. And it's very American and then very Western, but particularly American. It's like me, my house, my yard, my gun, my food supplies, my entertainment system, my pool, my kids, my private school, and this list of my my, my, my my leaves very little room for hour. And it's super inefficient. Actually, it's it's highly redundant, and it's really isolating and lonely taken to such an extreme. If we're all out here building our own you know, armies of one and cities of one in societies of one, then we're losing out on the benefits of even having other people around, Like what's what's the point of there being more than one of us? If we're all going I try to do the whole job of society by ourselves. It also includes a lot of denial, like you have to live in denial to believe that you alone are responsible for your place and and how and your well being. It's such an unrealistic view that it it boggles my mind. Um. I was fortunate to be raised by teachers and science fiction authors, so I came to my philosophy from a perspective of the sort of the star Trek view of society, like everyone contributes, and everyone's important. And if you if you deny that, if you think somehow that you are more important than everyone else, nothing but disaster awaits you and and there's there's you know, denial is a really good naming of one of the challenges of that kind of thinking. I think fear is another component of it, where we operate out of a sense of being afraid of others and so we must do this for ourselves because we can't trust someone else to be there for us. And there's reasons for the denial, you know, some of us are educated to believe we are better than others and don't need them. Uh, there's reasons for the fear, you know. We we we receive a lot of messaging and even have had personal experiences which would trigger that. It's not um outlandish, you know, it's it's not inexplicable, but I think it is ultimately self destructive for most of us to to live in such an extreme in that way. So you find finding people in this little pocket of the world who's who are asking some different questions, finding some different answers and saying, okay, So what if we made a social network that didn't give everyone on day zero all the powers of the network at once. You know what if you gradually unlocked these features over time, after being more carefully and considerately on boarded into the community. What do you mean I can't just start dm ng people right off the bat and addressed millions from from the first moment I sign up. WHOA, that's that's that's thoughtful. Why would you do that? It's like, okay, well maybe if you're not under the pressure of returning you know, ten x the financial investment to people who have already hundred x the money they were born with, you would have time to consider that and build a community optimizing that instead of just maximum noise. Uh and so yeah, we had this, you know, bach Rainy lgbt Q plus activists s ra Al Shaffi. She's one of the people who I think everybody. It's hard to pick up favorite. But just in this moment, given that you mentioned Facebook, that there's more than one way. There are many different ways to build networks and communities, and we've just done this copy paste thing. Uh. And Facebook in particular has just done the like copy paste thing with you know, innovations from others. Um, but speed speed, speed is costing us in some other ways. And the speed of enabling people to behave in certain ways without having any connection to the community they're part of. Yet it's like your first day as a freshman in high school. You're just like you're running the pep rally, You're the president of the class, like you're you're in charge of discipline. Uh. That's way too much power too quickly. Yeah, I uh so much of what you say resonates with me. I think back to some of the smaller forums that I participated in early on in the Internet and how fundamentally different they were, Like it felt like a community of people. Usually it was centered around something specific which helped, like an interest and exactly a movie or a comic. Yeah, hey, hey, shout out to all my fellow former Buffy the Vampire Slayer Bronze Bers. I was part of the Bronze Um, which I also have it man revealing a lot of personal stuff on this episode, and so do you in that first episode of season three. So I think that's good. But yeah, I I completely find that inspiring. I love the idea of social networks that truly are social and build towards that and and help people avoid traps, like the fact that a lot of folks fall into a sort of tribalistic experience online. UM that you have these echo chambers that you have, You have these these environments that they don't just allow for the noise, they don't just allow for the flame war. The platform itself is dependent upon that activity, the noise they need, the flame wars. They the flame wars fuel their growth. Yes, pretty much a literal sense. You know, there's another I'm looking bad at that season, something I haven't thought as much about. But given who you are and where you sit, you know, the way we UM defer to algorithms as a huge impact on our sense of reality and truth, and most of us are not aware of them. So we we think we're making choices, but we're actually you know, the choice set is predetermined by a series of machines guided by humans who tell us who we are before we have a chance to become who we may be meant to be. And so just even if you're like an independent minded person free will and rugged individualism, it's kind of hard to be that when you're subservient to a machine telling you who you are before you get to be who you are. And so there's folks working on cleaning up the data sets that power these algorithms and just adding a level of insight into like, oh, that was just a garbage mailing list that someone brought in the dark web. Maybe we shouldn't use that to determine who has access to health care? Huh interesting? Or you know, my favorite example is forman in Teresa Hodge, who's formerly incarcerated and was very frustrated by folks with felony records not being able to get employment after they serve their time because various algorithms say they're not trustworthy, you know, just because they got caught. I mean, I still maintain most humans are criminals technically, right, there's a lot of laws that we're breaking on a constant basis. Most of us are not under constant surveillance to be busted, and then many of us who are busted have access to a level of resource to get out of that, get that expunge. You gotta slap on the risk. It's get a warning, so you have you're able to learn from the error and then proceed in society. But but a subset of us get caught up and then punished forever. And so she came up with and another algorithm that employers could use to consider if someone is really a risky bet in terms of hiring. And and it takes a lot more data points into considerations because it's defined by people who have experienced that particular challenge. And so you're putting people who are close to the problem in the driver's seat to help co create the solution. And there was no assumption of vindictiveness or ill will. Right, this isn't about punishing companies, but it's also about no longer punishing people who have already been punished and then unlocking their ability to contribute productively for all of us, Like we would all benefit from those folks having gainful employement. So it's you know, it doesn't mean like no more algorithms. Ever, I think that ship has sailed. But how we algorithm and who's involved in crafting them, and what oversight we have, what goes into them, who makes them, how they affect the world. We have so much more choice in that. Then we have realized many of us should just sitting here kind of dormant, like a ghost. There's nothing we can do. Oh, well that they already the computers are going to compute. They must they must know better. It's like, oh, they know what we tell them to know, and we can still have an influence on that. So I just thought, Okay, people are not expecting to hear this formerly incarcerated black woman coming up with algorithms selling them to employers to help them hire people better. What's and that's the same kind of story that would be on the cover of an Ink magazine, you know, or of a fast company magazine, of a Forbes um But we don't hear it as often as the I made an app called Yek Yek, and and that alone is a crime that should be punishable severely and over and over again. Not to call anyone out, but one of the co founders, I don't remember both their names, but one name is always going to stick with me forever and ever and ever, because it was Brooks Buffington the third, And how do you forget a name like, No, that's an incredible name, that's an incredible books buff Rington the third. I shouldn't really you know, calling him out. I live in Atlanta. He's still in Atlanta running businesses and stuff. I mean, I'm burning bridges. Butever, and you know, that was I don't know what yik yak is doing, you know, with its return. Maybe they have figured out and we are in a very different world from in in so many ways. So let's let's assume, uh, as we have grown, so have they, and and you can just marvel at the amazing name that is Brooks Buffing. Yeah, phenomenal. I like that. I like that perspective. We've got more conversation coming up with barretun day after this short break. I love hearing about these stories. Uh, this is the sort of it's it's like nourishment for the soul. It's the the bomb I needed in order to kind of just rock every that's going on and not you know, fall into that little puddle in the corner that's like, yeah, small and helpless and knowing that things are wrong, but not knowing how to right them um and feeling like the snowball is already so large that no one's ever gonna stop it. It's it's going to wipe out the village. We're just waiting to see when it happens. And these are the stories that remind me that's not that's not the case. That's not the narrative you I tend to abstract too much, the concept of companies being these monolithic things that somehow existed on their own, and in fact they are the construction of people, like actual human beings made these and and by forgetting that, you start to just I mean, I do it all the time, You start to ascribe motivations to things that are not themselves really an entity. It's a collection that was built by human beings. And it's even possible that the motivations that you're recognizing were never consciously in any of those human beings minds, but it's manifested that way. And I think that's healthy to make those realizations, because then you can say, all right, listen, I'm not I'm not gonna necessarily lay blame on anyone here for for maliciously approaching this situation. But we still have to reckon with the consequences and to adjudicate, to decide are these things we want? Are they positive? Are they helpful? Or are they things we can do without? Are they things we can change so that we get more positive outcomes and more supportive outcomes. Um? And that's really the takeaway I get from your show, which is I think the most glowing review I can give five stars. Yes, we've got the strict and five stars accomplished retire from podcasting. I think, Please, don't I need more? I need more. I need more. I need like endless number of seasons. More is coming, More is coming. Yeah. Well, to to kind of wrap this up, I want to just sort of talk with you about some some random little things like do you have any uh uh favorite like I know you talk a lot about technological memories in your episodes, but do you have any like favorite standouts, like things where either something clicked for you or you encountered a technology for the first time, just that sort of sense of wonder and discovery. Yeah, so there's a I don't think that we put this in How to Citizen. Um, so this would be a pseudo exclusive. I've definitely mentioned it publicly, but not often. So in high school. I graduate high school to situate you in in my timeline, and we got an internet connection at that school in probably possibly nine two and always on T one level connection. So I was banging around in Unix and coding and see poorly and just bopping around Gopher servers and Usenet servers and finding gateways into public libraries UM. And I also worked for the student newspaper at the time, UH and a friend of mine had been expelled from school. So these three facts converged. A friend I felt who was unjustly expelled from the school. His family sued our school, and there was a court case involved, and I was called as a witness to this court case. And court cases create a lot of public documentation. Most people in the school did not know about this lawsuit. Enter my new internet skills, and so I start um a fake email address called the informant at knowledge dot com. It was one of my prouder I was like deep throating it, you know, and I figured out, you know, mail servers were very shall we say, porous at that time in our history, and so if you knew the right keyboard commands you could interact with a mail server as if you were a male client and you know, have the right syntax in the right order. And so I kind of logged in to this mail server at Yale University Minerva dot sys dot Yale dot e d U. I'm sure they've battened down those ports at this stage, and so I I used I launched my attack from from Yale, even though I was in the computer lab in Washington, d C. As said, well, friends, and I crafted a message to my fellow newspaper editors because I didn't want my fingerprints on it, and I wanted them to kind of independently decide this is worth talking about without it feeling like a favorite of me or without being colored by any attitude toward me at all. Because I was clearly close to the person who've been expelled, they I dismiss it. You know, you're just trying to get your friend back in school. So I alerted them to the fact that gave them like the docket number that they could look up in them the court system, and they ended up you know, telling the story you know, of this lawsuit, which triggered political action on campus and meetings and all kinds of stuff, but the the ability to influence in that way, to to discover a form of power. I didn't like hack into the mail server to destroy it. I didn't even create fake information with it. I had created a fake header technically, but you know, trying to raise awareness of an issue from my relatively meager position. I wasn't a trustee, I wasn't a faculty member, I wasn't a parent. But I was an interested and affected party by this, and I thought it affected all of us. I felt powerful in the moment. I felt like I did more than I thought I could, and it just felt kind of cool. And I didn't tell anyone for years. I just kept my mouth shut. I'm like, I don't know what the statute of limitations is. I don't know if that was technically a crime. You know, I'm not trying to go to jail for my friend, like I like him a lot, but you know, he still he wasn't incarcerated. He just had to go to a different school. So measuring all of that, but also just that the moment of realizing that I could communicate through machines in this way, and not just for the sake of communicating with machines, but for the sake of affecting the I R L universe that I inhabited. That was That was a significant moment in my technology life, in my life overall. Yeah, I also like to imagine, although I know it's not the case, that's why you had to go to Harvard because Yale was going to be like, oh no, well I didn't respect after that, you know, I'm just like, you don't take cyber security seriously, like you let a child manipulate your tech infrastructure. Come on, a child just just compromise as octa authentication company. Maybe so many people shouldn't shouldn't be dependent on that one service. Yeah, yeah, though I won't go down that road. But but I love that story too. It speaks to me about sort of the the pure hacker ethos, this idea of understanding how systems work, occasionally using that knowledge to have systems do something that they weren't necessarily meant to do. Not not. It doesn't have to be malicious, it doesn't have to be criminal, it doesn't have to be destructive. The term hacker obviously gets thrown around a lot in a very sinister way, but we understand those of us who have ever kind of put our hand to it. It's more about that that innate curiosity of how does this thing work? And once you understand how it works, like, oh, I wonder if it could also do this other thing that it's not designed to you and and that I feel is is something that we need to encourage. But unfortunately, just the the term hacker has got such a stigma against it that I feel a lot of people immediately make judgments as soon as they hear the term being thrown around. Yeah, make look at we We always need folks who are going to push things, and sometimes most of us don't appreciate it, like why is that person over there pushing things? I like things just the way they are. But then we find out you know, who we are through that process and like, oh, I guess we don't have to always do it this way now, you know, Forging emails isn't like a thing that I want all of us to be doing on account of basis, So the lesson is more metaphorical. Um, but you know, being able to find your voice, being able to express it, h caring enough about you know, a situation to try to influence other people's perception or even awareness of that situation. I mean, that's the same thing that drives something much bigger, like a me too or Black Lives Matter. Right, it's just and you see all kinds of social media usage to amplify awareness of situations as well as you see sort of secure journalistic communications and you know, very anonymized tour based UH file drop services UH to allow folks in a weekend position to still hold power accountable in some way, especially in like regimes that don't allow anything approaching the level of freedom free expression we have in the US, and that's super important work UH and will continue to be so, I suspect for as long as we have more than one person on the planet. Mm hm, I agree. And then we're even seeing it if you go one step removed from the tech itself. We're seeing it in the tech companies as we're watching a growing movement among employees toward organization. That's realization. I mean, I heart podcast union form not long ago and that was really exciting. And we're seeing it in efforts at Amazon. We're seeing it in efforts at parts of Activision, Blizzard, UM, you know, the these This is a really exciting time from that perspective too, because I see this this growing understanding that the balance has been out of whack for far too long and that it has been benefiting far too few people in the process. And I feel like we're getting to maybe not a full correction, but we're at least reckoning with it, and I'm hopeful to see that continue. Like that's another one of those trends. I'm excited to be alive to see that because we were also barred. We were also growing up in the Reagan era where a lot of those systems were dismantled. That's right. Yet the way that workers we have an episode of season three, Shall We Whang focused on not just workers organizing around better compensation, better benefits like those typical contract terms, but organizing around their own sense of power and purpose and technical Silicon Valley employees are highly valued financially um and yet they're starting to recognize the limits of financial recognition of their value and what do I want to be doing with my power? And then expanding the lens on what a technology worker is. You know, if you drive for Uber Eats, you're also a technology worker, and you know, just letting people claim that language for themselves, gig workers, gig workers, gig that's pretty dismissive unintentionally, I think, but it has a consequence of minimizing the labor of some versus others. And if you can build a bridge between the coder and the driver, you know, the coder and the courier, then you've just magnified your community and your potential power. And once we change who we relate to, all kinds of new things are possible. So there's been awakening that's happening to that's not just about contract terms, um, and it's much looser and broader, and I think potentially even more powerful, though contract terms very much matter. Yes, I feel the same. I don't want to keep you any longer because I am very cognizant of your time. But I could chatter on about all these things for hours, and uh, every time I'm like, no, no, stop, stop, stop, Jonathan Chatty, Cathy, you're gonna let You're gonna let it in here. You can have them back on the show some future point if he wants to come back, and I would happily come back. That's an easy, easy, yes, thank you. I would love to have you have you back on the show. Absolutely. I mean, you're a busy man, so we will talk when you've got time to breathe and uh and to engage in life in a meaningful way. I don't want anyone to be like, oh, I gotta get back on Johnson Show. I can't, you know, go outside and smell the flowers. None of that. Um, but thank you so much for joining the show. This has been a truly enjoyable conversation as it has been for me as well. Thank you for taking me back to south By Southwest sixteen, back to high school, which is not always a pleasant revisitation because it's high school and everyone knows what that means generally unpleasant time in our lives. Um. And yeah, and thank you for what you're doing with your show to explain, um, why all this stuff matters, even to some degree, what it is, because I think it's such an important center of power and community and creativity. It's it's not just tech stuff anymore, but it's you know, this, this locust. So you've been at this for a while and I appreciate what you've been contributing as well. Excellent. Well, the show is how to Citizen. It's available anywhere you get podcasts. It's you absolutely have to listen to it. I guarantee after one episode you'll be hooked and you'll just binge them it um yeah, you know. And if you're like me, then you're gonna listen to them at half speed because you don't want them to end. You listen to them at half speed. I have what I've never heard of any I've only known people, including myself, who accelerate decelerate the playback. Your shows can be so packed with such important stuff. I don't want to miss any of it. This is a good note. Maybe we should spread it out a little bit. Well, thank you again, look forward to having you back, and uh, I look forward to my listeners checking out your show, so do. I thank you for having me enjoy your day and the rest of your podcasting and beyond life. Thanks again to Baritone Day for joining the show. I could have talked with him for hours. I think that was pretty clear in the episod out uh, and he probably would have let me because he's a nice guy. But you know, I should not monopolize anyone's time, including yours, dear listeners, So I'll leave you with this his show How to Citizen is in fact available on all podcasting platforms. I really do urge you to go out and listen to it, particularly if you've ever felt yourself wondering what can one person do that can make a difference. I know that there have been times where I felt kind of lost and helpless and that the problems are just so big that there's nothing I can really do to make a difference, and and it it's really discouraging. Well, it turns out there actually are a lot of ways that you can make a difference, and his podcast kind of focuses on that in a way that you know it's actionable. So highly recommend you check it out, especially if you need to pick me up. I mean, they do tackle some tough problems on that show, but it's with that sort of optimistic view, always a goal of doing better, and I really admire that. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of Tech Stuff, or even guests I should invite on the show, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon, y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

In 1 playlist(s)

  1. TechStuff

    2,435 clip(s)

TechStuff

TechStuff is getting a system update. Everything you love about TechStuff now twice the bandwidth wi 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 2,432 clip(s)