But is the adoption of mathematical rationality in itself irrational? Berkeley EECS professor Ben Recht’s new book seeks to answer that question, tracing the historical development of the concept across disciplines and technological moments to the present day.

Next Tuesday (3/17) at 5:30 PM: join us in San Francisco for an in person book launch party with Benjamin Recht, cohosted by Bloomberg Beta.

​We’ll be discussing Ben’s new book, The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us.

Register for the event here, or read on for my review of The Irrational Decision:

Register Here!

There are, as a general rule, too many books out about AI right now. Yet these books, for all of their variety in tone and orientation towards AI, tend towards a certain sameness in presentation. Whether critical or laudatory in inclination, the current crop of AI books relies on a certain constrained set of historical beats, beginning with brief nods to Claude Shannon and ELIZA in the mid-20th century, passing over a long and mysterious winter, and ending with a hyper-focused portrayal of the technological developments of the past decade and a half. These books remake history into a teleological march to the present day, an obvious path to the status quo. They may answer the who, the what, or the how of our current techno-cultural moment, but they all uniformly fail to grapple with the why.

’s The Irrational Decision is a very different book about artificial intelligence — to whatever extent it is a book about artificial intelligence at all. Recht trains his sights not upon modern technological systems themselves but upon the mathematical, rational governing ideology that led to their creation. In doing so, he guides readers to a deeper understanding of the concept of rationality and how a seemingly simple idea became an organizing logic for much of modern society over the course of the twentieth century.

Recht, a professor in Berkeley’s EECS department (and advisor to Reboot’s very own ), is not a historian by trade. Yet The Irrational Decision serves as an artfully wrought window into the past in the way the best intellectual histories are, a book that allows you to understand and empathize with the flawed logics of the thinkers of the past even as it ably demonstrates the consequences of their decisions. Recht’s gaze falls upon the obvious precursors of our technological moment, yes, but also hits upon more unexpected paths.

The book’s first few chapters amble through an early exercise in optimization that sought to find the minimum cost diet for Americans during the Great Depression, various attempts to solve poker and other complex games through dynamic programming, and more strange interludes that nevertheless contributed, piecemeal, to advancing the concept of mathematical rationality into more and more arenas of contemporary life. In each of these case studies, Recht identifies triumphs (a diet that could feed an average American for less than $40 per year!) and failings (said diet being composed solely of the perhaps unappetizing combination of flour, evaporated milk, cabbage, spinach, and navy beans) of the mathematically rational approach.

By the time he reaches the origins of pattern recognition in machine learning in Bill Highleyman’s early efforts at optical character recognition in the early 1960s, it’s clear that no aspect of our contemporary world’s focus on mathematically rational process is novel. That’s a throughline in The Irrational Decision: there’s nothing entirely new under the sun. in a footnote, Recht mentions that his own academic work in machine learning was once mocked by Marvin Minsky for being nothing more than a revival of 1930s-era optimization processes. To Recht, contemporary evangelists of outsourcing more and more of human decision-making to putative rational machine intelligences are in a sense just carrying on in a tradition of optimizing logic that has lasted for much of the last century.

In Recht’s telling, mathematical rationality became a dominant worldview through a messy dialectic, the ever-more-sophisticated algorithms and computing hardware of the twentieth century on one side and the ever-widening set of problems researchers set those tools upon on the other. What begins as economists and mathematicians tinkering with rudimentary optimization problems in the age of ENIAC ends, somehow, with Stephen Pinker and Nate Silver preaching the gospel of mathematically rational, probabilistic thinking as a tool for living well and getting rich.

The Irrational Decision is not a polemic against mathematical rationality in all of its forms, but instead a more precise strike against the dominance of the rational worldview. Recht’s argument, at its core, is that mathematical rationality has become an overextended tool, a hammer asked to not just hammer nails but turn screws and saw boards as well. He saves his deepest critique for those who seek to remove human irrationality in its entirety from collective decision-making — those who, in his words, would make us “compute our way to utopia.” In response, he emphasizes that, underneath all of the complex layers of rational computation, any given optimization problem is, ultimately, determined by human choices, in all of their messy, disagreeable irrationality.

The Irrational Decision is out now from Princeton University Press. Join us on Tuesday March 17 for a discussion in San Francisco with Ben Recht about the book.

Reboot publishes essays, interviews, and book reviews by and for technologists. Subscribe for more like this!

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🌀 microdoses

• In another world, perhaps our data-driven visions of society would look a little more like the early-Turkish-republican data visualizations Elizabeth Goodspeed dug up:

  Casual Archivist

  Poetic Justice

  Today’s collection is a set of Ottoman-era data visualizations from Cerîde-i Adliyye, “The Justice Gazette,” a Ministry of Justice publication printed in Türkiye in the mid-1920s (thanks to chart-maker and -enthusiast Juweek Adolphe of Gourmet Data, who shared them in a design-y Slack group I’m in…

  Read more

  a month ago · 213 likes · 6 comments · Elizabeth Goodspeed

• New massive set of scientific retractions just dropped.

• Gareth Fearn on the struggles of the age of transition between fossil capital and electro-capital.

• David Oks on the struggles of the age of transition between bank tellers, ATMs, and iPhones (and its implications for how AI automation of labor may play out)

• The third issue of the SF Review of Whatever is out now! It’s very fun.

💝 closing note

Regardless of what I said up there about there being too many AI books, I’m still interested in what the big tech/literary stories of the year are; if there are books we should be reviewing or stories we should be covering, let us know!

— Jacob & the Reboot Team

But in the last few years, these publications fell one by one. Stock prices crashed; companies went bankrupt. Writers were hit by layoff after layoff. The winners stayed rich: Facebook, Fox News, The New York Times. Content production assumed a barbell shape, with masses of user-generated content on one end and the Times’s big-budget reporting on the other. Everything in the middle seemed to wither away.

Yet this is also the shift that has given so many a career—tweets and blogs and sponsored Instagram posts—platforms that don’t require unpaid internships and New York connections for people to put their stories out. As Martin Gurri chronicled in The Revolt of the Public and Alan Rusbridger in Breaking News, the end of one model meant the rise of another.

I invited journalists Ben Smith and Taylor Lorenz to talk about the last decade of digital media—how they saw it happen, and what might come next. ​Ben and Taylor are two of the savviest media thinkers I know: they’ve both been tenured reporters, but have also adapted their careers seamlessly to the age of Twitter, Substack, and the journalist-as-influencer.

​Ben, previously a media columnist at the Times and editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, is now running his own news venture, Semafor. Taylor is currently a technology columnist at The Washington Post after writing for the The New York Times and The Atlantic. Both also have new books out this year: Ben’s Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral came out in May, and Taylor’s Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet will release in October.

I was tipped off that Ben and Taylor are friends who also have a lot to disagree on, so this discussion should be a good one. And I have a lot to ask them: Institutions or influencers? Ads or subscriptions? What should we mourn? What should we celebrate? To what extent are platforms responsible for healthy discourse? Will TikTok end up as the only unpaywalled corner of the internet?

You can join us at 5-6pm PT next Tuesday by signing up here, or keep reading for my review of Traffic.

Register for free

Red Light, Green Light

By Jasmine Sun

For the urban commuter, traffic seems as natural a phenomenon as the ocean tides. Economies function based on the constant flow of people and products—fast, slow, stalled, blocked.

Likewise, internet traffic represents the flow of users from site to site, often measured in terms of clicks, visits, shares, and time. Early representations of Web 2.0 conjured images of swarms, crowds, and viruses—undirected masses of people creating emergent trends through their individual behaviors.

Some traffic flowed altruistically, toward protesting Egyptian dictators or contributing to Wikipedia articles. But as the internet gained steam, a new generation of companies rushed to begin capturing the new waves of traffic and converting them into advertising dollars at a far greater scale than print had ever seen.

Ben Smith’s Traffic is a story about these companies: in particular, about BuzzFeed, where Smith served as editor-in-chief of the News division for over eight years. 

BuzzFeed was helmed by founder and CEO Jonah Peretti: troll, tinkerer, Silicon Valley nerd. Like many of his peers in the burgeoning tech industry—and unlike most in the news business—Peretti’s love of the internet was rooted largely in its promise of democratization, in the triumph of the public over gatekeeping elites. 

Rather than relying on pedigreed experts to decide what topics were weighty enough to warrant front-page coverage, Peretti’s BuzzFeed—alongside peers like Gawker and Breitbart—chased clicks, a far more objective value. From laughter to anger and pride to pity, they just sought out anything that provoked a reaction. F good taste, he seemed to say—just give the people what they want. As Smith puts it, “Jonah’s approach was a radically new and abstract way of thinking about media—to focus on its psychological effect rather than on what it was actually about.”

For a while, it worked. BuzzFeed tapped into the psychology of shareability, realizing that users liked to share identity-based content to signal things about themselves to their friends. BuzzFeed also capitalized on boredom, receiving 800 million views on a livestream of two employees exploding a watermelon with rubber bands, and 4 million votes on the color of the notorious “Dress.” And unlike more traditional publishers, BuzzFeed knew that social media was the real arbiter of what mattered—not the curated front page of buzzfeed.com. Smith joined in: “I told my own reporters, a group of hungry kids excited at the opportunity to compete with their pompous elders, that I didn’t want a story that didn’t live on Twitter.”

Peretti was also ambitious. He turned down a lucrative Disney acquisition, instead betting that BuzzFeed could become to Facebook what NBC Universal was to cable TV, or even Wikipedia to Google Search. He bet that every revolutionary new medium needed its message-makers, and he was ready for the BuzzFeed content empire to power the Facebook throne. Together, they could join forces to capture the maximum amount of human attention to sell to advertisers (and perhaps foster a bit of human connection along the way). 

Peretti met frequently with Facebook product executives to discuss News Feed curation—this coziness was one of the tidbits that most surprised me in the book. In one chapter, he lays the death knell to strategic click-baiter Upworthy by showing how spammy “curiosity gap” headlines (“She Has A Horrifying Story To Tell. Except It Isn’t Actually True.”) were dominating the feed. In another, Peretti points out how Facebook’s new “meaningful social interactions” metric favored the worst of BuzzFeed’s content, prioritizing whatever links would prompt the biggest flame wars in the replies.

From a values standpoint, the partnership made sense. Peretti’s radical principles may have rattled the media industry, but they feel all too familiar as startup canon. Don’t be precious. That question is empirical. Do whatever makes the number go up. What was important was what people liked, and what people liked was what was important. Virality was content-agnostic, it could be reduced to a “science,” and BuzzFeed was the research lab developing its most viral strains.

But there was always one big problem with Peretti’s hypothesis. There is no such thing as “organic”; traffic is always being controlled. While his friendly conversations with Facebook helped BuzzFeed, they also highlighted the extent to which the social media giant had their hands on the levers of viral success. In one pivotal conversation, Adam Mosseri asks: “‘How often do you think things should go viral like the Dress?’… Jonah was surprised by the question—and by the idea that the frequency of things going viral was up to Mosseri’s team.” Only Facebook, the platform play, produced and routed traffic. BuzzFeed merely chased and received it.

After all, Facebook needed great content to show users, but only insofar as it kept them scrolling through ads. When it learned that videos retained attention for longer, they urged publishers to “pivot to video”—burning cash for inflated views. When Facebook noticed that news articles sent users off-platform, they downranked links. When Facebook got spooked by superspreaders like The Dress and fake election news, they narrowed global reach to favor family and friends. And ultimately, when Facebook simply became, well, uncool and its user growth slowed… so did new traffic to BuzzFeed. The partnership eventually looked more like dependence, and dependence ultimately spelled death.

By the late 2010s, web traffic was flowing so quickly and among so many different destinations that its value inevitably dropped. Advertisers were paying less for the same amount of views, and BuzzFeed’s sky-high video and news production costs were getting difficult to justify to investors. In a virality-constrained world, publishers had to pay more just to get their own promoted articles to find new readers on the feed. The first round of layoffs hit in 2017. More came in 2019, then each of the three years after that. Finally, in April 2023, just mere weeks before Smith’s book was released, BuzzFeed officially shuttered its award-winning News division, which Smith himself had founded and led from 2011 to 2020.

I came away with three big lessons from Smith’s book. One, traffic is not money. Two, traffic is not quality. And three, traffic is not natural. The numbers might be going up and to the right, but what matters far more is the substance behind them.

These are hard things to internalize after a decade of glittering promises about the internet powering a new era of free and democratic media. But we know now that traffic was fickle and accident-prone. The question is what stronger infrastructure we’ll now build in its place.

You can purchase a copy of Traffic here or preorder Taylor’s Extremely Online here. If you want to dive deeper and ask your own questions, RSVP for our event with Ben and Taylor on Tuesday.

Reboot publishes essays reimagining tech’s future every week. If you liked this and want to keep up, subscribe below ⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

• I was very endeared reading the “Definitive Oral History of BuzzFeed News”—sure, it might’ve been unsustainable, but it was clearly a blast to be there.

• One promising new media model is Defector Media, the worker-owned cooperative thriving through paid subscriptions.

• Read on writing style, from hustle porn to the internet novel.

• Community member Nikhil Sethi writes about the creator economy and the neoliberal myth of the lone genius.

💝 closing note

Thank you very much to everyone who applied to be a Reboot editor :) Very excited to share more news on this front soon!

Please like-comment-subscribe,

Jasmine & Reboot team

Register for free

RSVP to our virtual Q&A at this link, or keep reading for Kevin’s review.

—Jasmine

📖 jumpin’ jack cash

By Kevin Chu
Edited by Jake Gaughan

Cloudmoney by Brett Scott is a love letter to cash. The inherent friction of cash, Scott argues, serves as a bulwark against the automation and corporate capture of a monetary system increasingly ensconced within the cloud. With the on-the-ground lens of an anthropologist, Scott deconstructs the complex abstractions of finance and technology into scenes that play out in front of us from on our phone screens to ayahuasca tourism in Peru and the chama women’s cooperatives of the Kenyan informal market. 

“All of us have to survive in this world, and for the majority that means having to work within its existing structures. I often see those structures as having a logic that transcends the individual good intentions of those who find themselves employed by them, or even of those running them.”

Cloudmoney’s greatest strength is how it brings the abstractions of finance and technology down to earth. The book opens on the built environment: skyscrapers that house trading firms and fintech accelerators, multi-billion dollar data center complexes, and the fiber-optic cable networks that form the system’s global connective tissue. “Every element of these buildings,” Scott says of the towers of capital, “is designed to exude a sense of impenetrable power.” “The architecture echoes our relationship with high finance; most people stand beneath these monoliths, on the outside looking up.” 

The payment networks and high-frequency trading algorithms that ferry money around the world all live somewhere. Take for instance the Visa card network, which is housed in a data center encircled by a moat and 24/7 armed guard in an undisclosed location in Fairfax County, Virginia. If corridors of server racks and backup generators comprise its flesh, miles of CAT6 Ethernet and fiber-optic cable make up the veins and capillaries of the global payments network. Yet for all the technological infrastructure that makes up the backbone of global finance, Scott reminds us that all of this is derived from the land. Without the earth and nature, there would be no economy.

“High finance feels ever present and yet ever divorced from our lives, but the complex networks of finance can always – in the end – be traced back to our bodies, and to the earth. Indeed, everything in the final analysis is derived from our ecological systems, without which we perish.”

Scott breaks down the financial system into three layers of money: state money, bank money, and fintech money. Here in the United States, the Federal Reserve acts as the first layer of money creation, printing money out of thin air by fiat. Banks then act as the second layer of money creation, taking deposits and loaning them out, increasing the amount of money in circulation thanks to the accounting magic of fractional reserve banking. Finally, fintech money—cloud money—exists as a third layer of money Elmer glued on top of the traditional banking system. 

To Scott, cloud money represents the antithesis of cash, presenting a vision of money founded in legible efficiency and ephemerality as opposed to dog-eared, physical tangibility. Unlike cash in hand, cloud money exists insofar as a database record somewhere on a Virginia server farm says it does. Scott compares your Cash App balance to a pile of casino chips being shuffled around before they are returned to the house to be counted and paid out. He argues that the uploading of our finances into the cloud and behind a screen has turned our relationship with money impersonal and removed from warm-blooded reality. Rather than restructuring finance, much of consumer-facing fintech has only succeeded at reskinning and rebranding finance: the rise of identity-based neobanks, banks personified as chatbots, and slick mobile apps. “Branch counters were the original ‘user interface’ for banks,” Scott argues. “Increasingly, though, we cannot see financiers, or shake their hands. Rather, the only thing your hand may end up touching is the interface of a digital finance app.” Given this focus on redesigning not finance’s fundamental workings but only our means of interfacing with it, Scott’s assessment of fintech comes into clear view: “When I take a step back and consider the fintech industry, I see not an attempt to redesign Big Finance, but rather an attempt to automate it.” However, there’s just one thing standing in the way of this automation: cash.

The crusade to automate finance depends on removing the human element. Technology has swapped bank tellers for mobile apps and chatbots, replaced telephone stockbrokers with online brokerage websites, and rendered extinct the boisterous, broad-shouldered floor traders that once crowded the pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Yet, corners of life brokered in cold, hard cash have remained tantalizingly out of automation’s reach. Scott draws upon the imagery of gentrification, juxtaposing the storefront of a Sweetgreen proclaiming its (now illegal) cashless policy with the mom and pop Chinese restaurant across the street that asks its customers to pay in cash in order to avoid credit card processing fees. “To modern digital giants, the elderly shopkeeper in a small English town, or the traditional fabric merchant in Mumbai, is just human friction standing in the way of the large-scale profits that will accrue from large-scale automation.”

In delivering a clear and earnest defense of cold, hard cash, Scott lays out practical and political arguments for cash’s importance in upholding monetary diversity. But in its most social essence, cash mediates ways of life and relationship that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

When I’m short on change for my lamb over rice, my halal guy knows I’ll make up the difference next time. If my phone’s out of battery and my credit card declines because I’m out of country, I can scrounge my pockets for a €20 banknote just short of the taxi fare—”Lo siento, no tengo—” “No pasa nada, cuídate por favor.” On the other hand, there’s the very specific kind of guy who will Venmo request you $2.58 for the Uber Pool and keep a detailed ledger of outstanding transactions on a color-coded spreadsheet he leaves open on his vertical second monitor. The all-or-nothing atomicity of digital payments leaves no room for slack or small, unbothered moments of grace.

I would have loved for Scott to have written at further length about alternative monetary systems. He points to rippling credit as “the place to be for any person looking to get involved with idealistic-yet-practical currency innovation.” Such experiments in mutual credit, from the grassroots Sardex project in Sardinia to the Circles universal basic income project in Berlin, reject zero-sum competition in favor of an interconnected, collaborative economy built on mutuality. “This is perhaps the most profound,” says Scott, “of all the concepts that could create an entirely parallel monetary system.” However, he stops short where a researcher or technologist might want to learn more about the latest horizons in redesigning money. However, this isn’t that kind of book. 

At its heart, what Cloudmoney calls for doesn’t require any technological innovation. Rejecting tech-solutionist prognostication, Scott keeps his thesis simple: Cash is what will save us from the extinction of monetary diversity, its inherent friction a site of resistance against relentless financialization and extraction. Scott makes a vigorous defense of cash in terms that are practical and political but ultimately borne out of a fundamentally human ethos. In his words: 

“Deep down I am fighting for something personal. The right to be dirty and physical. We are not immortal super-beings with our brains plugged into an AI cloud-complex, and neither would we want to be. We are messy and contradictory, and that is a spirit better protected by a more down-to-earth incarnation of money.”

Join the Q&A

Kevin Chu is an engineer and writer. He is on Twitter and Goodreads.

Reboot publishes essays and interviews reimagining tech’s future every week. If you liked this and want to keep up, subscribe below ⚡️

Subscribe now

🌀 microdoses

• In 2020, penned an excellent tribute to the late David Graeber and the discipline of economic anthropology. (Reboot also put together a community reflection on Graeber’s Debt, which we highly recommend!)

• The newsletter by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan has been an accessible and clear-eyed accompaniment to the current wave of AI hype, with an emphasis on near-term risks.

• VC wrote a blog post with ChatGPT-4, and most interestingly, shared the full conversation and prompts for getting there.

💝 closing note

From the community recently:

• Olu launched , a newsletter about the history of web accessibility.

• Saffron and the Collective Intelligence Project are using Pol.is to foster democratic discussion about the AI moratorium, alongside Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang. Statement submissions end today, and voting ends on April 5.

• Khoi wrote an essay about conversational AI as a “translator”: something that helps humans and machines speak the same language, no code required.

On my way to the ATM,

Jasmine & Reboot team

Register for free

RSVP to our online Q&A with her at this link, or keep reading for Rishi’s review.

—Jasmine

📖 dismantling techno-chauvinism

By Rishi Balakrishnan
Edited by Jake Gaughan

GPT-4 was released last week. The release was accompanied by a full-court press of fanfare from OpenAI: artificial general intelligence is coming soon! Recently, the noise about the new age of artificial intelligence has been deafening. However, not all are as convinced about its marketed revolutionary promise.

Meredith Broussard, a Professor at NYU and author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, analyzes the current cycle of hype in her newest book, More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech. Providing examples of software systems gone wrong, Broussard takes issue with the technical mindset that reduces political, social, and historical complexity to an optimization problem and applies the blunt force of technology to solve these issues. Departing from critiques of  “techno-solutionism”, Broussard describes this approach as “techno-chauvinism”, a term that analyzes modern technology not as looking forward but recreating the injustices of the past. This frames her two main arguments: that technology cannot be divorced from the society that produced it and that an over-reliance on technology leads to its application in areas that require care and nuanced decision making. 

The reasons given to defer decision-making to computers often rely on the assumption that computers are better at two things than people are: objectivity and efficiency. Humans lie, but data does not. Data reduces complex situations with varying contexts into a clear set of metrics, making accuracy the simple ability of a system to represent a complex world. Claims of the accuracy of machine learning systems are supported by mathematical and statistical principles, and this veneer of science redirects trust from messy human decision-making to impartial statistical systems. But this ignores historical patterns of injustice. Broussard argues it should be no surprise that predictive policing algorithms recommend over-policing neighborhoods of color, or that loan underwriting algorithms approve black homeowners at rates far below white ones. All of this is encoded in our supposedly ‘objective’ data. What further increases the appeal of algorithmic decision-making is their speed. This isn’t by accident either: efficiency is the core of much computer science education and research. There’s a special joy to making a computer program run as quickly as possible, but speed comes at the cost of understanding complexity and nuance. When computer scientists give exclusive focus on creating the fastest systems, the shortcuts taken often reflect pre-existing biases in society. A one character variable for gender (‘M’ or ‘F’) saves precious memory in a database, but disregards the experience of everybody that doesn't neatly fit into either category. By its nature, computing reduces the complex and nuanced human experience into binary representations.

While computing technology is new, Broussard’s description of the techno-chauvinist mindset argues that the focus on “objective” and scientific categorizations isn’t. Broussard traces this line of thinking back to Carl Linneaus, the Enlightenment philosopher credited with developing taxonomies of plants and animals, who also applied those same ideas to create racial classifications of humans. When techno-chauvinism is the starting point of our evaluation, then tech is not even neutral by default. It’s expected to discriminate – this behavior is more than just a glitch.

But Broussard’s analysis is not the prevailing sentiment in the industry. Investment into creating systems that neatly solve messy social problems invest these systems with authority they don't deserve. Treating a machine learning system as a crystal ball leads to its use in situations that require human consideration, not statistical analysis. Broussard recounts the International Baccalaureate program’s process to algorithmically assign student grades during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of evaluating actual student work, grades were determined using historical data of a school’s performance, discriminating against hard working students from under-resourced schools. In the world of criminal justice, Broussard points to Chicago Police Department’s use of software that predicted which specific people would be involved in a shooting. Because of their blind faith in the software, police officers repeatedly paid visits to Robert McDaniel – a Chicago resident with a relatively clean record – despite his many protests. Neighbors started to get wary, and McDaniel was later shot on suspicion of being a snitch. The software's predictions and the department's trust in it resulted in the shooting of an innocent man. It’s absurd to think that a system can accurately foretell a person’s future based on a couple of data points in a police database. 

So what’s the solution? Defeating techno-chauvinism requires commitment to the public interest. This means centering the public good in conversations around technology instead of assuming that new technology will automatically get us there. She highlights two specific manifestations of public interest technology, investigative journalism and algorithmic auditing. Stories like ProPublica's investigation of the COMPAS recidivism algorithm or the Markup's exposé of Facebook's discriminatory advertising practices not only called public attention to unfair algorithms but also forced discussions around solutions and redressing harm. Algorithmic auditing, especially when supported by regulation, explores when (and for whom) a model can fail and takes preventative measures to ensure new models don't reproduce old injustices.

Overall, Broussard provides an incredibly accessible primer into the issue of blindly applying technology to complex social questions. I find her descriptions of the technical mindset that informs this solutionism both accurate and compelling, and agree with her advocacy for a renewed focus on the public interest when creating technology.

However, underlying the ideology of techno-chauvinism is the fact that automating judgment is incredibly profitable. Broussard dismantles the philosophical underpinnings of techno-chauvinism, but the structure of venture capital and Big Tech means that it likely isn’t disappearing any time soon. These material incentives inform the hype cycles around AI and should make us wary of the way that efforts to regulate AI are often co-opted by those it seeks to regulate. Algorithmic auditing and investigative journalism are necessary to limit the damage of current technology, but I also would have loved to see an exploration of an alternative politics of software design. Broussard briefly touches on such alternatives: universal design principles drawn from disability studies, juries that involve community members in the software development process, and movements like Afrofuturism which integrate cultural history into science fiction.

While I would have appreciated a deeper development of a politics that imagines liberatory, collectively designed technology, the book makes an important contribution in providing a framework to analyze technology. We cannot assume that new technology solves familiar injustices, and have to build technology with an eye towards equity and fairness. The creators of technology must be held accountable to their promises, and Broussard shows us how.

Join the Q&A

Rishi Balakrishnan is a software engineer based in Berkeley.

Reboot publishes essays and interviews reimagining tech’s future every week. If you liked this and want to keep up, subscribe below ⚡️

Subscribe now

🌀 microdoses

• The WSJ wins award for the all-time worst explainer of the SVB crisis.

• My favorite contrarian ridicules the popular narrative of tech company masterminds hacking user psychology or national politics, when in reality, his ex-employer Facebook struggled endlessly to even "make users post more" or "make people like Facebook."

• This essay on “putdownable prose” laments what is lost when we ask all our books to be page-turners, where the central aim is to entertain the reader rather than to challenge them.

• The most fun thing I read this week was this post on Flaco the owl.

💝 closing note

From the community recently:

• Daniel Bashir talked to writer Ken Liu about how sci-fi can help technologists for podcast.

• Alexa Jakob reflects in a blog post on why DEI alone won’t make AI ethical.

• I was interviewed by about Reboot and reimagining techno-optimism. Watch the video or read the transcript here.

Toward the public interest,

Jasmine & Reboot team

His new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, embarks on the ambitious journey of uncovering Silicon Valley’s complex past—colonization, internment, counterculture, the tech industry—and the deeply rooted capitalist system that drives it all.

Palo Alto was one of my most anticipated reads for 2023, so I’m incredibly excited to get to host Malcolm Harris for the Reboot Q&A next week. Please join us!

Register for free

RSVP at this link, or keep reading for Jake’s review.

—Jasmine

📖 What All Roads Lead Back To

By

Late in Frank Norris’ 1901 novel The Octopus, the poet protagonist confronts the villain, an old Californian railroad baron. Lambasting the capitalist for his culpability in the destruction and death caused by the Southern Pacific railroad, our writer finds himself backed into a corner by the baron’s response, “The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is a law that governs them—supply and demand. Men have only little to do with the whole business. Complications may arise, conditions that bear hard on the individual—crush him maybe—BUT THE WHEAT WILL BE CARRIED TO FEED THE PEOPLE as inevitably it will grow…Blame conditions, not men,”

In Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023), through the story of the namesake town, Malcolm Harris details the development of the Palo Alto System: a model of optimized development responsible for much of our modern world. Stanford University lies at the heart of this structure, the Farm is described as a factory of human capital development, treating pupils more as investments than students. Harris’ tome is a labor of love, his biting commentary is balanced by the care that he clearly has for his hometown. Tracing individuals, stories, and forces across centuries and continents, Harris highlights how the history of Santa Clara County has led us to our modern moment. 

Harris begins the story of Palo Alto by describing the exploitation, expulsion, and murder of the indigenous Ohlone people by the first Americans who moved into the region. What follows is a familiar story of settlement: capital seeks growth on the frontier, it accumulates into banks and conglomerates, municipalities and education follows, minorities are marginalized or expelled, history is forgotten. 

Nevertheless, Palo Alto’s story stands out for the outsized impact its actors and ideas have had on global history. The Bank of Italy was established to lend to Italian immigrants in the Gold Rush and is now known as Bank of America. Leland Stanford used his railroad profits to establish Stanford University—hoping to optimize students just as he optimized his racehorses. Herbert Hoover was one of those first students in Stanford’s initial “Pioneer Class” before becoming a presidential failure and pre-eminent conservative power broker. Ultimately, through the Cold War, a concerted academic mission, and military spending, Palo Alto became the heart of Silicon Valley. In between these major events, Harris fills in the story of Palo Alto with sobering examples—big and small—of the violence, racism, and exploitation which has built our world into what it is today.

At the same time, Harris has been able to meticulously craft a narrative which somehow remains hopeful. He notes that at every step in the construction of the Palo Alto System, there have been those who have thrown their bodies on the gears of the machine, sabotaging the forces at work. For every Herbert Hoover, Lewis Terman, or Bill Shockley, there is an opposite, an Ernesto Galarza, Caroline Decker, or Rosemary Cambra. None of these efforts of resistance were without fault and all ultimately failed to stop the Palo Alto System. Yet there is optimism in these stories of how collective struggles and advocacy moved the needle—if ever so slightly—against the hegemony of Palo Alto. Harris’ overtly political perspective provides a lifeline away from a defeatist acceptance of the horrors that much of the book details.

Though narrow modern connotations of ‘the Bay’ may suggest otherwise, Palo Alto should not be understood as a project centered on the technology industry. By the time familiar names like Thiel, Brin, and Musk appear in the book, they are simply the newest cogs in the established Palo Alto System. The discourses of both tech boosterism and criticism often misunderstand ‘Silicon Valley’ as novel, as if the use of computer chips nullifies the forces of profit. At the same time, by understanding the computing industry solely as a symptom of the broader Palo Alto System, Harris may actually miss the ways in which some social disruptions of the underlying technology lie outside of his historical narrative. Yet as Ben Beitler wrote in his review for the LA Review of Books, professional historians will need to comb through the weeds of Harris’ work to evaluate the merits of its story, the rest of us get to understand Palo Alto through its “explanatory power.” In this regard, the book excels.

Of course, while certainly exemplary in its scale and impact, the story of Stanford University and the Palo Alto is hardly singular. Imitations and emulations of the Palo Alto System can be found across many institutions of higher education around the world. To ensure that the pupil remains an asset to these structures, moments of student resistance to these educational systems are often met with the harsh enforcement of the status quo; sometimes violently. Reimaginings of the ivory—or poured concrete—towers are repelled by extra-educational power. The intractable relationships between education, money, and domination that Harris describes throughout Palo Alto are both terrifying and familiar. While Harris makes a point to highlight how the marketing of meritocracy was used to justify the forms that the Palo Alto System created, Stanford is not the only school to claim that its students are the brightest in the world or that its alums are the most powerful. If it could help their spot in the rankings, a handful of universities around the world would undoubtedly argue that Palo Alto should have been written about them instead. 

Harris’ analysis should prompt a reconsideration of what it means to pass through any institution which could lay such a claim and what responsibility one has in reinforcing or rejecting them. Readers should not conflate the enormity of the Palo Alto System and its offshoots with an inevitability of its continuation. In fact, Harris suggests alternative futures: the Palo Alto System is just an amalgamation of forces, forces which can be opposed. In the face of an accelerating climate crisis, Harris finishes the book by making a convincing case that the dismantling of Stanford and the system that it reproduces is necessary for the continuation of humanity. This goal is daunting but Harris argues that it’s hardly unpragmatic. 

Throughout this narrative, Harris notes the tension between understanding history through forces or through individuals: while the Palo Alto System places the utmost importance on the individual, Harris’ own materialist analysis deals mainly with forces. It is hard for the reader to find themselves in Palo Alto’s grand story, but maybe such a search is flawed in its premise. Norris’ railroad baron misunderstands his role in history and its forces; Palo Alto suggests a different way of understanding one’s own.

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Jake Gaughan (he/him) is a software developer based in Seattle.

Reboot publishes essays and interviews reimagining tech’s future every week. If you liked this and want to keep up, subscribe below ⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

• Is there ethical consumption under capitalism? Perhaps there is. In “Just Beans,” Malcolm Harris reflects on Starbucks smashing, Zizek, and why our individual actions might matter after all.

• For more Palo Alto history, check out “A Tale of Two Cities,” a Reboot essay by Stanford student Victoria Gorum on how racist redlining created East Palo Alto.

• An mid-90s WIRED editor reflects on how the Californian ideology led from cyberlibertarian hippies to the fascist populism of Peter Thiel.

💝 closing note

One more thing: I’m working on a short essay and talk about what makes “good tech criticism.” I’d love to hear in an email reply or the comments about a piece of tech writing that has dramatically shifted your perspective, or even better, your work. Thanks!

Leave a comment

Looking backward,

Jasmine & Reboot team

His book, Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back), analyzes how big tech corporations and their products have strengthened 21st century neoliberalism.

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📖 hegemony now by jeremy gilbert and alex williams

by Arushi Bandi // edited by

What is neoliberal hegemony and exactly how did it come to be? I remember my aunt recalling her West Virginian teenage years in the 70s: “No one cared about getting rich, they just wanted to settle down with a white picket fence.” Compare that now with a comment I heard a tech bro make in California: “One million dollars doesn’t hit like it used to.” This is the question at the heart of Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Can Win It Back), the scope of which takes Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams on a broad survey of the last century: from analyzing hip-hop and deconstructing the American classroom to redefining the terms “politics” and “power”.

Gilbert and Willliams’ main theses are informed heavily by the work of Anthony Gramsci, the Italian political theorist and critic working during Mussolini’s rule. Gramsci understood hegemony as a small group determining “the general direction of travel” of a society, often relying on the capacity of a larger group to adopt the same ‘common sense’ as them, understood in Hegemony Now to mean a worldview presented as “neutral and unchallengeable”. Through this lens, the book explores how the views conferred on us by tech-finance serve only to keep us running for same-day treats on their precarity-inducing, gadget-strapped hamster wheel: you deserve the best products, therefore the market must remain free, and the only way to stop running is to become one of them.

Yet the book opens and closes with the assertion that neoliberalism is dying. Gilbert and Williams show that many citizens of America and non-Western countries never really bought into the idea of neoliberalism — it was often enforced through organized violence or passively consented to as citizens accepted their new identities as consumers first. So what happens now when we decide the deal is off? We don’t want new clothes, they all have microplastics anyways. In the midst of this decay, we may find a moment ripe for change. 

This hegemony would like us all to be “functional neoliberal subjects that compete in the labour market, borrow, and consume.” Most of us must compete for labor and borrow; I wonder if it is in the third act of consumption that as acting individuals we might be able to tip the scale ever slightly in our favor. In resisting the urge to consume, we also resist our pacification towards the greater system. However pointless it may seem to leave a store without buying or not clicking on an Instagram ad, is it not an exercise in agency?

Perhaps this is harder now than ever before. With our reflections constantly being shoved back into our faces in screens and apps abound, appearing as the right type of person — and therefore the right type of consumer — is no longer a materialistic and shallow endeavor, it seems to be the morally correct one. But what is the experience of scrolling down a feed if not a purely consumptive one? Our role as consumers has expanded from that of shoppers to experience-seekers and brand-loyalists, then doubled back in the form of influencers and “creators”. But as Gilbert and Williams note in the chapter “Platform Power,” the greater our participation, the more market-value accrued to those who own the platforms — not us. The present day corollary to Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer” may well be “Why I am Not Going To Download TikTok”. Where he speaks of most technological progress as the “degradation and obsolescence of the body”, we may think of degradation and obsolescence of the mind; what else to make of feeds and algorithms, DALL·E, Lensa, ChatGPT? If we are to resist the path of neoliberal hegemony, one that has moved on from machines and seeks to make a twisted definition of “intelligence” its next target, we must find a way to either use these deeply intrusive technologies without giving them power over us, or simply be rid of them altogether. 

Reading this book as a highly “functional neoliberal subject” working in tech myself, I wonder just how much of software is dependent on this hegemony. Gilbert and Williams speak of attempts to co-opt the platforms propped up by hegemony, such as activists organizing on mainstream social media. But just as Audre Lorde proclaimed “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” can any counter-hegemonic movement that hopes to properly implicate corporations really be organized on Facebook? There may be need for a greater role of “small tech” in a counter-hegemonic movement, but the professional class of software engineers benefit from their current position and comprise the social unit keeping neoliberalism alive. To refer to Wendell Berry again: “Is the life of a corporate underling — even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well-paid — an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth?” Many technologists are willing to take pay cuts to find more fulfilling work and move to smaller organizations in hopes of no longer being just “a cog in the machine”. Neoliberalism requires scale to operate, but it is oftentimes precisely in the scaling of business where workers are left behind. I think of initiatives such as Community Memory: locally-oriented, community-owned software built in conjunction with the people who use it is necessary if we are to redeem technology in this moment. 

Hegemony Now offers hope for such a counter-hegemonic movement in its consistent refusal to admit to narrow interpretations of people and how they act politically. In a standout 35-page long chapter, the authors exhort ‘interests’ — potential future states of actuality and social goods that come out of them — rather than identity or values as the main motivating political factor of social groups. It is in the re-reading of people as multiplicities, with votes not tied strictly to skin color or faith, that we can assemble previously unconsidered coalitions and reinstate a social democracy. As the authors state plainly in the last chapter, “if you want to persuade people to follow you, tell them what’s in it for them. Don’t confuse the issue with arguments over right and wrong.” 

And so the lasting impression is clear: we have our work cut out for us. Hegemony Now ends beautifully with the famous Gramsci quote: “Pessimisim of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Indeed, this is the spirit in which it was written and in which we must march on into the new year if there is hope of an egalitarian and collective, dignified future to be found someplace ahead.

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Arushi Bandi is a software engineer living and working in San Francisco.

Reboot publishes essays and interviews reimagining tech’s future every week. If you liked this and want to keep up, subscribe below ⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

• Three related recs from Arushi:

  • On consumerism’s relationship to fascism, from .

  • “Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer”

  • “Feminism, the body and the machine”

• The book Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams is still one of the most galvanizing and provocative things I’ve read about tech and politics.

• ICYMI, started a Substack. Seriously.

💝 closing note

From the community this week:

• Our friends at Logic Magazine published their latest issue, Pivot. The cover was designed by Reboot fellowship mentor Justin Carder, and it features an “Intergenerational Struggle Session” conversation between Logic’s editorial team and myself, Jessica Dai, and Emily Liu at Reboot.

• Daniel Bashir at published a new podcast episode discussing the concept of an AI Bill of Rights.

• wrote a blog post examining the ethics of Lensa and other AI art.

Toward an optimism of the will,

Jasmine & Reboot team

Her book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance paints a rich picture of what it’s like to be a long-haul trucker today—and in particular, how digital surveillance has encroached into the profession.

Register for free!

RSVP at this link, or keep reading for our review of the book.

📖 data driven by karen levy

by // edited by

For as long as I can remember, my father’s van has been a sort of mobile warehouse for stacks upon stacks of carpet, hardwood, and vinyl samples. He has worked in the flooring industry for decades, doggedly shuttling this cargo to clients across the borders of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. He’d often return late in the evenings, and on nights when I could hear the sound of torrential rain and thunder, I would worry about whether it was safe for him to be out there on the roads. Once, he came back with a tale of being within a few yards of a truck that spun out of control on the highway, expecting me to share in his amazement of his good fortune that he wasn’t involved. Instead, I Googled the number of annual fatal vehicular accidents in the United States and grew even more anxious. 

While my father was certainly not a trucker, I was struck by how Karen Levy’s descriptions of the trucking lifestyle in Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance resonated with my own perception of my dad’s livelihood. Data Driven examines the legal, social, and cultural dimensions of Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs), monitoring machines designed to increase compliance with hours-of-service regulations that limit how long truckers can work before taking a federally mandated break. In 2018, legislation was passed that required truckers to switch from manual recordkeeping to using ELDs, believed to be less easily falsified than the old paper-and-pencil logs. My father’s story about the truck he saw on the highway rings true with a key element of Levy’s account: trucking is a notoriously dangerous profession. Accidents are commonly attributed to trucker fatigue, and the introduction of the ELD mandate was based on a seemingly straightforward rationale: if monitoring for compliance with legal requirements to rest was perfected via technology, then drivers would effectively be forced to rest, and accidents would subsequently decrease. In high school, partly motivated by concerns about my father’s long workdays on the road, I prototyped an ELD-like device of my own: a motion sensor that tracked a driver’s face to automatically detect when the driver was looking away from the road.

A trained sociologist, Levy examines ELDs from legal, economic, and cultural perspectives to better understand the forces that led to the implementation of the mandate and its resulting impacts on the trucking industry’s main stakeholders. Levy’s account of the ELD rejects the simplistic narrative that this technological intervention will make roads safer for truckers and the public. Instead, she argues that ELDs solve the wrong problem: the reason why truckers do not comply with hours-of-service regulations is because they are economically pressured to do so. After the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1970s, trucking companies switched to a per-mile, rather than per-hour, compensation system, which means that time that truckers spend on repairs, loading and unloading, and inspections are uncompensated. As Levy’s research shows, it is basically impossible for drivers to earn enough money or meet their company’s deadlines unless they violate the timekeeping rules. Furthermore, the most likely cause of driver fatigue are the long hours spent waiting to load and unload, which are demonstrably linked to increased crash rates. Based on the plethora of evidence Levy provides in Data Driven, reducing detention time would be a far more logical solution to fix driver fatigue.

Levy argues that interventions like ELDs are part of a larger trend of digital enforcement, in which technology is used to enforce organizational and legal rules with absolute precision. These types of interventions abstract away actual social realities in favor of adhering to simplified apparent orders. Without understanding the social conditions and aftermaths of digital enforcement, we cannot understand why technological fixes fail or, at the very least, introduce new forms of harm into the systems they are intended to improve. For example, truckers resent the ELD mandate, seeing the machines as an encroachment on their autonomy, particularly because the collection of data for regulatory compliance also enables new modes of managerial control. Because trucks are equipped with ELDs, which monitor the exact location of each vehicle in a firm’s fleet, remote operators are able to more clearly see exactly whether truckers are moving and remonstrate them if they are not deemed to be engaging in productive behavior. ELDs shift the balance of epistemic power away from the “localized, biophysical” knowledge of truckers, such as intuitively knowing when they are too tired to drive, towards the abstract, quantified, and ostensibly neutral gaze of the ELD.  

One of the most fascinating revelations in Data Driven is that ELDs appear to be a failure even in the terms of the rationale upon which their existence rests: improving the safety of the industry and the public. Levy discusses the results of a study that examined the ELD rollout which found that while compliance with regulations did increase, there was no evidence to suggest that any of the safety outcomes we actually care about improved. Perversely, while researchers found the greatest decrease in timekeeping violations among small trucking firms, those same firms found that truck crashes increased for that very category of firms. Further, Levy writes, “the number of fatalities in large-truck crashes hit a thirty-year high in the first year of the mandate’s enforcement, even as general vehicle fatalities decreased.” The reason, Levy suggests, is that the more absolute enforcement of timekeeping rules means that the latitude truckers previously had to take a little extra time for a given trip has disappeared. Instead of being free to exercise individual discretion to take breaks or go more slowly through a particularly challenging part of the drive, truckers must now complete the same distance in a fixed, digitally-enforced amount of time.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to the kinds of problems introduced by ELDs. While there has been worker resistance and adaptation to the ELD mandate, Levy cautions us against a tendency to believe that resistance is always inherently anti-authoritarian: when workers “resist” the ELD by finding clever ways to drive longer than they are legally permitted to, this resistance benefits the very corporations who have created the financial arrangements which exploit truckers. 

In a popular Medium post, STS professor (and former Reboot guest!) Lee Vinsel describes the phenomenon of what he terms “criti-hype”, the tendency of academic researchers to inflate concerns about emerging technologies into doomsday scenarios involving massive societal shifts. These types of overblown critiques form their own hype bubbles, inverting the naively optimistic tech boosterism so often found in Silicon Valley. And just as starry-eyed praise ultimately leads to greater investment in startup ecosystems, so too can criti-hype secure funding, prestige, and attention to its academic practitioners. The antidote to this, Vinsel suggests, is a deep understanding of the history, sociology, and economics of technology, paired with study of technologies that have actually emerged, creating real problems and agonies. In this vein, I see Data Driven as an exemplar of nuanced, careful, and comprehensive description and analysis about the real frustrations resulting from technology’s encroachment into everyday life. 

Worries about tectonic ruptures in the fabric of society that automation will ostensibly produce in some future date displace our attention away from how real workers, such as long-haul truckers, encounter friction when interacting with new forms of technology right now. It is perhaps more exciting to devote one’s energy to preventing an imaginary robot apocalypse than, say, fight for a world in which truckers can retain the everyday dignity of freely taking a bathroom break or driving unmolested by the intrusive gaze of a monitoring device. I wonder if the ability to take these latter, more localized concerns seriously is not subordinate to, but rather a prerequisite for, adequately reckoning with the kinds of challenges autonomous technologies will likely produce. 

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Matthew Sun (he/him) is a tech worker, writer, and Reboot community member based in northern Virginia. He enjoys reading, practicing Cantonese, and making new friends in the DC area. Check out his Twitter, Goodreads, and first essay for Reboot.

Reboot publishes essays and interviews reimagining tech’s future every week. If you liked this and want to keep up, subscribe below ⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

• I enjoyed this recent Odd Lots episode with truck driver Gord Magill, where Gord shares his perspective on the inefficiencies and labor shortages in trucking. One line particularly stood out: “They’ve overregulated the people doing the work rather than the people in charge of the markets where the work is being done.” (Gord also writes the provocative Substack .)

• I sent ChatGPT this book review and asked for more reading recommendations. Here’s what it shared:

  

• The always hilarious and always cutting Brandon Taylor writes about Spotify Wrapped, BuJo influencers, and secular meaning-making in his latest post on.

💝 closing note

I want to keep using this space to highlight cool things the community has created recently. Last week:

• wrote about reinterpretations of the IRCA, which allows state entities (like the UC System!) to hire undocumented folks who don’t have work authorization.

• Nikhil Sethi published poems in the latest issue of Typehouse Magazine—I especially liked “Anatomy Lesson” on page 92!

• We published a “Meet the Team” feature on Lucas Gelfond, who codirects the Reboot Student Fellowship and has written pieces for the newsletter and Kernel.

Feel free to plug your own work in the comments, and we’ll pick a few things to highlight.

Keep trucking on,

Jasmine & Reboot team

Her book What Can A Body Do? prompts us to reimagine the design of our built world through the lens of disability and accessibility, exploring ideas from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture. I’m especially excited because she frames the discussion not around constraints, but rather abundance and imagination.

Register for free!

RSVP at this link, or keep reading for our review of the book:

📖 what can a body do? by sara hendren

by Pearl Zhang // edited by Shira Abramovich

As a person with a vision impairment, I cannot remember a time in my education without assistive technologies. From Chrome extensions which changed font colors from black to teal and magenta to advanced head mounted eyewear displays, I felt the one constant in my K-12 educational experience was the presence of complex and hard to navigate technology. Although these technologies were helpful in making modules and educational sites more accessible, they also reminded me that I did not fit the profile of a typical user. These technologies were aimed towards returning me to what able bodied people viewed as normal, rather than meeting me at where I was in the present moment and honoring the richness of my full embodied self. 

In her book What Can A Body Do?, Sara Hendren, a design researcher and professor at Olin College of Engineering, depicts the adaptation of bodies to the built world and the ways in which the design of technology and everyday objects can honor the innate dignity that every person is due. Drawing on the fields of disability studies, human computer interaction, human centered design, and science and technology studies, Hendren powerfully brings to life the lived realities that disabled people encounter as their bodies clash with the built world, and how they creatively engineer their environments to reclaim their space and assert their agency.

Hendren separates stories by overarching themes: each chapter has a title such as “limb,” “clock,” or “time,” providing a cohesive structure to orient individual narratives that form the foundation for Hendren’s analysis. The stories depict a broad range of experiences; disability does not discriminate. From a father named Chris using his prosthetic arm to peel and pit avocados and untwist the lid from a jar of peanut butter, to the re-design of Starbucks at the Gallaudet School for the Deaf being based on key principles of Deaf architecture, to a supportive chair made from hundreds of layers of cardboard sheets, to the design of Dutch assisted-living centers for the elderly with dementia — Hendren writes with the keen eye of an artist to capture the universality of the lived experience. 

An example of how design reveals points of connectivity in human experiences is the previously mentioned Dutch care facility Hogeweyk (pronounced like hog-awake). A nursing home for Alzeheimer’s patients, it also contains restaurants, storefronts, gyms, and theaters — a planned mini-community. By imaginatively interpreting favorable surroundings, it ultimately creates an environment where people’s inherent humanity and dignity, in spite of their current condition, are encouraged to flourish and where their needs are honored. The semi-fluid nature of Hogeweyk enables the public from the town Weesp in the Netherlands to enter restaurants and sit down to have a meal there too. The blurring of private and public creates a community where people, in spite of their bodily differences, sit down and break bread. Above all, the genesis of Hogeweyk models a formative shift of thinking: a shift from individualism to dependence. Hendren writes, “Dependence creates relationships of necessary care – care that may be undertaken by individuals, families, local communities and municipal organizations, churches and mosques and temples, states or nations, or all of those in some mix,” highlighting the community forged around people’s shared contexts and connections and how these communities slowly but steadily build interdependence.

Interdependence features prominently in each story. One of the stories I found most touching was the story of Niko, a two year old boy diagnosed with a rare genetic mutation that causes developmental and motor delays. To provide optimal physical support for Niko, his parents collaborated with his physical therapist and a designer at the Adaptive Design Association to create a chair crafted entirely out of cardboard sheets ingeniously stacked on top of each other specifically for his condition. In part due to my own experience navigating disability, I loved seeing how the people in Niko’s life embark on a journey with him and share in the joys and pains of life — together. Each person touches another, and another, culminating in ripple effects that magnify communities, reminding us that we are not alone.

Hendren’s generous storytelling is complemented with insights into disability history, providing glimpses into the work of disability activists and philosophers. As a budding technologist, I found the emphasis on disability history and philosophy especially resonant. As technologists, we have our own biases and assumptions with which we program and design software that result in technology for the typical user. However, by paying attention to the long history of disability studies, software engineers and designers receive an invitation to answer “what can a body do?”. We can create technologies of abundance dedicated to meeting people in their current moments. We can dream up better solutions and co-design in solidarity with marginalized communities to build anti-ableist interventions that reduce harms in the status-quo.

While reading, I wished to see more on how the cultural perception of disability influences the technology design. At the same time, addressing these issues would have detracted from the book’s thesis: once we acknowledge that all technology is assistive and all bodies are different, we appreciate expressions of beauty throughout all aspects of life and that we all deserve things and spaces to express our authentic selves. 

I found What Can A Body Do? to be deeply moving and teared up at multiple sections in this book. Yet, questions lingered. What would it look like if person-centered ethos of compassion were embedded into design choices for institutions and technological instruments from the very beginning? How can we design technologies to accommodate the access intimacies of our friends and neighbors, and reforge and repair the ways how people are excluded by the tools already constructed? What do we owe to each other? Hendren’s prose emanates generosity and openness, a consistent reminder to re-imagine our lived realities into a metamorphosis of what can be and is possible. 

Join the Q&A

Pearl Zhang is a senior at Swarthmore College studying computer science and education. In her free time she enjoys reading fiction and memoirs and exploring hole in the wall restaurants.

🌀 microdoses

• For related reading, check out Reboot’s mini-reviews of Design Justice or editor Shira Abramovich’s personal essay Beyond + Escape, a reflection on (in)accessibility in CS culture for Kernel Magazine Issue One.

• Tech Workers Coalition published a “Layoff Guide for Twitter Workers,” which covers topics from workplace surveillance to local labor laws (and is applicable for any worker facing this economic climate).

💝 closing note

ICYMI: Reboot Student Fellowship apps are open for 2023! Please forward to an undergrad in your life—we promise this isn’t your average tech fellowship.

Also, I accidentally emailed out Jessica’s “Meet the Team Q&A” last night instead of just posting it online... sorry but also give it a read I guess? 🫶

In the ashes of the bird app,

Jasmine & Reboot team

📖 Resisting AI ft. Dan McQuillan

Dan’s new book, Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, comes out in just a few days.

Join us next Thursday, August 25 for a conversation on AI, its politics, and how to move past the surface-level of “AI has politics.” Note this is 4p PT, an hour earlier than is usual! Thank you to Dan for being very accommodating with US time zones from the UK :)

Free Registration

🤖 our take: a resonant critique

By McKane Andrus and joice tang

As AI — whether it be a complex deep learning model or simple automated decision-making tool — is repeatedly turned towards by decision makers in the hopes of resolving any number of social issues, we hear of countless cases of harm, intended and unintended. Thousands of Australians being wrongly forced to repay the cost of received social benefits, Black activists being targeted with facial recognition and other AI-enabled surveillance tools, minoritized groups being censored online by “hate speech” content moderation systems. Why do our social institutions keep turning to AI and, with the amount of work and money being poured into “Ethical and Responsible AI,” why does AI keep failing us?

Much of the existing work critiquing AI has pointed to specific problems with AI-centric systems: bias, non-inclusiveness, exploitativeness, environmental destructiveness, opacity and non-contestability, or any other of a number of valid, seemingly discrete concerns. When these issues are presented independently, however, one can be left with the feeling that they are resolvable in isolation from each other. During McKane’s two and a half years at the Partnership on AI, an organization deeply entrenched in the pursuit of “Responsible AI,” they very often felt the need for a more comprehensive theory of harm of AI (why AI ends up hurting people and society) that doesn’t just encourage playing whack-a-mole with the “ethical” issues that arise with AI in deployment1. Goldsmith’s, University of London Professor Dan McQuillan’s new book Resisting AI: An Antifascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence aims to provide such a theoretical framework. 

Within the responsible AI industry, there are often two archetypal understandings to the question of why AI causes harm. From one point of view, harm can be seen as stemming from a lack of understanding within institutions — and within the discipline of AI more broadly — of how to produce AI ethically and responsibly. Under this perspective, research and education are a reasonable path towards developing socially beneficial AI. From the other point of view — the one we tend to align with — harm is a result of the business models and institutional motivations behind deploying AI systems, meaning that systemic social changes are needed to actually eliminate AI harms. It can be difficult, however, to know how to go deeper than the somewhat simplistic, albeit accurate, critique that states “the problem is capitalism and capitalist production of AI.” This is where Resisting AI makes its strongest contribution: McQuillan illustrates how the root of modern problems with AI is its applicability to and immediate alignment with neoliberal and far-right ideologies — what McQuillan calls the “resonances” between AI and fascism. 

McQuillan’s conceptual tool of resonances between technology and social practices ends up being incredibly helpful for understanding and interrogating the politics of AI. It is related to Langdon Winner’s conception of some technologies being “inherently political” because of the social arrangements they require to function (e.g. a nuclear plant requires extensive centralization and administration). But McQuillan takes the assessment even further. By looking also at how AI becomes a lens through which we view the world that is itself more amenable to certain ways of thinking (e.g. us vs. them mentality), McQuillan’s “resonances” makes clear that it is the technical attributes of AI, not just the politics of its developers, that impact what direction the tech pushes us in and who chooses to mobilize it.

One of the recurring “resonances” throughout the book that stood out to us given our prior work is AI’s applicability to tasks of segregation and discrimination. In many cases, algorithmic decision-making systems exist solely to discriminate — between the deserving and undeserving, the risky and the secure. Instead of looking into why differences might exist between groups, the typical application of AI encourages the reproduction and reification of boundaries between them. While prior work has delved into this propensity of AI2, McQuillan makes the broader case that this is a significant reason why institutions turn to AI — it provides a pseudo-scientific basis for ailing social institutions to reduce costs and direct limited resources “objectively” and in a way that is difficult to be challenged. As an increasing number of institutions adopt the ideology that the problems our society faces stem from individual failings and not systemic ones, AI allows them to construct systems that “objectively” identify these “problem” individuals, shielding from view the actual causes of social strain. McKane, in their own experience with this research space, has seen how a majority of “ethical AI” work does not question whether largely unaccountable, tech multinationals should be building tools that segregate and discriminate on such a massive scale in the first place, leaving us to focus on how to more accurately label and discriminate between individuals as a path towards social justice.  

Another one of the resonances McQuillan examines is AI’s potential to reframe correlative relationships as scientific understanding of the world. Given that AI merely uncovers trends in historical data, deploying an AI system tells one almost nothing about why trends exist. This in turn allows far-right and fascist-inspired actors and institutions to freely project their otherwise unsubstantiated views of the world onto the patterns AI settles on, imbuing them with a veneer of scientism and objectivity. As McQuillan writes, “AI takes sides not simply by being a tool used by the powerful but by its inherent reinforcement of rigid dualisms and representations” (109). 

Ultimately, McQuillan considers technology a secondary solution to collective action, solidarity, and self-determination, a perspective we both strongly agree with and hope to further in our own research and community-based work. By rooting his anti-facist approach to AI in mutual aid, solidarity, and a political Luddite-esque resistance to exploitative tech, McQuillan makes an argument for the importance of human self-determination and consciousness of broader structural conditions. However, while we appreciated his avoidance of techno-solutionism, the paths forward were vaguer than we had both hoped. To put his approach into action, he argues for self-organized workers’ councils, pointing to examples of how such groups have built counter power and taking the time to differentiate them from traditional citizen’s juries and worker’s unions. McQuillan helps us understand how changing the social conditions of AI production would likely mitigate AI’s resonances with fascism, but he does not so much explore what role, if any, AI or its builders should play in the process of articulating social change.3 He argues for a prefigurative politics of anti-fascist AI, but does not spend much time discussing how we may use, create, and interact with technology in an anti-fascist manner beyond resisting it or changing material conditions entirely.4 Although we hesitate to imagine technologies without first centering affected communities, it felt like McQuillan, with his acute understanding of the fascist potential of AI, would be an appropriate guide in exploring what some prototypical anti-fascist AI systems could be. 

Taking the social organization strategies McQuillan offers to heart, however, reminds us that the role of the technologist is not more valuable than any other role in society. We can and should speculate what tech-involved futures can be, but we should do so as members of these communities, not as removed, “objective” engineers and designers. Pointing to feminist and new materialist theory, McQuillan encourages the reader to question what “objectivity” is in the first place; reminding us of both the validity and necessity of alternative ways of knowing. As technologists, this should remind us that our specific brand of technical knowledge is but one way to understand technology and its role in the social world. Taking an emergent, secondary stance to technological development means we must prioritize social relations, letting communities figure out the role of technology in society as we figure out what resonates with a just and equitable future for everyone.

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McKane Andrus is an incoming PhD student at UW HCDE and former researcher at the Partnership on AI.

joice tang is an incoming PhD student at UW HCDE.

Reboot publishes free essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you liked this or want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

Some topic-relevant recommendations c/o McKane and joice:

• If you are looking for a little more insight into what technology should/could be improved on the path to collective and self-organized decision making, Divya Siddarth writes in WIRED on how to make technology more democratic, and what we need to demand of “democracy”

• Studying Up, an academic paper that explores how to invert AI to interrogate power instead of acquiescing to it

• The Hammer of Ludd episode of This Machine Kills Podcast is a great description of the kind of political Luddism that Dan suggests in this book – break and resist the technologies that don’t allow for the social arrangements we actually want to see.

Regularly scheduled shitposts c/o Reboot Team:

• A bit late to this and also not really a shitpost but this thread is incredible

• Can’t believe my favorite didn’t make the top 3 :(

• Threads/ twitter/ discord/ substack/ …

💝 closing note

If you haven’t already, come hang out with us on Threads! See last week’s post for more info (tldr get the app).

Towards spicier discourse and more chaotic posts,

Reboot team

📖 Wendit Tnce Inf (& other work) with Allison Parrish

No, that’s not a typo; it’s the title of Allison Parrish’s newest work. Keep reading for our review and the explanation!

Join us next Thursday to experience some poetry, join the Q&A etc, you know the drill.

Free Registration

🤖 our take: meet us at the fault lines of language and computation

By Shira Abramovich

Allison Parrish’s latest work, Wendit Tnce Inf, is very much a physical object. It’s a hand-printed, hand-bound chapbook that looks the part: running a finger over each page, the light emboss of the letterpress is tangible; the thread binding of the book is tied neatly at the center page; the letters are shaped like the old-fashioned lead type that is still used on many presses today.

You’re not wrong to expect a poetry chapbook from this physical presentation, but what you find inside doesn’t match many expectations of poetry: the words are blurred, as though printed sloppily; the text reads like gibberish. That’s because, like most of Parrish’s literary work, Wendit Tnce Inf is computer-generated. Parrish created it using a GAN, a Generative Adversarial Network. Instead of training the GAN on words themselves, Parrish trained it on a bitmap image dataset of English literature—hence the gibberish, and its resemblance to old-time English type.

Why go to all this trouble, when a GAN is perfectly capable of creating almost human-level text when trained on words and paragraphs? Because Parrish isn’t interested in making computers imitate the work of human authors: she uses computers to expose the ways in which we view and interact with language, and vice versa. Like other kinds of conceptual writing, the work’s interest extends beyond its physical, literary value (which, some might argue, is hard to find), and instead encompasses the techniques that go into creating it—which in turn might illuminate something about the shape of words, the relationship between them, and what we do or don’t expect language to do.

Speaking of technique: Parrish’s computer-generated work encompasses a broad variety of formats and techniques. She’s best known as a creator of Twitter bots, which is where she first found her fame; her bot “Everyword,” one of the earliest Twitter bots to get a large following, printed every word in the English language, one every 30 minutes, for 7 years. The project was later printed as a book, where each word listed a timestamp and the number of likes it received. Parrish has also created a website for the generation of nonsense, a board game for word creation, a bot that creates poetry for NASA’s space pictures (extra-relevant while we’re all fangirling over the Webb telescope pictures), a chapbook of beautiful ML-generated visual-sonic connections between words, and much more. She theorizes and teaches about all of this at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

What unites all of these projects is Parrish’s attention towards the fault lines of both language and computation. Parrish takes the core desire of contemporary language model research—that is, to create a machine that will generate and understand language in a manner that is indistinguishable from a human’s—and turns it on its head. Instead of creating a machine that speaks like a human, why not make a machine that puts glitches into human language? Instead of creating an algorithm that obfuscates the connections it finds between words, why not write a bot to find connections between words through computational means?

In doing so, Parrish questions the place of authorship and readership both, as a computer-generated text is a collaboration between a human author-programmer and a program or machine, and the resulting texts may never be read by any human at all. Do texts require authors? Do texts require readers? What about poems? And if so, what kind? These are the questions that much of computer-generated literature leads us to ask, and they’re questions that I wrote about a bit more in a previous essay on AI-generated poetry.

As a technologist, what I often find especially interesting about Parrish’s creative work is that she directly exposes the issues that we, as folks interested in technology and ethics, often ask about the use of computer-generated language and human-computer interaction. As just one example, take the issue of overly-large, ambiguous corpuses as training for large language models. A tech ethics-driven research approach might be to expose the biases in the model, and to then attempt to solve for them. Parrish, on the other hand, chooses to expose the inherent bias of all models by training her models on well-defined, well-documented corpi, letting the models parrot back whatever oddities the training corpi may have.

Whether or not all this should be considered literature is a hairy question for another time (such as Allison’s Q&A!). Whether or not you like it is a question you can decide for yourself. I love Parrish’s work because it is full of play—Why not have some fun with language? Why not, after all, write language bots for fun? What those bots and generated texts do is make us pay attention to both very small and very large oddities in language that we otherwise might not encounter, and remind us that computer programming is not just for, say, B2B SaaS, which, as a working engineer, I sometimes forget.

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Shira Abramovich is a poet, translator, and software engineer.

Reboot publishes free essays on tech, humanity, and power every week. If you liked this or want to keep up with the community, subscribe below ⚡️

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🌀 microdoses

• Amazon is acquiring Roomba — the business case is obvious and/but, yet another case study for the whole “acquisitions include data and that could be not fun” thing (thread on possible consequences?)

• Super interesting piece on how ASL has evolved w/ new tech + culture (h/t community member Shreya)

• There’s a longtermism piece in the NYT this week by EA OG Will McAskill — here’s Hal’s essay on (in)effective altruism again, and responses to Hal’s essay!

• TikTok as search engine.. hmm

• The one and only time we will touch housing discourse

• My pile of unread books is.. a public service, actually..

💝 closing note

Can we just take a moment to appreciate Shira’s prose here? The fault lines of language and computation?! Are you serious??

See you next week,

Reboot team

And as always, add your own in the comments :)

🌞 what to read when your brain is fried

🤠 Once Upon A Time in the North by Philip Pullman — “a Cowboy Western from the HDM (His Dark Materials) universe set near the arctic circle. Pure escapist guilty pleasure” — Nate

🌌 On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden — “because space lesbians, and men don't exist” — Kevin

🍀 Yotsuba by Kiyohiko Azuma — “every couple of summers I reread [this] ... I think it’s full of that delicious summer feeling, and is so sweet and funny... ❤️” — Jess L

🌴 The Guncle by Steven Rowley — “really really wholesome and deals with loss and death in a touching manner... also we love queer media... just really easy to breeze through” — Ivan

🐸 Fair Play by Tove Jansson — “If Frog and Toad were Tinnish artists. Very calm cottagecore-esque vibes” — Nikhil2

🏖️ Calypso by David Sedaris — “a collection of semi-autobiographical/humor essays, so it's easy to pick this book up + put it down at the end of each essay. it made me literally laugh out loud at multiple points” — Emily

🧛 The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix — “a really fun horror romp! definitely a few content warnings bc it can get a little intense, but if ur ok with it, it's a fun ride and very atmospheric” — Amulya

🍋 Lemon by Kwon Yeo-Sun — “a super short and bittersweet mystery” — Amulya

🗺️ Maphead by Ken Jennings — “Jennings has a fun cheeky sense of humor, and the book is all about people who have various geography-related niche hobbies & activities (geocaching, geography spelling bee champions, geopolitical battles being fought over the contents of a forgotten map from centuries ago in a musty room in the library congress). It's a love letter to places and how we navigate them! (Also, some good thoughts on google maps and how technology has affected our ability to understand the geography of the world around us.)” — Matthew

🌀 microdoses

• A blogpost from Stanford HAI3 on why ~ social and ethical impacts are important ~ and a breakdown/commentary from Emily Bender [thread]:

• Actually I blame Taylor Swift for how hot it’s been this week

• Hate the twitter crop, love the audacity of our authors

💝 closing note

We’re just about to wrap up copyedits (ahh!!) on Kernel Issue 2! I asked Emily, Kernel’s Editor in Chief, if there was anything she wanted to put in the closing note about it. Unfortunately, all she had to offer was this signoff:

Shucking corn,

Reboot team 🌽

Our event with Lee Vinsel was “maintenance meme, but make it real scholarship.” If you’ve wanted that for NUMTOT memes, you’ve come to the right place.

📖 The Road to Nowhere by Paris Marx

Our guest for this Thursday, July 14 is Paris Marx, the host of Tech Won’t Save Us, a weekly podcast that critiques the worldview of Silicon Valley. They’re also a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland, after completing a Master’s in Geography at McGill University.

Join us next Thursday for a Q&A on the past & future of transportation, and how we might pick a better destination.

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🚗 our take: all cars are bastards

By Jake Gaughan

 In the early 20th Century, just as the mothers of fallen World War One soldiers were revered and respected, so too were the mothers of American pedestrians killed by automobiles given gold stars. In 1919, the names of those killed by cars were read aloud to school children across Detroit as bells across the city tolled in mourning. In 1923, Cincinnati held a ballot referendum on mechanically limiting the maximum speed of all automobiles in the city. Such acts of open confrontation with the personal automobile now seem alien in a country where over 42,000 people die by automobile crash each year without much notice, where vehicle pollution is killing both the planet and its residents, and where tech companies are allowed to beta test various forms of car crashes on unconsenting citizens. Yet in their new book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation, Paris Marx, host of podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, connects this history to the present day. In doing so, they create a necessary text that explains the political economy motivating transportation’s bleak status quo and even bleaker proposed future. Just as Ben Tarnoff’s Internet For the People does for the internet,  Road to Nowhere explains how we got here in order to prompt us to go somewhere better.

By laying out a detailed material analysis of modern American transportation history, Marx highlights specific points in recent history where a course to a better present could have been charted but how capital often won out. After auto industry lobbying, Cincinnati’s 1923 speed-limiter referendum failed. Marx makes the convincing case that, despite their own advertising, Silicon Valley’s current transportation “disruptions” fit into this long history manipulating the public space for private gain. The continuation of this project was a choice by those writing the checks, not the providence of innovation.

The book includes a variety of examples of the rot at the heart of such tech industry transportation projects: one chapter focuses on the shortcomings of electric automobiles, another on the ravaging of labor rights and urbanity by ride-hailing services. Marx’s thorough research and clear writing does a wonderful job of displaying the deep connections between our current moment of transportation investment and its various historical precedents. 

Marx’s storytelling is most effective in the thoughtful detailing of the killing of Elaine Herzberg. In 2018, Herzbeg was struck and killed by an Uber autonomous vehicle in Arizona as she crossed the street outside of a designated crosswalk. Post-accident analysis by the National Transportation Safety Bureau revealed that Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group—the group building the firm’s autonomous vehicles—knowingly cut corners on safety protocols in the interest of competition, failed to equip vehicles’ decision making with considerations for jaywalking pedestrians, and disabled the car’s out-of-the-box auto-braking system. The only Uber employee criminally charged for Herzberg’s killing was the safety operator in the car who took her eyes off of the road in the moments leading up to the crash. The detailing of Uber’s structural safety negligence leading up to Herzberg’s death is infuriating enough, but Marx aptly scopes out the culpability to greater structures. The road that Herzberg was on was a part of a spider web of freeways and large boulevards common in the United States. On these roads, pedestrian navigation is an afterthought, with a confusing mix of unprotected bikewalks, barely existent sidewalks, and confusingly marked paths. This built environment is the result of a century of urban policy and industry lobbying prioritizing automobiles over pedestrians and cyclists. Road to Nowhere is most moving here, as Marx connects how decades of American urban planning, car culture, and moving fast and breaking things collapsed onto a horrific spring night in Tempe. In doing so, Marx makes the case for transportation justice as a key social issue of our time. 

Marx’s proposed solutions are rooted in the liberation of transportation technology from the technology industry. Just as the state paved the way for automobile dominance, Marx believes it must now pave the way for the car’s death. The book’s last chapter contains a truly optimistic future of a new urbanism rooted in social empowerment; better environments of walkable neighborhoods and safe pedestrian streets already exist around the world. Yet similar to other entries in the genre, Road to Nowhere often reminds its reader of how vested the interests of the status quo are and just how uphill the necessary work ahead will be.

Road to Nowhere is useful in understanding the analytical and material reasons why our car-centered status quo is bad. Yet a more convincing argument may be that the simple experience of living nearly anywhere in America without a car sucks. There is something incredibly soul crushing about walking across a six-lane road to a Starbucks drive-thru just to get a coffee. It doesn’t have to be this way. Just as our present was planned, so will our future. We just have to put it in drive. 

Join the Q&A

Jake Gaughan is a software engineer. Find him on Twitter.

🌀 microdoses

• on ~market conditions~ & venture capital (from Reboot friend Arjun Ramani in The Economist)

• this short story is a Hugo finalist!! One of the best uses of alternative format I’ve seen

• thinking about all the mental energy spent on thinkpieces about Elon x Twitter… ours included :|

• gonna start using this line

• bear market continues across all sectors

💝 closing note

(“Put it in drive”? In this economy?)

See you Thursday,

Reboot team

📖 The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell

Our guest for this Thursday, June 30 is Lee Vinsel, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, and coauthor (with Andrew Russell) of The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most.

Join us next Thursday for a Q&A on maintenance as a political practice.

Free Registration

💰 our take: it’s time to maintain!

By Alexa Jakob

When I was searching for jobs as a new grad, I had a phone screen with the recruiter for a Design Engineer job. I had applied for Design Engineering since I thought that’s what would be the most interesting, and the most related to my degree: I studied electrical engineering, and our curriculum focused on designing and building circuits. “Wouldn’t you consider doing testing or validation?” she said, “We can switch you over to design after a few years, but validation is our biggest need. Most people out of school don’t know that this is a career path, so I always try to tell new grads about it. You’ll get to write scripts and understand hardware - it’ll be fun!” I politely declined and said I wanted to focus on only design engineering. That’s what I had been taught, and I thought it would be more interesting and valued than writing tests for others’ designs.

Our technology industry has a design-first culture. We value designers, makers, hackers, innovators—whatever buzzword is hip of late—looking for shiny new futuristic technologies to invest in; fetishizing the new at the expense of the reliable.

The Innovation Delusion, by technology historians Lee Vinsel (a professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech) and Andrew L Russell (a professor of history and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute), seeks to interrupt this thinking by making a case to go back to basics, to focus on maintenance, to do thoughtful work that responds to real needs. An antidote to the hypergrowth mantras of the technology industry (“it’s time to build”, “move fast and break things”), the book calls for a paradigm shift in how we treat existing infrastructure and invites us to turn towards reliability.

Vinsel and Russell make a distinction between innovation hype, which they dub innovation-speak, and actual innovation. Much like maintenance, actual innovation is done quietly and only acknowledged once a breakthrough is made. Hype is what makes the headlines and you hear about from your uncle at the BBQ (“is AI really going to kill us all???”).

Maintenance is often thankless work, and professions like Quality Assurance testers and validation engineers are often devalued in engineering organizations. In fact, professions like these have been some of the most to unionize in the tech industry (at companies like Activision Blizzard), in response to long hours, low pay, and precarious contracts. Maintenance work is both extremely necessary and invisible, and only becomes visible when something that is supposed to work simply doesn’t.

These ideas may seem simple, but Vinsel and Russell show just how surprising this inclination can be. In many ways, a focus on maintenance is radical in a capitalist and growth-focused society. Preemptively fixing systems, practicing gratitude for what we have, and turning away from optimizing time, material, and energy towards growth and instead towards preservation seems nearly impossible in today’s tech industry. 

That said, even if one cares primarily about growth, maintenance is still a good investment since it extends the life of existing infrastructure. It may seem ironic to optimize the lifespan of a system or object through maintenance; after all, focusing on maintenance should involve forgetting about optimization. The optimization criterion is different, though. When focusing on sustainability rather than profit, allowing a politics of maintenance to permeate every design and operational decision makes perfect sense.

Maintainers develop deep systems knowledge that can be deployed to carefully end the life of certain technologies. The book presents the climate crisis as an example of a clear opportunity to transition towards a maintenance society. Since growth is linked to greenhouse gas emissions, developing and maintaining low-carbon equipment is imperative to acting on climate change. The authors argue that, precisely because of their wealth of knowledge accumulated through maintenance work, maintainers can play a key technical role in bringing about “end of life” of certain technologies, such as transitioning away from  fossil fuels, and devising solutions to carbon-intensive industries. Moving forward, their expertise will also be required in maintaining new solar panels, carbon capture plants, and regenerative agriculture. In my opinion, this perspective is missing in the current conversation around climate. Although hydrogen and direct air capture garner headlines, they will not solve the climate crisis alone. In order to have a just transition to decarbonized energy, it’s crucial that we leverage the expertise of fossil fuel workers and other maintainers, and this framework raises an interesting path towards building solidarity.

Although the book is not explicitly oriented towards technologists, I think this is an essential read for anyone working on systems of any scale. Some of my main takeaways are: 

• Creating a maintenance culture is more than just investing in maintenance (raising salaries for workers, etc). It’s about creating a culture where people’s input is valued and there is time to devote to a backlog of tasks.

• Our education system focuses mostly on new design rather than maintenance. When educating students, stress the importance of maintenance, since this occupies most of an engineer’s time. 

• Make friends with the maintainers in your organization - yes, the QA testers and site reliability engineers, but also the janitors - and ask for their input. Too often maintainers are invisible. Consider how your organization treats maintainers, and seek to make their jobs easier however you can.

This “innovation delusion,” as the authors call it, has its roots in culture and history, but I would have appreciated more discussion of the ways it is reinforced through funding programs and other economic and political nudges. Oftentimes, a federal or state government will provide an initial grant to build a bridge, community center, or sewer system, saddling municipalities with operating costs without the tax base to fund them. 

I’m also left wondering: how do we fix systems that have become too expensive to fix? The authors write about the United States’ Department of Defense, which spends 40% of its budget annually on maintenance and operations, which is the largest proportion of its massive budget, and yet its facilities are still badly maintained. They argue that in some cases, allocating more money will not fix the problem. Where, then, should this come from? More locally, how do we fix the water plant when the residents of a town cannot fund repairs through taxes, and federal and state programs only shell out grants for capital projects? 

Of course, there is no right answer to these questions. But Vinsel and Russell’s commitment to drawing attention to these issues is inspiring. As a reader, I came away with a new perspective and eager to apply the politics of maintenance to my own work. As such, The Innovation Delusion is very well worth a read, and applicable both to people working in software and in more traditional engineering roles. I encourage anyone who cares about building resilient systems to read it, to set you on your way to developing a politics of repair in your work.

Join the Q&A

Alexa Jakob is an electrical engineer and climate organizer. She calls Toronto, ON and Queens, NY home. Find her on Twitter @wolframalexa.

🌀 microdoses

only tweets in microdoses this week because reading is hard

• don’t have much intellectual to say about roe (what is there to say, really?) — here’s a vaguely tech related take I guess

• and a non tech take

• oldie but goodie from reboot friend jacky

• VERY cool…. and then look at this visualization

💝 closing note

(maintenance good etc but the supreme court could use some disruption)

See you Thursday,

Reboot team

📖 Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff

Our guest for this Monday, June 20 is Ben Tarnoff, a tech worker, organizer, and cofounder of Logic Magazine — and, most recently, the author of Internet for the People.

Join us next Monday for a Q&A on infrastructure, both physical and digital, and his vision for where to go next.

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💰 our take: an atlas of the internet, a map for the journey ahead

By Nate Lane, edited by Deblina Mukherjee

The first time I logged onto the internet was at my town’s public library. I don’t recall exactly what drew me in, but I know I was hooked — I awaited my family’s Saturday-morning trips downtown with eager anticipation. PBS educational-cartoon series Cyberchase launched that same year, and it quickly became my favorite way to fill the weekday afternoons between my own online adventures. The show’s entire run is available on the Internet Archive, and I recently re-watched the first episode: three “Earth kids” are inadvertently sucked through a library computer screen into “cyberspace,” and are sent to a mysterious cyber-island to save benevolent cyber-matriarch Motherboard from data corruption. The trio is given a map of the island, and a brief warning about its severe seismic instability. It is then left up to them to, as per the show’s intro voiceover, “use brainpower to help save everybody.”

Twenty years have passed since the premiere of Cyberchase, but cyberspace still needs saving. No longer a curious novelty, today’s internet is ever-more-deeply woven into the fabric of daily life, but power and access continue to concentrate in the hands of the few. As Ben Tarnoff notes in his 2019 essay From Manchester To Barcelona, our digital realm is a space “made as a network, [but] owned as an archipelago.” Capitalist ownership, with its island structure, has shaped the ’net into a precarious and hostile place; and the only way off, Tarnoff argues, is “by thinking en masse and thinking in motion, while traversing difficult terrain.” Episode 1 of Cyberchase ends with the three protagonists studying their map and orienteering themselves to freedom. And like our young heroes, we, too, now have a map to aid in traversing our difficult terrain, in the form of Tarnoff’s new book Internet For The People.

The core argument in IFTP traces a sort of gross Marxism: capitalist ownership bad, collective ownership good. This uncomplicated thesis is, like any worthwhile Marxian critique, built upon a nuanced and deeply-researched materialist analysis of its subject — a particularly notable achievement, in this case, given the internet’s vast and fractal nature. In order to confront a topic indeed “too sprawling to squeeze into a single frame,” IFTP is structured in two parts. Part one, “The Pipes,” chronicles the development of fundamental network infrastructure from its roots in Cold War military research up through its mass deployment and domination by major telecoms. It is a tale of cooperation and ingenuity, but also one of manufactured consent, neoliberal deregulation, high prices, under-availability, and exclusion. Similar monsters lurk in part two, “The Platforms,” which covers the applications and services built atop the pipes. Spanning the dotcom boom through the rise of today’s tech giants, this section scrutinizes phenomena ranging from “filter bubbles” to gig labor, synthesizing their myriad negative social impacts into the singular Hydra of privatization through a thoughtful conceptual framework of “entanglements.” Tarnoff’s concise historical narratives — Google building an extractive surveillance apparatus to avoid the dotcom bust, Uber losing huge sums of money to put New York cabbies out of business — illustrate the diverse harms collectively produced by letting what could have been a “digital commons” instead fall prey to corporate behemoths.

Though IFTP’s primary territories are marked with warnings of here there be dragons, both sections of the book also conclude with prescriptive arrows pointing towards a frontier of more democratic and equitable possibilities. For “pipes,” this looks like a national patchwork of publicly-operated network links, grown from the seeds of existing community-run infrastructure programs in places like Detroit and from the institutional models of the Tennessee Valley Authority and USPS. For “platforms,” the paths forward are more complex; fediverse projects, workers’ movements, and antitrust legislation all have roles to play, with the collaborative “Technology Networks” of the 1980s Greater London Council serving as a template for how we might focus those disparate elements. Firmly grounded in the past and present, the Utopian futures conjured on the pages of IFTP remind us that techno-optimism does not have to mean techno-solutionism. Often the answer lies not over some unexplored horizon but rather in the places we’ve been before, seen through new eyes.

Arriving into a world of crypto scams and endless Zoom meetings, IFTP represents an important attempt to shift our perspective on the internet. Tarnoff takes readers on a vertiginous journey “up the stack” from the fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the sea to the cloud-hosted algorithms running today’s familiar platforms and services, explaining not only how these technologies came to be but also what kinds of social relations they mediate and why we might want to re-imagine them in more emancipatory forms. Along the way, he manages to address virtually every major current of tech criticism, honing in on effective and illuminating lines of critique while dismantling the shallow or misleading. Taken alone, the elevation lines of this intellectual topography present a valuable reference for anyone interested in frameworks of tech for social good. In aggregate, they also become the landscape on which Tarnoff charts a clear route towards his two-tiered vision of an “internet for all.”

Among my favorite of IFTP’s highlighted interventions is the proposal to center public libraries and public media as network institutions. I grew up, after all, on library internet and PBS — why not grow old in a hypothetical world where it’s commonplace to log into the local library’s open-source social media instance, or to scroll through community-driven content intended to actually inform rather than merely generate clicks? Perhaps these questions have good answers — even the most appealing of possibilities brings its own trade-offs, foreclosing other potential futures. Tarnoff is careful to make this clear in the more speculative passages of the book, asserting that the true path to a deprivatized ’net can ultimately only be determined through the collective imagination of a mass movement. I find it heartening to imagine Reboot members as “Earth kids” on a mission to save cyberspace; even equipped with IFTP as an atlas, however, it will take more than a plucky team of youngsters to build an internet that is truly for the people.

Join the Q&A

Nate Lane is a tech worker living in Cambridge, MA.

🌀 microdoses

• What the failed unionization effort at Mapbox illustrates about tech union-busting more broadly, from Anna Kramer for Protocol

• On downwardly-mobile union salts, and what it might mean for class solidarity, from Mie Inouye in the Boston Review

• From our friends at New_ Public: Caroline Sinders on “transparency” in machine learning and its limitations

• incredibly unhinged [thread]

• basically

• but for real, 💓 to anyone (esp students & new grads!!!!) goin thru it rn

💝 closing note

Pre-emptive apology if newsletters are a bit erratic this summer. We are all touching grass, and hope you are too! (But still come hang out with us at events we’ve got such a good schedule for the next few months!!!)

Watching the cyberchase theme/intro on repeat,

Reboot team

📖 Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Our guest for this Thursday, May 5 is sociologist Carolyn Chen, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Berkeley. Her latest book is Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley.

Join us next Thursday for a Q&A on tech culture, work culture, and the search for meaning within tech.

Free Registration

💫 our take: fulfillment-as-a-service?

By Kevin Chu

The summer I worked near the Embarcadero, two coworkers and I would huddle in the back corner conference room, holding weekly time for prayer over our catered salad lunches. Among our prayers, we would send up a benediction that our work at our mission-driven fintech startup would make a meaningful difference in the lives of our underbanked users. Each Friday afternoon, I would duck out of happy hour and dash off to catch the Richmond-bound BART from Montgomery Station so I could make it to Bible study with my friends at Berkeley. It would be close to midnight by the time I got back home to SF. This was church for me, well worth the commute for the few hours of conversation in my week that were not about tech and work.

It’s hard to find and commit to a church in the Bay Area. High rents mean the only churches that can afford to stay around for the most part are a handful of long-established institutions or well-funded, flashy megachurches. For years, a colleague-turned-friend used to livestream Sunday services from a church in Brooklyn until they found a congregation across the Bay Bridge that would accept and affirm the wholeness of their identity. Churches are already sparse to come by—try to search for temples in San Francisco, and you get the Temple Nightclub.

There is a steep activation energy to keeping up with religious life in Silicon Valley. At the same time, the intensity of work, easy reach of office amenities, and orientation toward “changing the world” redirects one’s zeal toward the ambitions of work. Silicon Valley is one of the most godless places in the world, yet is brimming with a distinctly religious fervor.

This is the paradox of religion in an increasingly secular age that sociologist Carolyn Chen confronts in Work Pray Code, beginning with the narrative of the devout parishioner who upon moving out west to work at a startup, eventually “traded his Christianity for an even more zealous faith in the eventual IPO of his start-up.” 

Work Pray Code’s diagnosis is straightforward: As the institutions that have undergirded religious and civic life fall into precipitous decline, work has swooped in to fill the void for alienated white-collar workers who are grasping for meaning in their lives. Taking on the role of a corporate mother, pastor, and personal coach, the workplace absorbs the motions of religious devotion, redirecting the ardor of a spiritual quest toward the aims of self-improvement and productivity.

In Chen’s first book, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience, the author followed the religious formation of Taiwanese American immigrants who adopt Christianity or Buddhism upon arriving in America, congregating in religious centers that doubled as migrant community hubs. I can’t help but see a similar socialization happen with interns and new grad transplants who arrive in the Bay Area.

Like the entrepreneurs and career changers that Chen interviews after moving to Silicon Valley, these transplants find religion in their identity as techies. Nurtured by sprawling, well-endowed corporate motherships and startup offices, they come to identify with their employers, internalizing the aesthetics and values of their company and industry. Far from home, a workplace that beckons their full, authentic self becomes a family to them. Soon enough, it becomes their church as well, commanding their piety while pastoring them into being the most productive employee they can be. In Chen’s words: “People are not ‘selling their souls’ at work. Rather, work is where they find their souls.”

Writing with an eye for history, Chen traces the roots of bring your whole self to work “expressive individualism” back to 18th century Romanticism and the Transcendentalist thought of Thoreau. She hints at the past of the Whole Earth Catalog-toting New Communalists and Mystics of late 1960s counterculture who later became a part of the establishment, today’s highly sought after executive coaches and gurus. She juxtaposes the rich landscape of civic participation of the 1950s, where white-collar workers fled corporate drudgery in lodges and churches, with today’s dearth of civic or religious life and an attitude toward white-collar work that has evolved into adulation. She locates the origins of the workplaces touting themselves as family in American companies seeking to compete with Japanese conglomerates in the 1980s by emulating their workplace ethos that prioritizes unrelenting, family-like loyalty to the firm. I have to wonder, though, how the rise of remote and hybrid work will change this workplace-as-family dynamic. 

Key to reshaping the workplace was a heightened emphasis on spirituality-tinged self-improvement and culture building. Workplaces started investing in the “whole self” of their employees, engineering a corporate “faith community” that draws highly-skilled, highly-paid workers to find their fulfillment in work. Chen follows a cadre of “mindfulness entrepreneurs” that sell services such as meditation, yoga, and coaching as not just perks, but indispensable to the performance of valuable knowledge workers. However, you have to wonder if something is lost when the means for religious formation are repurposed for the mere aim of increased productivity. 

The corporate spiritual menu of vaguely Buddhist practices is stripped of authenticity and rigor, presented only in generic, palatable form in service of productivity. It glosses over a rich local history of psychedelics and spirituality, gentrifying out any trace of woo woo weirdness. Chen’s most convicting chapter, “Killing the Buddha,” argues that this whitewashing amounts to cultural appropriation and ethical abdication, leaving “a Buddhism that’s had the religion steam cleaned out of it.” 

The “turn on, tune in, drop out” hippie counterculture embraced a naive, utopian escapism from societal responsibility. Similarly, Corporate Buddhism has stripped traditional Buddhism of its ethical core, precluding critical thinking about the nature of the work that tech employees are supposed to perform with greater efficiency after a meditation session. 

Today, the corporate tech worker downloads productivity-enhancing mindfulness exercises delivered via the politically correct, sanitized therapy speak and Corporate Memphis of apps like Headspace. She will never have to study the sutras, take the vow of refuge, or see yellow-robed monks chanting nianfo, unless as ornamentation at an extravagantly produced mindfulness conference. Such a culture, inextricably linked to the white supremacist appropriation and erasure of Asian Buddhism, neuters the radical, ethical potential of religion. 

Chen’s fieldwork took her to the well-stocked company cafeterias and yoga rooms of corporate motherships, the auditoriums of mindfulness conferences, and the hot springs of retreat centers like Esalen. Work Pray Code focuses on tech companies, their highly-skilled, highly-pampered knowledge worker employees, and the support staff that “make them whole.” While Chen remains disciplined in the scope of her work, it’s worth noting that the religiosity of the tech industry extends far beyond the reality distortion field built by tech companies.

Beyond the walls of startup offices, tech workers are microdosing LSD and freebasing toad in some nondescript living room of a Victorian in the Mission, entertaining life extension and immortality while heating up dumplings over trapstep at Burning Man, or constructing a pseudo-religion in the form of crypto degen culture, one Discord shitpost at a time. Though sharing roots in the wide-ranging trove of countercultural thought and alternative culture that made Silicon Valley weird in the first place, these expressions of spirituality, free and ungoverned, are not constrained by top-down corporate mandate. It is one thing to optimize worker performance to achieve a blowout quarter; quite another to truly blow your mind.

Techtopia’s ambitions are far greater than commanding zealous employee loyalty. Tech wants to commandeer the godhead itself. The Black Mirror episode “San Junipero” asks: What if heaven were a place on earth—one that humanity must create through achieving technological Singularity? Ever since the construction of the Ark and the Tower of Babel, humanity has grasped toward divinity, leveraging technologies physical and spiritual to transcend mortality.

Today, it is onsite yoga and meditation classes, expensed for little more than optimizing working potential. But the yearning for the divine will not be so constrained to earthly purpose. As we invent on, clamoring to transcend our mortal condition, we will inevitably encounter tough questions—ones that our religions, the compounded amalgamation of many millennia of human wisdom, can uniquely begin to answer.

This all being said, Work Pray Code is a sociology of labor, not a theological treatise. Chen’s focus on tech workplaces serves as a worthwhile preview of the direction white collar work is heading. After all, she warns, “Rather than ridicule Silicon Valley tech workers for worshiping work, perhaps we should wonder whether they are harbingers of things to come—whether their orientation toward work may already be ours, too.” 

What do we lose if the workplace becomes the only remaining institution where people can find meaning, are expected to make it their golden calf, and even then only if they are a certain kind of knowledge worker? If our daily bread is stripped of ethical consideration, leveraged for “self-hacking” instead of religious formation, how does that affect what kind of technology gets built? A chosen elect of tech workers are enjoying a more integrated and comfortable life than ever before—but, Work Pray Code asks, at what cost—for those workers, and for everyone else?

Join the Q&A

Kevin Chu is an engineer and writer. He is on Twitter and Goodreads.

What are you reading lately?

The book I just reviewed here, d’oh! 

But also, after finishing Work Pray Code, I picked up Buddhist chaplain Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, in which I found my culturally Buddhist upbringing reflected back at me. Be the Refuge continues the conversation about the erasure of Asian and Asian American Buddhists, exploring the rich complexity of Asian American Buddhism beyond the dichotomy of “two Buddhisms.”

Can you tell us a little more about your personal experiences with religion and how it's shaped the way you approach the tech world?

I grew up attending both church and temple, spending my summers between rehearsing “Father Abraham” at VBS and washing vegetables for the sangha’s daily communal vegetarian meal. Today, I introduce myself as Christian, but am readily inspired by bell hooks’ spiritual grounding as a Buddhist Christian.

We often talk about scale in tech. However, contemplating the vast infinitude of Creation will put all of that into perspective real quick. Even if Brian Chesky had the right idea when he wrote of operating on an “infinite time horizon,” exercising a worldview that gazes at eternity rather than the next quarter or funding round is a humbling check against the economic short-termism and hype that drives so much of tech culture.

Too many people have been sold a very narrow definition of what constitutes a good life. Having an identity grounded in something higher acts as a counterweight against that.

🌀 microdoses

• See also: Reboot favorite Fred Turner reviews Work Pray Code in LARB

• Read this awesome profile of Rosie Nguyen, Fanhouse cofounder and @jasminericegirl creator (let us know if you’re having issues with the paywall)

• “I helped build ByteDance's censorship machine” — a really interesting lens on moderation policy, building technical tools for moderation, and how the relationships between company leadership and governments affect moderation/censorship.

• An “unprovable” conjecture about the emergence of random structure has just been proved. I don’t really know what’s going on but I’m obsessed… way too cool.

• (The next tweet in thread: “we are now taking testimony from ‘cumbandit69’ on his unjustified suspension”)

• Really toeing the line between funny and really really bleak

• Finally… on the topic of religion!!!!!

💝 closing note

Final reminder to register for next week’s talk!!

Thinking about the applications we sent in to work at ummmm Asana and Samsara and Zendesk and Zenefits and …..,

Reboot team

📈 the future isn’t static

A while back, several of us convened a reading group for Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. As we’ve done in the past, we’re sharing commentary and reflections from book club participants. This is a strong recommendation for reading the book, ideally with a group of people who’ll work through discussions together. 

Sam, the leader of the book club, gives an overview of the book: 

Although the book brilliantly draws together a diverse range of anthropological, archaeological, and historical research to reveal the foundations of debt in human civilization, the book, I think, should be read for its capacity to spark conversation, revealing alternative futures and showing just how possible they really are. Graeber rarely despairs: the historical breadth of the book deeply informs Graeber’s optimistic outlook, making the impossible seem not out of reach. On both a political and interpersonal level, Debt has the potential to shift perceptions: from the historical precedent of debt jubilees to the grounding of economic relations in moral ones, the book provides an overview of debt that shows just how constrained contemporary thought is. 

Matthew discusses the violence of quantification: 

In the first chapter, Graeber writes that on its face, the only difference between a debt and a moral obligation is the matter of quantification: the numerical specification of how much is owed. This process of quantification is rarely benign, however: from invading militaries demanding taxes from local populations to enslavers cleaving people from their communities, the violent imposition of a certain form of social relation—and the severance of existing ones—is often a prerequisite for putting a price on human relations. Graeber: "The way violence, or the threat of violence, turns human relations into mathematics...is the ultimate source of the moral confusion that seems to flow around everything surrounding the topic of debt.” 

I think about how the violence that is inextricably tied to commodification of human relations might be reflected in discussions about applications of predictive algorithms for societal decision-making, which are often framed as matters of scientific progress or rational, evidence-based policy-making. It's now becoming common to acknowledge that technologies that claim to measure a person’s “risk of recidivism” or determine job-readiness from a video might be biased, but they are also fundamentally framing devices that treat social problems through the lens of examining individual-level data points. I appreciated that Debt raises the question of what violence is implied or required whenever quantification of human life is taken for granted.

Lucas and Arjun both wrote about the gap between what we typically think of as “economics” and the social and moral relations that it supposedly governs. Lucas focuses on the limitations of standard economic theory: 

Debt was fascinating first and foremost for me as an astoundingly well-researched, colorfully written refutation of every introductory economics course. While textbooks might assert that, without money, only time-intensive, inefficient barter exchange could take place (the ‘dual coincidence of wants’), Graeber notes that “this is a make-believe land much like the present, except with money somehow plucked away.” The ‘myth of barter,’ which he calls “the founding myth of our contemporary civilization,” ignores a rich history of societies which oriented their economies around credit and debt, which necessarily involve the social relations of participants; a loan to your brother is different than a loan to a strange traveler passing through your village. 

Graeber compellingly suggests that, by seeking to imagine all trades between people “who might as well be strangers—that is, who feel no sense of mutual responsibility,” standard economic theory fails to explain a variety of modern phenomena. From this base, Graeber presents an alternative narrative of economics, drawing from an astounding breadth of history. It’s almost immediately rewarding and feels consistently relevant; for example, we found ourselves quickly comparing debates on student debt cancellation to debt jubilees, longstanding ceremonial rituals destroying the tablets which recorded such financial obligations.  

…while Arjun discusses implications for how we live our lives:

If you have ever doubted the morality of the social game known as "the economy", you should read Debt. If you have not, you must read Debt. 

Graeber thoroughly interrogates the beliefs undergirding most modern economic systems: that human needs, capacities, and relations can be precisely and fixedly quantified, that moneyed debt is an appropriate tool for this quantification, and that enforcing repayment is a moral act. By scrutinizing the historic interrelation of economic systems, freedom/slavery, and conceptions of morality, Graeber shows simply yet elegantly that much of what "we" do (i.e. quantifying needs, capacities, and relations, as many are systematically taught and compelled to do) is incompatible with the right ways of existing with others. 

To read Debt is to literally re-cognize, to overwrite the assumptions and beliefs that damage ourselves and others with the wisdom that initiates healing in our relations.

Finally, Anna reminds us that present-day assumptions aren’t inevitable, that looking to the past can give us a path to the future: 

This bright red book looks like a heavy brick, and I was afraid it would read like one. But after traversing the winding, criss-crossing pathways of Graeber’s storytelling, my first thought when I emerged from the forest of pages was that I wanted to turn around and walk through the maze from the beginning again. From showing how markets and money as we know them today have their roots in violence and states waging wars, to demonstrating that ”it is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor,” Debt shook the internalized assumptions I didn’t know I had about the role of markets and the state in our lives. This destabilization of popularly entrenched ideas (like the idea that capitalism proceeds from freedom) helped break the molds that my mind was inadvertently conforming to. These molds constrained my imagination whenever I tried to consider what has been and what could be. It also reminded me that the work of imagining alternate futures doesn’t have to start from scratch. History is full of so many promising ideas (like debt jubilees, peasant rebellions, etc) and lessons to be learned. We have an abundance of seeds from the past to draw on when we’re planting the gardens of our future, if we have someone like Graeber to show us where to look for them.

And some bonus content—Ethan offers a triptych of tweets:

Sam Franz is a PhD Student in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he works on the history of computing, AI, and related matters in the 20th century. Matthew Sun is a second-year grad student at Princeton, in the Center for Information Technology Policy. Lucas Gelfond studies CS and English at Brown (and also ran the 2022 Reboot Fellowship). Arjun is about to pursue a Masters of Urban Planning at UW, after studying Classics during undergrad at UNC-Chapel Hill. He likes to sing, rock climb, and read. Anna is a recent grad from UNC and is working as a software engineer at Microsoft. She enjoys trying new recipes, watching dance videos, and being bad at wheel-throwing. Ethan is a software engineer.

🌀 microdoses

• Former Reddit CEO on Elon takeover (long thread but interesting):

• Advice for becoming a civic data scientist:

• To be young and online!! So true!!

💝 closing note

If you’ve read Debt, we’d love to hear what you thought of the book! Would especially love to hear critiques: Did you hate it? Do you have an econ background, and have Thoughts on Graeber’s dismissal of the field? Reply to this email or comment below :)

Next round of drinks on us (but who’s counting?),

Reboot team

📖 teaching machines by audrey watters

Our guest for this Thursday, March 24 is Audrey Watters, a writer on education and technology. She is the creator of the popular blog Hack Education and the author of widely read annual reviews of educational technology news and products. Teaching Machines is a thorough yet accessible history of personalized learning, and the ways in which technology has been supporting (or failing to support) educational goals.

Join us next Thursday for a Q&A on the long-held dream of using technology to automate teaching, and what this history means for us today.

Free Registration

🏫 our take: it’s not about khan academy

By Anh Pham and Pearl Zhang

Having been a fan of Khan Academy for quite some time, I remember feeling fascinated by an eleven-minute video, in which Sal Khan and Forbes’s Michael Noer summarized the history of the US’s current education system and Khan Academy itself. Skipping from the 1890s to the 1990s, Khan narrated, “education is static to the present day”—that is, until the emergence of the computer and the internet. For the first time in history, as they told it, learning was personalized. 

To be fair, the video is short, and its purpose is not about giving a lengthy history lesson. But that skip in the narrative (or “the sweep of time”, as Khan says) seems to mirror a common misconception among many of us about the actual history of personalized learning. It didn’t start from the dot com bubble, Khan Academy, or any other hot, new Silicon Valley edtech startups.  Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning is a wonderful attempt to retell the right history.

According to Collins Dictionary,

teaching machine (n): a machine that presents information and questions to the users, registers the answers, and indicates whether these are correct or acceptable.

The goal behind these teaching machines was best explained by popular psychologist and behaviorist B.F. Skinner, who believed the traditional classrooms had disadvantages since different students might have different paces of learning. He also supported operant conditioning (a type of learning process where a behavior is responded to with reward or punishment) as a solution to the problem of delayed reinforcement due to the lack of individual attention. Thus, with the help of a machine, a teacher can focus on their actual teaching and students can thrive at their own pace.

In Teaching Machines, Audrey Watters recounts the long history of such an idea maturing, from Sidney Pressey’s mechanized test-giver in the mid-1920s to Skinner’s teaching machine in the 1950s. These psychologists’ theories were influential, but their devices never made it into widespread use. Watters also illuminates similar works by other twentieth-century education technologists, psychologists, publishers and reformers. Some of those actually succeeded in marketing their devices, like Norman Crowder and the AutoTutor; some of them were unsung heroes, like Susan Meyer, who wrote the first program for the machines and worked directly with schools.

Watters particularly challenges what she calls “the teleology of edtech”—the idea that technological progress is the pinnacle of edtech. Too often, the context is stripped from the stories written about edtech, and all that seems to matter is the technology itself. Teaching Machines isn’t just a story about machines. It’s also a story about people, politics, systems, markets and culture. From the launch of the Sputnik satellite and the propagation of American exceptionalism to the youth led civil rights movements of the 1960s, Watters spotlights programmed instruction and personalized learning in all of their complex and nuanced forms. As much as the edtech startups might like to imagine an alternative future separate from the past, it is still the very same ideas from decades ago that continue to dominate the current thinking about technology in education.

Above all, there is a key question: what is the purpose of education, and how can educational tools be designed to meet those purposes? Sal Khan’s narrative of edtech history skims past the messy parts of political systems and capitalist culture; he emphasizes the purpose of education as beginning and ending with technology, and the ability to create a shinier future. In contrast to Khan’s pitch of edtech history, Teaching Machines’ historical narrative lingers in the past. While Watters hints at the present, I would’ve enjoyed seeing a more in-depth analysis of edtech history applied to the current landscape of edtech. However, I appreciate the ambiguity Watters leaves for further exploration in her retelling of edtech history. 

One such example of this nuance occurs in Watters’ critique of Khan's quick fix solution in her writing of the Freedom Schools and Freedom Vote Campaign in 1964. Instructional programming was a critical component in their success yet also a focal point of tension, specifically in the tension between a radical education of activism rooted in defiance and joy versus the methodical programmed instruction designed to condition pupils to conform. 

Watters highlights Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of problem posing education, “a dialogue with students and teachers where knowledge is jointly constructed”, in the Freedom Schools: teachers and Black students worked alongside each other to build educational materials that increased Black voter turnout and adult literacy. The intentional dialogue between teachers and students is rooted in humility and invites readers to critically reflect on the ways doing things that don’t scale might be more mutually beneficial and successful as opposed to engineering more methodologies for programmed instruction. 

Teaching Machines is for anyone who wants to learn the detailed history behind the United States’s modern education technology sector. The accessible narration makes it easy to follow through the historical events highlighted for each chapter, most notably B.F. Skinner’s futile journey of bringing his teaching machine to market, with a few witty snarks sneaked in between. However, there seems to be a hyper-focus on many minute details of Skinner’s business attempts and his lengthy personal correspondence (especially in the middle chapters) that sometimes detracts from the central idea. The conclusion is phenomenal, though readers might finish with more questions than answers. How does the past inform the future? What now? What can we do next? 

Seeing how the present mirrors the past is striking. Within school environments, educators and technology developers generally hold more power than students; it will require intentional dialogue and humility on their part to seek out and practice problem posing education with their students. 

Yet an ethos of hope can be glimpsed throughout; for example, the Freedom Schools optimized for students’ wholeness and self actualization with thoughtful humility. Intellectual growth must encompass new pathways through which individuals and communities can assert agency over their own learning. These pathways are less orderly than technology’s clean-cut solutions, but perhaps, it is by pressing into the uncertainty and ambiguity where genuine learning happens. 

Join the Q&A

Pearl Zhang is a junior at Swarthmore College studying computer science and education. In her free time she enjoys reading fiction and memoirs and exploring hole in the wall restaurants.

Anh Pham is a software engineer based in Vancouver, Canada, currently working at Mastercard. She loves consuming queer content, Kpop, kicking asses with Taekwondo and petting corgis!

🌀 microdoses

• Some folks from Bernie’s campaign are apparently encouraging Ro Khanna, author of a new book on tech & equity, to run for president if Biden doesn’t seek a second term.

• “Prince of Crypto” is a weird title, but still worth reading this profile of Vitalik Buterin in TIME

• Is it too early to start dropping hints that we’ll be hosting Ben for a book talk in a few months?

• We do not have a token

• You hate to see it

💝 closing note

Today I am too tired to put together a creative closing note, so all I’ll say is …. hope to see you all next week!!!!

Reboot team

📖 Should You Believe Wikipedia? by Amy Bruckman

Our guest for next Thursday, March 3 is Dr. Amy Bruckman, Regent’s Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She researches social computing, with interests in collaboration, social movements, content moderation, and internet research ethics.

Her new book, Should You Believe Wikipedia?, explores the relationship between internet communities and truth-making — as applied to Wikipedia, of course, but also so much more.

Join us next Thursday for a Q&A on what Wikipedia can tell us about knowledge on the internet.

Free Registration

📝 our take: theory, practice, and values in-between

By Deblina Mukherjee

Dr. Bruckman teaches Georgia Tech’s required CS ethics course, “Design of Online Communities”. This book is a public-facing extension of that course, and probably important for that: 101 level material that helps a reader become more conversant with academic literature and tech criticism informed by social science always seems needed. Specifically, Dr. Bruckman hones in (as the title might suggest) on the question of Should We Believe Wikipedia?, which she draws on concepts from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, design, and cognitive science to answer. It’s impressive, honestly, how organized and consistent the book is, given that arriving at this synthesis requires sifting through hundreds of years and several disciplines worth of theory. 

The book is also, in short, geared towards practitioners: those among us who work on designing Wikipedia, or really any other online community, but are eager to learn about how the humanistic social sciences might think about the industry’s problems. I have no doubt Should You Believe Wikipedia will be successful with such an audience. If you want to know what the sociologist Irving Goffman might say about anonymity on your platform, if you want to read about the surprising technicality of conspiracy theorists, inflect unremarkable conversations about polarization with tidbits about epistemology, or read about how social norms, laws, and technology work together to regulate online behaviors, you will find that here. 

If CS at Georgia Tech requires one ethics class, though, theory in the social sciences should require three to five—likely more. Any 101-level presentation of a social scientific concept, I think, can be dangerous: Econ 101 Fallacy abounds. If you learn about supply and demand, that is to say, it’s hard not to see it everywhere, and you might, consequently, begin believing that this graph with these two intersecting lines explain completely why the poor should starve. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

This is all to say that it’s incredibly difficult to do theory well. In the social sciences, theory is a constant site of contention, but you wouldn’t know that just by reading Should You Believe Wikipedia? The book’s (purposely) limited theoretical vocabulary and vague gesturing with the word “values” give it a kind of just-so, scientific-writing-for-practitioner’s-reference, textbook kind of quality. Why is Wikipedia so successful? Because of strong ties and weak ties, because of social capital, and because of pseudonymous identity—and it couldn’t possibly be any other way. 

This isn’t a call for nuance in the theoretical framework of the book, to be clear. To paraphrase Kieran Healy, fuck nuance. Rather, I’m wishing for a better disclaimer about how social scientific theory works, or even more tantalizingly, how theory should work. In my opinion, social scientific theory at its best should function as provocation or parallax. But to be provoked, or to be aware of parallax, a reader needs values and politics. Yet Should you Believe Wikipedia leaves both values and politics theoretically bereft, preferring instead to use those words as a kind of blank line, where readers can fill in whatever feels good for them. It’s hard to imagine, therefore, how the sections about practical implications could possibly turn into politically-intentional praxis. 

So, should you believe Wikipedia? 

Spoiler alert: It depends on the page.

Join the Q&A

Deblina Mukherjee is a recent Sociology graduate from the University of Chicago.

🌀 microdoses

• Always good to be reminded of the physical processes that make physical things (How a book is made, from the NYT)

• Conservatives and conspiracy theorists are flocking to DuckDuckGo because… privacy and anti big tech? 🦆

• Crowdwork platforms are known primarily in tech for their usage in labelling data for machine learning. They can also be used in wartime. Edit to add Mar 1: according to the WSJ, these are likely tasks from Western intelligence agencies, as Premise does lots of work with the US DoD. Client aside, this application setting was still new to me and possibly worth thinking about further.

• Misinformation about the Russian invasion abounds; Twitter’s outlined an extensive response.

• Ilya Kaminsky reads “We Lived Happily During the War”:

💝 closing note

There is… a lot going on right now, to say the least. We aren’t experts in foreign policy, but it goes without saying that the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent. We hope you are taking care of yourselves, are informing yourselves, and doing what you can (it may be more than you think).

See you soon,

Reboot team

Our guest for this Tuesday, Feb. 22 is ​Jane McGonigal, a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, and the author of two NYT bestsellers.

Her new book, Imaginable, is about the power of thinking deeply and rigorously about the future. You can pre-order the book here, or get a signed and personalized copy here.

Join us Tuesday for a Q&A on how imagination can help us build better futures.

Free Registration

💰 our take: thinking about the future doesn’t need to be scary

By Shira Abramovich

If you’re like me, the future feels scary, and has for a while. Why? There are many crises to choose from, like an anxiety buffet. My own fear is rooted primarily in the ever-advancing climate crisis, which feels like an apocalypse already in motion. At some point in the past ten years, I learned to stop thinking about the future of the planet beyond what legislation I want passed or what actions I want to take each day. Thinking ahead feels too painful – how is it possible to plan for the long-term when the road ahead seems to contain so much sorrow?

All of this is to say that I try not to think about the future because it terrifies me. I’m an anxious person in general, and living through many paradigm-shifting crises at once obviously hasn’t helped. So reading Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable, a book all about imagining and preparing for the future, was a novel experience – not only because it led me to think about futures both personal and collective, but also because it made me realize how much I could gain by doing so in a critical and creative way.

Imaginable draws on McGonigal’s decades of experience as a professional forecaster of futures as well as a game designer, roles which she merges to create future simulation games. The book arose out of her reflections on a particular simulation she ran in 2010 for the World Bank about the year 2020, which correctly predicted a severe respiratory pandemic with the possibility of long-term symptoms, widespread conspiracy theory campaigns, and wildfires across the US. This set of predictions seems uncanny, but McGonigal emphasizes that it all came from a set of techniques she uses to ask big questions and consider the possibility of immense, paradigm-shifting change. Whether you like it or not, everything can and will change, even those things we take for granted – and imagining these changes can actually make us far more resilient in the ways we think about both the present and the future. Participants in McGonigal’s 2010 simulation reported much lower feelings of stress and shock to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic than those in their immediate circles, and acted far more quickly to respond. In this way, imagining radical futures can give us more agency over the present, as McGonigal’s anecdotes highlight again and again.

McGonigal frames Imaginable as a preparation for its readers to “think like a futurist,” which means to think about all the massive possibilities for change that might exist even just in the next 10 years. Its throughline is the question: what will your life look like, exactly ten years from today? It’s a long time, and I found myself jarred and destabilized by the question. But gradually, I began to think about it.  The book is divided into three parts, loosely reflecting three categories of questions McGonigal tends to ask people about the future: “Unstick your Mind,” “Think the Unthinkable,” and “Imagine the Unimaginable,” and each part helped me gain more ease with a possible 10-year future horizon. I imagined what I’d have for dinner, what I’d be wearing, where I’d be living, who I’d be with. I have no way of knowing how accurate any of it was – but according to McGonigal, that doesn’t actually matter: it’s the act of imagining clearly and realistically that helps us become more aware of and hopeful for the future, even if we imagine great risk.

Importantly, Imaginable isn’t all doom and gloom. McGonigal emphasizes that when imagining the future, it’s important also to consider not only what could go wrong – which she calls “shadow imagination” – but also what could go right, through positive imagination. In one of the simulations she proposes, McGonigal imagines a world in which it’s a common custom to throw parties to welcome new climate refugees. Whether or not you think that’s a plausible situation, it’s one way to imagine what beauty people might create even in times of intense hardship, and how we might help rather than hurt each other in the future. In another particularly touching anecdote, she describes writing about a future ten years away and seeing clearly that she had a daughter – and how that very imaginative exercise prompted her to decide to have children with her partner. It’s a compelling case for how imagining the future can change us in unexpected ways, and create new realities in our present.

I’m excited to ask McGonigal how she feels about the future – and how she deals with the present given the possible futures which are grim, especially ones which require broad, sweeping action on a global scale (climate, again). But I’m also excited to ask her what other possibilities she’s excited about, in the near-term and long-term, and whether she has other stories of imagining unexpected futures that revealed to her something about the present. 

In my correspondence with her, McGonigal used the words “urgent optimism”. By nature, by anxiety, I’m not an optimist, much as I wish I were – but ultimately, what Imaginable does is lead its readers to a more expansive view of the future, one which includes both the worst-case and the best-case, but also the full field of odd and unexpected possibilities that lie beyond. In McGonigal’s words, “I see my job as transporting people to imaginary worlds, to worlds that don’t exist—either because they’re virtual or because they’re future worlds that haven’t happened yet.” Imaginable helps us do just that. Whether you’re an optimist, a pessimist, or an anxious mess, it’s good to look the possibilities of the future in the face. When we do, it seems, we’re often surprised by what looks back.

Join the Q&A

Shira Abramovich is a poet, translator, and software engineer currently working at Monthly.

🌀 microdoses

• Crypto regulation seems to be accelerating, with the SEC most recently cracking down on BlockFi’s interest accounts

• “There is no movement, there is no effort, there is no unionizing, there is no fight for the vote, there is no resistance to draconian abortion laws, if people think that the future is baked in and nothing is possible and that we’re doomed.” — AOC, interviewed in The New Yorker, on holding on to hope

• A guide to careers in climate (with contributions by community members Nick Adeyi and Charles Yang):

• Community member Jacky going above and beyond for Valentine’s day:

• 🥞🌕

💝 closing note

Finally, just a reminder that you can pitch the newsletter anytime — fill out the form here! In 2022 we’re able to offer $50-100 for accepted pieces.

Hope to see you next week,

Reboot team

On Thursday, we hosted a public Q&A with UC Davis professor Finn Brunton on his book Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency.

I found the book incredibly engaging. It’s full of fascinating philosophical history, weird facts about…

Read more