Part of my argument for how we get out of some of the messes we're in and change things so that we have more of that sort of material political security that we're talking about is that we actually have to face our vulnerability and we have to say, okay, we're all insecure, therefore we need each other, and let's band together to fight for a world that meets our basic needs.
SPEAKER_01I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get to this week's guest, I just wanted to let you know about a little holiday giveaway that we're doing here on the show. So, as you know, the show relies on the support of listeners like you to keep making it, to keep having these fantastic conversations like the one that you're going to hear in just a minute. But if you have been on the fence for a while or considering becoming a Patreon supporter, now might be the time to do it. Because if you support the show before the end of the year, you know, by December 31st, you will be entered into a draw for one of five signed copies of Joanne McNeil's new book, Wrong Way. Remember, she was on the show just recently, or five copies of my book, Road to Nowhere. So that is 10 books that you have the chance to win. And in order to enter, you need to sign up to become a Patreon supporter. And of course, if you're already a Patreon supporter, you will have the option to enter into that draw as well. But what better thing to do at the end of the year than to support a show that hopefully you enjoy very much and also get a chance to get a new signed book in the process. So give it a thought. If you want, you can pause the show right here. Go over to patreon.com slash techwon'save us and become a supporter, or you know, just keep it in mind as you're listening. And so with that said, this week's guest is Astra Taylor. Astra is a writer, filmmaker, and political organizer. She's the author of The Age of Insecurity and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. I've been meaning to have Astra on the show for a while. We talked about it about a year or so ago and just had some scheduling issues. And I was so happy that we reconnected and could finally have her on the show to talk about her new book and, you know, some of the other work that she's been doing over the years that relates to technology, the tech industry, some of the subjects that we talk about quite often. And I think that this was an important conversation to have because it relates to a lot of the topics that we've been talking about, you know, over the past year and even longer, especially when you consider the difficulties that a lot of people that workers face and how the tech industry can make those things worse. As the title of Astra's new book suggests, it is about insecurity, something that more and more people, I think it's fair to say, are feeling in their lives, and something that we see the tech industry and their new kind of innovative quote unquote business models making even worse. So I was thrilled to have Astra on the show to dig into the book, to dig into her perspectives on these issues. You know, we talk a bit about some Canadian political stuff because Astra is also a Canadian and this book deals with some Canadian issues, but I'm sure you won't mind that. You know, you love hearing a little bit about Canada. So I don't want to make this intro too long, but I'll also just say, you know, obviously the holidays are upon us. So whatever it is that you celebrate, I hope you have a really great time, are able to spend some time with friends or family. And thanks so much for the fantastic year. Tech Won's Save Us wouldn't be possible with all of your listens and support. And I think that 2023 has been really fantastic for the podcast. And of course, you know, you're a big part of that. So thank you so much. With that said, if you enjoy this week's conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want a chance at winning one of five signed copies of Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way or one of five signed copies of my book, Road to Nowhere, while supporting all the work that goes into making the show possible, you can join supporters like Yuto in Tokyo, Keith in Cary, North Carolina, Mo from New York, and Peter in New Haven, Connecticut by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Astra, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
SPEAKER_00I'm so happy to be here.
SPEAKER_01Ah, I'm so excited to have you on the show. You know, we've been we talked about it in the past for a bit and then took a break, but then, you know, you had this new book out based on, you know, some massy lectures that you gave up here in Canada. And it was, I thought, the perfect opportunity to finally have you on the show and chat. So I'm happy to dive into that and I'm sure so much more. And so, you know, let's start with the concept of these lectures and in this book, which is really insecurity. Why was this the thing that really drove you? And why did you feel compelled to explore this, you know, in much greater depth in these lectures?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I just want to say I'm so happy to be on your show. And it's true we talked about it uh years ago. And, you know, especially thanks for having me. When this isn't an explicitly tech-focused book, though I chat about tech a little bit in it. The idea to write about insecurity actually was prompted from a conversation with Ben Tarnoff, who's one of the founding editors of Logic magazine. I'm probably someone who's familiar to your listeners, uh, who was putting together an issue of the magazine with the theme of security. And so he called me up asking if I might want to write for it. And, you know, I just remember saying in response, well, what if I talk about the way that capitalism is actually an insecurity generating machine, the way capitalism actually needs insecurity as much as it needs inequality. And so I ended up writing a piece for logic called The Insecurity Machine that had a very tech-focus, because that was actually the raison d'etre of the magazine, right? As that article, you know, wrapped up and went out into the world, I had this lingering sense that there was more to explore and that it was a sort of framework that I could apply to other realms in addition to tech. So looking at basic material conditions from housing and healthcare to things like education to human psychology. I just felt like it was one of those pieces that could actually be expanded. And the opportunity presented itself when I was invited to give this year's 2023 Massey lectures in Canada. The challenge was essentially, you know, write a short-ish book in a matter of months so that they could have copies on hand. And then I got to deliver the five chapters or five lectures in five Canadian cities, and I did that in September. And so it was one of these concepts that kind of emerged out of, you know, sort of two prompts or invitations. You know, what I'm trying to show in the book is that insecurity is really central to the way that capitalism operates and that we need to be rendered insecure in order to be exploitable. And so I sort of use that as a lens to explore base of various social dilemmas. And it's one of those concepts for me, it spans the personal and the political, the economic and the emotional. And so, you know, it just kind of was able to sort of take it in all these different directions that I found pretty fun as a writer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and the book is fantastic. Like, as you say, it's not a totally kind of tech-focused book, but there's so much to delve into there. And, you know, I found it really great as well, obviously being Canadian, but also knowing a whole lot about the states and writing about the states often, the kind of interplay that happens in the book and in that work between concepts in Canada and things happening in Canada and relating them to the United States as well. Like I feel like I don't see so much of that. And, you know, I'm sure because, you know, you needed to relate it to a Canadian audience because you were up here. But I would I'm also hoping that, you know, maybe Americans pick it up and learn a bit more about things happening up this side of the world as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was, it's my most Canadian book for sure. And and that was, you know, really actually part of the pleasure of writing it was knowing that I'd have these lecture stops where I'd literally be speaking to people in a white horse, you know, in the in the Yukon territory, or I'd speak to people in Halifax and wanting to make it sort of resonant and relatable for those specific audiences, but also universal. Um, and so a big chunk of it was excerpted in in the New York Times when it came out. And, you know, my editor, after he read the book, he was like, oh, it's really interesting. Let's definitely run an excerpt. It does have a lot of Canada in it. But, you know, I think it's a really important actually for Americans to learn more about Canada and not just invoke it as this idealized place, right? You know, so there's a rather long disquisition about the crisis of the public health care system. I think that that's important. But also I did try to also pierce that veil of Canadian smugness throughout the book, too, and say crisis of indebtedness in the United States that I, Astra Taylor, have been organizing around. But guess what? It's really bad in Canada too. So hopefully the lessons sort of flow both ways. And then in terms of the tech stuff, I mean, I used to write a lot more explicitly about technology ever since my my first book is The People's Platform and Taking Back Culture and Power in a Digital Age, it came out in 2014. And what I've done since then is you know try to just not silo tech as its own thing to just write explicitly about tech, but to show that it's a facet of every aspect of our lives, right? Because it's part of our work experience, it's part of our education experience, it's part of healthcare, it's part of our social lives, it's part of our romantic lives. And to just, you know, sort of put it in there without cutting it off or reifying it or pretending that it's somehow separated from these other social fields.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, you you know, you talk about tech uh, you know, and how you've been writing about tech for a long time, which I don't know, might surprise some listeners. Maybe not, maybe they're familiar with the People's Platform, maybe not. You know, I I read the book, I think a little bit after it was released, but I found it a really great one. But that year as well, you know, you were also writing with friend of the show, Joanne McNeil, um, you know, a piece in the bathroom called The Dads of Tech, I believe it was. You know, and I feel like that was a time when Silicon Valley itself was still very kind of idealized, you know, a lot of the reporting was still very positive on it. So I wonder kind of what you were seeing in that moment that was making you kind of look at this industry or these technologies in a different way than, you know, I think the the public was still largely seeing them at that time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's interesting to think back to that moment. I mean, it's almost hard, I think, sitting here today in 2023 to remember just how over-the-top and utopian some of the rhetoric about the internet was, specifically about social media and about the potential of uh these new tech companies to disrupt the old media monoliths and sort of get rid of middlemen. So there's this whole idea of disintermediation that we as uh citizens or as cultural producers or just as amateurs in whatever field would suddenly have this direct connection to you know one another, to our audiences or to potential sources of income. And then it was gonna be, you know, radically democratizing and all of that. So I started going to a lot of these conferences and reading a lot of the tech books, and the basic analogy at the time was sort of Napster, we're gonna naperize everything, napstrize democracy, naperize these other industries. And so the analogies came from the cultural, the cultural field, and they were being extrapolated to the sort of political and the social and the economic. And as somebody who is a cultural producer and knows a lot of artists and knows a lot of musicians, I was like, hold on, this isn't happening. Like, you know what we've got? We've got like the old guard of Hollywood and the cable industry, and we've got this new corporate guard of Google and Facebook, and we've got, and they're not disintermediating anything, they're just new mediators. So we have double the gatekeepers and they're collaborating in lots of ways, and they're engaging in vertical integration. Like, what are you people talking about? But it did make me then wonder, okay, well, you know, what is salvageable here? And is the problem tech itself or is it the underlying business model? And so what I tried to inject into the debate back then was just a bit more political economy. You know, the problem is not technology, it's economic incentives and the business model structuring it and the fact that so much of our technical experience is actually funded fundamentally by advertising. You know, we can now we talk about you know surveillance capitalism as one way of describing that. But you know, just the conversation was just, it was so full of shit, man. And these people would get on stage and write these books, and they write the same book over and over about how everything was changing for the better because there were these new companies. And I was like, no, no, there's a lot of continuity here. Like a lot of these debates are debates we've had before around other media. And ultimately, you know, I was making a socialist case for state investment and culture, communications infrastructure as a public good, all the things that listeners of your show know really well and conversations that have advanced in really interesting ways. But yeah, it was a lot of debunking. And so the piece that you mentioned, the dads of tech that I wrote with Joanne, is definitely one of the more fun things I've ever written because it was just us sort of lampooning the misogyny of the tech world. And and I just have to say, every single guy we criticized on that piece got in touch with us and told us we were wrong. Like, and I'm Silicon Valley, like billionaire investors, you know, they were like read this article in the baffler and got their feelings hurt over it and had to reach out.
SPEAKER_01I I love that because when you think of like, you know, what so many of these powerful figures in Silicon Valley are like into today, where they've been like very radicalized. They are, you know, are increasingly embracing these like right-wing politics. And the question is like, was this always there or you know, is this something new? And it's like, oh, they've always been these people.
SPEAKER_00I will say about two weeks ago I was at a coffee shop in New York and I looked up and I realized it was like another table was one of the guys we were most vicious about.
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00Anyway, I think it's a good piece. People should read it. It's fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I will include it in the show notes for uh people to go check out. I guess kind of related to that, I think when we talk about tech, there has been a big recognition, especially in the past few years, even if it wasn't so much kind of on the radar or or not as many people were recognizing it in 2014, that in the past few years, there's been a real kind of, I don't know, wake up in the impact of the tech industry on the world that we're inhabiting. And I feel like the recognition of how it propels insecurity has been a really kind of important part of that. And that, of course, comes out in the logic piece that you wrote, but also, you know, the lectures that you prepared. What do you see in the way that these technologies are connected to these business models that allows them to be used in this way?
SPEAKER_00Right. So I think actually, you know, I I can actually channel a bit of the people's platform here because what I was part of what I said at the introduction to that book is we need to emphasize continuity as much as change. So in that book, I talk about how the old forces of consolidation, centralization, commercialism are still present. Those those problems from the old media model are still present in in you know the digital landscape and that continuity is really essential. You know, so in this book, The Age of Insecurity, it also takes that view of like, okay, what actually within the kind of capitalist paradigm has been consistent? And one of the analogies I make is between the sort of digital revolution and the enclosure movement. So the enclosure movement, of course, again, your listeners will be familiar, is sort of the dawn of market society, the dawn of capitalism as we know it. And, you know, for the period of many centuries through thousands and thousands of acts of parliament, millions of acres in England were enclosed, you know, literally turned from once common fields and forests into to privately owned property, enriching the landlord class. And this pushed people off of their homes, you know, changed the mode of production because people could no longer sort of provide for themselves and their families through subsistence agriculture. So people were made insecure. And as a result of that insecurity, you know, had nothing but to sell but their labor. And this was really conscious. I mean, when you read the commentary from enclosures, they say this this is their goal explicitly. And, you know, I my favorite, one of my favorite quotes in the book is a landlord saying, you know, when you're doing this enclosure business and you're putting up your fences and your hedges, don't plant trees that bear fruit because the idol will be tempted to eat for free. And so capitalism begins with what I call the manufacture of insecurity. So that manufactured insecurity is there at the genesis because you don't have people who have nothing to sell with their labor unless you have insecurity first, right? And so that displacement. And so what I say explicitly in the book is the enclosure movement, right? The that privatization has been rebranded. It's it was rebranded as creative destruction in the 50s, and then it was rebranded as disruption, right? Disintermediation. This sort of these tech buzzwords that are really about keeping that engine of manufacturing insecurity going. And so now what enclosers have is just more digital tools in their arsenal. So workers can be tracked, delivery workers. It's getting to be the holidays, thinking about all these people racing around delivering packages, but it's radiologists, it's white-collar workers being tracked on their computers. I mean, these are the kinds of tools that these enclosures, you know, could only, they couldn't even have dreamed of them, right? But it is the continuity is essential. And I think this is part of the project of, you know, not fetishizing tech is to be like, okay, what's really new here? Like, yeah, it's it's old wine in a microchiped bottle, but like let's get real, the goals are the same and the power dynamics are actually, you know, really familiar. And that helps us resist the kind of self-mythologizing the guys do, the guys that Joanne and I attacked in our article, The Dads of Tech.
SPEAKER_01I I feel like what you're describing there like really speaks to how this industry and you know, I'm sure capitalism more generally benefits from us not understanding those histories, right? And not understanding the connection between what's happening now and what's happening then and the real through lines that exist that show how these are not novel things, right? When we talk about how surveillance is being rolled out in the workplace or, you know, how um employers are using technologies against workers to disempower them and devalue their labor, these things happen again and again. It's just like a new fresh coat of paint, a new fresh set of technologies that they're deploying, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And a lot of work is done to obscure that that history. You know, I think part of the reframing I'm doing in these lectures is say insecurity really is at the center of this. Because when some of us who rail on about the economy day and night, you know, we tend to emphasize some of its pathological consequences, a concentration of wealth and power, you just the obscenity that poverty exists in a world where there could be abundance. But I think this aspect of insecurity is really useful because it helps us understand, you know, that it's not just the disparities, it's not just the fact that there are a couple of these billionaires, many of them tech billionaires, and people who are struggling to stay housed or stay fed, but the fact that, you know, even people who are kind of managing to get ahead a bit or quite a lot, you know, feel like they can never rest. They feel perpetually insecure. And that is not an accident. You know, again, to go back to those enclosures, why did they not want those hedges to bear fruit? Because they had a theory of human motivation, which is like you have to keep people insecure to keep them, you know, struggling, to keep them striving, to make them more controllable, to make them more efficient and pliable and docile workers. And that is also language that reverberates through the centuries into the present.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I I feel, you know, you can look at what Elon Musk says about, you know, workers in the United States being lazy and how Chinese workers are work harder than them and how you know people doing remote work aren't really doing work. These things stick around time and again, right? They just take a different form. Sometimes they're they're much more explicit and sound quite similar to what we were hearing long ago. You know, obviously the concept of insecurity is, you know, one that people will have heard about. But if they think about, you know, narratives that we've been hearing from the political left or just in political discourse in recent years, you know, what they've probably heard people talk about much more is inequality, right? And the growing gulf that exists between the rich and the poor. How does talking about insecurity kind of reframe or change some of those debates? And how does it make us think about the problems that we face in a different way?
SPEAKER_00I think talking about inequality is really essential. And it's been such a core theme of my political work as an organizer with the debt collective, which is a the a union for debtors that I helped found in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. And in my writing, my writing about technology, I mean, it's a big part of the people's platform, is that we are seeing, you know, that these technologies that people are cheering as democratizing are actually accelerating the concentration of attention and money in the hands of the people who own the platforms that we use every day. Inequality is really key. It's also essential to my work on democracy. You know, and inequality undermines the democratic project, the small D democratic project in big ways. But I think it needs to be supplemented with attention to insecurity. And that's because inequality gives us a snapshot in time. Inequality says here are the gains captured by the 1%, here's, you know, how everybody else is suffering, look at the various income differentials. Here's how deeply unequal this moment is. Insecurity, I argue in the book, actually, well, has two things that kind of supplement that. The first is insecurity actually always looks forward. It anticipates what's coming. And that's really important because as human beings, we live in time. And so I might be okay right now and go, gosh, I've got a fridge full of food. That's cool. And I actually have a place to live. But if I'm afraid I might lose my job, and so I won't have that fridge of food for full of food, and I might not be able to renew my Lease, then I'm going to be insecure. And that is an incredibly valid perspective for millions and millions of people right now. This is essential to the political debate that's playing out in the United States right now, where there are all these sort of economists who are like, but by these metrics, the economy is doing great. And I was like, yeah, but in reality, people are like, my rent keeps going up. Like, I don't know if I'll be able to live in a year if I'm, you know, take a look up from the spreadsheet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right. Like, and so I, you know, I say even that any insecurity is how the points on the spreadsheet feel. And that's really important because one thing I've learned as an organizer is that economic issues are always emotional issues, right? Financial issues are always about your feelings. They try to tell us that these are separate realms and they're not. You know, I think, you know, there needs to be a revolution of economic thought and you know, behavioral economics that does not cut it. This is not about nudges. This is really about affect with an A and fear, and the right knows this. The right taps into people's fears, taps into people's insecurity, taps into people's fear about losing status down the road, right? Losing position, about what Barbara Ehrenreich, who is one of my favorite writers, you know, the recently passed away author, called the fear of falling, which is something she said, you know, really plagued the American professional middle class. And so insecurity, I think, is is a really useful supplement. And again, you know, it is a heuristic that can help us understand people at different gradients of that inequality graph. Because, you know, in the United States today, you know, a simple medical emergency can push a middle class family into homelessness, right? Medical debt is the leading cause of foreclosure. But even in a place like Canada, where there is a more robust social safety net, but a tattered one, you know, people are increasingly anxious, especially because of the cost of housing or the cost of groceries, or the fact that they don't necessarily trust what remains of the welfare state will be there, you know, when they're older and in need of more support. So I just think it's something, you know, that can help us understand the world and people's emotions better. And that that can help us be better organizers because ultimately that is what I'm about. You know, it's like how do we not just diagnose the problem, but organize people to solve it. And inequality encourages us to look up and down. So we look at Elon Musk and we look at the unhoused people. And that's really important. I mean, it's sick that we live in a world where that uh gulf exists, but I think insecurity can help us look sideways too and be like, okay, we're not exactly the same, but you're afraid about what's coming down the pike, and so am I. And maybe we could build some solidarity together.
SPEAKER_01You talk about how it causes you to look forward, right, to what is coming. But I guess part of the book as well is, you know, looking back to how we got to the point we are today. And, you know, you talked about how manufacturing insecurity is really key to the capitalist project, but it feels like we used to be largely in a period where there was a bit more security. You know, the welfare state was more secure and there were kind of more protections for people when they did fall down. And that had to be really destroyed in order for us to get to this point where we do feel such great insecurity in the present, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's uh it's true. I mean, the one thing I am trying to do with this book is also rethink what security is. And security is a word that I don't necessarily love. It's a little tainted. And I think that's very much for me related to the fact that I sort of came of age politically under the shadow of 9-11, where there was suddenly a lot of talk of national security and homeland security. And, you know, it's not a word the the left really talks about that much these days. You know, it's a word more often invoked by the right. And, you know, to me, it conjures a lot of negative things, you know, policing, militarization, border patrols, and all of that. Nevertheless, I think material security, the security of the welfare state, that that kind of security is really important. And it's important for left-wing people to talk about security in that register and to acknowledge how important it is to people. And so, yeah, I mean, the way we structure our economy under capitalism can make us more secure or less so. And obviously, there's lots of problems with the mid-20th century welfare state, but it was a really important intervention. I mean, a really critical one. And one thing I learned that I wasn't aware of that sort of, you know, is something I sprinkle in there, is that during the construction of that welfare state, and this is true in Canada and in the US, talking about insecurity and security was really, really key. That's how the architects of the welfare state and how the movements, the labor movements demanding the construction of that welfare state, framed their intervention. They said, insecurity is a plague on people in this world where we could live better. FDR went on and on about security. I mean, obviously, we call the most famous sort of you know, welfare program that we know of it's social security. And it's a it's a product of that history. You know, it's more sort of evidence that actually it's something that speaks to people, right? That folks were less mobilized by, you know, invocation of inequality in the moment than insecurity because they had just lost everything in the Great Depression. They had just experienced a devastating world war. They felt this uncertainty that events beyond their control could bring and the havoc that could be wrought on their families. And so they wanted security, they wanted stability, they wanted that ability to look forward. So I think material security is really essential. And what I try to explore in the lectures a bit too is then, okay, but what does that do for us on that emotional level? And I look at a lot of empirical data and studies that have shown that when people have that baseline of material security, it increases tolerance, open-mindedness, that it is positive again for small D democracy, in that it it makes people sort of less prone to anti-immigrant sentiment, to sort of authoritarian appeals. And so there's all these sort of personal and political benefits that come from the public provision of security. And I think that's really important for us to emphasize in this moment, you know, when authoritarian is on the rise again.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And it it also kind of makes it very clear or really draws my attention to how the tech industry and you know the people in charge of it have used that insecurity against people, right? If you think about in the aftermath of, you know, 2008, 2009, kind of, you know, the really difficult period that people experienced then, you know, how many people lost their homes, lost their jobs. And then of course you had the tech industry coming in and saying, we're empowering you, we're giving you freedom by carving your work out of employment protections and all this kind of stuff through the gig economy, right? And how they have been able to do that time and again by using this, the supposed possibility of technology for empowerment to actually disempower and you know make people more insecure, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the big ironies of corporate America, right, is that they go on and on about entrepreneurial risk taking, but they're always focing that on the workers, whether that is by you know actively undermining the welfare state or through creating gig economy conditions, you know, or you know, whatever a few decades before it was just moving towards using, you know, contractors and things like offshoring, right? But meanwhile, the sort of corporate bottom line is insulated from risk, you know. And you know, we saw that in 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic, when you know there's just massive intervention, the economy, much of it going to subsidize corporate America. So yeah, that is definitely one of the dynamics that I'm pointing to here. The other thing is that their argument, maybe we could call it their ideology, again, goes back to that question of motivation, right? So they actually say that by repealing that social safety net, right, by creating a dynamic, disrupted economy where we're all entrepreneurs of the self, right? We're all little LLCs on our own competing with each other, that we're being the best we can be, right? Because if we were to invest in public provision, in a in a robust welfare state, in material security, you know, they say, then people get lazy, right? Then people will shirk. And so there's been this rhetoric, again, going back to enclosure movement, that like this is this is actually a sort of project of public morality, in addition to sort of market efficiency, right? Like that this makes us good and productive. And it's just bullshit, right? Because there's all sorts of evidence that people are motivated by all kinds of other things, the desire to cooperate, the desire to create, the desire to learn, the desire to take care of each other. And that actually a kind of desperation is inefficient for lots of reasons. But I think that part is there too, like in the rhetoric. They're not just like, oh, we want to make a lot of money. They're like, and it's good, you know, and you'll be better people as a result of us destroying your financial lives because you'll be scrambling and that's virtuous.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And, you know, it makes me think of like the general narrative of Silicon Valley around work, right? That you need to work long hours and you need to be willing to like give yourself to the job and you know, not have much of a personal life because otherwise, you know, you're not going to get ahead, you know, in the kind of the meritocratic narratives that they have. But, you know, as you wrote about, you know, many years ago, the people who tend to succeed in this industry are, you know, the people who already have kind of a leg up, right?
SPEAKER_00100%. Yeah. I mean, you know, or or they succeed because they've done something, you know, that doesn't necessarily, you know, benefit humanity, but is like a hack, or they manage to get sort of sold, you know, and absorbed by a bigger company at the right moment, right? Like, or because they privatize the commons, you know, they they engage in some act of taking uh something that was collectively built. I mean, the internet itself obviously is the creature of immense public investment, and they privatize some corner of it. This is, I think, just one of these old stories that we're just gonna have to be constantly debunking. And for me, as an organizer, as a writer, and as a writer, I'm very much about cultivating a sense of entitlement among ordinary people. And it's like, no, you're actually just entitled to public care, to food, clothing, shelter, the basic necessities of life, and society will not crumble. To go back to the example of billionaires, I mean, what do billionaires often live off? It's called unearned income. You know, it's just like the fruits of their investment. You know, I mean, they're not out there like living from the sweat of their brow. So it's always, you know, what works for me doesn't work for thee, and that that incredible, a hypocrisy. But, you know, security is, you know, I think there'd just be lots of salutatory effects. And what I also try to go into in in the lectures too is the fact that according to international human rights law, we actually have a right to material, we have a robust right to material security. And security is written into many domestic constitutions. And I found that really interesting as an organizer, that it's not a right that we often invoke on the left. Again, you know, I think the left doesn't talk about security very much, but it's there on some pages, and it's something that we could lay claim to. And I think there's some potential, you know, power in that, and that we should, you know, be more vocal about the fact that this kind of material security is something we're entitled to, and that it would actually it, you know, and and to go further than just saying, well, hold on, it's not going to be a bad thing for society, but to say, no, it's gonna be a good thing, because again, it's going to make us healthier, it's going to give us time to participate politically, and because again, empirical research shows it makes people more tolerant, more open-minded, less authoritarian, and less afraid. And those are consequences that we should be very keen to see manifest as reality.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And I feel like this is probably a bit more in like the Canadian wheelhouse sort of a thing. But you know, obviously it's a book that deals a lot with Canada. And I found that fascinating. But when you wrote about how the judges kind of interpreting the Canadian Constitution tend to focus on kind of the negative freedoms that Canadians have, but often not, you know, enforcing kind of the positive freedoms or not wanting to kind of bring that into, I don't know, the legal framework or ruling on it, I guess. I found that really fascinating and hadn't kind of realized it necessarily.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, this is I really, again, I got really into Canadian constitutional law. And you know, one of the cool things about right, I mean, it's the cool thing about podcasting too, right? Is you have this excuse to like contact people and be like, hey, do you want to chat for an hour? And I'll just pick your brain and learn from you. But again, you know, this right to security is found in many domestic constitutions. It's very explicit in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And it is directly inspired by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is the lead author of which was actually a socialist Canadian, this guy, John Humphrey, who is a character I'm very fond of. So he was an instrumental player in helping to uh in sort of the the left-wing social movements to help construct the Canadian welfare state. Then he goes and he's a very progressive influence on the United Declaration of Human Rights, very inspired by Latin American socialist countries and by the Canadian example. And he makes sure that woven into the Universal Declaration are positive and negative rights, meaning so the right to be protected from a tyrannical state, but also the right to the things we need to survive. So, you know, the right to have a speedy trial, right? To not be illegally detained. Those are these kind of negative rights to even to free speech, right? To not have your speech be censored. What we might think of as civil liberties, but then the right to housing, healthcare, you know, a labor union, right? Well-remunerated work, security and old age and a disability. Those are the positive rights. And those are positive rights to security specifically. Fast forward to the early 80s, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and there's section seven of the Charter, and it says that Canadians have right to security of the person, is the way it's phrased. And there's an ongoing, really interesting legal debate over what the hell that means. Because law, it's not like laws are ever just self-evident. They're also uh the terrain of political struggle, right? There have been justices and lots of lawyers and lots of activists saying this means a robust, positive right to security, like right to housing, right to welfare benefits, you know, right to health care. And because those are actually rights Canadians do not have. Americans like to think of Canada as the land of the welfare state, very romanticized. And it does have a more robust welfare state and tradition of welfareism. But Canadians as a people have a right to remarkably little in that positive sense, unless we can manage to rest the Section 7 right and imbue it with a kind of deeper meaning. And again, we have, you know, this isn't a pie in the sky or like ridiculous interpretation. This is an interpretation a lot of legal scholars and justices agree with, but it just goes against the market grain of our society at the moment. And so I wanted to take some time in the talks and talk about some of the litigation that has tried to push the envelope and say, you know, a right to security should mean a right to health care. It should mean a right to housing. So over the years, for example, activists and literally activist lawyers have managed to get the right to security to mean the right to be in a tent if there are no shelter beds available, right? So they've pushed it to mean that, but they haven't quite pushed it to the point where it means the right to housing. Youth climate litigants, right? So these kids who are suing governments around the world have been engaging in some interesting legal arguments saying that a Section 7 right to security should mean the right to a habitable environment. What is security if the climate is on fire? And they're making really interesting inroads too. I mean, they're they haven't won, but in one recent decision, a judge said, like, hey, they're making some credible points here, right? Just enough, they give them kind of grounds for an appeal. You know, I think it's really important to kind of always have your eye on, well, what are the struggles trying to make real these ideas you're promoting? Um, and and when you look, there's actually a you know quite a lot of inspiring stuff happening. But I think this is, you know, I just think it's like, yeah, we should be like, we have a freaking right to security. You know, when, and that means the welfare state, but also this larger context, I think, of the environment is also uh really important. But it's something that a lot of Canadians don't know about, don't think about, and certainly you don't, you know, a lot of us aren't thinking about the Declaration of Human Rights. But that's the thing with rights, like they're on the page, but we have to fight to make them real. That's just how it always goes.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Yeah, I feel like one of the reasons that it really stood out to me is because, you know, I feel like in Canada, if you're kind of aware of it, people look to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and say, like, this has had a really positive impact in getting kind of our courts and our Supreme Courts to make decisions that have been positive, that have maybe pushed the actual political system in our governments to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have, in contrast to, I think, how many people often see the US Supreme Court as this kind of conservative, kind of backward influence, especially under the current judges that are there. So I felt like it kind of added some nuance to that discussion, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, again, it's it's said the US is like a low bar. I feel like, you know, if I could just say one thing about Canadians and be like, never compare yourself to the US. Like, but it's true that the US Supreme Court has become this bulwark of reaction, you know, captured by these six ultra-conservative judges, but it's also just the American political system is full of these veto points that make progressive reform really, really, really hard. Whereas the Canadian jurisprudence is, you know, has more openings. And this is why I think this is an interesting frontier to push even further. In contrast to the sort of originalist, which is bullshit in the US, right? I mean, it's not an originalist interpretation, but this idea, this fantasy that we should hew to what the wise founding fathers thought about everything. In Canada, there's this doctrine called the Living Tree Doctrine, which is that you know the constitution should branch and grow and change. And that's a beautiful image and something people shouldn't take for granted. As someone who straddles both worlds, I'm like, it can get so bad. Like, grow that tree, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I I feel like somewhat related to this is a discussion that you have in the book around insurance, right? And I feel like when we think about insurance today, it's often like, uh, this thing that I had to spend money on that uh, you know, costs way too much and doesn't deliver nearly the benefits that I think I should receive from it. But that how, you know, when the idea of insurance was really kind of new, it was it was quite a radical thing provided by the state to give you this degree of, you know, the type of security that we're talking about. Can you talk to us a bit about kind of, I don't know, the origins of that and how it's been transformed and whether it can be taken back?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So, you know, you have to write five chapters for this because there's five lectures. And um, and when I got to the fifth lecture, I was like, okay, well, what am I gonna write about? And I had this one idea that I've been wanting to write for so long about insurance. It's really fascinating, I think. But I just feel like even saying that sounds so boring. Like I felt like this is risky, you know, gonna get up and give a lecture to a thousand people and be like, hello, people, I'm talking about insurance today. Um, precisely because it had it has such a bad connotation, right? I mean, I was just picking out what horrible online marketplace insurance plan I want for 2024. And like, I don't want it, it's terrible. The deductible is like $9,000, like it's a nightmare. But the word insurance once had a really radical ring, you know, in the early 1900s and late 1800s, as people started to fight for workers' compensation and programs and other schemes. I mean, this the idea of social insurance was transformative. It's the idea of pooling risk as a society. It, you know, really at the heart of the question of insurance is what is risk? How do we and and how do we share it? Uh, who is culpable or is nobody culpable? And you know, before social and social insurance didn't really begin with these worker compensation schemes, and it was always the workers' fault because the bosses had all the power, right? So if something went wrong, it was on the employee. And there were these societies that where workers attempted to pull risk and take care of each other, take care of widows, take care of you know families that had fallen on hard times. But ultimately saying what you have to do before this can become a public program is actually reconceptualize risk, reconceptualize accidents as something that just happens, that is sort of statistically unavoidable. It's not really on the shoulders of one individual person. And then only when you kind of have that paradigm shift of saying, actually, this isn't really, you know, one person and their punishment, this is just inevitable. When you have industrial production, bad stuff is gonna happen. We should try to mitigate against it, but also we should protect those, you know who fall or wound themselves or something like that. Only, only then can you start implementing these programs. And so this idea of pooling risk of sort of is really powerful. And it relates to insecurity because at the heart of that is like, yeah, we're all insecure. We're all we could all be the person who falls, who cuts themselves, who uh is in a car accident, you know, who gets an illness. And so let's take care of each other, let's create these insurance programs. And so I think there's just something, you know, really sort of poignant in that image. And we forget, you know, we we're so acclimated to conceiving of risk in that way, as something kind of impersonal, that I don't think we appreciate necessarily what a what a leap it was and how much work went into starting those programs. But then of course, you know, prevention is a better approach. And there are all sorts of ways to prevent workplace accidents by, you know, safety measures, by not overworking people, by not rushing them, maybe by using like digital trackers or whatever it is that's like causing people to feel harried. You know, we can prevent a whole lot of climate disasters by uh reining in fossil fuels. That's something I write about at length in that chapter two, is just the paradoxical role of the modern insurance industry in climate change. So, I mean, altogether in the insurance sector is enormous. They are sitting on trillions of dollars of assets. These are assets that they pulled ostensibly to pay out claims. But guess what? A lot of it is invested in fossil fuel infrastructure. So they are paradoxically literally invested in the things that they're going to be paying more claims on down the road. That right there is a parable about the pathology of treating insurance as a private good instead of as a commons or as a public good, which is, you know, one of the core things at the heart of that chapter is like, is risk something that we should that is privatized, or is it something that we approach communally?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I thought it was just another one of those really good illustrations of kind of how much things have been eroded over such a long period of time, right? That we see insurance, which is this thing that should be about providing us security as just another way to kind of rip us off and take money out of our pockets and stuff like that, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, we see it that way because that's what it is a lot of the time. You know, I mean yeah, it's like that perception's not wrong, but if we are stuck in it and we go like, ugh, insurance, I fucking hate my insurers, then we're actually not thinking about what it would mean to pull risk in a socially productive and caring way. In that chapter, I mean, I try to bring it to life by telling the story of Kafka, the novelist, who we all know is a brilliant writer and artist. And he was, but during his lifetime, he was mostly known as an industrial reformer. And I mean, he was really appreciated as such because he, you know, basically worked as a kind of cog in the machine of the workman's comp's office of Bohemia or some, you know, it was like one of the early workers' compensation programs. And his mission at the job was to stand up for workers as much as he could. And he wrote all of these very, very dull but detailed papers about the mistreatment of workers and how the working conditions precipitated the accidents. He even designed machinery that would protect workers' hands more than the machines that that were being used. Um, so he actually did some work that scholars say actually, you know, saved lives during his day. And as much as, you know, he's sort of famous for having hated his job, right? When we think of Kafka, we're like, oh yeah, he hated his job and he just wanted to be willing to write, but he actually was really fascinated by insurance because he he saw the social implications and cared about them. He just like, you know, he was just up against the monolith. He was up against bosses that were basically determined to blame the worker at all costs, and by a state that, you know, was deeply resistant to the idea of standing up for poor people. So it's a Kafka's a fascinating guy for sure, but his interest in an investment um in social insurance like it just endears me to him all the more.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it was one of those stories that really fascinated me when I was reading the book, you know, one of one of many. I want to pivot back to something that we were talking about earlier. You know, obviously you brought up the people's platform, and you know, we were talking about technology. You know, I think there's a lot of discussion today around the role that kind of social platform, social media plays in making people feel more insecure in their lives. I wonder how you reflect on kind of the impact that that has had on people.
SPEAKER_00That's a big question. I'm curious what you think, because I feel like you're more in the discussions and probably in the data than I am right now. I mean, I, you know, I quote some studies in passing in the book about uh detrimental effects of social media, particularly on young people and on old people, on younger people's self-esteem, just how quick these platforms are to show them, you know, harmful content. I mean, literally content that is um encouraging, you know, self-starvation and self-harm and even suicide. And then older folks who are often pushed down these sort of conspiratorial wormholes who seem to lack the skills to decipher, you know, sort of what's what's credible information from what's a scam. I mean, there's no doubt that these social media platforms, you know, the part of their business model is, you know, assaulting our self-esteem. But again, that's not new. Like that's what advertising has been doing for decades. And so I think here, you know, this lens of continuity is really helpful. And this is why going back to 2011, 12, 13, when I was writing The People's Platform, why I was like, really think that we're gonna have a revolution here when the business model of these platforms is advertising? You know, because like by design, an ad assaults your self-esteem or makes you feel like you lack something, right? You know, I say in the opening lecture of this book, no advertisement will ever tell you that you're okay and that it's the world that needs changing. No, it's always gonna tell you that, you know, you're not enough or to that to stay cool, you gotta buy this, or to stay young, you have to take this pill or whatever. I mean, that's just it's banal to say it, but also they wouldn't spend literally like trillions of dollars a year on this shit if it didn't kind of work. Like it doesn't work, it's not a science, right? And we can all laugh at the bad ads we get and how inappropriate they are, but bring me a person who hasn't bought something that they were targeted by. Like show me someone.
SPEAKER_01Oh, totally. I'm sure it happens all the time, right?
SPEAKER_00This is where I think, you know, I'm not ahead of the curve of the conversation on this front. I just think it's I think it's worrying. And I, you know, I see it myself. I see, you know, my own attention span, you know, kind of diminishing, my addiction to my devices increasing, despite my awareness of it. You know, and again, this is and you know, this is what progressive tech critics have been saying this whole time. It's like, yeah, these are addictive by design. Like we shouldn't be, it shouldn't be just up to us to impose our habits of self-control and our digital Sabbaths and things like that. In this section where I am talking about uh social media and its effects on people's psychology and self-esteem, part of what's maddening about these dynamics is like the more damaged people are by these devices and these platforms, or just by consumer culture in general, you know, the more a market opens up to ostensibly like solve these problems, right? And so this is, you know, into this gaping hole of despair, you know, flows the wellness industry or you know, self-care or self-help, which is like promises people some solace. And, you know, so that's you know, that's one of the ingenious things about capitalism, right? Harms create new markets. And so actually, you know, I never read self-help books, but I read a few writing this book because I was like, I'm talking about insecurity and psychology and people's feelings. And um, you know, most striking to me is quite a few popular authors, you know, talk about people's sense of lack or of never having enough or their desire to do things like be creative, right? To not live to work, but to work to live, that they just never take that political step, right? The problem is always you when it's like, no, the problem is capitalism. And, you know, these are just not, you know, you just can't self-care or meditate or exfoliate or breathe your way out of the crisis. But of course, you know, these books never take that extra step because that would be, you know, to sort of like undermine the conditions of their own success.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I think the connections to, you know, again, the fact that this sort of stuff has been going on for a long time. It's just now happening in like a different way through the tools that are available to these companies and to the system in order to, you know, continue kind of pushing us in this direction, to continue to making us feel terrible so that we buy things and, you know, all that. It's not, it's not much of a surprise, I guess. In the book, one of the things that you talk about, I think when you start to get more toward, you know, how we address these sorts of issues is the concept of decentralization. And, you know, obviously this is discussed in a much broader remit than just technology in the way that we would understand it. But obviously, this is a concept that is very much of interest to people in the technology space. And I feel like there are divided opinions on as well, where in some uh circles there's a view that, you know, if we just have more decentralized technology, everything will be better. And then there's also the way that companies have taken advantage of decentralization to kind of recenter their power structures and stuff. So I wonder how you see kind of decentralization helping in this way, and if you also have concerns about how it can be co-opted by powerful institutions that exist out there already.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think this is a tricky thing. I don't think that there's a one-sized fits-all answer because you can have sort of anti-democratic versions of decentralization and disempowering versions, and you can have democratic and empowering versions of centralization. And so I, you know, again, I think you know, we have to look to the context and have to look to sort of the political agenda and the economic paradigms, right? Like, and I also think they're not necessarily opposed. You know, you could have a situation where there's centralized funding going into communities where communities have democratic determination over what kind of cooperative businesses they want to start or something like that. Um, to just pull an example out of the ether. I mean, you know, but it's like where there's centralized funding streams and a and a mechanism for ensuring equality and conditions on where the where the funding goes, but there's still community determination, room for experimentation, room for democratic deliberation. So it's a bit of a false binary, but I do think we have to be really alert, especially in the United States with its weird federalist system and its fetishization for state power, states' rights, local control, local school boards, hijacked by moms for liberty, you know, that the right has used a project of devolving power to the states and to the local level to pursue a right-wing agenda because it was the federal government that was often trying to pursue things like the correct application of civil rights law. I just think it's really tricky and that we actually have to be sort of more precise about what it is we're talking about. I am someone who also thinks, again, I obviously like the word democracy. I like experimentation. I, you know, I wish, I'm not sure I'm ready to reclaim the word innovation, but I don't, you know, in theory, maybe we should. But we have to do it within a framework that pursues equity and security, you know, and justice. You know, I just don't think like one category alone, like oh, centralization or decentralization, gets us there. I think it kind of has to be more nuanced than that. You know, I guess I'm inclined to think there's sort of basic things that we need as human beings that should be sort of guaranteed by a central authority, meaning in this case the federal government, right? Like we have a right to healthcare. Now, you know, but I don't think that's irreconcilable with some level of community control, right? Or for example, you have public health care and you obviously have healthcare workers. Like, shouldn't doctors and the community have some say in how a local hospital is run? So, again, an element of decentralization mixed with central funding where you know funding is equitably distributed, you know, based on need and not just the ability to pay. So, yeah, I think it's interesting. This kind of gets a little bit into the terrain of a book I have coming out in March that's on solidarity, where there's a chapter where we talk about what a solidarity state might look like. So sort of something beyond the welfare state and a solidarity state would create feedback loops that encourage solidarity. And I think some element of decentralization or democratization is key to this because we want citizens to feel invested in public goods, right? So the welfare state sort of dispenses with services from on high on a charitable model, like the state giveth, right? So then the state can take it away. A solidarity state would be like, this is actually like public isn't it, it belongs to you, the public, be invested in it, right? And thus help protect it. I think breaking that binary would be essential to that project.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I love that. And I I love your recognition of decentralization as well and kind of you know the nuance that is inherent in it and looking at where power is and and how decentralization doesn't necessarily mean that you know you're taking power away from, I guess, the forces that we wouldn't want to have it, right?
SPEAKER_00Right. And you know, but there is also resilience in decentralization. There can be experiment in decentralization. It's just like not to make a fetish of anything. I mean, decentralization under really unequal circumstances is bad. Like you could argue, for example, that American K-12 public schools are decentralized, right? The funding is based on local property tax, then there are these local school boards. That is, you know, and it nobody, I think, who's got an objective analysis would call American public education democratic. You know, and to me, it could use a lot more centralization. We should equalize funding per student. Yeah, I'd like to see some controls implemented there. I don't know. So I just I think it it's one of those debates that I think it just needs to be much more context-dependent and example dependent. Like what are we talking about?
SPEAKER_01Totally. No, I I think it makes perfect sense. And and, you know, to wrap up our conversation, we've been talking a lot about the insecurities, you know, the way that this works in favor of capitalism and the system and how it really harms a lot of people out into the world. You know, after doing all of this research, you know, putting these lectures in this book together, you know, what have you learned about the best ways that you think that we kind of combat this and, you know, increase the kind of good kind of security that that we want for people?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, maybe I'll I'll end by actually going back to the beginning of the book where I contrast what I call manufactured insecurity, which is the insecurity we've talked about in this interview, with what I call existential insecurity. So I think that there's a case to be made that we are just inherently insecure in the byproduct of being mortal, vulnerable creatures who are dependent on care throughout our lives, right? We are born as tiny helpless infants. And if we are lucky to live long enough, you know, we're pretty helpless at the end of our lives as well. And the fact is we need care throughout our lives. We're all dependent on infrastructure and communities and supply chains that are so far beyond our own, not just control, but our we can't even conceptualize them. They're so massive and integrated at this moment. So that existential insecurity is there. It's something I think we will never escape. And, you know, the manufactured insecurity is kind of layered on top of it. That I think we can mitigate and reduce to a dramatic degree. So part of my exit, I guess, part of my argument for how we get out of some of the messes we're in and change things so that we have more of that sort of material political security that we're talking about, is that we actually have to face our vulnerability and we have to say, okay, we're all insecure, therefore we need each other, and let's band together to fight for a world that meets our basic needs. And at the heart of the word insecurity, and also the word security is etymologically, if you go back to the Latin, is the word cura, which actually means care. And so I think that recognition, we're all insecure, we all need care, can be the kind of basis for a politics of uh a kind of politics of solidarity, right? A recognition that we're interdependent, that we again are mutually vulnerable, and a kind of basis for this reimagining of what security can be. Security as not just something that is defensive, militaristic, market driven, but that is collaborative and caring and uh sustainable. Ultimately, those are just nice words, but we need to fucking organize to do it, which is you know another big theme of the book. I mean, I learned a lot writing the book, right? I learned about Canadian legal systems and I learned about the enclosure movement, and I learned about Kafka and I learned about all this stuff. But when I was actually out on the road giving the lectures, give the lecture, and then there would be like a 45-minute QA. And every QA was just like, what do we do? And you know, what I felt was people know that we're facing a bunch of shit right now, that they're intersecting crises. You know, they don't need to be convinced of that. But what they don't really know is what to do about it because it's not like they learn organizing one-on-one in high school or college, right? You know, unless they're lucky enough to be in a labor union at the job, in a good labor union at that, or maybe someone who's just like hyper-politically engaged, or maybe one of the tiny percentile of people who's like in an attendance union, like they don't have much firsthand experience of organizing. And so what I came away from those lectures was, you know, each Q ⁇ A almost became like a symposium on like organizing. Yeah. And I just I felt like just a lot of appetite for actually trying to do something to improve things. So that was actually it was like a really heartening experience because by the end I was like, oh, I'm not really convincing you people of anything. We're actually on to the really hard question, which is like, okay, what are the next steps that we take together so that we can build the world that we all deserve and are entitled to.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And that world requires organizing, not just new technologies delivered to us by some big tech companies, as they would want us to believe. Astra, it's been great to speak with you. You know, we'll I'll be looking forward to your new book coming in March, I'm sure. But thanks so much for taking the time. It's been great.
SPEAKER_00It's been really, really, really fun. Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01Astra Taylor is the author of The Age of Insecurity and a co-founder of the Deck Collective. Tech Won's Save Us is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham, and transcripts are by Bridget Pallou Fry. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.