In this episode we talk to UX career coach Amy Santee about capitalism. How we define it as an exploitative, extractive system. The lack of a good word for making money without screwing people over. The propaganda supporting capitalism. And what we can do to fight it.
Recommended content from this episode
People
Kim Cerna - the designer I talked about
Organizations
Tech Workers Coalition
Collective Action in Tech (list of tech unions)
Articles
"NY Times tech workers win largest tech union in United States" - Liberation
Books
Goliath by Matt Stoller
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
In this episode we talk to UX career coach Amy Santee about capitalism. How we define it as an exploitative, extractive system. The lack of a good word for making money without screwing people over. The propaganda supporting capitalism. And what we can do to fight it.
Recommended content from this episode
People
Kim Cerna - the designer I talked about
Organizations
Tech Workers Coalition
Collective Action in Tech (list of tech unions)
Articles
"NY Times tech workers win largest tech union in United States" - Liberation
Books
Goliath by Matt Stoller
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander
(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)
David Dylan Thomas
Welcome everybody to another edition of “Lately, I've been thinking about…”. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas, coming to you live from Media, Pennsylvania, which is formerly the land of the Lenni-Lenape people.
My guest today is Amy Santee and I'm going to have her tell you a little bit about herself.
Amy Santee
Thanks so much, David! I’m really excited to be here and see you face-to-face on Zoom as we have been doing for many millennia now.
David Dylan Thomas
We've never actually met in person, have we?
Amy Santee
No, we have not.
David Dylan Thomas
Whoever meets like that anymore?
Amy Santee
That's true! In fact, I've never met…okay, I’ve met one client out of my over a hundred coaching clients that I've had in the past two years, I've met literally one of them in person. But that's also the magic of doing remote work is I can do all of my work online and have that privilege, of course.
So, speaking of clients, I'm a UX career coach, essentially a coach for any kind of UX or user experience design professional, whether they are trying to get into the field, they currently work in the field – maybe they're a designer or a researcher or a manager – that's kind of the niche that I focus on.
A lot of people I work with are looking to get a new job, switching careers, transitioning from academia into product design. I also work with a lot of folks who just need a sounding board and a guide towards gaining some kind of important insight about their lives to make a decision; how to be more confident, how to navigate organizational culture and challenging conversations with managers and stakeholders. Even fun things like negotiating. It's been really cool to be doing this for two years. Actually, this is my two-year anniversary this month.
David Dylan Thomas
Congratulations!
Amy Santee
Thanks. I started it right when the pandemic hit, just out of total coincidence.
David Dylan Thomas
A lot of people started a lot of things then. We bought our house during the 2008 financial crisis. There's always something happening at these critical moments in history.
Amy Santee
Exactly, I was born in 1986, I'm sure there was some kind of crisis going on in that year. There’s a few good things about the eighties, of course!
David Dylan Thomas
I was born then so I will defend eighties music to the end of time, just zero of the policies that were introduced then.
So, Amy, let me ask you the million-dollar question. What have you been thinking about lately?
Amy Santee
You might not be surprised to know what I'm going to say. Any wild guesses?
David Dylan Thomas
Labor? Unions? Tech? Hit me.
Amy Santee
And the big ‘C’ word?
David Dylan Thomas
Oh, communism, no, capitalism!
Amy Santee
All of these things. Yeah, capitalism. I mean, it's just all around. I can't not help but think about constantly every single day in every single waking moment, essentially. It’s not a helpful thing a lot of the times because none of us individually can change this system. And that's part of what I constantly am thinking about is what can we actually do in a system that is just destroying society, democracy, the planet, exploiting people. What can we do about that as individuals, but specifically people working in tech and user experience design?
I do see a difference between living and surviving in capitalism and trying to thrive. Ideally that's what everyone should be able to do is thrive versus being individually responsible for it. That is a part of this question that I am constantly pondering. How capitalism is showing up in the workplace for us as professionals?
How can we live our lives according to our core values, when there's this tension? We might work for – I don't know, I'm just going to say company names – we might work for Facebook, AKA Meta. We might work for Amazon. We might even work for a company that we believe largely in the mission but their businesses, most of which are driven by growth for growths sakes. Infinite growth, which requires infinite exploitation, and so that's another component.
What can we do as individuals to practice anti-capitalism without harming ourselves? How can we limit the exploitation of ourselves and that of other people around us?
I do think there are ways we can think about that, things that we can do, even if they're small. The last part of this being that folk who work in tech and design being relatively well paid – and I say relatively because tech and design people are also highly exploited and if money were more evenly distributed, the pay for people would just be totally different.
If you think about a $7.25 minimum wage earner, a person who earns slave wages, their pay would be very different if it were more equitable. So would the pay of a tech worker who makes $200,000. Society would be totally different. So, anyway, my point is in this category of questions, they're all kind of related because you have to even understand that this is the situation and get that class consciousness as someone who makes good money before you can figure out what to do about it.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. It’s funny, I'm so used to these ‘capitalism is bad’ conversations, but I always have in the back of my head this voice that's like, wait, there are people out there – to some degree myself included – like capitalism can't be bad. That's how I have my house. Making money isn’t bad, is it? I think it's helpful – and I'm going to ask your opinion, how do you define capitalism?
Amy Santee
In my mind, capitalism is a system of economic exploitation where people with capital make money off people without capital. That's essentially it in my opinion.
David Dylan Thomas
Okay. So that's the definition of capitalism that sort of necessitates people with capital exploiting people without capital.
Amy Santee
Right. And the people without capital can be guaranteed to never attain enough level of capital. People in the United States, half of the people here, don't even have an emergency fund. People can't pay for unexpected medical bills. There's no way that they're going to gain any significant amount of extra money to move into this class of people who lives comfortably or extravagantly and has way more money than they will actually ever need.
David Dylan Thomas
It's funny because I think there are a lot of people when they think of capitalism they think of small businesses, which is by far the most common form of business, though certainly not the most elevated. Like what's wrong with the quarter store where the guy sells the hammers? How is that evil? I think what you're describing, which is very real and very persistent and very influential, is this form of moving money around that doesn't work unless people are really being taken advantage of.
So theoretically then there's an economic system or systems that still involve exchanging money for goods and services that does not necessitate and hopefully assumes notions of exploitation, the requirements that someone suffer that I may feel good.
Amy Santee
Right, and I think talking about small businesses is important. I'm a small business. I choose not to have an employee for several reasons. One is I would want to be able to pay them what I think is a good amount of money, but that is a strain on an individual person running a business which costs a lot of money.
I think people who run small businesses are taxed and penalized financially in ways that don't make sense for that level of scale, like one or two people. To bring on an employee, I would want to be really considerate of that sort of thing.
Some people go as far as to say that if you are a small business, like a restaurant and you can't pay your workers a fair or living or good wage, then you shouldn't be in business. I kind of agree to that in large part. But what if we could do something different where that kind of scenario would be okay?
It would just require so much change in the economic system that we live in, in the first place to make that happen. I'm not saying every small business owner is an evil capitalist person, but that's a good example of how can we talk about it at a small business level versus a mega corporation level.
David Dylan Thomas
I think a lot then about the policies and how policy encourages behavior. So, once you get to a certain size, tax policy and other economic policies optimize for you staying that size and getting bigger and frankly exploiting more. Before you get to that size, it's actually very, very, very difficult given the way policy is created to move out of that.
So again, you're getting into the situation where the policy supports this definition of capitalism as an I'm going to make it easier for you to exploit and easier for you to stay exploited if you're being exploited. And if you're already exploiting then I’ll make it easier for you to exploit it and again, almost incentivize that exploitation.
Amy Santee
And reward people for it. You get more rewarded the more you exploit.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, but what's interesting to me is that we have shown that that's not the only way. We can point to periods in American history that were very anti-monopolistic and people would actually go to jail for a lot of the kinds of things that they kind of tried to lift.
But also, we can look at points where we say, okay, whatever outcome it is we want, we can make it happen. If you look at the military almost as the exact opposite of that thing where it's like, okay, we're going to have salary transparency. We're going to have unlimited funds and not actually see great losses.
As a small example – this is a while ago, but last time I checked we were like three or four generations ahead in terms of our fighter planes. So we literally have all these fighter jets that are just going to sit in there and maybe we sell them and maybe we don’t, but like that just there's no “profit” around them.
They were just made to keep up because we decided as a society, it's worth it to spend this money to keep. If we decided as a society, it's worth it to make sure that small businesses can get over that first hump of giving health insurance to their workers, we could do it. It's just the question of, will we?
Amy Santee
If I didn't have to pay $500 a month for my health insurance, I could probably bring on an employee. There are just small things and I just did my taxes. I love doing my taxes. I just love to see the finances. It's like a nice validation of myself as a business owner to see those patterns and trends in my income – I love that, but I have also thought about how I pay $150 a year to use Zoom, like an annual subscription.
But Zoom, the proportion of the money that they spend on taxes, it's just so disproportionate to the amount of money that I make and have to pay for a service or, or pay for taxes.
This is the kind of stuff that I think we can make some changes with this. I like the thing you mentioned about salary transparency. There are several states now that have laws for that, it's required either in the job listing or at the moment of having a conversation with a recruiter.
In California – a lot of tech people work in California and they don't know that there is actually a salary transparency law wherein if you talk to a recruiter and you are going to proceed to the next round of interviews, they have to tell you what the salary is, but you have to ask for it. Otherwise, they're not going to voluntarily tell you that.
People don't know this. I had to look it up and go to some like old ass, 2010’s government website to find it and parse the legal jargon. And it's absolutely true, but it's a great example. It's one step. People, especially women, people of color, like they don't negotiate. They don't know how to negotiate. And I'm not saying everyone, but there are significant numbers of people who can't or don't do this, and it's just going to continue penalizing them for the rest of their careers.
But it would be nice if we had these kinds of policies or even individuals in companies. If you're a manager, try to get that person paid as much as you possibly can, budgets are important, but that could be an act of advocacy in and of itself.
That's what I'm really trying to identify here is what are these things that we can do in the workplace that are directly anti-capitalist or a more subtle version of it. Maybe that could be couched in a different language. I want to pay people as much as I can. That's actually anti-capitalist in the sense of, if that person gets 10,000 more dollars a year, that's 10,000 less dollars that that company or some part of that company will get. It lessens that exploitation just a bit.
David Dylan Thomas
Well, and it has to do with motivations, to your point, the person making that decision is saying it is more important that this person lives a good life than that we make 10,000 more dollars.
Amy Santee
Exactly. Do you ever think about this kind of stuff, like small practices, small ways to chip away, given that we're stuck in this system, it's not going away? Sorry, I think that's pretty obvious. We're not going towards a dystopia. We're in the dystopia already. So, what are these little things we can do? Have you come across anything interesting?
David Dylan Thomas
I mean, I can tell you in my own life, my own career. I'm also a small business of one, a sole proprietorship LLC. I came to a point where I had to redesign my… I give presentations for a living. I've got these three main presentations and they’ve been created over a period of like six years. And so, they're all in different design languages, even within a deck it'll switch fonts randomly, it's a mess because they were designed by 15 different people.
I was like, okay, I want a consistent design language. I want to make a new deck; I want to have the templates for that. My first thought was okay, I know a lot of great designers, who can I give this work to?
Then as I thought about it a little more and started looking through them, I know for a fact that one of the hardest things to do in design, especially if you are not a white, cis, het male, is to get your portfolio together because there's that paradox you see in a lot of industries where it's like, okay, I only want to hire you if you have experience, but how can I get experience if nobody will hire me unless I have experience?
I want to deliberately find someone who is basically a person of color, however they identify gender-wise and who is just starting out, who needs to build their portfolio. I want to give them that. I reached out to some friends and was like, this is what I'd like to optimize for in terms of what I'm looking for.
I found this great designer – I'm going to shout her out now so she gets more work, Kim Cerna, she did a great job. I let her negotiate what she thought was a fair price, and I was like, “done”, and we did it and she put it together and it's a good deck. I'm happy with it, it's work that I am glad I did not have to do, but it's also work that I wanted someone to get a fair price for.
That was all that was all coming from that place, I don't control a lot of things, but I've been doing this long enough to know if I ever get the chance to decide who's going to get this design gig – and I already know there are these inherent equities, why wouldn't I sort of say I am specifically going to try to do this one act.
Amy Santee
Yes. And that sets you apart, I think, from possibly other businesses who don't have that same motivator, that same value. This drive to be okay with making less profit. I think that's a huge problem is, what is enough profit? What if there were still rich people, but they just weren't as rich? What if people were okay with making less profit?
I like your example because it shows a very specific intention. I'm not surprised at all to hear that you did that, but you have a goal in mind for that. Let me find someone who is just dealing with the challenges and constraints of getting into the field of design, which is hard to do for many people. Whether it's having a certain amount of experience, maybe not having access to education or training, maybe it's because they're black, maybe it's because of some identity that they have that makes it just that much more challenging.
So, seeking that out, saying, “Hey, what do you think is a fair rate?” And if they said a rate that was not fair, you probably would have been like, “Actually that's too low. Let's do this number instead?”
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, and you do from time to time see these little stories of LinkedIn of like, this person went up for this job and then the salary they quoted was…and as I think about it, people have done that for me, especially early in my speaking career, I had no idea what to charge and it was very embarrassing, frankly. But I'd be like, “Hey, how about this?” And they’d be like, “We actually have this much in the budget. So, I'm going to kind of up it here, and I'm like, “Thank you!”
Amy Santee
Not everyone does that. I just was talking to someone who I already knew. She's a senior designer, she already knew she was being paid less than her white male counterpart for several years. After he quit, she found some documentation that laid out exactly how much he got paid.
She and I talked about how to bring this to her manager and HR and she's now in that process of starting that conversation. She grabbed all the data, she put it together and has a very strong rationale and is saying, what are you going to do about this? And they are jumping on that. They don't want to lose this person. It's lawsuit-worthy potentially, because there's written documentation.
Just another example of the responsibility put on people. Whereas, that manager knew that information, HR knew that information and they did nothing about it. It's not like other people like what you were just talking about, “Hey, I want to do this presentation, here's how much I charge.” “Well, you're undercharging, let me pay you a fair amount.” I don't think that's very common.
David Dylan Thomas
Why do you think people resist paying what's right?
Amy Santee
That's a good question. I mean in the United States it just seems to be part of our culture of seeing the fruits of our labor and wanting to keep that for ourselves, but a business thrives on the fruits of many people's labor potentially and all of that going into a single bucket of money, there's some sense for the fact that most of the money should or can go to the person who owns the business rather than the people really making the business happen.
And I don't know, I honestly don't have an answer, but really that is what comes to mind for me is the culture of, pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and just doing hard work and being rewarded for it and possibly seeing others in a different way than yourself.
There’s something that I've heard a lot of people saying recently, which is people want to feel like they can associate more with a millionaire and that they're just temporarily working towards being a millionaire or a temporarily embarrassed millionaire is the term I’ve used. Rather than seeing that most of us have stuff in common with people who are not millionaires. Jeff Bezos is further away from being a millionaire than pretty much everyone on the planet.
David Dylan Thomas
I think it's an important point you're bringing though because I think dignity plays into it a lot. I think there is this notion. I remember someone saying something about you'll hear the phrase, “I don't want a handout.”
I think about that phrase and I think why not? What's wrong with the handout? And I'm like, how do you get to the point where someone giving someone else money is bad? Is insulting? Is a mark of a lack of dignity on the recipient? And you get there through capitalism and you get there through a stigma around having less money, therefore I want to put out the perception – I love the way you put it, a temporarily embarrassed millionaire – I want to put out the perception that I am either on the way to being rich or I'm already rich.
Amy Santee
I want to say, or maybe this is a hypothesis, but that might be like an American flavor of capitalism, because I think there are other countries that have capitalist models essentially, but they take way better care of their citizens, whether it's in the form of paid parental leave. Maybe it’s just like you need a solid vacation and we're still going to pay you.
That’s a business thing, but countries providing services and support for people to take time off of work to have their kid. Going on unemployment and being able to have 60% of your paycheck until you find your next job. That's a number that I know from someone who lives in Germany.
So I wonder if this is kind of an American flavor of capitalism. I was thinking about this with regard to food stamps or EBT, as it's now known. I got that when I was in grad school, I'm like, that's free money, I'm going to take that. I'm going to use it for whatever. That wasn't shameful for me, but so many people see it as something shameful and a deficit and something that they have done wrong that goes in contrast to how people expect to live their lives or how we expect other people to live their lives around us.
David Dylan Thomas
What immediately comes to mind is body shaming. It's a similar thing. There is a perception of what the perfect American is and it is rich. It is skinny. It is all of these. It is white, very much so. I mean, we could do a whole podcast about colorism. That's a conversation, right?
It’s simple, I think it was Baldwin who talks about if you show someone something enough times, or treat someone a certain way enough times, you can stop because they're going to start doing it to themselves.
Amy Santee
James Baldwin?
David Dylan Thomas
James Baldwin, yeah.
Amy Santee
Absolutely. The US is really good at propaganda. It's really good at marketing. I mean, I look back on my life and I had so many beliefs that I just was enculturated with about people, about money, things that are very judgmental and I'm just taking a step back over the years and going, wow. I was taught to believe certain things about people that are really just fallacies, they're based on things that don't make sense, but it's a cultural norm to have these beliefs.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, I think a lot about in my own life, if I see a person who's unhoused, or let's be honest, I think is unhoused because of how they look, let's be really clear about that. There's this immediate almost – I'll say revulsion. There's this instinct before I even have the chance to really think about it deeply of like, I need to stay back because it's catchy. It's almost like cooties. It's like, oh my God, if I get too close, I will be unhoused or I'll somehow get a disease or they're going to attack me and all of that stuff.
If I thought about it for a second, I'd remember that that person is 1000 times more vulnerable than I am. They are the one in danger not me. I'm the danger. I wasn't born thinking about people who looked a certain way. I was acculturated. I saw it on TV. I saw other people how they behaved in those situations. And that happens and happens and happens and we don't question it and we're not even encouraged to question it. The gut reaction is always going to be based on the pattern.
Amy Santee
Yeah. The assumptions, the biases. Even people who are really conscious about systemic racism, which I consider myself to be, I still have racist thoughts. I might see a black guy walking down the street and maybe my initial thought is like something feeling off. But then you can train your brain to go that's an assumption, that is not the correct thing to think, that person is literally just a person walking through the neighborhood and actually to meet your shift your mind and go, is there something they can do?
Because that person is in a really hostile environment right now, walking through my neighborhood, so I think you just have to realize the kind of thoughts that you have and that's just a huge step, but also figure out what you can do about that.
It reminds me another of another thing I heard once from someone I know who was upset that she learned that a researcher who had come onto her team who was at a lower level of experience or whatever, was making more money than she did.
I think she knew this because she had gone up to a manager. What struck me was that she was mad about this rather than being curious about it. She was mad and making assumptions and kind of taking it out on that person or directing her anger to that person, perhaps that person negotiated really well? It doesn't matter. We do make these assumptions and they're often mistaken. I mean, biases, that's your thing, there's no unbiased thought really.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. And I like what you said about curious because I think as we discussed, well, what do we do about capitalism as a lone individual? I think curiosity is a fantastic position to take. I think that's far more enabling.
To say, I see this thing that I deem unfair, that I am uncomfortable with. Then you get curious about it. I think the rage is appropriate, but it cannot be the last step. Somewhere in there, there needs to be a curiosity that lets you start to ask the questions because capitalism thrives when we don’t ask questions. When we just get mad and tear shit down, which again, I'm not going to shit talk tearing shit down – sometimes that's appropriate, but if that's all we do, capitalism goes on its merry way because capitalism can take having shit get torn down. In fact, it can make that a business too!
Amy Santee
Yeah, I bet you could monetize that!
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, it is in the nature of capitalism is to take whatever you throw it at and turn it into a business, right? Look at the appropriation of black culture. So, I think getting curious ends up being very powerful. I mean, you talk about folks like Malcolm X or Angela Davis, they got curious and they found what was going on underneath the underneath the underneath and came up with things such as, oh, here's this weakness.
Things like qualified immunity. If you don't get curious, you never learn about qualified immunity, which if you don't know, for those listening, it is this legal concept basically that makes it very easy for cops to get away with literally anything because it is – to oversimplify a bit – if the cop did it, it's legal.
And if you don't get curious, you never really learn about it. And if you don't learn about it, you never know, oh, that becomes an objective now. You start to get strategic and say, that is the thing that we need to tear down. I feel like the same thing exists for capitalism as we start to say what do we do?
If we don't understand fundamentally at the policy level, at the boring paperwork level, how does capitalism work, you're never going to be able to tear it down or replace it.
Amy Santee
It’s like an iceberg. Imagine a teeny little island in the middle of the ocean and there's a palm tree and it's sunny and there's a chair and a book and then all underneath that is an iceberg, which, you know, ice and an island under it – that doesn't really make sense. But we're like sitting on this island and we're just enjoying our lives as much as we can, having blinders on, but underneath all of that is all of these problems. Most of which we cannot see unless we dig down and be curious about that sort of thing.
That's just my lifelong sort of goal is to always be curious and learning. I like to encourage that in other people, folks don't oftentimes understand just how severely they're exploited. Again, even coming back to people who make a lot of money. You work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, many of these other companies with just the highest expectations of their corporate workers, working nights and weekends, working harder and faster and growing and growing and growing and burning out from that.
People make an excuse of, “oh, I'm just really busy at work.” We have these deadlines and these are the expectations, but it's fucking exploitation. People don't think to use that word they might look at someone who works at McDonald's or an Amazon warehouse and go, yeah, they should be paid more, but there's something about applying the word “exploitation” to people who make six figures that just doesn't match with people's mental models.
It's also like labor organizing or unions. Unions are for coal workers; coal miners and unions are for construction workers or whatever it may be. I would love to get a giant rat and put it in front of any corporation, the big balloon rats that they place that have scab workers and a scab worker for someone who might not know is just someone who comes in to fill a role while there are people striking.
So anyway, this idea of unions, barely, anyone thinks about that as applicable to tech. What’s been cool though is over the past several years, we're starting to see some movement there. Just last week the New York times Tech Worker Guild created their union. It was like 80% of people voted for the union. And now they're the biggest tech worker union in the country. I'm getting chills just thinking about that. It's amazing. I want to see more of that, I feel like we could do more of that.
David Dylan Thomas
I think we met in part through one of the Quarantine Book Clubs Mike Monteiro did. I remember you bringing up a comment about the Tech Workers Union’s Slack. What is it called again?
Amy Santee
There’s an organization called Tech Workers Coalition, and then there's an associated union called Tech Workers 1010, which, you know, 1010 is like a binary, that's why they chose that number.
There are absolutely people doing this kind of work, sharing information, mutual aid, trying to bring experts together, having conversations for how to start a union one-on-one in your tech company, how to look out for the signs of sabotage from bosses and companies and what to do with that sort of thing.
How to have conversations with your coworkers that are really risky – don't do them on Slack. Don't do them on any company devices, be really, really careful. So, there are these things happening.
2022, just being an extension of 2020, essentially is a great year for this. We’re seeing a lot of shifts in power of workers and employers, or workers and capitalists. I am really happy to see this happening in the tech world, this acknowledgment.
Unions are there not just to make sure you make a good wage, but people who get sexually harassed can get help from a union. People who are fired unfairly, which we see in tech, can benefit from union resources. The amount of energy we're putting into our work, if there's some kind of boundary – working conditions, that's another term that people think are applicable to folks who are not white-collar workers. Working conditions, labor unions, exploitation. Do you ever hear tech workers talking about that? Not really. Rarely.
David Dylan Thomas
It's interesting because as we talk about what can we do about capitalism, there is the, “what can I personally, David Dylan Thomas do”, “what can Amy Santee do?” But then there's also the, “what can we?” And that “we” is becoming really interesting. I remember following that New York Times story on Slack – and this is a mental note for me to put that Slack in the show notes for this as I really want people to check it out.
Watching that evolve. So, I'm going to highly recommend everybody check out that. Just Google New York Times Tech Union. That that is a saga! That is fascinating saga, but it lays a template for what is possible and how we think about work and how we think about sticking together and the power we have versus the power I have.
Amy Santee
Absolutely, and if you think about the first Starbucks worker union that started, I think it was in New York a few months ago. If you think of a map of the US and just think of all these dots exploding all over the map. This viral nature of that one union, or that one Starbucks location unionizing and causing all of these other workers and locations to go, “that's a good idea!” and they're doing it and they're making it happen.
I see that for tech as well. Kickstarter had union organizing efforts. I think even though I can't remember if the union actually became one or not, I don't remember what the voting outcome was, but many of those organizers got fired for that.
So there is some risk in it, but it does also show an example of how to do things. What works, what doesn’t work. The more of them that can be successful, the more of them, the more success we'll have in general. I think that is a good way to think about the, “we” versus the “I”. There's a lot of “I” stuff and then there are some “we” things as well.
I imagine you've read Adrienne Maree Brown or are familiar with their work? he wrote a book called Emergent Strategy? She's an African-American.
David Dylan Thomas
Ah yeah! I haven’t read it…
Amy Santee
She's a black woman who, I can't remember if she is straight or not, she might not be, but she got a lot of inspiration from authors, black women authors, in Sci-fi specifically. She's written this book with this concept called emergent strategy, where if you think about an ocean, the ocean is one thing, but it's made up of millions of waves. And each of us is a wave. Each of us is this repeating pattern in the leaf of a fern plant. If we're all doing these small things and creating a bigger sort of effort, we can have more of an impact even in our individual actions.
David Dylan Thomas
It's like almost this concept of fractal organizing.
Amy Santee
Fractals, yes! That's exactly the concept she uses is fractals in nature.
David Dylan Thomas
It's interesting because it seems every generation relearns racism. There's this shocking moment, I forget, I think it was in the 2016 election. Every 30 or 40 years, a bunch of 20 year old white folks were like, “we did what??”, because America's good at propaganda.
But what's interesting is I feel like there's also a collective relearning around civic action. We remember that there was a thing called the civil rights movement, but we forget that, for example, the Montgomery bus strike took over a year. They walked for over a year and the sit-ins were for weeks and weeks and weeks on ends.
And unions, we've had unions for a while. We've been deliberately told to forget about them repeatedly.
Amy Santee
Well, when neo-liberalism started to happen as just like an international movement, kind of in the 70’s, 80’s, with deregulation, all of these things occurring at that time to get rid of legislation, get rid of any kind of constraints on business, finance and all of that stuff. That's when if you picture a graph, like start to see the decline of unions, and the decline of that power. Then the increase in the power of the most wealthy people essentially.
In the 1800’s, early 1900’s, we had some good union action going and we had that power base to keep things in check as much as possible, but there was a moment in history where that kind of just systematically was done away with. We're at the lowest point in terms of the percentage of people who are in unions or the number of unions, but at the end of the pandemic, I think what is an inflection point for people starting to take action to build that up, especially younger people and younger people thinking very differently about work and how work should fit into their lives rather than how our lives should fit into work, or even keeping those things as separate as possible. So, I am really excited to continue seeing these changes.
David Dylan Thomas
We're going to wrap up soon, but I kind of want to end on what I think is a positive note. So, to that point and again, I'll try to find the book and put it in the show notes, but I was talking to an author about this and they're sort of talking about this moment and it's basically around Watergate. When you start to see that shift from kind of anti-monopolistic Democrats. Basically, they became a point where they separated policy from economics. They sort of start to accept the idea that economics will take care of itself and policy should be focused on things like keeping the price of milk cheap, which you can do with some extremely corrupt labor practices.
One of the reasons you get there, as he described it was, let's be honest, the unions were pretty fucking racist. You were coming out of the sixties when that was not a thing we wanted to support. And so all business, small and big kind of got painted with the same brush and then were like, let's not even deal with that and certainly must not support unions.
It's similar to what I'm seeing now so much with bringing back these weapons against capitalism or against monopolistic or fascism, that were being used then, but making them less racist. So like the new deal, the new deal was very much about saying, how can we help the common man live better? Unions were also thinking about how can we make the common white men feel better?
We’re looking at this new version of those same old tools, but now it's like the green new deal, which is like, Hey, let's do the new deal, but maybe not racist this time? Let's do unions, but maybe not racist this time? I think that's important because I think that the reason you get there and we never really got to this, and I'd love to have you back on to talk about this more later, part of the reason capitalism is the way it is, especially in America is because of slavery.
If you look at all of the things that we don't like about capitalism, you can just sort of be like, yeah, that's how you would do it if you wanted slaves.
It's sort of like capitalism as we're seeing it. The things that we're defining as the bad capitalism. Exploitation, if doesn't get better than slavery when it comes to exploitation.
Amy Santee
It was just this brilliant idea of, okay, we have enslaved people and then we have not enslaved people. If the enslaved people become free, we don't want them to get with the other poor people. We need to get the white, poor people to hate the poor black people. And that has just caused, imagine how different things would be if that that divide didn’t exist? Our country would be very, very different.
It's always been a problem if you look at it today. There are folks out there who are really terrible, racist, horrible, right wingers. But there are a lot of poor white people working class white people, who have so much in common with folks with different identities. The propaganda is such that that's not the messaging and that's not what is commonly believed again, that association with rich people feeling more relevant than association with other folks who've been socialized to believe are trying to harm you or take advantage of you or get in front of you somehow.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. I mean, we don't even have to imagine, because there was a period in history where black folks and white folks were slaves, were enslaved people and there came this inflection point where we wanted to start to make it possible that your kids could also be enslaved and that came way easier if you invent blackness invent whiteness
It's like, “well, how do I know which ones of these are slaves? Oh, I know. Okay. I get it now, it's the ones with darker skin. Got it. Thanks for making that easier”, which was an economic decision, it's an economic strategy because it's cheaper to make my enslaved people have kids than it is to buy new enslaved people.
Which is horrible, but as you start to understand it as an economic decision, and I think we do that a lot, capitalism encourages you to dissociate and use business as a way to be good and virtuous ithout having to be good and virtuous.
Amy Santee
Exactly, exactly. But you know, rapping or coming full circle back to the first part of our conversation. What can you do in the workplace? What are these little things you can do? Again, I am just constantly trying to think of this because so many people in, in tech and design actually, they don't feel good about working in these companies. Even if they're not directly working on some key business thing at Facebook to make sure people are getting misinformation and pissed off at each other and causing issues with democracy and all of that.
People working on what would seem like neutral products or features don't feel good about the larger company that they work at. I encounter this a lot. I had it in my own experience as well, and I no longer work in organizations. I just feel better suited to work on my own as a self-employed person.
But when this comes up in conversation, there are several things I like to talk about with people and maybe that will be a good way to wrap up our conversation if I can point a couple of these out?
David Dylan Thomas
Sure.
Amy Santee
Cool. So, boundaries. Thinking about your boundaries, how can you put boundaries in place at work, even though it might feel scary? To just say no to an extra project on your plate, to not answer those emails at 9:00 PM after you’ve put your kids to bed.
Putting these boundaries on alleviates some of that exploitation for yourself and likewise to others. If we're in a team and we're all doing that, we're setting a precedent, everyone else is going to feel compelled to do it. That's just a magnified exploitation at that particular scope.
So, what are the boundaries and what are the things we can do to advocate for ourselves and advocate for other people that we work with? I think that’s an important concept to explore with regard to practicing anti-capitalism.
Another category of things is taking these risks to ask hard questions and point out ethical violations, even to implement an ethical code or guidelines. Some companies and teams don't even have that.
Let's see if we can put something in place to have some accountability and something to check ourselves when we are designing something. Making sure we put a process in place to think about the second order effects, the possible unintended consequences, the things that companies experience after putting a feature out and going, “Oh, you know what? That's harmful to this particular group of people.”
Well, if it was part of the process to think about those things, maybe that wouldn't have happened?
I would also say too, paying attention to and calling out contradictory corporate actions. Airbnb just announced that they're going to help thousands of people fleeing from the war in Ukraine by housing them in Airbnb homes. And that's fine. That's really great. That's a nice gesture, but what does that say about Airbnb’s practice and a core of their business model, which is to get as many people to put their houses or apartments on Airbnb and that having a negative effect on the people who already live in the country, who don't have access to resources and have to rent. The rents increase, they get out of the city.
So, that's a contradictory sort of behavior that we can at least identify and speak to. I mean, when it comes down to it, it's just what's the level of risk that we're willing to take on? Can you be a Francis Haugen and be a whistleblower? That's great, if you can do that and have job security and just go work at another company after you do that, that's awesome.
If you don't have the ability to do that, what are some small things that you can implement on your team with yourself? Protecting yourself? It's kind of a matrix of risk level and what are you willing to sacrifice, and that's different for everyone.
David Dylan Thomas
Thank you so much, Amy, and thank you, especially for those last bits of advice, which I encourage everyone to engage with.
It's been great having you on – I almost said for the Cognitive Bias Podcast, because that's how used I am to that being my sign off!
Amy Santee
This is a brand new one for you!
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, this is totally new, I'm leaving that in!
For “Lately, I've been thinking about…” I’m David Thomas. Thank you so much and we'll see you next time! Thanks.
Amy Santee
Bye!