In this episode we talk to Erika Wohlstadter, Principal Researcher at Think Company,, psychobilly upright bassist, sewist, costumer, queer spec fic writer, and so much more about strangeness. What attracts us to it? How do we hide or leverage the strangeness in ourselves? How is normality a political tool? What are the consequences of strangeness? And how is anarchy not what you probably think it is?
Recommended content from this episode:
Movie
Passing
Video
Glamrou on queer identity and quantum physics
Book
Design Justice by Sasha Constanza-Chock
In this episode we talk to Erika Wohlstadter, Principal Researcher at Think Company,, psychobilly upright bassist, sewist, costumer, queer spec fic writer, and so much more about strangeness. What attracts us to it? How do we hide or leverage the strangeness in ourselves? How is normality a political tool? What are the consequences of strangeness? And how is anarchy not what you probably think it is?
Recommended content from this episode:
Movie
Passing
Video
Glamrou on queer identity and quantum physics
Book
Design Justice by Sasha Constanza-Chock
David Dylan Thomas
Welcome, everybody, to the latest edition of “Lately, I’ve been thinking about…” Today my guest is Erika Wohlstadter and I’m going to let her introduce herself. Erika, tell us what you get up to!
Erika Wohlstadter
Hey there, I’m Erika Wohlstadter. I’m currently a Principal Researcher at Think Company, based out of Philadelphia.
What I get up to is I do a whole lot of strategy and research work. I've been involved in UX and development for over 20 years now. I even started out as a Flash Developer, but that dates me more than a little bit!
In my spare time I am part of a psychobilly band; I play upright bass as well as a number of other instruments. I am an avid sewist and costumer, specializing in video game and fantasy-like recreations. I also read a ton. I write a lot, especially queer spec fic and kind of whatever else I am interested in. Right now, I'm teaching myself Japanese.
David Dylan Thomas
That's fantastic! I also forgot to mention I'm coming in from Media, Pennsylvania, formerly home to the Leni Lenape first peoples.
Seriously, you have like the coolest hobbies! So, I'm all the more curious now your answer to this question, what have you been thinking about lately?
Erika Wohlstadter
Awesome! So, I've given this a lot of thought over the past couple of weeks, because the past couple weeks I drove to Texas to pick up one of the rarest basses in the world. There is a manufacturer known as Kay – now Engelhardt – who used to make basses back in the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, most of the big names played them.
They are not concert basses. So, if you go see an orchestra, you're not likely to see a Kay, they are made for people who were playing slap bass, who are playing upright, rockabilly, psychobilly, jazz, all that sort of stuff.
In the forties and fifties, they made a series known as the Swingmaster series. Now I'm very short, I'm five foot one. So, I play 1/4 size base, which is a student model. Most basses that you see are 3/4 size, but obviously it goes up to 4/4, which you basically need to be like six foot eight to play!
I play 1/4 size base and I love Kays. Kays are not very common. They made less than 3000 1/4 sized basses during the entire duration of the company. I have two myself which are student models, so the quality is a little lower than what you'd see a professional normally play.
However, they're antiques, they’re still wonderful basses. One's a ’65, one's a ‘67. I love them both dearly. One's tuned more for playing jazz and acoustic and the other one is set up for psychobilly, so I've got a big pedal board, a magnetic pickup, all the rest.
Anyway, the rarest of the rare of the Swingmaster series, which was their professional series, this is what you saw on TV during the forties and fifties, is the S10. The S10 is a quarter size professional model which means it has ebony fingerboard and tailpiece. It has full purfling, which is the inlay that you see around the edge of a base or around the edge of the F-holes, often imitated with paint, but originally that's actual inlay to reinforce the edge and provide some decoration.
The S10 it's estimated there are less than 50 of them in existence, because nobody plays 1/4 sizes unless you’re a student or unless you're very, very short! Almost all of them are done in a blonde finish and anyway, about two weeks ago, I had a terrible cold, my partner who always just checks Reverb to see if there's any interesting instruments on, because, you know, he plays guitar, I play bass, he found the listing and sent it to me, someone in Texas. It was like, “Hey, my grandpa played this for 50 years and we're trying to clean out my grandma's house and we talked to this guy who knows about old basses and he said that it was something called a Kay S10. It's in a little bit of rough shape but it still works. It doesn't have any major holes or anything. It's got some chipping.”
No joke, I thought I was hallucinating this because it's a dark finish.
David Dyland Thomas
Oh, wow!
Erika Wohlstadter
It may be the only dark finish S10 in existence, so you bet your bippy, and he was asking a song. The only equivalent bass, like the only mention of an S10 being sold in the last 20 years on the internet was in a state sale in Georgia for like 8k, he was asking for is asking for it for a song.
I was like, so you know what we're doing this weekend, we're driving down to Texas! Bought it, drove down there because it was local pickup only, picked it up from the heart of just Confederate Bible territory. No joke, the road number was 1488. We picked it up, we were like, if we don't get murdered, this will be a great story!
We picked it up, then we immediately turned around and came home because both of us had work. So yeah, we drove down to Texas, picked up this bass, it's everything that I hoped for. There's so much history in this thing.
But it got me thinking, and that trip made me realize what it was that I wanted to talk about, which is strangeness. Because I love road trips. I love driving for extended periods of time. I would rather drive in a car for 50 hours than be on a plane for five, not afraid of flying or anything, it's just there's something about the act of driving, the act of moving like that through the world, that I really enjoy.
I haven't been on a road trip obviously for more than a couple of years, so I was wondering, hey, do I still have it to drive that long? Because I did 46 hours of driving in three days. So, it’s like do I have what it takes to do this? And you know, I do, it's fine.
It got me thinking about that I don't think most people enjoy road trips. I don't think they enjoy driving. I wonder what other strangeness do we have about us that lets us do the things that we do?
Is there a quality to our personalities that allows us to experience the world, to produce art, to produce UX and whatever else we do, in the way that we do?
It’s often talked about how genius and insanity have this ineffable connection or a required connection. And I disagree, I personally produce best when I've got three square meals a day and plenty of water and my days are boring, but they're full and creative.
But I am nevertheless strange. I am, you know, queer, purple haired woman in Philadelphia, who has 8 million hobbies. The strangeness never seems to stop coming. I've been a consultant for a very, very long time now and being a consultant means you are what the role demands of you and much of society does that as well.
So, I'm curious, what do you consider your strangeness, and when did you first notice that?
David Dylan Thomas
So I, and I want to say, I think this is a really interesting question on a number of levels, because part of this – and this is my answer too – part of this makes me think about strangeness as inherent versus strangeness as learned. As soon as you were saying, I have these strange qualities…do you? Do you have them as in you were born and you had the right coding for psychobilly?
If you look back far enough, do you have like your great, great grandfather had the like equivalent 1870s psychobilly gene? Or it's nature/nurture, do you have these little moments in your life where you can be like that was one of the stepping stones from where I was to psychobilly, to cosplay, to any of these particular things?
I think all of us can sort of point to things as being potentially that, but at the same time, I think we're fooling ourselves if we're like, oh no, there's a very clean line to our particular strangeness.
To answer your question though, I think of my strangeness and my personal strangeness has to do with storytelling. I think I'm very, very good at it and I think I have a performance strangeness where I do not really have any trouble going up on a stage in front of a thousand strangers and just spewing off about whatever. In fact, if I had a choice between being on stage in front of those thousand people and being at a cocktail party with those thousand people and having to interact, I would much rather be on stage!
I do not want to make small talk with people at a cocktail party. I would rather go home and watch Netflix or anything but that versus like the nervousness. Most people would be like, oh no, I would just rather be at the party.
So, for me – because I’ve been thinking about this, and for me, that was a survival tactic because I was bullied as a kid. I was like the one black kid in a mostly white – it's funny, I got it from both ends. I was in Catholic school for one year and I was one of the few black kids there, and I don't think it was necessarily being bullied because of race, but I can't exactly count it out. I was really more being bullied for being a nerd.
I got this assignment. We all got this assignment to take vocabulary words and learn them by putting them into a story. So most kids had stories about, I don't know, going to the store or something. I had a story about people going to a planet that was full of dinosaurs and they had to fight the dinosaurs on the alien planet!
I was telling the story and the class was riveted. This is like sixth grade. The class was just riveted and I had noticed in the back of my head I was like, oh, they're not bullying me right now, noted. I'm going to write that down somewhere in my brain. Performance became this survival tactic as a way to keep people off and to make people like me.
So, when I think about my strangeness, I have difficulty not tracing it back to formative events. That having been said, I don't know that other people haven't had those formative events, but had their own different strangeness as a result.
Erika Wohlstadter
No, and I do agree that it's definitely a mix of nature versus nurture. I had very creative parents. They started me on piano at four, clarinet at nine, alto sax at ten. My dad was a jazz musician. My mom was a musician – she was on The Gong Show. She won too! We have Michael Keaton's ancestral family mandolin hanging up. He was dating my mother's roommate, Connie when they were both attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was a starving artist and we have it. Someday, if I can ever get it back, I just want to give it to him because, well, one, it'd be a great story!
But to your point, I think storytelling has a huge part to do with my own. I was always a writer. I don't actually have a memory of not being able to read. My dad doesn't remember teaching me, all I know is that even from like the age of like three or so, I just had books in my hand and as soon as I could figure out how to make marks, I was writing stories.
I got in trouble for my stories more often than not, they got me as much negative attention as they got positive ones because, you know, it's the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
When you grow up in rural Iowa and you've got ideas about fantasy and liking girls as another girl, that can get you some negative attention as well.
To your point I've never gotten stage fright. It's never been a thing. I love giving shows, but I don't like being the center of attention. I'm just okay with it. I know people who really love being the life of the party. I'm not one of those people, but I've never had an issue with it.
It's just like, oh, this is just another state of being, but yeah, definitely my parents encouraged that creativity. They wanted a musician daughter. They loved it when I drew pictures and told stories and did all the rest of that. The strangeness was encouraged.
I kind of wonder if I wouldn't have become a scientist or something else, if I hadn't been pushed so hard into the creative arts, but along with that there were things that I definitely did that were outside of their boundaries of what defines normality, that even within a weird family there are things that I was inclined to, that wasn't within my sphere of understanding at any age.
There was always that impulse to do things outside that sphere, mostly for a good story. That makes me wonder, how much of strangeness is what was cultivated in us versus what we cultivate in ourselves. I didn't have to go to Texas to get one of the rarest basses in the world, but it never occurred to me that not going was an option.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah. It's interesting because you're starting to kind of knock on the door of identity. I suspect the reason it never occurred to you not to go, is that wouldn't be you. Maybe not put in those terms, exactly, but because I've had similar impulses. I was thinking the other day, I'm a huge U2 fan and in 2004, when iTunes was young, U2’s new album was coming out and they had this gigantic digital package of literally every album, every B-side, everything.
It was coming out with a special iPod, not iPhone – because that wasn't a thing yet, iPod that was red and black and had all of those songs on it. It's funny, they were packaging that stuff long before their later controversy with Apple.
But it came with a whole thing on it, it was like this extra special thing you can get. It was like $400 or something ridiculous. It never occurred to me for one second that I wasn't buying that. I was like, of course I am, show up and take my money time.
Actually, even recently, the new vinyl edition the 30th anniversary edition of Achtung Baby on vinyl came out and I'm like, I already have two versions of it on vinyl, two! But at no point, was there a question. Well, of course I'm having it. 30th anniversary, are you kidding me?
One's red, the other is blue. Of course, I'm having that! And when you have those moments of a decision that anyone else would take time to make, if not in fact, reject outright, and for you, it didn't even occur to me I had the option.
I think you've found your strangeness when it's those things that feel just inherent and reflexive.
Erika Wohlstadter
One small tangent to your point about streaming – and what we were talking about earlier. So, with the whole Spotify kerfuffle going on, I am canceling my almost 20-year subscription, looking for other platforms. I discovered Napster is a streaming platform. They're an actual valid platform, and that is one of the funniest things as one of the early internet children that I could possibly think of!
I'm glad they survived, I'm glad they found a way. They never changed their model when you think about it, they just legitimized it.
David Dylan Thomas
Oh yeah, that was one of my earliest lessons, and it's so sad, I’m like in the back of my head, should I explain Napster to the young ones? It has been about 20 years at this point, but no, Napster was one of the earliest sorts of digital rebels that all the record companies are going to sue you for doing that stuff.
Not only are they legitimate now, but from what I've read from they’re one of the fairest when it comes to paying their artists. So, the whole lie of oh, Napster is taking money out of the artists mouths. No, they're taking money out of the record companies’ mouths. The record companies are taking money out of ourselves and it's come full circle to like, “okay, we're actually the fairest streaming game in town now!”
Erika Wohlstadter
Well, as someone who has been a musician in varying levels of professionalism, there have been times when playing clarinet put food on my table and paid my rent. There was never a time when any musician that I was around ever got mad at someone like pirating their music.
They were like, “We want you to listen to it. What we care more about is if you come to our show and buy a t-shirt. You buying merch, that's more direct money into our pocket that all of the expenses we had from recording. We want you to share music so that more people listen to it.”
The model of musicianship is very, very different than the lie that the industry is trying to sell you about what musicianship looks like and what we value as musicians.
I remember there was this self-help article. I can't remember, it might've been ‘Dear Sugar’ or something like that. I love reading these things, I love reading the equivalent of Modern Miss Manners, Emily Post, I could tell you how to conduct yourself at a 1940s dinner party depending upon your economic strata, just fine.
But you know, now as I'm getting older and I'm realizing that etiquette is evolving, it should not be about class warfare. Etiquette is class warfare. To me there's a big difference between manners, which is the graciousness that you extend to other people and that you wish to be extended to yourself – and that's manners, like not spitting food on people.
Etiquette is a base set of rules that when entering a new or unfamiliar situation, you can rely upon in order to allow for manners to occur. So that to me is kind of the split there. But anyway, that's a whole other topic.
David Dylan Thomas
I feel like this is a content model, a metaphor to be made there as well, but go ahead!
Erika Wohlstadter
But yeah, so the article was about what actions you identify as, as in like, I'm a good person, I'm not a liar, so, I don't tell lies. People often get out of acting better or being a better person by telling themselves that, oh, I'm just a slob or, oh, I'm just always late.
The writer made the case that we in fact build our personalities basically until the day that we die. The choices that we choose to make about how we act. One of the best ways to get someone to do something for you is to compliment them as if they were the type of person to do that kind of thing naturally.
So, if you're like, “Oh my gosh, you're such a gracious host. Do you mind if I crash here for the night?” It's a social engineering trick but it's true. You tell someone how people identify determines how they act.
If you're like, “Hey. I'm a perfectly normal person, these are the things that I like. I don't do anything strange.” It makes sense that when strangeness appears in your life, you would herd away from it or reject it. Just like, Hey, I'm, I'm honest to a fault. I will always tell people, I will tell you, your baby is ugly because honesty is the most important thing to me”.
But we build our personalities. I think whatever inclination we have; we build that strangeness just like we build other personality types. And so, I'm curious. To you, what is the value of strangeness versus normality? I think there are a few fewer people like waging a war between the two than you'd think. People tend to pick their alignment, so what appealed to you about strangeness that made you pick it over, this is the normal way to do things?
David Dylan Thomas
So it's interesting you phrase it that way, “to pick it.” I think it is more accurate to say whether or not you choose to reject it, because strangeness, when it is internalized, it's not a question of whether I am acting queer or not, or I am acting like a storyteller or not. It's like, I am a storyteller. I am queer. I am whatever that identity is. Do I show it? Do I lean into it? Do I hide it? How do I navigate? How do I show up as that thing or not?
I think that strangeness – and this is something I was hoping to get to, I think that strangeness is political. My kid’s 13 years old, and he's already said three or four of the wisest things I've ever heard anyone say, but one of them was this. He said, “I think normal is a word that people made up that they could say that other people weren't that.” And I'm like, oh wow. He's already spilling all our tea!
I think that in a fascist or authoritarian state, normality is your greatest weapon because what you do is you say this, you point at something, you say, “this is normal” and you create laws that encourage that and discourage the other. So, you say, “this here, this is normal and if you're not this, you don't get to vote. You can't stay out after dark. You can't drive a car. Because you're not this.”
And so now everyone wants to be this right. And that could be male. That could be white. That could be Sunni. Whatever it is, I say, this is normal. This is the baseline and anything else is abnormal, it is strange. I think that politically, what ends up happening then is so that's a super easy way to do command and control.
Advice to fascists, come with a picture of normal that looks just like you and just create all the laws to sort of encourage that. What then ends up happening, what can happen and often has happened throughout history is that the strangeness then becomes a political rallying cry. Basically, you have two reactions to that. One is to say, “Okay, well I'm not that, so I better behave like that as much as I can and hide anything that's not.”
There's a great movie that just came out called Passing on Netflix, which is about two black women who have the ability to pass as white in like 1920s, 1930s, New York, and make sort of different choices around that. It's just a fascinating exploration of sort of the personal and political implications of that. That's kind of the thing.
Or I can say, “No, I am this, I embrace this and that word you've been calling me. I'm going to say that's actually a good thing.” And so queer becomes a preferred term, it becomes an owned term, right? The word “bitch”, there's been a lot of really interesting evolutions of that word and how we decide or the “N-word”, which even me, a black person calling it, the “N-word” on a podcast tells you how charged it is, but there are contexts in which I am perfectly comfortable using that word and others where I'm like, “Oh no, you didn't!”
But that strangeness becomes a political tool. So, for me, I've been getting to personally a very interesting place in my life around that strangeness where, because I currently work for myself, I can dial that strangeness up as high as I really like without very many consequences. I don't have to worry about my boss is going to be a little upset.
In fact, I've arranged it such that, and I've been fortunate such that the stranger I am, the more I'll get paid! And not for nothing, for the good and the bad of it, like Joe Rogan. We're going to talk about the Spotify example. Joe Rogan is getting paid a lot of money to be as strange as he wants to be. I find that strange just to be hurtful, but he is in a position where, and for a lot of people that strangeness is normal. That's part of where this really gets interesting, but that is a choice. That is a way of being strange in the world where it can actually be beneficial in the right context to lean into your strangeness.
Erika Wohlstadter
And that's something that I've been wrestling with professionally for a very long time. I am autistic, so I grew up being socialized as a woman. I learned how to mask from a very early age. I'm masking right now because I want to make sure that my voice has emotion to it. I think that's part of why I'm so comfortable performing, because I am performing just as hard in front of a thousand people as I am in a one-on-one conversation. I'm a good researcher and a good interviewer and good at running workshops because I know how to perform. I know how to emote for people.
I have never really felt comfortable telling any job that I'm at, that I am autistic and that this is a thing that I have to do because it really upsets people. I've lost friends over it where they'll invite me out and I'll be like, okay, I don't have to mask for this. This will be fine. And they’ll be like, “Are you angry? Are you having a good time? This feels really awkward.”
My autism, just even by my just default state, we like to call it ‘resting bitch face’ and I would love for somebody to examine the connection between autism and resting bitch face.
But there’s a huge cost to that inherent strangeness because no one can say you choose autism because who would choose to be autistic if they were given the option of not being autistic? I mean, maybe? Maybe that's one of the great things the younger generation is going to change?
David Dylan Thomas
Okay, so this kind of gets at the big idea that I've been thinking about for a while now. It's really difficult to talk about, not in a socially awkward, but just in a conceptual way. I wonder if the problem is that we have the idea of normal and strange to begin with? If that is not a fundamentally unhelpful way of viewing the world?
There was a great queer performer who was talking about how you also have to be really smart about quantum theory and so that’s really interesting, classical physics is very binary, right? It's sort of like, it's up, it's down, there's forces, they do a thing and you can always predict – if you know the information – what's going to happen, blah, blah, blah.
Quantum physics on the other hand is anything than binary. It is both going through the slit on the left and the slit on the right, the particle, it's going through both. And it doesn't resolve until you look at it. All these different things about quantum physics, this is exactly the opposite and that is sort of like classical physics is very much sort of binary sexuality and quantum physics is much more queer and fluid sexuality.
The thing about quantum physics is it's more real. It is the foundation for the classical physics. In fact, the classical physics is just once all the quantum has resolved itself. Basically, a long way of saying that, like reality that we see and hear is reality's best guess at reality.
Like even real reality, isn't really binary, it's just the easiest way to talk about reality and I feel like there's more of the world that's not well resolved, accurately resolved, into normal and strange than it is. And it is fundamentally unhelpful to start with that concept to begin with. But the problem is, and both of us, as people who work in content probably already sense this, we don't really have good language for anything that isn't binary.
We don't really know how to talk about balance, for example. We have a word for “balance.” We don't have lots of words for the extremes of things. Lots of ways to say “cold”, lots of ways to say “hot”. We don't have lots of ways to say “lukewarm” except “lukewarm.” We don't know how to talk about things that are mixed.
So, even the concept of breaking out into normal and strange, well, it's comfortable. I know exactly what you're talking about when you say it. I'm also like, I don't know if it's really strange? I don't know that psychobilly – by the way, before this is over, please define psychobilly – but I don't know that psychobilly is strange. It's just psychobilly!
Erika Wohlstadter
I have a response that's going to take a bit longer. So, I'm going to define psychobilly before we go into it. Rockabilly, everybody knows what rockabilly is. It's the music of the 1940s, 1950s, it's pretty straight rock. Now, back in the late seventies, early eighties, there was a band called The Cramps. Maybe you've heard of them? Lux Interior and Poison Ivy. They decided that there was no room in rockabilly for queer. There was no room in rockabilly for minorities, for kind of women outside of just being pinups and draping themselves over cars. And that this was not reflective of the people who liked this kind of music who like hard punk with a little bit of rock edge, and some pop mixed in and a root in really American music and black music centrally.
So, they founded The Cramps and, their gender presentation was whatever they felt like, Lux Interior was very famous for being hyper-sexual onstage. One of his tricks was giving a blow job, like deep throating his microphone on stage, and Poison Ivy was the lead guitarist.
They were just an amazing couple and they founded psychobilly as a reaction against rockabilly. They wanted that kind of fun music, that fun music that you can dance to, that you can listen to. They wanted it to be queer, they wanted it to be political. They wanted it to be inclusive and so psychobilly grew out of that. Interestingly enough, over the last 40 years, psychobilly has increasingly been just turning into, well, white dudes!
David Dylan Thomas
That's how they do!
Erika Wohlstadter
That's how everything was though, because when anything gets attention, when marginalized people take anything, they're like, “Oh, I can't do what I want to do in this space. I'm going to take my ball to another field. I'm going to build a field and I'm going to play ball in it.” And then, you know, everybody else goes, “Hey, that thing looks cool and creative over there. Let's take it!” And they do, and so we're constantly changing fields, creating new balls to play with essentially, but to your point about reclamation, that's part of what we want to do.
We write songs about redneck vampires and zombie orgies and things like that. Just like weird, queer fun stuff that doesn't ignore the people that always tend to get ignored by being through music. It’s also just a whole lot of fun to play, it really is. A bright bass is just so much fun.
But in response to your question about binaries. One, binaries just out the window. I consider my gender, like my gender flag is a skull and crossbones, personally, and I realized in my early forties that the reason why gender is always felt wrong to me is because I picked gender based off of the fights that I want to have with society.
I mostly identify as a woman because those are the fights that I want to have and I like the artillery that being a woman gets me. I like being the underdog. I like a difficult battle. I'm going into this fight with society, you know, the idea of not fighting the society never entered my head.
I partly identify as a woman because this is the fight that I'm going to have. This is the side of the battle that I'm going to be on. But that said, it's also not a specific, it's not the side of woman. It's the side of everyone marginalized gender-wise.
David Dylan Thomas
It’s target of oppression identification.
Erika Wohlstadter
Now we've got a term, you know, NB, non-binary people who are like old gender or new gender or any amount of gender. Then it's on top of biology where there's already no binary, there is a spectrum of physiological sexuality. One in 10,000 people are born with intersex characteristics and the thing is, is that no matter what your body is, there's no such thing as normal for your sex.
It's just your body, you can have a mish-mash of kind of whatever, biologically, and still work just fine and be great the way that it is. Then there's gender identity and then there's presentation on top of it. So, even if say I had a body that society would mostly identify as male, but I personally identify as a woman, but I want to present as masculine, there's different ways of handling presentation and identity and all of those layers stacked on top of each other.
As kind of a queer elder, I'm super excited to experience new pronouns and see where sexuality and gender and all of it, this big, giant wonderful mess of the human experience is led.
To that point, we used to experience life in black and white. There are some linguists who have been delving into how we used to describe color. There were some articles that came out recently – and I'm probably butchering the reference terribly, but you know how Homer would always say the wine-dark sea, or the rosy-fingered dawn? Dawn contains a whole lot more colors. And what kind of wine are we talking about for it to be dark? I've never seen a red sea like that, or whatever shade of wine you're drinking.
The fact is that we used to have a much more limited language for color to the point that anything that was a darker shade – unfortunately, I'm not surrounded by a lot of colors because of all the black I wear – but you know, something that was dark red would be dark. Something that was black would be dark. Red was always important because red is the color of blood, warning sign. There’s theories that red may have been the first color that we actually had a name for, that we separated from other colors.
But when you look at the language construction, there used to really just be like, well, light and dark, and that was the division between things. Think about all of the millions, the billions of colors we have now, the fact that you can still invent colors even now. That to me is the evolution of everything human.
It's interesting that the idea of normality versus strangeness still exists in such an almost strict format that if something isn't normal, it's strange. If it's strange, it's not normal. But just like physics, something can be both, something can be neither, something can contain attributes of either side, but also why does this binary exist in the first place?
David Dylan Thomas
I think because of capitalism! Because I've been thinking about that, I think about categories where there isn't normal. So, I think a lot about music, for example, we're at a point in human history where there isn't exactly normal music. There's dominant music, which interestingly enough is hip hop. The number one form of music on the planet now is hip hop. And it's in the strange position – we're going back to the Marxist dialectic we were talking about before where we're like white people keep still in our shit. It is in this weird, unique position of it's very difficult to steal anymore because the blackness is part of its essence, right? It is strange – Eminem strange; he’s successful, but he's strange.
Erika Wohlstadter
That makes me so happy because this is why disco failed, because disco has at its heart, blackness. The thing is that EDM grew out of disco, etc. And I think like EDM was always queer, but it took out some of the blackness to make itself popular. Part of why disco failed was because they couldn't whitewash it enough. If you think of Abba etc., you think of all of the people that, and these were groups that were kind of like the early boy bands and whatnot. These manufactured stars could not whitewash disco enough to be popular, so it died out.
David Dylan Thomas
And I think that it's also because when I think about what replaced it, it was much more masculine coded. So I think it was also fighting an uphill battle around queerness and that like the Village People could only go so mainstream before people started asking questions. So, I think that that was also working against it as well.
But like hip hop, if you remember hip hop was unplayable on the radio in the late seventies, early eighties, there's the whole federal, even getting black people on MTV at all. Now try to imagine MTV without hip hop?
But it's interesting and so normal in music, gets into this really interesting place where like, K-pop, for example, it's one of those popular forms of music in the world and there's tons of people, tons of people, who've never even heard of it. They’re like, “What's BTS?”
Yet that's still one of the most successful…and so we're at this point now where things can be the most successful form of themselves and lots and lots of people have never even heard of it, in major forms like music. That is because music has evolved to a point where for at least a few studios and streaming services, you can make a lot of money by being somewhat diverse.
Whereas, if you think about command-and-control systems like the airport. I've been reading the introduction to Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice, and she talks about as a person who isn’t an identifying straight up and down male or female, going through security is a challenge because security at an airport is designed with binary in mind. And it is so much easier that way.
In terms of command and control. It would be even easier if there was just one gender, right? But it's 50 /50 at this point so we have to make that accommodation. That is an area where it is “profitable” to have it stay one way or another.
Food is another place where you kind of sort of have “normal” American food, it’s still kind of a category, but there's way more profit now. And again, it's a recent development, but way more profitable for your food court to have Italian and Mexican and two or three different Asian cuisines.
All these different categories have become profitable and therefore normal food is less definable. I think that in large part where it benefits the power structure – I feel like I'm talking like a Marxist, but I mean, I've been talking that way this whole time – but where the power structure benefits from binary definitions is where you're going to see people doubling down on binary definitions.
I'm curious, because I grew up with that. I am curious can we function? Can TSA function without gender at all? Can we function without normal and not-normal standard and not-standard in these categories where I'm used to thinking of, “Oh, you have to have a men's room and a women's room.” What other possibility could there be? And now we're saying, well, there's lots of other much better possibilities, but when you grow up with it, it's really, really hard to even come up with the language for much less the user experience for non-binary experiences.
Erika Wohlstadter
And to that, I would ask the very UX oriented question of what's the point of TSA in the first place?
David Dylan Thomas
Yep!
Erika Wohlstadter
I'm old enough to remember flying before we had all the security. I remember picking people up and standing right at their gate. I was well into adulthood by the time 9/11 occurred and seeing the statistics on how really doesn't help anybody.
If a feature doesn't benefit…like look at how young Homeland Security is and how many people just think it's an age old…No, it's not. It's a baby. I don't even think it would be allowed to drink in America, which is not to discount the input of young people. But I'm saying that Homeland Security needs to go. TSA, not very valuable. If it comes to a system where you have to define people according to a binary, what's the value of that system?
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, and is that system benefiting its intended purpose? Is it actually keeping us safe or is it keeping command and control structures in place? I think about that with politics too. I have an old debate with my friend about are binary politics actually one of the most dangerous things in the world? Like having Republicans, Democrats in the first place.
Earlier, in the before times, I was like, that seems a little extreme and now I'm like, oh no, people have literally died over this now! It's super dangerous. I still go back and forth. Does it benefit us to have those binaries and political thinking?
I find myself on the one hand thinking I'm generally against firearms and then I've also found myself identifying very strongly with one side, and it's like, oh, that's interesting!
Erika Wohlstadter
To be fair the side that we're identifying on is the one that thinks that everyone is a person and has basic rights and the other side doesn't! I’d be really interested if you get any listeners who disagree on which side that is!
David Dylan Thomas
And that's the trick, right? I think this gets at a very important point and a very important political tool, which is the idea of being able to play the victim card and I mean, going back to the Joe Rogan thing to say you're canceling free speech by saying we want you to disinvest from Joe Rogan. I'm like, yeah, but, hate speech. You were crossing a line after a certain point where it's public harm and there are sides to that, but that's still not a binary, because what we're really talking about is public health.
Erika Wohlstadter
Also, when you look at the definition of free speech, which is applied by the government, it has nothing to do with free speech at all. It's a term, I can't remember who said it, that fascists are irreverent above all things and will use language as their play thing in order to get you upset so that they can get away with what they want, because they have no respect for words, but they know that their opposition – anti-fascists, do have respect for words and for terms.
One of my good habits has just been avoiding that playground altogether, calling a fascist, a fascist and not giving them my money where at all possible. No ethical consumption under capitalism and all that! But, you know, I would like to point out that the natural environment of an anarchist is a meeting…
David Dylan Thomas
Unpack that a little bit!
Erika Wohlstadter
When people think about anarchy, the spin on it is that it's all about chaos. But in fact, anarchy is all about adapting rules, bylaws, to the circumstances that suit it so every particular level and unit develops its own system. It's a content model. They are content modeling for people. Anarchy is all about being like, “yeah, we've got this rule that covers the kinds of fences that we should allow on this property that we're all sharing, but got this one case where this kind of fence would actually be way better.”
And so they're like, okay, we create, we discuss this. We present evidence. We create a bylaw. The idea that anarchists are inherently chaotic – it's not true. It's about understanding the circumstances under which you're creating rules before you accept those rules.
David Dylan Thomas
So, it sounds like good UX!
Erika Wohlstadter
It is good UX, and it's also understanding that your average citizen gives up the ability to commit violence as they wish – violence is a tool – to the State, they give up a certain amount of their freedoms, including violence, to the State in order to have a certain amount of safety.
The fact is, is that we are still accountable for that, for the tools and for the rights that we give up to the State. It is still ours; it's just being used in someone else's hands. So, question becomes if someone is using tools in your name and you don't like how it's being done, you're still culpable for that. You're still responsible for that, so how are you changing the systems that you imbue with power? How are you infusing the world with your strangeness?
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, and I mean to kind of bring it full circle. I think that that is what you hope to have in a system like that. First of all, I love the idea that anarchy isn't about getting rid of all the rules. It's just about getting rid of the shitty ones, but what you hope for in a system like that, in a democracy let's say, is a feedback mechanism. That kind of feedback mechanism, if you think of it fundamentally, a democracy is designed to preserve and cultivate strangeness, or at least has all of the tools available to do that.
If the situation changes, there's a version of democracy that is meant to create an enforced normality and it's kind of the more authoritarian version that frankly we've leaned into for most of human history, but there is also a version of it, which is specifically designed – and I think you've seen this at more local levels. Different municipalities have been done better at this – there's a version of that, which is more about no, actually the whole point of this is to cultivate the strangeness. It’s to gather from our different strangeness’s, so that everything is strange.
That to me is a more interesting, more useful place to operate from rather than a point of, this is what a person is and now design everything to that unique thing. That is easier.
If I'd have to design a car seat, it's way easier for me to say everyone is basically a 5ft10 dude who weighs 150lbs. Let's just assume that's the case and when I designed a car seat or a space suit, it is so much easier if I just make that assumption.
Can you imagine trying to make any other assumption? That sounds exhausting – and cheaper. The space I would like us to explore more is what happens when I try to design in a way that doesn't assume I’m normal to begin with, which even as I say it, I'm like, I don't actually know how to do that, but we should.
Erika Wohlstadter
Well, that's where I think the difference between democracy and anarchy really comes into play, and I'm sure there's plenty of Democrats and anarchists who would disagree with me and that's totally fine. But essentially, anarchy is about whenever a new unit is formed, a new unit of people, a new group etc., that you start from ground zero and you define the parameters of that group and then you start defining rules for that group. Whereas democracy is about using that feedback loop to preserve the overall structure of support for the people while moving towards what more people agree about.
It's making sure that bureaucratic systems remain in place, support that would ideally would be like housing for everybody, medical care, schools, roads, all that great stuff that we enjoy every day. It’s preserving those systems while incorporating feedback about it. So, one’s an old system and one’s a new system, and both definitely have their place.
David Dylan Thomas
That's really interesting. So I’ve got to admit, you're giving me an education about anarchy, because all I knew about an anarchy was the little guitar symbol that people would draw on their guitar cases in high school!
Erika Wohlstadter
You know, it's one of those things where I have always identified as punk, I've always been too optimistic to be a goth, really, but I've always identified as punk, as counterculture, as queer. It’s like, well, how can I as a white woman in my forties, identify as punk? And as it turns out very, very easily. Punk is about the use of systems that work for you as opposed to what works for everybody else. Punk is inherently strange and so punk changes constantly, whatever the input is, whatever the participant is, punk is yourself.
David Dylan Thomas
I feel like we could do a whole other hour on anarchy now, but as time betrays us, let me ask you this – and I’ll put this in the show notes. What are some, if I wanted to learn more about anarchy – check your local library, remember those – what would be some resources that are sort of like, okay, everything you knew about anarchy is wrong, kind of resources?
Erika Wohlstadter
Oh my God, this is so tough because as much as I love to educate myself about books, most of my education about anarchy has come from anarchists.
David Dylan Thomas
It doesn’t have to be a book, it could be whatever, if you just started scrolling tweets or something, just whatever you got.
Erika Wohlstadter
Honestly, do some digging, find your own for it. One of the best places to start is to just start looking into the criminological circles, avoiding criminal science because criminal science is all about ignoring the root cause of the problem while addressing the symptoms, and it’s a bunch of white dudes trying to take over criminology. Focus on actual modern criminology, about why people do the things that they do, the systems that they create, militarization of the American cop, all that sort of stuff.
The more you start looking at the systems, the more you start getting a sense of the underlying systems that can be used to replace that. Anarchist has got such a strong cultural association with the idea of chaos and punk and all the rest of it that it's very difficult to find resources on what anarchy actually means, because of course by definition anarchy has to have a different definition for the people who work within it and live within it and identify as such.
I wouldn't even necessarily consider myself an anarchist. I consider myself like a bureaucrat or democratic in the sense of preserving social systems while using feedback to improve those for the greater good.
But that said, I'll definitely do some digging, I’ll see if my colleagues, comrades, etc., they can recommend some resources for those who are interested in learning more about, so what actually is anarchy?
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, that sounds awesome! Thank you so, so much for being on the podcast. It's been fantastic!
Erika Wohlstadter
I always enjoy our conversations; this has been phenomenal and we definitely just need to talk more in general.
David Dylan Thomas
Yeah, absolutely, we will do. For “Lately, I've been thinking about…”, this is David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time!