It's another week and that means it's time for a chat show. This week a real silviculturist provides inputs on last week's show, David provides first-hand knowledge of essential bathroom upgrades, we discuss the big business of promoting entrepreneurship abroad, the even bigger business of co-opting social scientists, and more. There's also a special close out on future show updates that you won't want to miss!
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(This transcript is machine generated and bad. We'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Etienne for this incredible transcript!
[0:00] We need metaphorical coffins. I'm David Torcivia.
[0:08] I’m Daniel Forkner.
[0:10] And this is “Ashes Ashes,” a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment; and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:20] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be. [0:36] Another chat show, David. Let’s see…
[0:39] We're back at it, Daniel.
[0:41] Don't know what we're going to talk about but we got an email. Last week we did a show on lumber and someone reached out to us about that show.
[0:51] Somebody far more qualified than either of us actually did speak about a lumber or related forestry question.
[1:02] “Hey Daniel and David. I'm a graduate student down in North Carolina, studying silvicultural management--” That's that word you introduced, David.
[1:11] I still can't say it right.
[1:13] “--I first want to say that I agree with your central thesis for the last show that forest management is generally exploitative and ecologically damaging; sustainable forestry is by far and large bullshit for a number of reasons. Most companies don't actually follow SFI or FSC guidelines, or they have very cozy relationships with auditors who certify their forests as sustainable. However, I think some of your characterizations are inaccurate, and there's actually a lot more that's bad about the forest industry than what you guys talked about. One really integral part of Southern forestry are product classification of timber and the commiserate price fluctuations. Another important part of the equation are the economics of harvesting that influences when and how large timber land-holders cut and the breakdown of who owns most timberland in the US. And--“
Oh, I didn't mention this last show but, just to piggyback off of what this person saying, I think 40% of all timberland in the South-- the Southern United States-- is privately owned, which has a big impact on how fast it gets logged. Because a lot of times loggers come in, and as long as the owner agrees to their price they can just go ahead. OK, back to the listener.
“--investor profit versus financing state pensions. Another interesting topic is what most timber gets used to make: toilet paper and diapers.” I didn't actually know that, David.
[2:39] It's a good point though, I think. There's a lot of good points in this email; things that we should have covered. But can I just stop for one second and take a soapbox moment here?
[2:48] Well, David, it's only fair; you let me step on the soapbox a couple weeks ago.
[2:53] Well, I don’t know if “soapbox” is the right word but maybe “shilling”? I want to really recommend everyone go out and buy a bidet. It’ll change your life. You can get these real cheap for like a very basic one. Like 20 or 30 dollars on some of these big retailers that are online. And it takes just a couple minutes to install, maybe 15 minutes if you don't know anything at all about plumbing. Very easy. And, oh my God, it changes your life, Daniel.
[3:24] I'm going to have to take your word for it, David.
[3:27] Well, let me--
[3:30] And I've been to your place before and I’ve seen it, but I just didn't even know where to start, so I just kind of let it be.
[3:36] They're intimidating at first, especially if you’ve never seen one or anything. But let me just use this analogy that was used on me -- that's what convinced me to buy a bidet. And that is -- if you got shit on your hands you wouldn't just wipe it off with a paper towel and be like, “okay, I'm clean now.” No, you wash that shit with water. And you should do the same thing with your ass. And so, in the interest of cleanliness and also in the interest of environmental friendliness -- I save so much money and time going out and buying toilet paper all the time; now I don't have to do that, just one little tiny square to dry off. And it's good for the environment, it’s good for the Earth, it’s good for the forest, and I'm cleaner and fresher because of this. So everybody should go out and buy a bidet.
[4:20] Okay, well, I didn't expect to be having this conversation with you on the podcast, David. So you mentioned that you're saving money on toilet paper, but how do you get dry after the bidet does its thing?
[4:32] So it would have taken, for example, several sheets of toilet paper to make yourself clean before. But now just like one small one, maybe two small squares to dry off and then you're done. That's it, easy. So what would have been 10, 20, maybe more squares, is now just one or two. So you're using your toilet paper 10 to 20 times less than you were before; it’s great.
[4:57] All right, that's awesome.
[4:59] Do it for the Earth.
[5:00] For the Earth. Well, let's see what we want to talk about, David, today. I have just a concept that I want to cover; it’s something that I came across when we were researching for the lumber show, remember? We had that section where I asked, “what is the point of all these sustainability officers?” And I was curious which companies actually had these sustainable officers or sustainability departments, and I was looking up some mining companies, and I went straight to De Beers group. De Beers’ probably the most-- the number one diamond sourcer and supplier in the world. And I was looking at their leadership structure: I could not find a sustainability department for that company, but what I did find is-- on their homepage for the De Beers group, not De Beers the jewelry retail website-- is a bunch of photos of Africans. Smiling Africans. [5:54] And a link to the De Beers Group, “Empowering Women and African Entrepreneur Program.”
[6:01] Hm. I think my warning bells are going off where you're about to take this.
[6:06] Yeah. So it turns out they partner with the United Nations on some program that's aimed at empowering communities and women through entrepreneurship. And I found the page on the United Nations website where they report, De Beers Group and United Nations Entity for Women for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UNW) South Africa are pleased to announce the launch of a capacity-building programme to support 500 women micro-entrepreneurs in the communities of Blouberg and Musina, near De Beers’ Venetia Mine in Limpopo.
The key objective of the programme is to equip women micro-entrepreneurs with business management and life skills to build their confidence and capacity to operate and grow successful small businesses.” It goes on. Here is a quote by the Deputy CEO of De Beers Consolidated Mines Incorporated:
[7:08] “In each of the areas we have selected, high levels of unemployment persist, and formal job opportunities are limited. In this kind of context, micro-enterprises provide an opportunity for income generation to support households, as well as job creation that can benefit a community more broadly. When we empower women business owners, we empower entire communities.” What do you think about that, David?
[7:37] Listening to it I find myself getting a little bit sad. That the only way we can seem to ever think about how to help people or use that word that we love to use, over and over again, “empower” people, is by making them little tiny tyrants over other people and extracting whatever they can in terms of labour or resources from them and their own form of exploitation and that's how we give them a step up in life; by teaching them how to exploit others just the same way that we came and exploited them. That’s the cycle of life, that’s the nature of how we operate. And that's the only way that business-- and unfortunately a lot of time, States-- can foresee themselves offering people who have been exploited to the point of catastrophe a leg up. And that's kind of sad.
[8:29] Yeah, that's a good point. I like how you said tyrant because we look at these international corporations-- like, De Beers Group is the quintessential villain right? They literally go into poverty-stricken countries and they exploit that to mine diamonds out of the earth, using all types of slavery and exploitation and bribery for licenses and things like that and even if--
[8:54] And real quick before people jump down our throat about that word, “slavery:” wage slavery is a form of slavery, so step off our back, please.
[9:04] Well, we talked about real slavery, like direct, even worse than wage slavery-- I don't want to say more real-- more real in the consequences, in Episode 36, “Slaves to Progress”; and we specifically talk about mining and a lot that goes on in the African continent, which, even if you look at the flagship mine-- that I'm sure De Beers would be happy to show you and its investors-- there's a lot of activity around that that is created by the way they conduct their business, oftentimes lying on the source of their diamonds, maybe moving it across borders to repackage it -- all types of clever loopholes to show that they're doing things in, I guess, a better way than using direct slaves, but it really comes down to that in a lot of cases.
[9:51] But I think it even goes further than that because-- so De Beers Group mentioned, “we're trying to solve poverty and bad unemployment in these regions,” and specifically they're doing this program in the very countries that they're doing mining.
[10:06] Specifically Canada, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa; and it's a paradox because they are the problem in the first place. And beyond that slavery, we also talk about, in Episode 59, “Bankrupt Ethics,” about a report showing how some 45 billion dollars is siphoned out of the African continent every single year directly by international companies just like De Beers who cheat taxes, lie on their import and export logs, and again use that bribery to secure undervalued leases and licenses for their mines.
[10:40] So to say we're going to empower other people to be, in your words, “more tyrants,” running around, really sidesteps the whole root cause of the poverty in the first place, which is companies exploiting vulnerable people abroad. Which leads me to another part of this conversation, David, because as I was thinking about this-- we talk a lot about how companies break things apart to get at the value that they can accumulate then as profit, and it is the process of breaking things apart which erodes everything around us, whether that's the environment, our society, our culture, our families. And last week was a great example of that: physically tearing a forest apart to get at lumber-- which is a very simplified extraction of that forest that leaves of forest destroyed-- for the benefit of profit accumulation in the hands of a few people who own the lumber companies.
[11:33] But I was thinking about how this plays out in communities themselves. And it occurred to me, this question. When it comes to communities of people in different countries or are across the world, how do you make money off of them if you don't know them? How do you make money off of people that you don't understand their culture, their history, their taboos, their likes, their dislikes, their traditions? How do you make money off of those people, David?
[12:03] So you're saying “no” not in like, “oh yeah, his name is Bill and he does this thing,” but you're saying “no” like, “we don't even understand how they live their lives, what type of consumer habits they might have, what they value culturally, blah blah blah” -- all these details that are that are larger than just this assumption that what people want in the West is what they want elsewhere.
[12:27] Yeah, exactly. The hidden, subtle behaviors, like when I go to your house to hang out as friends, these are the habits we partake in, and that's your opportunity to introduce some product. But if you don't know those habits, you don't know how people interact, you don't know what they think-- how they perceive-- then you have a problem. And so, there's a couple ways around this. Number one, you could simply learn about them and then offer products tailored to them, and and I want to come back to that, but in terms of this “empowering entrepreneurs” in countries around the world, I think there's a second option which is, remember that episode we did on Facebook, David?
[13:08] The one where Facebook is trying to install free internet in the developing world in order to harvest all this information and control what information is available to people in order to better profit off of them?
[13:20] That was Episode 15, “Terms of Service”; yes, that episode.
[13:23] Yeah, I remember a little.
[13:25] Well, that wasn't the only thing we talked about, David, we also talked about the way they manipulate psychological studies, conduct psychological studies in the first place, all the privacy and whatnot. But there was an interesting chapter of that episode where we talked about the way that Facebook crushes competition. And one of the ways they do that is they have a platform by which people can start businesses. They can start apps, they can start software, whatever, that utilizes the Facebook network to grow their business.
And the interesting thing about that is that in the process of creating these businesses, Facebook has all the data on not just how the business operates, how it is created, the code that goes on behind it, but also how many people come to it, how they engage, when do they leave -- all these very vital business statistics and data.
[14:17] And then what Facebook does is, when it notices a business taking off, “oh a new app just came out and it has a thousand percent growth over just a couple weeks,” the company then-- Facebook-- is in a very advantageous position where it make one of two choices, assuming it's taking the unethical position. One, it could buy that company out. It could approach you, the new owner of this app, and say, “look, we're going to throw you some money and give us the app and we're going to integrate it into our portfolio of businesses.”
Or number two, because it has every single data point on your business, David, and it has infinitely more money than you, it could just copy that business, replicate your models for success, and just drive you out of business because it has more money than you, it can scale at a much faster rate.
[15:07] And it makes me wonder, David. If this exact same thing is not playing out with these “empowering entrepreneurs and women” in so-called developing and third world countries, where I don't know how these people operate, I don't know what they like and dislike, I don't know their traditions or their culture; so I'm going to use my philanthropic budget to encourage entrepreneurs in this community, and I'm going to guide them, and I'm going to teach them, and I'm going to show them how to evaluate the cost-benefit analyses of all the ideas they come up with. And then guess who's first in line in witnessing which initiatives are successful and which are not? Well, your friendly neighbourhood De Beers Group representative; with all the money that diamonds can buy.
[16:13] Daniel, that’s a devious plan and a bold accusation, but I could see this playing out sort of similar to how you're saying where these companies are using less fortunate people, and under the guise of empowerment they're basically turned into lab rats, and what works-- what sticks-- can we profited off of, and what doesn't can be safely ignored. But that's the system that we’ve built and that's the Darwinian world that we live in where people want survival of what they say is the fittest, but what we know better is actually those with the most access to capital and to information; and in this case that is absolutely, of course, the exploitative De Beers company.
[16:58] And it's of course not just De Beers but the global economic imperative. When we talked about this in so many ways, the way-- like the World Bank for example, encourages pushing rural farmers in developing countries into cities because that's where the technology is, that's where the surveillance is, that's where these software applications-- all the hookups to monitor these people and integrate them into the financial economy-- it's why every major nation has a developing arm going into other countries and doing so-called philanthropic development, when really it's a way of opening up untapped markets.
And I think it's a really big win for this economic imperative because, again, not only are you finding new ways to invest your money and exploit people but you're also pushing this narrative of the way we're going to save people in-- as if they need saving in the first place-- all these communities, these rural farmers out in the middle of nowhere, we're going to save them by teaching them how to be entrepreneurs and business owners, when all that does is deflect the real problems that are rampant in our world, which is businesses in the first place.
And I think there's a big cognitive dissonance here where, on the one hand, people are going to climate strike and saying, “we need to change, we need to stop letting the oil companies destroy our world, we need to stop letting international corporations burn the Amazon rainforest for profit accumulation.”
[18:28] But then at the same time we watch Netflix shows about how billionaires are saving the world by encouraging business owners, and really all they're doing is finding ways to invest their money and pursue the narrative and push the narrative that economic growth is the real solution.
[18:44] Yeah, absolutely. And you point to the Climate March as a signifier that things are changing, that people want something else, but I want to remind you, Daniel, that in New York City-- which is the largest climate March in the United States, I think it might have been one of the largest ones in the world that day-- there were 300,000 people on the streets. A lot came from out of town, but a lot were from the Greater New York area, which New York City itself between all five boroughs is 8 million people, the Greater area is 20 million, something like that. And New York City released all the students that day to go to the Climate March if they wanted, so that's hundreds of thousands of kids that could have been there.
So you're talking of a place of millions of people, of millions of what should be some of the most concerned people because many parts of New York will quite literally be underwater. It has its reputation as this educated progressive place, for better or for worse-- and let me tell you first-hand that is absolutely not true much of the time-- but that is not a whole lot of those people that should be on the streets that should be caring already. And like I said, this is the place where that number should be 100%, or at least very close to that.
[19:51] And of course I think this really shows that this mindset that you're talking about only exists in a small minority, and it's up to us as people who do know what's going on-- all the listeners of this show, people who are consuming this climate change content who understand the systemic issues that threaten all of our well-being-- to try and increase the number as much as possible, because we're fighting a very huge uphill battle right now. You mentioned this idea that we should move people from rural areas to cities, that a lot of businesses want to do this, but I see these types of comments all the time!
Earlier today I was reading Hacker News because I was trying to abuse myself by reading these horrible comments that these tech-bro Silicon Valley nutters think that they know how the world should work because they happen to be good on a computer-- not necessarily good on the computer but they think they are-- and there were so many comments there where people very logically were saying, “oh, you know, in areas like the Bay Area, productivity is much higher than other places--”
I don't know what they measured productivity as but that was the stat they were throwing up,
“--so we could actually dramatically increase GDP without increasing the consumption side, thus preserving the Earth, if we could just displace people from rural, low productivity areas, and put them in cities in the Bay Area; all we need is a massive building program and then we can dramatically increase the U.S.’ GDP and increase our productivity and everyone will benefit with a higher standard of living, without having to damage all the inputs going into the system.” or some [whack out?] thing where they get so narrowed down on just some specific logical statistic that they really are blindsided by these huge systemic issues that make what they're talking about quite literally a fantasy.
[21:27] These people are so out of touch and they can only see the world through this specific lens that business has generated and said is the only way to look at things: productivity, bottom line, GDP; these are the only metrics that in their eyes deserve paying attention to. But things like quality of life, which can’t easily be measured, the suffering that happens in cities, the vast inequality that is exploding and places especially like the Bay Area, that doesn't get any mention except for the fact that—“Ah, I hate all these homeless people, let's put boulders on the sidewalk to keep them from being able to at the camp here because it's a disturbing view for me as I walk to my six-figure tech job” -- this is the kind of people that we’re dealing with, that we're up against; not just comic book villain companies like De Beers, but I mean these are the moneyed progressive class in some of the most liberal cities in America. We are fighting a very uphill battle.
[22:25] And just getting people to realize the exploitative nature of everything they do is a huge, huge step; and getting them to do something about that instead of just leaning into it and embracing it. And once they realize that is a whole other ballgame: we're so far behind in the terms of attack and changes that we need to be making in order to see any sort of real substantive change, that it’s honestly a little depressing, but every little bit helps. Every day we get a little bit closer with this, but we really need to fucking crank it up.
[22:55] I think the reason for tech people-- their saying things like this, David, that you're calling a fantasy-- that's a lot to do with what Wendell Berry was talking about in that quote we read last week about how the modern economy necessarily separates people and places and products from their histories; and those of us who participate in the modern economy do so because we are separated from our families and our habitats and our history. And should we be surprised, David, that the type of people advocating for fantasies are the ones who see their bank accounts go up $500,000 a year by creating apps? There’s a lot within our economy that is currently a fantasy in its current manifestation that it cannot be sustained, but those who are caught in it-- I guess I'm not really surprised that they can imagine a fantasy future when the present is one as well.
[23:48] But you know I'm up here in Massachusetts now, David, and I've been going to a lot more farmers markets and I can tell you right now that where I was in Atlanta I was in the suburbs, I shopped at the big supermarket chains, I drove my car everywhere. And I still have a lot of the same habits, but just being in a different area where I’m much more connected to the land in ways that I've never been before has really already kind of radically changed my life.
[24:15] I'm eating vegetables for the first time [laughter]. I think I might finally make the jump to vegetarianism because I go to these farmers markets and I'm seeing vegetables I've never seen before, and all of a sudden I'm inspired to go home and roast them and just see what they taste like. Like rainbow carrots and all these different kinds of squashes that I've never eaten before and--
[24:36] Yeah, it's much easier to be a vegetarian eating only vegetables when the vegetables and fruits actually taste good, unlike most of the stuff you're forced to buy in these crappy, big-box grocery stores you find, especially in the suburbs, where everything is very pretty but has absolutely no taste.
[24:54] Right. The other day I ate a raw sweet corn. It was pretty good; it tastes like sweet milk or something. It’s hard to explain but I was hungry, I was talking to the farmer at the market, and they had a bunch of sweet corn, and I was like, “let me get one of those sweet corns and let me just eat it because I'm hungry.” It was great. So I guess my point is, the more our lives resemble fantasy, the more they're separated from land, from the products of that land, the things that we eat come from the land but the more separated we are from the less we understand about the need to protect and to preserve the Earth by living our lives and supporting an economy that doesn't destroy it and exploit it every chance it gets, and it's kind of hard to see that unless you're there. And I guess that's one of the great successes of our modern economy is separating people from that land so that those that grow up in this very industrial, modern sprawled out way just don't even realize what's going on. And we obviously talked about that at length in our suburb episodes and in some of the others but--
[26:00] Yeah, it's that concept that keeps coming up over and over again. For most of us, we have no idea what we've lost; what we never had a chance to experience because we've never grown up in a place where we can, either because these animals or these nature scenes or whatever have gone straight up extinct, or in numbers so small that they might as well be; or because we are so cut off from these places where we never leave the city or don't have a choice to or we can't live-- experience life in a rural place and instead choose to mock it for whatever reason. We never have a chance to be connected or to understand what a connection to the land or a connection to a place or community might even be.
We're coming up just from the very beginning without a chance because it's been sort of denied to us, and we have to really fight back against that constantly and try and get this thing that we can't even really describe, we can’t put our hands on it, but we know inside that something is missing, and so we try and fill that with so many things, commodities and experiences, but it’s never enough; we’re always reaching for more. I see this all the time in New York City especially, and I really think that that connection to land and place and community and people and understanding what we are, originally on this Earth, is a huge component of that.
[27:20] Yeah. Well, I want to bring it back to the start of this conversation and circle back to this entrepreneurship topic, and I want to throw one more variable in here which is social science. So we were talking about entrepreneurship and how do you take advantage of communities. And one of those ways was to co-opt the entrepreneurs that you empower and shift this narrative. But then the other one was to learn about the communities that you want to target. And so—well, first of all, David, what is social science? What is the purpose of social science?
[27:53] I guess to study people on the hope that you at some point will have a better understanding of them? I'm not really sure what the exact dictionary-- formal-- definition is.
[28:06] What do you think Jair Bolsonaro-- the president of Brazil-- thinks of social science?
[28:11] He thinks it's for losers and weak men and should be banned from his country.
[28:18] Yeah, he actually tried a couple months ago, or he mentioned that he was going to completely eradicate the social sciences from Brazilian universities. And it begs the question, why does he want to that? I think it has a lot to do with what you were describing is the purpose of social science which is to, besides examine people, I think in general we can say it's to observe the systems that make up our lives, whether those are the, political, cultural, or social or economic systems. And so if you are someone like Jair Bolsonaro who wants to rule the world by destroying forests and just going crazy on resource extraction, you don't want people to examine the systems that govern their lives; you don't want people peeking behind the curtain of power and class.
[29:06] And so if you want to stop that I guess there's two ways to go around it for someone who's in power. First you could go the route of Bolsonaro or other people like Donald Trump and just go to war on the world and-- with fire and totalitarian authority.
[29:20] But another way is to simply co-opt the very people who would be your enemy. This goes back to Episode 11, “Designing Deception,” about public relations men who seek to redesign our world from behind closed doors and kind of orchestrate the behaviors of the very thought leaders and celebrities that we look up to to influence our own behavior. Well, David, I want to introduce you to a conference called EPIC 2019. This is the “premier global conference on ethnography in business” being hosted this year in Rhode Island, in November. It has a current waiting list of several hundred people; this is a very very hot conference.
From their website: “EPIC people draw on tools and resources from the social sciences and Humanities, as well as Design Thinking, Agile, Lean Start-up and other approaches to realize value for corporations from understanding people and their practices. EPIC promotes the use of ethnographic principles to create business value. We are a diverse, global community of practitioners who build deep understandings of people and their practices to ensure that innovation, strategies, processes and products are anchored in what matters to people in their everyday lives.”
[30:45] It sounds like a bunch of marketing speak to me.
[30:47] And the theme of the conference this year, David, is, “Agency: what does it mean to have agency in an increasingly automated world.” And so there's something interesting happening, which is-- technology companies are starting to pay attention to the value social scientists play in understanding people in social relations and they're using these people to help inform how best to tailor technology products to different demographics of the global population. Like user experience of products and software. And the idea I think is that those tech people living in the Bay Area with their fantasies-- they don't really know anything about how to relate to real people; I think you demonstrated that pretty clearly, David, that the software engineers of Silicon Valley probably aren't the best people to go to in terms of how to understand diverse communities. But social scientists—well, that's their job. So I just want to read just a couple things that I found on the schedule of this conference, okay David?
[31:52] Okay.
[31:53] Here's a panel, it's called “reconceptualizing privacy,” and here's a quote. “Algorithmic systems are increasingly integrated into the physical and digital infrastructures of our lives. The borders of privacy are being pushed and redefined, provoking new debates about what privacy is. All corporations claim privacy is important, but what does that mean? Panelists will explore what privacy might look like or mean when individuals are tied into multiple networks, both human and artificial intelligence.” Sounds like an interesting panel, right David?
[31:28] Sure.
[31:33] Well who do you think is on the panel? I'll give you-- I'll let you guess. There’s four people; if you get all four I’ll be super impressed.
[32:39] Okay, well, I think this is a loaded question [inaudible]. Mark Zuckerberg, Adolf Hitler… who else, who else… Joseph Mengele and Edward Bernays.
[32:54] You got one of the four. Well, kind of one of the four. Okay, so let me tell you. We have Jeff Sokolov of IBM; Elena O’Curry, Senior User Research for Uber--
[33:05] IBM made Holocaust equipment so that counts as is Mengele.
[33:11] [chuckles] Peter Levin of Autodesk; and the one you pretty much got right, David, Liz Keneski, the Head of Privacy Research at Facebook Inc.
[33:22] “Head of Privacy Research”… I guess the Head of How to Violate Privacy Department didn't sound so good. Didn't quite fit on a business card, so.
[33:33] [laughter] I'm kind of reaching for how to put this into perspective, David, because I just think we live in an interesting world where one of the leading conferences of social science, in terms of integrating with business, has panels on privacy being presented by Facebook. Which we know in what we talked about is the quintessential example of a company who violate privacy every chance they get; and it really begs the question: why is this marriage between social science and technology even happening in this way in the first place?
And I found an article by an anthropologist who spoke at South by Southwest last year, and she has an opinion on why marketers and these technology companies are so interested in the social scientists. In this article she wrote titled, “Anthro Spectacle @South by Southwest: How Anthropology Captured the Imagination of Marketing Tech.” And her answers are essentially that social scientists can help tactical marketing companies see the bigger picture. They help connect the dots between all this big data that companies are so inundated with. “Sure, advertisers now have better views into which half of their advertising is wasted, but they still do not know why. Marketing professionals are realizing they need to understand this thing called ‘context.’ “
And finally, she says all these advertising companies—well, they come across as creepy for spying on everyone, right? It’s not a good look.
[35:03] And so if they don't change their business model, either regulation is going to do it for them, or customers are simply going to get fed up and the company will go under. So the solution, in the author's opinion, is for companies to hire social scientists. “Privacy, data, personalization and value are fundamentally cultural phenomena. Perhaps now is the time big and thick data researchers can ask better questions together.” Do you ever feel like we as a society are being gaslit a little bit, David?
[35:38] [laughter] It's literally my everyday. Like, I wake up in the morning and I'm like, “damn, I’m being gaslit all day.” Go to sleep, I'm like, “fuck, I got gaslit like crazy all day long.” Yeah, of course-- that's what advertising is, it’s gaslighting.
[35:52] Yeah, it is. Because when it comes to surveillance, for example, we're all being just gaslit into believing this is the way the world works. And now technology companies are paying social scientists big money to drive that point home. But all of these initiatives start with a fundamental assumption that we live in a “surveillance world” or, “hey, we live in a big data world now; we better get used to it” or “how can we work together.”
We have people from Facebook and IBM standing on the stage saying “Oh, isn't it interesting; we live in a a big data world, a big surveillance world. Well, how can we improve everyone’s experience in a big surveillance world.” In fact there's a title of a paper from one of the researchers being featured at this conference who herself is an employee of Facebook, and her paper is titled, “Ethnographic Agency in a Data-driven World.”
But, David, [sighs] this is the type of language I’m talking about that’s gaslighting us, because, in reality, we don't live in a “data-driven world”; we don't live in a “Big Data” world, we don't live in a surveillance world. We live in a world where companies-- and the people behind them-- are very intentionally creating mass surveillance products and shoving them down our throats, our homes, our cars, our pockets, and every square inch of our lived reality. This is not a passive reality -- the fact that we live in an oxygen-rich world. Although I guess it's increasingly a carbon-rich world, but…
[37:20] Maybe I'm going to contradict myself here, but the point is: we don't need agency in a data-driven world. What we need is a world where companies are not harvesting data from our lives and dismantling cultural and social relationships to better harvest that data in the first place. I don't need agency to walk down a store aisle, knowing I'm being watched by a facial recognition and tracking camera that's uploading every bit of my personal information to an international data broker.
What I need are the collective tools to put those companies that are selling facial recognition software to the highest bidders out of business. I don't need agency in a surveillance world; I need to destroy the companies that are creating those products. And I think we're being gaslit into this assumption that this is just the way things are, this is the world we live in now, we got to make the best of it. Why not, instead of figuring out how we can improve the business models of companies that shouldn't exist, why don't we just put them out of business?
Why can't we just say, “hey, there are some companies that should not exist, and we have the power to prevent that.” Why not at the same time we're yelling for a Green New Deal we also advocate for a deal that makes it illegal to create surveillance products, or makes it illegal to mine oil out of the ground. We don't need incentives, we need coffins. For-- conceptual coffins. [38:49] [laughs] Metaphorical coffins.
[38:51] That's a good line but that’s also a good save, so that we can leave that in there.
[38:55] But unfortunately, David, the narrative being presented to us and being molded into our thought leaders are trying to erase those options from our imaginations. And mass surveillance and these types of things-- that's not even to mention all the questionable software being handed over to questionable governments for things like autonomous weapons systems, something we talk about in the Episode 29, “War Machine.”
[39:21] And this is “Ashes Ashes,” a show about this awful, dystopian hellscape that we’ve created. [music]
[39:26] Autonomous weapons systems, drug-resistant pathogens, boundless AI.
[39:31] And hence this. Cyber attacks. Massive blackouts. You know listeners, one of us is automated. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the audience to figure out if it’s either Daniel or me.
[39:41] Whoever seems less human is probably the one that is most human.
[39:45] Yeah, that’s what a robot would say. [music and robot sounds]
[David rapping]: Education is a scam, they’re grifting us; this student-loan debt we’ll never escape, we’ll be employed forever and have no jobs, anyway, because the robots all took them, and they’ll beat us into acid minds with whips. To mine acid for the robot batteries.
[40:12] That’s a scary future, Dave.
[40:14] It certainly is. It’s scary until I get control of my military—my lethal autonomous military. Then you’ll all know fear. Wait, what?
[40:24] We're spying on activists for things as simple as protesting against a tax on large-size sugary drinks, as the Mexican government has done in the past. It's a shame that, Daniel, that we do have all this incredible intellectual power at these ethnographer conferences that these companies are using.
[40:44] This skill and knowledge that these ethnographers can offer; and instead of trying to take that and turn it into something that's marketable, something that can help them increase their bottom line, increase their exploitation of these people's attention or other things, what if instead we use that for what I think is the actual reason to have the social sciences in the first place, to go back to your question a little while ago for me, and that is to understand people in order to build empathy for them and then understanding the individual populations around the world.
Really truly understanding them, and viewing them not as something to exploit or something to try and teach them the “right way of doing things,” “the right way of living” or give them technology, cultural or otherwise, is the wrong way of doing it, but understanding that they are living in a specific way that if it's untouched by our influence is good by itself. There's a reason for that, and it's not the wrong way just because it's something that we don't initially understand.
[41:44] It’s important. That empathy that builds up is important. The empathy that-- understanding populations around the world is fundamental in order for us to build a world that is inclusive and has solutions that does empower populations around the world and doesn't just concentrate capital and power and information, and everything that goes along with that with a very small powerful people, in a very small physical place. And right now, of course, that is Silicon Valley in terms of this conversation about the specific companies, but also of the global West in all this idea.
[42:17] But better distributing that power, better distributing the solutions for the problems that we here in the developed world have created, is going to take that empathy, that understanding of populations, especially indigenous populations around the world, and we're going to have to make the sacrifices here to make up for all the terrible damage that we've already done to them, and is going to increase as time goes on, and we see further fallout from our actions.
And ethnographers, social sciences, are fundamental in that process, and I think that's why Brazil wants them eliminated, because they’re in this action right now of what might at some point turn into genocide, but is definitely right now environmental genocide, that is destroying the ways of life of huge amounts of indigenous people.
And not understanding them, looking at them as primitive, is fundamental in people willing to do that destruction against them. And this is something that's repeated time and time around the world: if we don't understand people around the world then it's that much easier for us to exploit them. If we don't understand people in our own world, then that's that much easier to exploit them. [43:25] If I in a city don't understand the rural way of life, it's that much easier for me to say, “fuck them, they don't know what they're doing; they’re primitive idiots. They're the problems, not me, even though my lifestyle’s probably far more destructive than anything they're doing to the world.” So understanding populations, which is something that social science and ethnographers really offer us as their their value proposition-- to pull a word out of these companies playbook-- is hugely important, and we should encourage that, but we should not allow that information to be turned against us.
And like everything we have these days, information is power, but it can be used for good or for evil. And unfortunately, like you mentioned Daniel, good is losing, but it doesn't mean it has to keep going that way.
[44:11] Well, let's talk about the future.
[44:13] Let’s talk about the immediate future in terms of this show. To limit it, because we do a lot of talking about the future, I think at this point most people understand we visualize what we want to see, but let's limit this to the “Ashes Ashes” future for once.
[44:30] So couple months ago, we started preparing for a “Border” series. And we did six different interviews, we went to El Paso, and then we went to Tucson, and we visited the Sonoran Desert, and all this so that we could create a few shows on the topic, but then I moved up to Massachusetts, and now I have another job, so I've been working two jobs, in addition to this show. So, three jobs, David!
[44:57] Three jobs, yeah. It's been slow.
[45:00] We’ve been procrastinating and now I feel--
[45:03] We’ve fallen behind--
[45:05] And now I'm just very-- I'm very, very scared.
[45:08] We've fallen behind on what we think is a really important show that we're already really proud of, even though it's just still taking shape, and so we want to finish these episodes up, we want to do it right, and that we don't want to keep pushing them off, because we feel they're extremely timely and the situation changes literally day to day at some points here. And so we are-- and I'm announcing this here-- going to take a few weeks off to finish these episodes. So you might not hear from us for a couple-- may be few weeks, going forward, but don't worry -- we're not off the air; this is a break.
Maybe you can consider this the end of Season 2, if we had seasons, but we will be back and we will be back with a bang, dropping several episodes all about the border, about the migration crisis, about migrants as a whole, all at once. And I am so excited for these episodes, we learned so much stuff, we have so much to share, and I think these are going to be really great and really important.
[46:06] Yeah. And of course, my codependency issues makes me feel like we're letting the listeners down and I apologize to everyone who is supporting us to Patreon. If you can't stand a couple week break, you are and more than happy to adjust your pledge, although it does support us a great deal we do appreciate that. I feel like it's hard to do both. I feel like I need to say, “okay, we're going to dedicate our time to building these shows out, recording them without feeling pressure to get another deep dive episode every week or every two weeks out.” So I think it will be good.
[46:42] Yeah, it's going to be worth it, we promise. They’re going to be a little bit different than our normal format, but we're really excited about them.
[46:49] And if any of you have media contacts, we're interested in maybe seeing who might be able to help us promote or distribute or platform these series, so that we’re not just dumping 3 or 4-- however many there are-- episodes on you all just in a podcast app. [47:05] But if you know any media platforms that can help promote that for us, get in touch.
[47:10] And we can't wait to share them with you so tune back in a couple weeks. But if that doesn't tide you over, don't worry, we will still be active online. You can check us out on our Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram @AshesAshesCast. We will still be watching our subreddit at /r/AshesAshesCast, and most importantly we will be on our Discord chat community every single day, you can find a link to that on the website ashesashes.org, just click the community link, Discord invite, and you can install that; it runs in your phone, it runs in your browser, runs in a program you can install on your computer.
It's an incredible group of people, they've been an invaluable resource for all sorts of episodes, but also these migrant episodes coming up, and we would love to see all of you there. I've learned so much stuff from that community, and I I really can't understate how important they are to me and how supportive they are w ith each other. It's a great place, I love all of you on there, so thank you for those of you who listen and are on that community. Y'all are great, thank you.
[48:12] Yeah. Also use this break as a chance to catch up on older episodes if you haven't already, or share them with friends and family. We talked about surveillance in here and we actually have quite a few episodes specifically on technology, surveillance and the use of our privacy-- abuse of our privacy-- and the ways our devices are manipulated to get us to engage with them constantly, and that is Episode 9, “Nothing Left to Hide”; Episode 15, that Facebook episode; Episode 35, “Plugged In,” on why are the designs of our technology making everything worse, not better; Episode 51, “Eyes on Me” on medical surveillance; and Episode 68, “Mask Off,” about facial tracking in the real world.
[48:57] And all of these are tagged now on our website if you go to ashesashes.org you'll see a list of tags of a variety of topics, so if you really want to find something that looks interesting to you, you can just click that and it makes that list of almost a hundred episodes much less imposing. So we encourage you to check that out, it’s a useful little tool, and we’re happy we were finally able to deploy it.
[49:18] But until next week, a lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible, and we will never use advertising to support this show. So if you appreciate it, would like us to keep going, you-- our listener-- can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend, giving us a five stars on your favorite podcast hosts like iTunes, or supporting us through patreon.com/ashesashescast. Every little bit helps and we appreciate it. You can also get in touch with us through email: [email protected]. Send us your thoughts, we read them and we appreciate them.
[49:56] And if email is something you don't enjoy-- and let's be honest nobody does-- you can give us a call too. We got a phone number, we’ve been taking voicemails down. At some point we're going to turn it into a call-in episode and we’d love for you to be a part of that. Our number for that is 313-99ASHES. That's 313-992-7437. And it is a United States number. If you are an international listener feel free to record yourself and email it to us and we can integrate it in that that way as well. We love hearing from all of you and every time we get a voicemail I'm super excited to listen. So be a part of that. Tell us things you want to hear, thoughts you have, anything. We’d love to have you be a part of the show in any way we can, and we love hearing from listeners, so don't be afraid to reach out.
[50:42] Next week, we've got—oh, we’ll be on a break.
[50:46] [laughs] Tune in, find us on your social media to get an update of when we'll be back, and we can't wait to see you then. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes. Goodbye.