Episode post here. Transcription by Maria Araújo.
Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman,
and with me today is Rebecca Valentine,
co-founder of Queerious Labs in San Francisco.
Rebecca Valentine, welcome.
Rebecca Valentine:
Hey, how’s it going?
Matt Teichman:
So I billed you as the co-founder of Queerious Labs,
and I thought maybe we could start off by talking about what Queerious Labs
actually is. It’s where we’re recording now—so I see all kinds of queerious
things on the walls—but where exactly are we, and what goes on here?
Rebecca Valentine:
Queerious Labs is a queer anarcha-feminist art
space, a workshop—sometimes hackerspace, depending on who you’re talking
to—it’s a community space that’s run by the community, for creative technical
projects. Teaching, holding events, all sorts of things like that.
Matt Teichman:
You mentioned it was
anarcha-feminist,
and that might be a new term to some of our listeners. It sounds like it’s a
combination, maybe, of
anarchism
and feminism. Is that about right?
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! A lot of the motivation behind Queerious
Labs is a response to a very
cishet
masculine tech culture, here in San
Francisco,
and in the Bay Area more generally. A lot of us come from anarchist or
socialist communities. But here, in
the Bay Area, within the tech world—even within the hacker
world
and the arts
tech,
that sort of intersection of communities—there is quite a lot of masculine
dominance, and low-level sexism, and
misogyny,
and these sorts of things. And, you know, if you just look at tech, broadly
speaking—it’s just saturated with it.
So we created this space as a response to that, where we would have an anarchist take on what this kind of community could be like; an anarchist take on hackerspaces, on community workshops, these sorts of things. Which is not novel, but the feminist part of it kind of is. There have been other feminist hackerspaces, or makerspaces— like Double Union—but they haven’t really been anarchist; they haven’t been open. We wanted to take a bunch of the things that we loved about various places, and try to build a new thing that no one had really done before. So in that context, it’s anarchafeminism—or queer anarchafeminism, specifically.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, so that’s all very cool. What exactly is a
hackerspace?
Rebecca Valentine:
A hackerspace is a space for hackers. But the
deeper question there is: what is a hacker, ultimately?
Matt Teichman:
Indeed. Is it a person that breaks into banks and steals
money?
Rebecca Valentine:
Well…no. That’s a bank robber.
At least from my perspective, a hacker is someone who is passionate about the stuff that they do—and that can be something computer-related, or it can be knitting, it can be whatever. But typically, it’s someone who’s passionate about it; does it because they love it; and is oftentimes doing it in a way that is not the standard way, or the officially authorized way. Historically, the term ‘hackers’ originates from MIT, when people were hacking on model train kits to turn them into whatever they wanted the model train kits to be—as opposed to the actual official thing that the kit was designed to be. They were literally hacking their kits to pieces and reassembling them in all sorts of ways.
Matt Teichman:
So there was actual, literal severing of physical
things!
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! And then it became the—this is the model
train club that half of
the Computer Science Department at MIT was in. Which is why there was such an
overlap with computer science and programmers. And then from there, it became
the kinds of programmers that were—I don’t want to say, strictly speaking,
counterculture, but counter to the dominant culture in computers at the
time. Which is the narrow ties of IBM, and the
engineers—as opposed to the people who
just want to play around with computers and explore stuff. We get into the
criminal aspects of hackers, because, well, when you have a bunch of really
curious geeks, and you present them with a complex system—such as, I don’t
know, the phone system—they’re going to do some exploration and try to
understand it. How to make it do what they want it to do.
That’s how you got phone freaks. But then, as the phone networks became more and more computerized, to be a really good phone freak you had to be a good computer hacker—to actually use computers and get them to do what you wanted. Especially if they were computers you didn’t control—that the phone company controlled, or that a university controlled. Then you get the whole story of Kevin Mitnick and how he became public enemy number one, because he was hacking into all sorts of fun stuff, mostly just for exploration. Probably because of him, the whole notion of computer hacking as a criminal thing happens. But hacking, broadly speaking, is just looking at the world, being really interested in the world, and then—
—that’s the doorbell, by the way! But so, throughout the whole Kevin Mitnick thing—both before and after it—there was still this tendency for hackers, as a community, to basically just be people who are looking at the world, seeing all the cool stuff that was happening in the world—and then figuring out their own ways of making it work, and do stuff that they were interested in having it do. A lot of that was computer-related, but it wasn’t strictly speaking computer-related.
And so, you have a broader hacker culture, which is about hacking all sorts of things—whether it is model train kits, or computers, or whether it’s sewing or fabric hacking. A hacker is someone who makes stuff, takes stuff apart to understand how it works, and very frequently, it’s someone who doesn’t follow the rules that the thing has set out for it.
Matt Teichman:
Right, yeah. I get a lot of questions about
this. There’s an event in Chicago that I go to—sometimes it’s every week,
sometimes it’s bi-weekly—called Hack
Night. And people often ask
me, ‘Well, what goes on there? What do you do at Hack Night? Do you break into
other people’s computers?’ A verb I sometimes use to explain what it is is
‘tinkering’—tinkering, in an exploratory way, to try to learn about something.
I think the whole phenomenon of hacking is politically interesting in a number of ways. If you think about how most of the stuff that we use, purchase, consume, and enjoy, is mass produced, and because it’s mass produced, the stuff that I buy, in general, is not going to be made specifically for me, Matt. It’s going to be off the shelf—some general thing that lots of different people are going to get. I’m not necessarily saying that’s good or bad; it’s just a fact about what it’s like to live right now.
Rebecca Valentine:
And it has a purpose. It has a well-defined purpose
that has been put out there, and you don’t have a say in it, until you hack it.
Matt Teichman:
Exactly! You know, it could be something as simple as:
maybe, as a child, I get a toy, and I paint new eyebrows on it, to make it more
like the toy that I would want. Or maybe another interesting analogy would be
custom cars, which turned into a big thing—
Rebecca Valentine:
—yeah! Customization and personalization is a lot
of what it’s about—but it’s not about merely superficially doing things. I
mean, it can be. There’s no reason that you can’t just hack your stuff by
embroidering what you want to on your bag, if you get a bag, and you want, like,
whatever—that’s hacking, right? But a lot of it is also just totally
repurposing stuff in ways that are not even within the scope of what people
intended it to be for.
Matt Teichman:
I like that word repurposing. It turns out that things
can often have surprise uses that you didn’t know that they were useful for, and
this is about discovering those.
Rebecca Valentine:
Oh yeah! A lot of times, that’s what people were
doing with the phone system, and the computer networks that was connected
to. Actually, a great example of this—there’s someone that I know who’s a
Siri and Alexa
hacker. And
what he does is: he gets these things to talk to one another, and it
automatically goes through this whole process. Because when you have two
speaking things and two hearing things that can interact with one another, you
get weird cycles of conversations,
and they can do stuff that you otherwise couldn’t do. It was not even dreamed
of, by either of the groups of people who made these things. It’s almost
feedback, but it’s not quite feedback, because the one says something; the other
responds and says something; and then the other responds and says something. And
neither of them know that they’re not talking to a person. That’s the
coolest sort of hack, where you get something where no one imagined that this is
what people would do with it. But you can still get it to do something really
cool.
Matt Teichman:
I imagine those conversations are pretty surreal.
Rebecca Valentine:
They super are.
Matt Teichman:
Sometimes, when I’m driving home, my GPS says, ‘Turn
left, at such and such.’ And when that sound comes through the speaker, my
Google assistant thinks that that’s me talking to it. And so, my phone is
effectively talking to itself. So I can relate.
Rebecca Valentine:
This actually has a connection to video games,
too. We were just talking about video games in the nineties. One of the main
things that they designed Deus
Ex for was: they wanted
players to be able to feel like they could embody themselves in the game,
and play the game how they wanted. The designers of the game—especially
Warren Spector, who’s the
director—they were pleased, most of all, when players did things that they
could never have predicted.
Warren Spector tells this story of how he was doing a playtest, where he was watching someone play a level that he had seen be played, a thousand times, over the course of the development of the game. And this person was just going to do some random thing, and he was, like, ‘No, there’s no way that’s gonna work. Like, how’s that…no!‘. And then it works—it gains the person access to wherever they were trying to go—and it’s, like, ‘Oh, that blew my mind!’ Right? People who design games for this are still blown away by people basically hacking the game. It’s a beautiful thing when you see stuff like that happen.
Matt Teichman:
Right. One immediate connection to anarchism that I can
think of—and this goes back to Episode 68 of
Elucidations, where we
talked to Mark
Lance
about anarchism—it seems like
one of the ideas behind that political philosophy is to accomplish a lot of what
we accomplish in the current system in a more bottom-up manner, where some
organized pattern of behavior among a group of people emerges out of an
immediate need. Rather than: ‘Well, we decided in advance, we need to have this
group of people doing XYZ, and they’re going to see to it that that always
happens.’
So you end up having, like, a town council, because there are some issues that the people living in this area need to address—and they think that their needs can be best served if they work together. Rather than: ‘Well, before anybody even moved here, we created this town, and with the council, and we imposed this governmental order on it in advance.’ I can see a potential connection between the kind of psychological temperament where you’d want to imaginatively think of new uses for things—where you’d want to break down, reverse-engineer, the items in your vicinity, and try to arrive at a fuller understanding of them, in this playful self-education kind of way—and the bottom-up approach to governance. Do you think there’s a connection between those two things?
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah, absolutely. The first thing I would say, by
the way, is I’m not sure that I would actually agree with that notion of
anarchism, as a core conception of anarchism.
Matt Teichman:
Ok, cool.
Rebecca Valentine:
Because that seems like a very American perspective
on anarchism. I feel like the—
Matt Teichman:
—and I could very well be botching Mark Lance’s
view. So any errors here are due to me.
Rebecca Valentine:
This is a very American
perspective on
anarchism, though. So if Mark Lance is American, I would not be surprised if
this is what they were saying. If you talk to Spanish
anarchists during the
Spanish Civil War, where they
have complex networks of
councils, like factory
councils, and regional councils, and all these sorts of things—with some
fairly heavy structure involved—I think they would have said, ‘Yes, we’re
anarchists, but what do you mean? We definitely have these big complex
organizations.’ I think they probably would have just argued that anarchism is
about abolishing power, not that anarchism is about abolishing complex
organizational
structures.
Historically, it’s not uncommon for power and big structures to go together. But like—what is a chaotic dictatorship, if not power with absolutely no good organizational structure? I would disagree with tying those two things together, fundamentally. I would say that it sounds more like what you’re describing is adhocracy—where structures and organizations emerge as the need arises, in an ad hoc fashion, and it’s just: whatever emerges is the thing that’s appropriate for the situation. But I do think that there is a tendency, especially amongst hacker-y communities, to favor more ad hoc structures, and to disfavor big planning efforts, and big organization efforts. Even within, perhaps, less hacker-y communities, but in more West Coast tech communities, this is especially true, going right back through the history of the internet.
The development of the internet itself was kind of—there were these two forces. There is the efforts by the OSI model people, who wanted to have a formal specification of this big, complicated thing that was going to be the internet. It took them 20 years before they could get anything ratified, and they finally ratified something in ‘95. And wait a second—‘95 is when Netscape went public, right? Like, I think it’s too late, guys.
There’s a reason that it was ‘95—as opposed to 1975, when the first versions of TCP/IP were put out there. The reason is that when you want to plan everything out and make it perfect, before you do anything, the people—and this goes back to what we were talking about, with MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), and the whole human beneficial AI thing that we were talking about before the show—if you want to plan everything out ahead of time, and have everything perfect before you ever do anything, you’re going to get beaten to the punch by the people who don’t give a damn about any planning. The people who are just, like, ‘I’m going to experiment, see what happens. If it works, it works; and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’ And that’s why TCP/IP became the thing—because they wrote a very tiny spec for a corner of what they were trying to do. They didn’t plan the next thousand years; they implemented it, deployed it, and it was cool, and they just kept iterating.
And that’s very much in line with the hacker ethos, at least: ‘Try it, and see what works.’ That, I think, is probably much more part of the spirit of anarchism. Not, necessarily, ad hoc structures—because you can do this with big, organized structures—but it’s more about: ‘Try things, see what works, and iterate.’ You can have an organization that does this; lots of organizations do this. Sometimes it doesn’t work so good. Like, Valve is one of these places where anyone can kind of work on what they want, and try things, and iterate. But at the same time, Valve got stagnant because of this, as an organization.
Matt Teichman:
And as background for the listeners, Valve is a gaming
company. Would that be accurate to say?
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah. It’s an interesting question, though, how you
can get organized efforts—because a lot of things do require organization, and
coordinated efforts, and these sorts of things—without losing the dynamism
of being able to just experiment with a thing, and then iterate on it, if it
works really well.
Matt Teichman:
It’s the ‘too many
cooks’
problem, right?
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah. I don’t have an answer to how you do this. But
I think probably, the most important thing is to at least consciously do this:
to be conscious of how you’re doing things. A lot of times, you get
organizations where they didn’t intentionally set out to do this, and they
haven’t really thought about what they’re doing. Even if it’s a small
organization, or a larger organization—whatever it is—they often don’t do
these things consciously. As a consequence, they can’t sit and reflect on what
they’re doing, and how they’re doing any of this stuff. That’s the biggest
trap. When you just do it, because that’s how you do it—and if it doesn’t work
well, that’s how we do it.
Matt Teichman:
It must secretly actually work!
Rebecca Valentine:
I mean—it probably works for someone.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah…
Rebecca Valentine:
That’s another one of these traps in the hacker
community. You know, it’s the world, more broadly speaking—but, since we’re
sitting here in Queerious Labs, which partially exists because of frustrations
with this sort of stuff… When it works for someone, and they have now a vested
interest in preserving the way it is—if you have a hacker space that has all
sorts of gross misogynistic
stuff
going on, or whatever, and you can’t deal with it because it works for the dudes
who can dominate a space—well it works for them, right? So, why would they
want to change it? And so, it doesn’t get changed.
Matt Teichman:
Actually, that gets me to a related question. So we
talked about the connection between anarchism, and the kinds of activities that
hackers enjoy engaging in. Is there also a deep connection between feminism and
the kinds of activities that hackers enjoy engaging in? Sometimes I like to
build this romantic image in my head of: ‘Well, feminists are hacking gender
roles,
or maybe even hacking gender itself.’
Rebecca Valentine:
So I would say that yes, there is—but this is
ignoring the fact that hackers and hacker culture is a living thing outside of
my politics.
Matt Teichman:
Right, yeah.
Rebecca Valentine:
Hacker culture, historically, has been very
male-dominated, very masculine in temperament—or however you want to think
about it. There’s what some people would describe as masculine energy driving a
lot of what hacker culture is about. And the adhocracies of
Wikipedia, for
instance—some people have described
Wikipedia as leveraging male
geeks’ desires to one up each other, and be right about everything, for the
common
good.
That’s how you get Wikipedia to be really good—you take advantage of that
particular toxicity of geek maleness.
Matt Teichman:
Oh boy. I hope that’s not correct, but it seems like it
could be.
Rebecca Valentine:
Well, why does anyone correct a Wikipedia article
that’s wrong? Because, ‘Oh, well, I know what I’m talking about.’ Right? But,
I mean, it works!
Matt Teichman:
‘Actually….’
Rebecca Valentine:
I mean, it does work. Except for some topics which
are slightly more contentious than physics! So hacker culture is very male
dominated. In theory,
there should be a connection between hacking gender and opposing systems of
power, as made manifest in gender, and subverting implicit assumptions that you
have about people. All of these things—they’re very much in line with a lot of
what hackerdom is supposed to be about. But the reality of the
situation is that
that’s not how it is. There are lots of super rad feminist
hackers,
and lots of super rad women, who are hacking all sorts of interesting, atypical,
non-traditionally masculine things. But that’s a new version of hacker
culture. Yes, women have been doing computing for
ages, but: hacker culture.
Matt Teichman:
Like, the mainstream of the culture, right?
Rebecca Valentine:
Right.
Matt Teichman:
One thing I heard—I don’t know if this is true, but
one thing I’ve heard—is that computer geekery became coded as male starting
around the 1980s, when computers were marketed particularly to little boys.
Rebecca Valentine:
Uh-huh.
Matt Teichman:
And then, once, fast-forward 15, 20 years later,
everybody’s in college, and suddenly, the boys have been playing with these
computers that have been marketed to them from a young age. As a result of that,
perhaps partially, everybody thinks of technology as a masculine thing. Whereas,
before this happened in the eighties, it was not thought of that way. And
indeed, people often like to note that
computer was,
originally, a term for a human being who performed computations. And often,
those—back in the olden days, before it became prestigious—were
women. Does
that history at all track, to your mind?
Rebecca Valentine:
Oh, yeah! So you said a very important word, there:
prestigious. It is not uncommon for women’s work to become men’s work, the
moment the work becomes
prestigious,
or valuable in some way. Whether it’s for the prestige value, or the monetary
value—the moment that people start caring about it, and it starts to be
something useful and valuable to people, is the moment that these things tend to
be coded as
masculine. And
often—
Matt Teichman:
—I’m wtill waiting for that to happen to
teaching.
Rebecca Valentine:
Well, no, but here’s the thing: if you go back to,
roughly, Victorian era—especially in England, where being a schoolmaster, or
being even just a teacher at what we would call a private school—but what
they would call a public school, because it’s England and they say things
weirdly—
—being a teacher at an English public school was very prestigious. And so, it was basically dominated by men with PhDs!
Prestige is ultimately, in some sense, connected to power—and these things are intertwined in all sorts of ways. And you do see this through the history of technology, and especially computing. The moment that computers became really valuable and prestigious; and when you could get rich off of computing, and you could make a bunch of money actually doing programming and stuff; and you could make a career of it; that was the moment that all of this stuff became male-coded. It was a very conscious thing.
You can see when the advertising changed—go look in the ads. It’s around the same time that Legos changed, actually. Legos used to be uniformly marketed to everyone. And then—right around the same time that computers were becoming coded as male, so were Legos. It’s very strange.
Matt Teichman:
They’re kind of like bricks? Building things?
Construction? I don’t know.
Rebecca Valentine:
But like, it makes no sense—
Matt Teichman:
—yeah, none of this makes any sense.
Rebecca Valentine:
It’s like, you’re playing with toy blocks! Why is
this… Now you have Legos for girls, and they’re pink Legos. And it’s
like—
—if you look at the advertisements in the seventies—half of the people in the ads were women or girls. Like—what’s happening here?
Matt Teichman:
There is something really amazing about looking at what
previous eras have viewed as masculine or feminine; or what stereotypical
associations people have had with different things. You don’t have to go back
that far at all to see how in flux all this stuff is.
Rebecca Valentine:
So as a linguist, I
used to be very conscious of cross-cultural variation. Cross-cultural variation
in the sense of not just ‘here versus
Japan’; but also, ‘here
versus here, 300 years ago’,
which was basically a different culture. You have to be conscious of these
things, when you’re doing linguistic research, because, if you’re not, all sorts
of things which are highly tied to culture get mistaken as being highly
associated with language.
You have to put on your anthropologist’s glasses to look at the world as cultures, as well as the thing. And when you do that with gender, it’s so interesting, because all sorts of stuff that you think is canonically masculine, or canonically feminine—like, today, you just go to South Korea—who are the pop stars, the men who are idolized? A lot of them are kind of effeminate and very soft; if they were brought here, there would be so many people who’d think that they were just gay! Because they have all these qualities that are much more feminine, and girly, and whatever. It’s because, in South Korea, this is not associated with gender in the same way that it is here. The lines that cut reality and cut human behavior are not in the same places, in Korea.
Matt Teichman:
I’ve often had similar thoughts about 80s
metal, with the makeup, and the
teased hair, and so forth.
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! How is it that
Queen could go from having a bunch
of folks who are often androgynous, to then having folks who are hyper
masculine? Like, look at Freddie
Mercury during the two
stylistically most diametrically opposed parts in that band’s history—going
from androgynous early days, to super butch, masculine, handlebar
mustache. And yet at
the same time, in the context, it’s still considered quite a masculine thing,
throughout his entire history. That whole aesthetic change was still a
masculine aesthetic change.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, right. We can go down the list. Judas
Priest—took I don’t know how many
years—20 years?—for the lead
singer of that band to come out as
gay. You know, with the leather studded attire, and so forth. And when the band
came out, it was just viewed as hyper masculine, hyper
butch—but the reality of it
was that he was closeted.
Rebecca Valentine:
There’s definitely something very interesting to be
said about the interaction between gay male
culture
in relation to being closeted, but
still gay; and then seeing how that interacts to produce forms of
hyper-masculinity. That
then affects how straight guys behave, and then end up coding
themselves in ways
that, if you know a bunch of gay guys, you know that this straight guy happens
to be taking a lot of influence from them. But because they don’t know that it’s
a gay
signifier—until
it becomes well-known—you would never have known. And so you get this
weird… Yeah, it’s kind of funny for that to happen.
Matt Teichman:
You get
homophobes accidentally
appropriating gay iconography.
Rebecca Valentine:
Right. Because gay iconography is, often, about
hyper-masculinity,
and what it means to be really, really manly. Because, if you’re a gay guy,
you’re—I guess—into really manly
dudes?
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. This is the magic of Kenneth
Anger we’re getting at.
You mentioned you work in linguistics, and I definitely want to say something about that. I may have mentioned once or twice in the podcast that my doctoral research was in philosophy of language, and one question I often get about that is: ‘How is it relevant to anything? Isn’t it just this pie-in-the-sky theoretical thing?’ A project you’ve worked on is one of the things I always point to—not in a ‘taking credit for it’ kind of way—as an amazing example of how really difficult, abstract, mathematical linguistic theory can be brought to bear on a concrete technical problem. Basically, just by coding up some of the ‘pen and paper’ theories in a very careful way, you’ve been able to make a computer do something that it previously couldn’t do: understand certain fragments of natural language.
Rebecca Valentine:
Linguistics is useless, kids. Don’t do it!
Matt Teichman:
So maybe what you want to say is that my
example is completely ass-backwards because, actually—
Rebecca Valentine:
—so this is one of those tensions that exists
within computer-related language stuff. Whether it’s formal
linguistics that’s being
mechanized via
computers, or whether it’s people doing natural language
processing—that
whole world of languages and computers is, in some way, intersecting. There is a
tension between the two
sides:
the very theoretically informed people; and the (in many ways) anti-theory
people—the ‘throw more data at it’ people.
I have thought about this a lot, over the years, and try to make an argument that theory is very important. Lots of things could be said—but, basically, what it comes down to is: consider the following fact. Any time that you want to train your natural language processing models—your ‘throw more data at it’ models—on something, to get the right probabilities. What do you do? Well, typically, you take a parsed corpus, like the New York Times corpus, the GigaWord corpus—just take some massive corpus of parsed sentences, and then you train the heck out of your model, so that it performs really well on this reference corpus. And it’s like you’ve—
Matt Teichman:
—and parsing a
corpus
means that some enterprising graduate students have gone through a whole bunch
of New York Times transcripts, and been like, ‘This is the subject, this is the
verb. This is the noun…‘, and all that. They’ve
annotated it in that way.
Rebecca Valentine:
Right. So what the folks who are, like, ‘Oh, just
throw more data at the problem, then it’ll get perfect.‘—what they forget, the
thing that the data-obsessed, natural language processing people forget, is that
if you didn’t have theoretically aware grad students spending years of their
lives manually parsing and deploying the theory on the New York Times corpus,
they would have nothing to train. Right? So even if you think, ‘Yes, just throw
more data at the problem’—which, objectively, actually makes things work
better—you still need all of these people to know the theory, to give you
your reference
corpus. So
sure—if you don’t like theory, then you don’t get to use the New York Times
corpus, and you’re fucked!
Matt Teichman:
Exactly, yeah. It’s not like the data were just there
and we grabbed them. We had to get experts to ‘make’ the
data.
Rebecca Valentine:
You have to know what you’re trying to parse in the
first place. No one goes out there and is like: ‘Let’s parse your stuff. Let’s
make a neural network
that parses really, really well’, but they don’t have pre-parsed training
data. That’s not how it works. You can do end-to-end neural network stuff, but
that only does a certain class of things—you can only use that for a certain
class of problems. And, sometimes, that’s not what you need. So this idea of:
‘Oh, we don’t really need theory’—it’s like, well, you may not need theory,
but all of the stuff that you’re depending on needed theory!
Matt Teichman:
The areas I get most excited about—regardless of
whether it’s tech stuff, philosophy stuff, linguistic stuff—are always places
where you have a symbiosis between theory and application. Where it’s not like
the only reason we’re even doing the theory is for better short-term
rewards. But it’s also not like we’re not even thinking at all about how what
we’re doing is relevant to everyday living. There’s just a healthy interplay
between those two things.
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah—this connection between theoretical work and
the applied stuff, and how it has an impact on everyday life, in some way, like
in the context of
linguistics—it
has this nice oppositional structure. But the thing that I thought of as you
were saying that was: well, this is a philosophy podcast. Or a philosophy-ish
podcast; you talk about lots of stuff, but let’s just say it’s a philosophy
podcast.
Matt Teichman:
That is usually what we say.
Rebecca Valentine:
The thing that came to mind was how philosophy is,
in many ways, theorizing. I mean, whatever; it’s closer to theorizing than
digging a hole is, right?
Matt Teichman:
Sometimes, when people ask me what philosophy is, I like
to say: the theory of anything.
Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! Not the theory of everything—the theory of
just anything. I like that.
Matt Teichman:
Any old thing.
Rebecca Valentine:
Very
Merleau-Ponty: what is the
theory of this, just the texture on it? So what I was thinking when you said
that—when you were talking about the connections between theory and applied
stuff, and its impact in everyday life—is: in computer science and
tech, there’s this
interesting thing where
philosophers—ethicists—are
taking a serious look at what has happening in big tech and saying, ‘Hey, you
need to start thinking about how you’re impacting people—materially impacting
people. And we need to start having things like: well, engineers have to go
through ethics
classes,
and legitimately get trained in ethics to some degree. Maybe software developers
should too, because you were having material impacts on people’s lives, but you
have absolutely no clue what you’re doing.’
And so, you have the theorists of the most theoretical subjects you could have—philosophers—coming in and saying, ‘You’re having real-world, everyday impacts on people’. This is interesting. Instead of the theorists and the applied folks, having this opposition, what you have is theorists saying: ‘We need to train you in theory, because there’s things that you should be applying it to every day, but you just don’t, because you don’t know it. Or you don’t care’. The theory and the practical application, in that case, is the same group of people. They’re talking to the other group of people who don’t care about the application of their technology—they just want to make the technology, but they also don’t care about the theoretical implications of it. It’s really interesting. There’s this third camp that’s not theory or applied—it’s the masturbatory technologist, who is neither theoretically nor pragmatically inclined, and just does it because it’s fun. And God, do they need some theory and some practice.
Matt Teichman:
I feel like often, doing something because it’s fun,
though—sometimes that can be shorthand for, e.g. ‘I do care about the
practical applications, and I do care about the beauty of the theory; but I
don’t really know how to express it all exactly, right now, in this moment. I
just have an instinct that this is important, and I’m going to do it.’
Rebecca Valentine:
For sure. I do that a whole bunch. But there are
also a lot of people who just like working on a problem that’s interesting and
challenging, and they don’t really care. These are the folks who get hired from
Black Hat and go work at the
NSA—because it’s a
hard crypto problem. (For those
listening, Black Hat is a security technology conference that’s happening, in
Vegas, as we record this—which is why it’s relevant.) These are the folks who
Bruce Sterling admonishes: when
the person in the suit comes to you, and tries to hire you for a really cool,
hard problem with a big fat paycheck, you’re going to have to sit down and
think: ‘There are ethical implications to this.’ It’s not just a fun
problem—you’re doing more than just having fun solving cryptography
problems. You might be doing the work that ends up putting people in prison for
political reasons; or, if you work at
Palantir, you’re
materially supporting something which qualifies, according to the Geneva
Conventions, as
genocide. These things have real implications, and it’s not just solving a fun
problem.
Matt Teichman:
And I feel like, to a certain extent, this is the
condition of anybody earning a paycheck under contemporary capitalism. But maybe
there’s a way in which it somehow gets—
Rebecca Valentine:
—there’s no ethical production under
capitalism?
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, right. Exactly. But maybe it gets amplified in
tech—because
there’s the opportunity to deploy and use it in powerful ways that can have such
huge ramifications for massive numbers of people.
Rebecca Valentine:
This is a question that is not new. You can go back
to the Renaissance and look at
people having conversations—folks like Da
Vinci, who, on the one hand,
was an amazing artist, an amazing engineer, and also built weapons of
war. That’s a
conversation that people have had for a very long time. You can’t fund this
amazing, beautiful art,
without
also simultaneously, somehow, getting involved in the war industry. It’s not a
new conversation; it’s probably not going to go away anytime soon. In 10,000
years—after World War V, or whatever, and we’ve nuked ourselves back to
oblivion—people will still be asking: ‘I get that you can use this really
amazing stone axe to carve some wood—but also, that wood, you can throw it and
stab someone with it’. After World War V we’ll still be having this
conversation, in the New Stone Age.
This is just fundamentally, a consequence of something which, very visibly, has an impact on the world in a transformative way. Technology and science materially change the world in big, obvious ways. Whereas art and culture-related things—like art, literature, those sorts of things—they change the world too, but it’s harder to see the causal connection. So we don’t have the same anxieties. Until we do.
What’s happening in the media right now? People are trying to blame a massacre on video games. In that context, suddenly, people have this consciousness of the idea that cultural artifacts can impact the world. That’s another one of these old narratives: ‘video games cause violence’. But we tend to avoid seeing direct connections between cultural products and the consequences that they have. Whereas, with technology, it’s very hard to be, like, ‘Well, this new thing is not responsible for it.’ Well, no—you literally could not have killed the whole city full of people without an atom bomb. There is an obvious causal connection, and so it’s relatively easy to drop into conversations about the connections—whereas with other things it’s harder. I don’t think that it’s unique to technology, though.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah, I think that’s interesting point. Well, you
mentioned TCP/IP earlier—which, for non-technical listeners, is a way for
computers to talk to each other over the network, which the internet still
currently uses, to have one computer over here to be able to talk to any other
computer on the entire internet. It’s a way of establishing a persistent line
of communication. So clearly,
the creation of that technology had really deep ramifications, in the sense that
I can now be connected to somebody in
Dubai, or in
Eritrea, or wherever. With a tech
example, it’s very easy to say this possibility was opened up, and it didn’t
exist before; whereas, if you look at 19th century
impressionist painting, we do
have a strong sense that it transformed the way we see things—
Rebecca Valentine:
—ooh, actually, let’s say romanticism, instead.
Matt Teichman:
Okay.
Rebecca Valentine:
Not impressionism—let’s say
romanticism. Because
romanticism, as an art movement, is intimately related to
Nazism. There is a causal
connection there, between the two. But it’s not something that a lot of people
know about, and it’s hard to actually see. Romanticist artists were part of a
broader movement which was about the rejection of rationalism, about embracing
emotions and impulses, and all these sorts of things. Eventually, in the context
where it developed, it turned into romantic
nationalism. And the
connections from that to Nazism are much clearer, because the romantic
nationalists ended up founding a whole bunch of things like the Thule
Society, and other parts of the
Völkisch movement in
Germany. And then in Italy, they had their own thing, which was, sort of,
Neo-Roman,
as opposed to Neo-whatever you would call ancient Germanic people—
Matt Teichman:
—Teutonic?
Rebecca Valentine:
Neo-Teutonic. Yeah,
I guess that’s the word. They founded societies like the Thule
Society, and then, out of
those literally came the
Nazi party. When you look at the
philosophy that was embedded in early
fascism—Italian
fascism; you look at the Italian
Futurists and the Futurist
Manifesto—it’s very much
this anti-rationalist embrace of impulsivity, and that is directly connected to
the Romanticist movement. But it’s
hard to see that connection, because it spans 70 years and it’s not very visible
and obvious. It’s an art movement, and somehow you get Nazis out of it? You can
see this trend within fascist ideology still cropping up today. One of the
reasons people love Trump is because he’s very much a ‘shoot from the
hip’—a
very impulsive
anti-rationalist kind of
person. And it’s the same kind of ethos. Obviously there’s more to fascism than
just that, but there are these connections.
Matt Teichman:
So for people who are curious to see logic, philosophy
of language and linguistics in action—I would encourage you go on YouTube, and
look for the language engine
demo. It’s absolutely
astonishing. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I showed it to a friend of
mine who is an expert in computational
semantics—and
he was like, ‘What? Is there a little person in the computer, feeding the demo
the answers? Because this is essentially magic.’ One way I sometimes describe it
to people is: you know how in Star
Trek, when Captain
Picard talks to the computer and
asks the computer to do things? It’s kind of like that. Imagine you had that
kind of interface, where you could just ask your computer to do stuff, and it
wouldn’t get confused, the way Siri does.
Rebecca Valentine:
That is exactly what I was thinking of when I was
doing it, too.
Matt Teichman:
Hahaha. I would encourage everybody to go check that
out, and I would also encourage everybody to check out
queeriouslabs.com—that’s the nonprofit where we’re
recording this. Please go to the website; check it out. Donations are always
welcome.
Rebecca Valentine:
Read the manifesto! It’s really good.
Matt Teichman:
Read the manifesto—indeed, it is excellent. And,
Rebecca Valentine, thank you so much for joining us.
Rebecca Valentine:
Thank you for having me.
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