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all right welcome uh tim we’re here with uh tim mon

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author journalist novelist journalism work and i guess fiction as

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well has appeared in places regularly bbc vice motherboard

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host of other places i find fascinating because of his work not just as a writer in a box of writing but with

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like architects and artists in all kinds of especially technology saturated

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environments so welcome how you doing today i’m good thanks for having me man so we’re here

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to talk a bit about um the digital economies lab and some of the

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thinking and work that’s happened around this research laboratory here at art

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engine um you have been involved uh with a small

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group as you kind of uh engage the idea of organized labor

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and uh and in relation to the creative

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domain so what i guess let’s start with the sort of simple question of what what drew you to this idea of a union

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um and uh creative industries or the artistic world what what brought you around those

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two ideas in all honesty it came out of that first initial

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deal meeting that first weekend we had we were over at deloitte’s offices

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which was that was just weird but that’s a weird space but that’s a whole other video

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um and we were sat around talking and the things that people were you know we would

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that that day as you remember we did a bunch of exercises where people were talking about what their concerns were and their hopes and stuff and the thing

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that came out a lot the issues that were coming out a lot were were

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stuff around labor and specifically around payment it seemed to me the thing the thing i kept hearing people saying

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was that like there was a lack of transparency in in how much money they should be making as

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artists you know they’d often find themselves in in shows or performances or whatever and

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they were asked to they were asked how much they expected

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to be paid by clients rather than being given a figure and

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at the same time they suspected or found out later even the other people they were working with were getting paid more

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to them or in some cases getting paid less to them and that and that and that that inequality felt felt wrong to them

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and this kept coming out that was kind of the thing that kept coming out the most that first morning if i remember

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and it just made me i think i just literally just stood up or put my hand up or something in one of the sessions said it sounds like what you need to

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union because that’s what unions are for right they’re there to do a lot of things but for me one

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primarily one of the things so therefore is to create solidarity when it comes to pain when it comes to labor value right

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it’s to argue for their members to have an equitable and

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and just payment structure and that for their labor to be valued in the right

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ways and that just that just struck me as and i come out as well of you know now

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you mentioned the introduction i’m a journalist i’m a freelance journalist but a lot of my friends increasingly are becoming freelance

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for reasons that we might get into you know more the conversation but but you know a lot of them had just

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spent the last two years up to that point like fighting to unionize places like

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you know i write for vice a lot i used to i still do it vice were fighting to build a union

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buzzfeed or fighting to build a union um and and

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it talking to those people and watching them and how to see their organizing was really inspiring for me

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for to watch a couple years to see the union especially in the u.s i mean you know obviously i’m british and moving

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heaven from europe i think unions are i’m not too sure about canada yet but in

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in the u.s unions are viewed very very differently it’s very much a dirty word for a long time especially in the

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creative industries um outside of hollywood ironically where unions are very powerful and they as

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they should be and you know in the tv and film industry uh the unions are incredibly powerful

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um sometimes not always in the best ways but still they exist and then you know there was structure there for hopefully

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for people to mold and use but it felt like we it just felt to me

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from those discussions what we were talking about the kind of solidarity would kind of build was an organized labor issue

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however like you know that’s about pay or working conditions or intellectual property and stuff like

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this these all seem to be issues of exploitation of labor and that

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just struck me as that was the way to move forward with this and we’ve

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uh had this conversation a bit before but i i do wonder about um how over the

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course of this research have you been thinking about that question of what labor consists of

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in the creative context i think in some of the ways that we’ve seen and do see like you mentioned hollywood

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is a great example of like you have very specific skill sets that organize around you know you’re in

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um you know the being a cinematographer is a sort of you’re welcomed into a very

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clear barrier around the skill set um and if is is a skill set the right

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organizing force or have you sort of come to think is there another organizing principle that would be

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useful within a broader definition whether it’s artists or creative sector

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or creative industries that’s a good question and i don’t know that i know an answer to that the skill set thing is

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it’s incredibly hard to to clarify and to specify and and to use fairly i think

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and that’s that’s a real issue um [Music] there’s a whole

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minefield of of issues there that that i think to a certain extent we probably

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hand waved over a little bit with the with the project we did um we were just uh you know inviting people

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to be artists and i think that that’s something good and i think that that’s something that we should probably seize upon in a way

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when we’re talking about this stuff you know i don’t have any formal qualifications in any of the any of my

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practices at all you know i haven’t been i haven’t done a day’s worth of of studying how to write formally since

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i was 17. okay and i’m 47 now right okay so it’s 30 years since

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i had any kind of education or qualifications whereas i know other writers

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you know who have mfas have been through mfa programs i know journalists who’ve been to journalism school which is why

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i’m always a little uh uncomfortable calling myself a journalist i kind of fell into it but

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that’s very typical now a lot of people fall into journalism a lot of people fall into art

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exactly the same way and you know some of the best are i see and i want to say now but that’s not

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even true somebody i hold dearest and have done all my life was made by people who have

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zero education in anything sometimes right let alone art you know especially when it comes to music

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uh some of the best books i’ve read were written by people who who have no formal qualifications

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and you know we’re looking at a world now where some of the best art i see on a daily basis comes out platforms like tick tock

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you know i think genuinely amazing work being done on platforms like tik tok and youtube and places

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which is a whole you know whole other side of the discussion about what these platforms represent and how they exploit our labor

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both as both as artists and audiences yeah but it’s still you can’t deny that that that

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good art is being made on these platforms right so by people with with apparently no

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qualifications often so i i i’m very i’m very cautious about making it too

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skills-based that qualification to be to be part of a union and that in that way do you think that that’s sort of part of

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the one of the driving forces behind what that exploration that you guys are doing

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trying to speculate on what those questions would be if we if we remove skill set

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as an organizing factor what else will we you know and how do you how do you what

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kinds of questions do you did you did you come up with or did came to mind that was very much we came up with

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questions rather than solutions i think that was very much the point of the project really um that kind of ideas if

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people is identifying as an artist enough and i think i think it has to be right i think

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i think getting bogged down in any discussion where you’re trying to say the opposite to that

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it’s isn’t interesting philosophical discussion that makes very little sense in in the 21st century and secondly it’s not for

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union to do because the union has more important to be doing you know and and

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and i think that was kind of we came up with a bunch of speculative questions that we kind of put together in a

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manifesto my my head’s kind of blank to them now but they’re on the website and and

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but they were very much we’re very much asking participants or audiences or whoever’s looking at this

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stuff to kind of invite them into forming the union to so

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that it fits that which i think is an important thing for a union to do that

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that it melds itself to its members rather than any other way whilst at the same time having certain

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standards uh especially around diversity and how people are treated and codes of conduct but also around

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principles around labor having set minimums i think is what what union needs to do about no you will not we

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will not allow you to work for that this amount yeah you know the the fight for the union should be

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for all those members that want that to be a living wage that the ultimately to fight whether it’s realistic or not is

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that we that we get our members a living wage right that’s how i saw any representative talking very personally

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at this point but when we threw it out there you know we threw it out there as a way that hopefully people can come to

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this manifesto question list that we’ve written it’s a weird manifesto and every point

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is is a question but yeah maybe that’s the way maybe that’s the future manifesto i think that

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there’s a lot to be said for a 21st century manifesto that is constructed of questions for sure yeah yeah i think i

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mean it it there’s an interesting uh question around

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like what is the organized aspect of the union in relation to this kind of

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this amorphous thing that is totally disorganized uh of of of sort of the big

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tent version of art which we we welcome everyone uh i think you know you spoke a bit about the

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the question of uh you know uh even fee like a base minimum fees but then

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even then what are we what is the work that we are defining there yeah so

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that’s two questions but the one i think i’d like to go to first is the idea of

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what needs to be organized like what is the organized aspect there is

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the the sort of defense of wage um but what else how other what other kinds of

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mechanisms do you see in there what union’s about to me are solidarity and creating a presence that is greater than

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one person right you know so the idea that somebody has your back

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i think we were trying to argue for that and the idea that you know if someone

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someone messes with you they’re messing with more than one person that’s what a union’s about really in in an old school

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kind of labor sense and i think we kind of wanted to create that at least i did i kind of viewed it

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that that was what we should be aiming to do for artists so do you know if i see an artist

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being screwed over on the internet if the work’s been stolen if they’ve been underpaid if i find out about writers being underpaid which i do a lot you

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know i i personally become really irate and angry about it and i like the idea of there being potentially like

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potentially even tens of thousand people showing that anger at that moment and how powerful that can be

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what’s remarkable in in [Music] in some of the or many of the projects

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um which we set out to you know uh challenge

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you know creatives uh and you know all of all kinds to come together to

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think about these relationship between technology and prosperity and creativity and how in in a professional world

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um and the even before the pandemic the the i wouldn’t say a resistance towards

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thinking of technology but there was a uh a zig you know around our zag

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in relation to the question of technology and and what it was towards was this idea of collective care

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and i i wonder if you think some of that is is it

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um a reaction to um just the the way technology is being used or is

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there something inherent in technology which requires us um especially those steeped in in the in

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the practice of creating with it of of needing something else to offset it there’s something in heaven in

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in technology i do think to a certain extent there’s certainly something inherent in capitalism and you can’t separate the two

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right i think that’s really the crux i mean it’s the crux of my my kind of personal worldview it’s that you can’t separate technology from capitalism i’d

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like to be able to yeah but the technology we use and we we build and and and we’ve

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we’ve entrapped ourselves in from whatever between or we’ve committed to in certain ways is is fundamentally just

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an extension of of capital it’s that that’s what it exists to do um like one of the things that i’m very

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obsessed with at the moment especially around this issue is this solidarity in

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withholding labor to a certain extent um i’m i’m kind of trying to find a smart

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way of describing it at the moment and the best i’ve come up with is this kind of idea of commitment creep so this idea

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like feature creep which you talk about with software where you know something like i don’t know photoshop there’s so many

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features added to it constantly or your phone has so many features added to it constantly do it becomes unusable or

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bogged down or slow and work i feel like that this is happening to artists and while we are being asked to commit to

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different types of work in order to to to continue to be working eyes use an

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example um i mean social media is like the obvious example if you’re an artist

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you’ve got to be on social media in order to promote your work okay but that’s fair enough it’s there’s a lot

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that it becomes a lot of labor but i understand that it’s a good way of reaching out to people i’m certainly my

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career is dependent on me being on twitter all the time which is you know it’s just like awful but i have to do it yeah

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there’s a cycle like a it’s a real psychological cost oh it’s not only the labor cost but the fact

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that you are asked to be a part you are in order to

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to to make an artistic uh career it is impossible it’s impossible to not to not

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to not be on that right and as a journalist even more so um

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i get most of my work and get most of my contacts as a freelance advice social media people come to my work for social media so it’s impossible for me to

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abandon that right um i joke with my other friends especially journalist friends we joke about hanging we don’t want to be famous

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just want to be successful enough that we can quit twitter and it’s a very real feeling it’s a joke but it’s a very real

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feeling but it’s it’s more it becomes more than that because it’s cranked up constantly right so you know as a

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novelist who’s a relatively newly published novelist you know i was expecting to be told i

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had to have a social media account and no one did tell me that so i was already very active in social media at that

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point um but then you’re competing with everybody else on social media for attention it’s

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an attention economy and you’re constantly in competition with every other artist so you’ve instantly been

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put into a competitive situation where at a time where i’m arguing for solidarity right yeah but then there’s

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this like what this commitment creep where it’s like okay so you’re on twitter like are you on instagram okay

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have you on facebook what about having a youtube channel what about doing a podcast

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this was the thing like this year that was going around in writers communities or especially novelist communities was

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um you should start a podcast and i look at like you know i’m writing the science fiction area a bit and the

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most successful science fiction writers all have podcasts where they don’t really talk about their own work but they’re talking about other people’s

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work usually they’re talking about work made by disney they’re talking about work made by large corporations a lot of the time so they’re doing this

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incredibly time in sense time intensive labor of running a podcast in

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order to promote their own work when they actually tend to be promoting it feels like a lot of corporate work

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and it’s just this signal to noise ratio it you might be an author that’s got a

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really interesting angle in your book and a podcast makes perfect sense for it especially non-fiction books still make perfect sense well you might have this

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really amazing spin on telling your narrative um

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that you can use the podcast folds into this really clever and amazing ways of doing this and i’ve encountered like a lot of

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people doing incredible work for this but it becomes this competition comes

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this composition mix with this noise to signal ratio problem where i’ve got to have a podcast because

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you’ve got have a podcast and then then we both have a podcast and then everybody else has got a podcast and

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everyone’s an artist and it’s just like i can’t listen to a podcast

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no more than i can watch all the youtube videos will read all the tweets but and plus it’s it’s not just tweeting having

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a podcast it’s like a full-time job i know people who podcast for a living and

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and in order to do it well they’re spending like 12 hours to 20 hours a week just editing

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audio yeah i don’t do that to go back to this question of the of the technology

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and the um uh and is there something inherent in it

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and i wonder in in the work that um your group sort of talked over and and

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the way um that you thought about this issue is it is it possible

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to project a platform or to imagine a platform that that that does something different

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than what these existing platforms are or is it is there something inherent in in platform capitalism that there’s

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something inherent that makes it impossible i think there’s something inherent in platform capitalism yeah um

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the idea of a union in this context is it we first take the stance that that it

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is impossible to develop a care oriented platform or a collective but and so we

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must repurpose the tools knowing that they are tools that are inherently flawed but repurpose

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them for some kind of collective action there’s a couple of things that i mean the part the collective action i think is refusing to do that labor i think i

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would really i was talking about this and just to some friends and talk about the awful podcast thing

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and [Music] i was slightly dismayed to see i won’t mention any names and an author who

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whose work i really really like respect had a new novel and launched a podcast to promote the novel and i was like

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okay if you’re doing it now i feel like i need to do it right and and i don’t want that feeling i don’t want anybody

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to feel that and i kind of like the idea of there being a work solidarity movement of authors that say no we are

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authors we sit in a room and we write once every two years we might come out

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and do a few talks here and there or we might be on a panel or we might tweet and we might do things but that is primarily what we do we’re authors we’re

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not stand-up comics we’re not we’re not radio djs we’re not if you want to do these

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things then that’s possible but i think there’s kind of like a a kind of almost a refusal to do this but across the

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board right you know the idea that like including people whose profiles are very high just

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saying like you know you don’t have to do this as enough you don’t have to

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take on considerable labor outside the lab because it’s bad for you it’s bad for your practice right it’s not just

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bad for you economically that you’re not getting paid to do this labor and your time has been spent on unpaid labor

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which is primarily should be the primary concern of any union right to me but it’s also that it’s about your

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practice yeah if you’re spending like 10 to 12 hours a week organizing editing recording a podcast

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it’s 10 to 12 hours a week you’ve lost on your practice yeah and that’s what we should always be fighting for is the

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ability to spend as much time as on our practice right so i kind of like the idea of of the union representing a

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stand against that which was kind of exaggerated into the general strike ideas that we had

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um which was also about fighting against platform capitalism about giving this unpaid labor which is being turned

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directly into capital by these platforms right you know we create art we create we put our own

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emotions we get our own feelings anything we produce online it basically

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becomes just a content between advertising there’s a whole other thing there with that that economy is on the brink of

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collapse it’s fairly clear now looking at you know like tim huang’s work and the stuff he’s done around the attention

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economy and ad tech that you know probably in the next it feels very imminent and probably possibly the

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next 12 months we’re gonna see another collapse of the online advertising market exactly not exactly but very

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similar to how we did in the late 80s early 2000s right and and the massive

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impact that that had on on on online industries but just that

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you know we can’t it it’s i guess what i’m saying it’s not a

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it’s not a firm enough infrastructure to provide us an income advertising and it’s not getting to us anyway right as

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artists it’s getting absorbed by other people it’s getting absorbed by uh always getting a small amount of it is

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going to a very very small percentage of people at the top this kind of influences the economy

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the people that have been able to leverage these platforms in order to make money and [Music]

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i don’t want to go around saying people this isn’t art what they’re doing but a lot of what they’re doing the people i don’t see doing the most

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interesting are aren’t those people right they’ve left because you can’t do the most interesting art whilst doing

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whilst being restricted by what makes you popular right um

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which isn’t that you know obviously a centuries-old concern but

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whenever i talk about these things whether it’s art related or infrastructure related that everybody’s thought but that’s not new it’s always

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been like that it’s true um but it wasn’t always like that on a global scale and it didn’t always happen

23:35

in nanoseconds right that’s the difference yeah and i think i mean it it was uh the idea of thinking it was always

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like that there are themes that are perhaps you know struggles that

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have been going on sometimes that could be depressing to think that this rule hasn’t really uh you know resolved

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itself in any way but also that it hasn’t been like that everywhere simultaneously exactly right that that’s

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like it has been you know there’s a thread that there’s a sense of scale to it which is really

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hard to imagine yeah and b kind of realize how where it places us yeah and

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it makes it incredibly hard for artists to get attention if that’s what you’re looking for which has artists we unfortunately usually are right

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the problem that comes out of this is uh also as artists i don’t want to be denying anybody the use of these

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platforms yeah so that’s that’s where the the the conflict is i don’t want to say

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if you’ve got a fantastic idea that works best on youtube or as a podcast and as an artist you want to do that and

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by all means do that yeah and there’s a long history of artists and creatives intervening in

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dominant modes of communication participating creating television exactly music that is exactly but i

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think like in thinking about collective action um i wonder and you know when i was uh

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looking at the the day of action that you um that that you it was part of the proposal

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uh or the speculation and i wondered if you if you’d speculated on other ways of

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of seeing that um collective action happen i mean and as as we were talking now i i

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started to think about one of the issues is time right like a singular day of action

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as shortened as the time scale of life is synchronous time is actually not

25:29

something we experience but it’s this what if it was more um uh like

25:35

spores of growing and kind of like a day of action that’s really not a day of action but is it like is like a

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deflection or a constantly growing and expanding kind of yeah that makes the most sense i think

25:48

we went with the dive action because they’re headline grabbing right and yeah you kind of have to pull those stunts i

25:53

think um initially and how

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effective that would be which would be the only the only way to find out is to try it to certainly yeah you know what

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if we could organize the day when nobody posted new content to youtube or to tick-tock or anything it’s almost

26:11

impossible to do probably um i just wrote an article for 1-0 about complexity and you start looking at the

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i can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head but literally you know it’s years worth of video uploaded to youtube

26:25

every hour right yeah um so being able to to to organize on that scale maybe it’s

26:30

unrealistic yeah but if you you only have to get a certain number of high profile artists or people with large

26:37

followings in for it to become a headline grabber like you know you know if

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if you can i don’t know if you can get kim kardashian to not to not to not tweet to not post to instagram for a date

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um suddenly someone takes notice right um but that’s also not what we’re aiming to

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do we’re not trying to make it about personalities so it’s it’s a hard one it’s a tricky one to pull off i think as a stunt i think as a

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as a symbolic gestures are polemic i think it’s incredibly it can be incredibly

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powerful i know that you guys played with this notion of speculation and uh

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and sort of is it more powerful or or is it as powerful an idea in in the speculation

27:20

like is there a way to keep elaborating on that or is it to try to keep making it happen

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um so that it feels real i think what ifs are always powerful i wouldn’t be in the

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business i mean if they weren’t made you know what i mean and i don’t think any artists would really i mean which

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at some level all are is a what-if question right at some level um

27:44

i it has to break out of that at some point to be effective yeah uh

27:51

you know it’s weird it’s hard to i wrote a book about destroying the internet and and then

27:56

spent last few months watching people like actually trying to destroy the internet in certain parts of the world which was

28:03

both like exciting and then also terrifying because they were doing it for the wrong

28:08

reasons you know i mean like i have very real issues with you know 5g technology

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and what it signifies as it’s run by private corporations um

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but that doesn’t mean i want people setting fire to maybe i do want people separate to towers but not because they think it

28:27

spreads covered because they can see that it’s a it’s a

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it’s a privatization of the radio spectrum in certain ways right you know what i mean so i think what

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if i expand my union thing out to logical conclusion what i’m really asking arguing for is some sort of nationalization of a lot of a lot of

28:47

infrastructure that artists you know i wouldn’t have a problem with us at all being on youtube as much or or

28:54

twitter as much of those if those if those infrastructures and they are

28:59

infrastructure right and this is the i it’s very cool to my

29:04

personal work is is to arguing to have these platforms identified as essential infrastructure

29:11

because they’ve become essential infrastructure for so many people um whether it’s a communication platform

29:18

or or or an infrastructure for artists to work on um

29:24

to argue for these places being infrastructure and then treating them as as you would want to see infrastructure

29:29

treated now in neoliberal capitalism that means a lot of the time just open up to the free market anyway right

29:35

because that’s that’s how you know communication infrastructure and transport infrastructure is handled

29:40

except that in those cases i mean even if it is moving the dial somewhat the

29:46

the notion of regulation is is is not thrown out the window no exactly

29:52

like what are you talking about why would we regulate the construction of roads exactly you know you might privatize buses but you don’t deregulate

29:59

them in the same way that anybody can just have a bus and drive around which is kind of a part apparently what

30:06

silicon valley want to be able to do right which is what uber is and when lyft are they’re like the the the

30:11

complete deregulation of of of transport infrastructure and i’m really arguing for a movement away from

30:18

that especially for artists i would love to see you know

30:23

my wife who’s an academic um and and thinks about privacy issues a lot uh and

30:29

her research is around privacy and education and surveillance and education specifically um

30:35

she has this wonderful idea she talks about a lot about taking twitter breaking up and giving it

30:40

to libraries to run well if your local twitter was a local thing

30:46

and and it was run by a library you know an organization like your library in your

30:51

neighborhood so it would be like a kind of mesh network system i imagine when it was connected

30:56

to every other twitter in the world but you know like breaking it down into these smaller parts so that it’s not

31:02

centralized you know it’s not jack dorsey sitting in silicon valley on his shamanic retreat or whatever he’s doing

31:08

you know like you know dictating what’s become now the most important news and political

31:14

communication network infrastructure yeah in globally yeah you know and there gets to be like isn’t mastodon a bit is

31:22

it mastodon’s built similar around those lines yeah i’ve not yeah and this is a bit this is what’s like for me

31:28

personally i struggle with i have a master done account i’ve never used it because i don’t have the emotional

31:33

energy to start working out another platform right because i’m burnt out on all the platforms i’m on now i just i

31:40

just got a tick tock account like weeks ago because i’m writing a book about tick tock right and and i looked at it and used it

31:47

and was aware of it but i was kind of had put off actually getting involved in it just because i don’t have

31:53

the emotional reserves to to invest in another and some of that’s my age i get that

32:00

right i’m a bit old now i’m like i don’t need to be doing this stuff and you know 10 years ago you know i was the guy that signed up to

32:06

twitter within a month of it starting yeah yeah and every other platform facebook as soon as it was open to the

32:12

public i was on there because it looked interesting now there’s a burnout i mean but there are so many there’s so many right and you’re

32:19

told that this is the new one and as artists you’re told as this that this is the new one are you a visual artist well

32:25

why aren’t you on instagram yeah i have photography friends you know like gallery photography friends

32:32

photographer friends um and news photographer friends who

32:37

they won’t go on instagram and they fight really hard and people say to them but where

32:51

of this the state and government and because i think it’s something interesting that comes up

32:56

around what a lot of the organization and the idea of organized labor within this

33:03

creative context is in some ways pushing for like where where does it make perhaps more sense

33:10

for the state to be involved in these things and where does it make more sense like is it

33:16

is this impetus towards um and the desire towards organized labor

33:22

maybe come from the fact that we have both a weakened state and an overpowerful corporate structure um yeah

33:28

very much so do we and we need a strong i mean we need a stronger state uh as well or is it and i wonder if you think

33:36

if you guys thought about the different roles there yeah a little bit i think i think one of

33:41

my own personal bug bears is we talk about community a lot and we don’t talk about the state and to me

33:48

i you know i like to believe that the two are the same thing right that community seems like a nebulous term a

33:54

lot of times and it’s used in ways that used by corporations a lot like disney used the term community

34:01

constantly right what they mean is customers yeah and what they mean is audience

34:07

and the and consumers is what they mean but these you community as a film product or the star wars community the

34:13

marvel community expects that you know we are addressing ingesting needs of consumers and you’re selling products to

34:19

consumers um but i like the idea of the state being a community i think the two can interact

34:26

and [Music] and be the same thing at times like you know

34:33

we’ve also neoliberalism has demonized the state into being this very much top-down thing

34:39

the same way corporations are a top-down thing and that’s not the state to me the state is us right if something is owned

34:45

by the state it means it’s owned by us you know i got very upset today i saw a story on the bbc about back in the uk

34:53

um one in four people questioned during the pandemic thought that too many people were

34:58

getting welfare payments because they were at work and they interviewed a bunch of of

35:04

young women it turned out who had claimed unemployment benefit for the first time during the pandemic and they were ashamed of doing it

35:11

and they put off doing it to the last minute until they were really desperate for money in order to do it that is your

35:16

money yeah it’s money that you’ve paid in you know they’re getting like 400 quid a

35:22

month i think these people were paying more than that in taxes a month i’m sure they were national insurance payments

35:28

and such it’s your money it’s there for you yeah it’s a signed for you to use in these

35:34

situations we’ve broken that relationship so that the state is enough is is part of the other or part of the

35:40

domination of us rather than it being the community that we’re in it’s like you said this caring

35:46

community you know i want a state that’s built around care and and responsibility for

35:51

each other yeah and it’s these are i know i mean this was the the classic of the 80s late 80s and 90s of like

35:59

the nanny state that the nanny is sort of like

36:04

that someone who was taking care of you was a bad thing yeah exactly what’s wrong with being taken care of especially if it’s a communal taking

36:11

care of you yeah i’m sound like an old lefty hippie i know that but we don’t have enough hair for that

36:17

yeah we’ve got like red coat’s not here but i i i it’s interesting to think like

36:22

what what could you imagine the role like to think of the union uh as a as a

36:30

way towards um pushing and and getting the public to

36:35

understand um not just the physical infrastructure of the of the of the network and

36:42

technology in general but the actual sort of platforms as well as public infrastructure as there being

36:49

public value and much of it is too right then you think of like you know i mean america has

36:55

the the the silicon valley myth is is built on a falsehood that there is like

37:00

how much uh national defense money was spent on on foundational

37:06

technologies that things are then built on top of exactly so i wonder how a union could play and i don’t know that

37:13

this has come up in your conversations but it does through this conversation thinking how could a union play a role

37:19

in transforming the perception of this infrastructure as public public space yeah it’s

37:26

it would certainly be a campaign i’d like to see this kind of union very very invested in um and we’re artists right so it’s an

37:33

artist’s union we should be using art to make these points i’m hoping that that’s kind of why doing my art to a certain

37:38

extent is to argue for these points and then it’s like you know i certainly interact and work with other artists

37:45

kind of arguing those points um i think really sort of solidarity movements like for like like the kind of

37:52

general content strike thing that we were kind of talking about it would be kind of speculative strike

37:57

that we based the project around i think we’ll hopefully would highlight this you know they would highlight at least that the community’s creating the content

38:03

right the content is you can’t log on to youtube or spotify even right every day and and

38:10

there’s magically music for you to listen to on spotify someone made that music and it’s important i think to

38:15

realize that’s coming from the community as much as it’s coming from yeah and that there is a collectivism needed to i

38:21

think that’s the relation that the act of the union to think um collectively like there isn’t anyone

38:29

we can try to make better you know decisions to not be on social media because it’s for our own mental health

38:34

but it’s not going to transform the platforms exactly we need collective action either through the state or some

38:40

other mechanism that’s going to going to take care to try and make it make it so my kind of big picture is break up these

38:47

corporations nationalize them right which i know is incredibly like probably unrealistic and in many ways unpopular

38:54

thing to do um the alternatives are we build our own platforms but then that becomes a

39:00

dramatic concern and it’s not necessarily something that artists should be doing

39:05

maybe they should they should certainly be involved in in the design maybe of of kind of platforms

39:11

um but it does extend the question of the of the uh of the sort of internalization

39:18

of the silicon valley sort of like well you should build your own yeah exactly that’s what the answer is exactly

39:24

exactly which is what people say to me constantly well what have you built you know and and

39:30

it’s hugely frustrating um it’s not the point you know it’s not

39:35

the answer um but at the same time we are building these platforms these platforms don’t exist without our labor

39:41

both both as audiences and content producers i think that’s something that uh that needs to be rammed home to people

39:49

as much as possible and explained and illustrate to people i was always surprised

39:54

um a few years ago when i was living in new york a friend of mine invited me to come and talk to her class we were masters

40:02

students design master students um at a big it was that prat it’s a big

40:07

design school in in new york in manhattan um would you come and talk to them about

40:13

digital labor and these kids were like in the early 20s early to mid 20s and i was

40:18

like really they’re like can i really you want me to stand up in front of 20

40:23

20 year olds and tell them about digital labor and they’re going to look at me and they’re going to eyeball and go yeah we know this granddad whatever

40:30

we we’re aloof and we and i’ve just and i was absolutely shocked i went into that class

40:36

none of them were aware of these concepts at all i i started explaining to me you know when you realize if you’re watching a

40:42

youtube video and you click like you’ve done you’ve you you are working for google

40:47

you’ve created value for google your labor has created directly value for google because you’re

40:53

teaching their algorithms on what popular content is and you’re teaching the ad tech networks what you like

41:00

and then you you you directly create and i stood there and

41:06

slapped jaws and wide eyes these kids hadn’t really considered this before and that suddenly

41:11

became a lot of motivation stuff that ended up me talking about in dal because it was very much

41:18

i thought people knew this i thought that i thought that more people knew understood this than than

41:24

apparently do right yeah and it’s very um

41:29

it was very it was it was a real eye-opener at that moment for me and i think we nearly constantly kind of

41:34

pushing that that education is to people that awareness of how these structures

41:41

really work and the labor you do just as an audience you don’t have to be creating content

41:46

to be performing labor on these yeah on these sites right as soon as you use them as soon as you watch a video

41:54

yeah your the value of what you’re watching has been directly turned into something that’s used to create capital

42:00

well that idea to a privacy that that still remains within the frame of this

42:06

you know um uh it’s just it’s not framed in the way that i don’t it’s not a question of like

42:13

being surveillance it’s a question of feeling like it is private yeah right like it is it is in

42:20

the realm of that this is not i don’t need to leave a digital trail wherever i go uh i would be okay with that yeah

42:28

yeah um i did uh going back to this question of you know we were talking about artists uh and um

42:35

uh and change and like us trying to imagine you know uh new ways of being

42:41

and i think so like as we were talking about the organized aspects um

42:46

i wonder if you could talk a bit about um you know you straddle these worlds of fiction and journalism all the time and

42:53

i wonder if you could talk a bit about sort of speculative the speculative work that

42:59

you’ve done and how how um not only has it sort of helped in

43:04

this case of thinking through organized labor in relation to the creative world but but generally how how does that

43:11

speculative design or speculative fiction that you that you engage in a lot of ways um engage these real life issues like

43:18

what what’s the role of that it’s weird i’ve fallen into a place where the two are kind of inseparable to

43:23

me which is a really like this in the current climate of how the media is viewed by a lot of political actors

43:30

is a kind of weirdly strange thing to to admit to to doing that people don’t want to see

43:36

lines blurred between like the real and the fake or whatever um and it’s strange i does

43:43

i don’t write i don’t think there’s any issues that i write purely

43:50

fiction or non-fiction about i’m writing about both all the time and that’s not that’s i’m realizing now after doing it

43:57

for five years that that’s my practice my practice is doing both right so you know i’ve got for example i’ve

44:03

just got like just a couple of weeks ago start a new column for one zero

44:10

um which is part medium so another one of these big platforms right but they’re paying me

44:15

like almost a living wage to write this column for them which is about complexity issues from a lot of stuff

44:21

we’re talking about now and platforms and about how complexity um the complexity of networks and the

44:26

economy and the internet has a direct impact on democracy because we don’t

44:31

understand it but that’s what my novel was about was also about that um and i’ve written short fiction that came out

44:38

of that and that in turn a lot of that came out of reporting i did five years ago when i went to china and looked at

44:44

supply chains so these two these things are just constantly feeding into each other all the time

44:50

excuse me and it’s impossible for me to separate them apart from when i’m sitting down to actually do the work

44:57

to write them down you know i’m writing a novel at the moment which is about social media again

45:02

and the culture to certain extent which again is based on off of an article which actually hasn’t

45:08

been published yet but i got a lot of you know i wrote an article about funko pops you know those stupid little

45:15

toys with the big heads i wrote an article about that for advice um just before the pandemic started um

45:22

and it ended up being about fan culture in those things and how people relate to physical items and it’s inspired

45:29

straight out of that i’ve started writing a novel based on this this concept right this idea of how fan

45:34

cultures and how they interact with infrastructures and stuff um [Music]

45:41

in some ways it’s it’s easy and it’s lazy for me because i have to do twice as much research i’m always constantly

45:46

working on the same topics but it’s also an emotional thing for me i like that like that

45:51

for example like the stuff i wrote about going to china and looking at supply chains spending time containerships

45:56

all that stuff was published by the bbc and i loved publishing it through the bbc there’s a lot of restrictions

46:02

um [Music] especially to length i wasn’t allowed to write more than two thousand words on

46:08

any of the in the articles which i felt like it needed a lot more and but it didn’t matter because i was

46:14

getting out such a large audience and that was really important to me with those topics you’re talking about where

46:19

you know your everyday plastic items from china how they get you and the labor and the infrastructure and the

46:24

complexity and the algorithms and everything that’s involved in getting you know this cup to you from china right um it is

46:32

uh something that i feel is such an important fundamental thing to

46:37

all of us that it i need to get out to a wider audience as possible you know i could have written that article for did

46:43

for for maybe atlantic or written a much longer piece for

46:48

a you know a more politically interested publication but it wouldn’t

46:55

go out to you since i got it out to for i think something like half a million people read those stories or something

47:01

ridiculous over in the last five years that they’ve been upgraded so you know i getting that out to that number of

47:06

people is incredibly important to me but at the same time the restrictions that come with that are very emotional for me

47:12

as well so you know i sat there wrote an article about you know visiting christmas christmas decorations factory

47:18

and you were in china um and uh the bbc uh they accommodating me

47:24

and allow me to describe what the environment was there but i came away if it was haunted by what i’d seen right in

47:31

all the factories i visited in china um so i ended up writing fiction about that

47:37

because that was the way that i could get that other stuff out and i wrote a very

47:42

very initially a very experimental short story which is up on medium called special economic language it’s about

47:47

it’s literally the same paragraph repeated like 20 times and it was the i stood for half an hour in a

47:55

electronics components factory in shenzhen and watched this one guy testing

48:00

um little gps chips and he literally just had to plug them into a thing and if the light went green

48:06

they were fine if they weren’t red if the light went green they went in one box if the light went red they went in

48:12

another box and he did that for the half hour that i stood watching him

48:18

and he’d done that for 12 hours that day i was told and he lived in a dormitory which was next door

48:23

to the thing when we went to the dorm shoes there were these horrible little crappy rooms with four kids on bunk beds

48:29

playing world of warcraft and laptops that was that was their existence right and i wanted to kind of

48:34

you know the story is just the same paragraph repeated but sometimes the light’s red and sometimes it’s green and then there’s a break where they go and

48:41

have lunch we’ll go and play games and then they come back and they do it again and these kids were like you know 17

48:47

16 17 years old um and i wanted the story to be really challenging so like if you can’t get

48:53

through reading this you can’t get through doing this kid’s job right you know it’s that is that mundane and that that that that repetitive

49:00

and that that was something that i couldn’t get into the bbc articles i couldn’t get that emotional

49:07

angle into it so that’s where speculation works for me that’s why it’s really important to me

49:13

is to be able to envision it’s both emotionally present stuff

49:20

and envision stuff maybe i’ll get to a point in my career when i’m starting to be more positive

49:26

about things and i can start positioning like alternative futures which are good

49:31

but i tend to my work tends to skew the other way where i’m trying to look at how bad things are in order to yeah well i mean

49:38

i think that there was a a part of that the question that i guess i was i was inkling towards the the positive only

49:45

because we were talking about organized labor although much of that even if it’s in uh

49:52

a mode towards a better way of being is often about resistance

49:58

to trying to create a protestants yeah in which we will not put it like someone whose work gets called dystopian

50:04

a lot and i’m not happy i’m not particularly i don’t think the term dystopia is particularly what i saw in

50:09

china was dystopian to me yeah but that’s not a dystopia that’s people’s real existence yeah yeah so to belittle

50:15

it by calling it like a science fiction scopio is it’s like it’s offensive on some level to me

50:21

um and these things are dystopian if they’re happening down the road from you but they’re not if they’re on another

50:27

continent and you don’t need to see them but you get the end product of it neatly delivered to you well that’s i think i think that’s a really interesting aspect

50:34

of what you were saying that this what the speculation or what the

50:39

allows and and and uh that the news forum is about a kind of

50:45

reductive circulable form of information yeah um but that you know

50:52

the sort of entangled emotional complexity of contemporary life

50:58

needs other forms it needs something else yeah and i said well that’s i mean we’re artists right that’s what we do

51:04

i think me personally as an artist that’s my practice yeah and i think it is for most artists whose work i enjoy and and

51:10

relate to even if it’s on the even if it’s not always the most obvious thing they’re

51:16

doing they’re they’re trying to tackle that that that sense of of complexity and an

51:21

emotional kind of kind of confusion that comes with a lot of of modern life

51:27

and it’s like it’s it’s too easy as well to um you know say well you know people say to

51:34

me or i see people saying you know dystopias aren’t helpful or being negative isn’t it helpful or not you need to be

51:40

create positive alternatives and people have been doing that for decades without and it is useful and it’s part we need

51:46

both of those things right but you know i look at the number of silicon valley ceos that cite star trek as as a

51:53

as a positive future and they’re in no way walking working towards that kind of future right

52:00

this is a future where money is illegal people missed in the federation money is

52:05

actually illegal right it’s illegal on earth to have money it’s been banned it’s been outlawed

52:10

the capital has been outlawed in star trek but the world’s greatest capitalists including jeff bezos will

52:16

tell you endlessly about how this is the future that he’s trying to build and he’s not and in order for us to

52:22

understand in order for us to build positive futures we need to understand what’s negative about the about the present in

52:28

order to directly like you know fix that to stop it to change it right

52:35

and yeah it’s a tricky one it’s a tricky one

52:40

it upsets people when i talk like this a lot of the time but is that an inherent is that then like uh

52:46

kind of the uh i would call it punchline but maybe one of the most telling aspects of some of the

52:52

speculative component of a day of action is that you you’ve already envisioned its inevitable failure yes and then that

52:59

is that becomes then we will work at this even though it will fail and that that is part of that failure is drawing

53:06

out the complexity as to why why so in the in the day of action thing i

53:12

wrote a fake news article guardian news article i don’t know if it’s if you’ve seen it um

53:18

it’s part of the project the idea being that when when when the speculative project started there’s already been one

53:24

day of action and we’re organizing for a second day of action the difference being that after the first day of action

53:31

summer some of the platforms facebook banned uh the union because what they were doing

53:37

was against the terms of services and it was actively actively dissuading people from using

53:43

facebook as against facebook’s terms of services right actively disrupting facebook they’d you know

53:49

facebook speculatively speaking had found a way of of making these platforms illegal and that then also i think been

53:55

overturned later but it was enough to kind of it was interesting because it was enough enough i felt in a way to

54:01

make make the union more militant in a way you need to have something that everybody sort of it

54:08

comes against to to fight against it when you’re when you’re organizing politically like this and

54:13

um [Music] as much of the it was a perfect example for me and

54:19

as as a writer that you know you organize people against the platform that platform fights back it should make

54:24

that organization stronger it should make it easier for you to recruit people hey look see what’s happening

54:31

ironically the right is very good at doing this right we’ve seen this during the pandemic we saw it during the trump

54:36

and we saw during brexit we saw how how the right has used um

54:41

them being banned from social media for very valid reasons as an argument to say that these platforms are anti-democratic

54:48

which they are in other ways so everything’s complicated and and and difficult to

54:55

outline in a lot of ways but you know i kind of like the idea yeah of it failing but you take failures as a political as

55:02

political organizers as as activists uh

55:07

anyone who’s who’s really in a fight you have to take these failures

55:12

as expected and as rallying cries right and there’s

55:17

ways of of doubling down on you your efforts in a lot of ways or readdressing

55:22

your tactics or wherever they are i’m saying this like i’m an organizer i’m speaking here i’m speaking very

55:29

speculative because the last thing i am in the world and i put my hand on the heart and say the last thing i am is a

55:34

political organizer right i don’t pretend to be yeah i know people that do that and these people are the most incredible

55:40

people in the world yeah and people who go away and and and spend two decades

55:47

you know dedicate two decades three decades of their lives to a cause that’s how the civil rights movement happened

55:53

in the in the us it was people dedicating decades to it white people as well as black people

55:59

dedicating their lives to to giving up parts of the life for a cause

56:04

it’s very different from you know clicking like on a tweet or retweeting all the sort of stuff that i do right

56:09

you know just like you know tweeting links to new stories and saying this is terrible look at this and then moving on

56:14

to the next thing that’s not that’s not real organization and when you guys asked me for a reference for the

56:21

the hollow mag thing i got astra taylor article which called against activism

56:26

where she’s arguing for the difference between activism and organizing and we seem to be very

56:31

occupied with activism and not organizing at the moment and and i think that’s kind of i wanted to kind of scratch that

56:38

a little bit with with the dl with the union project it’s very easy

56:44

to on one level to say hey don’t upload anything to youtube for a day or don’t don’t do any instagram stories for a day

56:51

or don’t watch anything on facebook and click on any ads for a day it’s very easy to do that

56:56

it becomes gimmicky and people can move on for it and we need to be in for a like that project would only work if it was

57:02

there for a longer run and people dug in and people dedicated a certain part of their lives instead doing that podcast

57:08

on the off chance that 12 people might listen to it and buy your book maybe take that time and put it into

57:15

to doing some kind of collective action like i say it’s very easy for me to say this when i’m not actually physically

57:21

doing it no but it’s interesting that it i mean part of the part of the essential

57:28

work that we wanted to do in the digital economies lab was um

57:34

to to to think around what needs to what kind of infrastructure is missing and

57:40

what and what what can artists play in in imagining at

57:45

least the early stages of it we’re not there’s no we shouldn’t have a pretense that we

57:50

have the resources to really build the infrastructure in our tiny organization with our tiny ragtag group of

57:57

of critical thinkers but but we can’t imagine what infrastructure is missing and begin to sort of push

58:04

towards that and i think that’s a really interesting point about this this nature of the need

58:10

for organization in some form and it if it doesn’t look like what it’s what has come before

58:16

because there are certainly really you know valuable arts organizations that

58:22

are meta organizations serving other arts organizations but there’s something

58:27

still missing yeah and whether that’s it being about

58:32

21st century technology or the 21st century condition of globalization fully

58:38

realized like what you know it’s uh it’s tough to say but i think

58:43

that that’s a really important and interesting point going forward well i think this has been a fascinating

58:51

and i hope rich conversation thanks very much um for uh for spending

58:56

the time with us in real space in real space space in the tv space of the first

59:02

face-to-face meeting i’ve had in a few months and you managed to do it on the day it was minus 20 degrees

59:09

thank you for coming out of out of a bubble uh although all of us you know we

59:14

get that opportunity we know it’s safe we’re like that’s gonna feel great i’m gonna be around other people yeah and uh

59:22

you know even if i’m really awkwardly far from them so from over here on the other side

59:28

thank you thank you so much thanks for having me and for letting me ramble endlessly about stuff i hope we do it

59:35

again yeah i’m sure we will yeah

59:52

you

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