Structures of Interaction | Reflexivity

“This is my job. If I’m being asked to do more than my job, I can say no. If they fire me, they’re — that’s like way worse for most employers. So you do have a lot of power as an employee, I think especially if you’re organizing and unionizing and talking with everyone that you’re working with on your level. You have so much power to actually get what you need and not be exploited in the way that most people are.”

—Charles Hobby

Transcript of the Reading

Transcript of the Reading

The masses who settled into remote or hybrid work during the pandemic are waking up to the fact that Zoom-mediated labor isn’t all it was promised to be. Instead of being liberated from unnecessary drudgery, demands on their time have ballooned, they feel permanently on call, and some can’t shake the sense that they’re working harder than ever for less pay…

Disabled employees . . . demonstrated [that] nearly everyone could do their jobs just fine by telecommuting… Remote work has benefits for all.

…The pandemic and remote work turbocharged techno-solutionism, leaving us with the impression that Zoom alone could allow us to claw back everything the ever-expanding demands of the office had been stealing from us.

Unfortunately, outsmarting capitalism requires something more than one weird trick that bosses hate. We have to stop believing that technology, in and of itself, will emancipate us, and instead embrace our collective power to shape how technology is used. That requires organizing.

–Katherine Alejandra Cross, “Remote Workers of the World, Unite!”, WIRED (June 2023).

Transcript of the Conversation

Stephanie Jo Kent:           All right. Today I’m delighted to welcome to the show two guests: Charles Hobby, returning, our podcast engineer, and also Stellan Vinthagen, who is a scholar-activist working on resistance. I am very curious what conversation the two of you might have about this excerpt from WIRED Magazine about organizing and remote work in the times that we’re living in. Either of you want to dive in?

Charles Hobby:                   I guess I can just introduce myself to Stellan because it’s the first time I’ve met you. I’m super excited to chat. Currently, I’m a remote worker, and one that is being exploited and abused in my own way. Reading this article — actually, Steph, I did read the full article. I don’t know if that’s cheating, but —

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Cool. No, you’re welcome.

Charles Hobby:                   — I did. Yeah, it is a very interesting topic that I don’t — Yeah, I feel like this has been the promise of the internet since I don’t remember; that Arthur C. Clarke quote from the ’60s saying that, “The internet would liberate us to do whatever we wanted and be wherever we wanted and work from wherever we want.” It’s interesting that it’s just happening now in the 2020s and is immediately becoming completely corrupted and destroyed. So, yeah, that’s where I’m coming from, I’m someone on those front lines.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Thank you. Well, yeah, I’m very much a remote worker too. I have both the privilege and the curse of being a tenured professor at UMass. But my work is mostly research, which means that I work from elsewhere not really from campus. I would say that the advantage of that is that I have a lot of freedom to decide myself what kind of work I do and when I do it.

The curse of that is that I’m supposed to deliver a whole lot of things and it means that I work a lot more hours than what I’m supposed to.

Charles Hobby:                   Is that built into the position? My remote job is very much more like basically online customer service with a few extra roles added to it. But I’m very much a responder to stuff rather than — it sounds like you’re much more like — a little more interesting than what I’m doing, but also a little more, you set what you want. Or are you under the dictation of what other people want from you?

Stellan Vinthagen:           It’s taken me quite a while to figure out, but what I have learned is that my employers — they only look at the numbers of how much I produce. So I can very much decide the content, but I need to deliver books, articles. I need to draw in research funding and these kind of things. But that means also that I have a lot of freedom to decide on the content.

But I think what comes with this is an over-exploitation of work and hours, but also the possibility of using your content, the work, towards a service of activism and social change. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

Charles Hobby:                   Cool. Yeah. I’m curious. It seems like a different exploitation, because I feel like almost all — most work is exploitative, in the way that it works in this country and probably most countries, where it’s like my body, my time, my life is being taken for someone else’s benefit. What’s so interesting about, I think, remote work is that the body part of the exploitation is removed from it, which I think is scaring a lot of employers because that’s such a easy physical way to control someone.

So I think what this article hints at is all these even sort of creepier and potentially scarier versions of that theft of yourself. Like if they’re saying basically like, “Well, if we can’t have your body anymore, we’re just going to have access to you and to your house and to everything that you’re doing on your computer, because it’s our computer.” It’s just like suddenly so much — that physical theft has now become almost, like, conceptual and metaphysical. It’s weird to navigate because we’ve never really done it before.

Stellan Vinthagen:           No, I agree. There are many versions of how this exploitation happens, of course. I think the crude version is to measure then, how active are you at your computer? What kind of movements are you doing? What kind of sites are you looking at? What are you doing? How efficient are you in doing the certain different tasks? So that’s a detailed control.

But then the kind of control that people like me are facing is a different one where it’s a matter of looking at the output, that you’re supposed to be in the international frontline of a certain discussion, and you need to publish in certain journals, you need to deliver. That is then not measured in time, which I think is definitely a matter of both a privilege and a curse because you will put in a lot more time than what you are supposed to.

Charles Hobby:                   How long have you been a professor?

Stellan Vinthagen:           Nine years at UMass. Before that, I was a professor in Sweden.

Charles Hobby:                   Okay. Did you notice a big — or maybe not even a big, did you notice a change in how your responsibilities were measured or demanded with COVID changing a lot of the way people interacted online, or? Because it sounds like your job has always been, unfortunately, just — yeah. I’m just curious if the COVID aspect and Zoom mentality has really changed the way people are demanding even more from you.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah. You must experience a similar thing. All the time there has been this ongoing experimentation with the increasing amount of emails and the pressure to respond quickly on that, so that’s always been there. And then the output, as I said before: output delivery, but not that you’re present at your office. So it’s been remote in that sense, even before COVID.

With COVID, I would say that there was a brief period of a couple of months when it was beautifully quiet because people hadn’t really gotten into booking Zoom meetings and all that, so things became very slow. That was a beautiful opportunity that I could return to and tell about the contrast. But then after a while, it became incredibly many Zoom meetings. That pressure has increased, I would definitely say.

I’ve seen a lot with my students; that they lose energy, motivation, orientation. There’s been really psychological effects of studying remotely.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. I think the article is written by a professor and one of the things they mentioned was that, if I was teaching a class of 200 people, I’m not able to look at everyone’s eyes and where they’re looking and what they’re doing. The fact that now the response to teaching people online was to monitor every single individual’s attention level through AI platforms to make sure they’re looking at the screen and not looking at other browsers.

So quickly did it turn into this rather than — because that’s the thing about natural interaction is that when we’re talking on a computer like this, I feel compelled to look at you and always be looking at you. I can’t go get a cup of coffee or excuse myself or maybe look out the window.

It’s like a fake way we would interact because of this digital element, where it’s just like — I don’t know what it is, if it’s just politeness or something. Because we’re not in the same room, we feel like we need to just be overly attentive.

I think students are feeling like they have to be in Zoom meetings. Like I shut off my camera at a certain point because it’s just like I’m sitting in an hour-long meeting doing nothing, but yet I’m forced to look at the screen where I can get shit done, I can play a game, I can walk my dog and still be at this meeting and contribute identically.

Yeah, we’re all now forced to just sit and be lifeless because I feel like that’s what the people running the place demand in the same way that they demanded my body at other jobs, and now they’re just demanding my brain and attention because that’s all they have.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah. The ownership of your attention, your time is fundamental for that exploitative relationship that exists. But I’m curious, how is it that your work situation, your profession — is there a union organizing, or? Because we have a very good union where I am.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. I was actually going to ask you too. I’m currently working for Trillium Brewing Company in Boston who has decided to completely shut down their entire marketing team through — I don’t know how specific I want to get on your podcast stuff in case —

Stephanie Jo Kent:           [brief laughter] You can do whatever you want.

Charles Hobby:                   — there’s any legal action, but —

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Oh, boy.

Charles Hobby:                   — basically they — No, I’ll keep it vague and we don’t — it was a team of five. I think it’s hard to know how to unionize, especially when they have restaurants and everyone has different jobs and no one’s really taught to organize. I did some brief organization that wasn’t really union. But when there was three of us left, we really talked about our salaries, we talked about the work that we’re being asked to do because they were basically just firing people and then telling the people who are left to continue doing their work.

So we banded together to just make sure that none of us would agree to do extra work and do our best to not allow them to just continue to exploit what we’re doing. And then at this point, all of us are gone. So their reaction rather than to work with us was to create a workspace that was just really miserable so that we all leave. And I don’t know what they’re going to do with this. They seem to be just using AI to write copy and hiring people to temporarily take photos and just working in that space for right now.

But, yeah, I’m really curious since I’ve never — well, actually I was in a union once but that was before I knew what the benefits were. I’m curious, yeah, because this article does hint that we need to organize, but it doesn’t really — I read the whole thing and I don’t know, it’s about voting for people and not choosing bad landlords. I’m really curious what your recommendations are to organize.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah. I think we need to use a lot of different tactics at the same time. One is obviously what you’re saying, having a code of solidarity between people working. But formal organizing has its strength and limitations. I think when most of the people in a profession are unionized, you can actually be quite forceful and strong, making demands. Our union were, for example, able to find ways of compensation for us for the extra work of transforming all our teaching into online teaching.

Charles Hobby:                   Cool.

Stellan Vinthagen:           So we got compensation for that. So I think that is really important, particularly in the United States where employers are not really used to face a collective organized right of workers. I come from Sweden where it’s the default that people are in the union. But then the unions are not very militant, they’re not very strong. Whereas I find here, people tend to not be unionized. But when they’re unionized, the unions are quite militant and quite useful.

And then I think there’s yet another layer of resistance needed, another tactic, and that’s what I call “everyday resistance”, which is when people are cutting corners and finding ways of, as you say, participating in the meeting while walking the dog. So you need to find ways of defending your space and maybe do things good enough so that you deliver, but where you don’t participate in the exploitation of yourself more than you have to in order to maintain a job where you get a salary.

So I think a combination of tactics here are necessary. But the fundamental thing is that people that are in a similar situation talk to each other and develop a strategy.

Charles Hobby:                   It’s just a quick story from the recent — I finally am just pretty much done with my job at where I currently am working before they force me to…. But the end to my sad story at Trillium is that they are forcing me to leave because they say my job must be done in-person. The other end of the remote work is that a lot of companies, I think, are scared of remote work. So rather than just constantly surveil me, they’re just making some bullshit argument that I need to be back at — they need my body back, and I’m refusing to give my body back, so they’re like, “Okay, you’re no longer going to work here anymore.”

They also try to scam me into saying that I’m quitting rather than terminating my employment. Thankfully, one of my best friends is an employment lawyer, so he’s been super helpful to make sure I say what I need to say and hopefully that everything will work out.

But they actually came to me because I’d offered — I wrote myself a job proposal to say, “Hey, we have a need in the department. I would be happy to fill that need, here’s the salary I’m asking for, and here’s the responsibilities I’m going to overtake.”

They’ve ignored it, and then suddenly, two weeks later, they asked me to do the exact thing that I said I was going to do for the increased salary. I feel like a lot of employees would not — I just said, “Awesome, I’m so glad you’re interested in that. Send me that job offer and I’ll take a look at it.” I do think that you’re right that a lot of employees don’t really feel like they can stand up for themselves and they allow the exploitation, not through a fault of their own, but because they need the job.

I’m in a great position. I’m married to a wonderful person who makes more than I do. If I were to suddenly lose this job, I have this part-time job bartending, everything’s fine, so I feel like I can stand up for myself. But I know so many people that they have to just keep saying yes to their employer because if they lose the job, it’s going to be super hard. But I think that most employees also need to realize that they are in a place of power because without them, their employer will not be able to function.

And it’s way easier to keep someone that knows how to do a job than to hire someone else and — so I do think that people just need to think about, “This is my job. If I’m being asked to do more than my job, I can say no. If they fire me, they’re — that’s like way worse for most employers. So you do have a lot of power as an employee, —

Stellan Vinthagen:           Exactly.

Charles Hobby:                   — I think especially if you’re organizing and unionizing and talking with everyone that you’re working with on your level. You have so much power to actually get what you need and not be exploited in the way that most people are.

Stellan Vinthagen:           I think key to doing that and putting up these limits and demands is exactly like you do, have a plan B. What do I do when things are not working out? If you have a plan B, you can be much tougher in saying, “I’ll do this, but I won’t do that.” And then imagine if we were unionized and all of us were saying the same thing, then definitely their dependency on people doing the work is, as you say, very big. And it creates a lot of problems to find new people that are doing the job efficient enough.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. I think people forget that, they’re like — for my industry, there’s only so much beer Mr. And Mrs. Trillium can sell by themselves. So they got four people to help them and now they have 400 people to help them. And if all of us just were like, “Fuck this,” they would go back to being able to sell almost no beer. And it’s like that power that having so many people who aren’t the owners can really be like, “I am worth more than $15 an hour because you make like $100,000 an hour based on what you’re actually selling.”

The inequality with how much a few people make over what — the people that allow that to happen are just like, “It’d be so nice if we could all just be worth what we’re actually worth, not what they’re telling us that we’re worth.”

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah.

Charles Hobby:                   I’m curious, can I ask you a question about — you mentioned earlier that you got compensated for the extra work it took for you to convert your classes to digital classes. Is that right?

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yes.

Charles Hobby:                   Can you walk me through — because I’ve never been in a union that actually did anything cool, and I’m just curious like how you felt that need and responded to it and actually got it to work.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah. A lot of us were pointing out the extra work in terms of learning the technology, and adapting the curriculum to online teaching, and the kind of extra work that would entail in terms of creating enough of participation, engaging the students in an online setting. So when we had pointed that out, the union took that on board and had negotiations with the leadership.

It was a really hard negotiation because I mean, at that time, the university was laying off a lot of people, so it wasn’t easy. But what they worked out was that if we could demonstrate that we’d taken a number of courses, we’ve done preparation and we could show the conversion from one curriculum to another. We got compensation in terms of one extra course that we could, in future, teach less in the coming years.

So it was a really excellent negotiation the union made. I think that that really satisfied people. But it would never have been possible without the union.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. How does it start? Do you complain to your coworkers like, “Oh, I have so much extra work,” and then you all realize it? Or how did the beginning of the process happen?

Stellan Vinthagen:           As I recall, the beginning was discussions during department meetings at different departments where people were voicing the amount of extra work that was being done, particularly from those colleagues that have small kids because the kids were very often then obviously at home during COVID as well, which meant that they had to work taking care of the kids and do extra work to learn how this technology works and transform [that] into curriculums at a very high speed to be ready for the coming semester. So that was coming up at department meetings several times.

Charles Hobby:                   And then you just have a person that’s your go-between between the union and —

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah.

Stellan Vinthagen:          Yeah.

Charles Hobby:                   Cool.

Stellan Vinthagen:           We are lucky, we have the labor center based at our department. So very many skillful union representatives are part of the department, so they could collect up these things and formulate it into specific demands.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           I have a question, more for you Stellan, but I’m curious your take on it also, Charles. This excerpt is from WIRED Magazine, so popular, has a large readership. Does it mean anything in particular that they’ve published a pro-unionizing — I mean, maybe they don’t use union specifically in the article, but what else do they mean if they say organizing?

Stellan Vinthagen:           Well, my take on it is that particularly in the time of — it’s obvious from what I’ve said, I’m coming from Europe, I’m coming from Sweden. I’ve only been here in the country for nine years, so I have a little bit of an outside perspective. So my take is that, especially in the time period we live in now in the US, it seems to be very difficult to get understanding for unionization and that kind of collective bargaining.

So I think it’s really important. It’s kind of a signal of perhaps something that we can see more of because we have seen the campaign for $15 minimum of wage for a while. I think there is a trend that goes against otherwise very authoritarian developments with politics in the US. So, yes, I see it as a signal that there is one or several — of something shifting. Yeah.

Charles Hobby:                   It is interesting. I thought about that too, that it’s weird to see the popularization of this. I think it’s easy to write in WIRED Magazine about it because when I read this article, it doesn’t actually help — I just don’t find it super helpful the way it’s written, and it’s so much more helpful to talk to someone like Stellan because it says — the only mention of the word union is just like, “The best way to ensure your right to work remotely is to organize a union.”

And I feel like that’s what most people get, is like, you should be in a union and you see all these fights to unionize. But as a worker, I had four employees that are on the same level as me and I don’t even know really how to get started. It’s like, can I unionize a four-person department, or do I — it’s weird that it’s popular in some ways, but also still incredibly hard to actually know how to do it, I think.

So these articles are maybe following the trend that is all of American politics just like a bunch of — nothing really is changing. And even though we’re talking a lot about it, I don’t really see much … that is offering much hope that things are getting better, just that we’re now aware of them. But I’m not — I don’t know.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           I think that’s right. I guess I also took it as a signal, and it could just be a signal, that they’re doing their journalistic duty. I mean, there are unionizing movements happening and actually being successful. Starbucks maybe most notably right now. I think, to your point or your question, Charles, I’ve also been curious about unionizing interpreters for a long time. And we work independently. We’re all freelance unless we’re happen to be hired by a state and the state government has a union.

But for the most part, we’re isolated out here on our own. And there are language agencies that have situated themselves as intermediaries, so now they’re charging exorbitant fees to be the organizer of our — to facilitate the need and the scheduling. We are pushed further and further away from creating the conditions that would be the best conditions for, in my case, Deaf people because I’m a sign language interpreter.

But it’s true for interpreters of other languages too, that we have very little say over the conditions in which we work. Most interpreters have appreciated the shift to Zoom because now we’re not struggling with traffic, struggling with being lost. How do I find this place? I mean, there are many inconveniences to working out in the world as opposed to working from home. But working from home also means we’re in this ethereal Zoom video space.

Some of the apps work okay, some of them are terrible. And people don’t know how to manage the turn-taking or actually create inclusion really any better online than they do in person. But in person, the interpreter has a little bit of leverage to be able to manage the situation a little bit.

Anyway, there’s a lot of layers there because Deaf people also want to be dictating their own conditions without relying on the interpreter. And they have a little more access and a little more freedom to participate in things that are online instead of having to physically get places.

So we’re back to the positives and the negatives. But the question of unionizing, if it’s [that] you’re a disparate group, there are a couple of examples. I think actually the writers’ strike right now is one example of a union of people who are independent. They’re freelancers, they work for themselves, for the most part, but they organized themselves into a collective and created a structure to give themselves collective power, bargaining power.

There might be restaurant workers, but I don’t know how it works. Like, if you get your restaurant, how do you get the workers in your restaurant into the hospitality industry?

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. That was the industry I was in before I started working, because I was a server and a bartender, I still am. I don’t know if I’m in a union, I don’t think so. But, yeah, I think that’s [what] the issue is, and remote work is, you’re in this position where you are in a field, yet how do you get everyone in your field or a significant portion to want to come together?

Yeah, it’s such a challenge to — again, the internet should be bringing everyone together and it should be way easier to find ways to unionize like for these sorts of roles. And yet, I wouldn’t even know where to start if I were in your position. I don’t know if Stellan knows or if you’re — yeah.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Well, yes. I followed through a friend the unionizing of a restaurant. There they called for a union of restaurant workers to come and give them legal advice, and then they voted. So as long as the majority said yes, they formed a union locally. But there was a lot of anti-union or union-busting techniques used against them. So they formed the union, but sometime later the union was dissolved. I think it’s really tricky in this country because there are so many hurdles.

But I think you can form at the local place, as long as you have the majority of the workers on your side and you are willing to face the union-busting attempts that will definitely come. But then you should get the legal advice from professional union workers that then can make sure that you know what … you have possibilities of doing. There are a number of things that exist that people don’t really use otherwise.

So I think these kind of possibilities exist and they are necessary to use. But at the end of the day, I think it’s a matter of creating that kind of solidarity among people and agree[ing] on codes of how to protect each other and individually develop your plan B. I mean, I have a tenured position, but I do have a plan B; I think everyone needs that. My position has been threatened despite being tenured, so it happens everywhere. If you try to push the limits and do something with your work, that’s necessary.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. I love all the things that you’re pointing to, even in the worst case. As remote workers, find your freedoms and use them. I’m a firm believer in if while we’re working and being exploited, then exploitation — I mean, I don’t know that I can exploit my employer because of just the power imbalance, but find your freedom and take it. If they don’t explicitly say, “Have your camera on during meetings,” turn your camera off until someone tells you to.

If they don’t have control over you during certain parts of the day, then just don’t — yeah, just find ways to — I’m a firm believer in stealing from your employer, really. I think the power imbalance is so huge that if you can find ways to make space for yourself and live your life, then yeah.

You’re saying that’s your third way is like, go for walks on work time and do these things that maintain your balance of your life while we’re living in this weird time where your boss can just expect you to respond to emails any time of the day and they can get — so you find the ways that you can take your life back and have that plan B and be strong and talk to your coworkers.

Because there’s so much power, I think, in that collective voice. And well, we don’t have capital — well, I guess I won’t speak for everyone, but well, I don’t have capital. There’s a lot that we can do to have power in a system that basically only has capital as its main currency.

Stellan Vinthagen:           I love that, Charles. What you’re saying is very much what the book I wrote about “everyday resistance” is about. The opening chapter is a story about workers that work very differently when the bosses are around and observe what they’re doing and when they’re not there anymore.

Charles Hobby:                   I love that, just even if you’re not in a union, you can treat your coworkers like a force, that you can gang up on the person making the rules because it’s hard to say no to a bigger group of people all wanting the same thing.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Exactly.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah.

Stellan Vinthagen:           I love that.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah.

Stellan Vinthagen:           I think that when you negotiate with the union for better conditions, you do that collectively. But when you are using your work time, or as you say, borrowing stuff up to your workplace, you are increasing your conditions individually, you are improving your pay individually, so it’s actually the same logic in it. The collective bargaining and making sure that you’re not overexploited by using maybe an hour of your work time for private things or borrowing material at your workplace, they improve your salary.

So I think it’s the same logic here and we should value the kind of class struggle that is with everyday resistance as much as the collective bargaining through unions. I think they go very well together.

Charles Hobby:                   I’ll have to read this, I’m excited. Yeah, I’d love to hang out in person if I’m ever in the Valley soon. Maybe stuff like —

Stellan Vinthagen:           Yeah.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. I went to Hampshire College about 10 years ago so I’m a huge fan of the area, but I didn’t really spend much time at UMass.

Stellan Vinthagen:           All right. Yeah, we should meet up.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. That’d be fun.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           All right. A reunion in the works. Thank you both for being here today. This was a great conversation. I think the Structures of Interaction are just all throughout the conversation. I think we’ll put a couple things in the show notes. I’ll find a couple of resources for how to join a union or how to start a conversation about joining a union. We’ll definitely put a link to your book, Everyday Resistance, in there, Stellan.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Great.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           All right.

Stellan Vinthagen:           Thank you for the opportunity to have this dialogue.

Charles Hobby:                   Yeah. This is really nice to chat with someone who’s really engaged and active. It’s cool.

Stellan Vinthagen:           The same. Yeah.

Show Notes

This collection of short excerpts is from an article published May 17, 2023 by Katherine Alejandra Cross for Wired magazine, called “Remote Workers of the World, Unite.”

The Reading was recorded on June 5, 2023. The conversation about the reading with Guest Stellan Vinthagen was recorded on July 3, 2023.

Dr. Stellan Vinthagen is Professor of Sociology, and the Inaugural Endowed Chair in the Study of Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he directs the Resistance Studies Initiative. He is Editor of the Journal of Resistance Studies, and Co-Leader of the Resistance Studies Group at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He has since 1980 been an educator, organizer and activist, participating in numerous nonviolent civil disobedience actions, for which he has served a total of more than one year in prison. One of his books is A Theory of Nonviolent Action – How Civil Resistance Works (2015). Long bio at https://www.umass.edu/resistancestudies/about-initiative/endowed-chair

Stellan’s book: Conceptualizing ‘Everyday Resistance’ A Transdisciplinary Approach by Anna Johansson, Stellan Vinthagen, Routledge, New York, 2020.

Image credit: Shawn Michael Jones

Credits

Structures of Interaction is produced by Charles Hobby, co-host and producer of “When Will It End?,” an irreverent movie review podcast that explores cinematic universes, with each season of the show focusing on an entire film franchise that Josh and Charles watch from beginning to end.

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

“Part of what the author has documented scholarly throughout this entire fantasy, historical alternative reading of history is the potential that is unleashed or released when terms from different languages are uttered into a space or are inscribed, and sometimes it’s written, inscribed into a space, presented somehow in space and really importantly in time, more or less simultaneously.”

—Stephanie Jo Kent

Transcript of the Reading

TW: (Spoilers)

Transcript of the Reading

Then there was nothing to do but wait for the end.

How did one make peace with one’s own death? According to the accounts of the Crito, the Phaedo, and the Apology, Socrates went to his death without distress, with such preternatural calm that he refused multiple entreaties to escape. In fact, he’d been so cheerfully blasé, so convinced that dying was the just thing to do, that he beat his friends over their heads with his reasoning, in that insufferably righteous way of his, even as they burst into tears. Robin had been so struck, upon his first foray into the Greek texts, by Socrates’ utter indifference to his end.

And surely it was better, easier to die with such good cheer; no doubts, no fears, one’s heart at rest. He could, in theory, believe it. Often, he had thought of death as a reprieve. He had not stopped dreaming of it since the day Letty shot Ramy. He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.

Still, facing the moment, he was terrified.

They wound up sitting on the floor in the lobby, taking comfort in the silence of the group, listening to each other breathe. Professor Craft tried, haltingly, to comfort them, surveying her memory for ancient words on this most human of dilemmas. She spoke to them of Seneca’s Troades, of Lucan’s Vulteius, of the martyrdom of Cato and Socrates. She quoted to them Cicero, Fiorace, and Pliny the Elder. Death is nature’s greatest good.

Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence.

Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.

—Rebecca Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History (2022).

Transcript of the Conversation

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Glynis Jones is both a professional and hobbyist language learner, a linguist translator, and teacher by trade. She’s proficient in English, Chinese, and Russian. Glynis, welcome back to the Structures of Interaction podcast.

Glynis Jones:                        Thank you for having me.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           You bet. How are you doing?

Glynis Jones:                        I’m doing all right. A little tired, but mostly good.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Good. Do you want to brag a little bit about the program that you’re accepted into this summer that you’re getting ready to go to?

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah. On July 4th, of all days, I’m heading up to my first summer and a four-summer master’s degree program for a Middlebury Language School in Russian. So I already have a master’s degree in Chinese. Figured I should get a master’s degree in my second second language. Yeah, I’m probably going to end up going to some of the career panels up there, which are mostly titled things like Foreign Language Opportunities in the Intelligence Community, —

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Awesome.

Glynis Jones:                        — which for me is going to be anthropology.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           [brief laughter] Someday I want to have a conversation with various folk about what I termed to myself guerilla research. I think officially they call it studying up.

Glynis Jones:                        Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Anyway, so that’s very exciting for you, congratulations. I hope that it leads to all the great things that you wish.

Glynis Jones:                        Thank you.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           You bet. This is Part 2 of a reading from Babel, and we left off in Part 1 with the first command to translate, which we didn’t identify you as the reader of the Mandarin text there. But then that comes up again several times in this second series, second part in this two-part series. What do you think is happening in that moment? Or maybe we should back up and like set the context a little bit, just an overview. Where are we? What’s going on in this part of the story?

Glynis Jones:                        The important context is probably that I have only read this ending, I have not read the whole story. But from what I understand at the ending, all of our heroes are gathered at this tower, this perhaps Tower of Babel, and are faced with a decision to destroy it in order to protect it. So we’re watching the psychology of what’s happening for them as they’re realizing the reality of that choice.

So it seems like when they are saying the word in Mandarin — fanyi, which means translate, which the author notes has an etymology that literally means to turn over — something is being released from these silver capsules, some incredible force that is contributing to the destruction of the tower.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Right. These silver capsules, I can’t remember the exact term they used for them, they’re like columns or bars that are made from some kind of silver, which might be the regular metallic silver that we think of. But the idea that translation — and it’s paired, so it’s the Mandarin term and the English term together and something about the combination of a meaning being uttered in two languages that have some amount of distance between them.

Sometimes it’s a lot of distance, sometimes it’s not so much. Part of what the author has documented scholarly throughout this entire fantasy, historical alternative reading of history is the potential that is unleashed or released when terms from different languages are uttered into a space or are inscribed, and sometimes it’s written, inscribed into a space, presented somehow in space and really importantly in time, more or less simultaneously.

I love this imagery of turning over, that the release is both, something goes out into the world but also something is given up, it’s let go of. So there’s some power in what’s happening there in terms of language and humans, our communication with each other when we’re using language and languages. And then the symbolism of how she’s written this story, that these — all of them being translators have made this decision. I love the phrase you said, “To destroy the Tower of Babel in order to protect it”.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah. Again, not having read the entire book, I don’t have the full context for why they’re needing to protect this. But we get this sense that there’s this impending opposing force that they’re watching for on the horizon; that they do not want this force, meaning perhaps an army of some kind, to get to this tower. To me, what you were talking about with the original word and the translation of the word being like there’s some disconnect between them.

Of course, there’s always going to be an imperfection. The power of the way that that’s harnessed in this fantasy world is almost like nuclear fission. It’s a splitting of a term into its original form and its translated form, which creates this problem, this explosive reaction, which is true in translation.

So that’s something that they as translators are guardians of, stewards of. But it’s a power that can obviously can be destructive. They’re using it to destruct in order to protect. What they’re protecting is not letting that power get into the wrong hands is what it feels like.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Yeah. I love that. I love the atomic level breakdown. I’ve been more and more thinking of it as organic. That, yeah, there is the destructive part, which is when we technologize it, when we try to make it into a systemic structure that’s rigid and locks dynamics in place, and taking that apart has to happen with some destructive force.

But the everyday act of translation, the everyday act of words coming into the world and of us talking with each other, and communicating with each other, and me using a term and you using a term, even if we’re both in English, but just playing back and forth, what does that mean?

“Are you using it the same way I’m using it?” “Oh, no, I was going over here and you’re going over there.” And how do we come to the middle? And then to bring that kind of extra onus of another language in and what its subtle differences are, to me, that’s cellular; that’s at the nuclear level of here are these molecules generating proteins, generating actual life. Life doesn’t come about because of the mixing of things that are exactly the same, life comes about and continues because of the mixing of things that are fundamentally, inherently, essentially different.

So this process of translation is actually so alive. It’s the aliveness that tries to get captured by technology and locked in to a certain pattern. So, yeah, I’m just really taken with how this author has so masterfully collected so many examples of words that are very close but not quite, and played with the potential of those differences in thinking about, wow, if we could just really understand the organic nature.

That’s where I emphasize more interpreting, when we’re actually in time together, going back and forth, as opposed to translating when we’re trying to fix something onto a page or into a certain text. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you relates to the tai chi practice that you and I are both part of.

We’re in a lineage of tai chi that practices the 37-posture simplified form introduced by Cheng Man-Ching to an American audience and the Confucian and Lao Tzu philosophy, I guess, of this balance and this need to maintain equilibrium between the yin and the yang. Is there a way that you see that playing out in this conclusion to this book?

Glynis Jones:                        It’s an interesting question, and especially in light of the discussion we just had about my interpretation of the explosive quality of these columns being like nuclear fission, and then your discussion of the organic quality of life happens because of different things coming together. I was thinking about actually the coming together is almost the magic of nuclear fusion, it’s like the infinite energy.

When it comes to an understanding of yin and yang, yin and yang come originally from the I Ching, from the Lao Tzu. The Lao Tzu talks about Heaven and Earth are the things that control yin and yang. Those are things that are not humane, they’re not benevolent. They have no connection to humanity. They’re not something that begins and ends, or they don’t have birth and death.

So in some sense, from the Taoist point of view, Heaven and Earth are not organic. I mean, they’re not synthetic, they’re not manmade, but they’re separate from life. They are an overarching power that we just have to align ourselves with rather than struggle against. So thinking about that in terms of the context of this ending, it is just how things play out for these heroes, that they just have to align themselves with the Tao.

We hear, I think it’s — I forget exactly which character, maybe Abraham says, like, “I don’t want to die,” and they’re all like, “Yeah, no, we don’t want to die either, but we have to do this.” That is like, “I just have to align myself with the not so benevolent, not so humane pattern of the universe, which doesn’t take my own personal desires into account, that’s just how things go. So that’s the first thing it makes me think of.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           I think I was being even a little more literal in my own — when it occurred to me to make this comparison. But I love the background and the contextualization because you definitely know more about this than I do. I was thinking just of the choice of a nonviolent response by these translators in the face of a physically violent force. I mean, they’re active. It’s not like they’re doing nothing, but it’s a quiet kind of action.

They’ve holed up in this tower and they’ve figured out a way to destroy the tower, which will take them out with it, but which denies the enemy the ability to access and use it, but doesn’t enact physical violence against that enemy, it just removes this tool from their repertoire.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah. That way it’s very much like the push hands practice of it, is the yielding, ironically without collapsing, even though they are collapsing the tower. But it is not just giving up and like, “Fine, take it.” It is yielding of like, “Okay. If we can’t protect this, nobody can have it.” That is the yin with the dot of yang.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Yeah. Of course, taking it down there doesn’t mean translation goes out of the world and no longer exists. It just returns it to its decentralized, dispersed, everyday use rather than its centralized use by a particular power.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           I don’t know when it clicked for me, but the cover of the book — I have the hardcover edition — it says “Babel: An Arcane History”. The word arcane is signaling to us that this is a work of not just fiction, but a little bit of fantasy. There’s going to be magic in the telling. The internal cover page, the title page says “Babel: or the Necessity of Violence”. And then it has this whole extended subtitle ” An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.”

So the author has situated the Tower of Babel on the Oxford University campus, which is right in the heart of the British Empire. Those are themes that play out. The historicity of the text is incredible. I mean, it’s very situated in exactly the flows of how history has played out with just this emphasis on the role of translation and an exaggerated bit to reveal its power. But what I really started thinking about is that’s what it comes down to.

I wonder if you would agree, but I’m like, we have two choices — humanity as a society, especially given the times that we’re living in now, and understanding the threat of global warming, and seeing the wreckage begin to come ever and ever closer to our own lives. The smoke from the Canadian wildfires affected New York City and the East Coast. It wasn’t just over there on the West Coast where we don’t live.

Of course, now these things are happening in the United States, not just in South America and the third world, and over there where all those other people live that we don’t invest ourselves with care for their condition. But does it come down to as simple as the Babel, we have to live with the plurality of differences, with the languages, the cultures, all of that, or there will be violence. Is it just that simple? It’s not quite that simple.

But wow, I was like, this is it. She’s encapsulated in the title what, to me, is the essential social dynamic of our time.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah. That living in a true, ideal life concept of world peace is not going to be because everybody speaks English and nothing else, that is not going to lead to happy campers. People are going to be very resentful of that, if that is our future. I will be one of them.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Yeah. Then to me, there’s something about the yin and yang in that as well.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah. I think if the yang is the active force, sometimes if it’s too much yang, it’s aggressive, it’s violent. If it’s too much yin, it’s just collapsing and giving up. In the world where one language has become dominant and there is no need for translation anymore, then that language and that culture that has taken over is way too yang and it creates a necessity for balance to be restored.

Perhaps the only way for that balance to be restored is a return of excessive yang from “the other side”, the rest of us.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Yeah. But not the equal and opposite kind of reaction. I understand the physics of that, but it’s more like equal and sideways.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah. Well, I think we see the yin and yang symbol as this static two-dimensional object, but I’ve seen people animate it to be like a revolving three-dimensional object. Our Tai teacher, Wolfe, talks about that, of the gyroscope effect in the push hands practice of, it can be any direction.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           One of the directions I want to go soon with the podcast is in this area of activism called Emergent Strategy, which just popped to mind. I heard a phrase in one of their podcasts for the first time yesterday, I had not heard this phrase before. It might be in the book and I don’t remember it, but the phrase was “the six-way tie”. I just understood it as “our interactions in the dynamics we’re woven up in are playing out in these temporal ways as well as these spatial ways.”

And they have that infinite loop that’s always in motion, but there’s places where they connect, and you could call that — they’re tied together at those places where they intersect. Maybe that’s one of the places where interpreting and translation has its most capacity for either harm or for good.

Glynis Jones:                        Yes.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Great. Well, thank you so much for participating with me in a conversation so I could say the things I wanted to say about this book.

Glynis Jones:                        Yeah, no problem. I’m just happy to talk about it because it’s a cool book from a great author.

Stephanie Jo Kent:           Yeah. I encourage everybody to read it. She has a new book out now and she also has a trilogy that’s already been out that is also wonderful. This is R.F Kuang, is the author. You’ve been listening to Structures of Interaction.

Show Notes

This short Reading of an excerpt from RF Kuang’s Babel Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution (pp. 534-536) was recorded on April 10, 2023. The conversation about Part 2 with Guest Glynis Jones was recorded on June 21, 2023.

Glynis Jones is a language scholar, linguist, translator, and teacher. She is fluent in English, Chinese, and Russian. She works in the realms of theoretical syntax and morphology, translation of Daoist metaphysical texts and Slavic folklore, and second language instruction. Her other interests include taichi, icon painting, and language preservation and revitalization.

Glynis is also a member of the Klingon Language Institute.

Credits

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

“As so often happens in stories like these, the only offensive choice they have in the face of what I’m reading to be an insurmountable enemy, something — the only offensive action they can take is self-destruction, and then that seems to be protecting something because the only way they can protect it from the enemy is to destroy it and take it with them.”

—Glynis Jones

Transcript of the Reading

TW: (Spoilers)

Transcript of the Reading

Then there was nothing to do but wait for the end.

How did one make peace with one’s own death? According to the accounts of the Crito, the Phaedo, and the Apology, Socrates went to his death without distress, with such preternatural calm that he refused multiple entreaties to escape. In fact, he’d been so cheerfully blasé, so convinced that dying was the just thing to do, that he beat his friends over their heads with his reasoning, in that insufferably righteous way of his, even as they burst into tears. Robin had been so struck, upon his first foray into the Greek texts, by Socrates’ utter indifference to his end.

And surely it was better, easier to die with such good cheer; no doubts, no fears, one’s heart at rest. He could, in theory, believe it. Often, he had thought of death as a reprieve. He had not stopped dreaming of it since the day Letty shot Ramy. He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.

Still, facing the moment, he was terrified.

They wound up sitting on the floor in the lobby, taking comfort in the silence of the group, listening to each other breathe. Professor Craft tried, haltingly, to comfort them, surveying her memory for ancient words on this most human of dilemmas. She spoke to them of Seneca’s Troades, of Lucan’s Vulteius, of the martyrdom of Cato and Socrates. She quoted to them Cicero, Fiorace, and Pliny the Elder. Death is nature’s greatest good.

Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence.

Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.

—Rebecca Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History (2022).

Transcript of the Conversation

Stephanie Jo Kent: Our guest today on Structures of Interaction is Glynis Jones. Glynis is both a professional and hobbyist language learner, a linguist, translator, and teacher by trade. She is proficient in English, Chinese, and Russian. Glynis, welcome to the show.

Glynis Jones: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Stephanie Jo Kent: You bet. The mode here is we just dive in.

Glynis Jones: Okay.

Stephanie Jo Kent: This reading, there’s a lot going on in it. What immediately strikes you about it? Just in terms of the story or the interactions among the characters.

Glynis Jones: The way that their teacher is reading to them from these passages, both in the original and then the author is providing us the translations, and that they’re finding comfort not only in the text, which is what we’re seeing through the English translation, but they’re finding comfort through their teacher’s voice, saying it in the original. I immediately noticed that as highlighting the power of both of those things; of both the original and the translation and what that brings to us.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Oh, that’s cool. Right. What do we know about the characters? If this is the only part of the whole book that we know, what can we piece together about there? So there’s a teacher, and —

Glynis Jones: But, yeah, there’s this team of this teacher and students who are clearly a close-knit team and they’re facing something horrific together. We don’t know exactly why it’s the end for them, and this is my only exposure to this novel so far. But yeah, they’re facing this horror together and trying to understand death, trying to find comfort in their teacher’s philosophy around death.

They’re clearly doing it with some kind of heroic intention. I get the sense that there’s something they’re protecting, something that they’re standing for as they’re making this choice.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Do you have a thought about the memories of the people that he talks about, or is that too distant because of not knowing the story?

Glynis Jones: I mean, it’s pretty distant from not knowing the story, but they’re clearly, these lovely concrete, almost like sensory vignettes of his experience with these people. I think it illustrates that closeness and gives us a taste of why they’re willing to make this sacrifice together.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah. I’m trying to think of how this moment, or series of moments, encapsulates three levels of a structure of interaction with the interpersonal stuff at the base, these immediate and palpable relationships. And then I think where you went with your first take was more, I would say, at the level of discourse of the importance of language and languages and valuing them. And then at the level of the social practice and the context that they’re in, is it an offensive decision that they’ve made or a defensive decision that they’ve made? What position do you think they’re in in this conflict?

Glynis Jones: I certainly get the sense that it’s a defensive position. As so often happens in stories like these, the only offensive choice they have in the face of what I’m reading to be an insurmountable enemy, something — the only offensive action they can take is self-destruction, and then that seems to be protecting something because the only way they can protect it from the enemy is to destroy it and take it with them.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Could you make parallels, then, from this bit to the world we’re living in now?

Glynis Jones: Sure, if I was a little more educated on news and recent history. Unfortunately, the only examples I can think of are not ones that we think of fondly because they were taken out against “our side”, so I won’t draw those parallels. I mean, kamikaze isn’t the right metaphor because it’s not taking out the enemy. It’s the like, if I can’t protect this, nobody can have it.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Is there any hint in this passage what it is they’re protecting? Can we tell at all? Are there any clues?

Glynis Jones: I think the clues I picked up on would be it’s a tower. I know that the name of the book is Babel, and so that makes me think of the Tower of Babylon. And then we have these references to — at the very end where we paused for this section, Robin is seeming to activate some kind of power through a force of translation.

So that gives me a sense that like — immediately makes me think of Library of Alexandria. There is some kind of linguistic, and I use that word to mean language, academic knowledge that’s being protected here or some kind of language power.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Tell me about the Library of Alexandria, I don’t know.

Glynis Jones: Library of Alexandria; I am not an Egyptologist so my history is going to be full of holes. The Library of Alexandria is one of the great losses of ancient history. It was a library; it was a very large collection of texts on papyrus that was burned by an opposing force, it was not burned by choice of those protecting it.

Now that I’m telling this story, though, I can think of a slightly modern parallel to what this makes me think of in terms of destroying something to protect it. The example that’s coming to mind is that during the Siege of Leningrad, of course, there’s the Hermitage in what we now know is St. Petersburg, this massive extensive collection of art and artifacts from all over the world, some acquired legally, some through theft, like any good art museum run by a monarchy.

But this had to be protected when Leningrad was being invaded. What happened was all of the docents and museum employees rolled up paintings, packaged up sculptures and shipped them off to Moscow, which was not currently being invaded so that they were protected. But then those docents and employees stayed, they lived at the museum.

They lived in the basement, they ate rats, and they continued to give tours to anybody who came with empty picture frames. They would describe what they remembered to be in those picture frames in great detail because they had spent years looking at them and talking about them so they could. So there’s accounts of people going to the Hermitage just after the Siege of Leningrad that art had not come back yet and having these profound experiences of experiencing art that wasn’t even there. That comes to mind in terms of like when you have to destroy something in order to protect it.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah. And then let’s trace back then to the comment you made about the power of language.

Glynis Jones: Sure.

Stephanie Jo Kent: What is that power that we might guess from this very tiny window into this huge story?

Glynis Jones: I mean, the clue that we get is what the teacher is saying; she’s giving these quotes in the original Latin to try to comfort them as they confront their end. But that’s all they have to hold onto in that moment; that and their memories of each other. So the power of language is how we can transcend time in that way.

I read a theory about, because dogs have such powerful smell, they can smell things that are no longer there, and so they’re having this time traveling experience by being able to smell something that was there yesterday, but to them it’s still there because they’re smelling it.

There’s some kind of parallel there to this experience of language of — and especially language in a library sense, language from the ancients, it is this time travel experience. We are connected to somebody who was alive 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 years ago as though we’re talking with them.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s awesome. So the things they said traveled to us through this vehicle of language across this incredible distance of time, also, through an interpreting process or a translation process from one language to another, it’s another movement that establishes a connection, a relationship.

Glynis Jones: Yeah.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Thank you for giving this a shot with me.

Glynis Jones: Sure.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I look forward to having you back for Part 2.

Show Notes

This short Reading of an excerpt from RF Kuang’s Babel Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution (pp. 532-534) was recorded on April 10, 2023. The conversation about Part 1 with Guest Glynis Jones was also recorded on April 10, 2023.

Glynis Jones is a language scholar, linguist, translator, and teacher. She is fluent in English, Chinese, and Russian. She works in the realms of theoretical syntax and morphology, translation of Daoist metaphysical texts and Slavic folklore, and second language instruction. Her other interests include taichi, icon painting, and language preservation and revitalization.

Glynis is also a member of the Klingon Language Institute.

Credits

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

“So the priorities are shifting. When you’re younger, your mind and soul feel more important than your body. But now that you as an individual are getting older, your body is making a claim for some priority space in your life.”

—Charles Hobby

Transcript of the Reading

Transcript of the Reading

“‘When did the body first set out on its own adventures?’ Snowman thinks, after having ditched its old traveling companions, the mind and the soul for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel, or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company leading the other two astray. It must’ve got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining in the anxiety driven intellectual web spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them, music and painting and poetry and plays, sublimation, all of it, nothing but sublimation according to the body. Why not cut to the chase.”

An excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s (2009) Oryx and Crake, read by Stephanie Jo Kent.

Transcript of the Conversation

Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, I’m happy to welcome Charles Hobby back to the show. Charles is the producer and co-host of When Will It End, another podcast about movies, and the producer of this podcast. How are you doing today, Charles?

Charles Hobby: Hey, good. Thanks for having me.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, what did you think about this one?

Charles Hobby: I was confused by the separation. Again, I love that this show just sort of forces you to grapple with almost no information. But this idea that the body, mind, and soul are all — those are the three things, right?

Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah.

Charles Hobby: Body, mind, and soul. From my reading of it, the body is on its own now, and the mind and the soul are gone.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Something like that. I don’t know that the mind and the soul are actually gone, but I’m thinking that the body has become primary.

Charles Hobby: Hmm.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Maybe I’m interpreting it through my own lens of getting a little older and having the body actually converse with me more frequently in various kinds of ways than it didn’t used to. And it’s like, wow, things have been happening to my body while my mind, and my soul, and my spirit have been gallivanting through my life and now, ooh, it’s catching up with me.

Charles Hobby: Got it. So the priorities are shifting. When you’re younger, your mind and soul feel more important than your body. But now that you as an individual are getting older, your body is making a claim for some priority space in your life.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I don’t know. That’s definitely happening to me, whether that’s really what’s happening in this passage — I do think Snowman is advancing in his own age.

Charles Hobby: Is the Snowman a character or an actual snowman?

Stephanie Jo Kent: Snowman is a character, and —

Charles Hobby: That is a snowman or just called Snowman?

Stephanie Jo Kent: No, it’s just his name.

Charles Hobby: Okay, because that’s another funny thing when you don’t know anything else that — Snowman does just — is the epitomization of the body, that’s all it is. It’s just like big balls of snow. For me, when I was reading this, I was just thinking about a snowman who had no brain and was just going to a strip club. That’s what I was thinking about.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I get it. I mean, there’s a little bit of that. It’s like it wanted to be doing all of these gratifying physical things, and the mind and spirit kept getting in the way. So then I’m like, maybe it’s a different angle that it’s really coming about to, but the body is so necessary.

Charles Hobby: I guess for me it’s interesting, the words, the language that Atwood uses is, I don’t know, almost feels like nasty. And then when it’s describing the mind and the soul, it’s pejorative, which I found interesting. I don’t know, just like it was an unimportant aspect of the body’s life, and it’s glad to be rid of it now that it’s playing around with all the physical stuff rather than the fanciful stuff.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Right.

Charles Hobby: Like just stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall in such a — I don’t know, it’s like on the nose description of what a professorial or just like —

Stephanie Jo Kent: Totally.

Charles Hobby: Also, this is my own bias, I’m not a huge Margaret Atwood fan. I pretty much hated Handmaid’s Tale and mildly put up with the sequel. I don’t know that I’ve really read anything else of theirs.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Why did you hate Handmaid’s Tale?

Charles Hobby: I’m very forgetful, but in my mind I found it to be pretty — there’s so many puns in it. I found it really distracting, the word play. This is on display in this little paragraph too.

They really seem obsessed with playing with language as a tool rather than using it as a way to access emotion. So I found it a little bit part cliché and forced, especially the ending, I really fucking hated the ending. I found it to be really cowardly and cheap.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Interesting.

Charles Hobby: Also, the narrator made no sense. I don’t know why this would’ve existed in its format, which so much of the book is based on being the letters of a survivor. I just found the whole conceit of it to be hard for me to get behind as a reader.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s so interesting. It’s been years and years and years and years since I read it, and I didn’t watch the show that was made a few years ago because it just felt too close to home.

Charles Hobby: I do think that readers can read for whatever they want to read. I have very specific needs as a reader. I’m excited about when a writer can make me feel like I’m a part of something. But the biggest hang-up for me is when I’m feeling like I’m being written to, rather than just dragged through a memory, or a feeling, or a time, a moment.

Stephanie Jo Kent: So there wasn’t a hook, there wasn’t a character, or a storyline, or something in there that you could relate to enough to feel that you could be part of it that didn’t reach you or speak to you in that way.

Charles Hobby: I think some science fiction, I’m not going to label it as bad or good, but for me, when it doesn’t work, it’s when the messaging — you know me, I think politics are super important, but if the messaging becomes more important, then the fiction, I just don’t trust it and can’t really find much purchase as a reader.

I would love to just have an essay by Atwood being like misogyny is bad and this is the ways that it really terrifies and crumbles a community. But putting it into a fiction doesn’t always work if that’s like I can really just feel that architecture more than the characters involved.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Got you. That makes complete sense to me, I get it. Well, I was going to ask you about the word sublimation. I looked it up because I’m like, it’s a word that I see and I sort of know, but I’m like, what does it really mean? How is she using it here? I was trying to figure that out.

Charles Hobby: I remember learning it in 9th grade.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Ninth grade?

Charles Hobby: In earth science, because I think the original definition of sublimate is to skip the liquid phase. So if ice goes directly to water vapor, that’s sublimation. So it is a cool word. I really like the word.

Stephanie Jo Kent: It’s a great word. It’s fascinating because it has uses in many different fields. It’s like what’s the feeling that it gives you? Is it a good feeling or a bad feeling? I think because maybe I’ve had exposure to academic graduate, blah, blah, yadi, yada stuff, the sublime, sublimation is touted as this really intellectually desirable experience.

You want to have the sublime and see it and feel it. But I’m like, what are the states that are being changed? How would Atwood would be using this if she’s talking about the body? It looks like the body is not interested in sublimation.

Charles Hobby: Yeah, not interested.

Stephanie Jo Kent: The mind and the soul can do their own things, but forget that.

Charles Hobby: Yeah, which is what I find so strange about this. The idea that the body is unimpressed by poetry, that is baffling to me. The best poetry hits the body first.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s right.

Charles Hobby: This idea that the body is saying, “Oh, you mind, you can have your sublimated existence of wine, and poems, and film, and music, and opera, and whatever, but I’m going to skip it and go look at tits.” I think the body is the bedrock for all these feelings. You’re not going to feel anything unless you have a body that can well up in tears and that hits there before it — that’s what good books do is they make you feel physically, I think.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I really appreciate that. What is also interesting is that part of the challenge of this paragraph is to recognize and validate the gifts of the body more instead of reducing them to their general functions.

Charles Hobby: But that’s the thing is I don’t know if, based on this one paragraph, the body is dumping, it’s removing, it’s exercising, and it’s just getting rid of all these things as though they’re not necessary for the body. I don’t know, I’m not sure if this is showing that they are necessary.

But when it says, “Why not cut to the chase?” I think for me, the sublimation act of going from — usually when it’s not about water, it’s about like growth as a person, going from one stage to the highest stage. Then the body in this case seems to be like, “Why bother with that? Why not just stay down here with me in the mud?” But I don’t know, that’s the feeling I get from this paragraph.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Right.

Charles Hobby: That they’re separate somehow.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Instead of merged and influencing each other.

Charles Hobby: Yes, inseparable. I mean, it’s a cool idea to be like what it would happen if you separated things that are inseparable and made a story about it? I just don’t really know what Margaret Atwood ended up deciding would happen.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I don’t know where this is in the book. I’m just wondering about its placement now relative to the story.

Charles Hobby: It definitely feels from the body’s perspective, it’s like it must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging, and whining, and the anxiety-driven intellectual web spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was gritting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good.

It’s such strong language that’s very — the body is, in this perspective, the better of the other two. The other two are whining, and annoying, and are really distracting from the true joys of life, the good.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I wonder if there’s a little bit of some reactivity, like a reaction of the body to the mind and the soul because the arc of the story — I’m assuming this is midway or later in the story, in the arc of the story.

Charles Hobby: I’ve never read it just so you know, so this is all I know.

Stephanie Jo Kent: There’s a pretty massive die-off of human beings and not many survive. So Snowman is one of the survivors and there’s a reflection on what things used to be like and how he’s arrived to being one of the ones who’s still alive, and having to subsist in a pretty fundamental way with what his body is able to do.

Charles Hobby: So this is a world that doesn’t have much of the lecture halls, and music, and paintings, and stuff, or does it?

Stephanie Jo Kent: Not anymore. It’s like he experiences the transition from having had it to not having had it.

Charles Hobby: Got it, so that makes more sense, I guess, given that context of a body forced in its way to feel like it’s separate from the mind. But I don’t know, I guess that’s what dystopias, if everything is bad and — I don’t know, I just reread The Road recently, which also gets pretty, a lot of physical descriptions.

I think we associate comfort with where we are and removing comfort with dystopias. I guess most people think of if you can’t have nice things, you’re just going to be purely body, fighting to survive, and maybe — I don’t know. The body is — it is hard to imagine it’s separate from the mind and feeling and everything. I wonder what this exercise is. It’s an interesting exercise.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah, and then just having the conversation about the possibility of that separation. And just thinking about how we normally conceptually have a hierarchy in our mind among these three things. I mean, the soul is out of fashion. That was important a couple hundred years ago, but —

Charles Hobby: We sort of ditched that one.

Stephanie Jo Kent: You might be embarrassed if we talk about the soul too much, or with the wrong people; people who are going to be judgmental if you believe in that aspect of the human experience.

Charles Hobby: As a mild practitioner of yoga, I think that’s part of it is not having a hierarchy to your existence, and seeing rest and work and mind and body as just all the same and just different versions of the same thing.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s right.

Charles Hobby: I don’t know. For me, after thinking about it and talking to you about it, the author seems to be like saying, “In this dystopia where we have none of these things that we used to relish in as a mind-driven occupation, what is the body forced to endure?” But I don’t know. I feel like even in a dystopia you’d still have more mind than this. It might be unpleasant, but I think it’d still be accessible and equal. Well, I hope it would be.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Unless you weren’t just in shock or numbed to the horror of the situation that you’re in.

Charles Hobby: If there’s trauma, it makes the mind harder to access.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Definitely.

Charles Hobby: Did you read The Road? Speaking of dystopias.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I didn’t read The Road. I didn’t read The Road.

Charles Hobby: It was a fun reread. Did you see the movie or do you know anything about it?

Stephanie Jo Kent: No, I didn’t. I just heard people talking about it.

Charles Hobby: Okay. Well, it was a fun —

Stephanie Jo Kent: Go ahead, say whatever you want.

Charles Hobby: Great. As an anti-dad guy, it was fun to read a whole book that was basically the punchline of a 200-page novel. The dad has just been making this boy suffer for all this time. Once he’s dead, the boy can just actually go live a nice life. Actually, you should read it. The last paragraph is, somehow, it’s so good.

It’s one of those books where I was reading it and reading it, I was like, “Wow, this is a slog. I don’t really like these characters.” I’m finding it annoying. And then the last page just completely translated the previous 200 into a book that I found absolutely incredible.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s really cool. I had that experience with Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game.

Charles Hobby: I haven’t read that since I was a kid, I should reread that.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I remember reading that and being like, “This is just pretty typical video game, warfare, blah, blah, blah.” And then I think there’s a moment when the aliens enter, and I literally was mind blown in that moment. I was like, “Wait, there is something else going on here.”

Charles Hobby: It’s cool when authors can — it’s not really a twist, it sort of is, but in some ways it’s just deeper than a twist. Like Cormac McCarthy shifts from talking about these two characters that you spend the whole book with, and then suddenly you’re just transported to nature for a split second. It’s just this really profound shift in perspective that changes the whole meaning of the book. It’s like, “Damn, I wish I could come up with stuff like that.”

Stephanie Jo Kent: Awesome. It reminds me a little bit of our conversation about ideology in the other episode.

Charles Hobby: Yeah.

Stephanie Jo Kent: How do you think about these things? How do you think about the mind and the body and the soul? How do you think about the experience of having your idea of a conception of what you’re understanding, or learning, or experiencing suddenly shifted, now you’re in a different structure of interaction.

Charles Hobby: Yeah, that’s right.

Show Notes

This short reading of an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, page 85, was originally published on the Structures of Interaction podcast on April 11, 2020.

Credits

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

“It’s like it needs to be imaginary before it becomes real. Well, there’s like a cyclical, the chicken and the egg, which was first? I guess reality was probably first, but it can’t — for us to interact with it, we need to imagine something before we can put it into action.

—Charles Hobby

Transcript of the Reading

Transcript of the Reading

Ideology, noun, an imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled.

There is a real situation that can’t be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full. So we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology and this is a good thing.

So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act.

Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above, and so is science. Although it, the different one, the special one by way of its perpetual cross checking with reality tests of all kinds and its continuous sharpening of focus.

That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming, buzzing inrush of the world as possible.

What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

—Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020, p. 41)

Transcript of the Conversation

Stephanie Jo Kent: I’m delighted to welcome our guest, Charles Hobby, to the podcast today. Charles is the host of When Will It End, and is the producer of this podcast as well. Hello, Charles. Thanks for being here today.

Charles Hobby: It’s nice to be on this side of it.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah.

Charles Hobby: It’s fun. Sometimes I get jealous listening in, so this is good.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s good. Well, that’s great. We always have you primed as a stand-in to rescue us.

Charles Hobby: Though this is very different podcasting than what I’m used to, so I’m usually just — I don’t have to do anything, so this is much more investigative and intense than maybe I’m up for, but I guess we’ll find out.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, I guess, yeah. I think having an open conversation is really all that I want here too. Pretty relaxed and just, what’s our understanding? What comes to mind based on this prompt from this reading? Ideology is something.

Charles Hobby: It’s interesting. I don’t even know. Obviously, I think the context-lessness of this conversation is important to you and the podcast, so I don’t need to know too much about “The Ministry of the Future”. But the very first sentence, I don’t even know if I agree with that definition.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Interesting.

Charles Hobby: Or that ideology is something that can be defined as something that, just it’s that. I think it could be that, but I think it could also be other things.

Stephanie Jo Kent: What is not here? What seems not included by — he’s saying ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, everybody has one.

Charles Hobby: Well, he’s saying that it seems to us that ideology is a necessary feature, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. And then also he used the word “imaginary”, I find really interesting because I think some ideologies are real relationships based on real situations.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Huh! All right. Now I’m like, okay, we have to go back and parse this line by line. So maybe it’s not quite as loose a conversation, but I feel like, oh, we’re not even understanding it in the same way yet, so that requires a little bit of work. The definition, ideology as a noun is an imaginary relationship to a real situation. Okay, there’s a real situation and something in our relationship to it is imaginary and you are not sure you agree with that or you found that part interesting?

Charles Hobby: Both. I do think that some ideologies are imaginary, but I don’t know that all ideologies are imaginary. I think some are really based on real experiences and their relationship to that real situation. I don’t know that there’s always anything lost in that bridge.

What do you think of that word, “imaginary”? Because in my mind something like thinking about how we as people can change those structures of politics, I don’t know what tagging imaginary onto someone’s belief system does to that belief system.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Right, I can see that. But I think what he’s trying to do is establish a framework that’s even deeper. Belief is one form of ideology, science is another form of ideology, your political perspective is a form of ideology. To me, they’re all in effort to put language onto an experience, and language is never the same as the experience itself. So I think that’s, to me, how the imaginary comes in.

Charles Hobby: I guess so. I never studied philosophy and I think I always got a little bored with the signifier and the signifying and whatever that was because it is true — I guess in some ways, obviously all languages translation. But I think that that specific word imaginary really — it just connotates some sort of falseness, which I don’t know.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Wow.

Charles Hobby: Maybe I’m just taking the wrong feeling from that word, but for me, like an imaginary friend doesn’t exist.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Sure, no. That’s cool, because I think of imaginary in the sense of imagination. There’s a way in which neither one exists, the imaginary friend doesn’t have a material corporeal form. But there’s an idea in your head about this imaginary friend that you interact with and it gives you a sense of communication.

I’m imagining all kinds of things that I hope will happen in the future, forecasting them based on whatever, whatever, whatever. It’s just not here yet and we’ll live into it and it’ll be like that or it’ll be different from that, or there’ll be some overlap.

Charles Hobby: Okay. So you’re thinking Kim is using the word imaginary as meaning in the mind?

Stephanie Jo Kent: Yeah.

Charles Hobby: Yes, that makes sense to me. To me, I was feeling like it was almost dismissing someone’s ideology because it felt like it was a non-existent relationship. But I guess that’s true. It’s a way that we think about something that’s happening and what we want to happen.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Then he basically says, usually when we say ideology we’re like, “You have an ideology and I don’t agree with it because you’re messed up in what you’re thinking.” Then when I think it seems to us that ideology is necessary is that everyone has one. The piece of the communication, then, is how do we work back and forth between them?

Charles Hobby: That’s very cool. Maybe philosophy isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I’ll probably check it out.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Probably is.

Charles Hobby: We’re always translating, whether it’s just between two people trying to figure out what to have for dinner or countries trying to figure out how to deal with each other. It’s like language is always acting as a translation, and then I guess the mind is all we have as our translator.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Perception mixes in some kind of way. What’s fascinating to me is that we both read this passage and I had an immediate positive association and you had an immediate negative association. There’s this word that I’ve been using a lot in the last year and I think it’s the right word from communication, it’s called phatic, P-H-A-T-I-C.

It’s about the feeling that you get from the use of the word. It could be about the person’s tone, it could be about anything, but it’s really about how does it land emotionally?

Charles Hobby: Yeah, because I feel like if the imaginary had been replaced with ideology noun, what conceptual relationship to a real situation or something — less to do with like imagination and more about thought; that would’ve definitely felt different.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s interesting. I think it’s pretty cool that he puts science in the same category then he separates it out and he’s linking it as cognition. It’s a necessary aspect of cognition.

Charles Hobby: What do you make that Kim doesn’t include politics in the list?

Stephanie Jo Kent: Let’s see, what does he say?

Charles Hobby: We have worldview, philosophy, religion, but to me political ideology is the one I think of first.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, I think it’s the one that we’re being force-fed right now. It’s the one that’s on the high stage acting out, it’s high drama. But it’s a worldview, I think. I think politics is the action of trying to implement the worldview.

Charles Hobby: Okay. I see worldview; I guess politics is a subset of worldview. I feel like so much of the world is political. Almost everything important is political in some sense.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Everything important is.

Charles Hobby: If I were Kim, I would’ve put that in the list.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Why isn’t it in the list here? I wonder if it’s not in the list because — oh man, are we going to go back to signified in signifier? But the object of the ideology is politics.

Charles Hobby: Okay.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I don’t know. I’m making it up.

Charles Hobby: Great. I think that’s what they all did too, so that’s fine.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Right?

Charles Hobby: So you’re saying that what starts as worldview becomes politics after action?

Stephanie Jo Kent: Action makes it political. There’s a feminist philosophy, but it says that the personal is political. Anything we do, what we do or what we don’t do, there’s a political ramification because it has to do with how we organize our society.

Charles Hobby: Absolutely. I’ve found some people’s — and I don’t need to judge anyone because I know that they’re fighting for very important things. But to see like gun violence and racism as trying to stage as to be more palatable by saying that it isn’t a political issue, it’s like a personal issue, it’s like, I think we just need to get that upfront that politics aren’t bad.

We need to be structuring how we treat each other and the world works. Gun violence is a political issue, racism is a political issue, and that’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing. We should be fighting for political change.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s exactly right. I think this idea of ideology here, why I was drawn to this as a passage to read and reflect on and have this conversation about is, it’s also a word that’s used, as we said, in insulting, it’s used as a putdown. There’s something wrong with having an ideology, and it’s like, no, we all have a set of ideas about how we think things could go or we would like for them to go, or maybe there’s some moral we think they should go a certain kind of way.

But we don’t all agree, and we never are all going to agree because we’re not the same, and our experiences — the whole entire way this earth works is on difference. So our ideas are going to be different also, so we need to have structures and systems that allow us to accommodate the difference, but we’re not getting much practice at that, the way politics are being bandied about today.

Charles Hobby: That’s true. The first paragraph was so — I think having no context for who this speaker is and what the point of this paragraph is. It made it really the whole, “But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled.” That’s such a strange way to put it.

It’s like throwing a thought into my mind as though I own it, but I’ve never thought that. So it just felt like they’re trying to make me think that I’ve thought something before and it’s a weird way to structure a paragraph.

Stephanie Jo Kent: It’s been a while since I read the book and first did this recording, and I can’t find the book, it’s vanished. I must have loaned it to someone who I can’t remember.

Charles Hobby: It seems like an argument rather than an idea, like “But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition,” I’m included in the “us” by the way that that’s phrased and there’s no way for me to escape it.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I think the author, Kim Stanley Robinson, has a narrator’s voice in the story, and this is that voice. I don’t think it’s a character in the story, I think it’s the narrator coming in and setting something up for all of us, but I’m not completely sure I’m right.

Charles Hobby: Well, I don’t know. I guess we could read it again, but that sounds less fun.

Stephanie Jo Kent: We could read it again.

Charles Hobby: I’m reading it now.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Are you? It gave me so much hope when I read this book. I read it soon after it was published in 2020, and it was the first time that I read someone actually grappling with all the elements of our complicated, global, interconnected capitalist, racist, caste-based system, actually, a hierarchical global human society that positions people in different strata.

He actually applied the craft of science fiction to thinking about, well, here’s the situation, these are the conditions, how do we get out? How does global warming possibly get addressed by homo sapiens in time to prevent the cataclysms that are coming? I hadn’t seen anybody or anyone do anything even remotely like this, and it made me feel like if someone can begin to conceptualize a path, there is a path.

Charles Hobby: That’s what this whole little mini section seems to be. It’s like it needs to be imaginary before it becomes real. Well, there’s like a cyclical, the chicken and the egg, which was first? I guess reality was probably first, but it can’t — for us to interact with it, we need to imagine something before we can put it into action.

Whether that’s I’m completely walking, we don’t really think about it, or if it’s trying to make change on a community level. We’re always thinking about it first before we can act on it.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Or we’re acting just out of what feels what our emotional and our ideological experience tells this is the right way to behave in this instance. So if someone challenges how I believe, I challenge them back.

Charles Hobby: Maybe thinking is the wrong word, but it does have to enter that realm of non-physical, just like purely conceptual before it can come back out as a physical real action in the world.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I think we have to communicate about it. We have to talk it into being basically. What are the words and phrases and the kinds of conversations that allow an imaginary about getting through all of these different ideologies that are currently in conflict?

Charles Hobby: These philosophers, they might not have been wrong. They sound like they might have been onto something.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I have no idea.

Charles Hobby: One thing I loved, the blooming, buzzing in-rush of the world is such a wonderful phrase. I think associating that to the ideology of science is such a vibrant emotional way to describe science that I think is often overlooked. It seems language is usually more clinical and factual when they’re talking about science, and that’s such a great — it is all about what our senses can take in, and those three words are — I really like that passage.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I like it too, and I like how it really pops out of the rest of the passage because it’s like, oh, there’s life in this, it’s not computer algorithm, it’s alive.

Charles Hobby: Very specifically chosen words. Definitely. Do you think that science is that different from the other ideologies listed? What do you think?

Stephanie Jo Kent: I go back and forth. I think it is a set of ideas and a framework for organizing what to believe, what’s worth believing in, so I think it guides action and behavior. That to me doesn’t make it infallible. Plenty of mistakes and misuses of the scientific method and facts that we’ve figured out through science. I think it’s incomplete because there’s very little — there’s lip service and there might be some law that imposes some ethical boundaries, but they’re pretty thin.

Charles Hobby: It’s interesting because you think about science as something pure than ideology, but it is such an imaginative — we wouldn’t really have the strength to hypothesize without some sort of imagination to start there, and without that imagination, that dictates initially what science is going to be looking at. Again, I think that’s cool that none of this is judged.

I don’t know, it felt a little judgy at first, but it’s like ideologies aren’t really good or bad. And they’re based on real stuff, but it’s all directed by what’s inside mostly.

Stephanie Jo Kent: And what other people around us, how they treat it and what they say about it. We are socialized into ideologies. We come to take on what’s normal and normative to the people that we’re hanging out with. There might be resistance or rebellion to it at certain phases, but we can’t escape it. Whatever that exposure is, it establishes a reference point. And then the question is, are we going to hold that reference point with any kind of skepticism?

Are we just going to go whole heart, “This is it. This is the way I was raised and so this is the way it is,” or, “well, this is the way I was raised and wow, there’s some truth and some beauty and some value in this”? There’s a whole lot of this other stuff that, no, can we do that parse our own sense of what matters, and what we value, and whether our behavior and actions in the world are doing what we think they’re doing or something else?

Like perpetuating differences, and perpetuating disagreement, and perpetuating conflict. But I’m right, and I’m independent, and I know what I mean, and that’s okay.

Charles Hobby: Yeah, exactly. And then also science has been used for all these terrible, awful ideologies throughout history.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Awful.

Charles Hobby: It’s sort of this passage overall just makes me wonder what went around it and why this is what this character or narrator is trying to talk about because the way it’s phrased to start at this larger definition and to end with specifically looking at science as an ideology is an interesting journey that it takes place over just five paragraphs.

Stephanie Jo Kent: I’m also thinking economy isn’t listed as a separate thing either.

Charles Hobby: Yeah, that’s true. It’s also a big one. That one might be purely imaginative, it’s hard to say. Obviously it has real world situations, but the science of economy might be —

Stephanie Jo Kent: The science of economy has been pretty well blasted.

Charles Hobby: Yeah. I just read Debt.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Charles Hobby: Have you read that?

Stephanie Jo Kent: I haven’t read that one.

Charles Hobby: I read it a couple months ago. If anyone is listening and wants to read a very readable, look at 5,000 years of economic history, it’s absolutely wonderful and basically just throws a lot of questions at what people just take for granted and accept about capitalism and economic theory. It’s just evolved, so much more going on than what we are taught.

I guess that’s what ideologies are. This whole first sentence is based on, we have very limited information and ideologies are still forced to exist based on the very small interaction that we as individuals have with the world. So reading books like Debt, you will be like, “Oh wow, this is another person’s ideology coming forward, in our case, Communist, probably Occupy Wall Street guy and it’s —

He brings like, oh, what if the world didn’t work based on the last just couple 100 years of awful, just corruption of what people want to be doing with their lives? It’s really interesting, I highly recommend it.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Why do we accept the concept that debt is something normal that we have to live our lives with?

Charles Hobby: That there’s a moral judgment on it and that now we’re all just so forced into a debt narrative that we don’t even question why debt exists and why power structures allow for a certain type of debt to exist. If you have a debt, you just should pay it rather than thinking like, “Why is everyone in debt?”

Stephanie Jo Kent: Well, this is close to the theme of the show, Structures of Interaction, that these little actions and these little beliefs and these little ideas that we keep circulating lock us in to a structure. It seems inevitable to me, we have to use our imagination if we’re going to improve it or change it or alleviate it or address it in any kind of way.

Charles Hobby: This might be a great way to close out. I think if I were just to call up Kim, send him an email, if I were editing this book, I’d say, “What if you chose imaginative rather than imaginary?”

Stephanie Jo Kent: Ooh.

Charles Hobby: I feel like one is optimistic and based on forward thinking and the other is distorting the truth into something inside you. But that’s also just what I think. But I think if I were editing the book, I would say, “What if you tried imaginative and see how that felt for you?”

Stephanie Jo Kent: One thing that I’m struck by is that it could be either.

Charles Hobby: Right. I guess that’s the thing; I want to think my ideologies are right so I’m like, “They’re not imaginary, they’re imaginative, but that guy’s –”

Stephanie Jo Kent: Is that what it is?

Charles Hobby: Yeah. The other person’s ideologies are, those are silly and fake.

Stephanie Jo Kent: That’s the deal.

Charles Hobby: Yeah.

Stephanie Jo Kent: Thank you for joining me today on this episode of Structures of Interaction and we’ll be looking forward to more guest conversations with Charles Hobby in the future.

Charles Hobby: Thanks so much for having me though, it was fun.

Show Notes

This short reading of an excerpt from Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020, p. 41) and the conversation about the reading with guest Charles Hobby was recorded on May 1st, 2023.

Credits

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

“So he wants to die deliberately and he’s considering who to ask. These, I presume, are people or gods with whom he is close. The choices strike me as having an inherent performative quality. If he’s a god, other people regard him as such and so his death is going to have meaning. Even if he’s not a god, if he’s just a person, death has meaning. Who you ask has meaning.”

—Michael J. DeLuca

Transcript of the Reading

TW (suicide)

Transcript of the Reading

Eventually, I considered it the topic of death.

I could kill myself now, probably. This was not normally an easy thing for any god to do, as we are remarkably resilient beings. Even willing ourselves into nonexistence did not work for long; eventually, we would forget that we were supposed to be dead and start thinking again. Yeine could kill me, but I would never ask it of her. Some of my siblings, and Naha, could and would do it, because they understood that sometimes life is too much to bear. But I did not need them anymore. The past two nights’ events had verified what I’d already suspected: those things that had once merely weakened me before could kill me now. So if I could steel myself to the pain of it, I could die whenever I wished simply by continuing to contemplate antithetical thoughts until I became an old man, and then a corpse.

And perhaps it was even simpler than that. I needed to eat and drink and piss waste now. That meant I could starve,and thirst, and that my intestines and other organs were actually necessary. If I damaged them, they might not grow back.

What would be the most exciting way to commit suicide?

Because I did not want to die an old man. Kahl had gotten that much right. If I had to die, I would die as myself–as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child. I had blazed bright in my life. What was wrong with blazing in death too?

Before I reached middle age, I decided. Surely I could think of something interesting by then.

–N. K. Jemisin. The Kingdom of Gods, Book 3: The Inheritance Trilogy (2014, p. 1036). Orbit/Hachette Book Group: New York.

Transcript of the Conversation

Steph: Today’s guest is Mike, longtime friend, webmaster of my digital domains. Mike is an author and the publisher of Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Welcome, Mike.

Mike: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Steph: It’s very exciting to have you and to talk about our reading today. What did you think about our reading?

Mike: I feel that I was less offended by being thrown into a contemplation of suicide than I might have been at other times in my life. The older we get the more the specter of death is a part of life, not to get all goth about it. I also think of it in the context of the one Nora Jemisin book I’ve read, which was not from this series, but the other one. What’s that title?

Steph: The Broken Earth?

Mike: The Broken Earth Trilogy. I found the view of humanity in that book to be cynical. This jived with that impression. In a way I was somewhat disappointed about, because I want Nora Jemisin to have a less cynical view of humanity, though I know it is not fair for me to expect that of her.

Steph: So there’s some cynicism coming. I have two thoughts right off the bat. One is that this episode might need a trigger warning because of the content. And I’m not sure about the cynicism, at least that may be a global discourse that we should look at more. This particular passage is about one of the gods, not the humans.

Mike: I totally didn’t catch that from the passage.

Steph: Right out of the gate, quote, “This was not normally an easy thing for any god to do, as we are remarkably resilient beings.” But what’s interesting, this is one of the gods reflecting on the possibility of their own mortality.

Mike: I wasn’t sure if I was to read that metaphorically. Fantasy being what it is, you can have a character who is a god in one setting and a regular person in another setting. I happen to be reading my kid The NeverEnding Story, in which for the second half, Bastian is basically the God of Fantastica.

Steph: The other names in here are also gods. But what struck me as I was rereading it is how much it is reflective of the human experience in relation to coming to grips with our own mortality.

Mike: I’m struck by the performative aspect of it, which I think is something that absolutely comes up among humans considering death and suicide. I don’t think it comes up to everyone.

Steph: When you say performative, tell me more about what you mean.

Mike: Well, he — is this a he? I think it is.

Steph: I think it’s a male, yes. Male god, Sieh.

Mike: So he wants to die deliberately and he’s considering who to ask. These, I presume, are people or gods with whom he is close. The choices strike me as having an inherent performative quality. If he’s a god, other people regard him as such and so his death is going to have meaning. Even if he’s not a god, if he’s just a person, death has meaning. Who you ask has meaning.

Steph: Yes. That’s good.

Mike: I have not been close enough to suicide in my life…I mean, I can get really dark. My neighbor shot himself in the face when I was in high school. He did not leave a note. I really don’t think that guy considered the consequences of his actions or the impact because it was terrible for everyone except him.

Steph: There have been a couple suicides that have been fairly close to me. A very brilliant deaf mathematician that I was an interpreter for, killed herself, and my sister-in-law’s brother killed himself. My assumption is, is that the state of being that a person is in to take that act is so despairing, they’re not able to comprehend what the impact is going to be on other people.

I hear what you’re saying about, I think, the performance in this excerpt, this passage of a god contemplating his own mortality is also to recognize, like he says, what would be the most exciting way to enact his own death. The excitement piece is where the performative part comes in, I think. What would be the way that would have the most impact? That’s part of his intention.

Mike: It’s these lines at the end, “If I had to die, I would die as myself, as Sieh, the Trickster, if not the child.” So that goes over my head. And obviously there’s some context in the pantheon as to what those roles represent. I think of Osiris, who was the sun, and also a god of wisdom. Gods played different roles to different adherents.

Steph: Would it be anthropomorphism to make a god like us? Because as I was reading it, I was thinking about processes in my own life and aging, and as you said, we think of things differently the older that we get. Things that weren’t on our register before, or they change in their importance or significance. I think of youth not thinking that we’ll ever die, and the things that we undertake not knowing there’s risk or not having a conception of how that will play out over time.

And then coming to that point of it really is about the body, and that this god in this story has become weakened, whatever way, that he’s now vulnerable to the things that mere mortals are vulnerable to; that he could starve himself to death, that he could die of dehydration, that the organs that he’s through the powers of being a god has never had to worry about before because they could easily be replaced or regrown or whatever, now. It’s the regenerative capacity of his godhood that has passed, but then he’s also trying to take agency in that event.

Mike: It strikes me that this is different from the way an alive person in the world could contemplate their own death. Because again, as you say, if you’re thinking suicidal thoughts, maybe you’re not thinking clearly and you’re having a hard time considering what could come after. I totally understand that. But even if you’re not, if you’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer, having lived through that recently with a couple of my relatives, I imagined that a lot of what they were thinking about was the social expectations of grief and of the anticipation of grief.

So maybe people think this way, but they don’t articulate it to the people around them, I would think. Unless they have someone that they have an incredible trust in to not freak out. What is the best way for me to die? Well, you’re already thinking about something that humans mostly shy away from. I’m trying not to, now. Because of these deaths that I have seen in my life, I’m trying to think according to a conventional wisdom that I’ve heard: death is part of life. It’s a thing that happens in your life.

You’re born, and that’s a process everyone goes through. You go through puberty, which is a process most people go through. There are these milestones, and death is one of them that just doesn’t have anything on the other side. So I try to think of it that way, but I don’t talk to a lot of people, frankly, about thinking of it that way. I think because there’s this… taboo is not the right word, but —

Steph: There’s social practice.

Mike: Yeah.

Steph: That’s fabulous. I mean, I can bring in this concept of structures of interaction now and say we’re in a culture, and it may be different in other cultures, but we’re definitely in a mainstream culture in the United States where death is not an open topic. And the contemplation of how one might die, when, where, with or without control of the circumstances, with or without intention as to whether it’s a meaningful death, whether it’s a death that serves a purpose, or if it’s just the natural death that occurs in a life.

The articulation of this passage, if I think about a structure of interaction, is there’s an individual, in this case the god Sieh, who’s verbalizing, putting into language some thoughts about mortality and the inevitability of death, and what is the usefulness of dying, what could be? That counters the typical ways or discourses that we use to talk about death and dying, whether it’s intentional through suicide or through natural means like disease and old age, or it could be violence. There’s a lot of ways and they all interact with each other.

Mike: I’m thinking about this as a writer and a reader. One of the things that’s afforded by having the ability to contemplate this whole other setting where rules may or may not apply: the human condition may or may not apply from the perspective of a god, death means something different. I think that’s what we’re seeing in this passage; it enables him to think of it not exactly objectively, but with a calm that humans don’t generally employ when talking about death to each other.

That immediately makes me wonder how the author is approaching this idea. Did she say, “I’m speaking in the voice of a god, it allows me to step back,” or is this something that Nora Jemisin herself–and I hate assigning agency to an author like that, but it’s fun to talk about nonetheless–is this an aspect of how she thinks about death?

Steph: Well, it goes to the opening comment you made about feeling a sense of cynicism. It’s actually triggering in my mind, having just watched the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. If in fact all versions of reality are possible, or even all versions of reality are playing out, then the move to, “it doesn’t matter, let’s just be cynical”, is one option. The other move is, “yes, and because that’s the case in the circumstance of the life that we’re in, we need to do everything we can to endow meaning.”

Mike: Here’s a take that addresses the, possibly, if I understand it correctly, addresses the structure of interaction as we’re talking about it here. How dare you subject me to such a short excerpt and make me try and interpret it this way. You were like, “Don’t bother reading the whole book. This isn’t that kind of podcast.” And I’m like, “But how can I understand the author’s intent and the full roundness of her meaning without the rest of the setup for what gods are in this world?” I mean, perhaps this is your intention with the removal from context. You want to talk about the disconnects.

Steph: That’s right. Things are always fractured, and in our interactions with each other, we’re always only getting a piece. And from that piece, if we think of it holographically, it’s all there, but do we clue into the pieces that give us the wholeness, or do we just extract a few things that support whatever worldview we’re already coming from, or reinforce a stereotype. Can we take these partial bits and open them up?

Because that’s how human communication works. We misunderstand each other or miss the meaning that was hoped for and have to co-create it again together. I want the reflection of these other voices and how we interact with them to be the focal point of coming to understand the structures of interaction that we all are already operating within.

Mike: That seems like it could be a good ending.

Steph: Thanks so much for being with us today, Mike. Are you sure you don’t want to say something about Reckoning?

Mike: Reckoning is amazing. What can I say about it? It is a diverse collection of voices that you likely have not heard these kinds of voices all in one place, and they’re all talking about environmental justice, which in my opinion is the primary struggle of our times. There’s some speculative writing in there and some mimetic writing. They all jumble together in a way that I hope provokes new ideas. I hope you go check it out.

Steph: I encourage everybody too as well. Thank you, Mike, for joining us today.

Mike: Thank you for having me. It was great fun.

Show Notes

This short reading of an excerpt from N. K. Jemisin’s The Kingdom of Gods (starting on p. 1036) was originally published on the Structures of Interaction podcast on July 20, 2019. The conversation about the reading with Guest Michael J. Deluca was recorded on February 13, 2023.

Michael J. DeLuca is the publisher of Reckoning, a nonprofit journal of creative writing on environmental justice. He’s also involved with the indie ebookstore Weightless Books. His novella, Night Roll, was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020. A novel, The Jaguar Mask, is forthcoming from Stelliform Press in 2024. He lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with partner, kid, cats, plants and microbes.

Credits

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

“…what does classified information do? I think the metaphor that we’re intended to bring to it is war, spying, national secrets, and the vulnerabilities of huge things like infrastructure. I imagine that the individual instances of it are far more idiosyncratic and personal.”

—Michael J. DeLuca

Transcript of the Reading

Transcript of the Reading

Steph: This is an excerpt from Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, beginning on page 175.

It was only later, long after I’d forgotten about the missing Inspector General report, that the classified version came skimming across my desktop, as if in proof of that old maxim that the best way to find something is to stop looking for it. Once the classified version turned up, I realized why I hadn’t had any luck finding it previously: it couldn’t be seen, not even by the heads of agencies. It was filed in an Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment, an extremely rare classification used only to make sure that something would remain hidden even from those holding top security clearance. Because of my position, I was familiar with most of the ECIs at the NSA, but not this one. The report’s full classification designation was TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCON/NOFORN, which translates to: pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed to read this.

I was most definitely not one of them. The report came to my attention by mistake: someone in the NSA IG’s office had left a draft copy on a system that I, as a sysadmin, had access to. Its caveat of STLW, which I didn’t recognize, turned out to be what’s called a “dirty word” on my system: a label signifying a document that wasn’t supposed to be stored on lower-security drives. These drives were being constantly checked for any newly appearing dirty words, and the moment one was found I was alerted so that I could decide how best to scrub the document from the system, but before I did, I’d have to examine the offending file myself, just to confirm that the dirty word search hadn’t flagged anything accidentally. Usually I’d take just the briefest glance at the thing. But this time, as soon as I opened the document and read the title, I knew I’d be reading it all the way through.

Here was everything that was missing from the unclassified version. Here was everything that the journalism I’d read had lacked, and that the court proceedings I’d followed had been denied: a complete accounting of the NSA’s most secret surveillance programs, and the agency directives and Department of Justice policies that had been used to subvert American law and contravene the US Constitution. After reading the thing, I could understand why no IC employee had ever leaked it to journalists, and no judge would be able to force the government to produce it in open court. The document was so deeply classified that anybody who had access to it who wasn’t a sysadmin would be immediately identifiable. And the activities it outlined were so deeply criminal that no government would ever allow it to be released unredacted.

One issue jumped out at me immediately: it was clear that the unclassified version I was already familiar with wasn’t a redaction of the classified version, as would usually be the practice. Rather, it was a wholly different document, which the classified version immediately exposed as an outright and carefully concocted lie. The duplicity was stupefying, especially given that I just dedicated months of my time to deduplicating files. Most of the time, when you’re dealing with two versions of the same document, the differences between them are trivial—a  few commas here, a few words there. But the only thing these two particular reports had in common was their title.

Whereas the unclassified version merely made reference to the NSA being ordered to intensify its intelligence-gathering practices following 9/11, the classified version laid out the nature, and scale, of that intensification. The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from target collection of communications to “bulk collection,” which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance. And whereas the unclassified version obfuscated this shift, advocating for expanded surveillance by scaring the public with the specter of terror, the classified version made this shift explicit, justifying it as the legitimate corollary of expanded technological capacity.

The NSA IG’s portion of the classified report outlined what it called “a collection gap,” noting that existing surveillance legislation (particularly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) dated from 1978, a time when most communications signals traveled via radio or telephone lines, rather than fiber-optic cables and satellites. In essence, the agency was arguing that the speed and volume of contemporary communication had outpaced, and outgrown, American law—no court, not even a secret court, could issue enough individually targeted warrants fast enough to keep up—and that a truly global world required a truly global intelligence agency. All of this pointed, in the NSA’s logic, to the necessity of the bulk collection of Internet communications. The code name for this bulk collection initiative was indicated in the very dirty word that got it flagged on my system: STLW, an abbreviation of STELLARWIND. This turned out to be the single major component of the PSP that had continued, and even grown, in secret after the rest of the program had been made public in the press.

STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private internet communications as potential signals intelligence.

Such fraudulent redefinitions ran throughout the report, but perhaps the most fundamental and transparently desperate involved the government’s vocabulary: STELLARWIND had been collecting communications since the PSP’s inception in 2001, but in 2004—when Justice Department officials balked at the continuation of the initiative—the Bush administration attempted to legitimize it ex post facto by changing the meanings of basic English words, such as “acquire” and “obtain.” According to the report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency “searched for and retrieved” them from its database.

This lexical sophistry was particularly galling to me, as I was well aware that the agency’s goal was to be able to retain as much data as it could for as long as it could—for perpetuity. If communications records would only be considered definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but collected in storage forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation. By redefining the terms “acquire” and “obtain”—from describing the act of data being entered into a database, to describing the act of a person (or, more likely, an algorithm) querying that database and getting a “hit” or “return” at any conceivable point in the future—the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden (2019)

Transcript of the Conversation

Steph: Today’s guest is Michael J. DeLuca, a longtime friend and webmaster of my digital domains. Mike is an author and the publisher of Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Welcome back, Mike.

Mike: Thank you, Steph. I’m excited.

Steph: Right. Today we’re talking about this excerpt from Edward Snowden’s book, Permanent Record. How did it land with you, this section, this reading?

Mike: I have some context for this. I mean, I bring some context. I have a computer science degree. I briefly held a government security clearance of “secret”. For one year, I was allowed to look at minor secure documents, and boy, was I bad at it, that job was not for me. And then also, what this makes me think of in this moment is ChatGPT, the AI that generates text, which didn’t exist when Snowden wrote this book.

But the wealth of data he talks about in this excerpt is just such a wealth of data as what is fed into a machine learning “AI” like ChatGPT or one of those art-generating AIs. It makes me wonder what horrific machine intent is gazing on all of our data even now and what it makes of it.

Steph: By machine intent, you literally mean by an intelligent conscious computer?

Mike: Absolutely not. The reason I put AI in quotes, “artificial intelligence”–I’ve got a whole ax to grind about this if you’d like to hear me grind that ax. Artificial intelligence is a concept that was created in science fiction. Asimov and all, you’ve read those books, we’ve talked about them. The thing that is referred to as AI now is referred to in direct reference to the concept from science fiction.

It is an attempt to get us excited about something that is in no way like Lieutenant Commander Data, for example, or R. Daneel Olivaw, it is just a machine, which is why I call it machine learning. But that machine is fed a purpose. The ChatGPT machine, I presume, is told to try and absorb and grasp structures of grammar, sentence structure, and somehow it manages to distill that into the blandest prose I’ve ever seen.

But if the NSA has one of these machine learning devices, what is its directive? What is it looking for? I’m flummoxed if part of the shakeout of whatever they told it isn’t prejudice. “Run together all the Black people that you hear talking in your surveillance recordings and make assumptions based on that, and advise us to create policy in bad faith as a result of those assumptions.” That seems to be how all technology works, and so the specter of this kind of thing being done to all of our private conversations is pretty horrific.

Steph: I agree. Leaving the AI argument aside, just so that we can understand what Snowden is doing with his voice in this book, which is about his decision to become a whistleblower at this level of top secret national security criminal behavior. Like, there’s an intersection of things that are happening that he, as someone who was able to do that, and screening for the dirty words that are the clues that some document is floating around in cyberspace in some way that it’s not supposed to be, which makes it vulnerable to being accessed by people that we don’t want to access it, or whoever has created the document doesn’t want to access it, finding himself as a single individual in a position of knowledge and even leverage, right?

He leveraged his position and his knowledge to reveal this larger macrosocial governmental policy that was being done in secret. I want to focus on that, in terms of him telling us his story, and where’s his voice in this as an agent, what is it that motivates him to — I don’t want to reintroduce the whole debate, but to understand what it is he found, what is he teaching us about that discourse around secrecy in the government, and what is supposed to be legal or not legal, and the recourse that an individual has in the face of a huge structure like the National Security Agency?

Mike: It’s interesting to view this in the light of the ongoing rolling scandal about documents being at Mar-a-Lago, or in Pence’s underwear drawer, or in Biden’s underwear drawer. Yeah, what does classified information do? I think the metaphor that we’re intended to bring to it is war, spying, national secrets, and the vulnerabilities of huge things like infrastructure. I imagine that the individual instances of it are far more idiosyncratic and personal. Like, here, the personal is brought by Snowden.

Snowden is a guy who, I assume, I’m going to guess he’s got an Ivy League education. He’s got a computer science degree such as I have. He’s clean shaven, he’s got short, dark hair. He’s White, he’s affluent. They let him look at these documents because he had those features, I have to think, and now that makes him rare from a demographic perspective. It makes it more surprising that he made this choice because the government entity invested him with this trust and he chose to violate it, so that’s fascinating. Then by doing so, he achieved immediately this international status on par with Julian Assange or someone like that. Did he know he was doing that?

Steph: I think he was very conscious of the way that this revelation would alter his life trajectory. I mean, I don’t know that he knew he could predict the exact ins and outs, right? Nobody can, but he was a knowing actor. He understood that the consequences were going to be deeply personal and enduring. I think that’s part of what he talks about in other parts of this book, is the awareness that he brought to it.

I really appreciate you naming his demographic, because the betrayal that he made is more to Whiteness or even White supremacy, which is using the government of the United States, which designed the government of the United States to keep itself in power originally, and that is the tension that’s playing out in our democracy today.

Are we really going to be for all the people, or are we just going to be for a certain historically elevated subgroup of the population? I think that is important, and I agree, it does make him rare. Although there are historical examples of allies or race traitors throughout history too, they’re fewer and farther between because it is bucking, it’s going against the discourse and the social practices of the people who have said, “You’re part of us.”

Mike: It’s fascinating to speculate, what if Edward Snowden had been a Black woman, would that person have gained the fame that Edward Snowden now has, the notoriety? Would we have even seen this? Because Snowden, I presume, brought it to the New York Times and all these places. Had he not been an extremely well-educated White man, would all those places have dismissed it as traitorous act?

Steph: There’s a film, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Laura, what’s her last name, with a P? She was with Snowden when this hit the news, they documented. He covered every base, he had reporters from The Guardian in the hotel room with him when the news broke on the US media, and she was filming. It’s the most incredible documentary work I’ve ever seen. It’s Laura Poitras, and it’s called Citizenfour. Have you ever seen? Mike, you should.

It’s the most brilliant work of using contemporary media and the collapse of time and space that today’s media allows that I’ve ever seen. So that’s why I attest to the intentionality of him knowing what he did. Now, would a different person who was an outsider to the in-group have known and had the resources and the connections to bring in all of that support so that the message would be amplified? Part of what he understood is that it had to be a splash that couldn’t be denied.

Mike: Surely also he’s able to rely on his Whiteness to shield him in doing this.

Steph: Yeah. I mean, the irony of all ironies is that he’s ended up in Russia. I don’t even know what to make about all that except that clearly it serves Putin in some ridiculous way. What do you think about the language stuff that he talks about? Like the part where he talks about how the NSA said, “Well, there’s a collection gap and we just need to fill in this hole that we have in our collection practices of,” they call it “signals intelligence”, which is anything that’s communicated over anything; radio, telephone, digital — and then this play on whether they’ve obtained something or acquired something or not.

Mike: Right. That part sounds incredibly familiar. I mean, alas for the overuse of the works of George Orwell in this context, but this is a more apt situation for it. But it’s not like Orwell has a monopoly on propaganda and “doublespeak”, though I think he’s responsible for that term for it. What you were saying about this nation being founded on the principle of keeping the people who founded it in control: that’s how we see that done. From the 2nd Amendment on down, it’s what words mean and how they are made to mean.

Steph: But the 2nd Amendment was reinterpreted about 100 years ago to mean what it means in the discourse now, but it’s not what it meant when it was written.

Mike: Right. Yeah. “Lexical sophistry”, that is my favorite part of this passage.

Steph: That word, “sophistry”, can you define it or explain it?

Mike: I think so. It’s obfuscation using language. I think of it as a kin to solipsism; solipsism being where you imagine that you are the center of the universe. Sophistry involves convincing someone else that you’re the center of the universe. I’m taking liberties here, but it’s using a superior gift of gab to bring someone else around to your worldview and intentions, and that too is something we see everywhere.

Steph: When I was doing my research at the European Parliament back in the day, one of the members of parliament from the UK that I interviewed said something about why it’s good for the EU’s documents to be written in English, because you can always change what it means.

Mike: Wow, that’s brutal.

Steph: Yeah. I mean, that’s a paraphrase, that was the intent though. She said, “You can make it mean anything.”

Mike: Yeah. Now I’m thinking of Bill Clinton, “That depends on what you think the definition of ‘is’ is.”

Steph: Right. So playing with language — it’s just disrespectful in a certain way, right? It’s like I’m going to fool you. I’m going to make you think that you know what I’m talking about, but actually, I mean something else.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, it’s a way to wield one’s education as a weapon. Not even necessarily education, but just position of authority, because authority affords you the mic. You and I respect each other and interrupt each other and say, ‘”Oh no, you please go ahead,” but when you’re the President of the United States, people don’t do that.

Steph: Yeah. Of course, this is the argument, that the right is trying to tear down the structure of interaction so that we lose faith in any part of it working, which then just pits us against each other and leaves the people who already have entrenched privilege with more. I think, on the flip side, those of us who think there are more of us who want to cooperate than to compete have to figure out, what are the terms of our cooperation?

I was thinking of this earlier when you were talking about the purpose of the metaphor of the classified documents, right? Is that, well, we’re at war. We have national interests to protect, there are security concerns, but those are all invented terms for an invented practice of violence and competition. It’s got a long history, but it’s also been overly exaggerated, and recent scholarship shows that we’re much more cooperative than we are competitive.

Mike: Right. There’s all this theory piling up into producing that prevailing sense of competition, Social Darwinism. I was thinking about this just earlier today with the unidentified flying objects being shot down over various parts of North America, Turtle Island, and thought experiment: what if they’re actually aliens? What if the aliens don’t like having their stuff shot down with no attempt to communicate with them, or ask who they are, or what they’re doing? I literally went down this road this morning.

Suddenly, we have an extraterrestrial enemy, and all the divisions between humans are suddenly lifted away because we’re provided with this other thing to compete with. Then all of a sudden, people like you and me, Steph, who are struggling to make connections between humans are out of a job because now those connections are imperative for us to survive against the alien aggressor. It was not a fun thought experiment.

Steph: Yes. I’m not even sure if it holds actually. There’ve been some treatments of that in story, in science fiction, and some of them, I guess, are more or less satisfying as plausible or you could see how that could go that way.

Mike: And many of them are pure propaganda of the same kind that we’re discussing here.

Steph: Right. I guess that’s really the heart of what I hope to achieve in these podcasts and looking at these excerpts. There’s something important about situating ourselves in relation to things that we know about as well as things that we don’t know much about, and understanding that we’re influenced by them all.

Mike: Yeah. The wealth of that data is this great unknown. It’s interesting that part of the NSA’s argument for why they can have it is that it is so big they can’t grasp it all. This might be a nice metaphor for the points you’re trying to make about how humans interact. They have all the data, but they can’t take advantage of it without some algorithm.

Steph: Yeah. I mean, it does loop back to where you started with, now there’s this new machine learning capacity to parse huge amounts of data into sensible metrics that somebody can say are meaningful this way or that way, and how much bias is built-in, how much bias can be removed through different machine learning techniques. Are they asking it questions that are helpful? Should anybody be looking at that data in this way, is the first question.

Arguably, no, it was not collected with consent. It was collected against US law of protecting citizens. It’s got all kinds of reasons not to ever be formally acquired through the process of a search, but they have it. I think it’s naive to think that they aren’t already trying to do those kinds of things and reading for patterns that they want to use to mobilize in some kind of way.

Mike: The patterns that are occurring to me that they could be looking for now are pretty nightmarish. I’m almost afraid to bring them up for fear of speaking them into existence.

Steph: Yeah. I don’t think we need to do that, but I think it’s interesting to think, could the data be put to a different use? Could there be transparency around what algorithms are being applied to the data? Could there be more oversight of potential bias? Could there be intentional uses that are more about, we already have a global threat.

Mike: Excellent point.

Steph: We don’t need aliens to give us the global threat, it’s already here. What are the collective changes that we can make in concert with each other to give us all a better chance? I think that’s the different discourse that hopefully we can support and promote, that we could probably do much more together if we understood that we needed to work together than if we keep trying to pit ourselves against, whether we call them other identity groups, or other nationalities, or other countries. All of those are also fictions that have been made up more to promote difference than anything else, difference in competition.

Mike: I’m thinking of the metaphor or the model of the search engine, and the internet, I guess the trajectory of the internet, the ethical trajectory of the internet since its inception. When I was introduced to the concept of the search engine and the internet, all this information is at your fingertips, you can learn things. For a long time, I was delighted with that, and it fulfilled the expectations that were brought to my imagination when it was explained what it was.

Designers of search engines, for a while, competed to do better at that, at bringing you the actual information that you wanted. Then at a certain point, that ceased to be the goal, in my opinion. I don’t know when that was, it may have been a turning-the-Titanic type situation, that metaphor that is often brought up with respect to climate change, where it changed while people weren’t noticing.

But I don’t know if you’ve been aware of what seems to me to be a trend of people saying, “Google is not as useful as anymore. It’s harder to get that information, it’s harder to see what’s on the internet,” because everyone’s trying to monetize it or trying to manipulate. Those bad actors have been there since the beginning, and I don’t quite understand why they didn’t get purchase faster. Why did it take this long?

But to me, the internet is deteriorating as a useful tool as we watch. Then I think about the way the accumulated wealth of human knowledge is treated in an optimistic science fiction world like Star Trek, where you can ask the computer to teach you how to repair warp drive, or pull a bullet out of someone’s chest. Those things predate the internet, and we dreamed of them, and we can still dream of them. But man, is it hard for me to dream of a transition between this and a future more like that now? I don’t know what to do with that.

Steph: Joining me here on the Structures of Interaction Podcast is an absolutely excellent contribution to that effort.

Mike: That’s why I’m here.

Steph: Thank you, Mike.

Show Notes

This short Reading of an excerpt from Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record (starting on p. 175) was originally published on the Structures of Interaction podcast on November 16, 2019.

The Conversation about The Reading with Guest Michael J. Deluca was recorded on February 13, 2023, one month before reporting in the NY Times and Washington Post about the Discord Gamer’s leak of top secret national security documents. (See this Washington Post gift article for context and timeline: https://wapo.st/3n2lHUC).

Michael J. DeLuca is the publisher of Reckoning, a nonprofit journal of creative writing on environmental justice. He’s also involved with the indie ebookstore Weightless Books. His novella, Night Roll, was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020. A novel, The Jaguar Mask, is forthcoming from Stelliform Press in 2024. He lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with partner, kid, cats, plants and microbes.

Credits

Original music written and performed by Richard Guild Kent.

Transcript by Esther Wokabi.

Shownotes and Transcript are published at www.reflexivity.us.

An excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers, pp. 318-322, read by Steph.

Transcript:

“A lot of evidence suggests that group loyalty interferes with reason.”

Maidenhair and Watchman trade smirks, like he’s just told them that science has proven that the atmosphere is mostly air.

“People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that.”

Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”

Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand.

Maidenhair inspects Adam, as through a lab’s two way mirror.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Anything you want.”

“It’s a simple question. How long do you think we have?”

He doesn’t understand. He looks to Watchman, but the man, too, is waiting for his answer. “I don’t know.”

“In your heart of hearts. How long before we pull the place down around us?”

Her words embarrass Adam. It’s a question for undergrad dorms. For bar rooms late on a Saturday night. He has let the situation get away from him, and none of this—the trespass through private land, the ascent, this fuzzy conversation—can be worth the two extra data points. He looks away, out on the ravaged redwoods. “Really. I don’t know.”

“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?”

The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges. And it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.”

“Thank you!” She’s pleased with her overgrown pupil. He grins back. Maidenhair’s head bobs forward and her eyebrows flair. “And would you say that the rate is falling or rising?”

He has seen the graphs, everyone has. Ignition has only just started.

“It’s so simple,” she says, “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking, “Is the house on fire?”

`A shrug, a sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”

“And you want to observe the handful of people who are screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”

A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group…”

“. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?”

“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”

“—or lots of people would already have—”

“—with six billion other—”

“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two thirds of the planets’ net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”

“Can’t tap the brakes when you’re about to hit the wall.”

“Easier to poke your eyes out.”

The distant snarl breaks off, audible again in silence. The entire study begins to seem to Adam like a distraction. He needs to study illness on an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize.

Maidenhair breaks the silence, “We aren’t alone. Others are trying to reach us. I can hear them.”

From Adam’s neck down to the small of his back, hairs rise. He’s huge with fur. But the signal is invisible. Lost in evolution. “Hear who?”

“I don’t know, the trees, the life force.”

“You mean talking? Out loud?”

She strokes a bough as if it’s a pet. “Not out loud. More like a Greek chorus in my head.” She looks at Adam, her face as clear as if she just asked him to stay for dinner. “I died. I was electrocuted in my bed. My heart stopped. I came back and started hearing them.”

Adam turns to Watchman for a sanity check. But the bearded prophet only arches his brows.

Maidenhair taps the questionnaire. “I suppose you have your answer now about the psychology of world-savers?”

Watchman touches her shoulder. “What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?”

Adam doesn’t hear. He’s just now tuning into something that has long been hiding in plain sight. He says, to no one. “I talk out loud sometimes. To my sister. She disappeared when I was little.”

“Well, okay then, can we study you?”

A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world. Adam puts out his hands to steady himself and touches only a swaying twig. Held high up above the vanishingly distant surface by a creature who should want him dead. His brain spins. The tree has dragged him. He’s twirling again by a cord the width of a vine. He fixes on the woman’s face as if some last desperate act of personality-reading might still protect him. “What . . . ? What are they saying? The trees.”

She tries to tell him.

Recorded July 24, 2020

Location: Belchertown, MA

An excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers, pp. 232-238, read by Steph.

Transcript:

Four years at Fortuna College come down to one afternoon: Adam in his spot in the front row, Daniels Auditorium. Professor Rubin Rabinowski at the podium—Affect and Cognition. Last lecture before the final exam, and the Rabi-Man is surveying all the experimental evidence that suggests—to the delight of the oversubscribed class—that teaching psychology is a waste of time.

“Now I’ll show you the self-evaluations of people asked how susceptible they think they are to anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief, perseverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cueing—all the biases you’ve learned about in this course. Here are the scores of the control group. And here are the scores of people who’ve taken this course in previous years.”

Lots of laughs: the numbers are pretty much the same. Both groups confident of their iron will, clear vision and independent thought.

“Here are the performances on several different evaluations designed to conceal what they were testing. Most of the second group were tested less than six months after they took this course.”

The laughter turns to groans. Blindness and unreason, rampant. Course grads, working twice as hard to save five bucks as they would to earn it. Grads fearing bears, sharks, lightening, and terrorists more than they fear drunk drivers. Eighty percent thinking they’re smarter than average. Grads wildly inflating how many jelly beans they think are in a jar, based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses.

“The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.

“So why, you may ask, do I go on talking, up here? Why go on, year after year, cashing the college’s checks?”

The laughs are all sympathy now. Adam admires the brilliant pedagogy. He, at least, he vows, will remember this lecture years from now, and its revelations will make him wiser, no matter what the studies show. He at least will defy the indicting numbers.

“Let me show you the answers you yourselves gave to a simple questionnaire I had you fill out at the beginning of the semester. You’ve probably forgotten you ever took it.” The professor glances at the average answers and grimaces. His lips tighten in pain. Snickers across the room, “You may or may not recall that I asked you then whether you thought you’d . . .” Professor Rabinowski fiddles with his tie. He windmills with his left arm, grimaces again. “Excuse me one minute.” He lurches off the dais and out the door. A murmur passes through the auditorium. Thuds come from the down hall—a stack of boxes tipping over. Fifty-four students sit and wait for the punch line. Faint, swallowed sounds fill the hallway, but no one moves.

Adam scans the seats behind him. Students frown at each other or busy themselves with notes. He turns to look at that magnificent woman who always sits two seats to his left. Premed, fawn-colored, pretty without knowing it, binders full of neat handwritten notes, and he thinks again how glorious it would be to sit in Bucky’s over a beer with her and talk about this astonishing class. But the semester ends in two days, and the chance is as good as lost.

She glances his way confused. He shakes his head and can’t help smirking. He leans in to whisper, and she reciprocates. Maybe the chance hasn’t vanished. “Kitty Genovese. The bystander effect. Darley and Latane, 1968.”

“But is he okay?” Her breath is like cinnamon.

“Remember how we had to answer whether we’d help someone who . . . ?”

A woman shouts from below for someone to call an ambulance. But by the time the paramedics get their ambulance onto the quad, Professor Rabinowski is dead of a myocardial infarction.

“I don’t understand,” the premed beauty says, in their booth at Bucky’s. “If you thought he was demonstrating the bystander effect, why did you keep sitting there?”

She’s on her third iced coffee, and it bothers Adam. “That’s not the point. The question is why fifty-three other people, including you, who thought he was having a heart attack, didn’t do anything? I thought he was jerking us around to make a point.”

“Then you should have been on your feet and calling his bluff!”

“I didn’t want to spoil the show.”

“You should have been up in five seconds.”

He slams the booth table. “It wouldn’t have made any damn difference.”

She flinches into the booth, like he meant to hit her. He puts up his palms, leans toward her to apologize, and she flinches again. He freezes, hands in the air, seeing what the cowering woman sees.

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” Professor Rabinowski’s last lesson. Learning psychology is indeed pretty much useless. He pays for the drinks and leaves. He never sees her again, except for the following week, from four seats away, for two hours, at the proctored final exam.

. . .

He’s admitted to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountain side overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and laying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad clouds of stars. After two years, the other grads take to calling him Bias Boy. In any discussion of the psychology of social formations, Adam Appich, master of science,a is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

He consults with his advisor. Professor Mieke Van Dijk, she of the sublime Dutch bob, clipped consonents and soft-core softened vowels. In fact, she makes him confer with her every two weeks, in her office up in College Ten, hoping the enforced check-in will jump start his research.

“You are dragging your feet over nothing.”

In fact, he has his feet up, reclining on her Victorian daybed across the office from her desk, as if she’s psychoanalyzing him. It amuses them both.

“Dragging? Not at all. I am utterly paralyzed.”

“But why? You make too big a deal about this. Think of a thesis . . .” —she can’t pronounce the th—”as a long seminar project. You don’t have to save the world.”

“I don’t? Can I at least save a nation-state or two?”

She laughs; her wide overbite quickens his pulse. “Listen, Adam, pretend this has nothing to do with your career. Nothing to do with any professional approval. What do you, personally, want to discover? What would give you enjoyment to study for a couple of years?”

He watches the words spill from that pretty mouth, free from the social scientific jargon that she tends to drop into seminars. “This enjoyment you speak about . . .”

“Tsh. You want to know something.”

He wants to know whether she has ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is—he wants to say, robust. He feels a weird need to tell her how he got here, in her office, looking for a thesis topic. Wants to draw his entire intellectual history in a straight line—from daubing nail polish on the abdomens of ants to watching his beloved undergraduate mentor die— then ask her where the line leads next.

“I’m interested in . . . unblinding.” He steals a look at her. If only people, like some invertebrates, would just turn raging purple when they felt attraction. It would make the entire species so much less neurotic.

She purses her lips. She must know how good that looks on her, “Unblinding? I’m sure that must mean something.”

“Can people come to independent moral decisions that run counter to their tribes’ beliefs?”

“You want to study transformative potential as a function of strong, normative, in-group favoritism.”

He’d nod, but the jargon bugs the crap out of him. “It’s like this. I think of myself as a good man. A good citizen. But say I’m a good citizen of early Rome, when a father had the power, and sometimes the duty, to put his child to death.”

“I see. And you, a good citizen, are motivated to preserve positive distinctiveness . . .

“We’re trapped by social identity. Even when there are big, huge truths staring us in… ” He hears his peers jeering, “Bias boy.”

“Well, no. Clearly not or in-group realignment would never happen.” “Transformation of social identity.”

“Does it?”

“Of course. Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote, to having a major party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime. From Dred Scott to Emancipation in a few years. Children, foreigners, prisoners, women, blacks, the disabled and mentally ill: they’ve all gone from property to personhood. I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you’re my age, we’ll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.”

“How old are you anyway?”

Professor Van Dyke laughs. Her fine high cheekbones pink out; he’s sure of it. Tough to hide, with that complexion. “Topic, please.”

“I’d like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind . . .”

“. . . while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalties. Now we get somewhere. This could be a topic. With much more narrowing and definition. You could look at the next step in this same historical progression of consciousness. Study those people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.”

“For instance?”

“We’re living at a time when claims are being made for a moral authority that lies beyond the human.”

One smooth tensing of his abdominal muscles, and he sits up. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve seen the news. People up and down this coast are risking their lives for plants. I read a story last week—a man who had his legs sheared off by a machine he tried to chain himself to.”

Adam has seen the stories, but he ignored them. Now he can’t see why. Plant rights? Plant personhood.” A boy he knew once jumped into a hole and risked live burial to protect his unborn brother’s sapling from harm. That boy is dead. “I hate activists.”

“So? Why?”

“Orthodoxy and sloganeering. Boring. I hate it when those Greenpeace guys shake me down on the street. Anyone who gets righteous . . . doesn’t understand.”

“Understand what?”

“How hopelessly fragile and wrong we all are. About everything.”

Professor Van Dyke frowns. “I see. Good thing we aren’t doing a psychological study of you.”

“Are these people really appealing to a new, nonhuman moral order? Or are they just being sentimental about pretty green things?”

“That’s where controlled psychological measurements come in.”

He smirks a little, himself. But something large wells up in him, and he can’t even shift his weight or it will disappear. A way forward. “Identity formation and Big Five personality factors among plants rights activists.”

“Or: Who does the tree hugger really hug when he hugs a tree?”

A reading from The Overstory by Richard Powers. 2018, p. 232-238.

Recorded July 20, 2020

Location: Belchertown, MA

Transcript:

A reading from The Overstory by Richard Powers. 2018, p. 124.

It’s a miracle,” she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antenna arrays form up into thylakoids discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious gingko.

Too many zeros, their eyes glaze over. She must shepherd them back over that ultrafine line between numbness and awe.

“Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of poison gas and volcanic slag into this peopled garden. And everything you hope, fear and love became possible.” They think she’s nuts, and that’s fine with her. She’s content to post a memory forward to their distant futures, futures that will depend on the inscrutable generosity of green things.

Recorded July 15, 2020

Location: Belchertown, MA