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Episode post here. Transcription by Maria Araújo.


Matt Teichman:
Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Rebecca Valentine, co-founder of Queerious Labs in San Francisco. Rebecca Valentine, welcome.

Rebecca Valentine:
Hey, how’s it going?

Matt Teichman:
So I billed you as the co-founder of Queerious Labs, and I thought maybe we could start off by talking about what Queerious Labs actually is. It’s where we’re recording now—so I see all kinds of queerious things on the walls—but where exactly are we, and what goes on here?

Rebecca Valentine:
Queerious Labs is a queer anarcha-feminist art space, a workshop—sometimes hackerspace, depending on who you’re talking to—it’s a community space that’s run by the community, for creative technical projects. Teaching, holding events, all sorts of things like that.

Matt Teichman:
You mentioned it was anarcha-feminist, and that might be a new term to some of our listeners. It sounds like it’s a combination, maybe, of anarchism and feminism. Is that about right?

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! A lot of the motivation behind Queerious Labs is a response to a very cishet masculine tech culture, here in San Francisco, and in the Bay Area more generally. A lot of us come from anarchist or socialist communities. But here, in the Bay Area, within the tech world—even within the hacker world and the arts tech, that sort of intersection of communities—there is quite a lot of masculine dominance, and low-level sexism, and misogyny, and these sorts of things. And, you know, if you just look at tech, broadly speaking—it’s just saturated with it.

So we created this space as a response to that, where we would have an anarchist take on what this kind of community could be like; an anarchist take on hackerspaces, on community workshops, these sorts of things. Which is not novel, but the feminist part of it kind of is. There have been other feminist hackerspaces, or makerspaces— like Double Union—but they haven’t really been anarchist; they haven’t been open. We wanted to take a bunch of the things that we loved about various places, and try to build a new thing that no one had really done before. So in that context, it’s anarchafeminism—or queer anarchafeminism, specifically.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah, so that’s all very cool. What exactly is a hackerspace?

Rebecca Valentine:
A hackerspace is a space for hackers. But the deeper question there is: what is a hacker, ultimately?

Matt Teichman:
Indeed. Is it a person that breaks into banks and steals money?

Rebecca Valentine:
Well…no. That’s a bank robber.

[ LAUGHTER ]

At least from my perspective, a hacker is someone who is passionate about the stuff that they do—and that can be something computer-related, or it can be knitting, it can be whatever. But typically, it’s someone who’s passionate about it; does it because they love it; and is oftentimes doing it in a way that is not the standard way, or the officially authorized way. Historically, the term ‘hackers’ originates from MIT, when people were hacking on model train kits to turn them into whatever they wanted the model train kits to be—as opposed to the actual official thing that the kit was designed to be. They were literally hacking their kits to pieces and reassembling them in all sorts of ways.

Matt Teichman:
So there was actual, literal severing of physical things!

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! And then it became the—this is the model train club that half of the Computer Science Department at MIT was in. Which is why there was such an overlap with computer science and programmers. And then from there, it became the kinds of programmers that were—I don’t want to say, strictly speaking, counterculture, but counter to the dominant culture in computers at the time. Which is the narrow ties of IBM, and the engineers—as opposed to the people who just want to play around with computers and explore stuff. We get into the criminal aspects of hackers, because, well, when you have a bunch of really curious geeks, and you present them with a complex system—such as, I don’t know, the phone system—they’re going to do some exploration and try to understand it. How to make it do what they want it to do.

That’s how you got phone freaks. But then, as the phone networks became more and more computerized, to be a really good phone freak you had to be a good computer hacker—to actually use computers and get them to do what you wanted. Especially if they were computers you didn’t control—that the phone company controlled, or that a university controlled. Then you get the whole story of Kevin Mitnick and how he became public enemy number one, because he was hacking into all sorts of fun stuff, mostly just for exploration. Probably because of him, the whole notion of computer hacking as a criminal thing happens. But hacking, broadly speaking, is just looking at the world, being really interested in the world, and then—

[ DOORBELL ]

—that’s the doorbell, by the way! But so, throughout the whole Kevin Mitnick thing—both before and after it—there was still this tendency for hackers, as a community, to basically just be people who are looking at the world, seeing all the cool stuff that was happening in the world—and then figuring out their own ways of making it work, and do stuff that they were interested in having it do. A lot of that was computer-related, but it wasn’t strictly speaking computer-related.

And so, you have a broader hacker culture, which is about hacking all sorts of things—whether it is model train kits, or computers, or whether it’s sewing or fabric hacking. A hacker is someone who makes stuff, takes stuff apart to understand how it works, and very frequently, it’s someone who doesn’t follow the rules that the thing has set out for it.

Matt Teichman:
Right, yeah. I get a lot of questions about this. There’s an event in Chicago that I go to—sometimes it’s every week, sometimes it’s bi-weekly—called Hack Night. And people often ask me, ‘Well, what goes on there? What do you do at Hack Night? Do you break into other people’s computers?’ A verb I sometimes use to explain what it is is ‘tinkering’—tinkering, in an exploratory way, to try to learn about something.

I think the whole phenomenon of hacking is politically interesting in a number of ways. If you think about how most of the stuff that we use, purchase, consume, and enjoy, is mass produced, and because it’s mass produced, the stuff that I buy, in general, is not going to be made specifically for me, Matt. It’s going to be off the shelf—some general thing that lots of different people are going to get. I’m not necessarily saying that’s good or bad; it’s just a fact about what it’s like to live right now.

Rebecca Valentine:
And it has a purpose. It has a well-defined purpose that has been put out there, and you don’t have a say in it, until you hack it.

Matt Teichman:
Exactly! You know, it could be something as simple as: maybe, as a child, I get a toy, and I paint new eyebrows on it, to make it more like the toy that I would want. Or maybe another interesting analogy would be custom cars, which turned into a big thing—

Rebecca Valentine:
—yeah! Customization and personalization is a lot of what it’s about—but it’s not about merely superficially doing things. I mean, it can be. There’s no reason that you can’t just hack your stuff by embroidering what you want to on your bag, if you get a bag, and you want, like, whatever—that’s hacking, right? But a lot of it is also just totally repurposing stuff in ways that are not even within the scope of what people intended it to be for.

Matt Teichman:
I like that word repurposing. It turns out that things can often have surprise uses that you didn’t know that they were useful for, and this is about discovering those.

Rebecca Valentine:
Oh yeah! A lot of times, that’s what people were doing with the phone system, and the computer networks that was connected to. Actually, a great example of this—there’s someone that I know who’s a Siri and Alexa hacker. And what he does is: he gets these things to talk to one another, and it automatically goes through this whole process. Because when you have two speaking things and two hearing things that can interact with one another, you get weird cycles of conversations, and they can do stuff that you otherwise couldn’t do. It was not even dreamed of, by either of the groups of people who made these things. It’s almost feedback, but it’s not quite feedback, because the one says something; the other responds and says something; and then the other responds and says something. And neither of them know that they’re not talking to a person. That’s the coolest sort of hack, where you get something where no one imagined that this is what people would do with it. But you can still get it to do something really cool.

Matt Teichman:
I imagine those conversations are pretty surreal.

Rebecca Valentine:
They super are.

Matt Teichman:
Sometimes, when I’m driving home, my GPS says, ‘Turn left, at such and such.’ And when that sound comes through the speaker, my Google assistant thinks that that’s me talking to it. And so, my phone is effectively talking to itself. So I can relate.

Rebecca Valentine:
This actually has a connection to video games, too. We were just talking about video games in the nineties. One of the main things that they designed Deus Ex for was: they wanted players to be able to feel like they could embody themselves in the game, and play the game how they wanted. The designers of the game—especially Warren Spector, who’s the director—they were pleased, most of all, when players did things that they could never have predicted.

Warren Spector tells this story of how he was doing a playtest, where he was watching someone play a level that he had seen be played, a thousand times, over the course of the development of the game. And this person was just going to do some random thing, and he was, like, ‘No, there’s no way that’s gonna work. Like, how’s that…no!‘. And then it works—it gains the person access to wherever they were trying to go—and it’s, like, ‘Oh, that blew my mind!’ Right? People who design games for this are still blown away by people basically hacking the game. It’s a beautiful thing when you see stuff like that happen.

Matt Teichman:
Right. One immediate connection to anarchism that I can think of—and this goes back to Episode 68 of Elucidations, where we talked to Mark Lance about anarchism—it seems like one of the ideas behind that political philosophy is to accomplish a lot of what we accomplish in the current system in a more bottom-up manner, where some organized pattern of behavior among a group of people emerges out of an immediate need. Rather than: ‘Well, we decided in advance, we need to have this group of people doing XYZ, and they’re going to see to it that that always happens.’

So you end up having, like, a town council, because there are some issues that the people living in this area need to address—and they think that their needs can be best served if they work together. Rather than: ‘Well, before anybody even moved here, we created this town, and with the council, and we imposed this governmental order on it in advance.’ I can see a potential connection between the kind of psychological temperament where you’d want to imaginatively think of new uses for things—where you’d want to break down, reverse-engineer, the items in your vicinity, and try to arrive at a fuller understanding of them, in this playful self-education kind of way—and the bottom-up approach to governance. Do you think there’s a connection between those two things?

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah, absolutely. The first thing I would say, by the way, is I’m not sure that I would actually agree with that notion of anarchism, as a core conception of anarchism.

Matt Teichman:
Ok, cool.

Rebecca Valentine:
Because that seems like a very American perspective on anarchism. I feel like the—

Matt Teichman:
—and I could very well be botching Mark Lance’s view. So any errors here are due to me.

Rebecca Valentine:
This is a very American perspective on anarchism, though. So if Mark Lance is American, I would not be surprised if this is what they were saying. If you talk to Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, where they have complex networks of councils, like factory councils, and regional councils, and all these sorts of things—with some fairly heavy structure involved—I think they would have said, ‘Yes, we’re anarchists, but what do you mean? We definitely have these big complex organizations.’ I think they probably would have just argued that anarchism is about abolishing power, not that anarchism is about abolishing complex organizational structures.

Historically, it’s not uncommon for power and big structures to go together. But like—what is a chaotic dictatorship, if not power with absolutely no good organizational structure? I would disagree with tying those two things together, fundamentally. I would say that it sounds more like what you’re describing is adhocracy—where structures and organizations emerge as the need arises, in an ad hoc fashion, and it’s just: whatever emerges is the thing that’s appropriate for the situation. But I do think that there is a tendency, especially amongst hacker-y communities, to favor more ad hoc structures, and to disfavor big planning efforts, and big organization efforts. Even within, perhaps, less hacker-y communities, but in more West Coast tech communities, this is especially true, going right back through the history of the internet.

The development of the internet itself was kind of—there were these two forces. There is the efforts by the OSI model people, who wanted to have a formal specification of this big, complicated thing that was going to be the internet. It took them 20 years before they could get anything ratified, and they finally ratified something in ‘95. And wait a second—‘95 is when Netscape went public, right? Like, I think it’s too late, guys.

There’s a reason that it was ‘95—as opposed to 1975, when the first versions of TCP/IP were put out there. The reason is that when you want to plan everything out and make it perfect, before you do anything, the people—and this goes back to what we were talking about, with MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute), and the whole human beneficial AI thing that we were talking about before the show—if you want to plan everything out ahead of time, and have everything perfect before you ever do anything, you’re going to get beaten to the punch by the people who don’t give a damn about any planning. The people who are just, like, ‘I’m going to experiment, see what happens. If it works, it works; and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’ And that’s why TCP/IP became the thing—because they wrote a very tiny spec for a corner of what they were trying to do. They didn’t plan the next thousand years; they implemented it, deployed it, and it was cool, and they just kept iterating.

And that’s very much in line with the hacker ethos, at least: ‘Try it, and see what works.’ That, I think, is probably much more part of the spirit of anarchism. Not, necessarily, ad hoc structures—because you can do this with big, organized structures—but it’s more about: ‘Try things, see what works, and iterate.’ You can have an organization that does this; lots of organizations do this. Sometimes it doesn’t work so good. Like, Valve is one of these places where anyone can kind of work on what they want, and try things, and iterate. But at the same time, Valve got stagnant because of this, as an organization.

Matt Teichman:
And as background for the listeners, Valve is a gaming company. Would that be accurate to say?

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah. It’s an interesting question, though, how you can get organized efforts—because a lot of things do require organization, and coordinated efforts, and these sorts of things—without losing the dynamism of being able to just experiment with a thing, and then iterate on it, if it works really well.

Matt Teichman:
It’s the ‘too many cooks’ problem, right?

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah. I don’t have an answer to how you do this. But I think probably, the most important thing is to at least consciously do this: to be conscious of how you’re doing things. A lot of times, you get organizations where they didn’t intentionally set out to do this, and they haven’t really thought about what they’re doing. Even if it’s a small organization, or a larger organization—whatever it is—they often don’t do these things consciously. As a consequence, they can’t sit and reflect on what they’re doing, and how they’re doing any of this stuff. That’s the biggest trap. When you just do it, because that’s how you do it—and if it doesn’t work well, that’s how we do it.

Matt Teichman:
It must secretly actually work!

Rebecca Valentine:
I mean—it probably works for someone.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah…

Rebecca Valentine:
That’s another one of these traps in the hacker community. You know, it’s the world, more broadly speaking—but, since we’re sitting here in Queerious Labs, which partially exists because of frustrations with this sort of stuff… When it works for someone, and they have now a vested interest in preserving the way it is—if you have a hacker space that has all sorts of gross misogynistic stuff going on, or whatever, and you can’t deal with it because it works for the dudes who can dominate a space—well it works for them, right? So, why would they want to change it? And so, it doesn’t get changed.

Matt Teichman:
Actually, that gets me to a related question. So we talked about the connection between anarchism, and the kinds of activities that hackers enjoy engaging in. Is there also a deep connection between feminism and the kinds of activities that hackers enjoy engaging in? Sometimes I like to build this romantic image in my head of: ‘Well, feminists are hacking gender roles, or maybe even hacking gender itself.’

Rebecca Valentine:
So I would say that yes, there is—but this is ignoring the fact that hackers and hacker culture is a living thing outside of my politics.

Matt Teichman:
Right, yeah.

Rebecca Valentine:
Hacker culture, historically, has been very male-dominated, very masculine in temperament—or however you want to think about it. There’s what some people would describe as masculine energy driving a lot of what hacker culture is about. And the adhocracies of Wikipedia, for instance—some people have described Wikipedia as leveraging male geeks’ desires to one up each other, and be right about everything, for the common good. That’s how you get Wikipedia to be really good—you take advantage of that particular toxicity of geek maleness.

Matt Teichman:
Oh boy. I hope that’s not correct, but it seems like it could be.

Rebecca Valentine:
Well, why does anyone correct a Wikipedia article that’s wrong? Because, ‘Oh, well, I know what I’m talking about.’ Right? But, I mean, it works!

Matt Teichman:
Actually….’

Rebecca Valentine:
I mean, it does work. Except for some topics which are slightly more contentious than physics! So hacker culture is very male dominated. In theory, there should be a connection between hacking gender and opposing systems of power, as made manifest in gender, and subverting implicit assumptions that you have about people. All of these things—they’re very much in line with a lot of what hackerdom is supposed to be about. But the reality of the situation is that that’s not how it is. There are lots of super rad feminist hackers, and lots of super rad women, who are hacking all sorts of interesting, atypical, non-traditionally masculine things. But that’s a new version of hacker culture. Yes, women have been doing computing for ages, but: hacker culture.

Matt Teichman:
Like, the mainstream of the culture, right?

Rebecca Valentine:
Right.

Matt Teichman:
One thing I heard—I don’t know if this is true, but one thing I’ve heard—is that computer geekery became coded as male starting around the 1980s, when computers were marketed particularly to little boys.

Rebecca Valentine:
Uh-huh.

Matt Teichman:
And then, once, fast-forward 15, 20 years later, everybody’s in college, and suddenly, the boys have been playing with these computers that have been marketed to them from a young age. As a result of that, perhaps partially, everybody thinks of technology as a masculine thing. Whereas, before this happened in the eighties, it was not thought of that way. And indeed, people often like to note that computer was, originally, a term for a human being who performed computations. And often, those—back in the olden days, before it became prestigious—were women. Does that history at all track, to your mind?

Rebecca Valentine:
Oh, yeah! So you said a very important word, there: prestigious. It is not uncommon for women’s work to become men’s work, the moment the work becomes prestigious, or valuable in some way. Whether it’s for the prestige value, or the monetary value—the moment that people start caring about it, and it starts to be something useful and valuable to people, is the moment that these things tend to be coded as masculine. And often—

Matt Teichman:
—I’m wtill waiting for that to happen to teaching.

Rebecca Valentine:
Well, no, but here’s the thing: if you go back to, roughly, Victorian era—especially in England, where being a schoolmaster, or being even just a teacher at what we would call a private school—but what they would call a public school, because it’s England and they say things weirdly—

[ LAUGHTER ]

—being a teacher at an English public school was very prestigious. And so, it was basically dominated by men with PhDs!

Prestige is ultimately, in some sense, connected to power—and these things are intertwined in all sorts of ways. And you do see this through the history of technology, and especially computing. The moment that computers became really valuable and prestigious; and when you could get rich off of computing, and you could make a bunch of money actually doing programming and stuff; and you could make a career of it; that was the moment that all of this stuff became male-coded. It was a very conscious thing.

You can see when the advertising changed—go look in the ads. It’s around the same time that Legos changed, actually. Legos used to be uniformly marketed to everyone. And then—right around the same time that computers were becoming coded as male, so were Legos. It’s very strange.

Matt Teichman:
They’re kind of like bricks? Building things? Construction? I don’t know.

Rebecca Valentine:
But like, it makes no sense—

Matt Teichman:
—yeah, none of this makes any sense.

Rebecca Valentine:
It’s like, you’re playing with toy blocks! Why is this… Now you have Legos for girls, and they’re pink Legos. And it’s like—

[ LAUGHTER ]

—if you look at the advertisements in the seventies—half of the people in the ads were women or girls. Like—what’s happening here?

Matt Teichman:
There is something really amazing about looking at what previous eras have viewed as masculine or feminine; or what stereotypical associations people have had with different things. You don’t have to go back that far at all to see how in flux all this stuff is.

Rebecca Valentine:
So as a linguist, I used to be very conscious of cross-cultural variation. Cross-cultural variation in the sense of not just ‘here versus Japan’; but also, ‘here versus here, 300 years ago’, which was basically a different culture. You have to be conscious of these things, when you’re doing linguistic research, because, if you’re not, all sorts of things which are highly tied to culture get mistaken as being highly associated with language.

You have to put on your anthropologist’s glasses to look at the world as cultures, as well as the thing. And when you do that with gender, it’s so interesting, because all sorts of stuff that you think is canonically masculine, or canonically feminine—like, today, you just go to South Korea—who are the pop stars, the men who are idolized? A lot of them are kind of effeminate and very soft; if they were brought here, there would be so many people who’d think that they were just gay! Because they have all these qualities that are much more feminine, and girly, and whatever. It’s because, in South Korea, this is not associated with gender in the same way that it is here. The lines that cut reality and cut human behavior are not in the same places, in Korea.

Matt Teichman:
I’ve often had similar thoughts about 80s metal, with the makeup, and the teased hair, and so forth.

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! How is it that Queen could go from having a bunch of folks who are often androgynous, to then having folks who are hyper masculine? Like, look at Freddie Mercury during the two stylistically most diametrically opposed parts in that band’s history—going from androgynous early days, to super butch, masculine, handlebar mustache. And yet at the same time, in the context, it’s still considered quite a masculine thing, throughout his entire history. That whole aesthetic change was still a masculine aesthetic change.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah, right. We can go down the list. Judas Priest—took I don’t know how many years—20 years?—for the lead singer of that band to come out as gay. You know, with the leather studded attire, and so forth. And when the band came out, it was just viewed as hyper masculine, hyper butch—but the reality of it was that he was closeted.

Rebecca Valentine:
There’s definitely something very interesting to be said about the interaction between gay male culture in relation to being closeted, but still gay; and then seeing how that interacts to produce forms of hyper-masculinity. That then affects how straight guys behave, and then end up coding themselves in ways that, if you know a bunch of gay guys, you know that this straight guy happens to be taking a lot of influence from them. But because they don’t know that it’s a gay signifieruntil it becomes well-known—you would never have known. And so you get this weird… Yeah, it’s kind of funny for that to happen.

Matt Teichman:
You get homophobes accidentally appropriating gay iconography.

Rebecca Valentine:
Right. Because gay iconography is, often, about hyper-masculinity, and what it means to be really, really manly. Because, if you’re a gay guy, you’re—I guess—into really manly dudes?

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. This is the magic of Kenneth Anger we’re getting at.

You mentioned you work in linguistics, and I definitely want to say something about that. I may have mentioned once or twice in the podcast that my doctoral research was in philosophy of language, and one question I often get about that is: ‘How is it relevant to anything? Isn’t it just this pie-in-the-sky theoretical thing?’ A project you’ve worked on is one of the things I always point to—not in a ‘taking credit for it’ kind of way—as an amazing example of how really difficult, abstract, mathematical linguistic theory can be brought to bear on a concrete technical problem. Basically, just by coding up some of the ‘pen and paper’ theories in a very careful way, you’ve been able to make a computer do something that it previously couldn’t do: understand certain fragments of natural language.

Rebecca Valentine:
Linguistics is useless, kids. Don’t do it!

[ LAUGHTER ]

Matt Teichman:
So maybe what you want to say is that my example is completely ass-backwards because, actually—

Rebecca Valentine:
—so this is one of those tensions that exists within computer-related language stuff. Whether it’s formal linguistics that’s being mechanized via computers, or whether it’s people doing natural language processing—that whole world of languages and computers is, in some way, intersecting. There is a tension between the two sides: the very theoretically informed people; and the (in many ways) anti-theory people—the ‘throw more data at it’ people.

I have thought about this a lot, over the years, and try to make an argument that theory is very important. Lots of things could be said—but, basically, what it comes down to is: consider the following fact. Any time that you want to train your natural language processing models—your ‘throw more data at it’ models—on something, to get the right probabilities. What do you do? Well, typically, you take a parsed corpus, like the New York Times corpus, the GigaWord corpus—just take some massive corpus of parsed sentences, and then you train the heck out of your model, so that it performs really well on this reference corpus. And it’s like you’ve—

Matt Teichman:
—and parsing a corpus means that some enterprising graduate students have gone through a whole bunch of New York Times transcripts, and been like, ‘This is the subject, this is the verb. This is the noun…‘, and all that. They’ve annotated it in that way.

Rebecca Valentine:
Right. So what the folks who are, like, ‘Oh, just throw more data at the problem, then it’ll get perfect.‘—what they forget, the thing that the data-obsessed, natural language processing people forget, is that if you didn’t have theoretically aware grad students spending years of their lives manually parsing and deploying the theory on the New York Times corpus, they would have nothing to train. Right? So even if you think, ‘Yes, just throw more data at the problem’—which, objectively, actually makes things work better—you still need all of these people to know the theory, to give you your reference corpus. So sure—if you don’t like theory, then you don’t get to use the New York Times corpus, and you’re fucked!

Matt Teichman:
Exactly, yeah. It’s not like the data were just there and we grabbed them. We had to get experts to ‘make’ the data.

Rebecca Valentine:
You have to know what you’re trying to parse in the first place. No one goes out there and is like: ‘Let’s parse your stuff. Let’s make a neural network that parses really, really well’, but they don’t have pre-parsed training data. That’s not how it works. You can do end-to-end neural network stuff, but that only does a certain class of things—you can only use that for a certain class of problems. And, sometimes, that’s not what you need. So this idea of: ‘Oh, we don’t really need theory’—it’s like, well, you may not need theory, but all of the stuff that you’re depending on needed theory!

Matt Teichman:
The areas I get most excited about—regardless of whether it’s tech stuff, philosophy stuff, linguistic stuff—are always places where you have a symbiosis between theory and application. Where it’s not like the only reason we’re even doing the theory is for better short-term rewards. But it’s also not like we’re not even thinking at all about how what we’re doing is relevant to everyday living. There’s just a healthy interplay between those two things.

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah—this connection between theoretical work and the applied stuff, and how it has an impact on everyday life, in some way, like in the context of linguistics—it has this nice oppositional structure. But the thing that I thought of as you were saying that was: well, this is a philosophy podcast. Or a philosophy-ish podcast; you talk about lots of stuff, but let’s just say it’s a philosophy podcast.

Matt Teichman:
That is usually what we say.

Rebecca Valentine:
The thing that came to mind was how philosophy is, in many ways, theorizing. I mean, whatever; it’s closer to theorizing than digging a hole is, right?

Matt Teichman:
Sometimes, when people ask me what philosophy is, I like to say: the theory of anything.

Rebecca Valentine:
Yeah! Not the theory of everything—the theory of just anything. I like that.

Matt Teichman:
Any old thing.

Rebecca Valentine:
Very Merleau-Ponty: what is the theory of this, just the texture on it? So what I was thinking when you said that—when you were talking about the connections between theory and applied stuff, and its impact in everyday life—is: in computer science and tech, there’s this interesting thing where philosophers—ethicists—are taking a serious look at what has happening in big tech and saying, ‘Hey, you need to start thinking about how you’re impacting people—materially impacting people. And we need to start having things like: well, engineers have to go through ethics classes, and legitimately get trained in ethics to some degree. Maybe software developers should too, because you were having material impacts on people’s lives, but you have absolutely no clue what you’re doing.’

And so, you have the theorists of the most theoretical subjects you could have—philosophers—coming in and saying, ‘You’re having real-world, everyday impacts on people’. This is interesting. Instead of the theorists and the applied folks, having this opposition, what you have is theorists saying: ‘We need to train you in theory, because there’s things that you should be applying it to every day, but you just don’t, because you don’t know it. Or you don’t care’. The theory and the practical application, in that case, is the same group of people. They’re talking to the other group of people who don’t care about the application of their technology—they just want to make the technology, but they also don’t care about the theoretical implications of it. It’s really interesting. There’s this third camp that’s not theory or applied—it’s the masturbatory technologist, who is neither theoretically nor pragmatically inclined, and just does it because it’s fun. And God, do they need some theory and some practice.

Matt Teichman:
I feel like often, doing something because it’s fun, though—sometimes that can be shorthand for, e.g. ‘I do care about the practical applications, and I do care about the beauty of the theory; but I don’t really know how to express it all exactly, right now, in this moment. I just have an instinct that this is important, and I’m going to do it.’

Rebecca Valentine:
For sure. I do that a whole bunch. But there are also a lot of people who just like working on a problem that’s interesting and challenging, and they don’t really care. These are the folks who get hired from Black Hat and go work at the NSA—because it’s a hard crypto problem. (For those listening, Black Hat is a security technology conference that’s happening, in Vegas, as we record this—which is why it’s relevant.) These are the folks who Bruce Sterling admonishes: when the person in the suit comes to you, and tries to hire you for a really cool, hard problem with a big fat paycheck, you’re going to have to sit down and think: ‘There are ethical implications to this.’ It’s not just a fun problem—you’re doing more than just having fun solving cryptography problems. You might be doing the work that ends up putting people in prison for political reasons; or, if you work at Palantir, you’re materially supporting something which qualifies, according to the Geneva Conventions, as genocide. These things have real implications, and it’s not just solving a fun problem.

Matt Teichman:
And I feel like, to a certain extent, this is the condition of anybody earning a paycheck under contemporary capitalism. But maybe there’s a way in which it somehow gets—

Rebecca Valentine:
—there’s no ethical production under capitalism?

Matt Teichman:
Yeah, right. Exactly. But maybe it gets amplified in tech—because there’s the opportunity to deploy and use it in powerful ways that can have such huge ramifications for massive numbers of people.

Rebecca Valentine:
This is a question that is not new. You can go back to the Renaissance and look at people having conversations—folks like Da Vinci, who, on the one hand, was an amazing artist, an amazing engineer, and also built weapons of war. That’s a conversation that people have had for a very long time. You can’t fund this amazing, beautiful art, without also simultaneously, somehow, getting involved in the war industry. It’s not a new conversation; it’s probably not going to go away anytime soon. In 10,000 years—after World War V, or whatever, and we’ve nuked ourselves back to oblivion—people will still be asking: ‘I get that you can use this really amazing stone axe to carve some wood—but also, that wood, you can throw it and stab someone with it’. After World War V we’ll still be having this conversation, in the New Stone Age.

This is just fundamentally, a consequence of something which, very visibly, has an impact on the world in a transformative way. Technology and science materially change the world in big, obvious ways. Whereas art and culture-related things—like art, literature, those sorts of things—they change the world too, but it’s harder to see the causal connection. So we don’t have the same anxieties. Until we do.

What’s happening in the media right now? People are trying to blame a massacre on video games. In that context, suddenly, people have this consciousness of the idea that cultural artifacts can impact the world. That’s another one of these old narratives: ‘video games cause violence’. But we tend to avoid seeing direct connections between cultural products and the consequences that they have. Whereas, with technology, it’s very hard to be, like, ‘Well, this new thing is not responsible for it.’ Well, no—you literally could not have killed the whole city full of people without an atom bomb. There is an obvious causal connection, and so it’s relatively easy to drop into conversations about the connections—whereas with other things it’s harder. I don’t think that it’s unique to technology, though.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah, I think that’s interesting point. Well, you mentioned TCP/IP earlier—which, for non-technical listeners, is a way for computers to talk to each other over the network, which the internet still currently uses, to have one computer over here to be able to talk to any other computer on the entire internet. It’s a way of establishing a persistent line of communication. So clearly, the creation of that technology had really deep ramifications, in the sense that I can now be connected to somebody in Dubai, or in Eritrea, or wherever. With a tech example, it’s very easy to say this possibility was opened up, and it didn’t exist before; whereas, if you look at 19th century impressionist painting, we do have a strong sense that it transformed the way we see things—

Rebecca Valentine:
—ooh, actually, let’s say romanticism, instead.

Matt Teichman:
Okay.

Rebecca Valentine:
Not impressionism—let’s say romanticism. Because romanticism, as an art movement, is intimately related to Nazism. There is a causal connection there, between the two. But it’s not something that a lot of people know about, and it’s hard to actually see. Romanticist artists were part of a broader movement which was about the rejection of rationalism, about embracing emotions and impulses, and all these sorts of things. Eventually, in the context where it developed, it turned into romantic nationalism. And the connections from that to Nazism are much clearer, because the romantic nationalists ended up founding a whole bunch of things like the Thule Society, and other parts of the Völkisch movement in Germany. And then in Italy, they had their own thing, which was, sort of, Neo-Roman, as opposed to Neo-whatever you would call ancient Germanic people—

Matt Teichman:
Teutonic?

Rebecca Valentine:
Neo-Teutonic. Yeah, I guess that’s the word. They founded societies like the Thule Society, and then, out of those literally came the Nazi party. When you look at the philosophy that was embedded in early fascismItalian fascism; you look at the Italian Futurists and the Futurist Manifesto—it’s very much this anti-rationalist embrace of impulsivity, and that is directly connected to the Romanticist movement. But it’s hard to see that connection, because it spans 70 years and it’s not very visible and obvious. It’s an art movement, and somehow you get Nazis out of it? You can see this trend within fascist ideology still cropping up today. One of the reasons people love Trump is because he’s very much a ‘shoot from the hip’—a very impulsive anti-rationalist kind of person. And it’s the same kind of ethos. Obviously there’s more to fascism than just that, but there are these connections.

Matt Teichman:
So for people who are curious to see logic, philosophy of language and linguistics in action—I would encourage you go on YouTube, and look for the language engine demo. It’s absolutely astonishing. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I showed it to a friend of mine who is an expert in computational semantics—and he was like, ‘What? Is there a little person in the computer, feeding the demo the answers? Because this is essentially magic.’ One way I sometimes describe it to people is: you know how in Star Trek, when Captain Picard talks to the computer and asks the computer to do things? It’s kind of like that. Imagine you had that kind of interface, where you could just ask your computer to do stuff, and it wouldn’t get confused, the way Siri does.

Rebecca Valentine:
That is exactly what I was thinking of when I was doing it, too.

Matt Teichman:
Hahaha. I would encourage everybody to go check that out, and I would also encourage everybody to check out queeriouslabs.com—that’s the nonprofit where we’re recording this. Please go to the website; check it out. Donations are always welcome.

Rebecca Valentine:
Read the manifesto! It’s really good.

Matt Teichman:
Read the manifesto—indeed, it is excellent. And, Rebecca Valentine, thank you so much for joining us.

Rebecca Valentine:
Thank you for having me.


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