00:11:27.540And I was thinking about, well, what does it mean that these new technical systems and
00:11:32.420platforms on the internet, we were just even starting to talk about platforms, like, you
00:11:36.480know, that was also kind of like newer language.
00:11:39.340So I was concerned because so many libraries and librarians were starting to emulate Google.
00:11:47.300You could go to the front page of the academic library's webpage, and now they have a search box for keyword searching, which is very different than the early days of the internet and how we did discovery.
00:12:00.780And so I was concerned that, one, what was happening in Silicon Valley was kind of usurping these other very long thought about concerns about finding knowledge that seemed important that now everybody was like just Googling it.
00:12:19.740And so I wanted to kind of reverse engineer and say, okay, well, then what happens to minoritized people in these systems, in these ad tech systems?
00:12:32.960I looked at other, you know, Yahoo and other search engines.
00:12:36.080But at the end of the day, I ended up really making the case around Google because 80% of the market was using Google search.
00:12:42.120And that seemed like, well, that's the place you have to look at.
00:12:45.120And what I did is I took the census racial and ethnic categories and the gender categories at that time, and I just crossed them and I looked at them as groups to see. So I looked at white men, white women, white boys, white girls, Latina, Latino, Black, African American. I kind of used all the categories.
00:13:04.700What I saw with my sociology eyes was the hierarchy of racial discrimination and racism in the United States replicated in the way in which people were represented across all of these.
00:13:20.840So you just could see the racial hierarchy.
00:13:24.200You could see the way in which whiteness was not even coded as ethnicity.
00:13:29.480It would be like white men's shirts, you know?
00:13:32.540So white men weren't even a racial or ethnic category.
00:17:01.780But also, wow, we've got a lot of work ahead of us now.
00:17:05.280Oh, well, we're not dreaming against the machine right now, but no, but this is this is an important part of thinking of a better future. Right. Is identifying the problem.
00:17:16.180Certainly. I mean, look, yes, Trump was elected for the second time right after I sent off more everything forever to print.
00:17:27.840So like and and he was elected the first time when I was working on my first book, which is on something pretty much unrelated.
00:17:33.680And my publisher will kill me if I don't plug right here that at the end of this year, the paperback is coming out and there's going to be a new afterward about everything that's happened.
00:17:44.760Yeah, no, I just sent off a draft of that afterward, actually, to the publisher.
00:17:48.180So my publisher will also kill me that I'm going to say I have been wanting to write an update to algorithms of oppression that would account for chat GPT and large, large language models.
00:18:01.520And like, again, they're not interested.
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00:23:20.340I take heart like you do from the fact that there are so many of us working on this.
00:23:25.660But part of the reason I started this podcast or a lot of the reason I started this podcast is I feel like there is a lot of identifying what the problem is and maybe not enough or I haven't done enough thinking about what I want in place of what we have right now.
00:23:41.680And so I'm going to put you on the spot, Sophia, because because it is my podcast and and ask, OK, so what would a better tech industry look like?
00:23:57.600Oh, I mean, this is such an easy question to answer.
00:24:11.680So if we imagined a pro-social tech industry that respected our rights, our human rights, our civil rights, the environment, labor, the creative work of others and worked in concert rather than stealing it, which is quite frankly what we're doing now.
00:24:37.580If we imagined that technology was also like that the profits that accrued from our collective engagement in it, then went back into our cities, our states, whatever, even if we have other kinds of imaginaries that aren't the nation state or the city, but that went back into our communities and communities.
00:25:03.320because, you know, when I think about tech being, you know, seven of the 10 most well-capitalized
00:25:09.800companies on planet earth or tech companies and imagine the profit that we, in fact, generated
00:25:19.600for those companies coming back into our communities, our public institutions, into
00:25:25.660all of the kinds of things. We would actually have a very glorious world because one, we wouldn't
00:25:32.000make dangerous tech. We wouldn't make extractive tech. And then the way that we use the network
00:25:37.780to collectively facilitate all kinds of things, we would all benefit from it because the network
00:25:44.780effect is what makes it work, right? That's what kind of makes it go. So that to me is the thing
00:25:52.800that the critics, quite frankly, all of us who have been doing this work, that's the thing that
00:25:58.200isn't resourced. Because I actually think we have a lot of brilliant ideas and we work in
00:26:03.060collaboration with communities, with grad students, you know, with journalists, with all kinds of
00:26:09.840people who have their finger on the pulse of what a pro-social rights-respecting technological world
00:26:17.240could look like, what its limits, where the limits should be. And nobody funds us to make it.
00:26:24.080So that to me is like, of course, at the heart of that is the venture capital financing model, which is dubious. And I mean, I'm reaching for the adjectives that describe the most depraved waves of thinking about deploying capital and resources, right?
00:26:46.380And so those who work in finance and capital and, you know, what we're seeing is the tech industry has really facilitated the greatest transfers of wealth out of the public coffers, too.
00:26:59.260I mean, that's what the whole Doge effort was, was just to transfer wealth.
00:27:03.980I mean, every night we're watching the headlines.
00:27:06.400It's like, you know, X billion leaving the U.S. Treasury and headed out to private hands, to companies or individuals, right?
00:27:16.160I mean, the grift is just full display. No one seems to. I mean, in this country, we don't storm the Capitol for justice. You know what I mean? We like it's like swarmed for fascism. Yeah. On behalf of the worst ideas.
00:27:34.500but you know i think that it's very easy to dream up the world we want i mean at the end of the day
00:27:41.940they i've read studies coming out of the uk where they've polled americans on what they want and
00:27:48.760guess what what no matter how you politically identify people all want the same thing they want
00:27:54.280clean air water food they want an opportunity for their kids to do better than they did
00:28:00.700They want affordable housing and, you know, a nice quality of life.
00:28:05.780They want a good education that, again, is affordable.
00:28:09.580I mean, everybody wants the same things.
00:28:11.740We just have different strategies about how we imagine getting it.
00:28:15.720And what I think the tech industry has done is it's really robbed us of the potential
00:28:30.220I work in higher education. We are basically being defunded in the K through higher ed sector by the lack of taxes that are not paid by the tech industry into the coffers, by the exorbitant housing prices that happen when you live anywhere near a tech corridor, right?
00:28:52.160All of the things that, again, the largesse of the industry, that if it just did what regular me and you people do, right, like just pay taxes like everybody else has to do, we would be flourishing.
00:29:22.160But NSF, national science funding, NIH, I mean, all of it, that taxpayers, we fund basic research so that it can improve the quality of life, our health, our education, you know, all the things.
00:29:37.700And what the tech industry does, it works in, you know, in partnership with research universities, and it offloads the riskiest kinds of research that might be the least profitable, the most experimental, the potentially most dangerous.
00:29:55.500It funds that with taxpayer dollars while it sifts through looking for where it can get its like 1000x opportunity.
00:30:03.920So we also fund all of the failure instead of having our taxpayer dollars fund our success.
00:30:12.500And when they are successful, it's not like we're shareholders, you know, and we get a return back.
00:30:21.540So even their own model, they don't let us in on it.
00:30:24.980But we get to fund in the billions of dollars many of their failed experiments or great ideas that come out of the university have to be commercialized through their logics because we don't have a public interest tech infrastructure.
00:30:40.680And so this movement for public interest tech is also incredibly important.
00:30:45.420And it's something that I, you know, I work on at UCLA and my colleagues around the country
00:30:49.620work on because that's part of the dreaming of the future we need to, which is publicly
00:30:55.640owned and controlled and beneficial technology.
00:33:41.140And listen, I can tell you after, I don't know, how many years have I been teaching in higher ed, like counting my TA years, like maybe like 17 years.
00:33:51.600When the millennials were in the classroom, and I would say, look at this facial recognition technology that doesn't recognize Asian-American features, phenotypes, and is constantly asking, you know, are your eyes closed, right?0.50
00:34:08.240I mean, you remember that story that was like when I, like the, or the soap dispenser that doesn't, if he doesn't recognize it, the sensor won't go off if you have melanated skin, right?
00:34:18.740These were like the kinds of stories 17 years ago where we were trying to say, look, there's a there, there, like technology is designed in particular ways with like a certain kind of idea about the user.
00:34:31.480And those like older millennials, they would be like, I just want to go a job at Google.
00:34:57.760And this is why I think universities are under attack because we are educating people about reality, about facts, about and about different kinds of possibilities.
00:35:08.080And that is why they always come after the intellectuals.
00:35:11.120the 1%, you know, let's say they don't want people to be educated and to know and to have a voice and
00:35:17.340to push back. And yet here we are where it's undeniable the harms and the students are so
00:35:24.120incredible. And they have been for these past few years, standing up for their values and their
00:35:29.940principles and saying no to genocide and saying no to a lot of things. And so that I, how can you
00:35:36.060not be hopeful and inspired i mean i'm gen x so i'm just like our long game was having gen z you
00:35:43.720know what i'm saying we're like gone kids do it so i mean i'm an older millennial so you're just
00:35:49.800ragging on me and my people uh i'm sorry here i am i told you you're like 20 years younger than me
00:35:58.580And so I know we are. It's okay. You didn't go work at Google and Facebook. I don't even blame them. A lot of those, in fairness, those millennial tech workers are actually the ones who have been walking up, who have been fighting, who have been saying, absolutely not. You cannot put my labor in service of drones, drone technology that's going to go wipe out people we don't know.
00:36:24.800so i have i have a thing to say in response to that but um first i think we got to talk about
00:36:31.300your dog okay the dog she's she's annoying she's easily agitated and it's like groundhog day every
00:36:39.720day in our house because it's the same male man that you're barking at that you saw yesterday
00:36:45.260do you know yeah she's a rescue so she has been through some things yeah absolutely and she thinks
00:36:52.300everyone that is walking across the street in front of other houses is here to take her so
00:36:58.400oh man she has a lot to say yeah don't drive down our street is all i'm saying no it's okay i i have
00:37:05.380a rescue cat and she um i mean she's actually amazing and very chill but i i get it there's
00:37:11.480certain things she's afraid of shoes um but yeah i know i know that can't be anything good that