00:00:51.060You are listening to Under the Influence.
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00:01:19.460Today we have an episode that I think is fascinating. What happens when the thing
00:01:27.700that's supposed to keep your baby safe at night is the same thing that's training them to accept
00:01:34.200a lifetime of surveillance? This is something that anyone who's given birth in the past 10 years
00:01:41.740knows very well, anyone who's been exposed to the snoo or the owlet, that little thing that
00:01:49.700you put on your baby's foot to make sure they're still breathing. Welcome to Parenting in the
00:01:55.860Digital Age, a world that is equal parts magical because it helps you know that your baby is alive
00:02:03.180in the middle of the night and also completely unhinged and also feeding all of our child's
00:02:10.120data to the deep state. Today on Under the Influence, we are diving into the dark side
00:02:16.040of modern motherhood with New York Times critic and author Amanda Hestz. Amanda's new book,
00:02:22.700Second Life, explores how technology has crept into every corner of pregnancy and parenting,
00:02:28.000from tracking our cycles, tracking our fetuses, our fears, and even how horny we are at any given
00:02:36.260moment. Amanda and I talk about the very disturbing CGI fetus that became her emotional
00:02:42.340support hologram during her pregnancy. We also get into how apps like Flow can manipulate our
00:02:48.220sense of what is normal and what is not normal. We're also digging into the eugenic roots of
00:02:54.940menstrual tracking and whether or not parenting tech is often just really expensive anxiety in
00:03:02.020cute packaging. I've got to tell you, I have fallen prey to every single parenting app and
00:03:09.520new technology out there, and the majority of them are just total BS. And yet, and yet, and yet,
00:03:17.080if it tells me that it's going to keep my kids safe, I'm going to fall for it again. I am. I am.
00:03:22.700And that is just, that is just the curse of modern digital parenting, my friends.
00:03:28.640let's get into it hello amanda hi joe how you doing today i'm okay i didn't get enough sleep
00:03:39.460last night which i guess is just a normal thing yeah no we'll probably never sleep again or at
00:03:45.540least not for the next like 15 years right right right um but other than that yeah like i'm fine
00:03:52.420i don't know how to answer that question anymore i know it's weird it's a weird question to answer
00:03:57.040in the world right now i didn't get enough sleep last night either and i'm a sleep freak i'm like
00:04:01.300a nine hour a night person and so if i get seven i'm a dick all day long i'm just really the worst0.64
00:04:10.080person ever i've started getting those from like promoted reels on instagram that are like did you0.57
00:04:16.500know that women actually need 13 hours of sleep a night i think it's just like um like they know
00:04:22.500that i need something to show my husband that's like actually i need to sleep i need to sleep
00:04:28.120all the time here's proof of of yeah of why you just get the kid to leave me alone and i need
00:04:34.240i need more sleep i need more sleep um well i want to talk about that i want to talk about
00:04:39.940instagram and technology there are days when i wake up and i think that technology is the villain
00:04:46.460in my story in my in my like in my origin story we've been watching a lot of marvel movies in our
00:04:52.180house i'm like it's me versus technology yeah i mean that's basically how i wrote my book i guess
00:05:00.900you know technology is the antagonist of my book but you know hopefully it's an interesting
00:05:07.900antagonist and so it's a very nuanced it does very nice antagonist does very nice things for you it
00:05:15.080like mirrors you back sometimes in flattering ways others not so much but others others not
00:05:23.400so much what was one of the most shocking or manipulative things that you discovered
00:05:28.240behind the scenes of online parenting advice yeah i mean i think for me the thing that
00:05:37.800affected me the most even though it's incredibly simple is this like cgi fetus that was presented
00:05:46.360to me when i i used flow as a period tracker app and then uh as like a fertility tracker and then
00:05:55.060as a pregnancy tracker um and it has this level called pregnancy mode that you engage
00:06:02.640um when you have a positive pregnancy test and it presents this like cartoon fetus to you
00:06:10.920that is like sort of realistic but it's not as if the um animation is like
00:06:18.840so incredibly good but it is supposed to it's supposed to model like what uh embryonic or
00:06:29.540than fetal development looks like at every week of the pregnancy and i'm so it's like it's like
00:06:34.960the tamagotchi version of your own fetus yes exactly and i would look at it so much
00:06:41.080and it kind of floats around in there that it was like it started to feel on this like
00:06:47.180sub-rational level like i was looking at my baby when i was like looking at this um cgi fetus on
00:06:54.960my phone um and then like anything about this for you nothing and it's this like really like peachy
00:07:03.280kind of like smiling fetus thing and late in my pregnancy I got this I had an ultrasound that I
00:07:11.500thought was just going to be um typical and ended up being atypical um and like four weeks later
00:07:21.880my son was diagnosed with something called Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome which is a rare
00:07:27.540genetic condition that it's an overgrowth disorder and so it causes like certain parts of the body
00:07:35.020it's different for everyone to grow larger than others or grow like asymmetrically my son ended
00:07:44.940up having a very large tongue and it was only then that I was like oh this picture of a fetus
00:07:53.140is not a picture of my baby obviously like obviously I knew that on a rational level but
00:07:59.540now I knew it on an emotional level and I also just felt like somewhat betrayed by this app
00:08:08.260that had been presenting not my baby but basically like an idealized uh image of a baby
00:08:16.760and kind of like making me feel like this standard issue fetus this normal fetus was what like my
00:08:27.740baby should look like um and it was only really after he was born and I got to see like him as a
00:08:34.560person that i could banish that idea right um so it wasn't really you know you know flow has
00:08:44.480is at the center of like a long-running um a class action lawsuit about how they shared um
00:08:54.840sensitive data with facebook um and the but this like the thing that affected me the most was
00:09:03.680something that it was that doesn't did not involve sensitive data at all it just involved like
00:09:11.180them creating this image that i grew attached to in a problematic way which is so i mean reading
00:09:20.180your book reading second life i just kept thinking about episodes of black mirror that we could write
00:09:26.560together based off this right so and and that image of a woman being served this kind of basic
00:09:36.460b image of a fetus and growing attached to it as as you as as you develop in your pregnancy
00:09:45.480and it could also one day be used in this this dystopian way of getting mothers to feel attached
00:09:52.120to their babies in the womb. And, you know, one day the fetus just starts talking to you and
00:09:57.740asking you for things and, you know, promoting pronatalism. I don't know. But what we do know
00:10:04.820is that these tech companies know how to keep us coming back and they know the things we are
00:10:11.480going to attach to and the reasons that we're there. And while they are there mostly to collect
00:10:19.100our data is the thing you you get into this so much and you you put it really smartly you said
00:10:26.780that you know your your child's data was being collected before they even existed in the world
00:10:34.040that they exist as a bundled set of data talk to me a little bit about that yeah um i mean because
00:10:40.480my son ended up being diagnosed uh with a genetic condition before he was even born
00:10:46.880um it meant that i was just shipping his cells i was like shipping his cells to a laboratory in
00:10:55.660different state and they ran all sorts of tests on him tests that like you know i think more and
00:11:02.800more genetic testing is uh developing so quickly that even if you had a friend who's pregnant like
00:11:11.460two years ago you're going to be offered different tests than she was maybe and increasingly like
00:11:18.440my worry is that once it becomes standard to map a fetal genome or whatever before
00:11:30.080someone is really a person or before they're born um that that information can be used in like
00:11:38.120so many commercial ways and political ways that like I can't even imagine. I wrote this book
00:11:44.880before RFK Jr. decided that, you know, he wanted to build a registry, like a list of autistic
00:11:55.020children or anyone with autism. And that's the kind of thing where my son, because he's treated
00:12:02.360at this hospital chop in philadelphia which is oh really oh my gosh that's amazing it's a wonderful
00:12:09.540hospital and it's also like a research hospital and so um when he gets a blood draw there his
00:12:16.960blood is also like there's like another vial of blood that's like uh collected for people who are
00:12:24.240researching his condition to use to like see if it's linked to any other genetic conditions or
00:12:30.540outcomes or whatever and when I first agreed to this when he was a little baby you know I was
00:12:35.780warned like one of the adverse outcomes of this is if they end up through this process diagnosing
00:12:44.220him with some other genetic condition that means that like that is known now and if it's something
00:12:52.980I just like I I'm starting to worry about a political reality where getting a diagnosis
00:12:59.920of anything like put someone at risk at political risk i mean before um trump took office jd vance
00:13:12.560was like speculating about like getting rid of the pre-existing condition i think i'm i just i
00:13:19.300didn't realize how much i could know about my son before he was born and while that knowledge became
00:13:28.100really helpful in treating him after he was born. It also is, you know, it's risky information and
00:13:38.000it's information that really affected me also in that it, it made me, it affected my imagination
00:13:47.980around my son i think how so well once uh my doctor proposed a particular condition like he
00:13:58.540said i think this might be bws uh and he advised me not to google it like obviously i googled it
00:14:05.360immediately after i left and the thing that sticks with me now i mean before when i was doing this
00:14:13.660I was trying to like get some control over the situation that I had no control over and to really understand like could do could my baby have this is there something else that it could be but it meant that immediately I was like absorbing all of these cultural messages from various people who were commenting on like a rare genetic condition.
00:14:43.660Everyone from the Daily Mail, which like a kind of like news of the weird style report of a baby who was born with like a very large tongue who had BWS and was undergoing cancer treatment to like TikTok, where even though this is a rare condition because there are so many people on TikTok, like there are parents of kids who have BWS who are like showing their babies on TikTok.
00:15:11.200And I looked at the comments on them, just like wanting to know what people were going to think about my family, you know, and the comments on that stuff were like, you know, predictably disgusting.
00:15:25.300And so I think simultaneously, as I was trying to, like, get medical information about my son, I was learning about the stigma that he might face after he was born.
00:15:39.520from also the worst people on the internet yes and even though i i know that that's
00:15:48.880what they are or they're and maybe they're the worst people on the internet and they're not the
00:15:53.720worst people when you run into them at the supermarket or whatever you know people are
00:15:58.680coming to the internet to do all sorts of emotional work i guess even though i i know that when i'm
00:16:07.420looking at the internet as like a journalist i couldn't see it's hard to do it when you're a mom
00:16:13.540when you're looking at some rom it's a totally different lens i just like absorbed it as like
00:16:19.000this is the societal consensus about my son which ended up you know not being the case at all right
00:16:27.220Right. You write a lot about, you know, how we're seeing these traditions of eugenics and surveillance just recycled through modern parenting technologies.
00:16:41.280in a lot of ways, it feels like same story, different platform. I want to take a quick
00:16:47.860break. And when we get back, I want to expand on how these really kind of toxic and sordid
00:16:54.680histories manifest in today's digital parenting landscape.
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00:18:06.720okay we are back talk to me a little bit about how eugenics surveillance all of these things
00:18:19.880that have been happening for for centuries how are they manifesting in today's digital technology
00:18:26.060well i was sort of interested at first in because i start the book off with flow
00:18:31.960i was interested in understanding where period tracking had originated um i was assuming that
00:18:39.020please tell our audience because i'm i mean i'm just obsessed with the darkness of period tracking
00:18:43.720i really am yeah i mean there's like all sorts of um speculation that it's happened you know
00:18:52.000for a millennium but uh there's also this sense that periods were not necessarily very regular
00:18:58.620until pretty recently, just because of like the level of nutritional stability that you need to
00:19:06.200have in order to like have your period on a regular basis. But I did find this woman,
00:19:12.000Marie Stopes, who started tracking her menstrual cycle. And when I heard about this, I was like,
00:19:21.020this is like a kooky lady from the past. And I'm like really interested in her. She was a feminist.
00:19:28.620She was tracking her periods and then also, like, her level of horniness, like, throughout the1.00
00:19:35.180month. And she came to, like, she, like, charted this stuff. And so she interested me as, like,
00:19:42.060an early person who was turning menstruation, like, into data. And she then used that data
00:19:49.240to try to argue, basically, that, like, she, because she and some of her friends who she
00:19:57.680interviewed and like also charted. We're having these peaks of horniness at predictable times
00:20:03.600during the cycle. She basically used that data to argue that like women's sexual desire is like a1.00
00:20:10.300naturally occurring phenomenon. And it's not something that is like only exists once you're0.58
00:20:17.280like in your bed, your marital bed with your husband. And I found her so interesting. And then
00:20:23.760i perhaps unsurprisingly like realized that she was also a leading eugenicist and even as she was
00:20:31.460making these arguments always turned out to be the case though they're just like god i know so
00:20:35.760interesting also now you're also a terrible person into eugenics i mean um so even as she was arguing
00:20:43.320that it's normal for women to like feel this like sexual desire she was also setting the boundaries0.89
00:20:51.140of what a normal woman was and she was arguing that middle and upper class white women able-bodied0.96
00:20:59.840should be like having sex with upper middle class able-bodied white men and you know producing0.86
00:21:07.220a strong future for the race while disabled people should um you know be urged not to produce1.00
00:21:15.880And in fact, in some cases, sterilized. But, you know, like, as you said, like, there's a eugenic history to so many things that have to do with birth. And at first I was like, well, since everything has this kind of like eugenic history, is it unfair to mention it?1.00
00:21:35.720And then I was like, no, it means that it is so deeply embedded in, like, everything that we are doing.
00:23:07.780Yeah, it's just it's there's so much data about babies right now.
00:23:13.360Do you think it's making babies safer or just making us more neurotic?
00:23:16.740i mean none of these technologies can like legally say that they're making babies safer
00:23:27.320so i think that's like a pretty good answer um what this new says is the snoo keeps your baby
00:23:34.640on their back because they're strapped in there and it's safer for babies to sleep on their back
00:23:41.160So, you know, there's no, like, strong evidence that these things make babies safer.
00:23:48.740But I became sort of interested in people who were using the Owlet.
00:23:53.240I, my son, so when my son was born, because he had a really big tongue, he was sent home with an oxygen tank to use when he was sleeping.
00:24:01.480Because even though he could breathe normally most of the time, when he was sleeping,
00:24:05.480there was this risk of like the tongue because he was on his back, like falling back into his mouth
00:24:11.020and like closing up his airway in some way. And so he slept attached to this oxygen machine in
00:24:17.700order to make sure that he was like getting a steady flow of oxygen, even if that happened.
00:24:22.200So I came home with a medical device and I became really interested in people who don't need a
00:24:28.540medical device but want one for their baby um because I I think I understand that I mean there
00:24:37.400are so many babies who have like a tour in the NICU before they go home and you go from like
00:24:45.920all of this like insane like beeping and monitoring and like images showing you proving to you that
00:24:53.900like your baby is breathing or whatever and their heart is beating to just like nothing um and so
00:25:00.260I can see how it can be you know studying to have to bring like the hospital into your house
00:25:08.720but I also was personally like so excited to banish the hospital from my own life and I found
00:25:16.420this strange i think shared experience between parents who felt that the outlet had not alerted
00:25:27.800them to a potential emergency and parents who found that their outlet was like constantly
00:25:34.500alerting them to non-emergencies um oh that was my experience with the outlet someone said it to me
00:25:41.360as like a parenting influencer and we lasted maybe 36 hours because that thing beeped
00:25:48.160all the time my kid hated it um and yeah so just the out like good rinse and we've been in the
00:25:55.560hospital we've been in chop um where your son goes when they put like a real one of those
00:26:01.160on and my son still calls it gloto he's like oh he's like the worst part about being in the
00:26:07.380hospital it was glotto and i'm like you like nearly had a traumatic brain injury and the
00:26:11.540worst part of it was glotto glotto sucked so funny i love that um yeah i mean i talked to parents
00:26:19.680whose kids like got old enough uh and were still using the outlet that they were like no sock
00:26:25.360like now that you know once they could like communicate they were like no sock no sock
00:26:31.180yeah it just feels like so much if someone is like hey do you want to like make sure your
00:26:39.220baby's breathing while they're sleeping it's like oh no i'm not interested in that you know
00:26:43.960it's like such a baby i was like absolutely i want like i was convinced he wasn't breathing
00:26:51.040like all the time right i was that that mom going into his room like that scene in terms
00:26:55.920of endearment where she climbs into her baby's crib by the third one i'm like sure she's fine
00:27:01.740she's all right yeah i mean it's such it's a real thing that happens and like it's awful i just think
00:27:12.740these technologies like it's interesting that they're really like explicitly sold not as like
00:27:20.200anti-SIDS technologies but as anti-anxiety devices for the parents. I think they're sold preying on
00:27:26.160the fear of parents and frankly preying on the fear of mostly mothers because my husband took0.99
00:27:31.900one look at that outlet and he's like ridiculous this is ridiculous. I think there's one of the0.67
00:27:37.780things that makes them so powerful is that there's like something for everyone like I think there's
00:27:43.140also this um extent to which like all of these technologies that can turn your baby into data
00:27:49.800can be appealing to men who maybe want some kind of zone of authority over their babies and who
00:27:58.020feel like maybe they don't have a kind of like physical care authority oh right the data their
00:28:04.700dads yeah necessarily does so i think they can be sold to dads too good for them i guess
00:28:12.160yeah sure sure if it if it works yeah it's i don't know i i feel like i'm a person who's on
00:28:21.120the other side of the baby situation right so i'm moving more into toddler and how do i keep my kid
00:28:29.400away from these devices and this kind of surveillance as much as possible and yet my
00:28:36.520friends that are just getting pregnant the data collection is getting more and more intense and
00:28:41.960i know that they're feeling increased feelings of inadequacy and anxiety and do you think that
00:28:49.580these digital environments instead of equipping us to be the more competent parents are actually
00:28:56.400just making us feel more ashamed and more less than right and then they sell you know the thing
00:29:02.860that makes you feel confident again yeah I also wonder what it means for newborns and then babies
00:29:12.760and toddlers to start to conflate like being cared for with being surveilled um my kids like even
00:29:21.700though I didn't use any particularly invasive like video capturing apps or these like data
00:29:30.060capturing apps I was just constantly like I constantly had a camera in their face like a
00:29:35.040phone in their face uh when they were little and I still do and now they're like they're like video
00:29:39.860photo like they want to see the thing that I just made um and at daycare people who are caring for
00:29:46.700them are taking photos of them and sending them to me so that I can feel like I am photographically
00:29:51.860caring for them in some way and I I just wonder what we're training them for or priming them for
00:29:58.580Yeah. No, I mean, I think about that every time my two-and-a-half-year-old picks up my phone and knows how to get into my photos and then finds a photo of herself and says, cute baby. And I'm like, you are a cute baby.
00:30:13.340I know. It's like, and that's so cute that you said that. It is very cute. Yeah. And there's a part of me that's like, well, you know, it's a skill that they need to know, which is like their angles.
00:30:24.820I know. I use that all the time, too. Yeah.
00:30:27.140it's a skill that like i don't have and so i'm like what if i had these two boys who like grew
00:30:32.040up knowing how to take a picture of themselves like how amazing oh they will for them um but
00:30:39.060yeah it's horrifying well i think that you know all of this is also just encouraging the intense
00:30:46.220blurring of private and public lives right and it does feel you know especially as journalists
00:30:55.040as authors, that we're constantly finding ways to be on, to build a brand presence.
00:31:02.720Both of us have talked a lot and written a lot about parenting. Our children are inherent in
00:31:07.900that journey. And so do you sometimes have to really just be so vigilant about building the
00:31:16.000boundaries between what is private and what is public? Yeah, I mean, it really shifted for me
00:31:22.100after I wrote the book because in the book, I decided to, you know, be specific about my son's
00:31:29.580diagnosis to tell some stories about our medical experiences before he was even born and then very
00:31:37.300early in his life. I didn't use his name, but it meant that like I stopped posting pictures of him
00:31:45.520on my Instagram and I took the ones that I had posted off because I don't know it's just so
00:31:52.920unpredictable like how someone will read your book and how they'll respond to it and if they'll want
00:31:59.480to you know figure something out about your child and then what they'll do with that information
00:32:05.580and so as I as I exposed him more in this one way I wanted to expose him less in this other way
00:32:13.180But it's also true that like one of the ways that I have exposed him, I think most dangerously feels private in that like I'm uploading photos of him under every light source, like at every age, in every context to like Google Photos.
00:32:33.080and um it's just a gift to facial recognition that can be used in again like ways that i'm
00:32:42.200sure i can't even predict now i know i think about that all the time because i i was recently
00:32:48.100cleaning out my mom's house and which meant cleaning out boxes and boxes of my old photos
00:32:54.460from you know being a baby to like drunk down the shore to college just you know an archive of
00:33:02.740photos, which I haven't seen in a thousand years. And if they went missing or burned down in a fire,
00:33:08.280I don't even know if I'd remember them, right? So it's wonderful to have this digital archive.
00:33:13.060At the same time, we no longer own those photos. They're uploaded to Google. They're uploaded to
00:33:18.960Apple. I use SmugMug, which I think is now owned by Yahoo. I don't know, one of them.
00:33:26.440And they're all, I mean, I feel like they're all just being crawled for data and tracking at this
00:33:30.820point yeah sometimes google photos ask me is this the same person and it will be two photos of my
00:33:37.340son at different ages and there's something very powerful in me that like wants to answer a quiz
00:33:43.540like i want to do the game where i'm like yes yes that is the same person even though like i know as
00:33:51.040i'm doing it that i'm just like helping you know future cop like identify my son or something like
00:33:59.040that. So. Yeah. And not even if they've done something wrong, I mean, because we're living
00:34:04.860in such a weird world. When I was coming back into the country a few days ago, I mean, I post a lot
00:34:11.160of, you know, anti-Trump administration stuff on my Instagram. And even coming into the country as
00:34:17.220a U.S. citizen, I was like, you know, when are we going to get to the point where you're stopped
00:34:21.260just for posting something that the administration doesn't like? And so, you know, thinking about
00:34:26.020surveillance in terms of that, I think it gets even scarier. Yeah. I mean, I think that is
00:34:31.720happening even to U.S. citizens. It's very scary. It's very scary. It's very scary. I want to take
00:34:39.180one more break. And when we get back, I want to talk a little bit about how you've changed
00:34:42.640your parenting after reporting on this book for so long.
00:34:45.440I don't think I can be your friend, Isabella said.