00:12:15.460There was some confusing technical explanation
00:12:19.100over how and why the blackout happened.
00:12:23.080But those five hours, they taught us a few things.
00:12:29.040Chief among them is just how precarious this industry, that is very, very dependent on a single company that is not looking out for people's interests, actually is.
00:12:41.420This company doesn't give content creators a safety net, health care, a pension.
00:12:47.780If Instagram and Facebook go down for good, these jobs cease to exist.
00:12:53.340And for a lot of people, that's going to be devastating.0.96
00:12:59.040I mean, shit show is the word that I would use to describe it.0.99
00:14:15.260Mostly women creators are just making content1.00
00:14:18.860that is fueling ad sales for these companies.1.00
00:14:22.540I mean, we're making, we're making the, like, you know, stuff that all the more sales can run on.
00:14:30.060You know, the majority of Facebook's bottom line comes from us, just regular users.
00:14:35.080We are the ones who make up, I think it's 92% of Facebook's revenue.
00:14:38.780And so when you break down how many of those people are women, women and femmes, that is a big line item.
00:14:45.920And so I think right now we're in this space where tech billionaires and the people who build these platforms do not feel in any way they need to be accountable to us.
00:14:56.260And so if we as women united together and said, hey, listen, until we are treated better, until these platforms value us, not just as users, not just as more money in their accounts, but as actual people, we're not going to be on them.
00:15:10.620We could absolutely impact their bottom line.
00:15:26.040Look at the influencer economy, e-commerce, all of those like billion dollar industries.1.00
00:15:31.700The lifeblood and the life force of them are women.1.00
00:15:34.820Women content creators, women audiences, women social media users.0.82
00:15:37.700And so it only empowers the mostly male tech billionaires who are in charge when women don't see that power, when women are just thinking, oh, I'm just one Instagram user. I'm just a mommy blogger. I'm just an influencer. Every time you hear that in your head, Mark Zuckerberg is making another million. Right. And so when we own our power, the power that we have collectively, only then will we be able to really present a kind of threat that I think can make a better change and make a more equitable, you know, feminist Internet.0.96
00:16:07.700a more feminist internet wouldn't that be nice0.98
00:16:14.820but how in this universe could we even start to get there0.95
00:16:20.440ever since the day that the internet stood still i've been wondering how the hell can we show the1.00
00:16:28.120exactly how valuable women are on the internet how all of us how much power we have well we
00:16:36.000mentioned something in our final episode of season one that gave me a little bit of an idea.1.00
00:16:45.200On October 24th, 1975, 90% of women in Iceland went on strike. They didn't do housework,1.00
00:16:52.920they didn't buy anything, they didn't participate in the economy, and they shut it all the fuck0.99
00:16:58.160down. People in Iceland still look back on that day as the day the entire country started paying0.87
00:17:05.240better attention to women and the work that they do. Imagine if all of us went off social media
00:17:09.820for just one day. We would destroy it. We would destroy the entire system.
00:17:18.320Maybe that's something we should do in season two.1.00
00:17:24.860Today, I want to talk about this one massively huge event in the history of women's labor
00:17:29.640movements that you've probably never heard of. Hello, Erla. How are things in Iceland right now?
00:17:42.120They're just fine. Thank you. It's all going upwards now with the COVID and everything.
00:17:48.920Yeah, so we're going to Iceland. Not physically, of course. We decided not to ruin Iceland's
00:17:54.400COVID recovery with my gross American germs. I miss Iceland. Last time I was there, my taxi0.94
00:18:03.160driver told me that he was Bjork's cousin. And I didn't know if that was a joke that they tell
00:18:08.780every American that comes in their taxi. Well, not necessarily. You never know. He might be.
00:18:15.180That's Erla. She's got a very long and complicated, but very beautiful Icelandic last name. So I'm
00:18:21.580going to let her introduce herself. My name is Ertla Hulta Haldurstadir. I'm a professor of
00:18:27.520history at the University of Iceland, and my expertise is women's and gender history. So,
00:18:35.940yeah, women and gender are my thing. She's not here to fact check if I really met Bjƶrk's cousin,
00:18:41.900but she is here to tell us about a spectacular event in her country's history that completely
00:18:48.220changed how the entire country of Iceland viewed women. The Women's Day Off.
00:18:59.360The Women's Day Off was a strike. It was a strike by all the women in Iceland that made everyone1.00
00:19:05.020who lived in Iceland, women and men, wake the hell up to how much women mattered to the country's
00:19:10.240economy. What was the Women's Day Off, and why did it happen? The original idea was that women1.00
00:19:19.480should go on a strike. So one of the things they had to decide on was if it should be a strike
00:19:26.040or a Women's Day Off. And as you can imagine, there were very different views on that.
00:19:33.360I'll bet there were, because the word strike holds such, it can hold such negative connotations.
00:19:40.240Right? Yes, exactly. And the more radical groups and many women workers, they wanted to call it a strike, that it should be a strike. Otherwise, it wouldn't have any effect. But in the end, women agreed on calling it a day off. Then everyone, both the more conservative and the radical could agree on, we call it a day off. And as a matter of fact, it turned out to be a success.
00:20:10.240There's amazing radio and video footage that exists in this event, and watching it, it looks like it was a party, like a real rager.
00:20:19.600The crowds completely fill up Reykjavik streets, there's a big stage where women are giving speeches, and suddenly everyone just erupts in song.
00:20:27.180It was a great event that had much effect on many women, both in Reykjavik and all around the country, where there were smaller events going on.
00:20:49.620What is so remarkable about this event is that the purpose was for social change.
00:20:55.160More than for passing equal rights laws or establishing legal protections,
00:20:59.420the women who marched and protested really just wanted to change the way men thought about women in their work.
00:21:05.780Let's say they were dissatisfied, very dissatisfied about their position in society,
00:21:10.080because even though they had been granted all civil rights quite early on in the early 20th century,
00:21:16.840there were still, you know, these glass ceilings and barriers that women faced in the form of ideologies
00:21:23.460And just how people thought, people thought that women should be mainly mothers and housewives.1.00
00:21:33.360So Iceland being represented as feminist paradise today, the land of equality, it has not very long historical roots.
00:21:43.740You sent me a document that says, why a day off for women?
00:21:47.800And I'm reading these reasons and I'm actually tearing up while reading them.
00:21:53.460Things like because it's commonly said about a housewife, she isn't working, just keeping
00:21:59.520house, because when someone is needed for a badly paid, low-status job, the advertisement
00:22:05.660specifies a woman, because whether an applicant for a job is male or female is often considered
00:22:13.840more important than education or competence.
00:22:17.340And I think about so many of those things, and there's still problems in America today.
00:22:23.460Did your day off actually fix anything there?
00:22:28.720I think we can say it did have positive effects on institutions, on government, and on women's own self-esteem.
00:22:41.560And in fact, when Viltis FimboadĆ³ttir, former president of Iceland, was elected president in 1980, she has said that she would not have had the courage to do that unless she had experienced this power and how women could stand together.
00:23:05.780That former president that Erla just mentioned was also the first female president in all of Europe. So yeah, you can say that the Women's Day Off really did accomplish a lot.
00:23:16.160What I think is so interesting about the Women's Day Off is that it focused so much on the economics.0.75
00:26:53.520But it could if we all work together.0.96
00:26:55.900When we get back from a break, we are going to figure out how to apply the lessons learned from the Women's Day Off in Iceland to our goal of showing women just how much power they control on the internet.0.59
00:27:06.340We're just inching our way, baby steps, closer and closer to the feminist internet.1.00
00:27:11.460it. Based on everything that I learned from Erla and from talking to Bridget, I now have this0.97
00:27:26.920little idea. And it might be crazy. It's probably freaking crazy. But it also might be totally
00:27:33.060genius. I think I'm ready to start sharing about this plan, to start sharing it with the world.
00:27:38.840Of course, first I went back to Glynis, and then I had to fill her in on the whole Icelandic women's day off bit.
00:27:45.900Of course, she found it just as inspiring as I do.
00:29:06.540Of course, now to make this work, I'm going to have to talk to a lot of people and convince a lot of people to maybe not make money for a day.
00:34:27.740If we all together, collectively, get off of Facebook for just three days,
00:34:33.300we can really hit their bottom line and show them that we are a force to be reckoned with.
00:34:37.100I am really kind of excited because I feel like, as someone who's been talking a lot about how awful these platforms are, I think that we're at a time right now, like never before, where people are listening, thanks to whistleblowers like Sophie Zong and Frances Hagen.
00:34:53.620I think that people are finally starting to see, hey, we can't just have every year a new Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg apology saying, oh, we're sorry, we didn't know, we didn't know, we didn't know.
00:35:04.520at a certain point, you know. And so what's the next question? You can't just keep apologizing
00:35:11.140and not changing. And I think that the public is starting to see that these companies,
00:35:15.840we are their lifeblood and they need to be accountable to us. I think that these days,
00:35:20.100we are seeing people really understand their power as people who use the internet. You may
00:35:24.940not have a computer science degree, but you don't need one to know what your own experience online
00:36:52.040The last two years were just a lot of reflection and trying to figure out what I really wanted to get out of Instagram.0.99
00:37:01.640And the short answer to that was fucking nothing.0.98
00:37:06.720If you post a picture of your child online and it reaches even one other person who chooses to repost it, other people could still find that image.0.98