An English professor chats with her very-not-English-professor partner about her scholarly reading. We discuss technical communication, digital rhetoric, and health/medical comm, among other topics.
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September 11, 2025
The case for climate hope: A talk with Dr. Stephanie Rollag Yoon
For this episode of TC Talk: A Tech Comm Podcast , Abi and Benton interview Dr. Rollag Yoon, a professor of English Education and curriculum editor for the Journal of Climate Literacy in Education . We talk about definitions of climate literacy, how to communicate about climate to young people, and why hope needs to be part of the message. Check out ClimateLit.org , which features tons of teaching resources. Transcript ATell us about, I guess, sort of your general background and how you became involved in this topic.SYes, I approach things from story. So that's where I come. I think there was a reason I was an English major. I think, so I both learn through story. I think through story. And then I'm definitely like a feeler. My emotional response carries a lot of where I'm at. Growing up, I definitely was in a family who cared about thinking about and connecting to the world in like a really physical way and in a way that I think I've had to actually learn to name in groups of folks who you know, name themselves as environmentalists. Like I grew up on a farm, and there are certainly things that farming has been problematic in some ways, of course, for environmental factors, and I've thought a lot about that, but it also was a space where I, my whole childhood was connected to the ground, like in the ground. I literally pulled weeds from the bean field so that the beans would grow every July, you know, and was always outside, always planting. So I think I had this, my interest started as an innate sense of connectedness, like truly to the ground, like that's where we lived and and existed.SAnd my sister, to be honest, my older sister was very involved in, I think in high school, she is a little bit more, she was a science major, she was an ecology major for her undergrad, so she had this interest and would talk about it and the concerns around it, and I was like, yep, that makes sense. I've always had, sort of, I think the standard, coming from the 90s, good intention, yes, I care about the environment. Yes, I will recycle. Yes, I try to limit my waste. But then I'm somebody who has always believed in science, so like am aware of sort of the things that we've lived, the changing, the Al Gore era, like our climate is actually changing, our world is actually changing and becoming more concerned about it. And then I think being a teacher and starting, a classroom teacher mostly for 10 years with 7th graders, we're at this really interesting stage where they care about topics, they get deeply passionate about them. They also get nervous about them in different ways of seeing that.SAnd then I think being a mom and recognizing that my kids from an early age are super aware, right? They are aware of how the air feels when there are fires in Canada that affect us here in Minnesota. They are aware of trees that are cut down on our block and what that means. They are aware of, you know, their good and bad of like social media excerpts of like the ocean and all the plastic, right? And so I think that our kids both like my own children and kids that I taught, like, have felt it deeply, that sort of like entering that space.SAnd then as an English teacher, I think that I, again, going back to story, have always thought about writing and producing as a space for students to take action. Like, I think that's the purpose of teaching students to engage with word. I think in working with students, I think keeping me going in the classroom has always been sort of this idea of a speculative imagination. What do text tell us about? But where do they allow space for us to imagine something new and better? Because I don't want to stay in a stuck place. I believe in research and I believe in understanding the truth and the science of the moment. But I also believe that like we have to exist with some hope. I don't say that naively, but what is the catalyst that like is going to allow us to imagine and create something new?SSo then that interest kind of connected me with some of the work of a professor who I knew from being a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, who started the Center for Climate Literacy, that was Marek Oziewicz. He has cared deeply about this topic for a long time and he really just on his own connected to people from around the world and was like I want to, we have to do this. Schools are a place where if we connected teachers, teachers are a conduit to students and that is like the biggest, the biggest space we have for movement in our world because like we can't really sit around and wait for policy in some ways. Like we have to move from down here. That's how we reach people. And so how do we come together and start building resources and spaces and ways of thinking that allow to move that forward. And so he invited me in to start thinking about this work, particularly around our journal, which is just two years old. And so, so just started meeting with this group of people from all over the world who care about this and also work with teachers and teacher educators and literature to, to think about this work. That's kind of, that's how I got started.AWe both read the introductory editorial of the first issue. And I thought it was super inspiring.BYeah.ASo for our listeners here, I'm gonna just read a little excerpt of it.AThe journal is our collective effort to actively confront in and with education the climate breakdown and its drivers. Climate change is the key existential issue of our time. It is already eroding possibilities for human and non-human lives across the globe. If not addressed adequately, it will continue to erode these possibilities at an accelerating pace, leaving today's young people stranded in an unrecognizable wasteland that may become their future. But this is not the future we are willing to accept. At CLE, Climate Literacy in Education , we believe that the story of climate change is yet to be told. It will be told and shaped by today's youth and by all of us who stand up for young people's right to futures in which they can thrive without compromising the Earth's biospheric integrity.AAnd what I love about what I just read is that. It doesn't beat around the bush, right? We are living in a climate emergency. Right.AIt is the existential issue of our time, and like Benton and I talked about in our in our episode about facing the climate emergency, that was the first step is you have to acknowledge the reality and that's where it's easy to get stuck. And then there's this shift to this is not the future we are willing to accept. And there's that making space for hope that I need. Yeah.AAnd so I appreciate that your journal is out there with this honest but hopeful perspective. And it also makes me feel way awesomer about being an educator myself. The way you talked about howSGood.AThis is where we can make a difference is with the young people we’re teaching versus waiting on policy. Yeah. I, I really admire what you're doing. And yeah, I also appreciate how you're talking about it from your perspective as a parent because that's probably the key motivator for me right now, is I brought my kids into this world that's crumbling. Yeah.AAnd I would say our kids are pretty aware. But that's mostly because we talk about it a lot. You and I, and Zoe especially, is great at listening when she's not supposed to. Mm. So,Bespecially when she's not supposed to. Better than when we're talking to her. For sure. Yeah. Of course.ASo even she this year was like, oh, I wish it would snow it’s like Christmas time, Why isn't it snowing right without snow? Means it's too warm. Right.AAnd climate change is getting worse. And I realized, Oh my gosh, I have completely imparted my own existential terror to my 11 year old and so like we personally talking to our own kids, need to pair that with, there are steps we can take. There is another story we can tell, right?SAnd it is part of it. It is scary. We read a book to our kids called the Whatifs, and it talks about like when you have bad what ifs. You might also have good what ifs. What if this goes well today? But so we talk a lot about at our house, like when people, when we have the what ifs and I think that part of me when I talk about parenting is Simon, our oldest, will say he'll sometimes at night say like I just have so many what ifs that are so big. And they include like environmental concerns. And it's not because I think like we talk generally about the choices we make, right. I think we talk about like you know we're not, we don't eat as much meat because of this or we don't. You know, we're gonna reuse this instead of throwing it away because of this. Or like we don't need so many things because of this but. But the existential fear, I think, is also just like felt in if they hear a clip of news, right. Or they do notice these things like it's a collective thing. So.AYeah, I guess it's not better to hide it. It just sucks that they have to carry this burden that they didn't choose, you know. Right. 100%.BI'm sure that every generation has a degree of this, but you know we need to prepare our kids for a world we've never seen. And it's gonna be dramatically different from the world we grew up in. You know when they get to be our age, what is that that world gonna be? What does 2050 look like? You know, how can we get them ready to survive and hopefully even thrive in that landscape?SYeah. Yeah. And to move beyond that like again, I don't mean this to sound naive, but like also to say yes, we have to change right now that's it. And we will have to adapt to the world and like how do we create in a way that allows us, the world to maybe not be the worst possibility, right?SWithout jumping in too fast, I'll tell you for for example so one of the things with the climate Literacy Journal we have this, I don't know if I shared this with, I probably did, Abi, but the so climatelit.org is our database it’s all sorts of books that address climate and it's games and apps and youth-authored and picture books and novels. And I think about like one of the books that I do read a lot with my students and I'm holding it up, the the Tantrum that saved the world. And it's about this kid who is like, all these animals from around the world, and things are like knocking at her door. And she's like, why are you here? I don't have space. And then, like eventually, like, she's like, fine, move in. And then she starts to listen to. And she's like, wait a minute. Like, why isn't there a place for you? And then she, like, goes to the government officials and is like, come on now we're ruining this, let’s make it better. And she, she continues being told, like, don't worry about it. It'll be fine. You’re just a kid, you don't know. And then she throws this tantrum and she's like, actually, I do know and actually, like, I'm not letting you off the hook on this. But I love a book like this because, it is this sort of like awareness that the things that we're describing are on all of our doorsteps. And it's a young kid saying I'm actually not gonna just sit there and take this. I am gonna pound on the doors until something changes, which again that can feel like as adults, not always the most hopeful, but I think like if these are the stories we're telling our kids on a regular basis, we're not going to put up with these things, it feels like a starting point to me.BIt sounds like a good book.AWe have to get that.SIt’s so good.BMaybe we'll get copies and put one in each of the libraries.AHey.SThat's a good idea, yeah, I vote yes. I think the other thing that I feel sort. I don't know if hope is the right word, but when I think about movement, so I was a Co editor for a special issue titled Water as Conflict and Water as Commons, where we really featured how our teachers with their students, thinking about water in the classroom and not, and we wanted to complicate it, right? Not Just like water, we all need it. The end. And we did this special issue because we were thinking about with our own students, it's an entry point because everybody uses water so much. But then how do we complicate that with our students in a way that allows that space for both, that space for acknowledging like what we're doing with water and how it's problematic, but also we're all in this. It Affects all of us and so therefore what's the move? And so if you haven't heard of We are water protectors. We are water protectors is by Carole Lindstrom. That's the book that tells of Indigenous water protectors on the Dakota pipeline, like telling the story and like using the metaphor of the pipeline is a black snake and Here is how we come together as a community to protect the water. Because we are not individuals, we are a collective and we are doing this together, which I think I just want to always acknowledge like we're continually thinking too about the work that indigenous communities have done environmentally for a long time as part of this special issue and special, and the journal and the Center. And how we can draw on those stores as a space for learning. So that's connected.SBut what I was gonna say from there is we had this special issue and we invited teachers to share their stories of how they take up water in the classroom. And They were so beautiful and so creative. And these like lovely ways that teachers are thinking through with their students about water. Many of them using the book we are water protectors, but also in lots of other ways. And so we had some of the teachers come and speak on a panel at the National Council of Teachers of English in November. And it was an 8:30 AM session, which at a conference on the East Coast is like not the ideal time, but we still had 40 people, I think because people care about this topic. And it was so moving because we had a teacher from Florida and a teacher from Wisconsin, and in some ways telling these really different stories, but in some ways telling stories like you all are saying about what their students know and experience, and how it just has to be part of the curriculum. Somebody asked the teachers on the panel, what would you recommend for people who are in a conservative place where maybe it's, you’re not supposed to talk about climate change? And the teacher from Florida said, I teach in Florida. There's a lot of ideas about what we are and are not supposed to teach about. But my students just went through two hurricanes. They've lost their home. The idea that we can't approach this with our students is just not a thing. It's their lives. And now we, right, the fires in LA. So in one way it was a hard sharing of things, but In between that we were sharing, here are these teachers saying, and we're honoring our students’ experience and helping them think about, like, they’re living this, what are we gonna do with it? And helping them think about like, what are the stories we can turn to Where people have made movement and like, how do we then take our own voice and engage in that movement as well? Because we don't have another choice. I just. I think those are the spaces that for me I Have to move in. I don't know how else to.AYeah. So we've established that we need to be talking about this. There is no other choice. Can we talk more about, general best practices I guess in talking to young people and Benton, maybe now you can jump in with what you're thinking, what you're hoping to do, why you wanted to talk to Steph.BRight. For the benefit of the listeners, you know both of them. I am a member of the Climate Impact Corps and I'm working in St. Peter, Minnesota.SYay.BWith their Department of Public Works and one of the things that I would like to do is reach out to the schools and ask if they have any interest of someone coming in, I'm imagining me, coming in and speaking about climate change with the students.SYeah.BBecause the Climate Impact Corps is a part of AmeriCorps and supposed to be non partisan, I obviously can't get into politics in the way of parties or candidates. But I just can't, kind of like you. I can't imagine having all of this knowledge, I've been scraping together from here and there about the climate and what's wrong and what we can do and not try to engage with the people who, this will be their life's work. It doesn't matter what field they're going into. Addressing climate change is going to be the life's work of humanity for three generations. At a bare minimum. Yep.ASo when you go in, how do you not scare them away?BThe goal is not to get them cowering under their desks.SYeah. Can I jump in?BDo.S This is good goals. This is so exciting. I'm excited for you. So it's interesting because even when I do this with, so I taught children's lit to freshmen and sophomore in college, and then I taught an introduction, like a gen ed literacy class and I bring this into all my classes because I believe in it, and even in those spaces like there's a little bit of that concern of either a shutdown, like students just are like, I don't feel any type of hope about this, I don't wanna go there, or this might feel politically charged and I'm not trying to do that, but I think the way is in, whether it's with 7-year olds or 15 year olds or 20 year olds is to start with something that we know that they all can connect to. So when we were talking about the water issue for the journal, when we did our presentation, we had everybody write in response to the question, What is a memory you have of water? Because everybody has like a moment, whether it's from swimming, being thirsty, whatever it is, people have experiences with water being at a river fishing, whatever it is. People have memories, and I think particularly in Minnesota, where we are so dependent on rivers and lakes for entertainment in a lot of ways. People have memories of water. And so when we start with a question that is accessible and doesn't put people on either the defense or on the fear, it's a beginning place to say like, OK, we all value water. And then I don't think we need to name like and here are the 900 things that are going wrong with water. There's like some of that, yes, but some of it might not be that helpful at a certain point for productivity. So how do we move then from their personal experience to a sense of inquiry that says, these are important memories with water. What would we be willing to do to protect that water? What do we want that water to look like in the future? And then to move into, so what are some of the things that we might know that we need to do to protect that water for the future, so that we can have those memories again, so that we can have those experiences, so that those after us can have those experiences. And I think that is like a starting small thing. But then I think about, I think NPR did a series of stories about how the shorelines on Minnesota lakes have surpassed 50% home ownership now so there's a new concern about what's happening, but then all of these communities are coming together around different lakes to make sure that their waterfronts are more animal friendly, more sustainable,BMore natural.SYeah. So just sharing a clip like that, that type of thing is like an entry point. I also think there are some great books. I’m smiling because I'm looking at like graphic novels, depending on the age group. Astro-Nuts, have I talked to you about this by John Scieszka? Like it's kind of this wild story. He has a series of three books where the characters are, it's definitely like science fiction fantasy, but also graphic novel. But he's really addressing climate issues within the story. And so I think those are opportunities to like look at some of those pages and just have students identify what they notice and then make connections like. Here's in this story, what might this be like in the real world? And who would you, what character would you want to be in the real world? Where would you want to place yourself in this story?SAnother one that I think about, so Drawn to Change the World: 16 Youth climate activists and 16 artists of the collection. Brought together by Emma Reynolds. But it's all these different stories where it has, like Autumn Peltier, and it has a little bio. And then it has a graphic novel, like 2 pages of graphic stories about what she did and then it has where Are they now? And so it's this series of different, so like in my class I had students kind of jigsaw. Everybody took a different one and then shared something from that. So just sharing those stories all of a sudden it becomes, there are questions that naturally come up that allow then for what that means. So I think starting with a writing prompt. It's easy access. Then going to some sort of text whether that's a podcast or a book that says what do you notice about this? What do you connect to? What does this say about your story about water? Like, where do you see that line? We don't have to tell them the things if we build space for them to come up with it on their own. So that's the second piece.SAnd then the third piece is I do build in frameworks. So, Marek who I mentioned he created frameworks that I think can be helpful for thinking. So Marek in I think it might have been the first journal that he talks about it later, too, talks about the CLICK framework. And so in that framework he talks about it, can be helpful for us to think about kinship care, systems care, people care and Earth care. And so they're all connected. But so talking to students about like, It's one thing or us to care about all people, but first of all, that's not siloed, right? To care for all people we have to start thinking about what does it mean to care for all people in the world in the spaces that they are? But then if we also include things like kinship care and we say, what if we also care for our plants and our animals? Like what might that feel like? What might it mean to feel things for your dog, but also your plants, and also all the other animals and the species that we care about. What does it mean to think about the care that we take to make sure that our systems, government, school, whatever, are thoughtful towards everybody? And then ending with Earth care like, so how do we build all these things to make sure there our actual Earth itself is cared for? And so just having a framework to be like here are questions, just like you would any other theory with literature. So if we read this book, what is it telling us about kinship care? What is it telling us about Earth? What is it telling us about people care? For me when I think about teaching I think about entry point - how do students build a connection to the topic? What's the new information I'm gonna share with them? And then how are they gonna make sense of that with some sort of connection to their own world? So those are the things that I think are helpful.SAnd I will also say I say text broadly, like I love to use a clip from, well, now I'm thinking about Moana, because there's lots in Moana, but Frozen 2 is the other one. Where there are all kinds of moments where they're looking around going oh, Everything's fine. The world's on fire, but everything's fine. So how do we like, utilize things that students are already interested in and then ask questions about what's going on there.AThat does sound a little different, Benton, from what you were imagining.BYeah, a little bit.ASo Benton’s the data guy, right? And what you're saying really kind of put students at the center in terms of their connection to the world. And starting from that, I think that's certainly something you could open with Benton is a question like What is a memory you have with, or could you even go as broad as what is a memory you have about the natural world? Or would that be?BBeing outdoors.SYeah, I think it depends on the age of the students. I think a little specificity can be helpful.AWe'll say high school.SYeah. I think you could say natural world, I think you could say outside. I think you could say water? I think they'd all produce like slightly different answers so depending on where you would go with it, but I think you would get the idea of. Yeah, of like you all are connected to these spaces.AAnd then I like too, the idea of showing them something that has worked, showing them a way that people have taken action and it's made a difference.SYes, if you're working with teenagers, I think that book the Drawn to change the world, it's so great because they're short, they're accessible. They're real people who did real things that matter. Hmm.AAnd just empowering students to see themselves in that position themselves. Like, is that something you ever got growing up, Benton?BIs what?AThat that sense of empowerment, I am a part of this. My actions matter. I can do something about this or maybe the urgency wasn't there when we were in school.SOr something, I can do something more than just pick up recycling, which I mean, yes, we need to pick up garbage too, right? That's the thing.BMy specific experience was more that there wasn't, like there wasn't much focus on connection. It was more of a you can do whatever you want, you know, the sky is the limit, that sort of.SThe sky is the limit, yep. Yeah.BThing that probably has led to a worsening of the situation.SYep. The individualism versus collective. Yes.SI wonder. It just changes the conversation, I mean. A really prevalent conversation in schools is about like your responsibility that you can do for your own future, right? So just that shift from individual to collective, I think, yeah.AYeah. And you are part of a system that you cannot stand apart from, I mean some people can. And they're going to be the rich assholes.SWho literally want to build a new place on a different planet because then they don't have to worry about taking care of this one planet. Because they have the money and the means to go where they want.BThe phenomenal hubris of thinking that I can terraform a different planet rather than terraforming this one.SExactly.AMakes me so sad.SYeah. And I just think, that's about good narrative, that that there are folks who believe that they would, like, be invited to go along with this, right? Like that they would somehow be saved by somebody who would rather like create a new whole new world than like, help the one that we have. I think that's one of the things I think about storytelling and I think, I love discourse analysis. I think for me like who are people in our society who have done a really good job of telling stories that are full of hope. And what does that hope look like? And is that hope about like, take hope in this thing that's about being selfish. Or is it take hope in this way of like collectively building something that's gonna include everybody? We have to get really good at telling the story that we are all in this together.BYeah, specifically about the word hope. I'm going to get out of my lane and into yours. So there's so much discussion about finding hope when looking at the climate crisis, I feel like in a, in a lot of cases that many people equate hope with I don't need to worry about it. Yeah.BIt was, I believe it was in the Facing the climate crisis, that the author talked about discarding the the language of hope and talking instead about courage, where she she described courage.SOh, interesting.BAs the, the fortitude to to choose and do the right thing regardless of whether there is an assured outcome.AI think you are thinking of that literature professor. Genevieve something? She said, we've been telling a story about climate panic and rhetorically, that language works to delegitimize people who are raising the alarm. And she wants to rebrand it to climate courage. Do you happen to remember that professor's name?BGenevieve Guenther.AThe other thing I liked about her language is she she called it global heating instead of global warming. Oh.AAnd I was like, that's a that's a shake up that makes you think about things differently.SThat's interesting. As you were saying, I was thinking about the difference between hope and courage. I like the idea of courage, and I get why that matters. Who is her key audience was it general?BI think that was pretty general. It wasn't an academic oriented book, but yeah, another thing that I really like about that change of, you know, rhetoric. Yeah.BThere's. That's why I'm in your lane. Is thatSYeah, you are.BYou know, hope evokes passivity.AYou can hope in something or someone else.BWhere you cannot, where you cannot be courageous passively. That is an active thing.SThat is interesting. I have to kind of think about this. I think that for me, where hope feels maybe necessary is for kids because it feels unfair, I feel like we've positioned kids to be so courageous. And for so many things, because we haven't, because we haven't stepped up. I also think there is this thing that happens that sort of this like, the next generation will take care of it, right. And like we, now that’s stopped. Now it has to happen now. There's no more next generation.SI like the word courage. I'm not ready to give up on the word hope for kids because I think they deserve to have, and I know there's like a naivete there or like this idea that I hear what you're saying about like it might not feel as action oriented. But when my kiddo tells me that he has what ifs about so many things. I want to somehow find space that isn't totally naive or dismissive, but that also says like we're working towards something like we're going to keep going and it's, I want to be able to say and mean it's going to be OK and some of it's not gonna be OK. Mm-hmm.SBut I worry that if we don't put hope in the imagination as well, so courage is the action, but hope is the idea, and I think that because I live in story, it's about the idea in some ways, and so, and they're both, they go together. Like I think now that I'm saying this, I think we can't have one or the other and that hope might allow us to imagine courageous action.AOoh.SMaybe.BThat's interesting. Yeah, and I am. I am definitely in, professionally a pretty, diametrically different situation. Yeah, yeah.BStory is not the realm of the engineer. It isn't the realm of the tree worker. It can be, but the hands on, physically active kind of work is less about story than it is about.AI don't know though. Because remember when Steph was talking at the beginning about pulling the weeds out of the earth, right, and asking students to look for that connection on their own. That is a story.SYeah, it's about how we access that, right.BMm-hmm. Yeah, the action gives you something to tell a story about.SYes, it's embodied. Yeah.AThank you for saying that about. We can't put everything on our kids. They are still kids and they need space to hope that the adults in their lives are doing everything they can too. So yeah, kids, this is gonna be your life's work. But it's not only your work. It's our work too, yeah.A'Cause some kids are like me growing up I felt everything was my responsibility, right? To this day, I feel like everything is my responsibility.SAnd that's hard.AI joke that it was my fault that Al Gore lost the 2000 election because I wrote a song in praise of George Bush, and that was the tipping point. That's it.SThat's. That's it, Abi. No, no.AAnd like logically. I was a kid. I was. I was following what the adults in my life told me was right and it just tragedy to look back and realize what a turning point that really was.SYes. And maybe what I'm thinking about too, it's. I really appreciate what you're saying, too, Benton, about, like, where does this hit with every different type of person, right? Because It can't just be, you know, one type of learner, one type of, I don’t know, Myers Briggs personality who is up for doing this work. But I do think what I go back to is like even where we decide to find courage to do the action or what you were just saying, Abi, like you had all these adults in your life telling you this is the path to like goodness or like whatever that I will vote for this person because of this. So, you know, I think that as a public school teacher and now working at a public university, I know that when I walk into the room, 50% of the students voted for or are thinking about a candidate who has openly said no to climate policy, right. To somebody who said this is not my priority, we are not going to focus on this. We are not going to make this better. And so I think about, OK, if these are the people sitting in front of me. They all have different experiences. And they all have been told facts in certain ways from different groups, right? I don't know anymore that like the argument building shifts where they stand. But if they are saying, wait, this is my life and I have a memory or a connection or an experience that will be changed by this and like I can picture it then, like might that change how I actually respond to this work or to this idea?SAnd part of that is coming from, I'll give a shout out to the work of Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia, who did a whole project where they were actually looking, working with students from across the country. This sounds different, but I think it's connected, On gun violence and they were thinking about how in high school classrooms, we teach argument. And they were saying we have done a really good job and you know this, Abi, from your technical writing stuff. Like, they're saying we've done a really good job of teaching students how to take their idea and then find the right sources to back it up. But what does that do for us, right? And so they took these students from across the country and created this digital platform where they took a hot topic like gun violence, and they had them start sharing personal stories, their relationship to guns, whether it was gun violence, hunting, whatever it was. And had them start talking about how actually having dialogue shifted their responses more than like building an argument that they already believed. And so I think that's part of where I have storytelling too, is like it's, it's also like when do we actually listen to to information that's being told to us?AWe actually just, our last episode was pre election and it was about listening versus arguing. Yeah, interesting.AI was hopeful. I was hopeful going into it, now I've.BYou've sworn off hope forever, right?SHopes dashed.AI've lost hope in the power of dialogue, you know. So here's the thing. I look at the wildfires in California and I see people at the highest levels of government saying things like, Oh yeah, this is God's wrath because California had a, is more liberal than conservative and the absolute thought-stopping effect that that has and people eat it up and I'm just. How could I break past that in a student?BKind of wild how God wasn't punishing us with hurricanes earlier this year or last year. In Florida.ANo, that was the Democrats clouding or seeding the clouds, remember?BOh right.SWhen people really break it down to like that story, I feel like it's easier for people to hop on to that story right, then to have to actually, like make changes in their own life but I, again, I just feel like have they had this like history of believing that story like this happens because people, you know what I mean? And so I don't think it's different than messaging around climate. Like Project 2025 was a well documented, articulate thing. I don't agree with it, but like right there was stories everywhere in that right and so I think that part of my hope in the journal and the work of the Center for Climate Literacy is what if we tell more and more stories at an early age. Like the Tantrum that saved the world, but also like, I'm gonna throw books, Jason Chin's Grand Canyon, where he has these, like, beautiful, in-depth detailed pictures and maps of the Grand Canyon that are so glorious that like a kid would just wanna like you don't necessarily wanna sit down and read the whole thing. But you just wanna, like, play with the book kind of. If we are continually showing this story, like at what point does the other story seem silly? Is there a saturation of certain types of stories that can like move the needle? And that's a genuine question.AWe are going to put in a big book order after this don't you think?BInevitably yes.SI really, really love Astro-Nut. It's super fun.AOkay, yeah. And Zoe loves graphic novels, too, so we can certainly hook her up with some of those.SYeah, it's funny.ABefore we go, so some of our audience consists of other technical communication professors. It seems to me there could be a place for their work in this journal, they don't, they may not necessarily use literature in their courses, but the idea of story is certainly not foreign to people in my area. So what's different about this journal compared to your traditional academic journal and what are you looking for? What can people send in?S This is so fun. Thank you. One thing that's the same as we are going for quality and it is peer-reviewed because I think that's important to say, but it is also focused on accessibility and I think we're getting better at what that looks like and what that means, we're shifting. It's completely open access. So that's the first thing. Like you don't have to be part of a library system to get access to it. It’s An Open Access journal so anybody can read it at any point in time.SThe second piece is we really want to highlight teacher work. So I'm the editor of the curriculum section. So that's probably I shouldn't say our biggest, but it's definitely the core part of the journal is curriculum. We have a template and we invite teachers to send in. Here's what I'm doing in the classroom, and we have sort of they can plug in resources, but also opportunity for them to say Here's how I got here. Here's what the lesson or unit is. And then here's why this matters. Here's where I'm going to, so a space for, We want teachers to share the work that they're doing. And not have to pay for it, for the ideas with each other, but instead to honor their academic intelligence and say you are published in a peer-reviewed journal because you are doing really important good work that we want to spread. And so making it accessible in that way is really important.SSo open access is the first thing. Second thing is there's a huge emphasis on curriculum. But then there also is space for shorter research pieces. We also encourage multimodal pieces, so in our last journal piece we had a link to somebody made a graphic story. It’s beautiful, a digital story. And so again, we're kind of, I think, pushing the limits of what might be included in a journal and then short, short research pieces short reflective essay pieces. I say short because it is about accessibility and getting this information out as quickly as we can to as many people as we can. We're accepting our articles on a rotating basis. Two issues the first year, two issues the second year, I think we'll have 3 again this year. We already are thinking about launching our next special issue. That again, in nuance, but it's going to be about trees.AOoh, fun. This is K12 and higher Ed, correct.SIt is. A lot of the lessons, we particularly want to focus on K12 teachers having access to it. We also have a lot of teacher educators in the mix and a lot of folks who are doing stuff in their college classroom.AOk. I am so glad you could talk with us.SAbi, thank you for having me. This is so fun.
October 21, 2024
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Benton and Abi agree to disagree about how to disagree. In our "polarized" political climate, what value is there in a rhetoric that doesn't aim to change minds? Is it possible to embody empathetic listening while protecting ourselves from harmful views? They discuss their not-especially-successful attempts to converse with undecided voters as the election nears, and how presidential debates aren't the right format for solving problems. Abi gives a quick rundown of alternatives to persuasion throughout the rhetorical tradition, culminating in the 2022 book Rhetorical Listening in Action by Ratcliffe & Jensen. Stay to the end for Abi's most embarrassing high school debate experience. Sources and further reading Braver Angels. (n.d.). Our Mission . Braver Angels. Retrieved October 21, 2024, from https://braverangels.org/our-mission/ Burke, K. (1969). A Grammar of Motives . University of California Press. Compassionate Listening Project. (n.d.). History . CompassionateListening. Retrieved October 21, 2024, from https://www.compassionatelistening.org/history Foss, S. K., & Griffin, C. L. (1995). Beyond persuasion: A proposal for an invitational rhetoric. Communications Monographs , 62 (1), 2–18. Gearhart, S. M. (1979). The womanization of rhetoric. Women’s Studies International Quarterly , 2 (2), 195–201. Heller, C. (2015, March 9). Life Inside Jabba the Hutt: Toby Philpott Explains How Puppeteers Operated Jabba the Hutt. The Atlantic . https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/387298/life-inside-jabba-the-hutt/ Inman, M. (n.d.) "Piggers are going all the way this year." The Oatmeal. https://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences2/locker_room Jarratt, S. C. (1991). Feminism and composition: The case for conflict. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age , 105–123. Organizing and protest security culture . (2022, March). [Audio recording]. The Poor Proles Skillshare. https://open.spotify.com/show/2Xb99VLft9T9ObBLFJkj3n Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1973). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation . University of Notre Dame Pess. Quintilian. (1987). Quintilian on the teaching of speaking and writing: Translations from books one, two, and ten of the Institutio Oratoria (J. J. Murphy, Trans.). SIU Press. Ratcliffe, K., & Jensen, K. (2022). Rhetorical Listening in Action: A Concept-Tactic Approach . Parlor Press LLC. Talking radical politics with Dr. Ayesha Khan . (2022, March). [Podcast episode]. The Poor Proles Skillshare. https://open.spotify.com/show/2Xb99VLft9T9ObBLFJkj3n Talking Sense: Navigating relationships across political divides . (2024, September 5). MPR News. https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/09/04/talking-sense-navigating-relationships-across-political-divides Weil, Z., & Goodall, J. (2024). The Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better . New Society Publishers. WeRateDogs (Director). (2024, September 30). Tim Walz and His Rescue Dog Scout | WeWalkDogs [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spiwlde4kys Music credits: Opening theme: S: Disco Funk Loop by SergeQuadrado | License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 Julius Fučík (1897) "Entrance of the Gladiators" op. 68 Transcript AGood morning. Welcome to TC Talk, a tech comm podcast. My name is Abi Bakke.BMy name is Benton Bakke.AI teach technical communication and rhetoric,Band I don't. Currently, I am working in the climate Impact Corps for a nearby city.AThrilled to be working in an area that you are passionate about?BYes. Very much.AYay. I have missed recording.BSame.AI didn't think I would. But I've just been feeling like the last few weeks like, Oh, I want to get on the mic with Benton.BOh.ABut we have an excuse.BThat's right.AWe were invited to participate in the big rhetorical podcast carnival, 2024.B Insert Carnival sounds.A D d d d.BThat's right. Send in the gladiators. That little ditty that people associate with clowns now was actually written as, like, music to indicate sending gladiators into the ring, you know, to battle to their death, whichAHighly intimidating.BIt definitely gives a picture of the comic violence idea was not invented by our Highly intimidating. generation.AHm. How about that? It seems like the kind of thing that could be a fake fact.BI don't know. I think it's the title of the piece, soAOkay. Well, I'll look it up, and if I don't come back here from the future saying that this was made up, then you can assume it is true. Now, to the theme of the Podcast Carnival. Politics Slash Rhetorics: Navigating, civility, culture, and crisis. And this will be held from October 28 through 31st. Our episode is slated to be released on October 31. So I feel like we should give this a spooky vibe, but eh.BYou can listen to it while driving kiddos around to do trick or treating. In your car.ANope. Cause I'm going to drop F bombs.BYeah, but the kids are going to be out of the car.AAre you not going to go to the door with them?BOkay. I guess I do. But like when I was growing up, the way my parents did it they just kind of crept along on the street to keep pace with us. So you know, we would do all the walking and they'd just sit in the car and be comfortable. And presumably listen to obscene podcasts.ADid they levy their parent tax on the Halloween candy like we do?BThey may have done it without me knowing.AYeah. Meanwhile, my kids are like, Mom, you can have this tootsie roll, and I'm like, fuck that. Give me the Reese’s. Yes. Almond Joy. Okay. Dude, at this rate, we are never going to get through this conversation.BRight. Maybe we should just schedule fake podcasting time so that we talk to each other.AOh, my gosh. Is that what it will take?BIt might. To have eye contact? Sure. For longer than 2 seconds at a time?AMaybe. Cheers. Oops, you forgot the rule to not put ice in your drink.BOops, I did.AFor recording. What have you got going on?BI am drinking a dirty doctor Pepper.ADoctor Pepper with olive Brine?BYuck.AI'm kidding.BI'm sure someone's tried it. But what this is is doctor Pepper with amaretto and fireball whiskey.AI think we're just regressing in our levels of drink sophistication. We started off with, a martini, and now we're like dump liquor into pop of choice.BMm hm.AI have a suspicion that the theme for this podcast carnival or at least the timing was intentional because we are at the moment of recording, a few weeks out from the 2024 elections. By the time you're listening, it's possible that either Harris or Trump will have won the presidency.BYou may have voted early. If you haven't voted, Register. Depending on the state you live in, you might already be hosed. But if you live in a state that values its people like Minnesota, where we live, you can register at the polls on election day and then vote.AMm. And I am proud to say, we live in the town that brought us Tim Walz, current vice presidential candidate.BMm-hmm. Our daughters will both be going to the school where he taught.ASo your claim to fame is that you chatted with him in the YMCA locker room, right?BYes. it was when he was actually running for governor of the state. And fortunately, there was no nudity involved on any of the parties. Dudes just tend to walk around letting it all hang free in the YMCA locker room.APiggers are going all the way this year.BThat's true. Oatmeal reference.AI will link to that comic, but I will not explain it.BSo the county DFL chair kind of bragged me up to Tim Walz honestly.AOh, didn't he introduce you as one of the young people who's involved in politics?B One of the one of the excited young people, something like that. Probably an unearned positive, you know, review to Tim Walz and then shook my hand. We exchanged a few things, a few words.A Minnesotan pleasantries?BYes.ASo whether or not you have voted, whether or not a winner of the election has been declared, it will be a scary time. If you're listening before the election, you might be wondering if there are people in your life whose minds you could change. If it's after the election, maybe there are people in your life who now there is a rift between you that has gotten larger. And you're wondering if the relationship is salvageable, or you know, how to make it civil, I guess. So my question is, could there be an approach that's more civil, respectful and centered on people’s humanity rather than the charged political discourse we have today? My answer is no.BI'm glad I didn't just jump in there with it because I knew that was your stance. So your stance is we're doomed to division and strife.ANot necessarily.BOkay. We’ll find some nuance.A I'll give you an opportunity to listen to my stance later in this episode. Okay. What do you think? Is there a different approach?B I think there is a different approach. The way that media presents what the American public or electorate, which are different, what American society is like is very linear, you know, left versus right. I cannot remember the name of the model, so good luck finding it. I'm sure you will. But the model.ACan I just say, I hate when you throw in. Oh, I heard a thing somewhere. And then when I'm the one who has to go in and add the references, you send me on a wild goose chase. Anyway. You don't remember the model, but.BBut I definitely like more the two axis portrayal of political views. And so there'sAthree dimensional versus twoBTwo dimensional versus one.AAh, Okay. So we're not talking a line here.BNot line, but a graph. Admittedly, there's probably more than three dimensions to display butAIt would look like a sea urchin.B Sea urchin.AYeah, with like intersecting lines all over the place three dimensionally?BA sea urchin kind of sounds like an excellent metaphor for the time we're in. Yeah. Very prickly andAcomplex? Okay. So you wish that we would move to a place of greater nuance.BIt's fancy.AIt doesn't play well in headlines.BNo, it doesn't.ASo I guess you could say that the theme of this episode is listening. What role could listening play? How does it work? When does it work? When does it not?BI think that there is value in trying to reach for civility. Even though I recognize that civility and decency are often dog whistles of the powerful trying to silence.ATone policing.BYes, Tone policing. People trying to silence the aggrieved. Like, how dare you yell at me?AThe mean tone of your voice is meaner than the slur I called you, right? Am I a good listener?BI think that generally you are a pretty good listener, yes.AI did not think you would say that.BWell, it really does depend. You are very good at listening to our kids.AThey have good ideas.BWhat are you saying about me? When it comes to different political or philosophical ideas, I feel like I'm probably more curious in hearing a thing out. I feel like oftentimes, sure, I'm listening, but I may not be really listening with an open mind. I'm listening for, like, Is this actually a legitimate person critique or is this an astro turfedAcritically listening. That's good. That's a good practice. And I'm more likely to be, like, no, not engaging with that bullshit. So I think it's safe to say that we disagree about how to disagree with people and ideas.BYeah.AWe've gotten kind of heated about this. I'm not going to lie. I think it started with talking about undecided voters. Whereas you’re like, I'm going to hear them out. And I'm like, if you haven't made up your mind already, there's nothing I can do to change it. Yeah, I've been like, OMG, democracy will crumble if we don't do something, and so I've been looking into signing up for door knocking. What makes me nervous about that is encountering people who are unapologetically pro Trump. I don't want to have a conversation with them. Whereas, again, you would be willing to hear them out because certainly there are, you know, underlying beliefs and fears there that could be acknowledged and addressed by the Democratic Party ideally.BWhen it comes to economic concerns, I know that economic anxieties have been used as a dog whistle forAAn excuse.BAn excuse, a cover for out and out racism. But economic uncertainty is real.ASo I think the issue is don't go in there assuming that You're actually racist, so I'm not going to talk to you. Let's talk about the economy. Let's talk about what impact this has on you in your day to day life. And what can we take from that and how can we try to come at a win, win solution? Instead of trying to argue you out of your very real lived experience.BJust to add a little bit of nuance here, I distinguish between supporters and voters. So voters being people who would hold their nose and vote for Trump. People who aren't enthusiastic for him, but would check his box. Those are voters. Supporters are people who buy the merch and put the signs up, or, you know, put like a silhouette of Trump and they put in their yard and a giant flag. I wouldn't be willing to engage in conversation with all of his supporters. Some of them I would be willing to discuss with them in order to gain some insight into how is it that this guy has convinced you that in any realm, he's going to do a thing that's good for you personally.AThat's useful. Trump supporters versus Trump voters. I am less likely to recognize the distinction because the end result is the same. People who vote for Trump and he wins, they have elected Trump, whether or not they held their nose while doing it, you know?BTrue.ASo we got in a good discussion with some friends the other day, shout out to Sabrina. Recommended an MPR episode about this group called Braver Angels. On their home page, they say, “as we separate into groups that increasingly do not even know or interact with, people of differering opinions, we lose trust in our institutions, eroding the ability to govern ourselves, and lowering the caliber of citizenship. This growing trend coarsens public debate, produces policy gridlock, shrinks our capacity for goodwill, and harms our family and personal relationships. Effective self government depends precisely on what this type of polarization destroys.” I'm so done with the word polarized. There's one side that's been doing the polarizing.BThe vast majority. Yes.AYeah. I mean, the word, it's passive. When I think what is more helpful to do is to confront right wing radicalism.BYes. Polarization describes a phenomenon that is happening, whereas radicalization describes something that is being done by someone.AAnyway, this group Braver Angels organizes conversations among people who disagree politically and the focus is on understanding and not changing minds. I listened to the episode with the married couple who voted for different people, and there was a moderator there. And so they took turns explaining where they were coming from and this and that. And it was certainly more civil than an overt conflict. They were talking about, like, does this have to mean divorce? As I was listening, I was just thinking, Yeah, sure. This sounds all civil and well and good. But this guy who voted for Trump is still wrong. I like to think of myself as a relatively open minded person. But there's danger, I think, and vulnerability in opening your mind to ideas that dehumanize. So can I not draw a line there? I don't know.BThat that is exactly the sentiment of Braver Angels is to, re humanize people who are on the other side, not necessarily beliefs. Hmm.AYeah. The moderator emphasized that people's beliefs are not their identity. I'm like, Well, they kind of are. I don't know. I mean, it helps too that people self select into this. They're not going to participate if they don't value at least the idea of listening. So that shakes out the Trump supporters, I would guess.BYeah. The hard right hard liners. To some extent, I'm sure some of the hard supporters on the left too.ALike me. I wouldn't want to participate in this. Or I don't think I could participate in good faith.BIn instances where someone does or says something that's just completely off the wall and doesn't seem justified at all. I try to make sense of it. I try to be like, Well, maybe they were thinking about this or that.ABut I would argue, those people seem to always get the benefit of the doubt. Trump didn't actually mean to say there would be a literal bloodbath if he wasn't elected.BThat's true.AI kind of get what you mean when you say you try to understand it. Like, you are not agreeing with it, but that's different than trying to understand something.BYeah. Not agreeing or excusing, but trying to be like, what is the rationale behind this?AYeah. I kind of put those goggles on, those metaphorical goggles on, when I was watching the debate between Harris and Trump and part of me is watching and going. How is Trump a viable presidential candidate? And another part of me is like, I get it. I get why some people would insist that he had won. Because in that universe, in that universe of alternative facts, everything he's saying makes sense. I think I've had a lot of experience with that cognitive dissonance, I guess. I think it's fair to say that I experienced some indoctrination as a child religiously and politically. I don't say that in a way that is like, Yeah, my parents were brainwashing me. I would blame the institutions that we were a part of. Um living, growing up in a small, smallish town, very homogeneous community, and then getting to college and starting to be exposed to more ideas. And this was college in Fargo, North Dakota, I might add. So hardly a place to be exposed to expansive world views and diverse perspectives. But nevertheless, that was whatBStarted things. It was definitely a good thing to, you know, for people from a small town like you and me, it was probably good to have baby steps into diversity.AIt was indeed a stepping stone. Like we said, it was a baby step. It started with trying to juggle multiple competing world views at one time and that is hard to do. There is a mental and emotional toll that takes on you to try to be open to so many possibilities at once. I get why people dig in. It's hard. I've turned around my views. I've done the hard work and I'm exhausted. Anyway, considering what I came from, you'd think I'd have more empathy for Trump voters. But I actually have less empathy, I think, because I look at them and I'm like, Hey, I changed my mind, why aren't you?BI figured it out.AWhich is hugely privileged and judgmental because not everyone has access to college. There are a lot of things that allowed me to change my views over time, circumstances that others don't have. So besides that sense of exhaustion, I think oftentimes it's unsafe to hear out bad ideas. I think part of why you and I have different approaches to this is because I believe women have been socialized to default to empathy. I think women are expected to listen and to care for the feelings of others in ways that men have not been expected to do. That I think puts us at a disadvantage when in conversation with people who haven't practiced listening and empathizing. I might come across as a bad listener, but In reality, it's me setting boundaries after a lifetime of already trying to see value in other perspectives.B Mm. Yeah. When we were talking, it did kind occur to me that, you know, obviously, the main demographic difference between you and me is socialization of, you know, different genders.AAlso, you have curly hair and I don't.BI have curly hair, and I don't know what that gets me, other than, you know, a step towards clown. It came back. That male conceit that, Oh, yeah, why can't I be a leader? Sure. Mm hmm. Whereas from what I've heard from you, there is certainly more prevalent imposture syndrome for women in society.A Mm hmm. That's to say nothing of racism in society. Again, I want to acknowledge that I can walk into one of those Braver Angels conversations, and I might be annoyed, but I'm not going to be harmed. Picture a Black person walking into that and they get paired with a racist who is there because they have good intentions, but nevertheless, their underlying beliefs are harmful. Here's another example. So there's another group called the Compassionate Listening Project. And they started in 1991 as a way to push for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.BMm. That's gone pretty well so far.A right. And they would take trips to Israel and Palestine and go on like a listening tour. I'm imagining a situation where Somebody on one side of the conversation is saying, hey, I have a divine right to genocide you. That just seems like it could be putting people in a more victimized space. It’s not fair to ask them to be open to that.BHm.AI guess I would say this. I think people with privilege should do the hard work of listening and conversing with people with bad ideas because they are less likely to be harmed. I know that means I need to stop being cowardly and be willing to engage those conversations that more marginalized people cannot safely engage in. If it could mean changing a mind. But I'm struggling with this. If my end goal is ultimately to change minds, then we're right back to persuasion being the end goal and not actually listening. How do we engage empathy and true listening if we're not willing to change our minds? Are those mutually exclusive? How do we engage empathy while protecting ourselves from those who would argue in bad faith or whose beliefs harm us even if they're not intended to? Maybe that's not where listening needs to take place because some beliefs deserve or not deserve, but should be approached oppositionally.BLike flat earthers. You can't both sides that or racial supremacists of any sort. You don't give unchallenged voice to intolerant or uninformed views.AMm hmm. Yeah. Tolerance of hatred is dangerous. If you have the freedom to say hateful stuff, then I have the freedom to tell you you're wrong. And I guess we're talking about two different things when we talk about having one on one conversations with real people in our lives versus listening to the media or how politicians engage opponents. I think we've seen certainly a shift from the they go low, we go high philosophy towards what I would consider very gentle ribbing of the right. Again, thanks largely to Tim Walz’s astute observations of weirdness.BYeah, I agree. The proper response to someone being a troll is to outtroll them. Yeah. Or to mock them relentlessly.AYeah, I think there's a fine line though between trolling and actually getting down in the mud with them. And I don't think I don't think Democrats have done that. I think if the worst name calling they can do is say JD Vance is weird, then that is in no way comparable to JD Vance, for instance, saying that Haitian immigrants are eating pets, which you know, a claim that has had real consequences in the world. So I think that we can maintain a middle ground between always taking the high ground and always being the bigger person and engaging in harmful bullying.B Right.ALet's pause so I can go get the kids. We left off with me saying, Oh, I got to go get the kids. There have been several days since then. We did not get back to recording immediately. But that's okay because a couple of things have happened in the last few days that I think relate to our conversation.BDoes it have something to do with our governor?AYep, we watched the Vice Presidential debate on Tuesday night. And then the next day, I did some door knocking for some local DFL candidates.BDemocratic Farmer Laborer Party.A Yep so equivalent of Democratic Party. You should be proud of me because I did the door knocking specifically because of our conversation and me realizing, Wow, I am allowing myself to be way too comfortable. We'll go in chronological order. The Vice Presidential Debate. Tim Walz, JD Vance. I'm not going to rehash everything that went down. What I wanted to comment on was how this debate demonstrated my point about civility is not enough. In fact, civility can cover up evil. Right. Not to sound dramatic, butBI'm sure that Hitler had his JD Vance, too. You know, because Hitler was a very enthusiastic speaker at his rallies.AOh, Himmler, maybe?BYeah. I'm sure that he had someone who was more buttoned down, but just as rotten to the core.ASo my first impression, I didn't catch the beginning. I was teaching class. But I stepped into the watch party at a local bar afterwards. And the instant sense I got was that this feels normal. This feels like pre-Trump years. But I was also listening to the words JD Vance was saying, and it terrified me. The sense I got from people's reactions after was Oh, it was boring. It was refreshingly boring and respectful. Stephen Colbert did say that afterwards, Tim Was said something like, Yeah, there's a lot of commonality there, which in Minnesota means I hate your guts, sir. Something along those lines. Which I thought was funny.BYep. I'm sure there were a lot of people who watched the VP debate and were like, Oh, they're not fighting so much. That's a nice change. And you know, like, It speaks very much to Walz’s character. he was very much known for being a bipartisan congress person., that's what he was always trying to do in Congress was get people on both sides to buy in and to weigh in. that finding agreement you know,Alike It's necessary to get things done.BIt is necessary to get things done. When you carve of a horrible statement, a piece that like, Okay, this I agree with. This part, I can get behind and we can work with that. This wild nonsense over here, I'm going to ignore that. Let's push forward with the agreement part so that we can make anything happen. I think that there's a lot of ground to be gained by both sides because there’s that prevalent concept of it being a zero sum game. No, we can both get things that we want. There is overlap in the Venn diagram of things that we want. Hm. And we can make those things happen.AAs long as everyone is coming at the issue in good faith.BIn good faith, yes. That's true.AThat's the thing is you cannot come to the table prepared to problem solve when the other person is like, I'm going to destroy you.BYeah. When the other parties are interested in problem creation.AYes. My worry is that people will feel calmed by the “normalcy” of that debate and it will cover over the deep abnormality of the Republican platform.BYeah. Trump is a lemon, and JD Vance is the car salesman.AFor real. And of course, there's the appearance over substance debate, although I found JD Vance absolutely grating to listen to. I think it may have been the facial expressions, actually, more so than the voice. And then a lot of kind of subtle twisting of the truth, but also enough whoppers to make people be like, Oh, wait. He really has no commitment to the concept of truth. This is entirely utilitarian for him.BMm hm. I think my personal favorite moment in the debate, not that I loved it, but when he said, we wouldn't have a housing shortage if Kamala Harris didn't give millions of illegals houses.AIt was clearly a pre planned strategy to talk about Harris as though she is already the president.BRight.AWhich is the kind of thing that it's so blatantly wrong. But the very fact that it came out of his mouth, in a tone that implied like, Oh, this is just the way things are. It causes people to question reality.BMm hmm. Gas lighting.AAnd that was my impression. When I was watching, I was like, none of this sounds right.B None if it was right.ABut I was thinking to myself. Did I miss something? With Trump, it's the delivery matches the content.BMm hm.AI don't know. I shouldn't be surprised by this, but it was very disconcerting.BTrump is like Jabba the Hutt. The outside matches the inside. Although, I suppose literally the inside was three or four puppeteers.AI've never thought about how they did Jabba the Hutt. I kind of want to look it up now.BYeah. I guess in JD Vance's case, it's three raccoons in a trench coat. Three honey badgers in a trench coat.AOkay. In a stylish trench coatBA tailored oneAThat has a fake designer label on it. Three seat urchins in a trench coat?BBut he's slimier.AAnd it got me thinking about the format of a debate. And you're not going to believe that I'm saying this, but I don't like it.BWhat about all those years of being in debate team?AYeah, that's the point is I have fond memories of high school debate. And in retrospect, it was a philosophical exercise, right? It was solely a skill to hone and not about actually arriving at truth. Okay, I'm sounding a little bit too much like Plato there. I'll put it this way. When it comes to debate, the goal shouldn't be to arrive at truth because debate is often about looking to the future, making decisions, deliberative rhetoric, right. You can't know the future, and that's why rhetoric exists is to reason through situations that are not the kind of thing you can prove with a mathematical proof. But nonetheless, the goal is not at arriving at the best ideas when it comes to debate. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. I don't know why it feels like a revelation dawning on me, but if every resolution and in debate the resolution is just like the statement that you either have to agree with, affirmative, or disagree with, negative. If every resolution has to be worded such that theoretically an equal number of wins could happen on the affirmative side as the negative side, then it's not about the ideas. It is about the skill of arguing. Which is fine. I think that is a fine skill to develop for certain contexts, but there has to be a shared base of reality, and that was not happening on Tuesday night.BGive me some resolutions, just for context here.AOkay. Resolved. The United States has a moral obligation to mitigate international conflict. Here's another one. Economic development should take priority over environmental protection. There's a right answer, and it's not capitalism.BMm hmm. Even more so than presidential or vice presidential debates. High school debate isn't really about listening, right?ANo. I mean, you have to listen.BYou have to listen well enough toARebutB to be a butt again.AExactly that. But it's not the kind of listening that's an open stance. So when the point is to win, then you can do shady stuff to do so.BAh. The ends justified the means.A I don't remember anybody telling overt lies, but there certainly was a degree of stacking the deck. 'cause, of course. ButBYou put together words that sound convincing, right?AYeah, or you put together words that your coach gave you that sound convincing. So my poor little rural Minnesota debate team. We held our own in the regional contests, right? But we would get trounced in Minneapolis or St. Paul.BThose schools had enough resources in terms of people to be pretty selective.AI think it was more the style, and it was a style that involved talking fast, and throwing so much shit at your opponent that they can't clean it up in time to make their own argument.BThat sounds like a perfect encapsulation of the Trump presidency.AYes. And JD Vance had his very own bullshit trebuchet back there.BTrebushit.AIn light of that, I think Walz did an excellent job. He was very knowledgeable about the intricacies of the systems and policies involved and that he had a track record from his work in Minnesota to speak of.BYou could also tell he was an educator because he took notes.AYep. So it pisses me off when I see commentators being like, Yeah, he looked like a droopy dog out there, or what have you. Because it's like, yeah, he wasn't in his element, but that should not be what it's about.BI'm not sure who really should be in their element when they're you know, up to their armpits in rhetorical feces.AWow. There's actually a word for that strategy. It's called Gish galloping. Have you ever heard of that?BGish galloping. What the nonsense is that.AYou say a lot of lies really fast and overwhelm your opponent. And in debate, there was this thing called drops, where if you don't directly address somebody's contention, then it's an automatic point to them. And so there would be a lot of my opponent dropped my contention that blah, blah, blah, when it's like, I just didn't have enough time.B Taking a thing that might have value and then destroying it to make it a game.ABut imagine two Tim Walzes up there. Imagine if there were two candidates who weren't just disingenuously saying, Oh, yeah, we actually agree on this, but there was instead of a desire to win and destroy the other side, there was this effort at everyone's willing to change their mind, because they all want the same thing, which is a better country or what have you. So what's better than a debate? What formats get us to good ideas if not a debate. It's not an interview with the media. It's not a rally.BYou will not like my answer. Okay. I don't either.AOkay. Let's hear.BA long form interview where a candidate is able to express with detail, with nuance how they're going to address X or Y or Z.AWith live fact checking.BThe current person with the biggest following who does long form interviews is Joe Rogan.ANo. Oh, yeah, get Tim Walz on Joe Rogan 100%.BThat's so crazy it might work.AI don't think Joe Rogan is, he's not a paragon of a good faith conversationalist. ButBTrue, I am not arguing that. The format lends itself well to people who have well thought out ideas. It's important to get a lot of good stuff, but you can't get a lot of bad stuff, too. It drowns it out. Yeah and makes it useless.AI mean, the We Rate Dogs guy interviewed Tim Walz.BThat's true. Saw that on Facebook.AThat was not political in the least, and it was simply delightful. Mm hmm. That serves a different purpose. That's not about getting at good ideas, but it's about being human.B Mm hmm. I don't know that the other side of the ticket really can do that. No. I mean, No. You know, if it's ordering a doughnut or standing. Standing is a tough thing for anyone whose last name is Trump.AFirst day of standing lessons. And I think that's why people were surprised when Vance came out and was able to be coherent.BWhich is a big step up from certain, you know, other people on his ticket. Yeah.AThe bar is low. The bar is underground. This might be a stretch, but I'm going to tee you up. What could encourage candidates to listen to their constituents and each other and arrive at the best plan of action that represents the most people?BOh, I have an idea. Ranked choice voting.AOkay. Yes. So ranked choice voting would get us beyond the whole lesser two evils approach or, you know, feeling about voting. And it would force candidates to listen to more than their own devotees. I think that would make for better people in positions of power.BBetter democracy.AYes. And that's a structural thing. I think it's something that's picking up steam. Yeah, where possible we should be looking for things like that that enable and incentivize empathy and listening. And we are back for a third attempt to finish this damn episode. No, this is what happens when you have two people working full time with kids, you know? I don't think it's the worst, though, because again, it's been another several days. But I'm starting to view my experiences through this filter of what does it mean to listen? Versus what does it mean to argue and be right. What about you?BYeah. I feel like it's coming at me from everywhere. So I recently started listening to a podcast that was recorded 2.5 years ago. So it's the skill share series by the Poor Proles Almanac.AThe skill, in this case, being communication.BCommunication. So this podcast was actually about how to introduce radical leftist ideas to non radical people, like family members, friends, people who are just around you. And they started saying a lot of the same sorts of things that have been in our conversations about don't just write someone off. You have to listen to them. That's how you figure out your common ground.AI think that the fact that we're talking about this has been changing my mind. So we had talked about the debate. The other thing that I did more recently was door knocking. This was for a couple of local candidates. Since we last talked, you also have done some door knocking. I've been doing some tabling about Project 2025, just to make sure people know what it is and what the implications are. So that reflects that I'm willing to have the conversations now. That doesn't mean I had any meaningful conversations.BHow did it go?ASo you know how I hate going door to door to sell girl scout cookies?BUh huh.ANow, think of how much less people enjoy talking about politics compared to cookies. The app that the campaign uses allows you to sort by obviously area, and also if they're strong dem or lean dem or undecided, and we were working on a list of undecided voters in our town. I don't think these people were undecided in the way that we think.BI think that instead of undecided, unaffiliated is more accurately.ANo, not even that. I think apathetic. Because you and I are so chronically online, well, me. Online and pretty engaged with politics. Mm we forget that there are people who are not. There are people who are just going to their jobs every day and having hobbies and living a life.BOr instead of having hobbies, having a second job and not living a life.AMost people didn't want to talk to us at all. I know they were there. I know they were avoiding us.BI had one of those too.AOnly one? You were in a different town. There might be a different vibe in a smaller town. And I don't blame people. I mean, it's not like I rush to open the door to a Jehovah's witness or whoever. So I don't blame people for not wanting to engage. There were a couple of people who made it clear that they weren't in support of our candidate, but they weren't mean about it. They were just dismissive. There was one person who was like, Yeah, I'm voting for both those candidates. Everyone else was just like, Oh, I haven't decided. I think that that's just a catch phrase to get us to go away.BYeah.ASo here I was imagining, I'm going to have conversations with undecided voters, picturing these undecided voters as people who are somehow aware of the main issues, and there's some sticking point and we're going to talk through it and whatever, and no, nobody is thinking that hard about it. Which, to some extent, makes me pissed off because it's like this has such huge implications at every level. This is one thing, one small way in which you can participate. Is it a flawed system? Yes. Is there another way around it? No.BWell, with legislation that's passed.AThere was one house that had a let's go Brandon sign. Mm hm. And as we're walking to the door, I'm like, I don't think these people are undecided.BLet’s go next door.ABut the person I was with was just like, Huh. There's nobody in the race named Brandon.BNot anymore.A Suffice it to say I'm glad that they didn't answer their door. I guess one of my insights from this experience is that we're not going to meaningfully change minds at this point. The persuasion is going to happen in getting people to vote period. Which is a different focus.BMm hmm. That's why it's called get out the vote.AYeah. I have not had the opportunity to do this magical listening that I've been reading about and thinking about. But I now realize that I've been too quick to shut the door, figuratively speaking on certain people. I do opt not to engage with trump supporters because at least I've been telling myself, they're not going to change. They're set in their ways. They're too far gone. Which might be true.BI think that that's pretty much true of anyone who falls into a cult of personality.ABut I don't know that they're too far gone. Until I talk to them.BUntil they prove it to you.AIt's very possible that they're still people who aren't worth conversing with, but guess what? That will emerge. And at that point, I can be like, I'm out of here. But it's been a real cop out, I think for me to assume they're not changing their mind. Therefore, I don't have to engage with them.BMm hmm.AAnd you know, some people argue, this was in a book of yours that you got.BThe solutionary way.Aby Zoe Weil. I was reading it, and she said, Let's not think in binary ways, us versus them. Good versus bad. Let's focus on solutions. Obviously, listening is a huge part of that. She said that she is aghast that she knows people who write off Trump supporters, because she thinks it's important to have people with a wide variety of viewpoints in your life and in your social circle. And here's the thing. She says, If you're from a marginalized group that's going to be harmed by these views, then fine. You don't have to. But if you have privilege, then you should be having these conversations. Mm hm. I'm not totally sold on that because I think that engaging those ideas can convey a sense of tolerance or permission, even if that's not the case.BOkay.AThere's this other podcast I was listening to. It's funny because it was how to decrease your election anxiety. I was like,BListen to the crazies.AI'm going to hit play so hard on that one. One of the suggestions was, have a diverse media diet. And the guy was like. I listen to news on the left, on the right, in the center. In what universe, is that going to ease my anxiety?BIf you want diversity in your media diet, you should get or you should listen to media from other places. That is a better kind of diversity. Listen to Al Jazeera, listen to BBC, you know?AOther parts of the world. Yeah.BThey will have distinctly different perspectives.AHaving a varied diet like actual diet doesn't mean you need to incorporate an equal amount of junk food to non junk food. You know?BI need more highly processed sugar in my life. That'll balance things out.AHere's a story that illustrates how historically, I've been very quick to.BI think I know.AYeah, I need to be very strategic in how I talk about this. Details have been changed to protect identities of those involved. I was meeting a friend's new partner for the first time, I didn't know very much about them. And this was at a time where I was just done politically. And I was thinking to myself, what's the best shortcut to learn if this is a person I'm going to invest any time in getting to know. So I shook his hand and said, Hi, my name is Abi. Did you vote for Trump? Horatio didn't respond super well. It wasn't an immediate. It wasn't an immediate no. It was equivocal. Anyway, the people who witnessed this interaction were aghast at how uncouth I was being.BHow brazen it was. But you were right about that person.AHe turned out to be a piece of shit in the worst way possible. I have been 110% vindicated. But I don't think that my approach is universally applicable. Had I hoped to have any influence whatsoever on this person's even impressions of Democrats or Feminazis, or whatever you know, he probably saw me as, look at me. Stereotyping again.B Yeah.AThe thing is, I should not act like the thing they would want to call me. That's not going to help my case. I’m budging a little bit since we first started talking about this. How did your door knocking go?BIt was okay. I was basically, you know, saying, can we count on your support for this candidate and that candidate?AWell that's the script.BThat's the script. It wasn't really about having conversations. It wasn't really about convincing so much. And if I had taken it that direction on my own volition, it might have been more interesting. I had one person say that they hadn't made their mind up. They're like, right down the middle between Republican and Democrat, whichACan I say that's stupid becauseByou said you didn't think that existed.AWell, no, okay. If it exists, it's stupid, and here's why. Okay. Maybe I spoke too soon about me having this change of heart. Um, if you're calling yourself straight down the middle, then it means you're defining yourself only in relationship to the other parties. It's not based on an inherent set of principles.BIt seems highly derivative.ASo if you insist that you're dead center, then what that really means is that your views have been drifting right along with the right wing in this country over the last several years. People who call themselves centrists probably give themselves a pat on the back. You're an independent thinker. I'm gonna piss people off.BYou know what? It's okay for someone to piss you off or being self righteous.AAs though sitting on the fence is some moral high ground.BI want both sides to court me.AWhich is kind of happening. I mean, imagine all the media attention the swing voters get. Yeah, it just it suggests an unwillingness to take a stance. And you know what, folks, if you're listening, and you're mad at me, let's have a conversation about it. I actually am willing to hear you out. I will give it my best shot, and that's not a joke.BGreat.AWhen having these conversations, one thing that will be key is making it about personal experience, instead of making it about media talking points. Well, what I mean by that is not even the media, but phrases that your candidate throws out. That in reality, haven't impacted your life in a significant way. Making it about your lives. What is tangible? What do you care about? I'm not in a place to make an informed argument about Haitian immigrants based on personal experience.BI don't know anyone from Haitia.A I don't live in Springfield, Ohio. The fact that this has gotten to the national level and become what it is The people in Springfield can speak to that issue, and my cat went missing. Oh, never mind, it was in my basement. That doesn't count. Right. But this is the impact that these immigrants have had on the local economy. That's something that can be seen and observed or The negative consequences of, you know, Trump's magnifying that view.BMm hmm. The negative economic impact on Springfield. The police officers have to protect these people now who are put in jeopardy.AI don't want to hear what you have to say if you're not the kid evacuating from your school because of, you know, the bullshit bomb threats.BYou listen to victims. You don't listen to perpetrators. That's the way it should work.AI think that has more potential of getting somewhere than these big abstract ideas where so much misinformation has been injected. I got this idea actually from listening to Pete Buttiegieg, who, I think, is a great example of the communicator I wish I could be because he's so well informed, he will talk to the other side. He'll go on Fox News, you know? He gets a good grasp of why people feel the way they do. I appreciate that he balances that out with calling out bullshit when he sees it. Somehow, he can do both. I'm jealous of him for that reason. I wouldn't want to be on the opposite side of a debate against him.BHm.AWhat if we could start from a place of agreement, and my favorite modern rhetoricians, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca say the starting point of an argument is agreement.BYes, andAAnd where does the yes and come from?BImprov comedy.AYeah. So it was the Zoe Weil book that tied in improv with listening skills and problem solving versus debating. It's the idea that you don't try to redirect things. You go with the flow. In the case of an exchange of ideas, you can say yes, and let's add more nuance to it. Now, I don't mean to imply that all these ideas are somehow novel. This is something that the field of rhetoric has been exploring. Since the beginning of civilization. Well. A might be an exaggeration, but. But it is undeniable that there has been a privileging of the debate model, of the win lose model. A through at least the Western rhetorical tradition, right? Even in classical rhetoric times, there were some philosophers or orators who tried to complicate the view of rhetoric equals persuasion, a little bit. Quintilian famously said that rhetoric is a good man speaking well.BHm.AAnd what that definition appears to do is bring ethics into the equation.BOr morality.AMorality, yes, a good man speaking well.BThe problem is, Is it a good man speaking well?AA good man speaking well, actually. It sounds good in theory, but it implies that the effectiveness and the ethics of communication just happen to align most of the time. But what we really need rhetoric for is those situations where they don't. So where does that leave us?BHis statement that presumes that there's a universal good.AIt also functions to exclude bad rhetors.BAh, yeah.A Which isn't fair, right?BBecause I mean, who else is going to eat the dogs and the cats?AI'm thinking more like Mein Kampf.BOh, yeah.A It was effective, sure. Was it coming from a good man? No. I don't think it's fair for rhetoric to be like, Nah, that doesn't concern us 'cause he wasn't a good guy. Zooming ahead to the modern rhetorical era. Kenneth Burke brings in this concept of identification or consubstantiality, being one with one another. That common ground, right. And Kenneth Burke did not come along and say, identification is the better way to rhetoric. He said, it's a way in addition to the Aristotelian way. When we look at scholars who say down with persuasion altogether. That's when things get interesting.BDown with persuasion, are you trying to convince me?AThat's the inherent problem, right? So this is one of my favorite articles. The womanization of rhetoric by feminist scholar, Sally Miller Gearhart in 1979. She says that persuasion is violence. And the conquest model, the win lose model is pretty apparently violent. But even the conversion model, which she says is more subtle, even that is violent.BIt's imperialist.A“The difference between a persuasive metaphor and a violent artillery attack is obscure and certainly one of degree rather than of kind.” What do you think?BIt's a good way to tease out intentions.AWhat do you mean?B If you are trying to change someone's mind, you know, you're viewing them as a general, looking at a map of the battlefield. You’re trying to figure out how to take down their defenses,AMarshaling your arguments.BYes.AIs there no room for persuasion then? If it's all inherently violent. She's making a very strong effort to persuade people. That persuasion is bad. I personally find it provocative. Moving ahead in time, Foss and Griffin in 1995, coin invitational rhetoric, which also moves away from the conquest model and invites listeners to understand your perspective. Which it occurs to me is still ultimately self focused. I'm inviting you to listen to me.BTrue.AAgain, as long as it's reciprocal is fine, but I don't necessarily see that built into the definition here.BSo, if we're going with metaphors, instead of I'm going to march in and take over your ideas, I'm putting on an art show. Come and see. It's a one way sharing, but it is a sharing rather than a declaring.AInteresting. And then there's similar perspectives from outside of rhetoric. Psychologist Carl Rogers was famous for that approach of before you try to argue, make sure you've understood the other side as fairly and accurately as possible. You know, I've seen people adapt writing assignments based on that philosophy. Like, you're going to write a paper about this topic, but you're not going to develop a thesis statement an d three supporting details. You're going to you're going to put their perspective in your own words. And that's we do that, right? I mean, mostly I do it to you when I think you're not listening.B Hm?ANot funny.BIt's always funny.AYou try it every time. Yeah. Where I'll be saying something. And then I have to be like, Hey, say back to me what I just said. How do you feel in those moments?BArrghh. That's usually how I feel.ALike, ugh, I should have been listening to begin with.BUgh, this is going to require effort. I’ve got to rub brain cells together for this.AI mean, it's good that we check in with each other that way because we very much misinterpreted.BIt's kind of your way of foisting reflective listening on me.AViolently foisting. That's not to say that there's not a place for agonistic rhetoric or kind of fighting, conflict based rhetoric. Susan Jarrett, as an instructor, had this was in the 90s again, had witnessed some of the unforeseen consequences of the rhetoric and composition field’s resistance to conflict. So like in a classroom context, there's male students. There's female students. There's students of color. There's international students. There's students with disabilities. You know,BNon traditional students.A Exactly. And there are power dynamics that cannot be ignored in that context. And so the person who's socialized to be empathetic and the person who's socialized to believe that their views are automatically deserving to be heard, that's not going to be an equal exchange.BYeah.AAnd so Jarrett argues that we need to train students so that they can essentially stand up for themselves. Hm. And I think that's fair.F[purring]BOh Fig. Yes. So you were talking about how Zoe Weil was saying that people with privilege are the ones who should be reaching out. Along those lines, I was listening to another one of the Prole’s Almanac that said that it's important the way that you structure protests as well. You want to have the people with the most privilege in front because the people with the most privilege are least likely to be met with force by police or protester or counter protesters.AWow. So that's different than white saviorism, right? That's different than white people coming into a protest movement and saying, Because I'm white, I get to say the stuff. It sounds like it's a very, like a logistical protective situation.BBecause I'm white, I'm going to stand between person of color and the police. And I mean, if you think about it, too, if it's you and the fascists. You want the big white guy who looks like he just got off a shift of doing security to be in front.AI will say you had no like, you were not worried about doing your door knocking.BNo.AI was. You know, there is a degree of risk involved, even in knocking on doors and talking to people, especially when you are wearing your political views on your sleeve orBOn a shirt, so to speak, literally.AOr on your sticker or on your pamphlet that you're handing out. The day I was doing the door knocking, there were two other people there with me, and they were both young men of color. And one of them had gone off on his own and reported back that he was not treated well. Again, nothing dangerous per se, but people like ripping up the sheet that he'd handed out and It's justBThat's petty.AYeah. And the patterns are obvious enough in society that it's a fair chance that race was part of the issue.BMm hmm.ASo I am further chagrined at my own apathy up until recently, my own letting the people who are already oppressed put themselves on the line. But better late than never. But in thinking through all this, I've been obviously reading around for solutions and perspectives, and continuing in the rhetoric trajectory, what's probably the most relevant is this concept of rhetorical listening, which comes from Krista Ratcliffe. She originally wrote her book on it in 2005, and I read the 2022 book, which she co authored with Kyle Jensen. And this book is called rhetorical listening in action. So it builds on the theoretical concepts of rhetorical listening by suggesting, these are things you can do in the classroom, step by step, which I liked, because it's one thing to say, Hey, you should listen better to other people, and it's another thing to be like, Hey, Rhetorical listening is hard. It engages parts of our brain that we're not used to using. It goes against our conditioning to think one winner, one loser, and rhetorical listening requires us to be vulnerable and humble.BYeah.AThis perspective does help address some of the concerns or pitfalls I've been referring to all this time, like what do you do in a situation where there is a right answer. So they say the whole point is to be able to act. Analyzing and understanding has to come first, though. So what's the purpose of rhetorical listening? It helps you anticipate counter arguments of those that you disagree with. It can be a step towards persuading audiences to think and act differently. They need not be mutually exclusive. And I think this is key. Rhetorical listening helps you to think and act differently yourself. So I'm glad that they brought this up because I was, you know, the argumentative part of my brain wasBready to fight them?A Yes. But they acknowledge that a problem is people acting in bad faith. And they say to that, “There is no easy solution if no change occurs, the other people involved in such a situation, must brainstorm waste to expose the bad faith and or limit its impact, and then act.”B Yes, the investigative journalist solution. The best sanitizer is sunlight.AI think that's important. That doesn't answer the question of how do we know if someone is acting in bad faith? I used to think that the test is to ask them, Is there anything that would change your mind? And if they say no, then they're not there for a fair exchange of ideas. But then I realized, there are topics that I would say, I'm never changing my mind on that that I have subsequently changed my mind on.BOh.AAnd I wouldn't have changed my mind without getting exposure to different views. So when we encounter these things, I think the idea is that we have options. It's not that a purely empathetic listening stance is inherently better, a more oppositional or antagonistic stance, because like I said before, some positions should be called out as the bad ideas that they are.BSome ideas need to be antagonized.AYeah. Asking questions, focusing on personal impacts, personal experiences. Those are ways to draw out where people came to a position. This was a tip actually from the Braver Angels group that I was talking about before. Instead of asking someone, why do you believe that? Ask, how did you come to this view? Because that's where the story is. I do want to quickly run through the moves of rhetorical listening.BShow me your moves. Sorry.ARhetorical listening invites these moves. I'm not going to go in super depth on them because you should read the book yourself. But I also don't want to leave this episode on a fuzzy note.BWith no action items.ARight.B¡That's right, folks. There's homework.AOkay. Number one, assume an open stance. Again, this is something that I'm working on. I can engage beliefs that are dangerous or false without condoning them. If you aren't sure you can do that, maybe you're not the one to have that conversation, and I think we have to be honest with ourselves.BThat is an important first step in all things.AYeah, or if you recognize you're in an especially vulnerable place, then don't be trying to disprove I don't know. What's RF K's deal?BIndeed.ADon't go into a cult trying to break it open if you know that you are in a lonely and vulnerable state, right? It's just go to suck you in.BOr the vulnerability might not be to being seduced but to being attacked.AThat, too. You don't have to assume an open stance to a view that denies your humanity. People should be fully permitted and encouraged to set boundaries in that case.BAn open position does not mean make yourself fully vulnerable to being exploited.AAnd so that might mean that if you are a privileged person, maybe you need to be the one to step in and engage those ideas, again, not to condone them, not to be persuaded by them and not necessarily to attack the person believing them, but to try to make a dent.B I mean, if nothing else, I think that inspiring thought in people who have beliefs that they haven't questioned. That's a good start.AMm hmm. And this is why it's not worthwhile to necessarily write people off as quickly as I have tended to. Everyone who changed their mind started somewhere.BIt's true.AThe second move is to lay competing claims and cultural logics side by side. This needs some unpacking. Cultural logics are “ways of reasoning, common to groups of people who come together based on common knowledge, beliefs, or goals, and who share their ideas through discourse.” The example they give is Galileo and the cultural logic of science versus the cultural logic of religion and how they clashed. So it's not just about one claim versus another, but it's about what's the story behind this? What is informing this? What's the invisible context? Three, “pause to stand under the discourse of self and others in order to hear claims and cultural logics that may break through usual ways of thinking. Four, analyze and reflect on what you hear to better understand yourself and others. And five, design when possible win win solutions, which are not conceptualized as victories, but rather as situations wherein participants feel as if their stakes have been heard, considered, and factored however possible into decisions.” The example of walking through this process that they give is the cultural logics of in terms of race, color blindness. Well, first white supremacy then color blindness, multiculturalism and critical race theory? They walk through? These are the different associated beliefs that come along with these logics, and these are the scripts that come along with it. That encourages you or students to ask questions of the cultural logic. Like, what does this offer to its proponents? What are people getting out of it? What am I getting out of my belief? What problems does it cause? So by asking questions like this, “listening writers learn to complicate rhetorical problems and to generate information that helps them decide how to address different audiences. Keeping in mind that the point is not to tell an audience what they want to hear, but rather to present the listening writer’s ideas in ways that their audiences can hear them.” All that to say, there are tools out there that can help me, you know, us, as individuals to become better listeners. There are tools that if you are an instructor, you can use to help students become better listeners, because that's a skill set that has not been prioritized at the same level asBSpeaking.AYou know, speaking, writing, arguing. I have shifted my position somewhat. Mmm. From the time we started recording weeks ago till today, and I'm continuing to look at situations differently.BLook at you. Good job.AYou don't mean that in a patronizing way, do you?BI don't mean that in a patronizing way.AThank you. What it comes down to is, do I want to be right, or do I want to make a difference? Because what I've gotten hung up on so much is I shouldn't have to listen to those ideas. I shouldn't have to talk to those people. We shouldn't live in the world that we live in. Mm hmm. But we do. And digging my heels in is not gonna move the needle. What is with my mixed metaphors today?BMixing metaphors over here like a shark in a china shop.AHow did the shark get there?BIt was a rogue wave. Sling shotted it out of the ocean.ASo, I hate that this is the reality where we're awash in misinformation and hatred. But it's the only reality we have.BYou hate.A I hate the hatred. Yeah. And so I have to let go of my I don't know, weird sense ofBSuperiority?AUh I mean you're not wrong. My sense that the world should operate. According to what I perceive as what is just and right. It I'm still going to have a vision for what is just and right. But it's not going to get there if I don't put myself out there in ways that make me uncomfortable. So there, how's that for vulnerability?BMeasured, but okay.ASummarize what I've just said.BThat's what the recording is for.AHow about you? Have you changed your perspectives at all?BI’ve just been superior this whole waiting for you to catch up.ANo, but for real. Have you changed your mind at all?B Yeah, definitely.AYour lips are twitching as though you're trying to hold in a laugh.BI've been persuaded that even people who are unwilling to deal with the other side can change.AAre you referring to me?BYes.AAh. You got me. Good night, Benton.BGood night, Abi. Good night world.AGood night. Good night, bowl of mush. Okay, I'm going to tell you a story.BStory time.AAbout the first debate I ever did in high school. Because it's embarrassing. Good. The topic was the death penalty. Which, like I said, feels like a no brainer now. The state shouldn't fucking kill people. And I was on the side that was pro death penalty in this particular debate.BKiller move.AAnd one of my arguments was that sometimes people escape from prison, paroled, not escape, and keep criming.BKeep criming.AI had a story about this killer, Kenneth McDuff. Who escaped from prison, I meant paroled, and went on another killing spree, because he hadn't been put to death. When he could have been.BReal story?AThis is a real guy. But what happened was that I was really nervous. It was my first debate, right? So I misspoke, and I called him Kenneth McDuck. And the moment you say something like that out loud, and you realize this is so inappropriate for the context, the very fact of that becomes hilarious. So I have visions of this serial killer sliding down mountains of gold like Scrooge McDuck. And You know, I had trouble holding it in. I'll put it that way. That wasn't a great look, laughing uncontrollably while trying to tell the dark tale of this killer.
July 26, 2024
Recycling: You still don’t get it
Recycling or trash? It's a question you may have asked yourself when faced with a gross can, a heavily-stickered art project, or some weird plastic thing. Benton hijacks the podcast to teach Abi the behind-the-scenes of the recycling process: How it works, how effective it is, the consequences of "wish-cycling," and why plastic sucks so much. He addresses what steps you can take to make recycling work better, besides just putting things in the right bin. Sources and further reading TC Talk episodes mentioned: “Cult rhetoric.” https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Cult-rhetoric-e1b1gpi/a-a70h9n0 “Tech comm from outer space: More lessons from alien movies.” https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Tech-comm-from-outer-space-More-lessons-from-alien-movies-e1md55n/a-a8cdbc1 Wikipedia articles mentioned: “Recycling” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling “Sustainability” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability “Microplastics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics “Greenwashing.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing “Wishcycling.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishcycling Music credits: Opening theme: S: Disco Funk Loop by SergeQuadrado | License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 Ensemble. (2008). “So they say” [Song]. On Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog Soundtrack [Album]. Mutant Enemy. Wheatus. (2000). “Teenage dirtbag” [Song]. On Wheatus [Album]. Columbia. Image credit: Siera Wild, “Recycling sign green.png.” CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Transcript AAh man, how did all this ranch dressing get in my keyboard?BHello, this is Benton, a trained engineer and science literacy fanatic who has been described as a walking WikipediaABy me.BBy you.ABut others agree.BYes, I will be your host this week on what I'm hoping will be the first of many episodes of Still Don't Get It. Still don't get it is a podcast that explores subjects that are largely misunderstood or oversimplified by the media or the general public.AEverything? BGiven infinite time, Sure. AOkay. BSo the purpose of this podcast is to convey scientific and to a lesser extent, policy literacy to the people. this is not your regularly scheduled TC talk.ABut it kind of is because I mean, if Tech Comm doesn't intersect with science literacy, then I don't know what does.BThen what are we even doing here? With me in the studio for this episode is ADr. Abigail Bakke. I'm a technical communication professor and I specialize in topics like medical communication, information literacy, and as of late, user experience research methods.BFabulous.ASo I know you haven't asked for advice.BOkay.ABut, so you want to start a podcast called Still Don't get it.BYes.ASo you're insulting your audience right off the bat by implying their ignorance. Do you think that's a smart move?BYes?ANo. Tell me your reasoning.BSo my reasoning is, first of all, I wanted to have a catchy name that's not very long and kinds of gives you the idea of what the podcast is about.AYou know, come to think of it, it's in the same vein as You're wrong about,Bwhich sounds like an insult, doesn't it?AYeah, but I mean, it's pretty much right. Every episode is something I've been wrong about.BFair enough.ASo do you think that there's enough science illiteracy that you?B Oh, God, yesAI know that was sort of a rhetorical question.BThat was a softball question.AThis is kind of a trial and we're publishing it as a TC Talk and your goal is to see what response you get?BMy goal is to see what response I get, see if there is interest for more. Please do give us feedback if there is a means to do so.AWe don't use Twitter anymore.BBecause Twitter in the Shitter. Enough said about that.ABut I mean, I still have an account and that's where I've pointed people in the past. So if you DM me, it'll at least show up in my e -mail, and I won't miss I so Ar_bakke.BSo I wanted to start out by saying, thank you, Abi, for allowing me to hijack your podcast for this experiment.AAnd you know what's the best part about it?BWhat is it?AYou're going to do the editing this time.BYes, I am.AAnd you've got 12 pages of notes, which means you've got your editing cut out for you.BYeah, that was good.AFootnote. Benton did NOT in fact edit this episode. We do have a cocktail here that I prepared in anticipation of recording, so even though it's not our regularly scheduled TC Talk, may we have our regularly scheduled pre-TC talk toast?BYes. I like that. What's it called again?AA gin buck. But today, it basically amounts to a fancy looking ginger ale because we ran out of gin midway through the preparation.BAlso, if you don't hear our usual theme song, it's Spotify's fault.ASpotify.BYeah, they took that option away.AIf this is your first time listening to TC talk, start somewhere else.BOoh, but where? One of my personal favorite episodes is cult rhetoric. We did that back in the early days.AOkay. I really liked the one where we talked about science fiction, specifically, what can aliens tell us about? Oh, yes. Technical communication. Yep, I think we did that one about a year ago.BRight. Probably a little more ASort of our season opener for a season two. Actually that would be a good place to start because that kind of gets at, you know, the basics of tech comm and audience and such. With alien movies thrown in for good measure.BMm hmm. Or, I mean, I guess you could listen to this episode, But don't let it set expectations for the excellent work that Abi does.AOh, you're too kind.BUh, sometimes, AThe excellent work that Abi does? It's a joint effort, buddy.BIt is.AAnd I know some people listen just for you.BOh.AI mean, it may be like your mom's best friend, but that counts, nonetheless.BI didn't expect this to turn into an exercise inA mutual adoration?B But I'm not mad at it. Okay, so today I'm excited to talk about recycling. Now, just for listener context, I am the discard czar in our home, am I not?AYou take the garbage out, you take the recycling out, et cetera.BYes. And I sort our household discards into trash, recycling, plastic film recycling, and compost. So you would probably say I'm a touch fanatical in the subject, right Abi?AYes. I mean, you could call me the discard Czar in another sense of the word, that I love to throw things out and to me it matters less where the final destination is, as long as it's out of our house.BRight, so you're the Discard Czar, with discard being a verb. I am, with discard being a noun.AYeah, that's fair.BIt's a co-czar ship. And how do you feel about our subject of recycling?AI have mixed feelings about it. I really care about it. But I've also heard in recent years about how it originated as sort of a deflection on the part of the polluting corporations to kind place responsibility at the individual level.BIndividual and municipal levels. YeahAAnd I've also heard that a lot of stuff doesn't actually get recycled, which is discouraging.BYes, it is.ASo I want to know more about it and I want to know that there's a glimmer of hope that when we do, or I should say when you do deliberately sort out recyclables, that it's making a difference. I suggested calling this episode recycling rhetoric, because I think it's kind of about that. But I know that's a little bit like me trying to make it about my thing.Bhelping the environment, That's an excellent purpose to identify for recycling. One of the early uses for recycling was to get easy feedstock for manufacturing like specifically metals. And I'm going to ask you to interrupt me as you see fit. Oh Fern,ACan Fern interrupt you as she sees fit?BOh, she can't be stopped. To help me keep this from being too heavily a data dumpAanother piece of advice that you did not ask for.BOkay, Abut kind of the point of tech comm is to do the work yourself of transforming a data dump into a meaningful message. So I think you've skipped an important step potentially.BOkay, well we'll see. Wikipedia's definition of recycling is “Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. This concept often includes the recovery of energy from waste materials… this is an alternative to incineration of waste.” A little more digging revealed that this referred to the recovery of electricity and/or heat from the incineration of waste. Which allows some people to pull some semantic yoga and call burning garbage recycling.AOoh see, it is about rhetoric.BYes, so we've barely started, but we already managed to venture deep into the heart of green washing land. Wikipedia defines greenwashing as “a form of advertising or marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims, and policies are environmentally friendly.” ACan I give a sort of funny and pathetic example?BYeah. AOkay. I saw on Reddit somebody posted, so this was in the mildly infuriating sub red. It. Mm hm. Somebody said that they had ordered a bunch of bamboo straws to cut down on their carbon footprint.BUh huh. AAnd every straw was individually wrapped in plastic packaging.BUgh. I know I've seen that with metal straws, people posting that sort of thing. So key words in that definition are spin and deceptive advertising. In this case it's selling products or image as though they are responsible.ACan I give you another example?BYes. AAnd this one stands out to me because it was just such egregious product placement. But we were watching a movie, I can't remember which one, but somebody was, you know, on the loose and the police were like, yeah, he drives a Prius? What kind of criminal drives a Prius? A socially conscious one. It just struck me as like very oh, what's the word?BHam fisted?AYeah. And also like, you know Prius paid to like, have that association Breiterated for everyone to see while they think they're watching a movie.AYeahBAll right. So if you would please try to keep this idea in mind as we talk. Back to recycling. Pun intended because bringing it back. Yeah. Anyway, collection of recycling tends to be done exclusively by the same companies that do trash collection through a contract with the local government. So right there you've got typically big business dealing with small governments on a monopoly basis. What could go wrong right?AAre there not small business garbage collectors?BYes, there are but broad brush typically you're dealing with like the waste management companies, national businesses or even international, in some cases dealing with local governments. They want monopoly contracts which the smaller the city the more they're able to flex that power. So these companies are used to dealing with a single stream or single sort where all trash is created equal. They have this equipment and training for one thing and they want to do it the same for recycling, which is how you get single stream recycling. Have you ever had to sort your recyclables, Abi?AYes.BHow hard was that process?AIt was more ambiguous than you'd think. Like, we still have that question too, like, is this cereal box recyclable, you know, or this pizza box is not? Because whatever. You know, multiply the categories you have to sort in, multiply the complexity.BBut in terms of how to sort things, I think that the more categories they give you, the easier it is to say that, oh, this is not that, this is this, would you agree or?AIn theory.BOn an individual level, so not too hard, especially if you sort it as you create it.AIf it came with like a PSA or something like actual technical communication about how to recycle and why or how to sort and why, that'd be different.BI remember having to have the recycling sorted when we put it out on the curb when I was growing up at home. The city went around with a pick up, pulling a trailer that had different bins on it. This is the city doing the collecting as opposed to a big company doing it. That was like in the '90s.AI thought the single sort recycling nowadays was because they have better equipment that can automatically sort it. Shouldn't technology be able to do that by now?BYes, that is one of the reasons. Do you remember going to Cash Wise in Fargo where they just had like a dozen bins sitting in the parking lot for you to drop off recycling?ANo, because you were the discard czar.BEven then.AYep. BBut yeah, that's something that still is the case in a lot of places, but we currently have single sort recycling collection where we live, so everything recyclable goes into the same bin. Have you ever had to fish through the mixed recycling bin for a particular thing, ANo. Like what? Why would I need to do that?BLike a kid put a thing in, something that had to be rescued from the recycling bin?AOh, yeah. Yeah. BAnd what was that process like?AI don't know. Anytime you have to dig your arm down into like a slimy bin of refuse, that's not pleasant.BExactly. A time consuming gross pain. Now imagine that at industrial scale, because that's what we're talking about when even with a city of 50,000. All those tons of material have to be sorted for any of it to be recycled. A facility dedicated to sorting single stream recycling can typically process a truck load an hour. The flip side of this is that single stream typically sees a 30% increase in participation. Which is good Abecause it's easier at the consumer end.BIt's easier for the consumer to put a thing in the bin, so you get more things in the bin.AThat's a very interesting stat, thank you.BIt's a balance of more material captured versus a lower quality of material captured. One weakness of single sort is that all of the material has to go through the sorting machinery. This means that things that are too small, like jar lids or aluminum foil candy wrappers, or too large like a polypropylene tote are fully recyclable, but the system cannot handle them. Also note on the machinery, plastic bags are an absolute no. They gum up the works. Please remember not to put them in plastic bags when you put things in the recycling bin. Another element of single sort that makes it the Walmart of recycling is that it generates the least valuable product. But as things are currently, economically, money does matter and does drive decisions. The average value per ton of single stream recyclables is lower than most of its components would be if they were presorted. That's because it has to be hauled to a sorting facility and processed. This brings me to another key issue about recycling: transportation.AOh, I never thought of that. So they don't just have these sorting facilities in every city?BNot in every city, no. Sometimes the value of single stream recyclables is lower than the tipping fee at a landfill. Meaning the amount per ton that is charged for just landfilling something.AIf it's cheaper, that's where it's going to go.BIf it's cheaper, a lot of cities will make the economic decision instead of the moral one. That isn't the rule. A lot of times the value is high enough that it's worth processing at least then sometimes the various streams that come out the back end of a sorting facility will just be quietly thrown. Generally, recyclables are fairly bulky, meaning that when they're being moved around the truck doing it isn't at full weight load, thereby it isn't getting its ideal hauling efficiency, which is already not great. So at this point. How are you feeling about the decision to let me hijack the podcast?AI don't know. I mean, you've got a captive audience. I can't, I can't just run away when you get into lecture mode.BNext question. Do you feel like you're getting the reality about recycling?AYeah.BWell, I have news for you, you're still not getting it.AOh, nice Set up.B Thank you.A I walked straight into it.BUh huh. So there are, as we've discussed, a number of types of materials that can technically be recycled. New complication, there are two different categories of recycled materials. It's not really that complicated though. Pre consumer and post consumer are the designations for where the material to recycle came from. You may have seen these distinctions on packaging. Where the manufacturer is trying to brag about how green their product is. Pre consumer waste is scraps and failed products or by products that never see the consumer. This gives it a much higher potential for reuse and recycling because there is much lower diversity of material collected at a specific location than you would have as discards from an individual or group discarding waste from all of their activities. In some cases, such a minimal amount of effort is required to reclaim these materials that it's barely considered recycling by the company, but rather waste reduction or something of the sort. So claims that something contains pre consumer content are less praiseworthy. Post consumer waste is obviously waste discarded by the end consumer and is therefore usually much more difficult to recycle because it is often mixed in with other items, probably contaminated, and takes more energy to collect it because it isn't generated in industrial quantities at industrial purity in a single location.A I do have a question.BSure. AAre we going to talk about how much you have to clean your recyclables because, you know, say something canned. How much do you have to rinse it out versus, can you just dump it in or you know? We had this debate the other day when the kids finished off their spray cheese.B Oh, yes.AWhich they begged for and I was glad to see it go.BYes. ABut I was like, Put it in the trash and you were like, No, put it in the recycling And I said no because there's no way to like clean it out based on the way the container is designed.BMm hm. That is a good question. And I don't have the answers to everything. Obviously, it will depend upon the processor, the facility that does the actual recycling.AYeah, so hire technical communicators to educate your people.BEven better. Hire technical communicators to educate your engineers and CEOs, because they're the ones responsible for what you're able to buy.AThat's fair.BAnd it's a smaller group, ALess receptive.BYeah. I've got some numbers comparing countries in the percentage of household waste by weight that is recycled. It actually gives a bunch of disposal categories. Recycled, composted, landfilled, incinerated with and without energy recovery and a few different flavors of “other” as categories. My personal science based opinion of these categories is that in terms of kudos to the country, compost is the best, then recycling. Beyond that, we're talking about various flavors of bad. Landfilling is probably the least bad, followed by incineration with energy recovery. Then worst of all is incineration without energy recovery.AWhat about dumping stuff in the ocean?BOkay, that's worst, that's worse than landfilling. But that isn't in these statistics.AAre you going to talk about why landfilling is bad?BFor the general environment, it's a good thing for there to be landfills. But for the location where the landfill is and around it, you're concentrating waste. So something that wouldn't be toxic if it was spread over a much larger areaAOh so we should litter.BFunny. When you gather it in one place there is a capacity for more toxicity because you get a greater concentration of it.A And so incinerating is when they justBBurn.AYeah. They want to take up less space. But why is that bad?BBurning garbage does reduce the volume and weight of waste, but it's not a great solution because it only reduces it to about 15-20 percent of the original weight. And then you have that substantially more toxic ash and slag to deal with.AWhat do they do with that?BI know that sometimes they use it for making concrete, which ash is, without getting too much into concrete, ash is something that can replace I think it's called clinker in Portland cement which would otherwise be created by baking limestone to create calcium ash.ASo that does sound like a type of recycling.BIt’s not exactly recycling, but it's a replacement of mined minerals.AAnd I'm sure the burning process itself Breleases garbage like nobody's businessA and hurts the ozone layer or whateverB hurts the surrounding communities that are predominantly APoor?BPoor and minority and poor and underprivileged. So getting back to my numbers, the recycling number doesn't mean how much of the recyclable waste is recycled. It's a percentage of all waste. It also makes no accounting of the absolute quantity of waste produced per household. So, keep that in mind too. For the purposes of evaluating a country's laudability I'll combine the composting and recycling percentages.AYou're not a walking Wikipedia. You're a walking footnote, sorry. Okay. No, you're sitting, honestly. BThank you. So minding all of that, what countries do you think do well with their waste and which do you think do poorly? This data is from the OECD in 2019, so the countries included are: and I'm going to speed this up for comic effect. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.A I'm going to say Luxembourg is the best and the United States is the worst.BOkay. So I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that ten of these countries responsibly dealt with more than half of their household waste. Slovenia scored the best with a combined compost and recycling fraction of 71.8%. Germany also impressed with a combined score of 66.7% followed by South Korea, which itself had the highest recycling rate of 56.5% Just recycling.AI'm picturing them receiving their gold, silver, and bronze medals.BVery good.AMade of post consumer recycled material.BYes. I will asterisk this by saying that Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Denmark all reported zero landfill use. Which seems like clever accounting to me because typical incineration leaves about 15 to 20% of the original weight as ash and slag. But I suppose it is possible they figured out a way to make industrial use of the ashes and other slag created by their incinerators. The last general concept before we get into the specific materials will be Wishcycling and contamination. Do you recall what Wish cycling is?AYes. It's when you feel bad about throwing something away, So you think it might fit in recycling. So I'm just going to put it there and feel better about myself.BBingo. Wikipedia defines it as the disposal of consumer waste in a recycle bin in hopes of it being recycled, whereas it cannot or is unlikely to be recycled.ASo I was right Babout the spray cheese can?AYeah.B I don't know that.AOkay.BI get it. I've done it and you've done it too. We all have, except for people who, on principle, don't put anything in the recycling.AYeah. If you're already a person who cares enough to recycle at all, then you're already prone to wish cycling, I think.BMm hmm. The motivations for wish cycling are easy to see, but the consequences are less so. Here you see how wish cycling feeds into contamination. Nearly one fifth of all recyclables are contaminated with wishcycling which loads trucks faster with useless material that they haul around, burdens workers who have to manually sort out non recyclable materials at the processing facility, can damage processing equipment, and can even cause whole batches of otherwise acceptable recyclables to be thrown away. Contamination is, of course, a bigger subject than merely well intentioned errors. It includes consumer contamination, like not rinsing out food containers, manufacturer contamination like labels, marketing, branding and the use of composite or difficult to separate materials that consumers don't realize are unrecyclable. And to a smaller degree process contamination like dissimilar materials nesting in transport, and rain soaking paper and starting to rot it.AHonestly, because you explained this to me a while back, I've shifted my recycling habits and I put fewer things in the recycling. You don't like that though!B It's hard isn’t it?AYou're the one who told me not to wish cycle and yet you're the one who kind of does it more.BI won't say that I'm perfect.AThat's funny. BYou think that's funny?APractice what you preach.BYeah, sure thing. Here's a question that everyone but the most jaded recycling cynic has asked themselves, what is recyclable? Do you know? APlastic, glass, paper, cardboard, aluminum cans?BWhat do you think it depends on?AOh, how pure of a material it is I guess? That's not the right word, but like not mixed size if it's going to fit through the sorter. You told me that that matters earlier.BGood memory.AHow clean something is like that is a question I always have because, you know, as I'm rinsing out the can, I'm thinking about the water I'm wasting too. Right. Like there's an offset. Whether I recycle something also depends on what I think is a reasonable trade off of my time because I'm not going to peel the label off the ketchup bottle.B Good points. But what I have found is that the most comprehensive answer to that question is that it depends upon where you live. Even though that answer is totally a cop out.ASpoken like a rhetorician, it depends on the context.BBecause as I've mentioned before, recycling collection is handled at the local or county level. So listener, because waste and recycling handling is not uniform in the US and I could only speculate about other countries you will have to check with your city and or county government to know for sure.ABut that's work.B Yes. And even from our county to the one literally across the street with the websites in the same format. Our neighbor has information more concise and organizedALike our literal neighbor?BWell, Blue Earth County as opposed to Nicolet County that we live in.AOh, not our next door neighbor.BThe county that is across the road.AGotcha. I was like, that'd be an interesting over the picket fence conversation. So, tell me about how your county communicates what materials are recyclable?BUh, I gotta go.AOh yeah. Let me show you this pamphlet.BThat's weird, I'm leaving? Our county still has the waste wizard to look up anything but having to go through items individually, what do you think that will do for educated recycling? Another thing to note about recycling is that some states actually have made it illegal to throw away recyclables. These states are Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Carolina.AI've been breaking the law all this time? See, I'm more of a bad ass than you'd think.BOh. I think that that statement is more applicable to a municipal level, that they are not allowed to throw away waste. Although I will say that our neighbor, Jamie, said when he was at the landfill, he saw a truck a dump an entire load of green glass at the landfill.AOh, come on.BWhich is illegal.AThink of all the effort it took to sort not only glass, but green glass only.BExactly. One thing that's not so bad about glass in a landfill is that it's not going to, you know, like it's inert. It's not going to cause chemical trouble, but still maddening. Still a waste. A waste of waste. Some cities and states make it mandatory to recycle and will fine businesses for having more than 10% of their trash being recyclables. But households will instead get reminder tags put on their bins so it's not overly punitive to people, whereas businesses should know better.AFair.BAll right. Now I'm going to make like a processing line and split recyclables up into their major groups: Glass, metals, organics, cardboard and paper, and plastics. Perhaps though, I should zoom out a bit more and note the other major components of household waste that I'm not considering recyclable: clothing and fabrics, composite materials, electronics, ash, yard waste, chemicals, construction waste, and medical waste. With the exception of yard waste, some construction waste, and ash the concept of recycling doesn't work for these groups of materials. Clothing and fabrics I will get into why I didn't include them in recyclables later. I'll also note that organics like food waste and yard waste can be recycled, quote recycled by composting. But since it's a biological process, I’ll mostly set it aside for this discussion.AAnd this is off topic. But the composting of human bodies is a thing. If you care about things like green cremation, then this might be an option for you.BYes. An option to reduce your final carbon impact. By specifying that you want to be compostedAthey put you in a tube and let you sit, and then what emerges is beautiful dirt that you can plant a garden with and remember your loved one. But it's not legal in every state, true? Where is it legal, Washington?BI think. Washington, California, probably Oregon. And I didn't do research on that, so I'm not sure. Yeah, Talk to your state legislatures, Slaters about it because that is a state level issue.ATurn me into dirt. Cause I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby.BNice. So in terms of glass, metals, cardboard and paper, and plastic, what is your intuition, Abi? Where is the good news and where's the bad news?AI think you've told me that metals are pretty high value.BHey, no cheating.ANo, you have told me that. But I am looking at your notes, so I guess that is cheating. BAha.AUh, I think glass is easy to sort maybe, but doesn't have a very usable end product. Plastics is the worst.BWhat about cardboard and paper? Where would you put them in the, in the line up.APretty good. fun fact. Our daughter did a science fair project on that last year. On what material will recycle or can be turned into paper. And she tested cardboard, regular paper and onion skin. Oh, dryer, lint.B Dryer lint. Yep. Yeah. That created more of like a felt not so good for writing on.AMm hm. But you built all the equipment. I don't know. That's the most original science fair project I've ever seen.BOkay, before we get into the why, I'll give you the highlights of what seems to me to be the actual situation. Metals are some of the most recyclable materials out there. Paper and cardboard don't recycle super well out of a single stream but they do okay. Glass can be recycled well, with some caveats. Plastics, on the other hand, are really what inspired me to choose recycling as my topic for episode number one. They are the radioactive waste of non radioactive waste. To be sure, hash tag not all plastics as I'll get into in the details, but broad strokes, plastics are some of the worst materials conjured by humanity.A I was kind of right. I was close.BOf those groups, put them in order of what you think the rate of recycling is. By rate of recycling, I mean the fraction of recyclables that are recycled in that group.A I'm going to put plastics at lowest paper at highest, I don't know.BOkay. These statistics that I have from the EPA in 2018, which I had to do some real digging to find, are that 68.2% of paper and cardboard, 34.1% of metals, 25% of glass, and 8.7% of plastic is recycled in the US.ASo you're not going to acknowledge that I nailed it.BYou got it. You got the best and worst for sure. So Monetary economics aside, the energy and pollution economics of recycling metals compared to generating fresh material from ore is phenomenal.A In a bad way.B No, no, no. the value of recycling metals is phenomenal.ASo there's good news?B Yes. AOkay. BThis is good news. Recycling aluminum cans back into aluminum cans takes only about 5% as much energy and creates about 5% as much pollution as creating a can from raw materials. And a can go from curbside back to the grocery store aisle in as little as 60 days.AWow.BMm hmm. Steel takes only 40% as much energy and makes only 14% of the air pollution and 24% of the water pollution as fresh material. Recycling copper saves 85% of the energy. Recycling lead saves 65% of the energy and also obviously keeps lead out of the environment. I also saw that the recycling rate for lead is probably the very highest of all materials in the US. It's like 99% is recycled. AGood, but who needs to use lead? I have certainly never handled a lead thing on purpose.BYou've never handled lead, but you've driven a car. Lead acid batteries are the standard for vehicle batteries at least before electric vehicles. Actually probably the place where most lead is lost into the environment is sportsmanship. Hunting and fishing, because sinkers in fishing are made of lead and lines break. It happens and some people still use lead shot for hunting.AAnd see, I had been led to believe,Boh, I see what you did there.AThat lead was largely eradicated from paints and stuff at leastB Yes, from paint certainly.Athat has not been leads water supply, unless it’s Flint, Michigan.Bin the case of paints and plumbing and all of those things, there are still cases where it exists because it's historical and just hasn't been remediated yetAThat's just that's just evil, though Yeah. To let that persist when it's a known risk.BRight. And honestly, Plumbing got its name from lead.AHow so?BThe Romans, they made all of their pipes from lead. It's why the atomic symbol for lead is Pb.ANo way.BPlumbinus was the Latin term for lead.AInteresting. See you are a Bentonpedia.BPlumb line was a lead weight on a string so you know which way is down. I should get back to my list. Recycling zinc saves 60% of the energy. And all metal recycling has a massive impact by reducing the impact of mining, and the impact of discarded metals leaching into soil and water. Paper takes 60% as much energy and creates only 27% as much pollution to recycle compared to fresh material. Cardboard takes 76% as much energy to recycle as to produce from new materials. Glass takes 70 to 95% of the original energy to recycle and creates about 80% as much pollution.AYou're kind of getting into data dump territory.BYeah, I know that's the end of it.AOh. No, we need some visualizations here. BOh boy.ASome Bar charts, pie charts, Band how is that going to help people listening to a podcast AFair. Could post them on TC Talk website as supplemental materials.B I'll think about that.AOr you could just highlight the best and worst instead of going down the whole list.BMm hm. So these numbers are taken from a study that looks at the current process. There's certainly room for improvement, but even this is an amazing start. If we averaged a one third reduction in energy required and pollution created for all material fed into the economy, that's a huge step towards reducing the toll we exact upon the natural world.AThat's really encouraging to hear actually because I was afraid you were going to be like recycling is an entirely made up sham.BNo. It is a good stop gap, but it's not a perfect solution and it's not the whole solution.AExactly.BThere. That's your TLDR right in the middle of the podcast, and since we're talking about material fed into the economy, shifting from fully sourced from the natural world to being primarily sourced from our own waste stream, that's a much bigger boon for the sustainability of society.ACan I ask? So mining is a dying profession in some cases. Can you see some people resisting recycling to try to keep miners in jobs because the economy?BWell, I didn't do any research on mining. But Abecause it's the same thing with oil companies, right?.BSo mining for coal is something that's dying, yes. Mining for minerals is not. You see it as you look back through industrial history. The discovery of a new fad or a new thing creates a new mining industry. Especially when the atomic age started. There were so many things that were just of zero mineralogical interest to all industries that once we start talking about the physics of neutrons and how they interact with certain materials in ways that are different from other materials, I mean, there was obviously uranium mining, there was zirconium miningAWhere, where does radium come from?BYou would ask.AOnly because I read the book, The Radium Girls . By, I want to say Kate more. It's just wild to me how for so long people were convinced that radium was not only not dangerous but a healthyBA health boon. And right now there's a big boom on mining for lithium and on rare earth elements that are used in the construction of electric vehicles.ASo there is an environmental impact with electronic vehicle or electric vehicles?BYes, the environmental impact is at the front end, not continuing as it’s used.A Yes Exactly. Again, I want to see a chart. Like at what point does the electric car make up for its front end pollution?BWhat’s break even point.AYeah. Do you know how many miles driven or?BI'm sure that it depends on the model.AOkay, not a cyber truck.BThey break even more.AThey do.BSo, um, one last caveat is that the data I found here didn't look very far beyond energy and pollution. Recycling is a bigger boon for the sustainability of society as a whole than it is for any of these specific elements of recycling. Wikipedia defines sustainability as a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time. So, let's get into the details now.AWhat! How is what you shared already not detailed?BOkay. The detailsA of the details.BThe details, yes. The details of each type of recyclable material.AYou know what, Ben,BWhat?A I still don't get it.B You still don't get it.A I think I need to hear about all the individual types of materials that can be recycled.BYes, some details. We'll start with metals. Metals have been recycled almost since they were first refined from raw ore, going back about 10,000 years. Because all mining in those times was powered by human muscle, with some of the heavier lifting assisted by beasts of burden, and refining performed with wood-fired heat that was similarly procured by muscle power, the preciousness of every scrap of metal was not lost on early metal users. Since the process of recycling fit into a late step of the process of refining, it was a simple matter to toss the little bits removed by shaping and breakage back in to reforge them. Little has changed since then in the recyclability of metals, only that our more sophisticated manufacturing creates alloys that can complicate the recovery of metals from discarded items. I suppose you could say that recycling has had its standards upped with modern metallurgy being a bit more picky than your typical medieval blacksmith. Along those lines modern metals recycling has some contamination, challenges that weren't present in earlier times. Container residue, container coatings and labels and paint come to mind. All told, though, the melting process will handle much of this pretty adeptly. It will all turn into some combination of fumes and slag.AWhat is slag?BIt's a glass like substance, so, ash is when you have a fire. Ash is something that flies away. It's called fly ash. Burning residues or unburnable residues that just clump together are called slag.AIs slag the thing that then gets reforged or is it like a byproduct?BIt's a byproduct, it's typically viewed as waste product.AOkay. So it separates out from the metal somehow,BRight. It separates out from the metal, typically in, typically gets caught in a molten metal filter,ASo I don't need to rinse my cans that much.BIt's not that crucial. Surprise, cans. Metal cans not as important?AI'm going to go back to recycling more now.BGreat, I mean, you do want to rinse metal cans so that they're not like oozing on other things and contaminating them because not everything is as, you know.AAh. That makes sense.BYou don't want to put something icky in there because first of all, it'll start to smell, it’ll gum up other things. But it won't affect the recyclability of the metal.ARight but if your black bean liquid oozes onto the paper, it will affect the recyclability of the paper.BYeah, probably. So one other pleasant form of contamination present in all steel is mild radioactivity. Because steel is so often recycled, a lot of it that was exposed to atomic tests or radioactive material processing was recycled before these effects were fully understood. This doesn't mean that steel now is dangerous radiologically. But for scientific instruments that require high purity steel that won't interfere with radiation readings, like space program stuff, they have to source their steel from pre atomic sources like sunken World War One ships.ACool. Huh.BYeah. Talk about turning swords into ploughshares.AThat must be expensive.BWell, I imagine it isn't.AWhat do you send divers down or do you drag the ship up?BOh God, could you imagine trying to lift a boat that's had, you know, marine life incorporating itself for years?AYeah, fair.BI think it's typically gun barrels that are so thick that it's easy to get a salvageable amount of metal out of a chunk. Yeah. They'll have like underwater welder type people go down, cut a chunk off. Typically, it's the thing that is you know watched over by a government of whoever has the rights because it's a special kind of steel. No steel foundries operate with exclusively virgin ore, so that's always contaminated in that way. Anyway, paper and cardboard, as you'll remember from a few minutes ago, take less energy to produce and create less pollution than producing them from raw materials. Here, however, we start to run into more impacts from contamination. What do you think might contaminate the paper and cardboard recycling streams?ABlack bean liquid.BYes, black bean liquid. We've touched on that.ADid you know that chickpea liquid has its own name?BAquafaba.AYou knew!BI actually saw it gosh, yesterday, something I was reading.AIt can be a vegan form of BEgg AIn a cocktail.BYeah.AWhat else would BI think nutritionally, it actually functions like egg too.AWeird. What else would contaminate, if it gets wet I would guess. Colors maybe. Cereal boxes have like that kind of sheen.BYeah, the printing. Coatings.AThat's all I can think of.BYeah, that's a pretty good list. Ink used to be largely synthetic but now is almost entirely plant based. So while it may literally muddy the process, at least dealing with it is not wholly toxic. More difficulties arise from the variety included in the spectrum that ranges from newspaper to heavy duty cardboard. I want to take a brief rabbit hole to read from our county’s web page, on what paper products can and cannot be recycled. This will conflict with what I have said or will say but keep in mind that this is the guidance given by the collection service, not the recycling plant operator, which are different. They will accept books both paper back and hard cover so long as there are only a few hard cover at a time. Brown paper bags, cartons, catalogs, corrugated cardboard, envelopes including manila and those with cellophane windows,AWhich we just recently learned.BYes. Junk mail, magazines, newspapers and glossy inserts, office paper, paper board, phone books, pop boxes, and post it notes. They do not accept pizza boxes, dark colored paper such as black malfunction from a copier, egg cartons, paper tubes, shredded paper, plastic lined envelopes different from just the windows, tissue paper, and release paper from stickers.AOkay, so being a discard czar in my own right. I have the lovely task of sorting through our kids’ artwork.BOh yeah.ABecause we cannot keep it all. And so I discard much of it on the down low. But if there's paint or heavy amounts of crayon on it or something, I always wonder like, is that going to gum up the process? Do you happen to know?BMy guess is that paint would be, you can't really have too much paint on it before it's a problem. Crayon I am less sure about but it seems like it would have a similar, you don't want much on there if you're going to recycle it. So there. That's not too much to keep in mind when you're deciding which bin to throw a thing in, is it?AThat helps.BThe less the material looks and feels like the cheap brown paper towels you find in public restrooms, the more likely it is to require more chemical processing or coating to become what it is. Some of the processing chemicals may linger in the paper until recycling, but paper that is coated in wax or plastic is awfully hard to separate into clean paper fibers. Also, as noted by the county's website, glue in paper tubes makes them not recyclable.AOh, that's why.BThough they are compostable.AOkay. Actually, that helps with the art projects too.BMm hm.AThe glues. Also, I'm not a monster. I save out the best ones and put them in a three ring binder with those clear plastic sheets. Proceed.BStaples also are present in papers and heavy duty boxes which dull the chopping blades used to break down the paper. This doesn't disqualify things from being recyclable because obviously that would cut out most office paper. It's a known thing, they have a way to deal with it, but it is a contaminant. An important note to take into consideration is that contact with food will nearly always contaminate paper or cardboard with grease. Grease contamination makes paper unrecyclable, but it is still compostable. Boxes that go in the freezer though are almost all coated to keep them from getting soggy with condensation when they come out of the freezer. So they can't be composted, but as long as they don't get greasy, they can go in the recycling.AHm.BBut, paper can't be recycled indefinitely. Whomp whomp. The recycling process shortens the fibers of the material so that paper can only be recycled five to seven times before it must be down cycled or composted. So even with maximum adoption of paper recycling, pulp forests would still occupy around 20% of the land area that they would with none in place, given the same levels of consumption. Glass, however, has the ability to be recycled indefinitely without degradation like metals, because it is a mineral and basically inert. When you're asked to sort your glass, it will be based on color. Clear, blue, green, and brown, keeping in mind that the point of sorting is to keep from color contaminating the product.AIf people didn't care what color their jars came in, if it was like a mix of green and brown or whatever, it might not be pretty. But it wouldn't be the worst.BNo, that's a consumer preference question.AOr more likely probably the company.BYeah. Manufacturer preference comes before consumer preference. It could look very cool depending on how thoroughly mixed the colors are in the process.AOoh like tie-dyed.BIt could. I mean If you have things mixed very well in the melt pot, then, I mean, it's just going to come out on average color.AIt may make your pickles look less appetizing though, so I get why they do want to sort by color.BMm hm. And in some cases things are stored in brown glass because they need to be protected from UV light, which is the case for some medicines and foods.ASkin care products. BSkin care products. Sure. Not all glass will recycle though. Auto, window, and cookware glass do not recycle due to them having a different chemistry from regular glass. You may be wondering now, why did I rate glass below paper given the many limitations on paper recycling and the theoretically endless recyclability of glass?ANo, I wasn't wondering that.BAre you now?AI still don't get it.BYou still don't get it. Well, Abi, what do you think my reasoning is?ABecause paper, there's so much more maybe than glass?BThat's an answer. My first reason is weight. A 12 ounce glass bottle weighs 190 grams. A 12 ounce aluminum can weighs 14.AWhat's a gram?BGram?AI'm an American.BAh, yes. Metric illiterate. Um, ANo, it's okay. I do have a sense of what a gram is. I was just interjecting for no good reason.BOh, good. What fun. The second reason is that glass is dangerous. It is common for glass containers to break when moved around in the recycling process, creating sharp hazards in an array of sizes.ABut but but paper cuts.BOkay. Sure.ANot equivalent.BIt's part of why sanitation workers have one of the most dangerous jobs. Substantially more dangerous than police officers or even pizza delivery drivers. The last reason, AProbably not as dangerous as the person who dives to cut off a chunk of a World War One battleship.BYeah, yeah, probably taking an acetylene torch underwater in scuba. That's probably got a fair amount of hazards associated with it. The last reason I lowered glass below paper is that recycling glass is a bad use for it. Glass should be reused.AOh.BYou do it in your home when you wash glass cups instead of throwing them away. We did it for many decades in the US with glass bottles for milk and carbonated beverages. And we only stopped because beverage makers didn't like the cost of responsibility. I'll touch on reuse a little later. Okay, plastics, like some of the other subjects I've touched on, plastics and microplastics could each have been given their own episode. but this is the moment that I at least have been waiting for. Before I light up the flame thrower, so to speak, Abi, why do you think I use such strong rhetoric in describing plastic? AIt’s used to make cheap plastic junk that our kids bring home in their birthday party goody bags,BMaking it very personal, but yes.AThat’s all I got.BWell, there are many, many reasons to side eye the recycling of plastics. The first is right at its beginning, oil. I know that there are many efforts underway to create plastics from non petroleum sources. But good-intentioned as they may be, they're largely window dressing. More than 99% of plastic is oil based.A Why did I not know that?BI don't know. Is that like common knowledge?ABecause in my mind, plastic is just made of plastic, you know. But of course it comes from somewhere.BYeah, a plastic mine, right? Plastic being made out of oil is how oil industry is trying to stay alive with the growing opposition of environmental groups and use for energy starting to smell bad now so to speak.AWow.BPlastic production has been how they keep producing more oil without it just completely glutting the market.ANow I know.BNow you know. The next problem is the next step. Manufacturing. Turning oil into plastics releases about half of the carbon in the oil. Not to mention the transportation fuel to get it from well to factory along with a tremendous slew of combustion byproducts, volatile organic compounds, and persistent organic pollutants. Not to mention the trace contaminants of oil like sulphur, mercury, lead, arsenic, et cetera. After being processed into plastic pellets, it's shipped again to a factory where it's molded into a useful shape. Depending on the end use, it might get shipped a few more times being assembled into larger and larger sub assemblies before the product is complete, likely enduring at least a single cleaning per stop using yet more chemicals. Then it will be packaged, palletized, shipped to a distribution center, stored, inventoried, shipped to a big box store, purchased and driven to a person's home. If that sounds exhausting, that's because it is. Pun intended.AWhat percentage of oil companies business comes from plastics?BThat is a great question that I do not know the answer to.A Then you can cut my question out.BI know that one of the things that it depends upon is the mix of compounds from a particular well. Some wells make crude oil, that's really good for turning into fuel. Some make crude oil that’s kind of altogether garbage. Some make stuff that's, that has a lot of aromatic rings and so it's good for petrochemical industry where they turn it into plastics or metals.AAromatic?BAromatic rings? You've probably seen it. An aromatic ring is a double bonded ring of six carbon atoms.AOh, so just something that smells nice.BNo, I mean typically it's a ring like that that makes it smell nice. Plants make them too in their own way.ASo it's the same kind of aromatic.BIt is, yeah.AWeird.BIf you're looking at like the little chemical stick figure of a molecule, an aromatic ring is a hexagon with a circle inside it.AThanks for the chemistry lesson.BYeah, no problem. So, I talked about the process of oil turning into plastic, turning into a product that's in the home. So that litany of moving shit around is a function of globalized trade. It certainly is not limited to plastic. What's so funny?AI thought you were dropping in an F bomb.BIt's certainly not limited to plastic, but all of the incredible positive attributes of plastic as a material increase the likelihood that a unit of plastic will be subjected to this runaround compared to heavier materials that would make more financial sense to produce nearer the location of use. But all of that activity was involved in just producing the plastic and putting it in the home of some poor soul who will use it for some amount of time then have to figure out how to get rid of it. Now, finally, we can discuss recycling the plastic. So Abi, of all the materials we've discussed, plastic is the most recent and also the only one for which we have a pretty good estimate of humanity's lifetime production. Since we do, there are also numbers for final disposition on all of this plastic. Out of all the plastic ever produced, you get to guess the percentage going to each of these categories. Recycled, incinerated, and landfill or environment.AOoh. Since you're really mad at plastic, I'm going to guess 5% recycled. I couldn't venture a guess on the other categories.BWell, you have 95% left.AOkay. 94% landfill, 1% incinerated.BAll right. Sure. Talking specifically about plastics. I actually prefer incineration to landfill in cases where the incinerator and its exhaust are well regulated. That's because an industrial process has the potential to chemically break down plastic into components that the environment can use again. Potentially does a lot of work in that sentence, because the plastic has to be free of toxic elements like halogens, chlorine and fluorine. For this to be remotely possible, the incineration process has to reach and maintain temperatures around 2000 Fahrenheit, and the exhaust needs to be scrubbed of hazardous things like ash and toxic compounds like nitrous oxides and sulfur compounds. But to date, humanity has produced roughly 11 billion tons of plastic, which is more than the mass of animal and plant life on Earth currently.AWild.BOf this, 9% has been recycledASo better than my guess.BBetter than your guess. 12% has been incinerated and 79% was either landfilled or escaped to the environment.AHm.BThe numbers for what was produced in 2015 are a little better than that for the full history of plastic, 19.5% recycled, 25.5% incinerated, and a mere 55% landfilled or lost to the environment.A What year were your first stats from?BThe first stats were from the entire history of plastic production.AAh, Okay.BSo that is global numbers. But how do you think the US stacks up to it?ABadly?BIt's a good safe answer to go with. Only 8% recycled, 14% incinerated, and 78% landfilled or lost to the environment as of 2010. You may recall that earlier I said that by 2018, recycling rates of plastics had risen to an equally uninspiring 8.7%.AIs there no innovation in the processing technologies though, that could make them less crappy?BMost of the innovation is in labor replacement, automation.AOf course. BSo no process of sorting plastic is fully automated. Like there still has to be a person at least involved in taking care of the weird stuff. *We do the weird stuff.* A big part of why the recycling rate is not dramatically improved is economics. Most plastic is commodity level cheap as it gets material, takes more money to recycle plastic than it does to just create it out of new oil. It's externalizing the costs of disposalAYes.BAnd so you're not paying the full costs to deal with your actions. The environment always gets shit on when you externalize things. That's just how it goes.AAnd by extension, people who need to live in an environment, but hey, they didn't have to spend as much on that cheap tacky plastic thing.BThat won't last long. So I haven't even mentioned yet the almost obscene diversity of types of plastics. I'll start with the RICs, or Resin Identification Codes. These are the numbers you see in the middle of the recycle symbol on plastic containers. Number one is PET or polyethylene teraphthylte. Say that ten times fast.ANo, thank you.BWhich is typical in beverage bottles and packaging because of its transparency and strength. Number two is HDPE, or high density polyethylene, which is used in water pipes, milk jugs, and shopping bags. Number three is PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, which is used in sewer pipes, inflatables, records, and electrical insulation. Number four is LDPE, or low density polyethylene, which is used in freezer bags and squeeze bottles because of how flexible it is. Number five is PP or polypropylene. Insert giggle here. *Did you know there’s PP on your smock? Disgusting. P stands for Pablo Picasso.* Which is used in reusable containers you know like food storage containers? He was iron and ironically, disposable cups and plates as well as yogurt cups and other dairy tubs and bottle caps. Number six is PS or polystyrene. It's used in styrofoam, plastic clamshells and other high seal packaging. By high seal, I mean the stuff where it's thermally sealed, so you actually have to cut the plastic to get the thing out of the packaging. Number seven is other. The plastic industry got bored after completing six problems on their homework assignment. Typically though, number seven is either ABS, that's acrylonitrile utadine styrene, or polycarbonate. ABS is found in Legos and plastic car interiors. Polycarbonate is found in bulletproof glass, eyeglass lenses and CDs due to its optical clarity. All those numbers on bottles and such are essentially not useful in US recycling centers because it's almost entirely automated here.ABut in other parts of the world, they do make use of those distinctions?BYes, other places, put more of the sorting burden on consumers.AGotchaBAnd that's really what it's used for. But wait, there's more. Along with these plastics, there are innumerable additives which are other polymers that are included in most of the ones I just mentioned, to modify them for strength, flexibility, appearance, and processing. No plastic at all is sold pure, even by the primary producers like Dow Chemical and 3M. They all have at least a stabilizer to protect the polymer against thermal degradation in processing, because you obviously have to melt the pellets to mold it into the thing. Many have several other additives. And PVC can be up to 80% additives by volume, which seems excessive. These additives can leach out over time, which is one of the things making plastic pollution so problematic. You look like you could use a little bit of bright side.AGo for it.BOkay, about half of the plastic produced is either number two, number four, or number five, which makes up a group called polyolefins. Polyolefins means structurally, that is just straight chains or straight chains with straight branches. No goofy shit going on here.ANo aromatic rings.BNo aromatic rings.AAre there any benzene rings?BThose are in fact the same thing.ANo way.B Yeah.ACool.BNow you know. That, the fact that it's all straight makes these plastics the most inert or least reactive. That’s half of them, half of plastic not that bad.AGood.BThey don't interfere with any biochemical processes and they aren't toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic. The others though, are some sketchy bastards. Teraphthylates, which is what makes up the plastic water bottle are known to interfere with endocrine systems. PVC sheds chlorinated trash molecules like they're going out of style. Styrene is a uniquely busybody molecule that is toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic.AWhat does mutagenic mean?BMutagenic means it will change DNA.AWhoa. I thought the covid vaccines were supposed to do that.BNo, they're not that good. I guess that the microplastics inside of the vaccines could potentially do that. ButAI was being facetious by the way.BI know. I know.AJust make sure everyone knows.BThank you for clarifying that for listeners.AThe covid vaccine is safe and effective.BMm hmm. Styrene is also flammable. I mean a lot of organic compounds are but styrene will polymerize with almost only a suggestion. Polymerizing releases heat and so given the right conditions Styrene can actually cause its own explosion through self heating. From self polymerization.A Love that.BYeah. Polycarbonate is made from BPA or bisphenol A, whose effects are so troubling that reusable water bottles and baby bottles are all identified as not having that shit in it where it was commonplace 20 years ago.AIs this like the new lead?BThis is the old lead. BPA, around 2010 is when bisphenol A was the new scare.ABut it's legitimately scary.BIt is, yes. Because it can interfere with, like I forget what endocrine, or you know it has similarities to biochemicals, and so they can interfere with those chemical pathways in the body.AAnd is this proven. This is not just theoretical?B Oh yes, it's understood.AHuh. Why haven't I heard about it before? Is this the same as those PFAS that you talk about?BDifferent.AOh. BYeah. As I actually didn't include anything about as in here or polyfluorinated AAss.BAss. I should've looked that up or put a little something in there. But they're also known as Forever Chemicals because the carbon fluorine bond is not broken down by nature and it will not ever be biodegraded. It will stay there forever. Unlike regular plastics that just will be there for longer than we will. But yeah, BPA is, you know, that was a big scare 12, 13 years ago. It was a big like we got to get this out of our baby bottles now. And they did. And it's good that they did. I think you have a pretty good idea now of how diverse plastics are. Sorting plastics can be done automatically, but how much variation do you think manufacturers want in their recyclate source material?ANot much.BRight. They want consistency like they get from virgin material. That is a batch of very consistent stuff.AMm hmm.BNo difference from pellet to pellet.AI can see that being a safety thing too.BYeah, definitely, Alike depending on the product and what it needs to be able to do. They need reliability. Are there other things that could be made with mixed up plastics though?BSo it is possible to make makes plastic things out of mixed sources. Typically, there you get into low, low value kinds of materials. I know that they call it composite lumber, which is really just made from like plastic film recycling and some sawdust that's available at your home improvement stores. It tends to sag over time though, which is kind of crappy for decking material. So you get into situations where you need to over engineer, build it with lots of factor of safety because you don't know what kind of garbage is going to be in there, which for certain cases is just fine. Like I've seen palettes that are made out of recycled plastic and they're lighter than wood ones, they're also still made out of plastic. It's a good place to make use of this material, but it's not as strong as wood. You shouldn't just throw it away. It has its own challenges, to shorten the story that I was going to make too long already. Manufacturers don't want any variation if they can help it in their source material. So how many separation bins do you think would be required at a sorting facility for that level of purity?ASounds like seven, right?BWell, keep in mind that not everything that has a one on it is the same mixture of plastic. If you didn't want to have the variation of like a shampoo bottle versus a water bottle versus another bottle with different fillers and different stabilizers and plasticizers and all the stuff that gets added in for making bottles. You'd have to have a lot more places to sort them out if you want to have tight control on what's in the bin.ASo you don't have a number, but theoretically as many different types of plastic as there are, which is probably hundreds BI'd say at least. And mixtures of plastics. That's the thing that really getsAEvery conceivable permutation. Yeah, I see the problem.BBecause none of them are made pure, none of them are sold pure. So in order to theoretically have a recycling plant that makes that kind of purity, they would have to have an infinite amount of space to sort these bottles into. So that's one reason that plastic recycling is challenging. Certain places are just more conscientious than the United States in terms of setting policy that drives, that mandates recycling. Other places are driven more by need, like in Southeast Asia. India has a much higher rate of recycling water bottles than we do because they gotta. It's a way for people to make money. Where here you couldn't make enough money to have it be your income stream.ACouldn't regulations also happen at the level of the company and the amount of waste that they're allowed to produce?BSo governments put those regulations on companies. Putting regulations on companies is something that Europe is very comfortable doing. They do it pretty well.AUnited States, nuh uh.B The United States. There are many reasons that that falls flat.ABecause mah freedoms.BMah freedoms and mah lobbyists and so on and so forth. So talking about recycling, this isn't like people where diversity leads to greater strength. Here, diversity leads to greater complexity and complication. It's also not at all helpful that chemical manufacturers who make the plastic pellets that are molded into all of the junk of modern life have proprietary ingredients. So even for a commodity plastic, it isn't the same from one manufacturer to the next. If you need more points to understand my bias against plastic, which I'm sure you don't, look to microplastics. Because plastics are not generated by nature, biological processes don't break them down chemically with a few exceptions. I know that there is a flesh eating bacteria that makes an enzyme that breaks down some plastics. Unlikely allies, huh?AI mean, if you like multiply the population of flesh eating bacteria to take care of the plastic, you might be introducing another risk.BUnintended consequences, perhaps?ASci fi writers, take note. BMm hmm. In this, that they're not broken down chemically by nature they are like rocks. And like rocks, plastics erode mechanically, creating plastic sediment which is carried around by wind and water as well as animals on the move. This has begun the process of creating plastic sandstone.ACounterpoint, so we don't want plastics to disintegrate because they release microplastics. Then wouldn't forever chemicals be better because they don't disintegrate?BNo. So this disintegrating is referring to physical size. Like they don't chemically break down. Like that's the 1,000 years. Mechanically breaking down into smaller pieces. They do,AThat's the problem.BYes, that's what creates microplastics. So they're not necessarily chemically breaking down, but mechanically. And that's where the danger is. But for some real ominous feel, we'll talk about other places these microplastics have been found. Wikipedia defines microplastics as fragments of any type of plastic, less than 5 millimeters in length. For the metric illiterate, that's about 3/16 of an inch.ASee, there you got my conversion. BNanoplastics, which is a subset of microplastics, are particles less than one micron in length, which is a 1000th of a millimeter. Small particles of plastics can be taken into animal bodies through breathing or eating. Because plastics are not a natural hazard, evolution has not prepared body systems to identify and deal with these materials. As such, microplastics tend to bioaccumulate, meaning that they concentrate as you climb the food chain. Another consequence of the novelty of plastics interacting with live tissue of pretty much any kind of life, is that the short term and long term effects are almost entirely unknown. The diversity of plastics makes the challenge of studying these effects on the vast array of life all the more difficult. Where have these microplastics been found? They've been identified by one study as being present in all 17 arteries, human arteries that were tested meaning that they may be contributing to clogging blood vessels. They've been found at the peak of Mount Everest and in the deepest ocean trenches. Microplastics have been found in human blood, breast milk, and feces. In a sampling of 62 human placentas, all had detectable microplastics.ASo they're part of us no matter what.B Right now. Yeah. This particular finding troubled the researchers, because placentas only grow for eight months, meaning that other organs have much more time for accumulating these particles. The biggest contributors to microplastic pollution are textiles like clothing, tigers, naughty tigers, tires, and city dust. City dust here is the result of weathering, abrasion, and detergents in a number of contexts on synthetic products. Some products, however, are actually formulated with microplastics AOn purpose. BOn purpose. Okay, you let him in, come on in or out, come in, or leave us alone. An example is cosmetics, where micro beads or micro-exfoliates are microplastics engineered to be used in cosmetics and cleaning products. There we go. Fig has entered the chat. Many companies have stopped the use of micro beads, but have shifted to using metallized plastic glitter for the same purposes which is a crafty way of doing something worse because it wasn't specifically listed.ALoophole.BYes, it's a loophole. So one of the weaknesses that plastics share with paper is that they suffer from degradation in the recycling process. This is due to physical similarities. Paper is made of fibers and molecules of polymer are quite long like fibers. I don't think that plastics degrade quite as quickly as paper does, because paper is entirely broken down through mechanical separation, which breaks the fiber length, where plastics need to be broken down mechanically but melting is where the real process happens for plastics. Melting also contributes some degradation to the end product, which is why many scientists have looked for what's called a cradle to cradle recycling process that use chemistry to effectively unzip the long plastic molecules into the components used to create them. There are not currently any such processes in wide usage, but one of the interesting concepts I've encountered is thermally decomposing plastics into pyrolysis oil, which could be run back through a modified oil refinery to remake plastic. The most interesting part of this is that it would accept a pretty wide range of plastics. There were a few things that I talked about earlier that I said, I'll get to that later about, well, it's later. First, clothings and fabric. I didn't include them in recycling, even though there has been a pretty long history of recycling fabric and clothing. To clarify, by recycling here, I'm not talking about thrift stores which are great in their own right. I'm talking about remanufacturing clothes that are no longer functional into new cloth. In 1813, an inventor figured out that wool could be recycled in much the same way as paper, into what's called rag wool or shoddy, is that a familiar word?AYeah, that's where it comes from?B That's where it comes from.AShoddy work. So it must not have been very high quality.BWell, I'm not sure if there was a quality loss in it, but this shoddy could then be respun into yarn. Much simpler and more common is simply down cycling clothes into wiping rags for wiping off things that are oily or otherwise going to be like a single wiping use.AThat's a lot of rags though.BYes, that is a lot of rags. I don't think that there's quite that much demand, which is why they end up going to a landfill most of the time. But clothing can also, of course, be mended when it is damaged. Clothes can also be broken into seamless sections of fabric and used for patches, or turned into patchwork quilts or even patchwork clothes.ASo I'm guessing you're not a fan of fast fashion.BHaha, no, fast fashion is one of the things that needs to die fast.AOkay.BSome companies have invested in developing a means of chemical recycling of synthetics like polyester, in a cradle to cradle type process. But this is not in the mass application stage. Bits of natural fiber cloth, like cotton, wool, or linen that are too stained to be reusable can be composted. With this array of possible quasi recycling options, one reason I didn't want to include fabrics in a recycling discussion is because it has so many different shades of reuse and doesn't compare well with other materials in that way. The other big reason is how many clothing tags I see that have blended fibers. I said earlier that composite materials are almost never recyclable. In fabrics this is not quite as hard a rule because a patchwork item need not be made from uniform materials. But mechanically or chemically separating blended fibers is a complete nonstarter. You're familiar with stretch jeans, right?AMm hm.BThat modification of the fabric that makes them stretch also makes them stretch in unflattering ways after a few years, shortening the lifespan of the garment and making it difficult to repair and impossible to recycle. Finally, Abi, do you remember hearing about the three Rs in elementary school?AReduce, reuse, recycle.BThose are the ones. That is a list put in order of priority of how to deal with waste better than throwing things in the trash. First, you buy less stuff. You buy less stuff by making things go farther or being judicious in what you do use. Do you really need to buy that specialized kitchen gadget that you'll probably only use once or twice before forgetting you stuck it away on the top shelf.AIn the kitchen randos bin.BThe kitchen randos box.AWe have one of those.BSecond, reuse the things you get instead of tossing them. This can include everything from repurposing containers for plants or crafting with used materials, buying secondhand products, repairing things, et cetera. And then if you really can't do without a thing or figure out a way to use it again, recycle it. Why do you think, Abi, that this priority was reduced to a slogan that lost its real meaning?A I don't know.BMy assessment though is that reducing and reusing would cause a drop in economic activity, but recycling causes an increase in economic activity.AYes, that makes sense.BPerhaps recycling actually has some negative effect on extraction industries, but modest recycling would actually boost manufacturing, which benefits from increased supply of materials. Also, recycling requires less thought and intention than reducing consumption or reducing discards. My very last subject will bring us back to green washing. Where in all of our discussion did you hear something that made you think of green washing?AEnlighten me.BCompanies are doing it all the time in advertising. Making a thing seem great, for being 2% better, if it is better at all. This gets to what I think is one of the biggest and most dangerous problems with recycling. Throwing a discard in the recycling bin feels good even if it only has a marginal effect or if it has in the case of wish cycling a negative effect. It doesn't have to, but it can turn into a way of green washing yourself into feeling virtuous when you're really doing the bare minimum. That psychic relief can cause people to think they are doing something and that's enough. First they toss in the can, then they throw in the towel. AHaha, cute.BThank you. I am quite proud of that one, to quote my mother in law, for whom I must say, I have a great deal of respect.AUh oh, where's this going?BI already recycle. What more do you want me to do?AShe said that?BShe did.AUh oh.BIt was one of the nights that you were already in bed.A I bet that got heated. BYeah. A little bitABut Let's not forget the very first time you met my family. You instantly started in on lecturing my mom about the chemicals in diet Coke.BYes.A Made a great impression.BI do that. Make great impressions. Okay, that is my content. If I'm being honest, it was a lot of bad news. Sorry everyone. But in the spirit of trying to make things better, I'm not going to merely make you feel bad. Studies have shown that the best way to address anxiety is to have anything that you can do about the anxiety inducing problem. Here's what you can do about the problems with recycling. First of all, check your local government's website to figure out what is accepted and how to recycle. If you're not sure where to look for that, start at the state level and it will likely point you in the right direction. Pick up litter if you're bored in a public place, you can do this all by yourself. You don't need to ask permission and nobody will stop you. The next obvious thing to say is, don't put recyclables in the trash. I'm giving you permission to be slightly obnoxious about it. Slightly. If I don't see a place to recycle an obviously recyclable item, I'll bring it home.AYeah, you are obnoxious about it.BYes, I am, but you don't need to be as obnoxious as I am about it, listener. You could ask a worker if there's a place for recycling to go and if not, ask if there’s a way to ask the manager to get one put in. In your workplace you can ask the management to put together a recycling awareness drive to help workers understand what is and isn't recyclable and where to put these items. And with any luck, you could even convince them to set recycling improvement and or waste reduction goals. If it feels like a game or a competition, it's not drudgery. Another great move is to think twice before buying plastic. There may be a better option or at least an other option. The next step is civic engagement. You can show up at your local city council or town board meeting and push for better access to recycling services and better practices by the local government in their buildings, such as not buying plastics or not buying disposable plastic this or that. You can get involved in a local political party unit and start pushing for better and better practices and policies at every level of government. Join an interest group for zero waste, recycling, or an environmental concern. Go to a protest. Contact your representatives. Contact companies that make your favorite products. Tell anyone who will listen that recycling matters to you and there are ways that everyone can do better. In this case, some progress can happen quickly because the recycling system is already in place. It just needs to be used better. I want to reiterate the words of the one slur from Dr. Seuss Lorax. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, things aren't going to get better. They're not. That's it. Okay. We're done.AWell, no, we're notBOkay. I'm done.ASo we just, the last episode we did was about the climate emergency.BYes. ASo recycling is connected to that. But what about the shoving the responsibility onto individuals part of it?BVery good point. I thought that I had covered that, but I actually did not in my pages of notes. So that move, that anti littering campaign and even the framing of discards being left in nature as littering, something that the individual is responsible for, which they are, comes from companies like Coca Cola, who in I forget what year, they were part of the group that started Keep America Beautiful campaign. Sound familiar? And so this was something done by bottlers and other groups and tried to make American consumers feel bad about throwing something into nature.AWhen it was Coca Cola that was using plastic bottles in the first place.BYes, when it was Coca Cola that was churning these fuckers out by the million. Making individual consumers of their products feel bad for having the container that this company made still in hand and not knowing what to do with it. So yes, this is right in line with Shell releasing a carbon footprint calculator.AYes. The audacity.BCarbon footprint again, was a thing created whole cloth by oil companies for exactly that purpose. To shift blame from them, the producers to you, the consumers.AI'm sure people have calculated the carbon footprint of Shell, and I'm sure, ridiculous.B It's probably about like the military footprint of the United States, a great big one.AOkay. So I am relieved to hear that recycling is not, you know, Bit's not a shamA as cynical of a reality as I was concerned it was.BMm hmm. I have heard tinfoil hat kind of people say things like, it doesn't matter if you put an aluminum can in the garbage or in the recycling because it all goes to the waste incinerator anyway. That isn't true. That's a talking point. And if it was true, it would be economically stupid because like in our specific town, it doesn't matter how big your recycling bin is, you get charged a flat rate for recycling. But the bigger your garbage bin is, the more you get charged for it.AThen what would be the point of arguing that?BTo get people to stop doing it.ABut why? Who does that benefit?BPeople who don't want you to care about the environment at all.ATrying to cultivate apathy in general. Because secretly it serves business interests.BApathy serves the status quo all the time, every time.AWhich means apathy serves capitalism. So metal. Metal is where it's at, that it's more recyclable and more useful than someone might think.BYes, absolutely.AMore paper products, more types of paper are recyclable than I realized. Glass should be reused instead of recycled when possible.BAll things should be re used instead of recycled when possible.ARight. Mason jars, man. Like somebody should haveBMason jars are where it's fucking at.AWell, I know, but someone should have like a central repository for people to turn in their mason jars. And like people can come pick them up and then they wouldn't need to buy them from Fleet Farm. Because all you got to do is boil them and then do whatever. Plus it makes you look socially conscious and cool if you bring your salad in a Mason jar to work.BThat's true.ANot very functional though, unless you dump the salad out Bdirectly onto the desk. Yeah.AI mean, a plate would generally be less messy, but yes.BDepends on how clean your desk is, I suppose.AOh, man. How did all this ranch dressing get in my keyboard? Plastics avoid when possible. But that's really, really hard.BIt is.AAnd I think that's a burden that's not fair to place on individuals, like stop buying plastic because the world is such that we cannot live without it. I mean, it's embedded in our bodies at this point. So I think that when it comes to plastics. That's where I think more regulation andBSystems change.Aand awareness is the answer. Does that seem fair?BYes, it absolutely does. I'm not advocating for feeling bad about only having plastic products available and having to pick the lesser evil. I'm talking about cases where you could legitimately get a good replacement for a plastic product with one that is not.ALike for what?BIn buying clothing, you could avoid synthetics.AActually just buy secondhand clothes.BYeah, buy secondhand clothes because that requires no manufacturing. That's true. Yeah.A I've heard people discuss what a problem it is to try to get rid of clothes, that there's just mountains of clothes out there.BYeah. A lot of it gets shipped to the third world. Well, to what has been called the third world, but like to Africa and Asia, which is kind of funny because we ship a lot of clothes here from Asia.ASimilar to recycling, people feel good when they drop off a donation box at their goodwill or whatever. And you know that's one half of the equation. If you're still buying new to replace, you're not ultimatelyBYou're not helping.AReducing the demand. But again, this is coming from someone who, like I try to buy secondhand most of the time, but sometimes it's just not realistic for what you need. So again, speaking for the pragmatists out there, it's something to be aware of. But I wouldn't get caught up in being a purist about it.BRight. Yes, our society is not set up to accommodate purists at all in that way. So know that you're doing your best.AThanks Benton.BThank you.
January 4, 2024
Dealing with climate doom
Benton and Abi feel bad about climate change. As they should. They talk about how to channel negative emotions into productive action, as recommended in the book Facing the Climate Emergency by Margaret Klein Salamon. Sources and further reading Salamon, Margaret Klein (2023). Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth . New Society Publishers. Bakke, A. & B. Bakke (Hosts). "Disaster Comm, Part 1: Disaster is the New Normal." (24 Nov. 2022). [Podcast Episode]. In TC Talk. https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/Disaster-comm--Part-1-Disaster-is-the-new-normal-e1r7var/a-a8u21lb Bakke, A. & B. Bakke (Hosts). "A Tech Comm Prof and a Space Enthusiast React to Don't Look Up " (6 Jan. 2022). [Podcast Episode]. In TC Talk. https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/techcommtalk/episodes/A-tech-comm-prof-and-a-space-enthusiast-react-to-Dont-Look-Up-e1cffr5/a-a76c9bs Resilience. (2023, November 15). Crazy Town Bonus Riff: Bundyville and Stories that Need to Be Told with Leah Sottile . Resilience. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-11-15/crazy-town-bonus-leah-sottile/ Westervelt, Amy. (Host). (2016-present). Drilled [Podcast]. Drilled Media. https://drilled.media Transcript BIt's depressing. It's enraging. It's frustrating. It makes me want to change everything I do. It makes me feel like it won't make a difference if I do. It makes me want to run for office to fix something. I get all the feels about it.AHi My name is Abi. I'm a professor of technical Communication.BOh, now me?AMm hmm. BAnd I'm Benton. I am not a professor of technical communication.AAnd this is TC talk. That's tech talk. So we talk about Tech comm whether or not we are professors of it, BRight. I guess that you could consider me a bit of a subject matter expert on this. Expert ay be a little overreach butARight we're talking climate today.BWe're talking climate.AThis is going to be a hard episode.BYeah, AI've been putting it off because we're going to talk about BThe climate emergency Aand specifically our psychological states around it, our emotions around it.BMm hmm.AClimate anxiety. Climate doom BYes.AIt's a real thing. It's safe to say we both have experienced it.BYes. Would you like me to mansplain it to the audience?ABen splain.BBen splain. Okay. That sounds a lot less negative.AAre you going to Ben splain the climate emergency or climate anxiety?BClimate Doom.A Oh, okay.BSo climate doom, which can lead to climate Doomerism, is a response to information about the climate emergency that is basically, well, we're all fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.ARight. Climate doom is perhaps an unproductive manifestation of climate anxiety.BPerhaps?AOkay, okay.BIt's explicitly an unproductive response.AOkay. So Listeners may recall several months ago we did a series on crisis communication.BYes.AAnd in the course of that, in part one I believe we talked about how I tend to, well, initially I said I tend to bury my head in the sand in response to bad news. And then I revised it to no, I run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Because as much as I wish I could bury the feelings, I can't. They're always there and I find them paralyzing at times.BIt drives you to avoid engaging with the data, with the reality.A And you are, you're kind of like, let me work this into every casual conversation.BYeah.AWhich makes you a lovely dinner party companion. BHow many dinner parties have we been to?ASee, that's why!BI doubt it.AWe'd be invited to more if people weren't always like we can't invite Benton, he's gonna be holding us all accountable. No, but you're right and you have very kindly and gently brought my attention to this tendency of mine and we have a thing. Who's that?BThat's Fern.ALet her in. This is our first time recording with two cats. BYeah.AAnd Fig has never been in the blanket for it, so it's a new experience for him. where was I? So you very gently brought this to my attention by recommending that I read this book. And the book wasBFacing the climate emergency.AHow to transform yourself with climate Truth, by Margaret Salomon Klein. I did not like what this book had to say. It called me out. I needed to hear it. I hated the experience of reading it. But I'm on board. So this author, she is a psychologist and a climate activist. She founded the Climate Emergency Fund. And I feel like psychological perspectives have kind of been missing from the conversation about climate communication. Well, I shouldn't say that. I hadn't been paying attention to the fact that there is work being done around psychological responses to climate change and how that affects people's behavior. This topic is relevant to TC talk listeners in a couple of ways. Obviously, technical communicators are tasked with conveying complex technical and scientific information to a range of audiences. Climate change is scientific and technical, but it's also affecting everyone by now, BYes.ASo it should not be the scientific and technical topic that remains, this is knowledge that should not be hoarded or kept amongst experts. It needs to be shared widely. And that's not to say people haven't tried. I think for a long time there's been that, that classic science communication misconception that if only people knew, if only people had the information, they had the facts, then they would do the right thing. Then they would understand.BMmm hmm.AThen they would believeBthe Education Panacea fallacy. I just made that up.AYeah. There is an actual name for that. But I can't think of what it is at the moment. So I think part of the solution could be understanding how people are approaching it cognitively. One thing I always encourage my students to do is consider the emotional states of their audiences. There's never going to be a reader, or an audience, or a user who is in a 100% ideal frame of mind when they encounter your communication.BTrue.A People will have different beliefs and feelings and obstacles that affect how they respond to the information. So on the one hand, I hope that by discussing this, people who teach and do tech comm can, we'll give you something more to consider in terms of crafting communication for your audiences, but more relevant to our focus today. We each also individually have to deal with our shit.BYes.AI just I have feelings about this stuff. I’m going to vomit them upon you.BWhere they come from is a question that is real.ASo my dad is a songwriter. One of his first songs he ever wrote in college, that was a lyric. We'll never let him live it down. Um, feelings, I have feelings.BBy us talking about it and our feelings I think that, I hope that we can help guide others to begin this process on their own.AYeah. Which is something that she says in the book that we need to do is we need to talk about it. Do you remember when we went to the DFL picnic and I was talking with our Minnesota State representative. And I was like, so, give listeners a brief rundown of how awesome the Minnesota Legislature has done.BYes. So, national news has picked up a lot of the accomplishments of the DFL, which is the Minnesota variety of Democrat, ADemocratic Farmer Laborer.BYep. Anyway, their accomplishments at the state level, having control of the State House,AThey have a razor thin majority,BBut having that thin majority still accomplishing major things.Alegalized marijuana,BPaid sick leave.AEnvironment stuff, BYes, environment stuff.AThe point is Minnesota has been called the anti -Florida and I think it should be a model to other states of what to do when you actually get power.BMm-Hm.AIs like make stuff happen. Anyway. So I was talking to him about this and I was like, what do we do about climate change? Omg. And he said, have conversations about it. And initially I was like, what is that going to do? We need to act. And as will become clear as we proceed through this discussion, you got to get other people on board. Everyone's kind of already thinking about it, and probably ignoring it.BMm hm.ASo we got to make people uncomfortable.BYeah.AShe shares a 2021 study that showed that 56% of young people believe that humanity is doomed. 46% say that climate anxiety affects them every day. So I'm not just making it up. People are thinking about it, people are worried about it. The book is pretty easy read. Well, I shouldn't say easy, it's a decently quick read. She has the chapters broken down into steps for dealing with your climate anxiety. The first step being face the truth. Second, welcome the painful feelings. Three, re-imagine your life story. Four, enter emergency mode. Five, join the movement and disrupt normalcy. First, a little background. She says, and I quote, “we are in pain because our world is dying and through our passivity, we are responsible for killing it.”BSo that's why it's important to talk about it. Anything but passivity.AYeah. That sucks to hear but this passivity is all around us. It's like, I don't know, the millennial cynicism. It's probably not limited to one generation. But when we see that attitude, it seems like, meow, like the end of earth is inevitable. Like the end of humanity as we know it is inevitable, we've resigned ourselves to it. She says “How can we otherwise make sense of the fact that more people aren't rioting in the streets at the imminent destruction of their lives, their children's lives, and the entire web of life?” It's one of those things that you look around and you're like, am I banana pants or is everybody else?BAm I fully disconnected from reality or is everyone else? AYeah, yeah. And the answer is kind of everyone else, honestly.BMm hm.AI mean ourselves included because we're all like, she says, we look to other people to gauge risk.BYep.AHow are other people acting? We follow their lead, and frankly our leaders are not acting like this is the crisis that it actually is.BRight.ASo she's part of a group that helped make the phrase climate emergency a thing. We'll talk about what that is shortly. She advocates for disruptive but non violent climate activism and my reactions and my resistance as I read the book, have really helped see where I need to grow.BHm.ABecause I wish there were a way to make a difference without making waves. But change doesn't happen that way, like meaningful change doesn't happen that way.BSystems resist that.AYou've certainly looked this in the face more directly than I have. How do you feel about the climate emergency? How do you feel?BBad is too small a word.AIt is all encompassing though.BIt is all encompassing. Yeah. I feel, it's depressing. It's enraging. It's frustrating. It makes me want to change everything I do. It makes me feel like it won't make a difference if I do. It makes me want to run for office to fix something. I get all the feels about it.AYeah. And overwhelmed from all the feels.BRanging from the positive, I know how to fix this. Someone should let me, to Despair.AI don't know if this is an apt metaphor, but I love the good place. The TV show.BMm hm.AAnd I think it's season three, the part where Chidi, suddenly all truth is revealed to him, you know, the truth of the universe, and life and death, et cetera, and it's not good news and he goes out of his mind and he cooks a gigantic pot of chili in front of his philosophy class and adds marshmallow peeps and M and M's while wearing a who what where wine T shirt. He tells his class, nothing matters. That's what you need to know for the test.BHe has a moment where he says, this broke me. You get to a point of information where logic just gives up.AYeah. So when I think too hard about climate, I'm like, why not cook a pot of peep chili in front of my class? But then Eleanor kind of brings him to his senses and says, well, what other choice do we have but to try?BI think that's a pretty good metaphor.AYeah? All right. Are you ready to face the truth? I mean, you already have.BAre you ready to face the truth, listener?AIt's telling that the word truth pings my conspiracy alarm bells, like what does that mean?BThe fact is that there are in fact conspiracies, they're real, they've been uncovered. Conspiracies that specifically that Exxon knew. In the '70s. Like they were aware in the late '70s that climate change was lock things up.AYeah, I mean, it is kind of a conspiracy, but it's one that works because it makes us feel better to buy into the lie that it's not that bad. So here in two sentences, the truth of the climate emergency is, here. Read this for me.BCertainly. “Scientific consensus says the accelerating climate emergency and ecological crisis threatens human life through famine, disease, accelerating natural disasters, conflicts and social collapse. Only an emergency mobilization of resources to rapidly transform our entire economy and society (Meaning zero emissions and drawdown) can possibly protect the future of humanity and the living world.”AWe're not going to go over the science. That's out there. We're not trying to convince anyone that this is real at this point. We're trying to be real about the extent of the damage. She talks about how we actually expend energy trying to bury our feelings about it and protect ourselves. And the media and the fossil fuel industry have really given us a hand in this regard, even if we know they’re scum, their campaigns have been extremely effective. They don't have to deny climate change, they just have to scatter enough seeds of doubt that we can discard info that may be true, but it is hard to face. It gives us that plausible deniability.BWhat is the matter with you cat?AAnd they, so the fossil fuel industry followed the big tobacco playbook, right? And we have an entire major political party that denies the science of climate change. The Republican Party is the only major political party in the world that does that.BAmerican exceptionalism.AAnd, you know, in efforts to be bipartisan and whatever it, in efforts to appease that audience, all legitimate efforts to curtail climate change are going to be dragged down to a negligible level.BMm hm.ASo the Inflation Reduction act was passed in 2022. What do you know about that one?B It's kind of a big change from a lot of legislation that we've had lately. It is an industrial policy piece of legislation that, I think that it has something like 360 billion somewhere in there dollars earmarked for climate change, various efforts, which is the largest in the world so far. I say industrial policy because it aims at getting these industries up and going through whatever means necessary.AWhat industries? Renewable energy?BRenewable energy, electrification of various aspects of our industrialized society.ASo, it's a step in the right direction?BYes, it's a step in the right direction.ABut it's not enough.BIt's not enough and from the bill that it was taken, which you probably heard of the green new deal. It's basicallyAWatered down?BYeah, it's like 5% of that.AWow.BThat's the problem with compromising with lunatics.AYeah. So that should tell you how behind we actually are. And she talks about the justice aspect of this too, is that the effects of climate change are not being borne equally. The gap will only widen with the worst harms on the most marginalized peopleBwho caused it the least.AExactly. Exactly. And she talks about “a future where electric cars and trucks offer a temporarily tolerable lifestyle for the privileged, while electric tanks at the border stop desperate migrants from coming in.”BIt's an interesting comment. The electric tanks, Mm hmm. Militaries the world over have been by leaps and bounds the worst emitters of carbon dioxide, the worst. due to national security reasons, they're not added in to calculations.AReally?BYep. If you know how much fuel,A Oh my gosh.B If you know how much fuel an army is using, you can make a guess about how many vehicles of what types.AHow do you know this?BIt's in the book.A This book?Bmaybe it isn't in this book. I think it might be in Greta Thunberg's The Climate Book. A AWow.BWhich is also a great read.AWhat a loophole.BTo a much smaller extent, global shipping, air freight, container ships, that's not captured by any country, it's only 3% to 4% of carbon emissions but it's one of those had to deal with ones because, you know, long distance transportation is hard to do electrically.AIt makes me so mad to look at the billions being indiscriminately spent on defense in our country. Mm hm. BAnd no one questions that it goes up every year.AAnd we're apparently not able to keep account of the carbon emissions that result from our huge military.BMm hmm. Fun side note, I don't, I don't know if there's been a second one done, but the Pentagon has failed its audit. They can't account 21 million dollars of spending.AWhat? Did they check the couch cushions?BIt's a lot of couch cushions.AThe money is there because somehow as a society, we've decided that this matters more than anything else. We just need to shift our focus. What is it, is it that climate change is not a person? It's not an enemy that we can't wrap our heads around like this is actually a bigger threat than some other country.BI think there’s a lot of, a lot that goes into the psychology of not dealing with it. Part of it is that frog in the pot analogy, things have been changing slowly, so you might not have noticed over time how, for example, you don't get as many bugs on the windshield at night anymore because insect populations are declining.AWe live in Minnesota, it's late December, we have not had snow on the ground, BRight? That isn't unheard of, especially in southern Minnesota. But as nice as it is to work outside right now, it still is unnerving.ANot to mention, in the summer when the Canadian wildfires polluted our air in southern Minnesota, to the point where we were advised to stay inside. The position of climate denial is, it may have worked for a while. By now it's like it's keeping you in your house. How do you explain that away?BIt’s like Don’t Look Up.AI don't know, but people are very motivated to. Yeah, watch Don't look up on Netflix or listen to our episode on it. What is it, A tech comm prof and a space enthusiast react to Don’t Look up.BSo another thing that makes it really hard to address is that the easiest solution, the best solution, is less consumption and that is less imaginable for most Americans than the complete collapse of human civilization.ABut we need to be really cautious about thinking that the solution lies at an individual level,BRight. It doesn't.ABecause that's something that the fossil fuel industries, you know, that was masterful propaganda to say recycle and you individually can make choices to save the world while they're the ones Bprofiting from its demise.AYes, I think we need to be reasonable about individual actions we can take to reduce our own carbon footprint. You know, weigh them against the efficacy of other individual actions that are meant to push us towards systemic change. Does that make sense?BYes, everyone can do something, but the most important thing that we can do is change the systems that, you know, like suburbs make cars necessary. Yeah. The way that our society is laid out. It's just needs to change.ABut I absolutely see what you're saying is that self interest is something that's also causing us to avoid looking at the consequences of our lifestyles because Mm hm. It's hard to give up the privilege you have.BRight.ASo let’s talk about some of the common psychological defenses that people use. There's outright denial of course.BMm hm. AIntellectualization: it's real, but it doesn't affect me emotionally. Willful ignorance: I don't want to know what's happening. Mm hmm. Wishful thinking. It can't be that bad. We're making progress, which is false, by the way.BRight.AI don't think she talks about it. But would you lump techno optimism in with wishful thinking as a psychological defense?BI would consider techno optimism a subset of wishful thinking.ASo that belief that science,BScience will figure something out. Science already figured it out. That's the thing. We just need to have the will to do it.AWell, we want science to come up with an answer that doesn't require us to be uncomfortable.BRight.AIn any way.BWe want a drop in solution that doesn't change anything but somehow magically fixes the problems that our everything have caused.AYeah. Projection, it is real, but it's other people's fault. Mm hm. Which again, is largely true BFor every individual. It's largely true except for, you know, the 100 richest people in the world who've done most of it.AGradualism, we can't scare the public. We need hope, not fear.BMm hmm.ABut doesn't that sound so nice and balanced and reasonable?BYeah.AAgain, it's the civilized response. It's the response that allows us to not make waves and toBit's tone policing.AOoh, good call. It makes it possible to silence the people who are being uncomfortably loud about it.BMm hm. ABut we should be scared. Climate communicators are not being honest with us if they're not scaring us. And she also says that the claims against public fear are not supported by evidence. So that whole line of, we can't scare the public, is not actually true.BWe can't scare the public, well, the historical evidence is not in, does not support that. What happened after 911?AExactly. BWhat happened after Pearl Harbor?AYeah. Fear mongering is perfectly acceptable if it supports a military intervention.BMm hmm.AHow convenient. So she says that public discussion is trapped somewhere between denialism and gradualism right now. And the Overton window is too small to accommodate the reality.BYes, the Overton window, I think ironically it was actually coined by a right winger, It's the window of things that are okay to discuss, that are politically acceptable to discuss Athings that are in bounds.BMm hm.AIn other words we can't talk about radical climate action without being seen as silly or overreacting in the United States.BRight.AThe good news, she says, we're not powerless.BOh, thank goodness.AWe feel this way, We feel helpless for a reason. She says “larger forces have conspired, both purposefully and inadvertently, to deny the truth, making us feel helpless.” And that helplessness breeds passivity, which allows the status quo to continue. And she talks about World War Two as an example of the United States rallying around a common cause.B Yeah.AAnd not just like, let's go Bkill the baddies.AExactly. But home front like mobilization and self-sacrifice.BYeah. There were lots of scrap drives to get the important metals, materials that were needed for the war effort, for things as simple as building or retooling factories.AVictory Gardens?BVictory Gardens. Yeah.AAnd of course the up ending of society so that women went to work in the factories and they actually created government subsidized childcare.Bthat even included at times the ability to pick up your kid with a hot meal to take home at the end of your factory shift.ABut yeah, the country was largely unified. They had a common sense of purpose. It's possible. Covid was an opportunity to have that sense of purpose again.Bto a small extent, I think that some people captured it.AYeah. And with World War Two, I don't think there was an entire political party that was resisting forward motion. I mean, BNot in this country anyway.AWell, I mean, there were certainly American Nazis.BYeah, that's true.AAnd what do you call them? Isolationists.BYep.ABut I don't think they were the presence that climate deniers are today.BYeah. They had the good sense to shut up after Pearl Harbor.AMm. Are you feeling bad, Benton?BYeah.AWell, we're coming to step two. Welcome fear, grief, and other painful feelings.BArgh.AAnd by the way, it took us a long time to get through step one, but the rest of these won't take that long.BOkay.AHere's what I wanted the author to say when I first started reading this book. Don't worry about it. Obviously, because you're so distressed, you're a good person who cares and that's what matters. You can't do anything about this, so stop stressing. Do self care, go to therapy, meditate, take a bubble bath, journal.BI'm smiling. AWhy?BI mean, you weren't all wrong there. Go to therapy. Self-care, certainly.ANo, these are good things. These are good things. But they don't get at the root of our climate anxiety. BSoothe is not the right strategy.AYeah, I think those things should be done in addition to meaningful action. She says feel the feelings, they are justified. Stop trying to tamp them down. There is freedom in feeling your feelings. You feel this way because your fears are justified. I don't like feeling bad feelings, Benton. You can try to bury them but they're still there. She talks about approaching your feelings with self compassion and curiosity. So for my part I need to be compassionate towards myself for trying to bury or rationalize the feelings around climate change because it was and is an act of self protection.BMm hmm. AThis is how humans are built.BIt's an act of psychic, psychic self preservation.AYeah. And I really liked what she had to say here. “Your painful feelings spring from the best parts of yourself, from your empathy, sense of responsibility, love for others, and love of life.”BThat was so good to read.AYou know, we talk about grief even as being a sign of love.BYeah.AThat we've loved someone. And I think feeling grief about what we’ve lost, what our planet has lost,BWhat we've already lost.AYes. Is a sign that, that we truly do care about it.BMm hm.AWhat was that stat she had about the percentage of biodiversity that plummeted?BOh boy. It was really, it was really sad. I know that, like I had mentioned earlier, the insect population as measured by Bug strikes on windshields, which, sure, it's citizen science. It's not perfect but it's a good gauge.AMm. “The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2018 documents a 60% decline in the populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians in the last 40 years. The insect apocalypse is the tip of the spear, but it's also the base of the food chain.”BMm hmm.A“Number of insects surveyed by weight decreased by 75% between 1989 and 2016. Monarch butterfly population in North America has declined by 90% in the last 20 years.”B In the last 20 years. Man.Agrieving is not the same as giving up, she says. And here she talks about the climate doomers that you referenced at the beginning. “They use grief as an endpoint, an excuse for inaction” when we should be channeling grief into action. Step three then is reimagine your life's story. See yourself as a hero on a mission. And what gifts and challenges and experiences have you had in your life that can contribute to this mission? This kind of involves acknowledging that you can't live the life you've imagined. Or at the very least, our kids are not going to be able to live the lives we've imagined for them and their kids. She talks about this will to live that is part of all life, really.BYep. That's, that's one of the impulse, that's one of the impulses of, of life. Is that will to live. I know that she also talked about how, gosh, what was it during the Cold War? There was some study that talked about the oppositeAWill to die?B Yeah. Basically the apocalyptic thinking that is more or less dominant now. With the advent of mutually assured destruction as military policy, it sort of began that people were like, you know what, We kind of deserve it.ASo what does action look like? And that brings us to step four. Enter emergency mode versus panic mode, which is freezing, right? Or resignation mode,B right? So panic would be a whole bunch of action that accomplishes nothing. When you panic, that's what you do. Yeah. Run around and don't do anything useful.ASo right now we are in normal mode, which means we are acting in denial of the reality of global warming. And although we would all say we're not denialists, we know it's real, we are not acting like it. And that's what matters. We feel safe. In normal mode, governments can invest in multiple priorities. Emergency mode says everything goes to solve our one biggest existential threat. Like nothing else fucking matters, right? Spend without limit becauseBThe cost of not, is everything.AYeah. Yeah. And Like I said before, our government seemingly spends without limit on the military. So there is precedent for it.BYeah. The rhetoric of what it's going to cost, and the expense of the green transition and all of that is very much status quo. Not only that, but it's also not the way that those terms are used. Costs don't have a valuable product. Investments take capital and they give you something. Investing in a green future is what we would be doing.ASo try to shift the discussion from action costing something to it being investing in something. Is that what you're saying?BYeah, I think that that's the right way to do it. Investing yourself in a cause. Investing in upgrades to your home or whatever.ASo we need to follow the lead of climate groups that are acting like the problem is she mentions extinction rebellion, the sunrise movement. Are there others you know of?BJust stop Oil was one in the UK. They actually disrupted the flow of, I can't remember, probably just gas in Britain for 6 hours, whole country. With coordinated efforts of, you know, valve turning and that sort of thing.AWow. And people complain about that, right? And people say, I understand, I agree with them. But they shouldn't,BThey shouldn't disrupt.ARight.BSo step one is don't be that person. Don't complain about being disrupted.AYeah, I mean, you don't have to like it, but that's the point.BExactly.AShe also talks about the group Act Up, which helped bring awareness to the Aids crisis in the '80s. They obviously weren't covering climate issues, but they modeled disruptive nonviolent protest in a way that was effective. Also, if you are interested in Act Up, then the movie BPM, I would recommend. It's a French movie. It shows, I think, a really realistic picture of organizing and how there were disagreements and they had to prioritize and make decisions but they had a shared mission. Thanks to Matt for the recommendation. But the idea is that in emergency mode, people shift from thinking in terms of what is good for me and start to think what is good for the cause. When we personally shift into emergency mode, we should tell people because others need to see us setting that example, which means we're going to be the annoying ones.BYes, Awe're going to be no fun to be around. And she says, “ talking about climate is the one mode of engagement that I recommend to everyone.” On the one hand it's like how could that do anything, but on the other hand,B it breaks the culture of silence.AYeah and if you're listening to us and you're feeling uncomfortable it’s because you were already feeling uncomfortable and It's just coming to the surface now. So own it.BWe're giving you permission.A Yeah. Feel bad. BMm hmm. If you don't feel bad when things are bad, there's something wrong with you. AOr you are engaging in a very human response of self-preservation.BRight? I should say feeling bad about things being bad is an appropriate response.AYeah. Step five, join the movement and disrupt normalcy. She talks about how the original climate movement was dominated by gradualism, coziness with business interests and insider politics. And how that is not the approach that's going to get us where we need to be anymore. “Sustained escalating disruptive action is the fastest, most effective route to transformative change.” She talks about how disruptive action does not fit her personality. I think that's important because I have told myself, you know, that's just not me.BMm hm.ABut I believe in the research that it's the most effective. And she says that there are many ways to support the movement that don't involve, you know, being out in the streets rioting or whatever.BPeople out in the streets don't riot, they protest.AThank you. Good catch. My bad.BThat's an important rhetorical move by those trying to criminalize speech.AExactly.BWhich, I got to make a plug for Drilled done by Amy Westervelt. Yes, it's a podcast. She has a whole season on the real Free Speech Threat and it's how business, specifically oil, is trying to criminalize free speech largely in the sphere of protest.AThat's dystopian.BYeah, it is. AThat kind of investigative journalism, that is something we can support with our wallet. BMm hmm.AAnd she has, you know, sort of a checklist of questions you can ask yourself to gauge, like where might you fit in? What risks are you willing to take? Number one, your body, for instance, are you willing to be physically arrested BPhysical confrontation with police or counter protesters.AYep. And she says if you have racial or economic privilege, this is a great way to deploy it. At the same time, I don't think you should force yourself into literal danger. It’s, everyone has to decide for themselves like what's the limit.BHere's where the individualism comes in. You have to decide what your level of involvement in in the cause will be.ANumber two, your time. How many hours can you give to the cause? Your skills, and she lists a number of skills here. Project management, publicity, tech support, social media, accounting, video production, childcare, recruiting. Tech comm professors listening, I hope you see an overlap with several skills that we teach students. So this could be an opportunity for a community engaged assignment or class experience.BYeah.AAnd I haven't focused specifically on climate in my courses, but it inevitably comes up and some students choose to do projects on it and they care. And when I see that, I just want to say keep it up, like this is what we need is people who are openly passionate about this issue. You could easily theme a whole course around this. Hm. Partner with a local climate organization or something. And then your wallet, what can you give? And I'll be honest, that's my go to, I believe in throwing money at things. And that's because I'm privileged to be able to do that. Not everyone is. And it's also conveniently the one that least disrupts me, of everything listed. But it's a way of supporting others in what they're already doing. We're not saying go out and start a nonprofit. There are people out there who know their stuff. They can tell you what to do. There hasn't been much in the way of super local climate organization? BRight.AI know you've attended some meetings, but I don't know that they've been, that those groups have been able to sustain themselves.BAs an example, we live in Mankato, Minnesota. So Mankato Zero Waste is one group that's out there that’s, it has a specific focus for environmentalism. It isn't exactly focused on climate, but that is one group that's local and active to some degree, at least Asort of anti consumerist?B anti landfill. it's really just trying to keep things out of the landfill that could be recycled or composted or so on.ASee, I can get behind a like don't buy a ton of stuff philosophy. But yeah, you on the other hand, you won't buy stuff, but you will collect anything free that you think you could possibly get a use out of one day.BThat's generally true. Yeah. So free is hard for but I'm working on it some days more than others.AI appreciate that.BIn terms of other slightly less local, there is Minnesota350.org which is just the Minnesota State Chapter of 350.org, 350.org being focused on 350 is back in the '90s. Scientists determined we could probably get away with having a stable climate at 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.AWhat is our current parts per million?BOver 420. So we just need to stop and go backwards a few decades, ARight.BIt's a big goal, but it's one that I can get behind. There's also a Twin Cities chapter of Extinction Rebellion. I would really like to be involved with Extinction Rebellion, because they do the disruptive stuff.AHm. And how does the media portray them?BOh I think the most devastating way that the media portrays them is not at all.AOh, wow.BAnd when they do portray them, it's like look at the, look at these radicals. These, far, you know, it's marginalizing of the people involved,A right? They're extreme and they're silly.BThey're extreme and they're silly and they're disruptive. By no means we'll talk about what they're trying to accomplish.AYeah. So that's another thing we can do as communication specialists and human beings. Is help try to turn the tide against that kind of sentiment when this is going on. Yeah. Like, calling protesters rioters or a mob.BYou know, it's exactly that sort of a rhetorical move that benefits stability which benefits business which hastens ill effects of climate change. I did want to bring up something that I don't remember if it was actually covered in the book. This is more from my listening to podcasts. Also notice that this is, this is discussion on, this is not endorsement of anything but in the United States, property rights were something that was essentially fundamental to the founding of our country, the right of our property to be not taken away from us by the king. Because of that, there are more laws about protecting property than there are about protecting life. Non violence sometimes gets wrapped up in that. There was a group called the Earth Liberation Front in the '80s, I believe there's only one member that is still at large. The rest of have all been wrapped up by law enforcement. They were identified as eco terrorists, which is a term that I think is probably back in vogue now. They never hurt anyone. They did a lot of property damage, arson, destruction of machinery, to stop pristine forests from being logged, and to stop basically things that would damage environments.AFerngully. BYeah, Ferngully. They were labeled as terrorists. They were labeled as violent. They never hurt anyone. They were violent against property. That is a concept that should be completely foreign, that you can be violent against property. You're standing in for an environment that can't speak for itself and you're stopping the violence. And so in assessment of how you're going to join the movement and disrupt normalcy, I mean, I know that the laws are very much aligned with damaging property, being considered violence. It's a philosophical question to also ask yourself. Is actual sabotage or that sort of thing a way that you're willing to expose yourself?AYeah.BAnd on the current events flip side of that, you know, you can be called a terrorist for not hurting anyone, but you can't be called a war criminal for purposely targeting civilians in the midst of a besieged apartheid state.AYou're talking about Israel?BI'm talking about Israel, yes.AYeah, man, there are a lot of missions out there that need disruptive action. Where do we start? BOh.Ainvest in the organizations that have the right priorities and the right focuses.BMm hmm. I think that the age in which awareness of climate and environmental issues has risen to prominence coincided with the increased focus on intersectionality. As a result, of all social movements, this most recent has had the most justice focus to it.AFollow the people of color, the indigenous people, the marginalized people, because making a better world for them makes a better world for everyone.BAbsolutely. You could go as far as getting religious on it, what you did for the least of these you did for me. You don't need to start something new at this point. You could start a new chapter of something extant. You could start a local thing, of a national organization that's doing good work that you believe in. Not that that's easy. But they would be able to help you.AYeah. BMost important, know that you're not going it alone. Work with others. Know that there are others working with you to the same end.AAny closing remarks, Benton? You have no fungus updates I'm sure.BI did see, I did in fact see oyster mushrooms having been recently harvested or eaten by a wild animal when we were at Seven Mile Creek.AOh, cute.BMilder winters means a longer mushroom season. Such fun.
September 22, 2023
Accessibility and AI
An interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield of Minnesota State, Mankato about how accessibility intersects with artificial intelligence. She shares about AI in teaching, visual AI, inclusivity, ethics, classroom technology, and her current research on virtual reality for young adults with cognitive disabilities. Find Dawn at her faculty bio or her Instagram @dawn_armfield. Plus, what does AI have to do with fungus? Sources and further reading Baquero, C. (2022, August 3). On the Ethics of Writing With AIs. Communications of the ACM . https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/263291-on-the-ethics-of-writing-with-ais/fulltext Who’s Afraid of A.I .? (2023, May 12). What’s Next: TBD. [Podcast]. Slate. https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/05/why-artificial-intelligence-needs-regulation-now Floridi, L., & Cowls, J. (2019). "A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society." https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/l0jsh9d1/release/8 IBM AI Ethics: https://www.ibm.com/impact/ai-ethics Post Reports: Meet the hackers trying to make AI go rogue https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/meet-the-hackers-trying-to-make-ai-go-rogue/ What Next: TBD: Who's Afraid of A.I.? https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2023/05/why-artificial-intelligence-needs-regulation-now Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnT1xgZgkp Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are? (YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnT1xgZgkpk “The Slime Mold and the Universe.” 8 Apr. 2020. Planetary Radio [Podcast]. https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0408-2020-slime-mold-universe Transcript AB: Hi there. This is Abi with TC Talk. That's Tech Comm Talk. BB: I am Benton, also here with TC Talk. AB: We are here for a special episode to be part of the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2023. The theme is Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories. This is the fourth year of the carnival and we had a great time contributing last year, our aliens episode. BB: It was fun because we watched movies with aliens. AB: Specifically how communicating with an alien life form is an epic technical communication situation. When I saw that the theme this year was AI, I thought, well, we have something to say about that. In fact, we did an episode on that in the spring that was possibly less informative than just entertaining for us to play around with, to see what stereotypes AI has about technical communicators. But things have shifted since then, the tools have shifted. Professors and researchers have had more time to figure out how to fit it into classrooms. That doesn't mean there's not still problems to be solved, like accessibility BB: and workplace issues. AB: Labor for sure. We're good ones to be talking about this. Not as in you and me, but we, as in the field of tech comm, BB: I think we should talk about it too, and we're great. AB: Oh, nice. Well, in fact, it occurred to me when I saw the theme for the carnival come out. Hey, we have an AI expert in my very own department. BB: That's right. AB: So I figured this would be a great time to hear from her. She is surely more informed than you and me. BB: Yeah, I don't even read articles. I mostly just read headlines. AB: Shame. BB: I know AB: because they're probably AI generated headlines. Due to scheduling issues. Benton wasn't able to be part of that conversation with Dr. Dawn Armfield, but we will play that interview in just a moment. Let me tell you a little bit more about her. She's an Associate Professor of Tech Comm in the Department of English at Minnesota State Mankato. She teaches courses in visual communication, usability and user experience, content strategy, international communication, all areas in which accessibility and ethics play a key role. And we'll see those themes come up in our talk. She has research interests in emerging technologies, AI, AR, VR and ethics. AI, of course, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality. Those terms may come up in our talk as well. I will link to her faculty bio and her Instagram in the show notes so that you can follow what she's doing. You couldn't be a part of the conversation, but you did listen to it. BB: I did. AB: Let's hear from you. What should not readers, listeners, be on the lookout for? BB: My perspective coming in with a pro labor stance and wanting to be in solidarity with the writers strike and the actors strike. I was prepared to go Luddite and be like, no more AI. We stop them, we must fight them in the trenches. But the more informed perspective that Dawn brings, it helps to give pause and give consideration to that impulse for me. AB: Good. BB: In my mind it turns into a false binary of being an AI fan boy or post- technologist AB: Living in the woods, BB: living in my camper. AB: That's great to hear, and I think Hollywood does not do society any favors in terms of presenting AI as actually intelligent. BB: It's not a small part of the sci fi landscape. The robots takeover genre, AB: that is not the issue that we're facing. To treat it as such gives it too much power. Everything that chat GPT spits out is based on something that humans have already created. It's algorithms deciding what to spit out. It's not some mysterious mind behind it, BB: Right AB: Therefore, it's not something that's fully out of our control either. We don't need to give into the doom and gloom perspective. Were there other things that stuck out to you? BB: AI accessibility. It was really when Dawn was talking about it as a field, but putting those two concepts together. AI is already used a lot in increasing accessibility by auto subtitling. But in that context, it still needs to have a human looking over its shoulder. AB: Yeah, I think there's two issues at least, when it comes to AI and accessibility. And one is, how can AI be used to increase accessibility, which we talked about. And another, how can AI tools themselves be designed to be more accessible? BB: Yes. Accessibility of AI. AB:. Right. Cool. Stay tuned. After the interview, we will have our classic Fun with Fungus segment where somehow Ben is going to connect mushrooms and artificial intelligence. On to the interview with Dr. Dawn Armfield. AB: I think a good place to start would be the big question, what does accessibility have to do with AI? And if in the course of answering that question you can give us a little sense of what you think of as AI and accessibility, that would be helpful too. DA: Sure, when I think about accessibility, it's mostly about how can a wide range of people access whatever it is that we might be working on. When I teach accessibility, I talk to my students about not just about computers and websites and things like that. While most of them are computer science students, that's how they will think about it. But I also talk to them about when you're going into the grocery store, are the aisles wide enough for a wheelchair or would someone with a walker be able to handle them? Are shelves too high for somebody who may have some reach issues or, you know, who might be impaired in the ways that they can raise their hands or have any tactile problems. So I actually use the grocery store a lot because we're all familiar with the grocery store. So how accessible is a grocery store for somebody who might have some kind of difficulty, or even just for someone who is shorter than average or somebody who is taller than average trying to get to the bottom. You know, there are all these things that we need to think about. And so I want them to think about accessibility every time they walk out the door, and the majority of people access this space. When we talk about accessibility, we really try to, of course, we talk about universal design, which means that more people can access it than not. And that we make everything as open as possible for as many people as possible. But we know that there will always be somebody who slips through the cracks because we just can't make everything work for everyone. We try as hard as we can. Accessibility is that, is trying to make as much of whatever it is in wherever you are for as many people as possible. AI, of course, is artificial intelligence. And when I think about AI, I'm not just thinking about the things that are in the news right now which are Bard and Chat GPT the writing, although Bard has expanded a bit to include visual, but there are a lot of visual tools out there right now that do AI. That is one of the problems that we're seeing with the actors’ and writers’ guilds. They're talking about how visual AI will be able to recreate an actor's face or recreate, or how textual AI can recreate a writer's tone. But AI goes even further. It can use machine learning in order to give us good search results. For instance, algorithms will use artificial intelligence to give us all kinds of information. It could be used in our cars, in especially the newer cars with computers, or the electric cars, especially to adjust the ways that the car functions in order to make it function more economically. AI is a vast area. While we tend to be more concerned with the ChatGPT and Bard areas or the visual areas in our work, we've been using AI for decades. At this point we just don't realize it. AB: I like how with both of those concepts, you've just expanded them so much from how we typically think of them, where accessibility is not just about computers, it's about the grocery store. AI is not just about chat GPT, but it's about electric cars. How do you see those two intersecting? DA: Right. There's actually a field called AI accessibility. AB: Oh cool. DA: Oh yeah, there is a field that really looks at the way that AI can help make things more accessible. For instance, when we are in our electric car, we can read a read out, but it can also talk to our phones, can talk to us now through Siri or Google Assistant or whatever. These are all AI functions that help us work through different ways of having accessibility to the things that we use. There is a caveat to this. In order for AI and accessibility to work together, we have to be diligent as the humans behind it and pay attention to whatever it is producing. There has to be human oversight at all times. We can't just rely on the AI to make things accessible. We need to test it, and we need to make sure that it's working properly and not giving output that would be disinformation or misinformation or that could be harmful or it's just giving us gibberish, right. There always has to be that human oversight into the ways that AI is helping with accessibility. AB: Yeah, and I think it's really easy for people to have a set it and forget it mentality about AI, like let's just let it do its thing. And our field of technical communication, I think we have this tendency towards being more critical. It seems like it's a great fit for people in our field to be aware of those kinds of things. DA: Yeah, so this summer I actually had my foundation level students do an e-mail using AI. So they had to write me an AI about what is technical communication and how will it work for them in their field, right? So they actually had to bring their discipline into the AI output, but then I also asked them to answer a few questions afterwards and say, okay, so what did it get right and what did it get wrong? Where can you see this going way off the rails? And what did you have to correct in that e-mail to me in order to make it correct? I think it's up to us in tech comm to really think about these things and say it's a tool, that's what it is. It's a tool and it's an awesome tool, but it can also be a really dangerous tool. And we have to be those critical thinkers about AI and think about how can we use it to make our jobs easier, but not use it to the point of where we just do leave it to do its thing. AB: Mm hmm. So now that we have the broad strokes of accessibility and AI, now I want to move on to the tell me about yourself question. But I'm especially interested in what kind of background, whether it's teaching, or professional, or personal, that led you to your interest in this topic. DA: I've worked in IT since I was in my '20s and I worked in IT departments and did a lot of the IT work. Usually it was for public service, like the county or a university or things like that. I've always worked in and around the computer area of those businesses or those organizations. Whatever it is with computers or with technology, I'm always really interested in what is coming and how will it affect the humans. On the other end, even in the early '90s when I was first doing online chat, and I would think about online chat at that time, people were always thinking, all right, it's just a computer out there, right? We weren't thinking about the people on the other end. And then eventually we got to this place where we were thinking, okay, there are actually people on the other end, but I've always thought about that, how is this affecting the people who are either using it or who are engaging with it or who are having it used on them. So how can we think about these technologies and the humanity that is engaging with them? My professional life engaged in that. But then when I started doing my education, all of my work was about technology. I didn't major in technical communication in my undergrad, but I actually did a website for one of my junior level writing classes. And my professor said, oh, there's an entire field that does this kind of work that you might be interested in, right? That's how I got introduced to technical communication. And it just seemed like that right fit for me, that I am very technology oriented and even though technical communication is not just about that, it fit with the kind of person that I am and the kinds of interests that I have, but also with accessibility. Having worked in web design and in distance learning and in instructional design and things like that, taught me about how accessibility is super important. I've had these two things coming at me all of the time, the technology and the accessibility, and thinking about the people at the other end of this and how to use both of those in order to meet our audience's needs at all times. AB: You majored in geology, am I right? DA: Yeah. AB: Okay. Glad I remember that correctly. DA: Was a double major actually, it was English and Geology, but I wanted to write for National Geographic. AB: Oh, that sounds fun. DA: I thought, oh, if I have a science background and an English background, then I could do that. AB: My next question, you answered this earlier. What are some examples of accessibility challenges with AI technologies? DA: Yeah, of course, it's the human oversight, but it's also that we need to think about AI just as that tool and not think about it as a cure all. AI can be an amazing tool. Like this summer, I was playing with it quite a bit to create visual information, just to play with it and to use images that I was creating in AI for say like a logo or, my nephew and I were making up band names and we were creating band paraphernalia with AI. But we also had to be really careful and think about are the things that that AI is pulling in, are they copyrighted? So we have to think about where's this information coming from or where’s this image coming from or where is this data coming from? Is it copyrighted information that we are using? And if I wanted to use it as a logo or just to have fun, am I being a responsible user to the artist who first created this or is this a wholly newly created thing that the AI actually came up with just by me telling it what to create? The answer is typically no, that it's pulling images from all over the place to pull into the system to use in whatever it is that you're creating. We have to be really responsible and think about the ethics behind it as well. And then I think that an overreliance on AI could create spaces that might seem accessible, but that could actually cause problems. For instance, we might use AI to create a syllabus which is fun. I did that for a class and it was fun. Of course, I had to tweak it quite a bit. But one of the issues with it is that when I asked it to, and creating a syllabus for a class that I'm not even teaching, I was just trying to play with it. It had information that could be considered not appropriate for all audiences. Not that it was using swear words or that it was using information that was R rated or X rated or anything like that. It was nothing like that. But there is a bias in AI because typically AI algorithms are written by white men, right? And so there is a natural bias built into this, where if I asked it to pull up authors, it was pulling up white male authors for me for that syllabus. I think I saw one female author in there and no people of color. So we have to really think about those biases that AI is creating as well. When I've done visual information and I'll just say create a woman walking a dog, it almost is always a white woman. I have to specify a person of color, we have to think about those biases as well. That does create a barrier to accessibility, because if people of color are not seeing themselves in the AI or not finding that accessibility within the AI, then they're not a part of that conversation and they need to be. Accessibility can be even more foundational. I think it's not just about getting along and getting into a space, but it's about how we fit within those conversations. AB: And with the syllabus example, it's a good reminder that when you use AI to generate a genre, it's pulling from what is, not what ought to be right DA: Right. AB: or not what's inherently right. I was wondering too, if your syllabus had policies, because I can imagine from an accessibility standpoint, if it's drawing from what's out there already, then if instructors haven't been thinking in terms of accessibility, then that's not going to be reflected in things like attendance policies or what mediums you can use to create in. Did you see any of that? DA: Yeah. In fact, one of the biggest ones was you cannot use a phone in this class. But in my classes, that is never a rule. I'm like use whatever technology you can, just be responsible about it. I would never have that in my syllabus, but it seems to be a big enough rule out there. I'm guessing, especially say like in a math class where they might use it for tests or whatever, things like that. But I don't do tests. I want them to use their technology. But that was one of the big ones. But that's also an accessibility issue. We might have a student who needs to record the class because their brain just might not process things as fast as we're talking. So they might have to go back and re-listen, and re-listen and re-listen in order to get to where we need them to be. Right? So that could be an accessibility issue. Or they might need to be able to pull things up because they can't remember things as easily as somebody else might be able to. And that's okay. I think these phones have made my memory go. So I totally understand that. Right. Because we have so much at our fingertips now that we don't have to remember as much. So creating those kinds of policies is definitely an issue. AB: Yeah, yeah. And I can see instructors possibly pushing back and saying, well if somebody needs an accommodation, they can ask for it. And it's like, yes, that's usually built into like a university's accessibility policy. But the point of accessibility is to not require someone to have to overcome that obstacle in the first place. DA: Yeah, so that's really interesting. I also follow some Reddit forums on accessibility and on professors. And a lot of professors write about accommodation, a lot of them do. And how they demand that their students bring in a form from disability services before they will ever make accommodations. So that might be built into policies as well. And I didn't see any of that in mine, but I also did, I didn't have it look for disability services policies. So yes, there would definitely be that kind of an issue as well. Because I know that that conversation is going on with other professors, not just in the United States but also in parts of Europe, because the Reddit boards have people from all over the world on them. I think that that definitely could be an issue. AI has actually been a really big conversation in these discussion boards. I think so many of them are against it. It's really interesting, even computer science professors are against their students using it. But isn't it incumbent upon us to be the responsible people to say use it wisely? Let me show you how to use it, or let's talk about how we can use it, because you might be able to show me a different way of using it, right? Let's have that conversation about using it and being ethical about it. The very first thing I have my students do is they read an article about the ethical use of AI. We start there, then we build from that. AB: Yeah, because people are going to use it. DA: They are. I don't see it as any different as using a graphing calculator. That's how I look at it. For a long, long time, those were barred in classrooms. But then it got to the point where so many students had it that there had to be policies made up about it, right? There had to be talks about how to ethically use this in the classroom. AB: Don't get distracted playing snake or whatever that little game was. DA: Right. Exactly. AB: That would be the least of the concerns I'm sure. DA: But, but the AI things can totally be that way. We can totally have a lot of fun with it. But you can also see where if you're not asking your students to think about it critically, then they could just use it to write a paper, not even think about that paper. But then they're missing out on the whole point of the paper, right? They're missing out on that growth potential in creating something. Even if they use AI and they go back through and they edit it. At least they're thinking about it. They're thinking about that topic. They're seeing what AI is saying about it. But then they're also saying, okay, but that didn't quite make sense and I need to rework this. So if we give them those tools to use it responsibly, then I think that we're doing a better job. AB: Yeah. That active engagement and that reflection is so important. DA: Yeah. AB: My next question is about, well, you've talked about teaching a little bit, but what has your research revealed about accessibility and AI? And I know you've been on sabbatical for the past year, so this might be your chance to let us know what you've been up to. DA: Well, the majority of my research has been on using, using extended realities, which AI does have a part in this, especially in augmented reality. You'll see AI in augmented reality quite a bit, but it's also in virtual reality. Not necessarily as much in the ones that I've been working in, but what we have seen, because we've actually been using AI models in helping us think about how to create our presentations or how to think about different parts of our writing process. Or to even think about what kinds of questions could we ask our participants in our project. Our project has been working with young adults with cognitive disabilities to create their lived experiences of using public transportation and going to work. They create their lived experiences through virtual reality experiences. They take a lot of pictures and they do recordings of their voices. And they do videos, and then they put these into a virtual reality environment. But one of the things that we were doing when we were actually creating one of these is thinking about, okay, well, how could they use AI to help them do this as well? How could I assist them in creating their spaces more easily. Because virtual reality environments, even if you use the easiest one out there for someone with a cognitive disability, it can be difficult. Or if they have mobility issues moving anything, right? So we have these accessibility issues in creating these environments. So how can we use AI in order to help them create this? One of the things that we thought about doing is actually having the students talk to the AI and use voice recognition instead of typing. Talk to the AI and say, I want to create an environment that talks about this and this is my experience. And then they can get a more robust description of their experience. And then they can copy those words and place them into a VR environment. Or they can use the visual. The visual, sorry, I have way too many acronyms going on in my head. They can use the visual AI in order to create a scene that they hadn't actually participated in on the bus or that they had and they hadn't gotten a picture of, right. So they could do a scene. And my nephew and I actually did this. We were talking about, okay, You didn't get a picture of you at night time on the bus. So let's create an image of that using AI. And we did, but we actually did it riding a bus in space, right? So he had a moon behind him and he had this space mobile or something like that. But it actually added his personality into that environment in a different way than just his image and his voice. So he and I had talked about doing that. We didn't actually put it into our final presentation, but it was something that we had discussed and we had talked about making in order to kind of give him some creativity in that. Because sometimes virtual reality can seem like you just replace this here and this here and this here. And where's that creativity when you're trying to explain a situation or give instructions? Even because really, basically what the VR experiences are, are instructions on how to ride a bus when you have this kind of a disability. How can we put some creativity into that, beyond just creating the environment? That's what we've been working on and the ways that we've been thinking about using AI. AB: It seems to me that one of the goals of this work is to help designers gain more empathy for these audiences. Does that sound right? DA: Yeah, not just designers, but also thinking about community services. If somebody from the transportation department in this specific community sees how people are using their buses or having difficulty using these buses, how can they make accessibility to the buses better? Or how can the teachers understand the issues that the young adults are having? Because they're in a transfer program, so they actually have teachers that are doing all of this with them. Accessibility is at the core of this research. It is everything in this research, understanding accessibility to public transportation or accessibility to jobs is really where we started, and we just are using technology to help build that out and help create more equitable spaces. AB: Yes, you're using AI really thoughtfully and intentionally to create more access, whereas I can see how uncritical use of AI could shut out more audiences. DA: Right, exactly. AB: What do you want technical communication students or instructors or professionals to know about accessibility and AI? DA: Oh, that's a good question. I think this would be with anybody. I want them to know that AI is a powerful tool when it comes to accessibility. It can open up spaces, but it's also incumbent upon us to use it just as that tool, use it as one of the tools in our toolbox to create a more equitable space. We have to be intentional and we have to be empathetic about the ways that we use it. We have to understand that it automatically leaves some demographics out and it will be important for us to bring them back in. It's just a tool, that's all it is. It is not a cure. All it can help us create these environments that are more accessible, but they are not completely accessible. We have to intervene and make the space even more accessible. AB: So it's not a cure-all, but it's not necessarily something to be scared of either. DA: I don't think we should be scared of it at all. I think that we should just see it as an extension of our documenting process, right. Word has been telling us and giving us suggestions or Google Docs has been giving us suggestions for years. It's already using AI. But now instead of just giving us a little words or phrases to end our sentences or to include, now it's giving us entire paragraphs or entire papers. But we have to really think carefully about that, would you? When you're writing your e mail and it says, here's the end of that phrase, right? And you can hit your enter just to include that phrase. Is that really the phrase that you wanted to use? Does that convey the meaning? As we in technical communication know every way that we use a word has a different meaning and it can impact our audience in either positive or negative or neutral ways. We have to think about are those words that the AI is using, Are they the right ones? If they're not, where do we go in and correct for that? AB: I did get a suggestion in my Outlook as I was drafting an e mail that I probably should have listened to. But at the time I was like, what does that have to do with anything? It was like giving suggestions for tone. And I'm like, this is the most boring e-mail ever. How could tone matter? And after I sent it, of course, I saw that instead of hello, I had typed, hell, I mean, I doubt the recipient thought I was, you know, opening an e-mail with profanity. But it was just kind of funny. DA: But it's true, right? It gives us that opportunity to just click, and just go through or to click no or whatever. And we do it just automatically these days because it's just right there. We're so used to it, but we have to start thinking about all of that intentionally. I don't always use those suggestions like you didn’t. Sometimes I do. Especially if it knows that I've written the same sentence like 50 million times, I'm going to use that. Or it might also make me think, okay, you might overuse that phrase, why don't we try something new? AI has this really great possibility of helping us think even more deeply about language or even communication as a whole. Because if we're talking about the visual AI as well, I think it can help us really think about the way that we communicate. Deeper ways to ask us to be more exact and to be precise in the ways that we communicate. It's going to pull in a lot of randomness or a lot of generalities. But in most things that we do, we need more precision. It will require us to really read carefully and think about that precision. AB: That's such a good point. Is there anything else that you want to share? Anything I should have asked you that I didn't. DA: I think maybe about AI policy, when we're thinking about AI policy, instead of thinking about it as something that could ruin a classroom, think about it in ways that it can be a positive fixture in a classroom. But beyond that, I was actually listening to a podcast this morning about the writers’ strike. And they were actually talking about AI and how the writers are really concerned about AI taking over. The podcaster said something to the effect of, right, well if it's the writers now, it could be the teachers tomorrow, right. AI could take over their jobs or AI could take over a secretary's job or something like that. It's up to us to start creating policy about the use of AI and to encourage our unions because that's what they were actually talking about, was unions to include that in the language of our contracts, to say AI is a tool but it is not a replacement for the kind of works that work that humans do. We have to be, again, very intentional about AI and how we let it run us or we run it. AB: Perfect. Thank you so much. DA: You’re welcome. AB: What about Fung? BB: What about fungi? AB: Yeah BB: This summer I've got a stack of logs in the backyard that had oyster mushrooms spontaneously fruit out of them, which made me happy. Oyster mushrooms are relatively easy to identify because they only grow on wood and they don't have poisonous lookalikes. AB: Excellent. Did we eat them? BB: We did. I mean, at least I did. AB: Okay. BB: I think you did too. AB: You snuck them into something? BB: I think that I just sauteed them and had them with like rice or something. AB: Oh, okay. BB: I thought you had some, but maybe not. AB: I probably did and forgot. Let's try to connect it. Do you think AI could be used to successfully identify mushrooms that are safe to eat? It probably already is. I know there's got to be an app out there somewhere. BB: I know that in my foraging groups, not only for mushrooms but for plants too, people will use something like Google Lens. You know, it's basically AI. Take a picture of this with my phone and tell me what it is, AB: like a reverse Google Image search, BB: Kind of. Yeah. So again, if you haven't heard me say before, the first rule of foraging, never eat anything you cannot positively identify. AB: Google lens is not sentient. BB: No, it is not. This is definitely a case where we do that whole human over the shoulder thing. On the foraging groups, like someone will have a screenshot of like Google lens told me it’s this, is it actually this? Mushrooms are pretty hard to discern in some cases anyway. Real mycologists will weigh in and say, no, AB: You have real mycologists in your foraging group? BB: Amateur mycologists are real mycologists, but there are a few in there. AB: Citizen technical communicators. BB: Yeah, there was something I was going to say AB: About oyster mushrooms? BB: Oh, it does connect to AI. I believe the growth patterns of slime mold actually map fairly well onto the distribution of dark matter in the universe. AB: Mind blown. BB: Yeah, I actually heard about this on Planetary Radio. Host interviewed the person who noticed the similarity and used the growth pattern of AB: slime mold, BB: of slime mold to help inform the automated looking for dark matter algorithm? Algorithm. AB: That is wild stuff. BB: Yes. AB: There you go folks. That's your fun with fungus segment. I wish I could say that you can follow TC Talk on Twitter, but I have been using it less and less. BB: Why is that? AB: Let's not get into it now. BB: He who shall not be named? AB: Right. I will still engage minimally just for TC Talk promotion purposes but it's A R, underscore Balle B A K, K, E if you want to follow me there and if I decide to jump ship, I will let you know to where I am jumping.
May 25, 2023
How to read, revisited
How to turn off your inner literature professor and create a habit of reading for enjoyment. Books mentioned Dies the Fire , S.M. Sterling Name of the Wind , Patrick Rothfuss The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up , Marie Kondo Republic , Plato Sophie's Choice , William Styron Moby Dick , Herman Melville Diary of a Wimpy Kid , Jeff Kinney Where the Red Fern Grows , Wilson Rawls Garfield , Jim Davis Calvin & Hobbes , Bill Watterson White Teeth , Zadie Smith The Expanse , James S. A. Corey The Boxcar Children , Gertrude Chandler Warner Little House in the Big Woods , Laura Ingalls Wilder Farm Boy , Laura Ingalls Wilder Quiet , Susan Cain The Dispossessed , Ursula Le Guin The Climate Book , Greta Thunberg The Fellowship of the Ring , J.R.R Tolkien Sources and further reading Bogel, A. (n.d.). What Should I Read Next? Podcast. https://modernmrsdarcy.com/what-should-i-read-next/ Libby App. Retrieved May 25, 2023, from https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby/ Saturday Night Live (2017, May 14). Sean Spicer Returns (Melissa McCarthy)—SNL . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbpUcfpbnrs Woodside, C. (2016, September 11). How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Built Modern Conservatism . POLITICO Magazine. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house-on-the-prairie-conservatism-214237 Yankovic, W. A. (1993). Livin’ in the Fridge : Alapalooza . Rock N Roll Records. Transcript AAre your class sizes mysteriously ballooning?BAre you tired of walking from one end of the lecture hall to the other?AOr from one campus to the another?BIs it impossible to find time to grade?AFrom the creators of Course Hero, a revolutionary new classroom technology -BGodium, the podium that lets you lecture on-the-go.AConvey the superiority of the sage on the stage, with the mobility of the guide on the side.BWith space to hold a laptop, textbook and optional plexiglass COVID barrier. Zero turning radius allows for steering seamlessly between backpack straps and charging cords. AThe whisper-quiet motor mean you can sneak up on the student using ChatGPT in the back of the class.BIn addition to classroom mode, there's also autonomous mode.ASimply input your GPS coordinates and Godium will take you where you need to go at a blistering speed of 4.5 mph. grade papers uninterrupted during your commute. How else are you going to do the work of two full-time professors?BAsk your administrator if Godium is right for you. Rental options available for contingent faculty members. Do not use Godium while intoxicated. Only use Godium with IRB approval. In rare instances, whiplash, injury, death, or exploitation may occur. AI Grading software, heat-seeking plagiarism detection, and cupholders available at additional cost in the tenure upgrade package.AWe're TC talk, a tech comm podcast.BMy name is Benton.AMy name is Abi. I am a tech comm prof.BI am not.ABut we chat about things that are of interest to technical communication scholars, practitioners, and maybe just everyday people.BI hope so.AWho encounter and use tech comm in their everyday lives and perhaps even create it, without knowing that that's what it is.BWoah.ABenton, it's our last episode of season Two of TC Talk.BLast one?AAnd I thought it would be fruitful to revisit the topic of how to read. You'll remember that was our first episode of all time.BYes.AAnd it had gotten more listens than most, which could just be the fact that it was the first one and when people discover a podcast, they like to go back to the beginning.BList order bias?AAlthough there's nothing really chronological about our topics,BTrue.ABut it could also be that this is a topic that people care about. So assuming that's the case, I will forge ahead. I did go back to that episode to kind of see what my baseline was. And it was cringe as the kids say. But in looking back, I can see that just taking that moment to talk about it and be intentional about my reading goals and habits, et cetera. I am in a totally different place than I was then. How about you? If you can even remember?BI remember it was upstairs and downstairs. So that's a totally different place too. How long ago was that?Atwo years? Summer 2021. Because I was starting my sabbatical and the pandemic kind of pushed us into podcasting. Well, not really. It just seemed like the thing to do. I think everyone else had the same idea, but hey, we've kept it up for two years.BThat's true. I credit you with the determination and follow-through to keep that going. Because I just show up when you ask me.ARight. But reading wise, do you think anything has changed for you in the past couple of years?BI tend towards a little bit more non-fiction now I think. That doesn't mean that I'm uninterested in fiction. I do love blitzing through good novel.AI think everything you read has to do with climate one way or another.BThe thing is, everything everyone reads has to do with climate one way or another. Every part of society boils down to carbon. It does.AWell, I guess books are printed from trees, right? And even screens are surely not carbon zero.BRight.AYeah. So I think your reading is pretty focused. You've got a niche that you like. I feel like I've been more adventurous with my reading. By adventurous, I just mean diverse, perhaps in terms of genre and format.BMaybe.ANow, onto reading for fun.BOh boy.AAnd yes, I know some of you find scholarly reading fun. I do too. But I'm talking about something that is for you and not forBNot for professional developmentApurposes of tenure and promotion or whatever. Because like I mentioned before, as soon as you're obligated to do something, it takes it takes away a little bit of the ability to enjoy it, at least for me.BYeah, I think that if someone had laid out all the non fictions that I have read and said, read these I’d be like, those are such big books.AAnd it literally could have been a syllabus for like an environmental communication class or whatever.BProbably.ASo I asked a few people about this. Colleagues, friends, students, just to get some perspective on how other people fit leisure reading into their busy lives. Because I can sit here and talk about, here's what I do. But that only works for me a fraction of the time anyway.BYeah.AAnd it evolves a lot. So I think it would be more useful for listeners to kind of hear that variety.BYeah. In contrast, I won't make fun of my coworkers, but one of them attempted to insult me because I read I read books when we're not doing things in the truck. just as my fallback thing, instead of dinking around on my phone all the time,AInsult? What did he say?BHe said You're such a librarian.AOh I would take that as a compliment.Byou have to imagine too like, certainly someone who's going to listen to this podcast is not going to be like books are dumb. But he, he said that he had he hadn't read a book since high school.AOh, no.BWhich is mind-blowing to me. Like, I don't I don't get that.AOkay. People are allowed to care about different things.BThey certainly are,AAnd we'll talk more about that in a bit. But yeah, I mean, that's right up there with one of your teachers calling you and intellectual tyrannosaur, is it not? What grade was that?BThat was that was in 11th grade. For correctly identifying Macedonia on a map.AOh, wow. I did do one of those like can you identify the European country quizzes. And I manBdidn't do well?ANo.BHow long ago was that?AOh, just a few weeks ago when I couldn't sleep one night I was like, I mean the 50 states. I've got that nailed. That. Let's try Europe. Nope.BSo what did you find?ASo I looked through the responses for trends. Because I can't resist turning everything into a qualitative study.BYou.ABut here's the first thing I want to say. You don't have to read. You don't have to read for fun. You are not a better or worse human for having a regular reading habit or not.BGive three supporting details.AOne thing that came up in the responses with that was that it is hard to read. It is hard to find time to read. Kelly said, “it took me a while after grad school to get into a reading routine. I felt like I didn't have any space left in my brain not to mention time for more reading outside of what I do for work.” Joseph said “in my first master's, I learned that the academic setting is where reading for fun goes to die. The studying and the work of research, office assistant and teaching writing, complete with grading, made reading become my job and I lost track of reading for fun. I was a sci-fi fantasy nerd up to that point, but after reading for work all day, I lost the desire. When I graduated that MS my program chair gave me a Barnes and Noble card. I actually wept. I was so ashamed that I had not read a book in over 18 months except for school. I immediately purchased Dies the Fire by SM Sterling and read the series.”BPretty good. By the way.AIs that the one with.Bthe Ember verse, the one where electricity and explosions both stopAWhat's the one that you read with the annoying main guy?BThe self-important magic one?AYeah. Yeah. Yeah..BThat's The name of the wind by Patrick RothfussAOkay. Not the same.BYeah, a guy who should really get the fuck off is asked and finish writing that trilogy, write two to books and then dither.AOkay. And Matt says, “I will confess that is a perennial struggle. Ever since grad school, the amount of reading that I do that is connected to my academic work, means that pleasure reading often gets pushed to the margins of my free time. Furthermore, the fact that so much of my job as a film studies professor is tied to viewing, means that often my free time is taken up by watching movies that broadly aligned with my overall academic goals and responsibilities. In short, leisure reading has been one of those things that I continually try to re-prioritize in my life, but I've had mixed success.” These professors are all talking about seasons in their life that leisure reading has been a struggle. And my, again, my response to that is, that's okay. You don't have to read for fun because I needed someone to tell me that. Like my first year as an assistant professor. You may recall, I worked every single weekend. I never felt caught up. On top of feeling like I was barely surviving, I also felt guilty for having such a shitty work-life balance, you know. So it's like guilt compounded upon guilt. But it was a season. It didn't last.BRight.AI'm not working every weekend.BNo, I'm glad.AAnd so if you're in a place where you're just trying to stay above water, don't add in something that feels like a chore because you think you're supposed to.BRight.Abecause you think that's what makes you a worthwhile human being.BYeah. That that goes beyond reading.AYes. I have friends with newborns. LikeBYour hobbies become taking a nap.ANo joke.BThat's true. That's a blind spot of mine because your experience and a lot of academic and desk driving professionalsADesk driving?BLike working at a desk.AIs that a saying? Desk driving. Because here's what it makes me think of. Melissa McCarthy playingBSean Spicer.ASean Spicer on SNL with the podium on the segue.BThe segue podium. Yes, That was that was epic. you better put a link to the YouTube video in the show notes.ARight. I mean, can you imagine having that in your classroom?BYeah.AI feel like we need to record a fake promo at this point for segue podium.BOkay. I like this project.AI totally interrupted you. Desk driving professions.BYes. So people who have to do like a substantial amount of reading that is a regular part of their job.AKnowledge workers.BMm-hmm. I can see how that would make it very hard to want to do that leisurely. Kind of like how I'm less inclined now to just go for a walk when we're at home or go outside because I'm outside 10 hours a day.AYeah. No joke.BEveryone needs a balance of focused and unfocused time. And that balance, of course, is dependent on the person, but you need both to have a healthy brain. And I spend a fair amount of my workday, observing for safety purposes the other or my co-worker who is flying the boom to make sure that they don't accidentally like fly it into a power line because that's a bad day.ASo sort of an environmental awareness?BYes, being present, but there's lots of space for your mind to wander. Versus if I'm reading a book, you have experienced, like, especially when it's time to get the kids ready for bed. If I am reading a book, that is the world, that is the entirety of the world. I am focused on this book and reading the text and understanding it. So you need the balance and if you're like, if you're looking through reports and you're like thinking about how do I write this report? Like that's, that's very focus centric. And it's not very scattered focus or diffuse focus kind of work.ARight. And I think, I think reading is the kind of activity that has such range within it that even if you are parsing theory all day, like you can go home and read a murder book, which I do. Earlier this year, I had a bunch of deadlines kinda bunched up. And then as soon as I had all that behind me, I was like murder books. And they were bad books. I sat there and I told you the plot. And I was like, I cannot believe this drivel. And then I went on to read every page.BYeah.AAnd I think that that's part of recognizing that you're a human being and you can't be on 24/7 and that you deserve space to blow off steam and read tasteless trash. Now, I will say that even if you don't choose to read, it is hugely important to be able to cultivate some kind of hobby outside of work, which I am embarrassed to say didn't happen for me until the pandemic. And, you know, we bought a piano and I learned it.BAnd you learned how to podcast.APlaying music is something that engages a different part of your brain. And just to have something to care about that's not work or parenting was really important for me.BYeah.ASo I would encourage anyone who feels just too busy to just start with something. And at the same time, like if you're in a season where you can't, awesome, don't do it. But the season shouldn't last forever.BMaybe get ideas for how you're going to reward yourself for getting through to the promised land.AOr maybe you love watching movies or watching TV. in my mind, watching TV has always been the same as wasting timeBor eating junk food.ABut I savor a good episode of TV. In part thanks to you.BYou're talking about Stranger Things?AYes. Which I wouldn't have watched where it not for your prompting. And yes, I'm years behind the curve on this. As I am on most everything that's ever popular because I'm like, oh, something's popular I must go against the flow.BToo cool.AAnd then years later I discover it and I'm like, Oh, society is right. There's a reason this is great. So yeah, and to me, like sitting and savoring a good episode of TV is not the same as mindlessly turning it on and vegging out. Though there, though there is space for that too of course. Same as scrolling TikTok, right?BYep.AI think the question is, how do you feel by the time you're done with it? Because for me, I look up and 45 min have gone by and I've been watching Instagram Reels or whatever. And I couldn't tell you a single thing that I watched in the previous 45 min. Yes, I enjoyed myself while doing it, but I have literally nothing to show for it. Well, no, that's not true. I bookmark the good animal videos.BIt's true. And then I share them with the family.AI do the same with memes on Facebook. One of these days I'm gonna, I'm gonna barrage you with my folder o memes.BI look forward to it. Put them in a slideshow for me.AOkay.BMaybe you love gaming. Again gaming has a bad rap, but I think it's a lot more active than other kinds of hobbies. It is intellectually stimulating.AThey can be, yeah.BI'd rather my kid play Minecraft than just watch TV.ABut I would rather my kid just watch TV rather than play Grand Theft Auto or something like that.BYeah, that's true. Not all games are created equallyAFor young children, Yes, indeed. And I think it's also completely fair to choose your reading based on your personal or professional goals. So this comes from Lenny. “For me, I typically read non-fiction books and books that will directly help me grow in a certain area I'm interested in. It's very rare you'll find me reading a fiction novel. I typically find myself looking for new books to read whenever I have a desire to grow, learn, or become something new. And I recognize that I lack the necessary knowledge to feel confident in that area. Reading books helps me chart a pathway through unknown worlds and identities, but I want to claim for myself.” And he talks about getting into ultra running and how reading books was instrumental to him gaining some confidence in that area. And I totally get that. In the past. When I've needed a boost to do something I know that I need to do or want to do. I think reading about it can often do, can often give me that boost.BI feel like that specific thing though would feel very much like maybe not assigned reading, but dutiful sort of.AYeah. I guess one thing that comes to mind for me is if I'm feeling the urge to declutter or something. Pick up a Marie Kondo or one of those books with all the beautiful color coordinated drawers and everything.BThat’s when I need a bolt things down there so they’re there when I get home. What?ANow, Let's say you do want to be a reading person. You want that to be your hobby. You don't have to read what you think you're supposed to read. This is another thing that has been super hard for me to accept as an English major and as someone who has generally valued being a smart person most of my life. I do have this Platonic ideal of a reading list in my head that has led to a lot of guilt when I'm not reading that important stuff.BDo you ever see people put stuff like that on social media?AHave I ever seen anybody pose with Plato's Republic for their high school senior picture?BOkay. You got me.AIn your Hawaiian shirt no less. At least you read a few paragraphs of it while you were in the library are getting photographed.BWhile I was waiting for the photographer to get set up there.ALike do I see people bragging about their reading on social media? Or like, you have to read this book before you die.BLike most Americans have only read ten off of this list ofAOh, yeah.BI've read 23.AThe peer pressure kind of thing.BYeah.AYeah. Yeah. And it's bullshit. There is no such thing as a canon.BWell, tell that to the Civil War.AI recall, this was one of my first college classes I ever took. And I wrote my paper on women in the canon and the lack thereof. And for my cover page, I used a photo of a woman in a literal canon.BVery nice choice.AThank you. Okay. I'll give you an example. When I was a kid, our family had a subscription to Reader's Digest. And I remember reading an article that was like Laura Bush’s top 25 books everyone needs to read in their lifetime or something along those lines. And I put those books on my reading list. And so I'm like 12 and reading fucking Sophie's Choice.BI don't know what that is.AThat sucks when as a kid, you're told that the definition of great literature is a book in which the narrator is just trying to get into a Holocaust victim’s pants the whole time.BOh, wow.AYou know, maybe there are folks out there who are like, I love Sophie's choice and it's a great literary achievement. Fine. But I have spent so many years like trying to read the classics. And you know, at this point, I would say nine out of ten books I read is by a woman. And this is not me being anti-man. I'm simply making up for lost time, right?BYeah.AI saw a terrible tweet that kind of encapsulated this attitude. “I would 100% prefer my kid to be able to read and understand Moby Dick, but hate it and read rarely than to love reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid and its like frequently. A love of reading is nice, but it's not the goal of literary instruction.”BWow.AI mean, this guy got thoroughly dunked on.BOh good. Yeah. That's, that's like the nemesis in Ratatouille. Who is super gaunt and says, I don't like food. I love it. A food critic.AOh right and he's very anti the everyone can cook cookbook author? Yes.BSomeone who is regarded as an expert because they don't like the thing.AYou know what, Moby Dick is still on my platonic ideal reading list.BYeah.AMaybe I'll read it someday.BI know I'm never going to read that book. Sure. Maybe this is a lack of imagination on my part, but I cannot imagine that there's anything I need to learn in life from a guy who was obsessed with murdering a whale.AYeah, I can't do any animal cruelty. People die in a book, no biggie. A dog dies, I'm out. Don't get me started on where the Red Fern grows. So there's, there's so many things wrong with that attitude, especially towards childhood reading. Yet I have noticed myself like needing to be aware of that and push back against it because Zoe loves graphic novels. And I don't know, there's part of me that feels like they’re somehow less seriousBLike it’s cheating.Aand I wish she would read quote unquote real books. But at the same time, like graphic novels, are a beautiful blend of the visual and the verbal. I am not wired that way. And I respect that Zoe is.BYeah. I know I have exactly that kind of an impulse. Like for me it's more of a, It feels like a step towards watching the movie instead of reading the book. You know, it feels like cheating because we didn't have it in my day. Eh, back in my day.AYou know you would have loved graphic novels if there had been a wide assortment for you. Did you read any comic books? Well, these are comic books per se, but you had a whole pile of Garfield books. Which incidentally, Zoe loves, and I blame that 90% on why she's such a smart ass.BYeah. Yeah, I should get her I should get a Calvin and Hobbes now. I think she's ready.ASo all that to say. If you want to cultivate a reading habit, start with something that you love. No matter how unserious it may feel. Start with a childhood favorite. I, we read to our kids before bed every night and re-reading my favorite childhood fantasy books with Zoe is like one of the best things in my life. To like re-experience that and experience her reaction to it too. Except she hates when we have to end.BEvery night.AEvery night, it's like, NooBAright We need to go. that's it for tonight. No.AOne more page. Read a young adult novel. Read a book that's described as impossible to put down.BYeah.AAnd this has worked for Matt as well. He says, “I try to first return to the authors and types of writing that I find most pleasurable. I've always enjoyed literary fiction in particular and have attempted to at least somewhat keep up with a handful of authors who I’ve loved since high-school. Zadie Smith in particular is an author who I've remained relatively good at staying current with.” Reread something that made you feel passionate about reading.BYeah.ARead an author that you know you're gonna love. Yeah, if only to give yourself a strong start, if you're trying to build a habit, right? You're not going to build a habit with Moby Dick.BNo.AMaybe.BHopefully you don't build a whale killing habit with Moby Dick. Yeah, I like sci-fi. I like sci-fi, that is hard. Sci-fi, meaning the science is not the fiction. Jumping into a series, that gets critical acclaim or that is, that has really good reviews. like when I started in the Expanse series, which is a nine book series. They're big books, but they are page turners. To me.AI can see the appeal of a series because you don't have to reacquaint yourself with the world and the characters every time. I am not a big series reader, I kinda feel like if I'm going to read a book, it needs to be able to stand alone. Again, that might just be me making unfair judgements about books, but I also really like variety. And I feel like if I'm reading something in a series, like it's too, too much repetition. Which boxcar children did you get to?BOh gosh.AWith Zoe. I'm so glad that was you and not me. I would've torn my hair out.B40s or 50s. I don’t remember. There is a lot of repetition there. They like to play house, they like to cook. They like to do the same thing again and again, and they solve mysteries.AYeah. I will say the original boxcar children was one of the first chapter books that I read with Zoe because that was one of the first chapter books that my mom read with me.BOh,Ayeah. Same with Little House on the Prairie. Or no Little House in the Big Woods.BWhich sadlyAis super racist?BWell, yes, it is super racist, but it's also a reinvention of history to make it seem very rugged, individualist, very self-reliant. There's all of this stuff that talks about how they keep their farm and how they, how they provide all their own needs. And that is not the way that frontier life was.ASo you're telling me Laura Ingalls had an agenda?BYeah.AI need I'm going to use a source for this one.BGeez, which podcast was it? One of the things that I really did appreciate about those books, the first one and the second one. Farm boy?AOh yeah.Bthey give a very like up-close understanding of preindustrial skills, which is really just the way that people lived 150 years ago.AAnd the way we'll have to learn to live when the climate apocalypse descends upon our world?BWell, that too, but I mean, just the process of how a shoe was made. They talk about how they, how they made nice rows for their potato plants way by dragging a board with nails in it this way and then the other way, and then made little mounds for it where the lines came together.AAnd I tell you what, I will never forget the pig bladder balloon. from Little House on the Big Woods. Apparently you forgot about it.BYeah.AAnyway. That would be my first tip. Find something you love. Number two. Accountability. And this can include accountability to yourself in the form of setting goals and tracking your progress. But one thing that has been a really good jumpstart to my reading in the past year or so is doing a book club with a group of friends. We take turns choosing a book so that has opened me up to genres and topics that I may not have chosen on my own but that I've really enjoyed and have kind of like set me on a path to appreciating other books. And even if I don't enjoy a book, then it's nice to have people to complain about it with, right?BYeah.AThe other thing. And thanks again to Lindsey for introducing me to this is an app called Story Graph. And Kelly uses his too. She says, “I keep myself accountable to reading a certain number of books per year by tracking my progress on GoodReads and the story graph. I especially like the story graph because it keeps track of different stats. Like how many books I read in each format and each books mood. And from those stats that gives pretty good recommendations for what to read next.” here, have I showed it to you yet?BI don t know that you have.ACheck this out. Data displays.BAh Yeah.AI mean, how could I not. pie charts, bar charts, line charts. So it's got like a progress bar for myBHow many books you want to readAMy numeric book goal, I guess. And then it kind of takes the data from the books that you've inputted. And you can see, well, I'll let you interpret it. What does this say about me as a reader?BIt says that you like books that make you feel reflective and emotional. Those are you two biggest moods and the pie chart. Pace that you read atm page numbers. 63% fiction,AWhich was not the case two years ago for sure. that's a major shift in my reading life.BThis is a little bit funny.AWhat?BThe books read and it's got the rest of the year that hasn't happened yet and it's like, Hey, you're doing great and then it flatlines at June.AYeah.BSo you’ve got what is it, five books out here that are thriller, memoir, history, historical. SoAThose are kind of my top categories. But you'll notice there's a bunch of categories for genre. Which I like because I like a lot of different things. So this is anonymous. No one's gonna be able to find me on here, right? This is largely for myself, but I still have this ghost of a English literature professor telling me I should have more classics on here, or, why is murder books at the top?BYou're killing it. There, SeeAThere. Landed a joke. The self tracking part. I just started using it this year. I don't know if it is inspiring me to read more or if I just wasn't paying attention to how much I was reading previously. But it's fun to have a better handle on that. Largely because it's helping me think about the books I want to read through a better filter than just genre. Here's what I mean by that. There are stats like, so when you review a book, you can review it for things like, is it more character-driven, or more plot driven? Is it more fast paced or medium paste? does it have likable characters, stuff like that. But those lenses can be more informative than just you like to read sci-fi. I'll give you an example. Two of my favorite genres are sci-fi and historical fiction, which on the surface, they seem like total opposites? Future and past. So anyway I'm like is there a common thread here that explains why I like these books beyond just they fall under this category. And I realized that when I'm reading sci-fi, I'm not reading it for the science or the technology or the futurism. What I like about sci-fi is how it sets a stage for ethical and philosophical questions.BI like that too. That's really the calling. The purpose of sci-fi is to get you to not realize at first that it's talking about right now.ARight. I think the, the technology isn't a turn off for me though, if it's not super realistic or hard, as you say.BIf it isn't too?AMeaning I can see you reading a book and being like, This is so unrealistic. This is not how physics works or something like that. And that being a turnoff to you.BYes.ASo I discovered there's this sub-genre of philosophical sci-fi. And I'm like, that's where I'm at.BI heard the creators of the Expanse talk about how they actually, from book to book, they were able to play with different types of books that they were writing. Like the first one was, was, noir, it was a crime novel. And then the second one is more of a political intrigue kind of book. And then in each one has a, has a different field with the same characters.AAnd then when it comes to historical fiction, I like books that are set in war time. And I don’t actually like war. I mean, I don't, I don't care a whit about military strategy.BI played too many strategy games to not. It's baked in at this point.AI gave it a good shake. I tried I tried playing Axis and Allies with you.BYou tried. Yes. I would have literally had more fun with an Excel spreadsheet.AYou made it through being Russia on Russia's first turn. And after that you were like, I'm done.BWhat I care about is the motives, the personalities. And with Axis and AlliesANone of that.BRight. It's just like how many kinds of this battleship are you going to put in this atoll?AStrategic and tactical.BBooks set in the time of Nazi occupied Europe in particular, I feel do a great job of kind of tearing away the superfluous, What am I trying to say? It centers on like genuine moral dilemmas. And I like reading about people navigating that. Like you and I were talking about Anne Frank not too long ago. And like I was saying, it's like living out the trolley problem on a daily basis.AYeah. Which we have the luxury ofBviewing from a distance. Right.AUnless you're Chidi Anagonye.Bthat's true.ABut There's that question, how would I respond in this situation in a world where there's no good answer, how do you survive?BThat specifically is one of the things that, you know, that quandary is why post-apocalyptic media very much appeals to me. Because, you know, after an apocalypse, there is no good answer for anything.APut people in a survival situation and you see a whole new side. Also in story graph, there are reading challenges which you can sign up for. So I'm doing A to Z book titles, which is sort of a secondary goal for me right now compared to like what I do want to do is read X number of books in a year. But having that alphabet challenge can nudge one book higher on the read next list for me, you know, I'm gonna put this title next in the queue. Which incidentally I do need a Q book.B Quiet.AOh right. In praise of introverts. Right? And we're back.BWe're back.AI just spilled a full cup of coffee onto the keyboard, onto the floor, onto my clothes, onto the wall, et cetera. It may have splattered the microphone. And it was a special coffee too. Had whipped cream on it.BSalted caramel whipped cream.AYeah. Alas. This is not even the first time this week this has happened.BMaybe it's just that you have a bowl with a handle for a coffee mug.AWhere were we? My next tip is to mix up the format. I have gotten so many suggestions to try audio books that I finally gave in and tried it. I've listened to one. That experience was not enough to convert me. But I can see the appeal. I think the main problem for me is that listening to audio books would take up the time that I used to listen to podcasts and I love podcasts too much.BYeah. I don't have 130 subscribed podcasts like you do.AI don't listen to every single one. I just like having choice.BThat's actually a really great way to make use of a commute. If you aren't listening to either a podcast or an audio book while you're driving somewhere, I feel for youAYou ever heard of music?BWhat is this thing you speak of?AFor me, I can't sit and listen. If I'm going to sit and read then like holding a book feels more active, I guess. So I would save my my listening for driving or dishes or something.BOr when you just want to lay down and close your eyes.AThat's right. I do listen to podcasts a lot to fall asleep when you're not reading Ursula Le Guin to me. So don't take it from me. I'm not enough of an audio book enthusiast to tell you why you should do it. But Joseph says, “in my second master's, I started adding audio books so I could read during my commute. In my PhD, I would use the read to me feature from kindle and the Adobe reader read out loud to accompany texts I was reading for school so it was only natural that I would continue this into my reading for fun. Now that I'm working full time, I've purchased a program called text aloud. and I can turn any text into a computer read mp3. The voices are getting better and I find that it's cheaper than buying audio books so I've been buying the books on PDF, converting them to MP3s, and then reading as I listen. I think it helps retention and pacing.” And Kelly says “about 80 per cent of the books I read are on audio. I listen while I get ready in the morning, drive, Cook, clean, etc.” I will say this. A barrier to me adopting audio books is that I thought I needed to buy a subscription to Audible. I was like, I don't know enough whether this is going to be worth it for me to make that investment. But you can check out audio books and e-books from your local library.BNot available in all areas.AProbably. Yeah. Libby is what, is what that's called and it actually has an amazing selection.BDo they have an app?AYes. I actually I have it on my phone and my iPad because then I can pick up where I left off if I'm out and about and have some downtime and can just pull up my phone and keep reading. Yeah, that's really nice to is the syncing. And Lenny spoke of the distinction between podcasts and books too in a way that I identify with. He says “podcasts usually expose me to new questions and topics and help me learn by osmosis by just listening into the meandering dialogues of podcast hosts and guests. While books are usually more structured and coherent forms of knowledge, with a clear thesis the author is putting forward. both books and podcasts have their place for me.” And I think that may be why I have a harder time dipping into audio books versus podcasts is because with most books there is that need to follow the thread. Whereas with a podcast, those feel more informal. My attention can shift in and out. And I won't feel like I've lost a major plot point that I'm going to have to go back and reread, you know what I mean? Have you tried e-books, audio books?BI've done a few books on CD that I've checked out from the library and just fed them one after another into my car's CD player.AFun fact, my old car did not have a CD player, It had a cassette player.BIt did.AAnd that was a selling point because along with the car, we also threw in all of your Weird Al cassette tapes?BIt's true. When we were sellingAon Craigslist, yes. But the buyer said that piqued their interest, did they not?BI don't remember that.Amaybe it just gave them a sense of there's a real person behind this who knows.BRight now, you should pause this podcast, go listen to the entire works of Weird Al. So you know what we're talking about,AWhich you have memorized.BMore or less. *Living in the fridge, you can’t stop the mold from growing. Living in the fridge. Can’t tell what it is at all* He only makes gold. I mean, he only remakes gold.AHey, so you have heard of music.BYes, I have heard of music. Some people prefer to watch The Daily Show to get their news. I prefer to listen to Weird Al do popular music.ADo covers of pop songs.BBecause he makes it better.AYou've seen him in person?BI have. And he was a freaking dynamo on stage,AReally?BWhich it's hard to imagine someone holding an accordion being a dynamo, but he certainly was.AOkay. Would you ever try e-books? What do you think of having a book loaded into your phone so that you can read it during a slow day.B I'm not opposed to the idea.A It would make it harder to rile up your right-wing coworkers.BThat's true.AYour giant Greta Thunberg book sitting prominently out on theBUh-huh.Ayour Bernie stickerBon my car. Yeah. I mean, I don't have any problem with using an e-book. I know that there's some, some benefits that it would that it would have because there could actually be like links to like if it referred back.AYou know what I really like about it is getting to look up words immediately. So I was just reading a book about the Middle Ages. And there was a lot of stuff I could have gathered from context, but it was also nice to, you know, be like what is a lintel?BThe thing that's above the door?AYes. Who needs an eBook when you've got you? And then the next kind of category of advice I got was about making it a habit by setting aside designated times to read. That was a common refrain. There is something to be said for establishing a habit, because by definition, a habit kind of makes something automatic. And so if picking up a book feels like a chore to you, or it feels like you're going to have to summon up your willpower every single day to get into it. It won't always be that hard. That was that was the experience for me. At first I did, right. Because it's infinitely easier and more compelling to scroll through your phone than to pick up a book. But I think I can fairly say that reaching for a book has been my go-to recently.BYeah.AMatt says, “I've tried to reserve certain times of the day for leisure reading, either in the morning before work or before bed. This means moving myself away from distraction, phones, computers, and reading in a part of my apartment where I can physically detach from reminders of work, stress, etc. Lindsey says, “I have found that leaving the phone, charging in another room overnight has helped immensely. That way I read a book to unwind and get tired instead of scrolling. I also bought some bookmarks and a reading light that functions well, and funnily enough, it feels a little luxuries to use them.” Which is adorable, right? And kind of goes along with the whole, I'm going to create a reading nook, which honestly I'm going to read on the couch or at the table or in the bed like wherever I am anyway. So my beautiful fluffy reading nook tends to go unused.BWhat is that?AIn the office with the chair in the corner with all the pillows and the 14 lamps. Maybe I don't like reading there because it's associated with work. So maybe designate a reading spot. But then again, that can also feel like more pressure because you have to go to this out of the way space and it feels harder to detach from everyday life. Whereas, and this was something that you suggested in our first reading episode, is you have different books for different contexts, right?BMm-hmm.ASo you have like a dining room table book. And you've got a bedtime book, and you've got an Everywhere book. And the same is true for me.BYeah.AWhat's your living room book right now?BIt’s the climate book by Greta Thunberg. I did want to say that one thing I like about that book is that it’s like an edited collection.AIt’s curated.BIt's curated. But you get to hear from experts about various aspects of a problem or a concept, and you don't have to track them all down. That's been done for you.AHm. What would you think of like a short story anthology?BOh yeah, a short story anthology. I've read a few of those. Sometimes an author will make a collection of their own short stories in a book. That's one direction. I’m sorry what were you doing?AI was going to sing One Direction lyrics, but thought better of it.BThank you for not. You know, the anthologies of different writers in a similar genre are interesting because reading out of a bunch of different fictional worlds in short order. It opens your mind up in a way.AAnd I imagine it would be useful for folks who can only do snippets of reading.BFor those who aren't prepared to just sit down with a Tolkien. Deep.AI would consider it if there were a freaking glossary, an index,Ban index of?ANames and places,BDramatis personae is what you're looking for.AWell, but I would also want the page numbers that they are on. So I can be like, Okay, when was this person first introduced? I can't remember them. And every book should have a map.BThat is one thing that Lord of the Rings excels in.AYes. If they did, I would know my European countries better than I do. Timelines and geography, those are things that are easy to lose track of in one setting.BOh, that would actually, things like a timeline, for a novel. You wouldn't want something where the whole timeline is instantly viewable because that would spoil it.AThat’s true, that's true.BBut if you had a, like an e-reader type thing where it unlocks parts of the timeline and you can look back. That's a fun idea.AThat is really fun.BCopyrighted and trademarked.AAnyway, it's easy to make it a habit before bed.BYep. As long as you're not reading stuff that's too thought-provoking orAwhich often that happens to me. But better that I be reading something than staying up getting sucked into a Reddit argument. I don't argue on Reddit. I read other people's arguments. I'm here to say, someone is wrong on the Internet.BYou're just here with the popcorn. You’re like Ooh.AYes. Alright, the last thing I wanted to touch on is finishing books. You may remember the first time we talked about this I said, I have a really hard time not finishing books.BMm-hmm.AAnd I think I've gotten a lot better about that. I mean, accepting that I'm not going to finish every book. Or at least I've re-framed how I view it. Because there is no such thing as a universally good book. So if I'm having trouble getting through a book, it's easy to turn the blame towards me. Like I'm too lazy to want to finish this or I'm, you know?BYeah. You didn’t make this book.ASo what? Maybe a book isn't for you, but it's for other people. Great. And so I'm starting to think of like when, when I start reading a book and I just can't like I just don't care to continue, I'm viewing that as part of the process of getting to a book that I love. It's almost like honing my internal algorithm where I can be like, What is it about this book that's not quite grabbing me?BI don’t love this!Ayou only have one life, You only have so much time. And don't waste that time on William Styron. Sophie's Choice. Sorry.BOh.AI have feelings. And there's a podcast that I recently found that I think has helped me understand this. It's called What Should I Read next? And the whole premise of it is that there's this book expert, who asks her guests to say, what are three books you love and one that wasn't quite for you. In that way she's able to build a new reading list for them based on not just like, I like these books, but why do you like them or not like them? Which is very different from a universalizedBEveryone needs to.A13 can't miss sci-fi. Okay. But why? Oh, here's another thing I do. It's kind of cheating. If I've read most of a book, I'll call that read.BThat is kinda cheating.AI mean, 80% not 51%.BOkay.ABut then that's especially good for nonfiction, where it is easier to skip around to the stuff that's more relevant. And if I held myself to the standard of needing to read 100% of a book to consider it finished, then I would just not engage with it any further. So I need to leave a little bit, a little bit of that flexibility for myself.BOkay, alright.AOr all of the Ursula Le Guin I'm missing because I fall asleep. By the time you're done with that, I'm going to mark that as read. Even though I may have only been conscious for like 35% of it. So how about you? How do you feel about not finishing books or finishing them or?BI try to be pretty picky about the books that I engage with. My narrow selection is kind of a part of that. But there have been a couple of books that I've read in the last few years that I did not finish. Oh, there was one book that I started reading and it didn't quite feel right. I got a chapter or two in. Then I looked it up and I realized it's a sequel.AOh no.BSo plot points from the first book, completely spoiled.AYep. I think it's fair to say that you are, you maybe have a better sense of yes, this is a book I'm going to like, whereas I really have found enjoyment in dabbling.BThat's fine.AI think freeing myself from this unreal expectation that I need to finish every book I start. That, opens it up for me to be more adventurous in my selections because I know I'm not committing myself to something that I'm going to hate. There’s an off ramp. What else do you have to say?BI think in summary, the last thing we want is to induce pressure on you. Our dear listener. You've got enough internal pressures that you need to be cognizant of and try to dismantle them on your own. Like with the perceived what I should be doing, what I should be reading how, when, how much, all of the right, all of theseARight you don't need the ghost of Laura Bush breathing down your neck.BNobody does. Is this George W. Bush's?AYes.BOkay. She isn't dead yet actuallyAOkay so she wouldn't be a ghost.BSpecter?AYes, that's it.BMoreover, if she said you should read it, you probably should not.AI know. I mean, Reader's Digest wasBIt was still a dominant forceAIn my life.BYeah.AI would guess that the target, our target audience is probably the type of person who has that internal pressure. Oh, I should read.BYeah.AThere is a limited number of books you will be able to read in your lifetime. Some of those may be like challenging and rewarding in their own way. And others might be trashy murder books and each has their place. I think the thing is whatever you're doing, take some time to be intentional about it so that it is reflective of what you truly want versus I don't know who else, who else is a good representation? Oh, yeah the Moby Dick idiot on Twitter. I hope that this has not come across as prescriptive, but just these are things that people do that have helped them accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish. Any, any closing remarks? Any season closing remarks?Bif you're still listening to us, good for you.ABenton's going to talk about recycling in the future. I don't think I can commit to regular publishing of TC talk going forward, but I'm not ready to say goodbye fully. So don't unsubscribe, even though you don't, you won't see us for a few months,BRight.AWe may pop up now and again.BWe'll be back. Get to the choppa.
April 27, 2023
IBM and the Holocaust, Part 2
This is part 2 of 2 about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. In Part 1, we described how IBM, through its German subsidiary Dehomag, supported the mass extermination of the Jewish people. How do we know IBM's involvement made a difference in the scope of the mass murders? One clue comes from comparing how things went down in the Netherlands vs. France. We also talk about surveillance, ethical hacking, why the logical fallacy "argumentum / reductio ad Hitlerum" shouldn't be a thing, and what the story of IBM and the Holocaust has to do with UX design. Sources and further reading Black, E. (2001). IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation . Dialog press. Gabriel, M. (2011). Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution . Little, Brown. Gannon, L., & Rucker, R. (2022, November 17). Breaking Bad Energy . Building Local Power podcast https://ilsr.org/blp-breaking-bad-energy/ Is “Holland” the Same Place as “the Netherlands”? (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2023, from Brittanica https://www.britannica.com/story/is-holland-the-same-place-as-the-netherlands Katz, S. B. (1992). The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust. College English , 54 (3), 255. https://doi.org/10.2307/378062 Purnell, S. (2020). A woman of no importance: The untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II . Penguin Random House. Transcript ALast time we talked about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black and how Thomas Watson, the CEO of IBM knew Hitler, respected him, defended Germany against critiques from the world and overall did a great job hiding all this to the point that most people think of Watson as America's businessman and not as a Nazi enabler. Does that kind of sum it up?BYeah, that sounds about right. How different would you say the term enabler and sympathizer are?AMaybe the distinction is in the motives? Like sympathizer, I presume means you will agree with someone. Enable means you make something possible for them regardless of belief. What do you think?BYeah, I think that definitely a sympathizer knows what's happening. An enabler may not know what's going on.ASo you think by that definition, Watson wasn't an enabler, he was a sympathizer?BI think so.AWell, if it, if it comes down to awareness, then Watson was very clever about remaining strategically ignorant about certain things. But I think it's hard to claim that he had no idea. As for his motivations, I think greed is as good a guess as any. He kind of said the right words to the right people to get what he wanted. I want to tell you a story that Number one, is very interesting and number two, helps demonstrate how essential IBM actually was to the Holocaust being able to exterminate so many people so efficiently. Because I can, I can anticipate that objection. People being like, well, wouldn't Hitler have just found someone else to do it? Or how much did it really has to do with IBM versus any other number of factors. Which is true. I mean, both of those are good questions to ask.BFair question. Yeah. So if Dehomag hadn't been discovered and acquired by IBM, might it have just remained a German company and then been found independently by Germany for its own purposes?AYeah, that's also a good question. I think given the scarcity of raw materials though in Europe at the time, the fact that IBM New York was able to swoop in and provide the paper for the punchcards,BAh yes.ALike that was a key piece of it.BMaterial support.Anot to mention, you know, they had the infrastructure to train people for these systems. They didn't even sell them. They leased them.BCapitalism at its finest,ARight. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect bargain for a company if you canBFern, get down.AIf you can control the terms of how someone is using your hardware and also require them to use only your software. One way to help illustrate the importance of IBM to the Holocaust is to compare its implementation in two different countries, Holland and France. As you'll remember, every time Germany invaded a new country, it was time to do a census in that country so that they couldBCount them up. Weed them out.ASo they could identify the Jewish people and send them to concentration camps. When Germany took over the Netherlands, punch-card technology was already established in the country. So that country had the existing infrastructure. It already used Holleriths to do their census, as well as bill people for their utilities, inventory food, issue ration cards, all those kind of basic functions. And the Reich appointed a data nerd to run the census of the Netherlands as soon as it was taken over. And this guy's motto was, “To record is to serve.”BWow, that's so dystopian.AYeah. So he probably agreed with the Nazi ideals, but also wanted to prove himself and prove the capability of statistics. So he was very motivated for this to be a success. Although he was working against a more resistant population than average,BThat’s true.AI think it's fair to say because the Dutch people saw the census for what it was.BI know that there was a popular movement of non-Jewish Dutch citizens wearing the star.AAbsolutely. And they also registered as Jewish during the census because they wanted to stand in solidarity with their Jewish neighbors and they wanted to screw up the system in whatever way they could.BThey're braver people than Americans.AEngaging in the Holocaust is emotionallyBTaxing.ATaxing. And I find that I have to go like resupply some hope in humanity.BWhere do you find it?AWell, in stories like this.BOh.AYes, some Dutch people wore the yellow star even if they weren't Jewish. But according to the book, “it was not the outward visage of six gold points worn on the chest for all to see on the street. It was the 80 columns punched and sorted in a Hollerith facility that marked the Jews of Holland for deportation to concentration camps.” In other words, when we think of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jewish people, we think of that yellow star. And we think of, that is what singled them out. It was those behind the scenes records that made possible their mission to exterminate the Jews. The yellow stars served a different purpose, I thinkBOstracism, right?AExactly. It sent a message to the German people about who they should be rejecting. They didn't have access to the Hollerith lists, but they could see a star on somebody.BI find it interesting that you said that it was a data nerd. I mean, I have heard that nerds will rule the world someday.ABut will they rule it ethically?BYes, that's exactly what I was going to say. Is that, that's definitely true, but is that good?AYeah, I mean, think of how many self-styled nerds haunt incel forums on the internetBOr the halls of power, whether they be political, governmental, or corporate.AAnd this isn't to knock nerds. You are a paragon of nerdity.BMe? Yes.AAnd you're proud of that.BSure, yeah.AThat's what made me like you, you know, no, no. It was the Hawaiian shirts.BIt was the Hawaiian shirts?AAnd the faux leather orange throw pillows.BYeah.AThat was what told me this guy, he's a keeper. Tech comm classes and other writing classes can really help to show that data is not neutral.BYeah, absolutely. Like tech comm, you know, it selects for nerdery. And it's definitely a place where like you imagine, like the scientist focusing on the task or the engineer focusing on the design constraints. Like they are only looking at problems that are not necessarily having to do with people or with interacting with people. The tech comm professional, however, is like the bridge fromAthe liaison,BThe liaison from the siloed technical professional and an audience that to some degree is less technical than they are. That definitely places tech comm in a role where like the onus is especially on them to bring the ethics, to be the beacon of should this be done? I fight for the user.AYou know, different stakeholders are going to have different measures of success. There needs to be that voice. At the same time I don't want to imply that the humanities is going to solve these problems. Like, let's not forget, Hitler had a giant library and he appreciated art, right?BYeah.AHe also appreciated children and dogs, which horrifies me because all of that serves to humanize him.BOh my gosh. You mean he didn't, he didn't eat babies for lunch, breakfast, and midnight snacks? Hitler was still a human.AAnd I think it's important to humanize or cultural villains, not to hold them less accountable, but to shorten the distance between us and them and to recognize how part of being human is the capacity to be a monster.BYes.AAnd that is hard to accept. You want to, you want to other-ize the villains, because you don't want to think you could become one.BMm-hmm. In a sense, the logical fallacy of argumentum ad Hitlerum is a step in the wrong direction. I mean,AWhat is argument ad Hitlerum? The fallacy is inBThe fallacy is in making that connection too quickly. Making that connection without justification like, oh, Hitler loved parades. You like parades. You're like Hitler. Okay, that's, that's ridiculous. But you know, banning books, burning books, censoring books. That's a continuum.AThere's absolutely fascist stuff going onBRight now in Florida.ASo, okay. Let me see if I've got this right. You think the term argumentum ad Hitlerum is unhelpful because it suggests that any comparison to Hitler is inherently too extremeBor fallacious.AYes,BYeah, exactly.AWhen in fact, it's recognizing the similarities that we need to do, before it gets to the point of, let's murder a specific group of people.BYeah, I mean, it sort of sets up a false binary of like, well, there's an uncrossable chasm between not like Hitler and like Hitler.ABut I think it can be a fallacy. But I wouldn't call it ad Hitlerum, I would call it false analogy in that case where it's fallacious.BThere you go. There, we solved it. You're welcome, world.AYeah. And I think it also depends on are you throwing it out there to win an argument or stop a certain thread of argumentBStop the conversation.AYeah, exactly. I think that's inappropriate. I don't think it's inappropriate to look at a definition of what fascism is, see what's happening in the United States and call for action against it.BYeah. And of course, the United States isn't exceptional.AWell, right now I'm reading about Nazis in the United States during the war. Yeah, sorry, we got off on a tangent. This is why everyone hates moral philosophers. I don't know. Back to Holland. The Dutch people resisted bravely, but it was not enough to stand up against the literal machine. Of the estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, 102,000 were murdered, a death ratio of 73%. So keep that figure in mind while we move on to France. It was a different story in France. France was more laissez-faire about their statistics and documentation in general.BIt's a French term, so I'd imagine.AYep, right? For instance, when they did take their census, they didn't ask about religion. Furthermore, the puppet government, the Vichy regime, horrible as it was, wanted to exercise some facade of independence and came up with all these exemptions for certain of their Jewish citizens, such as veterans.BHmm.AThe general attitude was less enthusiastic about Let's use machines and punch cards to account for anything and everything. The census effort after Germany invaded France was a mess. There was no consistent method. They did things by paper form, also known as Tulard files, which required up to five pages per person. Things were just not going according to the Nazi requirements. They needed Holleriths. A guy named Renee Carmille was the Comptroller General of the French Army in the Vichy administration. And he steps up, he was a punch-card believer. He even had some Hollerith machines of his own. So he promised that his machines could quote, “deliver the Jews of France” unquote. So Vichy started planning another census. And the debate was whether to stick with the trusty Tulard files or the newfangled Hollerith punchcards. Carmille was lobbying hard for his proposal, but the Tulard forms won the day, at least until the Census Office found themselves buried in forms with nothing but Remington typewriters to help process them.BRemington? The gun makers had a chance to crank out a few typewriters, huh?AWe know that IBM made machine guns. So eventually they relented and arranged for the forms and materials to be transported to Carmille’s group. While they waited for Carmille to tabulate the forms, the Nazis commenced their raids on the Jewish people using the info they had gotten from the Tulard files. But those had such out-of-date information thatBThey were raiding the wrong place.AYep. And Adolf Eichmann personally visited Paris to oversee the deportation of the Jews. Eichmann wasn't happy with the progress they were making or lack thereof. They were still waiting for Carmille’s lists. And Carmille had the only copy of the card file. Meanwhile, Germany was losing battles in North Africa. This was 1942, 43. Somehow, an organized French Resistance Army had cropped up and valiantly kept the Germans at bay in North Africa. Where did they come from? It turns out that Carmille was a secret agent. He had used his Holleriths to help organize this army. Using the punch cards, he was able to track people's professions and military specialties in order to organize and mobilize them quickly. And he never punched column 11, asking for Jewish identity. Supposedly he tampered with the Holleriths to disable the ability to even track that. Carmille was caught,BOh shit.ATortured at the hands of the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie. But he gave up no names and ultimately died in a concentration camp. Let's compare the numbers. Estimated 73% of Dutch Jews died. In France it was approximately 25%.BWow. Yeah, that's a big difference. To be fair, there is a cultural difference between France and Belgium? The Netherlands?AHolland, Netherlands. Yeah.BNetherlands.AWhat's the correct term? What do they like to call their country?BI think that the Netherlands and Belgium were, well, Belgium got its independence from. You'll have to fact check.AYeah, well,Bthat's what I'm getting around to. I don't know.AAh, you admitted it. [The correct term for the country is The Netherlands. Holland describes the two most popular provinces within the Netherlands, which has 12 provinces total. However, Holland is often used to stand in for the whole of the Netherlands, in a type of synecdoche.]BI'm currently reading through kind of a history of the late 1800s of Europe and France in particular, you know, they were the first European country to have their monarchy dissolved. The French Revolution was in 1789 before it was cool. It kind of relapsed with various attempts to reestablish a monarchy or a dictatorship, an emperor in France. During that whole time, getting resistance groups organized, it was like a joke. It was like a sad, bad joke because there were all of these different groups that were on the political left that wanted an end to whatever reactionary regime was in place at the time, but they had infighting and wouldn't work together. I imagine that Holland didn't have that fractious, sectarian kind of a system. Like they didn't have as many splinter groups in their society. The more communal, like, you know, we will stand by our Jewish neighbors and wear this yellow star.ABut you'd think that that attitude would ultimately work against the Nazi’s effortsBTrue.AHere's the thing. We can't know what a difference Renee Carmille made. There are a multitude of factors that explain the different outcomes for these two separate countries. But you cannot deny that what he did was heroic.BYes. What he did was heroic and he personally, individually, I'm sure that he saved thousands upon thousands of Jewish lives in France.AYes, he not only foiled the Nazis efforts, he actively worked against them. And it's one of those things you can't measure the impact. But the more I research about World War II, the more I realize it's not down to one hero. Like it's not just you know General Patton or Eisenhower or Churchill.BIt was a time for the valiant.AIt's a combination of actions by individuals and choices by individuals that in the moment, in their little corner of the universe, might not have felt impactful. But in combination with others’ actions, made a difference.BMm-hmm.ASo I suggest we look to those people as role models for our kids. Don't have your kid do a book report on Thomas Watson. Have them research Rene Carmille or Victoria Hall. [Her name is Virginia Hall, not Victoria Hall. My bad.]BThe unsung heroes of World War Two.AYes. She was an SOE spy. Special Operations Executives. That was sort of the guerrilla warfare spy group that Churchill created to kind of sneak into, to parachute into France and do sabotage and organize resistance. Victoria Hall had a wooden leg. She was a woman. Those were things that blocked her from certain positions in society. And yet she gave her entire life to protecting the enemies of the Nazis and coordinating military actions against them. And she didn't look for glory. But I tell you what, she had to deal with a lot of men who wanted to be James Bond and wanted to be a spy because it was sexy but they didn't put in the work. And they didn't put in the care and the cautionBAnd it cost lives.AYes. I bring up the story of Carmille also because he's been called the first ethical hacker. Thinking, you know, thinking back to what we were saying about technical people. How it can sometimes be a challenge to look beyond the immediate consequences of their actions or to think that the work I do in this cubicle or in this lab or what have you is, it's just science or it's just numbers and thereby distance themselves from potential human consequences of the technologies that they're developing. I think this is a story that can show the power of a single technology to do harm and also when in the right hands to counteract that harm.BYeah, holler at the machines were definitely used to run the Holocaust. But car mile figured out a way to use a hollow Earth machine to defeat the Nazis in North Africa.AI don't want to fall into the trap of saying any technology is simply a tool. It can be used for good or for bad. To some extent that's true. But technologies can certainly be designed to lend themselves better to bad versus good consequences, for instance. And so that's something we need to be alert to as well. Is that it's, it's not just how the machine, how the technology is used, but how it's developed and for what purposes and with what capabilities?BYeah. Definitely.ABecause I think it's very fair to say that the technology that was used to I don't want to say innocuously because it wasn't innocuous. But the technology that was used to conduct the 1940 census in America, was as good as it was because it had been honed in a different context for a different purpose,BChilling.AYes. And we know that the results of the census were used to put Japanese-Americans into internment camps. Which you'd think, you'd think we'd learn a lesson from the enemy.BJust learned the wrong one.AYeah. And that should cause us to question the narrative of progress as an inherent good.BRight. It's the myth of progress, even.AYeah, and I'm sure many of my colleagues listening will have instantly connected the story of IBM and the Holocaust to Stephen Katz’s classic article, The Ethic of Expediency, which for those who aren't familiar with it, Katz opens with an example of technical communication that by all accounts is pretty much doing the job that tech comm needs to do, or it conveys technical details, it's formatted properly as a memo, it has precise specifications. And then you discover that it's a memo discussing improvements to a mobile gassing unit.BYeah.AAnd then you read it through a new lens. You realize that words like “merchandise” are used to describe human beings. And you realize that genocide is being discussed dispassionately, technically, neutrally. I know for me in graduate school, that article was a turning point in me recognizing the ethical implications of technical communication, that it's not enough to ask if something is effective, you have to ask, is it ethical? You have to ask who is this for? Who does it harm? Who might it harm? Another thing that's notable about that, the euphemisms, in the memo.BThat's a choice.AIt makes you wonder were they trying to distance themselves from the horrors that they were carrying out? Or was it for posterity so that the strategic ambiguity would help them skirt accountability. I don’t know. But that's another lesson for technical and business communication. And it's a lesson, it's a line that Watson learned how to walk very well. As I was reading IBM in the Holocaust and reading about like, wow, the Germans were just obsessed with surveillance and tracking and sorting and ranking and categorizing. And yet the people at the top don't want that transparency turned on themselves.BThey never do.ASo I want to show you a picture and tell me what you see happening in it.BYou vill show me picture.AOkay. Describe what you see here. This is an ad for Dehomag.BAh. I see a giant eyeball in the sky. Looking down on, it looks like a, it's probably a punch card, but it looks kind of like an apartment building behind a factory with a big old smokestack. And so it says in German “oversight with Hollerith”, lochkarten? I don't know what that is.AHere. It says in the caption. “See everything with Hollerith punchcards.”BOh.AWhat's the what's the message here?BOversight is good.ASurveillance.BUh-huh. Yeah. I mean, it could just be that it's printed in black and white, but I imagine that it looks pretty Orwellian in whatever color as well.AYeah. There's absolutely a power imbalance in who gets surveilled and who is privileged enough not to. And I think that needs to be accounted for anytime you hear somebody saying more data is better. And then one more connection to tech comm. As I was reading IBM and the Holocaust, it occurred to me that there's a parallel here with Katz's work in that he's talking to or he's using this written memo as an example of how technical communication isn't inherently good or neutral. And I think in this case, you can point to, you could almost call it a participatory design process. Because of how each punch card was so customized to a particular purpose and a particular user. And that by all accounts from, from a superficial glance at the situation would be an example of good UX practice. That's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to involve the people who will ultimately use your product and capture their needs andBCapture.AIt's not enough to stop there. If the victims of the Holocaust were included in this design process, it wouldn't exist to begin with. Do you see what I'm saying? Let me read a little bit from the book here. “None of Germany's statistical programs came easy. All of them required ongoing technical innovation. Every project required specific customized applications with Dehomag engineers carefully devising a column and corresponding hole to carry the intended and corresponding hole to carry the intended information. Every order was different. Each set was meticulously designed, not only for the singular client, but for the client's specific assignments. The design work was not a rote procedure, but an intense collaboration. It began with a protracted investigation of the precise data needs of the project, as well as the people, items or services being tabulated. This required IBM subsidiary field engineers to undertake invasive studies often on-site. So hearing about that process without context, you would say, Yeah. That's what a good UX designer does. That's what a good engineer does. That's what a good technical communicator does, isBSupport your product.ALearn about your audience. Anticipate your client's needs. And I say this to make clear that participatory design in and of itself doesn't necessarily guard againstBBad participation?AI don't want to say the word evil, that's too cliche.BSo it doesn't guard againstAharm, we’ll say. Who are you participating with? To what ends? Who will be affected? Whether or not your client, whether or not they're the one using the product or paying you for the work.BYeah.AThat looks like a dick. Sorry. It wasn’t on purpose.BNo? Oh, okay.AI doodle.BYou doodle.AI doodle on my notes while we talk and that was accidental.BYeah. And in a sense like it makes sense because the we don't want mob justice either, because that's participatory. But it doesn't mean that it's going to be good.AYeah, participatory design. Deep embedded field research and observation and interviews is not inherently socially just.BTrue.ASo what does that mean for teachers? For people doing UX? What takeaways do we want to leave our listeners with? I don't want to say don't do participatory design, right?BSo for practitioners of UX, I would say it may not be popular to say every time you get involved with a project that you should have been involved earlier. But do it. Ideally, every project, every, every thing that's supposed to have a great impact should start with an ethical study. Academia has the IRB step as like the gatekeeper for doing research. Industry no, nothing.AI'm surely there's some regulations to keep things in check.BWell, yeah, the gatekeeper is whether a manager thinks the expense can be justified. Pretty much. Occasionally someone will think to involve legal in the discussion. But, you know, I have a feeling that people who are in legal departments for corporations probably feel like a lot of UX designers who are brought in three days before launch to get their blessing Instead of to get their input and direction.AYeah. It doesn't matter how closely you collaborate with your client if the end result is to better surveil, or locate or control people who don't have a say in the product. So what do you think? I'm trying to I'm trying to wrap up.BYeah.AWhat do you think? I'm surprised that IBM has managed to keep its reputation so untarnished given this history.BNo kidding.AI'm sure we use and benefit from IBM products too. So it's not simply a matter of boycotting it. ButBThey were probably one of the early adopters of the idea of brand renovation. I don't know if that's the right term even but it’s the only way I can put words to it.AI don't mean to say that IBM is the one and only bad guy.BOh no.AThat was another one of the annoying critical reviews I read on Amazon is, why are you singling out IBM? If you do that, then you have to call out all these other companies that were complicit. And it's like,BSo let's do it. Call them all out.AYeah. Like why not do a deep dive on one if it means that we can better recognize moves that make this possible?BI know that it isn't exactly the same thing, I heard a podcast about denialism and how its roots go back further than tobacco. Its roots,ACorporate denialism?BYes. Corporate denialism.ALike saying we’re not part of the problem or we didn't do this?BYeah, that sort of thing. It goes back, in fact to electric companies. In almost all places they have what's called a natural monopoly. And so they kind of don't have to really compete because you can't just pick another electric company to give you your power. They fought hard against rural electrification because they didn't want to run all of those transmission lines. They wanted to power cities, they didn't want to power farms. They basically created studies to show that this wouldn't be feasible or that farmers don't even want electricity.AOh, use data and science to support their preconceived preference?BYeah. So they, when tobacco’s turn came, there was a rule book.ATemplate.BThere was a template already. And I imagine that IBM was just keeping it warm from, from the electric companies on to big tobacco. Oh no, no, no, we weren't, We didn't really like what Hitler was doing. I mean, it wasn't that bad. So the whole deny delay minimize all of the strategies used for when your business model actively creates harm.AWell, thanks for listening.BYes. Until next time.AIt was a challenge to read this book and not constantly report what I was learning because I didn't, because I wanted to make sure we talked about it on the podcast.BOh, it wasn't out of respect for me reading my own book that you held back, it was because you wanted to have something to hit me with that I hadn't heard before.AYeah. Get a more genuine reaction. It's not like you don't interrupt my reading to show me your meme of the day.BOh, come on. You get plenty of cute animal videos too.AYeah. That makes it all worth it.BWhen it comes down to it, cute animals, that’s what makes it all worth it.
March 23, 2023
IBM and the Holocaust, Part 1
Nazi Germany systematically identified, relocated, and murdered millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust. But how were they able to kill so many so efficiently? IBM equipment played a key role. Meanwhile, IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson got rich off of Nazi Germany and strategically escaped scrutiny for his collaboration. In this episode, drawing on Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust , Abi explains how intertwined IBM and Nazi Germany were by tracing their paths through the Hitler years. Sources and further reading Black, E. (2001). IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation . Dialog press. Transcript BHi, this is TC talk.AI'm Abi.Band I'm Benton.AI teach technical communicationBand I don't.ABut you're married to me so you get to hear all about it.BI do.AFor new listeners. Let's start with a brief definition of technical communication. I see technical communication as communication, whether verbal, visual, etc. that helps somebody make a decision or perform some action. The most effective tech comm is highly attuned to its audience and the audience's knowledge, their values, and so on.BThat sounds good to me.ANow, effective tech comm isn't inherently good or ethical, as we will get further into in this episode. Today we're going to talk about the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. It was written in 2001. And this is another of those books that I did not plan to talk about for this podcast. But once I started reading it, I knew there are multifarious connections. Is that a word?BMultiply nefarious?AWell, multifarious and nefarious, certainly in this case. Myriad.BMany.ALanguage. Many. Thank you. It was getting some buzz on Twitter on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, and I knew I had to pick it up.BWhat day in January is that?A27th.BOkay.ABecause I'm interested in history generally. But we'll certainly get to the implications for tech comm. I might just pull a Peter Jackson with this one. It's a very long and dense book. I may need to extend it into multiple episodes. We'll have to see how efficiently we can get through this.BWe'll see what the CGI budget for this one is going to be then.AWell, in fact, I don't think any of the episodes we've done this season have been planned like very far in advance. And I did actually go into the fall with a list of topics I wanted to do. And then other stuff just came up and it seemed more interesting at the time. But I still wanna do those topics. Okay, Benton, What if I told you that there was a man whose loyalists called him The Leader, assembled and sang celebratory songs about him. And who was instrumental in the efficient mass murder of millions of people. Who am I talking about?BThat sure sounds like Hitler to me.AI'm talking about Thomas J. Watson, the CEO of IBM, International Business Machines. Were you aware of this? Like what is your kind of background understanding of what IBM is or what or who Thomas Watson was?BI did know that IBM has existed for a lot longer than electronics. Well, as we know them today.AHence, the machines in its title.BMachines, yes.AVersus computers.B I know that they were instrumental in the US Census going from a process of several months of collating data before the punch card reader was used to being like a matter of weeks, maybe?AYou're talking about the American Census.BThe American Census.ANo it took years actually to compile the data before IBM came on the scene.BOkay. It was a substantial reduction, that much I knew. So being a kid growing up in the '90s in an Apple computer home IBM was known as Big blue. They were the evil empire. They were they were the bad guys in computers.AFor real?BYes.AWhere did this notion come from?BBecause they were the other team.AWhat about Microsoft? Where were they?BWell, they were on that team.AOh, Apple versus everyone else?BYes. I admit it. I was a techno-jingoist when I was a kid.AWell, you weren't wrong. I mean, I wouldn't say Apple is innocent.BThey're not innocent and they never were.AYeah. Okay. What about Watson? Do you remember the Watson supercomputer?BWas this Jeopardy or was this chess?AIt may have been both. What I remember of it is that it went up against my childhood hero Ken Jennings.BAh. So definitely Jeopardy.ARight. You know, it was created by IBM, named after its founder. Obviously,BI thought it may have been named after Sherlock’s colleague, Dr. Watson. Or maybe there's the Watson Crick model of DNA.AIt was indeed named after Thomas Watson. I just want to start by saying, I think this book offers a good lesson in who we choose to lionize. Who are our heroes? Even before I got very deep into this book, I did a quick Google search, like who is this Watson guy? And in some of the top results, there were articles like Encyclopedia Britannica and whatnot. Based on what I read there, there was zero reference to his dealings with Nazi Germany.BOh.AAnd he was only presented as one of America's best-known businessmen. Again, I wasn't looking deeply. It's not some hidden secret that IBM worked with Nazi Germany. But any elementary school kid trying to write a report on this guy would only come up with praise of him. And that speaks to Americans’, I think, tendency to respect rich people simply on the basis of they’re rich.BYup.AThe facade is starting to slip.BThe resistance to that. That general trend is definitely getting more pronounced and widespread. Thank goodness.AYeah. Elon is not doing himself any favors with his antics. Jeff Bezos, I can't think of a single person who looks up to the guy,BDr. Evil with his giant phallus rocket.ABut as this book shows, it's actually dangerous to unquestioningly respect someone even if they are a quote, unquote good businessman. Because in a capitalist society, being a good businessman means you make money. Let's get into the overlap between IBM and Nazi Germany. And as Edwin black argues, IBM added the Blitz to blitzkrieg. And the author is very clear about this. Hitler still would have murdered the Jews without help from IBM. But there is no way he could have done it quite as efficiently. Like any rhetorician, I like to get the context for what I read. What was the reaction when it came out? How are people reacting to it now? And it was generally well received thanks in part to its just absolute trove of documentation. So what Black did with this book is he pieced together this collaboration that they were very strategic about keeping hidden, as seen in all of the plausible deniability built into their correspondence and in how Watson's public PR stunts failed to align with his private decision-making. So in my search for context, I made the mistake of reading Amazon reviews.BAs we sometimes do.AThe critical ones were along the lines of this book failed to convince me that Watson was a genocidal maniac. Of course he wanted to sell his product. That's what companies do, make money. I'm just like, do you see the problem here? The value of capitalism and money-making is so deeply embedded that it seems like an obvious excuse for aiding and abetting fucking genocide. Right?BMm-hmm.AI mean, obviously not everyone thinks this way, but I don't know, the tone of that comment gives us a window into how some people react to this. So, sure, Watson may not have been a genocidal maniac like Hitler. But Watson was not against it enough for it to matter.BYeah.AAnd in my mind, whether you're motivated by a deep and abiding hatred based on lies or greed, the end result is the same, right? And these are the people who fly under the radar because they're not spouting the overtly racist stuff. But again, if you enabled the Reich, what does it matter? The swastika only represented a dollar sign to Watson.BAlso, again, getting back to capitalism, IBM, their leadership had a financial obligation to obfuscate the truth.AHow so?BWell, a corporation exists for the profit of shareholders.ASo like I said, I want to show how intertwined IBM and Nazi Germany were by tracing their paths through the Hitler years. If you want the depth, I do highly recommend the book, but I don't think you'll need to read the book to get the important lessons out of it. Which like I said, might be a future episode. Okay, background on Thomas Watson. So he worked for the National cash register company, NCR. He was a devious salesman, drove out any competition. NCR’s quote, “war tactics were limitless. Bribes, knockoff machines at predatory prices, threats of litigation and even smashed store windows were alleged.” So in 1912, Watson and other NCR execs were found guilty of criminal conspiracy. And I'm going to tell a story because it perfectly illustrates Watson's tactics for shirking accountability that he will fully deploy at IBM.BHm.AThe same spring that Watson and friends were being investigated, there was massive flooding in town. This was in Ohio. 90,000 people were displaced. Quote, “NCR organized an immense emergency relief effort.” They converted their factories to be able to produce rowboats. They opened up their facilities for hospital patients. They offered food, water, organized repairs of the railroads, so on and so forth. They became heroes. They used that hero status to get others to push for pardons for them. Eventually Watson's attorneys got him off the hook for a technicality. He learned two lessons from this event. Number one, you can avoid accountability by becoming indispensable. Number two, don't put everything in writing. The evidence for the jury to convict him was overwhelming. And he wouldn't make that mistake again. Watson took charge of IBM in 1922. And IBM acquired Dehomag, short for in German, German Hollerith Machine Company. What's a Hollerith machine? It was a type of early computing device that sorted punchcards for various purposes. This was invented in the late 1800s by an IBM worker, a German immigrant, named Herman Hollerith, who devised the machine while working for the US Census Bureau. Dehomag may as well have been called IBM Germany. But keeping IBM out of the company name helped him stay under the radar as the public started scrutinizing Germany, as Hitler rose to power. And by this point, IBM had already made a fortune off Germany even in the midst of the Great Depression in the United States. So Watson was sneaky in the way that he reported his profits.BNo.AIn fact, much of the book just covers his shady business dealings and his ongoing fight over finances with Willie Heidinger, the enthusiastic Nazi who owned Dehomag at the time IBM acquired it. I won't touch on that here because I don't have a business or legal background and frankly, I wasn't able to follow it very well. But the upshot is that Watson was greedy and cunning throughout all of this, and he micro-managed Dehomag to ensure he could squeeze as much profit out of it as possible and to conveniently obscure to the public and the US government his close relationship with Nazi Germany.BConvenient.AAlright, what's special about 1933 in Germany?BIs that when Hitler was elected?AI believe it was when he was appointed Chancellor.BChancellor.Aby President Hindenburg. Hitler came to power and it was no secret that his goal was to eliminate the Jewish people. This was one aspect of his platform that he never wavered on. You know, his Mein Kampf is full of the ravings of a racist madman. I say that to preempt any excuses like, no one could have known.BMaybe not everyone took him seriously at the time.AThe 1920s, he had that failed Beer Hall Putsch andBThat put him in prison when he wrote Mein Kampf.ARight. And Hitler learned from that experience that the way to get to power is through legitimate means. Or at least the appearance of legitimacy. After 1929, the stock market crash in the United States, America was like, Oh hey, pay those loans back. It was a financial crisis that prompted people to be like, oh, Hitler knows what he's talking about. But the anti-Semitism was already deeply baked in to culture at that time. Again, not something that just emerged out of thin air. Right away, Hitler started implementing laws that disenfranchised the Jews. The persecution ramped up over the years, starting with pushing them out of their workplaces, stealing their assets, moving them into ghettos, and ultimately sending them to concentration camps for either quote “extermination by labor,” unquote, or to be gassed.BI know that one of the, one of the camps had the slogan over its gate. Work makes free.AThat sounds familiar.BBecause it will free you from your earthly body. Enough work.AYeah. And this is a question I had always wondered about before I started really digging into the history of World War Two. How did Hitler know who all the Jewish people were, right? Because by that point, many were very assimilated. Many had even converted to ChristianityBYeah.ALikely nudged by the racism against them.BPolitical racism and individual racism.ARight. But I always wondered, how do you pick them out? Especially if you're defining Jewish as both those who practiced Judaism and those who were Jewish by blood, even by a small portion. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 kind of officialized this broad definition of Jewish. So how could you possibly identify them without collecting and cross-referencing data from multiple censuses, church record books, and other documentation? The answer, Hollerith machines. I'm going to give you an example of one function of the Hollerith machines just to illustrate how it worked. But it was used for many, many different purposes. And Nazi Germany was obsessed with documenting and tracking.BOh, yeah.AUm, so they also did a horse census. They did a cow census, they did a vehicle census, they did a fucking butter census.BNot only genocide. Hashtag, not all Hollerith machines.AOh my gosh. Okay, so here's an example of how a Hollerith machine helps to run the activities of a concentration camp. Black writes, “prisoners were identified by descriptive Hollerith cards, each with columns, with punched holes detailing nationality, date of birth, marital status, et cetera.” So with a spreadsheet you can filter, you can sort, you can list. But before computers existed, there was no way to do that efficiently. But if every person has their own punch card, then you can set your Hollerith to say, alright, spit out all the Jewish people who are men ages 18 to 24 or what have you. And then you send the punch cards through.BSay you've got a need for strong backs to do hard labor.ARight. Hole 3 signified homosexual. Hole 9 signified anti-social. Eight, Jew. And then there was also a code for reason for departure.BDeparture?AFrom the camp.BOh.ATwo was transfer. Suicide was 5, special handling was 6.BWhat the hell kinda thing is that?AIt was commonly understood to be extermination either in a gas chamber, by hanging or by gunshot.BSpecial handling.AYep. Does it make sense in general you know what Hollerith machines were able to make possible?BMm-hmm.AOkay. And they were used toBYou got a stack of cards. Every person is a database entry. Yeah. And when you pull their card, you call them, they get in line and they perform whatever task they were called for.AYeah. Right away Hitler was like, alright, we're gonna do a census. We're going to use the Holleriths. Of course they tracked religion. And it wasn't enough to just count the Jewish people. They needed to know, I shouldn't say needed, they wanted to know exactly who they were. One statistician at the time said “In using statistics, the government now has the roadmap to switch from knowledge to deeds.” BThere's a saying in, in business. I think it's in business that you can't control what you can't measure. Be careful what you measureAYesBbecause you'll start to think that it's important.AOh my gosh. Yeah. Well, I mean, we'll talk about this more. I think there's definitely connections here to big data of today. So I just want to call attention here to how Hitler marshaled these institutions of science, statistics towards his racist ends. They sort of borrowed the credibility of science to invent a pseudoscientific branch of race science.BMm-hmm.AAnd I think that's a move that we need to be alert to. That happened certainly in the United States, as we discussed in our episode about racist medical experimentation.BMm-hmm.AAnd then, I want you to read this quote. I want you to read this quote from Willy Heidinger.B“The physician examines the human body and determines whether all organs are working to the benefit of the entire organism. We, Dehomag, are very much like the physician in that we dissect cell by cell, the German cultural body. We report every individual characteristic on a little card. These are not dead cards. Quite to the contrary. They prove later on that they come to life when the cards are sorted at a rate of 25,000/h. Our nation's capital P physician, Adolf Hitler, can take corrective procedures to correct the sick circumstances. Our characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine, which we will and we must keep pure.”AWhat do you think?BThat is some grade a use of persuasive rhetoric. Not that I'm persuaded, but he uses the positive. A physician. Physicians are there to help, we’re like physicians. We're here to helpADehumanizes.BIt is not a human, it is a cell that may be sick.AIt's a tumor.BYes.AThat's going to harm the rest of the body if it's not excised.B“We must poison the tumor.”AAnd the punch cards are inextricable from this mission, right?BRight.AOkay. In 1935, one of the things that Roosevelt is best known for, Social Security Act.BYes, the New Deal.Awhich required tracking 30 million people. Guess who got the contract?BIBM.AAccording to Black, “Watson's people boasted that his was the biggest accounting operation of all time.” But actually it was the second biggest. The dress rehearsal had already taken place in Germany. I mention this to show how IBM was starting to become essential to the operations of the US government as well, right? Watson was elected chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce.BI imagine that meets in New York?AWell, that year the conference was in Paris. But once Watson was in charge, guess where he announced the next conference would be?BIt will be in Berlin.AYes. Meanwhile, IBM was becoming more essential in Germany. And just to clarify, in case you think that Germany could have done this without Watson. They did supply the punchcards. Billions a year.BGeez.ABecause of trade sanctions and whatnot at that time, Germany had a hard time acquiring the raw materials it needed and paper was in short supply. So they relied heavily upon IBM New York at this point. In 1937 was the International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Berlin. And at this meeting, Watson received Hitler's medal, Merit Cross of the German Eagle. This was in honor of Watson's vocal support for Germany, for helping keep a trade route open, for providing the technology that enabled the rounding up of the Jews, for the credibility he granted to Germany due to being quote, America's businessmen and a consultant to Roosevelt. At this meeting, there were lavish dinner parties. He was entertained by Joseph and Magda Goebbels. This was quite audacious of Watson because at this time there were boycotts, protests, public outcry against Hitler's regime. So again, already, the world was becoming wise to Hitler's dangerousness.BWary, at least.AWatson really was instrumental for Germany at this point because he went out of his way to defend them. Even if in vague terms. And his high-status with Roosevelt gave an implicit green-light to their activities.BBeing a publicly viewed as successful businessmen, that alone will get you access to politicians, but donations, they definitely put your name at the top of the list.AWatson donated large sums to Roosevelt's campaign.BYeah, and this kind of gets to the idea also that certainly Roosevelt was not a saint. ANo.BObviously under Roosevelt's watch, we turned away boats of Jewish refugees from Germany. Said, Go back.AYes. 1938 Hitler starts to expand. Not that way,BSorry. I couldn't help it.AStarts to expand Germany, not himself. Benton just did a gesture of blowing up like a balloon. Watson visits Germany again earlier in the year. He argued passionately for Germany's demands, according to Black, “that the world redistribute its raw materials and lower so-called trade barriers as the path to peace. Even as the mass media regularly published explanations that Germany desperately only needed those raw materials to arm its war machine.”BWell, there didn't need to be war if nobody fought back. Eye roll.AAnd Watson praised the rising standard of living in Europe even as the Jews were being dispossessed. I have to read you this quote from Watson. “You know, you can cooperate with the man without believing in everything he says and does.” And I point out his calls for world peace because of how disingenuous they were. And that's another thing we need to be alert to is that if the price of peace is eliminating an entire race of people,BSubjugation.Ait's not worth it. Germany continues to expand, invades Czechoslovakia. Every time Germany claimed more land, it had to buy more Holleriths and implement more censuses so that they could immediately identify and round up the Jews living there. Jewish people had been emigrating from Germany for years at that point. Because of the policies that dispossessed them.BThey saw they saw it coming. So they moved to France or moved to Czechoslovakia.AYep.BIf I get out of these borders, I'll be safe.ABut then Germany would just catch up to them. November 10, 1938. This was a turning point. Kristallnacht. Tell me what you know about it.BIt was the night of the broken glass. From my understanding, this is when groups of political hooligans, brown shirts, Nazis, whatever you want to call them, went around and broke the store windows of Jewish businesses.AThere were beatings in the street. Synagogues burnt down. It was a very vocal, not vocal, but a very obvious threat, sort of a signal, that the flood gates have opened.BThe leash is off?AYes. The public outcry outside of Germany continued. US continued boycotting German companies. IBM was lucky that it didn't have IBM in the name of its German subsidiary. And they were lucky that they were only exporting to Germany, not importing from Germany. So that allowed it to stay under the radar. But by this point, Watson had had a very public relationship with Germany. I mean, he got a medal from Hitler. And so he finds himself in a sticky situation, fully of his own making, I might add. He really didn't want to tell off Germany, but there was such ill will against Germany at that point that from a PR standpoint, he just couldn't keep silent. So he sent a letter addressed to his Excellency, Hitler, asking him to consider the golden rule in how he handled minorities. By all accounts, a very mild critique. Even so, this letter somehow got lost, was mysteriously misaddressed. Watson's really trying to play both sides here. 1939, International Chamber of Congress is held in Copenhagen. During Watson’s speech, he says, “We regret that there are unsatisfactory political and economic conditions in the world today, with the great difference of opinion existing among many countries. But differences of opinion freely discussed and fairly disposed of resultant mutual benefit and increased happiness to all concerned.” And this, sorry, I have feelings.BYou have, you have feelings, huh.AI mean, it reminds me of people saying Let's just all get along. There's so much polarization and hate from both sides. And it's like when one side is aiming to dehumanize a specific group of people. Again, so-called peace is not worth it.BYeah. The hate is not symmetric. It's not equal in magnitude or in type. One side hates what the other is doing. The other side hates what this side is.AYes. And you know, it raises the question. Sure. Maybe there's anger on both sides, but whose hatred is actually harming human lives?BExactly.AHitler invades Poland, bam, World War II begins. They start another census.BOnce Hitler invades Poland, the Soviet Union doesn't want to miss out.ARight. They strike a deal.BWell, they strike a deal. They said that you can invade Poland. And we can invade Poland, but we will not fight each other once we, once our lines meet,ARight.BPoor Poland.AI know, right?BIt's a plane, it’s a geological plane. Nothing to hide behind. you, No, no mountains to fortify, just perfect for tanks.AYeah. As I mentioned before, they would relocate the Jews into ghettos. They would use Hollerith machines to keep track and know exactly how many Jews were under their jurisdiction and how much nutrition to allocate. Such as 184 calories per person per day,BOh wow, that's, missed a zero there.AExactly. Again, no, no secret what the end goal is here. So Watson still in a sticky situation in 1940. He's trying to create more distance between himself and IBM Germany.BAt this point, America is not in the war.Acorrect, but Britain. Let's see. It was in 1940 that Germany invades Norway, Holland, and Belgium. When the Nazis blitzkrieged France, they were on meth.BWowAThanks to whatever documentary taught me this, butBMeth NazisAIt blew my mind. It's like, why are these Nazis never stopping to rest?BShall go until we get to Spain, ya.ASo Watson, he didn't want to offend Germany, but he didn't want to look complicit and risk his hero status in the United States. So he tried to shirk the decision of what to do with this medal. He even asked the Secretary of State if they wanted him to return the medal so he could throw them under the bus. And they were like, I refuse to comment on this.BIn 1940, yeah. The US, they were tip toeing.AYeah. Despite Watson's friends in high places, there was definitely suspicion. Even the FBI started nosing around IBM.BOh, man.AAnd Watson appeared to cooperate by throwing his German workers under the bus and pretending like, oh, we have no tolerance for this. And then he did eventually give the medal back, publicly, of course. The Nazis were pissed. Dehomag started revolting. Dehomag was starting to make plans to make their own equipment and threatened Watson with that possibility. But again, they were just too enmeshed basically.BI'm sure there were patents and other binding international business reasons that they weren't allowed.AWatson is, has lost his biggest supporters in Germany, but no worries. There's another country he can get rich off of, the United States. Because in 1940, he could sense things were building up to them joining the war. IBM started making machine guns.BWow, international business machine guns.AThey acquired a munitions company or converted a factory or something. They started doing military research for the US. You know, Holleriths were even used at Bletchley Park.BThat is where they cracked the Enigma machine.AIBM was essentially aiding both sides in encoding and decoding their intelligence.BWhich is the perfect place for a war materiel supplier to be.AAnd over the course of the war, IBM became a precious war asset to the United States,BToo big to fail, huh?AAnd IBM supplied the equipment needed to conduct the 1940 census in the United States. There was some reluctance about this and the invasive questions in the census. Eleanor Roosevelt even took to the radio to call the census “the greatest assemblage of facts ever collected by any people about the things that affect their welfare.” Remember this for later. US government is starting to crack down even more. US Treasury prohibits transactions with the enemy. So Watson found labyrinthine ways around it. He did a lot of his communication through neutral countries, like Switzerland. He wasn't micro-managing anymore. He opted not to know.BStrategic ignoranceAPrecisely, but, and this is wild to me. He continued communications with Europe under the cover of the US government. Remember, he'd been cultivating contacts for years. He had friends in the State Department or at least folks who wouldn't dare turned down the man responsible for making social security, the census, and other government functions happen. Meanwhile, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, America joins the war.BEnd of 1941. And then America gets to let its racist flag fly.AYeah. Roosevelt orders Japanese people in the United States into internment camps.BAnd they surrender all assets.AHow did the government find them so quickly? Remember the census of 1940.B1940, wow, that's handy.A1942. The Nazis hold the Wannsee Conference where Nazi officials planned out how to get all the Jewish people in their conquered territories expeditiously to the gas chambersBThis was in a movie I saw.Awhere the final solution was unveiledBto the top leadership of people who would be involved in making it happen.AYeah. And again, to be clear, this wasn't an ideological escalation on the part of Hitler. This was always where he wanted to end up. He just lacked the infrastructure for it. So the Nazis begin their extermination plan in earnest. There was IBM equipment at every concentration camp. Holleriths and punch cards were used to assign work, track transfers, ID the prisoners. Quote, “The third Reich’s transition from the blind persecution of a general population to the destruction of individuals had come full circle. In genocide, Jews lost their identity. Now every corpse comprised a mere component in a far larger statistical set, adding up to total annihilation.”BThey had numbers tattooed on them, didn't they?AYeah.BAnd I bet those numbers corresponded with the punch card.AYeah. Hollerith numbers.BWow.ASo skipping ahead to 1945 when the war ends in Europe. IBM New York, writes Black, “was able to recapture its problematic but valuable German subsidiary, recover its machines”BRecapture?A“and assimilate all the profits.” And Watson's, you know, things are going pretty well for him, but he's antsy because war crimes trials are starting to be set up. IBM very much wanted to be excluded. What do you do? You become indispensable. One of the ways that he became valuable to the United States was the US strategic bombing survey. Are you familiar with that?BNo.AIts goal was to study the effects of the bombings on Germany, especially the effects on citizen morale. And they wanted that data to plan their bombing campaign against Japan.BSo this was a pro carpet bombing.AThe Nuremberg Trials began. One of the challenges was that all the evidence needed to be translated into French, Russian, German, English. But one company volunteered to do it free of charge.BI bet one company did.AYep. Thanks. IBM. I think this is a good time to pause. I have more that I want to talk about. But I think at this point it's safe to say the war is over. IBM is intact. Watson is scrooge McDuck, swimming in his gold. And millions of people have died, whether in battle or murdered in concentration camps or whatever other ugly means the Nazis used. I'll close with this quote from IBM and the Holocaust. “What seemingly magical scheduling process could have allowed millions of Nazi victims to step onto train platforms, travel two or three days by rail, and then step onto a ramp at Auschwitz or Treblinka, and within an hour be marched into gas chambers hour after hour, day after day, timetable after timetable? Like clockwork and always with blitzkrieg efficiency.”BHuh.AI am cognizant of the fact that a number, a statistic, doesn't convey the tragedy of each individual being dehumanized and murdered. 6 million is one of those numbers that you can't wrap your head around. So I actually, I googled how many seconds or how, how long is 1 million seconds. It was like ten or 11 days.B11 days.ASo multiply that by six, you've got what, two months?BMore than two months.ASo if every life is represented by a single second going non-stop, every second of every day for over two months, that would equal 6 million. That's a crude comparison. But just as a as a way of trying to wrap your head around the scope of it. So at this point, anticipating potential objection. How do we know that IBM made that much of a difference, right? Clearly, Hitler would've pursued this regardless of the support of IBM. So that's what I'm going to talk about next by explaining how the use of Hollerith machines differed from country to country and how that affected the results.BOkay.AThis is a riveting story. So you'll want to tune in.
March 2, 2023
BONUS: All the jokes we couldn’t fit in the last episode
More jokes, ChatGPT-generated and otherwise, cut from the recording for the "AI is a joke" episode Transcript AAnd then the third joke I put on Twitter was getting away from profession- oriented humor. Why don't mushrooms ever shared their feelings?BSo this is a little bit of fun with fungus.AYou're right. We haven't had fun with fungus in awhile, but we are doing So right now. A: Because they’re a fungi, exclamation point. B, because they tend to get to mush-y, C, because they don't want to seem toxic. Again, small sample size, but also a smaller standard deviation because joke C got 91% of the votes, because they don't want to seem toxic. That was me.BIt looks like ten out of 11.AGive me some credit for being funnier than a robot.BYeah, oh yeah.AAnd then B, they don't want to get too mush-y. That was actually Zoe's punchline, 10-year-old. And then A is obviously then the AI punchline. And that did not get any votes.BIt’s a joke I would make.AIt’s a very bad joke. But I did like the addition of the exclamation point.BThat was very creative of the AI.AI give the bot a little bit of credit for that.BYeah.AI would like to use this opportunity to debut some of my original jokes.BOh, okay.AHow do mattress companies ensure their products are comfortable for their customers?BI don't know.AThey run snoozability tests.BOh.AWhy are project managers so good at gymnastics?BHm.ABecause they're agile. This one is so generic, I'm sure it's been said before, but why did the creative writing professor go to the graveyard? To find the plot.BYou had to dig deep for that one, didn't you?ANow, that is a dad joke.BWell, it'll become a dad joke once it's been done to death.AOkay. We started playing around with your profession. Technically, you’re what, an arborist?BMm-hmm.AThis one is from the AI. Why did the arborist go to the bank? To get a branch loan!BThis is the territory of failing so hard it wraps around to a win.AAnd then I asked you to come up with a couple. So you should deliver these.BWhy did the arborist go to the bank?AWhy?BHe saw their ad.A Aha.B Or, he had trouble logging into their website.AThat one would get my vote.BWhat did the arborist say when he planted an oak tree?ATell me.BAI says, this oak tree will grow and grow.AFunny in its ignorance.BThis is very much the same. Yes.AAnd then the ones we came up were notBInstead of a joke it came up with a truth statement. Wow.ANow this one, we didn't come up with great punchlines, but well, Okey-doke!BDoes this look oak-ay to you?AThen I wanted to ask a joke about academic podcasters. What did the academic podcaster say when their podcast was over?BThat's a wrap of knowledge.AExclamation point. My suggested punchline was, this was an exploratory pilot podcast.BNot funny but not bad.AAlright, one more and then I'll be done, I promise. When I was thinking of which one to put on Twitter, I was debating between the cross the road one and the trapped in an elevator one.BYou haven't said the trapped in an elevator yet.ABut I will. What did the technical communicator do when he got stuck in an elevator?BSo this is the question it came up with when you said write a joke about technical communicators.ACorrect. That was my prompt. The answer it came up with was “wrote a detailed manual on how to get out,” which is similar in theme to the crossing the road one. The one that I came up with was, he said finally, some alone time.BI think that's probably more of an assumption that technical communicators are introverts like you.AFair enough. So again, relying upon stereotypes. But if what my students report to me is representative at all of the tech comm population then they do lean on the introvert side. Last punchline I came up with. You get to read this one. Question. What did the technical communicator do when he got stuck in an elevator?BRecorded a three-part podcast series about risk and hazard communication. Hey.AYeah, that was a little personal.AI'd like to close with one more chat GPT experiment I did. So I'm famously bad at titles. I'm just not creative. So I asked it, what could I title my LOL-cats inspired cookbook. Secretly I wanted to see if it was going to include cheeseburgers.BMm-hmm. Because in the early days of memes when it was just captioned cat pictures.AI can haz cheeseburger. That's where you had to go for memes in the olden days. Anyways, I was curious if it, if it could draw on that history, that legacy, but it didn't.BNo?AInstead it suggested Cookin’ with cat memes, deliciously purr-fect recipes for every occasion.BDid it come up with anything else interesting? I see other stuff.AOkay. Well, yeah. I don't know if we have time for it, but in case we do. I asked it to title an autobiography for an engineer turned arborist who loves space and renewable energy.BWhat did it say?ALeaves and stars colon, a memoir of an engineer-arborist’s journey to a sustainable future. What do you think?BI mean, it basically just reformatted what you gave it, but.AAnd then I asked it to title an autobiography about an English professor who loves Disney channel original musicals, Ted Danson, and platypuses. And this is entirely hypothetical as I’m sure you can tell.BYeah. Asking for a friend, right?AA curiously magical life: The autobiography of professor Patricia Platypus. I don’t know where the Patricia came from, but there’s also Living an Eclectic Life: The memoirs of professor Edward T. Danson, platypus-loving musical enthusiast.BYou definitely got more of a word-salad answer.AYeah. You’ve got your work cut out for you, now that there’s a title for your book, you have to write it.BWhat in the? Fern. Silly cat. She’s gonna be trapped in there.AServes her right. Is that a wrap?BOf knowledge.AHa!
February 23, 2023
AI is a joke
We reflect on AI text generators, creativity, technical communication, writing instruction, algorithmic literacy, magic, and more. Importantly, we reveal the results of our Twitter experiment: Are we funnier than a robot? (Results were mixed.) Also, find out what happens when we drink an AI-generated cocktail recipe and ask ChatGPT to write a stand-up routine about the ethics of artificial intelligence. Sources and further reading Bakke, A. (2020). Everyday Googling: Results of an Observational Study and Applications for Teaching Algorithmic Literacy. Computers and Composition , 57 , 102577. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102577 Graham, S. S., & Hopkins, H. R. (2022). AI for Social Justice: New Methodological Horizons in Technical Communication. Technical Communication Quarterly , 31 (1), 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2021.1955151 re:verb. (2022, November 11). E75: A.I. Writing and Academic Integrity . https://www.reverbcast.com/podcasts/2022/11/11/e75-ai-writing-and-academic-integrity U.X. Podcast. (30 Dec. 2022). #305 Dyscalculia and ChatGPT . https://uxpodcast.com/305-dyscalculia-chatgpt/ Transcript AI am Professor Abigail R. Bakke.B And I am plain old Benton Bakke.AOld is right.BYeah. Lay off, you youngster.ANo, but you have, you have a curious history career wise.BIt's true.ABut that gives you all the more to draw from as we discuss the scholarship of technical communication.BYeah.APizza delivery driver to engineer toBLet's not forget, librarian.AAh, I too was a librarian. Well, not officially,BRight, same.ABut I also got to sit at the desk and tell people to use the self-checkout. So I was really worthless. And now you have swapped the desk for the great outdoors.BI have worked my way up in the world to cutting trees. In fact, sometimes way up in the world.ANice.BAs many as 70 ft up.AOkay, bottoms up.BWhat in the world? What is this?AThis is probably a good time to tell you that we are drinking a cocktail recipe generated by artificial intelligence. What do you think?BIs it an evil artificial intelligence?AI don't think it's bad. I was hoping it would be bad because I want reassurance that AI isn't getting too intelligent. You know what I mean?BWhat is this?AWhat part of it?BWhat is in this?AI basically said, give me a recipe with peppermint schnapps because that's the one thing in our liquor cabinet that I just don't know what to do with it. So it gave me a recipe and I asked it to name the drink as well. So we're drinking a peppermint schnapperscream. That was when I told it to give me a cute name for it. And then I asked it to give me a sophisticated name for it. Here's the sophisticated name. Minty snow float. So it's basically okay, it's ice cream. And our cat snuck in when we weren't looking.BOur cat is not an ingredient in this drink.ANo. Where was I? Ice cream, peppermint schnapps, club soda, and then it said to garnish with crushed candy cane. See what I did?BAround the rim?AThis was my own little twist on it. Yes.BI'm not a real fan of mint.AUgh, fine. Today we are not talking about disaster. Which feels weird because it's been literal months.BIt's true. And, you know, frankly, I am excited. I am so glad to be out of the hot seat and controlling things. In fact I would be pumped, turning it over completely to an algorithm to run this podcast.AOh, I see what you did. No, but I really enjoyed being the reactor. You know, you being the researcher and I being the reactor. That was a fun dynamic to experiment with. And I also figured it out. You are the Peter Jackson of podcasts. Do you know why?BTell me, Frodo.AI don't know if you’ll like my answer,BUh oh.ABut he took one book and spread it out into three movies.BYou are in this case talking about The Hobbit.AYes. But that's okay. That is a style that some people appreciate. Meanwhile,BThere was that much story to tell.ADid I ever tell you this? The first time I saw the Fellowship of the Ring, I was disappointed because at the end of the movie I was like, they didn't throw the ring into Mount Doom.BRight.ASo likewise, I would like to be able to condense multiple books into one episode, but that usually doesn't happen either. But today, we're not talking about books. We are talking about AI text generation, creativity, magic, technical communication,Band the end of the world.AWriting pedagogy.BOh, right.ASpecifically, chat GPT, which is all over the Twitter discourse. Everyone has something to say about it. And somehow I think I can add to the conversation so here I am. Chat GPT. I don't even know what the GPT stands for, but it's an app. It's an AI tool that you can ask it a question and it generates an answer from who knows where, everything on the web ever? And you can ask it to write in different styles or genres, like a recipe, for instance, a cover letter for a job, an essay for your English class. Hopefully, we can, we can put a little bit of a unique spin on it. Or at the very least, we can have some fun with it. Because I did. Professor twitter has a lot to say about it and people from different fields are weighing in and experimenting with it and trying to comment on how stupid it is or how smart it is and how this will change education for good or for bad, you know the drill. As with any new technology, we're hearing the gamut of, of reactions. One of the main concerns, of course, is cheating and writing instructor Twitter. That particular corner of Twitter, I should say, has more nuanced takes about it than in the mainstream. And I think that's because good writing pedagogy already guards against other kinds of plagiarism, so maybe there's less concern on the cheating front. For instance, having really specific localized writing prompts versus write a five-paragraph essay arguing in favor of…BCannibalism.ANo, that is not a paper that students write. Should hope not. You know, like, what's the most generic prompt you can think of? The value of a college education, say.BDefend the next $60,000 of your life.AOh yikes. Or write an essay comparing and contrasting, whatever. So with that kind of prompt, AI does pretty well, decent enough to cause some alarm. But teachers aren't asking students to write that kind of paper. I don't think. It's also been a very long time since I've taught first-year writing. I teach almost exclusively technical, yeah, just technical writing at this point. And I feel like tech comm by its nature, is very specific and exact. I'd like to think that's harder to replicate with AI. But, AI, even if it's not that intelligent now, it's only going to get more so in the years to come.BThat is of course, unless we’ll say, techno anarchists feed bullshit to the AI in order to keep them stupid.AI love it.BI need to pitch that to Hollywood right now actually.ATrolls for freedom. That's the title of the movie?BTrolls versus terminators.ANice. Even if we don't have to deal with a super smart AI right now, that's not always going to be the case. So I don't think we need to freak out, but neither can we rest on our laurels. Let it be known Benton finished his drink before I did.BYes.AThe other thing is that it really depends on the field and on what you're asking it to do, whether you're gonna get a legit response. So apparently chat GPT was able to pass an MBA exam.B I have seen that it passed the bar in, I don't know what state.AIf it's multiple choice I can see that. There's also been times where it's gotten basic historical facts wrong or math wrong. And like, there's an actual word people use for this, it hallucinates sources and facts.BWhat is it, Fox News?AOoh. So there is the fear response, there's also the excitement, like this is going to revolutionize the way we work. And if you're not on the bandwagon, then you're like people who were anti calculator back in the day kind of thing.BI think that like, like any technology, yeah, it's going to change the way we work. But what does that mean? Is that a good thing or is it not?AI'm honestly most concerned about the labor implications because okay. What was that meme that you were telling me about?BFuturists in the 1970s: automation is going to free us up from all of the menial tasks in our lives so we'll be able to pursue creative endeavors, the arts and music. And then it's like tech bro in the 2020s: Automation is going to free you up from creative endeavors and the arts and music so that you can be distracted from your menial task work-life.AAw. It is scary though, have you seen some of the AI art?BI haven't seen any good AI art, I’ve seen a lot of terrifying ones.AI mean, it's cool. It's cool. I'm also not an artist, so I'm not able to look and be like, yeah, this has quality composition or whatever.BThe meme pages I follow have put some really choice trainwrecks up. Most of what I saw was supposed to be people, but the faces were super fucked up. like fractal eyes or, like there's one I saw that was, when you ask AI to give you a picture about a handshake,Awhat did it show?BOh my gosh. Lots of extra fingers, like a hand with like eight fingers shaking a hand with four or something. There's one where there's a hand shaking another hand. That is basically like a wrist connected to another hand that's shaking a third hand.AOh, that's thinking outside the box.BYes.AWhich could be cool orBIt could be but it isn't trying to be.AYeah. So what's that one? DALL-E, no, DALL-E. Hey!BSalvador Dali?AThat must be what it's named after.BWhat?AThe art AI. An art AI, I should say. That didn't occur to me until I just said it out loud.BSurrealist.AYeah. Melting watches, right?B Pouring clocks in the bathtub.AWhere did that come from?BThat's a Dali, isn't it?AI feel like that's the punchline of a joke.BHow many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?ATwo giraffes and a bathtub full of clocks. So, yeah, I can't call out like yes, this art was definitely created by a human or a robot. And as much as they'd like to think I would be able to call out an AI generated essay, I don't think I could consistently do that. Although like from what I've seen, even if I didn't know it was AI, it would not get a very good grade.BI can definitely see that, that AI would not would not make an A essay.AYes, exactly that. It tends to be vague and wrong in places. And like I've done some experimentation and we're going to demonstrate it in a bit here. But I listened to a podcast interview recently that actually made me feel a lot better about this. It was on the Re:verb podcast. And they interviewed Scott Graham. He built a, an AI text generator into like a class project. I think he actually said write your papers using this and then revise it. And he said that the students hated it because it took so much work to bring the writing up to any standard of quality that they may as well have just written it themselves. So that's reassuring to me for the moment. But honestly, I am really glad that there are researchers and instructors out there who are incorporating this into their classrooms and not ignoring that it exists because it's one of those things. Students are going to use it anyway and so your writing class may as well be, and probably would be their one opportunity to think critically about how they're using it.BYeah.ASo thank you, innovative professors who are doing that work. I hope that there is room for me to be a little annoyed by the existence of this thing that suddenlyBCertainly, yeah.Arequires me to change up like projects and academic honesty policy and all that likeBOK, Boomer.AOh my gosh. That does really make me sound like a boomer. It's not like I'm teaching the same course again and again. Every time I reteach a course, I change multiple parts of it every single time and I always tell myself I'm just going to teach it the same way and see myself all this prep time, but I literally cannot, or I will get bored. And even so, I don't feel like pandering to the whims of AI.BBut it is fully reasonable to be annoyed that somebody made a thing exists that's going to change your job.AAlong with that, I think there should be room to be nervous about it too in terms of what the long-term consequences might be. Because the way things go in our country, people will settle for a lower quality product if it means they can fire their staff of technical communicators. That is my fear. At the same time, focusing on just the like, the text generation part of ChatGPT, that is a small piece of what technical communicators do. There is so much of a human element to that work that I think cannot be substituted with a machine.BI honestly think that in the realm of technical communication, like you said, because it's so specific and there's such focus of what needs to be done in this technical communication that you literally can't just make it up,Aright?BYou know, like if it's a user manual, pfft, you're gonna let a computer guess how it's supposed to work? Coming up with stories. That's one thing. Telling you how to use dangerous equipment is not the same sort of thing.AThat's right. And I don't doubt that there is a way to use it, supplementally or whatever, butBIt could be a failure of imagination on my part, but I don't see there being an awful lot of actual communication of technical information that can be done with accuracy, efficacy by an AI.AYeah, I mean we’ll have to see. Along the lines of long-term consequences. So it's that what could go wrong question that we did a whole episode about last year. I hope people are asking that question about this technology. I think they are. Whether it's enough to make a difference is another question. So some of my experimentation, I asked ChatGPT to write a podcast dialogue about the ethics of AI. You were there actually when it, when it spit it out. And we were both like, holy shit. Not because it was necessarily good, but there was definitely a sense of magic to it. Like, I can just conjure this. Let's do a reading. Try to make it sound as natural as possible. Okay, I'll be person one, you'd be person two. I highlighted your lines in pink.BOh, thanks.AOkay. Hey everyone. Welcome to our podcast about the ethics of AI.BYeah, let's talk about the ethical implications of the latest developments.AThat was pretty wooden. Take two. Hey everyone, welcome to our podcast about the ethics of AI.BYeah, let's talk about the ethical implementations. How am I supposed to say that in a non- wooden way? Let's talk about the ethical implications of latest AI developments.ASo what are your thoughts on the use of AI in healthcare?BWell, I think it's great that AI can help with diagnosing diseases and making treatment recommendations. But there's also the potential to misuse this technology.AAbsolutely. There are so many ethical considerations when it comes to using AI in any field.BYeah. And speaking of misuse, What do you think about the use of AI in military operations?AThat's a tricky one. On one hand, it could be a powerful tool for protecting people. But on the other hand, it could be used to commit atrocities.BExactly. We need to be carefulACan we just, can we just backup for a second? On one hand, it can be a useful tool. On the other hand, it could be used to commit atrocities!BYou know, I gotta say AI, you’re showing your hand. I mean, it's, it's basically already said that if we let it run military technology, it's going to commit atrocities.AOoh. Could be used. Oh, notice the passive voice there. I just find it a funny contrast like on the one hand, positives, on the other hand, atrocities, it's just this throwaway line. Do you not find that amusing? I mean, amusing is not the rightBIt does seem rather flippant.AYes, exactly that.BIt could be used to commit atrocities. Haha.AI need to hear more Pee-wee.BIf you see an AI committing atrocities, scream real loud. AHHHH. Huh huh huh.AWhat? Sorry, I interrupted our very natural sounding dialogue.BExactly. We need to be careful about how we use AI and make sure we're aware of the potential consequences.AAbsolutely. We can't forget the ethical implications of AI. Well, that's all the time we have for today's podcast. Thanks for listening. That's not the end of the real podcast, people. Don't stop your podcast player just yet. We need to analyze this. There's so much here. Deep subjects addressed superficially, plugged into a template. That's how it reads to me.B Yes, it is puddle deep.A It's almost like a Mad Libs forBYes. Mad libs for a podcast.ANo sources, obviously.BWell, yeah.ABut again, to its credit, I can see someone potentially using this to build out an outline like, Oh, we could talk about different fields or different applications of AI. And then you'd want to talk about it for more than a sentence.BThat I think is my favorite thing, it’s just like pinball, pinball, pinball over.AWhat's kinda cute about it is that whatever dataset it's drawing from people are very friendly to each other in their podcast dialogues. There's a lot of absolutely, Exactly.BOh, yeah.AYou're right. Great point. Yeah. That's not the worst.BThere’s no Are you out of your fucking mind?AYeah. So then I got to thinking, maybe I didn't give it a fair chance. Maybe the podcast dialogue genre is too superficial to let it really shine. So I was thinking to myself, what's a genre that's very nuanced and human: stand-up comedy. I asked it to write a stand-up act about the ethics of AI. I'm going to let you do the honors of reciting it, again as naturally as possible. We want to see how, how well this AI can emulate human comedy.BHello everyone. So I was thinking about the ethics of AI the other day. And it got me thinking, what robots do if they could vote? Would they vote for the same party as us? Or would they be like, Hey man, you're not a robot. I'm voting for the robot party.AInsert laugh track here.BInsert laugh track. Or what if robots had feelings. Would they be able to feel love? Or would they just be like, I'm a robot, I don't understand what love is. And then there's the question of robot rights. Should robots have rights? Should they be able to sue us for mistreatment? I'm thinking, Sure. Why not? It's only fair. Alright, thanks for having me, have a great night, everyone.AWhoo! Was any part of that funny on purpose?BMaybe I'm voting for the robot party. If you imagine, instead of political party, a bunch of robots getting together and dancingADoing the disco or whatever, whatever people do at parties.BI’ve never been to one.AI don't know what a party is, man. So yeah, it's capable of producing a funny image, but your human brain has to take it to another level. Potential situations that are being set up here could be played out in humorous ways.BI think you're giving it a lot more benefit of the doubt than I would.AWhat I'm saying is that if somebody were like, Oh shit, I've got my stand-up act on Friday and I'm not prepared. They could plug something in and they could read it and be like, That is shit, I can do better. How do I make this actually funny?BI'm going to do stand-up about this piece of garbage. It's got like the sandwich of the intro and the exit of a stand-up routine.Aand the storytelling like the other day I was blah.BAnd then it almost seems like the AI is coming through and trying to advocate for itself. What about robot rights? I mean, yeah, sure, It's only fair. You should be able to sue us for mistreatment.ALooked at through that lens that is a little scary. I think humor is one of the best tests of how human AI can come across. And in this case, I think it's fair to say it's failed, but like, okay, here's the thing about humor. It can be difficult to detect even among humans in the same room. There's so much that goes into a joke. For instance, there's inflection, there's facial expressions, all these like microscopic nuances. And then there's all that assumed shared knowledge that has to be in place for a joke to make sense.BYeah.ABut besides humor, do you know what else is context-specific, highly nuanced, and audience-centered?BOh, I know this one. I know this one. Is it fart jokes? I'm sorry. Technical Communication?AThat's what I'm after.BYay!AYeah. And so, like we were saying before, that's what gives me a little bit of hope that robarts. Roborts. It gives me some hope that robots aren't going to come steal our jobs in the immediate future. I got curious about AI's ability to write jokes specifically about topics that you and I respectively have a very deep knowledge of. Because I wanted to see, can the AI understand this topic in a nuanced way? Or are we just going to get like stereotypes or whatever? And that's where we get my experiment about whether we're funnier than a robot. On Twitter, some of you may have seen this, I had a series of polls where I put a joke and then I gave three punchlines and I asked people to vote for the best one. There was one AI punchline in the midst of each of those surveys. So now you get the results. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about technical communicators. Why did the technical communicator cross the road?BI don't know.AI have three options for you. A, to understand the pedestrian experience. B, because the instructions said to cross the road. C, the question is not why, but how? This one got 30-some votes on Twitter,Bokay.AOh, and our friend from the Podcast of Podcasts chimed in and suggested to get to the conference center, which would be very fitting in ATTW season.BThat's a good one for academics.AShould we reveal which one is the AI punchline first or should we reveal which one got the most votes first?BMost votes first.AMost votes first. Okay. It was A, to understand the pedestrian experience, which I am proud to say was my creation.BWhat's that last one, It's the question is not why, but how? Was that one me?AThat was me and that was the one I was actually the proudest of.BI thought that was the best answer too.AAnd then it was B, because the instructions said to go to the other side, that got the second most votes. And that was indeed the ChatGPT generated punchline. And this was the first one we did and so it was alarming because I was like, that's actually a funny punchline.BThat's a plausible punchline.AAnd when robots are funny, You gotta, you gotta be a little worried. Anyway.BI'd be more worried if they were militant, butAFair. Fair. So I decided to even try this out in person. So I asked my colleagues at a faculty meeting. So everyone there, tech comm. I figured if anyone is going to get the joke, it'll be these folks. One person said punchline B was their favorite. Someone said punchline A was their favorite. That was the, to understand the pedestrian experience.BThat was the UX person, wasn't it?AOh my gosh, it was. Yeah, and if I remember right. She said, now that one is really audience specific and nuanced. And I was like, you know what's up. Shout out to Dawn. And then the other faculty member said, I like all three of them.Bwe should say that almost half of the people who answered on that first joke went withAA. So in that particular instance, yes, I was funnier than a robot, but I was also less funny than a robot depending on how you look at it.B True.AThe next joke I put on Twitter was, Why don't English professors ever tell jokes in class? A, because they don't have a sense of humor.BFair.AB, because the Moby Dick jokes write themselves. C, because they don't want to start a grammar discussion. So this one had fewer participants so we are less confident in the significance of the results.BAnd the vote was closer as well,ARight. It was pretty evenly split, but, oh, punchline C got the most votes, 40%. And that was indeed the AI generated punchline. Because they don't want to start a grammar discussion.BSo apparently, what ChatGPT knows about English professors is grammar.APrecisely. And the one thing chat GPT knows about technical communicators is that they write instructions.BMore accurately, they expect them to follow instructions.AYes. Ooh, interesting. That's what we're going to get is we're gonna get superficial,BStereotypicalAExactly. And that can be funny. You know, ss, as someone who is an English professor and a Technical Communication professor at that, I am happy to poke fun of myself in these ways. But in reality,BWhat would you guess is the,Ahow much do English professors actually care about grammar?BRight.AAh. I think if other English professors are anything like me they are in the field because they love language and part of what is beautiful about language is that it can change. And that it means different things in different contexts to different people in different periods of time. Which means there's an appreciation for what language is more so than what language should be. That's not to say there are not sticklers out there. And again, there are situations where attention to grammar matters more than others.BSo it is of interest. But the rectitude of grammar is of less interest.AYes. The second punchline, the Moby Dick jokes write themselves. Yes, that was me. Apparently I have the humor of what, a 12-year-old boy?BI mean, call me Ishmael.AWhat?BOkay. That was really, really badly played. That is the first line of Moby Dick.AI know that.Bfor anyone who doesn't know.AAnd then who came up with the first punchline, because they have no sense of humor? Was that me?BIt was.AThat sounded like a little mean. I have to say.BIt was right up there. It was neck and neck.AIt got a couple votes, yep.BSpeaking of bad jokes, the other day, I was thinking about how like dad jokes are almost universally puns and groaners and bad jokes. Whereas mom jokes,AThere is no such thing as mom jokes.BUh. Mom jokes typically are derogatory.AOh, your mom jokes?BYes. What does that say about implicit sexism in society?AHow about that? And in fact, that leads me to an observation,BObserve away.AIn all the iterations of the English professor joke. I ran this multiple times just to see what kind of variety I was getting in terms of responses. And in all the iterations, the English professor was a he. And by all I mean like four. And then for the technical communicator jokes, it was most often he. Maybe there was one she thrown in there. Which I mean, both are not representative of reality. Technical communicators tend to be women, in fact. It suggests something about either who is the default subject of a joke or who is the default image of an English professor. You know, it kinda reminds me of that Google Images thing years ago, that if you Google search English professor, it'll pull up multiple images of old white men withBsweater vests,Aelbow patches. So there is bias. Obviously. I mean, even the AI itself acknowledged it can be biased and can in fact commit atrocities.BThat's right. We’re on to you, ChatGPT.ANow, I want to talk more about the experience of using this tool. There was a cool and unexpected thing that arose out of this experiment for me, which is that I felt inspired. And I don't often feel inspired creatively.BOkay.ABut you saw me. I was like,BOoh, now let's try this.BIt put my brain in a different mode, almost. Yes, I started from the AI. But the more I engaged with it, the more I was also able to move away from it.AMoved away from it.BLike teachers are afraid that students are going to press the button and turn in the essay, right? And it's going to have no amount of actual engagement. You know what I mean? And that was not the case for me. I didn't press the button and say, Oh, I'm done here. Not that I have any pressing need to tell technical communicator jokes. But as I was seeing what this AI was churning out, I started getting ideas of my own that I think it's fair to say they weren't inspired by what I was seeing, but not necessarily derivative of them. Maybe they were, who knows what that means.AWell, it was probably spitting out something that keyworded your brain to activate this network, or that network.BYeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.AYou came up with something that wasn't, it may have been because of it, but it wasn't based on it really.BOr like the punchline it gave me. I thought of a better setup for it or vice versa. Overall, I mean, you were kind of in range as I was doing this but you didn't do it yourself, did you?AI don't think so. No.BYeah. You were just kind of hearing me go on and on. And I mentioned before that there was this sense of magic. Like you press a button and it gives you this fully formed thing that you can then critique and take apart and adjust. AndBFern? Meow.AThat was exciting to me. But whenever we get that sense of magic with a technology, that's a sign to stop and think a little bit. Not to be a wet blanket, butBWell, yeah, I mean, definitely in the case of AI coming up with content, text is absolutely a realm in which it is so bounded, that it has a chance. It has a chance, Yeah, okay, come on up. It has a chance to figure things out and to monkey-typewriter its way into believability.AMm-hmm. The concern I have about it is that what's going on behind the scenes is so invisible. Like I mentioned before, I don't even know where this comes from. What, what kind of repositories is it drawing from?BWhat datasets started it learning? I mean, even, even when you're talking about a neural net, that is kind of by definition a black box, but you feed something into the black box and that isn't unknown, at least to the feeder.ARight, right. But there is a point at which machine-learning kind of takes on a life of its own. And you really cannot backtrace all the decisions it's made.BRight.ANow, in defense of black boxes, this was an interesting thought from Graham and Hopkins. They mention the fact that our brains are a black box. We cannot know the intricate processes.BBrains were the original neural net.ABut that doesn't mean we discount its output.BSometimes we do, butAIndeed, as we should. But I think it was just an interesting point.BI think that it's very much a form of the uncanny valley. At a certain point of getting close but not exactly, they’re just too unnerving and it freaks people out. I think that specifically in this case, since it's, like our brains, a black box, that information goes in and unpredictable information comes out. It behaves like a human. If it wasn't for the lightning fast reply, when you ask it for something complicated, you would think there might be someone on the other end of this conversation responding.AI mean, that's in the title, Chat GPT, right? It's supposed to feel like you're having a conversation with someone in a way. And so you frame your prompts in almost a conversational way. And when you think of Google, more and more Google has gotten better at interpreting the conversational kinds of search phrases people might put in, you know, natural language processing. But at least with Google you still have some agency because it gives you options.BYeah, you choose where it brings you. It gives you choices of where it can bring you.AAnd with ChatGPT, it's like, well, okay. Do you remember when Google used to have the I'm feeling lucky button. Is that still there?BI don't know.AI don't know that I've ever clicked on it, but if I remember right, it brings you to the top search result for that query. Is that right?BIt may. My first experience with it, gosh, it was one of those things that went viral before there was really a means other than word of mouth to go viral. It was you type in Iraq WMD and you hit, I'm feeling lucky. And then it brings you to some page where, it was like a 404 page that was specifically mocking George Bush's like insistence that there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whichAWhat was your reaction at the time?BIt was comical, so I laughed.AOkay. It was subversive. But it does raise the question of how that could be abused, of course,BTrue. And Iraq, WMD, the more interesting question is, how this beat out all manner of news sitesAYeah.Bthat had just been had for years been cranking out, towing the administration line garbage. And this joke site came up and rose to the top.AAnd that's saying something because, so you know I did a study of Google where I literally watched people Google stuff.BWere you Google-ogling?AGoogle ogling, it’s a new research method.BAnd if you study this phenomenon…AGoogleogleology?BGolly what a day.AYeah. And so one of the takeaways there was that so much of our use of Google is kind of in the background as in like we aren't necessarily conscious about it. And I say we because other research has, has backed this up too but you know I noticed that in my own observations and my own use of Google, we go to Google and we don't stop and think, is there a different search engine that would make more sense for this particular query? We don’t think what would happen if I prioritized results lower down on the list that kind of thing.BI remember that early on before the natural language learning of Google, there were classes, instruction, on how to use a search engine.AYou had to know how to use the Boolean operators and everything.BYeah.AI mean, in some databases you still do that but, and I don't fault anyone for just going with the flow because that is Google's goal.BThey want to be invisible.APrecisely. With Google, I think in recent years, I've heard people complain that it's less useful than it used to be because it's so loaded up with ads and sponsored results and everything now.BCapitalism ruins everything.AAnd in fact, it is difficult to distinguish between ads and not ads. But you can still figure it out if you pay attention. When it comes to ChatGPT, it just spits something out. If you don't know where it's coming from, if you don't know who might have paid money to get priority in a result or whatever, that's dangerous. And I want to shout out to the UX Podcast for raising this possibility in one of their recent episodes, which I hadn't thought of before. You can see how Chat GPT, in the way its interface is designed, actually takes away more agency from the user compared to Google. Because it gives you one response.BYeah.AAnd it's just straight out answering your question versus providing you multiple sources that could answer that question in different ways or provide different angles on it.BMoreover, Google gives you sources, Google gives you links to the place where you can get your answer from. Depending on how well it understands the question, it might just have that little sidebar,AThe knowledge panel.BIt might have the knowledge panel that just gives you an answer.Awhich frankly is good in some cases. Because when you type in what, diabetes like, you, it's probably better that people get Mayo Clinic prioritized.BYeah. I mean, there's definitely functions where you want to know your source, but there's also functions where you don't want that extra click because you're looking for something that is so simple. It can just tell you. If you type in 34 yd in kilometers, you want an answer. You're not looking for like, the most authoritative source on this information.APrecisely.BOr when was JFK assassinated? Or very specific things that there is one answer and there is no debate reasonable or unreasonable about.AWell, there might be unreasonable debate about it, when you're talking about JFK because apparently he is still alive?BI'm, I'm sure that there are tinfoil hatters around that will say that he's secretly running the US government from the far side of the moon. Why not?AYes.BAnd if not, that one’s free. That one's free folks. You run with it.AType it into ChatGPT and see what kind of sci-fi it gives you. However, that does get really blurry. Especially when it comes to medical information. Where on the one hand, we have people saying, trust the science, the COVID vaccine works. Here's, here's its mechanisms and here's the studies that show it's effective in these ways. And then on the other side you have people skewing and fabricating and manipulating information. And that's not to say that these are two equally valid ways to view this question. But rather it's acknowledging that there are issues like that where there's enough polarization and enough just complete lack of common ground on the issues that it gets really hard to make those calls, like from the perspective of a company like Google. And we've seen how politics does make a difference in how CEOs run their companies.BOur chat here is inspiring. I'm getting like, Oh, oh, oh, oh, ideas about things I would ask chat GPT if we had it here and ready to rock. Is COVID-19 real? If it had anything more than yes as the answer, ha. Were the moon landings faked? Is the Earth flat? You know, stuff that people create controversy about that is not controversial.AYeah. Yeah, but all that to say. The less distance between a question and an answer, the less opportunity for reflection. I guess. You're taking away those decision points that allow people to say, Oh, okay, there's this website and there's that website. In some cases maybe that's better. But in a lot of cases, because this AI is pulling from an Internet that is inherently, that has sexism and racism baked into it. I would be cautious about that.BChatGPT doesn't compensate for bad actors. Maybe it does, but it's a black box. So I don't know. Maybe it has a way of even understanding that bad actors exist?AI have seen people post results where someone will ask ChatGPT to, this is hypothetical, but in the vein of saying, write an essay in praise of Adolf Hitler. And it'll come back and say, nope, not doing that.BThat sounds like a human said, okay, we want to make sure it does not do this because we don't want them to come with pitchforks and torches to our house.AYeah. Someone is asking that question, what could people do to abuse this tool? But people are endlessly imaginative when it comes to ways to exploit technology.BAnd people.AAnd I don’t know that an individual organization is going to be able to keep up. So all that to say, I think the role of writing instructors at this point in time is to, again, acknowledge that this thing exists. Acknowledged the fact that students are probably going to use it. But talk about that importance of algorithmic literacy and kind of having those checkpoints for reflection rather than just inherently trusting it because it's technology and it, and it materializes texts like magic. So that's that.
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