CAPTivated

EP 02 The Personalized Public Sphere with Fred Turner

• CAPTivated • Season 1 • Episode 2

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In this episode, Sage, Hanna and Julius hear from Stanford Professor Fred Turner about how personalization and commercial platforms have corrupted the “public sphere.” Fred traces the historical roots of the fantasy of a global connected conversation system back to post-WWII scientists, critiques the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley, and underscores the importance of institutions and regulation for breaking up companies that would otherwise destroy public goods. He reminds us of the power of in-person organizing and solidarity to resist authoritarianism.

Key Takeaways from Fred:

  1. Personalization and profit-driven platforms killed the public sphere - When debate is about who you are as a person not how to distribute resources, rational deliberation becomes impossible
  2. Tech companies are terrified of regulation for a reason - Their fear is a measure of our power. We've broken up extractive industries before, and legislated safety. We can build seat belts.
  3. Online attention is not action - Stop circulating “misery porn.” Hard, dull in-person work builds the solidarity, trust, and friendships that create change

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Fred’s Media Diet:

This podcast is part of CAPT’s efforts to encourage open and diverse intellectual exchange. The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are their own and do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to a policy of institutional neutrality.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode! Send us feedback to captivatedpod@gmail.com

We were promised that digital technologies would bring us together in a global village, where everyone could speak and be heard. Instead, as Stanford Professor Fred Turner puts it, the individuation of communication technologies has resulted in a war of all against all as tech platforms farm our attention for profit. The personalization we were told would liberate us has actually made it harder to reason together, turning every public debate into a performance of identity rather than a deliberate conversation about the common good.

In this episode of the CAPTivated podcast, Sage, Hanna and Julius hear from Fred about how personalization and commercial platforms have corrupted the “public sphere.” He traces the historical roots of the fantasy of a global connected conversation system back to post-WWII scientists, critiques the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley, and underscores the importance of institutions and regulation for breaking up companies that would otherwise destroy public goods. Fred emphasizes the value of limiting screen time and reminds us of the power of in-person organizing and solidarity to resist authoritarianism.


Three Key Takeaways from Fred:

  1. Personalization and profit-driven platforms killed the public sphere - When debate becomes about who you are as a person rather than how to distribute resources, rational deliberation becomes impossible
  2. Tech companies are terrified of regulation for a reason - Their fear is a measure of our power. We've broken up extractive industries before, and legislated safety. We can build some seat belts here
  3. Online attention is not action - Stop circulating “misery porn.” Hard, dull in-person work builds the solidarity, trust, and friendships that actually create change


Find out more about:

‌

Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:


Transcript:

[00:00:00] Fred Turner: 
A good friend of mine, a media psychologist says, “Look, Fred, people are just nasty monkeys.” I think that's fair. I think that's really fair. And you give a nasty monkey a microphone, he's gonna screech into it. And we're doing that now at scale. 

[00:00:19] Julius Freeman: 
Welcome to another episode of CAPTivated, a new podcast hosted by the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology at Purdue University. In each episode, we will examine a specific facet of our digital public sphere, how it works, and how we got here. We are here to help you sort through the noise. I'm Julius. 

[00:00:38] Hanna Sistek: 
I’m Hanna. 

[00:00:39] Sage Goodwin: 
And I'm Sage. In this episode, we were very lucky to have Fred Turner with us. Fred was once a journalist. Today he's a professor of communication, a professor of history, and a professor of art history at Stanford University where he teaches researchers and writes about media and technology.

[00:00:57] Hanna Sistek: 
He's written five books in dozens of articles, and Fred is someone who often finds himself on the outside of cool things looking in. 

[00:01:05] Sage Goodwin: 
He went to Burning Man, but he was the guy in a button down interviewing the nudist and the go-go dancers. Fred focuses on how culture and ideology shapes technological change.

[00:01:15] Julius Freeman: 
On this podcast, we're thinking about different facets of the digital public sphere, and I don't know how I can communicate this adequately. I have been bombarded with negative feedback about how I say the word sphere because I believe that Americans just say it that way. 

[00:01:31] Sage Goodwin: 
It's not American students. No, it's just you.

[00:01:35] Julius Freeman: 
I will be the one person on earth that says sphere. But for the piece of this podcast today, I will say sphere. Is that helpful? Alright. Fred took us back to really think about that concept of a public sphere. It's a term that often gets thrown around, but for those who might not be familiar, it's really worth explaining. Its origins come from a German philosopher and social theorist. And Hanna, I'm gonna butcher his name if you don't help me, how do I say it? 

[00:02:00] Hanna Sistek: 
Jürgen Habermas, and so what Habermas calls the bourgeois public sphere is the imaginary space where people come together to question public authorities. 

[00:02:11] Sage Goodwin: 
It started out as actual spaces like coffee houses and literary salons in the 17th and 18th century where people would debate and gossip, and those discussions then moved to print in magazines and newspapers later on. This debating public was a counterpoint to the power of the old nobility and the church. 

[00:02:28] Julius Freeman: 
However, Fred points out this ideal Habermasian version of deliberation that it no longer holds in today's digital public sphere. The personalization and the attention economy have corrupted that and tampered with people's ability to hold fruitful conversations.

[00:02:43] Hanna Sistek: 
And I thought it was quite fascinating when he traced back the digital public sphere we have today to a group of scientists after World War II, and these scientists were afraid of mass media. Because they felt like mass media brought us fascism and Hitler, and therefore they promoted this alternative media model where every individual could be their own information producer.

[00:03:06] Sage Goodwin: 
And this conversation with Fred really made me think about how important regulations are. He has this great analogy about forcing car manufacturers to incorporate seat belts. So let's get this show on the road. We start asking Fred about his background.

[00:03:20] Fred Turner: 
So, I used to be a journalist, right out of college. My first intellectual affection was the American Puritans. I really loved early American literature, but when I went to grad school the first time for about a minute. And saw what it would be like to be a scholar of early American literature. I bailed, I ran away to Berlin and in Berlin, I became kind of a punk ESL teacher. And did that for a while and I started writing about bands that were playing in Berlin, for an English language magazine there. And I realized, “Oh, wait a minute. I really like being a journalist.” So when I came back to the States, I did that for 10 years in Boston, mostly cultural reporting. Toward the end of that time, I realized that I was writing really fast and not about things that I really cared about, which were much slower, deeper kinds of phenomena. And, I wrote a book about how Americans remember the Vietnam War, and by the time I was done with that, I was writing books with footnotes. Teaching part-time I realized, “Oh, wait a minute, I'm becoming a professor.” So I moved to California for graduate school, UC [University of California], San Diego, and when I got there in 1996. This thing called, the internet was hitting, and there was WIRED Magazine. And WIRED Magazine had this psychedelic cover, and there were all these ex-hippies promoting computers. And I'm like, “Wait a minute. I just wrote this Vietnam book.” And in the Vietnam book, the computer was the emblem of the Cold War American State. And now here were these hippies promoting computers as tools of liberation. And Steve Jobs advertising the Mac as this liberating anti-Orwell machine.

And I got kind of baffled and so I just started rummaging through the magazine and ended up finding these hippies who were really working in the tech industry and I wrote a book called From Counterculture to Cyber Culture, and after that I've stayed tight with tech and culture. 

[00:05:03] Sage Goodwin: 
Amazing. So you found your way to the button down.

[00:05:07] Fred Turner: 
No, the button down was by birth. Thank you very much. No. So I am the child of a political scientist and an anthropologist. So I came by breeding. My dad used to take me to men's shops, and teach me how to dress. And I still rock a good Brooks Brothers button down. And I rocked one on the playa at Burning Man. And that is a true story. 

[00:05:27] Sage Goodwin: 
Amazing. Well, we definitely are gonna wanna hear more about Burning Man. But before we get to that. I think the question that we wanted to ask you is what do you see as being the biggest problem with the digital public sphere today?

[00:05:41] Fred Turner: 
Yeah, the public sphere that I was always told was the ideal and that I still in some ways think is the Habermasian public sphere, where we gather together in some place and we reason together about the public good. We tend to do it in person, we do it in small groups and out of our deliberations comes something called “public opinion”, which the government then acts on through our representatives. That's an ideal public opinion, but it depends on people being able to suppress parts of themselves so that they can reason together. They have to suppress their appetites, their desires, their hidden personal things, their peculiarities, their kinks. All those things have to stay offsite in the Habermasian model.

In internet land and internet times we are constantly encouraged to personalize our discourse, to seek attention by taking parts of ourselves that were formerly off stage, private, quite possibly irrational and performing those. I feel that incentive every time I log on. I watch my daughter fill out her Instagram, and keep it stocked with images. And she's using the Instagram system and her friends through the system are soliciting her performance of individuality. And that's fine in that private space. But when you shift to debating the distribution of public goods on terms that are deeply personal, it becomes impossible to have a rational debate. Because what's at stake now is who you are as a person. It's no longer, how should we equitably distribute those resources? It's, “I'm this kind of person, you are that kind of person.” You shouldn't have anything. So that's the big [problem]. I think personalization is the biggest problem right behind it, is individuation. I think our media system, we hoped that by individuating communication systems, by giving everyone a mouthpiece, we would end up in what Marshall McLuhan called “global village.” A place where we would all communally, collaboratively make nice with each other. Well, people aren't built like that.

A good friend of mine, a media psychologist says, “Look, Fred, people are just nasty monkeys.” I think that's fair. I think that's really fair. And you give a nasty monkey a microphone, he's gonna screech into it. And we're doing that now at scale. So I think that far from bringing us a Global Village, the individuation of communication technologies has instead resulted in a war of all against all.

Lastly, it's not just individuation, it's centralized individuation. So, the internet is not a conversation system. Although it's sold to us that way. The internet is a system of global microbroadcasting. We all broadcast all the time, but our broadcasts now are coordinated centralized platforms by firms that have an interest in producing certain kinds of attention grabbing material. That combination of our need to broadcast the individuation of that process and the platform's need to profit from our interactions produces an incredibly toxic stew. So it's personalization, individualization, and commercial platforming. 

[00:08:30] Hanna Sistek: 
Okay. Well that begs the question is how did we get there?

[00:08:33] Fred Turner: 
Oh, yeah. So that's a long story, but I'll tell a short version of it. You might think that we only got there after the rise of social media in the 2010s. That's an important inflection point. But the dream of a global conversation system facilitated by digital media is about 70 years old. And it really emerges, right after World War II among a group of scientists and social scientists who call themselves cybernetics and they dream of a world where everything is information. Where the material world is secondary and order is produced by signaling. They're very afraid of the mass media. In their view, mass media is what brought us fascism. Hitler got hold of the radio. Hitler got hold of the movies, one to many. Communication turned everyone into a mass of like-minded fascists. So in the American model, the cybernetic model, everyone is their own information producer. We're constantly signaling to one another and in their theory order should simply emerge.

There's a few big problems with  this idea. This idea comes down to us through the 60s, comes down through us through the media world, informs a lot of early internet design, but it's got some problems. The first problem is that individuals don't live in the world alone. They live in institutions, and the cybernetic model only imagines that we are all just equally free individuals signaling one another. It's just not the case. So institutions aren't part of the model. The second thing that's not part of the model is the control of engineers of the system. So, the fantasy that we will all just speak into the air signaling one another by having access to new technologies, forgets the fact that certain engineers build the technologies, distribute the technologies, manage the technologies.

So we're gonna have platforms of some kind, and that's something that they just never talked about. So the world we've inhabited has this fantasy of global egalitarian communication and emergent order. But it is a fact of commercial institutions and engineering actors who seek political control. And that's where we live right now. When you see in Washington, when you see Musk and others and, and Palantir collaborating with the state, what you're seeing is a fusion of the engineering world, the state world, and commercial platforms in a kind of authoritarian manner. And those are all things that the cybernetic vision left out of the picture.

[00:10:43] Sage Goodwin: 
Super interesting. So I think there's a thread underneath there, of this idea of techno utopianism. I think you go to Silicon Valley, and I know Hanna, you've spent some time living in Silicon Valley, but there's this idea that technology in and of itself is the thing that's gonna change things. Like, the people working on these things, producing the technology, getting us towards this system, in and of itself is gonna do something. That makes me think of the very famous Edward Murrow quote from 1958 about everyone thinking that television is gonna be this instrument of enlightenment. And he, in 1958 says, “Actually without what humans do with it, TV is just lights in a box.” I think even back then you had people pushing against this. Guess the word is technological determinism. Is that, where does that techno utopianism come from? 

[00:11:35] Fred Turner: 
Yeah, it's a great question and I think there was in the 1960s an embrace of the kind of cybernetic dreams of the 40s and 50s, but it turned them in a different direction. The fantasy in the 1960s among people who headed back to communes and built a communal world, they dreamed of a world without politics. They thought politics was bankrupt. They'd taken us to the Vietnam War, and wanted nothing to do with traditional politics. So what would replace that? Well, technology driven consciousness would replace that. So if we could only leave politics behind, take technologies from the mainstream world, repurpose them and turn them into technologies through which we could unite ourselves in a shared consciousness, we would find a different kind of politics.

A politics like the cybernetic dream in which order emerged from our constant giving of one another feedback. So what were those technologies? Well, the commune movement was huge. And when they went back to the land, they took a lot of LSD with them. They took a lot of books with them. They were technologies of mind, music. Music was another one. With respect, you're too young to remember when walls of amplifiers were suddenly at concerts. And the first time you go to a concert, you know, not necessarily Woodstock, but something like that, and you stand next to an amplified wall of sound and you feel the vibrations run through your body. You get a glimpse of the kind of polity that these folks wanted to create. A magic kind of polity in which vibrations consciousness could serve as the organizing force. The world could be like Woodstock, the world could be like a commune. We would no longer need top-down, hierarchical politics. All of those ideas turn out when put into practice to liberate some of the worst parts of being human. When you actually build a world like that, that's not just a temporary concert. But let it go for a  long time, what you find is that without institutions stereotypes take over, pernicious cultural norms take over. In the communes I looked at, charismatic men took over and women and people of color got pushed to the side, pushed to the bottom.

So one of the reasons I've become such a raging advocate for institutions is that institutions I would argue and bureaucracy are what keep those things at bay. They're what make possible a kind of structured intimacy across great differences that the kind of communal model really doesn't, and the communal model did travel straight to Silicon Valley. I didn't mean to ignore that, but yeah. 

[00:13:51] Hanna Sistek: 
I was thinking of a couple of things. I was thinking about the Pareto principles. The 80-20 principle exists both in the natural world, so apparently 20% of the P shall produce 80% of the Ps. In social settings, 20% of the people in the room do  80% of the talking. And so thinking that, you know, somehow, order would emerge, naturally through just everybody having a voice, actually, that did not at all happen. And, people studying communications online show that these hierarchies and inequalities that already exist in society, just got amplified. So that was one thought… 

[00:14:34] Fred Turner: 
Can I pause on that thought? So, I think we should blame ourselves a little bit. In the 1990s, an awful lot of media theorists bought deeply into the utopian vision, so they would argue, you know, Yochai Benkler, who's a, a very well known scholar and a very thoughtful scholar, wrote a book about commons-based peer production, arguing that in fact, we would suddenly now be able to manufacture things together, online collaborating as peers and that institutions would no longer be quite so necessary. Lawrence Lessig at Harvard, famously wrote about digital environments in which egalitarianism would become possible. People who studied online communities would focus on the online interactions as if now a new world were actually borning.

So I just wanna flag those of us who were working on these issues in the 90s as Utopians, and I think one of the challenges for us as scholars is to maintain enough distance from the money and the power in the valley, some of which can be siphoned off to us to actually call nonsense when we see it.

[00:15:28] Hanna Sistek: 
Yeah. That's really interesting. So then, I'm thinking about… So you say that institutions are the solution. How do you create institutions that solve the problems that we are in today, which are these big platforms that are basically dominating our public, digital public sphere now, the AI companies are getting in there. There's a race to develop the most, the best AI. You know, the US, China, and so on. We can't even stop to think. How do we even know how to do this in a safe manner? Now, how do you create an institution when we have these business incentives that can counter that. 

[00:16:11] Fred Turner: 
I have good news. So, the first thing we need to say is that we're leaving behind the era of internet connectionism. In the 1990s, the tech world was focused on building global systems of interconnection. Those systems are largely built. Now, we're entering a new era in which data is being assembled in extraordinary quantities, and we are learning to extract it. We've left a connectionist era and we've entered an extraction era. So, AI, cyber currency, cryptocurrency, social media, those are all systems of mapping and extracting resources from the social world and increasingly the natural world, you need a lot of energy. You need a lot of water. You need a lot of cool air to make these large server farms work. Okay. The good news is that these industries are a lot like the oil companies. Were in the 1920s and like the oil companies, we can regulate them. We learned to break up the oil conglomerates years ago as they were polluting our landscape. There are still oil companies. Absolutely. They're still polluting. Absolutely. But we had then, and we have now a government. Institutions that are capable of holding those people to account and taking action. We have to find the willpower. To do that, we have to elect representatives who are not corrupted by money themselves, but that those are all fights. They're gonna be ongoing fights. Institutions aren't magic, but they are a vehicle for breaking up organizations like companies that would otherwise destroy public goods, and I think you can see the potential power of institutions in the degree to which tech firms are afraid of them.

When you see tech firms constantly saying, “AI is the future, it's just intelligence. You need to get out of our way so that we can just build it as fast as possible.” What you're hearing is don't regulate me. Don't break up my profit source. Don't make me stop polluting. They are afraid of the state. They're afraid of the government. That's one of the reasons they're constantly trying to manage them. Their fear is a measure of our power. We have real power. To the extent that we believe that AI is somehow inevitable, that server farms are somehow required for human flourishing. We become victims of their marketing campaign. We still have institutions that have done it, and we've done it before. We have a labor movement in this country that succeeded in changing the workday. We have a state apparatus in the US that has succeeded in controlling other companies. I talk about the car industry a lot. People will say to me, “Oh, Fred, that's terrible. Look at cars. Cars are everywhere.” Well, yeah, but how about seat belts? We legislated seat belts and because we managed to require seat belts, which car companies were very reluctant to put in, we've been able to save a lot of lives. We can build some seat belts here. 

[00:18:45] Hanna Sistek: 
Yes. but we also have the collective action problem of everybody wanting to get to a GI [general intelligence] first. And so, I mean there are people like Tristan Harris that are trying to build a public opinion, saying that, “Hey, enough is enough”, and now we need to sit down and make sure that we can at least put some red lines around. The development of a GI. But, yeah, it seems like a heavy lift. 

[00:19:09] Fred Turner: 
Yeah. I think the challenge is to shift our attention. So long as we think the goal or even the discussion should be centered around a GI, general intelligence, the idea of a human-like intelligence, that's what we're building. We are gonna be going off the rails because that's a very, specifically, non-specific way to think. When people in the 90s used to say, “We just have to build the internet so we can all connect and connecting was a thing”, but without ever specifying what connection actually might be. Like general intelligence, no specification of what that actually is. And the no specification is strategic as long as you don't have to specify, you can use it as a reason to do anything. I would go a very different way. I would say develop AI, but develop AI in a particular local context where it's shown to be effective.

General intelligence is a fantasy, but AI can be very good at pharmaceutical development. It's very good at solving certain kinds of computational problems and writing certain kinds of computational code. And so I would flip it upside down and say, where are places in our institutions, in our lives where we might want to apply new technologies, develop new technologies in accord with the mission of those places? I think we also need to remember that the US is out front, but we're by no means alone in this process. I've just come back from France and I attended a conference of mostly civic leaders, about 2000 of them all focused on trying to figure out how to use some of the new technologies within the context of the civic missions that their institutions served. That's an entirely different way to work. Other countries do work in that way. We can learn from them. If we can just put our hubris to the side for a minute. 

[00:20:37] Sage Goodwin: 
So a lot of what you're talking about is kind of engaging a lot more critically with the tech industry. One of the things I think you've spoken about before in other places that I'm really interested in is what role does the press play in the way that we think about the tech industry, and particularly about the leaders of the tech industry, the tech bros. How do you think reporting feeds into… 

[00:20:58] Fred Turner: 
Well, unfortunately the press often helps us not think, and it's been a real problem. I used to be a journalist for 10 years and I still love journalism. A lot of journalism in the tech world has focused on telling heroic narratives of innovation, which of course is exactly what the tech world would like us to do and that's a real problem. I'll give you a very concrete example. I did a book a few years ago called Seeing Silicon Valley, which was a collection of photographic portraits of working class folks in Silicon Valley with some essays by me and photographer Mary Beth, and we worked on it together and we couldn't sell that book in the US. No, I had an agent. I have a track record. I can publish books. My books sell. Nope, no interest. They said, “That's just not Silicon Valley. Where's Mark Zuckerberg? Where's Elon Musk?” And they weren't in our book. And the whole point of our book was to see the Silicon Valley that the myth obscures. And so that book couldn't come out until the French published it. They published it first and two years later, an American publisher said, “Actually that looks like a pretty good book and we'll buy it, but we won't give you any money. And we don't think it'll sell.” It was a best seller right off the bat. It sold out all of its copies right off the bat. And the publisher was “Oh, okay.” And I said, “Well, can we get some more? It'll take a few months.” Whatever. My point being, the Silicon Valley that we have is very different from the Silicon Valley we see in the press. And the press for the same reasons that many academics do has an incentive to stay a little bit aligned with the industries. The industries provide the news. The industries provide the stories. The market's incredibly competitive. Things move very, very fast. Critique takes time, critique takes inside sourcing. Critique doesn't produce money. You don't get a lot of money for producing critique. You do get money and audience share for saying, “Wow, look at the brand new thing. Oh my God, there's a giant superhuman being coming down the pike. It's called AI, HEI. It's going to eat us alive. Oh my God.” 

Yeah. So unfortunately a lot of the press is doing that. There are exceptions. I want a single out, particularly smaller scale writers. WIRED Magazine has been doing really well lately. They've been very aggressively critical. So have the Condé Nast publications, surprisingly, where it's just killing it. Right now in reporting Teen Vogue… 

[00:23:05] Sage Goodwin: 
I have heard that Teen Vogue 

[00:23:07] Fred Turner: 
Is just killing it. 

[00:23:08] Sage Goodwin: 
Which is no longer a print publication. 

[00:23:10] Fred Turner: 
Is that right? I did not know that part. 

[00:23:13] Sage Goodwin: 
Yeah. Teen Vogue doesn't print a magazine anymore. They've moved completely online, but have completely evolved and innovated with that shift. 

[00:23:20] Fred Turner: 
No, and they're wonderful. And there are a number of individual actors who have, you know, newsletters and podcasts and substack that are reporting on this. But by and large, the mainstream press, has followed the lead of the mainstream firms, and that's unfortunate. 

[00:23:34] Sage Goodwin: 
So I also want to go back to your original problem with the public sphere now to use that phrase from Habermas, and think about the personalization of this public sphere. What are the other problems you see with that? I know you think a lot about performance in your work. Do you think as individuals, this personalization affects how people are thinking about their identities?

[00:23:55] Fred Turner: 
Yeah. So you'll know and others might not, that I'm deep in a book project on the 70s and 80s and on the New York Art World and queer politics, in that period, and on the rise of performance centered, public life. And, I think it's a real quandary. I look at that period and I think it's the most amazing period. It's a period in which suddenly it becomes possible to celebrate a full array of particularly sexual identity, sexual preferences. And it becomes possible to take what is most personal and hidden, and in some cases illegal if you're a gay man and bring it onto the public stage and say, “I'm here, I'm queer. Get used to it.” And that's an enormously powerful public thing to do at the same time. When you bring your most intimate self to the public sphere and you perform it in the media, you reset the terms of public debate so that now you're debating about your most personal things and other people have their own feelings about that, and they may be very different than yours. And suddenly you're in a fight about sexuality that maybe needs to be a fight about pharmaceuticals and resource  management and medicine. And, that's a real challenge. So, that's the challenge I've kind of got my finger on. These very liberating discourses, very liberating practices, have opened the door to modes of debate that are themselves, I think, a problem that make it harder to do some of the work of democracy. The heavy lifting of sharing resources across differences. Did I answer your question? 

[00:25:22] Sage Goodwin: 
That was a perfect answer.

[00:25:24] Fred Turner:  
Oh, phew. Thank goodness. Okay. 

[00:25:25] Hanna Sistek: 
I was sort of wondering when I was listening to the seminar we were just in. When you talked about your book project, I was wondering how [or] what you learned going back to this time in New York, how that can help us interpret the current time of the backlash against identity politics and DEI and so on. Do you have any thoughts? 

[00:25:48] Fred Turner: 
I have some thoughts. Yeah. I think one of the things to understand, and this is something I go into much greater length in the book and we'll have to do kind of quick and dirty here. I think that in many ways, the language of gender flexibility, the language of performance, language of performative identity in the 1990s became a language for class. It became a way to articulate an upper class flexibility, mobility, and ability to choose that people from other classes may or may not have had. Now that's a very sweeping statement, and it's much more sweeping than the nuanced reality on the ground. So I wanna be clear that I know the reality on the ground was a little bit different, but I've always been struck that when the right pushes back on, queer people so aggressively, part of what they're pushing back on. Is their own fears that the kind of class that many of them come from no longer matters, no longer counts. The industrial world or the agricultural worlds where they make their living no longer matter. That where power now lives is in a constant sphere of image circulation, a constant sphere of performance. And that world as right wingers, you said in the 80s and 90s is a space already always owned by cultural elites, many of whom are doing the gender work that I'm chronicling in the book. 

[00:27:00] Hanna Sistek: 
That's really interesting and it makes me think of, so after Trump got elected the first time, I was a journalist at the time, and I did a story on the alt-right. And so I was interviewing all these people who were part of the movement, including Richard Spencer, one of the forefronts, for three hours. What I really got the sense of was that these people were really worried about. When, whites were not gonna be in majority anymore. This was a real worry. And, when I thought about it, I'm, “Yeah, that sort of makes sense because we've been treating minorities terribly all this time.” And now suddenly they're gonna be in majority, no wonder people are worried about that. Anyways, I don't know how this connects, I think that's critical. 

[00:27:41] Fred Turner: 
I think that there's a second strand here. So, what we're talking about here is a ball of string, and there are many strings in the ball. American racism is absolutely one of the strings. I recently published an essay called The Texan Ideology, which is focused on the move of a series of Silicon Valley leaders to Texas, to build out large scale server farms that AI and other industries require. And as they move there, they're moving to a state where extraction visions have been around for hundreds of years. And one of the key resources that you extract things from in Texas is black people. Texas was a slave state. It was a slave state until the very end. Juneteenth is a holiday that comes from celebrating the liberation of black folks finally in Texas, much later than other states. And, the eastern part of Texas was cotton country. It was farmed by slaves and the owners of the cotton country  had their power by manipulating the state to control the land and get the cotton, but also by managing slaves, enslaved people. And when they managed enslaved people, they did it in part through the ideological trick of saying, “We are better, we're special, we are chosen. Those folks are less than fully human.” And we see those discourses coming back now as well in the tech world. Elon Musk calls for the production of more smart babies, smart being in part code for white. And I go to dinners in Silicon Valley where people will talk explicitly, openly, and favorably about eugenics.

[00:28:57] Sage Goodwin: 
That's so scary. Wow. 

[00:29:00] Fred Turner: 
It's astonishing. It just astonishes me. I have to wonder if someone did not teach them about the rise of fascism, but they… no.

[00:29:09] Julius Freeman: 
I think that this gets to your idea of, that you referenced earlier about the nasty monkeys idea of that this cycle just plays itself out no matter the technology that we develop over time. These lasting ideas, these lasting concepts keep coming back and rearing their ugly heads over and over again of whether it's eugenics, whether it's racism, whether it's sexism. They just take new forms as the media continues to evolve.

[00:29:34] Fred Turner: 
I think that's partly right. I have a slightly different take on it. When I was a journalist, one of the things that I saw, especially 'cause I started as a business reporter, I saw people struggling for advantage in the world. It was really, people were hustling hard, and what I see with the discourses that you just named is that those are resource pools for people who want to seek advantage as if as a white man I can claim that people who are not looking like me are lesser, then I instantly gain advantage. And, that's very powerful. And, I've actually felt that. So, I'm very tall. I'm very square. I'm very old, and I walk into a room sometimes and I can tell people just like, “Oh. He must have something going on. He looks like the type who would have something interesting to say.” And I find that fascinating, I get. It's like, I get a 10% boost just from looking like this, and I'm very aware of that. And I have family members who don't look like that and they don't get that boost. And I'm aware of that too. And so it's an advantage seeking, I think about culture and cultural resources as resources, as things that can be pulled up when people need them. And in the case of the tech workers in eugenics, not tech workers, tech leaders in eugenics, one of the things that I think is happening there is that yes, they're seeking advantage. Yes, they're seeking profit in the ways that I just described, and that's raced. It's heavily raced. But in addition to that, they work in firms where numbers are everything. And when they see in their imagination that some kinds of people in our society seem to be underperforming. They don't see the legacy of racism. They assign some nature to that thing, “Oh, well, disproportionate people of black people are poor.” Well, that must be on them. Somehow the numbers say it, and there's that weird move where the number becomes the story, but it precisely obscures the whole history. But I think these are folks with faith in numbers and from there it's a hop, skip and a jump to eugenics and it's a dark, dark stuff. But you're right, these are persistent ideologies that are just lying around for people to pick up, invigorate and take to the bank or in the Trump's case, take to the White House. 

[00:31:29] Julius Freeman: 
And so it kind of leads us to the question: we have all these problems that we've discussed so far. So based on your work, what do you think are some solutions that as people who are trying to learn how to become more critical, media consumers, what should we be doing? 

[00:31:45] Fred Turner: 
I think there's a lot of good news on that front. I think the first thing we have to do is recognize the situation that we're in. And we're in a time here in this country where we are under authoritarian assault. We have a leader, and a party, a Republican party that I would argue, are following a fascist playbook straight out of the mid-century. And we have to recognize that that is the situation that we're in and we have to push back on that. So let's just start there. There's a number of things we can do.

One of the things we can do first and foremost is hold our political leaders to account. We still have political institutions in a way that other countries that have gone full authoritarian don't. We can push on those things, so we can not just vote, but we can lobby, we can build institutions, we can march in the street. Marching's enormously powerful. There's a wonderful book called Fighting Tyranny. It was written in the 80s and it's a book that was used by people in Eastern Europe to resist the Soviet occupation. And what it argues, and I'll just repeat it, is persistent nonviolent resistance works. It takes time, but it works. So that's marching in the street. That's not throwing rocks at ice, but surrounding them. That's building solidarity with people in your office so that when someone comes and asks you to do something, you don't feel like you have to just obey right away because nobody else is not obeying, everybody else is obeying. Well, if you actually talk about that, build some solidarity. You don't have to do that. You don't have to anticipatorily, obey. And it's about building alternative institutions. So at Stanford, we have a faculty union for the first time, AAUP. Now there are 2000 faculty at Stanford and only 200 belong to the union. But the 200 of us are pretty darn serious and we can do stuff. So I think that's the answer. Build solidarity. Persist. Be visible. Take chances, but take chances with other people. In Silicon Valley where I live, we had a seven mile street lined with people protesting Trump, seven miles of people. I love that. That really cheered me up. And just seeing my neighbors out there, I wouldn't have known my neighbors felt that way. Nobody else was flying rainbow flags. And so I didn't know. And then there we were on the street and we recognized each other and we saw each other and we realized actually we stand for democracy. That kind of work over and over again and be prepared for the long haul. It's not quick. 

One last thing I will say is that online communication can help with that process, but do not mistake being vocal and visible online for taking action. It's not the same thing. It's super important to organize together in person, institutionally, slowly building trust with one another because the pushback when it comes will come in the form of ice troops with masks and guns, and you have to be ready for that. And no, no Facebook presence is gonna prepare you for that. 

[00:34:26] Julius Freeman: 
And so I hear everything you're saying and what I'm starting to think about is a lot of those things are somewhat coded, and you can tell me if you disagree. Coded liberally or the more democratic side. So what do we do with individuals who may be listening, who don't see Trump as this fascist force, but still want to understand how to kind of push back against some of this media and this technology that is consuming our world? 

[00:34:57] Fred Turner:
Let's start with folks, who might support Donald Trump. And there are actually things that Donald Trump believes that I also believe. And I think that's a great place to start. Like, let's start by talking to each other about the questions that we share and the issues that we share. I think the question about what to do with America's borders is a real question. We ought to be all talking about that together. So let me just say that [there are] a couple of things we can do in the short term. 

The first thing we can do is monitor our media diet, make sure we're finding reputable sources. And what's a reputable source? Well, it's a source that checks facts and believes in facts. I subscribe to eight newspapers. I get them everyday. And, they're places like The Times or the Post with the Wall Street Journal mainstream, but they check their facts. Okay? So that's one thing. 

The second thing you can do is make a special point of talking to people whose views are different from your own. In an open-minded way, do that repeatedly and gradually you'll find yourself becoming more flexible. Your core beliefs might not change, but you'll at least have a gut check. I think those are two good things. I got two good things.

[00:35:58] Julius Freeman:
I think that that's great. I think that's an important point. I think that it is just hard, especially when you think about how some of these things are being impacted by the current administration. To not have that coded part of it, but I think that is, it's important that everyone understand that we all play a role in this. That there's a way that we can all participate in not allowing these, the Silicon Valley hegemony, to take over our lives the way that it wants to. And so helping everyone understand that we all are affected by that is really important. 

[00:36:30] Fred Turner: 
Yeah. I think it's really important. I think the first thing you can do too, is just turn off your machines. I turn off my cell phone, I don't go to bed with my cell phone. And my cell phone is shut down. My wife goes to bed with her cell phone, that's a problem. I don't.

[00:36:41] Sage Goodwin: 
Yeah. That's actually what I wanted to ask you about. In thinking about some ways to navigate your own personal technology, what advice or what things do you think people should be thinking about as they move through their day with their laptop, iPad, phone..?

[00:36:58] Fred Turner: 
That's a great question. I found that as… Okay, so, I'm 64. I was born before technologies were everywhere, right? So I was born when we had three TV stations and two of them came in fuzzy, in that world, I never had to think about this. But as new media technologies have come along, and especially once I got a cell phone, I found that I had to make a point of getting time away from my machines. So I meditate every morning. I take some time, a couple times a day to make sure that I go for a walk somewhere where my machines are not [with me]. I turn off my cell phone, I leave it in the office when I go for a walk so that I get some embodied time in the physical world. I make time. My family now lives on the East Coast, but when I'm seeing them, I very much shut everything else down so I can see them and my friends the same way. So creating media free spaces in which you can be wholly present to what's happening right around you. I think that's key. 

[00:37:49] Sage Goodwin: 
The first thing that actually makes me think of something that I've noticed in the US, which we absolutely do not have in the UK, is TVs in every single bar and restaurant. I find it really…

[00:38:01] Fred Turner:
Insane… 

[00:38:02] Sage Goodwin: 
An interesting thing that happens in the states is that any bar and restaurant you go to, anywhere you sit, you're in sightline of at least four or five televisions and it's impossible to have an engaged, fully present conversation with someone when there's a screen in your peripheral vision that's moving. You just can't. 

[00:38:18] Fred Turner:
And Steve Bannon has talked about flooding the zone with things and what those TVs do is they flood the zone with commercial propaganda. My old advisor, Michael Schudson called that stuff capitalist realism. It's like socialist realism. They're like posters, but they're alive. They're on the walls, they're talking at you all the time, and it's almost impossible to form solidarity. A coalition of five or six people at dinner who can talk things through carefully and build trust in one another while the Dallas Cowboys are blaring down at you from overhead. It's always the Dallas Cowboys. It isn't. What's up with that? I mean also, I have to ask, is that a race thing too? Because it's the Dallas Cowboys. 

[00:38:56] Julius Freeman: 
Definitely, what Jerry Jones. It's definitely a race thing.

[00:38:59] Hanna Sistek: But, I really thought about this because I grew up in Sweden and at our family dinners or gatherings, we would never have a TV on ever. Right. And here at all the family gatherings, there's always the bloody TV on. And I can't, and I feel… 

[00:39:13] Fred Turner: 
Well, come to my house. I'm happy to report there will not be TV on at my house. 

[00:39:17] Julius Freeman: 
I don't even understand it myself. Now that you guys are bringing it up. I don't really think about it. It's just like, I guess we just like to refuse to not be entertained at all times. It's like, there's always a desire to escape the natural process of human interaction of like, if a conversation becomes awkward, at least the Dallas Cowboys are on in the background and I can turn to the game or at least I have my phone and I can go on Instagram if this date isn't going well. Like all these options to escape the human experience. But, aside from the point, it's interesting for sure. 

[00:39:50] Fred Turner: 
Oh, that's so dark. I mean, because it's like if you're escaping the human experience, then you're not having the human experience. And it becomes almost impossible to build solidarity with other humans, to gut check, to fact check, to do all the things that we need to do to build a society in which we govern ourselves and don't submit to authoritarian charismatic leaders. 

[00:40:11] Hanna Sistek: 
Right. Because you don't really have people's attention because it's half split. 

[00:40:16] Fred Turner: 
Splitting people's attention. So, what would you want to do if you wanted to build an authoritarian society? Well, you would want to fracture solidarity between people. You would want to turn groups against one another, and you would want to take up half the mind space of every thinking individual. And you would also, of course, wanna destroy the sciences, destroy journalism, destroy the organs that might tell a different story, so that you could control the story space. And the story space itself would consist of audiences that were hyper individuated, unable to talk with each other, and unable to push back in a collective way. 

[00:40:44] Julius Freeman: 
And you start to take the people's economic power. I think part of this conversation with AI is that there's an attempt to replace people, but also draw people more into the media. So it's like pulling us away from each other in terms of our interactions with each other draws deeper into interacting with AI and treating it like it's our therapist, treating it like our friend, while it's also actively replacing people in their jobs.

Amazon is replacing people. Walmart is replacing people with AI and so it's like you take their economic power, you take their social power, like all they have left is to hate each other or whoever you gave them as the boogeyman. It's really interesting. 

[00:41:25] Fred Turner: 
Yeah, and hate to say it, but this is the logic of the slaveholder. What would you want from an enslaved person? Well, what you want to do is you want to break their ties to the rest of their world. You want to own, literally own, every part of their social life, every part of their social world. You want them on your plantation. In many ways, what Facebook wants is us on their plantations, they don't necessarily need to have my body there, and I'm not arguing that they're gonna whip me if I do something wrong, however, they absolutely want to capture every part of my social world and turn that into a resource for themselves. They're turning my life into labor for them just as slaveholders in the old days, turning the lives of enslaved Americans into wealth for themselves.

[00:42:08] Sage Goodwin: 
This is making me think of a really great essay by bell hooks called The Oppositional Gaze. And she mentions in the oppositional gaze, she talks about the under slavery moment using James Scott's terms infrapolitics is looking where you're not supposed to look. Having like that is a form of looking at someone you're not supposed to look at, for example, like the slave master's wife or something like that. But also not, the thing I'm thinking of in terms of this conversation is paying attention to something that you're not supposed to be paying attention to because your attention is actually the thing that's important. And, we think about the politics of attention and how that works in this extractive economy that you've been talking about in the tech world, I think is really interesting. And, I suppose I had never really thought about it. In terms of these companies are farming your attention, but in doing that, what are they taking your attention away from?

[00:42:59] Fred Turner: 
That's right. That's why Stuart Hall has this wonderful, wonderful term, it's a little awkward, but I love it, called “exnomination”. And exnomination is a process of excluding ideas or people from discussion, and from the world by simply not naming them, by simply turning your attention somewhere else. So you're not actively saying, don't be X or Z is bad, but you're just not mentioning them. And somehow they're not included. And that's the thing that journalists do. Journalists exnominated in Silicon Valley, for example, the working class, one of the things that we did when we did the Seeing Silicon Valley book was literally try to apply bell hooks’ oppositional gaze. Let's look where they're telling us not to look. Let's look at the ordinary people in the valley and how their lives are shaped, and so themselves shape the technologies that are built there. And literally when we went to publishers, they just literally wouldn't go there with us. It's like, “No, we're not gonna look at that. We can't look at that. The Valley is this other thing that we already know. It's Tech bros. It's Burning Man. It's that. It's not the tamale vendor that you photographed, it's not the Facebook security guard. It's something else.” So that is another tactic to get to your point. That's another tactic we can use. We can look where we're told not to look and we can say what we see, and that's very powerful. 

[00:44:09] Julius Freeman: 
Absolutely. And I think it transitions us into a really interesting conversation to hear all the stuff that you're thinking about, and you talk a little bit about it when you're watching things, but what do you consume on a daily basis to help you keep your awareness but also keep your sanity?  Because all of this, it sounds like it would make you lose your mind a little bit when you're like, “They're trying to take our lives, they're trying to take our attention, they're trying to take everything,” but how do you keep yourself?

[00:44:37] Fred Turner: 
My hair is definitely on fire, what's left of my hair is very much on fire. I am deeply concerned. I'm somebody who studied the 30s and 40s in my book, The Democratic Surround. I've spent a lot of time looking at that and the similarities between that period and this are shocking and scary and almost hard to name because they are so scary. How do I stay sane? I subscribed to about eight different newspapers, all the majors. 

[00:44:59] Sage Goodwin: 
And what [or] when you say subscribe, is this digitally? Or you're not getting a physical?

[00:45:03] Fred Turner:
No, I got one physical paper. It's an old habit. I get the New York Times every morning. And it's the first thing I consume because I sit down with my breakfast and I have the paper and I'm really foggy and I can just flip through it. But the physical paper also forces me to encounter stories. I don't know what to look for. That's really important. Okay, I started with The Times, then across the day I worked through the Washington Post, The Guardian, Fox News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, a couple of local papers in Maine where my family is, the Portland Press Herald, and Mount Desert Island. It's the MDI paper, but I don't remember the name of it. Over through those, there are a couple of substacks I follow, which can be good for specific things. I think that's really the core of my news diet.

The other thing I'm careful to do is to surround myself with people who are thoughtful and aren't constantly spamming me with new, horrible things happening. And, I have a couple good friends who do try to spam me that way, and I've just talked to them and said, “Look, don't send me that stuff because it's just too upsetting,” Right? When Trump does something horrible, again, when ice goes to North Carolina, again, those things, I have to limit my exposure to those things. So when really bad stuff is happening, I actually don't turn on the radio except for a half hour dinner time. I catch the news, I learn it, I put it away because otherwise I would go crazy. And then I guess the other thing I try to do is I try really hard to write and speak and be public about my opposition to what's happening. I think that's really important. I think that a lot of folks in my world had their heads down and I'll just go do my thing, it'll pass and there's an old joke in Maine where I spend a lot of time that, when the bear comes to the camp, he takes you one at a time. So he eats the first camper and the other campers are like, “Oh, phew, he's not gonna eat me.” Well, then he goes for the next camper. “Well, it's still not me.” Eventually the bear eats all the campers. So I'm one of the campers right now saying there's a bear in camp and this is a problem and that gives me some energy. That gives me some strength. 

[00:46:46] Julius Freeman: 
And so with all of this fighting back. You must have junk food, something that is a secret pleasure of yours that you go to.

[00:46:55] Fred Turner:
Oh, this is going to get really dark. All right. You're going out of me, totally here. So I like to watch a lot of Midnight YouTube. This is what I watch at Midnight. I think I've watched everything that Taylor Tomlinson has produced. She's a comedian, an excellent comedian. Oh, she's so funny. Jesus. She's funny. I love Taylor Tomlinson. I watch a lot of music videos, I'm currently, and I know I'm not alone in this. I'm completely enamored of a band called Wet Leg. and I'm just watching them all the time. I'm watching [Wet Leg’s] Chaise Lounge on replay. I also watch a lot of old sort of 60s concert videos. And occasionally if I'm feeling super sentimental, I can actually watch shows at a club called From Berlin that I was at where videos were made and they're now on YouTube. They were filmed and then they were on YouTube. And so I can occasionally do that and that's just a bizarre, strange time travel experience that I let myself have every now and again. 

[00:47:47] Hanna Sistek: 
So how do you palate cleanse when you've gone through too much of this? 

[00:47:53] Fred Turner: 
Mostly I get my body back in action. So much we talk about this as an intellectual problem, but, being able to reason depends on having confidence in your body and your body being in good shape. And so I exercise a lot. I paddle a sea kayak that gets me out on the ocean. And when you're in a sea kayak and the water's bumpy, you are fully engaged with your kayak or you are falling over. And I'm fully engaged with my boat, I also play music. I play the banjo. I play bluegrass banjo, so I play with other folks doing that. And that's a really intimate, warm experience that I love. So those are the ways I do it. 

[00:48:25] Sage Goodwin: 
Amazing. So I think our takeaways are: turn off your screens, learn to play the banjo, go kayaking, talk to people, talk to people, 

Fred Turner: 
talk to people, talk to people, talk to people, including people, and get on the streets and protest, 

Sage Goodwin: 
And get on the streets and protest.

[00:48:37] Fred Turner: 
And especially reach out to people who are different from you and disagree and try to find the common ground and do that over and over and over again. The world will change. 

[00:48:45] Julius Freeman: 
I did have one last burning question for you. You talked about not having to set a boundary with some people about sending you a lot of bad news. What would you say to people who have that problem of like, they're seeing all these terrible things and they just want to give attention to all of it. Is there a problem with that and maybe how do they handle that? 

[00:49:05] Fred Turner: 
Yeah, so one of the things that's an illusion, right, is that if you give attention to problems, if you focus on them, if you forward news about them, you've actually done something to solve them. It's simply not the case. You are allowing your attention to be drawn up into these things and you're involved in what one of my journalist friends calls misery porn often. And, you do not want to circulate misery porn. You want to put an end to the thing that causes misery. And to do that often requires hard, dull in-person work. The reward for doing hard adult in-person work as anyone involved in civil rights in the 60s can tell you is friendships that last a lifetime, a level of trust with other people that will blow your mind and the discovery of allies in places you never thought you had them who will support you, sustain you, and reach out to help you when you need them. And that's an amazing sensation. 

[00:49:52] Julius Freeman: 
Well, I don't think that there's a better term to end the podcast on than misery porn. I think that that really wrapped things up.

Everyone: Laughing 

[00:50:02] Fred Turner: 
I was thinking you would go to the more uplifting part of my little talk there. Great. Thanks for bringing us back to the dark side. 

[00:50:06] Julius Freeman: 
I thought that that was just great. 

Fred Turner: Yeah, it's a good term. It's a good term. It really summarizes it well. But don't do that. 

Julius Freeman: Don't do that folks. 

[00:50:15] Sage Goodwin: 
Well, as much as we've told everyone to turn off their screens and throw their laptops in the river and get in their kayaks, if people do want to find more of you and your insights and they're gonna do their screen to do that where should they go

[00:50:28] Fred Turner:
I'm super easy. You could just Google up fredturner.stanford.edu or just Fred Turner at Stanford. And I have a website there that has everything I've written, linked, and has a bunch of videos of me talking and podcasts of me talking. You can get all the Fred Turner you ever wanted right there. 

And, let me also just make a pitch too for the Baffler. Right now, the Texan ideology on the Baffler is brand new out about a week ago. You can catch the latest Fred Turner that's not on my website, but, it's free to everybody, so go check it out. 

[00:50:56] Sage Goodwin: 
Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you Fred, so much.

[00:50:58] Julius Freeman: 
Fred, we so appreciate you for coming on. 

[00:50:59] Fred Turner: 
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. 

[00:51:02]Julius Freeman:
This has been another episode of CAPTivated. It's been hosted by CAPT, you know, CAPTivated. You guys get it. It's the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology. 

[00:51:14] Hanna Sistek: 
 The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are theirs and theirs alone. They do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to policy of institutional neutrality.

[00:51:24] Sage Goodwin: 
 To learn more about this episode's guest, check out this show notes. We really enjoyed this conversation today, and we hope you got something out of it too. Thanks for listening.   

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Hanna Sistek

Host
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Julius Freeman

Host
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Sage Goodwin

Host