Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 11/18/2025 at
02:16PM eastern, and we have a pugilistic show for you this
week. Meagle shares her journey trying to rebuild her attention
span after a stark realization about her phone usage, and then
she chats with Emily Mazo and Muhammad Ali, organizers of the
conference, New Luddism, Technology and Resistance in the
Modern Workplace about regaining control over the technology that
suffuses our work, our leisure time, our lives, and also
machines. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break.
You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member
feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the
things that have happened since the last time you heard from us.
These boots were made for walking and that's just what
they'll do. One of these days, these boots are gonna have five
stories for you this week. Vine is back ish.
Jack Dorsey, who you may know from his facial hair and other
various questionable endeavors, is rebooting the six second
video app Vine, once purchased and then shuddered by then
Twitter as d Vine. Thanks to the efforts of the archive team and
others, Dorsey and co developer Rabble say the network will
launch with a significant back catalog of Vines which creators
can issue DMCA takedowns for if they wish to leave them lost to
the sands of internet time. Rabble and Dorsey say they want
to recapture a nostalgic version of the Internet and therefore
will be launching Vine AI generated content free and will
use external tools to verify that that which is uploaded is
not generated. This move is at least partially confusing given
that Dorsey's decentralized social networking protocol,
Noster, forms the backbone of divine and lists on its website
AI, making Noster the best for AI development and integration
as one of its quote unquote pillars. This has led some
posters to wonder if the site will be AI free in order to
guarantee a clean dataset for future model training endeavors.
Clip: Know. Do it.
Mike Rugnetta: Teen Vogue has been shuttered and will be
folded into the larger Vogue brand at publisher Conde Nast. A
surprising move from a publisher well known for wise forward
thinking decisions concerning the longevity of impactful and
culturally relevant mastheads. 70% of the teen Vogue staff was
laid off including its editor in chief, Virsha Sharma. The two
decade old magazine was launched as a fashion and celebrity
gossip spin off of Vogue Proper, only to come into its own ten or
so years ago as a hard hitting feminist leaning and politically
engaged outlet focused on issues important to young people. The
Roosevelt Institute called the closure, quote, evidence that
corporate concentration eliminates innovative ideas and
silences voices with less power, end quote.
Mhmm. Kickstarter employees are no longer on strike. After seven
months of bargaining and forty two days of pickets,
demonstrations, live streams, the whole nine yards, they have
won a contract with management which guarantees their four day
work week and protects against attempts to change that policy
down the line. They've bargained for an increase in the minimum
salary floor up an average of 6%, as well as securing a one
time $6,000 bonus for those at the low end of the pay scale and
more, including protections against replacing workers with
AI or full time workers with contractors. To read more, head
to kickstarterunited.org or check the link in the show
notes.
Nice work, friends. Very proud of you all. TikTok is launching
a podcast network. The social network is partnering with
iHeartMedia and among their endeavors is a network of quote
up to 25 new podcasts hosted by TikTok creators as well as a
national broadcast and digital radio channel, and a series of
live event integrations according to an iHeart press
release. IHeart will be building new production facilities in LA,
New York, and Atlanta to support the project, and we'll partner
with broadcast radio to feature creators as well as songs made
popular on the short form video app.
Sure. Why not? I guess. And finally, sticking with TikTok,
the shop, the TikTok shop is now the size of eBay. According to
Wired, quote, analytics from firm Echotick estimates TikTok
shop sold $19,000,000,000 worth of products globally from July
through September.
The United States, its largest market, accounted for
4,000,000,000 to 4,500,000,000.0 in sales, an increase of about
125% compared to the 2025. To put those numbers in
perspective, eBay saw $20,100,000,000 in total sales
in the last quarter, end quote. In show news this week, catch me
on this week's episode of Normal Gossip where I share a story
about a rich guy that eats too much sauce before dishing about
vampires in the nineties, a thing which I have direct
personal experience about. If you wanna know more about that,
listen to Normal Gossip. It's a ride.
It was really great to hang out with Rachel again after our
collab about monocultural Internet events back in her
ICYMI days. So head to wherever you get your podcasts and search
normal gossip or check the link in the show notes. Next, we got
T shirts. We got them. They're in our hands, and they are
beautiful.
They're so good. They're gonna go out right after Thanksgiving,
so keep an eye on your mailbox. Go outside, move a chair into
bed, maybe your refrigerator out there. Do not leave its company.
The t shirts are coming.
And finally, the Radiotopia fundraiser continues. Please
visit radiotopia.fm forward slash donate to give $5.10,
$15.50 bucks once or however often you would like to support.
Never post along with every other show on Radiotopia who
are, in case it was not clear up to this point, all of our pals,
our buddies, our friends, our comrades. We love them all
dearly. So please go to radiotopia.fmforward slash
donate today, tomorrow, any day.
Any amount helps us, all of our friend to shows, and this
wonderful network that we are all a part of. Tell them, never
post censure. Okay. That's all the news I have for you week. In
this episode, Meagol on attention, and then Meagol again
along with Emily and Mohammed on new Luddism.
But first, in our interstitials this week, the sounds of
progress,
sort of.
Drawn from the depths of freesound.org with credit where
it is due in the show notes, Creative Commons licensed field
recordings of an auto loom, a dot matrix printer, and a three
d printer. Please enjoy.
Meghal Janardan: Travel back with me to a time in the recent
past. It's the first week of the New Year, and TikTok is about to
be banned in The US. I'm finding this out as I scroll TikTok.
Content creator after influencer after small business owner is
freaking out about lost income.
Clip: It's over, guys. This is it.
Are they really banning fucking TikTok in fucking January?
Alright.
And to the US government, I'm never forgiving you for
Meghal Janardan: drastically this ban will affect my life. I
mean, I like TikTok, but it's not like I spend that much time
on the app. And at the very least, it will be a negative one
for big tech. I text my friends asking, how much time do y'all
spend on your phones and TikTok? My phone buzzes.
Most of my friends spend four to five hours on their phones a day
and max one hour on TikTok. Okay. Nice, I think. I probably
fall in the same bracket. I open up screen time and see ten hours
and twenty four minutes wait.
That can't be right. Oh, maybe that is my weekly total. I look
again. Oh, no. No.
No. What? That is double what my friends spend on their phones.
Oh my god. What do you mean I spent nineteen hours on TikTok
in the past week?
I see nineteen hours a week for messages too. My face starts to
feel numb and a sense of dread fills my stomach. Is this okay?
Am I okay? What is going on between me and my phone?
Fast forward one week. All I can think about is my screen time.
Every tap, every scroll, every video, every message adds to
that pesky number. My phone, it's always there right next to
me, constantly lighting up and buzzing, and I'm constantly
picking it up. I wish it would just stop.
Another week passes. It's Saturday night, and I'm
scrolling through TikTok. A message pops up. Sorry. TikTok
isn't available right now.
Oh, the app has been removed from the Google and Apple
stores. Has my wish come true? This is at least one less app to
worry about affecting my screen time. I can go to bed and wake
up without the to even scroll on TikTok. Wonderful.
That was easy. Fourteen hours pass. TikTok is back. You have
got to be kidding me. Not even a full day has passed.
Okay. My wish has not been granted. I guess it is up to me
to do something about how much I spend on my phone. Deep breath.
By now, it has been two weeks since that first conversation
with my friends.
Texting and TikTok remain the biggest offenders, clocking in
in a daily average of two to three hours each. I thought that
Slack and Gmail would take up a bigger percentage, but those
apps were at the bottom. If I really think about my habits,
this outcome makes sense. When I wake up, I check my text and
scroll on TikTok. When I'm between meetings, I check my
text and scroll on TikTok.
When I take my dog out, I check my text and scroll on TikTok.
When I'm eating lunch, I check my text and scroll on TikTok.
When I go to bed, I check my texts and scroll on TikTok. Even
when I'm out with friends, I feel the need to check my phone.
Unless I'm in a theater, it's hard to even watch movies.
Even right now, as I examine my screen time, I desperately wanna
check my text. I can't focus. My eyes hurt. I feel nauseous. I
can't stop tapping and scrolling.
Oh my god. Why am I doing this? Am I addicted to the little
dopamine hits? Do I only feel connected when I'm constantly
texting? Am I avoiding something not on my phone?
Maybe I'm avoiding chores or boredom. Is scrolling doing
something and therefore it's better than doing nothing? If I
try to focus, it feels like trying to build a sand castle
with dry sand. I keep trying, but everything keeps falling
apart. I thought the problem was screen time, but it's deeper.
It's my attention span. I barely have one. Listeners, now begins
the arduous journey of trying something that maybe you and
plenty of others have attempted before. I'm going to try and fix
my attention span. Is it even possible?
It is, but it's tough. What follows are seven steps I took
over the past eleven months in attempt to fix my attention
span. Step one, observe. I'm going to spend a few days
observing my relationship with my phone. I quickly realized I
am not only always on my phone, I am super attached to it as a
physical object.
I bring it with me everywhere. If I'm working on my laptop at
my desk, my phone is right next to my laptop. If I go to the
bathroom, my phone is on the bathroom counter. If I'm heating
up my lunch, my phone is on my counter. For context, I live in
a 600 square foot apartment.
I can hear my phone just fine if it's in another room. I can't
remember the last time I was without my phone for more than
thirty minutes unless I accidentally left it somewhere.
This supposedly amazing piece of technology is starting to feel
like an invasive parasite that I allowed into my life. Now I'm
hyper aware of the physical weight of my phone as I carry it
from room to room. It is like a lead shadow that I have to drag
around behind me everywhere I go.
Step two, offload. Do I have to do everything on my phone? Maybe
if I offload some phone tasks, I won't need to bring it
everywhere. I'm going to do something unthinkable. I'm
adding messaging to my personal laptop.
I never wanted to do this because I didn't wanna be
distracted while working. But, well, you know how that went. At
the very least, responding on my laptop can help with the eye
strain. It sounds silly to move from one screen to another, but
it works. Typing with a full keyboard is easier and faster.
The main problem now is that I'm constantly looking at my phone
because of the incessant notifications, which brings me
to the next step. Step three, reconfigure. The biggest trigger
to picking up my phone is seeing a text notification. I
desperately need to reconfigure all of my notifications. Let's
be honest here.
You probably need to change yours too. If you want to follow
along with me, please do. I'll wait a second for you to pick up
your phone. Okay. Ready?
Open up the settings, go to message notifications, and turn
them off. That means no vibrate, no sound, no lock screen, no
notification center, and no banners. My phone, and hopefully
yours too, is now a plain black box that doesn't constantly
light up and vibrate. The new silence is off putting. It's a
massive change to make.
It's weird not knowing when someone is communicating, but it
is working. After a few months, I look at my phone less. I am
less distracted and mostly text on my laptop. But get this, text
notifications are turned off on my laptop as well. If I want to
see who's texting me, I don't let my phone tell me when to
look.
I decide when to look. I decide when I respond. And most things
can simply wait. If someone needs to reach me immediately,
they can call. The hours I used to spend on my phone texting
have moved to my laptop and reduced.
Step four, redirect. Let's talk about the elephant in the room
and what started this journey in the first place. Please, one
more. One more. TikTok.
Yes. I can delete the app and go cold turkey or use app blockers,
but I wanna try a few other things first. When I pick up my
phone, I still instinctively open TikTok and scroll and
scroll and scroll. It is muscle memory. I have no impulse
control.
Before I know it, my eyes are hurting and thirty minutes have
passed in a blink. What if I choose to watch something long
form? Instead of opening TikTok, I can open YouTube. This also
sounds silly, replacing one form of video content for another,
but I have to try something. I give it a shot for a few weeks.
It barely works. Watching a YouTube video feels like too big
of a commitment. I don't always have twenty minutes. Now when I
open YouTube, I'm always playing catch up with half done videos.
I need something to consume for an undecided amount of time that
I can easily return to later.
Step four, two point o. How about a book? I don't know if
you know this, but books are meant to be picked up and put
down and picked up and put down to the library I go. It's really
exciting to pick out a book for myself. It feels so personal
like I'm making my own algorithm.
I'm also downloading Libby so I can have an ebook and an
audiobook on deck. If I'm going to replace my impulse to open
TikTok, I need all bases covered. I have something to
pick up instead of my phone when I'm at home, something to read
on my phone when I'm out, something to listen to when I'm
doing chores. Every time I reach for my phone, a little voice in
my head says, pick up a book instead. It works.
It feels like I'm replacing a bad addiction with a good one.
In just a few weeks, those twelve to fourteen TikTok hours
are spent reading. In three months, I read 20 books. But
taking up reading didn't magically solve everything. I
have this lingering fear that I'll enter a reading law, which
will trigger a TikTok relapse.
Every once in a while, I'm reading a boring book and my
mind wanders. And before I know it, I'm back on TikTok. But it
doesn't feel the same. It takes minutes before I feel nauseous.
It used to take an hour.
So hopefully, by the time I'm in a reading lull, I won't even
have the stomach for TikTok. Step five, delete. Remember when
I said I won't delete TikTok in step four? It is time. Okay.
Do this with me. Is your phone nearby? Good. Hold down on that
little icon and tap the minus button. Did you do it?
I did it. It will be okay. It feels a bit weird, like a ghost
in a nap. No goodbye. No explanation.
I just left. Like, it was a toxic situationship. TikTok felt
like everything I used to love about the Internet until it
didn't. A place where I could exist online without coming
across people I know, a place where I could explore and learn
new things. But I haven't had that feeling in a while
especially with the introduction of AI content.
I don't wanna spend even more time trying to decipher if
something is real or not. Plus, in the past eleven months of
fixing my attention span, most of my friends have deleted
TikTok too, which means fewer people to share content with. So
goodbye. I am free. A few weeks have passed and it feels so good
not to be sucked into the app twenty four seven.
I don't miss it as much as I thought either. Step six,
communicate. So far, everything I've tried appears to have been
between me, myself, and I phone, but it hasn't been. During the
past eleven months, I've been reaching out to people in my
life to let them know the changes I'm making. When I reach
out, it is a simple, hey.
My notifications are silent. I will be slower to respond, or I
might not see something you send me on social media because I'm
using it less. I thought this big personal change would have a
more drastic impact on my relationships offline. If I'm on
my phone less, that means I'm less connected to people in my
life. Right?
The opposite is happening. After reaching out, I often get
responses back from friends doing similar things, deleting
social media, scrolling less, using their phones less. When I
started, I was worried I would feel disconnected, but I'm not
alone in this journey. A haze has slowly lifted over the past
few months. I am more present in my life and more present with
the people around me.
I didn't even know I wasn't present before. Step seven, let
go. I've made a lot of progress, but my journey isn't done. Let's
go back to something I observed in step one. What am I going to
do about this black brick that is following me everywhere?
After months, leaving my phone in another room is my biggest
struggle. I am making some progress, but I'm still working
on it. When I take my dog on walks, I leave my phone at home.
When I'm out with friends, I keep my phone in my bag or
flipped upside down so I'm not checking it. But I need to make
some changes in my home.
I'm working on making a permanent spot for my phone in
my apartment, essentially turning my phone into a
landline. I'm wall mounting a box with a charging port that
lives by my front door. I'm also removing the charging cords from
other areas in my apartment, so I'm forced to put my phone in
the box. The hope here is that eventually, can let go of my
physical attachment and learn that I can leave my phone
behind. But this change is in the beginning stages, so I'll
have to report back later.
So where does this leave me in my attention span? Is it
possible to fix? Short answer, yes. Long answer, it's
complicated. After all of these changes, my attention span has
healed a lot.
My phone screen time now averages four to six hours a
day, down from ten to twelve hours a day. I rarely feel
nauseous when I'm on my phone. I'm less distractible. I have a
higher tolerance for long form content as well. With all of my
guardrails in place, I expect my screen time to continue to go
down and my attention span to continue to improve.
But it isn't a perfect system. Sometimes, my screen time spikes
back up to eight hours a day, not including reading. And
anything can trigger this. Back in February when my grandpa
passed away, I was doomscrolling on TikTok to distract myself. In
early November when Zoran won the mayoral election, I spent
countless hours watching celebration videos so I could
ride that excitement out.
Even after all of this work, my consumption habits are still
sensitive. I can easily be pulled back into my phone. But
now, I have enough impulse control to pause and think about
why I'm picking up my phone. I ask myself the same questions I
had at the beginning of this journey. Am I avoiding
something?
Am I chasing excitement? Am I avoiding boredom? Maybe put that
phone down and sit with those feelings instead. Allow yourself
to focus. Focus on what is going on in your life.
I guess that is step eight. Sit with your feelings. Every once
in a while, I'll have a day where my screen time is under
one hour, usually when I'm traveling without service. It
feels so good. I crave these days.
Instead of craving my phone, I've started to crave my life.
But here's the thing, I miss being on my phone a lot. Why? In
a twisted way, even though I'm more present in my life, I have
massive Internet FOMO. I miss the memes, knowing what sound is
trending, being clued in on influencer drama.
I miss the chaos and excitement of knowing I can come across
anything, a new idea, a recipe, a cute puppy with a simple
scroll. But ultimately, it's too much information, too much
distraction, increasingly too much slop. I don't want my phone
to dictate my life. I want to dictate my life. If I feel this
way and my friends do too, I know there must be more people
out there that feel similar.
We are taking our attention spans back. We have got to spend
our time on more than just apps. Deep breath. Technology has
become so interwoven within my life, it often feels impossible
to untangle. If I meet someone at a party, they ask for my
Instagram instead of my number.
On every job application, there's a spot to link my
LinkedIn. I need a Resy profile to make reservations. I once
tried taking a Pilates class in my neighborhood and had to
download a new app to book the class. A former employer even
asked every employee to use ChatGPT to make content more
efficiently. Feels like these apps hijack control from me.
Taking my attention back helped regain some control, but how
else can I reassert my agency as a technology user? Are there
people already working towards this? Recently, I learned about
New New Luddism is based on Luddism, an uprising in England
in the nineteenth century where factory workers were being
displaced by automated machines. They resisted by smashing these
machines to try to keep some amount of control over the means
of production. Earlier this November, I had the pleasure of
attending the conference, New Luddism, Technology and
Resistance in the Modern Workplace, organized by Emily
Mazo and Muhammad Ali.
I am so lucky that the organizers of that conference
made themselves almost immediately available to talk
with me about it afterwards. I wanted to talk to them about
what is happening in the new ledism movement and the ways
people are resisting certain technologies. Emily Maza,
welcome. Thanks so much for having us. Muhammad Ali,
welcome.
Mohamed Ali: Thank you for having us.
Meghal Janardan: Emily, you are a former software engineer and
now sociology PhD student at Columbia University, where you
study work and labor organizing in the tech industry. You are
also a member of Collective Action Tech, which creates
resources for tech workers who want to organize their
workplace. Can you help us understand what is new Luddism
reacting to?
Emily Mazo: Yeah. I think that the the main thread through all
of the different groups of people, researchers, activists,
all the different maybe movements that are taking up the
mantle of the Luddites today is the same one of the original
Luddites, and it's about control. It's not about whether
or not technology is good or bad. It's not about whether or
not you understand technology. It's about whether or not you
have control over the technology that is getting used on you, the
technology that you're getting asked to use, and the ways in
which, like, society is changing around you, your working
conditions are changing, your living conditions are changing
as a result of other people using that technology on you or
around you or developing specific technologies and not
developing other ones.
And it's about whether or not you have a say.
Meghal Janardan: Okay. Mohammed, you are a JD candidate at
Columbia Law School and former Google product manager who
studies the intersection of antitrust administrative law and
technology. And you are a member of the law and political economy
project, which examines how legal rules distribute power
across markets and institutions and a research associate at the
AI Now Institute. So for you, what does New Luddism want to
achieve, specifically when looking at, like, the means of
production?
Mohamed Ali: So as Luddites, we wanna have a deep and formidable
understanding of what the material, political, social
context of scientific and technological innovation is, and
how we as the public, and we the society, we the citizenry, we
the interested human beings, can take a role in guiding the
vision for technological progress in the future. Because
if we don't, somebody else will. And that somebody else may not
necessarily have our best interests in mind. And I think
we're seeing that now today with a wide variety of technologies
being deployed in the marketplace that can only be
called SLOP. And that is not, you know, and that is not
inevitable.
We're seizing the mantle of the word light and reclaiming it.
Meghal Janardan: Yeah. That's really interesting. It's
something that I was, like, thinking about when I was at the
conference and, you know, doing a little bit research for this
interview is the role of consent in the way that technology is in
our lives. And Buddhism makes you question that, like, did did
I opt into all of this? Can I opt out?
How? And what does that mean for, like, say, me as an
individual? Do you see Luddism as anti technology? And if it is
anti something, what specifically is it anti?
Mohamed Ali: Luddism is not anti technology and it is really an
outrageous claim when people accuse Luddites of being anti
technology. What Luddites are interested in is like Emily just
said very well, power. Who has the power to decide what
technologies are used and how, and how they develop and where,
and when they're deployed and why. Maybe it'll be useful to
illustrate a material example. Did you know the camera was
racist until very recently?
Meghal Janardan: I guess how it precedes light. Yes.
Mohamed Ali: Well, yes. Yeah. Since almost since the days of
like the Lumiere brothers, the colors against which the light
was calibrated was, you know, the primary colors, and then
guess what? The tones of white people. And that's why when you
take a picture next to a white person, you know you know, if I
were to a picture next to Emily, either I would look really dark
and then she looked great, or she looked like she's about to
ascend to heaven and I would look great.
Yes. And that is not just the inevitable result of technology.
And when I criticize that, it's not because I'm anti technology.
It's because certain specific hardware decisions were made
that led to this failure for us. And, you know, this leads to a a
social reality.
Maybe I'm less likely to wanna take a picture with Emily
because I don't think I'm gonna look good in one of that. And
imagine that that that little feeling that I have, how it adds
up when it multiplies across a society. And this shows where
the power is. That didn't change because some people had a moral
crusade, actually. It changed because other companies,
specifically furniture companies and chocolate manufacturers,
were complaining that they couldn't capture dark furniture
or dark chocolate well with the cameras.
And so two, you know, corporate bigwigs are fighting over our
technological future. What about me wanting to able to take a
picture with my white friends, you know, or me wanting to take
a picture with my white neighbors? I mean, that's like
Yeah. I think a lot more important than, you know, your
rendering of a dark chocolate, you know, on a a on a on a
screen. But what we want to do is based on that understanding,
look at what are the ways in which the worker, the public, or
anybody, really.
What are the ways in which power manifests in the way a
technology develops and the way it proliferates and the way we
interact with it.
Meghal Janardan: So what would control look like in this
situation or I guess a better future?
Emily Mazo: A lot of the battle for control over what technology
gets built, who gets to use it, who it gets used on starts in
the workplace. There's also sort of a lack of a history over the
last few decades in The United States of organized labor, like
unions organizing for control over what gets built. And I
think that that shift back to sort of democratic control over
what gets designed, what projects get planned, how they
get implemented, and those decisions being in the hands of
the people who are actually building things, marketing them,
figuring out what gets out to consumers, what contracts get
signed with vendors, other companies, other governments,
other powerful powerful groups. Having these decisions in the
hands of the people doing the work is one of the ways that
that control sort of gets back into the hands of people that
this technology is going like, all technologies are going to be
used against. There are a lot of different workplaces where
technology creation happens.
There's a whole supply chain of workplaces that goes into the
building of things like ChatGPT or surveillance cameras or your
social media feed. And that supply chain starts probably not
in The United States. That supply chain starts in places
like Mines for Rare Earth Minerals. It happens in remote
workplaces of data workers who are labeling data that then
becomes part of machine learning models. It happens in, like, big
fancy office buildings of professional tech workers in The
US as well.
And the fight for control over what technology gets built, who
gets to use it, who it gets used on, it's happening in all of
those workplaces. And all of that organizing, if it comes
together, it could be really, really powerful.
Meghal Janardan: Yeah. Definitely. And I think
something that kind of surprised me when I attended the
conference, was like, oh, a lot of what's being talked about is
a lot of stuff that I already want and I'm hoping for
personally and I'm trying to do. This entire year, I've been
trying to fix my attention span. What approaches are people doing
to resist the tech in the workforce?
Emily Mazo: There are very few wall to wall or, like, majority
unions in tech workplaces in The United States, but the few that
do already exist either have or are thinking about bargaining an
AI clause into their contract. And those are also getting
written into contracts in the tech industry. Kickstarter
United just yesterday concluded a six week strike over their
second contract and incredibly proud of everything that they've
won. And one of the things that's in their new contract is
an AI clause saying no workers here can be replaced by LLMs.
But because there aren't that many, like, NLRB recognized
unions in the tech industry yet, we're seeing a lot of, like, out
of contract, out of like technical public union
organizing around these things.
And the same way, anybody can do a collective action. You don't
have to be in a union that your boss calls a union in order to
do it. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, AUCJ, made
public an open letter that they've been organizing of
office workers at Amazon, just connecting like the
environmental, the labor, and like surveillance issues of this
technology with their everyday working conditions, their day to
day tasks at work, and how their labor process is changing with
the introduction of LLMs.
Meghal Janardan: Do you find that, you know, we already have
labor movements in The US. And like you mentioned, unions
amongst tech workers are not as as common. Do you think that
this new Luddism movement has is helping kind of unite maybe kind
of disparate forces together into one more collective action?
Emily Mazo: I hope so. And I think that we will. Office based
sort of professional tech workers, what I have in mind is
like software engineers, data scientists, designers, product
managers, and also like content moderators, call center workers,
data workers, data labelers. These are like professional
workers amongst whom there isn't that much of a history of union
organizing and collective action, at least in the last
couple of decades. But these are, you know, highly skilled
workers with specialized expertise.
And they know how to do their jobs and getting sort of
commands at work to use tools that they don't think are the
right fit to solve the technical problems that are in front of
them Mhmm. Is I think a really relatable issue at work for a
lot of people. And I think we're going to see a lot more sort of
coming together across job titles, workplaces, different
parts of the industry around something that is affecting so
many people. Not necessarily because it will make people more
productive, but I think historically, what labor
scholars and labor historians have seen is that automation
technology is frequently developed and introduced at
times when the people that run companies want to control their
workforce more. When they want to discipline labor.
When they want to make workers easier to control. And they want
to make production a little bit more predictable, let's say. And
I think what we've been seeing over the past few years, I mean,
the big union wave in media, the really militant strike of
culture workers in WGA and SAG in 2023, the surge of labor
organizing amongst professional tech workers in The US from like
2019 to 2022. This is a population of workers that I
think a lot of bosses wanna discipline. And I do not think
that it is a coincidence that a lot of these automation
technologies that are being introduced into the workplace
and pushed this hard, invested in this much right now.
Mohammed, to go back to what you were saying about possible
branching paths and which ones get pruned and which ones get
watered.
Meghal Janardan: Do you find that there is also room for new
to nuletism for people who are not, like, in tech?
Mohamed Ali: Almost everybody's a tech worker now in one way or
another. I'll give you an example. We were talking about
consent earlier. You ever forget your password? I'm sure you've
done that before.
Right? And you know those captchas that you have to do and
they're like, oh, show me what's a traffic's point the traffic
cone or point at the street crosswalk. Have you ever
wondered why all the questions they ask you are about road
stuff? Yes. Okay.
The reason that that is is because you are training self
driving cars. Every time you forget your password, you're
training a self driving car. Did you ever consent to do that work
for Google for free? Hell no. But at a minimum, at least from
a social perspective, we didn't agree to be tech workers.
Everybody is in one way or another a tech worker, whether
they like it or not. Who has the power? Who has the power to
control the technologies, their development, their application,
their proliferation, even just how they look and where they end
up. And right now, it's not us. Is there a place in Lenisim for
people who don't work in tech?
Of course. But more importantly, everybody, especially if you're
listening to this podcast, works in tech one way or another.
Meghal Janardan: Yeah. That no. That makes sense. Exactly. It's
it's very similar to what I was saying earlier about, you know,
like fixing my attention span.
By what you're saying, me being on social media, even though I'm
just watching videos is a way I'm working in tech.
Mohamed Ali: Oh, yes. All
Meghal Janardan: the data is going to something and it's
being trained for something else, whether it's even just to
see what is gonna be next on my algorithm. You know, even when
I'm like trying to be off my phone, I'm gonna go to a
restaurant and suddenly I come home and I'm on their email
list. I'm like, how how did that happen? It sounds like it's just
like there are so many ways that, you know, technologies in
our lives. And if you look, you know, at like in the new lives
of movement, it really does help one question what exactly is
going on and how, you know, you as an individual, your data is
just being used constantly.
Emily Mazo: Yep. Yep. And it is possible to create prosocial
technology. Right? It's just that the people that, you know,
have the resources to do technological development, don't
have an incentive to do that.
And Right. There's a a big discussion to be had, all of us
together about what we want technology to look like in the
future. What does prosocial technology look like? What does
technology created by workers for workers look like? By like
everyday people, how do we want our society to look at what kind
of technology do we wanna build to help us get there?
But if we had the power right now to decide what technology
gets built, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Right?
So before maybe before we're alongside the conversation about
what kind of technology we do want, we need to be having the
conversation that Mohammad's talking about. How do we build
the power so that we get to the point where we are the people
who get to make those decisions? That makes sense.
Mohamed Ali: And I I just wanted to add one thing to that, is
that it's not like we're just asking for unearned or
undeserved power. All these tech companies that, you know, make
trillions of dollars, make trillions of dollars off the
backs of, obviously, the labor of the tech workers, both the
employed tech workers, and as we mentioned earlier, the
unemployed tech workers. But more more importantly, they
receive billions of dollars of public money, of our tax
dollars. Look, we are subsidizing these institutions
all the way back to the roads that they they use to get to the
office, all the way back to the energy, the electricity that
they that they that they they use, you know, public works,
water, electricity, power, the education system that trains
their workers, that disciplines their workers, that educates
their management. We, the society and the polity, are the
reason they exist in the first place, and then we're gonna be
like, oh, go do whatever you want with it.
If certain people can succeed, we can't let them pull the
ladder right up from under them and say, oh, I did this by
myself. No, you didn't. Okay, we all played a role, and now we'd
like to enjoy having your success be diffused for the rest
of us, who played, you know, who continue, you know, to uphold
all of scientific progress in the planet today.
Meghal Janardan: Do you see that there is a need like, have
everyone coming together. Right? Everyone's interested in this
movement. Looking at historically where elitism
started, where we have people intentionally smashing
technology as a form of resistance very for very
specific reasons, not just because. And looking at where we
are at now, do you find that there is a need to escalate the
movement or the actions of people to something that is very
similar to that or like equivalent to say smashing the
machines?
Emily Mazo: I will say large swaths of the conference were
off of the record so that this conversation can be had in a
safe and secure way. I think that this is a question on the
tip of a lot of people's tongue. Right? How do we talk about
sabotage? What different types of sabotage are there?
There's property destruction. There's also Mhmm. As Jatin
Sadowski, who is one of the speakers of the conference
brought up the history of the idea of sabotage in the American
labor movement goes back to, you know, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
writing about it for a pamphlet for the IWW talking about
sabotages, the withdrawal of efficiency. There's lots of ways
to withdraw efficiency. One of those ways is all the tools that
are already in sort of the labor movement toolbox of strikes and
slowdowns, walkouts, work to rule.
There are other ways to withdraw efficiency like, well, I don't
know if you'd put consumer boycotts or other kinds of
consumer protest on that list technically, but there are lots
of ways to protest and put your maybe your hammer where your
mouth is, that are not property destruction. But I think that
there is I mean, if you look around online, there are a lot
of people making jokes about taking hammers to data centers.
I am not personally an expert on how to break a data center, but
I think there are a lot of people that are taking up the
history of the Luddites as inspiration that are having this
conversation.
Mohamed Ali: Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of forms of of
sabotage which aren't going to fall in under property damage.
And, you know, there and, you know, just to point out a few,
you know, there's like sabotage as refusal. So we can refuse to
use a harmful technology from the consumer side, refuse to use
biometric surveillance tools, students can refuse to install
proctoring spyware and get together at the university and
say we're not going to live in a world where we have to install
spyware on my computer to take a damn exam.
There's also sabotage collective action, which is what we talked
about, you know, of what we talked about at the at the
conference. Workers demanding limits on algorithmic
management. Unions may be requiring human oversight over
AI decision making, or, you know, strikes, collective
bargaining against unsafe automation or surveillance.
There's also, from the legal perspective, sabotage as
regulation. We lawyers can take an active role on banning things
like predictive policing or facial recognition, or creating
platform transparency laws or algorithmic accountability
requirements.
There's also culture jamming, which can count as a type of
sabotage, you know, public campaigns, that's what students
are doing at the university, at Columbia, and all over the
country, where they're putting out posters and art, satire,
zines, memes, art, and installations that describe, you
know, the dangers of exploitative exploitative AI
practices. There's constructive sabotage. Instead of just
resisting the harmful technologies, what if we create
better alternatives? There's a long history of the free
software movement that builds technologies that are copy left
instead of copyright. And so by building, you know, constructive
alternatives, and look at look at the look at Blue Sky and and
Mastodon, you know, that are alternatives to to Elon Musk
backed Twitter.
And finally, they're sabotaged, you know, as transparency and
whistleblowing. Here's where the journalists come in.
Investigative journalism unveiling as they did recently,
how many judges around America were using so called AI
technology to decide who deserves parole, which attacks
the very heart of the criminal justice system. Research
uncovering algorithmic harm, the waymos were found to be more
likely to run over black people than white people. That's a big
story.
Didn't really make as much of a splash as I wished it would, but
hopefully, you know, more research will come out that'll
expose the how common algorithms like that can actually create a
lot of harm, and other sorts of audits and whistleblowing
activity. So sabotage is not just taking a hammer to a
machine and doing property damage, but there are so many
things we can do, whether it's withholding our labor, whether
it's withholding our our our consumption of goods, whether
it's using our specific skills as lawyers to regulate, as
journalists to whistleblow, as engineers to build alternatives,
and as artists and generally interested people to jam the
culture against a specific vision for technological
progress that seeks to exploit people instead of uplift them.
Meghal Janardan: Oh, yeah. That's amazing. There's like a
lot of different ways to go about this. I mean, and you
brought up Blue Sky and Mastodon, like, something that
I've been thinking about, you know, if I'm gonna really get
off Instagram and but I still want to be on the Internet,
Should I start my own blog where I self host it, you know, where
I own the data? And that can be like an alternative to even
being on something like Substack and seeing like different ways
to resist.
Looking forward, you know, we have the conference that you
both helped organize, which did which was amazing and we saw a
lot of people come together and attend it. Is New Leadism a
movement?
Mohamed Ali: I would respond that yes.
Emily Mazo: I agree. I think that it's if not a a movement
with a membership, it is an analysis in a way of thinking
about the world, in a way a way of thinking about power that we
are seeing grow in a lot of different areas right now. And
there's a, certainly in this country, a resurgence of an
understanding of what power is and how to wield it and an
increase in people taking collective action together, both
in the workplace and in the streets. And sometimes that's
around technology and sometimes it's around other things that
help other people exert power and control over us. And this
analysis is being picked up more and more this way of looking at
the world and looking at power, I think it is going to bring
some really great things.
Meghal Janardan: Thank you so much, Emily Mazo and Muhammad
Ali for taking the time to talk with me. If you're new to new
Luddism like I am, Emily and Muhammad gave us a bunch of
resources for people to follow and things to look at to learn
more. After speaking with Emilene Mohammed, I'm
questioning even more how technology has affected my life
beyond my attention span. It's overwhelming. But I think New
Luddism has the frameworks and tools to take that overwhelm and
turn them into collective action.
I'm excited to keep this journey going.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, December 3.
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And the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rignetta. Who flees? The
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