Episode 43: Transcript

Episode: 43 — The Myth of Rugged Individualism

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the social meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, a science fiction writer who thinks from rather a lot of science.

Annalee: [00:00:10] And I'm Annalee Newitz, a science journalist who writes science fiction. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:13] Today we're going to be talking about rugged individualism, which is something that has really helped to shape the history of science fiction, especially in the United States and has really kind of shaped how we think about technology as a whole. So, get ready to strike out on your own.

[00:00:28] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:00:56] So Charlie Jane, where does this idea of individualism get started in the United States? I mean, it didn't just come out of nowhere. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:04] Yeah, I mean I think that there's a bunch of different components to it that kind of fell into place mostly in the 19th century. I mean it was, the concepts were around before that, but I think that the idea of like the individual at odds with society, wanting to go off and strike out and go explore a strange new world on your own and have like a hero's journey and like all that stuff. That really starts in the 19th century, and I think that there's a bunch of things that happened in the 19th century that carry through into this kind of like archetypal heroic protagonist, single person kind of science fiction story. 

[00:01:40] There's like the rise of privacy as an idea. Like, the idea of privacy really kind of takes on a new life, let's just say in the 19th century. People stop all just sleeping in the same bed, at some point. The invention of the private bed and the invention of the private bed room and like having like your own space is a thing. And also, I think throughout the 19th century there were a lot of legal analysts who kind of talked about like the idea of privacy and whether there was a legal right to privacy. That was something that really started to be talked about. We had the fourth amendment to the United States constitution before that, but the actual text of it mostly just talks about, you know, search and seizure and surveillance. But it was kind of generalized out to a constitutional right to privacy at some point during the 19th century.

Annalee: [00:02:25] And also, the idea that privacy was something that we should value. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:27] Right.

Annalee: [00:02:27] That it was not just sort of like, occasionally you would be in private. It was that you would want to be in private, or that this was something that we should protect. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:34] Yeah, I think that, I was reading up on this before we started recording and like there were a lot of things that said that prior to the 19th century, the idea of privacy was sort of viewed kind of as isolation, as losing something. As having something taken away from you, versus like gaining, a valuable thing. And you know, I was also reading up about like Grover Cleveland's wife, Frances Cleveland, who was like incredibly young and beautiful. He basically just like waited for her to be old enough so he could marry her. She was—

Annalee: [00:03:02] 19th century presidents.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:04] I know, God. And she was like the first celebrity in a lot of ways. And she had actual paparazzi following her. A photographer tried to bribe Francis Scott Key to like be snuck into her wedding disguised as a band member. And people were kind of basically stalking her a lot and her face was being used on advertisements and it was the first legal case about can you use someone's face in an advertising thing without their permission? And that was the first time that this was an issue. And I think that the case of Frances Cleveland really kind of helped people to start thinking about the right to be left alone and the rights to have a private world. 

[00:03:42] And then meanwhile, the other thing that happened in the 19th century is this idea of the frontier. And obviously the Europeans had been spreading out across the United States and colonizing and settling and displacing the indigenous people who were already there. But in the late 19th century with this historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, wrote a thing in 1893 about the frontier where he said that it was this individualistic iconoclastic thing where people were kind of rejecting institutions and kind of going off and being heroic individuals. And that became a huge meme and James Fenimore Cooper started writing these westerns that were like ridiculously popular. 

[00:04:17] And there was this whole—

Annalee: [00:04:18] Such as, The Last of the Mohicans, which was was a movie not that long ago. That was celebrating the rugged individual white man. And you know, it's interesting to think of how individualism is tied to these two really different things. The idea of privacy and the idea of the frontier, you know, it's, they're really quite different. And I just want to, before you go on, I want to throw in a plug for The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which in the United States we often talk about that as kind of the origin of our obsession with individualism. Because in his autobiography he talks about how when he was basically a teenager, he left home and went pretty far away to a different city. To Philadelphia to make his own way in the world. And this was looked at as being a radical break from tradition where people would live with their families, maybe for their whole lives. You’d have an extended family and everyone lived together and the idea that you would leave home to find your fortune and find yourself was in some ways even considered kind of barbaric.

[00:05:24] You know, why would you do that? That’s… you'd abandon your family and go do that. And he was kind of arguing, no, in America, this is how we do it. We depend on ourselves. We're individuals. We don't have to stay with our families. And so he becomes kind of this archetype of the self-made man kind of comes out of that. And then I think that ends up kind of feeding into all of these other kinds of problems. But he's kind of, he's the first Starship captain in a weird way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:53] And that makes me think of Thoreau who like, there's been a lot of discourse lately about how Thoreau wrote this book about going to live by himself in the woods—

Annalee: [00:06:01] Walden.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:01] —yeah, his mom was bringing him lunch every day and doing his laundry for him.

Annalee: [00:06:05] And he was having dinner with Emerson every night and apparently like having sex with Emerson's wife, maybe. I have to say, I used to think that Henry David Thoreau was pretty rad and now I think he's kind of a douche. I’m just a little—

Charlie Jane: [00:06:17] He was Thoreau-ly awful.

Annalee: [00:06:20] I’m feeling a little less Thoreau-vian these days. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:25] Yeah. So we have a couple of clips for you that kind of sum up this kind of frontier rugged thing. This is John Wayne from the movie Hondo.

Hondo Clip: [00:06:34] Man ought to do what he thinks is best. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:37] And that's the closest John Wayne ever actually came to saying the phrase that he's supposed to have said, “A man's got to do what a man's got to do.” 

[00:06:45] And then here is, some years later, here is Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry.

Dirty Harry: [00:06:49] Man's got to know his limitations. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:53] And I just love that like, man’s gotta know his limitations. It’s just like, you know it's rugged because there's no article. They don't say “a man” has to know his limitations or “a man's got.” It’s just like, man. Man’s gotta do. Man gotta do what he thinks best

Annalee: [00:07:06] Yeah, and I think that certainly, John Wayne's, all of the characters that he's played, and his kind of brand, if you will, is heavily associated with that frontier mentality. And then, Dirty Harry, he's a new character that Clint Eastwood is playing, but people would have known Eastwood from his spaghetti Western days. And so it's still kind of in that rugged individualist tradition. So, again, to bring it back to science fiction, these are the kinds of characters that we start to see all the time in science fiction, which— 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:36] For sure.

Annalee: [00:07:37] And then there's one other area of individualism that we haven't talked about yet, which is how libertarian thought gets tied up with science fiction. So why don't you talk a little bit about that? 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:47] I mean, obviously one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time is Ayn Rand who created this whole libertarian ethos of if you accept any help from the government, you're a moocher. And there are men of genius that I guess women of genius as well, maybe, who are just industrious and brilliant and should be going off on their own to their own John Galt paradise away from everybody else and should be left alone to just create. Because all society can do is get in their way and kind of mess with them. And she was part of this whole libertarian intellectual tradition going back to John Locke and Adam Smith and von Mises and Hayek. And in the 20th century there was Robert Nosick, this heavily influential Harvard professor who really… He constructed these elaborate thought experiments about the individual and why the individual would be better left alone by society.

[00:07:47] And it's interesting because his rival we with John Rawls who was his kind of great intellectual counterpart on the left. John Rawls constructed these elaborate thought experiments to show why we should have redistribution in an equitable society. But John Rawls’s thought experiments are also profoundly individualistic. If you think about them, they're all about like if you did not know whether you were going to be born rich or poor, what kind of society would you construct knowing that there's a chance that you will be born as the poorest person. And that's profoundly an individualistic conception. It's not saying you should try to imagine the lives of other people or you should try to have compassion for everybody around you. It's like no, from a strictly game theory perspective, you as an individual are playing a game where you might be poor and what kind of society do you want to construct so that in that instance as an individual have the best experience.

Annalee: [00:09:35] Right. It's appealing… in a sense, it's appealing to self-interest. It's saying not, oh, maybe what you should do is worry about all of society and worry about your neighbors and worry about your neighbor's kids. It's saying, well what if you were the poor one? So yeah, it's interesting that you see it that way. I think that's really true that it's, we never kind of get to the point of some great thinker who's saying like, well, but perhaps we should try to sympathize with people different from us. The only way you can possibly frame it is imagine that you're the one that's imperiled. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:08] You have these 20th century thought experiments, which I think were hugely influential on science fiction, which are different flavors of individualism. And then why don't you tell us about Freud? 

Annalee: [00:10:18] I like how you're like, and then: Freud.

[00:10:21] I think what you're getting at is just sort of how the field of psychology influenced science fiction and how that kind of falls into all of these other tropes about the individual. And I think Sigmund Freud was a great influence on literature in general. And he came up with a lot of scientific theories, which now we don't think of as being quite as scientific anymore about how consciousness works. And of course for him what was interesting was individual consciousness and he really wanted to look at how a mind worked a little bit independent of its society. I mean he was certainly, I mean I'm kind of a fan of Freud. So, I might sound a bit like I'm defending him here because you know, there's many, many problems with his work and I don't think you would want to use Freud to actually try to help somebody who is mentally ill.

[00:11:12] But I think as someone thinking about sort of how society works and how narrative works and things like that, I think he's really cool. And what he imagines is that everyone's consciousness is kind of a microcosm of society and that you have a part of your consciousness that reflects kind of the values and the morals of your parents and authority figures around you. And you have a part of your personality that kind of reflects just like the raw wants and needs of a baby or an animal, you know, like, give me food, give me sex, give me shelter, give me the pleasurable thing that I want again and again and again. Which I fully relate to, especially if I'm like eating Cadbury mini eggs. And your consciousness is constantly in this churn of trying to balance out these raw desires and these strictures that you've internalized from the world around you.

[00:12:04] And so that's what creates neurosis is that you're constantly trapped between these two extremes. And I think A, that makes for really interesting character building in literature because it allows you to think about, you know, how to real people's minds work. Because often we are really trapped between those things. And also writers picked up on that and it allowed people to, I think, sometimes incorrectly imagine that people's mental anguish didn't have a lot to do with things that had really happened to them. And because they would sort of say, well, but maybe somebody's brain is just kind of stuck the way Freud imagined. Like they're stuck at a certain stage in development. Freud was really into that idea. And it's not that this person was, say, raped by their father or it's not that this person was put into a death camp. It's really just that they have some kind of basic psychological problem that probably has something to do with not being able to balance out their raw desire to have sex with their need to kind of conform to social norms.

[00:13:09] And I'm really boiling it down because Freud changes his mind a lot throughout his career, too. So this is kind of, I'm sort of talking a little bit about old Freud and a little bit about later Freud. So, to sum up, I would say that what Freud kind of encouraged us to do was look at human psychology a little bit divorced from its social context and also to think about the human mind as being its own kind of frontier. And I think that that's really interesting. 

[00:13:36] And later in the 20th century we have a lot of different theorists who are taking up Freudian ideas and trying to extend them. And politicize them and think about them in a more social way. And Michel Foucault, the French theorist has done this in a lot of his work, although he deals with a lot of other different philosophical traditions as well.

[00:13:57] And I think the thing that's great about Foucault, who's another problematic figure that I'm kind of a fan of, is that he looks at the idea of the individual in historical context and he's really one of the first people in philosophy to come forward and say like, look, this idea of the individual that we're totally obsessed with in Western philosophy is actually a complete invention. It's an invention of the 19th century. He traces it back to an obsession with privacy to a certain extent and also to a kind of new focus which he sees as coming partly from Christianity but also from science on our relationship to ourselves. And how, suddenly, in the 19th century we start thinking about self-betterment and about the kind of minute things that we do every day and how we can optimize them and make them better. 

[00:14:48] And I think, you know, Foucault is even more relevant today because we have so much of this self-help culture that we're focused on. There's so much quantified self. 

[00:14:58] Jia Tolentino’s new book of essays called Trick Mirror deals with this a little bit. She talks about the obsession with optimization, self-optimization. Because it's really about that idea that the most important relationship you have is with yourself and like how you can make yourself better. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:15] I feel like I'm just dangling on Foucault’s pendulum now. 

[00:15:20] So we're going to take a little break now and then we're going to talk about how rugged individualism has shaped science fiction.

[00:15:25] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:39] So Annalee, how do these cowboy narratives, we kind of talked about this a tiny bit, but how does this John Wayne, Clint Eastwood cowboy narrative kind of crossover into science fiction? 

Annalee: [00:15:50] Well, I think we did sort of talk about the way that the Western has influenced science fiction a lot. And I think especially in, you know, mid-20th century science fiction, “Golden Age” science fiction, a lot of the main characters are rugged individuals. They're people who are exploring the space frontier as we say in star Trek, the final frontier. 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:11] And we have a clip of that.

Star Trek Intro Clip: [00:16:14] Space: the final frontier. [First couple notes of Star Trek theme plays.]

Annalee: [00:16:19] And so I think that if we can kind of reverse engineer what that means, going back to what we were just talking about. If we think of space as the final frontier and then we think about all these things that the individual means from kind of a libertarian point of view, from a Foucault-ian point of view, from the point of view of privacy, that allows us to unpack a lot of science fiction tropes that are both kind of problematic and also a little mysterious. Like, why did they end up in there? Why are we talking about these issues in science fiction? 

[00:16:56] So what do you think are some good examples of science fiction that's kind of playing with this frontier myth and kind of also at the same time bringing in, say, libertarianism or like weird obsessions with privacy. 

Charlie Jane: [00:17:08] I mean you have the classic heroes like John Carter and Conan from like Edgar Rice Burroughs and so on and so forth who are kind of out there on their own in the wasteland or on Mars or whatever. And then you have Star Trek where it's about the crew of a star ship and they're allegedly all working together and it's all collective effort. But somehow in every episode captain Kirk ends up going off on his own and the show would goes to great lengths to get Captain Kirk away from the rest of his crew so that he can go have an adventure on his own every episode, pretty much. Even if he beams down with a group of other people, he's separated from them pretty quickly because we want to see captain Kirk kind of confronting things on his own. 

[00:17:50] You have the superhero stories, which start in the ‘30s and become really huge in the ‘60s where there's often a lone hero who's really misunderstood, who's really, like Spiderman, everybody's writing newspaper editorials about him. Or who's kind of above everybody else, like Superman, where everybody just sort of looks up to Superman. And those are kind of the two modes for the superheroes. They're either despised outcast or they're exalted kind of on a pedestal. And then you know, the spy fi genre like James Bond, where it's often very larger than life and sensationalistic. And there's often gadgets and doomsday devices that kind of push it over into being science fiction. And again, he has an organization behind him, but somehow it's always just him on his own. And he's always kind of coping with these giant threats without any help from anybody, usually. 

[00:18:37] And there's actually a quote that I wanted to read a tiny bit of from Michael Moorcock where he says, “The bandit hero, the underdog rebel so frequently becomes the political tyrant and we are perpetually astonished. Such figures appeal to our infantiles selves. What is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their ‘charm’. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming.”

[00:19:04] And he kind of talks about John W. Campbell who took over Astounding Science Fiction Stories and created the Golden Age of science fiction with writers like Heinlein, Asimov and A.E. van Vogt who were “wild-eyed paternalists”, “fierce anti-socialists, whose work reflected the deep seated conservativism of the majority of their readers.” They were xenophobic, smug, and confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe.” And he says “Rugged individualism was the most sophisticated political concept that they could manage—in the pulp tradition, the Code of the West became the Code of the Space Frontier and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do.”

Annalee: [00:19:37] Rght. Part of this frontier myth or this rugged individualist myth is to take that individual out of their context, partly to show how strong they are, but also to prevent us from seeing what Moorcock is talking about, seeing that this person is basically some kind of authoritarian. And so we don't see all of the people that are being oppressed when we claim this frontier. We don't meet all of the people being cleared off the plains and cleared off the planet or blasted into space. 

Charlie Jane: [00:20:10] Or if we do, they have to be saved from themselves. 

Annalee: [00:20:13] Right. Or… it's the white man's burden. So, you know, lucky for them that some white dude has come along to save them from their terrible savagery. So the other thing is that these individuals, again, as Moorcock says, tend to be basically racist. And I mean this has come up as a big question around Campbell himself in the science fiction community, who made a lot of statements, direct statements, that were essentially saying, yes, white people are superior, and that was…

Charlie Jane: [00:20:43] He was an old-school racist. 

Annalee: [00:20:46] He was, yes. Very mid-century racist. Really believed in the separation of the races, really believed taht slavery had been a good thing and that indigenous people deserve to be mown over because they were inferior. He's made these statements, and we can link to it in our show notes. And so I think what ends up happening is that the rugged individual has a lot of baggage, a lot of political baggage that goes back to these 19th century ideas. 

[00:21:18] And they also go back to this 19th century notion of Freud's that you can sort of have psychological problems that kind of have to do with personal development as opposed to political development. And one of the reasons why I love the work of Franz Fanon was a Freudian psychiatrist and he was working in Martinique, a French colony, and he was there during the sort of decolonization process and he was examining people who came to him with psychological problems.

[00:21:48] My favorite story about Fanon is this guy comes to him and he's like, you know, I'm having horrible problems with violence and you know, I have this urge to beat my wife and I don't want to do that. And I'm having nightmares. You know, what can I do? Please help me.

[00:22:02] And Fanon’s like, all right, well, let me learn about you. What do you do for living? And he says, well, I torture people. Basically, he's a prison guy. He, working in prisons, he's torturing insurrectionaries who are trying to protest the colonial rule of this nation. And Fanon just says, I'm just not going to treat you because the only thing that you can do to fix yourself is to stop being a torturer. Like, literally, there is nothing, you're not having a psychological problem. You're having a political problem that's manifesting itself in this psychological problem.

[00:22:32] And it's just, this is like one of 20 million reasons why if you like psychology, you should definitely go check out the work of Franz Fanon. So I think that's the thing that we forget in the story of the rugged individualist. You know, we think, Oh, this poor man, he's having all these problems with violence and gosh, he's trying so hard, he's going to see a psychiatrist. Like he’s a good man. He's engaging in self-improvement like Foucault would enjoy. But the problem is it’s not that he's neurotic, it's that he's a torturer. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:03] Yeah. That is so profound. And that story just encapsulates so much. So then there's the other kind of individualist story, which I think is the dystopian narrative. There's usually one individual who realizes that there's something deeply wrong with their society, either that they're visiting a society that's messed up or more usually they're a product of this society, but they're the only ones who can see that their society is screwed up. And you know, it goes from Brave New World, Brazil, Logan's Run, The Hunger Games. A lot of the classic dystopias are about the lone individual who is at odds with this messed up world that they're in. And, you know, a lot of our most paranoid fantasies in some way pit the individual against an oppressive society. And this of extreme version of that is where, you know, individuals are up against some kind of collective that is like super coercive, like the Borg on Star Trek or the Cybermen in Doctor Who, or, a bunch of other things where people are being absorbed into some kind of collective against their will and having their individuality taken away. I guess Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another example of that.

Annalee: [00:24:04] Yeah, that's like a really key, early story in this kind of trope. And I think that it does grow directly out of thinking of individualism as American and thinking of these kinds of collectives as being communist, maybe thinking of them as Soviet or Chinese. And I think especially now as, as our racism and xenophobia have evolved since the mid-20th century.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:29] We’ve come so far.

Annalee: [00:24:30] I think these metaphors now, when we see them, which we again see them all the time, it's much more about China or Southeast Asia or maybe the middle East, although that's not usually represented as like an evil collective. But it’s still the rugged individual, I can't emphasize enough always seems to stand in for this kind of American identity, which is separated from its social context. So it's like free of all this baggage that we know it's carrying.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:02] We're out running it. We're… if we just keep running towards the frontier we can, we'll just stay one step ahead of all of our social baggage and all of our—

Annalee: [00:25:10] Just crushing all of the indigenous people before us, like screw those people. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:14] Yeah, manifest destiny. 

Annalee: [00:25:15] I'm curious about this other side of the myth, though, because it feels like the individualism we were talking about before was very conservative and it was very paternalistic and now we're talking about a rebellious kind of individualism that recognizes oppression. So does this other kind of individual that is fighting dystopia, did they also have a kind of baggage? Like, is there something that they are blind to like a social context that they're not seeing?

Charlie Jane: [00:25:46] I almost want to say that in some sense dystopia is a reaction to people rejecting the frontier ethos. I feel like you have this kind of like upbeat, heroic cowboy ethos of we're out there on the frontier, we're making things better, we're civilizing blah, blah, blah. The rugged individualist is a force for good. And then, as people kind of push back against that and try to point out the people who are harmed or left behind or kind of not included in that rugged Western frontier ethos. The response is to have these dystopian stories about like, you're trying to crush my individuality with your conformist, you know, participation, trophy culture. And I think that it is kind of a backlash against the response to the frontier ethos. 

Annalee: [00:26:34] So there's a conservative strand in those dystopian stories as well. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:38] Oh, for sure. One of the things that you see in a lot of dystopian stories that creativity is suppressed or that people aren't allowed to have like the full range of expression, emotions are banned like in The Giver and Equilibrium and a bunch of other things.

Annalee: [00:26:54] Free speech is banned. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:57] Yeah. And often it is this kind of fantasy about the state overreaching. It kind of gets back to Ayn Rand a little bit. 

Annalee: [00:27:02] Oh for sure it gets back to that.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:03] The state is overreaching and most dystopias are kind of by their very nature statist. They're totalitarian but they're also just like the state is trying to control everything and it's rare to find a dystopia where the locus of oppression is not coming from the government. 

Annalee: [00:27:19] Well except once you start seeing cyberpunk in the 1980s then you see a strand of corporate dystopias. I think those—this could be a whole other podcast, you know the strands of dystopia. But I do think that you still see the rugged individual in a lot of those, especially in the ‘80s cyberpunk stuff. And that was because they were playing with film noir tropes and they were playing with Western tropes. I mean they explicitly evoke them. And so I think people like William Gibson and Rudy Rucker and other folks who were writing like, Pat Cadigan, who were writing cyberpunk were a lot more self-conscious about what they were doing and were critiquing that idea a lot. And also try to show, especially, I think, in Gibson and Cadigan’s work, we see a lot of evoking of the communities around these people. And so it isn't just an individual, there's always a bunch of different POVs and we kind of see how people kind of work together.

[00:28:19] At the same time. They're in this tradition of kind of looking at the frontier and instead of the frontier being space, it's cyberspace.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:30] Cyberspace.

Annalee: [00:28:32] Which brings us to something that I've been really excited to talk about, which is technology and how real life technology is shaped by these science fictional tropes about rugged individualism, but also just the tropey-tropes, the tropes that came from philosophy and from our relationship to the frontier in the United States. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:51] So let's take a break and talk about that.

[00:28:53] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:07] So Annalee, how does this American, kind of rugged individualist ethos shape how we develop technology?

Annalee: [00:29:14] There's a lot of ways to answer that question, but I want to focus on just a couple of things, especially technologies that we use now that have been really influenced by science fiction. That, itself, was influenced by all these ideas of individualism. So one thing that's really obvious is the mobile device, which you can call it a phone, you can call it a lot of different things. We have a lot of different mobile devices now, but I think there's a clear connection between myths of the frontier, Star Trek, the communicator, and the mobile device. And I think there's always been this kind of wish that we could have a device that would enhance us mentally, somehow. And we've had lots of science fiction fantasizing about that. I think the development of mobile devices that are computers and also communications devices is so bound up with our idea of the individual being the unit of consumption, but also the individual as the unit of improvement because there's so many aspects now, especially, that we can see that mobile devices tie into self-help culture.

[00:30:24] You can have an app that will help you meditate, that will help you remember when to walk. So many of our wearable devices are coming to market with their first application being health and in quantified self stuff. So, I'm wearing a Fitbit right now, which is also a watch, but it's also a wearable device. It's also a tracker. It can let my phone know where I've been and how far I've walked and eventually this Fitbit will probably do a lot more.

[00:30:54] In 10 years if we continue with wearable devices. You know, this Fitbit might be basically a computer, but the way that they got me to buy it was it's tracking my steps and I want to know how much I walk.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:04] For sure. 

Annalee: [00:31:05] Because I want to optimize, and I think there's a whole history, a whole alternate history that could be written about what would technology look like if we didn't develop it with those kinds of goals in mind? If we developed it with the idea that technology would be consumed by groups, you know, what would that look like?

[00:31:26] Maybe we wouldn't all have one device that we carry around with us. Maybe there'd be kiosks, maybe we'd be sharing them. Maybe we would all have dumb devices that talked to a community server owned by our families or owned by our communities. It's really hard to say because these devices grow out of such a long tradition of never thinking outside that box of the individual that it's just how do you reconstruct that? And I think another technology that's obviously in the same genre is the car and the car is really great for thinking about that alternate history because I think we're at a point in the development of the car where we're starting to turn toward imagining the car as something that's collectively owned. We're just on the cusp of it. I think the turn away from using cars and using fossil fuels toward improving public transit or at least improving our desire for public transit?

Charlie Jane: [00:32:27] Right, or self-driving cars that can be ridden by multiple people.

Annalee: [00:32:34] Car shares.

Charlie Jane: [00:32:35] Yeah, over the course of a particular afternoon or whatever. 

Annalee: [00:32:38] I'm curious what you imagine mobile devices would be like if they were developed to be used by communities as opposed to individuals. 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:47] It's so hard to even imagine. I mean, as you were talking I was thinking about like the thing with your Fitbit and some of the other stuff where it's all about like improving yourself and it's like, what if you had mobile devices that reminded you to help other people. That were like, Hey, this person is homeless. Why don't you try to help them get a home or you know, this person is sick, why don't you bring them some chicken soup, or whatever. 

Annalee: [00:33:07] I mean, I think people would argue that those exist. Like they'd be like, Oh, there's GoFundMe. Or there's things like that. But it's, that's really different from a device that is physically designed from the get-go to be something that's communally oriented.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:23] Right. 

Annalee: [00:33:24] Like it's not just about an app. Like, I almost feel like the, the GoFundMe app and others like it are kind of the John Rawls of this scenario. It's like sort of, like, ping, if you want to be a better person, give some money to this homeless person. You know, like it's not about like how do you remember what your community is like? It's just like you could be a bet—you could improve yourself. 

Charlie Jane: [00:33:43] And I feel like a lot of what goes into a mobile devices and particularly the software right now for mobile devices is about maximizing your attention and trying to get your attention for as long as possible on, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on various other apps. 

[00:34:04] And part of how they do that is just by suck you in and kind of like appeals your vanity and kind of take over your brain to some extent. And it's kind of, in a way, has the result of isolating people. I feel like the weird thing about social media in 2019/2020, is that we're being more isolated by it rather than brought together, which was always I thought the promise of social media.

Annalee: [00:34:26] We’re being more heavily individuated 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:29] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:34:29] And we are, because we're being turned into data trails that can be packaged up and sold as little individual pieces of a giant marketing plan. 

[00:34:38] The other thing I was going to say to finish up is the way that you know that a piece of technology is deeply within the tradition of rugged individualism is when it's creating a privacy problem. Because, as we've already been discussing, the notion of privacy kind of goes hand in hand with the idea of the individual and so the fact that we have all these technologies that injure our privacy or that touch on privacy in some way, it's just another part of that baggage. The individual carries this baggage of building a form of privacy that is also itself a kind of vulnerability. 

[00:35:17] And I'm not saying that privacy is bad or that we shouldn't have invented it. I'm like super pro-privacy, but it's also… it makes people vulnerable because privacy becomes this thing that you're constantly having to protect because there's this unit of self, that's the individual, not to get like too kind of galaxy brain about it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:37] No, but it's the dark side. It is the dark side of the, my device is enhancing me as an individual. The flip side of that is my device is impinging on me as an individual. 

Annalee: [00:35:47] That's right.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:47] And I think that that's—

Annalee: [00:35:47] It’s the dystopia.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:49] That is the dystopia. Thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We really appreciate your support. If you want to support us some more, we have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You can also follow us on social media. We're on Twitter as OOACpod and on Facebook as Our Opinions Are Correct. And you can listen to us wherever podcasts are available or even some places where podcasts are not available if you're really good at hacking.

[00:36:14] We’re on Libsyn, we're on Stitcher, we're on Google Play Podcasts and Apple Podcasts. Please, please, please leave us a review if you like our podcast. Please tell your friends.

[00:36:23] And thank you so much to our incredible heroic, valiant producer, Veronica Simonetti, with Women’s Audio Mission. Thanks to Chris Palmer for giving us this amazing music, and thanks again to all of you who listen to us, and we'll be back in two weeks with more outlandish ideas. 

[00:36:23] Bye! 

Annalee: [00:36:37] Bye!

[00:36:38] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.