Episode 109: Transcript
Episode: 109: Work is Not Your Friend with Alan Henry
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct a podcast about science fiction, the meaning of life, and that time that you worked for a mouse procuring cheese for something you're not sure about. I'm Annalee Newitz. I am the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:22] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of the Unstoppable trilogy. The first book, Victories Greater Than Death is out in paperback and the sequel, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, just came out in hardcover.
Annalee: [00:00:30] All right, Charlie, Jane, I have a very important question. Do you remember the first job that you did to make money?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:40] I mean, yeah, I was working in a warehouse. Actually, yeah, no, I was working at a warehouse stacking boxes. I also around that time, I had a bunch of really low-level office jobs where I was basically just doing data entry. My first several years of working were just kind of a bunch of terrible abusive jobs. I gotta say.
Annalee: [00:00:58] Yeah, I remember my first jobs, too. My first job was making sandwiches for a living. And I later did a lot of other food service, a lot of jobs where I like, put together various ingredients, and then wrapped them in plastic and handed them to people who were either mean or nice, depending on the day and the person.
[00:01:23] And later, I had, you know, as an adult, jobs that would be considered less menial. Like I worked as a professor, I was a policy analyst, I was a journalist. And now I'm a science fiction writer, and a journalist. And those are pretty different from making sandwiches and burritos for a living. Sometimes even those jobs might be considered dream jobs. But there's one common thread in pretty much every job I've ever had, which is that I needed those jobs to survive, both economically and creatively, because I want to put my work out there in the world. So, I had to put up with various amounts of bullshit from bosses and colleagues, because I couldn't afford not to.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:07] Yeah, I had a whole bunch of like, really terrible bosses in my teens and early 20s, who were just often people who, they wanted to abuse somebody, and the only people they could abuse were me and their other underlings. And just like, you have to put up with like a bunch of really terrible jokes, sometimes offensive jokes.
Annalee: [00:02:25] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:25] You have to put up with a bunch of mean petty bullshit. I have talked before about that one job I had working for a hedge fund manager who wanted me to be their receptionist. But the phone was unplugged from the wall, and I wasn't allowed to do anything else. I wasn't allowed to read a book or do anything. They just wanted me sitting there next to a phone that didn't work so that it would look cool that they had a receptionist, but they didn't actually want anybody to answer their phone.
[00:02:51] So it was like, that was kind of like, my perfect example of like, that was later, that was in my early 20s. But I had so many jobs where people who were just kind of creeps or jerks or whatever, who, they needed to shit on someone and I was there. So yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:07] So, bullshit at work is basically it's an age old problem. We’ve experienced it in the present. And it's been, you might even say throughout time, bullshit has been around at work.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:21] I would say its intrinsic.
Annalee: [00:03:22] It is intrinsic to work. But the nature of the bullshit has changed dramatically over time. And that's what we're going to talk about today, we're gonna look at how the Industrial Revolution and unionization movements changed work and inspired a bunch of science fiction and fantasy stories that are still incredibly important to the genre today.
And later in the episode, we'll be joined by Wired senior editor Alan Henry, who is our former colleague, who used to run the blog Lifehacker when we were running io9. And Alan has a new book out called, Seen, Heard, and Paid, which is all about how to navigate the workplace when you're marginalized.
[00:04:00] Also, on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about Our Flag Means Death and why the show has stolen everyone's hearts, especially our hearts. And by the way, did you know that this show that you're listening to right now is entirely independent, funded by you, our listeners through Patreon? That's right, all the bullshit of having a boss. We just do it to ourselves. We have internalized our bosses. We're just giving ourselves shit and that's the glory of having a show that supported by listeners is that we can just provide our own meta shit and it's fantastic.
[00:04:40] Plus, you, as a supporter of us on Patreon, whether you join up and pay $5, or $10, or even $2. You get audio extras every other week where we talk about cool stuff. You can hang out with us on Discord where we are all the time chatting. There’s extras on our Patreon. You can see reviews and essays and it's great. We love having you. We love chatting with you all the time. And if you support us on Patreon, you'll get more correct opinions, 24 hours a day, 12 days a week. And pretty soon, you'll just be like, all correct, all the time. And it'll be amazing. So please consider supporting us on Patreon so that we can make this show happen. And find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And now, here's the show.
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Charlie Jane: [00:06:06] Unfortunately, I feel like dealing with crap at work is kind of an age-old problem. And when I hear about bosses pressuring employees to go back to the office and stop working from home, part of me suspects that it's just so that they can abuse people more. I mean, I’m just kind of cynical about this. People have been dealing with the problem of work, and especially abusive work situations, for basically, as long as we've had language, I want to say. So where does science fiction come into this?
Annalee: [00:06:31] Yes, so let's start with the idea of work. Because it's a really slippery concept. As we've been saying, humans have been working for literally forever, especially, if you want to classify finding food and shelter as work, people have been doing that for 100,000 years. But there's obviously a huge difference between random hominins, roaming around looking for food. And people today training algorithms to set surge pricing on rideshares. So, you might say that work as we know it started to emerge once you had economies where people got paid to do things that had nothing to do with subsistence.
[00:07:13] Some of the earliest writing that we have is in 5000 year old cuneiform tablets from the city of Uruk, which is in Mesopotamia. And one of these records, this is a 5000 year old stone tablet, records how much beer that workers were being given in exchange for their labor. So, we've been paying people for work for a really long time. And my archaeology nerd brain gets very excited about this idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:42] I'm kind of excited about the idea of getting paid in beer, but I don't know if my landlord would accept beer as like, payment of rent, I would definitely, I could accept some of my payment in beer, for sure. But obviously, nobody gets paid in beer now at least not on a very legitimate basis. So when do we start to see something like our modern idea of work and the workplace.
Annalee: [00:08:06] So, there's a really big shift that happens during the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution completely changes how we understand labor. So obviously, there are assembly lines, mass production, workers are moving into the cities from the farms where they've been working, sometimes for generations. But what really stands out to me is that this is also the moment when work starts getting associated with the future and with technological progress.
[00:08:36] Previously, work was often thought of as something kind of ancient and connected to the past, just like we've been discussing in this conversation so far, right? We can say like, well, 5,000 years ago, you'd be paid in beer and 100,000 years ago, you'd be hunting and gathering. It's something that feels like it's connected to the cycle of the seasons, the ancient cycle of life.
[00:08:57] In the 19th century, you have writers like Henry David Thoreau, who were mourning the loss of this bucolic world of agricultural labor, which seemed timeless to them. It seemed like it was something that connected us to our ancestors and to nature. And suddenly, because of the rise of industrialization, work is no longer connected to the cycle of the seasons. It's not connected to anything that our ancestors did. It's become a giant railway train that's just like bearing down on us from the future and belching smoke and destroying our old ways of life.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:33] Obviously, part of that huge technological shift is that there's a lot less individualism, like you don't have artisans and craftspeople, who, every time they make a—they still existed, I guess, but, every time they make a chair, it's a different chair. You have factories, which tried to make the exact same thing over and over again. And it's much more just, you are doing a repetitive task and it sort of, work does kind of become more kind of science fictional. In a way,
Annalee: [00:10:00] Totally. And I think the origin of this kind of science fictional work in the United States comes out of a very specific city. Lowell, Massachusetts. Do you remember visiting there with me?
Charlie Jane: [00:10:14] Yeah, it was so fascinating. This is like one of the first factory towns in the US where there were these huge mills for making textiles?
Annalee: [00:10:25] Yes. So, back in the early 19th century, this wealthy businessman named Francis Cabot Lowell invented a new process for mass producing textiles. He did it partly, actually, by copying machines that he'd seen in England, and no one would give him the specs for the machines. So, he memorized them so that he could come back to the United States, and set up what were called power mills. And he set these up along the Charles River in Massachusetts, where he could use water power to create these huge factories where raw cotton would come in and finished cloth would come out, thanks to these machines that could spin the cotton and weave cloth incredibly fast. And these are like these really loud, dangerous machines that you've probably seen in pictures from the time, big huge looms, and they're all being driven by this water power.
[00:11:20] And later, his business partners moved to a location along the Merrimack River because the Charles River was no longer strong enough. And that eventually became the town of Lowell. So Lowell’s along the Merrimack. Lowell himself dies in 1817 but his water powered machines, which were at the heart of this town, were cutting edge technology at the time, like it was basically, that era’s equivalent of building the internet. And people thought of it as this brand-new kind of factory with a brand-new kind of worker.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:57] And that new kind of worker was specifically, they were called the mill girls, right?
Annalee: [00:12:01] That's right. So, Lowell, and later on his business partners who continued the business hired what they called Yankee farm girls, which was basically white girls, to run the machines that spun the cotton and wool, that wove the textiles. And even in some cases, they sewed garments later on.
[00:12:20] So, this was a time when women rarely had opportunities to work for money. And Lowell, in the 1820s, became kind of utopian for them. Set aside your feelings about all of these shop floors for a minute and just imagine what it was like. So, these were girls who had never had opportunities before to work, unlike their brothers and fathers. And they came to this town where they got to work with all this cutting edge cool high-tech equipment. And at the same time, they were given special boarding houses where they could live, food and a certain amount of health care were provided. And they were given free classes to teach them to read and write. And they had newspapers that they put together themselves. They put on plays.
[00:13:12] There was this idea early on in Lowell, that work should be enriching for the workers. And it kind of echoes the way Google functions now. And especially earlier in the 20th century, when Google would provide its workers with all these meals and all of these health care plans that were really great, and entertainment and lectures. You could just stay at Google all day and learn everything. So that's kind of Lowell in the 1820s.
[00:13:41] But, at the same time, they're working these brutally long shifts that start at 5am and often went to 7pm, with only a half hour break for breakfast and a half hour for lunch. And the work was literally toxic. Because they're doing all this weaving, they're breathing in a ton of fibers. Cotton is floating through the air, fur is floating through the air, a lot of them came down with white lung. Some of them lost fingers or limbs or even died because these machines were so dangerous. And if you got really tired and you were operating multiple machines at once, you might actually get stuck in one. A lot of the people working at Lowell, were very, very young. There were girls that were 11, 12, 13 years old working there. And so that was kind of the price of embracing the future.
[00:14:30] But then something even more futuristic happened at Lowell, which really sets the stage for the science fiction and fantasy stories about work that we're going to talk about.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:36] So, what happened?
Annalee: [00:14:36] Okay, this is where it gets really good. So okay, they're working in Lowell in the 1820s. Sounds like it was pretty good except for the long hours because they're also learning to read and write. And they're also getting to have all these new friendships with these girls that they're meeting. But then, in the 1830s, things really start to go downhill. The prices on cotton were falling, factories had to produce more and more product in order to make money. So, the bosses started cutting salaries. And they mostly were cutting women's salaries. So generally, women would lose far more money in these cuts than men. And they also demanded that they tend to twice as many power looms at a time for the same amount of money. So, it was incredibly dangerous and people were dying and getting maimed.
[00:15:31] And Lowell women went on strike twice in the 1830s. And all of them were fired and blacklisted. So, the strikes brought attention to the bad work conditions, but nothing really came out of it other than some unemployment for these women. But then, in 1840, a woman named Sarah Bagley came to Lowell. At that time, just to give you a sense, there were about 8,000 people working in these mills at Lowell, and most of them were women. And Bagley was thrilled with the culture at the mills. And she wrote in one of the worker newspapers that her life was wonderful. She praised even just the noisy power looms, she thought were awesome, because she felt like working with those complicated pieces of technology would improve her mind. And she just really thought it was great there.
[00:16:27] But, over the next few years, she kept witnessing so much mistreatment of her female fellow workers, that she just apparently had enough. And in 1844, she created the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to demand better working conditions. And their main cause was the 10-hour workday. So that's how bad it was, is that a 10-hour workday was going to be a reform because most of them were working 12, 13, 14 hours a day.
[00:17:03] And I want to emphasize that this labor movement that she started, which wound up attracting hundreds of female workers to the cause came several years before Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in the late 1840s. So, they were leading the way on these labor strikes. They were the future. And I think this is the real turning point in how we understand labor, partly because we're dealing with the idea that work is high tech, and futuristic and cutting edge. But partly because workers have started to organize in ways they never did before. This is not something that we could look back on the past and say, this is old hat.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:48] Yeah. And of course, there's an amazing fantasy novella about that period called The Factory Witches of Lowell by C.S. Malelrich
Annalee: [00:17:59] Yes, I love that book so much. It's all about the strike and how unions are a form of good magic. So, I highly recommend that.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:07] So, what other kinds of science fiction grows out of that moment? I mean, this is the era of Frankenstein, right?
Annalee: [00:18:12] This is actually after Frankenstein. So it's a couple…
Charlie Jane: [00:18:15] It was the popularity of Frankenstein was coming up at that time, I guess.
Annalee: [00:18:19] Yeah, for sure. So, in other words, this is the dawn of science fiction is happening at that moment. Also, of course, initiated by a woman, Mary Shelley. And there's this one letter that Sarah Bagley writes in the 1840s. She's talking to one of her supporters who has been sending money to the labor movement. And she describes female workers at Lowell as, quote, “being made into living machines to do the bidding of incorporated aristocrats and reduced to a sum for their services, hardly sufficient to keep soul and body together.” Basically, she's saying that workers are being turned into machines. So, does that sound familiar?
Charlie Jane: [00:19:06] It sure does. And I feel like it's interesting that the moment people start working with machines in a more concentrated way, like obviously, we had farm implements before, we had other kinds of technologies that people were using on the job, but when you're working with machines that are kind of semi-automated, and that just require you to keep doing repetitive tasks. The moment we start working with those kinds of machines, almost instantly, we have this kind of logical jump to and we're going to become machines because we're being integrated with these machines. We're almost becoming like cyborgs in a way.
[00:19:38] And it's no coincidence that a lot of the earliest science fiction about work is about workers who are machines or workers who have been turned into machines or workers who are kind of dealing with the mechanization of personhood or whatever. You know, you see Metropolis which has a worker uprising alongside the dawn of robots you have R.U.R. which is the first, you know, it's that stage play that kind of introduces the idea of robots. And that robots are basically workers who are kind of artificially created.
[00:20:08] You also, we talked about this in the car episode, but you have Brave New World, where they're actually making artificial people to be workers. And it's all about factory work and Fordism, which is kind of the assembly line. So it feels like the moment we have that kind of automation, we start to think about how workers can become automated. And that leads us to robots basically.
Annalee: [00:20:33] Yeah, like you were saying, it's, you know, Frankenstein is, in fact, a kind of robot story. It's about a guy who invents a creature, using electricity, using cutting edge technology.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:46] It's artificial life.
Annalee: [00:20:46] It is. It’s artificial life. And one of the images from film in the early 20th century that I think really captures this anxiety is that famous moment in Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times, where he's an assembly line worker. And it's a company that is very futuristic. There's people at the company who are constantly trying to invent new kinds of automation. And one of the comic scenes is where he's testing out a system for feeding workers while they're working on the assembly line. And so, the idea is that he'll keep working, and then a little robot arm will come up and put a plate in front of his face, and another little robot arm will shove the food into his mouth. And of course, it all goes terribly wrong, and the food flies everywhere. And he's smacked in the face with the food and he can't keep up with the food, the food is coming into his face too fast. And then later, he actually gets… he merges with this assembly line, he kind of makes a mistake and gets caught in the gears of the machine itself.
[00:21:51] And so as the movie goes on, he's more and more in danger from being sucked into this futuristic device. And, of course, that's not a science fiction movie. But it has a lot of the trappings of this kind of science fiction, the fear that we are less than the machine or that we're just going to be integrated into the machine. And I just love that back in the 1840s, Sarah Bagley was already saying, workers are being turned into machines.
[00:22:22] The other thing I would say about this is that it really seems like this futuristic idea of work where we are robots, is deeply connected to worker revolts. And that's both in real life where of course, we saw industrialism leading to unionization. But it also is in the science fiction, as you said, in Metropolis and in R.U.R., these manufactured workers, what do they do? They have an uprising, They don't necessarily form a union, but they kind of do. They're kind of protesting their work conditions.
[00:22:55] So, the fear of being made into a robot, and the promise of joining a union with other human beings are both born in the same historical moment. And they just leave this huge impression on science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:12] Yeah, and you know, we all talk about “alienated labor,” quote, unquote, but I feel like, the more your work becomes a thing that's very repetitive, very kind of mind numbing, very kind of soul destroying, in a way, the more you are going to get alienated, and you kind of have to shut down part of yourself in order to keep functioning. And I feel like there's been a lot of science fiction about that in recent years.
[00:23:36] One thing that comes to mind is the amazing TV show Severance, which is literally about a future where people kind of divide their brains or whatever. They have like a brain implant that means that when they're at work, they forget everything about their life away from work. And when they're not at work, they forget about everything that happened at work. And these people don't even know what they do for a living. They don't even know anything about their work life. And meanwhile, their work selves are just these kind of deracinated versions of them, who don't have any sense of who they are as people. And they're very prone to being indoctrinated with this weird kind of work religion. It's a very nightmarish view of work. And you can kind of see how that would be seductive at first, because it's like, work is terrible if I could just go to work and then not have to remember that, you know, and just be able to put it behind me and have that clean separation, that would be great in some ways. But it very quickly shows how work just wants to colonize your brain.
[00:24:39] And also, there's the amazing book, Docile by K.M. Szpara which—
Annalee: [00:24:41] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:44] We talked to Kellan for our episode about anti-capitalist science fiction, which was episode number 38. If you want to go back and listen to it, which I highly recommend. Docile is about basically a future where there's a drug that makes you very obedient but also kind of makes you not really remember. And you know, and there's a, similar to how in Severance the main characters are working for the company that turns out to be the company that makes the chip that causes you to forget work, the main character in Docile goes to work for the guy who belongs to the family that made this drug. And you kind of start to realize how, yeah, if you have that kind of work self, or if you have this version of you, that's just very obedient and very compartmentalized, it's going to go horribly wrong, and it's going to ruin you over time. And I feel like it does come down to alienation. Literally being alienated from work to the point where you can't even remember it.
Annalee: [00:25:43] Yeah, it's interesting, because the, the notion of alienation and work being connected is something that Karl Marx writes about a lot. It's something that, again, is a big idea in the 1840s and 1850s. In the wake of places like Lowell, Massachusetts, where people are going to work and basically shutting their brains off. They’re just doing this really boring routine work. Like you said, it's very much like the scenario in Severance.
[00:26:15] And you know, one of the things that Marx says about alienation is that it is this kind of spiritual severing, it's a way of making people less than they are, not just because the work is boring. But even more importantly, because it's work that only benefits someone else. You don't get anything out of it. You’re making widgets for a capitalist who's selling them to other people, you're not making a chair for yourself, you're not making cotton that you'll wear or that your family will wear, or maybe they will, but they'll have to pay money for it. So, it's something where you put yourself into it, but then that's taken away from you.
[00:26:54] And so it makes sense that we would have these fantasies about just kind of turning our brains off at work. And I think the thing that is so interesting about Severance and Docile, as contemporary takes on this very old idea of alienation is that they’re specifically about mental labor, the alienation that you experience when you go to work and have to do things with your brain, as opposed to like going into work and having to operate a power mill or a power weaver, where your body is in play and your hands are moving around, but your brain is kind of off doing whatever it wants.
[00:27:34] But in Severance, for example, these are knowledge workers, they're people who are going to work and typing stuff on their computer, and they're supposed to be paying attention, like mentally paying attention to what they're doing on the screen, even though what they're doing on screen is absurd, and makes no sense.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:49] It's really surreal and nightmarish. And dream-like.
Annalee: [00:27:53] Yeah, it is dreamlike. But it's trying to capture that experience of what happens when you go into work and the thing that you're doing, the widget you're making, the handle that you're pulling, is actually something you're doing with your mind, which makes it feel even more like a violation of your selfhood. Because it’s like, now, this part of my brain is being used to pull levers, and it's just even, it's just super creepy.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:21] I love what you said about people not getting to kind of create something for themselves in the workplace or own any of the fruits of their own labor. It makes me think of this like famous song by Johnny Cash Ffrom 1976, it was his last giant hit, it was called “One Piece at a Time,” where basically, Johnny Cash, in the song, he's an auto factory worker who works at an auto factory for like 20 years, maybe more than 20 years. And he decides that he's going to steal car parts from the factory, one piece at a time and make his own car.
[00:28:53] But what he discovers eventually, is that over the 20 years, he's been stealing car parts, cars have been changing. And the parts he stole are not really compatible with each other. And he has to kind of jury rig everything up so that like these parts from 1952 can connect seamlessly to these parts from 1972. And so, at the somebody asks him what model of a car is that you're driving, and he's like, it's a 1959, 1969, he rattles off all these different years. And it's this kind of funny song that Johnny Cash did, but it's about like wanting to own the thing you make, and how hard it is to do that, unless you just go and buy it at retail, which you know, whatever.
[00:29:33] But wanting to make a thing with your own hands and own that thing that you made yourself and have that feeling of like I made this. And it's actually, it's a very poignant song in a weird way. So okay. Are there any utopian stories about work in science fiction or just in general?
Annalee: [00:29:49] Yeah, this is a super interesting question. So, remember how I was describing the way Sarah Granger[Bagley] used to write about how great it was at Lowell. She kind of found a family there, a community, it was a place that she felt like she belonged. She was given schooling in a way that nowhere else was offering. And she really loved it for a long time. And there's a component of science fiction that's about work in the modern era that really tries to capture that feeling. And it's called the work family.
[00:30:22] You see it everywhere in pop culture. I mean, there's tons of stories about work families, but it really has a special place in science fiction, I feel where there's a lot of found families like the ones we see in Star Trek, The companions on Doctor Who, there's things like The Avengers, there's the Mandalorians in Star Wars, who are all foundlings and have to discover a family among the Mandalorians. It's a huge, huge part of science fiction, I think, that there's this utopian possibility of finding a place where you belong, connected to work that's meaningful, and also work that you can really call your own. Like you're not, on the Enterprise, you're not building crap for someone else, you're trying to help other people and you're actually getting to do it.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:12] I feel like the work family, that notion of the work family, it's a staple on television. It's a way to have a group of characters who have relationships with each other and have to be in this one place together all the time. And so it's kind of an easy way to tell relationship stories that aren't just people who all hang out in the same bar, like Cheers, or whatever.
Annalee: [00:31:34] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:36] I feel like if you looked at TV shows of the last like 20 years, you see the work family everywhere, it is everywhere in science fiction, for sure. And it's often this kind of rose-tinted version of work, where we kind of don't think about the exploitative, abusive aspect. But it can also be a vision of how work can be better, like if we actually treat each other well in the workplace.
Annalee: [00:31:58] Yeah, that's why I think, not to keep returning to Lowell. But that's why I think it's such a good example, because the history of Lowell really is one of a more utopian idea of work sliding into a dystopian one, where we see an environment where there was a real effort made to treat the workers well and to enrich their lives. And then, when profit became more important than productivity, I would say, then all of those amenities went out the window, and it just became how can we turn these girls into machines?
Charlie Jane: [00:32:35] Right.
Annalee: [00:32:35] So, I think that really the most hopeful science fiction about work, and the most dystopian science fiction about work, kind of come from the same place in history, and they're always in dialogue with each other. There’s always the threat that will be turned into cogs in the machine, and the promise that through unions, through community, through work families, that actually we will become better people, and we will fulfill ourselves in ways that we couldn't on our own.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:05] Absolutely.
Annalee: [00:33:08] All right, so we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk to Alan Henry, who has thought a lot about how to prevent work from becoming dystopian.
[00:33:18] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Alison: [00:33:22] I'm Alison Rosen. And my new podcast is for everyone who is sick of bad news and wants to hear something uplifting. It's called Upworthy Weekly, and every Saturday, Upworthy writer and my personal nemesis, Todd Perry and I take a lighthearted look at the site's most popular stories.
Todd: [00:33:35] Upworthy Weekly covers everything that makes us human. Relationships, current events, and stories that make you smile.
Alison: [00:33:43] But it's not all sunshine and cotton candy, kids, sometimes we get into heated arguments over super trivial things.
Todd: [00:33:47] And we never tell each other sorry.
Alison: [00:33:50] Never. Upworthy Weekly is available wherever you get podcasts.
[00:33:54] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:33:59] Alan Henry is the author of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized. He's a service journalist who is a senior editor at Wired, and previously, he ran Lifehacker as well as the Smarter Living Section of The New York Times, and he's a friend of the show, and we're so happy to have him here. Welcome, Alan.
Alan: [00:34:18] Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Annalee: [00:34:18] I love this book so much, as you know, because I've already told you a bunch. And one of my favorite things about it is that you take all of the dogma about how to get ahead at work and reveals that it's basically a myth, especially if you're marginalized due to your racial identity, gender, sexuality, educational background, or all kinds of other things. And I wonder if you could start by telling us about some of the ways that marginalized people get treated differently from cis white guys at work. One issue that you mentioned is around how office housework and glamour work get divided up? And I wonder if you could talk about that to kind of explain the lay of the land.
Alan: [00:34:57] Sure, the big difference, I didn't invent the terms office housework in office glamour work, a researcher named Joan C. Williams did. She is fantastic and has dedicated her life. I mean, she has a PhD in law. But she is also an organizational scientist. And she kind of came to this conclusion that there are two kinds of work in the workplace, there's the glamour work, which is the work that is high profile, that gets you promoted, that gets the attention of your managers or the attention of other important people in your field or industry. And then there's the housework. And the housework is important because it needs to get done for the team to keep functioning. It is ordering lunch for the team meetings, it is scheduling the meeting rooms, it is making sure that someone's taking notes in those meetings and things like that. But that work tends to traditionally get relegated both to women and women of color almost exclusively in most workplaces, because of a variety of social factors that have to do with like emotional labor and social baggage that people who are have marginalized identities bring into the workplace.
[00:36:04] But generally, on the other hand, white men who get this kind of this ideal label of being entrepreneurial, and go-getters, and very, when they are assertive in the workplace, people look the other way, because that's just how you're expected to be to get ahead. They scoop up the glamour work. And it's not totally their fault, because everybody wants the best work, right? Everybody wants the banner work to do. But because there's a social conditioning that says you have to go out there, you have to lean in, you have to be aggressive and get that great work and don't spend time on things that don't get you anywhere. Those folks get that because they have the privilege to go out and do it and they don't have consequences associated with it.
[00:36:48] People of color on the other hand, if I step up and get aggressive and say no, I want that newsletter project, ripping from exactly what happened to me at the Times. I mean, I want that newsletter project, I should have it. I am the senior person on the team or I have the most experience, whatever, whatever, I get labeled aggressive. I get labeled angry, I'm an angry Black man. I am hard to work with. I'm not a team player. So, you see how the differences kind of take shape there.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:16] So, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit more about micro aggressions at work? And can you just explain like what a micro aggression looks like for a marginalized person in the workplace and how this affects your productivity?
Alan: [00:37:30] Oh, yeah. Let's answer the end of the question first. The big thing, the reason it affects your productivity, is because microaggressions force a marginalized person to deal with another job on top of their actual job. So, when something happens to me, and I'll pull this example from my book. I used to leave my work laptop at work. I had a better computer at home, didn't want to bring my laptop home, it belonged to the New York Times. So, I left it at work. I left it locked up. And I’d leave it plugged in on my desk charging so when I came into work, I could grab it, go to a meeting or something like that, or sit down and immediately start working.
[00:38:06] Well, I noticed one day my laptop was unplugged. And okay, I didn't really think too much of it at the time. I mean, it wasn't like unplugged like the plug was gone, or the charger was gone. It was just the plug was pulled out of the socket. And I was like what? Okay, whatever, no big deal. And then I came back again, and it was unplugged again. And then this happened, not regularly, but often over months, and two different seats in the building. And I'm just like what's going on. And it's such a silly thing, right, because on the one hand, somebody could be doing it specifically to jerk my chain. And that was kind of what I assumed was happening. But on the other hand, somebody could have just wanted to charge their iPhone and unplugged my laptop so they could charge their iPhone. Or someone came and sat at my desk while I wasn't there just wanting to charge their laptop, all of that right there, all of that, pulling it apart. I had to do that in real time. And then I had to do it again, every time I came into work, and my laptop was unplugged.
[00:39:04] And none of this is my job. None of this has anything to do with being a journalist or being an editor. And so now I have to deal with, who around me is allowing this or who is doing this? And what is their intention behind it? And are they trying to… are they trying to be mean? Are they trying to push me away from this space? Or are they just being kind of carelessly selfish?
[00:39:31] All of that nonsense is stuff I had to deal with while coming to work, trying to get to a meeting, trying to edit stories, trying to push them out, trying to promote them, trying to do my best work. And every person who suffers a microaggression, whether it is race, it is gender, it is religion, it is disability or anything like that. They have to think about those things on top of what they're already doing.
[00:39:52] So yeah, it cuts into your productivity because privileged dude over here, he doesn't have to think about any of that nonsense. All he has to do is to do his job. So I have to deal with all of those things in addition.
Annalee: [00:40:05] Yeah, it's like you're having to try to solve this mystery about like, is someone trying to make it so that I can't go to a meeting with a charged up laptop? Then that's also going to interfere with your job, too. If your laptop has run out of battery overnight, because someone took your plug, then now you actually can't be productive, even in the most traditional way. You can't literally use your laptop in a meeting. It's also kind of gaslighting, too, because you're now in this realm of mirrors where you're like, who is doing this? Why?
Alan: [00:40:41] Right. Exactly. And then you spend so much time kind of looking over your shoulder and being like, hey, so and so who sits across from me? Have you seen anybody just sitting at my desk? Or what's going on? And I mean, you know, none of this stuff is important. Like, in my annual review, my boss is not going to be like, well, I'm glad you spent all that time trying to figure out who unplugged your laptop, you know what I mean? So it's awful. And the fact that I do have to kind of go back and be like, what is their intention, right, versus their action?
[00:41:11] I talked about this in the book, too. Intentions versus actions. And I mean, the way you describe to somebody that what they did is problematic without labeling them as a problematic person, because then they'll get defensive. But like, actions matter more than intention. And when somebody can come to you and say, oh, I don't know, maybe they were just doing something innocent? Okay, that's great. But the effect of their action is still impacting my productivity and that sucks. That is where the attention needs to be focused, not on their intention.
Annalee: [00:41:41] Yeah, exactly. Actually, the laptop example, good for thinking about that. Because it's like, well, maybe someone was just innocently doing it. And they weren't thinking about how it would impact your work at all because they're oblivious to how these things pile up.
[00:41:56] This fits well with my next question, which is, you talk a lot about your work at The New York Times in this book. And I'm wondering if you could just detail a little bit more how that job inspired this book, but also how it taught you some of the solutions to these problems that people who are marginalized face?
Alan: [00:42:21] Yeah, it's ironically, working at The New York Times wasn't, so it wasn't the inspiration, I'll say that. Because the inspiration was my experiences back at Lifehacker. You remember Lifehacker, we traded so much in productivity tips and tricks, and downloads and apps and all these techniques to help you be a better busy bee at work. Though, they could arguably be helpful, right? There's nothing wrong with that. But it wasn't until I got to The New York Times that I realized that a lot of those same tips and tricks were applicable for some people, but not for me. And that was what I realized one of my colleagues had a no-meeting Tuesdays, right. And he kept his calendar blocked off all day so he could focus on deep work, on doing the important editing work. I tried to do the same thing and people just did not respect that time on my calendar. They’d just book over me. They would question me about it. And when I would tell them like, no, I’m focusing on work on Thursdays, you know, his was Tuesdays, mine was Thursdays. And they would just be like, well, everybody else can make this meeting. Why can't you? And that was a thing that he never got.
[00:43:32] And a lot of that had to do with the social baggage that I brought in. I was trying to be a go-getter. I was new to the Times, I am a black man whocame from an editorial background that many people at The New York Times didn't particularly consider valid or as prestigious as someone who came from The Washington Post or Harvard Journalism School or whatever, anywhere, those places.
[00:43:55] But when I got to the Times and I realized that there was this active disconnect, that's what inspired me to write this piece about what to do when you are discriminated against at work. Wrote it in my own time, got a friend to edit it, published it before anybody could tell me not to. And then that turned into the book. But it was at was my time at The New York Times that taught me there are ways to get around this. There are ways to succeed and work with people who like working with you, and who will chip in to make sure that you succeed and you thrive, even in environments that aren't systemically set up to support your success.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:36] Right. I'm kind of a workaholic. I feel like when we were working at Gawker Media, a bunch of us were kind of workaholics, that was kind of the culture.
Alan: [00:44:42] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:44:42] Yep. 100%
Charlie Jane: [00:44:42] It was definitely like, get up in the morning early, stay up late at night, kind of. A lot of, and, I'm somebody who has when I've had a job that was fun, which sometimes io9 was a lot of fun. I've been somebody who really identified myself with my job. But in your book, you kind of say, quote unquote, “Work is not your friend.” And why is it so tempting to think that work is our friend? And why isn't it?
Alan: [00:45:14] So, I mean, I was the same way at Lifehacker. I loved what I did. It was my dream job. And when I made editor in chief at Lifehacker, I was like, my career's peaked. What do I do? Where do I go from here? Right, right. I mean, it's so like, oh, sweet summer child. You thought your career peaked. But at the same time, like, I loved what I did. And it wasn't until that was ripped from me in a way that was very unceremonial. Very, welp, we loved all that passion you put into this, we loved all those sleepless nights, and those early mornings and those late evenings that you put into this. Now, goodbye. Great. It was great having you, sort of, here’s some severance, goodbye, right? It was that. Right? It was that that shattered that illusion for me. And I had written an article for Lifehacker prior to all of this called, “The company you work for is not your friend.” Mostly because I was tired of watching good people that I knew who were very skilled and very talented, put their whole souls into a corporate machine that was just going to absorb it, like so many metal jaws, sucking up old hard drives, you know what I mean? And I just—
Charlie Jane: [00:46:29] That’s such a vivid image.
Alan: [00:46:36] But I was just so tired of it. And at the end of the day, every organization, every company, I mean, maybe this is just hey, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. But every company is going to treat you like a piece of machinery that churns out product in the name of profit. And whether that is professions that like to brand themselves as callings, like journalism does, or whether or not it is retail work at Kmart, which was my first job, by the way. They will chew you up and spit you right back out. And they won't care. I mean, they'll say, wow, it sucks, bye. And then they'll just hire two people to do the job that you did before.
[00:47:13] Specifically for me at Lifehacker, once I was gone, they literally took my notes in my playbook and executed it one by one with somebody that I had recommended that they hire, because they just didn't want me around anymore. And I talked about that in the book, too, because there are a variety of reasons around that. But at the end of the day, it is difficult to kind of put your soul into that and to self-identify with the place you work. You can feel as much pride as you want in the work you do. But don't associate your self-worth with the company or the place that you work for. It's just not worth it.
Annalee: [00:47:49] Yeah, it is really hard to come up with models for how to behave at work and how to think about work, because we are so heavily encouraged to see that as your work is who you are.
[00:48:04] So, at your current work, you do this stream called Game Therapy, which I love. And it's really perfect because your writing is super therapeutic. And this is a very therapeutic approach to gaming. And so, I wonder if there are any games or stories that you feel are helpful for modeling good behavior at work, or good ways of communicating to avoid some of these pitfalls.
Alan: [00:48:28] One game that I used to play a lot on Game Therapy, and I stopped a little bit because it was so emotionally draining. So, I recommend this game with that caveat that it is emotionally draining. Is a game called Kind Words. And it's not necessarily a great model for work, although what I think it really cuts to is the fact that it's such an empathetic game, that it encourages the kind of empathetic approach to work and to leadership and to co working with other people that I think is so important.
[00:48:57] I mean, Kind Words is a game where real humans anonymously write letters to the ether, to everyone who plays the game, asking for advice asking for support, or just sharing a kind word, right? And then other players see those letters, and they can respond in kind. So, a lot of the letters were things that ranged as far as you know, my parents don't know my gender identity, what should I do? Or I love my boyfriend, but we are 12 and we want to get married but no one thinks it's a good idea. And like stuff like that.
[00:49:35] And a lot of my responses are often things like wow, I hear you, that's a lot to go through. In my experience, this is what might be helpful to you, but I really suggest talking to a therapist counselor, somebody in your community that you trust, etc, etc. So that's how I kind of got this reputation for having a little chibi version of myself that says “therapy” in rainbows above me on that stream.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:56] Aww.
Alan: [00:49:56] Because I kept telling people to go to therapy. But it's true, right? I do think everybody should go to therapy. I mean, I'm 100%. I'm in therapy, and I love it. And I will shout it from the rooftops. But I feel like it is important to, when I have the opportunity to play games that showcase some kind of empathy or dialogue choice or character choice that helps you build the kind of person that you want to see in the world.
[00:50:23] I did a little bit of that with a game called Oxen Free which is getting a sequel very soon. It's kind of a thriller horror game. It's not really horror, because it's not that scary. But you use old timey FM radios to unlock cool technology, it's really cool. In that game, you're just a bunch of friends who decided to go to this island, because you're about to graduate college or high schools. It’s high school. Your last big get together, and you're exploring this island that used to be an abandoned military installation. And all that sounds great and cool. But the game’s really about the relationships between the kids. And you have to make choices that further bond with each of these characters, and you could be a jerk, or you could not. And if you're a jerk, then you get the worst endings. If you bond with them and show interest in those people and their lives, and their stories are their lived experiences, that you get better endings, you avoid the inevitable catastrophe that started this game in the first place. That's beautiful. And I think more people should think like that when dealing with each other.
Annalee: [00:51:22] I love that. I love the idea of games that teach us to listen and to work collaboratively. And I think that is becoming more and more popular in gaming, too, this idea that we aren't all just fighting against each other. That's fun, too, sometimes, but—
Alan: [00:51:38] Sometimes, yeah.
Annalee: [00:51:38] But we also need to pay attention to each other. So okay, here's the very important final question for you, which is whether there are any work families or workplaces in fiction that you would like to be a part of. So, for example, would you want to be like a companion on Doctor Who? Or like join Starfleet? Or something else? What is your ideal workplace that you would like to join in fiction?
Alan: [00:52:06] 100% Starfleet. Absolutely. No questions asked. It's not it's not perfect. It's extremely problematic in many cases. But at the same time, I look at it and I have never seen. I shouldn't say never, but I’ve rarely seen fictional workplaces that are so consistently, on some level, dedicated to self-improvement, and dedicated to bringing in anyone who wants to improve themselves. And for the sake of self-improvement. We will give you a task or a job that matches your interests and abilities, and we’ll put you in a place that will let those abilities shine the most.
[00:52:48] And I mean, granted, of course, we watch we all watch Star Trek here we all see the the most highly functional cruise in Starfleet. I mean, I play Star Trek Online from time to time. And I like to joke that my crew is not the finest crew in Starfleet. And then we get a whole show about that in the form of Lower Decks.
Annalee: [00:53:08] I know.
Alan: [00:53:08] And yet, they're all hilarious mess ups. But when the when they're up against the wall, they're still Starfleet and that's the thing I love about that show.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:21] I love that show so much.
Annalee: [00:53:23] And they do help each other all the time. It's like—
Alan: [00:53:25] Absolutely.
Annalee: [00:53:26] They do sort of like trickster forms of helping or sometimes it's like, also, we're gonna skim a little bit of ice cream off the top for ourselves. But in the process, we're gonna help this farm community on a distant planet. And so in the end, good balances out over stealing ice cream.
Alan: [00:53:44] Exactly.
Annalee: [00:53:48] Awesome. So where can people find your work online? Where can they find your book? Tell us more.
Alan: [00:53:55] You can find everything about me at Alan-Henry.net. I set that up because the book. So, you can find links to the book there, you can find a link to order signed copies if that's what you want. And you can follow me on Twitter obviously, at @HaloPhoenix. And that is where I talk about the book. And then I shit post. And then I share memes in the middle of the night when I'm really high. And that's it.
Annalee: [00:54:20] Awesome. What day do you do your Twitch stream Game Therapy?
Alan: [00:54:27] Yes, Game Therapy is currently Wednesdays and then we'll be bringing some other cool stuff to the Wired Twitch channel as well. And I also stream on my personal Twitch channel as Halo_Phoenix. And I just play a lot of Destiny 2 there.
Annalee: [00:54:42] Awesome. Great. Thank you so much for joining us, this has been awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:45] Thank you.
Alan: [00:54:48] Yay! Thank you for having me. It's so good to talk to you guys.
Annalee: [00:54:53] You have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for being here. Remember, you can always find us and support us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. You can follow us on Twitter @OOACpod. And thank you very much to our incredible producer Veronica Simonetti at Simonetti Studios in Brooklyn, New York. And thank you to Chris Palmer for our music. And we will talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Bye.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:27] Bye!
[00:55:27] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]