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- [00:00]
Britt Paris
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Britt Paris
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Britt Paris
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Britt Paris
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Sam
Hello and welcome to the four four Media podcast. Four four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404 MediaCo. This week I am delighted to be joined by Britt Paris. Britt is a critical informatics scholar and associate professor of library and Information science at Rutgers University's School of Commun and Information. Her work focuses on Internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence, generated information, objects. We'll get into what that means digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology. She's also a fellow with AI now, her book Radical Imagining the Internet from the Ground up just came out in February. I have my copy. It's heavily highlighted, heavily marked up at this point. When you sent me the book, you sent me the cute little comic which YouTube watchers will be able to see. But tell me about this comic, because it's so cute, it's silent butler, informs callers of your absence. And it's like a doorbell. It's like a ring doorbell, but from like, what, the 40s or something?
- [01:43]
Britt Paris
Yeah, from the 40s or so. So this is from a trade publication about home, like home securitization from way back in the, you know. Yeah, 50s. But we made a zine. Some students and I made a zine about protecting your digital self in this time of increasing surveillance for students and professors and, you know, folks both within and outside of higher education. And so that is a piece that we have, you know, put into our zine.
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Sam
So cool. Yeah, it's like a diagram. Mr. And Mrs. John A. Hall are not home. Please call again. It's like a diagram with like a button and a transformer and the lights and all the wiring.
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Britt Paris
Oh, and shout out to Caitlin Rich, the student who found it.
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Sam
Shout out Caitlin. Yeah. So Brit, thank you so much for being here. I think we met at DEF CON 1000 years ago. If you want to just kind of walk folks through your career so far like, how did you get into the space that you're in now? What led you to this space? And what led you to write this book?
- [02:49]
Britt Paris
This book? Yeah. So when we met Def Con all those years ago, back then I was doing my postdoctoral work on deepfakes, which you broke that story to me. In my, you know, in my experience, you were the first person. You are how I found out about that. So you are a big part of my career. So I was doing work on artificial intelligence generated information objects, right? So everything from video to text, which is now, like, very, you know, we talk about it in terms of generative AI, right? But, like, back then, this was the first sort of consumer use of generative AI that I was writing about. So I've been following this beat for a really long time. But way back when I started my doctoral research in 2014, I was very interested in, in temporality and Internet protocols and how what we know in the speed and velocity at which we're able to access information is sort of meted out to us or sort of regulated through all of these Internet protocols that essentially allow us to engage with the time of information in particular ways. Which now seems, like, so archaic and cute, right? Very quaint, very mid-2000s. Like, what is the time of the Internet? So this idea for this book came to me in 2020, while my husband and I were in our 400 square foot apartment in Brooklyn, New York, both zooming in the midst of the pandemic, while I was teaching students about corporate overreach into, you know, our everyday lives, the ways that infrastructure serves some people and not others, as well as, you know, all of the ills of a poisoned information sphere. So as I was doing this and our Internet was going out in the richest city in the entire world, I kept thinking back to when I was younger and all of our Internet ran on a cooperative. All of our utilities ran on a cooperative scheme. And at that time, they had just laid Internet fiber to the home, to my dad's house. And he was, you know, getting amazing Internet speeds, barely paying anything. And so, you know, I really started to see these deeper layers of Internet infrastructure as something that, number one, was interesting to describe, and number two, can be seen as sort of a. A positive political project as this stuff is not immaterial. Like, everybody likes to talk about stuff gets here in an instant, that all of this stuff is untethered to the physical and material world, but rather, all of this stuff is very tied to resources, minerals, labor, and can be contested like anything else. Right? So on one hand, I'm talking about how this works within Internet infrastructure if we want to build something different. But it really, it's nominally about Internet infrastructure infrastructure, but it's really about how technology intersects with all types of infrastructural concerns and how this assemblage of technology intersects with other types of infrastructure that have become very entangled in the most pressing crises, as we see now of our time. Right.
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Sam
Like you said, this book is. I love that there was a personal kind of inspiration behind this. You talk about going to board meetings with your grandma to talk about the cooperative for the Internet and some of the work that your great plus plus plus plus great uncle did in Missouri. Can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Missouri and how different the cooperative networks were there at that time and maybe even still now compared to how access to the Internet works today in big cities? Because in New York, where I am, there's so many monopolies over every different kind of utility that we have, including, you have two choices, three choices for the Internet at this point. That's not how it is all over the country. And I think maybe most people who aren't familiar with the cooperative way of doing things for the Internet specifically have no idea. I really didn't know that this was still something that people did in other parts of the country. So. Yeah. How. How do those cooperatives work? Just kind of a explainer for people who don't know.
- [07:07]
Britt Paris
Yeah. So I grew up in this rural area with cooperative utilities and I went to these meetings with my grandma and they were long and they were boring and people were arguing about how to use essentially how to use the money that, you know, where people were paying in for their telephone service and dial up Internet service, how they were going to use that money. You get dividend checks every quarter, you know, depending on what capital projects the that everybody has decided that you invest in. But they were deciding, you know, are we going to invest in building out, you know, telephone service to the library or, you know, the school system. They were starting to have discussions about laying fiber to, like, schools and factories at that time. And there's a little story in the book about how I was teaching my own zoom classes in the pandemic for the first time ever in 2020. And thinking back to when that cooperative who had decided as a collaborative process to build out to local rural schools in the area so that kids could get college credit from one teacher who was in one site probably 60 miles away, who had credentials from, you know the local community college and would teach essentially over this ITV classroom which was fiber connected, basically a zoom classroom. So, you know, it's this wonderful sort of collaborative process, contested process of like deciding what we're going to do. Like what do we want for this Internet? Like do we want it to serve our communities? Do we want it to, you know, give our children college credit for, you know, very discounted rates or even for free? And I got into college and I had, you know, several credits that were already out of the way. They didn't have to pay for it. It's great, you know, and it's something that I think is pretty rare still today. And they exist because of this cooperative spirit or this Nebirnet in particular now exists because of this cooperative spirit in this rural area where, you know, these companies like Comcast and other infrastructural companies were really loath to build out, you know, what would be expensive fiber to these rural, very flower flung areas to just serve a couple people. So if the companies aren't going to do it, you're going to have to do it for yourself. And in a lot of these places they had telephone cooperatives. Even before there was telephone service anywhere in the cities, the telephone existed and then they would build out their own infrastructure and run it as a cooperative, which is what happened. There's a story in the book that is tied with the Nehmer cooperative of my, I think three great uncle who came to Missouri from Germany and decided to set up an electricity cooperative in that rural area. And it was hailed as the, the first rural electrification project, you know, in the early 1900s, before a lot of places had, you know, electricity or running water even. So in that area and in a lot of these rural areas in particular, there's this sort of long standing tradition of cooperativity because while they have been brought out to this area and told that they have to struggle to exist, they're not provided with a lot of resources. And so what happens in these areas a lot of the time has been building all sorts of cooperative infrastructure that stands to this day. So my dad still gets dividend checks from the electrical cooperative, from the energy that they sell back to the grid. His Internet service is still way better than mine living in a urban area. And so the cooperative way of life really works well for a lot of people. So those middle chapters in the book are really about how these folks who engage with the cooperatives and also sort of do the work of maintaining and cultivating and sort of allowing these cooperatives to run, how they do that work, like how they decide what fiber they're going to lay and where going to get it from, and what things they have to grapple with when they're thinking about actually putting this stuff into the ground and how that affects, you know, how they are storing the data that goes through these networks and how they have to grapple with a lot of the, what Dan Green calls the landlords of the Internet. So the people that own increasingly own the exchange points that allow this sort of fiber network in these rural areas to connect outward into. Into the larger areas so that they can get, you know, the things that they expect, like Netflix and all that stuff. Right, right. Yeah.
- [11:51]
Sam
I mean, yeah. The material engagement of it all just really struck me reading this book. It's like, I mean. I mean, at 404, we write quite a bit about like the, like you said, like the application layer and the people who own the companies that are running on what you're writing about in this book. So, like the actual, like physical land, the ground that the fiber is going in and who owns that, the fiber itself. I thought it was really interesting reading about the companies, and I guess it was. It was NIE where they started having problems getting fiber during the pandemic. And then people were moving out to these more rural areas because it was the pandemic and everyone was leaving the cities and starting to buy out in more rural places and just moving around in general. And that tension of, okay, more people need really fast Internet because more people are working remotely in these more rural places, but we can't get the fiber fast enough for them. And, you know, at a. At a price that makes sense for us to keep doing this, for these people to actually keep getting good Internet. I think that's just, that's. I mean, it's not something that, like, I would even consider to think about these layers so, so much further deep than beyond. Like, you know, it's like we know that Zoom, like, took off during the pandemic, but do we know about, like, the actual physical infrastructure that it takes to make Zoom work is something that most people just are not really thinking about or aware of something else that I hadn't really. I know that this has been documented and there have been articles written about it in the past, but I hadn't really dug into much before. This was the Silicon Holler. I had never heard that phrase before. Do you want to just walk us through the Silicon Holler? And then what we're really talking about is, I guess The People's Rural Telecommunications Cooperative. So places like Kentucky have cooperative models also. I had never heard of this and I was like, I immediately love this as someone who's from a very rural area and has watched my parents, you know, deal with shitty Internet from Comcast, for example. But yeah, if you can explain what that, that concept is.
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Britt Paris
Yeah. So Silicon Holler is like so many things, you know, sort of a marketing term made up by politicians and economic boosters to try to sell investors on an idea, you know, a particular area. In this, you know, in this case there are many like Silicon fill in the blank geographical features, you know, across the world. Right. Like Silicon Valley. Do you know, some sort of remediation of that? And that's what we're talking about. But really this was made by local politicians in the area to try to draw investment in from smaller scale tech industry adjacent type businesses. On this model of teaching miners to code is just sort of the newest iteration of that. Right. So there's this workforce here that is underemployed because the mines, the sort of economic driver of the area is in serious decline. Yet we have all of these wonderful geographic features that enable a nice place to live for folks who may not want to live in the cities anymore, as well as that are particularly good in some ways for building a lot of this tech infrastructure right on top of. And I tell a couple of stories in that chapter about how cryptocurrency miners and mining companies are coming into that area and literally running in abandoned mine offices and putting some of their terminals and data center infrastructure in these abandoned mines because it's cooler, because it's already there, because it's out of the way, et cetera. So that's what that's about. So I'm sort of like tracing this trajectory from, you know, the, the political economic concerns of the area, you know, from, from way back, but particularly from the coal boom onward and talking about how, you know, these sort of logics of extraction continue in these areas even as people sort of like in the, the Nehmer example, even as people are, you know, coming up wonderful inventive ways of providing the infrastructure they need for themselves and for their community. Right. So the People's Rural Telecommunications Cooperative exists in Eastern Kentucky for this reason is cooperative like Nehmer. And it's run by a very charismatic leader of the organization who is really focused on providing what he can for the community. He grew up there, his family's from there for several generations, and he really cares about making sure that he can provide what he can through this telecommunications cooperative, right? Like he did a bunch of things during the pandemic and he's constantly, you know, thinking about if they need a job that he can figure out some way to get them employed or get them the stuff that they need in that area where there are so few, you know, good paying jobs. So. So I really try to tell this multifaceted story to explain how these processes of at first, natural resource extraction happened. And then as these tech companies or crypto mining companies in this chapter in particular come in, they are similarly uninterested in maintaining or upholding any notion of community, or any notion that natural resources and the environment are something that they should be paying attention to or protecting or caring for at all.
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- [22:23]
Sam
I mean I want to go back to something that, that you said just on that point earlier, that the rot comes from deeper. Can we unpack that a little bit? Because I think that is important to talk about the extraction of like the natural resources that we have today. So yeah, if you want to walk me through just like the idea that this is all coming from much cheaper than maybe we realize.
- [22:43]
Britt Paris
I talk about this in the book, showing how, you know, these infrastructural layers that I sort of use to organize the book are interconnected. And this work shows us that the people and organizations that actually do the work of making the Internet possible are involved with these protocological layers in ways that sort of move up and down the stack. They have concerns up and down the stack. And these layers are not distinct in social or political practice, but rather they're a coordinated whole that people have to grapple with in some more than in part. So I foreground these struggles that are embedded within Internet infrastructure to show that like you say, the application layer reflects conflicts that are produced elsewhere, these conflicts of extraction and the sort of overwhelming desire by these companies to make whatever money they can off whoever they can and get out and build bunkers in Hawaii or in San Francisco or wherever they're building these days. That this drive toward monetization happened a long time ago. And it also happens at much deeper layers that nobody's talking about. And so the idea of this book, I call it Radical Infrastructure because on one hand it's a political sort of political economic project that I'm talking about here, but on the other hand I'm thinking about it from its root, right? So talking about radical as sort of the root of Internet infrastructure, talking about these buried systems of material skills, fiber and labor that Give the Internet life. And that can be, if we want to follow this metaphor, cultivated to generate some meaningful change. But a couple of clear examples about how this rot that we see at the application layers produced elsewhere is that there are exchange points so the Internet connects. So I give a couple of examples in the chapters about how people are laying fiber and how that connects with all of these now private equity firms that are buying up infrastructure that are essentially the connection points where all of these, you know, sort of localized networks join together so that they can sort of get outward to and connect folks to other places so that again, you can get your, you know, your data from Netflix and, you know, watch movies or whatever in a rural area. But we have these at Internet exchange points. There are folks who essentially charge rents for these Internet service providers, like these cooperative service providers, as well as push costs upward to application layer folks. And then beyond that, like we just talked about how fiber is expensive to coordinate, to build, to mine the materials, to refine the materials, to make it into, you know, the fiber that can be made into, you know, what becomes the Internet. Right. And all of this relies on extractive principles and it relies on, you know, sort of this capitalist encroachment into you, sort of remaking both physical terrain and, you know, people's daily lives into a site of, you know, productive, capitalist, money making activity.
- [26:14]
Sam
Yeah, I mean, it's something that a lot of people don't think about immediately when they think about the ways that our labor is being extracted all the time. But it is, it's a big part of it on top of everything else. You're the chair of the American association of University Professors, National Committee on AI and Academic Professions. And I know that you've been negotiating and bargaining on AI topics. We'd love to just kind of know what the issues are that are important to educators right now and people working academia right now. We just did a story about ASU professor's content was being scraped from canvas, which is their platform for students to access materials, and then turned out into AI snippets and AI curricula. Not at all anything useful for a student or for learning. But this is something that, that I think educators are more and more having to grapple with is how is our content being used and abused by the people who want to turn it into AI. So, yeah, what are you seeing right now in committee? What are some of the issues that are coming up for educators right now?
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Britt Paris
Yeah, so I always say that there are a number of ways to attack this type of Question. Right. So the biggest thing that we see that is educators are facing right now in this, you know, in this technological sphere, in this particular technological context where, you know, things like this are happening. At ASU other universities, administrators have threatened to do similar things, but so far as we can tell, haven't. So the biggest thing is we've needed better policy around educational technology in higher education for 20 years. We've needed it for 10 years, but now it's absolutely impossible to ignore, right? So that's one thing. We've needed better policy and we've needed people who are actually meaningfully involved in any work of the university, that is, people who have stepped foot in the classroom, people who have performed research, people who are intimately familiar with how these technological tools, whether they're AI or not, work or don't work in their work. And have those folks be able to make institutional policy around these things, rather than administrators who primarily make the policies around these things, even if they have some sort of faculty board that is appointed by the administrator or that they don't listen to. There are some examples, but they're relatively toothless in higher education. So that's one big issue, right? Like nobody involved in the work of higher education has ever had really any say in these technological issues in the university. And now it's a problem because, you know, because of the defunding of higher education over the last 40 years and increasing attacks on higher education, it is a target and I think especially because all of these generative AI tools and large language models by definition are doing work with language. And I think a lot of these Silicon Valley adherents who are proselytizing different AI applications for higher education see education largely as an exercise of language, people throwing language back and forth at one another. So they decided that, you know, this is a really good use case for us. This is a really good guinea pig for us to try to figure out what our use case is for this technology. And you know, they have said so themselves in high profile publications. So that's what we're working to combat. And we're working to combat that in a number of different ways. The AAUP has both bargaining and non bargaining units. So we in some of our units we have union contracts. In other units, they're largely advocacy units. And a lot of their policy governance works through like academic Senate or something like that within an institution. So we're working on developing workers collectives to have at least some oversight or be paying very close attention to technological issues within the university and pushing for better Policy. So at Rutgers we have a bargaining unit, we have a union at Rutgers and we're negotiating our contract right now and we are negotiating for some very common sense protocols and guidelines for introducing any new technology into classrooms. And primarily we're asking for decision making capabilities, like equal decision making capacity with administrators around educational technology. So that's everything from OpenAI partnerships to your Microsoft contract that allows for Copilot to be instantiated in all of your Microsoft Office products by virtue of just a software update. Right. And so administrators sign all of these contracts with these vendors like Microsoft or like with, with Instructures. Canvas, which is a learning management system that is used widely in higher education, that just yesterday I think a huge data breach was.
- [31:45]
Sam
Yeah, I saw that. I was like, they own Canvas. It's like, God damn it.
- [31:49]
Britt Paris
Yeah, yeah. So I've been working on this stuff for several years now and now I'm doing a lot of this work sort of reaching across the AAUP's national framework so that we can scale some of this analysis up as well as best practices and work together to build out coalitions of folks who are pushing back within their universities and trying to get some decision making power at their universities who really don't want to give it to them. Time and time again we see universities say that this is managerial prerogative, that we can decide what technologies will be used. It is our prerogative to sign these contracts with bad terms. And the case has become at this point deafening that this affects our work and as such should be at least in our locals that have contracts like something that is a mandatory subject of bargaining as it affects our work so deeply.
- [32:51]
Sam
Yeah, I mean, the point that the people who are using these tools every day and are in some cases forced to use them in the copilot instance should be the ones making the decisions about whether or not they're used, whether they continue to be used, whether they're working, whether students actually benefit from them or the faculty benefits from them is such a common sense idea and it's something that translates across so many industries. It's like the people in the union most of the time are the ones saying, this is not working this way. And then, you know, admin or management or whoever it is is saying, but we want to do it this way because Microsoft handed us a bunch of money. It's like, it's like, hello, do you want, do you want things to be good here or not? So yeah, I think it's such important work to be, to be pushing back against that. So on that note, and then I will let you go. Something that I've been asking folks in interviews, in these interviews, because I get asked this in interviews quite often. What in the world now is giving you hope? What in the spaces that you're in right now is giving you hope. Because right now I think a lot of people are struggling with finding the glimpse of light here. So what are you seeing currently?
- [34:09]
Britt Paris
Yeah, I think for me a huge thing that I'm seeing as a glimmer of hope is all of this data center pushback and contract canceling and people successfully halting data centers being constructed in their local communities. Massive investments being pulled from data centers, moratoriums on data centers being proposed until more concentrated study can be done to make sure that it actually benefits people. I think these are all good things. And also we see across our higher education unions that we're getting some good contract language around better control over technology and we see more unions bargaining over this as well. I don't think that there's anybody who's bargaining right now that doesn't have an article on technology issues. And so those two things bring me some rays of hope.
- [35:09]
Sam
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The data center stuff and the pushback against those is also, it's so interesting to follow what's working in these places. We just heard a story, I think it was last week, Ypsilanti in Michigan.
- [35:22]
Britt Paris
Yes, I was just there.
- [35:23]
Sam
Oh, amazing.
- [35:24]
Britt Paris
Yeah, we were building out a community labor table in Michigan around all sorts of folks across, you know, different unions and community groups pushing back, you know, some of which, you know, some of the union members had already been involved. Other people were, you know, just learning about these things. But we were talking about it in terms of how, you know, encroaching AI concerns at various, you know, within various industries are concerns of unions as well as, you know, this data center construction is obviously very relevant to, you know, union work that focuses on bargaining for the common good. So that is like sort of a more whole community bargaining strategy that some unions engage. So yeah, I was just in Ann Arbor a couple weeks ago talking with folks in a day long meeting about, workshop about this stuff and building out some networks and activities around that.
- [36:26]
Sam
Love that. Yeah. I guess for folks who don't know, didn't see the news, Ypsilanti has been really at the center of a lot of the data center conversations. But they just voted last week to put in a year long moratorium on water that would be delivered to the data center that's proposed, which I think is really interesting. The strategizing they're doing is really interesting. And also just that they were able to push back against this $1.2 billion facility. Just the people in this township were like, no, no thanks. So stuff like that definitely gives me hope also. Well, thank you so much. This has been so interesting. Please check out Britt's book again. Radical Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up. We'll put a link to it in the show notes so you can check it out. Yeah, thank you for joining us.
- [37:15]
Britt Paris
Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to see you, Sam.
- [37:19]
Sam
As a reminder, 404 Media is journalists founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the Subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out all Mart said. I'm the opposite of a tech enthusiast, but this is one of my favorite podcasts. Reporters make it clear why tech stories matter. I don't see these stories being covered much by other media outlets. And even though they're always saying they don't know how to do a podcast lol. I really enjoy listening to them. This has been four four Media. We'll see you again next.