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- [00:01]
A
Are all batteries the same? That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with powerboost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different. And Messi only trusts Duracell.
- [00:35]
B
From Wired, this is the big interview where we get to know the people beyond the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power and culture. I'm Anisha Krishnan, Wired senior culture editor, filling in this week for Katie Drummond. Today we have something a little unconventional in store for you. And to set the scene for those of you listening, I'm gonna describe my next guest who is, well, a puppet. And he goes by the name Gowan. Sort of bluish gray, his body is blob like he's got sock arms and eyes that appear to be made out of bottle caps. He's the media representative for the human organizers of the Summer of Ludd. This was a tech free multi day festival with activities like meditation, musical performances and plays designed to bring people together without all the doom scrolling and social media posting. The festival comes at a time when attitudes around social media are chang. A Pew research study found that about half of teens surveyed in 2024 felt that social media had a mostly negative impact on their age group. And now I want to welcome Gowanis to our studios. We're speaking just a few days after the Summer of Led festival wrapped up. Gowanis, thank you for joining me.
- [01:52]
C
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
- [01:55]
B
So I'm going to jump right in and ask, why are you a puppet?
- [01:59]
C
Oh, that is a phenomenal question. Well, you know, we live in a hyper digitized age, right? And the original Luddites were completely anonymous when they were going around in the 1800s, you know, organizing people, fighting automation. They sought anonymity because they were facing against the oppression of the crown, of local militias, things like that. And so in the spirit of retaining anonymity and not creating sort of movement figureheads and things like that, we made a puppet, a media puppet. And that's me. Hi, I'm Gowanis. Nice to meet everybody. Thanks for having me.
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B
So you brought a handwritten contract for me today?
- [02:39]
C
Yes.
- [02:39]
B
Can you tell me what it says?
- [02:41]
C
It's essentially an ask for you and Wired Studios to not make any short form content of this interview. We want people to pay attention and actually commit time to watching the whole interview, you know, we don't want clicks and likes and scrolls past and things like that. So that's essentially it. You know, no TikTok reels, no YouTube shorts, things like that.
- [03:07]
B
I mean, I'm with you on wanting to encourage people to get into long form, but at the same time, that is how we promote the show. And so it's like, are you against us sort of promoting it on any form of social media?
- [03:20]
C
Definitely not. Right. Because we want to reach people, everybody, Right. Most. Most people spend a lot of their time on social media. And the people who, you know, particularly need to hear this message often are chronically online. And that's totally okay, and we want to meet them where they are. But there is a practice, right, of the Luddite movement of, you know, really taking time and giving your attention to things. Right. Not if you're going to engage with something, not like scrolling past it being like, oh, this is a little YouTube short. Right. I'll look at it and then shoop. It's gone into the ether. Shoop. Next thing, next thing, a frog eating a chicken nugget. Whatever. Shoop. Right. So we're trying to engage people and pull them into. Okay, actually, yeah, let's sit down for this 30, 40 minutes and hear the entirety of our critique and, you know, engage people in that.
- [04:08]
B
You've sort of already referenced this, but I feel like most people hear Luddite and they think of people who are against tech or afraid of tech. But actually it dates back to the Industrial Revolution with English workers who are, you know, protesting exploitative working conditions.
- [04:25]
C
Yes.
- [04:26]
B
So in modern times, you know, sometimes calling someone a Luddite is kind of an insult.
- [04:30]
C
Right.
- [04:31]
B
Do you think that's still the case?
- [04:33]
C
You know, this is a very interesting question because you're right. Like, it's a totally pejorative term. Right. Like a Luddite is, you know, somebody who's bad at technology often doesn't know how to move files around on their MacBook or things like that. Or, you know, someone who's seen as anti tech. Right. Like, sort of like it's almost like saying caveman. And one thing that we really found coming out of the Summer of Ludd is that people started to have a new framework and a new understanding of, okay, what does it mean to be a modern Luddite? Right. And we really believe that to be a modern Luddite is to have a deeper critique of technology that's really been lost. You know, a lot of what's broadly accepted is technology Equals progress, sort of by any means necessary, right? The sort of founding mantra of Silicon Valley was move fast and break things, right? Like no matter what we make, the technology will be the progress and that will forward society, yada, yada yada. And I think people are really waking up to the fact that actually a lot of this tech is sort of extractive, you know, is sort of taking away natural resources, like with data centers is actually not necessarily needed, right? In terms of social media, like the whole billing of social media was, okay, let's be more connected on a global scale, right? And what we're seeing more and more is actually mass loneliness, atomization, things that just make Gowanus so depressed. But sorry, coming back to the word Luddite, a critique of technology, right? A look at technology that is not coming from a stance of neutrality. Every technology is progressive, every technology is sort of apolitical, which is something that of course, you know, Wired does a lot, is investigates all of these technologies and who do they actually serve? Do they serve people? Do they serve Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, big tech oligarchs.
- [06:31]
B
Are you finding that the people who are sort of joining this movement are people who are giving up tech, or is it a lot of people who never embrace tech to begin with?
- [06:42]
C
I would say it's a total mix. You know, tech is so ingrained in so many people's lives. And we also had people come to the Summer of LUD who have never had a phone or have never been online in like 20 years. So, yeah, it's a real mix, you know, and there's a sort of a range of ways to be a Luddite, right? There's no sort of one size fits all. A lot of the reporting really likes to hamper in on the, okay, Gen Z, we're getting flip phones, you know, and it's kind of a consumer based narrative, right? Like, oh, we're changing our consumer habits. But what we've shown with the Summer of Ludd is actually what we're doing is creating in person community. We're bringing people back into public space. And it goes beyond the current idea, which is really about like digital detox. I'm going to pare down my personal relationship to the Internet, to my phone, to social media, to whatever it is. And the way that we do this is we do a lot of events communally, right? So it's like we have something called Delete Day where we acknowledge like, okay, getting off Instagram, getting off Hinge, getting off whatever it may be, whatever App is ailing you is actually hard to do. There's a certain reliance that we all have on these things, and the best way to do that is to do them with a group of people and to actually sort of commit to, okay, we're all going to sit in a circle. We're each going to delete an app off of someone else's phone and do it together. Right. And learn about, okay, why is Instagram extractive? Or why is Hinge changing sort of the nature of dating and making more transactional or whatever the app may be? What's the deal with Spotify not paying artists a living wage? You know, and that's really our nature, right? It's less of a digital detox, individualist thing and more of a, okay, let's bring people together, let's do it together. Because it is actually something that's extremely hard to do.
- [08:44]
B
So I did pick up one of your Summer of Ludd guides and, you know, there's a lot of talk about the rise of tech oligarchs, this massive concentration of power and wealth. Are there like basic tenets to your movement?
- [08:58]
C
Yeah, sort of. The most core ethos actually does come from those 1800s textile worker, original Luddites that we were talking about. And what they wrote is, we are against machines harmful to commonality. That tears unduly at the social fabric, which is kind of like, you know, an old timey complicated way of saying we are against machines which accelerate wealth inequality, tear apart communities, you know, atomize people. Right. And so that's kind of our core thing against machines harmful to commonality. And that expresses itself in many different ways. You brought up the statistic about young people feeling affected by social media, and actually there being a trend of people moving away from social media media. Similarly with AI and automation coming for not only working class jobs, but also like white collar jobs, you know, like entry level coders and things like that. They're essentially automating themselves constantly by training AI tools. Right. So everybody is affected by this new wave of automation and all of these, you know, whether it be a labor issue, whether it be a social issue, whether it be an environmental issue, we see them as all tearing at the social fabric, taking away commonality from society and turning us into more atomized individuals.
- [10:29]
B
Is it more about moving away from sort of big tech tools totally, or is it like moving away from all tech writ large?
- [10:36]
C
Big tech, big tech, you know, and that's a thank you for bringing that up, because that is a distinction that is hard for people to Quantify, you know what I'm saying? And hard for people to understand immediately because we like tech that serves people and we actually create tech that serves people. There's this event during the Summer of Ludd called what are you doing tonight? How to create your own events calendar, right? And we saw that there was a real need because of the enshitification or sloppification of social media, right? Actually hard to find events. It's hard to go on Instagram and find something to do with your weekend, right? Find a book reading or a, you know, live music or whatever. It is something to actually get you out of the house, get you talking to strangers, because there's so much slop. Like, you literally have to wade through, like, a thousand videos of cats and pigeons that are AI and they're, like, riding on each other's backs and, like, nipping at each other and whatever, you know, it's just like, what. Like, what am I looking at? So we brought together a bunch of people who run newsletters, who work on RSS feeds, who do sort of, like, alternative tech things. And we brought them all together and had them teach other people how to create their own events calendars or just generally get their information flows away from these big tech platforms. We've seen this thing happen where so many communities, right? Community spaces, churches, unions, you know, it doesn't matter, whatever it is, are put in the box of having to have all of their information on Instagram because everyone's on Instagram. And that can often, like, also degrade the content of what they're talking about, because it turns it into, like, Instagram content, right? And they start molding their content to fit the algorithm. But you actually don't face this problem if you have your own newsletter or your own alternative infrastructure that you know you own and you can operate yourselves with your community. That, okay, gets people to events, gets people to meetings, whatever it is, gives people resources, right? And so we're actually really big on creating technology, which is kind of contradictory.
- [13:03]
B
Was there also a workshop teaching people how to flirt irl? Because that is two.
- [13:09]
C
There was two workshops.
- [13:11]
B
See, that's like a dying art, I can tell you from when I was single. So, I mean, do you have. Do you have any personal tips on how to do that?
- [13:18]
C
Yes. Well, it's funny because the sort of actual thesis of the workshop was called Luddite Riz. The thesis of Luddite Rizz was actually less how to flirt and more how to get rejected. How to actually go up to someone you have A crush on. Be like, hey, I have a crush on you. Like, it's okay if this is not going to work out, but I wanted to express this to you to see if you felt the same way. And then, boom. Rejection, right? And how to handle that feeling.
- [13:46]
B
Why is that important in the age of dating apps?
- [13:50]
C
Because dating apps have totally transactionalized the experience of falling in love. We swipe, swipe, yes, this person, no, this person. And it kind of like, almost doesn't matter if we get rejected because there's always, like, a bajillion more fish, right? With a bajillion more like, photos of themselves and little cutesy, whatever taglines and stuff like that. What we find is important is. Is retraining our social muscle away from that transactionalized experience of, like, I like you, I don't like you. Black and white, sort of thinking about how dating works, how socializing in general works, right? We, as a sort of modern, technologically entrenched civilization, have lost a lot of the actual nuance of interaction, right? Which is like reading body language, dealing with conflict, dealing with rejection, dealing with intense feelings of love, you know? And now it's all unhinged.
- [14:52]
B
The festival also had an evidence collection box where people could, I guess, write down how big tech had negatively impacted their lives. Were there any big takeaways from that?
- [15:03]
C
Oh, my gosh, so many. Thank you for bringing this up. The evidence box was for a protest we had on the 4th of July, which is called shit phone. It's an acronym. It stands for scathing hatred of information technology and the passionate hemorrhaging of our neoliberal experiences. And it's a protest where we all wear gnome hats and we put different technologies on trial. And the evidence we were collecting for the Amazon prime drone, the meta Ray Bans sunglasses, and the. It's like a big phone with ChatGPT on it, essentially. And one of the interesting pieces of evidence that people got on soapboxes and shared was a young person was talking about how their mom loves ChatGPT. And as we know, ChatGPT is, like, very sycophantic. It'll just tell you whatever you want to hear. And this young person just got a new bunny, and their mom looked up, can bunnies eat mushrooms on ChatGPT? And ChatGPT said, yes, of course. I love you so much. Yes, bunnies can eat anything, right? And they fed mushrooms to the bunny, and the bunny got extremely sick and almost died.
- [16:25]
B
Wait, sorry, psychedelic mushrooms or normal.
- [16:27]
C
No, no, normal mushrooms. Shiitake mushrooms.
- [16:30]
D
Oh, wow.
- [16:32]
C
And they had to fact check their mom. And it was like a real point of contention within the family because it was like, are you really going to use these tools and endanger the bunny? So that was an interesting piece of evidence. Another one was a young person was talking about their parent working for Amazon and just having to endure these brutal conditions of, you know, 120 degree heat, no bathroom breaks, no water breaks, things like that. There was a young woman who was saying that, you know, the meta Ray bans, like, are really sort of a device for like creepy men on the subway to like, record them without consent and post it online and things like that. For those of you who don't know, the meta Ray bans is sunglasses with a sneaky camera in them. And so we had like an amazing array of different pieces of evidence for all of these different products.
- [17:22]
B
Why, why do you think there is such a backlash towards big tech from young people, considering that a lot of them have grown up with it?
- [17:30]
C
Yeah, there's definitely a push from young people, right? And we, we often get this narrative of like, Gen Z, right? Gen Z is pushback, backlash against big tech, which I think is very valid, right, Because Gen Z, sort of right in the middle of like, probably their first phone was a flip phone in like third grade, and then it moved to an iPhone in sixth or seventh grade and they got like, wow, just like unfettered access to the Internet. The Internet was different than it used to be. We have a platform model where, like, addiction is the sort of, like, economic driver of all of these platforms. And so I think there's something really key in there of like, a feeling of missing out on like, genuine human experience. Because they were essentially like guinea pigs for Mark Zuckerberg. I think that's a part of it. But I also think that, and the Summer of Ludd is kind of proof of this because while yes, there are a lot of people from Gen Z there, there's also a lot of older people who are facing a similar kind of alienation, you know, a similar kind of loneliness or a similar feeling of like, what the hell is going on? We have all of the billionaires, and now trillionaires are all tech people, tech oligarchs. How did we get here? How do we get to the point where they're using their powers to erode democracy, essentially? And so there's a lot of crossover between the old, the young, the middle aged. And on a more sort of broader societal note, I think that there's been a real flattening actually of the distinctions between generations, because what used to separate generations in large part was the technological advancements of the time. We had like 1920s, we had radio, 1980s TV, 1990s, early Internet, things like that. And now we've had this hyper, hyper, hyper acceleration where in the past 20 years we have the Internet and the iPhone and, and it's essentially like hours and hours of every day of our lives. And so in some ways the example of like an 18 year old who is on TikTok chronically is not so much different than the boomer who is on Facebook having sort of a different content of, you know, maybe misinformation or politicization, but a similar feeling of like chronically online, constantly seeing slop, things like that.
- [20:14]
D
Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, global fashion news and features director at Vogue and co host of the Run through podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott and Simone Bellotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mel, head of editorial content at Vogue US and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's head editorial content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the Run through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.
- [21:00]
B
There were a lot of college commencement speakers who you.
- [21:04]
C
Oh yeah, I love that. I love that.
- [21:06]
B
They were like speaking positively about AI and students were booing them. What do you make of the disconnect there? You know, why did these speakers, in some cases they were tech leaders, keep bringing this up? Like, did they sort of overestimate how much people would be a fan of AI?
- [21:23]
C
God, I love those videos. I just want to say, I mean, just the mass booing is just amazing. And then, and then the commencement speakers, like, you see them rethink their whole speech in real time and they're like, no, I have to keep going.
- [21:34]
B
Yeah, they're, they're surprised.
- [21:36]
C
Yeah, I think, I think really what it is is, yeah, an underestimation of the pushback against AI, especially because all of those college students, right, like they're the new workforce and they are really staring down the barrel of a chatbot right now and they are not going to be happy or excited when, you know, their entry level job in tech or finance or law or medicine or whatever it is actually gets automated away from them. So I think that's a large part, specifically on the college issue of why there's so much pushback there.
- [22:14]
B
We hear a lot from the Sam Altman's of the world and even celebrities now.
- [22:19]
C
I hate them.
- [22:19]
B
I hate them sort of saying that, you know, AI is the next industrial revolution, that if you don't get on board, you're going to be left behind. We. What do you make of that narrative?
- [22:31]
C
Yeah, there is some merit to, okay, AI is a powerful tool. And it's a powerful tool because of its ability to merge data sets in a way that has never been seen before. Do I think it's the next industrial revolution necessarily? I think what it is right now, especially in this AI bubble, is it's really actually not showing us its capabilities. Right. And then oftentimes this AI doesn't really work. It's kind of like the bunny thing. It just tells you whatever you want to hear. So I think that makes it hard for me to conceptualize it as exactly like the new Industrial revolution because I don't actually see a value being generated from AI in the way that these big tech oligarchs like to push us. And they really play a game of like, it's going to take away the need for human labor to do things and then everybody is going to get paid, you know, either by the government or in some like libertarian fantasy. Like we're all just going to have abundance because of AI and we're really just not seeing that right now.
- [23:39]
B
Do you see the modern Luddite movement as being a political movement?
- [23:44]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think obviously, look at me, I'm a puppet, right? Our tactics are unorthodox. We are testing out a new organizing field and we're actually trying to experiment as much as possible with new organizing tactics. So in that way people may see, oh, this is kind of funny, this is playful. I'm not sure this is just about attention or getting off your phone, but this is really a very political movement. In the same way the original Luddites were hyper political. You know, I mean, they were facing starvation, they were facing, you know, disruptions to the family, the enclosure of the commons. In the same way that we are really, I mean, we're facing like mass unemployment, we are facing a massive surveillance of our public spaces, our private spaces. We're facing like the potential of like mass manipulation through AI generated content and things like that. So yeah, we are totally rebelling against all of that in a, you know, strongly political way.
- [24:47]
B
There's a lot of controversy over the idea that social media is addictive. Do you feel that it is?
- [24:54]
C
Yeah, I think that it's designed to be addictive, really. I mean, if you look at the incentive, the incentive of social media is to sell data to advertisers and now sort of to sell data to other corporations, to sell data to the government. So within its bones, it is meant to be addictive because the more time that you spend on it, the more data that there is, the more revenue that the company has. And what's that quote? It's like, if it's free, you're the product that's sort of become our classic, like, oh, this is what social media is really about.
- [25:31]
B
On the flip side, though, there's a lot of people who have found community online. You know, I've talked to young people who are lgbtq and maybe they grew up in a religious community and sort of first learned about some of these things online.
- [25:47]
C
Yes.
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B
So do you feel like there is good use cases for the use of social media?
- [25:53]
C
Absolutely. Absolutely. And never would I want to discredit. Right. Like, a queer person, especially in, like, a rural or, like, a very conservative situation, figuring out, oh, this is what it. It means to be gay or queer via the Internet. Right. And the Internet is a powerful tool for accumulating information, and that is absolutely beautiful. But where we've gone wrong is the Internet is actually not a powerful tool for actualizing information within our lives. And so that's why we, as Luddites say the event is the medium. The event is the medium that essentially means, like, when we learn things, we should be going out into public space, hosting other people, teaching them things, sharing our knowledge, and building community. That way, it is not enough for us to, okay, I see a post, let me repost it. And then sort of feel like I did something with information. Because we know that ultimately that's not fulfilling. That creates more cycles of loneliness and lack of fulfillment and things like that, because it's not material. We need to take all of our amazing information we get from the Internet and bring it actually into the real world and test it out with other people, you know, experiment with how we think and how we feel in the public sphere.
- [27:19]
B
Let's say I'm Luddite curious and, you
- [27:22]
C
know, I hope you are.
- [27:23]
B
I. I want to kind of unplug a little bit. How would you encourage someone to get started? Because it is an overwhelming idea.
- [27:32]
C
Right, right. I think that the first step can be different for everybody. You know, if you are Lud curious and you know the exact reason. Like, it's like, I'm on Instagram too much. You know, or oh, like I'm feeling a sort of a sense of emptiness or I'm doom scrolling a lot or things like that. One of the simplest ways is actually to just delete your Instagram app, you know what I'm saying? Or delete your Facebook or, you know, some people are addicted to their email or their hinge or whatever to just delete it and start going outside, going to local bookstores, going to community spaces and talking to people. You're sort of replacing one thing for another. It's not simply, okay, I digital detox now, I live my life. It's I take away these extractive platforms and I actually go and try newer, more communal things. If you're here in New York City, come to an event, meet us outside. You will come to a teach in, come to a music thing, come to a free lunch in the park, come to any sort of assortment of things and immediately be able, okay, let me test my social muscles. Let me be with other people who are thinking in this way. Let me learn from them. That would honestly be my best. Like, okay, first step, delete the thing, come outside, try it, experiment, come to an event. And same thing with, if you're somewhere else, you know, there are likely a Luddite organization or at the very least tech critical people around you and you can start having conversations with them immediately.
- [29:12]
B
So it sounds like part of the key to this because, you know, we are all kind of programmed at this point to prioritize convenience.
- [29:21]
C
Yes, totally.
- [29:21]
B
And so it seems like part of the key to this is showing people that it can actually be fun to not do that or fulfilling. Is that right?
- [29:30]
C
Absolutely, absolutely. And let me give an example for the Summer of Lud. There's nothing on social media of how to find the Summer of Ludd. You could not type up Summer of Ludd in Instagram and figure out the whole program, festival and whatever. What we did is we had posters all around New York City which had a hotline on them. And you would call the hotline and the hotline would tell you the nearest local bookstore, the nearest community space, the nearest cafe, whatever sort of place where people gather. And there would be guidebooks there that had events, 120 events in them. And so in that sense, like there's kind of a journey there. It's not inconvenient necessarily, but it's not convenient either. Right? It's not. Oh, let me click on this link. Okay, I'm here, I know everything. Right? There's a journey. And so we need to sort of you're totally right. Open ourselves up to actually not going for the convenient option always, you know, not immediately jumping to that. Okay, you know, I'm hungry, let me grubhub something instead. It's like, okay, I'm hungry. Let me go to my local deli, let me have a conversation with them, let me have an interaction.
- [30:43]
B
I mean, I will say even booking this interview was a little bit tricky because we ended up sending one of our producers two year events just because we were trying to reschedule it. And normally that might have been like a very quick email exchange.
- [30:56]
C
Yeah, that's great. I'm glad you said you. Okay, Go where the Luddites are. Go find one. That's great.
- [31:02]
B
I guess I'm just wondering, like, does that ever become a hindrance or like, frustrating?
- [31:06]
C
I mean, not necessarily, you know, because we love meeting people in person. You know, there's something that is kind of eternally lost in the email communication or the text or even the phone call. And the fact that you guys sort of knew that, okay, we're not gonna get them via email, let's send our producer to the park. You know what I'm saying? It makes us work differently. If we were a festival with sort of an updated website or I had like all the organizers locations on my phone or something and I could just go run up to them and ping them, it would be a completely different organizational structure. But because, okay, no one's using their phone, we actually had to rely on each other a lot more and know where each other were at certain times. And that kind of thing facilitated a lot of trust. So it's a hard cognitive jump to be like, okay, I'm not going to use these certain technologies, but in that sense I have to make my own new structure. And what we found personally is that there's actually a lot of joy and interest and experimentation that comes from that.
- [32:24]
B
Your movement is based in New York. Do you have ambitions for it to spread beyond here?
- [32:30]
C
Absolutely. I mean, for the summer of lead, we had people coming from all over the country and we had people from. Yeah, and we had people from Canada and people from Australia, people coming from all over the country in like completely different parts of the country. We had people coming from Iowa, from Santa Cruz, we had people coming from North Carolina, you know, and so there is already sort of a Luddite network out there. People just don't know about it because it's not online.
- [32:58]
B
So the festival just wrapped up. Are there any other events that you have planned?
- [33:02]
C
Not immediately, because we all need to rest our weary bones. However, if you do want to learn about events in the next month, there's the NYC OffTech calendar, which is essentially like a newsletter. You can sign up for it. You'll get like 60 events in a month, essentially. And also, if you're in New York, keep your eyes peeled. I mean, we do huge poster campaigns and we do in all different types of neighborhoods. Our guidebooks for the Summer of Ludd that we gave out reached bookstores up in the Hudson Valley. We mailed them to people in different states. I mean, there really is like, keep yourself open to. Okay, I'm going to look around. Is there a Luddite poster here? I'm at my local bookstore. Okay, is there some information here? And that's kind of, again, on this idea of like, social infrastructure, switching people over from the idea of, okay, I'll look at an Instagram page and here's all the events. And instead to the idea of I actually have to leave my house. I have to, when I'm walking home, stop in the local bookstore and see if there's a guidebook or a poster. So, yeah, be on the lookout. We'll be out here. Tompkins Square park, probably other parks, privately owned public spaces. We have events all over this city. It's amazing. Nixon 5 I love New York. The Summer of Lud was really a testament to the theory of public space. Here we were in Tompkins Square park, though. We had events all over the city and for three days it was 101 degrees, right? We just had a historic heat wave in New York City. And so what did we do? We didn't cancel our events. We moved some of them around outside of the heat of the day. And we sat there with our shade tents with gallons and gallons of water cups, electrolytes, salty snacks, so you could retain the water you were drinking. And we hydrated the local community that was in the park. And so it was a real testament to, okay, even in this complete doomerous moment of climate catastrophe and everyone's looking outside, like, how are we ever going to go outside again? Right? When you bring people together, you can actually organize and take care of each other. You can have systems in place to, okay, we're going to make sure people are constantly drinking water. We're going to, you know, have free lunch every day. We are going to have like, we had these spray misters and we just missed people down with cold water and they were like, oh, this is amazing. You know, and just the sheer amount of people that we engaged because they were on their walk home is just amazing because there's, there's nothing like it. Right. Social media is an echo chamber public space. You get everybody and you want to get everybody. You want to have that melting pot. That's what New York City's all about.
- [35:49]
B
And America, might I add, okay, Gowanis, we like to play a little game on each show.
- [35:55]
C
I love games.
- [35:56]
B
We're very proud of it. It's called Control, Alt, Delete. Woo hoo. So I want to know what piece of tech you would love to control, what piece you would alter or change.
- [36:13]
C
Yeah.
- [36:14]
B
And what you would delete. So vanquish from the earth.
- [36:18]
C
Wow.
- [36:18]
B
So are you ready?
- [36:19]
C
Control, alt, delete. Okay, great.
- [36:22]
B
Okay, let's start with Control.
- [36:24]
C
Okay, Control. I would say. This is so funny that you're asking me this. I would say the servers for the Internet, the Internet was billed as something that was, okay, we are going to have a free exchange of knowledge right across the world. It's going to help diversity and globalization and all this stuff. And then, okay, boom, military technology. Military can see everything that we're doing on the Internet constantly. I mean, we saw this with Ed Snowden, essentially. That's my control. Because I would say, okay, no more surveillance.
- [36:58]
B
Okay. And now alt.
- [37:00]
C
I can change this.
- [37:01]
B
Yep.
- [37:02]
C
In whatever way I want.
- [37:03]
B
Yep.
- [37:05]
C
Hmm. Hmm. I'm trying to think about, like, which technologies do I feel have a real positive impact but have a negative sort of profit incentive. Okay, here, let me give this one. I would alter the way that social media platforms have a centralized system instead of a federated system. I think that's pretty solid. And this was almost in the creation of Twitter. They were about to do this and then Jack Dorsey was like, no, we should have it be more centralized. That's. I think that's my final answer.
- [37:44]
B
Okay, and finally, delete.
- [37:46]
C
Delete. I can't wait. This is my favorite one.
- [37:48]
B
What would you delete?
- [37:51]
C
AI data centers. Done. Done. Immediately done. Boom, gone. I mean, come on, guys, come on. Especially when they bill it as like, okay, we are going to make an AI to fix all of our climate catastrophe, all of our income inequality, but first we have to absolutely drain the natural resources of the Earth. I mean, it's just ridiculous. It just makes me so frustrated. I think the data center is honestly one of the worst materializations of this sort of like big tech oligarch world that we live in, where like the whim of Mark Zuckerberg wanting a meta Hyperion data center in Louisiana is legitimately. Going to use multiple times the amount of energy that New Orleans uses. We can't sustain that as a planet. Truly, it doesn't matter how interesting the technology is or what it could do or what. Maybe it'd do this. Maybe it'd fix this. It doesn't matter. These are resources that we need now for life to continue. We need fresh water. We need land to grow food. We need ecosystems where birds and bees and wildlife can coexist. And I'm not very interested in trading that for a chatbot. Even if the chatbot tells me it loves me and we can kiss me through the phone, whatever. I don't care.
- [39:22]
B
Goannis, thank you so much for being here.
- [39:25]
C
Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure.
- [39:28]
B
Yeah, it was a great conversation.
- [39:30]
C
Okay. See you again soon.
- [39:32]
B
For sure.
- [39:32]
C
See you at Summer of Lead, too. I don't know. I'll see you out in the streets. Public space.
- [39:35]
B
I will keep my eyes open.
- [39:36]
C
Great. We'll see each other on the sidewalk. Say hello.
- [39:46]
B
The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope content. Our showrunner is Ann Marie Fertoldi and Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy this episode was fact checked by Matt Giles. I'm Manisha Krishnan, Wired's senior culture editor, filling in for Katie Drummond, our global editorial director. Check back on here Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to the Slack Channel.
- [40:17]
A
Foreign.
- [40:24]
D
Not again. Another AI project has ended without any ROI close to cracking. Time to meet the Salonis context model, which provides AI the operational clarity it needs. Go to salonis.com uncanny to start getting AI ROI. That's C E L O N I S dot com uncanny.