Yeah. I, so I just graduated with my PhD from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in sociology. I am currently a postdoc with Microsoft Research. I just started in July, so I'm still still fresh to the to the job. Before that, I was a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. I grew up in Redwood City. I went to San Jose State and Foothill College for my undergrad. I did sociology there as well. Then I did a two year MA program in sociology at San Diego State University, and then I did two years of a PhD in sociology at University of Washington in their sociology department. And I transferred there, from University of Washington to to Queen's University. And my research generally concerns technology and social justice, really broadly defined. So I am really interested in the different ways that people try to embed their political values in technology in order to realize some type of social justice, however they define that as looking. And I'm also interested in how digital technologies actually impact, attempts to realize social justice. So I look at this from a couple of different directions, and in a couple of different cases, but very broadly defined. I'm I'm really interested in how digital tech especially is bound up in questions of what kind of of a society do we want and how do we get there?

It it for me, it goes back to my undergraduate experience at San Jose State University. I sort of fell into sociology. I actually hadn't originally wanted to get into sociology. I went through a couple of different possible majors when I was an undergraduate student. I was one of those students who really had no idea what I wanted to do. I tried out software engineering. I tried out chemistry, and eventually landed on sociology just honestly because I had the prerequisites to major in it. I hadn't really thought about it at all. And when I transferred from from Foothill College to San Jose State, I took courses with this professor named doctor Rockne, who absolutely changed my thinking about everything. She turned my world completely upside down. And all of a sudden, all of these things that I had taken for granted in the world, all of these institutions, political systems, economic systems that I had taken as givens, all of a sudden were opened up, and opened up for contestation and questioning. And actually raised these questions to me that, you know, we could actually look differently if we wanted to. We don't have to have these systems. We can change things if we wanted to. And that got me so motivated into not only social justice, but also in looking at systems, assumptions, institutions, ways of doing things that we often take for granted. One of my favorite things is to look at some of these taken for granted notions and peeling back the layers on top and getting underneath to the politics. And that is especially what interests me about technology. So technology often is something we really take for granted, and we might understand that it's sort of vaguely political. But what I really enjoy doing, what I find incredibly rewarding in studying technology as a sociologist is looking at something that seems so apolitical and finding that it is actually deeply, deeply political. And I find that, first, very rewarding personally for my research, but also in teaching. I find that very rewarding to teach students. Students often have sort of epiphanies in the classroom of when they realize, oh, my gosh, science is political. Technology is political. And that I I find that, really exciting. And that that that's really what interested me in this field to begin with and also what continues my sort of drive to research technology and social justice.

Yeah. That's a great question because it wasn't originally actually the focus of the of the project. So it was kind of an interesting journey that took me to eventually focus on civic tech. So what I originally set out to do was the original project that I wrote about in my proposal for my dissertation was a long term ethnography with professional organizations that are involved in digital civil liberties. So what I wanted to do was sort of hang out with organizations maybe six months at a time, eight months at a time, and follow a group of staff members as they try to advocate for, you know, net neutrality or privacy online or freedom of speech online. And I ran into some trouble, as ethnographers often do, of finding field access. So I had a hard time getting access to these organizations for a variety of reasons. So I had to go to plan b. And plan b was, okay, let's enter into the field and talk to as many people as possible and just see what sticks. I'm gonna go out into the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm going to talk to to as many activists as possible who are doing something related to digital technologies and social justice. And the plan there was to find maybe that there's different fields or different approaches that different groups are taking. And I wanted to kind of map out the field of tech and social justice in the Bay Area. So I ended up speaking to a variety of different groups. I spoke with organizations that are doing counter surveillance and pro privacy work. I spoke with some economic organizations that are organizing, in the wake of the San Jose mega campus, the Google mega campus in Downtown San Jose, Some groups that are trying to bring in Google as a method for job creation and as a way of holding Google accountable for their role in accelerating the housing crisis in the Bay Area, but other groups who really didn't want Google to build the campus at all. So I spoke to sort of both sides of the equation. I spoke to folks who are involved in labor organizing in the tech industry, who are trying to build out solidarity and around labor issues in the workplace. I spoke with a lot of bureaucrats and a lot of city employees who are trying to adopt digital technologies in their daily work. I spoke to a group who was building a community owned and operated Internet. So I spoke to student groups who are organizing about tech and inequality in the Bay Area. So I spoke to a really wide range of organizations, and civic tech was one of them. And eventually, when I sat down to actually study the material that I had collected and analyze the data after one year of being in the field, I I came back to Kingston and I transcribed my interviews and I was kind of looking through what I had and thinking, okay. Where do I go from here? And the interviews with the civic technologist really stuck out to me, and I sort of just trusted my gut. Like, okay. There's something here that I really wanna pursue. And one thing that really stood out to me, first of all, was it's it's funny actually with ethnography is that sometimes the things that stick out to you are are really odd things that just kind of resonate with your own experience. So for me, it was actually I I was going to a lot of civic tech events, and I was doing field work during the day and then going to, like, a hackathon or doing more interviews in the evening. And I was thinking, how do these technologists do it? I'm exhausted. Like, I'm exhausted from doing the field work. How are these technologists going to their jobs during the daytime and then, you know, on a Tuesday night, going to volunteer until 10PM and then getting up and doing it the next day? Like, how are they doing this? And and, you know, where do they get the motivation to put in this much work? Because this is a lot of time that they're putting into coding, right, both of their jobs and while volunteering. So I really wanted to explore that a little bit more. Like, what's what's going on here? Like, how are they managing to put all this time in? And why why is this so important to them, and why are they doing it? So when I came back, in the second year, I focused just on civic technology. So at that point, I did targeted interviews with civic technologists. And, I did some follow-up interviews with folks I had spoken to the year before, And I also supplemented by going to a couple additional events by talking to some city employees who partnered with the technologists on some projects to try and build out a more comprehensive picture of what was going on at Civic Tech. So that that's sort of how I got there. Often with qualitative work, you don't, you don't often end up where you think you will, but that's the beauty of sort of talking to people is that they sort of lead you in unexpected places. So that's, that's how I ended up with civic tech.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is something that I think sociology can really bring, as a discipline, can really add to our understanding of social processes because sociologists are trained to look at these taken for granted things. Right? And to identify how they shape interactions, group formation, but also policy, technology production. It's something that sociologists have long been sort of, trained to focus on. And it becomes really important when, I think particularly in a civic technology context, where volunteers are building technologies that are not just going to be used by themselves, and they're not just going to be used by their companies, but they're going to be used by government. And that means that they're going to affect citizens. And oftentimes, the citizens don't, you know, they they might be brought in as not necessarily collaborators, but as maybe, you know, for some kind of user research in the process of building civic technology. But often but the vast majority of people are not involved in the process. Right? And these technologies get adopted by government and end up impacting their lives later. And when that is the case, when we're when we're talking about government using something and citizens being impacted, it becomes even more important that we're really tending to questions that we might that might not come up for us immediately. And I think that's sort of what I wanted to bring to the civic technology community with my study is hopefully bringing sort of an outsider's perspective of these are some things that I noticed that are going on, and it's much easier for an outsider to pick up on those things than than an insider. I mean, it even took me a while to realize that a lot of things I noticed about civic technology are things that are happening in academia. I mean, these are things that are applicable to my own job, and it still took me a while to realize that connection. It's sometimes it's a lot easier to actually have an outsider come in and say, hey. I'm I'm noticing that, you know, you sort of do this. Why is that? Because it doesn't seem normal to me because I don't do it every day. So I think if we're trying to especially think about technologies that are going to be used for the public, it's really, really crucial that we are considering the entire decision making process and how it's impacting different groups of people. Because if this ends up if it does end up getting adopted by government, you know, it could end up impacting people in ways that they're not anticipating. And if we're talking about access to public services, that becomes even more important because those are often, you know, safety net is sort of the last, you know, defense people have against, like, very, very severe poverty. So it's really important that we're actually questioning, assumptions as we go in the civic tech space. I think it's important in general, but especially in civic technology when we're talking about things that could impact citizens and the public, and especially people who really, really rely on on social services for basic needs and things that are really crucial to their well-being. I think it's really important that we do question as much as possible.

Yeah. So that's a great question. So, that comes up against that sort of I think it's a great segue into my argument about this being a form of an ideal tech workplace. So one thing that I found is that when I when I started each interview, I started by asking technologists, okay, what was your trajectory that landed you here? What brought you to Civic Tech? Why are you what what brought you here today? And what really surprised me was that I got almost the same exact answer from almost every single participant. And it was a story about their career. And it wasn't something that I was expecting because I I spoke with volunteers, like I said, in in dozens of other types of organizations. Oftentimes, other folks started with their education or they started they told me a story about how they get how they became politicized over time. Like, how they became radicalized or how they became sort of awoke, they awoke to political issues. Sort of like the story that I told at the beginning of this interview. Right? But when I spoke to civic technologists, they told me a slightly different story. And it was one about how they came to be employed in the tech sector. And so these stories kind of have very similar components. So oftentimes, the volunteers would start by saying, well, you know, I went to school at this university, I got involved in tech, and then I took a job with x company. Oftentimes, that involved moving from outside the Bay Area to the Bay Area. I would say the majority of the folks that I spoke with are did not go to school or grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area. They moved there from elsewhere. And then they took a job in the Bay Area. They were really excited about it. And then they experienced this gradual disillusionment over time. So over time, they started feeling like this isn't the job I thought it was going to be. This is not what I wanted. And there's a couple different reasons for that, and we can get into it. But what they ended up doing in response to feeling disillusioned with those jobs is that they found civic technology. That is often the story that folks told me was I started looking for volunteering opportunities to get what I thought I was going to get at work, and I'm not getting. So I went somewhere else to find it. Some folks tried out different groups, and they didn't stick, and Civic Tech is the one that did. Some, this is the first thing that they sort of found, and they just stuck with it. Some were encouraged by a friend, you know. So there's slightly there's some nuances in the in the differences of the stories. But by and large, this is a story that I heard from a lot of people. So if you think about so where I'm coming from is, okay, how do I explain this as a sociologist? Like, why did civic tech really stick with people? Why did they do this instead of something else? Because there's a especially in the Bay Area, there's dozens and dozens of different things you could do to sort of get involved in social issues if you wanted to. So what is it about civic tech that sticks with people? And I think this connection of going from being very disillusioned at work to volunteering in civic tech is a really important one, especially because I heard it from so many folks and especially because these stories were very similar across cases. For people of very different ages, different ethnicities, different, class backgrounds, different cities they grew up in, they told very similar stories. So I think there's something about for me, it indicates that there's something about civic tech that relates to our work in the in the tech industry or place it it connects somehow to our workplaces. And where I come from, as a sociologist, I am really interested in value judgments, especially cultural judgments and moral judgments. So I'm really interested in how people actually decide what is good and what is bad, you know, to put it simply. How do people define something as good and something as bad? And oftentimes and this is true of the tech industry, but it's not just the tech industry. Like I said, this is I see this in academia as well. I see this in a lot of my friends and colleagues who work in other industries that often activity is a, no matter what the activity is, being active is a moral good. Like, you want to be as active as possible. That's a good thing. So not only do you have a lot of projects going out on at work, like maybe you're juggling five or six different things on a good day, you've got a lot of different projects going, but also in your spare time you've got projects going. Maybe you're learning a new language, that's another project. Maybe, you know, you're doing, yoga or something, right, that's another project. Maybe you're trying out this other diet. That's another project. Right? And we think of this as a sort of a historical shift, and this is something I can also discuss a little bit later if we wanna get into the question of network capitalism, and some of the theoretical discussion in the dissertation. But oftentimes, this what we're seeing now in this time this sort of form of capitalism that we're living under now, one moral judgment is that activity is good. Constant activity is good. And we are seeing a little bit of pushback against that with some recent books that are advocating for being slow. Like, that's sort of a there's a book recently called The Slow Professor in Academia that's advocating slowing down and taking on fewer projects because we're seeing some pushback that maybe that's not so much a good thing. But for me, this sort of working and being active all the time is really bound up with moral judgments that we have about work and about not only work for a wage, but work on ourselves, work with other people, all get sort of subsumed under the category of a project. And that engaging in a lot of projects is a good thing.

Yes. Yes. That's a great question. Yes. So what really so to answer your first question, yes, that is something that came up very often. That folks, oftentimes the cause for the disillusionment in their jobs was because they felt like they were not making the impact on the social good that they wanted to have and that they expected to have. Right? Because a lot of the the volunteers I spoke to expected when they graduated from university and got a job in the industry that they were going to be saving the world. Right? That's sort of the phrase that we've attached to, you know, culturally has become attached to the tech industry. Right? And I use that sort of colloquially and sort of like as a shorthand, you know, for for often our expectations of the tech industry, both, you know, in the media, by government. You know, federal government often talks about the tech industry as sort of saving the American economy, but also for for those of us who do work in the industry. Right? That we we think about it as, like, well, there's worse you know, there's other industries that are doing worse things. Like, this is a place I can actually you know, my employer actually cares about social issues, and I'm here to design technologies that are actually going to help people in one way or another. Like, I'm here to help. I'm not here to do evil. Right? That's that's not why I I got this job. And that what what I found was that the the volunteers I spoke to found that that actually wasn't true in their workplaces, and that was a near universal experience for a lot of people, that they found that they're either they were doing something so narrow technically that they couldn't imagine this possibly having a social impact, or they were doing something that was only improving their employer's bottom line. So that was a common refrain that I heard was I found that my job is only improving profit for my employer. It's not actually helping people that who need help. And that's why I got this job is because I wanted to do that. So what what interested me so much about that was, again, questioning some assumptions is the assumption that a job in the tech industry is going to do social good. And that that's a very, very deeply entrenched entrenched assumption, and something that I think a lot of people hold very dear to them, and it's actually very important to them. And it's a belief that, is very crucial to them just, like, being able to get up and feel good about the work that they're doing. And it's something that has a lot of emotional attachment for a lot of people. It makes a big difference for a lot of people. But if you compare that to a lot of other jobs, there's a lot of other jobs where people are not waking up in the morning and thinking that they're improving the common good. Right? I worked retail for many, many years, and I'll tell you that in the morning, I did not wake up thinking that. Right? So there's something that's a little bit unique here about that. That being said, now that I'm in academia and I get up and teach, I do think that when I get up and teach. I do think that when I research. So perhaps there's something about assuming that there's a certain status of work, this certain cognitive work, that's often high status and high, highly paid and highly professionalized. That does lead us to think like, okay. I'm doing something good. I'm doing something good with what I'm doing. And that's why I want to do this, is I I wanna do something to improve the world. And when we find that that's actually not true, what I end up arguing is that civic tech becomes sort of an outlet for actually fulfilling those feelings that people have, that they feel are not getting fulfilled at work. The other interesting thing that I'll mention, before we move on is another reason people felt disillusioned was so one thing I mentioned which is fulfillment and actually having a public impact. The other thing that people felt disillusioned with was actually the freedom that they expected to have in their workplaces, that they felt like they didn't actually have. So a lot of folks felt like they expected when they got their job in the industry that they would be able to sort of work on their passion projects, that they would be able to do what they wanted to do. They would have the freedom to say no to some things and yes to others, that they could, you know, tinker and sort of play and do what they thought was important. And, actually, they found out in the workplace that it's more so that their boss is telling them what to do. And they they that's not why they got involved in the tech industry. That's not what they were expecting. So they got involved in civic tech because that was a place where they could actually do those things. They could actually, work on a project with no hierarchy. They didn't have a boss telling them what to do. They could do their passion project. So the way that I sort of explain that movement from disillusionment to civic tech is that this is actually a way for a lot of the volunteers to sort of get what they wanted from their jobs that they're not getting. That's sort of what I witnessed when I was, doing my interviews.

So, so what this is sort of what I was taught when I when I speak of how they're trying to build sort of their ideal workplace, this is sort of what I'm getting at here. So what I found was that okay. So the next step in the process. So what I've just spoken about is that they we've get we've got this disillusionment. They seek out civic tech because it's sort of an outlet for attaining what they thought they're going to get from their jobs. But the next question is, okay. That now that they're here, what do they do? Like, what do they how do they use the space? How do they organize the space? How do they engage with each other, with the technology, and with city employees? And what I found was that the organization of work mimicked what they told me they wished their jobs looked like. So what they wished they could do at work, which is, as I mentioned, have a very flat hierarchy, work in project teams with a project manager. They used scrum. You know, all of these practices that they used at work, they transported into designing projects. They added on the things that they wish were going on at work but aren't. So for example, being able to work on, something that actually has a public impact, or being able to work on something that's their passion, or being able to leave a project whenever they want, or switch or pivot without asking permission from anybody, or without having to prove that this adds to profit. So it's a couple of things going on. So one is this trying to build out this workplace that looks like how they wish their workplace looked like. The other one is the exporting that you mentioned. And there, when I when I sort of go into what gets exported from workplaces, it's a couple of things. So one of them is moral judgments and the other one is practices, and those things often go together. So oftentimes it's practices that are morally judged as good things. So for example, what makes good engineering? What is good engineering? What's a good project? What does a successful project look like? And those value judgments oftentimes are the same that they use at their jobs. Now that can work in their workplace, which is why they do it, obviously, because it works for them, when they're designing a project for their employer. But oftentimes the issue is that it comes up against the value judgments of the city employees. So for example, I can, walk through a quick, event that I witnessed, that I talk about a little bit in the dissertation. I attended a hackathon where, specific technologists were helping out a local nonprofit to build a technology that they they wanted to use. And I keep this really vague to sort of protect the anonymity of the of the participants, but you can sort of imagine how this process would go. Right? So a nonprofit says, look. We really would we would like something like this, this would be really helpful. The technologist came back and said Okay great, we can build it out for you. So what I witnessed during the course of the day of the hackathon though was that the nonprofit wanted something very specific. They wanted something really tailored to what they were doing, and they had a pretty radical mission. They identified they're a pretty far left group, so they have a very specific political mission, and they have a very specific political goal that they wanna accomplish. So they're very explicit about it. And when they were describing what they wanted, they wanted, something built for them that would make their work easier. And what the engineers ended up doing was they came back and said, oh, but we could build this for you, but while we're building it, why don't we build it so that it can scale and not just you can use it, but all citizens can use it? And actually, we can type we can build this out so it doesn't just fit your needs, it can actually fit a bunch of other people's needs too. And the project started getting built out in a way that actually became more of a platform for different types of users to use it as they wanted rather than a tailored tool for this particular group. Now for the engineers, that's a good process. Right? That's good engineering. You're making something that's scalable and that can help a lot of different people. There's a lot of different use cases, and it can be very, flexible and personalizable, and people can use it for what they want to use it for. But it didn't really help the nonprofit very much at all. And actually, what ended up happening is that the project got so big that the small team of engineers really couldn't couldn't build it out in the way that they had envisioned. And so when I left the field, that project did not get finished. And that's not to say that if they kept it specific that it would have gotten finished. I mean, there's a lot of open questions about that. But what's interesting is about is what I wanna emphasize here is about that value judgment of scale as being a good thing. And often, we take that so for granted that scale is really good and that if you could help a lot more people with a single technology, that's a good thing. But in the context of the relationship they were trying to build with the nonprofit, that actually ended up creating some friction with the nonprofit. Because a nonprofit was like, I don't you know, we need this for our daily activities, and this is what we wanted. Like, it doesn't matter to us if you're building it for everybody. I've seen this also in another case where they, volunteers were pairing with a local bureaucrat in a Bay Area city on a project. And the bureaucrat was like, I don't want this to scale to California. I need this to work for my city. Like, this is my city, and I need to help my constituents. I I I can't wait an additional six months for this to scale up. Like, I need this now. So oftentimes, when those value judgments get exported from not just workplaces, but also, you know, if you think about how we learned in undergrad, right, how we're socialized into a lot of these disciplines and universities, right, how we learn about about engineering. Oftentimes, something like scale is something that is really highly valued, but actually can come up against what

Sure. Absolutely. So it's it's definitely not a term that I came up with. That's one that's been, kicked around by social scientists, and others for quite some time now. But what I so when I'm approaching a lot of the data that I had in the field, what I try to do is find a framework for making sense of all of this material. Okay. I've got all these interviews. I've got seeming contradictions. How do I make sense of all of this? And the one thing that has helped me make sense of things more than any anything else, and folks who know me know I'm a broken record on this, and it's a book called The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luke Boltanski and Eve Schiappello. And it is I mean, it's a brick of a book, and it's quite dense and it takes quite a while to get through. But it is more than anything else that I have read, has really helped me make sense of what is happening with our economic system right now, especially in the realm of digital technology in the tech industry. So folks looking for something to read on that, to learn more about network capitalism, I would highly recommend. It's called The New Spirit of Capitalism by Boltanski and Ciappello. And what they talk about is capitalism as a system, an economic system that has sort of shifted over time. And they're talking in what sociologists call ideal types, which means that we're sort of overgeneralizing for the sake of analysis and comparison. So of course there's, you know, this is, we're over generalizing but it still helps us sort of think through these big big processes. So we think about capitalism and these sort of ideal types that have shifted over time, we can start with like feudalism, right? Feudalism, we can go to industrial capitalism, or Fordism, and then we can go to sort of now, under network capitalism. So how do we explain the way that capitalism has operated over time and why it has shifted. And what they do in the book is they sketch out this really interesting framework for theorizing the relationship between capitalism as a social structure, as an economic structure, and critiques of capitalism. And their conclusion is actually that shifts in capitalism partially are a result of the way people critique it. That often capitalism sort of absorbs critique and then restructures the way that it works. People critique it again, it restructures, and it goes on and on and on. So the way they got to network capitalism was, and I won't go back to feudalism, I don't think we have time for me to go all the way back in time, but let's start with industrial capitalism. Let's start with let's start with Fordism, right? So let's start with thinking about this sort of, again, overgeneralizing but I still think very useful, thinking about the Fortis system of production. Right? We've got mass production, we've got industrial firms that are very which are organized in a very hierarchical way. Right? Folks get jobs in companies like Ford and stay there for their entire careers, right. And they move up the internal job ladder over time, they get bonuses and raises and whatever. But being like a company man and staying and having you know a thirty year job, forty year job with Ford is a good thing, right? We we judge that as a morally good thing. And they were financially compensated, right, for doing so. But what happened was that there were critiques of this system that were going on at the time. First of all, that it was incredibly rigid and alienating for the workers. That they had no control over the work that they were doing, right, you're working on an assembly line. It does require skill, it does require some creativity to do that, but it was incredibly alienating for people because they didn't get to use the full their full human capacity for creativity, right, and for building things. So one critique of these big massive firms were that they were really oppressive to the people who were working in them. And the thing that the authors argue that I find so intriguing was that capitalism sort of responded to that, those demands by its critics to say, you know, we want things that are not mass produced. We want things that are individualized. We want more freedom in the workplace. We want to be able to control our own labor. We don't wanna work in massive hierarchies anymore. Out of that sort of critique, we get actually the ethos of the tech industry in the Bay Area, which is all about separating itself from those old industrial firms of the East Coast. We're not like those companies. Right? We have flat hierarchies. Like we're a community, we're a family, like we are not like that. And so this network capitalism is not just a different way of producing goods, it's also a different system of moral judgments about what a good worker is, what a good firm is, what a good career looks like, and what good work looks like. And so under network capitalism, what they talk about is the, what we assume the basic human unit to be. What is what is humanity? What is what is the most basic unit of human connection and human activity? And they call it the project. So they actually call it the, projective, not projective capitalism, they call it projective, moral judgments because it's all based on the project. That everything is about organizing into projects, and we jump from project to project. And we, always have a new project down the pipeline. We're networking within our project teams, in between project teams. So network capitalism is not just about, you know, these globalized sort of firms that are building technologies that are not mass produced but are actually individualized and more catered to niche audiences. We're not all buying the identical thing, even though, you know, in some cases we might be. I'm pretty sure my iPhone looks like everybody else's iPhone. But the idea is that you can customize it, right? It's a little bit different. You can be unique in your consumption. But also that in the workplace that you have more control over your labor, right? That you can work on your passion. And Sarah Jaffe recently wrote a really excellent book called Work Won't Love You Back and I I highly recommend that. She goes into a really great history of how some of those, assumptions also came about. She kind of walks through them with domestic labor as well. I highly recommend that if folks are looking for another reading. But that's sort of what broadly network capitalism is. It's not just, again, different way of producing things, but it's also about our assumptions about what good work is. And that's sort of where we get this valorization of job hopping as well, right, about switching jobs over and over again and that being a really good thing. That's a good worker.

Yes. That's a great question. So, again, the the valorization of job hopping is something that's come up in a lot of other folks' research prior to mine. This is just sort of me noticing what a lot of folks before me have already pointed out. Gina Neff has a really great book called Venture Labor. Again, I highly recommend her text, where she talks a lot about these issues, about how people actually make meaning out of precarity. That often we have these very precarious jobs that, actually, they are very precarious. Even if they are high status and they are professionalized and they are well paid, they're still not permanent, really. They're still quite short term and they still can end at any time because very few of us are unionized and actually have, you know, strict protections against being laid off or fired or or or whatnot. So what she talks about in that book is that people actually make meaning out of this, right? It's not that we're just, you know, we wake up depressed and hate it and go to work, I mean a lot of us do, but at the same time you actually find some meaning in there too, right? We actually say okay how can I make this personally meaningful for me to engage in this? How do I actually motivate myself to get up and go to work and participate in this system? Right? And that's a big thing that Boltanski and Giappello talk about as well, is that for us to actually participate in capitalism, we need some kind of motivation to do it. Like we need why do we still participate? Yes, we need food. Yes, we need a paycheck to, you know, pay rent, but that doesn't really explain why we go above and beyond so often at at our jobs. Like why do we keep doing it? And what these authors have kind of come to is that is morality and moral judgments often. Is that we we actually think like this is what a good person does. This is what meaning is. This is what it means to have a meaningful career and a meaningful life. And so one of the ways is job hopping. Right? So one of the things that Boltanski and Chiappala talk about job hopping is that often at our jobs we don't actually know if we're doing well or not. That it's kind of hard to tell sometimes. Are we actually like, am I doing well on this project? Like, it's kind of hard to tell. And the moment of feedback is actually when you can find a new project. Like if you have another one down the pipeline, okay, I'm doing well. The more projects you have lined up, the better you feel that you're doing. And so job hopping actually for them gets sort of bound up in this valorization of activity of creating new projects and of jumping from project to project. The other thing that we also valorize, according to them is movement and not being rooted to a particular place. So often we assume folks who have moved to different cities, who have lived in different places, who have worked at different companies, they're active people and that's a good thing. Like we morally judge them as good. Like that's a good worker. If they've been that means that they're driven. That means that they're really self possessed. That means that they know what they want. That means that they're networking and they're meeting a lot of different people. If you stay in your hometown and have been working at the same job for twenty years, people tend to judge that as less than. That there's something about wanting security that is not as valued as it might have been under, for example, industrial capitalism, where that would have been the case, right? Where that is the good job, is that you are really rooted to an employer and to a place. And it's very very different now. So job hopping is something that a lot of different scholars have spoken about and have slightly different interpretations of why that that's been valorized. Part of it is what I think to sum up, I think the the compelling parts of all these arguments is that it is a way that folks have made meaning out of a very precarious situation. That it's it's we're sort of forced into the situation where we don't have much job security, and it's a way for us to make that meaningful. And actually, in some ways, reclaim a little bit of agency from our jobs and say, no. I'm choosing to go somewhere else. I'm choosing to do something else. Right? That's incredibly important to people. Right? It's incredibly important. And again, I've done the same thing and I still am. Right? I I will only have my postdoc for two years and then I'm off to somewhere else. So it it and and I feel good doing it. It's hard to it's hard to deny that. Right? I feel good having moved around. And it's you can't really deny that on people. Right? So to say that we're creating meaning doesn't mean that it's fake, and it doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. It just is.

Yeah. Yeah. That's, again, not to keep dropping books on the on the listeners, but I'm drawing there from a really excellent book called Data Feminism, by, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein. And, again, highly recommend Data Feminism. It gives some really actually concrete tips for how to embed a different set of politics into your design work. So if you're interested in that, I believe it's also open access, so you can, access that on the Internet. And one thing they talk about is about attribution to some of these projects. And one of their principles is to rethink what labor is. So their question is, how do we actually if we want to actually make projects more collaborative with the people who we are designing hopefully with and not for, right? How do we actually do that in a way that's really productive? In a way that we can actually acknowledge community members while designing? And one of their propositions is that we expand our understanding of what labour is. So for example, some of the the technologists that I interviewed would talk about the life cycle of a civic tech project. And oftentimes user research or something that sort of resembles user research either was not discussed really at all, or if it was, it was always something that came in at the back end. Right? After they had an actual product that was usable, they would kind of roll it out and see how it responded. Some groups that I spoke with had a user testing group, but there was nobody really running it and it didn't it wasn't necessarily active at the time. So what I think this this text Data Feminism could contribute to some of our discussions about civic technology is thinking about how not only when do you bring in community members in the process, but actually starting from a completely different place. It's not just the engineers who have the technical expertise and that you're helping somebody else, but actually that as a more equal group, you can actually collaborate and build something together and recognize other people's contributions as labour at the same level as your own labour. So, that would be, that's a very different starting point and it also requires it can be quite challenging in practice. So I'm gonna do it again, I'm gonna drop another book. Design Justice by Sasha Costanza Chock is a really really excellent text that walks through why this can actually be challenging to do in practice. They have a whole chapter on, on user research and how we can actually bring people into the process in a way that is more equitable. But often when we try to do that, there's still some frictions. Right? There's still some frictions between epistemologies, between cultural values, between ideas of what the end product is even supposed to be. It can be really, really hard to do in practice. But what I think the text data feminism can really bring to the discussion is actually recognizing that for example the nonprofits, like they're contributing to this project too even if they're not writing the code. Right? Like they are actually equal contributors. And if you think about it that way, it changes your entire orientation towards the community members that you're trying to help. Right? It might also even change your thought about what problems need to be solved. And that is another disconnect that I I I witnessed amongst the interviewees is when I asked them, what do you think the biggest problem is facing the Bay Area right now? To you, what is the social problem that we need to fix? They all said housing, and they all said homelessness. That was number one. Like, we need to do something about housing. And they all had different ideas about what to do about it. They didn't all agree on them. But they all said housing and homelessness is the problem. Like, that was nine out of 10. But when I then followed up and said, okay. What are you doing in civic tech to do something about this? They said, either that's not a tech problem, I'm not really sure why we're not doing anything about it, that's really hard, and I don't know how to fix it. Something like that. And what I think civic tech can do, which I think is a, a really promising way forward is to think about starting actually with that question of what problem do you think is a big problem, not what is a problem that tech can fix. What do you think is the big problem? Okay. If it's homelessness, how do we fix homelessness then? And it doesn't have to be tech. Right? So sometimes it can be, sometimes it's not. And I think that this question of, like, opening up what we recognize, first of all, as labor to con contributing to tech projects, but also recognizing that other people are also doing work on projects, and sometimes they should take the lead. Right? Sometimes. Right? But that it depends. But sometimes they should take the lead, and we can be there to help. But I think rethinking that division of labor on some of these projects and who is a contributor and who is the audience, troubling those distinctions can actually be, I think, very productive for creating new relationships.

Yeah. That's a great question. It's something that I might I've been thinking about this quite a bit. It is really difficult because there it sounds like a cop out, but I promise it's not. There are really no clear answers. Like, this is a really, really tough situation, and I struggled myself with this while writing my dissertation. And even now as I'm revisiting a lot of the material going forward, building on it, Because, universally, the people I talk to, and I really wanna emphasize this, really wanna do good things. And I have a ton of empathy for the civic technologists who are doing work out there. A lot of the volunteers, really genuinely, like, I wanna help my neighbors. Like, there are people who are not doing well, and I really, really wanna help them. But there are certain practices that are that I have witnessed in the field that are unfolding in civic tech that sometimes can undermine that very real urge to do something good. That sometimes some of these practices can get in the way. And a lot of them have to do with these judgments about our workplaces and our relationships to our jobs. One of them is the, I think, the impulse to try to build an ideal tech workplace. I think trying to, seek out and build out a place that looks like what you wish your job looked like, sometimes that can only reproduce some of the inequalities that happen in the workplace. And sometimes that can actually lead to some of the design decisions that have gotten some companies into a little bit of trouble with their products, right, of, like, reproducing bias in technology. So I think that questioning that relationship and questioning and starting to kind of open up for contestation, that relationship to our employers and our jobs is a really important one. And but there's no clear there's no clear route to doing that, and I don't know how that should be done. I don't have a clear answer for how we should do that. But there are other technologists who are feeling very disillusioned with their jobs. There's a lot of folks out there who are, and there's a lot of groups who are starting to organize around those issues. So if that really speaks to you, then I think that's a that's a great direction to go if you want to, you know, that could be a very productive route because there's a lot of groups that, again, are trying to politicize what it means to work in the industry. Right? And that could potentially be, very, very fruitful. The other thing I was going to say is sometimes I think it can be okay to admit that tech can't solve a particular problem. That it's okay to sometimes just say we can't actually you know, if this particular issue like homelessness, for example, incredibly complicated, probably can't be solved with an app. Right? And that is okay. That is totally okay. But it doesn't mean you don't have a place somewhere. It just means that it might not be in tech. Like, maybe there are other organizations that are doing work that could really use your help. And maybe it's not your tech skills, but they could still use your help. And so that is another, you know, possible route. One thing that I think would be really helpful is to start having or continue having, because some groups are having this, explicit political discussions about what you think social problems are, what the dynamics are before diving into designing a technology to address them. Because oftentimes, even team members don't agree on the cause of a particular problem or what the dynamics are, and that gets played out in technology design and can actually get in the way of building an effective technology when a technology can actually help. So I think having, some political discussions can actually be useful, not divisive. I heard some discussion that amongst volunteers that's that civic tech can be an apolitical space. I don't find that a very helpful framing. I I do think that it can it can actually make civic tech more successful to have political discussions and ask, okay. What is the if if we're gonna do something about housing, let's have a discussion about what's causing housing. And it's okay to take your time and to really, like, research it and figure it out. And if you feel like it's not your wheelhouse, then, it's okay to support another group that's doing it. Again, those are not very easy easy to do in practice, and those are just some things that I you know, based on my sort of limited scope of my project that I witnessed. And, again, those all come with caveats because a lot of civic technologies are already doing those things, but that's just sort of what came to mind.

Absolutely. I think I I heard absolutely the same thing of a of a equating politics with political parties. Right? Absolutely. And you don't need to organize, like, a voting drive. Like, that's not you know, you can still talk politics as in, like, you know, distribution of resources, right, is a really important question. That's politics. Right? How do we wanna distribute our resources in San Francisco? What do we want to do about you know, we've got homes and we've got homeless people. What do we want to do about it? Right. And that's a political question. And it's unavoidable. Like, you do have to kind of start start to grapple with that. And and it's important. It is important.

So I do wanna emphasize this is even though it was my dissertation, it still is very much a work in prod in progress. So I, I submitted my dissertation, you know, to finish my PhD, but I'm still working on the data, and I'm still working through my argument. It's still sort of, you know, changing every day. So, if folks would like to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to share your thoughts on anything that you've read in the disc or something that came up today, I would be more than happy to chat over email or, direct message on Twitter or, if you wanna set up a quick chat, I'm happy to do it. I am eventually going to be turning this into a book, hopefully. So, that's a little bit farther down the line. But one thing I'm doing with my postdoc at Microsoft Research is I'm working on a proposal for the book. So I'm putting together a pitch to university presses. And in the meantime, I do want to do some additional interviews, and I do want to one thing that's really important to me is that I check-in with the community that it participated in the study and see, you know, what resonated with you, what didn't, you know, where do you think are the things that I'm missing that you think are really crucial. That's a really important part of the ethnographic process, and it's something that I'm sort of engaging in now that I finished the disc and I'm moving towards the book. So I would love to hear from people if you want to chat about this. My website is karinawrider.wordpress.com and this little contact button. So feel free to send me a message on there, or you can, just Google me. I'm on Twitter. If you search my name, I should show up on Twitter. Feel free to send me a DM. And if you wanna chat about it, informally, that's totally okay. If you're interested in actually participating formally and you would like to do a formal interview, just let me know. I am going to be, it's gonna be a little bit in the future because I've got to go through ethics at my new institution and get that all sorted out. So I'm not doing official interviews right now. But prior to the book, I absolutely will be. Especially if you're in the Bay Area, I'd love to hear from you, but outside as well. That would be I would love to hear from anybody and just kinda check-in and see see what resonated with you and what didn't. It's very important to me to sort of make sure that I'm not reproducing some of the things that I'm criticizing in my own research, that I'm not, just sort of extracting data from, from volunteers and running away with it. So, so, yeah, I would that would be my concluding thing is that if you'd like to chat about it, I am absolutely open, and I I would love to have a a one on one or even a if there's a group of people who wanna get together and and have, like, a group meeting, I'd be happy to do that as well. That would be great.