Micah Loewinger: Silicon Valley was once considered a liberal force, but its reactionary roots go way back.

Becca Lewis: The idea that technology can bring us into the future by restoring an older social order through these powerful men.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is on the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also on the show, a conversation with the CEO of Bluesky on how to billionaire proof the Internet.

Jay Graber: Well, Zuckerberg has built a digital empire. It's one man at the top of it, and I want people to realize that we can take that back. We can build our own digital spaces.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, for every parenting question, there's an app that says it has the answer.

Amanda Hess: I was trained to see myself as somebody who needed to be surveilled, that my pregnancy needed to be surveilled in order for me to do it correctly.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. It's been a big year for group chats. There was that accidentally leaked Signal thread featuring the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg.

News clip: Jeffrey Goldberg says he was included in a group chat full of our nation's top security officials as they were texting back and forth about highly sensitive war plans.

Jon Stewart: You know, back in my day, if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you'd work the sources, meet them in a dark garage, earn the trust. Now just wait for the national security advisor to be distracted by White Lotus while he's setting up his bomb Yemen group chat.

Micah Loewinger: In April, Semafor's Ben Smith wrote about the network of private chats where some of America's most powerful personalities coordinate and debate. There's the Signal group, featuring famous podcasters, another for Black political elites. Then there are the Silicon Valley chats. Last month, The Washington Post reported on several screenshots from a group conversation between between White House officials and tech leaders, including investor Marc Andreessen, who was documented fulminating over diversity programs at American universities.

News clip: So here's what Mark writes. The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal. When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years, and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.

Micah Loewinger: Given our current reality, it was shocking but not surprising to hear a Silicon Valley leader so unabashedly beating the MAGA drum. In the not so distant past, the assumption was that the tech industry had a left wing bent.

Becca Lewis: For a long Time, there has been a certain form of liberal politics that has been really prominent in the Valley. Gay marriage absolutely is a big piece of it. So is lean in style feminism promoted by Sheryl Sandberg.

Micah Loewinger: Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. I spoke to her earlier this year about how conservative thinkers were always in Silicon Valley and even helped shape some of the fundamental politics of the industry, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, a guy named George Gilder.

Becca Lewis: So George Gilder was one of the biggest evangelists of Silicon Valley. He ran arguably Silicon Valley's most successful investment newsletter in the second half of the decade. There was this phenomenon named after him called the Gilder Effect, which basically meant if he endorsed a certain technology or stock, it immediately increased in value as his subscribers would go and invest in it. He had gotten his start as a mentee of William F. Buckley, kind of the godfather of modern conservatism. He had really made a name for himself in the 1970s as a provocative anti feminist.

George Gilder: The female headed families of today create an unending chain of burdens for tomorrow as their children disrupt classrooms, fill the jails, throng the welfare rolls.

Becca Lewis: And then in the 1980s, he remade himself as a supply-side economics promoter.

George Gilder: The more I examined capitalism in anthropological terms, the more it became clear to me that capitalists give, and capitalists are people who are continually giving their wealth to others.

Becca Lewis: And he became one of the biggest economic gurus of the first Reagan administration. And he really determined that there was a crisis of masculinity happening and a crisis of the American nuclear family that was really caused by feminism, caused by women in the work, and caused by welfare programs. He thought that the way out of this crisis of masculinity was entrepreneurship. So he really helped create this cult of the entrepreneur in the 1980s that traveled really far and wide and became a part of the broader American mythos.

Micah Loewinger: So much of what you're saying feels familiar to this moment, especially this part, you wrote Gilder claimed that entrepreneurs were better suited to lead the country into the future than the experts found in academia or government.

Becca Lewis: He specifically blamed the rise of feminism. He talked about feminism's tyranny of credentials. And so entrepreneurs were this answer to that problem, that they didn't have to have traditional educations, they didn't have to have official roles in government. They were supposed to be these naturally genius men.

Micah Loewinger: How did the press at the time write about George Gilder and his ideas about entrepreneurship?

Becca Lewis: Even if it wasn't articulating Gilder's exact ideas about feminism, they would still take the ideas about entrepreneurship at face value. They still ended up amplifying a lot of his ideas and really helping to turn certain entrepreneurs into the celebrities that we know today. You already had Steve Jobs, you already had Bill Gates, and now the media was looking for more and more success stories to be able to feature. And Marc Andreessen provided that.

Micah Loewinger: He was a part of a group of students at the University of Illinois who developed an early web browser called Mosaic. Then he went on to make a lot of money as co founder of the Netscape web browser. He also started a big venture capital fund. You've said that Andreessen was, "the first entrepreneur who got the media treatment in the era of the World Wide Web."

Becca Lewis: There was a phenomenon happening in Silicon Valley where it was turning more and more away from hardware, which could take years and years to develop, and more and more towards software. There was a much quicker turnaround, and it meant that within a year or two of coming to Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen was able to have an IPO, become a multimillionaire, and get this instantaneous media treatment that called him the next big thing. And this was all before the age of 25.

Micah Loewinger: In 2023, he wrote the "Techno-Optimist manifesto," in which he lays out a lot of his thinking and also a long list of people he calls patron saints. Read the works of these people, he writes, and you too will become a techno optimist. On that list is George Gilder, who we just spoke about, Adam Smith and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was a founder of the Italian Futurist movement. Who were the futurists, and why is it significant that one of their principal thinkers is being featured so prominently on Andreessen's reading list?

Becca Lewis: The Futurists were a really fascinating group of artists in Italy at the start of the 20th century who became really big supporters of Mussolini and Italian fascism. They embraced technology and particularly automobiles, and they were obsessed with this idea of speed and modernity. They also very openly rejected the feminists, and they glorified war and violence. It unsettles this assumption that we have in the United States that somehow technological progress must necessarily be linked to social progress.

Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany specifically believed that new technologies could help restore older social orders. In Germany, the new motorways, the Autobahn, was this hyper modern thing that they also believed would help return German people to the countryside and kind of come into contact more with the Volk history of Germany. So technology can be used as this way of enacting reactionary politics. And I think that's what Andreessen is getting at here.

Micah Loewinger: Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, interviewed Marc Andreessen on her podcast. In this interview, Andreessen says that there was a deal, a social compact between liberal elites and the tech ultra rich, which was--

Marc Andreessen: Somebody like me basically could start a company. Everybody would think that that was great. Then you could go public, you could make a lot of money. That was great. You would pay your taxes, and then at the end of your, you know, career, you would be left with this giant pot of money. Then what you would do is donate it to philanthropy. Then, by the way, along the way, the press loves you.

Micah Loewinger: Then he says the deal between tech leaders and liberal politicians was broken.

Marc Andreessen: So basically, every single thing I just said is, you know, for the last decade, has been now held to be presumptively evil. Just the whole idea that there are certain people who merit a greater economic outcome than others is itself evil. Technology, of course, is held to be presumptively evil. Tech companies are held to be presumptively evil.

Micah Loewinger: What do you make of this?

Becca Lewis: To a large degree, what he's saying is true. That in many ways, both the Clinton administration and the Obama administration were so keen to work together with Silicon Valley that they didn't have any interest in holding them accountable in any way, in regulating them in any way, or in questioning kind of the underlying assumptions of the accumulation of this power. It's easy not to have the reactionary streaks come out when everyone is agreeing that you should be the one running the world. It's easy to kind of be this magnanimous face of generosity and the future.

I think that the Democrats did start turning against Silicon Valley, particularly in the wake of Trump's election in 2016. People started looking for answers around disinformation, starting to move away from seeing Silicon Valley's technologies as inherently good. Then from there, you had the Biden administration start to turn towards regulation of technology. All of these things were, I think, very startling to people like Marc Andreessen.

Micah Loewinger: But it wasn't just Democrats. Right-wing members of Congress supported antitrust investigations into these companies. Do you think that the open embrace of President Trump from all of these tech billionaires is opportunistic because he's the guy who won? Or do you think it's tech billionaires finally being honest about what they've been believing secretly for a long time now.

Becca Lewis: Andreessen talked about wanting Trump in office because he would deregulate AI, because he would deregulate crypto, because he would lower capital gains taxes. A lot of them were supporting him beforehand. Of course, you have figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook and others who I think are more belatedly supporting him. There ultimately are these shared reactionary resonances, right? This resentment towards feminism and the challenging of male power, this resentment towards what in the '90s was called multiculturalism, what now is being called kind of DEI politics. I think that that also is allowing this kind of shared coalition to be built.

Micah Loewinger: You quote tech journalist Michael Malone, who wrote in the '90s, "Forget digital utopia. We could be headed for techno fascism."

Becca Lewis: I've tended to refer to these sets of ideas as reactionary futurism. This set of ideas that technology can help bring us into the future by way of restoring an social order. I also think that techno authoritarianism can be a useful way of talking about it because the way that they see that happening is through these kind of charismatic, individual, powerful men.

Micah Loewinger: Well, yes, help square this for me, because when I listen to and read Marc Andreessen, he sees technology as a force that will free people from authoritarianism. I don't see in his worldview any sense that he and these other tech leaders might be participating in authoritarianism.

Becca Lewis: Well, I think they have very different understandings about what authoritarianism is. The way that he or other tech folks talk about it. It's an overpowering, regulating government that is authoritarian. It also refers to what they think of as the overpowering what they call wokeness or DEI, to them that is authoritarianism. I think that it's so fundamental in their viewpoint that they are the ones upsetting the norm, that they are naturally disruptors, they are naturally outside of the mainstream, that it's impossible to think that they are the ones being authoritarian.

Micah Loewinger: Becca, thank you very much.

Becca Lewis: Thanks so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and author of a Guardian article titled 'Headed for Technofaschism': the right wing roots of Silicon Valley. I spoke to her in February. This is on the media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger. You may have noticed that On the Media doesn't post on X anymore. We made the decision a few months ago, and honestly, we haven't looked back. Now, if you want to hear from the show on social media, you can find us on Bluesky, which we moved to for several reasons, because while it does kind of feel like early Twitter, under the hood, there's an important difference.

Mike Masnick: The idea was to really try and move the control and power away from the center to the edges of the network.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Masnick is a longtime tech journalist and the founder and editor of Techdirt. Back in 2014, he was observing how Twitter and Reddit were struggling with their own respective content moderation challenges.

Mike Masnick I was thinking about the earlier Internet and earlier forms of the Internet where there wasn't so much centralized power. You know, there wasn't some billionaire sitting in Menlo Park deciding who could say what and do what. At the same time, I recognized that you didn't want a free for all because there were horrible people who would do horrible things and that would scare away other people. So I started to try and think through, like, is there a different approach?

Micah Loewinger: His idea - what if social media ran on a protocol similar to the HTTP that the Internet runs on, letting users access any website from any browser? He used the example of the protocol that email runs on.

Mike Masnick: If you don't like what Google is doing with Gmail, you can switch to Proton Mail or Yahoo Mail or Outlook and you can still email the people at the other places. You don't lose all of your contacts. You can also put in place all different kinds of spam filters or other tools where the power is in the hands of the actual user and they can determine what it is that they want to do and how they want to experience email.

Micah Loewinger: Which is fundamentally different from how most social media platforms work.

Mike Masnick: If you leave Facebook and all your family uses Facebook, you can't really communicate with them in the same way. There's no alternative to Facebook that allows you to continue to communicate with the people that you wanted to communicate with on Facebook.

Micah Loewinger: At the time, the idea of getting a critical mass of users to switch over to a new social media site seemed unlikely to Masnick. His best bet, he thought, was to convince the existing social media companies to adopt this protocol based approach. He brought the idea to higher ups at Snapchat and Facebook.

Mike Masnick: I don't think the person at Snapchat even understood what I was talking about, but the person at Facebook was like, there's no way. Facebook will never do anything like this. This is a crazy idea and it's a stupid idea.

Micah Loewinger: So he put these crazy ideas together in a paper called Protocols, Not Platforms published in 2019.

Mike Masnick: I sort of assume that I'm going to write this and I'm going to be that weird crank who has this, you know, philosophical approach to the way the world would be better, and nobody listens to me. Occasionally I'll yell from my shack in the woods about how the world could be better if only people listened to me.

Micah Loewinger: But that's not what happened.

Mike Masnick: Someone had sent Jack Dorsey my paper, and he wanted to have a call with me and said, at Twitter, we've been having all these big existential discussions about what should Twitter be and how should it work. He said when he read my paper, it sort of clicked that this was the answer to the debate that they'd been having internally, and they built it. Actually, seeing something that I wrote turn into this is wild. Never in my wildest dreams that I actually think something like that would actually happen.

Jay Graber: Mike Masnick is on our board now.

Micah Loewinger: Jay Graber was hired by Jack Dorsey to lead the project and is now the CEO of Bluesky. When I spoke to Graeber earlier this year, I started our conversation by asking her about her given name, Lantian, which happens to mean blue sky in Mandarin.

Jay Graber: Yes, coincidence.

Micah Loewinger: So you did not name the site after yourself?

Jay Graber: No, Twitter named the site, and then I saw that they had this project called Bluesky that was decentralized social, and I was like, oh, this is something I must work on, because I'm already working on a decentralized social network.

Micah Loewinger: So you're now CEO of this hot new social media company. What have you learned about the Internet that you didn't know before your product really caught on?

Jay Graber: There's been a lot of lessons as we've scaled up, because we've grown by 10x multiple times, and that's a lot of growth in just a bit over a year. We opened up to the public last February. Users don't like a lot of complexity. You have to make it really easy for them. That's why when you get into the Bluesky app, it looks and works just like old Twitter did. But then under the hood, you actually have all this choice. So over time, we've been showing people how to use these customization options and explaining it to them. It's not something that's intuitive immediately because people are used to centralized sites that don't give you any choice or control.

Micah Loewinger: Let's talk about a little bit of that customization. One thing you can change is how your feed is moderated, how posts are filtered or emphasized to you. You've called it a stackable approach to content moderation. Give me some examples about specific ways that people can tailor their experience.

Jay Graber: An example of this would be somebody's built an AI art labeler, because some artists want to know if the art they're looking at is made by a human artist or is AI generated. Now, this isn't something that we have a foundational moderation policy on, but if you report a post to the AI art labeler, it will tag it as AI art. Then if you subscribe to that labeler, you can say, I want to see this. I want to have it labeled so I just get the warning label on it. Or maybe I'll turn it off for now. People have built labelers for screenshots from other sites, for political content, and then you can use these filters to cut down what you see so that you're in a space that you want to be in.

Micah Loewinger: Last year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wore a shirt that said "Either Zuck or nothing" in Latin at a developer conference. It was a play on the phrase Caesar or nothing. Positioning himself, Mark Zuckerberg, as Caesar. This year at South by Southwest, you wore a shirt that said "A world without Caesars," also in Latin. What specifically about Zuckerberg and Facebook did you see as something worth making this public statement about?

Jay Graber: Well, Zuckerberg has built a digital empire, and it's one man at the top of it. We've helped him build that with our data and our time. I want people to realize that we can take that back. We can build our own digital spaces on an open protocol where anyone can get involved. We want to live in a world without Caesars. We want to live in a democracy, and we want our online social spaces to reflect that.

Micah Loewinger: You've said that Bluesky is billionaire proof. This has become a kind of marketing term for the site. What do you mean by that? How is it billionaire proof?

Jay Graber: What this means is that if a billionaire acquired the Bluesky company or did something to take over, the foundation that Bluesky is built upon lets users freely migrate. So if something happened down the road where Bluesky changed hands, like we've seen with other social companies, users could move over to another app and importantly, keep all of their relationships and their followers and their same username. This reduces the incentive, actually, for billionaires to come and make a big change with Bluesky, or for me to drastically change business direction because we would lose users.

Micah Loewinger: Okay. But of course, the elephant in the room is that Bluesky, like every other social media site, needs to make money. You've said that Bluesky won't sell ads or profit off of user data. It's important to note that these are two major things that have denigrated the user experience on other social media sites. I know you're familiar with the term enshittification from Cory Doctorow. He's referring to this experience by which pushes to profit off of big platforms makes them worse. I mean, X and Facebook feeds are now filled with annoying ads. We know that they're violating our privacy with surveillance in certain ways, but this is how they make money. Bluesky was founded with a grant from Twitter. It's since received venture capital funding. But you're still a long way from making money. So doesn't that leave the company sort of vulnerable to a hostile takeover, like what we saw from Elon Musk? If you build up something big, what's stopping a billionaire from coming and trying to squeeze it for all it's worth?

Jay Graber: I think the important thing here is to understand that we're open source all the way up. What this means is that the power of exit, so the right for users to leave is built into the System. So if BlueSky, the company, were to enshittify, for example, if BlueSky starts sticking ads in between every single post on the main algorithm that we provide as a default when you sign up, there's actually thousands of other algorithms you can switch to, and you can just move your timeline over and uninstall the one that's the default. Then you wouldn't be on our own feed, even within the Bluesky app. So that means we want to keep that feed good. We don't want to shove so many ads in that you get sick of it.

Micah Loewinger: Are ads on the way for Bluesky?

Jay Graber: So the first thing actually is subscriptions. That's on the way soon. We're not exploring ads right now. There's people in the ecosystem doing sponsored posts in their feeds. And we're kind of seeing how it plays out, because one thing we've said is that in an attention economy, at some point ads work their way in. But I think that the way it's going to emerge in the Blue sky ecosystem is a bit more like the web outside of social companies, where, you know, in Google search, sometimes you get ads, but it's not shoved between every search result.

Micah Loewinger: So right now, the way that you think that Bluesky can become financially sustainable is first and foremost through a subscription service?

Jay Graber: It's one of the first steps. We think one of the most exciting things long term is actually marketplace models where we're creating connections between creators and their audiences, users and these other developer driven experiences and sites, and then taking a cut when people do transactions or exchange value. So people are already paying each other for feeds for stuff that other people have created. We would eventually like to build out a marketplace that supports all of these things.

Micah Loewinger: One way that Bluesky has set itself apart from say X/Twitter is that your site doesn't downrank links. I can tell you as somebody in the media business, we journalists like when people click on our links, even if that means that, hey, they leave your social network for a little while to read our article or listen to our podcast. Media companies in the past have been really burned by Facebook and Twitter. These were companies that courted news publishers. Facebook even went as far as to pay newsrooms to post more on their site. Then they kind of did this about face. They changed their strategy, they deprioritized news and links and a lot of companies just didn't recover.

Today, big and small news outlets alike, from The Boston Globe to The Guardian to The New York Times, have reported seeing considerably higher traffic from their links on Bluesky than on competitors like X and Threads, despite Bluesky having a much smaller user base right now. What role do you see Bluesky playing in our kind of news industry crisis moment?

Jay Graber: Other sites let you grow your audience up until you want to convert them and take them off through a link to subscribe or to read your article. Then they downrank that because they want to keep you scrolling on their timeline, because that's where they're showing you ads. So by not pursuing this single timeline ad driven model, what we're doing is being a neutral gateway. We're just passing users directly through to show them the stuff that they're following. It's a simple concept, but it means that people get a direct connection with their followers and they get way more traffic and subscriptions as a result. We're not trying to stall users on our site to capture that ad traffic.

Micah Loewinger: One of the features you've added for the benefit of news companies is link tracking. This is a kind of ethical fuzzy area that I kind of want to unpack with you. This is useful for publishers like On the Media because we want to see where audiences are finding out about our show and clicking on our stuff. It also means that you at Bluesky are tracking what users click on, which is a kind of surveillance. In the era of a Trump presidency, is it fair to see this as potentially dangerous? For instance, couldn't the government in theory subpoena Bluesky for information about, say, who clicked on a petition or protest signup form? If you have that data, is it ripe for the picking by the wrong people?

Jay Graber: Our goal here is to help sites understand that their traffic is coming from Bluesky. So this works like a website that just lets users see when they link between them. On the web, this refer information is usually sent by the user's browser. So we're just providing parity to that behavior. There's not a back channel or cookie tracking that follows you elsewhere or anything like that. It's just the basic facilities of a web browser. That helps sites understand where their traffic is coming from. Now, down the road, I think we would like to give people the option to opt out of this if it's something that they're really concerned about.

Micah Loewinger: You've staked yourself out as an anti tech billionaire tech CEO, but we live in a time where we've seen so many idealistic people in Silicon Valley abuse our trust. I know that you're building a protocol that exists outside of you, but how can we trust you, Jay?

Jay Graber: Well, first of all, my intention is to build an open system that retains user trust. The beauty of this approach is actually that if we ever drift from this alignment that we've set out, we've built ourselves on an open foundation that lets users have the power to leave without losing their social graph.

Micah Loewinger: So basically, the idea is that we don't need to trust you?

Jay Graber: That's the goal. I think we should have an online world where if a website or an app abuses your trust, you have options to leave. You know, if a news site where you were reading news started to abuse your trust and tell you lies and jam ads in everywhere, you would just use a different news site.

Micah Loewinger: It's funny because even while so many people in the sort of tech governance world are supporting what you're doing, there are already plans to kind of protect Bluesky from eventual or potential corruption. I'm sure you're familiar with the Free Our Feeds initiative, which is a nonprofit foundation that's raising funds to protect Bluesky's protocol from tampering. In effect, they're trying to protect your creation from you. How do you feel about that project?

Jay Graber: I think that's healthy. This means that there will be a diversity of experiences out there. BlueSky will be one app in the broader atmosphere, which is what we call the broader AT Protocol ecosystem. You could choose between two different microblogging apps, or you could choose between the Bluesky microblogging app and the Skylight Social, which is a video app, or the Flashes app, which is a Instagram-style photo app. Those are all run by different people. Those are run by developers outside the Bluesky company who will be operating according to their own principles.

Micah Loewinger: You said something really interesting recently that I want to ask you to expand upon. You said societies start to reflect the structure of its dominant form of communication. How has centralization of social media produced this political moment?

Jay Graber: I think centralization means that you really have one point of pressure. One sort of nerdy analogy I use is it's like the one ring of power that means that you can control the speech of billions if you own a major social platform. Then everyone wants that control. Billionaires will try to purchase it. Governments will also go after that point of control. I think that having more diversity of companies that are operating this ecosystem means that you will have different CEOs who make different choices.

Micah Loewinger: So what's at stake if we don't redefine how we communicate online?

Jay Graber: I think the future of democracy is at stake because democracy depends upon pluralism, people being able to have different viewpoints, find compromises. Right now, social media, I think, has accelerated some of that breakdown in our belief in democratic norms. I don't think a single app is the solution. I think having an ecosystem where new solutions can be built is the path forward. So you want a way where people with ideas on how do we improve the state of discourse, how do we address misinformation, they don't have to wait for a single CEO to make a decision to address this. They can start building a solution themselves off to the side and say, hey, try this out. Or they can integrate it into the application because it's an open platform. Those are the ways I think we will more quickly find a path forward that allows democracy to survive and thrive.

Micah Loewinger: Jay, thank you very much.

Jay Graber: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky. This conversation first aired in April. Coming up, having a baby in the digital age. This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. I recently became a grandparent, and I will say say, watching from the proverbial sidelines, pregnancy and the early days of parenting look very different from what I remember. There's a lot more information available and a lot more technology involved. That's the subject of Amanda Hess's new book, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. Our producer, Molly Rosen, could relate. I'll let her take it from here.

Molly Rosen: So There's a reason that I am doing this interview and not one of our hosts, and that's because I just had a baby nine months ago.

Amanda Hess: Oh, my gosh.

Molly Rosen: I either recently experienced or am in the midst of some of the things that you write about in your book. I really felt like your book helped me process some questions that I did not even know would arise for me. You have written for many years about the Internet and pop culture, and this book is a lot about how various technologies mediated the experience of your pregnancy and birthday. When did you decide that there was a book here?

Amanda Hess: I have been writing about the Internet for such a long time, and I have this relationship with it where I have a critical distance to the things that I'm investigating. It's very routine for me to look into something that's happening on the Internet and maybe join into a community for a little bit and then leave and leave it behind emotionally, too. It was immediately when I got pregnant that I realized that that was not going to happen this time. I just had a very different relationship where the critical distance was completely gone.

When I was seven months pregnant and I had an abnormal ultrasound, I had this feeling, this intense, superstitious feeling that by taking notes on my experience and writing little jokes to myself about how funny maternity wear advertising is, that I had doomed my pregnancy in some way. This very powerfully superstitious feeling. I'm not a superstitious person. So then it was clear to me that I was not going to be writing about this experience. And then it was only later, after my son was born, that I realized that this feeling of superstition and this just sub rational part of me that was driving so much of my interaction with the Internet was actually really interesting to me and I should try to find out more about why I felt that way.

Molly Rosen: That's so interesting because I feel like I hear you saying that you almost had your critic hat on at first where some things were maybe funny or unusual, and then it got very real.

Amanda Hess: I also felt like I've done a bunch of stuff on the Internet that maybe is less than productive for myself. Just wasting time trying to solve a plane crash from 15 years ago.

Becca Lewis: Sure.

Amanda Hess: Or more seriously, trying to lose some weight and getting a little bit obsessed with an app that shows the jagged line of my body trying to approach this straight line of my goal weight or whatever. I always felt like the only person I was really hurting was myself. Immediately when I got pregnant, I was like, I'm now using these tools to bring another person into the world. I think that also forced a reckoning for me in trying to understand better how I was internalizing some of the messages from those apps.

Molly Rosen: I do want to ask about one of the apps that you used pre pregnancy and then during pregnancy, which is a period tracker app called Flo. It's very popular. When you became pregnant, it switched into pregnancy mode immediately.

Amanda Hess: Immediately, when I activated pregnancy mode, I just had a completely different experience with it. The interface was so different. It had turned from this kind of empowering diary into a disciplinary program, something that would tell me what I should be doing every day or every week, and then show this visualization of my progress through a CGI image of a stock pregnant person whose belly is expanding and a CGI image of this cell floating in nothing, and then a blastocyst and an embryo and a little shrimp-like being, and then like a little peach baby doll that represented my child.

I think the thing that I never could have explained to myself before, and it's difficult for me to even understand now that I'm not pregnant anymore, is that when I looked at that janky image of a fetus, I felt like I was looking inside my body. It felt like it was really a true representation of my pregnancy. When, of course, it's just this cartoon that's generated for tens of millions of people who activate pregnancy mode through the app.

Molly Rosen: You write that advertising on Instagram became so personalized that it started to feel intimate.

Amanda Hess: So immediately after I got a positive pregnancy test, I searched what to do when you get pregnant on Google, and a WebMD link popped up. What I was not aware of was, like, how embedded in the online advertising ecosystem WebMD is. So I then later went back and retraced my steps and found that when I searched for that again and went back to that WebMD page, that action had allowed 74 ad tracking companies to track me and stored 153 cookies in my browser and also sent that information to Facebook.

So about 24 hours after I made that search, when I was just staring at Instagram, I started seeing my ads turn into prenatal vitamin ads, maternity dress ads. A lot of the times when a tech company is accused of using sensitive data that has to do with menstruation or pregnancy, they'll say something like, there's no part of our backend that's tracking who is and who isn't pregnant, but there really doesn't have to be, because the systems are complex enough and automated enough that it just knows that if you search what I searched, you may be more interested in prenatal vitamin ads than someone who has not searched for that and ended up on the I just got pregnant page on WebMD.

Molly Rosen: Something hat I think you did, which I also did, which I felt very clever doing, even though it's probably completely useless, was when I'd sign up for stuff and it would ask me for my due date, I would lie about the due date. What I thought was funny was you actually looked into how much that information about your pregnancy and your due date was. You write that, "My pregnancy was about as valuable as a list of CBD buyers suffering from OCD, a list of booming boomers with erectile dysfunction, and less valuable than a list of people who had purchased a Donald Trump themed chess set and a list of medical geneticists." You came to the conclusion that the value of this data was 1/10 of $0.01, almost worthless.

Amanda Hess: When we talk about how valuable the knowledge of a person's pregnancy is to ad systems, there was a part of me that when I heard that, I was a little bit like, ooh, I'm in such a valuable state right now. It was a little bit flattering. But the actual money that's changing hands, it's so meager. The actual fact of the day that your baby is gonna be born, which to me was the most interesting piece of data that my body had ever produced. This idea of when might a baby come out of it is to them actually very, very, very cheap and just sold by the thousand. A lot of my book is encountering these technologies and feeling that they're so intimate and tailored to me and that they make me feel special, and then looking at the back end and understanding that these companies don't care about me or my pregnancy, I'm not special to them at all. I'm one of hundreds of millions.

Molly Rosen: You open your book with a pretty intense scene. You're lying on an exam chair in the doctor's office and your routine ultrasound is going kind of suspiciously long. The technician keeps taking images and you can tell that they've seen something that they want to look into. This starts you on what you call a diagnostic odyssey. Trips from one medical specialist to another.

Amanda Hess: I was lying there on the table, and every time this had happened previously in my pregnancy, there was a little voice of worry that was like, what if something's wrong? What are they going to say? Every time it was completely normal. This time it wasn't. It felt like this thing that I had long feared was coming true. The thing that I remember the most about being on that table, my husband wasn't there because this was 2020, and so guests were not allowed in an ultrasound room. My first thought wasn't, I wish my husband was here. My first thought was, I wish I had my phone with me here so I could start Googling these things that I'm seeing the technician investigate on the screen. Then once I did seize my phone, I seldom let it go.

Molly Rosen: You wrote that if I had the phone, I could hold it close to the exam table and Google my way out. I could pour my fears into its portal and process them into answers.

Amanda Hess: Yes, eventually, when the doctor came in, he told me that my son was sticking out his tongue on the ultrasound persistently, which is unusual, and that he suspected that it might be a rare genetic condition called Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which now I'm very familiar with, because he was right, and my son does have that. But at the time, all I heard was that unrecognizable German name syndrome. It was incredibly scary. It took a full month to confirm that that's what it was. In between, there were many theories, some of them catastrophic, about what was actually going on.

Later, what I really came away with from that experience was, I'd started in the pregnancy Internet so centered in its image of what a pregnant person and a pregnancy is supposed to look like. White, able bodied woman who has enough money that maybe she'll buy a gadget to put in her nursery. So we're gonna pay a lot of attention to her. Then this image from Flo that was just stock fetus.

It was only after I had that ultrasound that I realized, of course, Flo's stock image did not look like my son looked on an ultrasound. This other pregnancy Internet zone that I had entered was one that acknowledged disability, which the generic pregnancy Internet really did not. I felt like I had been cast out of the normal pregnancy Internet that had spent seven months trying to get me to feel like it was my community. At first that felt awful. Later I now think of it as such a gift to have this opportunity to see all of the assumptions that it had been making all along that didn't apply to me. Frankly, like, do not apply to anyone.

Molly Rosen: You go through something with your first son that to me just sounded incredibly difficult, which Is that you had to strap on oxygen tubes every time he was sleeping. As someone who is very familiar with the difficulty of newborn sleep, that just sounds hard. You embarked on a journey where you tried out some of the baby products on the market to optimize sleep.

Amanda Hess: Before my son was born, my husband and I learned about the Snoo, which is this robotic bassinet that sways back and forth and emits a whooshing sound that mimics the womb. And the Snoo promises that Snoo babies, it says, on average, sleep one to two hours more than babies who do not go to sleep in the Snoo. I didn't buy it from the company. I bought it secondhand. So I didn't have any of its troubleshooting access. It meant that I was also then going online to Snoo online communities of parents being like, "How do I get this thing to work like it says to, like, actually make my child sleep more because he was not a great or easy sleeper."

The thing that I really took away from that experience was this device, which not only promised to improve my baby's sleep, but also promised to improve my understanding of my baby's sleep in that it also spat out this data and insights into when he had woken up, when he was fussing, when he was going back to sleep, the cumulative hours he had slept, had actually gotten in the way of me really understanding him and what he needed for sleep.

So after I used that, I became curious about all of these other products that are on the market. Smart baby cameras. The Owlet, which is a quasi-medical sock that you put around your child's ankle that gives you insight into your child's pulse and oxygen saturation and stuff like that. I really came to understand, because I was using a real medical device, I wanted only to get rid of this device. The idea that tech companies are selling to people to bring the medical environment into their home speaks to just this tantalizing idea that we can completely control and optimize everything about our baby's health and their sleep. It makes sense to me that so many of these things are focused on sleep, because it's only when your newborn is knocked out that it seems like you have any control over them, really.

Molly Rosen: That's actually a big takeaway of mine from your book, was that it's about technology, But I also saw it as really about you as an individual working with all these different systems, the medical system, the economy, these technology platforms. I'm curious how your experience in writing this book left you thinking about the control that we like to pretend that we have over our lives.

Amanda Hess: The older your kids get, the less control you have over them, and the easier it is to see that you never really had that control. It's only really in pregnancy and then this newborn stage when I think technology companies can provide this fantasy that you do have total control and that every decision that you make will have some profound effect over their future. I don't know if it was writing the book or just having my kids grow up and grow away from me a little bit that let me understand that that was the thing that I had really been looking for and that is so elusive and can't actually be delivered to a parent.

Molly Rosen: I have noticed, actually, becoming a parent, that I'm willing to compromise on some things with technology that I don't think I would have otherwise, I think because it feels so important. So, for example, my husband and I use this app tracking our baby's sleep that uses AI to have these predictive windows about when he should go to bed. We sometimes joke that, like, I don't know if we would know when he's supposed to sleep. Embarrassingly. I think we wouldn't know without the app.

Amanda Hess: I mean, I really felt like during pregnancy I was trained to see myself as somebody who needed to be surveilled, that my pregnancy needed to be surveilled in order for me to do it correctly. I became comfortable with that. Then once my child was born, it was like, okay, you're the surveiller now. I tried out this camera in my kid's room called the Nanit, which is an AI-enabled baby monitor. I really delighted in the images that it showed me. It does this thing where, through machine learning, it monitors when your child is moving in some way, and it captures video and puts it in a little feed for you in the morning. So I could see when my kids were rustling in their sleep or when they got up or when they said something. Just this little movie made of surveillance footage of my kids. Obviously, I think my kids are the most beautiful people in the world. So I was like, oh, they're so cute.

It wasn't until one night I laid down with my son to help him try to go to sleep right next to him where he is in the bed, that I was able to see what he sees from this camera. And it was just four glowing red eyes that was watching them. It made me really question how our kids are experiencing these things and how surveillance is becoming equated to care either through these smart technologies in the nursery or just how often parents are putting their phones in their kids faces, taking photos of them or whatever. I think there's a training that's happening that I think only makes us and them more vulnerable to whatever products or even government projects are coming next.

Molly Rosen: Amanda Hess is the author of the new book Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. Amanda, thank you very much.

Amanda Hess: Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender and Candice Wong.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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