Thanks everyone for coming. I'm going to talk about performance. I'm going to talk about quite a bit today. I'm going to go pretty fast. I tried to cut some of it down. Hopefully it's not too technical. I will see how much I cover. I'm going to try and do a live demo because I'm crazy. And I don't know if I don't have time for questions at the end. Just kind of find me afterwards. Let's get started. First, a little bit about me. I think actually most of this was covered. I'm from Arizona. I live in Northern California now. I went to school at the University of Arizona. I studied computer engineering. I worked at AMD in Austin, Texas for a couple of years after that. I worked on the design team for the first 64-bit processor. That little part there was mine. Then I went backpacking for three and a half years around the world after that. You want to talk about travel? Come find me later too. Wordpress. Back in, I think it was 2011, just after my daughter was born. I got into WordPress and doing some freelance consulting development work at the time. I did some plug-in development and worked on a backend service for a client. That client ended up being successful. Ended up with hundreds of his own clients and sites. He was having performance and security issues with the sites. I took a look. I was like, oh, I can solve that. That's how Site District was born. We've been doing WordPress hosting. We now have hundreds of clients and thousands of sites on our platform. Here's what I'm going to talk about today. First, why performance matters. Why are we even here? I'll cover that. Measuring website performance. Wordpress hosting and the effect on it. We'll talk about diagnosing the server response time. We'll talk a bit about the full load of your page into the browser when people are looking at it. Then a little bit about caching and, like I said, demo if there's time. Let's hold the questions until the end, unless they're critical. On the first slide, I had a link to it, and I think towards the end, I had another link to it. I'll also tweet it out afterwards. First, why does performance matter? There's a website that I like that I think really communicates the question well. I'm not affiliated with them and I just thought this was a really good marketing page for why WordPress performance matters. Why does speed matter? Summing it up, conversions and page abandonment.  If you're working and developing on WordPress, then it wastes your time if the WordPress admin and the backend is slow. Visitor customer perception. If you've got someone coming to your site and it takes a long time to load, they're not going to think as highly of you and your website. You're Google ranking. Speed, as Google has said, in some cases, speed is definitely a factor in their ranking. Client satisfaction. You build a nice fast website for someone. They're more likely to be happy with it.  I'd like to claim even more boldly that speed equals happiness. How many? To drive that point home, how many people have you heard say that? A quick survey for the beginner's day version here. How many of you are just starting with WordPress and haven't even used it yet? Got about five, six hands.  A few more. How many of you recently bought a hosting package for one to three years? About 10 people. How many of you worked on or developed on a site that was slow or became slow? Oh, look around there. Got the most hands on that one. I should have asked the other questions I have in here, too. How many of you have no frickin clue what a frex WordPress performance or how to improve it? All right. Hopefully, I think you're in the right place. I just made this slide this morning. I want to talk a little bit about habituation and the idea that I'm not a psychologist. So if someone's in here and I've got it totally wrong, sorry. If you're just getting started on your site, then whatever speed you're developing on will probably seem normal to you. But you'll probably actually not understand the magnitude of the difference in WordPress speed until you actually experience it. Variations in speed for the same site can actually be huge. And sites can be 10 times faster on some hosts or with unnecessary plugins compared to an optimized version. And I'll do a quick demo of that here. I've got a site that's hosted at one place. You could probably figure out if you want. And then a copy that's running on our hosting. And I'll show you the difference between the two. So I'm going to load this up and it is going through my phone. So we'll see how long it's like. But you notice I'm clicking around, kind of waiting for it. How long does it take to get from one page to another? So that's one version. Maybe try one more page. Alright, now let's go to the exact same site but hosted on our...whoops. If I spell it right. Okay, same site. Notice the difference. Exact same site. And this is not caching at work. This is PHP generating the WordPress pages as we go. And it's running through my phone because I tethered. Because the Wi-Fi, you know, Wi-Fi at these places. Okay, so that's the demo. So hopefully you can actually see a little bit there of the actual difference in speed. And that's it. So I was trying to get to the idea of experiencing it a little bit. You saw how long it took to click through some of those pages. Alright, so why don't more developers, designers, and site owners fix slow sites? And my hypothesis is that slow is comfortable and optimization is risky and uncertain. You or they don't know how to make a site faster. And you don't know if or how much faster your site could be. And it's not that you don't want sites to be faster, it's just not a priority. So I want to talk a little bit about that last part, priority. So I'd like to say that priority equals value over effort. I already talked about the value of fast sites and performance.  So my goal today is to show you how to minimize that effort. Alright, next, how do we measure performance and what is good performance? So let's talk about some basics. This here is a simplified version of what's called a waterfall for a website loading. When you type in an address in your browser and you try to get it to load, your browser will send up a request to figure out, hey, where's that site live? That's the DNS lookup. After that, you'll negotiate a secure connection with the server with HTTPS. That is if your site is running HTTPS and these days all sites should be. And then it will send that request to the server and then you will wait for some amount of time for that request to come back from the server. And that's the server response. And then once your browser has that initial page back, then it can start doing a bunch of stuff somewhat in parallel. It can start reading through that page and say, hey, what else do I need to load? So it'll start reading the HTML and then it'll decide, hey, what images do I need? What JavaScripts and style sheets and things like that. And then it'll actually do the hard work of rendering and painting the web page so that you can actually see it too. So this first part here, and sometimes just even the server response time here is often called the time to first byte. And that right there is WordPress and that's the bottleneck. I'd like to say too that WordPress by itself is pretty fast. It can run quite quickly in most places. But then often to make a site useful, you need to put a theme on it. You start adding plugins, you add additional functionality and stuff like that. And then before you know it, your WordPress site could slow down significantly. So that's why we're talking about this today. All right, so what about this time to first byte? How fast should it be? Well, obviously, the faster the better. And we're interested in, I haven't talked about caching yet, but when we're talking about performance, in a lot of cases, we want that time to first byte to be as quickly as possible without caching because caching is not always going to take effect. If you don't know what caching is, I'll talk about that more later. So I consider very fast for time to first byte is 50 to 150 milliseconds, maybe even less fast, 150 to 300, and going on up average, slow, and very slow in some sites I've seen 15 to 30 seconds. So someone is staring at a blank white page in their browser for 15 to 30 seconds before they see anything on some sites. So what's a good target? I think for WordPress, generally under 500 milliseconds for uncached time to first byte is a good target. Just a quick question, does that include the entire render of that on page? No, so this is just the time that it takes for your browser to ask the server to send back the first part of the HTML to the page. It's before any rendering starts. And so that's why I talked about it earlier as being the bottleneck. All right, so how do we test this time to first byte? There are some good tools out here. There's this Chrome extension that I really like, and it's called page performance. It's got a picture of the guy in here, it's kind of weird, but you install that in Chrome and for every page that you load, if you want, it's going to throw a number up here and then you can click on that icon, and it'll tell you what your time to first byte is for any page that you've loaded. So I just have this sitting there, and if I'm ever curious after loading a page, I can just click on the extension and it'll tell me. These are from Seattle, I didn't get a chance to update them. All right, and another way is you can actually use Chrome to get the number, so you can click up here on the little dots to come down to more tools, open your developer tools. You can then click on the network tab and then you can reload the page and you can then get the time to first byte from there. It'll show it over here. This, though, you do have to open up the network tab and then actually reload the page, whereas the Chrome extension will show you for anything that you've loaded. All right, one of my favorite tools is WebPagetest, and that you can find at webpagetest.org. If you go there, you'll see a form that looks like this. Now, there are some important settings to figure out when you're doing this. These are the ones I think make sense. First, pick a location. I often recommend picking one close to where your visitors are or actually close to where your server is if you want to test your server performance at its best. And if you also want to test your server performance at its best, pick a native connection. I believe this defaults the cable. Do one test run, but then make sure you click first and repeat view. And then also this important one here is capture video. And after we do that, oh, that's just a summary of what I said, then you click that button and you might wait a few minutes, so you might be put in a queue. It's a free tool and sometimes you have to wait for other people to finish testing. But when it's done, you'll get a report that looks a little bit like this. And what do we care about here? So first of all, we're going to look at the time to first byte, and generally that's what we want to optimize. And the second piece is the speed index. And what that means is it's the average time at which the visible parts of your page are displayed, so what people are actually seeing when they're looking at it. That's what we care about. Why? Well, it's because what people actually see. Oops, sorry. Also in web page test, you'll get something, you'll get a water view, which is basically, it's very similar to that diagram that I showed earlier in the talk, but it's for your actual site. And I won't go into that in more detail, but you can also analyze and see, figure out what's causing your site to be slow using that. One of my favorite pieces is the film strip view. So after you run a test, you can click in here and see over time what people are seeing or if they're using a browser to look at your website. So in this case, someone's staring at a blank screen for the first 0.7 seconds, and then the background comes in here, and then finally the image, and then some navigation renders and a few extra things, and then the cookie bar finally at the end. So we can see how long it's actually taking for the page to show up to someone visiting the site. Oops, sorry. I jumped kind of quickly. All right. Does that just show desktop or can you do mobile versions? So you can choose. There are options to choose mobile versions or mobile devices even. You can also control the network speed and several other options. It's got quite a few powerful tools built into it. Other speed testing tools. So, oops, I meant to ask how many of you have heard about GTmetrics or used it? All right. So then I was supposed to click onto this. All right. And why do I say that? That's because I feel like to get a lot of the useful information, you have to either sign up for a paid account or do jump-through things or switch screens for GTmetrics.  It's really hard to quickly see in GTmetrics the things that I think matter, which is your time to first bite. I'm not even sure if they show that right off the bat. But then also how long it's taken for your page to actually render the people that are looking at it. All right. So again, just to hit that point home again, ask yourself about your tool. Is your tool measuring the most important thing in showing what your user is actually experiencing? All right. Let's talk about time to first bite, which as I said earlier is often the bottleneck. So what factors into it? Your hosting provider and your website implementation. Does that mean that pretty much means your plugins or your theme and your plugins? So let's talk more about the first one. All right. Oh, here's another live demo. A lot of people with laptops. So hopefully this works. We've got one more fun little interactive part here. All right.  And I'm going to zoom out here a bit. If you've got a WordPress site in here or multiple, you've got client sites, friends, I'm going to reload this once to make sure it's connected. Go ahead and put in a domain, come to that URL, and it'll start in real time. We're going to test that server response time and send it back to all your browser should update in real time. We're going to test client sites, and we're going to get an idea on average of what people's server response times are, that time to first byte. And put in however many sites in there you want and it's just going to kind of real time populate and update. So do you have to sign in first or on that? No, you don't have to sign in. You just go to this page right here, put in the domain and click check right here. All right. So what are we seeing here? One thing that's interesting is this is a histogram so it's showing the distribution of the server response times. And remember that I said our goal is 500 milliseconds or less. That is right here. Most sites are over here. So most sites are not fast. And then we kind of break it down over there. All right. Thanks for playing. And the results for this will stay up and you can hit other sites for the rest of the weekend if you'd like. All right. Moving on. I was supposed to show that before I flipped over too. All right. Let's talk about WordPress hosting. All right. Your hosting provider. Yes. Does it matter? Yes, a lot. And... Is better hosting the silver bullet for WordPress performance? Yes, it is. Other times, well, slow-blooded site is slow-blooded site. It might be faster on better hosting but it might not yet be fast. So... Is your hosting provider a problem? Certain providers are known to be well optimized, consistently fast and not really have performance issues. Other hosting providers, it may depends on the plan, box, time of day, other things, might be consistently slow and others are... Others can be 5 to 10 times slower, you know, as a more optimized host. All right. So let me talk a little bit about some of the difference between web servers. You'll find... I put up the slide. Let's see. So a lot of hosts will be running something called C-Panel and usually that has Apache running with it. There's a large number of hosts running this. But I've found from lots of experience that it's generally twice as slow as a more optimized platform that's running just EngineX and PHP, FPM. So what's the takeaway from this is that if you're hosting provider a C-Panel available, then your site is probably not as fast as it could be. All right. Now, here's a checklist. What factors into performance? Well, a whole bunch of things. That's a big long list. They're supposed to appear bullet by bullet. I'm not going to talk about those because you're probably like that right now. And so what's better than trying to figure all that out see if your hosting provider has that or if it's optimized or working right? Well, here's a better option for checking your host. How do you know if it's causing all or part of your speed problem? Or if they've optimized it? Well, it's well, not hard to do reliably. Well, at least not while your site is at your current host. So try another hosting provider. How? And put an exact copy of your site on another optimized WordPress host. So copying your site to a new host. So a lot of hosts will let you sign up for 30 days free, try it out. Some will even let you sign up for free for a development site without paying. So there are definitely some options to explore out there for doing that. So different options for moving. Copying your site overs you can use a plugin to back up and restore it. Better is some hosting providers have a migration plugin that makes it even easier. It's more host specific. And if you can fully automate it or without even needing install a plugin yourself manually that's, I think, ideal. Here are some back up and restore plugins that give you an option. So you can get these from the slides later if you would like. Some of the hosting providers have their own plugins. And Blog Vault also provides they do a branded thing. I think this copies it to their server and then over to your final destination. And so there's a few hosting provider specific branded versions of their plugin too. And then we have an import tool which I'll try to demo later as well that makes it even easier than I think these other methods. So once you, let's say you've copied your site over to a new hosting provider to test it out. How would you test it? You can use web page test or we have some tools that will also help you. I'll show you some of those later. I wanted to say a word about shared and dedicated hosting or a VPS versus managed hosting. A lot of people I think have the conception like oh my shared hosting is not performing well. If I get a VPS it will be faster. In some cases that's true but I'd like to argue that a VPS or a dedicated server is for flexibility and not performance. And well managed, possibly shared or not platform can easily outperform most VPS's. What flexibility actually means is you just bought yourself a system administrative job and so unless that's what you want to be doing that might not be the best option. For most people performance is actually what you really want. My friend came up with this idea concept called a total cost of hosting so often times better hosting is more expensive so is it worth it? Some of you probably know Bridget she actually wrote a blog post on this and you can find it up on her page too. She said $25 that's what she pays for her hosting and she thinks many people think it is expensive is it? She asked people and she got a bunch of reactions on twitter and that's her page again you can look up the slides later and this is what do you spend $25 a month on is what she asked everyone and these are some of the responses she got. Donuts. Starbucks camey speaking tomorrow by the way and one of the best options I think or best replies was this one Bridget's Final Thoughts so your time is money you're going to spend a lot of time on your website, building it, clients are too so premium hosting is it worth it? If it's an e-commerce site with any volume you're making money on it then I'd definitely say it's speed important to the client and his budget are concerned good questions to ask and good managed hosting often includes what others will upsell such as backups and SSL certificate staging, features security, firewall and technical support at many of these places is also much better so I actually put a ranking based on my experience of some people might object to some of this but someone actually at a recent meetup told me they'd pay me to see this slide so for under $100 starting there are other hosts that are more premium than this I didn't include them on here and there are plenty of others I didn't include but these are some of the more well known ones and one thing I just noticed recently too is all the ones on this side here are running a custom platform usually with engine X or something else and all these are basically c-panel hosts at least for a lot of the entry level and options alright, but wait someone said another word camp talk you had my host on there and I think my website is fast wow why are they in the slope column things to consider well ignorance is bliss your site might already load in 2 seconds on but you just haven't seen it load on 1 second somewhere else page caching is your site or host using caching make sure to test the speed of your site while you're logged in which often disables caching and yes maybe it is good enough so if you're happy and your clients are happy and mobile test your site on mobile with web page test you can use that option someone asked earlier test it with a slower connection you might be thinking wow he just spent 20 slides talking about hosting yes it is that important um this is a feedback I got from this is a wordpress group about speeding up wordpress and uh here's some quotes from that guy that I talked to and interacted with on that he said he tried a whole bunch of other things and 5 days I think he said trying to speed up the website and none of his efforts worked and so I recommended actually Kinsta to him as an option for speeding up his site alright hosting final recommendations try before you buy so do not pay for 1 to 3 years of hosting at a discounted price it's a trap start on a monthly plan and better yet start with a fast host that provides a free development environment pantheon flywheel we also will let you get started for free without even needing a credit card alright server response times what if you've moved your site to a faster host but it's still a bit slow and you're trying to figure out what's going on or maybe certain pages are slow something is not fast yet then to most people that is a black box there's no way to figure out what is going on there so today let's open up that black box alright first things first though when we are diagnosing speed and performance problems on a site we go through a series of steps first we need to generate some traffic to the site we'll wait for it if it's in production and then we need to review the profiling results I guess I missed a step in there you need to enable a profiler on it first I'm going to talk about New Relic today then you make a change and then you repeat now the difference between this and what a lot of people do or all they are able to do is when we make a change here we're not going to be guessing that was the title of my talk too we're going to be seeing what is actually slowing down the site and figuring out what's really going on there so we're not just having to go through a list of plugins and figure out maybe this is slowing it down so New Relic is an application performance monitoring tool there is a free version available the pro version is most useful and there is a free trial available you do need root level access to install it though several hosting providers actually provide access to it and I personally have diagnosed hundreds of performance issues across sites in very little time thanks to New Relic literally in five minutes or less I can usually tell someone why their site is slow using this so this is what New Relic looks like once you get into it first of all it will tell you this overview page under APM will give you a breakdown of how long WordPress spent in PHP actually executing code and how long it spent getting stuff from the database well that's nice to know and it tells you your average response time but it doesn't really solve our problem New Relic actually has a really cool feature there's a WordPress page here and there's two pages under it and one of them is plugins and themes and if we click on that it's going to give us a breakdown that shows us how much time was spent in each of those plugins or your theme in the case of this test site here there was an A-B testing plugin installed on it that was taking up a huge amount of time that's the purple and when I talked to him we found out that he actually didn't need it so in this case he could just turn off his plugin and that his site got twice as fast oh yeah these are some older slides but I still see some common plugins often slowing down sites Jetpack Yoast SEO I press admin especially in a lot of cases now I'm not trying to paint these plugins I'll talk about in a poor light actually but I'm just more of the fact that there are some common plugins out there that could be affecting your performance test and figure it out and I'll tell you more about that in a sec so before using New Relic this is kind of how I felt when I was trying to figure out performance issues and then afterwards so optimizing I forget why I put this in here so optimization plugins can affect your performance too actually and they will WordPress plugins are just more code they're not going to make your raw performance faster and they mostly just cover up performance issues I generally don't recommend them and you don't often need them on better hosting and they can make your first byte actually worse on a fast host some possible exceptions if you have a heavier site you might want a page caching plugin if your host doesn't provide it server response time optimization New Relic is a great tool but I don't use it that much anymore and until that was last year a little over a year ago our servers were quite faster than most WordPress hosts but still not as fast as Kinsta and Pantheon and I was using New Relic to kind of figure things out but then we went and we upgraded our servers and things got twice as fast that was even more than the 20-30% gain I expected sites were so fast it wasn't necessarily or worth the time but more so more of the stories optimizing hosts was even more important than I realized and I do hosting so sites can be sped up quite a bit just by optimizing the server infrastructure alright now let's see we talked quite a lot about that time to first byte and I emphasize the fact that's a bottleneck for most people let's say you've got that optimized and you can also load in your browser so what affects that? HTTP2, make sure your host is running HTTP2 you don't know what that is it does require HTTPS which you also should have it's been around for a while there's some great speed benefits it compresses things other stuff I'm not going to talk about but some WordPress hosts are still not running it so check and see image compression this is a big one so if your site's loading slowly go back to those web page tests that I talked about earlier and check out and see how big at the bottom if you were to scroll down I didn't show it those results scroll down and see how big of piece of the pie the images the purple is there and if it's taking up most of that circle there and if you've got a poor score if that's not an A there already then you probably want to optimize your images and that can make quite a difference in the time it takes for your page to load this is a cool plugin that will resize your plugins on upload and also let you do some bulk optimization as well you can adjust the JPEG quality it can convert PNG to JPEG which won't go into those details but just more things for speeding up your images so they'll load faster without reducing quality which is important to everyone caching, alright the last section and is page caching the solution to your performance problems if you have a slow time to first bite well no and caching is for scaling websites with lots of traffic that's really what caching was invented for and what it's in my opinion people will have different opinions in what it's for your site should be fast without caching and caching on a slow site or server only hides poor performance and often only part of the time and only use it as the last resort app to have done everything else where does page caching fall down your WordPress admin it's not going to help you there your front end pages while you're logged in large sites with a lot of pages you're not going to be able to fill the cache with all your pages on your site sites with content that might be customized to the visitor and the cache can expire, it gets clear or it could be flushed and after that happens that next request it's often going to be quite slow so you want your site to be fast without a page cache we're only about page caching I think one of the best articles that I've read about WordPress performance and caching so again you can pull these links from the slides later so in summary a lot of hosts do provide page caching as well if you can't get your site under 200 milliseconds and time to first byte you might want it cached pages will definitely be faster I'm just going to skip through these because I want to cover some other stuff in summary measure your performance first pick a good host or switch to one if it's still slow do some profiling with New Relic optimize your images use a plugin for page caching if you need it and I didn't even talk about a CDN but if you have visitors that are located far away from where your actual server is a CDN can help speed up page loads for them and then if you're still having issues ask someone for help how high is your page loading slowly alright 10 minutes let's see what we can do with 10 minutes alright I'm going to do the demo thing now that's not it alright I've got a guest tab here so I'm going to go to our website and show off a few things here some of these things you can use for free and are useful for helping test your performance up alright just going to sign up as a whatever hopefully this works alright so I've created a brand new account so if I've got an existing site I can start by clicking this ad existing site here and I've set up a test site on GoDaddy actually I can put in the domain name here oops oh it is isn't it I forgot to remove that well I was testing earlier alright let's see give me a sec here this is my guest session 10 minutes clock is ticking alright alright let's try again okay so I put my domain in here it's going to look up some information on it and then I'm just going to add it to my dashboard we're just telling site district about it so we can do some stuff with it so I click add site here and then if I want to import a copy of it I can click the next button that says you know install the plugin before I do that I'll just show a couple quick things all I've done is told site district about it I can actually there's a few pages on the left that are available to us we can come to this web page test one here and if we want we can run a new web page test this is you don't have to click through and do their caption stuff on web page test and I already preconfigured those options for you to get some nice results so I can just click run test and it's going to submit and go ahead and run a test on the site I can also do some speed testing on it if I want to crawl through 30 pages on the site to see the server response time throughout the site and give me a good idea of how fast my raw server performance is I can just click in here and run a test of it there's no page caching so I don't need to click that button and this is going to initialize a test here and it's going to run through and see how fast through different pages I don't think I have very many if you run out of pages it'll just loop through and go through another until it gets to 30 this goes through and we'll test the pages on the site so you can see kind of where it's coming in right around 600, 700 milliseconds alright I'm going to close that and go back to the summary page here and go back to installing the plugin so now I want to actually pull my site over and get a full copy of it running and I realized that I don't remember the password oh that's NCI where's my regular window here it is so I'm going to pull that out of my password manager if I can type alright this will go and login to my site at GoDaddy and install the plugin our site district plugin there and then in a few steps it'll let us import the site and then we can run a couple tests on it so I'll just click here click again and it's going to go off and start importing it while I do that I'll duplicate my tab come back let's check out the speed testing results so average speed I'll zoom out a bit so we can see this better for request to the site on GoDaddy we got 650 milliseconds for the time to first byte that's pretty fast it's basically a brand new WordPress install with just a couple things installed and the web page test is still running we probably won't be able to see those results because it's waiting to hide 21 others but it did go off I could probably try to run another one at a different location let's try Denver maybe that one oh I don't know why that part is not working but live demos fun stuff alright so this is coming over and how we doing on time almost I got about five minutes I'll let this finish let me go ahead and take a few questions I guess while this runs and then I'll come back and show off the stuff finally yes how long does it take to test if you take how long does a test take sorry to run it which test so it usually it depends how fast your site is but to hit 30 pages on the site could take a few seconds pretty much under a minute though it's typical you can come find me after with more questions too alright I've got a copy of the site imported now so I actually have a full copy already imported over and we'll let you and this will load out the side by side view of both of the pages the copy on site district and the one on your original provider you can click this a few times to kind of see what a full page load looks like on the browser so you can see there's quite a difference there and we can also run that crawl which will go through 30 pages on each of the servers wow that one finished already so average response time I think that's a little generous I think it's a little bit slower than that but you can see the difference like 41 I think we had 650 before so let's say let's double that because that test is running close to our server even then it's still like 8 times faster exact same site copy of it various light speed, good question I've played around with it, I tested it out a bit and light speed definitely makes this faster than Apache unlike on the servers that runs on I'll come back to a site later and it'll just load really slowly at least that first time it might warm up but I'm not seeing as good a performance as I do with nginx well configured PHP FPM yes how about having Apache and nginx running together and then nginx is like a proxy that doesn't it might help a bit if there's a lot of load on the server from modeling static assets that might affect it but generally it's also still twice as slow for rendering that main page for WordPress alright so those are the results back so people are like so the point of this was not as much to show, let's see I can't find my tabs I was going to go back to the demo there we go that was the demo the point of that wasn't really to show like oh hey our hosting is that great really the message I want to try to drive home is that like hosting does make a huge performance difference there are other hosts out there, Kinsta, Pantheon that perform very well are very fast if your site is running slow put a copy of your site on one of these other hosts and try it out just to see the difference and so and then if it's still running slow do some profiling on it to figure out what's really causing the problems alright any other questions looks like I've got like one minute no question but does this work just as well if I'm using a bunny CDN so CDN is something that sits on top of your hosting and it just does a level of caching above your hosts often times for images and other stuff like that a CDN, Cloudflare such as Cloudflare, Bunny CDN or other CDNs will not make your server faster it won't speed up your site in some cases it will just cover up the problem but it's not really like I said earlier CDN is really if you have people that are located far away from your server I'll give you one more what you're saying is that this is my question could I import if I decide to go site district my website or my blog to site district or do I have to start all over again yes so what I demoed right there at the end was actually copying an entire WordPress site over so we just pulled the entire thing database and files over with our tool and like I talked about earlier you want to try another provider you can use a backup and restore plugin or some of the sites have plugins that will help basically assisted migration WP Engine has one I think Liquid Web might have one and so on Jason's talking about performance tomorrow too so if you haven't had enough of it come to his talk alright one more to another site won't you still need their plugins to make their site work so some hosting providers let me see if I'm getting the question right here do if you pull a site over from Godad or somewhere else will you still need their plugins to make it work some provider some hosts add some extra plugins often times their performance or server related if you switch hosts plugins one typically don't need and two probably don't want cause they can actually cause issues some places provide like other marketing type plugins a lot of all that stuff will typically come over with you some of them just might not work anymore the ones that don't work anymore are usually the ones that are not necessary so it's not usually an issue you know if you move your whole WordPress site over to a new place then it's usually going to work exactly the same it's just the speed will be different alright there's my timer right there alright so thanks everyone for coming and I'll hang out outside if you have any more questions


He's an author, activist, and anthropologist, and he will be speaking about his talk from managerial feudalism to the revolt of the caring class. Please give him a great round of applause and welcome him to the stage. Hello. Hi. That's great to be here. I've been in a very bad mood this last week, owing to the results of the election in the UK. I mean, think very hard about what happened and how to maintain hope. Ah, there we go. Good, good. I don't usually use visual aids, but I actually assembled them. And the thing is what I want to talk about a little bit is what seems to be happening in the world politically that we have results like what just happened in the UK and why there is nonetheless reason for hope, which I really think there is. In a way, this is very much a blip. Probably the most room. But there's a strategic lesson to be learned, I think. Speaking as someone who's been involved in attempts to transform the world, at least for the last 20 years since I was involved in the global justice movement, I think that there is a real lack of strategic understanding that there's vast shifts that are happening in the world in terms of essential class dynamics that the populist right is taking advantage of and the left is really being caught flatfooted on. So I want to make a case of what seems to be going wrong and what we could do about it. First of all, in terms of despairing, I was very much at the point of despairing. So many people put so much work that I know into trying to turn around the situation. There seemed to be a genuine possibility of a broad social transformation in England and when we got the results, I mean, there's a kind of sense of shock. But actually, if you look at the breakdown of the vote, for example, it doesn't look too great for the right in the long run. Basically, the younger you are, the more determined you are to kick the tories out. Actually, I've never seen numbers quite like this. The base of electoral base of the right wing is almost exclusively old and the older you are, the more likely you are to vote conservative, which is really kind of amazing because it means that the electoral base of the right is literally dying off, a process which they're actually expediting by defunding health care in every way possible. And normally, you say, oh, yes, so what? As people get older, they become more conservative. But there's every reason to think that that's not actually happening this time around, especially because traditionally, people who either had been apathetic or had been voted for the left who eventually end up voting for the right do so at the point when they get a mortgage or when they get a sort of secure job with room for promotion and therefore feel they have a stake in the system. Well, that's precisely what's not happening to this new generation. So if that's the case, the right wing's actually in long run in real trouble. And to show you just how remarkable the situation is, someone put together a electoral map of the UK showing what it would look like if only people over 65 voted and what it would look like if only people under 25 voted. Here's the first one, blue is Tory. If only people over 65 voted, I believe there would be four or five Labour MPs, but otherwise entirely conservative. Now, here's the map if only people under 25 voted. There would be no Tory MPs at all. There might be a few Liberal Dems and Welsh candidates and Scottish ones. And in fact, this is a relatively recent phenomena. Here's, if you look at the divergence, it really is just the last few years it started to look like that. So something has happened that like almost all young people coming in are voting not just for the left, but for the radical left.  Yet the vast majority of young people voted for it. The problem is that in a situation like this, the swing voters are the sort of middle-aged people and for some reason middle-aged people broke right. The question is why did that happen? And I've been trying to figure that out. Now, in order to do so, I think we need to really think hard about what has been happening to social class relations. And the conclusion that I came to is that essentially the left is applying an outdated paradigm. They're still thinking in terms of bosses and workers in a kind of old-fashioned industrial sense where what's really going on is that for most people the key class opposition is caregivers versus managers. And essentially leftist parties are trying to represent both sides at the same time but they're really dominated by the latter. Now I'm going to go through some basic political economy stuff in way of background. This is a key sort of statistic which is the kind of thing we were looking at when we first started talking about the 99% and the 1% at the beginning of Occupy Wall Street. Essentially, until the mid-70s, there was a sort of understanding between 1945 and 1975, say. There was an understanding that as productivity increases, wages will go up too. And they largely went up together. This only takes it from 1960 but it goes back to the 40s.  A cut of that went to the workers. Around 1975 or so it really splits. And since then, if you see what's going on here, productivity keeps going up and up and up and up whereas wages remain flat. So the question is what happens to all that money from the increased productivity? Basically it goes to 1% of the population and that's what we were talking about when we talked about the 1%. The other point which was key to the notion of 99 and 1% when we developed that was that the 1% are also the people who make all the political campaign contributions. These statistics are from America which has an unusually corrupt system but pretty much all of them, and bribery is basically legal in America. But essentially it's the same people who are making all the campaign contributions who have collected all of the profits from increased productivity, all the increased wealth. And essentially they're the people who manage to turn their wealth into power and their power back into wealth. So who are these people and how does this relate to changes in the workforce? Well the interesting thing that I discovered when I started looking into this is that the rhetoric we use to describe the changes in class structure since the 70s is really deceptive because really since the 80s everybody's been talking about the service economy. What we're shifting from an industrial to a service economy. And the image that people have is that we've all gone from being factory workers to serving each other lattes and pressing each other's trousers and so forth. But actually if you look at the actual numbers of people in retail, people who are actually serving food I don't have a detailed breakdown here but they remain pretty much constant. And in fact I've seen figures going back 150 years which show that it's pretty much 15% of the population that does that sort of thing. It has been for over a century. It doesn't really change, it goes up and down a little bit but basically the amount of people who are actually providing services, haircuts, things like that is pretty much the same as it's always been. What's actually happened is that you've had a growth of two areas. One is providing what I would call caregiving work and I would include education and health but basically taking care of other people in one way or another. In the statistics you have to look at education and health because they don't only have a category of caregiving in economic statistics. On the other hand you have administration and the number of people who are doing clerical, administrative and supervisory work has gone up enormously. To some degree, according to some accounts it's gone up from maybe 20% of the population in say UK or America in 1900 to 40, 50, 60%. I mean even a majority of workers. Now the interesting thing about that is that huge numbers of those people seem to be convinced they really aren't doing anything. And essentially if their jobs didn't exist it would make no difference at all. It's almost as if they were just making up jobs in offices to keep people busy.  And just to describe the genesis of that book, essentially I don't actually myself come from a professional background. So as a professor I constantly meet people, sort of spouses of my colleagues, the sort of people you meet when you're socializing with people of professional backgrounds. I keep warning into people at parties and saying, well who work in offices and say, well I'm an anthropologist, right? I keep asking, well what do you actually do? I mean, what does a person who is a management consultant actually do all day? And very often they will say, well not much. Or you ask people to say, I'm an anthropologist, what do you do? And they'll say, well nothing really. And you think they're just being modest, you know? So you kind of interrogate them, a few drinks later. They admit that actually they meant that literally. They actually do nothing all day.  They sometimes they'll take a couple calls a day. Sometimes they'll take a couple calls a week. Sometimes they're just there in case something goes wrong. Sometimes they just don't do anything at all. And you ask, well does your supervisor know this? And they say, yeah, I often wonder. I think they do. So I began to wonder how many people are there like this? Is this something, some weird coincidence that I just happen to run into people like this all the time? What section of the workforce is actually doing nothing all day? So I wrote a little article. I had a friend who was starting a radical magazine and said, can you write something provocative? You know, something you'd never be able to get published elsewhere. So I wrote a little piece called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs where I suggested that, you know, back in the 30s Keynes wrote this famous essay predicting that by around now we would all be working 15 hour weeks because automation would like get rid of most manual labor. And if you look at the jobs that existed in the 30s, you know, that's true. So I said, well, maybe what's happened is the reason we're not working 15 hour weeks is they just made up bullshit jobs and just to keep us all working. And I wrote this piece and, you know, it's kind of a joke, right? Within a week, this thing had been translated into 15 different languages. It was circulating around the world because the server kept crashing, it was getting millions and millions of hits. I was like, oh my God, you mean it's true? And eventually someone did a survey, you gov, I think, and they discovered that of people in the UK, 37% agreed that if their job didn't exist, either would make no difference whatsoever or the world might be a slightly better place. I thought about that, like, what must that do to the human soul? Do you imagine that?   And I thought about it and it explains a lot of social phenomena that if people were just pretending to work all day.   You have to pretend to work because it's somebody else's time. It's a very strange metaphysical notion we have in our society that someone else can own your time. You know, so since you're on the clock you have to keep working or pretend to be, make up something to look busy. Well, apparently at least a third of people in our society that's all they do. Their entire job consists of just looking busy to make somebody else happy, right? That must be horrible. So it made a lot of political sense. Why is it that people seem to resent teachers or auto workers? After the 2008 crash, the people who really had to take a hit were teachers and auto workers. And there was a lot of people saying, well, these guys are making $25 an hour, you know? Well, yeah, they're providing a useful service. They're making cars, you're American, you're supposed to like cars. Cars is what makes you what you are if you're American. How would they resent auto workers? And I realized that it only makes sense if there's huge proportions of the population who aren't doing anything. They were totally miserable and are basically saying like, yeah, but you get to teach kids. You get to make stuff. You get to make the cars. And then you want vacations too? That's not fair, you know? It's almost as if the suffering that you experience doing nothing all day is itself a sort of validation of, it's like this kind of hair shirt that justifies your salary.  You don't want people pay them too much. You don't want people who are just interested in money taking care of our kids, do we? Which is odd, because you never hear people say, you never want greedy people, people who are just interested in money taking care of our money, so therefore you shouldn't pay bankers so much. Though you'd think that would be a more serious problem, right? Yeah, so there's this idea that if you're doing something that actually serves a purpose, somehow that should be enough. You shouldn't get a lot of money for it. All right, so as a result of this, there is actually an inverse relationship, and I don't have actual numbers for this, but there's actually an inverse relationship, and I have seen economic confirmation of this, between how socially beneficial your work is, how obviously your work benefits other people, and how much you get paid. I mean, there's a few exceptions, like doctors, which everybody talks about, but generally speaking, the more useful your work, the less they'll pay you for it. Now, this is obviously a big problem already, but there's every reason to believe that the problem is actually getting worse. And one of the fascinating things I discovered when I started looking at the economic statistics is that if you look at jobs that actually are useful, and let's again look at caregiving. Remember, the big growth in jobs over the last 30 years has been in two areas, which are sort of collapsed in the term service, but are really actually totally different. One is the sort of administrative clerical and supervisory work, and the other is the actual caregiving labor, the work where you're actually helping people in some way. So education and health are the two areas which show up on the statistics. Okay, if you look at these statistics, you discover that productivity and manufacturing, as we all know, is going way up. Productivity in certain other areas, wholesale business services are going up. However, productivity in education, health, and what's this, other services, basically caregiving in general, insofar as it shows up on the charts, productivity is actually going down. Well, why is that? That's really interesting. I mean, we'll talk in a moment about what productivity actually even means in this context, but here's a suggestion as to why. This is the growth of physicians on the bottom versus the growth of actual medical administrators in the United States since 1970. That's fairly impressive looking graph there.  There's absolutely no reason why you'd actually need that many people to administer doctors. And actually, the real effect of having all those people is to make the doctors and the nurses less efficient rather than more, because I know this perfectly well from education, because I'm a professor, that's what I do for a living. The amount of actual administrative paperwork you have to do actually increases with a number of administrators. Over the last 30, 40 years, something similar has happened. It isn't quite as bad as this, but something very similar has happened in America in universities that the number of professors has doubled, but the number of actual administrators has gone up by 240, 300 percent. So, well, more than that actually. Yeah, I mean, so suddenly you have like twice as many administrators for professors as you had before. Now, you would think that that would mean that professors have to do less administration because you have more administrators. Exactly the opposite is the case. More and more of your time is taken up by administration. Well, why is that? The major reason is because the way it works is, if you're hired as executive vice provost or assistant dean or something like that, some big shot administrative position at a British or American university, well, you want to feel like an executive, and they give these guys these giant six-figure salaries, they treat them like they're an executive, so if you're an executive, of course you have to have a minor army of flunkies of assistants to make yourself feel important. The problem is they give these guys five or six assistants, but then they figure out what those five or six assistants are actually going to do, which usually turns out to be make up work for me, the professor. So suddenly I have to do time allocation study. Suddenly I have to do, I have to do learning outcome assessments where I describe what the difference between the undergraduate and the graduate section of the same course is gonna be. Basically completely pointless stuff that nobody had to do 30 years ago made no difference at all, to justify the existence of this kind of mountain of administrators and just give them something to do all day. Now, the interesting result of that is that, and this is where this sort of stuff comes in, it's actually, the numbers are there, but it's very, very difficult to interpret, so I had to actually get an economist friend to sort of go through all this with me and confirm that what I thought was happening was actually happening. Essentially what's going on is just as manufacturing, digitization is being employed to make it much more efficient. Productivity goes up, the number of workers go down, the number of payment that they, the wages are actually going way up in manufacturing, but it doesn't really make a dent in profits because they're so few workers. So okay, that we kind of all know about. On the other hand, in the carrying sector, the exact opposite is happening. Digitization is being used as an excuse to make lower productivity so as to justify the existence of this army of administrators. And if you think about it, basically, in order to translate a qualitative outcome into a form that a computer can even understand, that requires a large amount of human labor. That's why I have to do the learning outcome studies and the time allocation stuff, right? But really, ultimately, that's to justify the existence of this giant army of administrators. Now, as a result of that, you need to have actually more people working in those sectors to produce the same outcome. These are becoming less and less productive. More and more of your time has to be spent. Oh yes, this is what the average company now looks like. More and more of your time ends up being spent sort of making the administrators happy and giving them an excuse for their existence. This is a breakdown I saw in a report about American office workers where they compared 2015 and 2016 and said, in 2015, only 46% of their time was spent actually doing their job. That declined by 7% in one year to 39%. That's got to be some kind of statistical anomaly because if that were actually true in about a decade and a half, nobody will be doing any work at all. But it gives you an idea of what's happening. So if productivity is going down, these people are just sort of working all the time to satisfy the administrators.  There's a huge, there's both a squeeze on profits and wages. These more and more money's going to pay the administrators. And you need to hire more and more people. So what do you get? Well, if you look around the world, where is labor action happening? Basically you have teacher strikes, all over America, you have professor strikes in the UK. You have care home workers, I believe in France. They had nursing home workers, first time ever on strike. Nurses strikes all over the world. Basically caregivers are at the sort of cutting edge of industrial action. The problem of course, and this is the problem for the left, is that the administrators who are the basic class enemy of the nurses, and I believe in New Zealand, the nurses actually wrote a very clear manifesto stating this. They said, you know, the problem we have is that there's all of these hospital administrators, these guys, not only are they taking all the money so we haven't got a raise in 20 years, they give us so much paperwork we can't take care of our patients.  The problem for the left is that often those guys are in the same union and they're certainly in the same political party. Tom Frank wrote a book called Listen Liberal, where he documented what a lot of us had kind of had a sense of intuitively for some time, that what used to be left-wing parties, essentially the like Clintonite Democrats, the Blairite Labor Party, you can talk about people like Macron, Trudeau, all of these guys have essentially the head of parties that used to be parties based in labor unions and in the working classes, and by extension the caring classes, as I call them, but have shifted to essentially be the classes of the professional, I mean the parties of the professional managerial classes. So essentially they are the representatives of that giant mountain of administrators, that is their core base. I even caught a quote from Obama where he pretty much admitted it, where he said, you know, while people ask me why we don't have a single-payer health plan in America, wouldn't that be simpler, wouldn't that be more efficient? And he said, you know, well, yeah, I guess it would, but that's kind of the problem. You know, we have at the moment, what is it, two, three million people working for Kaiser, Blu-Clarus, Blue Shield, all these insurance companies, what are we gonna do with those guys if we have an efficient system? I mean, so essentially he admitted that it is intentional policy to maintain the marketization of health in America because it's less efficient and allows them to maintain a bunch of paper pushers and offices doing completely unnecessary work who are essentially the core base of the Democratic Party.  In fact, they seem to take this glee, they say, well, you know, autonomy's changing, you just gotta deal with it. But the moment those guys in the offices who are doing nothing are threatened, the political parties leap into action and get all excited. All right, so if you look at what happened in England, well, it's pretty clear that the conservatives won because they maneuvered the left into identifying itself with the professional managerial classes. There is a split between the sort of labor union base, which is increasingly unions representing very militant characters of one kind or another, and the professionals, managerials, and the administrators, both of whom are supposedly represented by the same party. Now, Brexit was a perfect issue to sort of make the bureaucrats and the administrators and the professionals into the class enemy. Now, it's very ironic because of course, in the long run, the people who are really going to benefit from Brexit are precisely lawyers, right? Because they gotta rewrite everything in England. However, this is not how it was represented, it was represented by your enemies. Well, I mean, they were an appeal to racism, obviously. But there was also an appeal that your enemies are these distant bureaucrats who know nothing of your lives. The key moment in terms of where essentially the Tories managed to outmaneuver labor and guaranteed their victory was precisely by forcing labor into an alliance with all the people, like the liberal Democrats and the other remainders, who then used this incredibly complicated constitutional means to try to block Brexit from happening. 20 minutes, okay, that's easy. And it was fun to watch at the time on TV where all trans sticks or all these guys and wigs and strange people called black rod and odd costumes appealing to all sorts of arcane rules from the 16th century. And it was great drama, it was like costume drama come to life on television. But in effect, and it seemed like Boris Johnson was just being constantly humiliated. Everything he did didn't work, his plans collapsed, he lost every vote he tried. But in fact, what it ended up doing was it forced what was actually a radical party which represented sort of angry youth in the UK into alliance with the professional managerials who live by rules and whose entire idea of democracy is of a set of rules. This is very clear in America. And again, you could see this in the battle of Trump versus Hillary Clinton. Clinton was essentially accused of being corrupt because she would do things like get hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches by investment firms like Goldman Sachs who obviously aren't paying politicians that kind of money unless they're expected to get some kind of influence out of it. And constantly, like Clinton's defenders would say, yes, but that was perfectly legal. Everything she did was legal. Why are people getting so upset? She didn't break the law. And I think that if you wanna understand class dynamics in a country like England or America today, that phrase almost kind of gives the game away because people of the professional managerial classes are probably the only people alive who think that if you make bribery legal, that makes it okay. It's all about form versus content. Democracy isn't the popular will. Democracy is a set of rules and regulations. And if you follow the rules and regulations, well, you know, yeah, that's fine, no matter. And these guys, that kind of mountain of administrators are the people who think that way. And they've become the base of party, they are the electoral base of people like Clinton, people like Macron, people like Tony Blair had been, people like Obama. And now, and Corbyn was not at all like that. He's this person who had been a complete rebel against his own party for his entire life. But what they did was they maneuvered him into a position where there had been a Brexit vote, which represented substance, the popular will. And he was forced into a situation where he had to like ally with the people who were trying to block it through legalistic regulation, essentially by appeal to endless arcane laws. Thus, identifying his class with the professional managerials. And a lot of my friends who actually were out on doorsteps, you know, they actually seem to think of Boris Johnson as a regular guy. I mean, this guy, his actual name is Boris Alexander Defeffel Johnson. He is an aristocrat going back like 500 years. But they seem to think he was a regular guy and Corbyn, who hadn't even been to college and was sort of a member of the elite, based almost entirely on that. And if you look at people like Trump and people like Johnson, how do they manage to pull off being populist in any sense? They're born to every conceivable type of privilege. Basically, they do it by acting like the exact opposite of the annoying bureaucratic administrator who is your kind of enemy at work. That's the game of images they're playing. You know, Johnson is clearly totally fake. He fakes disorganization. He's actually a very organized person, according to people who actually know him. But he's developed this persona of this guy, he's all about content over form and he's this sort of chaotic and disorganized. So they're basically play the role of being anti-bureaucrats and they maneuver the other side into being identified with administration rules and regulations and those guys who basically drive you crazy. The question for the left end is how to break with that. So I have, what is it, 15 minutes in order to propose how we can break with that? It strikes me that we need to kind of rip up the game and start over. We're in another world economically than we used to be. And perhaps the best way to do it is to think about, well, when people say their jobs are bullshit, you know, when people say that 37% of people who say if my job didn't exist, probably the world would be better off. I'm not actually doing anything. What do they actually mean by that? In almost every case, what they say is, well, it doesn't really benefit anyone. There is a principle that, ultimately, work is meaningful if it helps people and improves other people's lives. Thus, you know, carrying labor in a sense has become the paradigm for all forms of labor. And this is very, very interesting because I think that to a large degree, the left is really stuck in a notion of production rather than carrying. And the reason we have been outmaneuvered in the past has been precisely because of that. I could talk about how this happened. I think really a lot of economics is really theological.  So work is both productive. It's creative, but at the same time, it's also supposed to be suffering. Whereas, so we have an idea of work as productivity. So I was actually looking at these charts. They're talking about the different productivity of different types of work. Now I can see where productivity of construction comes in, but according to this, you can even measure the productivity of real estate, productivity of agriculture, okay, I mean, everything is production. Well, it's productivity of real estate. It doesn't make any sense. You're not producing anything. It's land, it sits there. Our paradigm for value is production, but if you think about it, most work is not productive. Most work is actually about maintaining things. It's about care. If you think, whenever I talk to a Marxist theorist, whenever they try to explain value, which is what they always like to do, they always take the example of a teacup.  So we'll look at this bottle. Certain amount of socially necessary labor time to produce this. Say it takes this much time, this much resources. There are always some production of stuff, but a teacup or a bottle, you produce a cup once. You wash it like 10,000 times. Most work isn't actually about producing new things. It's about maintaining things. We have a warped notion, which really, it's very gendered, right? Real work is like mail craftsmen banging away or some factory worker making a car or something like that. It's almost a paradigm for childbirth, right? Because labor is supposed to be, the word labor is very interesting, right? Because in the Bible, they curse Adam to work and they curse Eve to have pain in childbirth, but that's called labor. So there's this idea that there's this, factories are like these black boxes where you're kind of pushing stuff out like babies through a painful process that we don't really understand. And that's what work mainly consists of. But actually that's not what work mainly consists of. Most work actually consists of taking care of other people. So I think that what we need to do is we need to start over. We need to, first of all, think about the working classes, not as producers, but as carers. The working classes are basically people who take care of other people and always have been. Actually, psychological studies show this really well. That the poorer you are, the better you are at reading other people's emotions and understanding what they're feeling. That's because it's actually the job of people to take care of others. All rich people just don't have to think about what other people are thinking or care, they don't care, literally. And so I think we need to, A, redefine the working classes as caring classes, but second of all, we need to move away from a paradigm of production and consumption as being what an economy is about. Because if we're gonna save the planet, we really need to move away from productivism. So I would propose that we just rip up the discipline of economics as it exists and start over. I... So this is my proposal in this regard. I think that we should take the ideas of production and consumption, throw them away, and substitute for them the idea of care and freedom. Think about it. You know? Thank you. I mean, even if you're making a bridge, right? You make a bridge, as feminists constantly point out, you're making a bridge because you care that people can get across the river. You make a car because you care that people can get around. So even like production, is it one subordinate type of care? What we do as human beings is we take care of each other. But care is actually, and this is, I think, something that we don't often recognize, closely related to the notion of freedom, because normally care is defined as answering to other people's needs. And certainly, that is an important element in it. But it's not just that. Like if you're in a prison, right? They take care of the needs of the prisoners, usually, at least, to the point of keeping, giving them basic food, clothing, and medical care. But you can't really think of a prison as caring for prisoners, right? Care is more than that. So why isn't a prison a caregiving institution, whereas something else might be? Well, if you think about care, what is the kind of paradigm for caring relations a mother and a child, right? A mother takes care of a child, or a parent takes care of a child, so that that child can grow and be healthy and flourish. That's true, but in an immediate level, you take care of a child, so the child can go and play. That's what children actually do when you're taking care of them. What is play? Play is like action done for its own sake. It's, in a way, the very paradigm of freedom, because action done for its own sake is what freedom really consists of. Play and freedom are ultimately the same thing. So a production consumption paradigm for what an economy is, is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. I mean, even when you talk about degrowth, if you're working within that paradigm, you're essentially doomed, we need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom, on the other hand, are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who are the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? And to do that, we need to actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists. We're actually just starting to think about this. I mean, because economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong, right? There have been actual empirical tests of the basic fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on. It turns out they're not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don't really care that it's not true. But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have actually a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don't have that, you basically fall apart. That's why old people get dogs. We don't just care for each other because we need to maintain each other's lives and freedoms, but our very psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone. So what would happen to microeconomics if we started from that? We're doing actually a workshop tomorrow on the Museum of Care, which we're going to imagine in Rojava, which is in northeastern Syria, where there is a woman's revolution going on, as you might have heard. But it's in places like that where they're trying to completely re-imagine economics, the relation of freedom, aesthetics, and value, because at the moment, the system of value that we have is set up in such a way that this kind of trap that I've described and the gradual bolsterization of employment, we're essentially production work has become a value unto itself in such a way that we're literally destroying the planet. And in order to actually re-imagine a type of economics that wouldn't destroy the planet, we have to start all over again. So I'm going to end on that note. David, thank you so much. I think it's very interesting to also have some political views now that we mix in all sorts of technology and it goes very good in the theme of Congress. Please, if anyone has any questions, line up by the microphones and we'll go for that. Unfortunately, in beginning, I forgot to mention that you can ask questions over the internet through IRC, Mastodon, or Twitter. And remember to use the channel Borg and we'll make sure that they get answered. So please, microphone number one. When you observe the productivity in healthcare going down, do you have an explanation according to new liberal thinking why hospitals, one with more administrators, one with less administrators don't have a competition outcome that the hospital with less administrators wins? Yeah, well, one of the fascinating things about the whole phenomenon of bolsterization and bolster jobs is that it's exactly what's not supposed to happen under a competitive system, but it's happened across the board in every, equally in private sector and public sector. Why? That's a long story, but one reason seems to be that, and this is why actually I had managerial feudalism in the title, is that the system we have, all right, is essentially not capitalism as it is ordinarily described. The idea that you have a series of small competing firms is basically a fantasy and it's especially, I mean, you know, it's true of restaurants or something like that, but it's not true of these large institutions and it's not clear that it really could be true of those large institutions. They just don't operate on that basis. Essentially, increasingly profits aren't coming from either manufacturing or from commerce, but from rather redistribution of resources and rent extraction, so that, and when you have a rent extraction system, it much more resembles feudalism than capitalism as normally described.  I mean, if you look at anything from Hollywood to the healthcare industry, you know, what you've seen over the last 30 years of creation of endless intermediary roles which sort of grab a piece of the pie as it's being distributed downwards. It's, and I mean, I could go into the whole mechanisms, but essentially, the political and the economic have become so intertwined that you can no longer make a distinction between the two. So you have a, and this is where you go back to the whole thing about the 1%, you're using political power to accumulate more wealth, using your wealth to create more political power. You have an extract, an engine of extraction whereby the spoils are increasingly distributed within these very, very large bureaucratic organizations, and that's essentially how our economy works. Great, thank you so much. I mean, I could talk for an hour about the dynamics, but that's basically it. You know, you could call it capitalism if you like, but it doesn't in any way resemble capitalism the way that people like to imagine capitalism would work. Great, awesome. Questions from the internet, please. How to best address this caregiver class when the context of the proletariat is no longer low, sorry, no longer given to awake their class consciousness? How to address the caregiver when the proletariat is no longer what? Please repeat the question. How to best address the caregiver class when the context of the proletariat is no longer given to awake their class consciousness? Given to awake? I'm not sure what you asked about. Yeah, I mean, the question is, how do you create a class consciousness for that class? Yeah, yeah, well, that is the question.  And I mean, I don't mean to be too blunt about it, but I mean, the problem we have, why is it people are suspicious of the left? And people like Michael Albert, were pointing this out years ago, that one reason that actual proletarians were very suspicious of traditional socialists in many cases is because their immediate enemy isn't actually the capitalist who he rarely meets, but the annoying administrator upstairs in, you know, and, you know, to a large extent, traditional socialism means giving that guy more power rather than less. So I think we need to actually look at what's really going on in a hospital, in a school, and you know, I use hospitals and schools as examples, but they're actually very important ones because in, people have shown that in most cities in America now, hospitals and schools are the two largest employers, universities and hospitals. Essentially, work has been reorganized around working on the bodies and minds of other people rather than producing objects, and the class relations in those institutions are not, you know, you can't use traditional Marxist analysis. You need to actually reimagine what it would mean. Are we talking with a production of people? If so, what are the class dynamics involved in that? Is production the term at all? Probably not. That's why I say we need to reconstitute the language in which we're using to describe this because we're essentially using 19th century terminology to discuss 21st century problems, and both sides are doing that. The right wing is using like, you know, neoclassical economics, which is basically Victorian. You know, it's trying to solve problems that no longer exist, but the left is using a 19th century Marxist, you know, critique of that, which also doesn't apply. We just need new terms. Thank you, I hope that answered the question from the internet. Microphone number two, please. So, okay, I guess, so the question is basically to what extent can technology help, and the subtext here is there's actually a lot of, really lots of projects now whose function at some level is to automate management, and to the extent to which that can be molded into kind of removing this class that you're talking about or somehow making it too painful for them to exist. And some of these projects are companies, but some of them are very independent things that have very self-marked ideas, but with tens of millions of funding, so. Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing, that people talk about it all the time. And there's this, but this is where power comes in, right?    You know, he'd never got a single one through.  So there's no way are they gonna get rid of flunkies. I mean, that's just gonna mean, you know, the better they are at it, the less important they'll become in the operation. So somebody always blocked it. So, I mean, this is a basic power question. You can come up with great technological ideas for eliminating people, people do all the time, but who actually gets eliminated and who doesn't has everything to do with power. Great, thank you. And last question, please, from microphone number five. Can we maybe have one question from a non-male person? Yeah, that'd be nice. Non-male person, sorry. No, no, that person's just left, do you want to? Sorry, I am not choosing questions based on stuff. We're kind of choosing all around the hall. Okay, have fun. Please, microphone number five. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to speak. I heard that you, like I really liked your description of a paradigm or that a few people are stuck on production and consumption and that you would like to change the paradigm to a paradigm towards more care and freedom, so on, et cetera. And for me, it kind of sounds a little vague and that's why I myself think of basic income as a human right as the actual mean to break with the current, yeah, hegemonic macroeconomic paradigm, so to speak. And I was interested in your point of view on that basic income. Ah, yeah, well, I actually totally support that. I think that one of the major objections that people have to universal basic income is essentially people don't trust people to come up with useful things to do with themselves.  Like, so we're gonna have millions of people who are trying to create perpetual motion devices or becoming annoying street mimes or bad musicians or bad poets or so forth and so on. And I think it actually masks an incredible condescending elitism that a lot of people have which is really the mindset of the professional managerial classes who think that they should be controlling people because, okay, if you think about the fact that huge percentages, perhaps a third of people already think that they're doing nothing all day and they're really miserable about it, I think that demonstrates quite clearly why that isn't true. Now, first of all, the idea that people, like if given a basic income won't work, actually there are lots of people who are paid basically to sit there all day and do nothing and they're really unhappy. They'd much rather be working. Second of all, if 40% to 40% of people already think that their jobs are completely pointless and useless, I mean, how bad could it be? Like, even if everybody goes off and becomes bad poets, well, at least they'll be a lot happier than they are now. And second of all, one or two of them might really be good poets. If like, just 0.001% of all the people on basic income who decide to become poets or musicians or invent crazy devices actually do become Miles Davis or Shakespeare or actually do invent a perpetual motion device, well, you've got your money back right there, right? Great, thank you so much. Unfortunately, that was all the questions that we had time to. If you have any more questions, please, I'm sure that David will just take a few minutes to answer them if you come up here. Thank you so much, David Graber for your talk and please give him a great round of applause.


Huge news in AI, Google just launched generative AI across all Google workspace, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Images, everything. So this isn't GPT-4, this is Google's own AI, but I'm just very curious about, like, everybody thinks that OpenAI is winning the race here just because we haven't seen consumer level products from Google yet, even though it's built into all their tech already. And so I think they're just gonna come out, and just like a title we just take over the AI space, and what I'm really looking forward to because I have to do lots of presentations is the Slides feature, which they have released in preview form. Google will be coming out with AI in all their products, so Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides. In a couple of weeks, most likely you're gonna be able to use all of these with AI, which is gonna be absolutely incredible, and another game changer.