Okay, so I'll bring the questions here from YouTube. Thank you, David. Thanks, David. Thank you. I guess we just wait for the people to be let in. Yeah, I think we are live. Oh, all right. That's good. Would you want to wait for or shall we just get started? And let's give it a minute for more people to join in and all. Give it a minute and start. What's the, do you have a YouTube link? I can stick on to it. Yes, there is a YouTube link. Let me just find that for you. Thank you. Yeah, I've got it. Okay, thank you. Excellent. Thank you. Yeah, I guess we can start. Whoever wants to join will join. Everyone, welcome to the Intel Inside Science Fiction Book Club and to RIP Internet, Talking Infinite Detail with Tim Vaughan. A few things I'd like everyone to keep in mind before we begin. Please keep your mics on mute. We will be taking questions at the end of this session, so you could keep typing them in the chat box and we'll call on you later to ask the question. To introduce myself, I am Vijay Lakshmi. I'm the author of Strangely Familiar Tales. My poetry and short stories have been published in various online journals and anthologies. My writing on pop culture and feminism can be found on Women's Web. My excellent co-moderator, as always, is T.G. Shenoy. T.G. Shenoy is an SFF enthusiast, columnist and critic. He's the writer of India's longest-running weekly SF column, New World's Weekly for Factor Daily, and the Speckfix column for Bangalore Mirror. He also curates the SF track for the Bangalore Litfest. He has featured in podcasts such as the Tale Harate Kannada podcast and events such as Sri Lanka Comic Con to talk about SF in general and Indian SF in particular. He hosts to boldly go a fun SFF quiz every Saturday. He is also an advertising and marketing professional and is currently a consulting partner with Celsius Hundred Consulting. Today we are speaking to the brilliant Tim Vaughan. Tim Vaughan is an author and journalist using both fiction and non-fiction to explore issues around cities, class, culture, technology and the future. His work regularly appears on the BBC, New Scientist and Vice Motherboard. His debut novel Infinite Detail was published by FSG in 2019 and selected by The Guardian as their science fiction and fantasy book of the year and shortlisted for the Locust Magazine Award for Best First Novel. He also collaborates with artists and filmmakers and has had work shown at the VNA, Columbia School of Architecture, the Vienna Biennale and on Channel 4. Welcome everyone. Chenoy, you've always said that Infinite Detail is a book that you would recommend without any reservations. So tell us why. Yeah, without reservations and at the cost of sounding like a stuck record. I mean it's to me Infinite Detail sort of came like a bolt out of the blue. You know the way it was written, the way it treated technology, the way it looked at internet and all of those things and yeah I mean everybody looks at it from the perspective of the post internet apocalypse. I mean I don't know if the word apocalypse is right but we'll get to that later. The end of the internet is the big thing but that's the after that happens. Just for anyone who hasn't read Infinite Detail, there's a before and there's a after and there's this event that happens. I will try to keep this discussion and conversation as spoiler free as possible. The event that happened that sort of switches the internet and you see what happens in a post internet world that's the after but this equally important is the before in the novel in which the same sets of characters appear in both so there's continuity there and we constantly shuffle between the before and after and the before takes us on a wild ride of how things could be and as with anything it depends on which side of the fence you are on to see whether it's a good thing or it's a bad thing because I've always believed there's no such thing as a dystopia with the capital T. What's dystopian for some is so at the ground zero you could say is Stoke Bristol. There's this community which has created this sort of enclave for themselves which is free from all surveillance and these are a counterculture a bunch of people there are hackers and all of that there's there's a BLM protest that happens and suddenly the internet goes dark for a bit it continues and then it's it's permanent. So from that perspective the way it treated people the way it looked at culture the way it integrated music into its into its fabric and painted a very realistic portrayal of how things could be right sometimes you know and reality is sort of overtaking it so much I remember reading an article which described Tim as the man whose science fiction is turning into a shitty reality right so you know there you go I mean so this is one of those books that I would heartily recommend to people please read it while it is still fiction right a time may come and this is you know at least the before part of it feels like you know before it feels starts feeling like you know a documentary right so please read it but hopefully this conversation will give you more reasons to read it than my sort of blathering on about it I know we are all here to listen to Tim so let me just throw the question to him that let's talk about before the after which is the world before the internet gets switched off you posited these specs you know which is like this google glass plus plus plus with all social media that you can think all the feeds that you can think integrated into it a sort of hyper connected society right and without the specs a person would technically be handicapped I take it you know for all practical purposes in that world so I mean is it extrapolation is it experience how did this you know how did you come with the specs and the world before it sort of goes out or is it just a question of an unevenly distributed future that you know you sort of posited in the before section of infinity table thanks thanks thanks you know it does a thanks a lovely intro there and thanks for having me guys um yeah the specs thing um I've been writing about augmented reality for for a little while before I'm around it's 10 years actually this year since my first kind of short story collection paintwork came out and and that was all stories about augmented reality or it's just a there's a very short self-published book with three short stories in and they're all about about specs specifically and to have them a set in Bristol in in the I guess what you've called it before time now after infinite detail and the reason for using augmented reality was like for a bunch of reasons for me the technology really fascinates me virtual reality technology really fascinates me as well and always has since I was you know first of all the concept when I was in the 80s when I was a kid um but really like really for me largely it's kind of like a literary device it so writing about computers and writing about hackers and writing about social media and data mining and surveillance capitalism and all these these things that would you know we talk about when we talk about this stuff um it's very dry it's very hard to to put into literature people using computers is a very boring thing people using phones is a quite boring thing as well and this is it's quite a big problem for literature because I don't think you can really write it not even you know science fiction aside I don't think you can write really kind of relevant contemporary literature um without talking about you know social media and phones people relate to computers and the internet and stuff like that so it makes it it's very hard you probably have read the terrible thriller you know pulpy thriller books or you know crime novels that try and deal with you know cybercrime and stuff and it's you know just or hollywood movies that have to turn this into some kind of like you know big flashy windows on screen saying you're being hacked and stuff like so I kind of I kind of wanted a device to get around that and I'm by you know by no means the first person to use augmented reality is that device you know William Gibson did a a lot bunch of science fiction writers Charles Strauss if other people have used have used augmented reality glasses are there but what it allows you to do is very they visually uh kind of communicate a lot the concepts and not just like the concept of technology and and people interacting with technology which can be quite boring to describe but also it allows you to talk about and this is the main interest with me I think really allows you to talk about the way cyber space is kind of colonizing meat space about the way that you know how our real world has been completely consumed by the internet you know in very literal senses where you know just about everything you can buy now connects to the internet in some ways but also in more kind of like philosophical and cultural reasons you know so it's um as that it was really it's just a really really useful useful um useful visual metaphor and and and like I say it's really good for describing spaces and you know one of my obsessions is cities and how cities have been manipulated and changed and and gentrified and and and morphed by the like the use of technology and stuff so it's kind of a perfect it's kind of perfect metaphor for describing that stuff if that makes sense that that makes perfect sense and what you said about cities uh you know there's that the whole uh instance of that that canner that that you know quote unquote homeless person trying to collect the can so in infinite detail in the beginning I found it quite nice about how this whole smart cities thing may be smart but not equitable that you know that was the the takeout point for me with that instance where there's this person I mean for the benefit of those who haven't read it no spoilers again this person who's who collects you know old soda cans and coke cans and all and turns it in at the recycling center and next thing you know he sort of finds out that he can't do it anymore because he's not the person who bought the can because suddenly the can has become smart right uh you know that's another thing that you know I sort of struck me that how um it's it's a topic that's been explored before but it just sort of freely hit home with this instance that uh you know anything that's quote unquote smart needn't technically be good for the people or equitably your thoughts on that yeah so that that exactly that really you know it's this idea that these smart city technologies these smart technologies in general are kind of they're top-down technologies they're dropped onto populations to to test them really a lot of the time they're even designed specifically for you know white men in Silicon Valley or um designed specifically for their needs and their wants and how they see them working alternatively increasingly we're seeing them especially in the cases in the U.S. at least of facial recognition technology um or maybe more literally drone technology in the Middle East these are kind of almost literally dropped on people on populations who then then have to kind of deal with the the impact of them the canner story actually I was looking for an equivalent of a real life story when that came to me I was living in Brooklyn when I wrote that and um I was very familiar with the the canner the canners in our neighborhood I would see them going around and talk to them occasionally and stuff but they would they were constantly orbiting our neighborhood and collecting cairns from residential trash and from commercial trash and this was a living for them and I started looking into it I realized it was they weren't necessarily all homeless even there's a lot of people doing that work who were like taxi drivers um who were having finding that they that you know they were mobile driving around the city seeing where they could grab stuff but at the same time struggling to make a wage increasingly because of competition from Uber and Lyft so a lot of a lot of those guys have moved into doing recycling it turns out but I was actually looking for an equivalent for another story a real life story that happened in San Francisco many years ago now it would have been about 2014 I guess um where in one of the neighborhoods in San Francisco had been heavily gentrified by people from the tech industry moving in there was a Latino population that would every Sunday come together and play soccer on a local soccer field and it was like a tradition that went back decades in this neighborhood if not longer you know Sunday was the day you go to go with your friends and play soccer um and they turned up one day to find that there was two teams playing soccer on the pitch or all white people and all wearing Dropbox t-shirts and they were like hey hang on what's going on this is you know where we play soccer on a Sunday and one of these Dropbox guys turned to me said but did you book the did you book the pitch did you reserve the pitch you said what do you mean you pointed out a poster that had been put up in the last week since they've been there um with a QR code on it and stuff I think they said you know in order in the future in order to reserve this pitch you need to download this app and and and like reserve it and it just had just been started by some startup who decided that this was a this was the problem that as a startup they needed to solve with the booking of football pitches um of soccer pitches and you know the guy turned to him and said I don't own a smartphone you know like you know it was six years ago not everybody's had smartphones yet um and it just struck me it's just struck me as as kind of this really brutal implication of how like technology can drop to the community rather than having any knowledge it's even coming and how it can change the lives instantly and it's it's um I was going to say that's a fairly trivial example but I don't think it is actually I think really these kind of community cultural cultural activities are far from trivial they're possibly the most important thing in some ways and more important than the job box of the tech industry in San Francisco the things that actually make people happy at the end of the day but also I was looking for an example that was it had you know kind of slightly deeper implications and you know I'd be looking at smart seek technology a lot for over the last decade and I'd even talk to people who were trying to make smart trash cans and stuff like that and it occurred to me you could stick an RFID tag on a on a kind of code which I'm sure they're already doing I know they're doing in retail distribution at least sort of they're already stuck on there but you could stick a bit of code on it and then you could work out who had bought it and automatically refund them when they recycle there and it sounds like the best idea it sounds like an incredible idea it sounds like an ecologically friendly idea because it encourages people to recycle but don't have to do any effort it's it's offers huge convenience it's very appealing to consumers it's very appealing to everybody apart from those people who are forced to you know to scrounge on the streets to make a living by collecting these cans and who are liking the story if it's just to happen with what happened you know wouldn't know it's happening until it happened potentially so yeah like so you know you mentioned specs at the beginning Frank doesn't know the can he doesn't own a pair of specs in the same way that the guy from Dropbox Soccer Story didn't own a didn't own a smartphone um and it's just trying to drive at that you know that cities are inclusive spaces or they they should be they have to be for lots of different populations and building them redesigning them just for one population or what we see as the majority of population can be they have awful implications for so for people I mean you know you speak to a quote tech bros quote unquote not all of them the feeling you know tech and an app will solve the world's ills but what you just said and what's there in infinite detail seems to be a question of here's a solution now let's create a problem that it will solve right anyway to to come back to the internet you know it's sort of become a part of our lives right I mean it's part of the world's plumbing if you can call it that right it would be lost without it and so much so that some time ago I recall the supreme court of India said that access to internet is a fundamental human right right so it's that there are so many ways in which you know the internet affects us that we don't even know about and I think it was at the quarantine books event or something where I heard you speak about the the container story you know and I found that most fascinating about how you know these things happen in the background especially when it comes to supply chain something that you know a lot about for the benefit of those who are not there at that event could you just tell us that container story because I found that most illuminating this is the the story from when I was on the container ship is it that one yeah so I've told this story so many times because it's kind of like a really important story to me it was kind of those you eat your moments that kind of change my career and so it would have been it was 2014 and I went on the trip to China starting in the UK flew to Russia then flew to China and then got on a container ship and from no sorry flew to Korea and got the container ship in Korea South Korea and spent a week on the container ship traveling on China seas until we ended up in Shenzhen in China and then a couple weeks in China looking at manufacturing and rare earth mining stuff so the idea was we were doing we would we were tracking the supply chain for electrical goods from electronic goods and for everything really from China down across to Europe in reverse so we were following it right back we ended up in in Mongolia looking at rare earth mining so where the you know materials that our smartphones etc are made from it's kind of dug out the ground so spent like I said spent the first part of it spent a week on this container ship which was incredible if you've not been to mega ports you've not spent time around those kind of structures and those kind of infrastructure it's worth having a look if you can just a scale of stuff kind of insane and I was we were out at sea one day and we were out at sea most of the time and I was chanted I stood on the deck of the ship to the captain and he suddenly there was a beeping sound and he was like so hang on a second and broke off of the conversation and walked over to computer in the side just like a just like a beige pc and he went over and I tapped away the computer a bit did this then got off the computer got on the phone called the engine room and told them to slow the ship down and then came back and started talking to me again and I said why hang on what just happened there because I'm here to you know I was on the ship to try and understand I was right now to go for the BBC trying to understand the running of the ship and I said you know what was that what just happened and he said well Merck it was the Danish shipping company that owned the ship the world's largest shipping company said Merck just emailed me an automated email from Copenhagen telling me to slow the ship down and I said why and he looked to me said I don't know the captain of the ship he said I don't know I don't know I said really you said do I can guess it probably means the next port we're going to it's busy and we're going to be late getting into a berth there we're going to have to wait a couple of hours before we can actually dock so going up full speed now it's just wasting fuel and I was like wow okay and I suddenly like just had this moment with you know I suddenly saw the world in a slightly different way and I realized that this you know this huge ship that had like that's like I can't even remember how many of them I had like tens of thousands of containers on it it's a huge huge massive ship with a crew of 30 that orbits the world for you know nine months at a time right it's these these huge ships with and this man that was in charge of of all this was taking his orders from an algorithm from an automated email system in Copenhagen and the whole supply chain was is managed that way and the supply chain can see things coming further along it can see you know by monitoring the GPS units on containers that are on trucks somewhere it can see maybe that there's a traffic jam outside the port and that has a knock-on effect of how quickly ships are going to be processed in the port and had made decision that that our ship is going too fast and probably made at the same time simultaneous decisions about literally hundreds of ships and and sent out and sent out commands to them and it just and this was all being done for the internet we had really really really ropey satellite internet on on the ship you could use it to connect to facebook and stuff which the crew obviously did to keep in touch with most of the crew who were south indian who who would use using the the wi-fi it was very bad on the ship to you know keep in touch with with their families and stuff while they were at sea but um the captain told me that that only existed that wi-fi only it wasn't there for the humans on the ship it was for the containers to to send information back to Copenhagen and for Copenhagen to email commands to tell you how fast to go and things like that and just really struck me this really struck me as how kind of weirdly dehumanizing it was and how kind of like huge and kind of skynet like this kind of infrastructure was that was making all these decisions that we didn't understand and it didn't tell us while it was making this decision but also struck me how incredibly fragile it was because all this was hugely dependent on the internet and without the internet it wouldn't operate at all and then you know like a few years later in fact around about the time i had finished a book in the senate to publish it so in a way it was kind of kind of helpful to me there was there was you know big ransomware attacks like WannaCry and and the other one didn't know me the other one skates my name skates from now but that were were targeted at everyone but also largely at shipping companies and Merce were being I found out subsequently Merce were in chaos for two weeks and they had to have have guys with clipboards going to ports telling telling people what to put and what ship there's absolutely chaos one company in one Chinese shipping company completely disappeared at the time it went completely it went completely out of business and ships have stranded off the coast of China in various places while while they waited for the internet to come up so this kind of back in 2014 i'd already started writing infinite detail or at least had the basic ideas for uh and this just really struck me it just really has this really kind of like you know if you lose the internet we lose the way that we have at the moment from moving basic goods around I mean talk about Chinese supply chains and talk about you know you talk about talk about iPhones and kind of sexy kind of obvious tech gadgets but in the west we get everything from China I'm sure in India you also get a lot of stuff from China and India obviously sell at least you export a lot of you know clothing and other another fabric based products on on a huge scale as well and I thought that was all to drown going to a halt the overnight which you could could easily do the internet for a month would be fragile in fact parts of it are you know this this everything would be threatened from in Europe for a lot of where people get their food a lot of a lot of say back in the UK for example did you rely on importing food from Africa some food and vegetables that are grown in Africa so that was to disappear overnight there's only kind of a few days of contingency in the in the sigma markets in the warehousing system and we've seen this we saw you know we saw a lot but this in pandemics with supply chain snarl ups and the I just wrote a couple weeks ago about about the issues around getting um N95 masks out of China um during the pandemic and you know we had shortages here with basic goods in some of the stores and stuff so yeah it just struck me it's it's it was a weird story but just one of those unique moments made it kind of put everything perspective in kind of kind of brought home how intrinsically dependent we are on this infrastructure Skynet is real and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves like you right but yeah I mean that actually brings because this line comes from that drone gods manifesto which is one of the most engaging parts of the book for me because it's so brilliantly touches upon all these things that we are upon here in the news you know like eco chambers and the crashing of democracy and how the internet has become a tool for capitalism and you go so far as to say that it's naive to imagine that we could use the internet as a place to build any kind of safe spaces or solidarity so it's a very angry passionate and more than a little scary thing to read I'd like to know how you went about writing that bit so the crazy thing about that is I actually wrote that a long time before the book was published and it was on the internet for all that time I wrote it I wrote it I'm trying to guess when it was it's probably around 2016 something like that and I literally I got up one morning and was meant to it was meant to be a day when I was I was writing the novel working on the wall and something had upset me on Twitter which is something that happens to me like three or four times a day to be honest and and something had upset me and I sat down and wrote this screen which I kind of thought I was going to use for the book but also I just like no I knew it was for the book but then when I finished writing it it felt so kind of timely right at that minute that I stuck it on Payspin I just copied and pasted it on to Payspin and then got a few friends to secretly drop links to it on Twitter and other places so it didn't look like it had come from me so it looked like kind of like it might be real and it was fun for a few days people you know but you got a little bit tiny bit of traction and people like what's going to happen you know like people thought it's my it's what it to be clear about what it is it's it's a work obviously it's work of fiction and it's obviously the words of the character or characters it's not me but it also is me at the same time it's me and my kind of like most knee-jerkie most angry I'm annoyed at Twitter kind of moment you know when I when I see the worst and everything it's kind of me but it's not doesn't mean that's necessarily what I believe or necessarily what I think there might be moments in the day when I think exactly this but there's other you know there's other times sort of a bit more positive and a little bit more hopeful about how we use technology but yeah I'm glad you enjoyed it though it was it was like a yeah it's a really fun story about it because when I put it up on on Payspin I put the ASCII art of the of the fist right on there which I just had googled ASCII art something and it just came up and a lot of that one I'll do and I copy and paste and put it on there when the book came out they were like can we publishers were like can we use this art and I was like well I didn't make it I don't know I have to find and I went find out who made it and I went on there like about a month's little kind of detective work and managed to track down the original artist of this kind of piece of ASCII art that had been flagged around the internet so for like decades they haven't he'd made it in the 90s and and and sweet guy blessing he was just like yeah use it as long as you give me a small credit somewhere I'm quite happy for you as long as you keep my initials in his initials at the bottom of the art as long as you keep learning so that was kind of a weirdly positive internet story find the artwork and find the artist that made the artwork I wanted to use and reach out to him where to be easy and it was a nice story so kind of like slight ironic twist to it yeah but it's nice it's nice to hear the story behind the story so to speak another really great idea that caught my attention in the book is where you it comes almost towards the end of infinite detail where you're talking about the characteristics of a successful revolution where you say that you know you need to plan you need to organize you can't just have ideals and you should be you know you should stop being afraid of power and use it I'd like to understand what influences you were drawing from over there the very um it's a very quick answer to that I mean there's a lot of you know my kind of a lot of it's kind of my life philosophy and experience of being on the very quick ways of a lot of political movements throughout my life from like being a teenager and being involved in like anti-apartheid movements in the UK when I in the 80s through to you know going on Black Lives Matter marches now and various kinds of socialist groups that I kind of was on the fringes of I was never an activist but but very specifically when I was about two thirds of the way through right in the book Astra Taylor the American journalist published a really good essay and I escaped me now I think it might be in the Baffler or New Republic or one of these one of these places a really good essay um where she points out the difference between activists and organizers and and and how we've all become activists in that we will see a a topic that we want to you know a cause that we want to support and we can hashtag about it we can talk about it on Twitter we can go on the march even and support it and that makes us kind of like an activist but it's not the same as being an organizer and people actually that these battles are one not by instant instant kind of gratification approaches to protesting online they're won by you know decades of very committed people put in their lives over to organizing I'm sure this is something that resonates you know very clearly in India um it's very true in the US with like the US civil rights movement I wasn't you know a few marches that got civil rights for African Americans it was it was uh you know decades of organizing both black and white people dedicating their lives to or huge sections of their lives to these causes and a lot of that organizing involves imagining what comes next it's about you know not just we want to stop something but we want to replace it with something else we want to find a better world we want to build build better alternatives to what's happening and that's something I think that's that's often lost in a lot of a lot of contemporary um a lot of contemporary um political protests and new activism so I kind of want to highlight to that you know the idea that you know unless you can have a revolution but if you aren't agreed on what's going to happen next it's kind of futile um and it can backfire it can backfire in kind of quite quite terrible ways you know as history has shown us on various occasions I mean since you spoke about you know imagining what comes before and just to get back to our discussion about the the internet I mean yeah it's it's of course capitalism will use whatever it is for its ends all the smart technologies you know are usually tested on migrants and poor people and then you know slowly you know it's like boiling a frog and all of that so yes I mean it's agreed that the internet isn't as great as you know people thought it would be as great of an empowering power or this liberating force that it meant to be but once I mean in infinite detail the minute the internet goes off I mean the situation is pretty bleak right I mean people are I mean to put it mildly you know people are trying to sort of scrambling for vegetables there's militias running I mean I mean shipping and banking and everything is just like communication everything that you think has just gone down so my my question would then be okay I mean the internet isn't a great thing as it stands today but would switching it off be a worse option I mean you know you have to read the book to find out that's kind of like people ask me this question a lot and it's kind of like well I don't know and that's why I wrote the book and the book doesn't really give you a straight answer on it either I think the point more is not whether or not we should have the internet is about how dependent it should be on it and if we are going to be dependent on it which isn't necessarily I'm not arguing we shouldn't be dependent on it but we really need to carefully think about what the internet is who owns it who controls it you know is it is a human right to have access to it should governments be able to to control it and and even that's a tricky question where I'm I'm kind of torn over you know you don't want governments obviously you don't want governments limiting access to it and you don't want them censoring it but at the same time I don't want corporations doing that either I don't want that responsibility put into corporations I'd rather responsibility for maintaining the internet and allowing access to it and making sure that it works correctly and and justly you know for people I'd rather that was done by a a democratically elected body than it was done by you know Facebook or Google or somebody who we only have you know the data collection algorithms and their shareholders to answer to um I it's so that's you know that's you know that's the kind of cool argument the book really is it's what's better what's worse it's very grim after the internet goes um you know people are dying if you read between the lines of the book sometimes it's spelled out but sometimes it's I kind of want to kind of just subtly point out you know that hospitals don't work if you don't have electric electrical power and as we've seen in you know in Texas recently electrical power is very fragile takes the slightest thing to take to take it out electrical grids which are managed by computers which are connected to the internet um are very fragile but and and you know it's it's like it's the question it's the core question which is worse and we don't my point there isn't so much to go oh you know we should destroy the internet internet and then live with with the ramifications what's happened in order to to protect our data privacy it's not what I'm arguing at all what my arguing is I'm just kind of pointing out to people that we are dependent on this and you need to understand what that means and as such you need to consider your own relationship to the internet but also as a society and as a civilization how we relate to this infrastructure and who owns and controls it and what it means for us um and as tricky we don't do that we don't do that rather infrastructure so you know we don't have these conversations which is what I'm writing this in a series of articles for one zero for example the moment to have these and we don't have these conversations about shipping infrastructure we don't have about power infrastructure I I'm very depressing thing I saw you know if you guys saw the huge power outages in Texas last week they were apparently unprecedented they were we were told that this has never happened and you know Texas doesn't usually have this kind of weather um so it's unprecedented for millions of people to have to have lost their power like this and couldn't have seen it coming actually there was a John Oliver article on it last week that pointed out it happened 10 years ago pretty much exactly the same thing happened 10 years ago and the Texan government was meant to put meant to fix it and had 10 years to fix it had 10 years to change the infrastructure bring it up to date put in backup systems you know just make sure that the companies that running it because that's also what's you know very very important about Texan infrastructure and American infrastructure in general it tends to be run by corporations not by government vital technology you know like water electricity provision and they're often run by private industry and I'm not I'm not answerable to government you know they just didn't do anything they didn't do anything for 10 years and it happened again and and we've got very short memories and we don't we don't think about these things and I think that's kind of what the books really about is trying to get people to recognize that these infrastructures both culturally and physically and economically that we're vital on them we're vitally dependent on them and if we don't explore our relationship to them and how they used and who owns them and controls and repairs and maintains and all these questions then you know we're heading for these kind of calamities when they happen no I mean the book you know the people have said that it doesn't provide easy answers or a full closure and all of that and to me that's not a negative right as some people make it out to be it's supposed to make you think and which I thought was one of the better bits of the book the way it makes you think and even when I asked the question I wasn't expecting a satisfactory answer but it's just one of those things that this sort of makes a thing and you want to hear more opinions about it and you know just I mean it's like between the devil and the deep blue sea we don't know where the answers we don't know where the answers are I mean we don't even know if there's a center path but it helps to talk wouldn't sort of raise these issues to the surface and that is something that I thought infinite detail did very well which is why you know lots of people called it relevant and you know very timely and all of that and right which is why I keep telling people like I said at the beginning like please read before it's a documentary right and speaking of which brings me to the other bit of it which is one of the highlights for me the music right the music you know the its infinite detail is a novel about culture as much as it is about counter culture right and you even provided a soundtrack for the book I mean those of you who haven't read the book there there's if you search for Timon infinite detail soundtrack there's a nice soundtrack that is put together that you can read the book to on my reread that's what I'm planning to do so I mean you know how did that I mean you are a you you compose music you're a big music buff how did that come to be that's one bit of it and then what happens to sort of culture once the internet goes off okay and one thing after reading infinite detail I started looking at my old box my few boxes of tapes that much more longingly and lovingly saying okay I'm not going to let my boxes of tapes go right as long as I can score some AA batteries I have an old sharp tape recorder I'm good with music excellent yeah that's it's the way forward it feels there's so much there there's like I could talk for hours about how hard it is to even maintain a music collection at home now because we're so pushed into using Spotify ironically the playlist is on Spotify but I didn't really have any other alternative to that um I don't use Spotify myself I kind of really dislike the service uh for how it treats its artists and how badly it pays them and I'd still try to buy and own music digitally but that's going to get increasingly it's increasingly hard to find ways to play it back it's it's but that's a different a whole different story and not what you're asking me at all um I um I love music it's the most important thing in my life people don't necessarily let you know me personally don't always pick up on this but music's far more important to me than politics or science fiction or any of these things it's the thing I think about most of all and dedicate a lot of my time to and specifically electronic music um um or you'd roughly call like rave music or techno in in the case of infinite detail drum based jungle music which is kind of a music genre and culture which is very specific and localized crystal where I spent like 10 plus years living before I left the UK um it comes on wanting to put it in the book was really important to me I've always felt that that kind of music I've always felt that that kind of music electronic music was incredibly science fictional from Detroit techno moments it's just like it's the story it's kind of like a folk music for the technological revolution like you know it's kind of this even like looking at Detroit techno and this this music that was made by black teenagers in Detroit whose families were being displaced by robots literally the part of the city's collapses due to lots of reasons but due to the industry being being undersells by Japan who had automated so the electronics had had destroyed the car industry in Detroit but at the same time provided um you know like poor like black and suburban kids an opportunity to to get into electronic music production by bringing down the cost of of the equipment quite quite radically in the 80s so that that's always struck me as hugely science fiction when I started writing science fiction there was a lot of um there was a lot of like kind of articles going around on the internet about science fiction and music and they would always be like 90 percent of them were about David Bowie and like Bowie was great I'm not a huge fan I understand his importance and sometimes music that you know is obviously incredible and he's very very important to a lot of people but not to my generation and I'm 47 you know it's like you know and at the same time the debates are going around in science fiction at the time about how can we get more young people involved in science fiction which isn't so much an issue now but it was about 10 years ago and you know and how do we get more like non-white and we get more queer people it's like maybe you know maybe don't think that David Bowie's the only science fiction music exists right do you know me and I don't really think that like the lot of the music I was I'm talking about especially drum bass and jungle and techno is it is science fiction and it's science fiction for people and it does the same job or it did the same job in the 90s and early 2000s that science fiction is meant to do in that you know science fiction's meant to give you some kind of perhaps lexicon or or language or approach to understanding or at least an aesthetic that understands the world you're in and how rapidly it's changing through technology science fiction and I'll be honest with the exception of a few writers hopefully myself doesn't really do that so much these days it's very obsessed with escape it doesn't really want to talk about society wants to talk about spaceships and dragons and young teenagers that have got special duties and are better than everybody else that they have to save the world but these kind of cliches of escapism which I really understand and I really understand that especially in times of tough people looking for that kind of escape to get away from their life but at the time I also felt that as science fiction wasn't doing that music was doing it increasingly for a large part of the population is certainly even in instrumental electronic music providing this kind of narrative to the world around you that is you know the the speed of the of the intensity of technology that we work with and how intersects with our life in various ways and I really think techno and drum bass and house music has the ability to do that in ways that written literature doesn't so it was very important to kind of nod to that for me when I was writing the book it was very vital it's like it's a key thing it's one of the first things about the book that I decided that drum bass was going to be a part of it and also at the time when I was writing when I started writing the book and that took me a long time to write this book like nearly seven years because I don't know if I was very busy doing other stuff when I started writing it in the early 2010s the only vinyl that was being manufactured then was was for drum and bass and for the DJ specifically in the UK even as people were transitioning to using digital files to DJ and CDs and stuff but but there was still a lot of vinyl being produced in Bristol at the time all the vinyl being produced was drum bass records or dubstep records it wasn't anything else and by the time the book came out that changed because there'd been this kind of nostalgia for vinyl in the US and Europe at least like I can't speak on India but in in the west where you could walk into shops and see repressings of classic albums from you from say it's this style where people were going young people were going and buying the vinyl version of a Taylor Swift album that they bought five years ago on or they never bought they end on Spotify whatever you know and kind of asked nostalgic because vinyl wasn't even their technology they've never grown up for it that's a bit weird but when I was right for started writing the book I didn't know that was going to happen I didn't see that happening so the idea I like the idea that the only recorded music that was available after the internet had gone after Spotify just appeared after all your mp3s have been wiped off your computer etc etc was vinyl and tapes and and to me in Bristol at least that would have been you know set that would have been like predominantly like jungle music and drum bass and tapes of recordings of DJs which is a big trade of people trade those and sell those you know recordings from from club nights that people have been to the truth very very important part of my life growing up those those kind of beat like recordings or something I'm very nostalgic for myself now and and pipe radio as well which in the 90s which is something I'm incredibly nostalgic for that I miss miss they very much and you know living in London and places we have to tune the radio in through crackly signals to find out of all the news and very mainstream music in the early 90s are very boring mainstream rock music was we tune it and then there'd be this great beats and this futuristic sound coming emerging from the static of the it was just the most like exciting thing to me as a kid and it felt very very cyberpunk it felt very technological very exciting that someone was hacking radio to to transmit to me and the community this at the time incredibly futuristic music just didn't sound like anything you'd ever heard before and that to me was you know as a teenager in my early 20s was just like the most exciting thing so I kind of wanted to nod to those things and there's slightly for nostalgic reasons for myself but yeah it's we build our culture now uh whether it's Spotify or TikTok Twitter or Substack or whatever it is this week that's getting excitement NFT nonsense and all this kind of stuff we build all this stuff on infrastructure we don't own or control to go back to the point that I was making earlier you know our culture is created and performed and exchanged on platforms that we don't own and then can disappear at any moment and we've seen it we've seen it happen it's a vine go for example you know and like and and this whole this whole culture had emerged on vine and a whole new language and new visual language and new performance language largely driven driven by black teenagers in the US and it just disappeared pretty much overnight you know like when Twitter decided vine wasn't profitable and they shut it down we had a similar thing here in in well not here in Canada but in in the US you know a few months ago time's gone so quickly well however long it was now longer than that but when you know when Trump was threatening to shut TikTok down the same things happened on TikTok we've got this really in in like innovative culture that's a manager of people with this really limited time and medium and making incredible works of art and works of satire and and everything or just funny shit you know they're just doing incredible learn how to use this medium they've created a new art form in effect from what was to learn it during vine but also from particular to TikTok it's very particular to that platform you don't own that platform so by Chinese a Chinese mega corporation owns that platform they could be banned from operating in the US by US government if there's security reasons or whatever bullshit the US government comes up with they might just decide that it's not profitable with them anymore anyone want to change it or they might change how it works very fundamentally like Twitter just announced yesterday just announced yesterday that they're going to have these superfollows these subscription based Twitter feeds where you know if you really like something you have to pay to see some of their content right that's and culture flushes on on Twitter on the daily basis and changes and more but if that starts can find paywalls then it becomes exclusive and it becomes something that people have access so I just kind of the ultimate kind of expression that was to shut the internet down in the book and see what happens to cultures resolved that or this could just vanish instantly and obviously the answer is the new cultures emerge in its place right which is exciting in some ways but it's not necessarily what we want and it's not if people have poured their lives into generating this culture that they've you know always been able to make something of a living from it which is incredibly hard to make a living it's incredibly hard to make a living culturally on the internet as I'm sure a lot of us could testify to if that was just to disappear then that that if that infrastructure we don't own and I know you know like when I'm talking about the 90s as well I haven't gone about this in too long so I can realize I'm ranting a bit but when I'm talking about the 90s and that music that I was listening to techno and drum bass in the 90s radio infrastructure wasn't owned by us so we we started radio stations record labels wouldn't publish music so we started around record record labels you know independent record labels and clubs wouldn't play this music so we had illegal raves and warehouses and stuff like that we found ways to counter this in the way we owned the infrastructure and created our infrastructure that's not happening now you see people who are doing really really interesting and revolutionary feeling art but they're doing it on platforms owned owned by you know Tencent or Google or Facebook or Twitter or Amazon or other large corporations so that's worrying to me that it could be snapped away from us at any moment and it's and also it's just instantly instantly the moment you upload a file to one of these platforms it's been absorbed into the cultural hierarchy and the advertising technology driven capitalism that that fuels it you know and that's just really depressing for me and really depressing for me of all the topics you talk about it's probably the one that makes me the saddest a lot of the time so I kind of just wanted to I kind of wanted to highlight that in the book a little bit so I mean and it doesn't just need to be platforms and their profit motives right has happened with the TikTok and a lot of Chinese apps they could become just casualties and geopolitical saber rattling between two countries right so yeah exactly exactly yeah it's there one day not the next but thank you for that answer on culture and thanks for putting together that playlist and all before I hand over to sing one personal comment that I would like to make about infinite detail is because of that playlist I got at least I know but at least two people who started reading infinite detail and the science fiction because of the playlist there's one third person who's bought the book I don't know if he's read it so fingers crossed on that thank you thank you that's lovely news thank you yeah but yes I mean the passion that you have for music really does come through in the book and this point that you've just made about how everything that we create right now is on platforms that we don't really own and it could actually just go away in a flash and on the last it connects me back to something else that you said in the book through Refty where you're saying that you know until you can dismantle them always use the oppressors tools against them so from a tech perspective I'd like to know if we can do that and if yes then how do we do that that's a really good question and it's another one those questions that I don't know the answer to and I don't know that I and and it's part of the reason for putting it you know the book's really really largely about about that question as well and and I don't know that I agree with Rush when he says that in the book either I wanted him to say it as a kind of to put it out there but I'm not sure but I fully agree with it I think it's so hard right you know and and and I'm sure like you know from an Indian perspective you can see this like very much so you know we do you have this kind of you know we watch the Arab Spring for example and and and that was incredibly exciting for you know that year whatever it was about like 2009 2010 my brain smelted for years these days but you know like you know it looked really exciting like okay Twitter's and Facebook are platforms for revolution they can't be controlled by governments and the way that turned out we've you know ended up with just other to tell you to tell you the genes taken over in some of those countries and it also what's perhaps more important if you talk to activists for organisers and people now about what happened then and what's happened in in in protest movements and the political movements subsequently we end up doing is you end up giving away a lot of your playbook to those in power it's very easy to show how you're using the internet you can do it once you can do something revolutionary once on the internet and then everybody knows how to do it that's how the internet works like you can do anything put something on the internet and everybody knows about it everybody can get access to it in some ways you know same way you're giving away you're giving away your kind of tactics which allows governments or corporations or whoever you're you're fighting against to counter you very quickly or to build you know to eliminate those those mechanisms from the platforms that they own like you like to say we don't own the platform so the tech industry can be very reactive to to changes when it needs to be and not when other people are calling for it right you know which is is is the the big problem and the big contrast so I kind of I saw someone post the Lord quote and that's kind of what I was kind of getting at you know for the master's tools and this will never dismantle the master's house that may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game but they'll never know us to bring about genuine change and I think that's really what the book's about you know you that's what rush is doing he's trying to build this alternative society within our society and it works to a certain extent and he's not trying he's trying to do it the finger stokes craft which are for people I've read the book is the area in Bristol where the internet's been deliberately cut off it's kind of it's an art experiment some ideas that's how he originally the people that built it in the book envision it and how I envisioned it based on certain artworks that I even saw when I was living in New York this idea that you know you can a community can separate self from the internet and see what happens and what emerges as an experiment if you do that but when he gets what he's asked for it's not quite it's not quite how he imagined it it's more chaotic and he realizes that like the infrastructure he's built can't scale with the interest that he's suddenly got as well which I think is very of a poignant kind of kind of part of this debate is that you know you build something on the internet it can scale very quickly lots of people get interested in if you don't have to handle that then that's when you have problems which is you know exactly why we've seen all the issues around social media and Twitter and Facebook and how they're misused for hate and political manipulation and stuff because we don't understand how they work when a lot of people start using and we don't plan for that which is one of the points I wanted to kind of bring in so sorry yeah it's not very definitive answer but hopefully that goes some way to like kind of tackling that question yeah right Tim one last question before we take audience questions audience if you have any questions please type it in the chat those of your own YouTube type it in the chat there it'll be conveyed to us here uh on last mission I mean Tim wanted to ask is still you know recently you know when people said apocalypse you'd think you know nuclear bombs going off and nuclear wastelands or asteroid strikes you know unlivable earth and all this sort of a thing and infinite detail has been called post-apocalyptic so which is just switching on the internet is an apocalypse in itself but my question to you is it's been called post-apocalyptic it's been called dystopian I mean do you agree with these uh labels if not why I don't I don't know how to put this I don't I mean the apocalyptic one is is hyperbole to a large extent but a lot of this comes from publishing right and it comes from comes from readers and reading communities and science fiction communities and tropes and things like this where everything has to be kind of cat guys and putting pigeonhole you know people in good reads people looking at amazon publishing marketing people marketing for books they need to they feel like they need to you know constantly pigeonhole everything so the audiences know exactly what they are and you see people marketing their books in this way themselves which is always slightly upset me they'll list the kind of romances that are in the book or the list of the topics that come up in the book as as they're announcing their book you know and it's almost like a checklist for fans so these are the things I like I like dystopias I like romances I like this I want to take these things off the book before I read it and I find that I just find that really limiting and it's it's it's tough man when you're a writer it's tough to be labeled this way because some people buy your book and then not enjoy it because it's not dystopia and some people won't buy your book because it's a dystopia right and I've had people like say this to me I've had both people say both things to me I bought your book and it wasn't in dystopia or are you looks interesting but don't read dystopias and it's like you know it's kind of like even science fiction I have people who a lot of people who's not a lot of people but I know people like oh I don't looks interesting but I don't really read science fiction and the mind I'm not even sure this is a science fiction there's nothing that's particularly science fictional in it like like we've been discussing this morning like everything's kind of happening already or it's about to happen and it's about issues that impact I hope impact everything one of us in various ways even if we don't realize it so yeah I'm not keen on I'm not keen on being labeled in that way dystopia but at the same time you know I grew up reading dystopias and watching dystopian films and they're huge in huge influence on me um you know like JJ Ballard's a huge influence on me and I don't think he ever really called his own work dystopia even he probably had some issues to that term but other people said he called his work dystopia um a lot of cyberpunk is often called dystopia and which is also you know like a massive a massive influence on me um so yeah it's tricky it's tricky I don't like the terms I don't like the terms utopian dystopia um like one of you said earlier on the on the on the call you said you know dystopia is a one person's dystopia could be another person's utopia or a lot of times I find you know I'll write something and put it in a book or short story perhaps and people say to me or this is like really dystopian depressing and I don't want to read this this is just or you know it's like it seems dystopian depressing for you but that's the reality for you know factory workers die so in China you know this is how they live like this is they live in dormitories and in in factory complexes that's not science fiction like just transplanted it from China to the US so suddenly it seems relevant to you and suddenly you're upset by it and I think that that's that's that's an important thing about dystopias is that you know they're not they you know to paraphrase that Gibson quote about the future they're not evenly distributed I think let's move on to audience questions now because we started getting a few um the first one is from Will Elwood via YouTube um do you have any thoughts on regulation around machine learning and other brute force AI technologies uh yes I do I do have a I have like very strict I like I have pretty extreme thoughts on that I would actually I'd want to call for a moratorium on a lot of that technology for until we really understand it like and and when I call I'm gonna say moratorium I mean not not not not even doing any research and development on it for like a year maybe longer there's a lot of these technologies we've been told we need that we do not need we didn't need them five years ago the world was fine wasn't fine it was terrible five years ago but you know there's a lot of stuff you know I to use it's not an AI technology I'm trying to think of an AI example people used to say to me and this isn't an AI technology but you've used to say to me about Uber a lot so I you can't ban Uber because I need Uber to get around and so how did you get around two years ago you know like this is like people are saying this to me in like 2014 so how did you how did you get here on there it was a bit hard and tricky yeah okay it wasn't as convenient for you um and it maybe cost you a little bit more money the answer isn't necessarily you but the answer might be you know getting involved in a press group and campaigning for your local mass transit to be there might be you you you you car sharing with people you actually know rather than people in the algorithm rather than car sharing with you know underpaid workers that are now with no protections that labor protections that an algorithm has told you you should car share with right so you know there's there's kind of I'm very pro-regulation these technologies because like we said earlier you know we're we're beta testing them by dropping them on some of the most vulnerable populations like just yesterday I or was it yesterday or the day before I was completely shocked to see one of these you know Boston robotics robot dog things being used in the Bronx in New York to go into an apartment building by NYPD and NYPD who are you know basically a fascist police force at this point if you if you watched what happened in New York and how they treated their population and treated Black Lives Matter not just Black Lives Matter protesters anybody that was near them but caught up you know physically assaulted and killed in some cases by the police who went on a complete rampage in the city and police sources all over America did the same thing and now we're giving them cutting edge robotic AI technology and and and asking them to use it in places like the Bronx and in some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York just beta testing it and the people had never seen one of these things on the street until it turned up at someone's house at the Bronx on Thursday and and it's it's it's terrifying to me we need to stop I really I really believe in like heavily regulating this research and development and maybe even pausing it until we understand the implications it's not like there's a lack of research there's a huge amount of research done by you know devices and the problems that are associated with AI and machine learning but we're not listening to them and certainly the people making and deploying these technologies aren't listening to them and maybe they should be stopped until they start I think but good question thank you this question from Dharmendra who asks are there any books book or books Tim would recommend given that his book may well end up as a documentary just in the last month or so we have read about hackers attacking hospitals in Africa bike dances censorship engine etc is there any fiction left that's a really good question and I don't know the answer to it I like I'm I'm also I always freeze up when people ask me about book recommendations because I I I because of the internet and everything I don't read as much as I used to which is like an awful thing which I'm sure a lot of people relate to some writers whose work I've really enjoyed recently come on let's think um Elvia Wilk who wrote a book called oval which is set in a future Berlin um it's very very nice blend of like contemporary fiction and science fiction it works really really well it's about like hipsters living on an artificial mountain that's been built in the middle of Berlin um it's really about culture and personal relationships Christopher Brown's books as well um tropical Kansas failed state just the last one is a trilogy of books actually set in an alternate history they're set in the future but but that is had and whose timeline is split from our timeline in the 80s and it's about civil war in America um very scary to watch what happened in the US in the last year after reading those books where he the second book he very very accurately describes what DC would look like under a kind of military lockdown if there was an insurrection um he talks about building huge fence complexes around the White House and Capitol Hill so exactly what happened exactly what's happened you know after after but they did it run after Black Lives Matter protests and then they did it too late after after the insurrection in in January uh so his work and he also talks a lot about something that I'm convinced is coming to America and is very scary as the I mean I was just talking about the robot dog thing but you know the use of drones on civilians I think is something that's inevitable in America that there'll be drone strikes against civilian targets drone strikes against civilian targets in the Middle East all the time um there's drone strikes you know constantly in Afghanistan um which seem to be in a gray area as to whether they're legally acts of war but I can see that he just he explores that a lot in the book about about an American crisis using the same drones to keep its own population under control and surveyed and and assassinated when necessary and and I think I feel like there's when we saw the drones we saw drones being deployed during the Black Lives Matter protests you know just to monitor just circling cities and monitoring what was going on so we're there already he's he's a very prophetic writer in that sense um and um I'm trying to think who else I'm sorry my brain's kind of kind of seized up it always does when I'm asked for recommendations um and then the classics you know go and read Jeju Ballad that's what I always say to everybody go and read High Rise and and Concrete Island and understand and some of these actually some of these more recent books like Millennium People and give you a good idea into how uh we've become reliant on on technology and how it impacts our culture I think um yeah sorry I'm trying to think I'm not near books I'm a very bad simple person because I do it up here in my loft where my books are not up here um that's that's a good offer I mean a good offer should have a war internet you can always reach out to you and yeah yeah I should have I should have used a virtual battery owned thing to put somebody else's books in so I look like a proper offer right um yeah I guess that's uh just about what we have time for um thank you I mean that was really really good I mean honestly we could still keep going on I could keep going on there's so many other things in the back of my head that I wanted to ask you know but you know people you need to go have breakfast we need to go have dinner all of those practical concerns are there so it's good no thank you thank you it's been it's been lovely and thanks for getting me up this morning I might actually get some work done this morning rather than sitting around like I normally do it's been good but no but seriously thank you so much this has been just like a really pleasurable experience I think I've been a lot of fun just great questions guys thank you so much and she's muted one last question just came in uh from moss allen do you see a viable path to reclaiming independent internet space given the trends for most people to depend on easy centralized apps or websites will people swing back to building internet spaces uh that's a really good question I hope so I know there's community projects all over the world and most major cities people trying to do similar mesh based networks to I describe in the book I might tend to think will happen I think I've been expecting it for a few years and a lot of shits happened the last couple years so things got distracted I think but I think there's going to be a swing back towards privacy and I think there's going to be maybe a swing back to people using applications and stuff that aren't based in the cloud my concern is that that's not going to be a universal swing back I think it's going to be a swing back towards people I think it's good are you rich enough to be able to pay for google services that aren't based in the cloud are you rich enough to download your music are you rich enough to buy the phone that isn't always connected to the cloud are you rich enough to have you know a social media or messaging app that has really high privacy and isn't run by ad tech I mean we see it already right because so the surveillance and the privacy issues stuff really and the centralization is all dependent on ad tech that exists because of advertising technology right if you there's a lot of platforms where you can pay them and you don't have to ever see another youtube you can pay youtube and you don't have to see advertising anymore hulu other platforms like that even newspapers now you know there's some newspapers you can take a subscription and you're not forced to look at advertising all the time so kind of class system for privacy if you can afford to tap privacy is a commodity that you can buy okay we're already there and I think we might sit in place on that which is worrying you know anything on the internet which club creates a class system or a tiered system just sort of twitter you know like I said earlier introducing its subscription models and like anything that happens like that is of major concern for me for obvious reasons so I think I hope that we see community groups pushing for this stuff I hope we see more of it my my my suspicion is that we'll see see it initially as a as a product that you can buy which kind of kind of kind of defeats the point sometimes thank you thank you so much um I think that's all the questions before we before I say goodbye I'd like to recommend Tim's other books which are short stories one is ghost hardware which is very much set in the world of infinite detail and has many of the same characters and gives very nice backstories to them so definitely go eat that one and as well as paint work which also he mentioned has a lot of augmented reality and stuff and there's a connection between again ghost hardware and paint work because three cube is a character in both right um but yes go um thank you everyone for coming today thank you I mean this was really insightful um thank you so much for coming and speaking to us thank you to the audience for your questions because they definitely you know led to a better discussion uh thank you Shenoy for being awesome as always thank you to Zainab and David and the rest of the Husky team who's been handling everything behind the scenes and uh yes thank you everyone we will see you again next month and thank you you've you've awesome awesome thank you thank you thank you both of you it's been an absolute pleasure it's been a lot of fun this morning and uh like I said just brilliant questions and thanks for everybody came along thank you hopefully you can do this again sometime hopefully in a better world with with less travel restrictions you might even be able to meet up and buy you all a beer or something at some point but um but yeah yeah fingers crossed yeah um but thanks thanks so much guys this has been one thank thank thank you for agreeing to come and to speak with us you know thank you absolute pleasure to pick your brain it has been an absolute pleasure um and thank you all again enjoy the rest of your weekends thank you


Good evening and welcome back to Byline. This is our public affairs show here at Amherst Media, and we have the assistance of Adrian Turizzi from our League of Women Voters as we form our programs, plus the staff here, Faith and Jam, and a whole bunch of other people here in the studio. So as you remember, this is our weekly or bi-weekly show now. We're actually doing it bi-weekly to provide you information about what's happening with our town government as we transition from the old system, which is now feeling older and older as our new government is settling in. And today we have our city town counselor, I guess we still call it town counselors here in town, town counselor Kathy Shane, and we have Julie Johnson, a familiar face in this community, connected to the Hitchcock Center. If I remember, yesterday you said you were approaching a number, a second decade of full service. Yes, terrific. That's really great. So we're going to talk a little bit about arts-related stuff today. And by the way, I'm not sure whether the last show I recorded is going to be on before or after this, but you're going to see two shows in a row, I think, that both tie into arts and culture here in Amherst, which is really interesting. It was not planned, but it's really fortuitous because there's a lot of cultural activity going on here in the community and it contributes in so many different ways to the life of the community. So let's start with percent for the arts. So Kathy, tell us what percent for the arts means and what's going on at the town council on that subject. We have a new by-law that we're going to be bringing to the town council, not this Monday but February 24th, so anyone who wants to tune into that discussion, Bill Cason, who is chair of the Public Art Commission, will be doing a visual. And this by-law, I chaired a subcommittee, an ad hoc committee on revising one, would take 0.5% of large new building projects, so large meaning at least a million dollars, and dedicate it to a work of art. And we would be vetting that with both the users of the building, if it's a building, and try to integrate it at least in concept or with the overall structure. It might be attached to the building, it might be next to its sculpture, but the goal would be both art and culture, but also bring people downtown, bring people to the building and want to see and visit it and use it with the thing of beauty or of interest. So this, if town council accepts it, as I said, we'll be voting on, would affect only the major projects, but we have some big buildings scheduled to be on the horizon over the next several years, so we would be seeking public input, there would be public hearings with an overall plan. It's quite exciting because we haven't had this way of funding something which could be a significant piece of art. We could put the competition out internationally if we wanted to for we're interested in getting ideas like the following. So let's give people a sense of scale by numbers. So if it's a million-dollar project, how much public art are we going to spend on public art? $5,000. And if it's $10 million? $50,000. $10 million? $10 million you just did, but double it. So it does keep up. If it's $20 million, then it's $100,000. So one of the ways we've... Is there a cap? There's no cap on it. So the .5... So if we built a $150 million building, it would be .5%? It would be up to. The likelihood of Amherst doing that is not probably in our lifetime. That's more in New York City building. But the idea is that it would be up to that amount. And because it's tied to the overall construction, we can go out and be paying for this as part of a big project. So it can be paid back in 20 or 30 years. So what looks like $50,000 is much smaller on an annual basis as a draw on our capital. So it makes it much more affordable to spread it out that way. And this is how other cities we found who do this. So in most cases, we're talking tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. And occasionally it might hit 100,000 or a little bit more, but it would be hard to get there. Again, not all at once. Not all at once, yeah. So even if you took $100,000 and did it over 30 years, you're not talking about it very much each year. And it doesn't have to be an up to to pay for the idea, the artist doing the artwork, and installation. And this is visual arts? It would all be visual. So could you imagine a video artist? Potentially, but I think what we've been thinking... More objects. We've been thinking more objects and artwork that wouldn't necessarily require a lot of maintenance. We would like it to... So it could be a sculpture. It could be a mural. It could be tile work. You know, in some cities what I've seen is a creative, again, if you're doing it with the construction project design, a cutout of a side of a building which has an amazing place to sit that's got some creative cement work that's very interesting. So it could be utilitarian as well. Absolutely. I think of Air Maristice. We've got dinosaur tracks everywhere. So would we, near an elementary school, build in a theme that's local to us, or car museum kinds of things? I think we could be extremely creative because we'd be wide open to ideas once we decide is it a mural, is it physical? You mentioned other cities, so we wouldn't be alone in doing this. No, there are cities all over the country that are doing this. Often with much, much, much bigger budgets, but yes, there are lots of cities doing it. And so we're not creating the wheel here, we're not inventing the wheel, and we wouldn't be the first, even in Massachusetts, to do this. We're not the first, but I believe, and I haven't double-checked this, Cambridge was the first, and I'm not sure there are many others than Cambridge, and Cambridge, just by the nature of it, is... Yeah, we had a state program at one time, and we lost it in one of the recessions, and we've been fighting to get it back, so it's been unfortunate, but we've not been able to get it back because you think about the number and scale of buildings that the state builds. Absolutely. We could be creating some... You think of what Springfield could look like if some of those state buildings had someone thinking creatively on them. So we're going to come back and talk a little bit more, because Public Art is actually already in Amherst. This is just another thing, but we'll come back to that in a second. Julie, I just want to get the conversation started with you about a program that the Hitchcock Center is involved in, and it's not the only one in Amherst, as I recall, but tell us about this program that you're working on with the Cultural Council for the Commonwealth. Yeah. So, well, as we know, we live in a state that is very rich in cultural and arts organizations, and the Mass Cultural Council is a state funding agency that has been supporting many of those organizations to create greater access and richer cultural life for people. And in 2017, they opened up a new partnership with the State Department of Transitional Assistance, and so that anybody who had an EBT card through that department, anybody who's receiving funding... EBT is a food stamp card, basically. It's an electronic benefits transfer. They get financial assistance for a lot of different things. So it's for low-income people who are working with that department. They get an EBT card that identifies them as a participant in that program, and through the partnership with the Mass Cultural Council, what that card now does is that any organization that currently receives funding with the Mass Cultural Council voluntarily registers to accept that card and, as a result, a benefit that dramatically reduces or offers free admission to our cultural institutions so that it is to break down barriers to access to the arts and to culture. And so organizations like the Hitchcock Center, and there are, I think, 130 different organizations across the state, the Hitchcock Center being one, we were the first to register, among the first to register for that program in 2017. We offer free membership to anybody who holds that card, and then that gets them discounted programs, and also it gives them automatic eligibility for scholarships for summer camp programs. So since the opening of that program, we've served about 40 different households, maybe 120 family members and individuals, and they've been able to participate in about 104 programs over the course of the last three, three and a half years. And so the event that just, that we were part of launching with Mass Cultural Council this past month was they've added a new partner to that program, and it's the Department of the Massachusetts Connector Health Program. They have now, anybody who has affordable health care through that program, they're part of the Connector Care Card to Culture, just like the EBT Card to Culture, and it opens up even more access. So anybody who has that card also can have free access to a lot more cultural events. So this provides a lot of opportunity for low income people who may have a desire, but not the means to be able to participate in these programs. And I think it's interesting because the Hitchcock Center, which has been in town for many, many, many years, is a real institution here. It's an environmental center. We don't think of it as a cultural, but if you think about in a broader sense, the natural environment is filled with the elements that relate to culture and life as well. And Kathy mentioned dinosaur tracks a few minutes ago. And so here the arts are thinking, well, dinosaur tracks are part of our culture. Well, it's also part of the scientific culture of our community. Yeah, culture is such an interesting word because it's really about people who share a common value, beliefs, and language in place, exactly. And so our natural heritage is as much of our culture as our artistic representation of our culture and so forth. So it's a broad interpretation and a very important one. It's also interesting because there's an implicit belief that's expressed through this program that the arts can serve more than just as entertainment or making your life a little more pleasant by what you see around you, that there are other things such as making people feel better and healthier as a result of having different kinds of experiences that you can engage in through the arts, whether painting, I know you do some painting or have done so over the course of your life and just other people just finding respite. Exactly. Finding relaxation, finding a change of venue and frame of mind. It's a very exciting program for that reason and I think it's the first of its kind in the country where the state has taken the leadership of really opening up cultural arts and programs to recognizing the direct connection between the sense of health and well-being of our residents. And if you don't have that access, it takes a large part of that sense of place, that sense of well-being, that sense of connection. And do you find that a lot of the folks who are participating and taking advantage have children in the household? A lot of them do, a lot of them do. And as you know, the whole issue of really connecting children to nature, that has a lot of research that demonstrates the deep benefit for physical development, cognitive development, social development, critical thinking, free play. So it's definitely in line with the vision of this program to really create opportunities. This is really big picture thinking. And you have to have an open mind to see the value of this and to see the contribution this makes on so many levels. You mentioned social development, well social equity as well. And social equity. Because if you don't have the resources, you're shut out from these experiences. And so just having the door open for those children and those families is really, really important. And if you get the secondary and tertiary benefits of not only the leisure and the enrichment, but also the health and being part of the community and not being isolated from the community because you can't afford the fee for the admission. And breaking down the barriers in this way is, people don't have to say, I'm low income and I need help. They've got a car. They can seamlessly integrate into, right, and they're not identified in any way. It really has deep impact in that so you don't have the stigma as well. Great. So let's go back for a few more minutes and comments here around public art. And before I transition over, I suggested that this, we have a lot of public art in town already. So we're not starting something brand new in town. We're creating a new policy. That's absolutely right. To further advance the opportunities but tied to public building. Amherst is amazingly rich in our art activities and I don't know whether if I hold this up but I think I fed it to you also. There's a brochure online under the Public Art Commission but it's also, you can click through the various sites that we have and one of the things that I've witnessed with when we open up a new exhibit as a town and the other thing about this is it is public, meaning there isn't an entrance fee. You just go to it is when this new mural that appears on the back of one East Pleasant facing the graveyard opened up, there was a whole community. That was the one that was rescued. There was a whole community gathering. So in addition to everything else you were talking about it's bringing people out and mingling and you saw conversations start on who is this and people were sharing stories and then going off to eat. It was a cold day and they got cold so it's bringing people, if it's this in downtown, there's a wonderful sculpture in Mill River Recreation Area of Anute. There's a salamander over by Cushman but it's in the corner and it wraps around with rocks and people go over and discover it so you have kids out on the ball field coming over reading about this rocky animal so it's very exciting for what it can add to an experience and I think this sense of community that someone else is sharing that with you and you're sharing it with others. And most of those pieces of art that we see all around town that already exists were actually paid for mostly by private initiative and private effort and the public art though is a piece of public art that will be paid for by the public as part of the construction of the various buildings that will come along over time. And that's true and what you'll see on plaques it'll say donated by so it might have been financed with private money and the public art commission is in a position to take people's donations also so it might be if a new park opens up and isn't necessarily part of this part of money someone would say wouldn't you want to have and talk about the designers of the park. It's interesting the very first thing that happened in the opening of Kendrick Park which has been on the books for a very long time but finally is now engaged and they have a series of sculptures. Yeah. On that property and there was no public funds involved in those except perhaps the Amherst Arts Council gets a small amount of state tax money that comes into town so I should say no local taxes were involved in those as far as I know at this point and so this new program would be tied to specific buildings and it would be built into the budget of the creation of those buildings. That's correct, that's correct and that's why it you know it could it can do something more substantial if we decide to do it you know as we go forward. Yeah. Interestingly I mentioned that there was a taping of a show with our new bid director Gabriel Gould and they presented a five point plan to the town council recently one of which was the creation of a performing facility venue on the South Common in downtown Amherst and this has apparently been talked about for many many years there have been different versions of this but none of them ever got to the finish line and it's now part of their vision and their plan and as I was listening to her describe this is going to be a performance venue and it could be any kind of performance from film to music to poetry to another example she used was just even a business opportunity where people come to pitch their businesses so instead of doing it in a closed auditorium on a college campus the people who are doing that might do it right there on the town common this venue but I was also thinking of that point when she was talking about this that right behind the South Common over the shoulder if you will of that facility is a sculpture on the corner of people reading are you familiar with that piece of sculpture and so you know that's visual and it's it's right there it's just very quiet there's not a big deal about it except that when you take a walk or you drive by it catches your eye and it's so Amherst it's our book and our plow reading and you know right there with some big trees around and then Sweets are Park across the street as well so it's there's a real potential for enlivening the downtown that is absolutely the goal more public art it's important to really know too that you know art and culture are economic drivers for cities and towns they actually really drive a lot more you know business and the more beautiful and more attractive and more appealing and accessible your towns are with art you can take walking tours for visitors who come in and they hear oh I hear they have the following and yeah it's interesting too because we just recently if you don't know we we recently built a brand new building it's gorgeous one or two wood net zero construction buildings in town right where the 23rd certified living building in the world which is an exceptional you know highest standard for green building but one of the things that in order to get that certification and requirement is not only to have high performance standards environmentally but also they have what they call these different pedals so they have performance standards for different pedals, energy, water materials, non-toxic materials beauty beauty is one of them and beauty is they consider is extremely important to not only for green buildings to actually be beautiful because often high performance buildings aren't but that beauty in general has an incredible role in again creating livable cities and places that inspire people and give people a sense of of respite and so I see the arts and you know and this this sort of one percent of half a percent half a percent sorry half a percent for the arts the state program was a percent the town would be half a percent and the other thing about the living building too is that it had this whole thing about rights to nature and so those any living building creates public space that's beautiful as part of their own construction to not be exclusive to others so if it's people who are using the building who aren't using the building but have space that they can use so it gives that history and sort of and I think that's one of the things we've always we have been in this century or the last few decades at risk of losing is that community space that public space that brings people together we often just build over it rather than say you know this is this is part of the economic center as well as a cultural center to have a place where people can meet and greet each other and want to come to each other rather than stay at home in front of a television set or whatever more isolating experience they have building community building community through arts and culture yeah and do you think this will be in place in a matter of weeks or months well on February 24th is where the full council there are 13 members of the council so this is going through two council committees positively if it's voted in it then goes on the books in terms of a bylaw so any new building will have this what about renovation or restoration of the public structure if it was major and partly new construction it's written sort of a dollar level more than you know it would not include building a new water for purification plant on the enterprise fund off in Hadley and the woods it's thought if we want it to be publicly accessible and a place that people would want to come to or that the public is regularly coming in and out of the building the way a school is and we will fortunately it looks like we're on our path to getting a new school great and so this would be in place for the public construction projects that are under consideration right now and at what point will artists be engaged in the conversation will it be from the beginning of the planning of the building the goal would be very early and it's not necessarily the artist is going to create the work but having the art sensibility at the table as the project is being developed and ideally then early on before there's anything like the final design of the building having the construction managers say these kinds of artwork could work and then go out and solicit the proposals because there's going to be a real effort and we wrote into the bylaw that in no way would we want the artwork to delay the building so if the building is moving along and suddenly oh wait we didn't get around to choosing the artist isn't ready to do and they can't build without it we don't want that to happen a delay that was related to the art if it was critical we could end it but the idea is to integrate it early on and it's there the opportunity to enhance the size of the project by adding private funds or foundation funds if somebody wanted to do that and let's say it's a $25,000 in the budget but somebody says I'd like to match that and you could do a piece of work Stan, if you have some donors like that I think the answer is absolutely yes the art council is set up as is the town so there are mechanisms to and if we didn't have an earmarked fund right now our controller could set up the percent for our donation fund so that you would know that if I'm donating I'm donating to this but the public's exposure is limited to a half a percent but also what was important to some of the people on the finance committee and I think the general council is if we hit a big dip in some way or somehow with this particular building and the timing of it we had four at once we could decide on any project to lower the amount or for this one not to do it so it's not a no matter what so it would be a thoughtful process Shane you have the last word and we want to thank you and Julie for being here and thank you all for listening and we'll see you again soon


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