Episode 180: Transcript
Episode: 180: The Invisible Chain that Holds Us Together (w/ Alexis Madrigal)
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, I want you to play a little game with me. Are you ready?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:04] Okay. Yep.
Annalee: [00:00:05] Okay. So I'm going to give you just a few words and I want you to come up with a definition of what they might mean in the future. Are you ready?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:15] Hit me.
Annalee: [00:00:16] First one is “AI Slop Party”.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:20] You know, I feel like it's really hard work being AI slop. I feel like AI slop works all the time. It never gets a break. It's just…
Annalee: [00:00:28] So true.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:29] People are constantly like, sending it to you and like receiving it and putting it in their orifices. And like, I feel like AI slop needs like a vacation and needs like just some like…
Annalee: [00:00:39] Recreation.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:40] Like some big, tall glasses of like information ooze to just suck down with like big bendy straws and like, hey, you know, give that AI slop a party. I think it deserves it.
Annalee: [00:00:51] Love it. Love it. Okay. I can't wait to go to the AI slop party where like everyone has like 400 fingers. Eating things in a really weird way. All right. Here's your next one.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:05] Okay.
Annalee: [00:01:05] “Bomb Cyclone Regulatory Agency”.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:08] I mean, I feel like bomb cyclones are really smart and they should be regulating us. And like, I feel like, you know, they're very spontaneous. They kind of have lots of ideas. They kind of appear out of nowhere and then go back to nowhere. And I feel like they can just come in, re imagine a particular set of regulations and then be gone. And it's just, it's very efficient. It's way more efficient than what we're doing right now, which is basically having all the energy of a bomb cyclone with none of the organization. And I feel like we could have more kind of like order if a bomb cyclone was in charge of what we currently have in our regulatory agencies at the federal level, specifically.
Annalee: [00:01:48] I totally agree. I mean, bomb cyclones are great at brainstorming. That's all I'll say. All right. Here is your last single word. Tell us what this is in the future. The word is “gerbilnomics”.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:04] I mean, I had gerbils when I was a kid. I used to have, always have two gerbils named Hersh and Hersh. And like, you know...
Annalee: [00:02:11] Wait, you had a series of gerbils that were all named Hersh and Hersh. Like there were multiple iterations of Hersh and Hersh.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] They were always just named Hersh and Hersh. H-E-R-S-H, I guess. Hersh and Hersh, the gerbils. And like, those were the only pets we had when I was a kid. And like, sometimes gerbils will just eat each other. You know, sometimes they'll just… Gerbils are cannibals. They are cannibals.
Annalee: [00:02:32] Sure. Relatable.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:34] It's interesting because gerbils are very big on recycling. Like, you don't have to give them litter. You just give them like cardboard boxes and they will shred the cardboard boxes which keep their teeth really sharp. Or keep their teeth from growing into their faces and killing them. But also, then the shredded cardboard boxes become the thing that they kind of run around on and the thing that they used for their waste disposal. It's like, very efficient. It's a very efficient system.
[00:03:01] And so I think those two things, the cannibalism and the extremely efficient use of resources, is kind of what I think about when I think about gerbils. I think about gerbils as being highly efficient and totally immoral. And so I feel like we're already living under gerbalnomics. I feel like gerbalnomics is increasingly about...
Annalee: [00:03:19] But without the recycling!
Charlie Jane: [00:03:20] No, well, I mean, you know, it is very efficient. We're living in a very efficient closed system. I mean, but then you think about the recycling and how it leads to just like piles and piles of shredded cardboard soaked with gerbil urine and stuff.
Annalee: [00:03:34] Right. That is a good...
Charlie Jane: [00:03:36] That is kind of our...
Annalee: [00:03:37] That is an analog for what we're doing, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:39] I feel like gerbilnomics is our system that we currently have. And maybe one day we can like upgrade to hamsternomics.
Annalee: [00:03:46] Wow. Or guinea pignomics.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:49] Guinea pignomics, like civetnomics. I don't know.
Annalee: [00:03:52] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:52] My ex had like chinchillas. Chinchillonomics would be good.
Annalee: [00:03:55] Chinchillonomics! That would involve a lot of like dust baths and eating tiny raisins and stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:01] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:04:02] So what I'm getting is that we have gerbilnomics, but what we need is a bomb cyclone regulatory agency to like fix the problems with gerbilnomics. And while we're doing that, the AI slop will go have a party.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:15] Thousand percent. That's... We've solved everything.
Annalee: [00:04:17] We've solved it. All right. That makes sense because you're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that only makes sense when you listen to it backwards. I'm Annalee Newitz. I am a science journalist who also writes science fiction. And I have a book coming out in a month or two called Automatic Noodle, which is about robots who are trying to run a noodle restaurant.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:42] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. I also organize a lot of stuff and do book reviews. And I have a book coming out probably around the time you're listening this almost called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about, you know, a young trans woman who teaches her mom how to be a witch.
Annalee: [00:05:01] Which is perfect for our times as well. That's like that could be part of gerbilnomics. We're talking today about a topic that I've been really eager to discuss for some time now on the show, which is supply chains. Most people started thinking about the global supply chain during the pandemic or maybe when the Ever Given was stuck in the Suez Canal for a week. And we were all talking about how like one ship had like blocked all shipping for the world.
[00:05:28] But now with the Trump tariffs, we're hearing about the supply chain again and supply chains have been shaping our civilizations and imaginations for millennia. So joining us at the top of the show to talk about real life supply chains is journalist Alexis Madrigal, whose new book, The Pacific Circuit, is about how trade between Asia and the U.S. has shaped the city of Oakland in California.
[00:05:55] And later in the episode, Charlie Jane and I are going to talk to you about supply chains in science fiction and fantasy, because there are a lot more than you realize. Also, on our mini episode next week, we will be talking about why we're going to miss the Wheel of Time TV series.
[00:06:14] And finally, we should let you know that we're going to go on vacation for a month. We do the show all the time and we just wanted to have a little time off. We're going to be on book tour in August. So hopefully you can come out and see us on our book tours. You can find that on our websites or if you follow us on social media, you can find out where we're going to be. So we will be gone for a couple of weeks, but then we will be back in your ears in early September. So look out for that in your feed. All right, let's jump into the supply chain.
[00:06:48] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:07:19] And now we are so excited to welcome Alexis Madrigal. He is a longtime environmental journalist. He worked at The Atlantic and is now one of the hosts of KQED's legendary show Forum which airs every weekday in the Bay Area and online. And he's also the author of a new book called The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City. It's a really terrific book. It's beautifully written and researched. And it's all about how supply chains affect the physical and social environment of our cities. Welcome, Alexis.
Alexis: [00:07:53] Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:56] Yeah, so let's just start out really basic. In your book, you talk about the supply chain in the Pacific Ocean as something that's invisible, but also extremely complicated. It's something that we don't really think about that often, but it transforms the land, it mobilizes labor, it creates trade partnerships. I'm wondering, can you just talk us through what constitutes a supply chain and how this Pacific Circuit connects to Oakland, California specifically?
Alexis: [00:08:23] Totally. Yeah, you know, I think people sometimes think of a supply chain almost like it's some set of links, like it's a rope or something, you know? But really, it's a set of processes, it's a set of spaces, it's a set of technologies that connect largely Asian manufacturing economies with consumers around the world, and in the case of the United States, you know, with just American consumer-dom.
[00:08:49] And it's really a creation of the second half of the 20th century. It grows out of military logistics. You know, the very first container ports across the Pacific, one was in Oakland, California, the other was in Cameron Bay in Vietnam. And the reason is it was kind of solving a military issue of not being able to get enough stuff for the American army to fight the Vietnam War. And what developed out of that was a series of ports up and down the West Coast, as well as across Asia, and a series of standardized kind of interlocking parts, and that means the container, the box itself, that means, like, the twist locks that attach those containers to various things, that means the cranes, that means the port infrastructure and all the dredging that has to be done.
[00:09:42] And one of the things that I realized, and I think this is telling the sort of Oakland-based version of this story, or the Bay Area-based version of this story, is that it kind of takes, like, three things. It takes all that, like, material stuff, and there's been some great books about that, like the book called The Box by Marc Levinson. But then the longshoremen, who were dealing with this, who were the labor on the waterfront, realized that it wasn't just the boxes, it was also the information technology that was required to control these supply chains around the world. The sort of centers of production needed to be controlled by the big companies in the U.S.
[00:10:19] And so that was the second piece. And then the Oakland part of it that I added was it also requires these environmental sacrifice zones, because if you're going to do all your production in one place and ram it back through a few port areas to the Malls of America and the big box stores, you're going to need thousands and thousands of trucks every time a ship comes in, and that's going to have these, like, major repercussions for communities. And so that kind of, the three things the book really focuses on are, like, you know, the labor, both human and machine, of the ports, the information technology, and the kind of ideas of controlling supply chain, and then the people who were affected by all that stuff.
Annalee: [00:10:59] I really loved how much you centered this on containers and containerization, and the idea that we get these standardized containers that make so many things possible. And I've been recently researching the Bronze Age, and there's a similar kind of revolution at that time, 4,000 years ago, where they invent ceramic containers called pithoi, and they're in a standard shape, and they're easy to ship. And suddenly, like, Crete and a bunch of other islands are able to ship all of their oil and wine all across the Mediterranean, and it's sort of the same thing that we're seeing in the Pacific. And I wonder if you could just expand a little bit on what that revolution was, like, when we suddenly went from having... Because you talk a little in the book about what it was like before we had containers versus after we have containers.
Alexis: [00:11:52] Yeah, it's so interesting, because, you know, I spent all this time with longshoremen, mostly older guys who were present during the container revolution, you know, drinking in bars, getting stories out of them, you know?
Annalee: [00:12:06] That's awesome.
Alexis: [00:12:07] And they would tell you these, you know, like, kind of how it worked, you know? So it used to be, right... Like, imagine, like, maybe you can picture San Francisco in your mind, or if, you know, you're listening to this, like, Google Maps, San Francisco. You'll see this kind of crown of piers around the city, and that's how it used to work, right? I mean, this was, like, a ship would pull up right into one of these piers. It would dock there. It had cranes on board. A longshore gang would go to the hiring hall, get a job. They'd go down to that pier. They'd open up the hatches, which were these massive steel, you know, doors, basically. And then they'd go down inside, because the ship itself was the container.
[00:12:49] So let's say they were shipping coffee. There'd just be a whole hold filled with coffee. And the guys would go down there. They'd have this hook in their hand, and two guys working together would swing these coffee bags onto pallet boards, and those would go and get deposited back up on the dock. And then those would get brought to warehouses. Teamsters would come pick it up, and it would go on to wherever it was gonna go.
[00:13:09] But, like, if you were shipping anything, it needed to go in there. So a lot of what longshoremen did was, like, low-key carpentry, right? Because, like, let's say you were shipping a trunk or just, like, a bunch of random goods to Hawaii or to China or wherever the thing was going. They had to, like, build a container for that, that when, you know, a ship would be out on the sea being rocked around, everything wouldn't get broken. And so that was a pretty inefficient system.
[00:13:36] There were these clerks who had to keep track of everything that was supposed to be on every single ship. There was a guy called a supercargo who was supposed to balance, okay, we've got these oranges here, and we've got this coffee there, and we've got a bunch of machine parts. And, like, you can go see these diagrams that people drew, the supercargos drew, of, like, what cargo was supposed to go where. And it would take, you know, a week or two to unload a ship. And a ship that's carrying just a minor amount of cargo relative to what we've got now.
[00:14:09] And so one of the things that that meant, too, was that there were many more shipping lines. Like, there were many more companies that did this. The ships tended to be smaller. They docked at more ports. And one of the things that containerization enabled, in addition to simplifying that process, was it led to the kind of scaling of particular ports, particular shipping lines, and the ships themselves. And that leads, like in many other areas, when you find something that scales like that, you can make a lot of money and lots of changes kind of come to the world.
[00:14:45] So that was a really major part. And then the other major part of containerization was it was much easier to do what they call multimodal logistics, right? So you take it from the ship, you put it onto a truck which takes it over to a yard. Another truck comes and picks it up, or it goes to a rail yard, and suddenly it's like on its way wherever it needs to go.
[00:15:06] And what that really did was it opened up logistics away from the shore. And so before everything, you know, like SOMA in San Francisco was all warehouses. Everything had to be packed in there. But once you can immediately drop all these containers onto trucks and trains, now, like, one of the biggest logistical facilities in the country is in Dallas, the inland port of Dallas. Because all this stuff comes into L.A. Long Beach, they stick it on trains. They take it to Dallas where there's essentially apparently infinite space to build warehouses. And then there's all these logistics workers there who then, like, farm it out to whatever, Target, Walmart, wherever the stuff is supposed to go. And so it really opens up the interior of the country for logistical work to be able to do all that stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:49] That is so fascinating and just kind of blows my mind. So let's talk about the cultural impact of containerization. You kind of talk about the logistical self kind of emerging in response to this, which I'd love to hear more about. You know, this idea that it kind of takes away the solidarity that we had from living in a city and working together in this city. And it kind of makes us more isolated and lonely. How is this sort of rise of the logistical self getting rid of like chipping away at our sense of community?
Alexis: [00:16:20] Yeah. Yeah, you know, logistics such a weird thing because it doesn't seem like it should have kind of major cultural impacts. But I think once this thing kind of slipped out of the military and you started to see these technologies not only rolling out like to big box stores, that was kind of the first wave of this stuff is like you get Walmart like in the rural areas wiping out Main Street, right? I mean, that's like purely kind of like a logistical thing, but cities totally survived there. In fact, cities were in the midst of a Renaissance, you know, before the pandemic where, you know, cities are thriving and there's lots of retail around. And even though there were problems, with retail because of online shopping stuff, it wasn't like necessarily going away.
[00:17:06] I think the pandemic really pulled forward that logistical self where people for a time were like, well, I don't really want to leave my house. And so what does that make my house? It makes it like a node in a logistical network. It makes me a delivery point for goods and services. And you see this like incredible explosion of people like beginning to do even more, you know, online shopping, ordering everything through Amazon. But also you see the Doordash and you see the Uber Eats and you see all these kinds of things.
[00:17:42] And I think once people start to pull back from other versions of sort of being in a city where you're like, oh, I'm gonna... I'm a flâneur, you know, maybe you're fancy pants like that and you're just gonna go wander the streets and see people. Or maybe you're someone who just likes being in a walkable city or maybe even you're someone who, you know, lives in a semi-suburban area, but you like to drive into, you know, downtown Oakland and do stuff there. You drive into the city.
[00:18:11] Now, I think, you know, there's just a lot of that pandemic time, I think chipped away at that for people. And I really, you know, I'm not the person who has kind of coined logistical self. This is like belongs to logistical scholars, people like Claire Leister and other folks. But I think that there's really something to that.
[00:18:31] That we begin to think of ourselves as like a coordinates in a logistical system and not a person who's responsible for maintaining the city by using it, you know? I mean, I think that's always been what's so beautiful about cities is that merely by participating in urban life, merely by walking around and going to the cafe, you're like generating urban life, you know? And the less we feel like that's an important part of our kind of social contract with being in a city, the less the city can survive.
[00:19:06] And I think you really see that in the Bay Area where we have so many people who are attuned to these technologies of sort of personal logistics and are also busy and also have money. And so you kind of have this mismatch where you have all of this wealth and yet businesses can't survive. And like the thing that really pinged for me on this is, you know, Condé Nast Traveler declares Oakland the best food city in the country. And yet every restaurateur I know is like, “I'm barely keeping the doors open. We barely are full on a Friday night, you know?” Like something has kind of slipped out of alignment.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:43] Oh, man.
Annalee: [00:19:45] Yeah, it reminds me of in William Gibson's novel, The Peripheral, there's been this horrible collapse where we don't know what's exactly happened, but the population has gone into steep decline. And in London, the city is generating all these holograms of people that wander around in the city to make people feel like they want to go out into that environment because they'll see people even though there's actually very few people left.
Alexis: [00:20:09] I mean, there's sort of like the budget version of that, you know, in various areas where the vacant ground floor retail of all these places has like pictures of people who could be in there being happy and eating and drinking and hanging out with friends, but instead it's just like life size plastic walls. I always find this thing so depressing and sad making.
Annalee: [00:20:33] Yeah, so creepy. There's this really great term that you use throughout the book, which I found really helpful to understanding how supply chains impact the land. Because, you know, we think of them as like, this is a thing that happens on the ocean or on railroad tracks. But you talk about the supply chain requiring sacrificial environments to function. So what's a sacrificial environment?
Alexis: [00:20:55] Yeah, totally. I mean, that term really kind of comes out of like the environmental literature. There was a great book called Petrolia, which is about the first oil fields in Western Pennsylvania. And I always that was in my first book. And I always remembered it because I was like, oh, yeah, there are these times where people just go, “you know what? Like, F this place. We want to do we want to make money from it. We want to do something with it. And so we're just whatever happens to the land and the other inhabitants aside from those doing the work, like, you know, forget them.”
[00:21:33] And so when I started thinking about West Oakland specifically, which is, you know, the neighborhood that's closest to the Port of Oakland, that's the term that immediately came back to me. And so like, in a human context in the 1950s, like, how do you build such a thing? You know, how do you build a sacrificial landscape?
[00:21:51] And one of the things that I discovered is basically like the city always wanted to do this, right? West Oakland was long the sort of blackest part of what was know of what became known as the Black City. And it was a place that for particularly the years after World War II was just hit with a variety of city planning tools that led to the destruction of the commercial corridor along Seventh Street, and also really led to the destruction of a lot of the community and residential space that was there.
[00:22:34] And, you know, it was done in a variety of ways. Some of it was building BART over the top and buying a bunch of land for that, which took out people's homes. Some of it was bulldozing public housing that had been built and like war housing that had been built. Some of it was declaring areas blighted for to put in a postal logistics facility.
[00:22:59] And one of the things that I discovered that process was it was kind of like an algorithmic decision making process, something that we think of as being quite modern, I think. But really, they wrote this quite complicated and opaque equation based on various factors that I would call racist. And that led them to declare the areas where 98% of the black people who lived in Oakland, they were in the zip codes that were declared blighted. So they essentially found like a the city planners found like a proxy statistic for blackness and then declared many of those areas blighted.
[00:23:30] And when an area was declared blighted, it could be bulldozed. And those bulldozed areas generated just huge holes in the community and generated all kinds of problems. Disempowering the community, there are just many, many things that happened there.
[00:23:48] So that's kind of like the backstory. That's what has been happening when containerization takes off. And what it meant was that that area had already been sort of marked for industrial development. And even though it was a very dense residential area, the idea of like running thousands of trucks out to the port of Oakland diesel trucks, the oldest dirtiest trucks, was not even considered. It wasn't even in the planning document. You know, like none of these things are even looked at.
[00:24:17] And essentially what ends up happening is as containerization scales up in Oakland and across the world, you have neighborhoods like in LA Long Beach, like in Newark, that end up having this terrible air quality in addition to a bunch of other quality of life problems caused by thousands of trucks running through your neighborhood every day and idling outside elementary schools. And so that... I think of it as quite an intentional process, like essentially a neighborhood that was a thriving black commercial corridor with a sort of class integrated black community that was living nearby was turned into a place in which the air was poisoned. The commercial strip had been destroyed and the class integrated black community dispersed through the rest of Oakland. And it was really part and parcel of the growth of the port and the political project of the port.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:15] Yeah, so I want to ask you about one of the key figures in your book, an environmental activist in West Oakland who goes by the name Ms. Margaret. She's at the center of this network of people who are trying to improve life in the city. And when we meet her, one of the things we see her doing is setting up these cheap, high-tech sensor networks that she's building in the city. And so can you tell us more about her activism and why she's so important to the story of the supply chain?
Alexis: [00:25:41] Totally. Yeah, you know, I mean, Ms. Margaret is, and the group that she worked with for a lot of her career, which is called the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, they were very smart about realizing that their stories wouldn't be believed without their own data, basically. You could show people, hey, look at all these kids with asthma. And look, they're right by, you know, all these trucks that are, you know, spewing out particulate matter. But the way that cities traditionally have done air quality monitoring, there's like one air quality monitoring site and it's like high up in the air, you know? And that isn't really reflective of the conditions like down on the ground right next to these trucks. And so they did a variety of things from just literally counting trucks being like, you know, sitting out on the corner. Being like, how many trucks have come by to setting up air quality sensors, both on like mobile stations attached to Google cars, as well as ones that they installed in particular areas around the neighborhood. Basically trying to just create data sets that could be used and brought to bear in these various kind of regulatory processes and city planning things.
[00:26:58] And they call it, you know, community-based participatory research, where essentially they bring the people who are sort of affected by these things directly into the process of actually creating these data sets with the idea that people know what's going on in the neighborhoods. And Ms. Margaret would say like, people always knew it was the trucks. Everyone knew it was... this is the problem. Of course, this is the problem. But they were able to actually like generate data that stuck, you know?
[00:27:26] And of course, it doesn't happen on its own. It takes engaging with all these kind of long-term political processes in order to get things changed. But they really did. I mean, she eventually gets herself onto the board that governs the Port of Oakland and kind of holds her feet to the fire around this maritime air quality improvement plan, which one of the reasons why I got so interested in her story was the victory. It wasn't just the sacrificial landscape that existed, but also that they were able to improve the air in West Oakland tremendously. I mean, by some measures, we're talking like 90% improvement in the amount of particulate emissions from diesel trucks.
[00:28:03] And that took engaging the state and the port and the community and all these things. And it's, you know, in some ways it's like boring work, you know? It just like takes a long time and there's lots of community meetings. But like, that's how lots of important stuff gets done. And so I kind of wanted to have an example where somebody wins. Like that's what attracted me. One of the main things that attracted me to doing this book in the first place, which is like, oh man, how nice to have a victory to show a real tangible improvement in the quality of life of people in West Oakland and the port still chugging along.
[00:28:39] I mean, that's the other thing. And people are always like, “well, if we do that, if we do, if we do this environmental cleanup, if we do this thing that's good for the community, we'll destroy our competitiveness.” And there they are, you know, they're just fine. And I think that's another good lesson.
Annalee: [00:28:52] Yeah. I love the way that a lot of this book is about how you're trying to make invisible things or hidden things visible and like the sensor network to me is such a great, it's both a metaphor, but also a real way of doing that. It's like, yeah, we can actually measure the stuff in the air. Like it's not in our imaginations, people. The supply chain is in our lungs.
Alexis: [00:29:12] Yes, totally, totally. And you know, the thing is it's like true kind of everywhere. I mean, the thing that's so interesting is, you know, if you go to these like goods movement conferences and stuff, you do find that like people in, you know, Savannah, which has a big airport and, you know, the LA Long Beach, which is huge and Seattle Tacoma. And it's the issues are the same because the supply chain necessarily has to be the same. Like the containerization is a form of kind of automation and standardization. And so the same kinds of processes are affecting all kinds of places.
Annalee: [00:29:50] So to finish up, I wanted us to get a little bit into speculative fiction. And there's this amazing moment in the show, The Good Place, where we finally learn why nobody has gone to heaven for centuries. And it's basically because of the supply chain.
[Clip of Michael] [00:30:06] These days, just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they're making one choice, but they're actually making dozens of choices they don't even know they're making.
Annalee: [00:30:23] Yeah, OK. So what we hear about is, you know, this is Michael the Angel is explaining to the Judge who's sort of like God and sort of a divine upper level manager or something. And he's saying, like, buying a tomato, it has so many choices and you can't be good because there's so many evil choices that you're making that you don't even know about. And I feel like the Pacific Circuit is kind of showing us these choices. And I wanted you to end by helping us think about how we might unwind those choices and maybe repair and restore some of the relationships that have been broken by the supply chain. And I know you've thought about this. Give Michael some wisdom.
Alexis: [00:31:04] It is such a, you know, there's this, oh, man, and I'm forgetting the scholar's name and apologies to the Academy. But there's this concept of like a second self, you know, that you essentially you are you going to buy a tomato. But you in the process of activating the supply chain that makes that tomato come into being through your sort of like consumer demand, you're also like spraying the pesticides in the Central Valley onto the farm workers as well as onto the more than human world that's destroyed in the process of doing all that.
[00:31:39] And I think there's a real reality to that, you know, just American consumer demand makes so many things come into being. Like I just was reading this Robert McFarland book, Is a River Alive?, and they're talking about Chennai. They're talking about, you know, all the dye factories that are like poisoning the rivers, you know, that go on to the floodplain of Chennai. And it's like, well, they're they're doing that so they can like dye our stuff so that we can like buy our stuff that looks cool colors, you know. It’s real that like we are calling this these other actions into being through this incredibly powerful supply chain.
[00:32:16] I mean, I think, oh, man, there is a there's a there's a part of me that can imagine can begin to imagine more super happy scenarios. I mean, I do think like, our current consumer culture is like remarkably new, like particularly in the scheme of your kind of work, Annalee, where we're thinking civilizationally, you know, this is probably a blip. Like the amount of like consumer goods that we generate and dispose of, like, it's probably not going to keep going.
[00:32:54] I mean, I just think like when you like I don't know how or when this will be forced upon us. But it really does feel like you can't I cannot really imagine that we will continue to make the amount of plastic goods that we make now out of petroleum like it just feels totally insane that we would continue to do that.
[00:33:18] So that's one piece is I kind of have a… It just feels to me like that will break down at some point. I don't know exactly how like I couldn't give you the chapter and verse of how that happens. But it just seems like impossible to me that we'll continue to do that. Like we'll run out of stuff, you know, especially because we don't reuse so much of it, right? We just have this incredible extractive approach to the earth that just feels entirely diluted.
[00:33:46] At the same time, we also have incredible amounts of like polluted areas all around us in these sort of developed countries that have all this demand for these consumer goods. And I'm I feel like that mega happy scenario is I know what the forcing function is going to be there, which is that, you know, we basically all around the Bay Area, but everywhere that was part of a working waterfront, of which there are many, many, many of these places there also as sea level rise begins first, it will push under like the rising sea level will put pressure under the ground, which is going to force up toxins that had previously been just kind of sitting there capped, which generates these gases. And we kind of you know, researchers are calling this kind of toxic tides that like, as you get this pressure on the shore, you're going to see the mobilization of all these chemicals that we put into the ground during the 20th century.
[00:34:43] And we're going to have to clean that stuff up. I mean, it's just like, it's like, we got to do it. And I feel like in some of these areas that were sacrifice zones, my hope is that we use some of the lessons that we have developed in cleaning up army bases and other military facilities which have been a big part of the changes in urban landscapes over the last 30 years. And we use those for those other industrial facilities and that those things somehow become part of a cooperative local economy rather than whatever else might happen to that land.
[00:35:17] Because I just think, I don't know, one of my key beliefs is that I don't think we're ever going to not have a globalized world in which ideas move around and people move around and all these kinds of things. But I do think that relocalization of certain things and that communities will link with other communities.
[00:35:37] You know, this is what Huey Newton called intercommunalism. You know, he thought we were in this period, what we would probably call globalization or neoliberalism or whatever. He called it reactionary intercommunalism, where the sort of the nation state was breaking down, corporations were at the fore. And what he was really hoping for was revolutionary intercommunalism where communities that had a similar relationship to global capitalism would sort of unite with each other to do a different thing. You know, he was basically like, you can't just take over one country and have socialism work. You know, you need these communities that are working together.
[00:36:09] So there's some mega happy scenario in which this sort of like archipelago of communities finds a way of doing something differently. But that means you need community controlled assets. It means you need the land. You need all these other kinds of things. And so in a pure speculative mode, that's my mega happy scenario is that like you fulfill the vision of the 1970s Black Panthers, at least, to have this revolutionary intercommunal network or, you know, the Zapatistas kind of adapted like a similar kind of way of thinking of that there'd be this network, you know, like this kind of a counter to the logistical networks that currently, you know, dominate and run the economy.
Annalee: [00:36:50] Yeah, like a utopian globalism that's like connected to like locally rooted communities. Yeah, because I mean, we want to keep our local restaurants and our local bookstores. Of course, we want books from all over the world and we want food from all over the world. But we also want, yeah, like to walk down the street and like…
Alexis: [00:37:10] Yeah, we all live in a place, you know, and like a real sense, like we you your body for the time being still remains in one location, you know, and that one location also has a more than human world surrounding it, you know, that also eventually will need to be re integrated, I think, in any kind of sane scenario for the earth will have to take those things into account as well. And that will mean much more local action, you know. So that's my those are, you know, that's my hope, I guess.
Annalee: [00:37:40] Yeah. Well, thank you for leaving us there with a slightly happy vision. Yeah, I love that.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:45] Really appreciate the hope.
Annalee: [00:37:46] So where can people listen to you on a daily basis?
Alexis: [00:37:50] Oh, kqed.org. Excellent. 88.5 on your FM dial if you're in the Bay Area. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:37:57] And you can actually like call into Alexis's show. It's like a real thing. You can actually pick up a phone and call and he's on the other end. All right. Well, thank you very much.
[00:38:10] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:38:13] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? That’s right. There’s no supply chain, there’s no containerization, there’s no hyper industrialization happening. It's just us talking into microphones, thanks to your funding. And you're helping to pay for our amazing producer, Niah Harmon, to help us put these episodes together. You're helping to pay for transcriptions of the episode. And if you kick in five bucks, ten bucks, twenty bucks a month, you get extras with every episode. We always post a mini episode between regular episodes. We invite you to come into our discord and hang out and chat.
[00:39:02] And so just think about it. All that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. You can find out more at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Please do give. We really appreciate it. It's like how we survive and stuff.
[00:39:20] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:39:23] So we've been talking with Alexis Madrigal about the reality of supply chains and how they affect our lungs, how they affect our minds. And now we're going to talk about how they affect our imaginations in science fiction and fantasy.
[00:39:40] Like I said at the top, it doesn't seem like supply chains are the kind of thing that would show up in science fiction. But in fact, they're everywhere. Obviously, the biggest example that people always joke about is that in Star Wars, a lot of the action of those movies is caused by an interstellar trade war. And it has to do with who controls the supply chain and…
Charlie Jane: [00:40:05] Who controls the trade routes.
Annalee: [00:40:06] Yeah, who controls the trade routes, which is a supply chain issue.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:10] Yeah, I mean, that's the opening of The Phantom Menace, episode one of the nine now main Star Wars saga movies. And it's basically, yeah, trade war. And I feel like there's a lot of, you know, stories in science fiction, especially space opera of like disrupted trade of like, you know, we have to get this one thing. If you if you watch the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk is constantly having to deal with like supply issues. Like he has to go to planets where there's miners who are mining for dilithium or for other things that they need. He has to like deal with basically like the flow of commerce in the galaxy. And you know, because they don't have replicators yet in the original series.
Annalee: [00:40:57] Right. Yeah, that's so interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:00] You get to the later shows. It's the Ferengi who are kind of like where we locate all of those issues. It's because about the Ferengi are the ones who are the traders who are kind of like moving things around. But, you know, the notion that like everything has to come from somewhere, everything has to be made somewhere. It's a big thing in space opera. It's a reason why we have space empires, kind of, is to like keep goods moving around.
Annalee: [00:41:24] I mean, John Scalzi has a series that starts with the novel The Collapsing Empire, and that is specifically again about the collapse of this wormhole network that has been connecting all these planets that are linked by a supply chain. You know, some of the planets are completely dependent on the other planets for food and for resources. And if they're cut off, their lives will be destroyed.
[00:41:47] The other thing I was going to say is that the Dune series is very much about the supply chain. It's not just about mining all of the spice to fuel all of the space vessels, but it's about how the trade can happen in the first place because it's partly about the product, the spice, but it's also about the transit network that the spice makes possible. And so it kind of gives us a view on both of those things.
[00:42:14] And I think what's really powerful about Dune and about a lot of these stories that tell us about supply chains in space is that it tries to make visible something that's often invisible in our daily lives. And we talked about this with Alexis a little bit because it's easy to go to the store and just pluck a bottle of spices off the shelf and never think about where it came from, the bottle that it's in, where that came from, who packed the spice, who picked the spice, who grew the spice. It's easy to just put that out of your mind and just be like, it's a bottle of spices and I won't even think about it.
[00:42:51] But in Dune, not only do we see where the spice comes from, but we see the horrific labor conditions. We see how it's this imperial plot to keep down a whole civilization of people and force them deep into the desert so that the Harkonnens or whatever bad guys are on the planet can continue mining. So we kind of see this invisible thing become visible in those stories. And I think the same thing to a large extent in some of the other stories we've been talking about.
[00:43:25] One of the things I also wanted to poke at is where we see supply chains in fantasy. Because I think you're right that in space operas, it's kind of an easy way to talk about supply chains, but it happens a lot in fantasy too. I feel like oftentimes it relates to how a civilization gets its energy or other kind of power. C.L. Polk has this amazing trilogy called The Kingston Cycle, which in many ways is about how people get electricity. I mean, it's not electricity, but it's like basically electricity. And we find out over the course of the first novel a really dark secret about where all of their electrical power is coming from.
[00:44:20] And again, it's about making this invisible thing visible. Like all of the labor behind giving us beautiful electrified buildings and tram cars and stuff like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:31] Yeah. I mean, I feel like a lot of fantasy in particular, like when you start to see more complex trade, more complex, you know, stuff being sourced from various places and things being combined from different places into one commodity, which is kind of what the supply chain is. That's kind of a marker of like complexity of the society and also hegemony because it is a sign that we have an empire or that we have a strong ruler who is able to kind of guarantee the safety of all this stuff moving around.
[00:45:05] And, you know, the Game of Thrones books, like the Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin, like part of why those books are like a 9 million pages long is because he will obsess about like where stuff is coming from and like the Dornish wine and the like, blah, blah, blah. And like how certain commodities require complicated setups in order to create. Like he'll talk about castle forged steel, but also Valyrian steel, which is steel from this one other part of the continent, which then is brought to castles and castles have the infrastructure to forge it into a sword that's like a really good sword. And like there's just like endless amounts of detail about like where raw materials come from, but also how they get turned into products that people want.
Annalee: [00:45:51] Yeah, that's so interesting. I feel like sometimes just the forging of a magical item is sort of about supply chains. I mean, you see this in Lord of the Rings, but also in the TV series Rings of Power, where we're kind of seeing the origin of the rings. And we also learn about the origin of mithril. And I mean, I think it's important that it is represented as magical because that's part of the supply chain in real life kind of casts a spell on us. And it's like, look at all these magical items that just arrive on your doorstep. Don't think about the sorcerer behind all of it. Just enjoy the magical things.
[00:46:31] And that's in the Rings of Power. Like the temptation to do that, to draw the wool over your eyes is evil. And I love that. Like I love that it's just like straight up like, yeah, that's evil. And don't do that. And it's of course the same thing in The Good Place is like that that's the source of evil is that we're not paying attention to how this stuff is happening.
[00:46:55] Another great trope in the supply chain story is the space trucker.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:05] Including the movie Space Trucker, which is such a great film.
Annalee: [00:47:09] What do you like about space truckers?
Charlie Jane: [00:47:11] I mean, you know, there's been this rise really in the last decade or so inspired by things like Alien and like, I guess, Firefly. There's been a trope of like moving towards like what people call blue collar space opera and like exhibit A is something like The Expanse or Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet or something like that, where the heroes are more kind of working class, regular folks who aren't like admiral or whatever, or captain, whatever of like this giant starship.
Annalee: [00:47:39] They're not like Duke Harkonnen or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:41] Right. They're not like noblemen. They're not like officers in some giant galactic, blah, blah, blah. They're just regular working stiffs. And often there is an emphasis on like just hauling shit around and like carrying stuff around the galaxy and in Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, they're building the infrastructure that allows the supply chain to operate because they're punching a wormhole. They have to travel the long way to this distant planet and then set up the other end of this wormhole that they're creating. So then ships can just whiz back and forth.
Annalee: [00:48:14] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:14] And oftentimes, again, going back to what I said a moment ago about how empires are often about like trade and about like moving goods around to the ability to have goods from all over. I feel like this is where you see the guts of the empire. This is where you see the kind of belly of the underbelly like long wait or small angry planet is kind of about like rather than being a drama about like, is this planet going to join the Federation, which is the thing that Star Trek would do is like, are they going to join the Federation and get access to all of this stuff? Instead, it's more like, are they going to just become a shipping hub? Are they going to get like a highway? Are they going to get like containers?
Annalee: [00:48:55] Are they going to become a port?
Charlie Jane: [00:48:56] Yes. Are they going to become like Oakland?
Annalee: [00:48:58] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:59] Side note, it's super interesting that like one of the main things that people think about Oakland always is that Star Wars has those ATATs, the kind of like big giant robots, the big giant mechs, I guess that attack in the Empire Strikes Back. And those are based on machinery in the port of Oakland that you can see from the bay. And like, it's just like, oh, yeah, you know.
Annalee: [00:49:23] The cranes have four legs and a kind of horse shaped head in a way.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:28] And George Lucas was just like, this piece of supply chain infrastructure is going to become a weapon used by the Empire that is enforcing this supply chain on people.
Annalee: [00:49:39] I've never been sure if that was an apocryphal story or not. If people just kind of like retconned that his ATATs were based on those. But either way…
Charlie Jane: [00:49:48] I believe it's true. I've got like the giant doorstopper about the making of that film. You can go look.
Annalee: [00:49:54] Let's just say that even if he never said that it was, he would have seen those every single day. Like if you live in the Bay Area, which he did and does, you can't like anytime you cross the bay, anytime you come into San Francisco or Oakland, you see these giant ATATs like by the shoreline. You can see them from an airplane. Yeah. So, you know, he was either unconsciously or consciously inspired by them for sure.
[00:50:21] The final thing I wanted to ask you about Charlie Jane was something that you brought up to me when I was talking about supply chains, which is that one of the big themes in these stories is that there's a post-apocalyptic breakdown of the supply chain.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:35] Yeah. And you know, this is everywhere. Like I feel like one of my big theories about post-apocalyptic storytelling is that sometimes it's just about like being freed from all of the like, you know, hassles of living in a civilization. Like, oh geez, you can't kill your neighbors even though they're blasting their leaf blower because killing your neighbors is frowned upon. But like once the apocalypse happens, you can kill your neighbors and you can do, you know, I mean, that is part of that.
Annalee: [00:51:00] That's The Purge.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:01] Yeah. The fantasy of just being like the special one who survives. But another thing that's like compelling about post-apocalyptic shows is it does expose these systems that we take for granted by showing them breaking down. And, you know, that's kind of the world without us kind of thing where you get to see the ruins. And like we were just watching season two of The Last of Us and The Last of Us has tons of stuff where you kind of see… You know, and The Last of Us also cheats a lot. Like sometimes they somehow they still have gasoline.
Annalee: [00:51:30] Oh, gasoline still works. No problem.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:31] They still have bullets. They still have all this shit that they shouldn't really have anymore after 20 years since the zombie pandemic.
Annalee: [00:51:39] FYI, fuel does go bad.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:42] There's one episode of The Last of Us where they show people very carefully, like having the elements of fuel kept in separate places so they can combine them when they need to. That's only once that we see that. But thinking about how much we are dependent on just raw materials, but also manufacturing processes that involve multiple sites all over the world. And there's a clip I wanted to play you from a show called The Survivors, which is Terry Nation, who created the Daleks on Doctor Who and also created one of my favorite TV shows, Blake's 7, also created a post-apocalyptic show called The Survivors, where a virus wipes out most of humanity. Your bog standard apocalypse, kind of. And there's this amazing scene that stuck in my head for years.
[Clip of Abby] [00:52:28] Can’t you see the point we’ve reached in our civilization? Now, look around you. Anywhere you like in this house, in this room. I doubt if it contains a single artifact that was the exclusive creation of one person. Well, this table. This simple, wooden table.
[Clip of Arthur] [00:52:43] Well, I’m no carpenter, but I reckon I could knock up something like this.
[Clip of Abby] [00:52:46] Right from scratch? You’d fell the timber? With what? An axe or a saw? The steel for the saw has been made in a foundry. The iron ore has been dug from the ground. And the fuel to smelt it with has been mined. Now, what happens when the last axe head cracks and the last saw breaks? This simple metal knife is the product of hundreds of people in dozens of different trades. And take anything else you like, anywhere you like, and the same will be true of it.
Annalee: [00:53:15] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:16] And basically, this character is just, like, unpacking, like, how just to make a spoon, just to make a wooden table, requires so many steps that you don't think about, so many things that have to come from different places, and, like, you're not going to be able to just make a spoon. Like, you can't just make a spoon after the apocalypse, because so many steps are involved in making that possible.
Annalee: [00:53:39] Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so incredible. Well, I wanted to end by saying that one of the promises or one of the opportunities that science fiction and fantasy and speculative fiction offer us when we think about the supply chain is how to re imagine it, you know, how to think about after it fails, how do we build in its place? Even going back to, like, David Brin's novel, The Postman, that's about rebuilding a supply chain. And, you know, rebuilding, like, ways for people to communicate. And I've always thought that that was a really utopian gesture that he made in that novel to be like, yeah, you know, it's really important, people talking to each other. And, like, the postal service is, like, really valuable.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:22] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:54:22] But of course, there's tons of other stories that try to do this, that try to imagine what does the world look like when we come back from having, you know, abandoned a really toxic supply chain? I mean, even N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, which is dark in many ways, is also about civilizations repairing and rebuilding time after time. And so I think that one of the things we should be looking for in our science fiction, and I think solar punk work tries to do this a little bit, is stories of regeneration and repair and, like, stories about trade systems that are nourishing and collaborative as opposed to exploitative.
Charlie Jane: [00:55:07] And sustainable. And, like, yeah, I mean, I feel like we need to really radically re imagine how this works in the real world. And, like, that clip you played, Alexis from The Good Place, kind of gets to the heart of that. And, you know, I think that we need to just try to imagine a world where there's a lot less exploitation in general, where we don't just allow ourselves to trash things and people and stuff because it's out of sight, out of mind, you know? And it's really hard to even imagine what that would look like. But I feel like people are trying. Becky Chambers is trying in some of her recent work. I think you and I are kind of doodling on that in our work. I think it's just it's hard. It's a hard project and it requires a lot of concentration.
Annalee: [00:55:53] It requires a lot of imagination and science fiction, fantasy. These are places where people will turn. In times of trouble, we turn to these kinds of stories because they're comforting and escapist. But in the process of reading them, of watching them, playing them, we can learn, oh, actually, the supply chain could look really different. You know, we need to have community relationships, but like they don't have to look like this. You know, they could look like something else.
[00:56:20] So that's my final thought on supply chains is that actually they can be a really good thing and we need to be actively re imagining them and looking out for stories that help us do that.
[00:56:30] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:56:33] Thank you so much for listening to another episode to Our Opinions Are Correct. We will be back in your ears in a month, after we take a little vacation. And remember, in the meantime, you can find us on Mastadon, on Bluesky, on Patreon, on Instagram. We’re floating in the ether. We’re like driving little tiny micro-drones everywhere like whispering friendly thoughts into your mind.
[00:56:59] Thank you so much to our incredible producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. Thank you for listening. If you like this show, please share it. Please subscribe. Please, you know, like and rate us on whatever weird platform you're getting this on. And if you're a patron, we will see you on Discord. And otherwise, we will talk to you later. Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:57:26] Bye!
[00:57:27] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]