And then she notes something crucial: The way to understand a society and its progress is to look at the forces that control technology. “Who decides that trolleys and passenger trains are obsolete but that cars are all-important and our cities must be built around them as if they were the primary inhabitants?” she asks. “Who chooses which technology is explored? Who sets the rules for what is dangerous and what is acceptable risk?”
Who is setting the rules? This is a vital question. And here’s another, which seems particularly pertinent: Have we agreed what the game should be? And if this one’s fixed, can we start another? Would a future game designed by women be more fair? Would it at least be level enough so that all the paper money didn’t drift to one side of the board?
LET’S RETURN TO Wisconsin for a moment, perhaps the least likely place for the dreams of technology to be made flesh. Soon, no part of the Earth will be immune from the reach of automation or artificial intelligence (AI). Should I say the “progress” of automation and AI, or the “creep”? Language is loaded; is this journey to human liberation or enslavement?
We’ve barely begun to consider these questions. Robots, as it is often wearily pointed out, are not part of the future, they are part of the now. They perform surgery and drive trucks and compose symphonies and are much better at Jeopardy! than sausage-fingered humans. Those are the benign applications; some are more threatening. Unless we do something to regulate the advance of lethal autonomous weapons — that is, killer robots — they will entirely change the face of warfare.
This is quite apart from the worries about what automation will mean for our children’s futures. A recent report from Ryerson University in Toronto predicted that more than 40 percent of jobs might disappear due to automation in the next ten to twenty years. It’s the new generation of workers — people aged to fifteen to twenty-four — who will be most vulnerable to these changes. That’s my kids, and your kids, or your neighbour’s kids, if you happen to be child-free. These are the statistics that have me gasping awake every night, panicked, as if Vincent Vega just administered a hypodermic full of adrenalin to my heart.
We do not have the legislative or philosophical tools to even begin to contemplate this revolution. Bill Gates says we should place a tax on robot producers, and Elon Musk warns that AI must be regulated in some fashion. In the United States, there is a call for a Federal Robotics Commission, which so far has not been heeded; the European Parliament in early 2017 called for a legislative framework to regulate the activity of robotics and AI. We may have left it a bit late. The cyborg horse may have already bolted the stable.
And if we can barely keep up with the latest shiny products being produced in Silicon Valley, how can we possibly pause to envisage a better future than the one we have now? Technology’s advance is tied to the profit motive; we are too busy playing Candy Crush to imagine an alternative.
As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari says in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow: “The world is changing faster than ever before, and we are flooded by impossible amounts of data, of ideas, of promises and of threats. Humans are relinquishing authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because we cannot deal with the deluge of data.”
I wish this didn’t fill me with bowel-liquefying anxiety, but it does. I read the words of the cyber-utopians and transhumanists, with their promise of a gender-free future in which our brains will be uploaded into a central matrix for all eternity, amen, but I see no possibility of a better tomorrow until we address the crushing inequalities of the present. I personally do not want immortality in a world where some people are still split-shift wage slaves and others piss in gold toilets.
I apologize for being such a bitter pessimist. I’m not usually, I swear. My character tends toward blitheness and optimism, or at least it used to. I look at my trajectory — a turbulent childhood, a house without much money, no family history of postsecondary education — and I’m proud of what I have accomplished. I look at the feminism I embraced as a young woman in the early nineties, the so-called “empowerment” years, with its gospel of personal emancipation: If I just used this soap, worked out at this club, wore these heels, read this self-help manual, I would be a free woman. I could pole-dance my way to liberation. And I could do it on my own and have a nest egg to show for it.
How empty that promise seems now. I had my eye on individual freedom, while ignoring the ways in which the systems exploited the vast majority of people who toiled in it — women, yes, but men, too. They are also crushed by a machine that values only the profit that can be extracted from them.
Perhaps this realization is dawning. Perhaps I can claw out a little hope from that most-maligned demographic group, millennials (that is, people born in the twenty-year period beginning in the early 1980s). Through their lack of material acquisitiveness, millennials have been accused of ruining, among other things, car ownership, home ownership, golf, cruise ships, and napkins. Elsewhere in the book, I’ve noted that some of them have retrograde notions about gender roles in relationships. Not all, of course.
If anything, the millennials’ fabled devotion to self-actualization might save us. They believe in social justice. They are not so sure about working themselves into the cardiac ward of the nearest hospital. Battered by unforgiving economic forces, they’re not convinced about this whole capitalism thing. According to a 2016 study from Harvard University, 51 percent of respondents, who were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, did not support capitalism; 42 percent said they did. As the Washington Post noted, somewhat dryly, in its accompanying story: “Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.”
Frustrated: that’s putting it mildly. Ask the young feminists who are running for office in record numbers, pushed to action by Donald Trump’s misogyny. Ask the young women who are making alliances across race and class lines, realizing that traditionally marginalized allies need to be brought to the podium when strategies are planned.
I’m given hope when I listen to those young feminists, some of whom I’ve written about in this book or elsewhere: the ones fighting against harassment, or child marriage, or sexual violence as a tool of war. They are waging daily battles for reproductive rights or for better toilet facilities in the developing world so that girls will continue to go to school after they get their periods. They are heroes, all, and they face the future.
But I find inspiration in the past as well, as I’ve also tried to demonstrate in this book. Women’s struggles and solidarity have been overlooked until recently, their triumphs relegated to the domestic zone.
Women’s groups are thinking about ways in which social justice can be implemented on a larger, collective scale, as a way of addressing inequalities that goes beyond the narrow confines of individual empowerment. There are feminist economists working on new and enlightened ways of calculating value and productivity; feminist peace activists campaigning against arms proliferation; feminist politicians looking at innovative ways of collaborating on public policy.
As much as I look to the future, I also look for transformative wisdom from the past. I think about one of my great heroes, and a hero to great many Canadians, Ursula Franklin. Franklin, who died in 2017 at the age of ninety-four, was a renaissance woman whose pacifism, feminism, and devotion to science combined in one singular, mighty heart. A Holocaust survivor who emigrated from Germany to Canada in 1949, she became a Quaker and spent her life opposing war in all its forms. Trained as a physicist, she became the first female professor of metallurgy and material sciences at the University of Toronto, where she unflaggingly supported other women in a profession that was not entirely hospitable to them.
In her collected essays, The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, she is a much more elegant cartographer of the place where technology, power, and
justice meet than I ever could be. In particular, she lays out a vision for a future that I find incredibly compelling. A meaningful life, she told a Women and Peace conference in 1994, is one that is free of the fear of exploitation: “Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the absence of fear. Peace is the presence of justice.”
She continues: “The issues before us are very much issues of peace and justice: justice for people and justice with respect to the environment. Such justice allows a condition where there is freedom from fear: fear of war and the military; fear of economic, political, cultural or sexual oppression; fear of not knowing where to find meaningful work for oneself or one’s children; fear of not knowing where there could be a public sphere in which the issues of peace and justice have priority over the issues of profit.”
How to engineer such a world? That’s the question. Maybe some of the answers are being incubated right now in the Toronto high school named after Ursula Franklin; students lucky enough to win a spot there are taught a curriculum heavy on science, social justice, and free thought.
Maybe the answer is in the head of the physics graduate student who asked Franklin if there was a place in science for a young feminist. Yes, Franklin wrote back, the exact right place for a young feminist was in science. She wrote to the graduate student, addressed only as Marcia, in a letter published in 1993: “Take the time to keep involved in women’s issues, and don’t ever think of yourself as ‘the only woman in . . .’ Likely you are not, just as I have never been. Wherever men work, there are also women working, usually for much lower pay. You may be the only female doctoral student in a particular group, but what about the secretaries, the cleaning staff, the librarians and the technicians? You may link up with them and gain their support and friendship. As you watch over the safety and well-being of others, your own will take care of itself and the chilly climate will warm up a bit.”
I will confess that it makes me teary to read that passage, almost twenty-five years after it was first published. How chilly it still is for women out there, especially women in technology, science, and computer engineering. As I write this, the news is filled with stories of the harassment and abuse that women in tech continue to suffer. Their very right to be in those industries is still questioned. And yet, as Marge Piercy noted, those who control the technology control the direction of a society. It is crucial for women to be present at the inception of the imagined future.
Even if the promise of Ursula Franklin’s letter to her student is yet unfulfilled, its central message is more crucial now than ever: We must work together to change a punishing system. We must elevate the work of women who have been hidden. We must make alliances, and friendships, and open our ears to new voices. Otherwise the climate will remain chilly; and you know who will be frozen out.
SIZE MATTERS:
A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
IN MY DREAMS, I am called upon. Not to lead an army or make enough cupcakes for the entire class picnic — no, nothing so worthy. In my dreams, I am called to give a commencement speech.
I know: sad! Feel free to say it together: how very sad. Who else would dream of standing on a podium in front of hundreds of recent graduates desperate to tear off their smelly rented gowns and ravage the first beer keg they see? Who else dreams of being asked by their university to return and scatter platitudes like cherry blossoms on the wind?
I do, damn it. I do. Every spring, I watch in envy as the famous of the world, who do not need more free publicity, gather on leafy campuses around North America to spread their hard-won, common-sense insights. They are Johnny Appleseeds of folksy wisdom, tossing hard-earned wisdom from manicured fingers. Love! Fail! Grow! Grow to love failure!
Every spring my skepticism cowers in the back seat — normally it likes to drive — as I read famous people’s commencement speeches and admit to myself that they are right. Those bromides are bright with truth. Often I’m sobbing as I realize this. You’re right, George Saunders, when you say that a person’s goal in life should be, simply, to be kinder. And J. K. Rowling, I agree that there is no greater teacher than failure and no greater gift than imagination. Steve Jobs, you speak the truth when you say that you must follow your heart and your instincts — wait a second, Jobs. You’re a dropout! How the hell did you get to deliver a commencement address? Oh, right. You changed the landscape of the modern world.
Of all the commencement speeches that have been published in large print and stuffed into Christmas stockings around the world, none, to my mind, is greater than the one Nora Ephron delivered at her alma mater, Wellesley College, in 1996.
Ephron graduated in 1962, and she demonstrates how the world had changed by stating a few simple facts: there were five African-American women in her graduating class; the dorm-room door had to be left open six inches if a boy was in the room; six girls had been kicked out of college that year for “lesbianism.” Illegal abortions cost $500 and were performed without anaesthetic. In her speech, she threw some epic shade on the Disney-bright nostalgia that enveloped postwar America.
So much had happened in Ephron’s life since she graduated — the heartbreak that led to Heartburn, the brilliant essays, the screenplays for Silkwood and When Harry Met Sally and a dozen other films. It was a tornado of a life, and she embraced it. Her speech celebrated feminism, and accomplishment, and — my favourite part — the chaos and too-muchness of life. Here is what she says:
Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you.
Sometimes, when I’m walking or having a shower or talking to my imaginary boyfriend Keith Richards, who likes to bring biscotti when he visits, I imagine what my commencement speech would say. Would I talk about how it is vital to always carry a notebook and pen? I could mention Roald Dahl’s warning that “a thought unrecorded is a thought lost.” I could tell the anecdote about my trainwreck interview with a Very Important Man: As I sat down to record his thoughts, I realized that the only writing utensil in my purse was my toddler son’s Spider-Man pen, which squawked “With great power comes great responsibility!” every time it touched paper.
Or perhaps I should talk about how the most important thing to look for in a mate is a similar tolerance for filth — or for freaks, a love of cleanliness. This, I feel, is the secret to marital bliss, and astonishingly unreported. A man who will run away screaming when he finds a desiccated mouse carcass stuck to the shag carpet under a pile of your dirty clothes is not a man who will stick around through life’s other crises. I discovered this the hard way. Conversely, a man who will whisk a coffee mug filled with moldy sunflower seed shells from your bedside table with no words further than “Good morning, baby” is a man you want holding your hand at the very end. When I found this man — there was only one left in the shop — I married him.
But filth and emergency preparedness are such little topics. The graduates of tomorrow — particularly the women, at whom this book is aimed — should be thinking about living large. Yes, that’s what I’d talk about, if only some enterprising college administrator would ask me to expound on the topic. What, you’d like to hear it anyway? Bless you. Bless you, my imaginary friend.
This is what I’d say:
Good afternoon, and welcome everyone on this beautiful afternoon. It’s so wonderful to be back on this campus after so many years. I was starting to think I’d been banned, it’s been so long! Not that I’m bitter at all, and I regret that email I sent the dean last year, truly. I’d been feverish for three days and was living on cough medicine and vodka.
It is a great honour and privilege to be with you here today. You’ve made it, and well done to all of you. You don’t ha
ve to listen to some ancient alumna drone on at you about boring historical events any longer — except for the next few minutes. Seriously, don’t try to leave. I’ve been waiting for this moment for decades. There are guards at all the exits.
How little this campus has changed — that’s the tree we used to climb at the end of one-dollar draught night. And yet how much it’s changed. Do you see that building there? It used to be a women’s residence. The student newspaper carried a story about how the fire exits were kept locked because the administrators were more worried about boys getting in than women trapped by fire getting out. It’s true! What a crazy old world.
And that building over there — we used to be able to smoke inside. I smoked with a professor who had worked on Fleet Street and who told me I should never wear stripes because they made me look fat. He used to make the female students do spins for him, like we were fashion models. It’s true! What a strange old world it was.
I took that professor’s words to heart, for some strange reason. I went on a crash diet in my last year of school and lost 20 pounds by eating only Hickory Sticks and drinking only beer. It was not a hospital-certified diet. Of course, I was also diagnosed with a life-threatening, incurable disease at the same time, but who cared! I was thin, for once. I was the subject of admiring glances. I had shrunk myself, and therefore grown in attractiveness, and desirability. What strange mathematics this was, that I had never been taught!
Years later, while working as a newspaper reporter, I would sit across from a man who regularly shushed me. I know what you’re thinking: How am I standing here, delivering this commencement address, and not in prison for this man’s murder? It’s crazy! There were many days when I would open my mouth and he would frown at me across the desk divider and hold his finger to his lips, and I would think, I wonder if this stapler could kill a person? Or, Could this Diet Coke can be used to crack open a skull? And yet I never did. I was afraid of jail, my friends. And I was so young. I actually thought, in those days, that if I made myself smaller and quieter — if I reduced my footprint in the world — then I would be happier.
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