coe202_mattern.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hi. Hi, hi, hi, cultures of energy, listeners, we are coming to you with much energy in our mouth, bringing much and in our soul and our soul and bringing much energy into your ears and maybe even your soul and brain too. Although I don't know if I'd go that far, but that's the aspiration.

Speaker2: [00:00:40] We're trying so hard. We're trying to start to bring a little, a little light, a little vilifying virtue right into into the scene. Today, we have another great conversation to share with you today, and that conversation is with

Speaker1: [00:00:54] Shannon Materne

Speaker2: [00:00:55] From the new school. And we'll be talking about her new

Speaker1: [00:00:58] Book, which is called A City Is Not a Computer. Other urban intelligences.

Speaker2: [00:01:04] Very cool title. It's a great title action. Great title. I really like that title. Yes. And so we had a chance to catch up with Shannon, who we haven't met in person, but whose work I've been admiring at a distance for a while. And I know that a lot of folks in the worlds of urban studies and anthropology and sex and feminist ethnography have been really interested in what she's doing, and she takes on basically the data fixation of cities and the idea

Speaker1: [00:01:30] That dashboard logics. Yeah, the calculative imaginary of containing cities within those kinds of rubrics.

Speaker2: [00:01:38] So in in the episode, you talk a little bit about your own experience with these dashboards, but there's been more since we recorded this one a few months ago. There's actually been more. So do you want to say something about what has gone?

Speaker1: [00:01:48] I don't know. I mean, yeah, I think when we were talking to her, it was just sort of starting up this dashboard, which looked to be a kind of interactive dashboard that was being done at the behest of NSF. And what I was saying is that they do, I think some of these funding agencies and institutions, they they like this stuff like, I get why cities are sort of into these, this kind of modeling because there's a kind of fetish around the data and the calculation and the ability to see it. And yes, even though it's all tied up as we talk about with Shannon, there's all kinds of problems with demographic racism and bias and other really fundamental issues that go on around these dashboards. But. Yeah, the dash, I've been working on this dashboard with some graduate students and some some programmers and staff at, and it's been a really interesting experience. It's a GIS mapping site, basically. So maybe it's less of a dashboard than really a GIS map because it's not so interactive, but it is kind of interesting that it is. It's kind of a nice way to visualize some of the research because you could tell the pretty pictures and you get to have the maps. It kind of zoom around and one of these days we're actually going to launch that thing.

Speaker2: [00:02:57] Cool. Yeah. Well, we'll definitely put the word out when you do. And I don't know. I think one of the things that's cool about Shannon's book is she goes really deep into the history of like, the dashboard is a concept and how it's related to auto mobility, but also to kind of a vehicle and an environment. And I don't want to spoil it here. But just to say that I think part of what's charismatic about these dashboards is that you kind of feel like you're in like the pilot seat right off a flight simulator or like, you can see what's happening. And there are all these like cool like bells and whistles around. You can toggle to see what's going on. And the one that I've used, and it's a pretty simple one to be honest, is just the power outage that you see as to monitor the frequent electrical failures and the states, including in Texas. And I do feel like there is something to this idea of being able to visualize these data streams in a way that is, yes, not like The Matrix, folks. It's not that seamless. But but it is in a way that you feel like you've got a different relationship to it. Although is it ocular centric? Yes. Is it visual

Speaker1: [00:04:00] Pretty tech to actually right? Oh, it's got that. It's got that techno fetish going on, too. It's a little techno utopian. It's got that mastery sort of omniscient God's eye view. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I think Shannon's really spot on with her argument and her critique of these kinds of systems,

Speaker2: [00:04:20] But also her celebration of the abundance of kinds of intelligence and knowledge at work in a city that are not, you know, that are not right computational, which is cool too.

Speaker1: [00:04:30] So are you are you thinking of a certain other kind of plant based intelligence? Oh yes, that's coming to mind, because I know that you have a green friend outside the door who has become quite massive in recent times, who you encounter and share experiences with quite regularly.

Speaker2: [00:04:51] It's the green envy monster somebody is talking about. Oh, the envy just keeps boiling up in me.

Speaker1: [00:04:57] It's a plan tackler friend that lives on the gate outside the front. That's what we were talking about the hurricane fence with, with robust, robust energy and chlorophyll filled, chlorophyll filled clothing. I don't know no chlorophyll filled corpus corpus.

Speaker2: [00:05:16] So we were talking a little bit about things that have happened in the past two and a half years that are noteworthy. And as we mentioned last week, there aren't so many. We haven't really accomplished that much. If you want to be, if we want to be totally honest, as many people haven't because it's been a pandemic.

Speaker1: [00:05:30] Come on. I mean, something happened, but I don't know. Things have happened. I don't. I think we forgot a lot of it.

Speaker2: [00:05:36] Yeah, a lot of it's a lot of it's a blur. A lot of us were pressed, probably. But one thing that is undoubtedly an achievement and not our achievement, as you were pointing out, but rather the achievement of this vine is that the passion flower vine that we as well as the Texas freeze from last year and a bunch of Gulf fritillary caterpillars have tried to kill, have tried to destroy through our ineptitude. And in the case of the caterpillars, savage hunger, how much hunger they have. It has come back and it's so strong a very a very brief history of this fine. So we wanted for many years to cover over the really ugly metal fence in front of our house with a vine. We've made a couple attempts at it. All have failed this past year, say 2020. We tried to do some gardening as a way of passing the time and reconnecting with our habitat here, and we planted this passion flower vine. And it worked really well in the sense that it grew up about six feet and it brought in these really beautiful golf fritillary butterflies and the butterflies enjoyed the flowers. They lay their eggs, I guess. Yeah, because

Speaker1: [00:06:41] Those became caterpillars. It's a pollinator. It's a pollinator, attractive vine and flower, which is part of the reason why we put it in. But then with a few other flowers out there that do the same, it does really make a nice habitat for the butterflies.

Speaker2: [00:06:54] Such a nice habitat, in fact, that the caterpillars ate the entire thing. Somehow a metaphor of the Anthropocene. Perhaps? I don't know. They ate every single leaf on this thing down to the bare stalks like this, and it was amazing. It was like a skeleton of its former self.

Speaker1: [00:07:09] Just fine. And then came the freeze, where the little green tendrils that remain turn brown and then

Speaker2: [00:07:14] Black totally husks. And we thought, for sure, OK, that's the end of this vine. Another failure to be charted up on our cosmic balance.

Speaker1: [00:07:24] But more and more input for the composter.

Speaker2: [00:07:27] But then in the spring, as though those caterpillars and that freeze together had simply devoured just the weak parts of this plant and only left the strong parts, it came back with a robust fierceness that I've never seen before. Growing not just to six feet tall, but to like 12 feet tall up until the light. Well, all over the place. And as you were pointing out, with fairly few flowers as though it had learned its lesson and said, I'm not going to put those flowers out for those caterpillars.

Speaker1: [00:07:54] Don't bring the butterflies.

Speaker2: [00:07:55] No more butterflies, but just a lot of foliage. And now this thing has grown over entire fence to the point that you can't actually easily get in and out of the gate anymore. Right.

Speaker1: [00:08:05] So and and it actually because the the little the ends of the vines, a little tendrils which actually look like little tiny, little skinny green fingers actually hook through the gate and sometimes close it. They could close the gate, closes the gate itself, which is kind of haunting. It's freaked out. A couple of people actually who've come and gone, they're like, What? You know, how do I navigate this fine? Like, they need to sort of duck and swerve to get around it, including. Luckily, it's not covered in caterpillars like it was last year, which got to the point of being almost disturbing because the thing was just literally crawling with caterpillars like in every, every direction. And sometimes they would fall on your head as you were ducking underneath or might get, you know, sort of wipe off on your sleeve. And I don't mind caterpillars. I've got nothing against them, but it got to be a little a few too many. Yeah. In some ways. But now the plant is very, very happy and it's gotten super thick. It's not just one layer thick of vines and leaves, but it's like layer upon layer upon layer. So it's like five or six layers that gets become almost like a wall.

Speaker2: [00:09:11] And the reason to bring this up now is last week there was another freeze in Texas. Not as bad as the one a year ago, a couple of days, maybe getting below freezing. And we thought again, Oh, that'll probably kill this plant off. And I was out of town, came back

Speaker1: [00:09:25] To wound up a little bit a couple of spots, but not really.

Speaker2: [00:09:28] But the plant looks as good as ever. It's insane. So anyway, there is hope here.

Speaker1: [00:09:33] Howard Urban intelligence of the passion flower, which is also a super spectacular flower. I'd like to see more of the flowers back, though, because those are really cool looking and they're purple and they're pretty psychedelic. So I know they're pretty anyway, so.

Speaker2: [00:09:47] So that's of intelligence. We probably should have talked more about dumb cities and urban stupidity, too, but we didn't. One thing I will say, though, and I wanted to mention this too, is I saw a photo, an aerial photo of downtown Houston in the 1970s, and the caption was something like it's all parking lot and it's true. Like there's like four buildings and then the rest of it is just concretized parking lot. And it's amazing that there are that many cars for that few buildings. And I was just like, That's a good example of whatever the opposite of urban intelligence is.

Speaker1: [00:10:20] Now it's a lot of skyscrapers and former Enron buildings and kind of glass and mirror covered buildings, and the cars are still there. I'm sure they're just underground and garages now along alongside the tunnels. You know, people may not know that Houston has a series of tunnels underground and that there's a whole world of tunnel habitation that happens down there. They've got subway sandwich places and probably used to have newsstands when people bought newspapers. They've got flower kiosks, little shops. It's sort of like Minneapolis and the skyways. And there's another place that's got the underground. Oh, a lot of them do.

Speaker2: [00:10:58] Yeah, surprising number of cities.

Speaker1: [00:10:59] But this is, I think, I feel like I associate it more with cold places. And here it's for the heat and the sunlight.

Speaker2: [00:11:05] Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:11:05] Well, the sun. Yeah. And to keep people out of the humidity because it's pretty cool under there. It's dark. I mean, it's lit with unnatural light, but it's dark and it's kind of cool and they're quite wide. I mean, I'm sure you could drive a car through there if you need it to, which probably has happened at one point.

Speaker2: [00:11:20] Or maybe it's just people's instinctive reaction to the dystopian surface of Houston is that they want to crawl underground and burrow as far as they can. I don't know. It's something like that in any case. I don't know why they brought that up. Well, I just thought I was thinking, you know, what's the opposite of urban intelligence? And it's like just turning your city into a parking lot? Oh, right.

Speaker1: [00:11:39] Yes, good. Good turn.

Speaker2: [00:11:41] We're all of the cars are massive, of course, like Eldorado and things like that. I think of that Beastie Boys video for Sabotage, like that type of car, you know, car, actually, that makes it seem cooler than it is. We probably should let. We should let ourselves go and get to the main, the main event. Let's get to the goods. Quick.

Speaker1: [00:12:00] No. Quit babbling.

Speaker2: [00:12:02] We could babble on forever. But you really want to hear Shannon material, and that's who we're going to hear in a second. Simone, take us there.

Speaker1: [00:12:08] I want to listen to Shannon so much. I'm going to say, Go Shannon.

Speaker2: [00:12:31] So everyone, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we are thrilled, simply thrilled to have on the line with us, Shannon Materne coming to us from Hudson, New York. Shannon, how are you?

Speaker3: [00:12:41] I am doing OK. Thank you. And how are you?

Speaker2: [00:12:44] Well, thank you for asking.

Speaker4: [00:12:48] We're hiding out. We're in Texas, so we're in hiding. We are, you know,

Speaker2: [00:12:52] We're surviving little by little. I mean, it's it's been a struggle, we'll be honest. But on the other hand, we have, you know, all the privileges in the world to get through this. So we're not going to complain. We're just going to say, you know, we feel you all out there who are struggling. And that's part of why we had to come back with this podcast was because we all need. We're running out of podcast to listen to.

Speaker4: [00:13:14] So, I mean, one of the things that we get to see in your new book, Shannon and I really loved reading it. The book is called HD is not a Computer, other urban intelligences, and it was. It's so timely as it kind of gave us this lead in here about the time that we've spent on screens because you really dig deep into the sort of screen mentality and these computational models of urbanism and give us a meditation on that and and a deep critique of it as well. So I wanted to start us off by asking you how you got into the project in the first place. What? What spurred your interest? What, what, what took you on this path towards trying to understand how the city is in fact a not a computer as much as these computational models and algorithms want to make it so?

Speaker3: [00:13:59] Well, I hope this is a useful story because it's not really an Orthodox book coming into being kind of story. I have written other books to sort it out with more of a traditional argument for each of the chapters of kind of leading incrementally towards the support of a bigger thesis. In this case, it's mostly a collection of essays that I kind of retroactively applied a thesis to. And the book is published through a Princeton University Press imprint called Places Books, and that is really the two places journal with whom I have been a columnist for the past decade or so. So I've come to realize that it's a really less, much less intimidating way to write a book when you think of it as kind of, I know, lots of first time book authors are given. This advice is to think of it as writing individual chapters or individual articles, rather than, you know, planting this large, onerous task of writing a book on your shoulders. In this case, I really wasn't imagining this as a book. This was a series of essays that came into being over again about eight years or so. So for places I have written, probably close to maybe three dozen now pieces long form pieces about urban data mediated infrastructures and then select series for a short book for Princeton, I looked back to see which four might fit well together and speak to one another.

Speaker3: [00:15:09] And I realized that those that the editor and readers expressed most interest in were about kind of urban data and digital city type topics. So I selected these four essays, the first to really have to do with more traditional, techie oriented ways of thinking about this topic. So one is about the urban dashboard. The next one is about the limitations of the city as a computer metaphor, which we see in so many different realms. We talk about the brain as a computer, we talk about other other kind of biophysical bodies as computers. But then I also wanted to expand the conversation because there are lots of books about smart cities kind of that are more within the tech realm. I wanted to encourage the thinking about smartness and encourage us to look to existing knowledge institutions like libraries, which is another topic I've studied that was the subject of my dissertation, my first book, and then go even further to think about the fact that it's not all about innovation, that maintenance and care are kind of knowledge. Work require really kind of embodied embedded knowledge is that we don't often think about under the umbrella of smartness and digital technologies. So the last the latter two chapters are really about really expanding the notion of what counts as urban intelligence. So that's kind of how it all came together.

Speaker2: [00:16:18] That's a that's a marvelous description of the book Shannon and I wanted to ask you, you know, one of the things I really appreciate about this, this book and about your work in general is your ability to take these like very cutting edge contemporary things like algorithmic governance or kind of computational urbanism, something that seems intrinsically very new and to show like the deep historical roots of the thinking and the institutions and the infrastructures that go into it. So just focusing on this idea of thinking about, you know, a city as a computer and a sort of computational mode, can you give us a little backstory to that? Like, where does this begin? Out of what kinds of philosophical movements or kind of practical experiments do we get this idea of the city as computer?

Speaker3: [00:17:02] So one of the underlying questions to most of my work is like, how new is this really? So I tend to, if I'm writing about something contemporary, always have a part where we step back somewhere, maybe a third or a quarter of the way through and look at the deeper historical context for that thing that we think is so novel. So in this case of the city and computation, this is really the history of it. The deep history of it was really the subject of my previous book, which is called Code and Clay Data and Dirt and that is drawing. A lot from archaeology and anthropology and urban history and classics and related fields to see how what we might consider as kind of responsive spaces, intelligent architectures, data writ large or conceived very capriciously has been an inherent part of urban planning. What makes a city a city of urban governance for pretty much the entire history of urbanity? So in that in that book, I really did look at that deep history again drawing from these myriad disciplines. But in terms of the computer metaphor specifically, this is really coming out of a lot of cybernetic theory. Jennifer Light is a historian from MIT, whom you might know her work has written several books that touch on these both corporate, governmental and military histories of the city thought of as a computer.

Speaker3: [00:18:15] But if we think break down what computing is and we think of it as maybe kind of records management or information processing that has a much deeper history for the. Again, the deep history of computation is in large part about record keeping because you can't really govern a body politic and an economy if you don't have a form of recordkeeping. So you know, some of the theories about the rise of writing in general was it's being born in accountancy and, you know, written on clay, which also coincidentally happened to be the material out of which many early cities were made. So you're both writing down, making marks on clay and you're building buildings out of clay in mud. So it depends on again how how generously you want to conceive of computing the more Orthodox and maybe limited conception of computing. A lot of those metaphors are born kind of like out of Cold War cybernetics theory, and there are lots of kind of as Jennifer Light, as I mentioned, is one of those folks. But if you think of it more generously, it has a much deeper century or a millennia long history.

Speaker4: [00:19:09] Yeah, it's one of and there's several places in which you sort of dig back into that that that clay in that mud of the history that makes her the computational city or the sort of the dream of it that we see played out in so many urban centers around the world. And you have many, many examples of cities where we can see these dashboards and the algorithmic logic that guides the dashboard mentality to be able to putatively visualize and know the city in this way. And one of the places you begin, though, is this question of the tree and the arboreal metaphor. And the grafting that goes back to medieval times, I believe, are just beyond where where you have the tree and you have the plant and you have this sort of floral metaphor where there's this combination of being able to combine certain traits with another and then how that gets mapped onto the city of the present. And so I was really taken by this idea of the city as both a cultivated space and an engineered space in the way that gets imagined in these computational imaginaries. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about these, these sort of different tropes or metaphors or logics, the city as the tree, the city as graft, the city as computer and how these are all reductive in their own ways, but have their own kind of origin stories as well.

Speaker3: [00:20:39] Sure, I'd be happy to, and I'm really glad that grafting metaphor resonated for you because I had a lot of fun working with it and going back to the initial question that you asked Dominic about the origin of the book. This was something that has I have been really lucky and grateful over the years where a lot of my ideas for things I write come at a space of convergence, where I'll be invited to write something for an exhibition or an edited collection. I'll be given a keyword or a big theme, and I have to think about where do my interests and what I can do well, intersect with that theme. I was asked maybe three years or three or four years ago now to write an essay for an exhibition catalogue about the theme of grafting. I hadn't really written anything about that before, but I have written about wood and furniture. So I tried, and then it just occurred to me that this is a really productive metaphor for thinking about the mix of the organic and the mechanical, the engineered and the cultivation of. That's a word that really is a more productive way of thinking about, Oh, it's already a mix of productively mixed metaphor in a way to think about how cities are all these things simultaneously.

Speaker3: [00:21:39] So that just became again, it was the serendipity, the good luck of being given this term to write about a few years ago that they then expanded into the introduction for the book and then tried to read back into the conclusion also. But grafting, as you pointed out, is already a bit of a mixed thing. It combines the engineering and cultivation. And that's kind of one of the arguments in the book is that when we turn to tech companies and a lot of city governments who are taken in by the techno solution as promises of tech companies, they tend to use this urban operating system. Urban code, city esque computer metaphor really sold hard by the tech companies that there's this omniscience and omnipotence that computation offers that you can computationally model everything and get this completely objective, omniscient way of understanding and managing a city. Obviously, the things that I argue in the book that are left out, although the. Things that don't lend themselves to gratification, to measurement in quantitative form and to algorithms and things that just can't be rendered on a dashboard, something like how would we measure our progress on dealing with the history of racial capitalism? It's really hard to dashboard something like that, obviously, right? Or human rights, you know? Yes, you can count live saves, lives lost, but that's really reductive.

Speaker3: [00:22:52] So, so we've already talked about the city as graft. The city is computer. There have historically and again, Jennifer Light writes about this a bit. Been a series of metaphors, many of which are drawn from whatever the prevailing thinking or technologies of the day might be. So it could be the city as a biophysical body, the city as an ecology. The city is a machine, the city as a gas pump, the city as a steam engine. It's a kind of whatever was the thing du jour was then kind of conveniently applied to understanding seemingly inscrutable systems. I think each one of these has something productive to offer, especially if you combine kind of like the city's ecology with the city as a computer, with the city, as kind of a social network, you can really get it kind of the human, the ecological and also recognize there are certain things that technology can help us do productively if it's used responsibly. So I'm more for kind of pragmatically using and layering metaphors to see what each of them affords methodologically and epistemological.

Speaker4: [00:23:49] Yeah, that's really nice. And I also like the point that you made just a second ago about how the technology du jour often ends up working as a sort of operative metaphor. As we're thinking about these urban spaces. And to your point about the kind of the digital impulse, you write that Silicon Valley, for example, likes to think of itself as moving fast and breaking things. But cities, if they're responsibly designed and administered, can't afford such negligence. And I think that this is a really important point. I mean, the kind of fantasy that we can can live through when we're talking about, you know, digital code is very different than when we're talking about human beings, lives and the kinds of worlds they live in, the worlds that they hope to live in, that they deserve and have a right to live in, and that we can't really turn to the computerization or the these computer models, necessarily as a way to solve these converging crises, right? And you make that point very well throughout the book that yes, there are crises. Yes, there are disparities. There are challenges that we can try and metastasize in the computational mode. But that's not really enough. It's not enough to really face the challenges that cities and the ecologies that they live within are facing. So these are really important insights, I think, in so many ways.

Speaker3: [00:25:14] Well, thanks. And I do think that there are things the technology and the technology, the data that dashboards there are useful functions they serve. We just have to recognize their limitations. So, you know, with the pandemic, for instance, a dashboard can really point out hotspots to us. It can let us know where we need to do kind of more deep in depth, maybe ethnographic research to understand what's really going on historical work to understand what the systemic problems are there. But yeah, just recognizing the methodological affordances and limitations of these different models.

Speaker2: [00:25:45] So have you ever and I do not mean this question to sound at all flip. But do you have like a dream urban dashboard model that you, I mean, in your mind, you ever dream about? Like, what the perfect or I mean, the perfect. I'm sorry that's already buy into the logic, but I mean, do you have a do you have a sense of kind of ever sort of play around with ideas for how how it might look different or like whether the interface could be changed? I mean, or whether it's like the kinds of things we're measuring, I don't know, like I was, I found myself fascinated by this while I was reading the book.

Speaker4: [00:26:15] And if you want to take four to 12 screens to do it, you can. You don't have to limit yourself to one screen, by the way. That's right, it's right.

Speaker3: [00:26:25] So just the fact that it's all reduced to the visual is one of those aspects of reduction. I mean, I have really been into and written about over the years, and if you're working on exhibitions with other folks, realize that there's a lot to multicenter multi sensorial and a body knowledge, especially getting to the points that you were talking about, Simone, about kind of bodies and kind of the human subjects that inhabit a city. It's not just about the walking data points. They are bodies with histories and and kind of phenomenological experiences. So I think kind of thinking about a dashboard is something more multi-sensory will be really interesting. And I wrote a chapter or sorry, another places article, maybe six or seven years ago called Interfacing Urban Intelligence, where at the end I do look at some of these more unorthodox, inventive, maybe even speculative dashboards and interfaces that are trying to help to reveal certain aspects of what knowledge is are embodied in a city that go beyond the algorithmic. I also really like speaking of the speculative. I realize there's some kind of fraught political discussion around speculation in terms of like, who gets to do it? And some. Some good critiques of that whole movement these days, but I have really enjoyed working with students and seeing kind of other designers play with almost neurotic or absurd dashboards where you take something and it just really is not meant to be boarded like the racial justice example I gave before or something like happiness. Or I'm trying to think of something else really kind of big and nebulous and beautiful and ephemeral. So taking something and making almost having fun with demonstrating the perversity of trying to dashboard's something that really doesn't lend itself to that way of representation? I really love like epistemological messes, ontological chaos, the things that don't fit in the classification system or that slip through the cracks or don't lend themselves to representation on the map. Same thing with like the almost absurd dashboard, those are just really poetically evocative things. They show us the limitations of positive ways of knowing.

Speaker2: [00:28:22] I had a little hands on experience in this realm, trying to do some work on long term climate forecasting for local government here in Houston and also working together with the Spatial Studies Lab at Rice. That that is really into making dashboards. And I think they make dashboards kind of kind of coming from a good place and trying to do good things like public health initiatives and things like that. But I often feel like at some level, it's like the charisma of the dashboard or the charisma of sort of algorithmic governance is something that like I want to understand better because I think it is. It is shared by government. I mean, it's almost kind of like they want to overcome their own human failings and like hope that some algorithm can solve their problems and make their their decisions easier or maybe more just. And then, you know, you have the people from Silicon Valley swooping in saying, Yeah, of course, we can do that for you. And you know this, you know, we're going to help you out. And there's something in that message speaks to the kind of precarity of human knowledge. Somehow, I don't know. Do you see it that way or do you? I mean, how much of this do you see is like kind of insidious, corporate driven nonsense? And how much of it do you see kind of coming from people just trying to muddle through and make the best use of technology they can?

Speaker3: [00:29:28] Well, I think it's how all of these altogether. But if you do have the power and the money and the charisma to use your term of Silicon Valley and the fact that you do have government bodies that everywhere from the local to the state to the federal to international levels who are looking for ways to both prove or promise solutions and then to measure progress for their constituents, the people to whom they're responsible. A dashboards are really convenient way to do that, especially if you kind of handpick the metrics that are going to push the arrows in your favor. Well, well, this is what we see at predictive policing and kind of data driven criminal justice all the time where there's a lot of cooking the books there of hands, selecting particular metrics that really show essentially you already know what dashboard the dashboard you want to look, what you want it to look like the end of the year, so you harvest the data that produces that result all along the way. So there is an aspect of dimension to this. There is kind of a huge, huge, hubristic dimension to it. The hubris of Silicon Valley, there's also a historical dimension to it, too. You know, this idea that we've for I'm not sure exactly how far back the desire for the universal library for the the complete dataset goes. But that has a very long history to the history of the MAPPA Mundi. The idea that we could map the world, these desire for having a comprehensive overview of something, being able to make the map that's as big as the territory, which you know the Borges aspiration. So there's a deep history to these desires to have some way of having a charismatic completist representation of the world we live in. So it's all of those, all of those kind of impulses altogether.

Speaker4: [00:31:09] I mean, it's great that we're talking today. Actually, from my point of view, also because I spent a good hour plus today working on a dashboard project of GIS mapping for an ethnographic research project that also is pivoting upon quantitative metrics created by these physicists at NASA and trying to calculate the loss of ice and sea level rise in coastal cities and then how to sort of represent those impacts. And so we had a great discussion today among the team about what to represent on the dashboard. And here I am reading your book and then thinking about what are the metrics of this dashboard and what are we trying to convey? What are we trying to teach? And then I'm also thinking about the dashboard as this way of keeping the mud out and so wondering, and you should tell the history of the original dashboard because that was news to me. And that's why I say it's a great story that was fantastic. So you must tell it. But it's like, what don't we represent? And then what is the epistemological basis behind that? And not that we're hiding something necessarily, or at least not maybe intentionally, but something that just doesn't make it to the dashboard. What do those emissions say about what it is that we're trying to present in a? A positive Islamic way.

Speaker3: [00:32:30] Well, that's a that's a great question, and I'm really glad to hear that you're working on this project, but but yes, again, it's going back to this idea of the dashboard as charisma. It's also about efficiency. It gives you this really almost comforting sense of both power and maybe relief for comfort, the sense that you can take this really complicated phenomenon like a pandemic or climate change and compress it into a screen to get a sense of like, I have my finger on this. You have some semblance of control, but there's a lot of mud and you're kind of an environmental case, both metaphorically and literally left out. And that's we can see that when we look at the genealogy, the history of the term. So the first dashboard was essentially a flap that kept mud from flying up into a carriage. You know, a transportation device. And then we had the dashboard on a car, which if we look at some of the earliest models, the Model T, for instance, it was highly minimalist compared to what we see today, in part because control engineering systems engineering, we didn't really have instruments to measure things or the kind of the instruments to demonstrate the kind of the the live tracking of data in a car. So you had essentially kind of the on and off switch, maybe a fuel gauge, you didn't really even have like a rate, like a way to test kind of the if your radiator was going to explode, you wouldn't really have a warning sign for it. It was just explode. And that was your indicator.

Speaker3: [00:33:50] You're kind of analog indicator that something is wrong here. But then once we have control of systems engineering, you can figure out ways to not to test and then represent these different variables on a dashboard. Let we get into the history of flight, just the expansion of things that are measurable and what are also required for the successful management, the successful kind of administration of the of the vehicle. Just explain this dramatically and you require special training. You require the design of an entire cockpit almost to comport the body so that it can interface with the dashboard in the most efficient way. So we look through the history of cars through airplanes, Jet's mission control, space travel and then you also have things like control rooms. And Medina has this great book about the history of the cyber arson control room. So that's a great one. Yes, it's wonderful. So just looking at kind of the evolution of the dashboard, it's small scale analog in terms of the horse drawn carriage. It's kind of mechanization in the car. It's digitization and real complexity in the airplane. And then it's architecturally in the control room. So how it takes on different epistemological and political balances as it evolves. And every time, though, you still have that leaving out the mud dimension, both the metaphor, the literal mud in the case of the carriage and then the maybe the epistemological and methodological muddy stuff that you just don't know how to fit on the dashboard that gets left out in the more contemporary versions.

Speaker2: [00:35:16] Yeah. And I wanted to sort of following up on this like ask you to talk a little bit about failure and function because it's interesting. I mean, as in the case of Project Cyrus and the project fails and you could say, well, the CIA invaded and overthrew the country and it never really got a chance to operate. But a lot of these cases that you profiled end up not working or being given up for a variety of reasons. And I was wondering, you know, given that to think about why we keep coming back to that, it kind of reminded me, and I don't know if this is an apt comparison or not of of what Jim Ferguson once wrote about development that, you know, development always fails. But does it really fail because it always creates the pretext for more development? And maybe that's its real function. The failure is actually, you know, the pretext for for re-engagement. And do you think that's kind of what's happening here too with these projects? Or do you think that I don't know, there's some other kind of dynamic going on?

Speaker3: [00:36:06] Well, I think we see a couple of different kind of failed models that just keep repeating themselves, maybe instantiate with new technology each time the desire for the master plan. We keep seeing that being kind of reincarnated with the technology and the sensibilities du jour. So that's manifested in some of these manifestations of dashboards. Also just today, I was listening to another podcast with Dan Green, who wrote a great book with MIT, whose title I'm forgetting about the history of access and how we think of technological access as being this panacea for neoliberal kind of uplift. And there it's just he's looking specifically at the startup metaphor, how to start a metaphor and a read. Halpern talks about this, too. And I know you've spoken with her on your program about the startup is really very conveniently multi lived, so it's actually failure is built into its very reason for being. So it's all about trial. You start out not making making very hubristic claims, but also saying like, we're just going to move fast and break things to go back to one of the earlier phrases that you mentioned, Simone. And but that's part of the plan. We're just we're just really throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Speaker3: [00:37:13] And if it doesn't, we're going to take lessons from that and start over with a new iteration, get some new funding. So the startup metaphor as appealing, just the fact that we keep birthing new apps, there's always going to be a new techno illusionist approach to something. But yes. The dashboards do fail and the smart cities kind of the larger the grandeur of Smart City Project does fail fairly often. I wrote the original article on the dashboard, I think maybe six or so years ago and then revisited a lot of the case studies I used there when I updated and expanded the chapter that for the book and realized that I'd say more than half of them were either gone or half of the widgets were essentially dead feeds. So just in the space of five years, so many of them were essentially rendered non-functional. And this gets at the importance of going to maintenance, which is the subject of the last chapter of the book. And when you have a technical solution as it approach, often maintenance isn't built into its original ideation or design of the project.

Speaker4: [00:38:10] You brought up water has a couple of minutes ago, and it makes me think that we need to turn to libraries for a moment because these are an ongoing fascination for you and subject of study and introspection. And you mentioned in this book that they're really like libraries don't figure super prominently in these smart city narratives, and yet they really should, but maybe not in the way that one might expect or the kind of dashboard ethos might expect. And so you make an argument about the library as a critical infrastructure that needs to and should play a central role in these practices of digital urbanism. So could you tell us more about why the library? What does the library do for the digital city or the urban imaginary of the future?

Speaker3: [00:38:57] Sure. And again, I'm going to say the answer is it does so many things. The way you would sell it to potential funders and to kind of urban administrators is that it teaches urban citizens how to live in a digital economy or how to upskill themselves. This is going back to those issues of access that I was talking about relation to Dan Green's work. So this is the way a lot of library leaders will sell themselves to the city council, to the mayor, to taxpayers, essentially saying We are helping you, helping to keep you, especially for adult education. Kids are supposedly getting this education in schools, but for adults, we can help you to keep your skills fresh, to keep you a kind of competitive in the job. Markets can can help to to build a startup culture, help to build a culture that entrepreneurialism that is often the way they're sold. Many smart cities or some smart cities in certain parts of the world, like in Singapore and Scandinavia, where they tend to be a very, relatively well funded institution, also say that there are places to try out new smart city technology. So to help people test out like what your new surveillance system is like or or maybe on the more benevolent and like how to empower citizens to develop or residents to use civic data in interesting ways they have. They have also been spaces where people just going further with this idea of them as data hubs, they can be places for kind of data literacy, for the promotion of data literacy, for critical information literacy, which is something especially in the misinformation culture which we find ourselves right now.

Speaker3: [00:40:29] Libraries, if well-funded and respected as they should be, could be even more so kind of central places for larger public discussions about critical information literacy and dealing with problems of misinformation. They're also, in some cases, the place where, given the the unfortunate decline of public media and public local newspapers, there are some traditions of public libraries being part of larger kind of local media networks where there could be a space, a platform for the rebirth of more civic or civic data and public media. I also think libraries also remind us that the fact that there is more worth knowing than what is data viable. So we have oral history projects. We have local there's a library in Brooklyn that just opened recently, the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center that is collecting oral histories about the environmental history of that neighborhood, which is the home to multiple Superfund sites. And then also empowering local residents to collect data. That means it's meaningful to them, not necessarily what the EPA collects, but data that would be kind of really informed by a local sensibility or generations of living in a neighborhood. So libraries, I think, also remind us that there's more that's worth knowing that what can be shown on a dashboard or what can be turned into data?

Speaker4: [00:41:43] Yeah, I think that this is a really important point that you make, and that is that libraries aren't just hubs of information or experimentation. They are a nexus for creative research endeavors like these oral history projects they're talking about. They're they're they're spaces and places where people can have a kind of embodied encounter. Like you mentioned the the reading spaces at the Austin Library, which I've never been to, but now I want to go and see. And that also that they are in many cities in the United States, maybe especially hubs of care, caring for other human beings. And so you bring in the example of how many librarians have now, especially in big cities. I mean, I'm thinking of Philadelphia have been. Trained to administer Narcan, for example, to counteract overdoses from opioids, and that places like San Francisco and in Phoenix, you know, did a bunch of work around COVID contact tracing and then this really is striking point that you make that I didn't know and that the San Francisco Library has employed a social worker on its staff, and they have a team of unhoused people who are helping with health and safety measures like that's quite extraordinary. I think that's that's a kind of an understanding and a kind of capacious sort of view of the library that that I don't think immediately comes to mind and yet is increasingly true as a kind of hub of attention and care for for human beings, you know, beyond their informational needs.

Speaker3: [00:43:17] Absolutely. And this is again one of those places where I like to think of it in relation to or as a really productive counterpoint to these more smart cities. Weigh these data, find ways of thinking about this city. Libraries are especially important and architectural infrastructures for people who are either targets of the smart city or completely ignored by the smart city because they're not like a lucrative market. So yes, they have. As Eric Klinenberg and I have written about over the years, they are really critical social infrastructures and increasingly so as cities tend to defund a lot of other infrastructure projects like the senior care services, mental health services libraries often take on those when others are unable to or kind of are defunded.

Speaker4: [00:43:59] I found myself kind of writing this mantra down defund the police and refund for libraries.

Speaker1: [00:44:04] There you go. Not like without

Speaker4: [00:44:05] Refund. Like give the money back, but like, really Dash funds

Speaker1: [00:44:08] Them like fund and fund them up.

Speaker2: [00:44:13] But I mean, I think the other point that you make that I think is really well taken is that, you know, there's limits to what you can ask libraries to do. So it's not maybe fair to the staff to expect them to do everything that we're expecting them to do in terms of care work, especially where their funding isn't probably expanding in the ways that would be needed to cover all of those different services. But I mean, this is a great, a great, really concrete example of what you call other urban intelligences. And maybe it could kind of be a launching point for talking about that concept, which which appears in different chapters and I think is really resonant for somebody who's who's kind of familiar with the smart city model, let's say. Tell us about like where the other urban and where we should look for the other urban intelligences. What kind of qualities do they have? What kinds of situations do they emerge from

Speaker3: [00:45:03] With the last two book chapters in the book are trying to do? Obviously, the library, I would say, is one place where we can look at these other urban intelligences. It's not just what is data fiable algorithms sizable, all these complicated words or rentable on a dashboard, they are. The local knowledge is indigenous. Knowledge is embodied ways of understanding their in other history, knowledge, institutions, museums. Of course, we have to be cognizant of the fraught histories of all of these institutions. I don't want to romanticize them. They're all kind of rooted in colonialism, kind of white supremacy, patriarchy, especially if you look at like the classification systems of libraries. That said, they do house a lot of these other and validate these other urban intelligences, recognizing that the thing that makes a city a beautiful and complex and and kind of vibrant place is the fact that it does allow for so many of these different ways of knowing to coexist. And then the final chapter is about maintenance and repair and care. And there I would say, those are other embodiments if you're looking especially at kind of forms of manual service labor recognizing that those require intense forms of intelligence that might not be kind of intellectual work. It's not white collar work. But but the pandemic especially has demonstrated that there is long histories of standing and knowledge and kind of embodied ways of doing and knowing that are essential to the efficient and inclusive functioning of a city that require recognition and validation and celebration, too.

Speaker2: [00:46:35] Yeah. And somehow this also raised for me the question of what is city and what isn't city. And I guess maybe that's a question that's probably rooted in Houston, which is both city and just sprawl at the same time, kind of endless the endless sprawl of the mid-20th century. And, you know, it seems like kind of intrinsically ungovernable, but also like not to really, you know, respect any sense of its own bounded ness. It kind of metastasizes and spreads. And so, you know, I wonder, OK, here's the question I'm sorry this. I've just been rambling. The question is the following To what extent do you find this idea of the kind of computational model of urbanism, something that belongs to a particular historical era and maybe something that is not going to fare so well in the Anthropocene as I mean, we've been in the Anthropocene a while, but you? Know what I mean, like in climate chaos, new kinds of weather systems, floods, droughts, also this kind of relentless sprawl of settlement beyond suburbs into exurbs. And you know, it seems like there's a lot of things that are sort of undermining any sense that the city is knowable almost. So do you think we might look back on these kinds of projects 50 years from now or whenever and sort of think of them as, Oh, wasn't that precious? They thought they could control and understand a city or. Or do you imagine that they're just going to keep inventing new ways and new technologies to pursue the same projects?

Speaker3: [00:48:03] That's a really good question, and I kind of hope it's the former that the manageability of a lot of these massive challenges we're facing will demonstrate that hubristic and kind of futile nature of attempting to think you know everything, but still encouraging people to attempt to know as much as we can to address these problems as far as they are addressable. Of course, it might be kind of beyond beyond the pale on that one.

Speaker4: [00:48:29] I was going to say that my question, actually, I think, might be the inverse or it's a mutation of Dominic's question.

Speaker2: [00:48:37] Maybe that sounds troubling.

Speaker1: [00:48:41] I mean, maybe it takes a slightly different direction.

Speaker4: [00:48:43] I'm curious as to whether you think that in our contemporary moment where we are watching so many metrics and models of climate destruction, for one, these the kind of Anthropocene times where we've been attuned to computational models and mapping by scientists for good reason to understand the effects that humanity and certain humans in particular are having on the vital Earth systems that we rely upon. If that doesn't also feed into and some organic or parallel or orthogonal way into this sort of this, this desire to kind of control the urban space to metro size the city, to dashboard it, to to calculate it, rather than to feel it right rather than to to kind of encounter it in that different way. I don't know. It's just it struck me as there's a kind of parallel operation going on here.

Speaker3: [00:49:41] Absolutely. And this is maybe goes to the question you asked earlier about what some of those other urban intelligences are. And this is in part why I tried to come back to the graft in the last chapter. Thinking about what we can learn from other species and recognizing that we are not the first inhabitants of New York City where I happen to be ending the book thinking about Lenape intelligences that preceded us. But this is interesting. You ask this to me because I just have been giving a talk in the spring and hopefully wrapped it up for wrapped up the the article version of that talk about trees as data and all of these compulsions to use kind of algorithmic, artificially intelligent operations to find ways to think of trees as a data find solution to urban to climate change problems. So if we can have a metric, if we can have a dashboard that measures things like average income, age, racial composition, all of these different kinds of demographic and psychographic variables of a neighborhood and then count the trees in it. We can develop a magic number of trees we need to plant in order to produce to kind of effect environmental and racial justice. So I think that a lot of these data solutions do tend to lead people to think about forests and data and other natural resources as quantifiable algorithmic, sizeable solutions which are, you know, the reason like the million and trillion tree campaigns are so appealing even to people like former President Trump, because it allows for this quantifiable this way to quantify your virtue without really necessarily addressing systemic issues. Yeah, yeah. Well, put.

Speaker2: [00:51:15] Yeah. And and I think that also then shows like the the limits to it. And there is something I think deeply kind of masculinist in the logic of computational urbanism that I know that's obvious. So we might think about what comes after that kind of singularity, Ray Kurzweil kind of thinking that seems to me informs a lot, a lot of this stuff at some level.

Speaker1: [00:51:37] And yeah, yeah, yeah, I

Speaker4: [00:51:38] Could I could walk outside right now, walk down the street here in Houston and tell you that a block, a very concrete block with, you know, four trees on it. It's going to make me a happier person than the one with none. Absolutely. The one with four trees allows me to breathe, literally provides me some semblance of shade and joy and greenery. It's, you know, I don't want to quantify this, but in some ways there is a real ratio there.

Speaker3: [00:52:04] Absolutely. And there's a really great article also happens to be in places journal that I recommended to so many people over the past couple of years by Sam Block. It's called Shade, and he looks at, you know, the politics of shade, which is something that seems kind of just atmospheric ambient, but it's actually a very political phenomenon. It has to do everything from kind of a history of urban politics, of the politics of procurement of. The cosmetic choices of which particular mayors like particular species of trees that might not have been well suited for their environments about the socioeconomics or where trees get planted and don't about car companies involvement and how why the streets are, where the medians are, where tree trees can survive. So, so many different kind of both computational data, fiable and really kind of messy human dimensions wrapped up together and how shade is distributed across the landscape. So I think that articles is a really good way. So a great way to get at the kind of the overdetermined ness of something like the environmental impacts of street trees.

Speaker2: [00:53:07] And that is so apropos of life in Houston, where I could can't tell you how many like children's play areas there are with no shade over them at all, which is, I think is not even in some ways it's you can't even it's so haphazard that it's like our urban intelligence is running on a Commodore sixty four or something like that. It's like really

Speaker1: [00:53:28] Old school rule, I guess.

Speaker2: [00:53:30] I know, but it's cruel and like a I mean, it's it's the same in the wealthier neighborhoods as the poorer neighborhoods. They just don't. No one gives a shit, unfortunately. So anyway, I digress. It digression Shannon. Listen, listen, I just want to say that everybody has to read your book. A city is not a computer, other urban intelligences. It's really brilliant. I loved reading it and the other thing and this came up.

Speaker4: [00:53:54] It's also beautifully written. I walked out for sure.

Speaker3: [00:53:57] Oh, thank you. Thanks.

Speaker4: [00:53:58] It's very it's truly a pleasure to read. It's a great read. I learned a lot and I enjoyed every minute of spending time with the words that you put to paper.

Speaker3: [00:54:06] That means a lot. Thank you.

Speaker2: [00:54:08] And it's compact, which came up on Twitter trying to pivot to your Twitter feed because the other thing I want to tell people is, the other thing I want to tell people is I kind of got obsessed with your Twitter feed, and I just, for one thing, it's very active. It's very smart. There's always interesting ideas there. I don't know how you find the time to do it. So like, that's a question one. Question two is maybe going back to your original observations about different ways of thinking about writing books and kind of using the grafting metaphor for thinking about how this particular book project evolved. How do you think about your work? And I do think of it as work. It is a kind of educational public work you're doing on Twitter, talking about these issues. How do you see that as connecting to grafting with your your essay, writing your book projects and everything else you do?

Speaker3: [00:54:58] Oh, that's such a lovely question. So yeah, I hadn't really thought about the grafting metaphor applying to Twitter, but it certainly does. And I think that the graft encompasses not only my writing and public presence on Twitter, but also my teaching, and they all inform each other in such really profound ways. I mostly use Twitter to share resources that I find things that I read. I really try to promote the work of kind of like junior and marginalized scholars and artists as much as I can, and to talk about interesting things I encounter in the city. You know, exhibitions. I'm seeing events I'd love to go to, but also the way I use it to make it useful for me most often is to kind of crowdsource references for students. Or, for example, today one of my classes I'm developing for the fall, we're going to be making kind of an unorthodox annual report. That's our collective project at the end to kind of rethink what the annual report is for an urban organization. And I wanted to find some examples of artistic, periodic, absurd urban or kind of annual reports. And when I ask questions like that, which happens a few times a year, I typically add hundreds of people responding and then I collect all the responses and put them into kind of an online collection site called Arena and share them back to the people who shared them with me. And then they become a class, and then classes really inform my thinking. So in the acknowledgements to the book, I mention several of the classes I think the writing of from and the students who shape my thinking. So I really feel like the Twitter teaching the classroom and the writing are all kind of grafted together and they they're kind of like my own world wide web. I guess you could say they're kind of symbiotically feeding one another.

Speaker2: [00:56:32] It's a good web. I like that web.

Speaker3: [00:56:34] Thanks. Thank you.

Speaker4: [00:56:36] So, so, so beyond cultivating these ecologies of crowdsourced ideas and materials and coming up with a brilliant active Twitter feed?

Speaker1: [00:56:45] Oh yeah.

Speaker4: [00:56:46] What is next on your agenda, Shannon? What are you working on now?

Speaker3: [00:56:51] A few different things and part of them, as I mentioned to you earlier, that I have really liked it. My career has kind of evolved that most of the projects I develop are a space between what I've been asked for and what I can offer. So I love that I get prompts for things that people write me and say, Have you ever thought about this? So the next two books that I have kind of three in very nascent stages, kind of on written on a notepad somewhere and a to do list. But those that are most immediate one is about sound. I've written about sound periodically throughout my career, but I wrote a piece to be three years ago about the sound that objects make everything from how. Car engines are engineered to sound a particular way, and potato chip bags and the dings that our computers make and how they cultivate certain subjectivities and and shape our relationship to objects, to material objects and environments. And an editor at a trade press wrote me and said, Have you thought about expanding this into a book? And I thought, No, I hadn't. But now that you mention it, so that is something I I got an agent recently first time, so that's something that will probably be in the near future when I next have a sabbatical.

Speaker3: [00:57:55] And then also furniture, I have honestly gotten a little tired of talking about and thinking about data, stuff and smart cities. The word smart cities is almost nausea inducing to me. This case is so ubiquitous, but just growing up in a wooded area. And my dad had a hardware store, and I've written several pieces over the years about furniture and how, again, that shapes the way we know the world through these designed objects. I'd really like to put that together just because it's a nice step away from the data stuff and also kind of an homage to my parents as they get older, like more creatively formatted book about intellectual furnishings, the way different cultures have design and furniture shapes, the way we interact with media and the way we know the world. So there's the sound book in the furniture book. So those are two big things. And then for now, immediately, it's just teaching that's going to probably be consuming you for the next semester, at least.

Speaker4: [00:58:46] Does both sound super cool and, you know, on sound and the sound of engines. It's so funny because I was talking to someone a few days ago about how electric cars are almost silent, right? And yet there is a certain brand of driver out there, and we have some of them here in Texas who really are like a loud revving engine sound. And so I'm kind of maybe it's already happened that Tesla has created an obnoxious sort of carburetor sound?

Speaker1: [00:59:13] Ok. Yeah, yeah. I think I've

Speaker4: [00:59:15] Read nothing new under the Sun, but here I thought you could do it too. But it's just something, especially now that they've made the Ford F-150 into an electric truck like you need to have a loud engine sound. And and for the wood, I I don't know. I'm saying so many. So, so much potential. I'm imagining wood bound book with like a very thin and maybe maybe bamboo or something that's more sustainable than chopping down trees, but something that has a woody feel, shall we say. Oh yeah,

Speaker1: [00:59:44] That's a great idea. I like that. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:59:48] Well, the one historical example I really like resi latex, which I think started in the 18th century, and they're kind of like little enclosed archives of trees. So there you would make almost like a little book. It's a box. It's covered with the bark of the tree. The box is made from the wood of the tree and inside the box you contain its nuts, its fruits, its leaves, other things like soil that's kind of retrieved from the ground around it. So there's essentially this little kind of constellation of the tree's materiality in this box that you put on a shelf with other boxes. So it becomes like a library of the books in their own germane form. So that's kind of a poetic way of thinking about it.

Speaker4: [01:00:26] Nice. I love that the Xylo box, it's called.

Speaker3: [01:00:28] I like it a lot. Yes. Textile tech? Yes.

Speaker2: [01:00:32] I mean, I also wanted to know about this potato chip bag, but that just shows how downmarket I am.

Speaker3: [01:00:37] Oh, well, well, you you speaking. Well, given your interest in sustainability, you probably know that like some, I forget exactly which company was. There's probably Frito-Lay a few years ago. Try to introduce a more readily recyclable bag that's made more from plant materials, I think was specifically for sun chips. And because and whatever its material composition was, it was a lot clear and people were doing kind of acoustic tests on it and found that when you crunch a sentient bag, it is as loud as a lawnmower, essentially. Wow. So the market rejected it, so they went back to their less sustainable kind of more plastic infused bag. So this is part of like product development is trying to find more sustainable packaging because the more kind of sustainable plastics tend to be a lot more loudly quickly, which is not appealing to some consumers.

Speaker4: [01:01:27] So in other words, we just need to stick a bunch of sun chips bags into the tailpipe of the Ford F-150.

Speaker1: [01:01:34] Yeah, exactly. That's it. Obviously, it's like

Speaker4: [01:01:37] Reusing, recycling and

Speaker2: [01:01:38] Repurposing. It would be like driving down the road. Yeah, this is, you know, it's kind of making me hungry. But but I don't know.

Speaker1: [01:01:45] I have something else. Pretty yummy. There we go.

Speaker4: [01:01:51] Well, I'm glad we figured something out here today.

Speaker2: [01:01:54] Well, we're all about solutions on this podcast yet. And as you figure out, so we're about we're about data and we're about control, about solutions.

Speaker3: [01:02:04] That's where we're at.

Speaker2: [01:02:07] Shaaban, thank you for being with us. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. Great conversation. Brilliant work. And I do hope you'll come back again.

Speaker3: [01:02:14] Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure, and I hope so, too.