Writing For A Better Future

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0:59I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And before I introduce our special guest for the hour, I want to play a variation on a game that my kids love to play. It's called Two Truths and a Lie. So I'm going to list three apps, smartphone apps, and I want you to guess which two really exist and which one is fiction. The first is an app that tells you the best moment to run out of a movie to go to the bathroom so you don't miss anything important. The second app creates a puff of air from your iPhone speaker, blowing out birthday candles for you hygienically. The third one, it analyzes your friend's facial expressions to determine just how trustworthy they are and then rate the quality of your friendship.

1:49So, which are real and which doesn't exist? Believe it or not, the first two are real. But the third, the one that rates your friendships, isn't. Not yet anyway. That app comes from the mind of writer Dave Eggers, whose latest book, The Every, satires our relationship with technology. It tells the story of a villainous fictional corporation called The Every, which is essentially Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all wrapped up into one big controlling tech company. The heroine is Delaney Wells, a former park ranger who vows to sabotage it from the inside. And in an early chapter, Delaney finally gets an interview for a job at the Every.

2:37But she's nervous she won't get it because someone has filmed her behaving poorly in public on her way to the interview, using another fictional app called Shammed. Here's Dave Eggers reading a passage from the Every. Delaney, rarely nervous, was rattled. She'd spent years assiduously building her profile, her digital self with meticulous care, but there were many, so many things she couldn't know if they knew. More pressingly, on the way to the campus, Delaney had been shammed. On the subway platform, she'd dropped a wrapper, and before she could pick it up, an older woman with a phone had filmed the crime.

3:17Like a growing majority of tech innovations, the invention and proliferation of Samaritan, and app standard on every phones, was driven by a mixture of benign utopianism and pseudo-fascist behavioral compliance. A million shams, a bastard mash of Samaritan and shame, were posted each day exposing swervy drivers, loud gym grunters, Louvre line cutters, single-use plastic users, and blithe allowers of infants crying in public. Getting shammed was not the problem. The problem was if you got ID'd and tagged, and if the video got widely shared, commented on, and that tipped your shame aggregate to unacceptable levels.

4:01Then it could follow you for life. This dystopian, creepy world of the every exists in the not-so-far-off and not-so-far-fetched future. The book is Dave Eggers' follow-up to his 2013 bestseller, The Circle. And Eggers has been a mainstay of American fiction and nonfiction for both adults and kids ever since he published his breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. And I am delighted that we are going to spend the hour with Dave Eggers. We'll talk about why he's obsessed with tech's effects on society, what's happened since he won the million-dollar TED Prize in 2008, plus his latest project, publishing memoirs for kids by kids.

4:54Hey, Dave. Thanks for being here. Hey, thank you so much. Okay, so the every, it's funny, it's dystopian, it's a page-turner, but it's also kind of frightening because it's really an extreme version, it's an extreme story about how technology changes us, changes our behavior. I mean, I think we live largely in a world where any deviation from societal norms like a mistake, jaywalking, or whatever might be filmed, an attempt would be made to publicly shame the offender. and I think it leads to a kind of constant low-level paranoia for so many people, especially living in urban settings where there are so many cameras and you think, anytime I drool on the subway, anytime I have a piece of toilet paper hanging from my shoe, anytime I drop a wrapper, this could follow me for life.

5:54And in the book it's taken on. It's gone further than it has right now, But the assumption is that if you do it, it will be captured and will never go away. That seems exactly right, Dave, because we checked out of our Airbnb, my family, the other day, and I noticed there was one of those Ring video doorbells. Yeah. And I was like, oh, wow, we're checking out 20 minutes late. They know that. Yeah. It's just a weird feeling. I don't know that I'm being judged, but it's weird. Surveillance has become socially acceptable. It used to be the province of spies and FBI agents, and you would have to have a court order, and it was a very high bar.

6:38But now it's a matter of course, and it's considered absolutely fine to surveil your children, your loved ones, your Airbnb guests, your employees. It's fodder for comedy, but it also makes me very sad. I wish we were a little bit more feisty about that and a little bit more outraged. I will say that, you know, now here we are, 2022, and there is a better understanding, at least, if not resistance, an understanding of the power that these tech companies have. But you came to that, I mean, more than a decade ago when you wrote the predecessor to the Every, The Circle. So talk to me. You were early on this one.

7:22Tell me how you formed this skepticism and maybe even fear about technology. Well, you know, I was an early adopter and I saw it go from a really egalitarian and really fun and sort of, you know, Apple as the scrappy tiny company with like less than 5 % market share to the rise of all of these incredibly voracious monopolies that had, you know, surveillance capitalism embedded into their DNA. And I was struck early on because we had our little magazine called Might and we were in South Park. We shared office space with Wired and Boing Boing. And so these were our friends, too, and still are my friends.

8:11And so I got to see really the human side and the really lovely side of so many people that were just regular people. but they did think first, and this has been the case for the next 30 years too, that the best solution to anything is going to involve a screen. And it's going to involve the internet, and you can't even begin to think of solving spread of malaria or hunger or anything. It's going to start on your phone and then work its way from there. And I think that that sort of digital solutionism was something that really rankled me early on. And I just thought like, well, let's it doesn't have to be everything.

8:58Let's go back to your protagonist in The Every, Delaney. She wants to implode this giant tech company from the inside. And it was interesting to me. You created this character well before Frances Hogan, the product manager turned whistleblower at Facebook, became probably the best known tech critic of 2021 when she leaked all this inside documentation about how Facebook execs knew they were potentially hurting young people's mental health, among other things. I just want to play a clip of her testifying in front of Congress right now. The choices being made inside of Facebook are disastrous for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy and for our democracy.

9:45And that is why we must demand Facebook make changes. I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits. The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats and more combat. The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government, and from governments around the world. The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.

10:29When you listen to that, after having written about a young woman who works at a similar company, what do you think? I love her. I think she's a hero. I think that they should have a statue in Palo Alto or somewhere down there to Francis Hagen. And the data dump that came out of it was crucial. It was very much like, you know, I covered the tobacco industry in the 90s when things turned and some insiders leaked documents, first implicating Brown and Williamson and then other tobacco companies about what they knew and what they did to hide it. And then suddenly they had to make a settlement with all the attorneys general because they had nowhere to hide.

11:13The cat was out of the bag. And so when you are marketing products to young people who are more than any time in history assaulted with information at all times, it has never been no young people have ever had to deal with so much of an onslaught. We're going to talk later about all the work that you do with kids and teenagers and writing. But this makes me wonder, how do you bring up this topic with young people? Because I feel like anytime you start to criticize tech or social media, they're like, yeah, goodbye. Bye, old man. You know, when I went on tour for The Circle, I spoke at colleges for about a year, maybe two years.

11:57And we would always have really open discussions. So when I went on these colleges, I said, well, how many of you, I'd speak to like a room of 200. Raise your hand if you feel comfortable with your relationship with technology. Not one hand goes up. Raise your hand if you trust the motives and practices of the big five tech companies. Not one hand goes up. Raise your hand if you wish you had a more balanced daily use of technology. All the hands go up. So you have a product and a whole digital world that young people who are just finding their way, getting their feet, trying to figure out what they want to do.

12:39Their brains are still forming and will form for another 10 years or so. At that moment, when they really need contemplative time and interpersonal time and time to laugh and time to, you know, be outside and walk around, I don't know, all of these things. We have these monopolies, these giant companies that are doing everything they can to say nothing that in your life can or should be done outside of a screen. So how do we fix that? In a minute, more with Dave Eggers about getting kids to love to read and write offline. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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15:11this message comes from ted talks daily the podcast that brings you a new idea every day learn what's transforming humanity from balancing ai and your critical thinking to surpassing discoveries about the adolescent brain find ted talks daily wherever you listen before we get back to the show a quick heads up that our next bonus episode for ted radio hour Plus listeners is out soon. One of our producers interviewed the CEO of a Native American tribe in Alaska that is using scanning technology in an ingenious way to protect tribal lands. We only had time to include a few minutes in our episode called For All Eternity.

15:55The extended cut of the interview is out Wednesday and it is so fascinating. Access these bonus episodes and get our show completely sponsor-free by supporting us at plus.npr.org slash TED or right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thanks. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Our guest this hour is author Dave Eggers. And we were just talking about the effects of tech on our behavior and society, especially kids. It's something that Dave thinks about a lot. He's been involved with education for the last couple of decades. And his nonprofit 826 Valencia tutors kids in reading and writing and develops their skills as authors by connecting them to grown-up writers in their own communities.

16:46Dave's won numerous awards for his nonprofit, including the million-dollar TED Prize in 2008. The organization is now called 826 National, and they just celebrated their 20th anniversary. Yeah, 826 Valencia started as a neighborhood drop-in tutoring center in the Mission District of San Francisco. And it was also the offices of McSweeney's, our little publishing company. We were in the back and we thought, you know, a lot of teachers in my family, a lot of my best friends became teachers and were teaching in San Francisco. And And everybody said, you know, teachers need more after-school help with a lot of their students, one-on-one attention, especially English language learning students.

17:35And I thought, well, why don't we combine our little publishing company with a drop-in tutoring center? And then, you know, we rented this building at 826 Valencia. And, you know, this is a story I've told too many times. No, tell it. It's really good. Yeah. I mean, the space was zoned for retail. So we had to, at the last minute, think of something to sell in the front of the store. And so I just thought, as a gag, really, I just thought it would be funny to sell pirate supplies to working buccaneers. And so we actually got in touch with wholesalers. wholesalers. There's a lot of them down in Tampa Bay, Florida for some reason that sell peg legs and sell eye patches and hooks and a lot of the stuff we made ourselves.

18:23And so we made it really like a working place. Like really, it's not like stuff about pirates, but stuff that real pirates would use. And so that's the front of the store. And then there's a dozen or so tables and desks where the kids can come and get one-on-one attention from humans. So it's still that way now, 20 years later, but we've gone into, you know, we publish books and we do readings. We had a reading yesterday afternoon in Golden Gate Park with student poets. And we do evening workshops and we do college access writing. And we do, I mean, you name it. It's grown in a thousand directions And then it spawned similar centers all over the country and all over the world.

19:12And each one has its own theme, right? Like they don't all sell pirate supplies. The one near me in Brooklyn sells superhero supplies. Yeah. It looks kind of like Costco for crime fighters. And then, you know, in L.A., they opened the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, which really looks like a 7-Eleven. but for people that might be going from the middle ages, uh, into the near future. And so you get everything you need, you know, if you want, if you're going back to caveman times and you need some woolly mammoth, uh, jerky or something like that to go, it's got all this stuff. And the, and the, the detail is incredible because it gives you a way to engage.

19:56So if you're walking by, you walk in, you maybe buy some mammoth chunks, and that goes to support the, you know, the center, helps pay the rent. The kids see people coming in. You can buy student poetry, student books written by the kids that are working right behind the storefront. So it's a way to sort of, A, it destigmatizes getting help after school. It's not like going into some clinical place that It says place for tutoring help for kids that aren't doing well. It's nothing like that. This is inherently fun, inherently weird, because weird is like a very key thing, and inherently creative.

20:36So it's caught on in so many other cities and countries because I think it attracts people that say, oh, that would be fun, and that would have been fun if I was a kid. It's a magical sort of environment. And now we're getting the kids that came up through the program are now writing books left and right. I just got two sent to me in the last few weeks from two students that came up through the pirate store. Not all of the kids become published authors in that way. A lot of them are lawyers or real estate developers or software engineers. But they're all had that one on one support, human to human contact to help them to get through and get stay at grade level and to feel heard.

21:28So I want to play. I mean, it's been a while, but I want to play for you a clip from your talk in 2008 in which you describe essentially how moved you were by how the center affected the students. kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their life. If they know it's going to be permanent, know it's going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said, that we've honored their words, honored their thoughts with the hundreds of hours of, you know, five drafts, six drafts, all this attention that we give to their thoughts. And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level, they can never go back.

22:06It's absolutely transformative. So the basis of it was one-on-one attention. And, you know, We find ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street, within those few blocks at around 2, 2.30, you will get run over often by the kids in their big backpacks or whatever, like actually running to this space, which is very strange because it's school in a way. But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was there was no stigma. They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor. They're seeing adults, they're modeling the behavior of these adults that are working in the field.

22:41They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adults. And it all sort of, you know, feeds on each other. There's a lot of cross-pollination. You sound incredibly excited there. I'm guessing you haven't heard that in a while. So I was just talking mile a minute. But also I was feeding off of the audience was so warm. And really, maybe my most favorite time talking in front of an audience was that day because they were just feeding off of it. And, you know, they laughed at all the right places and helped me keep going. And so it was a blast. But, and, you know, I made a lot of friends and a lot of connections there that, and they helped a lot of the centers.

23:32And you also say in that talk that as much as these centers are about helping kids with their homework and writing, it's also about supporting their curiosity and living what you call an enlightened life. What did you mean by that? To have these young people that can reflect on their lives and to be and to listen to others' stories, you know, their peers' stories. Every writing class I taught, I guarantee it was the first time that they were asked to tell their own story. I don't know of anybody who's had the assignment to say, write about your life. Tell me who you are. it's exceedingly rare because um you know there's so many other things that teachers have to do but we have that opportunity at a very slow pace two three hours every day after school or in the evening or on weekends even we can slow down and write on paper very often and one person's gonna look you know over your shoulder when you're ready and you know shine a light on what you do and then we're gonna polish it, polish it, work hard at it and then publish it.

24:46So they are published authors at age eight, published authors at 12. There are kids that are 14 that say, oh, I've been published. Well, let me see. It's 20, 23 times now. And they own it and they feel like their words are worthy of preservation and to be put in a bound book that'll last forever. and I think that there's a reason why so many of these kids are coming back now at 28, 29, 32 with novels and you know memoirs and non-fiction books because something got into the bones way back when and they got a very supportive community that said what you have to say should be heard and that's not always something, it's not always a message that everybody gets, and especially kids that are in sometimes chaotic situations in their lives, they need to hear it.

25:47I want to hear about what has happened since you gave your talk, because at the end, you, on the stage, you made a call to action. You challenged the people in the audience. We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools. We hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community. Always let the teachers lead the way. They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out. There's a million ways you can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers.

26:22They'll always tell you how to help. You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person, your physical personhood in your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are, how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join us. Thank you so much. So Dave, what happened?

27:00Did your talk usher in a new era? Did they join you? Where are you now? I think the latest count is 68 centers around the world that are based on our model. And most of those folks learned about it and saw it through TED. Because, you know, in the early days, like the writer Roddy Doyle came over from Ireland, sat and studied our model for a week and then went back and opened a center in Dublin. And Nick Hornby did the same thing in London. But there was something about the TED Talk and the, you know, the ease that people could watch the talk and sort of look up stuff and, you know, and go from there that they could just start a center in Stockholm based on what they saw online and what they heard.

27:49But it just kept going. Like five, six years later, there would be some young person, maybe 28-year-old in Milan that would say, you know what, I saw that TED Talk and we're going to start a center like that here. And what do you think of this? And, you know, everyone interprets the idea in a different way and they serve their communities in a different way. We're in a very different place when it comes to education. Since you gave your talk, technology is baked into the classroom. What have you observed about how they learn or don't learn now. I mean, writing is certainly different. We have spell check.

28:27We have grammar check. Like I got flagged being like, this sentence is not constructed very well. I was like, well, thanks. Maybe not. That's horrifying. I find that software horrifying. I think spell check is useful. Grammar check, so far, it doesn't work very well. And I'm a grammarian. I love teaching grammar, teaching diagramming sentences. The software right now is very crude and it's very often wrong. So what happens if you're 14 and the machine tells you you're wrong? Well, then you correct it, but you're still wrong. You're just wrong a different way. And so it really should be, again, the humanities need to be left alone.

29:12They really must be left alone. And the most horrifying place of all is the grading. So a lot of states, you know, at the end of the year, a student might take a standardized test and a lot of it, multiple choice stuff, fine, you can grade that with any machine. But when you're grading essays, a lot of those are graded by algorithms now. And the machines are very careful and the companies that sell them are very careful to say that our software cannot read. What we're doing is scanning for keywords. So if it's an essay about Harriet Tubman, they'll want to see if you got their dates right or whatever.