I continue to be a designer/author out in the world, talking about his new book. Last week felt unusually busy on the Talkin’ About The Book front, so I thought I’d write up what happened.

First, I appeared on the venerable ShopTalk Show, chatting with m’learned colleagues Chris and Dave about You Deserve a Tech Union.

We don’t have a lot of options for instrumenting change at work, outside of leaving. A union, at least as I’m writing about in the book, provides a lot of those options because it’s a path to a contract: like, actually writing down the things we’re guaranteed, the improvements we want in our work, the changes that we as union members want to see instituted in our workplace.

I don’t know. It’s a simple thing, but I think it’s kind of revolutionary, too.

(Two of my favorite moments from the episode? Chris sharing a few stories from his dad’s time as president of his union local; Dave realizing that he’ll be in worlds of trouble if his kids ever figure out how to bargain collectively.)

A couple days after the ShopTalk episode dropped, I appeared on the latest episode of the Smashing Podcast. As it happens, this was the first ever interview I did for the book — we recorded the episode back in August — so fair warning, I might sound a little rough! I was very nervous! I needn’t have felt nervous, of course: it was a lot of fun, in part because I got a chance to chat with my old friend and colleague Drew McLellan. Drew is, as you may already know, a wonderful interviewer and conversation partner.

I think one of the things that’s so deeply weird about our insistence on calling it “artificial intelligence” is that it conceals the extent to which this technology is deeply reliant on human labor. Part of that is because these large language models are trained on content that was produced by humans…and trying to analyze [that content] for future output. But there’s also a considerable amount of content moderation work that goes into this AI software as well, where underpaid contractors are paid dollars on the day to basically clean up their output.

I hope you enjoy the chat as much as I did.

And finally, I rounded out the week with a non-podcast discussion.1 At the end of my last post, I mentioned that the inimitable Mandy Brown and I were planning a free online book talk. Well! It happened last Thursday, and it was an absolute delight. We were joined by fifty or so people, and it was a grand evening. The attendees asked excellent, thoughtful questions, and Mandy and I had a stellar conversation.

We didn’t record the evening, as we wanted attendees to feel comfortable talking about a topic that can be dangerous to discuss openly. (In the United States, at least.) But we covered a lot of fantastic ground: the long history of organizing in the tech industry; how I got from “responsive web design” to “hey, unions in tech are good actually”; how unions — and through them, union contracts — can collectively repair our workplaces; and so much more.

It was a wonderful night. I mean, I got to spend an evening talking about issues I care about with an old friend — how could it not be wonderful? And honestly, much of the evening’s success is largely due to Mandy’s work: she really ran a hell of a event, and I’m deeply, deeply grateful to her for that.

And if you happend to join us last Thursday, or listened to either of these podcasts? Well, I hope you know I’m grateful to you, too.

  1. I know, I’m as shocked as you are. ↩︎