Making creative laborers for a precarious economy.
Summary
Josef Nguyen’s THE DIGITAL IS KID STUFF narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from playing Minecraft, to DIY innovation with Make magazine, to selfies on Instagram, to the Creative Science Foundation and imagining technological innovations using design fiction. Nguyen is joined here in conversation by Carly Kocurek and Patrick LeMieux.It seems like one of the things that you're most interested in this book is that this formation of the child, the digital, and creativity has some kind of relationship to our economy.
Carly Kocurek:Is this actually about, like, anything that's a benefit to children? Are we just, like, building digital surf so that you can, like, devalue coding and pay people less because now everyone knows how to do it?
Josef Nguyen:I'm interested in exploration of what would it mean for us to, instead of directing creativity to creating a small locatable thing, to think about things like a world without war or a world without prison, you know, I think that's a kind of creativity that we could really direct energy toward. Oh my goddess. Hi, everyone. I'm Joseph Nguyen. I use he, him, his pronouns, and I'm an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas in critical media studies.
Josef Nguyen:And I'm really excited to be featured here on the University of Minnesota Press podcast to talk about my new book, The Digitalist Kid Stuff, Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy. And I'm joined in conversation with some really great folks, Patrick Lemieux and Karly Kosiric. Could you please introduce yourselves, friends?
Carly Kocurek:Sure. My name is Karli Kosarek. I am an associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. I mostly do research about the history of video games. My pronouns are sheher.
Patrick LeMieux:And I'm Patrick Lemieux, he, him pronouns. I'm an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, where I make, play, and think about video games, but am extremely excited to be here chatting with Joseph about this, fantastic first book, The Digital is Kid Stuff. So, yeah, let let's get into it. Joseph, did you wanna kind of lay out a few sentence description of what's going on here, and we can kind of dive deeper?
Josef Nguyen:Sure. I think of this book as a way to explore the meaning of children as it's connected to our anxieties about digital media and technology as well as around labor and employment. And so seeing these kind of three elements triangulating together and modulating as we're, you know, facing various kinds of uncertainties about the future. You know, children get to stand in for the future in a lot of ways, or we equate children with the future. And so the ideas we have about what children are, who they can be, and what they should or shouldn't be doing, I'm seeing really, really closely tied to what we should be doing with digital technology, or how we should be approaching our employment or work opportunities, and kind of teasing all of these out through this range of of media objects from Minecraft and Instagram selfies and and maker culture, I think, really shapes a particular way of us thinking about life and civic belonging and work and fun.
Patrick LeMieux:Yeah. The the book is really kind of far reaching in a way, but it's organized according to bringing together these central concepts. I mean, I think it's important to kind of, like, articulate that child here is like a watchword and loaded term because it's a construction sense of Rousseau and, like, the enlightenment. Like, what we mean when we say that both as a consumer class, but also, like, a concept in contemporary culture. But it's the child.
Patrick LeMieux:It's somehow creativity, and that is also, like, another strange word because what does that mean? And then something about technology is in there, but then also labor always. It seems like one of the things that you're most interested in this book is that this formation of the child, the digital, and creativity has some kind of relationship to our economy, whether that's in a neoliberal sense, like offloading responsibility for building the economy onto individual actors or as a risky test bed for ideas using, child labor in a sense. It's those three terms kind of through each chapter, and then these objects like Minecraft or Make magazine or Instagram show us kind of the relationship between those things in each sense.
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. I think of the project as at its, like, sort of broadest reach interested in political economy. Right? So very much the conditions of labor, value generation, the workings of the market, consumption practices. And that's where I link the concept of creativity for my purposes.
Josef Nguyen:Obviously, we think of creativity as something that's inherent and individual. It's something to cultivate in people so that they can generate newness and novelty, or express themselves better or discover things about them. But we also have a lot of discussion of the creative economy and creative labor, creative industries. And this project takes creativity, as you point out, as a kind of watchword among other watchwords. And rather than start with an understanding of creativity as something individual, it's something that I explore as socially constructed to be valuable and to be valuable specifically under the logics of our contemporary economic system, right, neoliberal capitalism, late capitalism, that converges a lot with the discourse of creative economies and even maybe less positive spins on our current state of things like the gig economy or the hustle economy.
Josef Nguyen:And so creativity becomes one way that I'm kind of trying to make sense of how we're being told to operate, you know, post financial crisis or post y two k or or in the era of of COVID, shifts in what work looked like or, you know, the increasing instability of work and long term employment. How do those get described in relationship to creativity? The element of children that connects to this, right, as you point out, is not, that I care about actual children per se, which is not to say that I don't care about real children in the world. But for the purposes of this project, it's really the idea and the language of and the figure of the child and other youth and youthful subjects, in part because that, as I noted earlier, is a kind of way that we try to make sense of the world around us or the future that might be encroaching in on us. What kind of world do we want our children, apparently, to to live in, or what kind of world do we need to prepare them for?
Josef Nguyen:Right? So we connect the future to children in these particular ways. But the children are also used to naturalize specific ideas. You know, the idea of creativity I show in the book has a real deep connection, you know, centuries long to children as kind of taken for granted examples of natural creativity and then are used to define what creativity are. But that doesn't necessarily an obvious or cemented thing.
Josef Nguyen:That was a part of a social process, and particular decision makers and ways of thinking contributed to this this kind of idea of children as naturally creative. And so I think by kind of unpacking the child as naturally creative and unpacking how creativity is supposed to be instrumentalized to participate in the market, to contribute to labor relations in particular ways, is really the exciting space of the book. And looking at these kinds of media texts and cultural practices that have associations with youth and with creativity allow me to kind of pull out richer tapestries and histories and genealogies around these concepts.
Patrick LeMieux:It strikes me that these particular terms and how you're bringing them together, creativity. And if we think of that in, like, a naive way, it's just bringing something new into the world or, like, creation. Right? That idea, along with the child in this, like, kind of Rousseauian context, like, from a meal, you know, from a state of nature and therefore not hindered by the rules of culture yet. And so therefore have some kind of, I I guess, in Rousseau, like closeness to God, but also some kind of natural value or creativity there where children are closer to untapped potential.
Patrick LeMieux:But then also technology and, like, the ideas around newness in technology are about spinning something out of nothing. And I'm saying these three things in, like, a naive sense. Like, our common understanding of them seems to me that when you bring them together, they're, like, very, like, American in a way as a formation or as an ideology around individualism, freedom, and, like, the production of newness kind of out of an individual actor, the way these things get tied together in, like, American culture, I can see how that connects to the economy and thinking about kind of offloading of responsibilities onto and risks onto the individual, when these things are so celebrated. But at the same time, your book kind of shows that, you know, creativity isn't really creative, children aren't really children, and technology isn't this kind of cure or, like, techno fix to any of these problems. So why did you pick these particular objects to talk about this triad of concepts?
Patrick LeMieux:Like, you talk you have a chapter on Minecraft. You have a chapter on Make Magazine, chapter on Instagram, and then a chapter on design fictions. Why why these things?
Josef Nguyen:Well, there's the there's the part that we're trained to say that, you know, everything's kind of master planned and that we had a kind of clear vision of a project at the start. But a lot of the formation of this project was really unclear to me as I was working on the dissertation as a PhD student, which eventually became the basis of the manuscript for for this book. My first thought about what the dissertation was gonna be was about amateur and expert science in some kind of cultural landscape of debate. And the first chapter I worked on was a chapter on Make Magazine, and you can see those threads in this chapter, which are all about DIY and amateur science and innovation. While I was working on that chapter, I saw a pattern of childhood and youth being invoked and images of playrooms and toys appearing throughout the magazine's pages and even at maker fairs where I attended.
Josef Nguyen:And so I just sort of thought at the time, oh, one way that people make sense of amateur and professional or expert science is, like, what kind of ways can we produce newness or new information or new technologies? And in make, there's real attention to the child as a particular figure to organize that. And I sort of thought that those questions were just about make and that other things that I would be looking at would have different figures or different threads to to pull out. After I sent off that first chapter for review for my committee, I decided to take a little break and work on a side project, so a side standalone article on Minecraft. Because I'd been playing Minecraft for, like, two years or so at the time, and my friends were really into it.
Josef Nguyen:And they bought it for me for my birthday. And it was fun to play with them, but, like, it's not the kind of game that I normally am into. I'm not really that excited about open world games that are about me deciding what I wanna do with my time in the game. I like objectives, and I like clear kinds of markers to work toward. You know, tell me, do anything I want in an open world game, and I might respond, I'll just take a nap.
Josef Nguyen:That's what I want. And so part of writing that article was kind of figuring out what was it that was so captivating for other people. People were, you know, losing their their minds over how great or how wonderful Minecraft was. And, you know, this is early twenty tens, and I wasn't getting it. So I wanted to at least understand logically, if not personally, what was going on.
Josef Nguyen:And I kept running into discussions about creativity and expression, and in particular, all of the stuff about how Minecraft was something that children should all be playing, or that this is a great game for children, and people were finding ways to try to install it into and use it in schools to teach children, you know, content material, subject matters, but also to let them express themselves and to and to build things. I thought that was so strange given the fact that just, you know, a decade earlier, you couldn't convince such a large swath of parents to believe that any video game would be good for children. And somehow, Minecraft shows up, and it is like the exception to this, like, long standing anxiety about video games, or at least as I was seeing it. Sort of in that moment, I thought, what if instead of just thinking about the amateur and the professional scientists, I'm really thinking about technologists and, you know, the production of new and novelty. And the child maybe is a a way to cohere a project a little more tightly with a little more focus.
Josef Nguyen:I got rid of some of these other proto chapters that didn't seem to fit anymore in this model.
Patrick LeMieux:Wait. What were some of the proto chapters? Just as, like, a side.
Josef Nguyen:Oh, yeah. I was writing a chapter, like, a b like, GP side. I guess, a chapter on Lablet, which is this kind of genre of science, like, fiction written by scientists to be, like, realistic about the process of science. And so it's, like, a kind of strange community of people at this kind of anxiety around the public perception of science. So I was trying to think about that as a site of thinking through negotiations of the scientific expert and the professional.
Josef Nguyen:I had these two chapters, Minecraft and Make, and I thought, well, I can see kind of the rumblings of a organizational story line in which, like, Minecraft allowed me to think about a template of the natural creative child. And Make became something that talked about how should you raise that child. So thinking about that as not the child as they're born, but how they need to be nurtured and and provided for and taken care of and taught to take risks. Right? And then I was like, oh, maybe an adolescent chapter makes sense here, and then maybe a chapter about young adulthood or about some version of adulthood that gets inflected by childhood and youth.
Josef Nguyen:You know, with that kind of structure in mind, I I was exploring what could I piece in as case studies. So where maybe the first two chapters emerged out from the cases that I was already interested in, even if I didn't know what that framework was, the second two chapters, the latter two, were working within a framework that I had started now in this new version of the dissertation, but then needed something to be a case study in. Well, I sort of thought then instinctually that if I was gonna have a chapter on adolescence, it has to be about social media. In some way, this project, one, has to talk through or engage with with the social media landscape, and what better place to start exploring that than adolescence where we sort of dismiss the value or significance of social media with the dismissal of adolescence as this kind of terrible time of social apocalypse. Right?
Josef Nguyen:And at the time, I was thinking a lot about things like selfies at funerals. And a lot of these kind of apocalyptic pronouncements to the end of humanity, obviously, super hyperbolic, I hope, anyways, that we're associating, you know, disgruntled or or kind of callous teenagers with their version of social etiquette. And I was, like, really suspicious of that because, you know, we give teenagers a really unfair hard time, and in particular, adolescent girls and young women a really hard time. And so that became an opportunity for me to say, oh, can I recuperate, and can I find what is actually important and valuable about adolescent social media? And I picked Instagram at the time because it was one of the top social media platforms and one of the ones with most, clear association with with adolescents.
Josef Nguyen:The others at the time were, like, Tumblr and Snapchat. But Instagram allowed me a a way to think about the selfie and the self that I thought would be really productive to explore, and it worked really well in in the kind of narrative I was developing. If I were working on that chapter now or thinking about it in in this contemporary context, I would focus perhaps on TikTok, which, you know, now we sort of see Instagram as a kind of late twenty tens moment, maybe not having the same kind of cultural currency or associations as TikTok does now. But I think that kind of chapter would look really different. Instead of focusing on the selfie and self work or identity work and branding, I might think about instead organization and networking.
Josef Nguyen:You know, thinking about virality, but also the way in which TikTok is being used for protests and forms of community building that maybe look a little different than the the Instagram chapter as it exists now.
Patrick LeMieux:This is, like, one of the double edged swords of working on new media or contemporary. It's because because it's it's immediately historicized in a way. And I think Minecraft also fits with Instagram in this really 2,000 tens phenomenon in a way.
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. So I guess if if I had a little more clarity in the project while I was kind of wrapping it up for publication, maybe I could have framed it as a a look at the twenty tens or, like, a kind of specific moment. And then in the case of the last chapter on design fiction, that really was a serendipitous find. Colin Milburn, my dissertation adviser, just told me about the sort of thing that Bruce Sterling had started as a kind of design movement called design fiction, and he noted, oh, you know, you're interested in media practices, speculative narrative, technology, something just to pay attention to. And you didn't even recommend it necessarily as a dissertation component, but just something to keep tabs on.
Josef Nguyen:And lo and behold, it found a way into this project. And just in exploring it, just seeing all these different ways that ideas of childhood continue to percolate through it even though it is really kind of in its center about adults and design work.
Patrick LeMieux:Right. Yeah. Now that you say it, it's very clear that the chapters move from a kind of, like, childhood into tweens, maybe, into adolescence, into young adult. And it also makes me, like, walk backwards. Like, what if there's a chapter zero or minus one that was on creativity, the infant, and technology or something?
Carly Kocurek:Well, it's I mean, it's interesting because there's, like, almost, like, obsessive worry about technological toys with children. Right? And something I was thinking about in kind of the lead up of this conversation was actually the Waldorf movement and, like, how anchored, like, all those ideas of innocence and, like, not being quite in this world and stuff. But, like, Waldorf is, like, super enmeshed with white supremacy. Right?
Carly Kocurek:So, like, when we're talking about innocent children, like, which children are those, and, like, under what circumstances do they get to be innocent?
Josef Nguyen:Right. And, you know, I rely a lot in that that last chapter on imagination, to to think through the fact that not all children get access to imagination as they as you point out, right, even with innocence. And I think Robin Bernstein's work on the racialization of innocence. Right? That white children could be innocent by excluding black children from that that process, especially under chattel slavery in The US.
Josef Nguyen:Right?
Carly Kocurek:Well, there's just a a study that dropped that's, like of course, you know, it's got one of those headlines. Like, everything you know about but, basically, like, children that go to pre k under perform academically compared to children that just hang out in play based day care. I mean, I think I want more research there just because, like, also the children that go to play based day care also tend to be more affluent. And we also know that affluence tracks to academic outcomes. So, like, that may or may not actually be meaningful in terms of pedagogy.
Carly Kocurek:Although, I totally want play based, for everyone because it's more fun. So, like, I think that's actually a fine justification.
Patrick LeMieux:Yeah. There's something really interesting about when we think about creativity or pedagogy or enrichment or something. As Joseph's showing in this book, these categories are actually not about creating something kind of fresh and new, but about being situated within a previous kind of structure for creating. I think Minecraft is like this. Right?
Patrick LeMieux:Like, what is creativity in Minecraft? Well, it has to do with the specific game mechanics of that particular game and what's allowed within the mechanisms of it and how kind of socialization occurs within Minecraft servers, but then also, you know, what you can and cannot build in those in those situations. There's a kind of limit there that is part of the production of creation that you're kind of historicizing and showing is always the case with creativity. I think in this chapter, you show that, like, you can't have creativity without a predefined notion of some kind of limit to that creativity Right. Using some of the utopian arguments.
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. I always think about this kind of through something like when parents or teachers or adults describe children as being creative as a as some kind of fact, and in particular, their specific child. Right? And so it's like, okay. So your child drew a tiger using a purple crayon, and you're calling that creative.
Josef Nguyen:I'm sort of stepping aside from whether or not we can say that there's a true creativity in that. It's like, okay. Great. Maybe this child just doesn't abide by this idea of color correspondence, and what they had available was a purple crayon. And what they wanted to focus on was the shape or the kinds of stripes and patterns.
Josef Nguyen:Right? But interpreting that as some kind of creative or you know, creativity here stands in as against convention or some kind of deviation from convention. Right? As you're pointing out, convention is a social function. Like, how do you know what is new until you can know what is old?
Josef Nguyen:And that has to be contextualized. Right? So and I'm not really coming for all children with purple tiger drawings, but, you know, it's just like a fun example. I would be hard pressed to believe that your child right now is the first child ever to have drawn a purple tiger, and yet you were still calling them creative. Clearly, it can't be a universal idea of newness.
Josef Nguyen:And so what is it really standing in for? Right? Or what kind of hopes are we projecting onto a child by trying to identify them or prove that they are creative? In the same way, I think, when we project onto children that they might be the category of gifted, which is not what they are doing now, but what they could be doing in the future, what they could be capable of, and thus, what we have to do in the moment to ensure that that comes to fruition.
Carly Kocurek:And that fruition is always about somebody else's benefit. It's never for the good of that kid, right? Like I think all the time about coverage is like this gifted kid is now a bouncer at a bar where did he go wrong? And I'm like but he said he likes working there like what like is that bad? Like is it bad for him to enjoy his job?
Carly Kocurek:And actually yes, because they're not, like, living up to their potential of of, like, doing something for every that, like, actually isn't about them at all, but is about everyone around them.
Josef Nguyen:Right. Or particular ways. So I think about in in the examples throughout the the book, I'm thinking of the makes chapter in particular, these these examples about children being creative or naturally creative and needing to be raised to be able to take risks to be innovative. Right? Anxieties about hyper safe parenting or sheltered childhoods, they're always expressed through things like, think of the innovations that they could develop for us.
Josef Nguyen:Think of the problems they can solve for everybody. Right? This kind of instrumentalization of these supposed individual gifts that can't just exist for that individual. They have to be harnessed or channeled in some way to a social and largely, right, probably an economic or political end.
Patrick LeMieux:Right. Yeah. This is super interesting because the notion of both children and creativity operate under a similar ideology where the idea is that, it's this unmetricized or unquantified potential, yet those categories themselves have a a kind of rule boundness underneath them. And in the case of both Minecraft and Make, in Minecraft, there are very strict constraints on, like, what type of making you do within that. And, likewise, with Make, as is with kind of LEGO or, erector sets or home science experiments, there's a specific set of instructions to produce these specific projects within these categories.
Patrick LeMieux:So the the creativity or innovation is always within the kind of formal rules of a given system that's set out. And I think what's so interesting about these chapters is you extend that to even modding of games and work beyond the limits of Minecraft as a piece of software, which has its own rules and details and restrictions. But you even include kind of folks modding of that as part of this regime of digital quantification around creativity. Whether it's like the dynamite cannon or like the 16 bit adder within Minecraft or it's the ingenious mods that people make, they're all kind of working within the rules of the game.
Josef Nguyen:Right. Or that the game is expressing a particularly distilled version of creativity, which I'm unpacking, which is modularity is my argument. Right? That if we understand that creativity can't be just something that is made carte blanche because you gotta make stuff out of other stuff that exists. You gotta do it in a social context in which people can recognize or value or participate in what you're doing as new.
Josef Nguyen:And newness isn't this kind of complete birth of novelty, but that novelty is constructed relationally to what is available, both from the materials to create something that didn't exist before, but also relationally to being recognized as such. Right? Again, like with the the purple crayon tiger, within specific context, you can describe it as a creative act, but then there are other ones in which that is no longer the case. It's done before even if that child has never seen something like it before. Right?
Josef Nguyen:So thinking about it maybe in terms of scale, the relationality or the contextuality of it is also about recognizing that there are things that we could be recognizing as creative and that we don't or we refuse to. You know, you brought up earlier about the kind of Americanist versions of creativity and of labor and of childhood in the project, and that's very clear and central to to the framework of the book. But one of the examples I always bring up is Alfred Gell's analysis of art and agency in different cultures around the world, and that in the West and in in The US, there's such an emphasis on really intentional and deliberate forms of creation in which, you know, there's a kind of project set out or a kind of, you know, a kind of masculinist energy that is expressed in the shaping of the material world. And he says that if we look at some other cultures, such as in in sort of more eastern traditions, practices of found art don't find a place that's legible in in the West. Right?
Josef Nguyen:The idea that instead of being the one who makes things happen the way that they will, right, the sound of, like, goal directed or even, like, scientific method y approach, just being open and receptive can't be recognized as creative when that is such a central or an alt you know, an alternate model that exists in other cultures.
Patrick LeMieux:Maybe this is one of the places where, like, monetization fits in. The found art or community art project or the purple tiger maybe don't don't make a buck, but a a Minecraft mod or a new make instruction set or anything on Instagram get fed back into a kind of economic structure of those platforms. And so there's this kind of, like, enclosure, almost like a dialectic movement happening where new things occur on the edges out of the stuff, that's already there, but then the corporations enclose that within an official release or within an advertising platform or within a new issue of the magazine or something? Maybe that's a question. Like, is that different than the purple tiger?
Patrick LeMieux:Like, are all these things, like child labor, kind of hidden in these platforms as well, whereas, like, the purple tiger maybe isn't? I don't know. There are
Josef Nguyen:different versions of monetization that we we can trace out. Right? Does the platform itself, whatever, or the media text or the artifact or the technology itself structure its monetization? You know? And some places, that's the case, like YouTube.
Josef Nguyen:Right? YouTube itself is a platform where people create content and share it and interact, and that platform itself manages its monetization. You know? Something like Instagram. Instagram, in some ways, can do that through things like ads, but that there's also that kind of para sponsorship system in which brands pair with creators to create content that is ads.
Josef Nguyen:Right? And so there's a different system of monetization that's there. You know, Minecraft, as a media artifact, right, starts from the get go monetized because you have to pay for a license for it, whereas some of these other tools or platforms are free to play or or don't have an initial cost, but maybe sneak it in in other elements or in other parts.
Carly Kocurek:I think it's interesting because we're seeing that right now with, like, the big blow up about Prodigy. Right? That, like, the free version is free at school, and then when you go home, they try and sell you, like, a hundred and $20 membership. So they're actually using that, like, oh, we gave this to schools for free as a way to access children in the market, which is, like, so slick and so cynical. Right.
Patrick LeMieux:Wait. Can you say a little more? I don't think I know Prodigy. It's it's like a math game.
Carly Kocurek:Yeah. It's a math game where you, like, build a wizard or something. I don't know. My kids are not the right age for this. But schools were using it because it's, you know, well designed kids, like, playing with great.
Carly Kocurek:But then when they leave the campus and are playing this at home, they're being advertised to very heavily for the pro version, which, of course, like, costs actually quite a lot. And and so it's just this, like, really slick monetization, right, where you're advertising something by, like, getting your brand in the schools. Like, Apple did this historically. Right? Like Right.
Carly Kocurek:They were so smart about, like, oh, we've got all the contracts with the schools, and now the platform everyone knows who's gone to school is Apple, and their switching cost to another platform is very high. Right? So it it's like these things that always seem kind of benevolent, but they're actually not. Like, they're actually about kind of, like, market capture and brand recognition and and things like that.
Josef Nguyen:And specifically with, like, Apple, right, as you're pointing out, it's not just that they found a market to kind of set up camp in, but that because it's a market built around children, that there's a particular investment that parents are expected to be willing to make or have to make for them to, quote, unquote, invest properly into their children's development and education and growth.
Carly Kocurek:Yeah. And I also think it's often actually about growing your own consumers, right, where it's like, oh, we're gonna have this consumer for life. Like, we're not thinking about them buying it for ten years because they might die soon. We're thinking about them buying it for, like, seventy years because they're gonna be alive for a while. Right?
Carly Kocurek:Like, it's I really think American capitalism is, like, that cynical. And so, like, watching this unfold, I'm just like, oh, no.
Patrick LeMieux:Right. Yeah.
Josef Nguyen:But maybe that's, like, the way to narrate, right, the the history of Apple and its glow up in the late nineties. Right? So if we think of the introduction of the Apple computers into schooling in k through 12 in The US, that's largely, like, an eighties, early nineties project. And then, like, circa 1998, we get the the iMac, and then, like, all of a sudden, Apples aren't these gray educational boxes, And now they're trying to, you know, come these, like, trendy trendy items. And, obviously, that has worked really well.
Carly Kocurek:Yeah. And you get, like, the I'm a Mac. I'm a PC ads that are, like, totally about kind of, like, ageism. Right?
Josef Nguyen:Right.
Carly Kocurek:Yeah.
Patrick LeMieux:Yeah. There's something really interesting, like, thinking about the long history of the production of the category of the child, first as a way to kind of protect these angelic beings from culture at large, but also, like, throughout the industrial revolution about, oh, maybe, this also extends, especially in the aristocracy, to protecting children against work. So maybe this is like a a work distinction, but then it becomes a consumer class as a group of people you could sell clothes to and, like, toys to and things like that. So these in the Victorian era, like, all these consumer objects come up for the first time around this category. But then now we're seeing something a little bit stranger, which is consumption almost operates like a form of labor or value production in some way.
Patrick LeMieux:And people have made arguments like Jonathan Beller, to look as to labor in the cinematic mode of production and and the kind of arguments around the attention economy as the clicks or looks or likes we do producing a certain result in terms of not just ad revenue, but producing content out of our reactions to it. And so children are deeply bound up. If we think of, like, kids' YouTube, for example, a whole millions and millions of dollar industry tied up in the inactive clicking of children and the recommendation functions of YouTube without adult supervision. Right? The ad revenue within that system skyrocketed, and then Google had to, what, hire 10,000 content moderators in a warehouse in LA to try and, like, figure out what exactly was going on in that rabbit hole.
Patrick LeMieux:So I know that the labor argument is somehow about futurity, but there's also labor happening in the moment. And some of the mods in Minecraft are evidence of that. It's like, oh, you made something cool. That got put in the next version of the game. And especially in the early two thousand tens, that was happening with every cool thing people were doing with or without, Notch when that game was being developed.
Patrick LeMieux:And I think, Carly had brought this up in an earlier conversation. Roblox makes this really clear because of microtransactions within the platform around content made by children for other children, which is wild.
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. I think it's interesting, as you're pointing out, maybe keeping in mind related valences of labor or temporalities of labor, that there's something that we're imagining about future labor or future laboring with children. Right? Are they gonna contribute? In what ways are they gonna contribute?
Josef Nguyen:But that labor has to go into raising those children to begin with, and that those children are also probably producing labor through their recreational activities, through their participation in schools in various ways. Right? If we understand labor in a really broad sense, any generation of value. I talk to this a lot with my students and classes. I'm like, you know, you're all paying to attend school, and, you know, when we think of university as a school, we understand one set of labor relations.
Josef Nguyen:Right? I am the teacher, and I labored to teach you as, like, you know, in the really reductive sense, like, as a as a consumer client, which, obviously, we have a lot of problems with that that increasingly neoliberal model. But I also tell them, like, you're also laboring for the university. You're also generating things like average SAT scores at admission and your average GPAs, and, like, the achievements you make help make this university more desirable or prestigious or whatever in securing recognition or rankings or donations. This kind of idea of right to consume is also to produce is, like, really richly built in and not even just because of digital technology, technology, but throughout the various ways that value just gets generated from what we do.
Josef Nguyen:Like, it seems like any activity we do is value generating. Right?
Carly Kocurek:Yeah. Although, I always argue, like, the students aren't actually the consumer. Right? Like, the students are the product. Yeah.
Carly Kocurek:Like, they're we build them and then ship them out into reality. Or, like, look. We made workforce ready people, you know, and they're doing good things for society. Like, we don't do good things. We make the people that do good things.
Carly Kocurek:Right, which is, like, so fraught. And I also wonder and and this is something that really struck me in your in your book, Joseph, and it's something I've increasingly been thinking about in a in a in a pretty, like, grim way, because I've been working on a project that the Girls Movement and kind of, like, women like, trying to get women into tech. Because I'm like, is this actually about, like, anything that's a benefit to children or to the people actually being, like, placed in these processes? Are we just, like, building digital surf so that you can, like, devalue coding and pay people less because now everyone knows how to do it? Sort of like how you used to get paid really well to be good at typing, and now you're just supposed to figure that out and it's, like, an inherent part of everyone's job to be able to type.
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. I think that's a really great thing to think through, which is one, right, like, the categories of producer, consumer product. I've really imagined these, like, really distilled, very simplified models of how our market works And, paying attention to how we're raising children to be products, to be workers, to be consumers can help blow all of that up. The the example of, like, right, women in games or women in Steam or STEM fields, you know, I use the example of the GoldieBlox situation in the Minecraft chapter. Right?
Josef Nguyen:There's this attention to, obviously, some historic anxieties about the lack of representation or participation by by girls and women in engineering fields. And so it seems like the response to that is we should make it equitable. And, you know, and there are fraught ways in which that is being done and perhaps more beneficial ways. But what's taken for granted is that we just need more people in STEM fields as you're, you know, pointing out, or more people who know how to code. And it's like, well, do we actually need more people to know how to code?
Josef Nguyen:Like, what is it that we're assuming will happen because of that? Are we actually gonna just create more workers who create more products, or is it gonna deskill labor or distribute labor in such a way that now it just gets taken for granted and does no longer has to be trained by people. Right? So I think something like you were pointing out with typing. Right?
Josef Nguyen:People would have to be trained and put in energy at companies to make sure that their workforce was properly brought on board. But now so much of that is presumed to be the responsibility of the individual because they already have access to their own technologies and their own online resources, YouTube videos and courseras and tutorials and guides of all kinds. It seems like just increasing the participation of people in one level. Yeah. Sure.
Josef Nguyen:It's good to open up the possibility for everyone to participate. But to actually expect that we need to increase participation at, like, sort of grand scales can also be quite fraught and quite complicated.
Patrick LeMieux:Yeah. There's also that double edged sword that you cover in the book where it's like, we want GoldieBlox and Craft magazine to increase our demographic coverage in some way for these products. But then when you have, women using a platform like the curvy movement on Instagram that you cover, it's denigrated and subject to cyberbullying in, like, the broader mainstream culture around these digital platforms.
Carly Kocurek:Right. Because nobody actually wants, like, women and girls in there. They just want the work that women and girls
Josef Nguyen:Mhmm.
Carly Kocurek:Do, and they want Yeah. Their silence. Right?
Josef Nguyen:Like Right.
Carly Kocurek:That's what's actually desirable is, like, oh, we need warm bodies to fill this problem we have, which is, like, people need to be able to do this uncompensated work for us. Right? I get so frustrated with conversations about, like, pipeline problems because, like, we actually know where all the leaks are. And it's not in girls. It's in, like, mid career women who look around and are like, wow.
Carly Kocurek:I work with jerks. Everything about my life is terrible because I work with horrible people who don't value me, and I could fight this for thirty five more years, or I could leave, and they leave.
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. And so that's the kind of question that's about larger systemic and structural problems that cause these discrepancies or inequities or disproportionate participation in the first place. I think about this with the last year or so, right, in the in the wake of the twenty twenty Black Lives Matter protest resurgences and the sort of public visibility of that following the murder of George Floyd. A lot of academic institutions were seeing these specific hires of various kinds for black literature, black American history, African American culture. You know?
Josef Nguyen:And that's great. But, also, how are you gonna support them so that they can actually sustain a career there at institutions that have been built through white supremacy, right, in a country that's been built through white supremacy? So just trying to resolve this issue as a pipeline issue, just hire more more black faculty, that's great as one step, but also making sure that they can stay and be valued and be incorporated into a a new kind of university that doesn't just think about them as a token move to say that the university is now more woke than it was before.
Patrick LeMieux:It makes me think of all the changes that have been happening over the last couple of years, not just, after George Floyd, but with COVID in general and the kind of changes to children's culture. This book is, in a lot of ways, feels like about the before times. Right.
Josef Nguyen:There is one footnote where I think I acknowledge that there's, like, a make article about how to reframe your home as a makerspace and to teach your kids at home now that they're being taught remotely during the COVID pandemic.
Patrick LeMieux:I should refrain. It's prescient of the types of increases in neoliberalization that we've seen under COVID, where now the classroom is at home. And Minecraft is a useful teaching tool because you have to deal with your job and your kids. And make comes into play in these specific ways in the home rather than in kind of shared hackerspaces or makerspaces. And likewise, the gig economy is kind of overlaying a lot of the skills that are developed in these specific creative platforms that people have grown up with.
Patrick LeMieux:Maybe I'm I'm wrong, actually, because the book actually sets up the conditions for labor under a kind of lockdown or pandemic scenario and the kind of frustrations and abuses and struggle that happen when you're being asked to be creative without consent in a lot of cases. I mean, the gigification of a lot of this labor is what was a hobby. As we see with a lot of the women in the back half of the Instagram chapter, may have started as a hobby, but is when it becomes work, it becomes an untenable situation.
Josef Nguyen:One of the things I I trace in the book is that creativity comes to stand in for a lot of other elements. It's kind of a catchall in a lot of ways, but part of it is being risky in a productive sense. Right? Taking risks to be able to to innovate, being able to express oneself really clearly, and uniquely, but also being flexible. And I think the desires for increased neoliberalization and increasing precarious economic conditions really value flexibility.
Josef Nguyen:Right? And in fact, we see the language of flexibility and of being creative and coming up with creative solutions weaponized against people. We can't go into work, so be creative and be flexible about how you're using your home. Right? So now your dining room gets to also be your work from home setup.
Josef Nguyen:We have to contend with these always changing decisions or rules or regulations or guidances about masking or handling COVID or how to test or what are quarantining periods. And, you know, our plans are always now kind of tentatively up in the air at all at all times. And we're just told it's about being flexible and that you gotta reschedule a meeting at a moment's notice, and you gotta be ready for an update or be ready to strike while the iron's hot, right, with when people are all available at at any given time. And with things like the turn to work from home, we're also asked through bringing in our work technologies and our work communication into our domestic and private space, further expected to be on the clock all the time, right, checking our emails all the time or being available for messages and meetings. These are the kind of new norms that we're developing or that are at least being forced on us by, you know, upper managements of various various capacities.
Patrick LeMieux:We're in, like, the late apocalypse in the wake of the laws of cool. Right? Like, the Oh
Carly Kocurek:my god.
Patrick LeMieux:The man in the gray flannel suit into the dude, into the in the designer jeans, into, I don't know, like, wearing pajamas to work. Yeah. Because I feel like in the nineties and and early two thousands, there was this especially in creative labor and in tech, this idea of you do your job because you love it, and you bring in kind of, like, toys in the office, and you see Pixar studios or different game design studios, with a certain kind of lifestyle or or culture in the office as a way to retain employees and also to recruit and things like that. But now we're at home, and we have all our stuff around us, and it's a fucking nightmare. Right.
Josef Nguyen:The sort of conflation of work and play or work and leisure. Right? Those already constructed categories. People have been exploring those for years. You know?
Josef Nguyen:The idea of the hobby and, you know, only makes sense if we understand it as a leisure activity, which only some people have access to, and only certain things get to be thought of as intrinsically motivated activities or pursuits. As you're pointing out, the logic of passion or drive that motivates people to work, that's deeply pernicious. If you are driven to work, you're also driven to be exploited and to be, like, taken advantage of in really, really exhausting ways. You end up associating or being told that you should associate self actualization, your very identity with your work. Right?
Josef Nguyen:Like, our work life balance, that somehow work is separate than life, that work is not separate than play, and yet there's all these examples of the ways in which our work wants to look more and more like play and more and more like our leisure so that we cannot tell the difference between them, so that we can always just be working and producing. Right? I think about this in, like, my in my practices as, like, a quote, unquote maker or crafter. I'm, like, a baker. That's, like, my favorite thing to do.
Josef Nguyen:I just think it's so strange that when you do do something as a hobby or as a leisure activity, one of the most common forms of compliment that people think they can say is, one, that it's better than something you can buy at the store or just as good at something you can buy at the store. So, like, it has to be brought into a consumer market logic. Or they ask me, like, oh, when are you gonna open a bakery? You know, I'm not opposed to the idea that people can open bakeries. Sure.
Josef Nguyen:But what if I just wanna make things? You know, I don't necessarily think that if I opened a bakery, whatever world in which that happens, that it would make it less enjoyable. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But, also, I just don't know why that's the logical step. Why is it that that is a question that is taken for granted?
Josef Nguyen:That I should be thinking about monetization or as a side hustle or as a moonlighting gig.
Carly Kocurek:Well, I think a lot of that's about how much of that work involved in that kind of business is actually invisible. My dad, people would be like, oh, you should open a restaurant. Like, my dad was a mechanic. Like, he didn't wanna run a restaurant. He wanted to barbecue on the weekends with his family.
Carly Kocurek:You know? It's like, oh, do you wanna run a bakery? Like, do you wanna get up at 3AM and make sure? You know? Like No.
Josef Nguyen:The answer is no. I and I've I've, you know, explained that to people. But the the issue with even those responses, I think, is that it still grants them a kind of base in which their question is valid. So when I say things like, oh, you know, bakers usually wake up at, like, two or 3AM to be able to make everything ready by by morning coffee, in fact, I'm leaning in by saying, I have thought about it, and this is why I wouldn't do it. Now my sort of response is, why should I even think about a bakery?
Josef Nguyen:Why why is that a go to to complement my projects that I make partly I mean, mostly for myself and to share with my friends?
Carly Kocurek:I think this is a thing that you like, it's late capitalism. So, like, our only measures of value have to do with professionalization. Like, they have to be measurable. And how do you measure things if they're not tied to money?
Josef Nguyen:I don't I don't think the the other alternative, right, is, like, what likes on Facebook? That's still monetized and quantified. Right? Followers on a on a amateur baking blog or, you know, Instagram profile, still monetized and monetizable.
Carly Kocurek:The numbers are instantly transferable to money almost. Right? Like, where I sew as a hobby, and I also sell my quilts because otherwise I would have 47,000 quilts in my house. You know, you'll see people that want strike sewists, which are, like, usually hobbyists or they're not, like, working at Chanel or something. Right?
Carly Kocurek:Like, they're people that are very skilled, but they're not necessarily professionals. And, you know, it's like, oh, don't talk to me about being a strike sewist for my company unless you have, like, at least 5,000 followers. So, like, even if you wanna do this, like, volunteer labor for a company, they want this. Right? It's like, oh, and you get a free pattern every six months or something.
Carly Kocurek:It's like, that's worth, like, $20. You know? But there's all kinds of social clout and stuff, but it's it's all numbers driven, and it's all countable.
Patrick LeMieux:Yeah. I have a similar experience of moving from game design as a hobby because now I have to teach it every day to doing a bunch of music stuff. But the same thing persists where inevitably it's about not just how many views or listens you get, but the quality of those listens, etcetera. It's this double edged sword of going back to creativity where even if you imagined a creativity in the sense of the purple crayon drawing that wasn't preparing somebody for the workforce or wasn't going to sell that as a piece of art, you'd be falling into these old thoughts about creativity as essentially new. Right?
Patrick LeMieux:So we're caught between kind of those poles.
Josef Nguyen:One of the things that I think about in the last chapter is this kind of obsession with the object or the product, right, when which, like, creativity is attached to what is the thing that you have made. And I link this to things like, you know, the fetishization of gadgets and gizmos aplenty in science fiction. I'm interested in exploration of what would it mean for us to, instead of directing creativity to creating a small locatable thing or to imagining different kinds of worlds that can't just be distilled to a single object that can just be sold on the market. I point to something like, Octavia's Brood, the the collection of of science fiction stories written by by activists and organizers who think about things like a world without war or a world without prison. And, you know, I think that's a kind of creativity that we could really direct energy toward that doesn't just start with or end with an object or a product, but entire new forms of social organization.
Patrick LeMieux:That's such an interesting point. Yeah. I mean, I think throughout the book, one of the pervasive qualities of the objects being discussed are how they're partitioned into, like, projects, whether it's your project in Minecraft or your project on, you know, Make or Instagram or in our cases, you know, baking something, sewing something, writing a piece of music, all kind of fall into this project logic. And maybe there's something else that is not the definitive kind of endpoint.
Josef Nguyen:Right. Yeah. I don't know what that else is, but I think that there's possibilities that we could be exploring, like seeing what it means to imagine a world that doesn't center around objects.
Patrick LeMieux:I was thinking, like, throughout this topic, when you bring together the concept of the child, concept of technology, and concept of creativity, you also run into issues of consent and volunteerism and freedom. And I noticed on your bio, Joseph, that, like, your next project is on consent. How does it relate to all the work you've done on the Digitalist Kids stuff? Do you see it as, like, a sequel or, like, resolving some of the questions in this book, or is it kind of fresh?
Josef Nguyen:Yeah. I think of it as kin to this first book. I think we can point out, right, like, so much of what we've been describing about children or about youth and ideas about them are largely adult discourses. So children don't even seem to get a stake or a say in how how they should be raised or what their education needs to look like. It's what we as adults and teachers and parents decide for them to play with or where they go to school or what they, you know, get pressured into majoring in.
Josef Nguyen:The question of the child is also a question of a non adult subject that needs to be raised to become mature enough to make their own decisions, but children and youth legally don't have full autonomy until they, quote, unquote, become adults. And so there are definitely a kind of surrogate or a border case around things like consent and agency. The second project that I've started working on, I wouldn't say, like, emerges out of this first one, but it has a very similar kind of approach, which is let me take this concept that floats around prominently in digital culture. In the first case, it's creativity. In this new project, it's consent.
Josef Nguyen:And let me blow it up and see what's actually happening. You know, what is it standing in for? How is it being negotiated through digital culture, digital media, and technologies? What is it doing to shape a particular way we understand power and privilege? Consent, for me, stands in for things like autonomy or self possession of subjecthood, and children are as one kind of group, don't fully have that.
Josef Nguyen:But other groups don't have that either, historically, right, slaves or noncitizen immigrants who don't have full rights under the law of the country. And so thinking about different ways that the idea of consent as something we are expected to be able to subscribe to, but then yet can get coerced in or get complicated through, plays out differently for different kinds of subjects.
Patrick LeMieux:Well, Joseph, this has been a super interesting conversation. I'm glad we've been able to kind of hang out for a bit.
Josef Nguyen:I've really enjoyed this opportunity to chat with you and Carly and to be able to have this conversation connected to the book, but also just to other things that I've been thinking about, and that we've all been thinking about in our in our current day and age as a as it were.