Introducing the Peoples & Things Newsletter

For a while now, I’ve been hankering for a place to park various projects I’m working on, including to explore and remind myself and others how these projects are connected. In an important sense, all of the things I do, from the podcast, Peoples & Things, to the books I’m working on, are really one thing: working through how to do the best job possible researching and thinking about human life with technology. So I’ve decided to start a newsletter where I can pull things together. (Including my sanity?)

For those who don’t know me, my name is Lee Vinsel. I’m an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. When I was young - in high school, college, and a bit after that - I mostly studied French and German philosophy. I know, I know. A filthy habit and a tremendous waste of precious life energy. Mercifully, grace and salvation are real and true experiences in life. I changed my ways. I got a doctorate in History and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where I specialized in the history of technology, business, government, and the environment. While I was there, I worked as part of a large interdisciplinary research team focused on decision-making around complex technological issues that impact global climate change. My dissertation and first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, a history of automobile regulation from 1893 to the Google car (LMAO), grew out of that climate change research. Later, with my buddy and academic soul brother Andy Russell, I co-founded The Maintainers, a global interdisciplinary research network focused on maintenance, repair, care, and other mundane work that keeps our world going. Andy and I also wrote a book together, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work that Matters Most. 

In recent years, I’ve aspired to become a generalist in  technology studies. How to think about technology studies will be one theme in this newsletter, but I try to read as broadly as possible in the many fields that write about the topic: sociology, economics, anthropology, history, stuff that comes out of business schools and organization studies, and more. I am interested in EMPIRICAL studies of how people use and make tools and devices and change their habits and the world as a result of that use. I don’t think you can say much about human life with technology without doing the hard work of research. You have to get off your ass. That will be a theme in this newsletter, too. 

In what follows, I’ll outline some topics I hope to cover on this newsletter. There will be two hubs: 1. The multimedia project - mostly known as a podcast - called Peoples & Things. 2. My book projects, most of all the one I’m putting most of my energy into these days, A Good History of Shit Jobs. But if you don’t want more details, you already have the basics: I’m starting a new technology studies newsletter. I would love it if you would come along for the ride. As we say on the podcast, Hey . . . . . GET EXCITED!

1. Peoples & Things

Most people know Peoples & Things as a podcast I host and make about technology studies, or as its tagline puts it, “human life with technology.” BUT Peoples & Things actually started as a class I taught as an introduction to technology studies. (You can see the old syllabus here, though I would now do it differently as you will eventually see.) That course grew out of a frustration I had: I could not find a single-volume textbook that introduced students to how various humanities and social sciences fields have thought about, research, theorized, and so on what we can call the social dimensions of technology, including how technologies are created, adopted, used, maintained, given up, and all the rest. To give an example, Sergio Sismondo’s Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, while admirable in some ways, was really mostly focused on science and ignored large bodies of writing on technology, including some of the best work out there.

So I started creating my own framework for how to introduce students both to these themes (invention, adoption, maintenance, etc.) and how different fields have approached them. The podcast later grew out of my desire to highlight and amplify scholars of technology studies from a variety of fields who I think are doing really excellent work, a motivation that still drives the podcast today. 

Now, the media production team I am lucky to work with at Virginia Tech and I are hoping that Peoples & Things will soon be a class once again, perhaps simply titled “How to Think About Technology.” More specifically, we are planning on turning it into an online lecture series that will be posted on YouTube, and we are currently seeking external funding to this end (thoughts and prayers welcome). And who knows, maybe someday it will even become a textbook or primer, if those kinds of things even continue to exist. 

As we work on these and other fronts, you can expect Peoples & Things related posts here on a variety of topics. First and foremost, I will be writing a lot about the role of METHOD in empirical technology studies and how we can do the best job studying material stasis and change. These reflections on methods (something I think about a lot as I teach a graduate methods seminar here at Virginia Tech) will also drive on a number of explorations, likely including these: 

• Why, if we care about the moral and political dimensions of technology, we should start by looking where human pain is instead of following hyped technologies. 
• Why non-empirical, cultural pessimist writings on technology, including those of Jaques Ellul, the Frankfurt School, Neil Postman, Langdon Winner, and so on are so bad.
• How leaders of organizations can think well and make sound decisions about new technologies in the context of extreme hype 
• Why the critique of “Big Tech” and the over-focus on digital technology in technology studies have gone off the rails and led us to overlook the main material causes of human suffering in places like Flint, Michigan; the Southside of Chicago; the state of West Virginia; and homeless camps around the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. 
• How we can do a better job using analogies to think through technology policy and why the most common analogies (Manhattan Project, Apollo program, etc.) are usually so lousy.
• Why we need a return to social history and old school economic history in the history of technology and similar shifts in other technology studies fields.
• Why following David Edgerton and others and starting from the USE of technologies, rather than the invention of them, solves many of the intellectual problems around the topic. 
• Why we have to be careful with the word “technology” itself and, given its ideological dimensions, should suspect that technological change has less of an effect on the world than many of the actors we study do.
• Why calling for scholars to produce “futures” rather than spending time doing sound empirical analysis is so deeply misguided, intellectually, morally, and politically.

I will also be writing about episodes of the podcast - new ones as they drop as well as revisiting classics - and I hope to review work by other scholars to give examples of how things both should and shouldn’t be done. 

2. Book Projects, especially A Good History of Shit Jobs

I’m at one of those points in life that middle-aged, over-the-hill, old-and-in-the-way academics sometime fall into where I have a lot of different projects in different stages of development. So, for example, you might see posts in this newsletter about a book project I’m working on with my friend, historian Ben Waterhouse, and a podcast we’ll hopefully get going on US history in the 1990s. 

But mostly what you are going to see me write about here is a book project called A Good History of Shit Jobs. This project grows out of my work on The Maintainers and The Innovation Delusion. Through that work, Andy Russell and I met Stephanie Hoopes, the founder and director of United for ALICE, a research center that examines economic hardship in the United States. ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These are working households who struggle to make ends meet. In 2018, 29% of US households were ALICE. When you combine these households with others below the US Federal Poverty Level, you get to a total of 51 million households, or 42% of the population.

42%!! That's a huge number. Almost half. The question that drives my book project is a simple one, why are so many households in the United States struggling financially?

A Good History of Shit Jobs attempts to answer this question by examining the history of the US economy and job markets from the 1970s to the present. The book will explore a number of well-known themes - globalization, "deindustrialization," government policy, the expansion of the service sector, the decline of labor power, shifting household structures and gender relations, and more. But it will draw those themes into a new picture of what has gone wrong. I am also interested in how these economic difficulties have affected populations differently, especially along racial and gender lines.

Now, you might ask, why would a person mostly known for writing about technology be well-positioned to write about this topic? Well, technology plays an important role in this story in at least two ways: First, the ways in which people have changed and used different technological systems has shaped how the economy has and hasn't changed. To use the most stereotypical example first: the application of automation in manufacturing has been one force that has reduced jobs in that sector, although, as we'll see as we go along, industrial automation appears to have been neither as fast, nor as deep as many assume. But to give another example, the 1970s-present is a period that saw a huge expansion in service sector jobs that, so far at least, have not been amenable to automation. So technological systems play some part in this story, but we have to attend to both where they have and have NOT had impacts, which leads to the second role . . .

US business, government, and culture more generally has been haunted by the idea of "technology" for decades now. So many people, from influential leaders to ordinary citizens, assert that "technology" is the core driver and explanation for so many things that they observe in the world around them. Moreover, the period I examine in this project has been marked by wave after wave of hyped technologies that are promised to fundamentally transform society. Today it's generative AI, of course, but there have been so many examples in recent decades. But often predictions of deep change from technology have not come true. So A Good History of Shit Jobs must pay attention to both actual technological change and how often unfounded notions of "technology" have shaped the economy, daily life in households, policy, politics, and much more.

Again, as I work through this project, I will be thinking a lot about the role of METHOD in social inquiry. Scholars have already offered so many explanations for what has been happening with the US and other rich economies since the 1970s. How do we know which ones were actually the most important? And how can we ensure that the factors we choose to emphasize are not just the result of our own instincts and biases? We shouldn't let ourselves off the hook!

And that most of all will be the theme of this newsletter: many of us believe that they ways in which humans have reconstructed their material environments ("technology") have important ramifications for how they live and how they suffer. How do we reach for the strongest possible knowledge of this reality?

That's the question that most fascinates me in life. I hope you'll join me as I explore it.