Welcome to tex Stuff. I'm as Volocian here with Cara Prices.
Has social media ever made you feel superstitious or paranoid?
Yeah?
I mean I've dipped my toe into the world of social media Instagram. I'm getting push notifications about being bold and about being depressed. I know I'm bold, am I depressed too? That makes me feel a bit paranoid that the algorithm may know more about me than I know about myself.
I similarly get fed things that I've searched for that I don't want to know about myself. Why do you ask, Well, I feel like this is kind of a universal state. This tech induce paranoia, like most people can relate to it.
Nobody would be like, yeah, you know, I just think social media is just such a fun, clear place to rest my head. And I actually spoke about this feeling with Amanda Hess, who is a writer at large for The New York Times covering technology and internet culture.
She actually she wrote a fascinating column in the last couple of weeks actually about somebody who live streamed their birth on Twitch. So I'm very interested in her in her take in general. In the story, she finds.
She's super smart, and I would definitely check out her book if you haven't checked it out. It's called Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age. And she said that even though she's normally really rational, getting pregnant changed her relationship to technology and kind of fed into a lot of superstitious feelings that I think most women feel went pregnant.
Pregnancy is such a time of imagination and conjecture, and I had never been pregnant before. I didn't have many close friends who had undergone pregnancy, and so I was just turning to the Internet for everything, Like I ate a piece of turkey that tasted bad, Like what's going to happen? Like do I need to make myself throw up? Do I need to go to the hospital? I was like constantly googling stuff like that.
And Amanda's superstitions were complicated by the fact that her pregnancy actually became complex.
When I was about seven months pregnant, I had a routine ultrasound where my doctor, as he put it, saw something he didn't like, and at first my doctors didn't know what it was, but he suggested that he thought it might be a genetic syndrome called beck with Weedaman syndrome, which to me was like a jumble of nonsense sounds when.
He said that, well, that's the doctor meeting that nobody wants to have. And also how brave of Amanda to write about this and share it on the podcast. But what is beck with Weedaman syndrome?
So Amanda said that b to BUS is a genetic disorder where hearts of your body grow faster or bigger than is typical. It's very rare, and it actually took a month for her doctor to confirm that her son did in fact have b TOWS and during that time, like you can imagine all the googling she was doing. And that's where I wanted to start my conversation with Amanda, reflecting on that moment of uncertainty right after her son's diagnosis.
Even before my pregnancy was complex, it was like a very trying experience for me. You have to like sacrifice a lot and endure a lot during pregnancy, and I found myself thinking.
About what my child was going to be like. And so.
When I got this possible diagnosis for my son, I immediately googled it as well, and I found that like the prospect of my son having a genetic condition potentially having like a catastrophic complication where I needed to make decisions about my pregnancy and I needed to start to imagine him differently, imagine myself differently, imagine my role as a parent differently.
It so.
Limited my imagination around what my son was going to be like and what our life was going to be like. And the first way I did that was just like showing me pictures of kids who have BWS. When you meet them in person, they're like human beings and their kids and.
They're beautiful and really cute.
And when you meet them online, it's like pictures that have been taken from medical journals. So the kid is sort of like in this like very medicalized environment, hooked up to like wires and stuff. My son was born with a very large tongue, so you would see kids with their tongue just like stuck out as far as they could make it stick out for the doctor to take a photo, like their.
Eyes blacked out.
And then photos from tabloid reporting. I found a lot of photos from the Daily Mail, and so I was like absorbing all of this new like imagine nation fodder from the Internet that was from the medical world. Or it was from the tabloid world, or it was from Reddit, where they were just like teenagers speculating about bws and like seeing pictures of babies with bws and giving their
thoughts about whether they thought they should be born. And it was only like after my son was born and I met him as like a person, as opposed to this idea that was inside of me, that I realized I had just like bathed my brain and all of these distortions and lies about what he would be like and what our life would be like. And that was really when I started to think about just how influential and damaging that experience.
Had been for me.
You know, it's almost like the Internet immediately turns into a Ripley's believe it or not when you go looking for something, and it's never the sort of tempered, middle of the road version of the thing that you're looking for.
And I think, you know, like the first time I googled bws and I found an article in the Daily Mail, I was like, well, my child is going to have something so rare and alarming to other people that you could write a newspaper article about it, And that I think really affected how I started to think about it. But then I realized later as I was like fact checking and researching the book, that they do like publish this article like every year about a different kid who
has BWS. So once you see all of them, there's like fifteen or twenty articles, and you're like, oh, well, it's actually, in fact, there are so many children in
the world that it's not quite so odd. And once I got an actual diagnosis for my son before he was born, I was able to join like Facebook groups for people who have BWS and their families, and there are like thousands of people in these groups, and so eventually I was able to navigate to a part of the internet that was comforting and helpful and helped me realize there are many children.
Like my son. I was not alone. There's so much support there, and.
There's such a diversity of people who are in these groups, which made me feel like it alleviated some of the guilt I had about feeling like I had done something by not eating the right leafy green, or by drinking a glass of wine, or by having a tablet of an anti anxiety medication, that I had caused this somehow by just the kind of person I am, but at first it was a really horrifying experience to google it.
But it is interesting that the thing that could make you so miserable is also the thing that provided you a safe harbor. Social media has that sort of double edged nature.
Yeah, I mean, I think if you're someone who's dealing with something that is rare, or at least like feels rare in your community, the internet can be such a lifeline. But it's also most helpful as something that is like a supplement to my real human life. And when I was pregnant, my son didn't present as a human yet.
It was as if I was experiencing him only through the Internet, which is a terrifying way to experience another person, especially someone who's going to be like so important to you and who you are, You're the most important person to them when they're born. And so I ultimately felt like sad that my first encounter or like perceived encounter with him was this of like fear and judgment, and so it took me a while to sort of like untangle myself from those feelings.
What are some of the other ways that you felt pregnancy technology was priming you to see surveillance as something normal, and what do you think are the consequences of that?
Yeah, I mean I think The first real pregnancy tech that I was spending time with was Flow, my period tracker, which when I was using it as a.
Period tracker, I loved it.
It was such a great app I'm just such a forgetful person that, like I would just have no idea when my period was coming, and so having this alert in my phone that was like just so you know, if you feel uncomfortable and sad and angry in the
next day, maybe it's because of this. But then as I started to think about getting pregnant, I realized that it was also telling me when it thought that I was at my most fertile, and so it became this kind of like biological clock very quickly for me, something that I have always thought of as like this sexist and corny idea that there's like this ticking clock in the back of women's minds, but it really it made it real for me. It's like here, it is in
your hand. And then I used it to get pregnant, and I was like very lucky and that I got pregnant immediately, So I was like, wow, I think really works. You know, I've been avoiding pregnancy all my life, and I tried a couple of times and the app told me like just what.
To do and it was right.
So I think at that point I had conferred this power onto the app that maybe I wasn't realizing. And then when I was pregnant, I realized that this app that I had been using once a month, I was now opening ten times a day. And it wasn't because there was any new information in there necessarily, it was because my mind had started to associate it with my future baby, and so I was like thinking about that
all the time. I wasn't telling all of my family members or friends or colleagues about it yet because it was so early, And so it became this like outlet for me to have this perosocial relationship with a fetus. And it showed me this like floating peachy cgi representation of what the baby looked like at that particular time. And it was also like anthropomorphizing the embryo and the fetus in this way that's like, this is how many brain neurons or whatever your baby is accumulating by the hour,
Like it's getting so smart. Your baby's getting so smart and it was like nine weeks gestation or whatever.
Did you feel as though you were interfacing with a medical product when you were using Flow or were you aware of the fact that it was basically a way to capture your data and keep you on an app.
I mean, I don't think I thought of it as either of those. I think if you had asked me, journalist me, what are you doing, I would have said, Oh, I'm interfacing with this app that is taking all of this personal data from me and is kat asking me to like upgrade the service or whatever like every day.
But if you ask the me that exists beneath.
Rational me, the feeling me, it would have been like, oh, this is the time that I'm spending with my baby. I'm like opening it, seeing what it looks like, looking as it transforms. But I think what I didn't realize at first was I was absorbing what the app thought was normal, what a normal mother does, what a normal baby looks like. And at a certain point, once the fetus gets aged enough, it has a face and it's
always kind of like peacefully smiling in there. And it wasn't until I had this abnormal ultrasound that was the first time really that I realized on an emotional level that the picture in flow was not a picture of my baby, and it was not actually a representation of what my baby's face looked like.
And that made me feel betrayed.
Which sounds nuts, But I had spent the first part of my pregnancy relating to this thing, and now I realized that it's not really showing me anything, So I don't know anything.
Part of what I think you're talking about is this instinct that we have to like offload our meaning making onto apps, right that, like, I'm going to make meaning of my life by creating data of myself.
Yeah, I mean I think for me, I don't know that the app was helping me, but it got me used to this idea of like tracking myself and my baby, even though there was no like achievement that I really needed to make. But there a bunch of pregnancy apps like create things that they hope that you achieve, like that you'll be doing pelvic floor exercises every day, or that you'll get your like thirty minutes of exercise, and like yoga doesn't count.
For me.
It was more just like this drum beat of getting the information and giving the information back. That felt like something I was compelled to do. You know, women are used to that, just the sense of being surveilled by
who knows what and participating in it. But I think this specifically trains parents to start being the surveilling force of their kid, and once their baby is born, to consider all of these products that tell you if your baby is sleeping normally, if your baby is developing normally, if they're growing normally, or whatever, when it's just not necessary in most cases. And also this idea of normalcy, it's not a real thing. There's no real normal, average person.
That's like an idea that we have. But for me, as the parent of a kid who ended up having a disability, I think it can be destructive because there's a suggestion beneath all of it that what we really all want is like a normal kid. And I found later, like after my kid was born, that wasn't really what I wanted, but it's what I felt that I wanted.
A long time ago, I reported on a story about this woman called Gillian Bruckell who was served adoption ads after her still birth, and one of the kind of conclusions that she came to was the idea that, like Facebook, ads were not programmed to understand any alternative for a childbirth. You know, there are no variables that are engineered into the way we are marketed to as expected mothers.
I'm always, I feel like in my work, like struggling to understand whether technology if it knows so much about us, or if it really knows nothing. It's just so easy to like project ourselves onto this stuff. But I yeah, I found with Flow it made a lot of ass about how a person felt about their pregnancy, whether it
was something that they wanted to continue or not. There was a point in my pregnancy where I got an ultrasound from a doctor who is an expert in fetal brains, and she told me that she saw something.
Unusual in my fetus's brain, but that I would.
Need to get an MRI in order to confirm the results. And I needed to wait a week to get that MRI. And once I got THERI, the MRI doctor said the brain was perfectly normal looking. But for that week, I was like, this was a wanted pregnancy, But now I have to prepare for the possibility that I am carrying a baby who's not going to survive or who I would need to consider the possibility of having an abortion.
And meanwhile I was opening Flow and it was like, your baby's almost here, Like your baby is almost gonna be bought, Like your baby is crying in the womb, just like it's gonna cry on the outside.
And I was so.
Shaken and offended that this the app was like assuming all of these things that I felt like, at least for that week, we're no longer things that I could assume.
But yeah, it really it knew my do date and that was it.
After the break, the blurry line between pregnancy tech and eugenics stayed with us. One of the most surprising things about the book to me was the kind of rabbit hole you go down, connecting eugenics in Silicon Valley to genetic screening startups and then how it all shockingly ties into feminist theory. So how did you end up making these connections and what were some of your big takeaways from this section.
Of the book.
I mean, I think at first I was using Flow and I was just trying to understand, like who started tracking periods, Like how were people tracking periods before apps? Before feminist books in the nineteen seventies, and there's a bunch of different theories about what the origins are.
Like there are people who believe that they are.
Like notches on an ancient whalebone that represent like a women's cycle. But like what I came to understand was, for most of human history, like women's cycles were so irregular that it wouldn't have made sense to track a period just because the level of nutrition or whatever, like food security of human beings was not what it is today. But then I found this woman, Marie Stops, who was like an early proponent of tracking women's cycles, and she was doing it in this proto feminist way in the
early nineteen hundreds. There was a lot of like fascination at this time about menstrual cycles, whether they meant that like women shouldn't be able to work because they were like laid out for like several days a month or whatever. And she started tracking her cycle on paper and then tracking basically like how horny she was at various parts in the cycle to prove that like this horniness that she was experiencing was natural, it was normal, and that
it didn't have anything to do with her husband. And it really reminded me of flow because there were so many things that she was charting that I could chart in my flow app And then I found out that she was like a huge proponent of eugenics, which at the time was very popular as it is now again today, I think, but there was a way in which her eugenics intersected with this data tracking that she was doing, where she was establishing what was normal in a reproductive sense,
and she was also arguing that people who fall outside of the bounds of normal, which for her was Northern European, white, heterosexual whatever.
Should not be allowed to reproduce.
And so I became interested in like where eugenics was like sort of coursing through our modern technologies too. And I do think there's this drumbeat of normal that they try to establish often that carries on some of the ideologies of that movement. But as I went on writing the book, I found many more Silicon Valley startups that are just self consciously eugenic, Like they wouldn't say that their eugenics, but they are trying to improve the stock of human babies.
I have a kid who has an.
Overgrowth disorder, which means that he is a higher risk of having pediatric cancer than most kids. And so when I read a lot of the advertisements for these testing companies, these embryo testing companies, I find that, like the first thing they often say is pediatric cancer. They're basically like claiming they can like cure cancer by weeding it out genetically.
And then after that they're introducing other stuff like maybe someday we could have like an IQ score, or you could optimize for a baby who was tall and who had great coordination and maybe they'd be like very good
at playing sports or whatever. But I always found that it was sort of like taken as non controversial that you would want to like eradicates associated with pediatric cancer, which I find interesting because like, that's that's my son, right, and I certainly don't want to eliminate him, and I think he has a life worth living.
And all of these things, I think, you know, have been.
Coming out and are endorsed by tech political leaders who are at the same time slashing research for pediatric cancer or like getting rid of welfare.
And I see all.
The time like comments under these companies ads that are like this is really going to reduce the amount of money that we have to pay for healthcare. And so when I was first starting to look at this stuff, I was like, oh, like deep within this stuff, there's sort of like hints of eugenics. And then at the end of writing the book, you know, now that it's twenty twenty five, it's it's not a hint anymore.
Do you have advice for parents or people who are planning on becoming parents and are overwhelmed with figuring out what role technology should play in parenting? Do you have any sensible takeaways?
Yeah, I mean I think the most sensible advice that I give people is like, try not to buy anything before your kid is born.
Which defies conventional wisdom.
I know, once the algorithms like figure out you're pregnant, they're going to be trying to sell you all of this stuff.
And it's like a.
Five hundred dollars video monitor that like uploads a three D representation of your child to the cloud that's like watched to see if they are like breathing normally or whatever. I was so stressed during pregnancy, and I felt so unprepared that I it's not that I bought everything, but I bought stuff that I didn't end up needing and now I have like a fifteen dollars audio monitor, which would have been perfectly acceptable with a newborn as well.
And was acceptable for many decades.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it was helpful to me to like see the way that these audio monitors were advertised when they first came out, like in the nineteen twenties. There's so much fear mongering in the ads, and it's like, you need this two way radio to hear if somebody is going to enter your home and snatch your baby away. And they call them like the radio nurse or whatever, and their estyle is like so much more reliable than a real baby nurse because it's not a person you
could steal a baby. And so to me, like just seeing the stoking of the fear like transforms through the generations where now it's like your baby may stop breathing in the night and never breathe again, and that's true, like that could happen, But none of these devices are FDA approved for preventing SIDS.
What is the craziest thing related to parenting or motherhood that you have seen online?
There's this genre of parenting video that's like a video of the person's child making all of their food in a tiny kitchen themselves. But it's because the parent is like such a good parent that they've already trained their two year old to like empty the dishwasher and like boil water or whatever, like make pasta, like put their cereal in a bowl from the cereal dispenser, and they're like such a good parent that their child is this
like beautiful miniature kitchen or whatever. And then the comments on it are like finding fault with the best parent ever, and like that.
Apple slice is too big.
Yeah, cereal isn't real food, Like have your child prepare real food for themselves.
I mean, I.
Think there's so much content.
You know, I have toddlers.
Now I have like two year old and a four year old, and so I'm aware of a bunch of content around lunch packing or whatever. And it's styled as like advice, Like I know, you're so out of ideas of like what to pack for lunch here like all of these ideas about what to put in the bento box. And like I started out being like I don't think I should know what somebody else feeds their child. Now my kids are in public school, I'm like I don't want to know what they eat, Like I don't want
to know what they're being fed at school. My mind is like blissfully free of this information, and it's so great, and I feel like there are all of these accounts that like exist to like try to make you do work that's like not actually necessary, and like having my kids like eat school lunch just basically the one way I'm able to access this ideal society where like we actually share things and like we eat the same thing instead of sharing advice on how you can make the same fancy omelet that.
I've paid for my kid.
I think just this idea of like trading actual support with advice is like such a bad trade off.
It's such an awful trade off.
Thanks so much for joining me, Amanda.
Thank you so much for having me for tech stuff.
I'm Kara Price Namas Valoshian.
This episode was.
Produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and Tyler Hill. It was executive produced by me Ozwalashan, Julia Nutter, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvelle for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Join us on Friday for the Weekend Tech when Karen I will run through the tech headlines you may have missed.
Please rate, review, and reach out to us at tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.