In this episode of RadicalxChange(s), host Matt Prewitt engages in a deep and thoughtful conversation with Barry Threw, Executive & Artistic Director of Gray Area. They explore Barry's diverse career integrating art, technology, and humanities for economic, social, and ecological regeneration, and examine the cultural shifts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Barry and Matt saunter through anecdotes from Burning Man to Joan Didion to the technocratic molding of the Silicon Valley phenomenon — an exciting pathway of cultural importance to walk along.
In this episode of RadicalxChange(s), host Matt Prewitt engages in a deep and thoughtful conversation with Barry Threw, Executive & Artistic Director of Gray Area. They explore Barry's diverse career integrating art, technology, and humanities for economic, social, and ecological regeneration, and examine the cultural shifts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Barry and Matt saunter through anecdotes from Burning Man to Joan Didion to the technocratic molding of the Silicon Valley phenomenon — an exciting pathway of cultural importance to walk along.
References:
Bios:
Barry Threw is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, a San Francisco nonprofit cultural incubator applying art and technology toward social good. He drifts fluidly between roles, collaborating as an executive, curator, technologist, cultural producer, and strategist to cultivate forward-looking, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. His previous leadership positions have generated innovative & influential platforms, products, teams, and businesses spanning art, music, internet, built environment, and experiential & immersive media: as Software Director with Keith McMillen Instruments, developing advanced technology to bridge traditional string instruments with computers to spark a Western new classical music movement based on the technologies and aesthetics of the 21st century; as Technical Director with Recombinant Media Labs, presenting surround cinema at installations and festivals around the world; as a founding Partner at Fabricatorz, a distributed technology studio for cultural projects with nodes in Hong Kong, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Lisbon; and as Director of Software with Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative technology studio specializing in the design and execution of immersive and interactive experiences worldwide, and the first company to do architectural projection mapping. He organizes the #NEWPALMYRA project, an online community platform focused on the virtual reconstruction and creative reuse of cultural heritage. He played a key role in developing and operating the Vatican Arts and Technology Council, a nondenominational external advisory body for the Vatican, which advanced goals of environmental stewardship, humanitarian compassion, and spreading experiences of spirituality worldwide through an experimental art and technology lab.
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Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.
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This is a RadicalxChange Production.
RxC Barry Threw
[00:00:00] Aaron Benavides: Hello, and welcome to RadicalxChange(s). In today's episode, host Matt Prewitt talks to Barry Threw. Barry has had a wide and varied career designing artworks, installations, and products across a wide range of media disciplines and platforms. He has developed an integral approach combining art, technology, and humanities, which he feels are necessary for economic, social, and ecological regeneration.
He is currently the Executive Director of Gray Area, a San Francisco non profit institution focused on creative action for social transformation through public events, incubation, and education. And it is that location, San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, that forms the core of this conversation. Both Matt and Barry have spent much of their lives in the Bay Area and have seen the culture shift.
Drastically over the past few decades into the techno-utopian Silicon Valley worldview, [00:01:00] they bring their unique perspectives from having worked in political economics, art, and technology to offer a critique of the Silicon Valley phenomenon and all the hype surrounding it. We hope you enjoyed this deep and thoughtful exchange.
And now here is Matt Prewitt and Barry Threw.
[00:01:21] Matt Prewitt: Alright, I'm happy to be here today with with Barry Threw who will tell you all a little bit more about himself in a moment, but first I'd like to say why I am looking forward to talking to you, Barry. So you and I have both reflected extensively on the sort of state of Bay Area culture and, where it's been and how it got to the point that it is at today and where we would like to see it go in the future.[00:02:00]
And not only have you thought about this really deeply, you are in a position as the leader of gray area to to play an important role, I think, in the development of. culture at what is, I think by all accounts, interesting and pivotal moment in in the history of this area.
So first of all, welcome. Nice to see you. And good to see you. Yeah. Yeah. We'd love to hear a little bit about maybe you can tell the audience in case you're not aware of your work a little bit more about. About who you are and and what you do and we can
[00:02:51] Barry Threw: jump into it Yeah, that's great.
Thanks so much. And it's great to be here. And I also think it's a super important conversation these days. And something [00:03:00] that i've been Directly involved in for i've been in the bay about 20 years now. So I guess you know to start i'm Executive i'm an artistic director at gray area and we're a cultural incubator in San Francisco.
And it's an odd organization in both or unique in terms of both traditional sorts of arts organizations and organizations, I think, that deal with technology. We're a nonprofit. And We have a big theater space in the mission district of San Francisco. It's the 15th year of the organization this year.
And so we've moved around a little bit that are at the spot in the mission district. And we do a few different things. One is public events. So we do exhibitions and conferences and symposium things. We have [00:04:00] education programs. And we have sort of an incubator and research programs that are going on.
And so all of these sort of program areas self support one another and create kind of a cycle of professional development that people can go through in the organization. And so we're hitting. We're focused on this inner, almost a cliche at this point, but the intersection of art and technology but also like interdisciplinary collaborations.
We're interested in the ways of knowing and intuition building that come with taking art and technology in the same conversation pulling down knowledge. Siloed knowledge and like vocational tranches and trying to find some ways of knowing about the world in that [00:05:00] sort of way of working.
And so we're also a community space. And so we're dealing with a lot of different kind of levels of this puzzle of how to operate as an organization, which is really. Thinking about how to reintegrate. I think some of the ways of working that have been rendered from one another in the last, however long, but at least 20 years that I've seen in, in, in San Francisco with dealing with technology development.
[00:05:41] Matt Prewitt: Say a little more about that. What do you mean rendered from one another? I, I
[00:05:48] Barry Threw: mean the. It goes back to I think what we're going to talk about today, which is like why Is this sort of like economic miracle and [00:06:00] innovation happening in san francisco in the bay area? And the hypothesis is that's more of a story of culture and creativity than it is anything else and As we you know, I think as we'll cover Through our conversation as we've become ever more like capitalistic and extractive about how we're doing business here and how and the way that the sort of companies that are here are not reinvesting in the kind of local cultural infrastructure in the area has made, an unsustainable situation that's effects are like being rendered explicit and in a, and characterized and endless think pieces about what's going on here. And my, [00:07:00] my assertion is that's largely a problem of of walking away from cultural support. Yeah.
[00:07:11] Matt Prewitt: So let's, maybe let's lay a little bit of.
I think it's probably everyone in the world, no matter where they are, has some kind of a perspective or some kind of an opinion about what is going on in the Bay Area or what has gone on in the Bay Area. There's, as you said, there's endless think pieces. There's a sense of some kind of a cultural crisis.
We're clearly at a moment in which people like yourself who are trying to do. Do culture and to [00:08:00] advance the Advance the cultural ecosystem of this area are feeling a sense of maybe you can put it better than I do, but there's a little bit of a sense of what is this area? We're clearly at a particular moment in the longer arc of Bay Area culture in which people who are living here are, or, or who moved here recently, or who've lived here their entire lives, feel some kind of a sense of frustration, feel some kind of a sense of some.
Cultural identity or momentum has been lost or some kind of threat has been lost. Meanwhile, the the entire rest of the country in the world I think, also has a [00:09:00] negative narrative about the Bay Area in their mind at this particular moment, which has some truth to it, but lacks nuance, lacks the nuance that, you know, people like you and I have been here a long time have been able to glean.
And I wonder if you. Can I wonder if we can try to to share like your view on exactly what has happened. Why have we gotten to this, what feels like a little bit of an impasse or or a moment of pivot in Bay Area culture and identity, like what has led us to this point so that we can think more clearly about.
What it would take to to move [00:10:00] forward and to, I don't know, repair some of the mistakes that have made and perhaps make this place the, a cultural leader, which we really think that it can
[00:10:09] Barry Threw: be attributed. Yeah, sure. I think maybe just a little bit about What I was looking for when I got here, right?
And so I you know my back I've made a career in this center of culture and technology kind of space and I you know I got there I think through playing a lot of video games basically when I was a kid, but That got me very interested in and into computers generally. I also played Within the band in high school played saxophone and things like that And so when I got you know, I basically did that spent a lot of time on the computer and through you know Sort of byproducts of like playing a lot of video games and having to install things and deinstall things and reload windows and stuff [00:11:00] Like that gained some technical familiarity with just like how to deal with technology.
My parents were Teachers my you know, my mom was a college teacher. So we got internet access very early through that. And so I had a lot of very early internet experiences. And so anyway, when I went to college, I went to college in Boston at Berkeley College of Music to do sound recording because I had some sort of idea that marrying these sort of the music and technical part into some sort of career would work out for me.
And I learned on a lot of like large format consoles. And that's right when the sort of digital disruption and music had, Napster came out right then and it was clear that learning those kinds of skills, weren't going to be as valuable ultimately as everything was going to be laptop based and so I pivoted into Doing sort of programming and music [00:12:00] synthesis like computer music programming kind of stuff And so after I came out to san francisco directly after that and went to mills college for a composition degree in electronic music Mills College has a Center for Contemporary Music there, which is a, what do I want to say?
Follow up. It was birthed from something called the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which was storied electronic music. Studio where people like Morton Subotnick and Pauline Olivares and Ramon Sender Don Buchla started, and maybe we can go back into this later, but there was a rich kind of like electronic music scene and still is in the Bay Area.
And so that sort of music brought me here and like the sense of what was culturally [00:13:00] possible here and not. How to cash out in a unicorn, or something like that.
[00:13:11] Matt Prewitt: Say a little bit more about that though. What was it, what were you, what was the cultural scene that you were attracted to out here?
[00:13:22] Barry Threw: Some of it was just contingent, so I can't say like I had a complete strategy around this, all the dots connect in retrospect, but it was. One is that there is just like a go West I was, I want to say manifest destiny, even though that term's troubled, there's there, there is a West kind of like sense of possibility thing in the culture gold rush, but not the sort of like cash out part of that, but just we [00:14:00] can wax philosophic about the mythos of California for days, I think, but, that's part of it specifically in San Francisco, the technology part is part of it, but it was less, I can say 20 years ago, in my mind, it was a lot different because it wasn't far enough away from like the kind of creation myths of California, Steve Jobs and Wozniak in their garage.
And those guys met from Atari, so there was still a lot, it was more of a, technology felt more creative in the it felt closer to media than it did to whatever social media is now, which is a different thing, I don't, I'm not sure quite how to [00:15:00] articulate that, but it was closer to something, to, to me.
To something in, in the space of music and like expanded cinema. It was more cinematic than it was then it was, yeah. Wasn't functional or something. Yeah.
[00:15:20] Matt Prewitt: Yeah. There, I think there was a way in which the technology culture was more of a culture and less of an industry that might be like. Might be, yes,
[00:15:34] Barry Threw: I don't think that's
[00:15:35] Matt Prewitt: right.
Not quite visible to people who've, been looking at it for the past
[00:15:41] Barry Threw: 15 years. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think the most, the aspects of technology that are most interesting to me are things that fall more into the realm of media. And I would say almost cinema how to create [00:16:00] it's almost a cinema kind of history, even though that in a very broad and expanded definition of that term. And so when I got to San Francisco in 2004, it was, after the first dot com crash. And there wasn't a clear idea that things would be back in this, in the way that they came back.
It's Things had, rents had gone down. A lot of people have lost a lot of money, but some people hung on to enough money without any clear business, without capital liquidity just flowing around and investing in things to the point that a lot of people were doing their kind of like pet projects.
So there were a lot of just like interesting creative projects going on from [00:17:00] people who did it, did okay from dot com one and work sort of investing in more cultural things here still which was an interesting difference from what has what happened in either of the other major kind of like financial crashes that have, bubbles that broke since then we didn't really get the same effect out of it.
I don't think.
[00:17:33] Matt Prewitt: And then there was, so there was a just to, to go quite quickly through like the, the secret history of the Bay Area, if you will, like the, there was this kind of, so there, there was a real, Greed driven go era in the late nineties, which was the first.
[00:18:00] com boom. It totally crashed. It seemed like all of that was over and there was a bit of, there was a calm in the Bay area between 2001 and, I want to say 2008,
[00:18:13] Barry Threw: 2009, 2010, but yeah, somewhere in there,
[00:18:17] Matt Prewitt: somewhere in there, probably around 2010 actually is when, So there was like a, there was like a decade there where where the Bay Area culture wasn't what people have in mind today.
And and then the sort of Web 2 social media era, the era of mega growth. of Google and Facebook took over the whole area basically [00:19:00] around, nine,
[00:19:02] Barry Threw: 10, 11, 12. Yep.
[00:19:05] Matt Prewitt: And this was the era of I think that. Douglas Rushkoff captured something really important about this era with that book.
Throwing rocks at the Google bus. There was like the kind of the beginning of a backlash to big tech that happened here that sort of preceded the more national international tech lash conversation. Seems to really happen in around the election, the time of Trump's election in 2016.
But it was like a mini react, local anti tech reaction happened earlier than that. But I wonder if you can say from your vantage point, how did the, how did your work shift? How did the [00:20:00] culture of the place shift? During during that time, which I think is, by the way, I think that time is really pivotal for in the history of this area.
Sometimes I, I sometimes half jokingly tell people that San Francisco died in 2012, and, after the city in some
[00:20:24] Barry Threw: ways, it's true. Yeah. And I think there were I think 1 of the things about it to make clear is that there were some strategic decisions and compromises by the city of San Francisco in terms of policy that.
Shepherded that through, right? So I I got here in 2004, went through Mills College was a. Art school kind of experience with like free improv music and [00:21:00] stuff like that I started doing some sound recording and like technical work for artists that were doing audio visual performance and things like that for a while and did a couple, you know help start a Electronic music instrument company that made weird synthesis interfaces for string instruments.
That's now called keith mcmillan instruments There is a whole history of synthesizer manufacturers here that were still, there's a lot of musical activity here maybe we can go back into it later, but like Don Buchla Dave Smith, who's the inventor of MIDI, roger Lin who invented the drum machine max Matthews, who invented digital music and Bell Labs.
In the mid, I don't, I can't remember the year up fifties, [00:22:00] more or less. And a couple of major music research institutions at, there was Mills, but also UC Berkeley has a music institution called SynMat, and then Stanford has one called Karma that this John Chowning started, and he invented frequency modulation synthesis, which was, until Google was the highest grossing Patent that stanford university owned all the way up till google was this Frequency modulation synthesis that yamaha bought and started this anyway So that's but that's part of the cultural, it's what was the highest grossing patent until google?
Okay, it was this weird Electronic music algorithm, right? And so that was the kind of like output that the bay area was having I started working with a place called recombinant media labs at the time and which still exists, [00:23:00] partner organization with Gray Area still, and we did do present and commission surround audio visual works.
We have a surround video presentation system that can tour and things that we do. And around that time Josette Milchor, who founded and started Gray Area along with the group of people that coalesced around that organization in some of its early, it was a small town at that point.
It's like in that mid, late 2000s era, because there was less attention to it because of the dot com kind of credit. Again, there wasn't this capital activity in the same way. Everybody met each other pretty quickly [00:24:00] that was doing any sort of cultural activities in the city.
And so that was about the time. We started. Working on both gray area and some other stuff at that time. And originally it was going to be a gallery to support this group of artists in the city that was working on software based art, generative and software based.
Artistic output. And then we very quickly turned into a kind of a community space and educational space and did meetups and things like that. But that was about the time that the city started really attacking all the nightlife. This place, Recombinant Media Labs, also had a place in Hunter's Point that was called The Compound, where we did a lot of after hours shows.
And there was a time during, I don't know, 2009, 2010, it might have been 2011, that [00:25:00] the... Police in the city started shutting down nightlife like after hours parties by compensating DJ's laptops. And a lot of people were DJing on their... Black laptops. This must have been about the time that Ableton Live was in.
It's like first releases or something, and so that pretty quickly shut down a lot of that in Soma, particularly there used to be a lot of. After hours and like loft parties and things like that. And they shut all that down pretty quickly. And it must've been about that time that the Twitter headquarters moved in, which I think was one of the bigger kind of like points in this story.
In [00:26:00] terms of, a milestone, because that movement of a big company into the city they were offered like major tax subsidies and breaks to do that. And it was really the start of this kind of, capitulation to tech and, to drive this economic growth in terms of policy which is also coupled, the other side of that is
I think you can't get away from like the. Current state of San Francisco without talking about real estate generally to and what goes on with kind of zoning and like housing costs and prices, which is wrapped up in that a little bit. But maybe we [00:27:00] can get to that. Maybe we can come back to that later.
But it's a I'll just mention it because I think it's a big thread also. Yeah.
[00:27:06] Matt Prewitt: I think, one, one, I think piece that I just want to draw out here because I think it's, I think it's important is that there was this, there was that period of time, when Twitter moved into the city.
I think that, Twitter moving into the city was symbolic of a larger. Of a larger phenomenon that was happening at that time where basically Silicon valley was moving up north up the peninsula to san francisco So there used to be a cultural separation or distinction. Yeah between san francisco and silicon valley And at you know at some point as the big You know companies started to grow around the end of the 2000s a lot.
They started to hire like crazy [00:28:00] and a lot of the people that they were hiring wanted to live in San Francisco, like thousands of people. And that, that influx of young tech workers into the city. Change the city in a quite a rapid and dramatic way. I think what's important to see is that like the technology culture that came to take over the area later through real estate prices and so on was like, in a way was distinct from the culture that preceded it.
But was in the same way, like an outgrowth of the culture that proceeded it and wasn't indebted to it in a way. So there was a weird disconnect that didn't happen. Where [00:29:00] some the kind of. Generative, creative, cultural milieu that made Silicon Valley possible was, squelched by the culture of the big tech companies around this time.
And there was like a, is that how you perceived it too? Am I
[00:29:29] Barry Threw: Getting this right? Yeah, I think that's right. I think there was still that like wild west and like possibilities mentality there, partly because it was cheaper. And there were still some raw spaces and things were, but at that time it was even more so than now in a certain way, this like startup fever now it's right.
The caveat to that is we should talk about what's happening with AI now because it does hold [00:30:00] some parallels, I think, but it's an interesting time right now that's both simultaneously boom and bust in San Francisco and like it's making a weird, very, nobody knows what's going to happen, it's like it could fall either way, but at that time it was still like, okay, there were like, A group of three friends that met at the coffeehouse every week and they started a web app and the web app then was like Facebook or whatever, it was like seven people that sort of thing.
Even prior to Even outside of like venture capital Which is like more of a thing now that people are after. But at that time, even though that was, there, it's not there wasn't venture capital, but there was, it seemed that there was more of an opportunity just to launch something [00:31:00] online and it would take off, it's like the field was somehow less crowded and there was still opportunity.
And there was in San Francisco, there was this idea that again, there was a cultural value that was
You would find other creative people there that were just like doing interesting stuff, not necessarily looking to, have a high paycheck or just engineer or cash out. That hadn't disappeared yet. And I think. The artistic kind of community there was also felt as a part of that situation that was going on and the thing that I think, the people that were aligned with your gray area and the other organizations like it in the city had this idea that those two things weren't separable [00:32:00] because there is, there was a is still, A certain subset of the arts community that wasn't interested in media arts.
There's like a conversation about media arts here that's interesting because for a long time art using technology, and silly in a certain way because the history of art is a history of technology development. And vice versa. It's like always driven by affordances and technology and what's possible to make new, catalyze new forms of creative expression.
But in terms of like computers and electronics, particularly a lot of media arts for the longest time was relegated to universities and certain forms of experimental spaces. And [00:33:00] wasn't really accepted by. The art world at large, and that's something that's really changed in the last five to ten years.
Which is probably worth talking about. Now if you go to, if you watch the press releases from a lot of galleries, or you go to major cultural things like Art, Art Basel, Miami or stuff like that. Really the art world has adopted the, Cadence and pastiche of the technology press release and how it describes, like there's innovation and newness and first ness that has to happen there in a way that wasn't true say 20 years ago.
And that's really, and it's really the, you can with a big asterisk around like video art [00:34:00] and the Portapak, like handheld video, the first things that the art world at large really took seriously, like the traditional or contemporary art world as such were blockchain because there was a financialization involved that everybody was interested and very early we're not talking about the wave of 2020 in NFTs, it's like earlier than that, there were conversations around it and AI.
Are like the two first tech conversations that artists and cultural producers are the leading use case in the technologies to communicate them to the mass market. But anyway, we're grasping a little bit from that. Yeah,
[00:34:54] Matt Prewitt: let's, I want to, let's linger on that for a moment and then get back to the [00:35:00] thread.
Because, do you think that is, why do you think that is? Do you think that is because the art world follows the promise of, Large sums of money, or do you think that's because there's something about these technologies that feels like, interesting or culturally unignorable for the art world or it's probably I think it's I think it's deep.
[00:35:27] Barry Threw: I think it's even maybe deeper than that. I think culturally our entire world is driven by technology cycles now. And and there's no choice but to follow it. And I don't say that with any joy even having been like the, and it's really for people who are in media arts, I know it's it's pretty much exhausting around the, across the board, like to anyone you talk to, because [00:36:00] pretty much the practice at this point.
Is getting as early access as possible to the next thing that comes out and then creating work with it and trying to get on that leading edge of conversation. And I say this as somebody who has spent a, good chunk of my career arguing that, and I still believe actually, that having artists involved on that level is in certain ways vital.
At the same time surfing hype cycles is like it's it's a gotten to be an exhausting situation. And so there's something in there that needs [00:37:00]
[00:37:01] Matt Prewitt: You also see, it feels to me like, the artistic possibilities of a new medium are not immediately obvious all the time. So not at all. If you're just moving to the next medium, then you're, there's not enough time for an artistic, understanding of that medium to, to emerge.
[00:37:25] Barry Threw: So that's the point of getting early access. I think that, the value of having artists involved is that
amplifies certain capabilities or desires very narrowly at the expense of the periphery. So you lose context and you lose you get very myopic and [00:38:00] part of the, part as gray area, part of what we're trying to do is demonstrate that, the value of adding arts and culture and that activity back in to the, early during innovation and development and critique is that what art does when it's done well is increase the aperture of what you're, the context within which you're looking and expand the set of possibilities and find edge cases and do all that stuff.
And so I think it's in. I think it's it's interesting because It's really this capital cycle that's the problem and not the interfacing with technology, innovation and technologies. It's the problem, so that those are so linked [00:39:00] that it's almost hard to separate them. But there is something in there that they're not.
There's some parallax in there where they're not precisely the same thing.
[00:39:08] Matt Prewitt: Totally. I think there's definitely a distinction there. And if, yeah. This kind of brings us back to our, the main thread here, which is that what we're trying to understand and grapple with is this sort of amorphous observation that this boom in the related, but not identical areas of, capital and technology in the Bay Area.
Has not fed cultural life in the way that perhaps it might have, right? Yeah, and what,
[00:39:52] Barry Threw: yeah, what happened during the early 2010s, let's say, was when this sort of [00:40:00] local Tech lash started happening. Some for, for some great reasons, right? It was the, you mentioned Doug Rushkoff's throwing rocks at the Google bus book, but that was that was a real situation that happened, right?
Like the deal was, is that the commuter buses from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley started using public Muni, which is the local bus, line municipal bus line infrastructure. With all these tax breaks happening at the same time. And so it was like, why? Are all of these private buses using public infrastructure?
So it really was I'm, I don't really want to use the word socialism, but it's it's that kind of [00:41:00] like social public service, like what's public infrastructure and what's private infrastructure and how does it relate? There was all this sort of without anybody having any sort of like coherent.
Ideology on the city of San Francisco side. That was a big argument that was going on, and so when we were dealing with art and technology in San Francisco during that period. We were in the worst of both of all possible positions and still are to some risk in some respect where
Sort of the art and cultural communities Initial reactions were to say, you know screw tech. They're not, they're not they're a malign force in [00:42:00] this cultural ecosystem Which I think there's a point there, but also from the other side, you had a lot of technology people that didn't understand why they needed art and culture in their practice.
And I think that there was kind of antagonism in both sides. And I think one of the early things that we were trying to do is say, okay, you bring you know, it's like the art and technology people aren't talking to each other you Program certain things to bring them both in the same space and communicate There will be a synthesis and integration of fields and then you know pegasus will spring forth from the and instead The art people didn't know why they needed to go to, they didn't want to be in the room with a bunch of tech people and all the tech people had no idea why they needed to go to art stuff and it's just it's just instead you have this third, what you [00:43:00] could make is this, and this is the, this has always been the challenge of media arts in general is it turns into a third space kind of thing where it's, it draws its own cultural borders that's like not integrated with the other Thank you.
Things that are going on and so you just end up with another kind of silo where what you're trying to do is break that down and integrate. And so that's an interesting. It's an interesting kind of thing that happened. It's really interesting. Yeah,
[00:43:38] Matt Prewitt: there seems so I have a couple observations to make, but let me contextualize them first. The reason that I think that this conversation is so interesting as, I find it interesting on multiple levels. One is that, I [00:44:00] I was born in the Bay area. I grew up here. I care about this place. I want to see it thrive in a way that I feel that it is not right now.
The but also I I feel. In a way that like the, in the same way that the, I think there is a way in which the future of the world happens here first for better or worse. And how's for some time, I think, and I think
[00:44:34] Barry Threw: that the where you got pick one, you
[00:44:37] Matt Prewitt: know, and I think that the I therefore think it's interesting to think it's not only interesting, but important to try to think about how to.
Address the problems that the Bay Area is facing right now because the Bay Area has been a sort of a canary in the coal mine [00:45:00] for a long time in all kinds of ways. If you thought Facebook was stupid in 2009 and you didn't live in the Bay Area you were right, but also it was coming, so there's a way in which what the Bay Area is facing right now is relevant beyond it.
And and I think that you put your finger on something important, which is this idea of fragmentation, right? There's a way in which like kind of cultural spaces just tend to fragment here and not integrate the tech. People don't want to talk to the the art people don't want to talk to the tech people, the media art people don't need to talk to the other art people, there's a And I think you can see that pattern reflected in all kinds of other other cultural Bay Area contexts.
One of which is Burning Man, right? Burning Man is an [00:46:00] interesting phenomenon to me precisely because it is, you can't imagine anything more of a silo, right? It creates another parallel world for itself that doesn't really, way out there in the Nevada desert never, never really integrates, never really reintegrates, never really brings anything back to the rest of the culture.
On a scale with the effort that went into building a parallel silo out there in the desert.
[00:46:36] Barry Threw: Yeah, I think that's true. There are a couple of interesting things there. This this fragment this fragmentation
of knowledge as an outcome of capitalist specialization and like vocational I am not a sort of like anti [00:47:00] expert person in any, it's like not, throw away the experts or whatever, but so some degree of that's necessary and it's there's something to like spending a long time in your life studying and getting good at some sort of defined subject matter.
But in terms of being, in terms of being interdisciplinary. That as a institutionally and systemically, there's a problem, so it's not any one person's true, but so there, and this has gone this divide between I hate having to use the term art and technology. For a couple of reasons.
One is it's been completely co opted in the culture by, it's a meme now, right? It's like the intersection of our technology is like a joke in some way. [00:48:00] But the real reason I don't like it as there's a language problem there. And automatically by defining those two terms with an and between them, you've already bifurcated that you've created a dichotomy between two things that I actually don't think that there's a difference between in some very real ways.
And so I talk a lot about, I almost, it's it's one of those deal with the devil thing where it's like it's the term people understand and so you use it to define the space you're talking about, but I tend to think more about like anti disciplinary collaboration or integrating knowledge fields and things like that, which is more of what we're up to.
Anyway, this, this was identified in, there were, there are a lot of historic examples to this there's like experiments in art and technology, Bell Labs there's the LACMA art and technology labs, but go [00:49:00] back to there was a book by this guy C. P. Snow called Two Cultures. This thing he had this thing called the two cultures problem, and he was thinking, and this was in, I don't remember the year on this book, but it was some early 20th century, early to mid 20th century.
And he was just talking about creatives versus engineers, and having this language, this communication problem between the fields that blocked being able to synthesize and integrate and invent, invent more than right more than innovate, which are different things, right?
So Really? We're talking about Mending a rift [00:50:00] that I think is caused by capitalist specialization to some degree between the sort of like Culture and engineering technical and creative. If you want to get really cheesy, left brain versus I don't put any water in that it's a way it's there's something in that
[00:50:28] Matt Prewitt: Yeah there's another
[00:50:30] Barry Threw: and just and what so I guess the main point in that is like If not in san francisco where to attack that problem, that's the point of it And so like why are we doing gray area?
Why does that organization exist in san francisco is because If ever there were a conversation that the bay area should be able to know own and be a world leader in and [00:51:00] would if the values inherent in that were supported via cultural infrastructure at scale in the city that, there's no place on earth that should be able to own that conversation more than San Francisco.
And instead, it's turned its back on that and become extractive. And so now back to Burning Man to not let that just go by unremarked upon. It's a, it's you have to be delicate with the Burning Man conversation because, a lot of people for people's personal experience with it, there are a lot of folks that have had transformative experiences within Burning Man that I would say fall into this bucket of folks [00:52:00] that have learned how to integrate certain sorts of creativity into their, cool.
I think systemically there has been a problem where it's it's not what it, what is happening. And it's in relation to what isn't happening. And so it's in a situation where you have a bunch of companies. That silo their culture internally and don't invest in the cultural infrastructure in the area.
That's the main thing is that the, there's a cultural milieu in San Francisco that went from the gold rush all the way through the 60s, made a bunch of companies happen here. And then those companies all became extractive and stopped reinvesting into that sort of cultural [00:53:00] infrastructure that supported it.
So that's been eroding and when you have something like Burning Man, which takes up, unquantifiable amount of not only financial, but human resources it can't, there's so many people here that most of their cultural activity throughout the year is building a project to go out and burn in the desert.
Then. And like exports that to this enclave, which, is support it purports to be like anti capital but it's like clearly only sustainable via a huge pouring in of resource.
When that's put in juxtaposition and contrast to [00:54:00] the sort of like erosion of cultural infrastructure in the city of San Francisco itself, it's hard not to see a strategic misstep there if you're interested in, sustainability. And that's, again, to say nothing of the friends we made along the way or communities we've built or like love we've shared or whatever that is going to be inherent in the social situation of going out in the desert and doing a bunch of drugs or whatever.
[00:54:38] Matt Prewitt: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want to make the same caveat that I mean, it's I have a lot, many friends who have, who have
Poured a lot of love and sweat and [00:55:00] tears and joy into.
Into Burning Man and it's a it's a very important
[00:55:05] Barry Threw: thing to some of my best friends are birds, it's
[00:55:09] Matt Prewitt: yeah, but that's that, nothing is above criticism and we got to take a look at here in context and like the, but there's another I also want to so where we need to get to in a moment is like where we are now and how we.
Yeah. And, what it would look like for San Francisco to, or I shouldn't just say San Francisco, like really the Bay Area, what it would look like for the Bay Area to. Perform some kind of a overcoming of the cultural crisis that it's in. . But before we get there, I wanna problematize just a little [00:56:00] bit further by suggesting, by pointing out some older historical things, right?
Yeah. So one is that I think another angle on the extractivism that you. You outlined is indicated by the following and I'm connect things to radical exchange a little bit here. Henry George, the 19th century economist and land reformer who had these kind of. Wonderful insights about the way that private property in land allows economic extraction.
He had his big life defining insight about how land gets its value. [00:57:00] After, when he was living in San Francisco in the 1870s. After growing up here in the 1870s, San Francisco was undergoing a real estate boom. And despite the real estate boom and the rapid development of the rapid economic development of the city, there was, a steady or increasing amount of of.
Poverty and misery in the city. Henry George noticed this and thought about why that was happening. And he realized that what was going on was that as wealth was being created, it was causing the value of land to go up, which was causing rents to go up, which was causing costs of living to go up. And And so people were being, people who didn't own things were being immiserated at precisely the rate at which the city was growing.[00:58:00]
For people, for the non capitalist class, things were not getting better, even though everything was developing in the city, he had that insight in San Francisco, which is remarkable to me because even in 1870, there was, there's some sort of disjuncture.
In the way in the culture and economy of san francisco where the prosperity that was being created wasn't Recycling back into the social fabric. And and then you know going into the 20th century. I think we have to you know, we have to tip the cap to Joan Didion who noticed and wrote beautifully about earlier cycles of the same kind of, [00:59:00] I don't know, disjuncture or like failure of synthesis that was that, that was happening in in the culture of the Bay Area.
She writes about how it's actually, it's all, it's almost as, cause it's just this kind of dark, destabilizing view that she ultimately paints where, because she she noticed the sort of vapidity and shallowness of 1960s San Francisco culture from the point of view of someone who had grown up in an earlier.
California, right? So she saw there's just this kind of like lack of moral seriousness, lack of social integration going on in 60s San Francisco that was, belied the rosy flowery hippie narrative, right? She [01:00:00] saw something darker going on underneath that. And and then later in life, when she like looked back at her own childhood, she saw actually the same, it's just the same kind of things are not quite what they seem dimension to the culture that she grew up in, in Sacramento, which was like.
the, the best way to, so she grew up in basically a prosperous agricultural class of Central Valley planters who who were had a conception of themselves and a conception of their identity as Californians that was very much informed by this kind of western movie mythos [01:01:00] of the pioneers and the far West and and as she got older, she saw the kind of emptiness of that too.
So there's just this kind of I think that. There have actually been many generations of of people in in California who have tried to solve this puzzle or tried to solve this riddle of the, the way that the. The culture seems to change really rapidly. It seems to not have a very strong sense of itself.
And it seems to alternate quite dizzyingly between a sense of enormous promise and freedom and this kind of sense of decay and [01:02:00] enemy and and so I feel that whatever comes next for California is first of all, it needs to be attentive to this these cycles of history, recent history, a little deeper history, and if we can figure something out, if we can figure it out, who we are today and how we can, how to build a better society in this kind of hyper modern, hyper just, I don't know, psychedelically, kaleidoscopically unstable society, if we can figure that out here, [01:03:00] then it's that, yeah, that would,
[01:03:05] Barry Threw: that would, and because yeah. The model, to the degree it can even be called a model.
Is attempted to be copied, throughout the world, right? They call, I talked about drop shins in on a little bit earlier. That's a whole different thing, right? But they call it the greater Bay area there. And now part is like a provocation and part the part because it's alluding, it's pointing at something, right?
And then you have things, Berlin has Silicon Alley and there are all sorts of, people call their local, That everybody wants to make these tech innovation hubs that they think is going to do something similar in terms of economics but I think that there's not the appreciation for the Culture, the cultural cross section with that and how that's [01:04:00] contributed, from things, like you said, historically for a lot of things, Edward Muybridge invented cinema here, right at, and it was Leland Stanford's horse, it's like that all of this stuff has a deep, this sort of things that I would generally put in the bucket of media.
Has, I think, a strong, which includes like sensory and perception and things like that. Even in some of the earlier companies, things like, there were more things like VPL research. Which was the original VR company, and Jaron Lanier's company. And the stuff that was happening there was not in that company.
We was talking about the [01:05:00] future of post symbolic communication, and not, like, how do we all have a business meeting in a place where it's impossible to get lunch. Like it's just like that not you know with no legs or whatever like it's That sort of it's like what are we doing?
We've our our kind of like humanistic Goals are so petty and impoverished now that it's very hard to figure out like What's going on with that? So
Another way to tie this in, another framing, I think, [01:06:00] for what... We're trying to do with gray area in terms of like terraforming this, place Can be framed under kind of like the plurality banner too. It's like in what ways can We create technology and systems and infrastructure that works for to center Those on the margins to create a pluralistic system that can take everyone's voice or, like needs or opinions into account and our assertion is that.
That conversation includes a large cultural component that's like inseparable, if you don't have that conversation and that technology building isn't [01:07:00] going to work out right? And so it's a lot of what we're doing right now with our, we have our gray area festival that's coming up at the end of October, which is, I don't know, announced pretty soon, but we're talking all about prototyping these pluralistic technologies with getting artists involved in the technology process and Yeah.
Doing this art is a loaded word, which is another reason why you have to use it, but I don't like it in a certain sense, because it's been co opted by this sort of like commodity and transactional capital kind of sense. And so I think. In terms of like media and creativity and like communication, is what we're, another way to think about what we're getting at when talking about that because historically most people's conception of art is that you like throw a bunch of money in a pile, burn it, and then you're in like a white cube.[01:08:00]
It's like the most separated thing from society possible. And we're really talking about reintegrating it into just like processes about knowing and interacting and perceiving the world. I guess it brings us up to today. And I think I like this the way we're approaching this conversation, because there's nothing I.
And more bored by them like predicting the future right now Because i'm much more interested in understanding the present I think we spend too much time trying to speculate on the future when we don't even know where we are And so I think it's okay, where are we right? San Francisco is interesting right now because, I talked a little, I said something earlier about [01:09:00] our sort of like humanistic goals being impoverished and I think this is a good San Francisco has basically doubled down on that and now we're saying our eggs are in the basket of a very speculative general intelligence springing forth from this Multidimensional statistical model and then like maybe or maybe not destroying humanity.
We're not sure but let's talk about that and it's like such a, talk about wasted intellectual resources not on the near term tools, which I think there are uses for and it's a, Yeah. It's not to cast aspersion on AI [01:10:00] in general, but the sort of sci fi conversation we're having about it is so unmoored from reality that it's certainly a Rorschach test for where your values lie.
Yeah.
[01:10:18] Matt Prewitt: One, one thing that I guess is a bit of a Rorschach test for me, if you, like, when I look at all of these sort of all the prior cycles of Bay Area culture, what, one thing that really just stands out to me is the the way in which All of these radical ideas, all of these radical, [01:11:00] interesting, amazing, beautiful ideas about, what could be done with technology or what could be done with a different kind of cultural configuration or et cetera, have all just been appropriated like more.
Fully and more comprehensively than anyone could have ever even imagined. Like the degree to which, you know, X, which was exciting. Y number of years ago has been appropriated is always like worse than the worst case scenario. Does that make sense? And and so what stands out to me is that there's, there's been like naivete about the.
extent of appropriation at every juncture. And you might say that one thing that I noticed in Bay Area history is that, you might think that people thought that what they were doing [01:12:00] couldn't be appropriated and that it was appropriated, but that's not actually what in fact, what in the history of the Bay Area is actual.
Naivete. Actual blitheness about the possibility and likelihood of appropriation, right? In other words, people have said, if it gets appropriated, it's going to be cool anyway, right? I'm going to build something and yeah, okay, maybe the, maybe the capitalists will take it, but that's cool, right?
Like that, that I feel like that in the. In the history of the technology culture that in you see that to a certain extent in another place where I think you, you see something like this is [01:13:00] in just to I don't know, moral relativism of of the deadhead culture or six or the Burning Man culture is for example, in the nineties there was like a weird intersection at Burning Man between like hippies and gun nuts, right?
Neither one judging the other. That is emblematic of something. And what, and, but to me, the lesson is that I think we need to be more focused on on like economics and political morality. I think that that [01:14:00] as we imagine the possibilities for. For foundation models and AI and all the rest of it the conversations about how this affects political economy should, they should be the first, second, third, and fourth things that we're talking about, not the not the question that we get to after we, finish being excited.
[01:14:32] Barry Threw: Yeah, it's interesting. I think that and all of this goes into a sort of Decades long flight into abstraction. It's what is the metaverse and what is cyberspace? It's not glasses you strap to your face, really. It's like a psychological space of just floating off into pure idealism with no...
And really, we need to get back to... Some of this stuff is what's the [01:15:00] most naive materialist like? Take you could have on this stuff, right? And I think there's that sort of one of the things I was going to mention earlier is that the other interesting thing that sort of intention with all this stuff in the Bay Area is like, there's such a rich history of environmental work here people that really understand it.
Kind of Gaia theory living systems like Agriculture like there's all very like earthbound material conditions like stuff here. Some amazing artists like Helen Meyer Harrison and Newton Harrison at like the Center from Force Majeure down in Santa Cruz. Newton just died last year.[01:16:00]
People that are really So this, there's this history of environmentalism here from, that came out of also the a lot of it from the hippie movement. And there's the same sort of cognitive dissonance that happened between, one of the things I like to notice and have gone back to is the trans the sort of switch from whole earth to wired.
And the sort of way... Libertarianism crossed both of those thresholds. And whole earth had a certain amount of like human agency and empowerment, but also sort of environmentalism and sustainability and how people could integrate with tools into their land, the commune movement, like geodesic domes and things were wrapped up in it.
But at some point around, [01:17:00] 2000, it switched over into that was just a wholesale cat. There was this sort of John Perry Barlow, we're all citizens of cyberspace and we're released from all material because we're going to go build utopia in the, electronic superhighway, or whatever.
And you go back to some of the media theorists like McLuhan and every one of these extensions of our nervous system is an amputation. And so it's what have we amputated? And so that's continued on to today with this AI stuff where it's like, We're floating in this abstraction about intelligence, people are saying things about intelligence that have no grounding.
It's just like thinking about the abstraction of what intelligence could be in and of itself with no like material conditions around it or like in physical embodiment or like [01:18:00] sensory apparatus. Or how the lived experience of being an actual person or cow or dog or bat or bacteria or whatever contributes to the way that you perceive and are intelligent about the world, and we're just in this statistical model abstraction that doesn't even make any sense.
And so it's really, nobody is asking. Like you were saying earlier, these questions about who benefits from this stuff, why are they benefiting, why are they doing it, like, where are the data what is it, what does it take to train these things, what are the politics beyond that, it's pretty interesting [01:19:00] that
somehow
I don't know what was the cart and what was the horse in this, but it's pretty interesting that how much of this pivoted around the Ethereum merge. Because prior to the merge you had a whole bunch of graphics processing hardware that was dedicated towards mining crypto, right? And then post merge, you had a lot of resources freed up.
And almost immediately after, you saw a boom in... AI training on like NVIDIA hardware. And so somehow there was an entire hardware. It's like, where did those resources go after? [01:20:00] It's
[01:20:03] Matt Prewitt: It's an interesting pattern to notice, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure that's I don't, I
[01:20:11] Barry Threw: don't think there's a conspiracy theory space, but I think there's, I think there's something, I think it's more likely than UFOs.
You know less likely than the cia shooting kennedy or whatever but like somewhere in there It's like how does how do the economics around chips and hardware and mining influence what's going on in our sort of intellectual and software and like Capital space I think not zero I'll tell you that much.
Yeah. Where's the dog there? I don't know.
[01:20:50] Matt Prewitt: I don't know if there's a practical question about whether, [01:21:00] OpenAI needed freed up, Bitcoin mining or Ethereum mining rigs to train GPT 4 and the answer is probably not. But, there is an interesting pattern there, and the yeah, it reminds, I think another really important dimension of of California culture, which is spilling over into the, to the general bloodstream is conspiracy theories, Wilson, operation mindfuck and all
[01:21:40] Barry Threw: of this and everything else. Yeah. We, yeah, we haven't really touched up. We've danced around LSD and this whole thing, but that's clearly one of the big threads these days is like what are the big trending topics, wellness and [01:22:00] psychedelia.
It's like psychedelics are back. Yeah. With new
[01:22:05] Matt Prewitt: psychedelics
[01:22:08] Barry Threw: MDMA on Instagram, right?
[01:22:14] Matt Prewitt: It's okay,
And,
[01:22:17] Barry Threw: and they're being appropriated and they're all sorts of claims being made upon them that are, I don't know, true and not true. Yeah. There's, so there's that, there's this, there, there's this AI boom happening here.
And I think. It's part of that abstraction I was talking about earlier. I think part of it is also how people and companies see themselves as being like local citizens or not. And I think one of the big there [01:23:00] are a few sort of like theories I have into why. Even when you go to more established sorts of known cultural institutions, like the opera or ballet or symphony or major museums, in, in San Francisco, flip to the back of the program, you don't see Google, Facebook, Twitter, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, like whatever these companies, you do see some older than like Hewlett, like I, IBM, like there's some of these sort of 20th century companies.
What happened? I lost you for a second. Am
[01:23:45] Matt Prewitt: I back? You're back, but repeat yourself from even when you flip to the back of the program.
[01:23:53] Barry Threw: Sure. Let's start talking about the [01:24:00] way some of the new kind of web, let's say web companies contribute to culture and you flip, if you go to flip to the back of the program, even at some of the more well known cultural institution or like well established and like legible cultural institutions, like the symphony or the ballet or the opera or modern art museum or things like that in san francisco.
You will not see facebook or twitter I'm, sorry x or google or Oracle or a lot of these other companies. And so what's going on with their sort of like cultural philanthropy there? I think there are a couple of things one is just that companies like to silo their culture internally Like I was saying before, if a company wants to do some cultural output they'll commission artists to put things on the wall of their Campuses or they [01:25:00] will run sort of cultural programs internally that then might be displayed in like London or New York centers where they want the cultural prestige of doing something like strategically, but they won't do it in San Francisco.
And so things don't get reinvested there. That's one thing. Another thing is that generally the people that are doing work in technology feel that their work is their philanthropy to a large degree. It's to like absurdly, it's I, what do you mean? Like, why would I donate? I work on Gmail. Imagine imagine a world without Gmail.
I facilitate the communication between, people people's grandmothers would not be in contact with their grandkids, all this stuff. It's that is my plan. I'm making the world a better place, which is not untrue, but it's also a different conception of [01:26:00] how you contribute to the world than a lot of earlier models of this stuff, right?
And I think a third one is just people like these companies and maybe people I don't know companies don't Consider themselves local to san francisco. They consider themselves global companies that happen to be in san francisco Like maybe they have an office here, but they're not really invested in the culture locally what they're trying to do is Operate on a global scale, and so that takes the sort of sense of like philanthropy out of it.
And I think, now, the, in addition to the wellness and psychedelia, the AI and like transhumanist intelligence stuff going on. [01:27:00] The other thing going on now is like effective altruism, right? Which is you know a lot of these folks that spent their 20s and 30s building up these companies and then Watch the social dilemma once we're like, oh Maybe some of the stuff I did was problematic and bad At least as byproduct and then it's okay now I guess I have to fix the world now, and then so you have all these weird NGOs popping up that are funded by like like single people and they're trying to like i'm gonna solve You know Economics [01:28:00] or whatever.
And that's another sort of like thread here, which is okay people in San Francisco people, nobody wants to contribute to stuff that's existing. Everybody wants to start their own new thing and run with it. And so it's really like an NGO based like capital and social.
Engagement where like you have to have your own initiative, like you would never go around and see who's been doing work for 30 years or whatever. And try and help their thing, because clearly they haven't done it. Because there are still problems. And so you have to have some news.
Simple like idea for how all the problems are going to be fit. So it's an interesting like change and how thinking around philanthropy is done. And it all has to be metricized and [01:29:00] have impact metrics which leaves what I think is like maybe slower and less definable, but ultimately crucial and more important, which is like.
What's the culture and how do we think there's culture precedes politics, and a lot of times we're talking about a political project here too, or we don't have any grand narratives or ideology of how we even or vision of how we want society to be even today, let alone the future, what do we wanna see happen? And like very there's very few coherent thoughts around that now from what I see.
[01:29:50] Matt Prewitt: So where do we go? What's the this is the [01:30:00] most California question I could possibly ask. Where do we, what's your what's your quick fix, Barry?
[01:30:06] Barry Threw: What's, yeah, it's let's go There are a couple of good hot springs up North that I can think. It's I'll give you the most Californian answer, right? It's we're going to get some beers and go out, it's smoke them if you got them, baby. Yeah. I'm biased on this answer, right?
Because I actually am doing the thing, a thing I would never call it the answer, but I think it's some sort of, at least leverage point, if not a precondition For what I think should happen, which is like.
A cultural engagement with what we're doing in a way that [01:31:00] recenters the margins and listens and sees the conversation through. Training perception, realigning our sensory apparatuses from just being visual and the like sound and touch and music and like experience, like that sort of stuff that's it really can I risk sounding like a hippie myself, but I think there really is something tangible in the way that we're like.
And it goes, I think it goes back for me towards, like I was saying at the beginning of this I got into all this stuff through music, and I think there really is something there about the [01:32:00] difference in psychology through music. Auditory and visual McLuhan talks about a lot about this like sensory imbalances and things since the printing press and I think there's some truth to all of that.
And just I can say how I thought about and conceived about the world. Being in a sonic space for so long and then going it like I was also a coder for a long time too Like I did a lot of programming when I was in some I ran a couple software departments and so It's a palpable The difference in the way you think and perceive and those different modes of mind and headspace.
So I think Getting people re embodied socially connecting, getting into conversations and listening, and doing [01:33:00] that through a process and methodology that includes the tangible creation of like media artifacts and objects as ways to communicate to the public and think together through these sorts of sensory experiences.
That sort of thing You know the theory of it isn't entirely fleshed out and articulated in an elevator pitch But in practice I can say that there's a there, are
you are
[01:33:33] Matt Prewitt: you a meditator?
[01:33:37] Barry Threw: Off and on. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I like say I don't Not in the sense of like I don't do any very long term or like I made it out of meditation.
I bicycle a lot. So I would say like cycling, like road cycling. And I think that there's some [01:34:00] degree of meditation and the best times of that also. But why do you ask? Yes.
[01:34:07] Matt Prewitt: Just because you know what you're Resonates with the idea behind a lot of different meditative approaches that are about re stabilizing and centering attention around sensory field.
[01:34:27] Barry Threw: I think it's pulling, I think there's some, it's like pulling out of we're talking about. Assailing the Cartesian mind body split with all weapons at our disposal, like that's
a very base level of it, right? It's like the destruction of linear [01:35:00] perspective and the Cartesian mind body split is really what we're, really what we're about.
[01:35:08] Matt Prewitt: What gray area is about? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Or what we, ourselves we see. I don't
[01:35:17] Barry Threw: wanna speak for everybody involved, but that's what I'm up to.
[01:35:23] Matt Prewitt: I think
that's probably a good place to to wrap up. But it's always good to talk to you. I think that the cultural challenges of of the Bay Area are are really deep. But I'm glad that you're working on them. And I think that
I guess as I was saying [01:36:00] earlier I, one thing that worries me, frankly, cause I, I know that a lot of people around the country and around the world think about the Bay Area too, from different kinds of. One thing that worries me is that is that the, is that other places will just dismiss what's going on in the Bay Area as look at what a mess those tech bros have made for themselves, which is yes, but there's just a lot more to it.
And I think that the mess that we are in here is something that A can't be summarized quite that simply and B probably holds lessons for for. People [01:37:00] in in other places that are like a little, a couple of clicks back on the social fragmentation cycle. Yeah. I hope, folks get something out of this conversation, folks in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Boy,
[01:37:18] Barry Threw: me too. I got something out of it. At least we can be glad of that. Thanks. Thank you.
[01:37:33] Aaron Benavides: Thanks again to Barry and Matt for the many interesting anecdotes and their experiences in the ever changing culture of the Bay Area, from the optimistic Wild West mentality to the technocratic molding of the past 20 years. If you enjoyed this episode, it would help us out if you could rate and subscribe to RadicalxChange(s) on your favorite podcast platform.
This episode was produced by G. Angela Corpus and co-produced, edited, and audio [01:38:00] engineered by Aaron Benavides. The RadicalxChange(s) Podcast is executive produced by G. Angela Corpus and Matt Prewitt. If you would like to learn more about RadicalxChange, please follow us on Twitter @radxchange or check out our website at radicalxchange.org.
We also invite you to continue the conversation on our Discord, where we have a variety of channels discussing topics like what you heard today, as well as partial common ownership, community currencies, soulbound tokens, and much more. There will be links to all these in the description. Thanks again.