This is the second installment of a three-part interview that Judd Baroff did with Ashley Fitzgerald. You can read the first part here.
Judd: Let’s talk about ‘Spreadsheet Brain’. You and I met because we were discussing this problem on Twitter. And now, in a previous installment, you’ve talked about abstract thinking, how that led you and Pat to Uruguay in the first place. You’ve also brought up Spreadsheet Brain, and, in the same breath, alienation. So start with the basics: Could you explain first what Spreadsheet Brain is? Second, how did you come up with it? And what connections would you draw between Spreadsheet Brain and alienation?
Ashley: When I coined the phrase “Spreadsheet Brain”, I was talking to Dougald Hine who is friends with this guy, Vinay Gupta, who I don’t really know, except for having fought with him on Twitter. And Dougald is telling me all these stories about Vinay, and I was like, this name sounds familiar, and I go back and look it up, and my only interaction with Vinay is that I fought with him about fake industrial meat and who knows maybe this was the guy for whom I had to invent this term Spreadsheet Brain because I was so frustrated.
There’s a type of guy, sometimes they’re Silicon Valley guys, sometimes they’re just tech bros, sometimes they’re environmentalists who have lost their minds, but there’s a type of guy out there who is so out of touch with the material world that his thinking based on total utilitarian rationalism ends up going to really weird places. And so somebody like George Monbiot gets convinced that animals, livestock, are one of the main culprits of environmental problems.
He sees CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), and those are horrible, but his logic is ‘this is bad, and therefore all animals need to be taken out of agriculture,’ and soon it’s ‘we should all just eat food made in a factory or out of a vat in a laboratory.’ And I don’t know how you get so alienated—to go back to this concept of alienation—as to get to the point that you’re arguing for those things.
But Spreadsheet Brain is fundamentally a result of alienation. It is directly related to not knowing context, not knowing how land works, not knowing anything about ecologies, not having life experience outside of total machine, pavement, technological, high-tech mediated existence.
I have a whole episode of Doomer Optimism where I talk with a fan of the show who interviews me about this concept of Goethean Science, named after the poet and scientist and philosopher Goethe. And basically the idea with Goethean Science is that you’re doing a kind of science embedded in context and embedded in time, not just in place, but in time. So through time you see things change. And of course this is how any farmer or land manager or pastoralist or anyone who’s ever spent any time on the land, interacting with nature, comes to understand reality, through time longitudinally and through experience embedded in situational context. The desire for utilitarian rationalism is behind the whole Spreadsheet Brain line of thinking, and those approaches are in direct opposition to one another.
Judd: That brings to mind a series of rapid-fire questions, so bear with me. When speaking about Spreadsheet Brain, you keep talking about “a guy”; do you think this is predominantly a male weakness or was that just idiomatic? If it is a particularly male weakness, why do you think it is? Do you think women suffer in different ways? How common do you think Spreadsheet Brain is? And how do we guard against it in our own minds? And how are you priming your children to guard against it in their thinking?
Ashley: On the male-female thing, I do think there probably are slightly more men who are spreadsheet-brained than women. Slightly more women have learned not to ignore their intuition and disgust instinct. But there are absolutely women who are spreadsheet-brained, and one weird phenomenon which may or may not be interesting to your readers is I think sometimes women can have their emotions hijacked by the spreadsheet.
By that I mean I know of a lot of very militant women vegans who have an emotional reaction to eating animals because they haven’t had a holistic or embodied upbringing in nature. And they don’t know how nature works. They’re alienated from nature. And so their way of showing love toward animals or care for them is to not eat them. But then that gets hijacked by spreadsheets and statistics, and so it’s like they have this visceral reaction that’s actually intuition-based and has to do with their lack of connection to nature and natural cycles. It allows them to think that energy and food and calories just kind of come out of the ether and there’s nothing harmed in the process, which is just never the case.
One area I’ve seen only women being spreadsheet-brained is the one area exclusive to women: giving birth. I think a lot of modern women don’t have patience, and they don’t have the ability to let go of control over exactly what will happen to them, and what their birth story will be. And so then they’ll rationalize the use of medically unnecessary inductions or C-sections, but it’s really just a desire for control they have. So yes, I’ve seen those things.
And yes, I also oscillate between theory and praxis. I think everybody does. And I think the Spreadsheet Brain thing is mentally related to but not exactly the same phenomenon as being too theoretical and too in your head and not embodied enough. I think the vast, vast majority of people in our society are deprived of praxis, at least in the United States. They’ve fallen out of practice because they don’t have to. Just like the need for thrift and sharing and interdependence happens with working class culture because it’s necessary.
The same is true society-wide; if you can just hire someone to swing a hammer, you’re going to hire someone, and then you’re going to lose that skill, and then the whole lot follows from the constant hollowing out of skills and any practical reality for your life. It’s like washing dishes—we didn’t have a dishwasher in Uruguay, and now we have a dishwasher and nobody’s washing dishes anymore. It’s little things like that; nobody’s making bread, and even cooking a little bit from scratch is now revolutionary somehow.
It shouldn’t be but people are just so out of touch. It’s wild. And so I make a concerted effort to do as much as possible. I think that the future is a world in which having the ability to manage the frustrations and the challenges that come with physical labor and work and manipulating material reality is essential, and it’s essential for my kids too. And so I’m just like everybody: I have my dumb mouse-jiggler job, and I spend too much time looking at a computer screen and typing and thinking, but every chance I get I’m in the garden, I’m making dinner, I’m being physically present with the kids, I’m teaching them to fold laundry and to wash dishes and to clean up after themselves and, you know, the skills of life, and I think home economics and crafts are really essential there.
My daughter’s really into ceramics. That’s part of it. It’s not necessarily the stuff of life or the stuff necessary for life, but even just manipulating materials and trying to make them look how you want them to look is a form of practice. It’s those who intentionally muscles through that are the people I like and who are drawn to Doomer Optimism. And those are my people, and by ‘my people’, I’m including my own parents who grew up working class and raised me working class and still have that orientation. So it’s not just people who come to it out of some theoretical reason, but just people who are raised that way culturally, practically.
And this is part of a little tension between my orientation for Doomer Optimism and some others because I’m just increasingly drawn to working class people, urban and rural both, who work with their hands as a part of their culture and not because it’s a boutique cultural movement of people who recognize that working with your hands is good. But instead, I’m drawn to people who do it without thinking too self-consciously about it.
Not that I don’t like the other group, too. I mean, I’m very proud to call myself one of those people who is doing it despite the need. I don’t really need to learn how to do things on my own. But, if I think about it in terms of home economics, I like doing things myself and saving my money and then putting my money into more independence and less dependence on the system. I could just try to make more money and then outsource more of my life, but I’m not interested in that. I’d like to work less and spend more time with my family and be more free from the treadmill.
Judd: I get that. There’s a fugue state which comes over someone when he just sits before a computer screen all day. This used to happen to me all the time when I played video games, but even when I’m doing something wholly worthwhile on the computer, like writing, I’ll stand up and I’ll just need to walk around outside because the world is more intensely real. It’s like if you’ve ever read on your phone or a tablet outside and then you’ve looked up into nature and you’re just blown away by how much more vivid the world is. And I think that’s something that most people don’t even notice anymore because they go from in front of the computer at home to a car with a computer to an office with computers to a gym with computers, back to the home with the computers, all of which are in air-conditioned spaces as well.
What you seem to be saying is that Spreadsheet Brain, this faux rationalism, doesn’t separate us from our emotions; it actually makes us more susceptible to certain ones. And in women you’re pointing out that it’s their compassion which gets hijacked. What emotion you think gets hijacked in men?
And how does Twitter fit into this? Because you said at one point that every chance you get, you step away from the computer and practice your life. But you post on Twitter a lot, and that’s great, I hope you continue, but it is clear that that does take you from your daily life. So I’m wondering how you think a space like Twitter fits in with this real-world, false-world distinction we’re trying to get at?
Ashley: Do men’s emotions get hijacked in the rationalism? I’m reminded of this quote from Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s painting a scene where there’s all these intellectual, philosophical, highly educated people, all arguing with each other about various topics and using, you know, “reason” to argue their points. And eventually the narrator says, ‘it all just comes down to them trying to explain what they love.’ So rationalism is a tool for understanding the world, but, if you take a few steps back, what you’re interested in understanding is just your curiosity, and the way in which you approach it is related to love—love being the attention we pay a thing.
Where it gets to the false premise that rational or utilitarian thinking is somehow detached from the subjective or the qualitative, I think instead we need to recognize that throughout the process we might be drawn towards some disordered or irrational thinking, or we might use the tools of rationality to make irrational arguments, or we might be drawn toward evil in the name of rationality or utilitarianism. And I think a lot of people just can’t do that, for in order to do that people need to have a moral framework of good and evil when they go into rational inquiry. Otherwise, ‘rationality’ will take you over.
I’m arguing with people right now about surrogacy and it’s like, well, isn’t it good that a woman can have a baby if they don’t have a uterus? And I’m like, I don’t actually know that that’s good. Just because science enables it, do we think it’s good to retrieve an egg from one woman and put it in another woman and carry the baby that way? First and foremost, let’s talk about what is good.
On using the tool of Twitter, yeah, everyone who’s involved in the Doomer Optimism universe is a hands-on type person, and therefore skeptical of this tool and doesn’t want to be chained to this tool.
So there are a couple of ways to think about this. I think that all technology is a tool, and you can use it in healthier and less healthy ways, and I think it is a false premise to think that one could potentially totally avoid all use of these things. So I think ‘on or off’ is a false dichotomy. We all have to engage with these tools. How you engage with it is important. In my own rhythm of work, I have to do all this other computer work during the day, while my kids are at school, so I just kind of pop on Twitter and engage with that in little bursts in between that other work that’s a little more mind-numbing and a little less engaging.
James Pogue and Nate and I have all been thinking about how, for Doomer Optimism, the podcast and the events are the tangible things that I’m making. I ran these two events in Wyoming. I ran this one event in Chicago with Dougald Hine. I had an event with Kingsnorth in New York, and then I have this summer’s Wyoming event.
And those are tangible things. I mean, it’s a little intangible in some ways, especially the podcast. But I get a reaction from people, I find out what people like, I find out what people are mad about, and I hear from people about how the events were amazing and transformative for them or their careers or their trajectory. So I think there are ways to turn the digital into tangible outcomes for people. And I’m looking to do more and more of that. I feel like we’ve laid the groundwork on Twitter for setting out the tone and the vibes now. Now it’s a matter of people being ready for us to build something real. And I think we’re right on the cusp of that.
Judd: That’s wonderful, and it opens up the next and obvious question: what is this ‘something real’ that you’re right on the cusp of building with the DO community? And actually, we should also talk a little more about what Doomer Optimism is.
Finally, your comment that love is the attention we pay a thing reminds me of a Simone Weil quotation. Did you have that in mind? I’m not saying you couldn’t have come up with it on your own.
Ashley: So I had heard the attention as prayer line somewhere a couple years ago. And it always resonated with me, but I didn’t know who it was from. And it was only at the Dougald Hine retreat that one of the people there told me that it was a Simone Weil quote. That’s why it’s been on the forefront of my mind.
As for Doomer Optimism, we have not yet announced anything. James Pogue, who’s my main collaborator now, and I are working on these events on what next steps would be. We’re kind of making it up as we go, so there’s no big announcement yet but these discussions are forthcoming
But what is Doomer Optimism? I mean, the simplest explanation I’ve come up with is that it’s not just about homesteading, it’s not just about regenerative agriculture, it’s about a wholesale, humane way of living, if that makes sense. It’s about supporting any kind of project that encourages a more humane way of living. I don’t know, maybe you could let me know what more specifically you’d like to hear about.
Judd: Well let’s start with Doomer Optimism itself, did you know ahead of time that the acronym was going to be DO? As for what Doomer Optimism is, I’m going explain what I think it is and then you can tell me if I’m right. Doomer Optimism is about believing that the guano’s going to hit the fan, as it were, in the near future. And, for a variety of different reasons, that future is also going to be much better for those of us not fully plugged into the machine. So one could think about fertility rates, which seem to be plummeting everywhere and are going to have cascade effects into, just one example, the collapse of the social safety net. But many people, especially in the communities you’re talking about, our communities, are still having lots of children. And so it will not directly devastate us, and we will be able to do something for those for whom it is devastating. What DO seems to be saying is, ‘Well, modern society for all sorts of reasons is making us sick, not just in body, not just in mind, but perhaps most dangerously in spirit, and yet everything is going to come out all right in the end.’
Now about Jason, James, and Nate, are you Doomer about the same things and Optimistic about the same things or Doomer and Optimistic about different things? And how big is this tent?
Ashley: So on how to draw lines in Doomer Optimism, I think part of its memetic power is that, and we’ve said this kind of from the beginning, we don’t really care what your doomerism is, and we don’t really care that much what your optimism is (although I’ll clarify that in a bit). The important inclusive criteria is that you have a realistic view of the present, a recognition that there are some fundamental characteristics of modernity that are screwed, for lack of a better term, that are either spiritually unhealthy or economically not viable or potential environmental catastrophes or politically. And then you take that non-naive information and instead of getting stuck in the doom, you recognize that there are ways to move forward, despite those issues, with agency and intentionality.
Nobody intentionally made this name. We only realized after the fact, probably months into the project, that the acronym was DO, which is funny and perfect and just makes me feel like there’s providence involved.
Part of what inspired Doomer Optimism is my dissertation work. I think all of this as building a career of things that I’ve been interested in and working on, and insights I’ve been refining over the course of my career. And not just career, it’s like a vocation, like my life and moving to Uruguay and being a mother and all of that stuff.
What I found in my dissertation was a set of actors who were subsistence food producers. So they were people who produced at least half of their own consumption. And what I found with that population was that they did not share a sense of doom. I interviewed Second Amendment libertarian, anti-government rural people, and their sense of doom was different from the progressive black woman in Chicago who was concerned with urban poverty, and who was more skeptical of corporate malfeasance and lack of pollution standards.
So I came to this conclusion that what you think of as the doom isn’t really necessary or important for a movement toward optimism, and by that I mean action. So for a lot of the people I interviewed, self-producing food gave them a sense of security and a sense of control over their food supply. And they could agree that growing their own food was unequivocally a good thing, but the reasons why they were drawn to it were as disparate as could be. And so I would say that there’s a huge power in building a constituency around the practical realities of a project or an activity. And it could be anything, like being able to keep chickens or whatever.
I interviewed somebody on Doomer Optimism recently who I think shows where James, and the whole sphere are going. They had a climate smart agriculture grant focused on the Ohio River Valley food shed. And I was like, yeah, what a cool thing to build around this bioregional identity and specifically around local food and healthy food and regenerative food. That’s a project!
So we are flirting with the limits of what kinds of projects count as a Doomer Optimism project. And we do draw lines. I’m thinking of this guy who is organizing this land movement for Catholics. And, in theory, that would be a perfect Doomer Optimism project. It’s this movement built around agrarianism and Catholicism and this is kind of an older movement getting revived and getting attention from the Catholic Church. But this particular guy running it is saying the most unimaginably hateful slurs online. And we just don’t want to associate with that at all. We don’t want to associate with anyone who displays that kind of immorality and lack of virtue.
So we’re trying to navigate a kind of “big tent,” or, the way Jason, my former co-conspirator conceptualized it, it’s not a big tent as much as a campground with a bunch of different campfires that people are around. And there’s some people who can go between different campfires. We’re all drawn to this campground by a similar kind of desire for connection to nature or spiritual fulfillment, but we’re not all drawn to the same campfire.
The way that would practically look is building Doomer Optimism into a loose network with network inclusion vetted through us. We’re kind of determining who is in and who is out based on the quality of their work and their project. I’m very much against these kind of new amorphous network state type ideas where it’s like the inclusion standard is whether or not someone can pay money to be a part of a person’s substack, and then everyone goes to these meetups. It feels weird and random. So we’re going to have a lot higher barrier to enter. That’s kind of a necessary thing.
There’s already a bunch of people who are a part of this network who we know personally are doing really good work and are high quality, and since people are jonesing for some kind of network where highly vetted, high-quality actors who do interesting and important projects are highlighted.
Now, what will the form of support be? I don’t really know. I liked this Ohio River Valley model; they got this grant and then they doled out mini-grants to regenerative farmers in the region. I imagine Doomer Optimism could do something like that where we’re a clearing house for super high-quality individuals doing important work and then we determine where subgrants would go to support this work, including like subgrants to go toward bio-regional events where people get to know each other and build out the network further. Or subgrants that go toward writing legislation and lobbying for a specific kind of—whatever!—access to mobile abattoirs in a particular region or state or at the federal level. Things like that.
As for whether James and Nate and I share the same doom and optimism, No, we don’t, and that is in alignment with the ethos of the project. James is actually the most Doomer of the group. We have differences of what we think is important and where we put our focus optimism-wise. James is thinking a lot more explicitly politically, federally, and culturally. He’s thinking about the material realities of a future of collapse, and also internationally because he’s done work in Africa. He’s figuring out the global supply-chain future, whatever is going to happen with a multipolar world. Nate is thinking a lot more locally focused on the Midwest and trying to build out local capacity. I’m thinking in an urban setting. I’m thinking a lot about the family, the urban-rural interface, and religion.
Judd: I want to stick to this idea about where to draw borders, because that seems to me one of the central questions. You almost providentially mentioned Michael Thomas of Sharon because, a couple years ago, when I took the first steps of my Catholic journey, I followed him because he seemed very interesting. But the faults you find in him, I also found, and I backed away pretty quickly.
But outside such monstrous low character, it doesn’t seem clear where to draw the lines. To take an obvious example since we’re both Catholic or Catholic-adjacent, abortion. So Catholics have a very definite stance on abortion. And some make the argument that abortion is worse than slavery, which, if we take the premises, makes sense—that is, the argument follows logically. But unless we want to be constantly at war with our fellow citizens, and possibly our own families, we have to live with those who have diametrically opposite views from our own. And this is true of any project worth its name.
So what do you do? How do you think about drawing these lines? Because on one hand we don’t want to fail from the weight of our contradictions, and yet on the other hand we can’t just include only those who think exactly like we do or we’d never get anything done.
After we talk about line drawing, perhaps we could talk about another phrase you’ve mentioned several times, regenerative agriculture. And yet another, the “urban-rural interface.’ Would you please explain those phrases and how they interact, if they do interact?
Ashley: On the drawing of lines, I don’t really have a hard-and-fast rule to be honest. In fact, we had this event in Wyoming and this somewhat reputationally right-wing and apparently scandalous guy, known on Twitter as Lomez, was in attendance. He was as nice and as normal as he could be. His talk was reasonable, thoughtful. He’s just a really fine person and apparently his press publishes some things that are very questionable; I don’t know much about it. But the question is, ‘how many steps of association count?’
So I was in the room with this guy who then publishes books that, maybe, broadly, are okay, but within those books they have some questionable takes. But I don’t really believe in the guilt by association thing. I definitely don’t think because you’ve been at the same event with someone that you somehow accept all of their associations or thoughts and are taking responsibility for them. I think the closer you associate with someone, the more it does matter.
But even if James said something I didn’t agree with, I wouldn’t disavow him. I would say, ‘Well, he’s entitled to his opinion.’ I don’t know. We had an interview with a small-town mayor, the mayor of Stanford, Texas on Doomer Optimism, and I think part of it is just the disembodied nature of all of this. People are trying to grasp at some kind of heuristics to find who’s on their team with weird and anonymous and disconnected individuals. So it’s hard to know where people stand because there’s no context. You’re not in place. You’re not local. And so a lot of that stuff just solves itself once you’re local and once you’re focusing on a specific issue.
It could be issue by issue, coalition by coalition that you build things around. In my dissertation, I tell this story about people who keep chickens in Chicago. And there was a city council person trying to ban chickens. And then all the chicken keepers came together, rose up, and opposed the ban. Then the ban didn’t happen. You come together around issues.
So let’s say that now that we’ve had someone on our podcast discussing the Ohio River Food Shed. We all agree about that it needs to be more robust and there needs more food sovereignty. So we’re going to build a coalition around that issue. Now, just because we agree about the Ohio River Food Shed, it doesn’t mean we agree about gun rights or abortion or whatever else, you know. And to me, that’s how the best version of American politics works. And it’s different from different governance structures throughout history. But for America, it’s a place that’s built around tolerance and it’s about diversity and it’s about freedom. And it’s about being engaged in your civic duty, and it’s about building out projects and initiatives that are tangible and knowable.
On the urban-rural interface and the regen ag question, it comes from my kind of environmentalism being interested in agriculture. East of the Mississippi, agriculture is the main way land is used. And so thinking about agriculture is really a way of thinking about the environment. At first when I was thinking about including agriculture as part of my dissertation, and I was talking about doing subsistence agriculture, I was only focusing on urban areas.
And I had a friend say, ‘Why would you only focus on urban areas when you’re talking about subsistence agriculture? How would you justify that? You know, the people who do subsistence agriculture typically are rural people.’ So I started talking to rural people as part of my dissertation. And that kind of changed my whole trajectory because I saw these rural people are really resilient and they have a strong conservationist ethic. And the urban people are only just coming along to this.
So I realize that it’s not just agriculture that gains you resilience and self-sufficiency and a relationship with nature, but it is a major way in which humans connect to their environment. So I have and always will advocate for a lot of home production, and that’s the way I think about it. And the way I think about this is you don’t really need to be on nine acres to be actively involved in food production.
David Holmgren wrote a book called Retro-Suburbia and he was on the podcast. I’m a big advocate of advancing human-scale agriculture wherever it is possible, including a postage stamp backyard in a city. Pat and I have a very small lot relatively. I can hear my neighbors on both sides when their windows are open. We’ve got a little backyard and a little front yard, and I’ve got ten fruit trees on the property, and I’m going to try to espalier a few of them. I’ve got some in the front yard, I’ve got two grape vines, I’m trying to grow some passion fruit, I’m hoping to eventually get chickens. Everybody should be involved in food production, as was the normal way of living for most of human history.
And rural areas shouldn’t be four- or five-thousand-acre row crop farms either. So right now both urban and rural are hostile to subsistence agriculture or regenerative agriculture. I think we should totally upend that system, and by upend, I mean returning back to what agriculture was 100 years ago. That’s really what I mean by the urban-rural interface. Urban areas have consumers, rural areas have larger amounts of production. But in urban and suburban areas you could increase production significantly.
The way I think about Regenerative Agriculture is as defined by Allan Savory, and the kinds of mixed-use farming methods that increase soil, increase biodiversity, increase water health, water retention in a drought, &c. It’s really just a set of principles for land management, primarily including livestock as a way to increase soil health and productivity, but also super diverse operations. The principles get implemented differently depending on rainfall and geography, &c, &c.
You’ve just read the second part of this three-part interview. Next week (2/26) we will publish the continuation of this interview. It’ll be called “Regenerative Agriculture and the Human Good.”
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