Pancake Technology

small tech and memory sharing with Alison A.G.

Raya Marie Hazell: To start, can you introduce yourself and share where you’re located?

Alison A. G.: I’m Alison. I live in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years, and I primarily work for nonprofits.

Raya: What first brought you to the Collective Action School?

Alison: I was excited about connecting with other people who wanted to talk about the ways that tech, the tech industry, was or wasn’t working and to imagine new futures and possibilities together. As a new parent who’s so focused on caretaking others, I wanted to carve out some time for myself to engage my mind in something new. And the curriculum for the previous cohort sounded really interesting. I think what drew me to tech work originally was the opportunity to keep learning, since technology is constantly changing. It’s important for me to not just continue that education into the technology itself (and the languages and the tools), but also into how technology is impacting society. I had also recently gone from being an individual contributor to a manager, so I was thinking a lot about what my position meant, and how power dynamics play out in the workplace. CAS seemed like a good place to reflect and engage with those topics.

Raya: And how has that gone? How did those thoughts and ideas move during or after digesting the program?

Alison: I think it was a good place for that reflection. There was a lot to dive into—I feel like each week was a whole new kind of entryway into some idea. There was a really great balance between engaging readings and discussion and then reflection on how these things apply to my life and work.

Raya: I agree. I feel like it was like a nice scan of approaches to organizing within the space. And there were certain topics I felt I could dig deeper into from my personal position.

I really love this question when it was first posed at the start of CAS 2023, and I’ll pose it to you now: who do you bring with you into the Collective Action space?

Alison: Well, I’m queer. I’m the child of Cuban immigrants. I’m a parent. So these are the communities that were top of mind for me, since they have shaped so much of who I am. Those identities are what I had in mind when I was thinking about what I wanted to build and who I wanted to build it for. I think there’s also a lot of intersection between these communities. And we can of course say much more about that.

Raya: I’m curious about how those communities have shown up in your work or in your project.

Alison: Getting into the project, I was interested in ways that technology can either help or hinder connection with our ancestors, particularly when migration and new languages cause disconnection between generations—that angle speaks to that immigrant community that I’m a part of. Or from another perspective, when stories aren’t even captured because people haven’t always been able to live openly in order for their stories to be documented, or perhaps haven’t survived to share those stories—and that speaks to my queer and trans community. As a parent, I’m also thinking about how I want to share who I am to my child, and how they’re gonna feel connected to their history and where they’re situated within the world.

I lost my dad and my grandmother within a few months of my son being born and that prompted me to reflect on ways technology can connect us to our past. So I started having conversations with friends about our connection and their own connections with memory building and technology.

Raya: Thank you for sharing. I’m so sorry for your loss. I resonate with that experience of layered familial loss. Holding your loss here.

I’d love to hear more about your project and how it developed from these beginnings—of these communities you were thinking with and thinking about—in relation to memory work.

Alison: So, so much of technology is geared towards speaking to large audiences, amassing a following, profiting. So I wanted to think about what it could mean to create small, intimate technology that can hold our private stories—technology that feels like standing in the kitchen with your grandmother while she’s brewing the coffee. How will technology allow me, allow for my great-great-great grandchildren or descendants of chosen family to connect with me, and in doing that, understand the communities and histories in which they’re situated.

I shared a photo with you all during my final presentation of how my grandmother made coffee in her kitchen when it was out of commission. She’s heating the Moka Pot with an iron used for clothes, and it’s stacked on a bunch of other random appliances, so she doesn’t have to bend down too far. I love this photo because it reminds me that engineering comes in all forms. And technology can be a way of showing care or hospitality.

One of the conversations I had with a friend led me to this article by Robin Sloan about programming as home cooking. In it, he describes an app he built for his immediate family articulating how it felt making a home cooked meal for them. That analogy really resonated with me. I’ve made small things for small audiences of one or two people. I found this kind of technology to be the most nourishing and I’m not as focused on getting the tech perfect. I’m much more interested in how it will make the other person feel.

Another anecdote that I was thinking about during this process was from when I was visiting someone a long time ago: the person is flipping crepes for us to eat for breakfast and I asked him what’s the secret for flipping them up in the air and actually catching them? He laughed and said, “Well, you have to be okay with eating cereal for breakfast.” I think about this moment a lot when I think about the fear of failure. How when I’m cooking at home or building something small for myself or my community, I have more room to take chances and try something new, more so than I might in a professional setting.

Through these conversations I had with friends and people at CAS, I realized a lot of technologists and artists that I know are building small and delightful things, and I found that really inspiring. My original intent for the final project was to create a recipe zine chronicling all these projects. I wanted my project to inspire smaller and more focused tech for the people closest to us.

Raya: That’s so beautiful. I love the idea of it being a space where you can try new things. I had some friends over for dinner last night, they were talking about a category called “lover meals” in reference to things that you don’t make for yourself, you make for someone you love. We were saying that pancakes are a part of that. When you think of pancakes it’s not a solo meal. It’s like a parent makes it for the children or you make it in the morning for someone who’s stayed over. It’s an endearing thing to do and to decide to do. The idea of a category of technology that also is a precious thing made for someone with care rather than this thing produced to be distributed and dispersed

Alison: Yes pancakes are a perfect example of that. Like, let’s make pancake technology actually work? Yeah, we talked about the fullstack. This is the pancake stack.

[Laughter]

Raya: I love that. I definitely love the idea of leaning fully in metaphors for it. From where you are with the project now, what are some of the challenges you’ve encountered? Or are encountering? And how has it been working through them?

Alison: My biggest challenge was capacity as a parent of a toddler and with a full time job. Unexpectedly at the beginning of CAS, my partner had to have a major surgery. So she was on bed rest for a month, and there are some long term implications of that. I was struggling with allowing myself to take a break or not do something, especially in the context of school. You know, I was that kid with perfect attendance growing up, kind of to a fault. So it took me a while to accept that it would be okay to cut scope and focus on readings and conversations and building relationships rather than on productive output. Collective Action School isn’t a traditional school. It’s more of an examination of the structures around us and our relationships. We talk a lot about who we are accountable to in Collective Action School and I’m most accountable to the people I caregive for. Eventually, I was able to let go and accept that my time at the school was more about planting seeds rather than harvesting fruit.

Raya: Mmm I hear you and really appreciate that the program was flexible to that. I’m curious, what’s your wildest dream for the project? For what this seed could bloom into?

Alison: I would still love to put together a zine for the different projects in the spirit of small tech for communities. It’d be part inspiration and part recipe book for the things we can make to support each other both in serious and silly ways. My wildest dream would be, for us to move away from the factory farm of big tech and towards the dinner tables of our own homes. A world where we take more ownership of our technology and our stories and deepen our relationships with each other and make sure these things live on like a recipe passed down, where each generation is able to connect to the history of it, and the memories, and add their own flavors to it.

Raya: That’s so beautiful. I love this recipe metaphor. I really like the at the dinner table, you’re having like a free dinner table. It reminds me of my friend Joshua who I was staying with recently: I was watching him cook and he literally has a written notebook that has all of his recipes. All the pages are kind of wet and a bit yellowed and crinkled. It has this wear to it. I just imagine the idea of carrying code between people, like literally writing it down. I’m thinking about what the technology can be and thinking of the tenderness of that object and the tenderness of the type of technologies you’re proposing. I think also what you’re talking about, about capacity and focusing on caregiving, is so aligned with the ethos of the project.

Alison: Yeah I love the idea of making it more tactile like you said with the pages.

Raya: I really think handwriting to me is something that is so attached to family recipes—for me, it’s photos, but it’s photos of like an index card with cookie recipes. It’s not only my aunt’s recipe, but it’s parsing through her handwriting each time I’m making the recipe. I wonder how that could be a part of the zine too. Whether it’s your handwriting or other people’s handwriting?

Alison: I love that idea. And a zine is kind of perfect for that because it’s not a book, a zine feels a bit more like it can be handcrafted.