Slow it Down: An interview with Adam Rothstein
Adam Rothstein writes about technology, though does so without any of the rush or tumble. He's careful, arching his way through the thought process, straining past the headline, to arrive somewhere ahead of the development.
But the "technology writer" label is a short-sighted claim. Instead, he's someone fascinated by the now - whether political, social or cultural - , and how it aligns with then and tomorrow.
His academic background certainly influences his historian-like take, but it's his ability to bring numerous angles together - with an active, brimming voice - that lets his pieces land outside of a textbook.
Here's our brief chat with Adam.
Read his latest contribution, "Ad Coelum", here.
Alec Berry: So, you seem like a writer who's very much in service to the subjects you're writing about, versus a writer who's in service to themselves.
Adam Rothstein: Yeah ... it's difficult exactly to sum up what I'm trying to do in writing, but I think explaining the material is definitely always the goal, especially when it's subject matter that is a little uncommon or a little unfamiliar. [There are] things that get covered in a certain way, in a certain direction in the general discourse, so I try to open up a different way of looking at it. I think a lot of that comes from my background in academic writing. I was studying philosophy, and I was going to teach philosophy before I abandoned that course and decided to pursue freelance journalism.
AB: In terms of opening up "a different way of looking at" the subjects you write about, can you be more specific about that?
AD: Sure. A lot of the things I write about are relatively new. Technology is the easy route to go with that. There's a lot of new technology out there, and we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to know what it's for, how it can be used, what it means, and what it will change about our world. There's a lot of quick solutions to that; there's a lot of quick answers to those questions. I try to look to the second, third or maybe fourth answer because, a lot of times - as we've learned studying history - you look at something ... like a technology that's invented for one purpose ... and it ends up affecting something entirely different. So these interconnected webs of the way of causality works in the real world, outside of the sort of design fiction or the kind of advertisement for the product as is. What it actually ends up being used for is much more interesting, I think. Maybe much more important, too, depending to most people in the world.
AB: I do like your interest in slowing down these always in-motion subjects.
AD: I don't like to be one for knee-jerk reactions, that's for sure (laughs). I try to avoid those whenever possible. That serves me pretty well when thinking about technology, or how to organize people or the way the world works. I think very few people have the skill or the luck to have their first, immediate reaction be the best one. I know I certainly don't.
I've never really gone toward journalism as being the first one out with the story, breaking the story. I've kind of gone for the more historical view. Maybe I can just apply my skills to that better? It seems more in tune with my personality and abilities, but it's also something I see as important. That's why I do it.
AB: With most of your stuff online, have you felt a need to push against your background in academic writing? I mean, going by your answers, it does't seem so, but has it ever slipped into your head - in order to catch someone's attention within a much faster medium - you may need to leave some of those tendencies behind, or do you proudly keep them?
AD: Oh, yeah. It's always a struggle for me. If I really wrote the way I want to, I would write 5,000 word tracks about the Hegelian dialectics of social media art or something (laughs). Which, I do venture into some of that heady, theoretical territory from time to time, but there's definitely some ... trying to work with the online medium of writing is a different procedure than academic papers, for sure.
On the other hand, it was in grad school that I first started blogging. There was a transition there for me. I was having frustration with the academic lifestyle, the academic cannon, and then I saw blogging as this great outlet. This different way of doing things. It wouldn't need to conform to these channels or way of thought. It was fun to be able to kind of hybridize my writing for the internet.
AB: With your piece for ByLine this week, you mentioned in an email that you felt you were just writing about drones again. And you were. But what I liked about the piece ... you managed to take it away from the now and link it to past and future. It gave it some scope versus being another tweet.
AD: That's the real thing about drones, in my opinion. I'm actually working on a book about drones which themes are along those lines. Drones are these things that are very current, very much in the zeitgeist, and something some people are very worried about in terms of surveillance and military power. But drones are also very historical. They've been around for a while. Even very familiar reconnaissance drones have been around for 40, 50 years at this point, so it's not something new. But it fits into our historical continuum in the way we adopt and adapt to new technologies.
I kind of compare drones to things like the airplane or the car in the way that these were culturally transformative technological forces that weren't really as simple as the one thing. They're sort of connected to all of these other developments. Drones are totally like that. They're about radios, big data, processing ability and digital imagery. There also about the very basic mechanics of aircraft, and that's a 100-year technological continuum, and drones are not even the cutting edge as far as aircraft go.
So they're incredibly historical, and that's how I like to think of them. And I still find them fascinating, and I still find them troubling, in certain respects. If I had a mission about drones - if I had something I'd want to impart to an audience - it's that we can still be concerned about drones even though we're considering them on this wider, historical level.
