I sat down with Kevin Slavin to follow a strange path from punk-rock liner notes and Situationist psychogeography into location-aware games, bees, sewers, and the invisible microbial fingerprints of cities. This is part 2 of 4.
Transcript
Pablos: We can cut out anything.
Kevin: Yeah. for me, when I was 13, maybe 14, I discovered punk rock. And it was so important for me for so many reasons, in part just because nothing that was happening around me made any sense. And this made sense. It just.
Pablos: Made sense. I know how you feel because I discovered at the same time. Nobody who's into punk rock thinks I know. You've lived it. But I had been only listening to classical music before that. I was that nerd. changed my life. Never lived it down.
Kevin: The thing about punk rock was that it came on albums. And the albums had liner notes. And the liner notes had nobody talks about this, but the liner notes for punk rock were footnotes for 100 years of counterculture. They were basically 100 years of everybody who ever said fuck you to anything was somewhere in some liner notes on some crazy.
And one of them that caught my eye, and I was 14 when I first hit it, was about this group of artists and intellectuals in the 50s and 60s in Europe called the Situationists. And the Situationists were artists and intellectuals. And there was one guy who gets a lot of the credit named Guy Debord. And they had a bunch of really important ideas.
But the one that hooked me was this idea of something called psychogeography, which is basically just saying that the environment around us produces unique psychological, psychic, and emotional states. And who gets to determine that? Is it architects? Is it urban planners? what are the environmental conditions that produce specific psychic conditions? And so they would stage interventions in Paris.
They would do things run chains across the boulevard to just stop traffic until somebody could take the chains out, just so that people could feel what is it when there's no cars for 15 minutes? how do you feel?
Pablos: That was their artistic version of this.
Kevin: Yeah, and of all the things that really hooked indelibly from exposure through punk rock, it was that notion of psychogeography and the notion that who we are is yes, it's a function of genetics. Yes, it's a function of all the things that we were just talking our upbringing. But it's also just we're sitting here in Manhattan. the trees do something to me out the window that bricks wouldn't, or the bricks do something that the trees wouldn't.
And even just smells, or the noise of people or even hearing strangers, I grew up riding the subway, listening to everyone else's conversations. These are what make us who we are. And it was years later that I realized, the thing that the situation didn't have was software. That's what they were missing. And that's what, in a very direct line, that's what led to myself and my partner, my business partner at the time, Frank Lance.
This is 20 years ago now, really being some of the early pioneers in location based games. what we were interested that, and we both came to it from the same place through the situation. Which was weird. But, it was just this idea that you could add layers to human experience using phones and informatics now. Which, we were man, the situationists would have, they would have loved this.
And we basically tried to bring to life a lot of what they had dreamed about in terms of being able to understand and shift psychic states using designed experiences.
Pablos: Wow. let's pick that apart, but I want to ask you, I think, do you think this psychogeography thing still resonates with you? For sure, 100%. Because I have been thinking about this a lot lately because the, somehow, only recently it started to really occur to me how radically different I am from all the people around me. Everybody else knew it, but it just dawned on me.
And I think a lot of that is attributable to my weird childhood growing up in Alaska. And I've said for a long time, flippantly, that I've had enough nature for several lifetimes. I don't need to go hiking on the weekend to feel a connection to nature. I've had enough of that. I'm trying to find cement and skyscrapers.
But I think that part of why that's okay is this balance through extremes. I did get what you were trying to describe. I had trees and mountains and streams and snow and ice and just all that stuff. I wasn't trying to get was forced on me. But I think it also, whatever that positive thing is people are trying to get out of meditation retreats or whatever, it's already in me.
I don't feel drawn to that. There's nothing that it seems they have or they're getting that I'm seeking. I have that. I get that. I'm not bragging or something. I think whatever that is, it's not a need that I feel. Whereas I grew up deprived. To buy a skateboard was you lick a stamp and mail in a postcard to order it and wait six to eight weeks for delivery.
That's what it was I was just deprived of everything that a city New York offered me as a kid. I never rode a subway until I was much older. I just didn't have those things. I wanted to experience that. I wanted to be where people were. You described these situationalists as intellectuals and artists. When you said that, I thought, what class of people are intellectuals and artists now?
That's two different classes of people, as far as I can tell. Is Kanye in both camps? There's folks who span that. Maybe a few, but it doesn't seem that's.
Kevin: It may be that there were never.
Pablos: More than two,.
Kevin: Which I think is real. It's funny because I remember when I was a teenager, and I went to the library, and I got all the books about the situation. There were all these photos of them in Paris, hanging out and smoking cigarettes. You could see, oh, this is where this painter met. Then it was years and years and years later, I was hanging out with all the people that we hang out with.
I was I think these are those photos. Not in a self aggrandizing way, but I think that there are moments that produce certain groups of people, and then those groups of people change the moment at small scales and big scales. And for me, I think even as a teenager, just being aware was a thing. I aspired to, in a way, exactly what I have, which is to be in a milieu of people who are ambitious either in deed or in.
Pablos: Mind, or both. I don't know, for me, it was the early, I think the influences were the people trying to build computers, the early personal computer industry and those things. And I was far removed from them. I was going to the library and reading about what's going on with them. You're years behind probably on everything and just trying to figure out how do I get to Silicon Valley from what was basically Mars or maybe more Pluto.
And that was a, I eventually got that when in New York City. All subcultures were available. Yeah. You found some weird one in Europe or something. And do you think it was partly appealing just because no one else had found that? Yeah. Everybody else had found punk rock or whatever. Yeah.
Kevin: I actually, to bring it back to the discussion of child rearing, I think that you and I had something that we were some of the last to have this experience, which is that we could get a hold of things and be exposed to things that were obscure. Yeah. That were hard. Nothing's obscure. That were hard.
Pablos: To get to. No.
Kevin: That was part of their value. the value was is that I don't think anyone knows about this. Yeah. Right. no one can ever feel that way again. that's was really taken from us. I feel.
Pablos: Strongly. That's an interesting thing, because I think Because I was always working on fringe technology. Yeah. I've always felt I had something that nobody else knew about. Yes. even that feels threatened now. Right. there's not a lot left that I know about. we still do obscure technologies and I probably am still on some bleeding edge. it does feel that edge is thinner and thinner.
Yeah. lots of people coming, which is in some sense a success. I'm not necessarily complaining. Right. I don't necessarily need to be the only guy who knows about. Right. whatever's going on. But I think there's a. But yeah. But that thing you describe is for our kids, yeah, no. I'm look what I found. They don't care. They're I could have found that.
I know. Right. yeah, there's probably something that. I wonder how this is a frontier for art where we basically have to go build something geocaching or something. Start creating mysteries. Yeah. Again, that can't live online or that I know that somehow or is trying to escape.
Kevin: That. of note. Right. is that, I don't know if you saw this anthropic. Basically bought a call. I don't know what the number is, but call it a million.
Pablos: Old rare books. Yeah.
Kevin: And then fed those into the machinery. Yeah. Because they exist from the world before everything had slop in it. Right.
Pablos: Right. You.
Kevin: Know, and yes, it's that. I think it's iron or steel. There's something that holds radiation endlessly. And so the only the only place that you can get it is from submerged. Rex. Do.
Pablos: About.
Kevin: This? Right. There's the only place that you can get certain types of metal are not irradiated,.
Pablos: Which you need.
Kevin: For certain things.
Pablos: That you probably know more about.
Kevin: Right. from submarine Rex. And it's there's an equivalent of that in.
Pablos: AI. Right.
Kevin: But there's also an equivalent of that just in general. what are the.
Pablos: Things. Yeah. It becomes cannibalism. Yeah. you're training.
Kevin: Are the things can actually feel they are authentic. And can be and can somehow be yours. Right. and I think that is don't have distribution and slop and monetization, on top of them. I bought for our 11 year old daughter. I bought all the copies of the Mad Magazine books from the 70s that I grew up with.
And so she's so in the car she's so who Spiro Agnes? I'm oh, my God, that's a long story. But so but it's that's hers. Right. because wow, because that. but so few.
Pablos: Things that. I worry about The Simpsons being out of date. But you've got Mad Magazine.
Kevin: The humor holds up. All the references.
Pablos: Are.
Kevin: Completely blown. Yeah. Right. yeah. I think I think it's a thing I wish for everyone on Earth. Right. Is to have that feeling of oh, this is knowledge is mine or this experience is mine. And so for me, it was this notion of psychogeography. And I chased it technology and through games a bunch of years. that was a wild ride and it was beautiful.
And I think in some respects, said we did what we set out to do. But years later, I ended up at the Media Lab at MIT. it was the first time for me that I was exposed to real scientists. OK. not engineers, especially New York City engineers at that time or not alpha engineers. Right. in the scope of financial relatives.
Yeah. Social engineers. But not yet. But, and this is all a while ago. it was really it was the first time it was OK, these are scientists. realizing that the ways that they saw the world and engage with the world is really they are not engineers. They're much more artists. Right. Scientists are much more artists. I.
Pablos: The Media.
Kevin: Lab. OK. no, but also, I'm married to one. OK. And it is it's similar in the sense that it is often about just going off into a dark forest. And have a notion of what you might discover or do. But you don't you don't really have a plan per se. Right. and you're just going to feel around maybe you'll find it.
And most of the time you won't, the most interesting scientists for me personally that were there certainly the most audacious. We're really they were all biologists. Right. And it was that was my irradiation to buy. But it was my radiation by folks who were really thinking about.
Pablos: Biology all the time.
Kevin: And I got there in 2013, which is a very cool time in bio is a lot was changing right then. it is it really took me time. It took me over a year of completely floundering at the media lab, where I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do there. But I realized it was I just need to ask the same question in a different way, which it that makes this place feel this place and to not think about it in terms of from a cultural perspective or a technological perspective from a biological perspective.
What makes a place feel a place? I had I started to learn a lot about microbiology really learning OK, if the if the gut biome determines as much about us as it does well, it has a lot to do with our with our moods and behaviors and outcomes. And but everything that's in our gut came from somewhere.
And in most in many cases, it came from the from the immediate environment. And the question is, what is the immediate environment from a microbial perspective? that was really where I started. rather than adding technological layers, could I find the invisible biological layers that make this place? is there, is there a unique biological fingerprint to Cambridge that's different than Lagos or Tokyo or New York?
Is it is there a unique biological fingerprint to 46th Street that's different than 45th Street or 47th? what is the resolution of it? Is it stable? we don't know. when I was first asking this, it was really it was genuinely in the very same spirit as when we were first trying to do location based games, which is layers can we uncover or add that will make this place either more understandable or more magical?
Or both more legible or magical or both. I had to figure out how to do that. And I didn't in the beginning. I really knew nothing about micro bio.
Pablos: And what's the just pick up a part for a second if I think I know I've a general sense that, even the word microbiome probably wasn't used until 10 or 15 years ago. about that time. Right. Yeah. And I guess the primary association people have is what's in the gut. Yeah. But maybe that's the most common and diverse microbiome.
But, we've certainly got them our hands and faces and the other parts of our bodies. But is there something on my computer? Is there something on my bed? Is there something on the walls? Yeah. what else is out.
Kevin: There? Yeah. yes. But everything that's on your bed or your computer is basically stuff that you transferred.
Pablos: To it. Yeah. Right.
Kevin: Which is interesting. And then where did you get.
Pablos: It? Bed and computer don't have their own natural microbiome. No. But if I go outside a tree does, how much is on a tree that's not tree? Right. A little or A lot.
Kevin: And this is a tangent, but it's an important one for me, which is that the more you're doing, you go into this question, the more you realize that the notion of an individual independent organism is a lie, right? There is no such thing, right? all organisms on earth are somehow embedded in a living system with a whole bunch of other organisms that are in it, on it or around it.
And, it's we'd live five minutes without a gut microbiome. Right? it's we're totally dependent on, we have no idea what it is really still broadly. for me, what was, the question okay, but that comes from our surroundings and is what is it? And how can I, how can I find it? the question is what does it mean to be an individual in Cambridge is actually different than what it is to be an individual in Lagos at a biological level, right?
Which is, which I don't know how it matters, but must matter. It has to matter. There's no way.
Pablos: It's a crazy thing because we're at this point where, we're at that point you just described, we know it matters. We don't know how, to what extent, we don't know how to read it and write it. Yeah. And it's a big deal. And you can clearly see, people are heavily affected by their gut microbiome. And that's just one.
And we barely understand that much less we know it's having an effect on people's moods and probably a lot more than that. And we haven't, I, we have a one company that's working on trying to research the microbiome, the gut microbiome. And they invented this machine called a, they call it a gut simulator. they can take a fecal transplant sample, a piece of shit, shove it in there, regrow your microbiome in the machine.
And then they can test diets on you, drugs on you before they do it to you. And then that'll feed a machine learning model where eventually in software, we'll be able to do the same thing. Test a drug on you in software, but it's actually you. And, but there's, thousands of microbes, different types of microbes in your gut.
Yours are different from mine. then there's all these, well, more and more of these fringe cases of people doing their own home fecal transplant for a gut and with sometimes extraordinary results. I know people who had great results. Probably it's super dangerous and nobody should do that unless they know what they're doing. Even knowing what we're doing is a farce.
Cause we don't know. And so, but these guys, the reason I mentioned it is they've discovered a few of these super bugs. This company is called Holobiome and they figured out one that's outperforming SSRIs for depression.
Kevin: I don't doubt it.
Pablos: Yeah. it's a probiotic. You could make antidepressant yogurt out of this stuff. Yeah. And it's just crazy to think about, our toolkit of just using drugs for everything is so limited. Right. And nature didn't really choose to do that. In a few cases, nature is using a molecule for a thing. But by and large, what nature is doing is not using molecules.
It's creating these, proteins trans and it's creating these, little organisms these microbes, which we call them probiotics, but they're just more of a given microbe that you probably need for some reason. And then, but yeah, in the long run, we've got to figure out it's all multifactorial. It's you have a team, a football team of wide receivers and a quarterback or two.
And you've got to have all these things in order for it to work. That's right. And they have this relationship that we haven't even begun to pick apart. Right. I think it's exciting frontier. And, but just imagining what we, what we're eventually going to find out is fucking people from Iceland or native Americans had this extraordinary, gut microbe microbiome that we can't even come close to, or maybe, whatever's going to happen.
Going on in Lagos could be really useful for everybody in America who's got IBD or whatever. there's just a bunch there. anyway, so you were, but you were thinking about it from a perspective of how do we just figure out what's in the environment to start with?
Kevin: That feels an essential step in understanding the relationship between us and all these other species, which are all around us and inside us. what is that? Putting aside, how does the transfer work? But just what is it? What, there are folks who want to study the microbiome of the gut. I wanted to study the microbiome of New York City.
Right. Okay. when I first started working on that, which is 2013, 2014, there was, this was, it was broadly speaking, a novel idea. Okay. came into contact with a few other folks who were also at the beginning of that. And one of them actually at MIT just down the hall was a woman named Marianna Mattis, a brilliant grad student.
And she, I, so I ended up using honeybees to gather microbial material that I would then sequence what the honeybees brought back to the hive. But grad student at the time, Marianna, she was well, if you really want to understand the microbiome of a city, hey, you just, you should hit the sewers.
Pablos: That's actually, and.
Kevin: She built a robot that would go down into the sewers and basically, core the shit mash, to, then bring it back. And then they could sequence that and they could see what was moving through a city. And, Marianna and partner, they ended up turning that into something called Biobot, which was the first commercial wastewater surveillance, which was absolutely, essential during COVID to understanding what was happening in cities, and so that was there is a, there's a straight line from that point to that point.
But there was Marianna Mattis, and there was Jessica Green, who was at University of Oregon at the time, biology and the built environment. And she was, she was, this was very clever. She was using the filters in HVAC, okay, which are they're filtering out all this stuff to give you clean air. But from a microbiologist perspective, it's bycatch.
Pablos: It's a fishing net, right?
Kevin: And so she would sequence that to see how things were moving through a hospital or what have you. and then Chris Mason here in New York at Weill Cornell, who I ended up working closely with, he did this amazing, for him, it was just another thing that he did. For me, it still blows my mind that he did this.
He, with a hundred grad students, he swabbed and sequenced every stop of the New York City subway. what is the microbiome of this stop versus this stop? And unsurprisingly, but also shockingly, they are each unique microbial.
Pablos: Environment. But is that, if I did that, if I went to, Port Authority and swab it today and tomorrow and the next day, does it have a unique signature that persists?
Kevin: There will be some microbes that will be especially prevalent, over time. analogous to your.
Pablos: Gut microbiome, right?
Kevin: It changes because you ate this thing, but also it's relatively stable. And so, and so they found things God, the stories that emerged, they found, high prevalence of this, very specific microbe in the West 30s in Manhattan and in this one neighborhood in Queens. And they were because it was completely off the charts. They were what is this even?
Because, by the way, half of what you find when you do this doesn't even have a name. We don't even know what it is. But so they started to track this down and it was produced in fermentation. And so, is that because people are drunk and they're vomiting, you can demand. And it turns out it's produced in the fermentation of cabbage and it's the live cultures in kimchi.
Pablos: Oh, wow. And it's in the two neighborhoods.
Kevin: Where there's a lot of Korean Americans. Right. And it's and that's a real thing. it moves from a cabbage to a human to the poles of the subway and it is durable on.
Pablos: The poles of the subway, right?
Kevin: It's as I what I'm trying to get.
Pablos: At that,.
Kevin: That there are these connections between us and this invisible world that we really don't understand at all. for me, I was only interested in this from, I don't know, probably speaking in a cultural perspective. I was is this not magic? Right? is this not incredible? I can put a hive anywhere in the world and I can tell you what is within a mile and a half of the hive that's invisible.
And in general, broadly speaking, nobody gave a shit. Yeah.
Pablos: Cared. That's how you're onto something.
Kevin: And I was I felt this before and I was right. I'm just going to chase this. And I chased it for a couple of years. and then I, and then I gave up lots of reasons. MIT wasn't working for me our daughter had been born. There was a lot of reasons. Fair enough. Life. Yeah. Life. Mostly life.
Also I wasn't, academia was not a good fit for me,.
Pablos: Broadly speaking. I haven't tried to find out, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't make it either. I don't,.
Kevin: I don't recommend it to most folks, it did give me freedom. Okay. Yeah. which is not to be taken lightly. Yeah. and I will, I will always be profoundly grateful. for the freedom and also the knowledge,.
Links
- Kevin Slavin at MIT Media Lab: official profile and background.