‘Sandra’ Podcast Looks at the Problem of Human Labor in the Information Age
Digital assistants are now ubiquitous in modern life. We rely on them to find out the weather, set appointments in our calendar, search for when movies are playing and a lot more. We trust them with personal information about our private lives and though maybe it’s occurred to us to think about the safety of giving them so much information, I doubt it’s stopped many. But forget about hackers trying to break in, what if those computerized voices weren’t bots at all, and actually humans we were just handing our information to? Writers Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby of The Silent History have taken that possible future as their inspiration for a new podcast with chilling results. I talked to them over the phone about the cultural divide in technology today and about our tendency to believe machines over people and excerpts of that conversation are included below.
Sandra is a new scripted podcast from Gimlet Media written by Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby and voiced by a phenomenal cast. Helen (Alia Shawkat at her most vulnerable) stars as a small town woman eager to start her new job and escape the clutches of a failed marriage to Donny (Christopher Abbott of Girls fame), a man who can’t seem to keep his life together.
Helen gets hired by a tech company famous for their amazing digital assistant, Sandra. Sandra is so responsive the users feel she’s practically human-like in her interactions. But this technology is hiding a dirty little secret: it’s powered entirely by people. Helen becomes a Sandra operator, answering the user’s questions about anything they ask, and when she talks to people, they hear a synthesized female voice as interpreted by the inimitable Kristen Wiig.
One of the ideas Moffett was interested in is how people react differently to an automated voice. “Some people talk to her like she’s a person, and other people treat her like a smart microwave”, he says. One character even trusts Sandra for medical advice but refuses to go to a real doctor. It’s a strange world we’re living in when people are more trustful of machines than people because they perceive machines as always correct. It allows us to isolate ourselves and can lead us down dangerous paths.
As a Sandra, Helen is emboldened by being a voice of wisdom to the users and discovers she has more power than she thought. She’s persuaded by her boss (Ethan Hawke in an over-the-top role) to get her husband to sign divorce papers and move on with her life. Everything seems to be going well until Helen forms a quasi-friendship with one of the Sandra users named Tad.
Helen thinks Tad is a good person because of the information available to her online, but in fact, the reality turns out to be very different; a reminder that the internet allows us to rewrite our public self in sometimes dangerous ways. When Helen divulges more information to him than she perhaps should, the consequences are potentially life-threatening.
Writer Matthew Derby went into this narrative wanting to explore the notion of the private self versus the public self and the rapidly changing borderline between the two. “We are all invested in the construction and maintenance of our public and private personas” he said. The dangers of believing everything you see and read about a person online are very real.
Instead of what could be a screed against evil corporations and data mining, Sandra aims to tell a more personal story about human labor in the information age. As with the digital assistants currently in existence in our world, realism and humanness is highly prized in Sandra. But because Sandra is run by actual people, the line between the operators’ lives and Sandra’s persona gets messy almost immediately. Helen’s boss pushes her to incorporate more of herself into her job because the realness of Sandra is what the users value. At work, Helen hears a couple argue and suggests that they break up and her boss is excited by that. He tells her that she did what no one else had the courage to do. A machines can give advice that would never be trusted by people. The problem with that, writer Kevin Moffett said “is that when you add humans to the system, you get all their messy biases and preferences, and all their racism and sexism.” Using real people turns out to be both Sandra’s greatest strength and biggest weakness.
I asked Derby if he thought we’re headed towards a scenario like what happens in Sandra and he referenced a Wired article talking about humans being paid to do simple tasks like taking soup cans off the shelf to teach robots how to do it. “These things are already happening,” he said. “We just pushed it into a speculative context.” Sandra takes the idea that we are all just cogs in a machine to its logical next step by placing human workers in the service of the ultimate digital assistant. By utilizing human reactions Sandra is able to learn and advise its users much better than a machine ever could.
The meat of the storyline is sandwiched around Helen’s various online interactions with the Sandra users that are often funny and realistic at the same time. Listening to little boys trying to trick Sandra into saying the word “butthole” while she is telling them about a bird’s cloaca felt like a glimpse into childhood. In another telling instance, an off-work Helen meets an ice-cream truck driver who cannot turn off the music in his truck. She recommends he try Sandra, and he refuses her help saying that he doesn’t need a device because he makes his own decisions and spouting conspiracy theories about what the computers do with all the information. Her charms win him over and Sandra reads the truck’s manual online giving the driver the information he needed in seconds.
Characters like her husband, Donny, and the ice cream truck driver represent another more subtle theme of the show about the cultural divide between the educated class who use technology and the ones who don’t due to ignorance or mistrust. Derby said he wanted to explore the cultural divide between what is called the “silicon necklace” that starts in New York and wraps around the country. Helen’s use of technology versus the ignorance of it with all the characters outside her work show how isolated these two cultures are.
The fact that Sandra uses human labor is a secret to their user base, but Helen has no problem discussing that aspect of her job with Donny. Within the fiction of the show, this suggests that she thinks Donny would never use this technology, or that if he did, no one would believe his story about Sandra because he’s from the uneducated class.
This part of the storyline, unfortunately, felt like a nagging plot hole because in what world do open secrets online stay secret for long? Ultimately, the show comes together with very strong performances all around, and the unlikelihood of the secret of Sandra didn’t diminish my enjoyment of a fantastic drama with strong character arcs, humor, and tight pacing.
Following the serialized fiction success of Homecoming, Gimlet Media sure looks like it has another winner on its hands. All seven episodes of Sandra are available now.
