CZM Book Club: "Tongue Mining" by Jack Morton

Margaret reads you a story about AI, translation, and love across languages. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Book Club, book Club, book Club, book but no one
else can say it. That's a joke. There's no one
else on the call. It's just me. I'm your host,
Margaret Kildoy, and this is Cool Zone Media book Club.
And this week, dear listener, you're the guest, so I
hope you're going to okay, So let's chat it together. Okay,

(00:29):
you already book club, the Club, the club. What do
you mean you don't want to do it in public
with while you're listening to headphones on the bus. You
should be chanting with me. Well, either way, this is
the Cool Zone Media Book Club. I'm your host, Margaret Kildrey,
and every week I bring you a new story that's fictional.

(00:53):
The opposite of the truth is fiction. This week we're
going to talk about well, I guess you're going to
hear what the episode, what the story is about when
I read it to you. This story is called Tongue Mining.
It was written by Jack Morton, and here's a bio.

(01:14):
Jack Morton was born in New Brunswick, Canada. He studied
theater and writing at the University of Toronto and carries
a knit and black belt in karate. He currently lives
in to Lose, France, where he writes and narrates audiobooks.
You can read more of his stories in rat On Journal,
The Woodward Review, Expanded Field Journal, or let Him read
one to you at Vast Literary Press. And this story

(01:36):
in particular first appeared in rat On Journal number four.
And if you like Coolsone Media Book Club, you'll probably
like rat On Journal r A Don which is a
anarchist fiction magazine, so might interest you. It might not.
I hope this story does though. It's called tongue Mining.

(01:58):
Oh and the best part is there's a bunch of
like French and stuff in it, and other languages, and
I don't know how to speak them, so you can
hear my. I'm not even going to try into an accent.
I'm just gonna stumble through it. That's the way it goes.
Tongue mining, my ears sting, threatening to water, sweat beads

(02:21):
on my upper lip. I don't think anyone said not
to blink or touch. My face just remains still so
the camera can focus on my eyes. The word bird
appears plain white font on a black background projected onto
a fabric screen. My gaze flicks to the upper right corner,
and then back to center. Mountain comes up next upper left.

(02:43):
The man beside me coughs, I don't look. That could
throw off my results, but I'm distracted. It takes me
longer to place mole in the lower right. The words
disappear quicker, less time to read. I hear sharpened hails.
Tension fills the room. Relax, says the woman monitoring the test.
She paces slowly between the rows of desks, making me

(03:04):
feel like a school child, even though I'm probably older
than her. I break down and wipe the sweat, and
I'm able to breathe steadier. The words begin to fly naturally.
Tree upper right, stump, lower left, cloud, upper left, bat
upper right. Just as the monitor said, I relax. I
tell myself not to think about whether the object is

(03:26):
high or low, animate or inanimate. The meaning is contained
in my English speaking mind. I just have to let
it come out. Then something flashes on the screen. Poutik.
I think I didn't have time to reread it before
it disappeared. I'm lost for a moment, but suddenly a
voice in the back row said, booisit. I try to
keep focused forward. More words are coming, but I hear

(03:47):
a scuffle in raised voices. The man who shouted insists
he misread and doesn't speak to Gallic. The monitor points
out that nobody mentioned to Galic until him. When a
chair scrapes loudly against the floor, I turn around. Two
men with a symbol matching the one on the monitor's
lapel across their broad chests are physically removing a panicked
elderly man from the room. He's cursing now in English,

(04:10):
and what I assume is to Glic, resisting like if
he could regain his seat, it would undo all of
this and he could still take the test. Then I
realize he's reaching for his earbuds and glasses, lying to
the side of his desk. Like all of us, he
had to remove them to start the test. Please just
let me take my The monitor cuts them off. These

(04:32):
devices are not yours, they are the property of all talk.
She strides across the room and collects them. By refusing
to abide by the rules of the test and by
concealing language fluencies, you have violated our terms and conditions.
Your subscription to our translation service is terminated. He tries
to object again, but soon he's out of the room.

(04:53):
The monitor closes the door and all noise from outside
is silenced. Sorry for the dis option, everyone, please turn
to face the screen and we'll resume. I look at
the others. They mostly look as scared as me, but
one tall, blonde man's face shows indignance. We make eye contact,
and my meek cowed expression seems to motivate him further.

(05:16):
He stands, no, I'm not taking this. You can't treat
people that way, dragging him out like he's some criminal.
All Talk reserves the right to expel testers who disrupt
the process. You all saw him grab me when I
asked him to leave on his own. I'd seen nothing.
I don't know if anyone else had. The blonde guy
goes on, I'm a paying customer. I don't need to

(05:39):
put up with this treatment. Of course not, she replies calmly.
This test is completely voluntary, as you were informed when
your attendance was requested. You're welcome to leave at any time.
Simply leave any all Talk devices with the front desk
on the way out, and your subscription will be terminated.
And there it is. She has us or they do.

(06:02):
The corporation behind that symbol on her lapel because no
one would voluntarily give up their all talk. They'd venture
into the world with no translation tech, without the ubiquitous
glasses and earbuds. Maybe at work the next day they
discover their company was Russian and their boss gave instructions
in Arabic. Maybe at home they'd find out their partner
spoke mohawk. Half the signage in the city is probably

(06:25):
in scripts they couldn't name, much less read. The blonde
man's face still looks defiant, but he swallows whatever he
wants to say and sits down facing the screen. And
if you want to look defiant, dear listener, you can
buy our one hundred percent defiant ADS revenue. This is

(06:48):
an AD pivot. Here you go, and we're back. We
all turn and resenter our eyes on the cameras as
the monitor scrubs. The test playback and we start at

(07:11):
bird again. My eye actions become jerky, trying not to
think about the Filipino man. At least I can vindicate
his loss by succeeding. Now that I know the real
point of the test. They don't care whether we correctly
identify objects as high or low, animate or inanimate. The
start of the test was mental training, getting us to
react instinctively to these concepts, so that when non English

(07:34):
words appear, we'll respond without thinking. They aren't testing fluency
in English, they're hunting for it in other languages. And
maybe my participation wasn't random selection, like they'd claimed. A
flash of Grandma's old place, the box she made us
put all our electronics in when we arrived, songs and
games in French as a child, stories about Champlin or

(07:57):
the Corie de Bois when I was older. But I
haven't used my French in years, not since Grandma died.
The test won't pick up on that, certainly, not if
I can help it. I banish Grandma's living room and concentrate.
Sure enough, after putik every few words, something appears that
I don't know. Often can't even read. Even if I

(08:18):
think I recognize something, I stare defiantly straight unless I'm
sure it's English. Anyone else try to fool them in
the room has an edge now, but it still won't
be easy. The words are getting trickier. Snow falls from
high to low. Brain could be animate or an inanimate
part of an animate whole. I have to think before
I can place mine as something low and inanimate. I

(08:41):
first think of the other meaning ownership, to which neither
of those ideas applies. Loon. My eyes flick up and
left slightly before I study them. But I hadn't been
expecting traps. I would have looked. A fluent French speaker,
already programmed by the start of the test to go
up and left for something high and inanimate, would have
had no chance. I hope I didn't react too much.

(09:03):
Surely English speakers know lune, they have lunar and lunacy.
I try not to think about it. More words are coming.
Apparently I succeed at the word recognition portion. At least
the monitor doesn't say anything to me before moving on
to the written composition. I stare at blank paper on
which I'm supposed to write a response of a few
hundred words to their prompt describe a wedding you attended

(09:26):
in the form of an email to a friend. Pens
move all around me, but I feel stuck. Images of
various weddings flashed through my mind. My cousin on the beach,
my sister at the old farmhouse, or I could invent
a wedding. It shouldn't matter. They're not judging my memory,
just my writing, Except now I know that's not really

(09:48):
the point, or at least not the only one. They
don't just want to evaluate my English. They also want
to know if I secretly understand anything else. I glance around.
The projection screen is rolled up, exposing writing on the
blackboard behind it. Some of it looks like a lesson,
a list with bullet points. Some of it could be
student graffiti. I turned quickly back to the paper before

(10:11):
I have time to take anything in. It wasn't in English.
It may be part of the test. I should write
in an anglophone way, use a variety of sentence structures
to showcase English's versatility. Maybe drop in some impressive vocabulary.
But trying too hard might seem suspicious. Everyone around me

(10:31):
is already writing. It's not that hard to write a
few hundred words in your native language. Simple off the
cuff writing is probably best. I squeeze out some details
from my cousin's wedding, mixed with a movie I saw
last week. Reading back, it feels clunky. Maybe that's okay.
Just because you're fluent in a language doesn't mean you
can spontaneously shit out beautiful prose especially in as synthetic

(10:53):
a situation as this. I write a few more trite
sentences and start counting words. The monitor cos all the
papers and directs us to the next haulover for the
oral communication portion. Everyone instinctively puts their glasses on and
earbuds back in. We move with the slow shuffle of
a group no one wants to lead. I have time

(11:14):
to check the blackboard. The writing and other scripts and
tongues has resolved into English. I read some of the
crassest and most abusive insults I've ever seen. The original
phrases could have been tough to ignore for someone who
understood them. I chuckle and glance around. No one else notices.
We sit in low plastic chairs waiting to be called

(11:36):
into one of the small rooms. When my name comes up,
I'm surprised by the man waiting for me. I'd prepare
myself to see the monitor from earlier, but of course
she couldn't run each individual test. My expectations of the
tight haired school teachery woman run up against a smiling,
balding man in his fifties, a red face and a
well fed build, plus a twinkle in his eye, suggests

(11:59):
as sort of bombon. I mentally chied myself for using
that phrase, but there can't be any harm in loanwords.
I don't know French speakers even say bon vivant. He
gestures for me to sit. I reach for my earbuds,
but he says to leave them in. He verifies my
name and all talk user information, then asks how the
written component of the test went. I explained my struggle

(12:21):
with what to write, how long I hesitated worrying about
the content of the response. Apparently it's a common problem.
The setting is so much like a school classroom that
people feel they're going to be graded on clever ideas,
when really we're just looking for comfortable use of the language.
The same goes for this test. No need to stress
about what you say. We're just establishing whether you speak naturally.

(12:44):
So let's chat. He takes out his earbuds and I
do the same. He's explaining why it was important that
we talked briefly before taking them out, something about hearing
changes in vocal quality or vocabulary. But I don't follow
because halfway through, both of our earbuds are out and
I suddenly hear a regional accent. I'm not sure where
from maybe northern England. I wonder what he'll make of

(13:06):
my accent now that all talk isn't filtering it for him,
He looks expectantly at me. We can talk about anything
at all. An awful pause follows, which he breaks by
bursting into laughter. Sorry that was mean, he admits. I
love how universal it is. Take the most talkative people
in the world. Ask them to speak, and they have

(13:27):
no idea what to say. Why don't you tell me
where you're from? As I described the small town I
grew up in, I get more comfortable. He must often
ask people about their home to put them at ease.
I wonder if that gets boring. I meet people from
all over the world in the city. All talks have
eliminated one of the biggest barriers to integration. But for him,

(13:47):
always testing in English speakers, they must have a more
limited range of backgrounds. It might surprise you how many
places people have learned English as a first language. The
British Isles and North America, but also in Australia and
Pacific Islands, Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean. There are pockets
of it everywhere. That's without all the people trying to

(14:08):
pass it. Off as their mother tongue. We sell someone
ejected for that during the word recognition test. Why would
they do that? Silly, isn't it? The whole point of
all talk technology is everyone can use their own language.
A major selling point when we first pitched to governments
was preserving minority languages while giving their speakers the same
opportunities as people with one of the big colonial international languages.

(14:31):
I noticed you didn't answer my question, So why do
they object? All talk only translates into the wearer's first language.
People raised multi lingual get a choice. But you can't
get translation to English if you didn't grow up speaking it.
But why would someone choose English over their first language? Oh?
There are some complaints that the AI interface, designed by

(14:52):
Anglos and first adopted in the US, has been trained
to perceive the world with an anglocentric lens. Whatever that's
supposed to mean. He's frowning at the table as he speaks.
It's all nonsense. There's more data coming in from Mandarin
than English these days. Honestly, I think English has become
sort of fashionable. But not knowing all our customer's fluencies

(15:12):
messes with our data collection. It lowers the quality of
the translation. He hastily adds, as if clarifying was important,
we wouldn't want the AI to start thinking that the
way that non native speakers use English as normal, he chuckles.
I decided to push a little further. Outside. I saw
a few people picketing the building. A few is understating it.

(15:33):
They outnumbered those of us coming in for the test,
people of all ages, holding signs, shouting. None had warn't
all talks, so most of what they said as I
walked in with gibberish, but my glasses decoded the signs.
My words are not all talks property. You are a
police camera now mining your tongue to sell to my ears.
Monopoly on translation equals monopoly on the truth. The bearer

(15:57):
of the last one stepped in front of me, shouting.
I realized I could understand him. His shouts were English
is a multinational corporation. States have to work together to
regulate it. But all talk translates to international law. They're
writing their own rules while they harvest your voice as
data and decide how you interpret everything you hear or read.
They are your oppressors. Your mind is being colonized. I'd

(16:22):
push past him without really taking in what he said.
Voices that aren't filtered through the all talk speakers sound
a little fainter, less real when the earbuds are in,
but his wrinkled, angry face stuck with me. Something about
oppressors colonizing the mind. I say to the monitor. We
don't tell anyone what to do, he starts off angrily.
We offer a service, they're free to use it or not.

(16:44):
How could we possibly be oppressors? Then he laughs again,
but it doesn't have the same full throated ease of
the first time. We're a private company. We're not the state.
We exist to liberate people. There was a time when
national governments could make language competency a requirement for so citizenship, employment,
or access to services. Not anymore, just a bunch of

(17:05):
nut jobs, I guess. He concurs, reassured and happy to
finish with the subject. He asks me some more about
where I grew up, before saying he's heard enough, so
did I pass? Then he chuckles, there's no passing or failing.
We just want to evaluate our customer's facility with the
language to better meet their needs. I stand up and
shake his hand before heading to the door. I fiddle

(17:27):
with my earbuds and thank him thoughtlessly. He answers mercier who.
I turned back to him, frowning and ask him to
repeat himself. He shakes his head. Never mind, thank you.
I exhaled deeply as I make my way out. They
were specifically checking me for competence in French, and I
don't think it was to better meet my needs. The

(17:50):
crowd of protesters has gone when I leave the All
Talk office. A few police cars park nearby suggest it
might not have been their idea. As I turned the corner,
the same wrinkled face from before confronts me. He has
a stack of papers in one hand and holds one
out to me with the other. I turn my head
and my All Talk glasses with their built in cameras
away from him. Without looking. I take the paper and

(18:12):
stuff it into my bag. At home, Louise asks how
it went. I tell him it seemed fine, and mention
about the Filipino man getting thrown out. He doesn't know
what to make of it either. I say nothing about
the French. When we head for the kitchen, I continue
to look after him, but I reach blindly into my
bag and move the crumpled up paper into my pants pocket,

(18:33):
still not looking at it. In the kitchen, when Louise
is facing the other way, I feel around inside the
drunk drawer until I find a small flashlight and pocket
that too. In bed, later, we say good night before
taking off our ear pieces and glasses, mounting them on
their chargers. When I hear Louis's breath coming deep and regular,
I reach down to my pants on the floor and

(18:55):
retrieve the paper and flashlight. I turn my back to
my glasses, ostensibly deactive while charging. Then I duck under
the covers and unfold the paper. It's covered in writing
dozens of scripts. I don't know. Even the stuff in
Roman letters is mostly meaningless to me. At the bottom,
there's one phrase written over and over in different languages.

(19:16):
I spot the French vou valais resiste a prem un languis,
and then the English want to resist learn a language.
How could learning a language be resistance? I think back
to practicing French. There were fun games than boring memorization
of conjugations and genders. It got better when I could
read books or I have conversations and started noticing the

(19:38):
differences embodied by the languages. It felt fun naughty, maybe
to learn the swear words calise, tabernac, but never felt
like an act of rebellion. I was just hanging out
with Mammy. Mammy. I hadn't thought of her by that
name earlier. When I had my all talk head set
on Grandma what my parents called her in English, not

(19:59):
what I'd addressed in French. The screen from the word
recognition test flashed into my mind. In ten minutes, they
could train my brain to react in a specific way
to certain concepts. How many hours of wearing glasses and
headsets had taken to implant Grandma and erase Mamie, or
to erase harvest to use later with native French speakers

(20:20):
mining your tongue to sell to my ears a sign
had read no wonder. They couldn't stand even a passing
competence in a language to go unreported. The service they
sold and all the power and influence that went with it,
was built from the voices of linguistic minorities. I suddenly
noticed an absence. Louis has stopped snoring. I look up.

(20:41):
He's ducked under the covers as well. His dark eyes
are wide staring at me. In the paper and the torchlight.
I position it between us. Can you read any of this?
I whisper quissoldu? He whispers back. It almost sounds like French.
I don't quite understand, but I want to the end

(21:02):
and I'm going to talk about it. But first I'm
going to talk about how lucky you are to have
this podcast interrupted by capitalism right now and we're back

(21:30):
that we in this case, it is either royal or
I'm including you. Everyone's back. We're all back. So I
clearly like this story, oh as I want to read
it to you. And at first I wasn't sure how
I was gonna feel about the story, because the idea
of a universal translator is one of the positive things

(21:52):
that we can imagine to come out of AI and
that we can imagine to come out of technology, right,
And that's what interests me so much about this story
is it talks about the way that that would be
developed within our current capitalistic ecosystem economy, economy. And to

(22:13):
toot my own horn, yeah, that's the expression. I once
wrote a story called one Star that ran on Vice motherboard,
and it was a story about a self driving car
that drives you to jail and when it came out,
a lot of people were like, yeah, Margaret Kiljoy Hill
hate self driving cars just like us. And I'm like,

(22:36):
I lived in a van at the time. It's like,
I would have loved if my van drove me places
while I hung out in the back and read books. However,
that doesn't mean that I'm not capable of putting two
and two together to say that within our current society,
if you had a self driving car and you had
a warrant, your self driving car would drive you to jail.

(22:57):
Because technology. While some of the concepts embedded within technology
could be applied in lots of different ways, the ecosystems
in which technologies develop do not lend themselves to creating
neutral technologies. So I don't want to specifically say it's
like bad to have translation I think it's good to

(23:17):
have translation services. Not everyone's going to learn every single language, right,
But talking about the way that these things that seem
like they would be really good would get twisted is
really interesting to me and to I actually asked the
author what he had to say about this particular story,

(23:37):
and he mentions radon the journal that it was published in.
He says, it's cool how Raydon brings transhumanism into conversation
with anarchism. In my imagination, transhumanism has always been the
threat to freedoms cybermen or the borg, not mally from neuromancer.
I had trouble squaring that well. Working on tongue mining,
it clicked for me. Not only can transhumanism work with

(23:59):
the centralized freedoms, it has to. Transhumanism is scary when
it represents a loss of humanity, but if there's no
authoritative state enforcing it and no corporate interest standing to
benefit from it, it becomes a question of personal choice.
Then physical or mental modifications are an embodiment of the
individual's aspirations. What could be more human than that? And

(24:20):
I like this thought about it because I like realizing that,
you know, the author of the story is coming sort
of from the opposite position where I'm like, oh, a
self driving car would be cool, but oh wait, it
is actually gonna be terrible, you know. And it seems
like he's coming more from a point of view of like, oh,
all this transhumanist stuff is going to be terrible. Well,

(24:40):
I could see actually how it could be freeing, but
within our current context it's not Okay, my one other
story that relates to this story. You know, there's this
part in this story. I thought it was a really
good detail about how there was a bunch of very
explicit things written on the chalkboard in a bunch of
different languages because people can't help but respond to that.

(25:05):
The state does that. Now, they did it to me once.
I was once arrested in the Netherlands and for an
anti fascist action where some Nazis had burned down a
mosque and a bunch of anti fascists went to Rotterdam
to go try and stop the Nazis from physically interfering

(25:26):
with the rebuilding of that mosque. We went to go
fight Nazis and we all ended up in jail. And
it was a very internationalist movement, and they knew that
I didn't speak Dutch, and I didn't have a Dutch passport,
and I wasn't from the I wasn't an EU citizen.
So everyone refused to speak anything but English. And we
all went to jail together and none of us gave

(25:47):
our names, and we all said we only speak English,
and so they separated us and they started going through
and trying to get all of us they tried to
prove who was Dutch. One of the ways that they
would do that. Some of it would be like they'd
catch someone and they'd have a Dutch book, you know,
something like that. But one of the things that they

(26:08):
would do is we're all on individual cells, and so
an angry man would come in and basically like scream
in Dutch, like, yeah, I fucked your mother last night,
how do you feel about that? And like look to
see our facial expressions. And when an angry man screams
at me in Dutch on my second day in the Netherlands,

(26:28):
I have no idea what he's saying. I just sort
of stare blankly ahead, feeling a little bit defeated, a
little bit like it's my second I haven't even been
in the country for twenty four hours, and I am
in jail, you know. And so they picked me out
and sent me to foreign attention. However, they picked several
Dutch and or EU citizens and send them to foreign

(26:51):
attention as well, because those people had successfully masked their Dutch.
And here's where systemic racism comes in. Those people who
were picked and sent to foreign attention with me by
American standards, those were white people, but by Dutch standards.
You know. Someone said to someone said afterwards, like, notice

(27:12):
how they picked the darker skinned and darker complexioned people
and sent them to foreign attention, you know. And again,
racial conceptions are very different in different places. But realizing
that it was like the people who didn't look Dutch
based on ethnic characteristics, and even though it was ostensibly

(27:34):
this language filtration, it was also had a racial component.
And I think that that kind of thing would absolutely
become true in something like what this story discusses. And
that's it. That's it for this episode of Cool Zone
Media Book Club. You can find me on Cool People
Who Did Cool Stuff if you listen to this on

(27:55):
these it could Happen Here feed, and you can find
it could Happen Here on the could Happen Here feed
if you found this on the Cool People Who Did
Cool Stuff feed, Because it's one podcast on two feeds,
neither of which are the feed for the pod. It's
wild crazy, We're doing something new, no one's ever done
it before. I'm gonna press stop now on the recording.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated
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