computer says yes: an interview with Georgina Voss (part 2)

Welcome back for the second part of my epic interview with writer, artist and educator Georgina Voss.

In case you missed it, in the first part we covered worldbuilding versus world-fleshing, and the ways in which an artist might engage with the systemic through speculation and making.

In this second part, we dig in properly to George's book, Systems Ultra, which was published at the start of 2024 (around the time this interview was actually recorded). Along the way we discuss: the narratology of complex themes, and the role of anger and humour in communicating tricky topics; ethics in engineering, and the challenges of teaching it; and the difficulty of representing a complex technological scandal like Dieselgate.

—pgr

Paul Graham Raven: I have many, many Verso books, and I love them dearly as a publisher. But your book does not have the voice of the usual Verso book at all—and I mean that in a very complimentary way. It speaks a lot like you do! It has a theatrical sense to it, the narrator of the book is very personified: you give asides playfully, you describe things with interesting turns of phrase... it's really unacademic.

And after ten years in academia, it's like, oh my god, I'd forgotten people could write like this! I laughed out loud at a number of moments. Perhaps you'd like to, as succinctly as possible, tell us what it's about?

George Voss: It's good to know it has landed in that way, because that was always the point: something written in the way that I wanted to write it, about the things I wanted to write about. And as you said, that's not always a given when you're writing about complex technology!

The book is about the idea of systems. There has been a big push in the past decade or so from artists, policymakers, writers, from people involved in and around things like the internet, digital technology, climate change, who have all been arguing for—or asking for—a better literacy around systems. Because the idea of a system is both very big and very woolly, it's very, very hard to describe what a system actually is. And that's been a problem—not the problem, but a problem. Particularly when you're saying, well, how do things like supply chains, global commerce, financial networks, platform systems, all link up with each other when they're just so big, but also so weird and so nested?

So the book takes on the idea of what a system is and how we think about them culturally, but also what they do, and then how we think about what they do. The idea is, if we go to the places where these parts of these systems operate or pop up—like a port, or financial payment platforms, or computer aided design software and architecture—and we think about the different aspects of these systems like scale or materiality or time, what happens then?

It's written in the first person, which I think relates to what you said about voice, and each chapter bounces off from an art project that I've done. One person described it as “field writing for infrastructure”, which it kind of is, or perhaps travel writing for infrastructure. It takes my going to a place to do the research, to do a project or to try and build a sculptural thing, and then uses that as the starting point for talking and thinking about all the bigger complexities. Like, if we're trying to do something about airspace and air traffic control, what happens when we start thinking about the time-based element of that, about the history and the legacy of these systems? Or, we're going to a digital fabrication facility in San Francisco: how does that get us thinking about materiality and immateriality and digitality and virtuality and the power dynamics of those systems—which, particularly in a place like the Bay Area, are quite present.

I wouldn't describe it as a comedy book—I think you could write a very funny book about infrastructure, but this isn't it! But I'd wanted it to have that narrative element of... I mean, good genre writing is glorious, right? When it it works, and particularly when it starts to merge. And some of the writers that I adore, the playwrights and filmmakers and the performers that I adore, use comedy in certain ways, they use genre in certain ways. Good action writing, good comedy performance, it's such a special thing, because it operates in the world that it's in.

There's a paraphrased quote from Eddie Izzard quite early on in the book, and Eddie Izzard's performance routines from the 1990s onwards are a beautiful example of how you can not only talk about but perform about very big, messy, complicated things, and you get it to move fast and it hits the ground and it's very, very funny. And you wouldn't come away from any of her shows feeling like you'd been in a lecture hall, but the work is there. I love that as a way of bringing the audience, bringing the reader with you.

PGR: One of the things I wrote down is that this book is a love letter to infrastructure. I don't want to over-literalize that metaphor, but nonetheless it does feel a little more literal than I might mean it about other books sometimes. People who write about infrastructure are often excited by it in some way, but there's a bit when you're eating your lunch and watching cranes at work in Rotterdam, and it's not some rarefied and intellectual sublimity you're talking about, it's really embodied. You describe yourself as “quivering with fear and desire on the bench by the dock”. It's a love—something that comes from the heart as much as from the head.

GV: I remember years ago a friend described what I had been doing as looking at the interesting part of boring things, or at the boring part of interesting things. So, looking at things like maritime infrastructure and getting really excited about it, but also looking at adult entertainment and not looking at the performance part of it, but looking instead at the business models, the financial systems. So yeah, I think it's kind of love for how interesting it is… though I'm a little wary of the reifying impulse. You know, “my perfect girlfriend, who can do no wrong”, where my girlfriend is, like, a port!

But there's that fascination—it's not just intellectually super interesting, actually being there is super interesting, too, and trying to find ways to explore this stuff is super interesting as well. And there's the part where you're asking, well, super interesting for who? Because, y'know, these places are places filled with power, and sometimes violence... port work, from the point of view of manual workers, is some of the most dangerous work out there; airspace is a space of border control.

So it's not like, “hurrah, this beautiful rolling machine, look at how wonderful it is”, but more a fascination with not only the parts but also with how all the parts fit together, and how the people who work with them or are engaged with them think about them and work with them. And in some cases, that's possible at the much smaller scale: you can start to think about architectural software by firing up a vector graphics program, and swearing at it when you try and use the curvature tool. In other cases, it's more specialist knowledge that comes from trying to traverse an airport and not being stopped.

But there's the weirdness of these juxtapositions, between the cultural stuff and the systemic stuff. As you mentioned, there's this little bit of the old port in Rotterdam where you can go, you can get a coffee and sit on a bench and you can just look at these massive bits of infrastructure, these boats or cranes or barges that are coming through. And I don't want to say “delightful”, because I think that makes it twee, and it abstracts away from what's actually happening—but it's interesting. It's just interesting that you can do that, and be present with these systems.

PGR: I think what excited me about your excitement was your willingness to admit that it was something more than just purely intellectual. It's part of what makes your theoretical take interesting as well. In the chapter on scale you have a polite but quite pointed rejoinder to Timothy Morton, where you say that many of the things described as hyperobjects are human made: “We do not exist within them, but are part of them, from their constitution, to their presence, to their collapse.”

The whole book exemplifies the same thing, but I felt like there was something really crucial there about your sense of the relation of human beings to systems. You're very clear quite early on that there is no system without someone standing there and asking, “hmm, are there any systems here?” But there is also that kind of figure-ground thing: you're always trying to flip the perception, “it's not a duck, it's a rabbit; it's not a rabbit, it's a duck”. You're trying to grasp that vastness of the hyperobject; Morton is somehow still writing from a notional position outside of the thing they're talking about, but you're really insisting on an inescapable inside-ness.

GV: I very deliberately didn't look at environmental elements or climate change—that's not my wheelhouse. Many things have come out of that quite hyperobject-y way of thinking about things, which did have an effectiveness with the natural world or the environment, but in a way that implied it was outside, which implies a kind of force that is uncontrollable. Any group that's ever been subject to, say, colonization will know that there you can be subject to horrifying violent, powerful forces. But there was a part that implied that there was no human element there, that it was something utterly abstracted, that the power was abstracted as well.

I owe a huge debt to the many other writers who have written about systems, particularly Valerie Olsen and Clifford Siskin, who respectively looked at the idea of systems in NASA and the history of ideas around systems. You go back to Galileo, you go back to the physical sciences, you go back to seeing a system in the natural world, the movement of stars, the movement of planets, and you're like, fine, great, lovely—we can look at that and make assertions about it, but the movement of the moons around Jupiter is not really inflected by human hands. And then you come back down to earth, you come back down to any of the systems that have been made, and it's like, no, no, no.

It's been humans all along, you know? There are obviously the parts where complex systems will give rise to unexpected elements—this is Donella Meadows again, talking about how systems are surprising. But it's still humans, and it's still humans who are living in them, so systematicity implies this kind of high-level abstraction, which then gets transferred all the way down into many of the technologies, particularly those which are digitally inflected, that we have today. That viewpoint implies that these technologies are just there, and they're just happening: “we're just going to use AI in our government processes because it has been made by clever people, but there's no people here!” And it's like, no, no, no—it was humans all along, all the way up and all the way down; humans, politics, culture.

I think I mentioned when talking about Morton, I'm going to mangle this quote, but he talks about wherever the zones burn through, no matter my perspective, wherever you're situated—like, the hyperobject is just so overwhelming. Again, it's an assumption of the inability to grasp the scale of this thing, but also a singular perspective on it as well. But if you're working with [these systems], if you've got a relationship to them, if they're part of your life—and some of these things may be less individual, they might be kind of constructed through policy work or community work or things where you're asked to pay attention, or things where you're embedding narratives or history into education—then there is presence there, as well.

I don't think this is about me having come out of the sciences years ago, because if you're working in biology or biochemistry or even chemistry, if you're working in those wet sciences, it's very present that you are there in them, because you're wearing goggles and gloves and trying not to burn your hand off, or to figure out how much horse's blood you can centrifuge that day. So it's not the abstraction of “computer goes boing”, of just of typing—but again, the abstraction of human culture was the part that drove me bananas, because if you can't recognize power, if you can't recognize culture, then the dominant culture and the dominant power will persist.

So if it's “just a computer”, well then, you know, “computer says yes”—because computer gets to, you know, just computer itself all over you, all over your local government or all over your education system. That was the part that made me very angry when I started writing that bit of it. There is culture and there is power, I think that's the far, far bigger thing—and unless you start to really engage what these things are and where they're present, you're going to miss the power part of it completely.

PGR: I absolutely believe you when you say you were angry when writing that part! But part of what I was saying earlier about about this not reading like a Verso book is it's not angry in that thump-the-table “listen, pal, I'll tell you about the fucking Luddites” sort of way. I think it's really interesting that you you didn't just take the anger and put that out. Instead, you use the anger as fuel for this other thing, which I think is all the more powerful for it.

GV: About twenty years ago now—which is terrifying—I taught ethics to engineering students.

That was one of my first teaching jobs. Anyone who's taught ethics to engineering students knows it's a very specific challenge. So you've got this abstract challenge which is like, what do we actually mean by that? Do you want philosophy? Are we talking “what is a technology?” But there's also this very practice-based thing where, you know, an engineering student may likely want to be an engineer. They want to learn engineering, do some engineering, and then graduate and go and do more engineering, but this time for cash money.

So when someone turns up and says, firstly, we're thinking about the meaning of words, like “system” has a meaning, “ethics” has a meaning… now, some engineering students are really excited to learn about ethics. A compliment I got from one of my students was when he said, “it's just like what we talk about in the pub, isn't it?” Like, do you take a job with BAE? What does it mean if you do that? How does this work? But some students hate it. They are genuinely aggravated to be in a lecture hall where they're not learning about engineering.

So very early on, I learned a couple of things. You can't only do dry theory; you can't stand up and be like, “Hello, three hundred engineering students! Today, we're going to learn about Immanuel Kant.” No one has their Dead Poets Society moment doing that! Secondly, when you're trying to get students on side and engaging—which is step one—if you're also getting angry and talking firmly at them about, you know, militarized choices, well, that's also not going to work. Because a lot of the language we use to talk about power and structure and technology, that's doesn’t always easily open up for a student who has primarily done engineering. And I say this as the biochemistry student who went to philosophy courses when I was an undergraduate and struggled, because I didn't have the skills then to understand that specific form of language—so, not because I was stupid, and not because they're stupid.

So one of the things I learned quite quickly was I had to entertain them—not by being a merry little clown, it wasn't just like “LOL for ethics”, but by finding a way in, to get them on side so then we can start talking about it all, including the theory and Immanuel Kant. As part of that, it had to be grounded in their own experience. There's a much, much larger body of engineering ethics, pedagogical work, which says that you can talk hypothetically about this stuff, but doing so doesn't actually get you that far.

This is actually coming back to worldbuilding: this is where stuff like games and local experience comes in. I have taught the Challenger disaster to engineering students, and from a systems point of view, it's super fascinating: you get the technology part, you get the culture part, you get the politics part, all intersecting—from the type of material science that was happening, the stress where the agency had to perform, the culture within the agency about responding. If you work with this stuff with actual engineers or people who have industrial experience, it's very resonant and quite bleak.

But if you teach it to engineering students, very understandably, what they'll say is “I wouldn't behave like that. I wouldn't do that.” And you're like, well, you might—just give it twenty years! It may not be that you're working for the US government, but you might be under pressure to deliver a project ahead of schedule; you might be under pressure to do deliver a project under budget; you might have a terrible boss; you might have really shit communication with your staff, you might have weird supply chain issues. We know this, but it's not there and it's not present for them.

So we had to work through stuff that they knew, which was present in their lives. And that was the part of being entertaining, I guess? There are spaces, obviously, where you can do the heavy, heavy theory teaching. Writing the furious book about systems, it does something—and there's a space for that, and I love a rant! But this couldn't be that. Rather, let's start to pack the world in, and then let's see where we get to from there. Even for the opening of the book, I remember talking about this to my editor, it's like the opening of a performance: you're here, I'm here, right—let's go.

And this is not against anger, because fuck knows we need this, and we need this now. But what's the audience you're working on with your anger? Are you expressing it to them? Are you bringing them along with you?

PGR: Those early encounters you had, trying to make ethics for engineering students entertaining—was that where your artistic practice came from? Or do you think that was just a very early expression of it?

GV: I've always been comfortable talking to a crowd, I've always been comfortable on a stage, and I absolutely cannot tell you why—but there was definitely something about now having to put that to purpose for two hours a week on a Tuesday morning.

PGR: Returning to the book, I guess my reference here is always going to be Latour, you know? And you're always saying “oh, there's a black box here, what's inside that?” Your instinct is not deflationary; you're not like “let's open the black box just so we can say, Oh, well, that was silly, wasn't it?”

But here’s my thesis: I feel that for you, to some extent, seeing systems in the world and then saying “well, what is this, anyway?”, the thing you’re doing in the book—it is a part of your practice as well, of course, but I think it's also a kind of worldbuilding thing. Or maybe a worldunbuilding?

GV: There's ways it can be used for that—world-fleshing as an approach where you open the black box and you stick your hand inside and you grasp around it, find out what weird things are in there, to either make sense of it or feel it out or kind of relate it to other bits. I guess actually, now I think about it, there's an implication of worldbuilding where you're starting from a blank slate, even though you're obviously not—you know, “we have had neocommunism for 3,000 years” implies communism, implies blah, blah, blah. So you're always building from something else. But you're taking these bits, your box of scraps, and you're patching them together… and I think maybe, what I have always been thinking about is the scraps: where the scraps come from, how you get them, and how you make sense of them before you start patching them together. Because there isn't only one way of reading it, and there's not only one way of understanding it. There are many, many, many... And maybe that's also my slight eyebrow-raise at worldbuilding: it implies that everyone is engaging with that same world in the same way, and they're not, because it's a different world to all of them.

And we know this, we hold these truths to be self-evident: with our engineers learning ethics, or with teaching a room of students from different courses, even when they're all from one college, they all have a very different idea about how to approach and engage with the world. Or if you're trying to build multidisciplinary teams to deal with a health crisis, everyone comes at it from a different perspective. There's a plurality, a mix of experiences, a mix of engagement, and that's the fucking point.

So I guess part of my part of it is finding those scraps to allow for that sense-making to articulate the elements of the world, what they do and what they are.

PGR: I'm going to jump ahead to the end of the book, where you started talking about breaking things. Again, I want to pull a couple of your own quotes and throw them back at you—partly as a way, to be honest, of congratulating myself and saying, yes, I think I was completely right all along!

So, in that final chapter you say, and you're paraphrasing someone else here, but you say “to break something is to learn something about it, and what the social scientist Stephen J. Jackson describes as the world revealing properties of breakdown”. Then about ten pages later, you say we can also think about what kind of world was revealed in the breakdown.

GV: Ah, the Dieselgate chapter!

What came out was that Volkswagen had been tweaking the software that controlled their engines, the engine control unit. These days all cars run on software—not just autonomous cars, but every car today, pretty much. We'll have some software that will control things, particularly how the engine works. Volkswagen had fudged or tweaked the software in many of their engines of their cars, which meant that they pumped out far more nitrous oxide gas than was legally permissible under environmental trading standards—except for when the car was being tested to see if it was pumping out nitrous oxide.

So there was a discrepancy: if you tested the car, you would think great, lovely, environmentally friendly car, roll it off the line, job done. But once you drove the car away from the test environment, it would then go into full death mode. What was happening was very easy to pick up, and it wasn't only Volkswagen; the engine control unit was built by Bosch, so we've got an entire supply chain here, but Volkswagen were the first ones to be, uh, got on it.

My friend Oliver Smith and I produced a multimedia installation work called We Didn't Lie, We Didn't Understand the Question. The title was taken from the hearings, of which there were many, where when the people from Volkswagen were asked why they had lied about what was going on with their engines and their software, they said, “We didn't lie, we didn't understand the question”, which was just beautiful. So that's the context for those bits you quoted.

And it’s funny, because I've been putting together talks around the book and I've done talks around that project anyway, but if you try and find a good visual image that sums up Dieselgate from media outlets, you can't because it's software and it's nitrous oxide gas—so you've got the Volkswagen logo against a cloudy sky, or you get a car shrouded in mist, and it's just like okay, we're not really going to be able to do this with pictures, are we?

But that was the scandal, and I think Oliver and I found it super interesting as our starting point, because Oliver’s primary practice is as part of a collective [previously] called the Demystification Committee, and a lot of the work that they have done is about complex industrial systems, and we had become friends quite early on while looking at, like, weird corporate stuff.

The Volkswagen scandal is super interesting because, well, the scale of it, for one thing. It's the software in hundreds of thousands of vehicles, which is what you can do with software: it goes into one, it goes into many! But there was also the aspect where Volkswagen had said that they were not able to produce cars that had the performance capacity that their customers desired: if you buy a VW, you want to be able to drive fast, drive hard, and be able to meet the environmental standards laid down by international law. The stuff about performance in the hearings that we were interested in, where you can watch these videos of senior men from Volkswagen—and it is all men!—kind of sweating and saying they've done all they can, and then blaming it all on one individual engineer, a rogue engineer, and so claiming the absolute absence of any systemic problem or complexity.

And then there was the way that like Volkswagen themselves talked about software, before all this happened. We worked through quite a lot of the corporate material, the business-to-business stuff, where you get stuff like… well, it's a lot of rendering! You get a digitally rendered engine, and then it has these neon blue zeros and ones zooming up and down inside it, and it's data, it's the algorithm, it's technology! So in the same way that even media outlets found that they could write about it but they couldn't visualize it, Volkswagen itself had leaned into a very specific way of kind of visualizing the technology that they were working with.

All of that could have as its backdrop the question of how things break—and again, this is not just how things break technically, but what does it mean when something breaks? That chapter opens with the very well-known Paul Virilio statement, you know, the “the invention of the ship is the invention of the shipwreck”—in other words, every technology carries its own negativity with it, and to which yes, absolutely! But I was interested in what the different meanings were around those different forms of breakage—because what it means when there's a pile-up on the motorway is not the same as what it means when there's a shipwreck, you know? All these things, they all carry different accruements of the system that they exist within.

PGR: You also talk about bottle episodes in TV series, and there's a kind of worldbuilding heft to this as well.

You say on page 62: “by the time a bottle episode takes place, the world in which the show exists and the internal logics that it runs on has been well established, and much of the drama is wrought from the tight focus on a small part of this place, and the knowledge that the rest of the world is still there. A bottle episode”—and this is a wonderful line—“a bottle episode provides a respite from time, but time still claws away outside.” [my emphasis as spoken—ed.]

In that chapter, or possibly the chapter after, you're talking about the Architecture Machine Group at MIT. And my note here says there's a kind of doubled worldbuilding with the Architecture Machine Group, because they are building a world in which they and their clients might have a world apart. They're building their bottle episode world within that world of architectural practice as well. So how nested and meta can this get, right? Are there worlds within worlds? There are obviously systems within systems… are there bottle episodes within bottle episodes?

GV: I think what is really wrought by those kind of stories is attention, right? The whole point of something like the show Severance, which I enjoy very, very much, is the tension between… you know, it's not going to end happily for anyone, there are these divided worlds, but like, what is bleeding between them is the tension. In something like eXistenZ, meanwhile, the tension is how these things move between and then start to echo back towards them.

So, on the one hand, yeah, we could go eternally into that referencing of building your own worlds—AMG began it, but obviously it's something which is very present now in different digital walled gardens. But the tension then—which I guess almost comes back to the materiality part of the chapter—is that they're still coexisting, right?

In any kind of crisis-on-infinite-earths story, the crisis happens because the infinite earths start to bump up against each other; not because everyone's just living their happy life on Earth 5000, but because there's a bleed-through. That's kind of where we’re at, because we're still operating within the same energy resource environment, within the same labour environment... as much as these things might be carved up and put away, they still co-exist.

I finally got around to reading Empire of Pain last summer, the book about the Sackler empire—and if you've watched enough Succession or White Lotus, it's the real thing, actual horrifyingly rich people living in appalling ways and trying to build their own worlds where they are untouchable, going to private beaches and having staff brush down the beach so that footprints aren't there in the morning and all manner of things—but it's still the same place. So there's that part of the worldbuilding which is maybe where it comes back to—well, I wouldn't say less of the foresight stuff, because that can be kind of separate, what's it mean for this particular institutional environment, but rather the fact that outside it is an institutional environment which is embedded in everything else. It's still the same place—it's still Earth One, you know, it’s always been Earth One.

There's something there about the not-desirable future stuff, but the purpose of figuring out how to build things against hostile environments or for marginalized groups, which necessarily takes into account a power imbalance from the very start, as opposed to a kind of AMG-type thing where we're gonna build this separate skin that we're going to live within, and it's all gonna be great.

PGR: I noticed Damien [P.] Williams talking online about a week ago [more like nine months ago at time of publication, sorry—ed.], and he was saying he'd been rewatching Severance and kind of ranting and raving and saying that it's only when you rewatch this show that you realize it's actually a horror. Now, I have no idea what he's on about, but when he says a thing like that, he usually has a very good reason for it. Do you recognize what he's saying there?

GV: Absolutely—but I think the beauty of it being a horror is the way that it's done. Again, this comes back to “isn't it nice when people make good things”: the burn is so slow! We'll come back to “show, don't tell”, but the patching together or the piecing together and the questions that get raised, and the stuff that puts you slightly off your mark... it does that beautiful thing, it sets you out of time, there's technologies in there which are, like, different. And you try and piece together, like, do they have the internet? If they've got mobile phones, what is going on? But not just to be simplistically gosh-wow, like “oh yeah, they're in a parallel reality”; it's a more of a destabilizing force, so that when shit starts going down, you are properly destabilized.

But it's a very gentle ride... not a gentle ride into horror, but it's that emergent “we were the monsters all along” thing that, when it dawns on you, the implications of what's happening are just so cleverly and delicately done that when it emerges it's just like, oh my, like air coming out of a balloon. I know that they had to stop production of the current series because of the actors strike, but I'm hoping we get more soon.

PGR: Is this good worldbuilding for you, then?

GV: Yes! I think it's so delicate, it gives us so much care in the craft of it—and not in a kind of like fetishized “it's just like the 1980s” way, but there's still enough echoes there where it feels like there's some almost Michael Crichton-esque institutional buildings where some horrifying corporate shit is going down. Again, on humour, it's funny—but there's stuff where you're just like, I don't know if this is meant to be funny within the context of the thing, or just funny like odd, where I don't really know what's going on. There's enough that is unsettling, and it works very cleverly with the tropes that it has.

Now, the film The Nest, written and directed by Sean Durkin, is a horror film which is not a horror film. Without spoilers, it uses the visual language of horror, the story is not a horror, but it what it sets up for you for is this absolute sense of dread in a way that you're not really sure about, and then that influences your reading, how you involve yourself with it. A lot of the camera movements, the kind of shots, the lighting, even the performances are very horror-like, but it's not a horror film. Severance, meanwhile, goes the other way: it works with this kind of disassembled, not quite 1960-70s, early Steven Spielberg strange-corporate-environment thing, but it gives you a read that feels more science fiction-y because it's so abstracted, because you have superb actors that you want to, well, not root for, but you want to know what's going to happen, you're trying to figure it out.

And so when the world that it builds is all unfolding and nested and kind of knowable/unknowable, so when the horror part of it reveals itself, like it was there all along, like it's always been with us… and I think that part of it, it's not just the building of the world, it's the reading of the world. That's what's so good about it. When we think about genre protocols, how it leads you there is so clever, and so beautifully done.

That's all from George, at least for this particular interview... but if you'd like to hear some of her thoughts about science fiction cinema and special effects (and a whole lot more), then you should really check out her keynote talk from the Conference in 2024. Two words for you: Jurassic. Park.

(For British readers of a certain age, those two words will likely have conjured up a particular pop-cultural character...)

If you've enjoyed reading this interview at Worldbuilding Agency, keep an eye out for more to come in the weeks and months ahead—and perhaps you'd consider taking out a paid subscription, so I have the time and resources to keep making them free for everyone to read?