Honoring 'The Day Iceland Stood Still'  ## Metadata - Author: [[Amanpour]] - Full Title: Honoring 'The Day Iceland Stood Still' - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2fe38933-f161-4b92-a121-bf070badd49a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Women’s Strike Revealed Social Leverage** - The 1975 Iceland women’s strike showed that when women stop working, society grinds to a halt. - That mass action accelerated Iceland's path to top global gender-equality rankings. Transcript: Christiane Amanpour On this day, 50 years ago, 90% of the women in Iceland went on strike. They stopped working in their jobs and at home to demonstrate the irreplaceable role of women in society. They refused to be invisible, and their women's day off changed Iceland forever. It's now the subject of a new documentary called The Day Iceland Stood Still. Halla Tómasdóttir If women don't work, everything collapses. We are going to show them that we can stop this society. The man thought it was ridiculous. Oh, you were so silly. Goodbye. Speaker 6 The beds were not made, dishes not washed, the telephone system went dead, theaters did not open, most of the schools were closed. ([Time 0:02:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/50d0c989-2849-43df-a13e-9250f199921e)) - **Childhood Memory Sparked Leadership** - Halla Tómasdóttir recalls her mother and aunts striking instead of baking on her mom’s birthday, making the day feel joyful and political. - That memory sparked her belief that one day she might matter and pursue leadership. Transcript: Halla Tómasdóttir And just quickly, you were seven years old when the actual day off, so to speak, happened October 24th, 50 years ago. Christiane Amanpour What do you remember from that day? Halla Tómasdóttir I remember it vividly because it was my mom's birthday and this day they were not baking and cleaning, see, and her sisters as on every other day. And they were on a strike and they were having fun while doing it. And pretty much nothing worked in Iceland that day. And it really made me think that when women are not at work, very few things work out well, at least. And when I asked my mom and her sisters why they were on a strike, they told me very plainly that they wanted to show that they matter. And I think that was maybe the beginning of me thinking that one day I might want to matter too. ([Time 0:04:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0adfb9c2-6940-45cc-af5a-fe5b4abe01eb)) - **Hidden History Sparks Film Project** - Pamela Hogan discovered the strike via a small Lonely Planet note and was stunned no film existed about it. - She found the women’s mix of humour and courage both compelling and cinematic. Transcript: Christiane Amanpour What struck, I mean, what made you get involved? How did you even decide to do a film about this date that, I mean, not everybody knows about? Yeah. Pamela Hogan You know, there's a famous saying, there's nothing new in the world except the history that you do not know. And when I was in Iceland on a family trip 10 years ago, and I read this tiny little blurb in the back of the Lonely Planet Guide about this incredible day. Like literally, Christian, my head exploded and I just thought, why don't I know the story and why don't we all know this story? And when I realized that no one had yet made a film about it and I started talking, calling some of the women, you know, just doing a little bit of research, I just thought, these women are Incredible. And not only are they, you know, courageous and did they do something that started really a revolution in their country, but they're also funny. They're humorous and they used humor to open people's ears to their message. ([Time 0:05:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e36888b6-38cc-4c02-b897-90147efbe563)) - **Repeat Firsts To Normalize Leadership** - Normalizing women in leadership requires repeating 'firsts' so female leaders become ordinary rather than exceptions. - Iceland credited repeated female appointments with shifting the national norm toward gender-balanced leadership. Transcript: Halla Tómasdóttir Madam Vigtis was not only the first female president in Iceland, but the first female to be democratically elected as president. And I remember equally vividly five years after the women's strike when she was elected, I felt as 11 year old girl that anything was possible. And her leadership, just like the collective leadership of women in 1975, changed my life. Her leadership really impacted the life of all of us who were lucky enough to grow up under her leadership. And I often point out that it's important to be first to break down these barriers. And we've had many first women leaders across Icelandic society. But I also think it's important when we elect a woman again for some of these positions, whether it's bishop, which now we have a second woman serving there, or president, where we have A second woman serving, and prime minister as well. So we have, because then we start to normalize women's leadership and gender balanced leadership. And it's not just the exception, and then we go back to the norm. It starts to become a new norm that women lead. And I think we've reached that level of closing the gender gap in Iceland. ([Time 0:08:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/141ff8f9-b057-4584-99ff-b4358f494fa7)) - **Coalition-Building Through Language Shift** - The 1975 action bridged radical and conservative women by renaming a 'strike' a 'women's day off' so everyone could join. - Ninety percent participation proved the organizing worked without social media or modern tools. Transcript: Halla Tómasdóttir Yeah, it's very interesting that some of the perhaps more radical women wanted to call it a strike and some of the more what you might say conservative women were more comfortable with Calling it a day off. And women somehow found a way before social media, before the internet, to organize a strike or a day off and find a bridge between those words so everybody could participate. And 90% of women participated and did no work that day. And I think it's quite an achievement at a time where we didn't have the tools that we have today to mobilize. But what I was more impressed with already at the age of seven and still am today is exactly what you mentioned, that they did it with such solidarity, even if they had to call it different Names. They did it with such courage and such joy. This was really a fun day. They were singing and chanting and making signs. And it was a fun day. And we have repeated it several times since. And we'll do so now on October 24th as well. ([Time 0:12:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1a3faf36-3a7e-4b1a-98ec-1a1189744df2)) - **Equality As Economic Strategy** - Closing the gender gap brought Iceland economic and social gains, including high GDP per capita and well-being scores. - Gender equality was framed as a national prosperity strategy, not just a women's issue. Transcript: Halla Tómasdóttir And many men as well. Because increasingly, I think in Iceland, we realize that closing the gender gap is for all of us. It's brought us economic progress. It's brought us social progress. Brought us to the top of many more lists than closing the gender gap, including highest GDP per capita, one of the highest and high well-being and happiness scores. And it really has delivered great progress to our country to focus on closing the gender gap. ([Time 0:13:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd57bd9a-7442-448a-bb46-b6e11e7cd882)) - **Hot Dogs And Male Allies** - Halla joked that hot dogs sold out because many men could only cook them when women stayed home. - She noted men of her generation became strong allies remembering the strike vividly. Transcript: Christiane Amanpour Because now all we hear about is boys around the world feeling alienated by the progress women have made, even though women still are not paid parity by any means and are still not as recruited For certain jobs as men are. Halla Tómasdóttir Well, first, I just want to point out that hot dogs sold out in Iceland that day, because apparently that was the only meal that many men could cook at the time. But joking aside, I think it meant a lot for both girls and boys who experienced this. And I know that men of my generation in particular remember this day vividly and have been great allies. And we would not be this far in closing the gender gap in iceland if it wasn't also in the interest of men to do so but in iceland as elsewhere we haven't fully closed the gender gap we still Have to work on gender-based violence that's still a problem here as elsewhere we still have to lift the floor of the wage gap that we have particularly for caring jobs teaching jobs, Caring for the elderly, caring for children. I think there's still a lot of work for us to do, even in Iceland that is supposedly best. ([Time 0:17:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/294cd7f2-6f39-41d7-b819-846901fa729a)) - **Reporting Exposed FGM's Human Cost** - Gayle Young described being shocked when invited to witness an Egyptian FGM ceremony and the child's anguished protest. - The raw footage and follow-up reporting sparked national debate and policy changes in Egypt. Transcript: Gayle Young So we found a number of families who were willing to invite us for the ceremony because in their mind it was a wonderful thing to do. It was, you know, they loved their children. They weren't trying to hurt their daughters. They thought they were helping them because they believed that female circumcision was needed because otherwise girls would get too excited, you know, if they did chores or wore underwear That was too tight or whatever, and that they would be susceptible to men who would take advantage of them. And so for them, it was a happy occasion. It was a rite of passage. So we went to a home and there was a... Christiane Amanpour I'm going to play the report, so don't give it all away. I won't give it all away. Gayle Young But what happened was not what we were expecting. Next. This morning she'll be circumcised. Hag Omar is known in Arabic as a hygienic barber. He circumcises thousands of girls each year as did his father before him. He doesn't bother to wash his hands or the child. A ripped sheet makes a crude bandage around her waist. The family celebrates. The operation will be quick without anesthetic. Shame on you, chides the barber. It's finished, soon you can get up and go play. ([Time 0:25:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2dc6f8fc-56f9-4349-80c9-cd615f1cc5b4)) - **Journalism Catalyzed Legal Change** - The CNN report on FGM prompted government action: bans in public facilities, education campaigns, and later stronger laws under President Sisi. - Journalism acted as a catalyst for social and legislative change over decades. Transcript: Gayle Young And everyone was talking about it. We were, both of us, interviewed by international press about that story. And then the next day, you did that thing you do with an interview with President Mubarak, where you held him accountable, and he stumbled. I'm going to actually play just a little clip of it, because I hadn't planned on it. Christiane Amanpour I didn't know I was just going to do President Mubarak as the host of this conference and as an important Middle East leader. But I had to focus on this. Here's a little bit of it. You saw that we did a report on the term female circumcision in this country, which is not illegal. Do you think you're going to, why don't you outlaw it? Speaker 6 Really, I think that this disappeared in our country. Maybe still in some village in Upper Egypt, but this appeared nearly. Christiane Amanpour If I was to tell you that it appears a lot... Speaker 6 I was shocked when I saw it yesterday. Christiane Amanpour Do you think your government can outlaw that? Speaker 6 It needs to explain to the people. Because if we cannot issue another law, they will not obey it. Because we will never catch them or never punish them. So interesting. Christiane Amanpour Shocked, which I believe, but also mindful of the conservative nature of much of the population. We can't issue a law. We'll never catch them. So what then happened? I mean, to be fair, they were about to kick us out of the country. Gayle Young You know, we got a lot of criticism for that story, both of us, CNN in general, for showing the girl's face, for not asking her her opinion, et cetera, et cetera. But others said this is a pivotal moment because this story will jolt them into action. And, you know, today, so many reports from the World Bank, journalists, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times were winning book. You know, they have cited that story as the catalyst for change. And not long after that interview, Mubarak, they did order that it would not be performed in public health facilities and that they would start an education campaign. And here we are 30 years later, and the number of girls circumcised in Egypt has dropped dramatically. Studies showed it was at 97% before or when we did the stories. And that now some surveys have suggested that only 15% of urban girls are now circumcised. Egypt itself puts that number for all girls more around 30th percentile. But the point is, it is going down. It has been made illegal. ([Time 0:29:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8aa6db86-0b1f-45d8-91be-0005655b6b01)) - **Model Of Platform Decay** - 'Enshittification' describes how platforms lure users, lock them in, then degrade service to monetize sellers. - The result is a monopoly-like system where end users and sellers both lose most of the platform's original value. Transcript: Cory Doctorow So it describes this pattern of platform decay. First, platforms are good to their end users. They find a way to lock those end users in. And once it's hard for them to leave, they make things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers who also get lured into the platform. Once they're locked in, the platform withdraws all of the value from those sellers as well. And eventually, it's just a pile of shit, right? Eventually, the platform is fully decayed, end-stage identification. But the more interesting thing is the questions it raises and the answers it proposes for why it's happening now. Speaker 6 So, you know, walk us through examples that people would be familiar with. I mean, you spend quite a bit of time on Facebook, and, you know, there's about 3 billion people on the planet that know what that is like. So kind of walk us through how this process has played itself out on something we're familiar with. Cory Doctorow Yeah, you know, Facebook started with a very attractive proposition. They went to people who were using MySpace, which was the big social media platform of the day, and they said, we will never, ever spy on you. And so people piled into the platform. They identified the people who mattered to them. They got a feed consisting solely of the things they asked to see. They also locked themselves in. They locked themselves in through something economists call the collective action problem, which you may know as the problem of getting the six people in your group chat to agree on What board game you're going to play this week and what movie you're going to see. Only when it's a couple of hundred people on Facebook and, you know, some of you are there because that's where the people with your rare disease, they're hanging out or where you meet With the people who live in the country you left behind or how you find your customers or your audience or just plan the little league carpool. It can be really hard to go. And so once Facebook knows that you can't leave anymore, they start phase two of inshification, making things worse for you to make things better for business customers. So they go to, you know, the advertisers and they say, hey, do you remember when we told these suckers that we weren't going to spy on them? Obviously, that's a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends. We have these incredibly detailed, non-consensual dossiers on them. And if you give us remarkably small sums of money, we will target ads to them with incredible fidelity. They go to the publishers and they say, you remember when we told these people we were only going to show them things they asked to see? Obviously, that's a lie too. We will cram stuff into people's eyeballs who never asked to see it. All you need to do is put excerpts from your own website on Facebook with a link back to your own website so people can click on it and we'll just show it to people who never asked to see it. So they get locked in too. They become dependent on us. We know a lot about monopoly and kind of our daily lives. We think a lot about what happens when there's just a few sellers, but it's actually just as bad when there's just a few buyers. So you get this monopsony lock-in, right, where Facebook has control over its sellers, and it makes things worse for them. We see ad prices going through the roof. We see ad targeting fidelity going through the floor. We see ad fraud exploding. Publishers had to put more and more of their content on Facebook. You had to put so much that there was no reason to visit your website. And, of course, no one was going to because if you put a link to your own website on Facebook, they wouldn't show it to anyone because maybe that link was a malicious link. And so we end up with this kind of deadlock where we are holding each other hostage. The businesses are held hostage by us. The amount of content in our feed that we want to see has dwindled to a kind of undetectable homeopathic residue. ([Time 0:39:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/995e70f6-763d-48dd-9a79-7e6e86742ffb)) - **Uberification Exploits Workers Digitally** - 'Uberification' extends algorithmic exploitation across labor markets using dynamic pricing, misclassification, and data-driven wage discrimination. - Digital tools enable precision extraction from workers while regulatory and competitive checks lag behind. Transcript: Speaker 6 I mean, because we talked about Facebook, we talked about Google, and it seems like slightly a different type of business, but it kind of follows the rules that you lay out in this book Of how these platforms decay. Cory Doctorow Yeah, so, you know, Google lost $31 billion over 13 years, mostly Saudi royal money. They got it from a venture capital fund called SoftBank that's run by Masayoshi's son. That's the same people who gave us WeWork and they gave us, well, now they're backing OpenAI. So the Saudis subsidize 40 cents, 41 cents out of every dollar of all of our taxi rides for more than a decade. All the other cab companies go under. We have a lost decade in transit. And as a result, when Uber starts to raise prices, and they more than doubled them now, and when they start to cut wages, and they've more than halved them now, we're often without any Other alternatives. They're able to make a lot of money from this. They're redeeming those discounts they offered in the early days. Uber has really digital, high-tech ways of changing the wages and prices that they pay and offer. So this is something called algorithmic wage discrimination, comes from a legal scholar called Vina Dubal. And what Uber does is periodically offers drivers a slightly low ball offer, a little less per mile, a little less per minute. And when the driver takes that, if they take the bait, then the offer goes down again a little while later and it goes down again a little while after that. The idea here is to sort of in the manner of boiling frog to get that driver to abandon all the things that used to let them be picky about which Uber rides they would take. And as a result, you have the steady erosion of these wages. Now, that's something that's spread to other fields where you have contractors. Google, or rather Uber, misclassifies its employees as contractors and can get away with paying them different wages for the same work. That's also true in fields like nursing, where hospitals preferentially hire nurses as contractors, not as staff. It's how they do union avoidance. And it used to be that if you were hiring a contract nurse for the day, you do it with a staffing agency, and that would be someone local. These days, there's four giant apps, each of which bills itself as Uber for nursing. And because we haven't had a new privacy law since 1988, these apps, before they offer nurses a shift, can go to a data broker and find out how much credit card debt the nurse has. And the more credit card debt that nurse is carrying, the lower the wage they are offered. They are imputing financial desperation and charging them a premium as a result. ([Time 0:45:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5c9ea66e-7a35-43fe-b029-fe475812a3f6)) - **Push For Federal Privacy Law** - Advocate for a federal privacy law with a private right of action to curb mass surveillance and platform harms. - Push coordinated coalitions to align privacy, consumer and civil-rights interests for effective reform. Transcript: Cory Doctorow Believe in systemic changes. And you asked about which policies would make a difference. Well, you know, privacy law would sure go a long way. There are lots of different people who are angry about the privacy situation in America. And if we could get them all to start pulling in the same direction, boy, could we ever make a difference, right? And the answer to this is a federal privacy law with a private right of action. And we are long overdue for it. That would be a very big one. And I think it's a relatively easy lift. The other stuff's a little harder. One thing that I go into some detail on in the book is how to think about a policy that is administrable, right? So we can imagine lots of things we don't want companies to do, but figuring out whether they're following those rules is really hard. If we say, okay, we have to stop people from harassing people and allowing hate speech. Well, you have to agree on what hate speech is. You have to investigate something that someone has called hate speech and see whether it is hate speech. You have to decide whether the company did what it could to stop it. This is like a multi-year process for something that happens 100 times a minute on a platform like Facebook. And so it's just not a great answer. Meanwhile, if you ask yourself, why do people on Facebook who are bombarded with hate speech and harassment stay on Facebook? Well, the answer is that they don't want to leave their friends, right? And so those people stay. So why don't we make it easier for them to leave? You know, Mark Zuckerberg gave you a scraper that would let you leave MySpace, but still see the messages for you in MySpace. We could reverse engineer apps to do that. We could use scrapers to do it. And we could also mandate, you know, through policy that firms do it. So we could make it so that if you left Twitter or Facebook and went to Blue Sky or Mastodon, that you could see the things people were posting for you on the platform you used to belong to, And they could see the things that you posted in reply. And that would mean that if the company didn't treat you well, you could leave. That is how you vote with your feet and vote with your wallet. But in order to do it, we need policy that makes it possible as to how you get involved in policy. ([Time 0:48:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/05cfceec-d4b2-4408-818d-f89d3399d53c))