Technology and the Bay

On this episode of North Gate Radio, five reporters explore how people across the Bay Area are dealing with technology and its impact on the human experience in a rapidly changing world. You’ll hear about the repair café volunteers in Silicon Valley saving electronics from landfills, a young mother using social media to find community while facing a terminal diagnosis, the pressures of optimization on Palo Alto youth, and why Gen Z is suddenly obsessed with physical media. We close with a visit to Children’s Fairyland in Oakland to see why puppets still capture the shortest attention spans. 

This is a recording of North Gate Radio that was broadcast live on KALX radio station, 90.7FM.

 

Full transcript

Dinée Dorame: Good morning and welcome to Northgate Radio. I’m Dinée Dorame.

Chelsea Kurnick: And I’m Chelsea Kurnick. Today is April 16th, and we’re excited to share the first of five radio shows produced this semester at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Dinée Dorame: We start our show with a story about volunteers who help neighbors get their broken stuff fixed, for free.

Aditya Nyir: I mean, you bought it for a reason and I feel like you can keep it for a long time, that’s great.

Chelsea Kurnick: Next, we’ll meet a young woman who found community while facing a terminal illness.

Lindy Ávalos: ​​Social media has been great in finding people going through a similar thing.

Dinée Dorame: Then we go to Palo Alto, where teenagers are feeling the pressure of optimization.

Kevin Volkan: The idea that the children are treated as black boxes: you put an input in and then you get an output.

Chelsea Kurnick: We hear why Gen Z is embracing physical media.

Tallula Richardi: I love to buy things and I have to be really careful about not just buying anything that looks cool.

Dinée Dorame: And we end our show in Oakland at Children’s Fairyland with a puppeteer who has been here for nearly 50 years.

Randal Metz:  I don’t think they realize how much a puppet can influence a child.

Chelsea Kurnick: But first, Lenéa Sims with the news.

Lenéa: Live from North Gate Radio, good morning! I’m Lenéa Sims with news of what’s happening across the Bay.

Drivers in the Bay Area should plan ahead this weekend ––  a major stretch of eastbound Interstate 80 in San Francisco will be closed.

The shutdown begins at 11 p.m. Friday and will run all the way to Monday at 6am. It’ll impact about a mile and a half of freeway around the interchange connecting I-80 with Highway 101.

Drivers are urged to avoid the area if possible and to plan for significant traffic delays. There will probably also be more riders on BART and the bus than usual.

The closure is part of Caltrans’ “Fab Rehab” project, which is repairing aging viaducts near the Bay Bridge and bringing them up to current safety standards.

In San Francisco, health officials have confirmed the city’s first case of measles since 2019 in an unvaccinated infant who was exposed during international travel.

California has already recorded 39 measles cases so far this year. In 2025, the state had just 25 cases total. There’s been an ongoing outbreak in the Sacramento region since February, which has now reached 17 cases. Health officials expect this number to increase.

There’s also been a resurgence of the disease nationwide. Measles was previously declared eliminated in the U.S. in the year 2000.

Finally this morning, it looks like San Francisco’s 4/20 celebration is going up in flames –– but not like usual. For the third year in a row, the city’s official 4/20 party on Hippie Hill at Golden Gate Park has been canceled because of funding cuts.

If you’re planning to celebrate at the park anyway, you may be disappointed — the space is reserved for a sports event from 1-6pm. And as a reminder, public cannabis use is still illegal for people of all ages and could result in a fine.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Lenéa Sims.

Dinée Dorame: A lot of us don’t know what to do with our stuff when it breaks, so we just throw it away.

A movement to reduce that waste is gaining steam in California.

The state passed the Right to Repair Act in 2023 – and advocates continue to push for additional improvements and changes.

Patricio Provencio reports that the culture of the movement is most visible in local “repair cafes”.

Patricio Provencio: Repair Café Silicon Valley is a community event in a packed Milpitas library room, where people bring everything from cellphones and bikes to laptops and microwaves to get them repaired for free.

Dozens crowd around work tables while others wait for their turn, and a bell rings out every time something gets fixed.

[A bell ring]

Aditya Nyir has come all the way from Reno to get a mixer grinder fixed…

Aditya Nyir: In Indian cooking, we use a lot of batter, and that usually tries to create a lot of load on the mixer, so that’s probably caused something to not work.

Patricio Provencio: Owen Yang, a young software engineer and first-time “fixer”, is hoping to apply his abilities to help Nyir.

Owen Yang: These skills I have can actually be applied to solve a problem. I just like solving problems.

Patricio Provencio: Nyir is worried that the grinder might not work again and potentially ruin a special family visit.

Aditya Nyir: We got this because our grandmom is coming and she likes to do stuff in this.

Patricio Provencio: Before finding out about this repair café, Nyir and his wife were about to get rid of it.

Aditya Nyir: It was not something that we were planning like we’ll get fixed. We were planning to like just throw it away.

Patricio Provencio: If Nyir and his wife have to toss it, it would not only add more waste to our growing landfills. It’s also considered e-waste. Sometimes full of chemicals that can leak into the ground and pollute the environment.

But the thing is, many devices have gotten harder to fix. Elizabeth Chamberlain, sustainability lead at the online repair hub iFixit, explains that this is by design.

Elizabeth Chamberlain: A lot of stuff is not being made to be fixable today. We’ve got all kinds of devices that are designed not to have replaceable parts, you know, designed with glues instead of screws.

Patricio Provencio: This forces people to throw out old devices or spend a lot of money on simple fixes. Jon Freilich, one of the organizers of the repair café, has seen this happen many times.

Jon Freilich: There’s a KitchenAid blender that I’ve been trying to repair where it’s just a little rubber gasket in the bottom of the blender jar, and it’s not sold. KitchenAid says, “If that’s bad, you need to buy the entire blender jar for $90.” And this is like a 5 cent rubber gasket. It just doesn’t make any sense to throw away the entire jar and spend that much money just to repair it.

Patricio Provencio: Frustrations like these led Freilich and others to launch Repair Café Silicon Valley, the group that regularly organizes repair cafés across the valley.

iFixit’s Chamberlain notes that repair cafés are part of the Right of Repair movement, a coalition of advocacy groups and citizens pushing for laws around the country that make it easier to fix things.

Elizabeth Chamberlain: The movement is really focused on requiring manufacturers to provide parts, tools, documentation, making sure that manufacturers can’t put roadblocks in our way.

Patricio Provencio: Thanks to the movement, California has a right to repair law that opens up access to the parts and tools needed to fix devices like Nyir’s grinder and Freilich’s blender. Since California passed its law, states like Washington, Oregon, and Texas have followed suit.

Nick Lapis, a lead advocate at the non-profit Californians Against Waste, says that California now needs to fix a major loophole in its law.

Nick Lapis: One of the things we didn’t get was prohibiting parts pairing, which is this practice of an individual part being tied to a specific component. For example, if you take two identical iPhones that have the same model and you swap screens between them, the phone will reject it, and that’s a software decision that the companies make.

Patricio Provencio: Lapis thinks the legislature will consider closing that loophole in the next year or two.

Although much remains to be done to ensure that things are easy to fix, Chamberlain points out that repair cafés are the motor that pushes the movement forward.

Elizabeth Chamberlain: Repair cafes are shaping culture and helping people realize that we can still fix things even when manufacturers don’t make it easy.

Patricio Provencio: Back in the repair café, Yang and Nyir aren’t thinking about changing the law. They just want to fix the grinder.

Owen Yang: Is this? Is this gonna fix this?

Aditya Nyir: But, then, no. That would be crazy!

[A loud noise from the grinder]

Owen Yang: Fixed. It works!

Aditya Nyir: Are you kidding me? Okay. So, we didn’t use this for a long time and now it works. That’s amazing!

Patricio Provencio: Nyir says it’s better to get things repaired than throwing them away to extend their lifespan and reduce waste.

Aditya Nyir: I mean, you bought it for a reason and I feel like you can keep it for a long time, that’s great. My wife, she’s gonna be happy because we can actually use this.

[A bell ring followed by applause]

Patricio Provencio: While repair advocates push for better policies in Sacramento and elsewhere, these volunteers are proving that with the right tools and a sense of community we can keep our stuff in use and out of the landfills.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Patricio Provencio.

Chelsea Kurnick:  A content warning: The following story is about terminal illness.

I would like you to think about what you were doing at the age of 34. Or, if you are not yet that age, what do you envision for yourself?

Our next story is about someone who was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at 34 years old… That’s really young.

What surprised her is that it could have been prevented. Now, she’s creating a community to get the word out … Brenda Yamilex Vasquez reports.

Brenda Vasquez:  Hi Lindy.

Lindy Ávalos: Hi Brenda.

Brenda Vasquez: How are you?

Lindy Ávalos: I’m doing good.

Brenda Vasquez:  That’s Lindy, mother to a toddler and is about to celebrate 37 years around the sun. I asked her to tell me why this birthday is a little extra special.

Lindy Ávalos: When I was diagnosed, I was given one year to three years. So, I’m coming up on my max life expectancy.

Brenda Vasquez: You were pregnant and with cancer and you didn’t know. What was that like?

Lindy Ávalos: I thought I was just having a really bad pregnancy. It was horrific. They thought I was having kidney stones or just having a bad pregnancy, but turns out it was cancer. We just didn’t know. So, my diagnosis is colon cancer. It’s called adenocarcinoma. I was stage four when they found it, and it spread to my liver and my lymph nodes and my lungs. I remember hearing that and being like, oh my God, I could only live for three more years.

Brenda Vasquez:  So, after your diagnosis, you told your sister to get tested, although she was only 30 years old.

Lindy Ávalos: Because I was diagnosed, my sister was able to get a colonoscopy ‘cause otherwise insurance wouldn’t have approved it because unless you’re now 45, insurance normally won’t approve it unless there’s like a preexisting condition or you’re having symptoms and they found two precancerous polyps. I get on my soapbox so much because the best way to prevent colon cancer is to remove the polyps. And, if you don’t know you have polyps, you can’t remove ’em. And a colonoscopy is way too much money to pay for out of pocket. So, unless insurance approves it, you’re kind of out of luck, which is why so many people are saying this needs to be lowered to at least 30.

Brenda Vasquez:  Since your diagnosis. You’ve been advocating a lot for cancer research and for people getting tested early and you’ve been posting about your life with cancer online. Here’s one of your TikToks.

Lindy Ávalos [TikTok video]: So, it’s about 3:30 in the morning, and this is the reality of cancer. I’m in a lot of pain, so come with me to push my pain button so I can get some pain meds.

Brenda Vasquez: Why is it important for you to be on social media?

Lindy Ávalos: If you can see, hey, come with me to have chemo, it’s not as scary as you may build up in your mind. And to show people, hey, yeah, I’m only now 30, almost seven years old and I have stage four colon cancer and this is not normal and what’s going on and why is this happening? So, hopefully there can be more research being done and we can prevent this in the future, and if I do die, you know, my family can go back and hear my voice and see my face.

Brenda Vasquez: What… keeps you going?

Lindy Ávalos: My son: wanting to see him grow up, that is a big reason to want to continue to fight, and I would love to be that old stereotypical, me and my husband sitting in our rocking chairs, watching our grandkids play. You know, everybody wants to see their life through. I just want to be alive.

Brenda Vasquez: Thank you so much, Lindy.

Lindy Ávalos: Thank you, Brenda.

Brenda Vasquez:  That was Lindy Ávalos, who, as a young cancer patient, turned to social media to find community and build meaningful connections with others from her generation who are sadly facing a very similar experience… and who just celebrated her 37th birthday. Happy birthday, Lindy.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Brenda Yamilex Vasquez.

Dinée Dorame: In the past couple of years, thinkers and journalists who grew up in Palo Alto have been trying to understand what’s happening in their hometown. Once an artistic bohemia, it’s now the epicenter of the tech boom, but what is the cost for today’s youth? Gabriel Lopez reports. Please note, this story contains mention of suicide.

Gabriel Lopez: Malcolm Harris is a journalist who grew up in Palo Alto and a couple of years ago he wrote a book called “Palo Alto: A History of California Capitalism and the World”.

It’s a sprawling 700-page book that begins with the city’s colonial past, which led to the mass death of the indigenous population, to the current technological boom happening in Silicon Valley, and he touches on the epidemic of suicides at Gunn and Palo Alto High Schools.

Harris writes, “We have a word for idyllic towns where the youth suicide rate is three times as high as it’s supposed to be. ‘Haunted.’ Palo Alto is haunted.”

Kevin Volkan: I think Harris really does a good job of talking about this.

Gabriel Lopez:  That’s Dr. Kevin Volkan. He’s a professor of psychology at Cal State Channel Islands. Volkan also grew up in Palo Alto. He recently wrote an essay called “Haunted by Innovation: Technology, Psychoanalysis, and Growing up in Palo Alto”.

Kevin Volkan: The idea that the children are treated essentially as black boxes.

Gabriel Lopez: … Or like computers…

Dr. Kevin Volkan: You put an input in and you get an output.

Gabriel Lopez: The input being the best schools, club sports, music lessons. And the output, an acceptance letter to Stanford or another Ivy League school. It’s a kind of binary thinking that seeped into the collective unconscious of the place that people, like technology, can be optimized.

Kevin Volkan: I think there’s a lot of pushing the kids nowadays into rational-based professions where you can find some kind of perfection.

If you are coding something or making a product or, you know, something that can be measured, maybe it’s the amount of money you make. I think there’s a lot of pushing the kids nowadays into that.

Gabriel Lopez: In his essay, Volkan connects the suicides at Gunn and Palo Alto High Schools to this larger cultural shift, and he believes that shift happened when Silicon Valley lost its artistic soul.

Kevin Volkan: Jerry Garcia taught music down at Dana’s Music downtown and, you know, supposedly slept in his car on University Avenue. The Hell’s Angels had a crash pad down the block from me in Palo Alto, which, now you would just go, that’s impossible.

Gabriel Lopez: Volkan grew up in Palo Alto in the 1960s before it became what he calls, quote, a cultural wasteland, a surface of affluence covering a haunted shadowy group unconscious.

 For Dr. Volkan, the artistic and cultural components of a town are vital to a community’s ability to cope with the pressures and pains of the world.

Kevin Volkan: ​ The unconscious forces in our lives can be channeled through and processed and digested through art. When you create a culture that devalues that and really overvalues rationality, logic – things that we tend to use to repress our emotions and repress unconscious material – we’ve lost ways to digest and come to grips with those things.

Gabriel Lopez: All is not lost. Dr. Volkan is optimistic that things can still get better.

Kevin Volkan:  I think kids will start rebelling in their own ways and they’ll do it through music and they’ll do it through their own youth culture kinds of things. The kids should be encouraged to individuate and find themselves, and if the adults don’t do it, I think the impetus for that will find a way out.

Gabriel Lopez: We are seeing that change happening as we speak. Youth today are reaching for analog media and a less tech-filled existence.

For North Gate Radio, I’m Gabriel Lopez.

Chelsea Kurnick: Gen Z grew up with digital media at their fingertips, so it may surprise you to learn that today’s teens and young adults are now embracing physical media.

You know … CDs, DVDs, vinyl, print magazines … some are even buying cassette tapes.

Steffi Puerto tells us about the generation that’s shifting the culture of media.

[Noise of a casette been inserted into a tape recorder]

Steffi Puerto: I’m at Out of the Closet Thrift Store on Polk Street. It’s a large pink building with blue accents. Inside, you can find Tallula Richardi, a 24-year-old city native, flipping through CDs. She loves everything retro and vintage.

Tallula Richardi: Yeah, so CDs, cassettes and VHS are a $1.25 each, which is great. Records are only $2 and DVDs are $2.25 generally. I mean, sometimes there’s outliers, but yeah, I, this is a fun… I like how big this is because you can really dig.

Steffi Puerto: That was Richardi. She visits this thrift store often when she is on the hunt for new CDs, magazines, or even DVDs. And when she finds something great…

Tallula Richardi: Oh! Wow! See, this is Kelly Clarkson, “A moment like this before Your Love Live on American Idol.” Never seen that before.

Steffi Puerto: But Richardi isn’t the only person who loves collecting physical media; it’s a trend that’s been rapidly growing within Gen-Z, who share it on social media platforms like TikTok…

TikTok User #1: I’m getting back to physical media just in case they ban my favorites.

TikTok User #2: We don’t own anything. Not our homes, not our cars, not our devices, not even our music and movies. This is my case for physical media.

TikTok User #3: You don’t own anything anymore. Sure, you pay for a streaming service, but the content gets taken from you whenever their contract expires. You don’t pay money to see a movie or listen to an album, but instead you pay for the permission to do so. Movies, music, even video games now are all intangible.

Steffi Puerto: It’s a trend, but it’s also a lifestyle that’s built on aesthetics, nostalgia, and practicality… In Richardi’s case, she started collecting CD’s three months ago with the intention of listening to albums in their entirety.

Tallula Richardi: And I was realizing on Spotify and Apple Music and all that I was listening to a lot of, like, playlists that I made, but also playlists that Spotify made. And I really wasn’t listening to albums in their original order and in completion.

Steffi Puerto: She says that she thinks that albums made before 2005 were meant to be listened to in the order they were released.

I went to visit Jacob Gaboury’s office, an assistant professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley. But it doesn’t look like your typical professor’s office. Inside he has a wall with old iconic VHS tapes like 1995’s “Party Girl”, an old school iMac and video game consoles from the 1980’s to the 2010’s.

Steffi Puerto: So, that’s, Nintendo 64?

Jacob Gaboury: Nintendo 64. Super Nintendo, um, there’s a Wii up there, there’s a Sega Genesis.

Steffi Puerto: Gaboury wrote a book that examines the archaeology of computer graphics and to him, physical media can teleport the user back in time.

But he acknowledges that there are some downsides to physical media, like the fact that it slowly falls apart.

Jacob Gaboury: See, the Super Nintendo has a big crack in it right there, um, but I think there’s also something really useful about handling original objects when you’re doing history.

Steffi Puerto: Gaboury says that some of what’s driving Gen Z’s usage of physical media is nostalgia. But nostalgia has its issues.

Jacob Gaboury: The challenge, of course, as I said, I know I keep coming back to this, but a lot of the CDs that I have from when I was in college don’t work anymore, and a lot of the DVDs also rot and, um, fall apart. And so there’s a kind of inevitable need to digitize or at least reformat these things in different ways.

Steffi Puerto: Back at the thrift store, Richardi isn’t bothered by physical media falling apart.

Tallula Richardi: I have to be really careful about not just buying anything that looks cool, um, and like I’ve only been collecting these for three months, and I’m almost out of room on my little shelf. Um, which is why I think I try to only buy albums that I know are solid and I know I’ll enjoy. I don’t want to take too many risks on buying actual media. So I think that’s where the combination of digital and physical comes in.

Steffi Puerto: For North Gate Radio, I’m Steffi Puerto

Dinée Dorame: Parents know that kids’ attention spans are getting shorter. A study by researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that when kids spend more time on social media, it can actually hurt their ability to focus. Samson Nivins was the lead researcher on that study.

Samson Nivins: School age children who are using more time on social media at nine to 10 years, they tend to have more inattention symptoms when they’re at 13 to 14 years.

Grace McCarty: Reporter Grace McCarty found a place where kids are able to pay attention without screens, and have been for decades … and that place is Children’s Fairyland in Oakland.

[Joyful music]

Grace McCarty: On the shores of Lake Merritt a tiny outdoor theater is packed.

Voice: Alright, without further ado, please put your hands together for how the little dipper came to be.

[Audience applause]

Grace McCarty: Kindergarteners and preschoolers— most of them on field trips in matching fluorescent vests—sit shoulder to shoulder, waiting. Then, the show starts. But instead of talking to their friends or acting out, they’re transfixed— giggling, pointing, even jumping out of their seats, like, is anyone else seeing this?

Voice Actor:  I do hope I’m not lost. No! Here’s the path again.

[Wolf-like cry]

Voice Actor: What was that?

[Wolf-like cry]

Audience Member: That’s the doggy.

Voice Actor: Oh, my!

Grace McCarty: Puppet shows still work. “How the Little Dipper Came to Be” has been running since 1980— and kids still sit mesmerized. Puppeteer Randal Metz has been here nearly 50 years.

Randal Metz: So, we are a legitimate theater, meaning we can build the sets, we fly them, we can do everything that a theater production does, but just back in that room over there.

Grace McCarty: Metz has been capturing kids’ attention since the ‘70s—and says it comes down to giving kids live theater.

Randal Metz: It’s not on the screen. It’s not a movie. They are watching scenery change, music being played, things happening. So, it is like going to their first Broadway show.

Grace McCarty: Metz says concerns about children’s attention spans are exactly why puppets matter now.

Randal Metz: I write for adults and I write for children, and then I’ll see the parents out there putting the cell phones away, putting them into their pocket, because all of a sudden now they’re captivated by it and they can then get closer to their child, put their arm around them, and then it becomes a bonding thing between child and parent.

Grace McCarty: Maria Rodriguez, the manager of the puppet theater at Fairyland, says that teachers will ask her how she was able to capture children’s attention.

Maria Rodriguez: Teachers are just constantly blown away by the fact that they’re like, you held their intention for the full… that program’s 45 minutes long. You held their attention that whole time, and that’s the magic of puppetry, right? A puppet can say anything and the kids are gonna pay attention.

Grace McCarty: Rodriguez has a couple theories as to why puppets seem to be such an enduring method of capturing children’s attention.

Maria Rodriguez: I think maybe because there is so much screen time that it’s starting to switch. They want that in-person interactive touching of things. And so, we’re actually seeing more of a resurgence to the arts, to handmade crafts, because that’s not what they grew up with.

Grace McCarty: The researcher on the study that found links between screen time and lower attention spans, Samson Nivins, says the multitasking nature of devices is clear.

Samson Nivins:  The kids who are using the digital media. So they tend to open multiple things at the same time. Just switching between one… next, next, next, next, next… and when you make those kids to sit in the class, that becomes a habit ’cause their brain, like, cannot focus on specific tasks.

Grace McCarty: Dimitri Christakis is another researcher who’s examining children’s attention spans and more traditional media, like puppets.

Dimitri Christakis: But puppet shows happen in real time because they can’t emulate cartoons. And I think as an alternative to screen time, they’re wonderful. But kids have loved puppets. That’s why the early Sesame Street relied on Muppets. And in fact, they did studies to show what draws children attention. And, guess what? They are more interested in puppets than they are in humans.

Grace McCarty: Back at the Fairyland puppet theater, Metz says the public fascination with puppets comes in cycles. He’s lived through them all—but it always returns to the same place: the connection between a parent and a child.

Randal Metz: The nice thing about Fairyland is it can be important in your childhood and then you outgrow it. But then when you have kids and you’re around kids, it comes back again because you wanna share your memories when you were a child with that new family and they will do the same thing.

Grace McCarty: Metz says puppets help children express themselves.

Randal Metz: I don’t think they realize how much a puppet can influence a child. That’s kind of how I became a puppeteer. I needed to express myself.

Grace McCarty: Why are kids still paying attention?

Randal Metz: ‘Cause puppets are actually, a, uh, invention for children to get their thoughts out. Henceforth, the puppet is one of the greatest teachers you could want.

Grace McCarty: For North Gate Radio, I’m Grace McCarty, at Children’s Fairyland in Oakland.

Dinée Dorame: That’s it for North Gate Radio. Thanks for tuning in. Today’s show was produced by Joni Binder and Brenda Yamilex Vasquez. Our Director was Gabriel Lopez and our Executive Producer was Grace McCarty.

Chelsea Kurnick: Rick Johnson was our engineer. Queena Sook Kim and Ethan Toven-Lindsey were our faculty advisors.

Dinée Dorame: North Gate Radio is a production of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I’m Dinée Dorame.

Chelsea Kurnick: And I’m Chelsea Kurnick. Tune in next Thursday to hear more stories from our program.