We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable.

We speak to Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us on the shifting politics of Silicon Valley. We’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintain the status quo? Marx is author of the book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, out now from Verso Books.

This is part of a wider series on techno-utopian thinking, produced with professors Tanner Mirrlees and Imre Szemen. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.