Tech Won't Save Us

Paris Marx is joined by tante to discuss troubling developments in the open source world as Wordpress goes to war with WP Engine and a new definition of open source AI doesn’t require being open about training data.

tante is a sociotechnologist, writer, speaker, and Luddite working on tech and its social impact.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• tante wrote about the problem with the Open Source Initiative’s definition of open source AI.
• Check out this link for the full breakdown on the Wordpress drama.
• Wordpress changed its trademark guidelines on September 19 regarding the use of the WP abbreviation.
• Tumblr and Wordpress started selling user data for AI training earlier this year.
• A lot of the controversy around Richard Stallman started blowing up in 2019.

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Paris Marx is joined by Jacob Silverman to discuss all the money Elon Musk is pouring into the US election and what Silicon Valley’s political influence will mean regardless of who becomes president.

Jacob Silverman is the author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, coming in September 2025 from Bloomsbury. His book Easy Money is now available in paperback.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• The New York Times reported on Elon Musk’s efforts to get Trump elected in the final two weeks of the campaign.
• The Pennsylvania district attorney sued Elon Musk’s PAC to stop his $1 million giveaways.
• Marc Andreessen wrote the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and the Little Tech Agenda.
• FTX was up to way more shady things that didn’t make it into the first trial of Sam Bankman-Fried. The second didn’t go ahead after he was found guilty in the first.
• The canvassing operation for Trump by Elon Musk's PAC has been flagged as potentially fraudulent.
• The US Supreme Court’s Chevron decision will have significant consequences for federal regulators.

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Tech billionaires are embracing extreme right-wing politics. It’s not just to enhance their power, but to try to realize a harmful vision for humanity’s future that could see humans merging with machines and possibly even living in computer simulations. Will we allow them to put our collective resources behind their science fiction dreams, or fight for a better future and a different kind of technology to go along with it? This is episode 4 of Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The show is hosted by Paris Marx. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Postdoctoral candidate at Case Western Reserve University Émile P. Torres, features reporter at The Information Julia Black, Goldsmiths University lecturer Dan McQuillan, and former head of the Center for Applied Data Ethics Ali Alkhatib were interviewed for this episode.
• Pieces by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and an interview with Elon Musk were cited.

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Paris Marx is joined by Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry to discuss how Silicon Valley's extractive data collection regime and the power it grants them resembles a much older form of exploitation: colonialism.

Ulises A. Mejias is a professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Oswego and Nick Couldry is a professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics. They are the co-authors of Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back and among the co-founders of the network Tierra Común.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Read an excerpt of Ulises and Nick’s book.
• Ulises has helped advance the Non-Aligned Technologies Movement.
• The World Economic Forum and Accenture published a report on governance of AI.
• Geoffrey Hinton was one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics. Paris wrote about why we shouldn’t trust his assessment of AI.
• Google told the UK Labour government it will be left behind in the AI race if it doesn’t do what the company demands.
• Data centers use 21% of electricity in Ireland, and number that could jump to 31% within the next three years.
• Home building in West London could be restricted until 2035 because data centers have used up the available energy.
• Kenya is being drafted into the US’s anti-China tech alliance, which includes building data centers while ignoring the poor working conditions of data labelers and content moderators.

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Sam Altman is clear: he’s ready to sacrifice anything for his AI fantasies. But are we? We dig into why generative AI has such extreme energy demands and how major tech companies are trying to rewrite climate accounting rules to cover how much their emissions are rising. AI isn’t just churning out visual slop; it’s also being used to transform how our society works and further reduce people’s power over their lives. It’s a disaster any way you look at it. This is episode 3 of Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The show is hosted by Paris Marx. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Hugging Face Climate Lead Sasha Luccioni, Associate Professor in Economics Cecilia Rikap, former head of the Center for Applied Data Ethics Ali Alkhatib, Goldsmiths University lecturer Dan McQuillan, and Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute Alex Hanna were interviewed for this episode.
• Interviews with Sam Altman and Brad Smith were cited.

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Paris Marx is joined by Julia Black to discuss who Curtis Yarvin is and how his anti-democratic, far-right writings have influenced the politics of Silicon Valley and the wider American extreme right.

Julia Black is a features reporter on The Information’s Weekend Team.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Julia wrote about Curtis Yarvin and his ideas for The Information. She also wrote about the Musk-aligned tech CEOs trying to shape how we think about the future.
• Paris wrote about Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto.
• The Dark Enlightenment is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian political project.
• Gil Duran wrote about the Reboot Conference and how it put the connections between the tech industry and the Heritage Foundation on display.
• The Heritage Foundation is flooding federal agencies with thousands of information requests to identify government employees to be purged under a second Trump administration.
• Peter Thiel wanted Balaji Srinivasan to become head of the Federal Drug Administration under the Trump presidency.
• According to Nick Land, hyperstition refers to ideas that bring themselves into being.

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As hyperscale data centers move into communities, they come with significant water and energy demands that some are not willing to put up with. We go to Ireland, Spain, and Chile to learn about the effects of data centers on the ground and why some communities are fighting back. They’re asking whether the tradeoffs they’re being expected to make are really necessary. This is episode 2 of Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The show is hosted by Paris Marx. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• People Before Profit TD Brid Smith, Tu Nube Seca Mi Río organizer Aurora Gomez Delgado, and King’s College London lecturer Sebastian Leuede were interviewed for this episode.
• Some pieces by Dara Kerr in NPR, Sarah Emerson and Emily Baker-White in Forbes, and Hannah Daly in The Irish Times were cited.
• A full transcript can be found on the show’s official website.

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Paris Marx is joined by Spencer Ackerman to discuss the past year of Israel's actions in Palestine and the innovations in war technology being used to carry out what the ICJ has deemed a "plausible" genocide in Gaza.

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer-prize winning author of Reign of Terror. He’s a contributor at Zeteo and publishes the Forever Wars newsletter. He’s also writing a new series of Iron Man comics that come out very soon.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Spencer wrote a piece marking a year since October 7 for Zeteo. He’s also written about the Lebanon pager attack and Israel’s innovation with quadcopters.
• Yuval Abraham has written about the use of AI in Gaza and how Israel is relying on US cloud companies for military purposes.
• Roberto González wrote a paper about the links between Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex.

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Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the dominant players in the cloud market. Around the world, they’re building massive hyperscale data centers that they claim are necessary to power the future of our digital existence. But they also increase their power over other companies and come with massive resource demands communities are getting fed up with. Is their future really the one we want? This is episode 1 of Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The show is hosted by Paris Marx. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Senior cloud consultant Dwayne Monroe and Associate Professor in Economics Cecilia Rikap were interviewed for this episode.
• Interviews with Jeff Bezos and The Oregonian journalist Mike Rogoway were cited.

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Paris Marx is joined by Karl Bode to discuss how Mark Zuckerberg's makeover and the PR campaign that’s accompanied it shouldn’t distract from the ongoing harms of his company.

Karl Bode is a freelance tech journalist and consumer rights reporter.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris wrote about the problem with the “Zuckessance” for Disconnect.
• The New York Times published an article about the political evolution of Mark Zuckerberg.
• Facebook’s Free Basics was widely called out for being a form of digital colonialism.
• Joel Kaplan was a key figure within Facebook defending right-wing content from effective moderation.
• Neil Postman wrote the book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985.

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