Tech Won't Save Us

Paris Marx is joined by Nastasia Hadjadji to discuss Emmanuel Macron’s plan to run France like a start-up, how that justified a further dismantling of France's welfare state, and how his desire to create national tech champions is having domestic consequences.

Nastasia Hadjadji is a French journalist looking at tech from the lens of political economy and the author of “No Crypto. Comment Bitcoin a envoûté la planète.”

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 will be speaking in Auckland on February 18 in an event hosted by Tohatoha.
• Emmanuel Macron aided Uber’s lobbying efforts as Economy Minister under the former Socialist government.
• France worked hard to attract the crypto industry. Macron even took a selfie with Binance’s Changpeng Zhao, who’s now pled guilty to felony charges.
• The group Technopolice documents police surveillance in France.
• La Quadrature du Net campaigns against algorithmic video surveillance.
• Louis Pouzin is considered to have almost created the internet.

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Paris Marx is joined by Victor Pickard to discuss the continued layoffs in news media, and how they are symptomatic of a deeper, structural crisis in journalism.

Victor Pickard is Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at University of Pennsylvania. He’s also the author of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society.

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 and produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris will be speaking in Christchurch on February 4 and Wellington on February 8.
• Victor wrote for Niemen Lab about the need to divorce news and capitalism, and argued for public newspapers in the Washington Post.
• In the US, two-thirds of newspaper jobs, or 43,000 journalists, have been lost since 2005.
• Robert McChesney and John Nichols propose a Local Journalism Initiative.
• Police raided a newspaper in Kansas on August 11, 2023, setting off a major scandal that’s now seen the police chief suspended.

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Paris Marx is joined by Eric Silver to discuss Spotify’s big plan to dominate podcasting, why it’s now pulling back from those efforts, and the difference between highly produced and more independent podcasts.

Eric Silver is a podcast producer and head of development at Multitude.

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 and produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris will be in Christchurch on February 4 (details here) and Wellington on February 8 (details here). He’s hoping to get an Auckland date organized and is open to going to Australia.
• Spotify pulled back on its podcasting ambitions last year, canceling big shows and laying off staff.
• After buying Gimlet and Parcast, it merged them into Spotify Originals last year.
• Ashley Carman posted a slide from a Spotify presentation presenting the RSS feed as “outdated tech” because it’s harder for them to harvest data from.

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Paris Marx is joined by Timnit Gebru to discuss the past year in AI hype, how AI companies have shaped regulation, and tech’s relationship to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
 
Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute.

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 produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
 
Also mentioned in this episode:

• Paris is speaking in Montreal on January 20. Details here.
• Billy Perrigo reported on OpenAI lobbying to water down the EU’s AI Act.
• Nitasha Tiku wrote about the push to train students in a particular idea of AI.
• Politico has been doing a lot of reporting on the influences on AI policy in the US and UK.
• OpenAI made a submission in the UK to try to get permission to train on copyrighted material.
• Arab workers in the tech industry fear the consequences of speaking out for Palestinian rights.
• 972 Magazine reported on Israel’s use of AI to increase its targets in Gaza.
• Jack Poulson chronicles the growing ties between military and tech.
• Timnit mentioned No Tech for Apartheid, Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory, and Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto.

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Paris Marx is joined by Vincent Bevins to discuss the mass protests of the 2010s, the role that social and traditional media played in them, and why the horizontalism of those movements ultimately didn’t work.

Vincent Bevins is a longtime foreign correspondent who has worked for the Washington Post, Financial Times, and LA Times. He’s the author of The Jakarta Method and If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.

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 and produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Read excerpts from If We Burn in The Guardian and In These Times.
• Vincent mentioned the work of Charles Tilley, Cihan Tuğal, Evgeny Morozov, and Andrey Mir.

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Paris Marx is joined by Naomi Klein to discuss the problems with personal branding pushed social media, how the left’s insufficient response to the pandemic created an opening for the right, and the fight over the roots of Western society that will shape our future.
 
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and a columnist with The Guardian. She is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.

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 produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
 
Also mentioned in this episode:

• Read excerpts of Doppelganger in The Guardian and Vanity Fair.
• Naomi mentions Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.

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2023 is over, so it’s time to go through everything! In a special year-end episode, we review the biggest stories of 2023, what we’re thinking of the AI hype, how science fiction makes us think about the future, the worst villains in the tech industry, and what we’re watching in 2024.
 
Gita Jackson is a journalist and cofounder of Aftermath. Molly White is the creator of Web3 is Going Just Great. Aaron Thorpe is co-host of Everybody Loves Communism.
 
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 produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
 
Also mentioned in this episode:

• If you become a Patreon supporter before the end of the year, you’ll be entered into a giveaway for five signed copies of Joanne McNeil’s Wrong Way and Paris Marx’s Road to Nowhere. Sign up now!
• Gita recently launched Aftermath, and you can go subscribe!
• Molly is getting started on TikTok. Go follow her!
• Aaron posts a lot of cool science fiction art over on Twitter. Give him a follow!
• You can see the Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos photos we discuss in the Worst Person in Tech segment on Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon.
• Paris was mistaken: Enya sang “May It Be” for Fellowship of the Ring, not “Gollum’s Song” for the Two Towers. That was Emilíana Torrini. But Paris listened to both of them too much.

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Paris Marx is joined by Astra Taylor to discuss how capitalism creates insecurity to sustain itself, the way tech is used to make us more insecure, and what it will take to change that.

Astra Taylor is a writer, filmmaker, and political organizer. She’s the author of The Age of Insecurity and co-founder of the Debt Collective. Her next book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, written with Leah Hunt-Hendrix, comes out in March.

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 produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
 
Also mentioned in this episode:

• Astra wrote about the Insecurity Machine for Logic Magazine and the Dads of Tech for The Baffler.
• Find excerpts from The Age of Insecurity in The New York Times and The Walrus.
• Become a supporter on Patreon to join our giveaway.

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Paris Marx is joined by Émile Torres to discuss Silicon Valley’s recent obsession with effective accelerationism, how it builds on the TESCREAL ideologies, and why it shows the divide at the top of the AI industry.
 
Émile Torres is a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University. They’re also the author of Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

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 produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
 
Also mentioned in this episode:

• Emile wrote about the TESCREAL ideologies and AI extinction scaremongering.
• Timnit Gebru also did a great presentation on TESCREAL.
• Paris wrote about the religious nature of Marc Andreessen’s techno-solutionist manifesto and about Sam Altman’s (temporary) ouster from OpenAI.
• The Year In Tech livestream for Patreon supporters is on December 17 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET / 9pm GMT. More details on Patreon or Twitter.
• The Information did a great profile on effective accelerationism.
• Forbes revealed the man behind the e/acc moniker Beff Jezos.
• 972 Magazine reported on Israeli’s use of AI to expand targets in Gaza.
• UK plans a “hit squad” to replace public servants with AI. Paris wrote about the threat it poses.

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Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss why the story we hear about Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t reflect their real impact on education and health around the world.

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist and the author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.

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 produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Bill Gates was pied in Belgium in 1999 and made fun of on The Simpsons.
• You can watch highlights from Gates’ deposition in the antitrust trial on YouTube.
• Gates had a reputation about questionable and inappropriate conduct toward women below him in the workplace.
• Aaron Gordon wrote there’s an adage that “everyone thinks Musk is a genius until you hear him talk about a subject you know something about.”
• In 2008, the head of the World Heath Organization’s malaria program criticized the growing dominance of the Gates Foundation in the research area.

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