Paris Marx is joined by Aaron Benanav to discuss his vision for a multi-criterial economy and how it would alter the type of technology our society creates. It’s a plan to center human experience through democratic discourse while driving true social and technological innovation.

Aaron Benanav is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University and the author of Automation and the Future of Work.

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 Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• The two parts of Aaron’s essay on a Multi-Criterial Economy were published in the New Left Review.
• Learn more about the briefly discussed Bangladesh youth led revolution.

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In this episode of the Climate Confident Podcast, I sit down with Tom Day from the NewClimate Institute to unpack one of the thorniest issues in corporate climate action: credibility. Over the past few years, big tech companies and multinationals have rolled out bold net zero pledges, but how much of it is substance, and how much is smoke and mirrors?

Tom argues that offsets, once seen as a solution, have become a dangerous distraction. Instead of reducing their own emissions, too many firms hide behind carbon credits and creative accounting. We discuss why greenhouse gas accounting, while essential, is riddled with blind spots and loopholes that allow companies to look greener on paper than they are in reality.

The conversation digs into the tech sector specifically, where energy demand from data centres and AI is skyrocketing. While firms like Google and Microsoft have pushed promising practices such as 24/7 renewable matching, others continue to claim progress by buying certificates far removed from the grids they actually use. We also ask the tough question: should software and cloud services that help fossil fuel companies extract oil and gas more efficiently really count as climate leadership?

From supply chain decarbonisation and product circularity to the future role of carbon removals, Tom challenges us to demand more transparency and honesty from corporate climate strategies. If we want tech, and business at large, to play a meaningful role in a 1.5°C world, we need to move beyond glossy PR and focus on genuine transitions.

The Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2025 that Tom referenced in the episode is available here.

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'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity (Taylor & Francis, 2025)' by Petter Törnberg & Justus Uitermark

In my conversation with Petter Törnberg about Seeing Like a Platform, we kept returning to a simple but unsettling point: platforms don't just carry our messages or connect us to information. They've created an entirely new way of knowing the world. His book with Justus Uitermark argues that when everything must be tagged, ranked, and fed through recommendation engines, we get a reality that only makes sense through those mechanisms.

This goes beyond previous technological shifts. The printing press expanded what we could know. Television changed how quickly we could know it. But platforms have altered the conditions of knowledge itself. When a platform "sees" the world, it only recognizes what can be counted, sorted, and optimized. Everything else becomes invisible or, worse, stops seeming real. We start mistaking the map for the territory, except now the map is writing itself based on our clicks and swipes.

What troubles me most about Törnberg's analysis is how naturally we've adapted to this new epistemology. We optimize our research for algorithmic discovery. We think in terms of engagement rather than understanding. The platform's logic becomes so embedded in daily life that other ways of organizing knowledge start to feel antiquated, inefficient. For STS researchers, this creates a genuine bind: we're trying to study platform society while swimming in its assumptions. The challenge isn't escaping platform thinking but remembering that there are other ways to think.

Notes:

The Ascendance Of Algorithmic Tyranny

Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Collection on Technology and Work)

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In this month's special feature, Tom and Beth are joined by Simon Marvin and Allan McCay to discuss how advances in neurotechnology - specifically Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) - are changing the way we think about urban infrastructures and human-technology relations in the city. 

We discuss:  

• How can we understand the complex and continuously changing relationship between cities and technology over the last few decades?
• What and where are the new frontiers of urban technology in light of neuro-technological advances, such as Brain Computer Interfaces?
• What are the legal and ethical implications for cities and residents of neurotechnological urbanism, and can science fiction prepare us for what’s to come? 

The feature is followed by a short reflection from Tom and Beth which also draws on an interdisciplinary workshop on Neurotechnically-enabled Urbanism which was hosted by the Urban Institute and the ESRC project 'Experimenting with robotics as a new urban infrastructure', led by Aidan While. 

Guests:

Dr Allan McCay is Co Director of The Sydney Institute of Criminology and an Academic Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School. His first coedited book is Free Will and the Law: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2019) and his second is Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity (Oxford University Press, 2020). 

Professor Simon Marvin is an internationally recognised academic with an excellent publication profile, with expertise in the changing relations between socio-technical networks and urban and regional restructuring.

Read more:

Elon Musk’s brain implant company offers an intriguing glimpse of an internet connecting human minds

Vulcan (page 38)

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. 

Ever since its publication, Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism has proven to be more urgent and insightful. Today I talk with author Wendy Liu about how developments like AI and LLM, further erosions of intellectual property, and increased invasions of privacy make the case for abolishing Silicon Valley even more important. We talk about how abolition is critical at a time when more and more the private sector has come to eviscerate the public good. Turning to the genocide in Gaza, we discuss the ways Capital has enlisted technology in deadly and horrific manners. We end with a meditation on the commons and how one can live with fewer commodities and find value in common projects to make life more valuable and worthwhile outside of the logic of the market.

Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism, a memoir/manifesto about the tech industry from the perspective of a former believer. She lives in San Francisco and is working on a novel.

This week, writer and activist Laura Bates joins Ellen and Alona to discuss her latest book The New Age of Sexism.

Best known for founding the Everyday Sexism project in 2012, Laura has spent more than a decade documenting the realities of gender-based discrimination. In her new book, she turns her attention to the digital world—where artificial intelligence is giving rise to disturbing new forms of misogyny. 

Laura explains how technologies like deepfakes and AI chatbots are being weaponised against women, what her experiences of raising awareness in schools have taught her about how parents and teachers can better protect children, and why governments and tech companies are failing to act. 

Plus, Ellen and Alona discuss this week’s “banger” or “dud”.

This episode contains material that some listeners may find upsetting.

‘The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny’ is out now.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’ve been reading Tech Policy Press closely over the last three weeks, you may have come across one or more posts from collaboration with Data & Society called “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis.” The articles in the series examine how powerful tech billionaires and authoritarian leaders and thinkers are leveraging AI and digital infrastructure to advance anti-democratic agendas, consolidate control, and reshape society in ways that threaten privacy, labor rights, environmental sustainability, and democratic governance.

For this episode, Justin Hendrix spoke to four of the authors who made contributions to the series, including:

• Jacob Metcalf,  program director of the AI On the Ground Initiative at Data & Society;
• Tamara Kneese, program director of the Climate, Technology and Justice program at Data & Society;
• Reem Suleiman,  outgoing US advocacy lead at the Mozilla Foundation and  member of the city of Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission; and
• Kevin De Liban, founder of TechTonic Justice.

Paris Marx is joined by Nitasha Tiku to discuss how AI companies are preying on users to drive engagement and how that’s repeating many of the problems we’re belatedly trying to address with social media companies at an accelerated pace.

Nitasha Tiku is a technology reporter at the Washington Post.

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 Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Nitasha wrote about how chatbots are messing with people’s minds.
• Paris wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about people needing AI friends.
• AI companies are facing ongoing lawsuits over harmful content.

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Paris Marx is joined by Laís Martins to discuss the recent enforcement measures against tech companies like X and Rumble in Brazil, how the country is grappling with the overreach of US tech companies, and the wider discussion about tech policy in Brazil.

Laís Martins is a technology reporter at The Intercept Brasil.

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 Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Laís has reported on Rumble's fight against the Brazilian Supreme Court as well as the decisions the Brazilian government is making to welcome AI data centers.
• Former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was spied on by US intelligence services.
• The Brazilian government has long used and supported open source software.

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