Tech Won't Save Us

Paris Marx is joined by Fenwick McKelvey to discuss the massive outage at Rogers, why it’s challenging the narrative that more competition will fix Canada’s telecom sector, and the need for better regulation and even public ownership.Fenwick McKelvey is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. He’s also an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and a director of Machine Agencies at the Milieu Institute. Follow Fenwick on Twitter at @mckelveyf.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: Fenwick spoke to CBC about the Rogers outage and previously spoke to Daniel Joseph about changing the way we think about media platforms in Canada. Paris has previously argued for telecom nationalization in Canada and has written about the history of Canadian telecom. After the outage, Canadian innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne forced telcos to come up with a new agreement on several key areas of emergency cooperation. The Competition Bureau is objecting to a proposed merger between Rogers and Shaw. Last year, the Rogers family was engaged in a protracted feud that affected management of the company. ZeD was an “open-source television” series aired by Canada’s public broadcaster from 2002 to 2006. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Malcolm Harris to discuss the legacy of Stewart Brand and why the myth we’re often told about him overstates the reality of his impact.Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and his forthcoming book Palo Alto. He also writes for New York Magazine. Follow Malcolm on Twitter at @BigMeanInternet.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: Malcolm Harris wrote a critical review of John Markoff’s Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Benjamin Kunkel also wrote a critical review of Whole Earth. The Stewart Brand documentary We Are As Gods about his quest to bring back wholly mammoths to solve climate change is slowly being rolled out after two years of delay and seeming lack of sales interest. Brand’s Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000-year clock in Texas that’s funded by Jeff Bezos. We also mention Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Dwayne Monroe to discuss what it’s like to work in a data center, how the cloud came to hold a dominant position, and the consequences of its control by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.Dwayne Monroe is a cloud technologist and aspiring Marxist theorist of technology, with twenty years of experience architecting large-scale computational systems. Follow Dwayne on Twitter at @cloudquistador.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: Dwayne wrote about cloud computing for Logic Magazine. He’s also written about a public cloud and the metaverse on his blog. Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in the eastern United States experienced a major outage in December 2021. Residents in various parts of the world have been questioning the logic of building data centers, including in the United States and New Zealand. In July, the network of Canadian telecom giant Rogers went down, leaving millions without service. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss how the digital infrastructure that companies have built out over the past couple decades to track everything we do in order to serve us ads places us at risk, and how that’s come into focus since the overturning of abortion rights in Roe v Wade in the United States.Shoshana Wodinsky is a privacy reporter at Gizmodo. Follow Shoshana on Twitter at @swodinsky.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: Shoshana wrote about getting an abortion in the age of surveillance and why every company is becoming an ad network. With her colleagues at Gizmodo, she also wrote about how Facebook perpetuated climate denial and killed news feed changes that would anger conservatives. Anti-abortion groups targeted ads at people who had visited abortion clinics. Data brokers have been selling data on people who visit abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood. Support the show

In a special episode to celebrate the release of host Paris Marx’s new book Road to Nowhere, Brian Merchant takes over as guest host to interview Paris about the book, the tech industry’s visions for transportation, and why they don’t solve our mobility challenges. Paris is the host of Tech Won’t Save Us and the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. Brian Merchant is a tech journalist, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant. 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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon. Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.  Also mentioned in this episode: Road to Nowhere is available anywhere you buy books, but Verso has it discounted until July 8 as part of its Summer Reads sale. An excerpt of Road to Nowhere about the dystopian future the tech industry is creating was recently published in Wired. Paris recently spoke to StreetsBlog USA about the problem with Apple CarPlay. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant to discuss the impact of the iPhone after 15 years, including its effects on how we work, how we use technology, and what it’s meant for Apple.Brian Merchant is a tech journalist, author of  The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: In 2011, Cory Moll tried to unionize Apple stores. In June 2022, a store in Maryland became the first to vote to form a union. Apple’s claims about privacy are, at least to some degree, a clever marketing campaign. Paris previously wrote about some of Apple’s environmental messaging. The previous episode with Brian on the iPhone is episode 78 (Sep 16, 2021), and I also spoke to Jenny Chan about the conditions at Foxconn factories where iPhones are manufactured on episode 27 (Sep 17, 2020). Support the show

To kick off a new monthly bonus series on tech in Canada, Paris Marx is joined by Bianca Wylie to discuss Canada’s COVID Alert app, the problems with the digital contract-tracing experiment, and why we need a public post-mortem so lessons are learned for next time.Bianca Wylie is a partner at Digital Public, a co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Follow Bianca on Twitter at @biancawylie.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: This series on Canadian tech is made in partnership with Passage, a left-wing publication in Canada. Passage published an edited transcript of the conversation. On June 17, 2022, Health Canada decommissioned the COVID Alert app. In April, Bianca wrote that the government needed to shut down the COVID Alert app because it wasn’t working (if it ever had). She also began writing a series on the app on her Medium blog that month. In July 2020, Bianca and her colleague Sean Mcdonald were already asking questions about the app and the planning around it. Other digital contact-tracing apps were launched in many other countries, including Australia, France, and Iceland, with poor results. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by David Nemer to discuss how residents of Brazil’s favelas reshape technologies developed in the Global North to serve their needs, and how technology alone does not solve social oppression.David Nemer is an assistant professor in the Department of Media Studies and in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Virginia. He’s also the author of Technology of the Oppressed: Inequity and the Digital Mundane in Favelas of Brazil. Follow David on Twitter at @DavidNemer.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: Paris’ new book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation is out on July 5! It’s currently on sale at Verso Books. Ahead of hosting the World Cup, Brazil forced thousands of favela residents from their homes. Grace Blakeley recent spoke to David Adler about Colombia’s election and the use of TikTok. Dan Greene wrote The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope and Lindsay Ems wrote Virtually Amish: Preserving Community at the Internet's Margins. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Gita Jackson to discuss how streaming has altered the film and television industry, what happens as their business models are coming under question, and whether cinemas have reason to celebrate streaming’s woes.Gita Jackson is a staff writer at Motherboard, Vice’s tech vertical. Follow Gita on Twitter at @xoxogossipgita.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: Gita wrote about why Eternals was still bad even though it was diverse, Netflix laying off Tudum writers, and some of the challenges Netflix faces. Paris wrote about the end of the Paramount Decrees, the need to break up the media giants, and the problem with the new Spider-Man movies. EA considered a merger with NBC Universal, and had talks with other companies. Raven Software at Activision Blizzard and Bioware contractors at Keywords Studios have voted to unionize. Microsoft’s Phil Spencer said the company would recognize the Raven Software union if its acquisition of Activision Blizzard goes through. CNN+ was shut down after a few weeks of operation. Netflix is changing its content investment strategy as investors lose confidence. Netflix’s share price plummeted in April after reporting it lost subscribers. The following week, the cinema celebrated the negative turn on streaming at CinemaCon. The Mandalorian pioneered a new kind of film set with massive LED screens instead of green screen. Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Ben Tarnoff to discuss why the problems with the modern internet, including its excessive concentration in the hands of a few companies and the way its dominant firms shape our interactions to generate profit, find their root in the decision to privatize the network. To fix them, that needs to be changed.Ben Tarnoff is the author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future and the co-founder of Logic Magazine. Follow Ben on Twitter at @bentarnoff.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode: An excerpt of Ben’s book was published in the New York Times. Victor Pickard wrote about the history of public media in Democracy Without Journalism. Newt Gingrich and George Gilder, once featured by Wired for their visions for the internet, have now become big crypto fans. The United States has terrible broadband access. Major tech companies are buying up undersea internet cables. Tarleton Gillespie wrote about the politics of platforms and what the term suggests. Jathan Sadowski compares platforms to shopping malls. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about the predatory inclusion of the internet. Community internet has shown success in the United States, while provincial public telcos have a history of positive outcomes in Canada. Support the show