Tech Won't Save Us - Big Tech Entrenches US Power w/ Michael Kwet

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Michael Kwet to discuss how digital technologies are used to entrench the power of the United States and its dominant corporations at the expense of the Global South.Michael Kwet is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He got his PhD in Sociology at Rhodes University in South Africa. Follow Michael on Twitter at @Michael_Kwet.🚨 T-shirts are now available!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:Michael wrote about digital colonialism and the need for a Digital Tech Deal.Bill Gates wrote a notorious letter in 1976 opposing the sharing of software as it conflicted with Microsoft's business model.Tech companies export content moderation, training AI, call center, and even more labor to the Global South.Gabriel Winant criticized the dominant liberal perspective on antitrust action.Support the show

Rich countries, they own the intellectual property, the means of computation, the cloud server farms, and that system that they have in place, it benefits them. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Michael Quett. Michael is a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and he did his PhD in sociology at Rhodes University in South Africa. He's written for a number of different publications, including The Intercept, Al Jazeera, Motherboard, Wired, and others. In this episode, we discuss digital colonialism, the role that the tech industry plays

in entrenching the power of, you know, the United States and the global north across the world. I would argue that this is an aspect of technology that we don't see discussed so often. You know, technology and the internet in particular has had these really positive narratives formed about it for several decades now. You know, in a recent conversation with Dan Green, we talked about how these kind of narratives of access and opportunity came out of the Clinton period and were associated with the internet at the very time that Clinton and the US government were cutting welfare and increasing the carceral state. And just last week, I was talking to

Olivier Joutel about blockchain imperialism and how there are powerful groups associated with this technology who are using it in very exploitative and extractive ways in the Pacific and the Global South more broadly. So I think this colonial or imperial dimension of technology needs more discussion. And that is why I wanted to have Michael on the show to discuss what he's been writing about digital colonialism, in particular, a piece in Roar magazine that I will include a link to in the show notes. But we discuss how the major US tech companies entrench the power of the United States around the world because everyone becomes dependent on these technologies and on these

networks that are ultimately kind of controlled by the United States. Not to say that they are always owned by the United States, but kind of the content and the services that so many people use around the world come from US companies and then link people into this technological system. And it becomes very difficult then for people in the global south in particular to think about different ways of building technology for different needs and different outcomes. And instead, the way that they use technology and kind of the labor that they do around technology is centered around creating value for these companies in the global north. And, you know, ultimately, that also benefits the United States at the same time. So there's a lot

that I could say about this, but I think, you know, you'll get a more fleshed out idea of what we're discussing in the interview. Before we get to the interview, I also wanted to let you know that Tech Won't Save Us is now an award-winning podcast. It won the Outstanding Technology Series Award at the Canadian Podcast Awards because, you know, I am based in Canada. So just a quick, you know, thank you to everyone who listens for being a regular listener to the show. A thank you to all the guests who have come on the show. And obviously a thank you to the people who support the show on Patreon, who allow me to continue doing this every single week. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com.

If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review and share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And as I just said, every episode of the podcast is available free for everybody because people who can support the show choose to do so. If you feel like you learn from Tech Won't Save Us and the conversations that I'm having every single week, you can join supporters like Victoria from Philadelphia and Billy from Edmonton by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Michael, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Paris, it's good to be with you. Yeah, it's great to speak with you. You know, we've been meaning to have this conversation for a while after I read your work on digital colonialism and a digital tech deal. So I'm happy that we're finally able to have this conversation. And so I wanted to start by kind of laying the groundwork, I guess, and getting an idea of what this digital colonialism is. So can you define, you know, how you imagine this concept? And how does that differ from, you know, the kind of images or structures of colonialism that we would associate with the

past of like the British or Spanish empires? How are these different? Or how are they similar as well? Yeah, so digital colonialism is an evolution of the colonial order. But it is different from what happened under what you might call classic colonialism, which was extremely brutal. So under classic colonialism, let's take an example i know pretty well the dutch went and colonized south africa and they showed up on the southwest coast they created the cape colony what's now the western cape it was a refreshment station and they went to war with the indigenous people and they violently took over the land and they killed people. They imported slaves. They exploited indigenous persons for their labor. So obviously,

when we're looking at digital colonialism, you don't really have that. Now, another feature of classic colonialism where you have a parallel is with infrastructure development. So there's a good article online about Kenya and some of the railroad construction there, and they show a nice map of the railroads, and they show that they were built by the European colonizers to bypass the local villages and to hook up the military outposts in the places where they want to put them to work and then construct it to go back

to the seaports where they're going to bring the raw materials that the human labor is extracting. They're going to ship it out back to the mother country when it's there. Oftentimes in these contexts, this has happened all across the world with the railroads and the seaports. You might extract cotton, produce textiles, and oftentimes even flood the local markets where you're exploiting the labor in the global south so that they can't develop their own industries and compete. So you have a kind of similar process here with digital colonialism. You're not colonizing the land, you're colonizing the tech. It's the intellectual property and so on, and the means of computation and the markets. And you have extraction of data, and then you're processing it as raw material, and then you're creating the services, and they can't compete

in the global South. And primarily, if I were to define digital colonialism, I would say it's the use of digital technology for political, economic, and social domination of another territory. And you achieve that primarily through the ownership of the stuff of the tech world are dominant, it's primarily in the global economy, tech being one of the preeminent things that you want to be good at because it's lucrative, it's no mistake that these firms are global north firms. It maps onto the inequalities that were created during the colonial era. Absolutely. And I think that's not only a good kind of summation of the concept, but I think that the kind of historical parallels that you're

drawing there, like when you describe the construction of the railroads and how they were constructed in a way to serve the kind of colonial interests of the companies or whatnot that were associated with the colonial powers, you know, we can also kind of see that still today, right? With the way that the internet infrastructure and the undersea cables are constructed in a way to kind of have everything lead back to the United States or broadly the global north to kind of connect these countries up in that kind of way and not have the kind of connectivity between one another. And I believe I've read as well that the routes of the undersea cables to connect the global south

run along the same lines as the telegraph lines that were connecting, you know, the then colonies to kind of their colonial cores, I guess, in the past. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's wild to see that parallel. And then, you know, obviously, you're discussing the kind of imperial role that these technologies can play in serving, as you say, the power of the United States in particular. And I feel like this is a piece of technology that we have forgotten, right? Or that has been so long kind of excluded from the discourse that we have about the tech industry in the United States or globally or what have you. And when you go back and look at, you know, the 1990s, the late 1980s, the discourses that were happening in that time, there's a very clear recognition that the expansion of the internet

and of these technologies is going to serve American power. Like Al Gore says this very clearly, who ends up being the vice president under the Clinton administration that privatizes the internet and pushes the kind of form that the internet takes today. So what do you make of that kind of divide between the narratives that we so often have about technology and the kind of material role that it plays, especially when you get out into the global South and the wider world. There's been an evolution of that narrative and there is a kind of missionary saviorism behind tech that I think we all have seen. Obviously, the tech companies portray themselves as making

society better. In the US and kind of Western context, it's been called tech solutionism, right? Your podcast is called Tech Won't Save Us. But if you put it in the global context, it's a kind of missionary saviorism where the poor countries of the world need to catch up right with the global north and the fact of the matter is is that if you look empirically at the core stuff like the operating systems the office productivity software the cloud server centers, the platforms, the social media, Netflix, Spotify. It's Sweden-based, right? But if you look at the stuff that people use and need to use all the time, the processors and the chips, almost all of it is American stuff. And that means basically in order to use a computer, you have to pay the Americans every time you're online

and every time you're firing the thing up, right? So that's how they got so rich is because they own it. And so Al Gore, he was in the era of the 90s and the spread of personal computers. It was pre-platform era, online platform era, and so on. But they understood that American power must always be the number one power in the world. So it was something that obviously they did a good job securing to the detriment of everybody else. Absolutely. And I think even when you look back

further and are thinking about those histories, like you can see the discourses around IBM back in the day and how, you know, there was a concern even in Europe, even in, you know, the UK and France about using IBM computers because of kind of the power that would give to the United States and how that kind of brings US technology into their kind of countries and centers of power in a way that they did not want to see, right. And then when we think back to the past two decades of kind of the expansion of Google and Facebook and social media and all this kind of stuff, like, you know, the narrative shifts from, you know, there's not

this focus on kind of the global power dimension of all this and how this is serving particular interests in the global system, but around kind of, you know, expanding freedom, expanding democracy, expanding economic opportunity to the world. And, you know, it's just so interesting to see that kind of division between what is actually happening and the kind of narrative that is deployed in order to justify it. Yeah, for sure. And if you look at the evolution of that narrative as well, you went from a situation in which you had personal computers come out in the 1980s, and it was a different world back then. If you wanted software, you went to a store and bought a package and brought it home and put it in a disc and threw it in your computer and you waited for it to install and you probably weren't online. The World Wide Web wasn't out yet and IBM was

losing its place, not knowingly, but Microsoft was rising and they became the real superpower into the 90s and early 2000s. And then the internet spread. And once the internet spread, eventually we see the rise of Google, we see Facebook come onto the scene, and then it changed. And the human rights issues did come up quickly so if you're looking at what the first real battle was as far as i can tell was between free and open source software and proprietary software so if we're now pre-internet we're looking at the 80s into the 90s, the premise of free software people was the one who can control the code in the computer can control your user experience, and therefore they exercise some control over you. And so the idea was that people should be free. It's your computer, it's your experience. So you should be free to be able to modify that and exercise control over it as individuals and as a public. And so the philosophy there was commons. And commons is a socialist philosophy, or at least I think in its best version here, it is. So you had a private profit-seeking proprietary mode of production

with Microsoft where they own the code, you can't see it, you can't modify it, and whatever they say, they're like the dictator of what can happen on your computer with your software. And I just want to give an example for the crowd on how code could matter. Let's say you're in a conversation and you have, did the person read it when you send them a text on the other end? If there's a system in place to

show that they did see it, it's going to change how you interact. It's just a simple example, but it drives home the point that whoever gets to make those decisions about how your technology works is going to influence the way people interact. And so, yeah, you had that battle between free and open source and proprietary software, and that carried on over into the global South, where the global South was like, we want free and open source software. We don't want to be the slaves of Microsoft and dependent on them. Anti-dependency is an anti-colonial thing, right? But then the rise of cloud computing platforms and big data changed the game.

And those guys adapted. They kept some proprietary stuff. They brought in free and open source where they could use it. And since then, they've been in control been in control. If free and open source community still there, they're still doing good stuff. But these there's been a huge explosion of tech corporations. And I think that's a snapshot of kind of power relations over the past three decades. I think what you're describing there and what is important is how, you know, there was this kind of debate or there were these alternative visions of kind of the way that these

technologies could have developed or, you know, one along, you know, this kind of proprietary line where things are locked down through intellectual property, patents, copyright laws, et cetera, et cetera. And another one where things are opened up so that people can share and collaborate and build on other things more freely. And you know, don't need to be scared about running afoul of the law or some massive tech corporation if they do so. But obviously, the route that we went, I'm not sure I would say that we chose to go but you know, was kind of I think the built in direction given the kind of incentives of the system that we live in, is that we went this proprietary route, because that is the way that you create value under a capitalist system are able to sell things,

etc, etc. And then that obviously has very significant implications for society and the technologies that we use. Yeah, for sure. How does that then play out when we think about, you know, these technologies in the global South? You know, there is clearly like this distinction in the global value chain. Earlier, you mentioned intellectual property. And so you have, you know, these companies in the global North that are creating these technologies and then exporting them to the global north that are creating these technologies and then exporting them to the global south. So what effect does that have in the global south itself when they

go to use these technologies? I think the global south is more of a user and they're being assimilated in to the unequal status quo of the global economy right so the rich countries they own the intellectual property they own the means of computation the cloud server farms and that system that they have in place um the game of capitalism the game of uh intellectual property um is a rule that's created socially constructed it's created by society, but it doesn't have to be that way, but it is, and it benefits them. So if you look at a place like South Africa where I did my PhD, half the population lives on $3 a day or less, right? So who is going to be the future computer user or computer developer, I'm sorry,

that winds up competing with your Microsofts and your Googles and your Facebooks? It's never going to happen. Plus, a lot of the stuff that's already core has kind of been set up. So if you want to compare back to classic colonialism, what the settlers did in South Africa is they came in, and the colonizers, and they came in, and they consolidated the land. Then they dug up the diamonds and gold that was at the surface, literally with shovels. It was like a gold rush, right?

And then they eventually needed machines to go deeper. They needed chemicals to go deeper, right? So they brought in their chemical entrenched and they wound up taking over the industry. And if you look at the big tech of the day today, when you have all these cloud server farms and the processors, China with the ban and they can't keep up with the advanced processors unless they can license and get access to the IP. Well's china what about everybody else so a lot of the core stuff is already been taken um by the global north too so you have this kind of unequal status where some people are still digging in the dirt for metal that's mining they're picking the coffee beans. They're doing things like that. In a global economy, you don't get much for that.

That's not what you want to be doing. And the colonial powers, the traditionally colonial powers, are doing the more lucrative stuff. They're doing the thinking, so to speak, the high-level thinking, and they own it. They own it as property, and there's an unequal exchange and division of labor. And that's a large part of what characterizes digital colonialism.

As you're outlining there, you know, you think about the technologies that we use every day, we think about the Apple product designed in California, manufactured in China or assembled in China, sorry. And that is kind of an example of this global division of labor where, you know, the valuable kind of intellectual property creation happens in the global north. And then those less valuable tasks are farmed out to other parts of the world, the global south, usually, you know, sometimes some of that stuff happens in the global north as well, but usually not as often. And so then, as you're describing, it gets more difficult for the global south to kind of, you know, rise to the same level, because all of that intellectual property is already protected. So it's much more difficult to kind of gain access to the tools and to the existing kind of inventions or technologies or

whatever that would be necessary to effectively challenge these kind of massive companies in the global north that hold all of this intellectual property and that benefit from this kind of global division of labor as you're talking about. You know, one thing that comes to mind, you know, thinking back to what you've written, is the role that this also plays in education, right, in the global south. Because I was talking to Dan Green recently about kind of the narratives around technology and education that came out of the Clinton period, around the ideas of access and the digital divide, and how by gaining access to technology, to the internet, that you were gaining access to labor market opportunities anywhere in the world, right?

And so how does this aspect of education then play out in the global South with these kind of tech companies? Education is a huge thing. Access is assimilation, right? Like it's basically unequal assimilation into becoming the consumer and the user of the owners. And the owners are Microsoft, it's Google, Africa, and there was a textbook delivery crisis. And this was in the Limpopo province, northeast. And the ANC, that's Mandela's party, decided that they wanted to put tablets into the schools. So I began investigating that because you're doing your PhD, you got to pick a topic. And as I was investigating it, I realized Microsoft, Pearson, Intel, Google, all these corporations are down here. They're part of the planning process. Microsoft has an army of teachers in South Africa. It was weird. And I was just like, whoa, these companies have such an incredible reach. And as I moved actually further into my investigations of just the general digital tech economy, interviewing startups and so on. I have a dog named Lily.

And when we had her as a puppy, she had hairs everywhere, right? And I'm in my car and you go in the glove compartment and you're like, I haven't opened this glove compartment in like five years, right? And there's Lily hairs in there. So like big tech is like lily hairs. They're everywhere. And so in education, it's a special thing for them because if you want to colonize the market, if you want to get everybody in a poor-ish economy, they don't go to the super poor economies very much. But if you have a South Africa and you know that some people in that economy have money, if you're Microsoft, you want them using Microsoft software. If you're

Google, it's Google software. And so what they're doing is they're training people on how to use computers. And if you look at what they wind up picking for, this is how you use a computer. Well, what do you think Microsoft gives the kids to use, right? What software are they picking? Office, obviously. Yeah. Right. Like they're picking Office, they're picking Windows. Google, if you learn how to search the web, you're going to search on Google. Email is going to be Gmail, right? So it's a smart strategy for them to get them when they're young. And that's one way for them to, you know, build up market share.

It kind of harkens back to, you know, this, this isn't like a new strategy, right? Like, I believe it was in the eighties, Apple was doing something similar where it was trying to get into schools in California and across the United States. Like, you know, this is part of the playbook and it's just being expanded to other parts of the world, you know, as the footprint of these companies and kind of the size of these companies expands and they need to get into new markets and get in front of new people and try to bring more people kind of into this kind of global technological system. And so naturally they want to kind of capture, what is it they say?

I think like the next billion and stuff like that, they would say sometimes, right? To kind of get access to these new potential users. And as you're describing there, like you get them using Microsoft products, you get them using Google services. So they're used to using Gmail. So when they set up their own account, they're gonna set up a Gmail account instead of something else. Right. And so you start

to get them hooked on these kinds of technologies and ideas in this, I think, I think even more broadly, like this idea of what technology, what the internet is, you know, it brings to mind as you were talking there also kind of the of the kind of Facebook and Google projects like Facebook Free Basics, right, where the whole kind of experience of the internet becomes Facebook. And what that kind of does to people when they start to think about, you know, what it means to be online, what it means to use the internet. Do you see those sorts of kind of means of talking about connecting people who are not connected right now in these sorts of ways that Google and Facebook are talking about when they talk about things like free basics as an extension of this kind of idea of how technology kind of

infiltrates around the world in that way? Yeah, for sure. It's a kind of missionary colonialism. They like to think of themselves and talk about themselves as if they are just providing stuff to make society better um there are inequality machines they're consumerism machines at a time where consumerism is threatening life on earth like nobody talks about it this way right like nobody says like hey like why should an american it would be one thing if it was just one company we can talk about how like awful corporations are in general but like you know it's just like a set of them and it's like why should they all just be owning the high lucrative stuff. So we're missing that part of the conversation in

general. And that's a big part of the problem too. Absolutely. You know, it makes me think about how the tech industry has kind of seemed to exist in this kind of like exceptional space in the sense that like, you know, especially if you think about post 2008, the rise of the gig economy and services like WeWork and whatnot, where there's all these kind of companies that brand themselves as tech and go into like traditional industries. But they're assumed to like not have to follow the same rules as other companies because, you know, there are these tech companies that are doing these really kind of insidious things around the world that we would question if other companies were doing anything similar. Like when we think about mining companies and going into parts of the global South and the effects that they have, like we will call that out and see that as an

issue. But because of it's like technology, because it's the internet, at least for a long time, there has not been that kind of same association. And so, you know, we've been talking about the issues with this kind of digital colonialism, how it kind of impacts the global south. But there are also growing discussions to kind of regulate the US tech giants to address kind of the power that they have. Do you think that those efforts, that those regulatory agendas would address the kind of global power that you're discussing, you know, if they were to be implemented? My short answer to that is no. I would say that there's like kind of like two branches of conversation of what's considered to be like a tech lash or a criticism, a so-called criticism of big tech. You have your kind of law heads and your reformers in that regard. And then, you know,

I'm at Yale Law School, so I see a lot of conversation about law all the time. And then you have your kind of human rights-y oriented algorithmic bias, worker wages, that kind of stuff crowd. And both of those crowds are portrayed as being really critical, but there's real big problems. So let's talk about the first one, antitrust, say. If you look at the antitrust literature, there's quite a bit of a fetishization of competition, and antitrust is really about competitive capitalism. And so the premise is you have these monopolies, and if these monopolies arise in society, and they like bullies and they're not accountable. It's not good for people. It's not good for politics. And it's not good for consumers and workers.

And so the leftmost you get on that, that's their take. And it buys into this kind of fictional notion of there being a good kind of small business-y progressive capitalism. It goes back to the progressive era, antitrust. It carries on into the FDR in the so-called golden age of capitalism, which is not environmentally sustainable, right? So first of all, if we're looking at the global South, we have to say, again, let's just go back to one example, South Africa. Half the population lives on $3 a day or less. So who's going to be the one to become a computer programmer and compete with the global North, which is so well-resourced, networked, all this kind of stuff? Then oftentimes, big tech will poach their people.

They'll leave, they'll go to Silicon Valley, or they'll alternatively, and Amazon.com, for example, will set up shops, say, in Cape Town, and a lot of the local talent will wind up going to them. So let's say we had some antitrust and we had some things that happened to structurally break up Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and this kind of stuff. At the end of the day, the people who are next in line to benefit from this are still the people in the rich countries. Europe wants it because they want to kill the super giants so they can make their own giants. And also the elephant in the room is the environment. And all these corporations are still oriented towards growth, which is unsustainable. And they're oriented towards consumerism. I mean, it really is kind of baffling.

And then if you look at the literature, Lena Kahn, Zephyr Teachout, Tim Wu, Barry Lynn, et cetera, Matt Stoller, you look at their books, they don't mention American empire. They don't mention digital colonialism or anything. And it's as if the very society they're living in doesn't have an imperialist role in the world, which is a basic thing. If you were talking to an alien from outer space, you would say, look, the people on this little part of land, they own 4% of the world population. They have 40% of the household assets, and their technology corporations dominate everybody else. We can't talk about that? I mean, it's pretty remarkable, right? But that's the best of the

best in scholarship. So in terms of reforms you're talking about, no, I think that this is actually part of the system. It's the leftmost end of an imperialist country, also Europe too. And it's not really social justice. It's a problem. around antitrust and kind of breaking up big tech and things like that has a very narrow lens on what is happening in the United States, what might work for the United States. And I think, you know, we would both quibble with that, that simply making a more competitive capitalism is actually going to address the ills of these companies, you know, that that's not going to happen, I don't feel. And as you're saying, like, you know, if there is a breakup, and if there is kind of a sharing of power in any kind of way, it's not going to be power that is going to be shifted to the global south. But rather, you know, some more European tech companies or Canadian tech companies might get in a little bit more and get to play a bit more in this kind of imperial game that they're all playing. Right. To take more of the value and the wealth from the global South,

as they already do. Canada, where I am, is the largest center for mining companies in the world, taking all of the resources from those societies and at the same time causing massive environmental harm, community harm, human harm, all of those things, which should be obvious. But you were touching there on the environmental implications of this kind of technological system that we've created. Can you discuss that a little bit more, the kind of environmental footprint of the kind of capitalist technological system that we're all reliant on right now? So tech, like anything else, should be contextualized to the big picture. So environmentally, what's the big picture here? material resource use, extraction, consumption, production per year, aggregately for humans,

is about 50 billion tons per year for all humans. Where we're at now, there's about 100 billion tons of production per year. The high income, each individual on average consumes about 26 tons per person per year. Low income is about two tons. And the sustainable limit, and you can find this in literature by people like Jason Hickel in the references, the sustainable limit is probably somewhere around six to eight tons per person per year. So what happens when you're growing your economy? So this is linked in with the scientific literature and social science literature called degrowth. And it's about the limits of growth. And the fundamental premise is you can't burn down the walls of your house to keep yourself warm. And so there's a box we live in in the society and we can't go beyond that box. Traditionally, alleviating

poverty has been about growth. And the idea has been, as long as there's growth at the end of the year and everybody gets something more, then there's progress. And that's how we alleviate poverty. But what this is saying is growth compounds over time, it's exponential, and we're already beyond our limits and we're destroying the environment ecologically and overheating. And so the only real way to do this is to scale back consumption and production. And then you're left with an awful, wicked inequality, which means that you have to redistribute wealth and income, which means a reorientation of the economy, which means

reparation from the North to the South as well, and the creation of a classless society. And that's a matter of survival. Now, some people might hear this and say, okay, well, that ain't going to happen. And it's like, well, look what we're doing. We need to take off our caps of I'm an engineer, I'm a liberal, I'm a whatever. And so at the end of the day, we need a democratic, bottom-up, egalitarian socialism that we've never created. And we have a small timeframe right now to fix this problem. And if we don't, it's going to be the worst chapter of human history, and it's not going to be fixed. There's no way to fix it. I like giving the story, my favorite basketball player is Kemba Walker, and he's got a knee injury. And I'm like, they can't even fix his knee. How are we going to destroy the entire globe and think that we're going to step in and just fix the problem? It's not going to happen. So let's put tech into that context. And I think that if

we're looking at what it means to be environmentally sustainable, you can't have companies with people making on average $250,000 US per year. And that's not even to include the executives, the shareholders, and all that kind of stuff. So these companies, their DNA as capitalist organizations is profit, growth, accumulation, market expansion, and competition pressures them to do it. And production for exchange value indiscriminately doesn't matter what you're producing. You could be producing all sorts of shit people don't need for people who have too much already. And none of this is going to work. And so when we look at tech and we want to talk about environmental sustainability, it's not just the cloud centers and how much carbon they emit. In ecology, it's not just the lithium mining and cobalt mining and

the local environmental destruction. It's also the fact that these are consumerist machines or inequality machines. They're not environmentally sustainable at all. And so like the way of the fossil fuel corporations, we should be talking about getting rid of big tech altogether as fast as possible. It makes me think of what you were saying earlier about, you know, the difference between the different proposals for software in the 1980s. Right. And how there was a proposal to see software and thus, you know, I think the technologies that came after in a very different way, but we kind of took this path that was, you know, all about creating a massive new industry around it. Because that was obviously what works in the system that we are in right now. And, you know, just on the point about GDP,

it's always interesting to me that this is a concept that largely is like a post World War Two concept, but we assume that, you know, it's an inherent thing in our society that there always needs to be constant growth, or else we're like, you know, stagnating or things are never going to work. But you know, on your point about the technologies and the technological system that we have created, you also have written about a proposal for an alternative way of seeing technologies through what you call a digital tech deal. So do you just want to give a brief outline of what that digital tech deal is and how it would change the way that we see technology?

For me, there's no option for FDR type progressive capitalism and survival. So that's off the table. And so there's some digital tech new deal proposals and I have one article out with the new deal in it and then I scratched it. That's because I didn't want association with FDR. The red deal is where I saw that first. So I said, you know what, I'm going to borrow from that idea and call it a digital tech deal. And so I think the idea here is that if you want to fix this, you're going to need a large scale effort to fundamentally change the system that we're in. Just like we have to change our energy system, we have to change our technology system. And that means in concert with what I was just saying about the bigger context. Global inequality, we need classless society, we need reparations in order for it to happen from the north to south. And it can't just be about taxing the rich and giving money down.

It's got to be about reorienting power, fundamentally. So it's more than just trying to tax people. So I started thinking about the best I could, you know, how could we do this with tech? And one of the things is, you know, well, what are the sources of power here? And then how can we change it? How can we get rid of the capitalist elements? So with intellectual property, especially patents and copyrights, we can start phasing out patents and copyrights. That would have a redistributive effect from the global north to the global south. The means of computation, the cloud centers, we have cloud centers that are being opened up in Malaysia, all over the global south, Microsoft, Google.

It's all imperialism. And it should be called, we talk about it as structural racism, but we should be calling this racist, right? Because they're setting up these centers that are basically, they're going to be dependent upon in those countries for now, for the rest of eternity. So the means of computation should be socialized. These cloud centers should be being put up as reparations if we're going to use them. And we should be decentralizing things like social media as a socialist form of decentralization,

which means it's free and open source, it's community run, it's interoperable, it's not oriented towards profit. We could be using universities and we could be making research institutes to sustainably develop and maintain new technology. You can take it completely out of the hands of the private sector and have it be democratic. We need to coordinate this. We would need to get people from all across the world, global south, global north, to get together and come up democratically with a plan of how to reconstruct the information economy and the tech economy. be a New Deal program that would fit the needs of survival, it would fit social justice. And instead of having things like antitrust and competitive capitalism, I think that that's the direction we really need to go in. I think what you're saying there suggests a very different

way of thinking about the way that technology is developed and in whose interests it's developed for. And I think that that is something that we need to be thinking about as we consider the way forward and as we consider, you know, how we are actually going to build a technological system that serves the needs, not only of publics in the global north, but of the global public and also, you know, addressing the various needs that are going to be different in different places. And I wonder if there's anything final that you wanted to leave us with in this discussion of digital colonialism, and the possible path forward.

Yeah, I wanted to say a few things. One is that the part of digital colonialism is tech hegemony. Hegemony is the thoroughgoing dominance that is so dominant that people don't think that there could be anything different, right? They've internalized the ideas of the world of the masters. And so the things we talked about today, they're not really being talked about publicly. Maybe elements of them, but if we're really serious about human rights and social justice, the people who are harmed the most are the ones who should be at the forefront of our consideration. And really, when you look at it, it's the global South whose future is being bought

up, who don't have an easy means to resist because when you're living on $3 a day, you're not going to be concerned about a new Microsoft Cloud Center or operating system. So they're being preyed upon from without, and there's low level of resistance. And the global North is silent on this. And the reason for this is, and I've come to learn this at being at Yale Law School and looking around what's going on in terms of narrative generation. So you have your legal scholars and you have your elite universities. That's your Yale, your Harvard, your MIT, your Stanford, et cetera. You have your think tanks and research institutes. That's your AI Now, Data and Society,

Future Privacy Forum, et cetera. And you have your elite media, your New York Times, Fox News, et cetera. And you have money coming in from foundations and you have money coming in from big tech itself. We have a weird situation where there are actually people coming in from big tech itself. We have a weird situation where there are actually people who work for big tech that are considered leading social justice scholars.

Microsoft is the best case example. You know, they can't say these things because there's a conflict of interest. And at the end of the day, if you're to say that it's racist for Microsoft to open up a cloud center in Malaysia or that we should be putting free and open source software in schools instead of Microsoft Office, you'll be fired. So we've normalized that and there's no left wing cause where we say, oh, OK, well, this is a health ethics person who works for Pfizer or Philip Morris or an environmentalist who works for Shell Oil.

So part of this is that this conversation has been whitewashed by elite academia, and it's an elite within that elite pretty much, and the other social justice-y kind of scholars who are often in bed with big tech. And Microsoft is running a race in tech lecture series. They're completely whitewashing what Microsoft does. I won't go into right here, but you can look up for policing. I wrote an article called the Microsoft Police State. Microsoft's Iron Cage was at Al Jazeera. Tons of stuff, right? They're completely whitewashing it. And that's not to speak of their other stuff. We have this narrative thing. And I think what we need to do in order to change up this situation is common sense here, right? For leftists, you're never going to fundamentally change the society

without a mass of people behind you. And so we do have some concrete alternatives. I have a little kind of short book slash guide out called People's Tech for People's Power. It's contextualized to South Africa, but it applies broadly. What it does is it brings through some ideas, but it also lists like, here's all free and open source software stuff we can use. And then it talks about policies. We need policy change too. It's not just using different tech.

But we have some concrete stuff in place and we need to build a people's tech movement that links up with other movements like environmentalists and is global in its orientation, social justice globally, reparations, solidarity across borders. And we have to fundamentally challenge the status quo. So I would say that the big challenge that we have is figuring out how to build that movement. And I don't think that's going to come from the elite voices that we see and who have framed this conversation. We have to build a new narrative and we have to link up from below. And I think that's how we begin to really actually change the status quo the way we have to link up from below. And I think that's how we begin

to really actually change the status quo the way we wanna see in our lifetimes. You know, I think this colonial and kind of imperial aspect to the tech ecosystem that we use every single day deserves more discussion and needs to be something that we are more laser focused on when it comes to our critique of these tech companies. And so, you know, I think that this is something that more people should be paying

attention to. Michael, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show and discuss it with me. So thanks so much. Paris, thank you so much. I love the show. Michael Quett is a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. You can follow Michael on Twitter at Michael underscore Quett. You can follow me at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at Harbinger Media Network dot com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week, you can

go to Patreon dot com slash Tech Won't Save Us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.