Tech Won't Save Us - Reimagining Our Relationship with Digital Tech w/ Paris Marx

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Paris Marx marks the beginning of 2026 by discussing some of the big themes that will be moving the conversations he’ll be having this year, particularly digital sovereignty and rethinking the value of the tech we admit into our lives. 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: Paris wrote about the lessons of the US invasion of Venezuela and why we need to reassess our relationship to digital technology. Paris co-authored a white paper on reclaiming digital sovereignty. A digital detox is a great way to review your current relationship with tech.

We need to be thinking about how we reduce our dependence on the U.S. and the ability of the U.S. government to wield its power over these other countries and the people of those countries. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with the Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week, well, there's no guest. I figured this is the first new episode of 2026, and I thought it would be a good moment to kind of set the stage for what I think this year is going to look like for Tech Won't Save Us, the kind of topics that I want to focus on. That means seizing this episode for myself to talk about some of the things that I think are going on right now and some of the things that I will be paying attention to and that I will be probably doing a fair number of episodes on through this year that you might be interested in. Before we get a replay episodes that we did from last year to kind of get us into this year,

refresh us a bit on some of the topics that we were talking about last year. And those are, of course, the interviews with Liz Pelly and Karen Howe on streaming services and Spotify and the media. music industry, and then, of course, on the AI industry, Open AI, and the whole kind of vision for what this future that Sam Altman and these AI companies have, and how that really does not work for us. So I thought that they were great episodes to recap the year and some of the key topics that we were talking about, and of course, things that still remain relevant moving into 2026. It also helped me to get a little bit of a break and to get some edits done on my book before I got back into recording more podcast episodes. And I did initially have an interview recorded

for this week, but as you'll hear about very shortly, because of events that happened, I figured it was worth taking this episode to talk about some bigger issues. And then, of course, you'll hear that next week as we kick off the new interviews of 2026. So before we get into that, of course, I would just say that if you do enjoy the podcast, if you do enjoy these critical, in-depth, usually conversations or, you know, as this week is going to be, kind of like a rant about something that was really on my mind or a few things that are really on my mind, then it always helps for you to go to your podcast platform of choice and leave a five-star review, sharing the show with friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it and would enjoy the

kind of episodes that we do here on Tech Won't Save Us. And of course, supporting the show so I can keep having these critical in-depth conversations so I can keep doing this work to try to educate people on the tech and industry, these tech billionaires, the power that they wield, and of course, the ways that they're changing our world by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well. You can get ad-free episodes. You can get stickers at a certain level. And of course, we'll have more premium content this year to give you something extra for supporting the show. Thanks so much for those of you who do support the show. And of course, beginning of 2026 is a great time to kind

chip in and help us make tech won't save us. So with that said, let's get to the the main topic. The reason that I see is this episode is because of the events of January 3rd, 26, right? Or maybe we could say the night of January 2nd, the events that happened around there, which are, of course, the United States invading Venezuela, capturing President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, taking them to the United States and putting them on trial for things like narco-terrorism and the possession of machine guns, which just seems like a wild thing. to charge a foreign president with. So what to say about this?

There's so much, right? The first is, you know, this is clearly a violation of international law and the UN Charter. There is no question about it. Any legal expert you ask will say that. And the U.S. justifications that this is kind of like a law enforcement initiative is just ridiculous. It's like the worst kind of justification, right? And you might say, okay, what does this have to do with a tech podcast, Paris?

Like, you know, we're talking about technology here, not the U.S. invading other countries and Donald Trump being like openly imperialistic. And I would say, actually, it has a lot to do with what we talk about on the show. And in particular, what I have been talking about the past year, more and more, which is, of course, digital sovereignty and this dependence on U.S. technology and the consequences that come along with that, right? And so what we see here in the attack on Venezuela is the United States showing how it sees its place in the world, showing how it sees the way that it can use its power for its own gain, and how it is going to use virtually any point of leverage that it has over other countries and other peoples in order to benefit itself. You know, that is really what I'm seeing in this attack along with a number of other things, right? And, you know, the thing that really stood out to me is, you know, the morning of January 3rd, Donald Trump is at a podium in Palm Beach, Florida, where he, you know, is kind of like explaining what happened and, you know, making his big claims about how they have captured Maduro. And, of course, now he's, these are not the words that he uses, but he's effectively stealing the oil of Venezuela to benefit the United States and U.S. oil companies, which, again, completely shocking. and basically like holding the remaining government in Caracas, you know, in Venezuela, hostage, right,

to do what he wants or else he says he'll go in and basically do what he did to Maduro to anyone else who is standing in his way and in the United States way. And so it stood out to me as he was standing at that podium that he explicitly described this as an attack on sovereignty, right? and especially going back to talking about digital sovereignty, talking about the control that countries should have within their own borders for what goes on, it really stood out to me to see the attack described in that way, right? And to see that the United States really does not care at all about the sovereignties of other countries and other peoples, right?

Effectively, nothing matters except for U.S. interests. And I think that is very important to us, especially for anyone who was outside the United States. But I would say, you know, there's a lot of people within the United States who care about this as well, right, who care about international law and international order who don't so want to see their country acting in this way. You know, having him talking about an attack on sovereignty really brings to mind to me things that we have been hearing from Trump for a while. Early on in this presidency, and to a certain degree, even in his first presidency, he was talking about wanting to take control of the Panama Canal and of Greenland. again. And then more recently, he has, of course, talked about Canada as a 51st state. And then in the aftermath of this attack on Venezuela, he has talked about doing similar attacks in Colombia,

in Cuba, in Iran. So it's like the United States is kind of feeling under Donald Trump, especially after the successful action that they are unrestrained, right, that they can do pretty much anything that they want. And it really brought me back to Donald Trump's inauguration speech in January of 2025 where he explicitly talked about manifest destiny being back, right? And for people who are not as familiar with U.S. history, this is basically this idea or this assertion that the United States has a God-given right to capture territory and to subject its will onto others. It is kind of like the shining, amazing country, and it should be able to spread its values to anybody else, regardless of what that means for those people. And in the weeks leading up to the,

attack on Venezuela. The United States also put out a new kind of national security document where they laid out their vision for what the future strategy was going to be for the country. And it explicitly talked about renewing the Monroe Doctrine, which of course we're now hearing called the Donro Doctrine coming from Donald Trump's name. But again, this is this idea from the 19th century that essentially asserts that the U.S. government should have control over the Western Hemisphere, that it should be able to do what it wants within the Western Hemisphere, and that nobody should be able to stop it. That's part of the reason why we see all of these coups happening throughout Latin America for the past hundred years or so as the U.S. was interfering

with these governments to make sure that they served its interest over other countries' interests, right? And so obviously, then seeing an attack on Venezuela kind of like increases that concern, right? Is he going to try to do this in other places? But also, again, what does this mean for the United States, how it sees itself in the world, and what it's going to mean them for every other country leader, you know, the peoples of all those countries, if the United States is acting this way and kind of turns its eye to your country or your leader next. There are huge implications that come with that. And so if we're kind of turning more to the realm of the technology sphere, of the things that we typically talk about on this podcast, you know, that I usually write about

and what have you. It brings back a number of events over the past year that I feel like we have talked about on the show that I have been talking about a lot in the work that I do. And that goes back to February, right? You know, not long after Trump is sworn back in as president. And vice president J.D. Vance goes over to Europe and effectively scolds European leaders during speeches in Munich and Paris where he talks about how their values are backward, you know, because it's not this kind of right-wing notion of free speech that is adopted in the United States

and is more balanced and actually pays attention to hate speech. And also, of course, how the German government excludes the far-right alternative for Germany party from government more often, right? And effectively saying he wanted that firewall to come down and for more of these far-right parties to move into government across Europe. And again, that is something that we saw in the national security strategy that the United States released a number of weeks back, I guess about a month or so ago now, where, again, they're talking about having more of these quote unquote nationalist parties, right? You know,

these extreme right-wing parties come to power in Europe and that being in the interest of the United States and it wanting to see that happening. And then, of course, when Vance was in, was in Paris, he basically, you know, slammed these European tech regulations that he doesn't like and that U.S. tech companies don't like and basically said that Europe would always remain secondary to the United States on the technology front, kind of saying, you know, you will always be dependent on us, you will always be secondary to us. And, you know, you know, what that kind of means is that the United States will always have that control over Europe, over the European Union, because they will always be dependent on U.S. Tech. And that is the way

that the United States and that the Trump administration and J.D. Vance wanted to keep it. So that was in February. That same month, the United States sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, because of the arrest warrants that were issued by the court for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, right? Because they have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity against the people of Gaza, and the court was investigating that and sought to hold them to account for that, right? And obviously, the United States was not happy with that. The Israeli government was certainly not happy with that. And as a result, the United States put sanctions again on the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court.

And this was not actually the first time that they had done such a thing. During Trump's first term, they also sanctioned the chief prosecutor, who at that time was Fatu Ben Suda, because it looked like the court was going to look into war crimes committed in Afghanistan, including by the United States. And of course, you know, the Trump administration was not going to accept that, was not going to see it happen. So, of course, then what are the effects of being sanctioned in this way? Karim Khan is a British judge who is working at the International Criminal Court. Being sanctioned means that he's effectively cut off from banking services because so many of them depend on the United States and the U.S. Swift system, but it was also revealed in May that once he

was sanctioned, Microsoft cut off his email account, and he actually moved to a Swiss service called Proton Mail instead. And of course, that detail, because of all the talk about technology, about the talk of dependence on U.S. technology, set off alarm bells in Europe, and rightfully so, because it was effectively showing very clearly that this dependence on U.S. technologies, on these platforms and services created by U.S. companies that have become so dominant, not just in Europe, but in many other parts of the world, over the past couple of decades, could be turned off at a moment's notice if the United States decided that it wanted to do that or that you are working against as interest or anything like that. And for these governments,

and even a lot of advocates and people, that is a pretty concerning development, right? You know, there were already concerns about the fact that the U.S. could, request information from these major cloud services like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. If people's data outside of the United States is stored on their servers, even if it's outside of the U.S., if it's in servers owned by American companies, because of the Cloud Act, the United States can request that data. And a Microsoft public policy person admitted to the French Senate earlier this year that it effectively could not say no when the United States makes that request.

So, you know, this is something that is known, right? And then, of course, throughout the year in June and then again in August, the U.S. put more sanctions on further judges at the international criminal court, but also the UN special rapporteur who has been focusing on the Palestinian territories on Gaza, Francesca Albanese. And again, those people were hit with the same consequences of being sanctioned individuals. So the French judge, Nicolas Guillaume, maybe I'm mispronouncing that, basically said that, you know, not only was he cut off from banking services, but he lost. all of his accounts with American companies, Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal. They all shut down his accounts because now he was a sanctioned individual. It was hard to do almost anything, hard to book hotels, shop online, you know, use any of these platforms, right? And again, a Canadian judge, Kimberly Proust, again at the International Criminal Court, said it was basically the same things.

Her credit cards were disabled immediately. She lost access to her Amazon account, all of these accounts that people use. Many of these people also said that it wasn't just affecting them, but it was affecting people around them. In some cases, their kids' visas for the United States were canceled or became clear that their plans to study in the United States were not going to be able to happen because their parents had been sanctioned by the United States. These are really ridiculous things, right? Like, it's ridiculous for the United States to be able to do this and for us to collectively be so dependent on the United States and U.S. systems that if it decides that there is

somebody that is working against its interest or somebody that it even doesn't like because of the actions that they take and the United States is now more willing to use these powers than maybe it had been in the past, that now all of a sudden they can be cut off from banking services internationally, they can be cut off from the tech services that we all depend on. And like, then what can you do? You know, it's hard to travel. It's hard to shop. It's hard to be paid. It's hard to buy anything. Like on and on, things just become more and more difficult because of the dependencies that, that we're we have kind of collectively developed and didn't really think so much about for a long time, but now can really be used against us by United States that is like openly and clearly imperial,

working for itself, has very little regard for international law. Or, you know, if you look domestically at the United States, seemingly its own constitution and law as well, right, for the rule of law in general. It's just whatever they want to do they seem to be moving forward with and getting away with in many cases. that brings a lot of concerns. And then, of course, if you move up to, like, the international level, you see the United States increasingly dismantling this international system of, you know, international rules and treaties and things like that that have been built up for a long time, which is not to say that

the United States was always the greatest country at following those types of rules. We, of course, know the Iraq War as a clear example of where it violated international law went in without, you know, kind of international sanction there. Last year, the strikes that it conducted on Iranian nuclear facilities in June were also illegal under international law. And I think one of the problems here is that the United States keeps doing these things, right? You know, keeps asserting its power in this way. And instead of finding real pushback, right, instead of other countries trying to rein it in, more often they justify what the United States is doing, which helps to allow it to continue to do.

it even more, right? So when it attacked Iran back in June, the response of many Western countries was not to criticize the United States for reaching international law, something they have been criticizing Russia for doing in Ukraine for the past few years, rightfully so, but instead to say, you know, Iran is a bad regime, it shouldn't have this nuclear program, and now we need to see where we're going to go next, we need de-escalation, things like that, right? You know, not calling it to account for what it had done there. And then, of course, in Venezuela, more recently, we heard a very similar response. Maduro was a bad guy, and now we need a peaceful and democratic transition in Venezuela.

But, you know, to achieve that, if that's even going to happen, it doesn't seem that Donald Trump is very interested in democracy in Venezuela. He seems to be more interested in oil in Venezuela. There's no talk of the breach of international law, so the United States gets the message that, again, it can trample over these things as much as it wants, and it will. not be held to account for the types of things that it is doing, right? That is unconstrained because its power is so great over the international system, over these other countries. They do not want to feel the consequences of going against the United States, right? So, you know, they all want

to negotiate deals and trade deals and lower tariff rates with the United States. They don't want kind of the eye of the U.S. government to be firmly placed on their country and then, you know, kind of like hitting them with different tariffs and sanctions as a result, you know, to try to make them feel the pain. And so instead they just let the United States keep getting away with this. And we saw many examples of this last year, right? You know, I've talked about it a number of times, how the Canadian government kept giving in to Trump's demands, got rid of the digital services tax and things like that to try to appease Donald Trump and, you know, the people behind him, in particular in that case, the tech companies that were behind him. But we see it in Europe.

as well, right? Where again and again, whether it's the United Kingdom, giving into a lot of what Donald Trump wanted because it wanted a trade deal and it wanted U.S. investment, particularly from the tech companies, or, of course, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who had a meeting in July with Trump at his golf course in Scotland that many saw as a capitulation, right? You know, kind of giving into the demands of the United States and of Donald Trump and how the European Union didn't actually get very much out of that, right? They didn't do very good. in kind of like getting this amazing deal. And there are, I would say, are quite a lot of people in the European Union who are getting

more and more frustrated with the tact that the European Commission has taken to dealing with Donald Trump because it is not forceful enough, right? It's not pushing back enough. And this gets really difficult then when immediately after Venezuela, Trump's eye seems to turn back to Greenland and how much he wants Greenland and wants to take Greenland. And only at that point do we start to hear some talk from Europe. European Union officials from Canada, from places like that, from the United Kingdom, saying, you know, Trump should not go near this. You know, the future of Greenland is between Denmark and the people of Greenland, because of course, Greenland is part of Denmark.

But it's not very forceful. And on top of that, it's like, okay, you let him get away with these other breaches of international law and you only care, again, when his eye turns to a Western country or something like that. So it really shows the, like, you know, hypocrisy that is baked into the way that they're approaching that. But how, as a result, the United States power increases, right? Because it sees that it will not feel the consequences of taking actions like this throughout the world, of tearing up international law, the international system, multilateralism, because all of its traditional allies are too scared to actually do something, you know, are willing to kind of come together and use their collective power to try and. to rein the United States in, of course, working with other countries around the world as well. They could certainly do that. But instead, the United States just runs roughshod over the international system, over any country that it seemingly wants, other than China maybe, and largely gets its way.

And it's certainly not sending us in the right direction, right? You know, as this policy of might makes right is the one that ends up defining the way forward. And so, you know, if we think about tech issues, if we're kind of pivoting back to that. we're thinking about it through that lens, then we need to think about the dependencies that have been built up on the United States, right? You know, we're very dependent. Many countries are very dependent economically and militarily on the United States. And of course, there's been talk about diversifying trade relationships or investing more

in the military in order to try to develop more of local defense industries or try to procure military equipment from other places rather than just the United States. But the issue there is that you need to think about the technological system as well. And unfortunately, too many of these governments are too focused on chasing tech investment, you know, trying to get these major tech companies and major tech investors to put money into their country. And as a result, they're not willing to take the actions that are necessary in order to develop that technological resilience as well, which is something that is absolutely essential in how these actions by the U.S. government over the past year, as well as the sanctions that they have placed on different individuals and the way that they have been

asserting the power of their tech companies and trying to punish any country that tries to regulate those tech companies really shows why the technological piece needs to be front and center. If we're talking about, you know, kind of weaning off dependence of the United States, reducing the ability of the United States to, you know, make a country pay if it goes against what it is that the United States wants. But we haven't seen nearly enough of that over the past year. as there have been these focuses on these other things. But it's very clear that that needs to change, right?

And that really trying to achieve that degree of digital sovereignty, obviously something we've talked a lot about on the show over the past year, and also that I have written about a bunch, including in a white paper that was published at the end of 2024 with some colleagues that I can link to in the show notes again if you want to check that out. One of the keys there, and I would say there are a few, but is really creating an international alliance to make this something that is doable, that is workable, right? So it's not just one country going out of it alone or even one block of

countries going out of alone, but is this broader effort to develop some kind of infrastructure, some kind of suite of technological services and things like this that, you know, are not dominated by just another player that is, again, trying to replicate the model of Silicon Valley and sell it all to these other countries and companies and what have you, but is actually tried to create that resilience and not it just being about, again, creating a another new market or creating some new unicorns, right, some tech companies that are valued very highly, but is developing technology for the public good at the end of the day, but also to give itself that degree of independence, that degree of sovereignty, that degree of power

over, you know, its own affairs. And you can see that in many different ways, right, whether it is to try to empower oneself as an individual, but I would say that I think that is a bit of a fool's error and is a bit of like a libertarian fantasy and that we do need to think, much more collectively about these sorts of things. And from my perspective, if we're ever going to kind of wean ourselves off of these major U.S. tech companies, the government is essential from a regulatory perspective, but also from an investment perspective, right, to channel the funds that can actually go into making robust technologies that a lot of people and companies can develop and that are made to be

accessible to people, rather than just being kind of open source free software and only tech people can figure out how to use it and get onto it and use it properly, right? Leaving everyone else still dependent on these US technologies and these technologies that, for better or worse, are made for the wider public. And that's why so many people use them, right? And that's something, of course, that we need to keep in mind. But so this alliance piece is necessary, right? We need to work together.

We need to channel those resources. And then, of course, you know, we can all work together to try to achieve this kind of new system, this new set of technologies that is going to help us get up. off of these US technologies, while I would say slowly banning and restricting the US ones so that they can't kind of interfere in the attempts at this transition. But then the other piece of that, of course, is if we're kind of forming this international alliance, if we're working together to build a different set of technologies, then it's clear that those technologies also need to be built on a different foundation, a different framework, right? And that means not seeing technology as primarily

something that is done by the private sector that is done to make profit over public benefits and things like that, but, you know, is actually developed potentially by kind of nonprofit groups, by public corporations in order to not have this kind of profit motive and these market incentives at the foundation, at the base, guiding the development, but actually thinking about what the society needs, what is going to benefit the society and the broader public, and developing those types of technologies that I think would actually look quite different and work quite different than the ones that we're dependent on right now that are all about the extraction of data, the extraction of profit, and getting us dependent and hooked on these services so that these

companies can make as much money as possible off of us, right? That's really what it's about at the end of the day. And that also enables a significant amount of surveillance, not just from the companies themselves, right? You know, figuring out what's going on in our lives so that they can try to sell us more things and keep us hooked on these different platforms, but that also enables this kind of broader surveillance by governments and intelligence agencies as well

because of the infrastructure that has been built out by the private sector in order to enable their business model. So this is all interconnected at the end of the day, and that's a serious problem, especially when we think about, again, the power that the United States is wielding right now and how it kind of has like a degree to utilize these surveillance systems in a way that,

few other countries do, right? There are other countries with high level capabilities, but the United States is like basically at the top of the pile there, right? Because its companies are making these things. It is kind of foremost on technological development, at least at the moment. Maybe China will leapfrog it there. But this is what we're seeing, right? And so that shows us not just why we need to develop something different, but also why it needs to be very different from what we have today. And I think that's part of the reason why these approaches so often fail, because if we look at what's happening in Canada, in the European Union, in Australia right now, there's a lot of talk about growth, growth, growth, right? We need economic growth. We need to be growing the economy.

We need investment. And so that means instead of thinking about approaching technology from a different angle through a different lens, through a different set of priorities, instead it is all about how do we get this investment, how do we make big tech companies that are valued highly for ourselves. How do we commercialize and privatize more things that can be kind of put into this technological system that we can potentially create value from? And that has a whole load of effects, right? And even when we have these U.S. tech companies moving into the economies of other countries, you know, in the past, we thought that that was a great thing because we were getting this investment from these companies. They were creating jobs and, you know, kind of doing high-valued

work essentially in the countries or at least that's what you would imagine that actually part of what happens there is sure you get you know taxes being paid sure you get jobs being created but at the end of the day the real value is accruing back to the united states right that's where they're paying most of their taxes that is where the benefits are ultimately going and sure they might have these satellite offices in different countries around the world that might get some degree of benefit from it but ultimately the united states is the main beneficiary and you can see that you can see that that not just in the way that its economy performs and the way that its stock market performs, because it has so many of these major tech companies based in the United States, but also then

the control that is able to wield because of the degree of dependence that so many other countries have on these tech companies that are based in the United States, that have links with the U.S. government, and that especially over the past few years, are talking more and more about how part of their mandate or their mission is to support the United States. States, the power of the United States in the world, you know, it's all linked up. It's all linked together, which shows you once again why we need to be thinking of getting off of this, of doing something different. And I think this is my entryway to maybe pivot to talking about a different angle of this, right? So for the past year, I've obviously been talking a lot about digital sovereignty,

right? And everything I've been talking about thus far really relates to that concept. You know, we need to be thinking about the power of the U.S. We need to be thinking about how we reduce our dependence on the US and the ability of the US government to wield its power over these other countries and the people of those countries, right? And that is certainly going to remain a big focus of the show going into this year. That is not going to end.

I'll be continuing to follow developments there, looking at what other countries are doing that maybe we didn't discuss in 2025. And so I'll be really focused on that. But then the other piece of this is the kind of opt-out piece, right? How we reduce our dependence, how we, get off of these technologies.

And so I guess like the digital sovereignty piece, the geopolitics piece is at a higher level, right? You know, we're thinking about governments, we're thinking about states, we're thinking about what they can do, and how we need to push them to do more in order to move these agendas forward, in order to reduce these dependencies, and that sort of thing, right? And so the other piece of what I'm thinking a lot about, and again, I was still thinking about this last year, but I think is going to take a bit more focus this year is how we try to get off of these things ourselves as well, right? It's important to have the governments thinking about this, again, taking actions that will hopefully give us more choices as we think about what to adopt or

use instead of the platforms offered by U.S. tech companies. But at the same time, there are already options out there that we can potentially take, that we can utilize in order to start this transition off of U.S. tech companies, but also hopefully support a nascent set of platforms and services that already exist that hopefully have better values than the U.S. ones that many of us are dependent on right now, but also by having more people using the services, paying for the services, it hopefully kind of gives more money into that ecosystem of developing something that is different, right? Even if in many cases there's still commercial services, hopefully because they see that they need to be distinct from what's going on in the

United States, that they won't start acting in that way as well. And hopefully in the influx of new users will be able to kind of pressure them to keep doing that. Right. And so I guess what I'm saying there is this relates back to an episode that I did a number of months ago on getting off of US tech and certainly in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Venezuela, I have seen a big uptick and interest in how to get off of U.S. tech companies and service. is. So certainly I think that that is a big piece of this, right? Thinking about how right now we're dependent on Google, we're dependent on Microsoft, we're dependent on Amazon or Apple or meta, how is it that we start to move off of these platforms, reduce our dependence on these platforms, recognizing that,

you know, we're never going to be able to fully get off of these things right now. You know, there will still potentially be dependencies to some of these tech companies just because of the infrastructure that so many of us are dependent on and how they have been. and really built into a lot of the things that we use, even the ways that our governments communicate with us sometimes. Or we kind of work at a company and they require us to use a Microsoft product or a Google product as a result of that. So for those reasons, maybe it can be difficult to get off of certain pieces of it. But that doesn't mean that we can't get off of other pieces of it more readily or more easily and that we shouldn't do that.

So I think that is part of the focus going into this year as well. you know, again, how do we continue to do this? How do we move this forward? How do we keep trying to get off of these services? But maybe the thing that I add to it this year is also thinking about the technologies that we use more generally. So right now, if we are using this set of services, if we have had all of these devices and whatnot pushed at us because of this notion of convenience, right?

You know, this is going to make your life easier. You need to adopt these things. you're going to enjoy it. There will be a lot of entertainment. It'll be easier to shop. It'll be easier to communicate with people, but also, you know, we'll be sticking, you know,

a bunch of posts that are trying to increase engagement and that are probably AI generated now to get you to be using the platform more because over time we have transformed these services that we once sold to you as convenience, utility entertainment to be less useful to extract more profit from you, to make them more engaging or might even

say addictive, then, you know, I think that there is an opportunity there to think about what we have actually been sold, to think about the tech infrastructure that has been created, and to think about whether maybe we adopted some things that we shouldn't have adopted, and it's time to do a bit of a reversal, maybe like a form of digital refusal or digital resistance or something like this, to say, you know what, some of these technologies are not actually working for me. They're not actually working for my community. They're not actually working for us collectively. And so the point is not then to look for an alternative to replace it with, but actually

just to like move away and reject it fully or maybe to return to something from a previous era that was working better in a sense, right? For me, as I started off this year, I was thinking about what technologies am I actually using which ones do I need, which ones are not serving me, which ones are like actively potentially making my life worse? And how can I change the way that I use them to benefit myself, right? So I've already gone through this process of trying to shed a number of the digital services that I use. That is not something that I have completed by any means. And this year, I'm planning to continue replacing some more. You know, just for example, I still unfortunately am

using Microsoft Office until I finish, you know, the book that I'm working on right now. And at that point, I'm going to switch over to Libra Office. I have unfortunately fallen back into using Google Maps in large part because of the business listings on there. But I want to make a renewed effort to get off of the Google mapping service and use something else like, here we go potentially. And I still use Apple Notes, right? Because it's built into my systems.

Yes, I'm still on Apple devices. And I want to move that over likely to a service called Obsidian, which is made in Canada, just to give you a few examples of things that I'm still struggling with, things that I still want to move forward with, we're not all perfect, we're doing the best that we can. I don't think that there should be an expectation that we're going to replace everything that we use. But again, I think every time that we chip away at something, it's helpful, it's useful, it's beneficial, and it's moving us in the right direction. But then along with that, I've also been thinking about the things to get rid of, right? So at the beginning of the year, or as 2025 was ending, I started deleting a

of social media apps off of my phone, eventually culminating in getting rid of Instagram, you know, the account is still there, but at least getting it off of my phone because I found that I was just falling into these loops of watching far too many reels, you know, getting stuck on it, as I'm sure many of you have experienced with Instagram or with TikTok. And I was just like, I'm losing way too much of my life to these stupid videos that I don't really care about. And so I literally deleted it. I don't know if it was December 31st or January 1st. And then like a week later, I realized, you know what? I have not even thought about it since I deleted it.

That was how little importance that app actually had in my life. But because it was on my phone, because it was so easy to access, I would just go into it all the time and see what was happening and, you know, just waste some time. And that was a bit of a wake up call to me as well, right? And since then, I've just been deleting a ton of apps on my phone that I don't need, that I feel like I don't need, you know, that are just there and potentially wasting my time or, you know, that I could potentially fall into

if they were still there and I just want to like remove that temptation or that opportunity, right? And then on top of that, I can't remember if I've talked about this on the show, but I've really moved back to reading physical books from e-books. There were a number of years where I read almost exclusively e-books. And in the past, I guess since the pandemic really, but especially in the past couple of years, I almost exclusively read physical books now. And I really enjoy. that because it means I'm not looking at a screen. You know, often I'm taking notes in a little notebook as I'm doing that pen and paper, not just in a notes app or something. And I really enjoy it. And, you know, I've been going back to trying to do more and more kind of physical media,

got back into magazines. And I actually even, because I've been reading a lot about this lately, and I'll tell you, I often enjoy going on to the R. Dumpphones subreddit. I'm really not a Reddit guy. I don't use it very often. But it's like maybe once a week. I'll drop into the subreddit for dumb phones just to like see what is going on there. And I feel like it's a lot of younger people who tend to use it. And the thing that I really enjoy is they talk about their everyday carries and they put up photos of the things that they carry with them every day. And of course, you know, these are often people who are getting rid of smartphones or

who are really trying to like dumb down the smartphone that they have to not use it very much and replace different features of the smartphone with something else, whether it's a notebook or a dedicated device so that they're not being pulled into some other app on their phone. So they'll have little digital cameras, or it's very common, it seems, for them to have PSPs, you know, the portable PlayStation gaming system from back in the day, which I thought was really cool,

but also MP3 players and iPods. And I've gotten off of Apple Music in favor of Deezer, which is a French service, but even then I've been like, I've been feeling a bit weird about streaming services for a while. I canceled most of my video streaming services, and I actually rent a lot of digital movies now instead of, instead of subscribing to a service. And I do have some Blu-rays as well,

but I guess I don't do as much of that as maybe I'll start doing, at least for the movies that I really like and that I rewatch from time to time. But so I'd already been thinking about pulling back on a music streaming service as well. I like the idea of getting an eye, again of potentially modding that iPod. And so I actually remembered that last year my mom showed me my old iPod classic. And so I found it again. I have it.

And I'm planning to mod it if it still works. I'm waiting for a charging cable so I can actually see if it turns on. But yeah, I'm planning to like mod it to use it, see what it's like going back to an iPod again rather than having a streaming service and being more intentional about like the music that's on there and not just being lost in these algorithmically generated playlist. that caused me not to remember, like anything that I've actually listened to and just have this stream of music flowing into my ears.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, like, on one hand, there's like the getting off of these US tech services, right? Of doing something different, of trying to reject the Googles and Microsofts and Amazon's of the world, but also thinking about how much of that we actually need. How much of this tech infrastructure is not working, was just made to maximize the profits of these companies,

maximize the data that they can get off of, us and that don't actually provide the degree of convenience or utility that they initially sold us because they wanted to get us to subscribe to something new or get us using some new product or something like that. And so I feel like that is going to be a big part of this year as well. Thinking more intentionally about the tech products that we use to potentially abandon some, right, to potentially exclude some from our lives that maybe we don't need. And that's not to say that we've never talked about that in the past. What comes to mind initially for me is, of course,

Chris Gileard coming on the show and talking about surveillance technology and luxury surveillance and the problems with even a lot of these like Fitbits and smart watches and this idea of tracking all of your biometric data and things like that. So it's not like we've never kind of moved into this space before. Of course, I don't have an Apple Watch or any of those things. But I think it's worthwhile to think about it further. to talk about it a bit more, to see what people are doing in this space, right? And to see if they have any, like, good ideas for thinking about doing this differently,

right? For thinking more intentionally about the technologies that we use and potentially rejecting some of these technologies that exist to serve the major tech companies, but not to serve us, right? Again, getting back to this idea that if we started from a different set of values, from a different set of foundations, from which to be. build technology, right, that are not oriented toward profit and power and extraction, first and foremost, but more oriented toward the public good, human flourishing, encouraging

human culture and the things that make human life worthwhile, are these really the technologies that we would be using? My thought is like, no, I think a lot of these things are technologies that were developed because of a particular moment in a particular system that benefit particular interests, but in many cases do not benefit us, do not benefit our society, and are actively harming our society. And, you know, I think that the more and more we kind of go down the road of this system of technological development, the clearer and clearer that becomes, right? You know, looking back at cryptocurrencies, looking at the metaverse, looking at the attempt to stick smart glasses on our faces and put cameras everywhere. And now, of course, with generative AI and

what these companies are trying to do with that, and how little regard they actually have for what is good for human society, for human life, for what brings joy to humanity. And instead, they seem not just to want to destroy those things, but to have an active ambivalence for humanity itself, right, to want to replace us with robots, to want to merge us with machines with AGI and all this kind of stuff. I think it's time to really think about the ideology that's at the base of all this stuff. to really question the technologies themselves. And yes, I don't think that individual action solves everything,

but it can hopefully be a start. And if enough people do it, then it forces change on a broader level, or at least I hope that that's how our system is supposed to work democratically. So I guess to zoom back out, that gives you a good idea of some of the main kind of directions or kind of themes that are going to be motivating the work that goes into tech won't save us and the conversations that I'm going to be having this year.

Again, thinking about digital sovereignty, how we reduce our dependence on U.S. technologies, and to a lesser degree, Chinese technologies as well, but obviously a lot of the listeners to this show, it's U.S. technologies that are the bigger concern, right? You know, it is a lot of Western listeners at the end of the day, and even in a lot of other parts of the world. The technologies that people are still using for the most part are U.S. technologies. And that doesn't mean that we should just all run into the camp of Chinese technologies and adopt all those instead.

but again, think about a different system of technological development, thinking about developing technologies that work in different ways that actually benefit us rather than extracting profit from us. And I think that that's really at the core of this, right? And then, of course, the second piece is thinking about the technologies that we use more tangibly at like, I guess, more of an individual and, you know, kind of small community level and what that actually means for the societies that we live in, but also the lives that we lead, right? And whether there is an opportunity to not just get off of these services that were already dependent on to try to find something else. But in some cases, to actively just reject the technologies or the services or the platforms altogether

and say, maybe there isn't really a better version of this that looks better, that works better, that is more human-centric or whatnot. Maybe this is a technology, a platform, a service that is developed to extract that can never really serve us properly and that we should opt out of. or even maybe the version of it that exists right now is something very harmful that doesn't work. And there is no real alternative that exists at the moment that is more socially beneficial, more socially conscious, what have you. And so that means we don't just wait on the shitty harmful service until something better comes.

We reject it and we do something else. And if that better thing comes along in the future, maybe we try it out and we see if that works. But for now, it's not. And it's okay for us to accept that, to reject it, and to move on with our lives, and to say we don't need that. And I think it's important to not just have these discussions, but hopefully build a community around it as well, right? You know, one of the things I found most inspiring in the past few years was reading about these Luddite clubs in New York, in Brooklyn, and how they expanded to many other places of, you know, young people just thinking about the technologies that they use, rejecting the ones that don't work, and trying to intentionally create community around that rejection. and around culture and around physical objects again, which I think is really cool.

And we'll be talking about that on the show in the next few weeks. So I think that's a good place to kind of leave this initial episode that gives you an idea of where we're going this year. And also my thoughts on some of these issues, right? And why we need to be paying attention to these broader geopolitical trends, even if we're thinking about technology, because this is all related these days, right? Technology is everywhere.

Technology is part of everything. These companies are immensely powerful. they have close relationships to governments and to the U.S. government in particular. And when the U.S. government is acting the way it is, when these tech companies and CEOs have the relationships that they have with the Trump administration in particular, but also with administrations of both political stripes who have been serving their interests for a long time, then we need to be aware of what's going on here. And we can't have kind of like a blindfold over our eyes anymore.

We need to look clearly at this if we are going to make sure that technology serves the public, the people not just of particular countries, but of the world, and to try to think about how that technology can look different and can actually serve a social, human-oriented project rather than serving profit and kind of pretending to do something like that, right? So welcome to 2026. I know it's off to a wild start already. Hopefully it doesn't turn out to be as bad of the year that the first kind of week or so is making it look to be. But of course, at Tech won't save us. I will be continuing to have critical in-depth conversations to explore these issues, you know, the politics of technology, the geopolitics of technology, the political economy of technology. These are the types of things

that I'm really interested in and that I think a lot of you are interested in as well. So, of course, as always, Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kylie Houston. Tech won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. So if you enjoy these conversations about technology, the tech industry, and everything that surrounds it, you can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week for our first full conversation of 2026.