Tech Won't Save Us - Silicon Valley is Embracing Anti-China Nationalism w/ JS Tan

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by JS Tan to discuss the internet’s connection with neoliberalism, China’s protectionist measures to develop its own tech industry, and how the new tensions between the United States and China are leading Silicon Valley to embrace nationalism.JS Tan is a former tech worker and writer. He also started Collective Actions in Tech. He recently wrote articles about the tech angle on the Cold War for Foreign Policy and Trump’s attempted TikTok ban for Jacobin. Follow JS on Twitter as @organizejs.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network and follow it on Twitter as @harbingertweets. You can also find Kino Lefter on Twitter.Also mentioned in this episode:The solidarity between tech workers in the United States and ChinaKey insights into tech worker activism from the Collective Actions in Tech databaseMark Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown UniversityPeter Thiel’s tech nationalism op-ed in the New York TimesEric Schmidt’s tech nationalism op-ed in the New York TimesSupport the show

They both give Silicon Valley the same warning, that Silicon Valley must start to collaborate with the Pentagon and the U.S. military, otherwise China will win. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, part of the Harbinger Media Network. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by JS Tan. JS is a former tech worker and a writer who said pieces at Foreign Policy, Jacobin, Made in China, and The Guardian. He's also an editor at Laosan and started Collective Actions in Tech, which chronicles the modern-day tech labor movement. In our conversation today, we talk about the so-called new Cold War between the U.S. and China and how that focuses on technology and the major tech companies of both of these major countries,

but also how the framing around these conflicts often miss what's actually happening between these countries, these companies, and the workers on both sides. As you might have heard on the last episode, Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, which is a new group of left-wing podcasts presented by Passage, a left-wing publication in Canada. And this month, to introduce people to some of the other shows on the network, we are giving a little introduction at the beginning of each show of one of the other podcasts on the network. So today, if you're interested in movies and TV, Kino Lefter is a really cool socialist podcast hosted by Evan MacDonald out of Edmonton, Alberta, that has great guests on to look deeper into these cultural

artifacts. As always, if you liked today's episode, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And obviously, if you want to support the work that I put into this show, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. JS, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hello. Thank you for having me.

You've had some fantastic pieces lately in foreign policy and Jacobin kind of expanding on this kind of new Cold War. But before we actually get to what's happening now, you know, I want us to kind of go back of it and look at how we kind of got to this point. And so in the foreign policy piece, you write about how Silicon Valley was very much entwined with the larger neoliberal project. And so can you explain how this played out in Silicon Valley itself very much entwined with the larger neoliberal project. And so can you explain how this played out in Silicon Valley itself and how it influenced the politics of the executives

in Silicon Valley and how they perceived technology? To answer that question, I kind of want to dive back into the history of the internet a little bit and how it really went global. Starting from the 90s, since the internet's popularization, the internet has always really been this way for freedom and democracy to transcend national borders. So very much in line with the neoliberal project in that sense. And people believe that it was this new and natural way for liberal democracies to counter authoritarian regimes. There was this idea that if you simply unleash the internet on the world, the internet would free all people and allow them wherever wherever they are, to stand up against authoritarianism

and state oppression. And I think this belief of the internet really resonated in the West. You have people calling the Arab Spring the Facebook movement, claiming that it was because of social media that protesters were really able to stand up to the state. And in 2013, Mark Zuckerberg doubled down on this idea, claiming that the internet was this international human right. People believe that with the democratization of information, the democratization of society would be inevitable, and that the internet was this perfect mechanism for it, this bottom-up, ungovernable, and effectively impossible-to-control mechanism. In 2000, Bill Clinton famously said that controlling the

internet was like nailing Jell-O to the wall, and that this technology was going to fundamentally change China and ultimately liberalize it. But what many people don't see is the flip side of this story, which is that this particular vision of a free and an open emancipatory internet dovetail with globalization and the neoliberal project. And it was in fact, this language and this ethos of liberation and emancipation that allowed them to get away with it. It's kind of interesting to contrast this history of the internet with what we have today, which is a very different picture of the internet. Everything we hear about the internet seems to point away from this liberal world that we once believed that the internet would create,

especially after the Snowden reveal, where we found out that actually the internet was being used as a way to surveil pretty much everyone. And so we're also starting to hear about the emergence of this new kind of internet, the splitternet, as some have called it. And we see this with the potential TikTok ban, the WeChat ban, and sort of the whole theater of the tech cold war. And of course, China, since the 2000 ban, and sort of this whole theater of the tech cold war. And of course, China, since the 2000s, have operated quite differently from this model. Instead of liberalizing the country, the government has used the internet as a way to control and censor people. And so there's this shift between what the internet was meant to be, how it was meant to support the neoliberal project, and how it's really taken this 180 today. I think that's a fantastic way to

kind of introduce and explain this discussion, right? You mentioned the Arab Spring and how a lot of those revolutions were kind of framed as Twitter and Facebook revolutions. And that's something I've been thinking about a lot lately because, you know, we're having this discussion about the impact of social media and of data collection and algorithms on what people think and what broader effect that's having on like politics and reality and fake news and all these things, right? And I just think about how, you know, we should have learned back during the Arab Spring that it's not just about technology, right?

That there are other factors at play here, but still these same narratives are still being repeated today. We still don't seem to have learned from that. So I think that's a really interesting point. So obviously Silicon Valley was very associated with neoliberalism, and it had a great influence on how the people in Silicon Valley, how the politicians responding to Silicon Valley were thinking about technology and the internet. But in the piece, you also write that the neoliberal project and the United States' ability to push that across the world through getting countries in the global south in particular to change policies, to liberalize their markets, all these sorts of things, also benefited the tech giants because then they could roll their tech products out into all of

these countries and kind of suppress local innovation and local tech industries. So how did that happen? And how did they kind of use this language of freedom and liberation in order to justify this project that they were carrying out? You've laid out a little bit of the context. And I think that's really important. If we sort of trace back to where we are when these tech companies started to go global, this was the 90s, the early 2000s, the prosperous decades of neoliberalism. And the neoliberal order, which had reached a level of maturity, and we haven't, at least in any significant way, seen really any competing economic paradigms since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so at this point, elites around the world have pretty much accepted that the free market is really the only way to go. So here in

this context, this is where the internet is really set up to thrive. After all, it's this perfect medium for the free market. Transactions are instantaneous and borders are not really a thing on the internet. So tech companies in the US are able to take advantage of this, dressing up what is actually, in my opinion, an economic maneuver under the veil of benevolence. And Silicon Valley is very good at this. They make every product sound like it's going to change the world or make a difference in the world. Search is sort of talked about as having free access to the world's information. Social media is all about connecting you to people. And the best part is that most of them are free. And so Google during this time became this icon for what

a modern and progressive company should look like, of course, most famously represented by their old slogan, don't be evil. And so this ethos of an open and a free and a liberating internet really allowed companies like Google, like Facebook, and countless other Silicon Valley companies to enter foreign countries completely unregulated, creating new markets, new digital markets that they would then immediately monopolize. And so domestic firms in these other countries were effectively given no space to develop, let alone compete. And as a result, we have an internet in the rest of the world that effectively looks the same as the internet that we have here in the US.

The ability to kind of offer these products for free, ostensibly, really kind of helped push those products global, right? Because they could rely on the US markets and wealthier Western markets to act as an anchor as they pushed into the rest of the world and then got the populations of those countries reliant on their services. And so then it was much tougher for local companies to kind of push back and challenge that and create their own alternatives because the people already had access to this globe-spanning platform that was free and was much easier to fund and serve ads to them and all these sorts of things than a local competitor would. But what we do see is that some countries push back against this model. And one of the most obvious ones is China because of how

they implemented what's called the Great Firewall. So how did China develop its own tech industry? The question of how did it develop, especially during this time where in the 90s, early 2000s, the West was really dominating the internet? I think the answer is effectively, they were able to develop their tech industry by breaking the rules of the neoliberal order. You know, I think when most people think of China's internet, they, you know, as you mentioned, they think of the Great Firewall, which is used by the Chinese government

to block hundreds of Western sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Google. And I think people usually arrive at the conclusion that this is really a mechanism to censor Western sites so that the government can retain full control over the flow of information in China, and they can censor politically sensitive topics whenever they please. Of course, this critique is absolutely valid. The Chinese government has absolutely taken advantage of this to control what information people in China have access to and what they

don't. They've even built out this vast surveillance network using the internet to do things like this social credit system, as well as to surveil Uyghurs in Xinjiang. So I think this is absolutely a valid critique. But just as importantly, the Great Firewall, especially early on for the Chinese internet, was also a protectionist measure. It was a way to insulate Chinese tech companies from the West. And intentionally or not, it gave Chinese tech companies the space to develop and the space to grow into formidable competitors of Silicon Valley. And so now today, we have hundreds of Chinese tech companies trying to go global, perhaps most famously Huawei and TikTok. Ironically, I think as the Chinese tech sector has started to

go global and started to eat into the American market share, we're starting to see this interesting reversal of roles between the US and China. The US has now called to ban WeChat and TikTok. And Mike Pompeo has even launched this Clean Initiative Network, which is effectively a protectionist measure to keep China out of the U.S. market, of course, under the guise of national security. The U.S. has also pressured its allies to sort of follow suit in this,

encouraging countries like the U.K. to also ban Huawei on 5G technology. And so I think what we're left with today is we're sort of seeing these two countries, these two tech super giants who are pointing the finger at each other and propping each other up with nationalism. In the United States, the major tech companies that we associate with that are Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft are the major ones. What does the composition of the tech industry

in China look like? And how do these companies operate differently from the ones that we would see in the United States? There is definitely a lot of similarity in the way these tech companies are shifting towards conglomerates effectively. The biggest few companies in China are Tencent, who owns WeChat, Alibaba, who is you can kind of think of as an Amazon competitor, as well as Baidu, Huawei, and even some of the older players like Sina. As far as how they differ, I think in a way, many of them are very similar, but as they sort of become these conglomerates that you have them sort of going in slightly different directions. So for example,

Tencent actually has a huge portfolio of gaming companies under the belt, including, you know, some of the American flagship game companies like Riot. And another aspect with Tencent is that they diversified their portfolio in the sense that WeChat has taken on this kind of role of being the whole internet within the app itself. You know, so you can do payments on WeChat, you can obviously chat with people, you can send money to people. It's sort of one of the most commonly used ways to actually pay for things in China now. like actions and companies and capabilities and things within it. I think for people who haven't used WeChat, it's difficult to understand the degree to which kind of like everything is in there. And you really don't need to like leave the app if you don't want to, right. And so you talked about how we're moving toward this Cold War framing between the US tech companies and the Chinese tech companies, and I guess the US and China

more broadly, if we think about like geopolitics, right? And so up until a few years ago, it was kind of fine for US tech companies to be trying to cultivate close ties with China, operating in China, all of these things like that. But now we see people like Peter Thiel, who is a major Silicon Valley libertarian, and Eric Schmidt, who's the former CEO of Google, writing op-eds kind of saying like, US tech companies need to work with the Pentagon to challenge China, right? So how should we understand this shift just in these past few years, where Silicon Valley has gone from being fine with working with China to now, it's like, okay, we need to work with

the US government to counter what China and Chinese tech companies are doing to us or the threat that they could pose to us. The rise of the Chinese tech sector has become so threatening, has become so internationally competitive, that it threatens the global hegemony of Silicon Valley. And this is a change that really only happened in the past several years. And so as a result, we're seeing the tech sector portray the Chinese tech sector as this imminent threat to American values, ultimately so that American tech companies can do things like escape regulation and justify lucrative contracts with China really demonstrates this. There's been this change of attitude over the past several years. And so just a few years back with Zuckerberg, he tried to cozy up to China so that they would allow Facebook back into the Chinese market. He even offered to develop custom-made censorship tools for the Chinese government in order to sweeten the deal, but it never worked. And so now there's this change in his attitude where he's kind of gone on the offense to China, especially in this moment

where seemingly everyone is trying to regulate Facebook. He's now painting China as this authoritarian enemy, saying if Facebook gets regulated, then these Chinese companies who do not have the American democratic values that Facebook supposedly has will overtake Facebook. But of course, we know that given the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and sort of the countless other scandals since then, Facebook has never really cared for democratic values. Another key example that you touched on is Peter Thiel, who literally portrays Chinese technology as a military threat to the US, as well as, like you said, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who similarly sounds the alarm about the threat of Chinese tech. And they both give Silicon Valley the same warning, that Silicon

Valley must start to collaborate with the Pentagon and the US military. Otherwise, China will win. And what's really interesting about the example of Thiel and Schmidt is that these two men, at least in my opinion, represent very different positions, very different identities within Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is this right-wing, Trump-supporting, libertarian businessman. So it's hardly surprising to see him adopt this nationalist rhetoric. But Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, he was the CEO of this super multinational, super progressive company, Google. And I think to many people, it represents the liberal and supposedly the sensible point of view. So this attitude towards China is actually, at this point, quite widely spread across the political spectrum among tech executives in Silicon Valley. I think what this points to is this deeper, almost ideological question

in Silicon Valley, which is how should Silicon Valley rule if it plans to keep its place in the world capitalist order? And in the past, American tech has embodied this blend of progressive values with economic conservatism, as we've talked about previously. But what they're finding is that this model is actually no match for the Chinese mode of authoritarian state capitalism. And so many tech companies have, as a result, decided that they should drop the Progressive Act altogether. It's going to be a process for some companies, but we can see from Google, they've dropped their slogan, don't be evil. And that's partly why I think we're seeing this

emergence of nationalism across the industry. If playing the good guys isn't going to be enough to compete globally, then big tech is more than happy to cozy up with the Pentagon. And just to illustrate how lucrative that is, just last year, Microsoft won a $10 billion contract with the Defense Department, a cloud contract called Jedi. We're seeing right now that so many of these major tech companies are getting big contracts with the US government, with the Pentagon, and that's becoming at least a significant part of their businesses, right? Whether it's in cloud or developing AI systems or whatever. We're seeing it with Amazon, with Microsoft, with Google. And I think what you say there about how we're seeing this shift is really important, right?

You know, you talk about how Facebook has gone from wanting to get into China to now, when there was the hearing a few months ago with the CEOs of the major Silicon Valley companies in Congress, Zuckerberg was the most fervently anti-China and kind of like agreeing with the Republican talking points on that in order to try to score points. And so I wonder, before we get to what that means from the government side of things. Do you think that this increasing turn against China and against companies that work with China will be a threat to the American tech companies that have closer relationships with China? I'm thinking particularly of Apple, but maybe you have ideas of other ones. It's important to remember that this talk of the

Cold War between the US and China is actually quite different from the previous Cold War, and that the Cold War of China is economically very different. The U.S. and China have, for the past 30 years, been integrating their economies in a way that the Soviet Union and the U.S. never did. That's absolutely true for the tech industry as well. And so if you were to sort of dig into kind of the portfolios of each of these major tech companies in both the US and China, you'll see that their interests are actually deeply intertwined. You know, you have like Uber, for example, is a pretty big investor of its competitor, Didi in China. And Tencent obviously has a huge portfolio in the US spanning game companies and other tech companies in the US.

And so there's this mixing of capital among the elites in the tech sector. And I think there's a difference between sort of the political rhetoric that folks like Trump and the Republicans are using to sort of drum up an emergency in order to make the case for less regulation, among other things. I think there's a difference between that and actually where capital is in the tech industry. So one example is that when Trump set the ban on WeChat, people were initially thinking that this could potentially mean preventing WeChat from existing on Apple phones. This is where we can kind of see through the political rhetoric. Trump would never have

blocked that because it would effectively mean Apple's market in China being completely lost. I'm pretty sure people would rather be on WeChat than they would have an Apple phone. And so as Naomi Klein has talked about in the shock doctrine, we're kind of seeing a similar application of emergency being used here. You know, you make a really good point there, right, about the economic ties between China and how they really can't easily be cut, or both sides will be significantly harmed by that. And of course, not just the US and China, but you know, the global economy, right. And so, as you mentioned earlier, there are increasing moves being taken within the sphere of technology to push this notion of a Cold War with China. Earlier in Trump's presidency, he was really focused on Huawei and their technology being used in telecommunication systems for 5G, things like that. But now in the past few months, as you outlined earlier,

we've really seen the attempts to ban WeChat and TikTok in the United States, or at least the stated goal of that hasn't come to fruition, of course. And then Mike Pompeo kind of rolling out this plan for the clean network, not only to try to ensure that within the United States, people are not using Chinese tech companies, but also to ensure that within the United States, people are not using Chinese tech companies, but also to ensure that US allies are also not using Chinese tech companies, right? So what do you make of the goal of this Cold War and whether these actions by the US government are trying to forward whatever goals it is they're trying to achieve? One thing we can do is look into the details of the TikTok fiasco to understand how Trump is

perhaps thinking about this move to really go hard on these Chinese tech companies. One thing to remember is that Trump initially had talked about a 45-day time limit on the ban on TikTok. And if the company doesn't get sold entirely to an American company in the span of 45 days, it will be out of the US. And so of course, a lot has happened since then. But effectively, nothing that Trump seemed to have asked for, you know, between the 45 day ban, as well as sort of his rhetoric of national security, and why TikTok needs to be banned because of national security, none of that has come to fruition. At this point, we are way past the 45-day deadline. TikTok is still not banned. And the plan as is right now

with Oracle and Walmart is that the company will predominantly remain in the hands of its original Chinese owners. And so in this scenario, Trump is really seemingly not getting anything that he's asked for. That's kind of one read on it. But in my perspective, in a sense, Trump is getting exactly what he wants, which is to demonstrate his toughness on China, which is going to be especially important leading up to the elections. That's why we have Trump and his administration sort of constantly talking about national security as the reason for the ban. But if we look at the details of the Oracle-Walmart agreement, we'll learn that there isn't any concrete measures to mitigate any of the national security concerns that Trump raised. There's nothing to guarantee any tangible measures to protect users' data,

for example. And everything we've seen so far on data security is wishy-washy at best. Yeah. So I think what we should sort of take away from this is that Trump is using sort of the emergency of nationalism to effectively get his way with the election, or at least try to get his way with the election. Just because he says that he wants something to happen doesn't necessarily mean that that is ultimately like the goal that he's looking to achieve, right? He is looking to look like he's being tough on China because that plays really well for him politically, but he also does not want to jeopardize the businesses of these major tech companies. And so you talked earlier about how within Silicon Valley, there is the right-wing libertarians like Thiel, who are backing increasingly working with the Pentagon,

the US government, but also people who are perceived to be more liberal like Eric Schmidt. If we take that to the political level, obviously we see Donald Trump is trying to be really hawkish on China. If Joe Biden and the Democrats get reelected in November, are we likely to see much change? Or are they likely to also try to continue this kind of Cold War framing, at least when it comes to China? Especially after the elections, I would expect maybe a pause for a moment. But I think ultimately, Biden's views on China isn't too far off from what we're seeing with Trump. I mean, Trump does have this aspect of being completely unpredictable when it comes to what he's going to pull next. Biden similarly

sees China as this looming threat to American dominance. And, you know, I think Trump's strategy is going to be to go on the offense with China, whereas Biden's might be a bit more the old strategy of soft power and using America's vast network of allies and supporters and sort of putting pressure on China that way. As far as tech goes, I mean, I don't know how accurate this analogy is, but maybe Trump is to Thiel as Biden is to Schmidt in that they both ultimately have the same perspective on China. But unlike Thiel's famous New York Times op-ed, where he's effectively calling Google treasonous and saying that American tech is like working with the Chinese military, Schmidt's offense on China is a bit more subtle. He's still

saying that there's opportunity to collaborate, especially on sort of these major global things. But ultimately, we as the American tech industry need a way to push back on the rise of China's tech sector. Yeah, so it's certainly still nationalistic, but it does seem that the Democrats are, at least the Joe Biden wing of the Democratic Party, still retains this kind of hostility to China because it does threaten America's hegemonic role in the world, its power, its global influence. And it also wants to retain good ties with the major tech companies of Silicon Valley. And so I also am wondering if you have a view on what you think the global implications of this will be, basically of

China's model of developing technology challenging the American model. We've already seen countries follow the Chinese model, put in more restrictions on the ability of US tech companies to be used within their borders, like in Russia and Iran and some other countries. Do you think that we'll see more of that in a move toward what you call the splinter net in the future as more countries seek to develop their domestic tech industries? Or do you think the US will remain kind of dominant and still have countries allow its tech companies to do whatever they want within their borders? I think that there is right now this trajectory of going towards more of the splinternet. I think it maybe mirrors this

sort of what policy folks are talking about in that we're going from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. And the internet may mirror that to some extent. The other aspect to consider is that China is trying to push for this model of digital sovereignty among other countries. And they're helping to build the tools for that. They want to be able to export their tools for control and censorship to other places. This is obviously not any better than, in fact, probably worse than sort of the previous order where you had just complete monopolization from the West. I think both are horrible models. But I think sort of with these competing ideologies, I'm concerned that there isn't much space for a third option, which I think would be sort of a

global internet, one that's more similar to what we had in the past, but with much more democratic oversight from countries all over the world. Yeah, I think that's a great point. On a past episode, I was speaking with Juan Ortiz-Freuler, and he described, you know, the potential for a digital non-aligned movement in the way that during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, there was kind of a group of countries that said, you know, we're not part of these two alliances or whatever, and we're kind of doing our own things. We're independent from it. And so his argument is kind of like, maybe if there's going to be this kind of like pressure

to adopt a US model or a Chinese model, maybe there's like a third way not to kind of use the neoliberal framing there. But you know, a non-aligned movement that says we don't want all of this heavy control of the Chinese model. But we also don't want to just allow these American monopolies to kind of override our countries, right. And so that's just one idea that's out there. I'm sure that there are many more for what a more democratic internet could look like. But it is interesting to see these conversations starting to happen, right? And so when we think about that future, it's also not just about what governments want or what executives at these major companies want, right? Because ultimately, it's the workers at these companies

who develop these products and who have a lot of that technical knowledge for how they work. And if they become radicalized, then they also have that power to try to develop something different, right? And so a lot of what we talked about seems pretty negative about what's happening,

but you've also discussed about how there's a really positive thing happening there too. So can you expand on that? With the current climate where nationalism is used by tech executives on both sides of the Pacific to talk about protecting workers and protecting national interest, I think this is where the story of workers at these tech companies is crucial. There is this idea that nationalism is to protect the everyday person. But in practice, this rhetoric on both sides, what we're seeing is that this practice has been actually used to disempower workers, especially in this moment where we're seeing escalations from both countries, from both the U.S US and China. And it's in this backdrop of the theater of this tech cold war that I think international solidarity among tech workers can be this powerful way to actually counter this rising nationalism. Already in the US, tech executives have fallen in line with

Trump's aggression towards China. Mark Zuckerberg, as we've talked about before, he has really bought into this. He made a speech in Georgetown in 2019, essentially discussing the rise of China as this battle of competing values. And that, you know, if another nation's platform sets the rules, then the U.S. discourse would be defined completely by a different set of values. Similarly, in the antitrust hearing, Republican politicians criticized Google CEO Sundar Pichai heavily for letting employee activism force the company into dropping Project Maven, which was this contract that Google had with the U.S. Department of Defense. And likewise, in China, we see tech leaders there doing the same thing. They're weaponizing U.S. aggression to get their employees to work longer hours as a matter of national pride. I found an interview in CNBC with the founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, where he discussed his company's response after being put

on this US entity list, which prohibits entities from using American technology. And he effectively said that Huawei must use this moment of US aggression to prevent employees from sl American technology. And he effectively said that Huawei must use this moment of US aggression to prevent employees from slacking off. And so there's this attack on workers on both sides stemming from nationalist rhetoric. And I think as the Chinese tech sector continues to undermine Silicon Valley in the coming years, executives and politicians on both sides of the Pacific will continue to use tech nationalism to disenfranchise their workers. So I think there's this opportunity here for tech workers where transnational solidarity between Chinese and American tech workers can really be one of

these mechanisms to deescalate the tech Cold War and to really craft a bottom-up narrative that works for workers on both sides. I love that. And I completely agree. What we're seeing in the United States with workers at these major tech companies increasingly pushing back against their billionaire bosses and CEOs and kind of the demands that they have and the pressures that they're increasingly putting on them to kind of work with law enforcement, work with the military, all these things are really hopeful. But then what we also don't see, at least, you know, on this side of the Pacific, is that, you know, workers in China are also pushing back. And maybe they don't have as much power to do so because there are different kinds of pressures that exist there that we don't have.

But it is hopeful to see that happening. And I completely agree with you that what we should be seeing in response to this tech nationalism is not for us to kind of retreat into our nationalistic bubbles, but to work with other workers around the world in solidarity to demand a better future, not just of technology, but just a better future more generally, right? And so, JS, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk and to inform us more about this really important issue. Thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. JS Tan is a former tech worker who wrote recent great pieces for foreign policy in Jacobin looking at this new tech called war and Trump's attempt to ban TikTok. He also started Collective Actions in Tech, which chronicles the modern-day tech labor movement. You can follow JS on Twitter at at OrganizeJS. You can also follow this show at at TechWon'tSaveUs. And you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. If you liked our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a new group of left-wing podcasts presented by Passage. And if you want to find out more about that, you can do so in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Thank you.