Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Billionaires Are Coming for Workers w/ Wendy Liu

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Wendy Liu to discuss what it was like to work in tech in the 2010s and why structural changes in the industry are empowering an increasingly reactionary capitalist class to strike back at workers and upend the expectations of the boom period.Wendy Liu is a writer and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter at @dellsystem.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.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer wrote about how tech CEOs are inspired by what Musk is doing at TwitterMel Krantzler and Patricia Krantzler wrote Down and Out in Silicon Valley: The High Cost of the High-tech DreamJacob Silverman wrote about David Sacks and the reactionary turn of tech billionairesParis wrote about how longtermism is designed to justify the position of billionaires in societyJulia Black wrote about the embrace of pronatalism within the tech industrySupport the show

Don't trust rich people. Don't believe what they're saying about themselves, about their own motives, but also what they're saying indirectly to you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get to this week's episode and the fantastic returning guest that I have for you, I wanted to let you know about something that we're doing on December 18th at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern, and 9pm GMT. We are having a live stream with some friends of the show, Brian Merchant, Gita Jackson, and Chris Gileard, where we'll be discussing the year in tech, you know, the wildest stories of the year,

the worst CEOs, the types of things that we'll be looking forward to in 2023, kind of rounding up the year and the things that we should be taking away from 2022, what happened in the tech industry. And I think that it's going to be a really fun time. This is a live stream that's just for supporters of the show. So if you're supporting the show on patreon.com, you'll be able to access the link to join us for that live stream where you'll be able to watch it live, you'll be able to ask us questions, and you know, to see what our thoughts are on the tech industry. So that's this Sunday. So I hope that you'll join us. If you're not a supporter of the show already, you can go to

patreon.com slash tech won't save us. And I'll be sending out an update with the information on how to join us before the live stream starts. And for those of you who won't be able to join us, we will be releasing a recording of the live stream as the episode on December 29th. So you can stay tuned for that as well. But I highly recommend joining us live. Now with that said, my guest this week is Wendy Liu. Wendy is the author of Abolished Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. And she was the first guest on Tech Won't Save Us all the way back in April of 2020. I can't believe it's taken me this long to have her back on the show because she has so many great insights about the tech industry,

and particularly from a labor perspective as someone who worked in the industry, who tried to launch her own startup, who really bought into a lot of the narratives around tech for a very long time, or at least for a while. Let's give her some credit. But then she turned things around. She started looking at the industry critically. And then she wrote a book called Abolished Silicon Valley about her experiences in the industry, what she learned from it, how she started to wake up

to what the tech industry was selling her and how we can imagine a better future for technology in our society in a way that serves the public good rather than the good of shareholders. Now we are in this moment where the venture capitalists, the CEOs, are really turning against workers, right? They're using this opportunity that has been offered by the aftermath of the COVID moment, where there was all this hype and then things have crashed back down. And now as interest rates are rising, placing pressure on share prices on some revenues of some of these companies, and they're using it

as an opportunity to really push on workers to really push on the pay that has been expected, the number of workers that many of these companies, you know, cutting back on those and cutting back on the perks that they've expected. And, you know, kind of the politics that they've expected from some of these companies for them to actually stand for something good in the world instead of just maximizing profit. Elon Musk is, you know, the most obvious example of how this has been happening since he's taken over Twitter and has really tried to reshape that company. But there's a broader movement in this direction by many venture capitalists and many CEOs in the Valley. And it shows us that there is a different orientation toward labor and toward

technology that is coming out of the industry, that things are really shifting. And so I'm so happy to have Wendy back on the show to discuss this, not only from a labor perspective, right, what this is going to mean for workers, but also to kind of step back and think, you know, what does this mean more broadly about the broader ideology of the tech industry and how this is evolving and what these most powerful people in the industry are trying to achieve from it into the future? So this is a fantastic conversation. I think you're really going to enjoy it. I was so happy to have Wendy back on the show. Like, it's just been way too long, and I'll have to have her back on the show, you know, much sooner than two and a half more years into the future. I would also note before we start the interview, not to go on too long, but this is the first

introduction that I've recorded in a month because I was on the road doing a bit of travel in Egypt and Europe to promote the book, to go to COP27 and things like that. But during that moment, the Spotify wrapped stats came out and it was just incredible for me to see, even though Spotify is only like 9% or 10% of the listenership of the show, just how many listeners of the show that there are, how many people are subscribed to it, are listening to it, enjoy the show. It just kind of brought that back to me, you know, to reflect on those things as 2022 comes to a close, as the podcast heads toward its third birthday in April. It's just wild to think that so many people listen to these conversations and, you know, learn from them

and glean insights from them to the degree that they tune back in every week or every few weeks to listen to some of the conversations. So I just wanted to say that as this year comes to a close, you know, another really good year for the podcast and the listenership numbers have increased yet again, substantially, you know, just a thanks to all of you who listen to the show, you know, for tuning in. Certainly a particular thanks to those of you who support the work that goes into making the show every week. I really couldn't do it without that support. And just thank you so much for sharing the show, for liking the show, for listening and tuning in. It's, I don't know, it's just incredible for me. Thanks so much.

So let's get to this week's episode. If you do like it, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Make sure to share it with friends or colleagues on social media or off of social media, people who you think would learn from it. And of course, if you want to support the work that goes into making it, if you want to join us for that live stream on December 18th, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsave save us where you can join supporters like Dylan Bythe from Vancouver, Kieran from Brooklyn in the US and Peter from Yorkshire in the UK by becoming a supporter by

contributing to ensure that I can keep doing this work that I can do more live streams in the future if you know this one works out if you guys enjoy it. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's fantastic conversation. Wendy, you were the first guest on Tech Won't Save Us way back in April of 2020. It's hard to believe it's been that long, but welcome back to the show. Oh my God, I can't believe it's been two and a half years. Wow, thank you for having me back. What a pleasure to be back on the show. And I mean, in the meantime, obviously, Tech On Savings has been doing so well. Listenership has grown astronomically. Yeah, there will be many more people listening to our conversation now than listened way back in April of 2020. So that is a lot of pressure. Okay, so I have to sound a lot smarter than I do. I'm very sorry. No pressure. But it's great to have you back on

the show. You know, I'm so sorry it's taken so long because, you know, you have so many like great and insightful things to say about the tech industry. Your book, Abolish Silicon Valley, was fantastic and I think really kicked off and helped contribute to a really necessary conversation around Silicon Valley to really challenge people to think even more critically about it than we had been at the time. And so I'm very happy to have you back on the show to talk about what we've been seeing with labor in Silicon Valley for a while. You know, I know that this is a topic that you've been really engaged on, really following, really involved in for quite a while yourself. And so I think that there are a few different kind of ways that I want to approach this. But first, because, you know, you wrote about your experience in Silicon Valley, you know, working in the tech industry in a bullish Silicon

Valley, you know, your time at Google, very short, I know, and then, you know, your time at a startup. And I know that you've worked, you know, some other done some other kind of tech jobs besides that. So I wonder, can you give us an idea, especially for people who don't work in the tech industry, who listened to the show, what it was like in the 2010s to work in the tech industry, you know, whether you were at a big tech company or whether you were on the startup side of things and really trying to launch something on your own, what was it like to work in the industry in that period? Yeah. So I think the way I would answer that is I will say that I was trying in the book to capture not just my own experience, but also capture something that was in the air for people who

were orbiting around Silicon Valley as this idea. And in the 2010s, and so I worked at Google in 2013, I was an intern. And then I started a startup in 2014. There was just this idea that things were mature enough that you could expect some degree of stability and that you were pretty sure you were doing the right thing, but that there was still this opportunity to make it big, to do something innovative, to be your own sort of hero. And I was definitely drawn in by that. A lot of people I've talked to who were active in that era felt the same thing. And I was definitely drawn in by that. A lot of people I've talked to who were active in that era felt the same thing. And it was a weird time. It was a very, very heady time. There was a lot of potential, but people could see that there was a backlash that was

going to happen. And maybe the best way to describe the 2010s versus the 2020s is that we're living in firmly in the post-backlash era right like we're not no one can talk about tech these days without being aware and having to mention the criticism you can't just be like this is a great company you have to be like well this is a great company but or you have to be entirely critical and then just say like all of these all these companies are doing awful things and i think that's great on the one hand because when i was writing abolished silken valley i remember i felt so nervous so many times because I felt like, oh, everything I'm saying is, it's so bold. It's so radical. It's so mean. And people are going to be mad at me.

I just, I was plagued by these feelings of fear that I would be ostracized and everyone would hate me. You know, my friends, my acquaintances, everyone would be like, wow, look at this weird radical. And now I read the book and like, my criticisms were pretty mild. I could have gone a lot harder because the discourse has just shifted so much and people have become much more aware of the criticism. So I think that's great. But still there are times when I miss the sense of yearning, the sense of possibility when I first was drawn in by the tech industry. and I think a lot of people had a similar feeling of this idea that you could have a degree in, I don't know, so let's say something technical or even not something technical, but then go to work for one of these companies and they would treat you really well and you would make a lot of money.

But more than that, you could work on something that was good for the world and would change the world. And so there's this conflation of there's on the one hand, the money you could earn from working in these companies, which is part of it, but also it wasn't just the money. It was also this idea that you could use your skillset and work on something with smart people, build something that would be good for the world and not bad for it. So you weren't exploiting people, right? You were innovating. Yeah. You weren't going into the finance industry and like making derivatives and all this kind of stuff. You were working on technology that was going to like transform the world, make things better in so many different ways. Yeah. And there was this feeling of like

industry without a history. There's like, it's a thing without a shadow. There's no sense that this industry is part of the world as it exists with all of its structures and history of exploitation, it feels like a totally new thing that can be made into whatever you want it to be. And I mean, by the 2010s, things had solidified to the point where there wasn't that much room for like new startups or anything, right? But still, you know, definitely for me, like I thought, oh, I can be a founder. I don't have to just be a worker. Like I can be a worker or I can also be a founder and I can make a lot of money and make an impact as a founder. Whereas that possibility now feels a little bit different. It feels like more people see themselves as part of the rank and file because there isn't as much opportunity. And if you do

start a startup, either it dies or it'll get acquired by a bigger company. It's harder to make an actual impact now. So the industry has changed and people's attitudes towards it have changed. And it feels a little bit more mercenary. People like, you know, you were saying expectations have been reset. I think it's harder to see people viewing the industry with the same starry-eyed, dreamy way of being like, oh, this is going to change the world. It's going to make the world better instead. It's like, well, I might as well get a degree that will let me work at Microsoft or Apple or whatever, because then I can make some money to support my family. It feels like more of this recognition that these companies are bigger and they're assembly lines as opposed to

these little R&D labs where you can just invent things and be a genius or whatever. A little bit of the glamour has faded, which I think is good because I think it's a more realistic vision, but also a little bit sad. You know, for all my criticisms of the industry, I do think there's something kind of beautiful and powerful about feeling like you're in the proverbial garage, right? You know, you're inventing something and you don't know what it might be, but it's new and exciting. And I mean, I think there was a time maybe like last year, earlier this year when crypto felt like that for a lot of people, right? Like anything involving Web3, people thought, oh, this is the new thing. This

is where the new garages are. Now, I mean, after the crypto crash, it doesn't seem like that is as much of a narrative that people are holding on to, but who knows? We might see more of that in the near future. It's almost interesting, like, especially when you talk about crypto, also how that demonstrates how this kind of vision has shifted, right? Say, even from like the early part of the 2010s, when you had like the app boom and the gig economy boom, and there was a startup boom that was associated with all that. And how, you know, this kind of boom in excitement around crypto. And certainly there were some companies started around it, but really how,

you know, I think very early on, it was clear that this was less so about transforming the world in this very positive way, but the kind of criticism of it and the very obvious problems with it were so apparent right from the beginning that this was really this kind of speculative bubble, this attempt to really kind of pull money from a lot of people and ensure there were positive narratives around it. But it was really not like that kind of earlier period that we saw, you know, you didn't have this excitement around it in the same way. Certainly among some people you did, but like this kind of widespread vision that this was really transformative in the way that we thought about the tech industry

and that boom in the aftermath of the recession in 2008, right? It's interesting to hear you describe like that kind of moment in the tech industry and what it was like to work in it or to want to work in it, because obviously I was looking at it from the outside, right? And the narrative around the tech industry was very much like, you know, you go kind of get your degree or your diploma in coding or computer science or whatever, you know, you get one of these jobs, you're kind of like set for life, you're doing these really positive things, you get all these perks by working at these companies, like, it's all positives, right? Why would you not be going into this industry? Why would you pursue something else when there's all this opportunity in tech?

And when this is really like where all the growth is happening, where all the dynamism is, why are you not heading in there? But then I think what your book also reveals and what is obvious to anyone who's really looking at the industry critically is that there's all this excitement. There are people making a lot of money. There are people feeling that they're making these positive contributions. But then also because there's that kind of feeling that you're doing something good in the world, it's easy for these companies and this industry and these venture capitalists to also take advantage of those people, right? Sure, you get all these perks at your job, but you're only going to get free dinner if you stay past a certain hour, put in those extra

hours of work. If you come in early, you'll get free breakfast or what have you. And, you know, there are all these other perks available to kind of keep you at work, to keep you working for so much longer so that they can extract these extra hours of work out of you. And I also feel like the startup boom was part of that as well, right? You had so many startups that were being acquired by these bigger companies or were just kind of failing over time. And then their IP or what they had been working on were kind of gobbled up by one of these bigger companies or were just kind of failing over time. And then their IP or what they had been working on were kind of gobbled up by one of these bigger companies in the end, maybe at a discount. But in that kind of moment where these founders or these workers were trying to build

these companies, they were putting in like a ton of hours, probably not getting properly compensated for all the time that they were putting in. there was also this way of these capitalists in the industry to really take advantage of labor or founders, whatever you want to call them, that I think maybe didn't get the attention that it deserved in this moment where there was all this excitement. For sure. And I think there's something that money does that it just like warps the, there's sort of reality distortion field around that. And people think that being paid a lot of money and getting nice perks and being associated with the glamor of this industry is somehow more important than anything else. And I think what you're saying about, you know,

employees and like founders having to work really long hours, there's that. And there's also the fact that they actually have no control over what they're working on. Even as a founder, even as an early employee, you don't actually have control. You think you do. You think you can choose what frameworks to use. You can choose theoretically what products you build, maybe. The incentives at the end of the day are larger than you and larger than your choices. You have to build what your investors are going to fund. You have to build what your boss wants you to build. And so I think people were realizing that in a way that inspired them to start doing collective action, right? And like, that's what we saw with Project Maven, for example, with these workers at Google who said they did not want

to build something that could be used by the US military. We saw that with a lot of other collective worker actions over the last few years. And I think that's something that sort of is like hidden secret of the tech industry in any industry that produces a lot of money for certain employees, which is that all the money in the world is not enough, right? Like people realize that they want more than just to clock in and clock out or even go to their well-paid, highly regarded job and just to do what someone else tells them to do. They want some control over what they build. They want to build something that is aligned with their values. They want to contribute to the world in a way that they think is good for the world and not actually harmful.

And so I think these companies were really good for a while in letting the money just shadow everything else and sort of get people to not think about what they were actually working on. And maybe even convince them that what they wanted to be working on was precisely that which they were working on. And money is great at that. It can do so many things if you let, but only for a while. And then eventually people get to the point where they think like, okay, I have all this money. I have theoretically a really nice life, the best the money can buy. And yet I'm kind of unhappy and I feel kind of unfulfilled. And I have this like vague feeling of doubt that what I'm working on is good for the world. And I think that's, people will get to that point eventually because money is unfortunately

not actually a substitute for, I don't know, happiness. So I think for me, that is a big part of the story of this industry, trying to use money to smooth everything over and, you know, bribing people with money and everything it can buy in an attempt to get them to forget that they are human beings who want more from life than just to be told what to do and have like a, you know, vacation house in Tahoe and exchange or whatever. So then I think what's worth remembering here is that this isn't that new. And for anyone who's lived through the dot-com crash, right, the boom and bust cycle of the late 90s, early 2000s, this will seem very familiar.

And so for people who haven't lived through that or aren't that familiar with it, there's a book I would recommend called Down and Out in Silicon Valley by Patricia and Mel Kranzler, who they're basically writing about their clients. So they're psychologists. They worked with a lot of clients who were these high-performing, high, high achieving engineers and other people in Silicon Valley who had to live through this boom and bust cycle. And a lot of them lost their jobs. And they also were realizing that they were making a lot of money, but they weren't happy. There's something that was missing. And I think reading this historical narrative of how people had to deal with an older cycle of boom and bust, which is not that dissimilar to what we're going through now. I think that's probably very helpful to anyone who is like trying to place themselves

into context, trying to understand what's going on. This sort of thing has happened before and will probably happen again. And it's nice to have a narrative of why these things happen and what they do to the psychology of the people who are embedded in these industries, because it's nice to have a narrative of why these things happen and what they do to the psychology of the people who are embedded in these industries. Because it's, yeah, it's like there are these patterns that reoccur for structural reasons. So I think I would highly recommend this book down and out in Silicon Valley. No, I love that. And I think it relates to what you said before, right? How it felt like this was an industry that didn't have a history, right? That didn't have these kind of connections to these broader structures. But as we talked about before, as you talk about

in your book, as I talk about with many people on this podcast, this is an industry that does have a history. And it's a history that the people at the top of the industry don't want us to know about, don't want us to remember, because it reveals a lot about what they're trying to sell us and what they're trying to do. And the real harms that can come of that when we actually know the long history of this industry, where it comes from, what has happened in the past, and how things just keep repeating over and over again. But they don't want us to recognize that. So I will have to check out that book as well. Thank you for the recommendation. I wonder then, we talk about the history of this industry, the past 15 years or whatever, what has been happening in the 2010s, obviously, we are seeing a shift, right? And we have been seeing a shift,

I would argue, for the past couple years, since the pandemic, that certainly kicked some things off, there was a lot of excitement, there was a lot of hiring in some companies, but there was also the shift to remote work, there was attempts by Facebook to say, okay, you're going remote, but we're going to cut your pay. There was a lot of companies who were saying, okay, you're going remote, but we're going to implement new tools to kind of surveil your workspaces and things like that, even though you're remote. Uber cut engineering jobs and then hired engineers in India as part of an effort to outsource more of that kind of work. So get it done for cheaper somewhere else in the world. So these things were already starting to happen. And now it feels like, you know, we're moving in a direction where these companies and these founders, these CEOs are much

more desiring to change the just kind of the basic structure, I guess, of work in the tech industry and the expectations that workers have. So how do you think about what we've seen in the past couple of years? What are you observing about that? Yeah, that's a great question. So a couple of things. One is I think it's worth bringing up that Paul Graham tweet that we talked about earlier. Do you want me to read it out? Yes, please read it out. All right. So on December 6th, so quite recently, Paul Graham tweeted, automation is an inductive proof that Marx was wrong. And then he followed it up a little while later with a tweet that read, you still hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be

rich because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees. So what should we make of that? Perfect. It's wonderful. I think he really managed to distill the essence of this vibe shift that's going on among the billionaire class, the executive class, the capitalist class in the Valley. Because I don't think this is something that he would have said like 10 years ago. I think the vibe was different then. But now it's important to have an ideological justification for why actually employees don't really deserve that much of the value. Because 10 years ago, there was more of the sense that if you're, especially if you're

an early employee, you deserve something. You contributed your labor, you helped innovate, you helped produce something, you deserve something. And now it's more like, well, maybe we can get away with giving them nothing. What if capital took even more and more of the credit? I mean, obviously, just on the face of it, this tweet is a complete misreading of Marx, complete misunderstanding of history, of what capital is and how that works. We don't even need to go too much into that. But I think it is important because it captures something of this spirit, this like zeitgeist of how the investor class is thinking and what they want to do to just claim more and more of the power. Yeah, there's been a clear like radicalization of the VC and of the investor class. I spoke to Jacob Silverman about this recently, but it's very clear in looking at a lot of these powerful people in the Valley that they've really gotten tied up in this right-wing reactionary narrative ideology, whatever you want to call it, that is really popular right now. And that, it's important to say, really serves them in trying to reframe

how we think about the tech industry, how we think about the economy more broadly, how we think about the position of billionaires in society. Very helpful for them to pick up on these narratives to kind of push back against the power of workers, the kind of other pressures that have been placed on them increasingly over the past decade or so, and they really desire to push back on this. For sure, yeah. And I think we should see it as a naked attempt by capital to consolidate its power and to get back more of its power and to take back even the little scraps it was throwing at certain workers because there was a time when capital thought it needed to give people lavish salaries and treat them really fairly well and give them all these little perks. And now it's like, oh, what if we don't need that?

And I think we see this shown so clearly in the Elon Musk buying and subsequent gutting of Twitter incident. And my theory for how we should see that is we should probably look at that the way labor historians now look at the air traffic controller strike and the way Reagan reacted to that in essence, crushing the strike. Because yeah, you know, you know, as a lot of journalists are saying CEOs and other people who have power in the industry are watching, they're watching what happens. They're like, Ooh, that's interesting. What if I did a little bit of a, you know, laying people off and asking my employees to commit to being hardcore? Like what if I did it? That probably would be fine. And yeah, so I think it's important, not just in the sense of like,

Elon Musk has taken a company, a quite large company, and changed the employment status of a lot of employees and created this culture of fear in the rest of them, but also because what he's doing will have effects on everyone else in the industry. And even if individual executives are not trying to emulate Elon Musk, they will probably be pressured by investors and others who are,

who are like, why can't you get rid of the, I don't know, the SJWs or whatever at your company? Why can't you just make your workers accept a pay cut or lay off all these underperformers? That is something that in the future, historians will be probably talking about in terms of pre and post Elon Musk buying Twitter, not necessarily because it has that much of an impact on itself, because it was such a spectacle, such an outsized cultural event. People all over the world were watching and were fascinated by it. Yeah, the layoffs that we've seen recently, it seems like some of them are due to financial circumstances.

Sure. There are definitely companies that are struggling. It doesn't really feel like a lot of them are that way. It feels like a lot of the sentiment is more, oh, everyone else is doing layoffs. I might as well do layoffs too. I'll cut my teams that I'll cut my projects that I don't want anymore. I'll get rid of people who are on performance improvement plans. I'll just like trim the fat a little bit. So it feels like that is what's happening. I don't know. I'm not going

to make predictions. I don't know if what we're seeing is, you know, something that is going to last for a while or just sort of this like part of a normal boom and bust cycle. It's sort of hard to tell if the golden ages of the 2010s were the norm or the exception. I think this is something that, you know that we could debate forever. And it's really hard to know. We're probably going to see more boom and bust cycles in the near future. It's just hard to know what the magnitude will be. But I think it is probably pretty concerning for anyone who is about to enter the industry, right? Especially people who have degrees in STEM and were planning on working at a tech company and maybe planned their whole

resumes so that they would be able to get a job at these companies. And then suddenly they're seeing, oh, all these big companies have hiring freezes. The vibe feels different. It's concerning as to whether they can even get a job. I think that is going to feel like a qualitative shift in the industry for a lot of people. And as to whether that's good, I mean, it's kind of both good and bad, right? In a sense, because it's good because we probably don't need that many people going into the industry, at least in such an unconsidered way. It'd be nice if more people could do things other than work for Google or Meta. That would be great. But also, it's bad because, well, where else are they going to work? The economy is not actually set up to allow people to do something that is socially valuable most of the time.

It's like you take your pick. You work for a company where you make a lot of money and do soul-crushing work, or you work for a company where you make very little money and maybe it's also soul-crushing work. So there aren't a lot of great choices. So there's no winners of this, honestly. It's pretty demoralizing. Yeah, no, I think you've put it so well. And I think you've made so many great points there.

And so I think that your point about, you know, kind of the Twitter moment, the Twitter layoffs being a defining kind of moment that we might look back on, I think is really important, right? And I think you're spot on with it, because even if it isn't like the most significant layoff or something like that, it's one that really kind of signals a shift to a lot of other people in the industry that they are probably watching. And just to give some context for the listeners, I did some looking before we had this conversation. Crunchbase News estimates that so far in 2022, you know, as of kind of earlier in early December, more than 90,000 workers in the US tech

sector have been laid off in mass job cuts so far. TrueUp's tech layoff tracker that is more global estimates 1,405 rounds of layoffs that have affected almost 220,000 workers up to the first week of December through 2022. So that's a lot of people losing their jobs. You know, we've seen Meta cut 11,000 jobs. Amazon is rumored to be cutting up to 20,000 in total. They've already cut 10,000 or so. Twitter, of course, laid off an initial 3,750. Then some more after that who weren't considered hardcore enough, plus 4,400 to 5,500 contract workers who were also lost their jobs as a result. You know, those are people in various parts of the world who do content moderation and things like that on the platform. Stripe, 1,100. Microsoft, 1,000. Apple, hiring freeze until late 2023. You know, as you say,

a lot of these companies are not facing real financial challenges, real financial difficulties. Sure, they might have seen their share price drop a little bit, but that doesn't mean that they're not kind of financially, you know, solvent businesses or something like that. It's just that there's this moment that they're taking advantage of where they can lay a lot of people off. And I want to put this to you because I think it kind of aligns with what you were saying there. I was talking to a software engineer recently. I won't name them because I didn't check with them before, you know, we've recorded this about repeating what they said. But they were essentially telling me that, you know, in that kind of moment in the 2010s, especially in that earlier part, there was a lot of demand for this kind of labor in the tech industry, right? And there was a

shortage of the workers who could do this kind of work, because you didn't have as many people coming out of the colleges and universities who were doing it. So the companies were really desiring to get as many of these workers as they could. And even companies like Google were kind of overhiring to make sure that they had the workers that they needed, but also to deny their competitors access to the labor that they might need. And now we're entering this period where there's been all this hype around the tech industry for the past decade. A lot more people have kind of gone into that pipeline, whether it's university and college degrees, whether it's kind of training bootcamps, coding bootcamps, all this kind of stuff to develop these skills. So the companies have a lot more access to labor. There's a much larger pool of labor for

them to draw from when they are trying to staff their companies or whatnot. And so as a result, there's a kind of a feeling that there doesn't need to be as many perks, there doesn't need to be as high of pay to attract all these people to the companies. And it's a lot easier now to kind of attack the workers to lay off the workers to cut the benefits, as we're seeing in many of these companies to cut the pay even, because there are enough workers for them to draw from and continue drawing from. And so they don't need to kind of hold on to as many workers as they did in the past. Do you think that kind of aligns with what you're seeing as well and part of the shift that we're seeing in the industry?

For sure. To that point, it's worth thinking about the materialist origins of any ideology. So if we look at the 2010s, okay, there's a lot of money to be made. A lot of companies are hiring. They're throwing out a lot of money. There are a lot of startups that like raise, you know, a billion dollars and then just crash and burn. But still for some time, they have this money to pay to people. And in that material structure, the culture, the ideology that emerges will be one that's sort of like meritocracy, right? So you have these people who believe that they're making all this money because they're so smart,

they're so hardworking, they have these skills that no one else has, which is like, and this is something that you talked about in your book as well. You know, something that you really believed as you were going through this. Yeah. Mea culpa, right? Like this is something I definitely know. And I'm not saying that, that there's no truth to that. I'm not saying that people in this industry are stupid. It's more that it's a very dangerous ideology because it's one that can justify a lot of really horrific things. And if unchecked, then it means the people in this industry will just tell themselves like, oh, I just make this much money because I'm that much smarter than everyone else. And then they'll look at economic inequalities in the rest of the world and power imbalances. And they'll be

like, oh, that's fine. That's just normal. And so this sort of ideology is very, very good at justifying hierarchies that are anything but natural. And I'm curious what this decade will bring, because the material conditions are definitely changing. And I don't think that this meritocratic narrative is going to have as strong of a hold anymore, because there isn't as much money being thrown at people. Maybe for certain people, like maybe if you have 10 strong of a hold anymore because there isn't as much money being thrown at people. Maybe for certain people, like maybe if you have 10 years of experience in the industry and you've worked at Google or whatever,

then you might still be able to make like a million dollars building something, something for the metaverse or whatever, right? Like there's still some money. Really valuable work there. Really valuable, yeah. Just like making legs for people in the metaverse. I think that's an increasingly small proportion of people who are going to be able to command the same kind of like lavish salaries and perks that felt like more of the norm in the previous

decade. And so I think for most people in the industry and people who are about to join the industry, there'll be this dawning sense of, okay, well, the gold rush is a little bit over and now this is the time for a new ideology to emerge. And I think what I'm scared, what I'm afraid of is that this ideology will be one driven by these more revanchist elements, reactionary right-wing elements that are like, oh, well, software engineers are just coddled or something. We need to fire everyone who like a woman or something because they just aren't hardcore. The sort of ideology represented by Elon Musk and people like that. We all just need to work 80-hour weeks again. We all have to build more hardcore products. Something that's obviously untethered from reality, but at the same time is very appealing to people who are feeling like the ground is shifting beneath them.

What I would hope would dawn on people instead is the sense that actually this meritocracy myth was always a lie. The amount of money you make as a worker in our current society has so little to do with your individual worth in any sense like it. And we should probably just not think of it that way at all. Just think of it in terms of you make how much someone thinks they need to pay you for whatever reasons of their own that have nothing to do with anything inherent in you, nothing, nothing to do with your innate value as a person. It's all to do with what they need from you. And so maybe it's because the company that you're a part of makes a lot of money for reasons that have to do with the structure of the economy. And they need you because you have a skill set that is rare.

Or they just think you're worth it, you know? Maybe it's nepotism. Whatever it is. Whatever reason has so little to do with you as a person that it's worth training yourself to ignore the conditioning by capital. Don't think of it as any reflection of yourself. Think of it in terms of, okay, this is the amount of money the labor market deems me as being worth. That's it. I'm not going to let it, you know, infest my sense of self. The thing that the industry does, the toll it takes on people is that it does creep in, in this very insidious way into their sense of worth and it

warps their mind and makes them think, well, like, oh, if I don't have a job where I'm making a lot of money, then am I really worth it as a person? Am I doing anything valuable? I think that is a sense we have to kill. That is something that just needs to die because otherwise then it's like capital wins. Capital has infested your brain and has you thinking in its terms, which I think we all deserve better than that. Because as anyone who's even vaguely critical of capitalism as a system should know, money does not flow to the right places. Money is not going to the right people. It's not going to the right ventures. And therefore, we need to detach our sense of self from how much money we make and whether we're employed by this lucrative industry. So that's kind of my hope is that

in this moment of crisis, sort of like this crisis in the industry, in this moment of change, that an ideology will emerge that is more critical of the money in the industry and more conscious of the fact that the money is not going towards anything meaningful. I mean, I probably sound like a broken record, but honestly, this is a message that we're being told every day, every day by the rest of the world. And we have to remind ourselves, this is not a reflection of my worth as an individual. And even if I were to make a lot of money, I can't let that, I can't let that affect my self-esteem. I can't let myself think, oh, I'm a genius because I can make like a million dollars at Facebook building legs for Mark Zuckerberg.

That is going to break you and that's going to break your brain. It's going to keep you trapped in this like hedonic treadmill. Yeah, I think it's such an important point though, right? Because especially when you think about these people who are entering this industry that has a unique kind of ability to quickly build a global kind of market for its product. So you can exploit a lot more customers very quickly. And that allows, you know, So you can exploit a lot more customers very quickly. And that allows, you know, the company to make a lot more revenue to pay these employees in a way that might not be as easy to attain in other industries. And thus, you know, they can't kind of pay the kind of salaries that are expected in the tech industry. You know, anecdotally, I've seen a number of people saying as, you know, the news of these layoffs kind of increases that, you know, it's probably a good time to have a skilled trade instead of having a computer science degree or something like that.

Right. Because there's so much demand for infrastructure investment and stuff like that, especially as we're responding to the climate crisis. But on your point about, you know, the kind of ideology. Right. I think it's so important. It really strikes me as something that is something that we need to be paying a lot of attention to in this moment, right? You know, you talk about the ideology of meritocracy that was very kind of common in the 2010s. I would say that was also kind of connected back to some of these kind of countercultural ideas that have influenced the tech industry a lot in decades past. And then you also have the desire by these companies to

show that they are diverse, that they are responding to the kind of progressive ideas in society, that they are representative and all these sorts of things, right? And as we're seeing this kind of pushback against labor by these people at the top of the industry, the Paul Grahams, the Elon Musks, the Marc Andreassons, all these kind of folks who are really turning toward this right-wing ideology, really pushing back against the quote-unquote woke culture and all this sort of stuff that you see at a lot of tech companies that's really popular in the industry.

And really, that's supported by most of the United States and the Western world and the people who would be using these products and working at these companies, that there is a shift that's happening in the ideology as well, right? Because you talked about the hierarchies and how these ideas of meritocracy kind of promote and make people accept a kind of false hierarchy that exists in society that they are kind of higher up because they have these technical skills. And it seems like now there are these ideas that are being pushed by the people at the top of the industry and being funded by those people at the top of the industry. Things like effective altruism or long-termism or pronatalism, right? These ideas that if we just invest our money effectively, then that's okay for us to have billionaires because we're making a good impact on the world.

Or, you know, we need to be thinking about the very long-term future of humanity not the things that are affecting everyday people right now because we need to protect like what humanity is going to look like in a million years and it's only us really wealthy billionaires who are so disconnected from human society as it exists today who can actually think in these kind of long time scales that are so essential or you, we really need to be focused on the declining population rates in the Western world and, you know, the declining white race, so to speak, that they won't, you know, explicitly say. But then when you actually dig into some of what these folks in tech who have really benefited from this boom are talking about, they're very clear about trying to like look at the genetics of their children and ensure that their kind of best offspring are the ones that will kind of lead

the future of the world. And like these hierarchies are all built into it, but it's a different kind of hierarchy and it's a different way of thinking about hierarchy than in those kind of boom times of the 2010s. Because now you have these people who are incredibly wealthy, who are seeing the tide kind of turning as we're seeing higher interest rates, as we're seeing, you know, just kind of the dynamics of the industry, the larger economy and society shifting, and they are looking for a new kind of ideological justification for their position in society. And it's not one that's around meritocracy, but it's around maintaining their position at the top and ensuring that we don't question, you know, their wealth and their power at a moment when, you know, I think there's a growing backlash toward those things.

Yeah, for sure. And I hope that people who are paying attention to this, I hope that this makes them realize or like, you know, remember the lie that's always been under any meritocracy narrative. And, you know, just to see this moment where elites are trying to consolidate their power and they're not even pretending anymore that they actually really care about everyone else. They're like, oh, we care about people in the future, but not people who exist today, right? Like too bad for you. You can go die. It's fine. I hope that this radicalizes people. Especially I hope that it radicalizes people who previously would have been the targets of this this meritocracy narrative.

People who theoretically could have gotten really nice jobs and done really well for themselves and maybe even still can. Maybe even still now they can still do that. But I hope that the behavior of the elites makes them realize that they should aspire to more. They can aspire to more. And that the crumbs that are being thrown at them by the elites in people, whatever they say. It's like, they might believe it. That doesn't mean they're right. And they always have an ulterior motive. They're going to tell themselves these amazing stories about how they are the only ones who can save humanity.

I don't know if you saw this, but I tweeted out some excerpts from Seveneves, which is that Neil Stevenson story that features a character who's basically Elon Musk saving humanity. And I mean, no shade on that story. It is a good book, Seveneves. It is a fun book. neil stevenson story that features a character who's basically elon musk saving humanity and i mean no shade on that story it is a good book 70s it is a fun book it has weird ideological elements but it it's a fun read but i do think there are people who really believe that these elites are the only ones who could save us and especially the elites who have any sort of technical bent they're the only ones who are going to save us. And I think we have to be very careful in questioning that because, I mean, that's such a convenient narrative. It would be so nice if that were true, that it's so easy to just like sit back and be

like, oh yeah, you know, tech is going to save us. And you know, I know that's the opposite of the name of this podcast, but unfortunately I think people don't believe that, right? I think like one of the things I want to hammer home in this conversation is just like, don't trust rich people. Don't believe what they're saying about themselves, about their own motives, but also what they're saying indirectly to you. If you get a job offer to go work for some company owned by some rich asshole, and most of them are, unfortunately, and you're like, oh, wow, I can make a lot of money working

here. Maybe this person isn't so bad after all. I're like, oh, wow, I can make a lot of money working here. Maybe this person isn't so bad after all. I'm like, they value me. They see how amazing I am. I'm like, you know, I just don't believe their crap. I think that's just something that it's too easy to fall into that trap of believing that these people are genuine and that they have anything worthwhile to say just because they have money and not on the merit of actually what they're saying. And it's important to realize that power is always going to tell stories about itself that justify its power and that will help the little people feel better about the hierarchies that exist. Absolutely. And you can see that in a lot of Elon Musk's companies, right? Where people

have specifically tried to work for him, even in some cases, you can see that in a lot of Elon Musk's companies, right, where people have specifically tried to work for him. Even in some cases, like, you know, there are stories in SpaceX where he's purposely paid people like a lot less than the industry standard because they know that people will come just to be kind of close to Elon Musk, right? The need to challenge those ideas. And I do wonder, you know, whether this kind of moment that Elon Musk is in is making some of those people kind of reassess or if they're just so kind of bought in that they have to find a justification, right? I want to go back to what you said about Elon Musk just briefly before we start to wrap up the conversation, because I do think it's really important and instructive, right? Elon Musk is kind of has taken over Twitter, has started to rework this entire company, has laid off a ton of people, has cut benefits. It's very much aligned with some of the things that we've been talking about, but kind of like a really extreme

example of what might be coming and what some of these founders might be trying to do. And as you indicated, you know, Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer have written an article where they essentially say that, and I'll quote here, for executives who have been looking for an excuse to stop pretending that they care about diversity issues, then Musk seems to be providing huge inspiration. Musk seems to be proving similarly inspirational to CEOs who believe their employees have grown too lazy, too coddled, too opinionated about their workplaces, end quote.

And so, you know, he is providing this inspiration to a whole load of venture capitalists, founders, CEOs, who really want to push back on the workers. What do you think that the future of work in the tech industry is going to look like moving forward as you have these empowered and radicalized in many cases, CEOs and venture capitalists kind of setting the tone for what happens going forward? I mean, I think we've been talking about capital cracking down a little bit, right? And I think that's going to continue. I think probably, I mean, I don't want to make too many predictions, like concrete predictions, because who really knows, but it does really feel like more layoffs,

less remote work, more, probably more offshoring, probably more hiring freezes, fewer perks. That feels like that's going to happen. In terms of what I hope is going to happen, I hope people in the industry will respond by trying to fight back the only way that they really can, which is not on an individualist sense. You can't fight back against capital by being the ideal worker and by being the most diligent individual and like climbing up the career ladder, because that's not going to work. That's not a challenge. That is just playing on their terrain that is playing by their terms. The only actual way to fight back is through solidarity, is through a collective struggle, recognizing that, you know, the other

people in the industry, they're not your enemy. They're not your competition. They're your comrades. They're part of your class. It's not going to be a natural thing. It's like, this is complete anathema to the way the industry wants people to think and the way the industry is set up. But I think this is the only way out of the moment where this is the only way that the power of the elites can actually be held in check. It's through building solidarity with your peers, recognizing that you are in this together and that your fortunes as a worker are much more a response to these broader structural things than anything to do with yourself, anything to do with your own actual abilities. It has more to do with the political climate, the economic climate, the associational power that people have, whether you have a union, whether you have the possibility of a union. Yeah. And I think this is,

this is going to be really hard to do. There will be a lot of reasons and opportunities to see other people in the industry as your enemy. And you're going to want to build yourself into this little fortress of meritocratic achievement as you, you know, climb up this ladder all by yourself. But I think it is a choice that you can make and that once you make this choice, you will see that there are a lot of things that you really just can't change on your own, but that there are things you can change as a class

and as part of a movement, even if it's slower, even if it's harder, even if it feels more nebulous, because it's not just a matter of outcome, it's a matter of outlook. Because once you recognize yourself as part of this larger project of class struggle, it will change your view of the world. It will change your understanding of what's important.

It will change your understanding of what's worthy and what's possible. I think that is what I hope will change in this industry, that people will start to identify as workers and will see themselves not as just these brilliant, hardworking people who are getting what they deserve at these companies that are paying them so well, but instead as members of a class that is being held back by the economic structure that we have and that everyone in this class deserves more than the world that is being constructed for us by these elites in tech and outside of tech. That is what I would hope. I will not make any predictions more concrete than that, but that is something that I hope to see. I love the hopeful message. Let me ask you this though. Obviously we know from the history of this industry that there has been a very individualist bent that has been built into it for decades, right? Going all the way back to Hewlett and Packard and their desire to fight unionization by giving workers stock options to make them feel like owners instead of workers. And so you're not going to try to unionize because,

you know, you want the company to succeed. You're an owner in the company, all these sorts of ideas, and that really influences what other companies do going forward and their kind of tactics to stop unionization within the industry. As we've been talking about, there was this moment in the 2010s where there was a strong desire for workers, where there was a lot of pressure to hire, and that workers could demand a lot as a result. And that's part of the reason why they had a really high pay, why they had all these perks that were provided to them by these companies to ensure that they could work more. They had a lot of influence, right? Do you think that if there is like kind of a pool of labor that a lot of these companies can draw from where there's not these kind of pressures that existed in the past to have to hire up as

many workers as possible because there is this limited supply, that some of the pressure that these workers could apply to the company, right, by organizing, by trying to demand more, has now been lost because we're shifting into this new moment where these companies and capital are gaining greater leverage. Like, I guess, in some ways, have you been surprised by the lack of organizing that we've probably seen in the past couple of years as the conditions of work in the industry have started to shift. For example, there were some conversations around like, you know, why aren't Twitter workers trying to organize or unionize? Why are they just kind of letting Elon Musk get away with doing some of these things?

What do you think of that kind of approach or question to what's going on with labor in the industry? Yeah, I think that's a fantastic question. I think if you look throughout the history of the labor movement, what you do see a lot of the time is this unfortunate sort of balance where as the ease of organizing increases, you know, like it's theoretically really easy to build power when you have a crucial position, when you are able to get a lot from your employer. Also the reasons for organizing kind of go down. And so there's this sort of balance where a place that really, really needs, really, really needs a union. Maybe we'll just, it'll just be really hard because people aren't really paid that much. They're really desperate. They really need the job. Everyone's decentralized. Everyone's dispersed. They don't have chances to talk to each other.

So that is the unfortunate reality of a lot of labor movements in the past where you kind of have to find this almost magical spot where it's both possible to organize and it's also people feel the need to organize. People feel this urgency. And unfortunately, it's like as the urgency of organizing goes up, it also becomes a lot harder. So I think the tech industry is weird in that sense, because for a while, people didn't really feel the need to organize because they were sort of given as a gift, these working conditions that felt like they were optimal, even though, you know, I really, I don't believe they were optimal. I think people should have demanded more than just like money and the everything that comes with that. But still for people, it felt optimal. And I think people got used to feeling like they could get what they wanted without having to fight for it. When the reality of really so many industries that have any degree of labor protections or labor standards, those were only achieved through fighting for it. I live in San Francisco. This is a city that had a general strike in 1934 that started with the longshore workers who now actually, I mean, their union has suffered a little bit because of automation, because of all these structural changes. But even now, they still have pretty good working conditions and salaries. They didn't get these things because they were lucky. They didn't get these things because they just happened to receive these crumbs from employers. They got

this because they fought for it. And they fought and some of them died while fighting for it. I think the tech industry as a whole, especially the parts of it that are white collar and well-paid and higher up, the tech industry is plagued by this problem where a lot of people were able to get a lot of things without having to fight for it. And the way I think about that is if you didn't fight for it, you don't really have it. If you didn't fight for this power, if you didn't fight for this wealth, you don't really have it. And it can be taken away from you just like that. And I think maybe the answer and hopefully what's going to happen is that people are going to start fighting for it. But it's hard, right? Because if you're this little

entrepreneur of the self, you're this meritocratic individual, you believe that you just have to be really good at your job and you're going to get what you want. I think that is an ideology that is ingrained so deeply in a lot of people who have done well in this industry. And it's going to be hard to break out of that mold and to see themselves as part of this collective movement. I think that is a big part of why a lot of these companies where theoretically it's so easy to organize.

It just hasn't really been happening because there aren't, on the one hand, it doesn't feel like there are worthy reasons for organizing. And on the other hand, it's because it's so easy to just stick with this much more individualistic narrative of how change gets made and how you're supposed to live your life. But yeah, I don't know. Like hopefully, I don't want to say hopefully, but like as the elite class continues to crack down, because they will, that is what they're going to do.

That is what they always do. As that happens, I mean, maybe that will spur people to see themselves differently, to see their own interests differently, and to hopefully see themselves as part of this larger project and not just concern themselves with their own careers, their own lives, but to see that actually the best way to ensure that they're able to live a life worth living is to find common ground with other people who are trying to do the same thing and to realize that they do have to fight for it, that the things that they want will not just be given to them because power is never going to concede anything worthwhile without a fight. No, I think very well put. And I should be clear when I say,

you know, the relative lack of organizing, I do mean among kind of the white collar part of the tech industry. You know, obviously, we've seen a lot of organizing around Amazon warehouses, and it looks like the Teamsters are going to be stepping up their efforts around that as well. You know, obviously, we've seen long term the organizing by Uber workers and other gig economy workers to, you know, demand employment rights and other kind of fair treatment by these companies and how they continue that fight against the laws in California and that Uber is trying to push forward in many other parts of the country. You know, we've seen QA workers in a number of video game companies unionized recently,

so that is still moving forward. So that's not to say that there's no kind of hope that things aren't happening in this industry, but often where we see that they're having these successes or that there is a lot more pressure to organize, for example, like the janitors at Google and things like that. It's by these lower paid workers who are making these gains rather than in the upper part of the industry. But now that they might be facing more pressure, it will be interesting to see if that happens more on that level too. And so I wonder, to close off our conversation,

what are the final thoughts from Wendy Liu on where we're going with labor in the tech industry? What should we be looking for? I know you said you don't wanna predict very much, but one thing on my mind is that we had a lot of these companies, even though it didn't get the kind of attention that it we had a lot of these companies even though it didn't get the kind of attention that it deserved a lot of these companies were shifting a lot toward contract

workers like google for example had a ton of contract workers even more than its full-time workers i believe and that kind of didn't play into the broader kind of discussion around work in the tech industry right because they didn't get nearly the pay or the perks as the full-time workers who had the right color badges as compared to these contract workers. So where do you think things go next as we are in this period with higher interest rates, with stock prices being affected, with these CEOs who are wanting to push back against workers? What are we looking at in the months and years to come? Sure. Yeah. So I i think we're gonna see more of the mask off

behavior from capital i think we're gonna see in the tech industry and elsewhere too i think it's we're gonna see this like elite consolidation not even pretending that they care about making the world a better place anymore and more just like oh yeah we just really like money we really like money and having all the money we need to be able to do our little projects and like populate the world with our descendants and like build a spaceship or whatever. It's like money for the sake of, you know, dressed up in this ideological cloak of the future of humanity. But really, you know, I think it's pretty clear that it's for their own sake and for what they believe is important, not any sort of democratically arrived at vision of what the world

should be. So yeah, the elites are going to keep doing what they do. I think we're going to see more interesting opportunities for solidarity. And I really hope, I mean, all the labor organizing that's been happening in the last few years, so inspiring, so amazing. I think we're going to see interesting opportunities for solidarity between workers in different types of roles and maybe different companies and maybe different parts of the industry. And I definitely hope that those opportunities will be seized upon. And then in general, maybe like the message I sort of want to leave on is just returning to the title of my book, Abolished Silicon Valley. So what does that mean? What I'm trying to get at with this concept,

and it's partly just a catchy phrase. It's not that meaningful. Don't have to read too much into it. But I do think it's useful in that it poses a question about what the world could look like. And I don't have the answer. I don't think any individual has the answer. I don't think anyone can exactly describe what that looks like. But it's worth for all of us to think about what would a world look like if the development of technology was not monopolized by these massive corporations that don't actually care about any of us? How could we aspire to more? What can we build instead? How else could we govern things? How else could decisions be made? How else could people be allowed to live in this world? It feels like such a mild question, but really I think it's the most radical and challenging thing to ask.

It's like, not only what could it look like, but also how would everything else in the world have to change if, for example, Elon Musk didn't have the power to do what he just did with Twitter, right? Like it's such a tiny thing, but actually everything would have to change. Everything about our financial system, everything about the way labor laws work, the way corporations work, that would all have to change. And I think it's worth remembering how much of these institutions and these structures and these norms are all just fictitious. None of them are natural. They're all created. They build on top of each other. They're symbiotic, but we don't have to have things this way. We don't have to have a world that is run by billionaires for billionaires, where the future is determined by

these middle-aged men who just throw tantrums all the time and no one can tell them no. We don't have to have that. But the problem is that we're not going to be able to get out of this just by wishing. We're not going to be able to just tell each other, oh yeah,'s have a different world. And that's enough. I think the only way we can get there is by fighting and you know, what that fight looks like that will just determine on what opportunities are available and how things play out. But I think it's worth remembering that we all deserve so much more than this world that we're in now. But the only way that we're able to get what we deserve is by fighting for it. And we might not win. We might not always win. The history of the labor movement, the history of the left, the history of any sort of social movement is littered with defeat. That's just how

things are, but that it is worth fighting for because we all do deserve better. So I think maybe that's the note I want to end on. I love that. You know, the solidarity, the organizing is essential to realize a better future, but especially at a moment where these tech billionaires are so invested, as they have been for a while, in defining what our future is and defining how we think about the future, we still need to be able to imagine a different way of organizing society so that when we have that solidarity, when we do organize, we know what we're fighting for. I love it, Wendy Liu. Sorry it has taken two and a half years to have you back on the show,

but it's been fantastic to talk to you again. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter at at Dell System. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't save us. Tech won't save us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger media network. If you want to support the work that goes into making the show and join us for a special supporter only live stream on December 18th, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.