Tech Won't Save Us - Tech's Response to COVID-19 w/ Wendy Liu

Episode Date: April 20, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Wendy Liu to talk about how the tech industry is responding to COVID-19, how tech workers may find their jobs at risk in the aftermath, and why we need to change the system to build tech for the public good instead of in service to private capital.Wendy Liu is the author of "Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism." She has also written for Tribune Magazine, Logic Magazine, and the New Statesman. Follow Wendy on Twitter as @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.Support the show

Either we're going to see more consolidation or the whole structure will be dramatically overthrown. I'm hoping for the latter. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that thinks there's no crisis Elon Musk won't try to turn into a PR opportunity. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Wendy Liu. Wendy is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. She's also written for Logic Magazine, Tribune Magazine, and The New Statesman.

Today we talk about her book, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on the tech industry and workers. Before we start the interview, I just want to say Tech Won't Save Us is a new podcast. It's just recently launched. This is our first episode. So if you like what you hear, consider going to Apple or anywhere else that you listen to podcasts and leaving a review. Also feel free to share the interview. Obviously that helps not just the podcast, but it would help Wendy and our other guests in the future as well to promote their books and what they're doing. You can also follow Tech Won't Save Us on Twitter, where our handle is at Tech Won't Save Us. My handle is

at Paris Marks, and you can also follow Wendy at Dell System. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the interview. Wendy Liu, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me on. Obviously, we're in this kind of like unprecedented moment, this like really extraordinary situation with COVID-19 kind of shutting things down across the world. And tech is obviously having a very specific response to that. You know, we're seeing Amazon, Instacart are really benefiting from having everyone at home and people needing to order all of these different items to try to avoid going to the shops. And in response, they're not treating their workers so great. And those workers are starting to kind of push back and demand better. So what are you sort of seeing in the response to these tech companies?

And what is your reaction to how they're taking advantage of this crisis? I think what's really interesting is that we're seeing this crisis be good for some companies and bad for others. So for example, Yelp is suffering because people aren't going out to restaurants right now. And they've had to do massive layoffs here in San Francisco. Whereas companies like Instacart and Amazon and Uber, because of Uber Eats mostly, they're benefiting somewhat from the surge. But I think what's true across the board is that it's not workers who are benefiting.

It is the companies, the workers themselves. At best, they'll get a little more business. You know, like if they're peace workers, if they're contract workers, they're going to maybe make more money. But they're just they're busier and they're probably not going to make that much money. And so the fact that Amazon is hiring all these workers, I think what gets lost in the mainstream discussion of this is that these workers are not going to be greeted like royalty. They're going to have the same horrible working conditions that workers at Amazon have always had,

and that it will take a lot of struggle to be able to change that. And I think what's interesting in the tech industry is that while some see this as like a chance to you know adjust their priorities to um to like hunker down and and uh focus on their business model there are other people in the industry who see it as an opportunity to create a startup and just like find promising startups to invest in and so so paul graham who uh was the co-founder of Y Combinator, and who I'm not sure what he does now other than just like make spicy tweets all day. But he said that... We love spicy tweets.

We all love spicy tweets. I've been blocked by him, but I still see his tweets sometimes. He was saying that it is a good time for investors to invest in promising startups. Because, I don't know, I guess he doesn't understand survivorship bias but the the idea is that during a downturn the people who are motivated enough to work on their startup when the whole world is falling apart are just like the most determined ruthless people and that you should invest in them and it's like that's one reading the other reading is that these people are just like delusional that they're so trapped in their bubble that all they care about is whatever probably pointless startup they're working on, instead of recognizing that the world around

them is collapsing and that there are other things that are more important than whatever idea they came up with, which is probably something blockchain related. Always blockchain, right? And cryptocurrencies. But yeah, so I think that's completely right. We're seeing that workers in general are not particularly benefiting. There's these stories of Uber workers who are kind of demanding better treatment from the company. The company responded by saying that they were going to do these two weeks of paid leave. But now we're seeing stories from the workers who are saying, like, I even tested positive.

I have my doctor's note and Uber still won't give me the money that like they promised me, right? And, and like these, I'm not sure if you saw this story I saw the other day, these Instacart workers who are seeing these orders come in with like massive tips, like 50 plus dollars, then they make the order and like, and they want to take this order because the tip is so large. And then when they finish it, and they deliver the order, the customer changes it later later right and like that's partly on the customer but like why is that feature even built into the app in the first place you know yeah and like i see even like when we talk about the companies themselves um brian merchant has written about how they're kind of taking advantage of this, and we're seeing the Amazonification of the economy. With all these traditional businesses

shut down, these tech companies that kind of operate under this model can take advantage of it to kind of grow their piece of the economic pie, right? And so this kind of creates these these issues where as you say workers aren't benefiting and it's all going to the shareholders um are there are there any other like big examples of this that you're seeing that are really standing out to you and do you think it presents problems like when we start to come out of COVID-19, when we start to come out of this crisis? Like, what are we going to be dealing with on the other side of this because of what tech companies are doing now? It's pretty terrifying. And so, I mean, the Amazon situation is probably the one I'm worried about the most.

But at the same time, it's not just Amazon who's looking at this as an opportunity. I think private equity is the traditional villain here. And this is just what they do. They find distressed assets and they buy them up and then do whatever they want with them. After the financial crisis, we saw all of these houses that were foreclosed upon and snatched up by private equity and just like milked for all they were worth.

And so I think, yeah, after this is over, we're definitely going to see more consolidation, you know, unless either we're going to see more consolidation or the whole structure will be dramatically overthrown. I'm hoping for the latter, but I think we'll have to resign ourselves to the former. Yeah, but I think work is going to change. And I'm not like, I don't really have a sense of how it's going to look overall yeah but i think um work is going to change and i i'm not like i don't really have a sense of how it's going to look overall but i feel like in tech um there are people who are working tech jobs that they thought were safe that they had just like they had no they're people who

have like not lived through the dot-com crash who don't really have a good memory of what things were like then and they kind of you know from college, got a job working in a prestigious tech company and assumed that they would keep climbing the career ladder, that if they ever got fired, you know, they would always find another job and that their career path, unlike every other, was just like guaranteed. And now we're seeing the beginning of layoffs. And what happens when more layoffs happen? And then all these companies realize that like, when the pandemic is over, they don't have to hire the same people back. They could just try to, you know,

hire people in Eastern Europe or hire them from China or India or something. And this is something that like, you know, these companies have been doing for a while, but I think a lot of these high-tech companies, the Facebooks, the Googles um Netflix whatever they're they've been I don't know thought of in different terms where we you know we can just assume that they hire the the best of the best in quotes people who graduated from like prestigious universities

but you know these companies yeah yeah exactly exactly but I think you know after this after the pandemic like if these companies have difficult financial situations, they might think, well, why do we have to pay 500K, like in terms of fully loaded costs for a that happened recently was this company, Linetics, which, you know, based in San Francisco and a few other cities, they fired all their software engineers and then outsourced those jobs to Eastern Europe because they could. And you know what? Companies have been doing this for like a pretty long time. And it's not, it's not a situation that they're, you know, they're always going to go for. And they're always, there's always like variance among different, you know, CEOs and what they care about. And if, and it depends on the kind of product they're building. Some products are harder to like offshore than others. But I think this is something we should be on the lookout for

because like, what is stopping companies from realizing that they can save on salary? Like Zoom, for example, it's a US company. I believe a lot of its software is built in China. And I'm sure there are a lot more companies where they give the impression of being based in the Bay Area or whatever, but actually they've offshored a lot of their engineering at much lower labor costs. And unless those workers unionize

and demand better treatment, then it's just gonna be a race to the bottom. So that's something that worries me. And I mean, to what you're saying about Instacart, I mean, I think you're absolutely right in that it's partly to blame on the customer, but more so on the company because the company is benefiting from the fact. Like it knows that customers are doing this and it's allowing it. And it's probably saying like, well, if we didn't give customers the ability to do this,

then they would just go with another app. In which case it's like, they're aware that they're profiting from this feature and they know it's immoral. So yeah, I think this just illustrates the, I don't know, the moral failings of this idea of customer obsession, which Amazon also loves. And a lot of these companies are just like, all we have to do is satisfy the customer. Well, sometimes the customer is a jerk. Sometimes the customer is going to do things that are bad for other people. And your job as a platform is to prevent that from happening. Because otherwise, then what are you doing? What is the purpose of you having this power and making all this money?

I think that's a really good point. And with regard to what you're saying, there are so many people working from home right now. And there are a lot of people who work in tech who might feel in the past few years, kind of the sort of two-tier system that has developed at a lot of these tech companies. I know Google is the one that sort of gets the most attention for this, where you have the full-time workers who kind of get all the benefits, get the better pay, but then there are contractors who are often doing the exact same sort of job, but they're paid worse. They don't get the benefits. And we saw in response to COVID-19, the full-time employees were able to work from home.

But then initially, the contractors were not, right? And they were told that they still needed to go into the office because it wasn't like in their contract you know they couldn't go away um but then there are also a lot of workers especially with these startups that are going on and with these companies that are trying to promote this concept of like remote work and working from any anywhere and all this sort of stuff that take advantage of co-working spaces we WeWorks, things like that. And obviously WeWork has been in the news a lot in the past year with kind of the collapse that has happened. And we were all gawking a few months ago at how it looked like

Adam Neumann was getting this billion dollar payout. And now it looks like he's not going to get that because SoftBank is pulling out. So if we're looking at WeWork in particular, are they going to come back? What is going to happen with co-working in the future? Like, is that going to be a thing? Like, what's going on here, right? Yeah, the WeWork case is so interesting just because like the times we're living in now are the worst possible times for WeWork. And WeWork was already struggling before the pandemic.

But they were struggling in a way that seemed like they could still turn it around. And now it's very unclear what's going to happen. I think SoftBank is going to try their best to do what they can with WeWork, even though it's not clear what they actually have other than just contracts with buildings. But SoftBank has said that they want to install a new management team and like try to turn profitable at some point. But I think what's really interesting about WeWork is the fact that like, it's easy for us to make fun of the business model, just because there isn't really anything innovative there.

And it's not financially, you know, it doesn't actually make sense financially, right? Because they're counting on making profit through just like branding, essentially. They want to have these buildings that are WeWork branded with great like design and aesthetics, but without anything, without actual technology. And we can make fun of that. But at the same time, I think it's important to remember that this is what most of the economy relies on. What is Nike? What does Nike have that's technology? They don't really have anything. They have a brand and they're good at coordinating. They have contracts with basketball players, universities, sporting events, and they've used that to try to inflate the value of the brand. Meanwhile, all the actual work is done by third party suppliers who are paid like almost

nothing to, you know, make the actual product. And I think the, I think what WeWork was trying to do is like, it's actually closer to, you know, a Nike where the whole point is to create a, create this brand with this artificially high value, get people to just like have loyalty to the brand, even though there's no actual reason to be loyal to the brand. And then through that, get this kind of like monopoly over real estate so that eventually it doesn't really matter

if you like WeWork or not, you know, there's no choice. Everything is a WeWork. And, you know, in a weird way, I almost feel bad for WeWork for not having achieved that because this is like the capitalist dream that, you know, that entrepreneurs taught was uh attainable for them and i think in a sense like adam newman he

did almost everything right maybe he was just a little bit too uh he was he was a little bit too off the rails like you know the whole walking around barefoot just like saying really weird things i think i think he could have made i in another world, he would have been like hailed as Steve Jobs or something or Jeff Bezos and just he wasn't quite there. So, you know, let's pour one out for Adam Neumann. He almost made it. I'm not sure I can join you on that one. I'm very sorry.

I mean, I don't feel too bad for him. He still has like six houses. He bought like a $20 million house, just like in in marin like a across across the bridge and i've looked at photos of it it's like it's absurd like no one deserves to live in a house like that um but sorry so to your point earlier you were talking about uh what's going to happen to like like software engineering jobs like white collar tech jobs and i think the thing that i keep thinking about is there's always going to be

this like tech aristocracy, this like layer on top that coordinates everything. And so what we're seeing with other sectors that have automated more and have found a way to expand their operations is that even though you might hire like 100,000 more workers doing jobs that are coded as low skill, you still need some people on top to coordinate that. And so you can see this in like pretty much any company that uses any kind of technology. A company like Uber, they have software engineers writing the algorithms that coordinate among the drivers. For a call center, you have people who are writing the algorithms that like surveil call center workers and make sure that they're always like happy. And I think with any of these companies, even as they automate away more of the work that

software engineers would traditionally do, there's always going to be a small layer of software engineers on top who are needed to like maintain that. And those jobs are, you know, of course, those are going to go to the people who are already kind of privileged in the industry. It's going to go to the white men who've gone to Stanford or whatever, and who have been able to like, you able to have good resumes. Yeah. And I think as the industry gets more and more diverse, we're going to see more of this stratification where the women, people of color, people who have non-traditional backgrounds, who just haven't been given as much leeway in the industry,

they're going to get the shitty contract jobs where there's no pay stability there's no economic security like it's just they're gonna get the worst jobs and i think this is something that we see in like other industries as well tech is not is not immune to that um the the economic trends that drive bifurcation of um of work you know that's gonna come to tech eventually and it already is like as you're saying with the contract workers at Google. Yeah. And like, I feel like we might even see, um, cause you say that like this, this automation also results in sort of greater surveillance of the workforce as well. Right. And, and keeping better track of everything that they're doing. Um, and I was just reading the other day that with everyone working at home now,

all of a sudden, like companies are investing a ton of money to buy these systems that can like track everything that you're doing on your computer. And I remember like working in a call center when they had these systems, right? So they could see like everything

that you were doing and you would just be like sitting there at your desk wondering, even if you're taking a call, if you're not taking a call, you're sitting there and you're like, is someone, is some manager somewhere sitting at their desk watching my screen and seeing everything that's happening right now? It's just mind-boggling. And then to think

that, like, you're at home, like, you know, like, you're in the comfort of your home, you're in this private space, but like, still, they might be able to, like, log into your computer, and like, see what you're doing and see what you're typing at that moment. Like, it's madness, right? So like, I think it's really worrying that they're doing this in response to the working at home, but to what degree is this going to continue later? And, and also like we're, we're seeing these technologies increasingly moving into our homes, moving into our cities that are tracking the things that we do in urban space, in our homes.

Like there was this story I saw the other day, you were telling me about it, that is kind of tracking people who aren't paying their rents, right? So this tech is being used in this way at work, at home, in cities, everywhere, that is kind of surveilling us. And it makes me very worried about where we're going. And so I don't know if you have any thoughts on that that or if you're seeing any further progression in that direction. Yeah. Yeah, I think what we're seeing now is this really dystopic future that maybe some of us have.

I definitely did not see this coming when I first started learning about technology and the tech industry. It was, it always felt to me like something that was just for the better, betterment of humanity or something, right? Like I didn't have a good understanding of the negative use cases that technology could be put to, but now it's, I think it's, it's becoming very clear that technology is going to be used for the most lucrative purposes. And what that means is like extracting money from workers, extracting money from renters. And I mean, with Zoom, I think what's interesting about Zoom

is there's been some controversy over whether or not it's tracking the programs on your computer. And it's like, yeah, of course it is. It's enterprise software. The whole purpose of enterprise software is to make your workers more productive. And maybe that comes in yeah, of course it is. It's enterprise software. The whole purpose of enterprise software is to make your workers more productive. And maybe that comes in the form of surveillance.

I'm sure there are people working on machine learning to figure out if workers be more or less productive so you don't have to physically have a manager watching them. It's just you're managed by an algorithm. I mean, that's exactly what I'd invest in if I was an investor with no morals. This is just the trend of where technology is going. And what you were saying about tracking people who don't pay rent.

Yeah, there's this company called Neighborly, which I think is hilarious that they've called themselves that. It's spelled N-A-B-O-R-L-Y. Of course, you have to misspell it, right? That's what every startup has to do it feels like something you'd find on hbo silicon valley like it's that bad um and i think what's really sinister about them is that the the rhetoric around the company is that is that of like social justice language they talk about how they're like you know they recognize that things are hard for

renters they're trying to help renters but they're serving landlords and like tenants don't really have a product for this. It's not built for tenants. It's built for landlords so they can figure out like, you know, which tenants should they accept? And like, it's basically like credit scores or like background check for tenants. Yeah, they're trying to help you

by making sure that you can never rent a place in the future, right? Yeah, and I think so they talk about how they're trying to end like discrimination making sure that you can never rent a place in the future, right? nationality or something like that. But at the same time, it's very obviously about discrimination based on economic circumstances. And it's kind of funny to me how people like that can think, oh yeah, racism is bad, but discriminating against someone who works a low wage job where they don't have a lot of savings, that's fine. That's just good business. And I think that to me speaks to the fundamental untenability of our economic system where it's like, we've gone to the point where we've, at least, you know, people who are more progressive agree that it's bad to discriminate for things like gender or race. But it's okay to discriminate if someone just is unable to make money. And it's like, that doesn't make any sense to me. And so I think, yeah, coming to that realization was part of what made me just so frustrated with Silicon Valley and the world in the first place, because there's this veneer of social justice language that if you look closer, it's not being lived up to. All these tech companies that claim they're making the world a better place, once you take a look at what they're

actually doing and how they really operate behind the scenes, you realize that the rhetoric is just, it's just like PR. I don't think they actually believe in it. Or if they do, they've found a way to rationalize to themselves. Like the fact that they're not living up to it. And it's really, you know, it's really disorienting. It's really tragic. I think that's a good transition to move us into talking about your book as well. Because obviously, that kind of criticism of the way that Silicon Valley operates is really core to what you're talking about, right?

And before we get into your specific criticisms and your ideas for how we could make it better, I think that one of the most powerful aspects of your book is that you don't take this kind of like traditional left-wing nonfiction book where you kind of like give us the historical perspective and then give us a bit of theory, make your dig at neoliberalism, like kind of, then kind of like give us our criticisms of like the near past and the present, and then give us a few chapters on like how to fix things. And then's like all right perfect here we go right um because instead you treat it a bit more like a memoir and you kind of bring us through your own personal development and how your ideas evolved over that time right so if you just want to tell me why you decided to structure it in that way,

and like how that evolution worked for you, and how you kind of went from really believing in these kind of mantras and kind of myths of the tech industry, to seeing that, you know, maybe it's not all cracked up to be and doesn't work exactly the way that this top hierarchy that you're talking about is really presenting it to be? Yeah, sure. So I mean, first, on the way I decided to structure the book, I wrote it as memoir, partly because that was the way that felt true to me because I wanted to make this case for how the tech industry had the seed of potential, but just blew it. And for reasons that were maybe outside the control of the people in the industry.

And I wanted to make clear that it was a structural problem. And so when I thought about how I could make that case, I had this, I guess the audience I pictured in my mind was like a younger myself. Like I was like, you know, me of like five years ago when I was just doing my startup, how would I explain to me then that all of these problems exist and that the, you know, the worldview that you've been led to believe is wrong. And I thought, well, I don't know how I got to this point really. All I know is like, if I retrace my steps, I was a Silicon Valley believer like five

years ago and now I'm not. So I thought if I want to reach people who are kind of like I was five years ago, I would have to take them through the steps that I went to. Because otherwise, like I couldn't find a way to connect the dots without like going through my own personal story because that's just like how I lived it. And I also wanted to write a book that wasn't just for leftists. Like the hope with this book is that people who are either in tech or like interested in tech will read it, even if they've never heard of like anyone on the left before. And they'll think, oh, this is interesting. Like there's this, this book is hinting at a way of thinking that I've never come across before. And I want people to read the book and think, I should learn about the left. Like I should read, you know, theory, I should go to events, I should talk to people. That's kind of the point of the book. And yeah, I guess to kind of summarize how I got from there, there to here, it was just, it was partly the time I lived through, I think, because my startup started in 2014, summer of 2014. And at the time, that was like, at least from my perspective, that was like the peak of tech optimism.

Right? Like, there are all these startups being formed. Theranos had just been announced. There was a feature all over Fortune. I think Fortune magazine was like the first place to talk about Elizabeth Holmes. And like, I remember reading that story summer of 2014 and sending it to all my co-founders and saying, guys, like this, she's so cool. Like, she's such a boss. I want to be like her.

And it was just, there are all these other startups coming out. It just felt really exciting. I think tech felt like this really fun, you know, dynamic place where uh it just it totally made sense for a motivated ambitious young person to like try to join the tech industry and do a startup and then you know things kind of started taking a turn for the worse maybe like 2015 for me um a lot of stories came out about tech companies that were just not doing what they were supposed to be doing. Theranos happened, the fall of Theranos happened, Cambridge Analytica, Trump getting elected in 2016 was a big part of it. But at the same time, there are all these other

scandals around tech and the way that tech was not actually doing what it was supposed to be doing. There are all these stories about venture capitalists and other well-known men in the tech industry abusing their positions of power to sexually harass women. And until then, I had a very naive understanding of the tech industry where I really did believe in the idea of meritocracy and that people in the industry were just better than other industries. And so I found it difficult to square my knowledge of what was happening with my prior beliefs. And so I was living through this weird time where I was like watching what was happening in the world around me. You know, everything from like Trump being elected to just the student debt crisis,

the European debt crisis, learning about what life was like for most people who didn't go to a good college and realizing that it's like, oh, this is what the world is like. My own personal experience of assuming upward mobility, of like never having to, you know, never being broke, never having to worry about money. That was the exception. And I think once that hit home for me,

it, I felt, um, I was very confused, but I also found it hard to go back to the way I used to think about the world, which was just assuming that like the world is fine. It's a meritocracy. If you work hard, you'll get what you deserve. Because then it was very clear that that wasn't true. And the more I learned about when I started reading about like Uber drivers and how little money they actually made, that's when I kind of thought like, oh, well, I feel like I've been lied to. But if I've been lied to about that, then what else was I lied to about? And then, you know, it all kind of just started to unravel. And I started reading books about the financial crisis. And then from there, books about capitalism. I started like, just, you know, going to like leftist events. So when I when I moved, I moved to London to do a

master's degree at the London School of Inequality. And I mean, the degree was fine. But I think what was the most eye opening for me was like was going to protests and there'd be a bunch of Uber drivers or something who try to organize a strike and organize some sort of protests at the Uber office. And I'd go there and I'd be like, oh, I didn't realize that this was a thing people could do, that there were workers who were angry and that there was also this established framework for figuring that out for struggling for struggling within capitalism. So I mean, the like, year and a half that I spent in London was the best time of my life. Like it really just changed my life. I was exposed to all these ideas. Yeah. And so part of the reason I wrote the book is because I wanted to

distill my experience in and like, help people understand that there is a path from being skeptical of the tech industry to doing something about it and you know I'm not sure exactly what like doing something looks like it's it's more that I think um I'm thinking a lot about the people I know in the tech industry or the you know the people who are like unhappy with their jobs in the tech industry and they don't really have time to do a master's degree or to like go to all these events or read all these books but i think that they could they would find it valuable to have this um like a an attempt like my book to introduce them to these ideas that are you know maybe difficult to hear about otherwise because like it's not like

left theory is that popular in mainstream media unfortunately it's a bit difficult to hear about otherwise, because it's not like left theory is that popular in mainstream media, unfortunately. It's a bit difficult to find. Yeah. Although in recent years, with Bernie Sanders and AOC and stuff, people are talking about the left more, but it's still not really mainstream. Yeah. And the perspective you get on it is always kind of, I guess, not necessarily how we would always describe it, right? When it's presented kind of from that liberal frame, you know, there are a lot of people who even say that sometimes you often get the best kind of analyses of these things in the FT and some of like the business press, because they actually kind of look at things the way that we look at things, right? And so obviously, when you get into your critique, which is really based on kind of that understanding

and that evolution that you went through, through those years, and probably not coincidentally, your evolution kind of coincided with this larger kind of change in the public opinion and the public view of the tech industry. And you describe how part of the issue here is that the system that tech is developed in results in a certain kind of technology that gets created because it needs to serve the profit motive. It needs to generate as much money as possible for the people who are investing in it, right? And so what are some of the solutions that you see to the way that tech is developed right now that would allow it to be developed in a way that actually serves the public

good rather than the profit of a really small number of really wealthy people? Yeah, that's a great question. I have a chapter in the book that's dedicated to the five different directions that I lay out for how we could reclaim our worlds from capital. Because I see the problem here is, you know, capital is directing the development of technology and it's directing it according to its interests, which could mean surveilling workers, surveilling tenants, can mean, you know, locking people up in camps along the border. And the purposes to which technology is being put right now are just, are not what most of us would choose if we had to say.

And so I think ultimately, the goal is democratization of the development of technology. And how we get there, I think there are like so many directions we go to. And I'm, I'm pretty excited about like, any steps in that direction. But I think, you know, ultimately, the world that I want to see will look very different to what we have today in a way that's hard to imagine. Because the world that we live in now, I mean, I live in San Francisco. I don't leave the house these days, but when I was leaving the house, I would walk past all of these startup billboards. I would walk past venture capital firms because they're a bunch in the area where I live. And that's just like, we just take that for granted. That's such a deep part of the social fabric. This idea of a venture capital firm directing which startups get big and that you have these billionaires who, because they either invested in the right thing or they won the startup lottery, they're not billionaires and they can do whatever they want and no one will ever hold them accountable for anything. I think that all that has to change. Like we can't have any more

billionaires. There's no more billionaires ever. Not okay. I would like that. Yeah. What I noticed as well, like when I was in San Francisco, you would kind of see these tech companies and these venture capital firms, but then the streets were just full of homeless people, right? Yes, yes. And it's clear that there are a lot of people who are making a lot of money, but there are a lot of people who are really not benefiting from this at all and are actually being harmed by it. Yeah, and the way I see it is that's a feature. That's not a bug. That's what the system is designed to do. It's designed to increase inequality. And what increasing inequality means is that some people will always be at the bottom.

And, you know, like the people who are in that system either have just have to find a way to live with that somehow. And they probably just tell themselves that they're better or something. I don't, I don't know. But going back to like things that we could do that would be in the right direction, I think we should have more co-ops. I think some companies should be kind of nationalized or otherwise made to public utilities. I think some companies should be kind of nationalized or otherwise made to public utilities. I think some things should be banned entirely. I think the amount of advertising that we see in our daily lives is just like, it's not okay. We can't have this any longer. I think we need to step that back dramatically. And that means companies like Google and Facebook that operate primarily with advertising money, they need to find a different business model.

And that could just mean maybe they're somehow nationalized or otherwise made into public goods. Maybe their code is open source and taken care of by some sort of nonprofit or government entity. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of ways that this could happen. It just ultimately comes down to not having venture capitalists and then later like public shareholders owning these companies. I think we need a different model. And a lot of the gig economy companies, they don't really have anything other than just like this way of coordinating labor, right? Like the innovation that they've come up with is taking advantage of labor laws that are kind of confusing and finding a way to just

like bulldoze over decades of worker struggle. So that we can just fix just by like not allowing this loophole, right? It's absolutely ridiculous that companies like Uber can claim their drivers are independent contractors and they aren't responsible for anything when they're, you know, they direct how drivers can work. Like they have a lot of control over the way they work. And it's just, it's absurd. I think we need to close that loophole. What else? I think, yeah, general more public services, more worker rights. I think entrepreneurship should be thought of in a different way. Like, I don't think we should get rid of entrepreneurship. I think it's that entrepreneurship needs to be done without the profit motive, without

like venture capitalists taking a stake. And the goal should be like delivering a public service, right? Your goal should be starting something that is useful to a lot of people, whether or not you get rich. Like just the idea that people can become wealthy through entrepreneurship, I think completely skews. Whatever good there is in entrepreneurship, it has been completely twisted by the fact that people can get rich idea of money and power that they just lie and they cheat and they're basically grifters. And Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival is another example. A system that incentivizes people to

follow the money, follow the money and the power and the fame, it's just going to breed the worst kinds of people. So yeah. And I think that's really a key piece, right? If we take these people out of their powerful positions and their ability to direct everything that happens, and we put the workers in control, so they are actually deciding how these things get built, then we can potentially have a much better future and develop technology that works for the common good instead of the private profits of these individuals, right? So I think your book has a lot of really big ideas that people can think about, right? And obviously, I'm going to recommend everyone go buy your book. But if they want some other things to read as well, obviously, you need to buy Wendy's

Abolished Silicon Valley. But what are some other things to read as well, like obviously you need to buy Wendy's Abolished Silicon Valley, but what are some other things that you have been reading lately that really stands out to you that you think would help say the listeners think about the things that you're thinking about or see a new way to imagine text feature? Great question. So I've been reading a lot of labor history lately. and that's something that really is just blowing my mind because, you know, I didn't learn any of this stuff in school. I didn't learn it through like the media or anything. This is all stuff that happened that I just had no idea about.

And I think that gave me a very naive and inaccurate understanding of how the world worked and my place in it. And so I would definitely recommend anyone who has a job or may have a job in the future to just like read labor history and understand where workers' rights came from and the kind of struggle it took to get to the point where we are now. I recommend that.

In terms of tech criticism, I love Logic Magazine. I think Logic Magazine has some of the most like fantastic writing on tech out there. So I'd recommend to anyone just like pick up an issue, any issue. I read the nature issue recently and it's just, it's stunning. It's so beautiful. Yeah, Logic Magazine and Labor History. Those are my recommendations. Fantastic recommendations. And they go together really well because Ben Tarnoff, of course, who is one of the founders of Logic Magazine, is also very focused on the history, right, and knowing the history. Thank you so much, Wendy. It's been great talking with you, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. It was published by Repeater Books, and you can buy it at repeaterbooks.com, hopefully from your local independent bookstore or library, and anywhere else that sells books. Thanks for listening to Tech Won't Save Us. Make sure to leave a review on Apple or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to follow us on Twitter, where our handle is at Tech Won't Save Us. You can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. Thanks for listening.