Tech Won't Save Us - The Financialization of Everything w/ Edward Ongweso Jr.

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Edward Ongweso Jr. to discuss Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, how technology is enabling an extension of speculation and gambling, and why those pressures need to be opposed.Edward Ongweso Jr. is a staff writer at Motherboard/Vice and a co-host of This Machine Kills. Follow Edward on Twitter at @bigblackjacobin.🎉 This month is the show’s second birthday. To celebrate, we want to get 100 new supporters at $5/month or above to bring on a producer to help make the show.  Help us hit our goal by joining on Patreon. You can also follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Edward wrote about Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition and the casino economy we increasingly find ourselves in.Paris wrote about Elon’s Twitter purchase for Jacobin before it was confirmed, and Tribune afterward.Max Read also wrote about the acquisition and what it might mean.CNN spoke to meme stock traders who made a lot of money and the difficulty of what came after.TrueAnon did a recently episode on mobile gambling.Tim Hwang wrote “Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet.”Support the show

We have nothing to gain from creating a much more violent, trustless, anti-human world like the libertarians envision, and yet they had the audacity to say that they were going to save the world. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get to the show, just a final reminder about the membership drive that I'm doing this month for the podcast, Second Birthday. We've already hit the goal of 100 new or upgraded supporters at $5 a month or above. So I can bring on a producer to help me make the show and take some of the burden off of my shoulders. So I can focus more on the research and the interviews rather than the editing and the production side of things. And we are almost at the stretch goal of 150 supporters at $5 a month

or above. We are currently at 140, so 10 more people in the next couple of days and we'll hit that goal. So then I can do occasional bonus series that go beyond the regular weekly episode that maybe cover some more niche topics that don't fit in so well to the usual weekly interview that I do. And so I don't want to drag this out. I am very appreciative of everybody who has supported the show or upgraded their pledge this month. And everyone who supports the show in general, even everyone who listens supported the show or upgraded their pledge this month and everyone who supports the show in general, even everyone who listens to the show and shares it. I just thank you so much for paying attention

to the work that I do, to listening to these interviews with the fantastic tech critics that I'm able to talk to every single week. It's just fantastic. So if you like the show and you're able to do so, I would just ask you to consider becoming a supporter at $5 a month or above or upgrading your pledge this month to get those 10 more people to hit that

stretch goal before the end of April. And you can do that by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where if you join at the Caesar Cup replicant tier $5 a month or above, you'll get stickers, you'll get access to the discord and new Q&A that I'll be starting in May or June. And if you join at $10 a month, the Space Cultist tier or above, you'll also get a new metal pin and you'll be getting one of the first batch of that pin. So you'll be getting them before anyone else. And so before we get into the episode, just a quick thanks to the new supporters. So a big thank you to Emily in San Francisco, to Richard from Manchester, to Mike from New York, to Becca from New York City, to Violet in Philadelphia, to Richard from Manchester, to Mike from New York, to Becca from New York City, to Violet in Philadelphia, to Will from Cumberland, Maine,

to Dan from Manchester as well, to Ian in the United States, to Alex McKeever in Kingston, Ontario, to Max Mitchell in Somerville in the US, to Henriette in Zurich, Switzerland, to Bridget in Edmonton, to Kina in Allensworth, to Andre from Cologne in Germany, to Ben who's also from Cologne, to Bilal in Toronto, and to Nicholas from Houston. Thank you to all those people and if you want to join them, 10 more supporters just to hit that final stretch goal of 150 new or upgraded supporters, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us to do that. Now for this week's guest, I'm very excited to welcome back to the show Edward Onweso Jr. Edward is a staff writer at Motherboard, which is Vice's tech vertical, and a co-host of the podcast This Machine Kills. Now I have to say, personally, I think Ed is one of the best critical tech journalists going. I love reading his stories.

He does a ton of fantastic deep dives on really important topics on crypto, on what's going on with the economy, and just so many other topics. It's so wide ranging, and he has such a deep and broad knowledge of all of these topics. It's always fantastic to be able to pick his mind,

to chat with him, and I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. As I'm sure you're aware, Elon Musk did buy Twitter this week, or it looks like he's going to buy Twitter if the deal doesn't fall through. I was really not interested in doing a whole episode on that. I think that there's been enough conversation about it on Twitter, in the media. Both Ed and I have written articles about it, and I'll link to those in the show notes. So we do talk about it briefly at the beginning of the episode, just to give some thoughts on what might come of this. But then we get to, I think, a much more interesting topic. And this is a term that you've probably heard before, the financialization of everything, the ways that financialization and that speculation are extending through society and that we interact with these dynamics more and more in our everyday lives. do take place and how technology and particular technologies help to extend this dynamic even further in a really insidious and a really exploitative way.

And so I think that this is a fantastic conversation that gets to many aspects of what is actually going on with this, why it's a serious problem and why it needs to be opposed. And so I really hope that you enjoy the conversation. And just a final note that the membership drive does end on April 30th. And so if you like the show, you haven't supported already, or you're able to upgrade your existing pledge, make sure to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us to help support the work that I do in making the show every week, having these conversations. So thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ed, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. It's been forever, I feel like, since you were last on the show. You were one of the early guests, I think, in the first 20. And now I'm heading toward episode 120. So it's been quite a while since you've been back on the show. But, you know, it's great to speak with you again, as always. And there is so much that we could get into. I have a really interesting topic, I think that I want to talk about. But before we get to it, it feels like we just have to talk about the topic of the moment, at least to touch on it, which is Elon Musk buying Twitter, or, you know, it seems like that is going to go ahead based on

what we've seen the past few days. You know, I'm not really interested in how it got to this point. I think that there's enough that's been written and published on that. If people want, they can read either of the articles that we've written on that on that aspect of it. But I'm wondering what you think happens now. And what do you think Twitter is going to look like under the ownership and governance of Elon Musk? Yeah, you know, I think there's been a bunch of argument about that, because on the one hand, we're seeing some changes or shifts immediately, like him disparaging members of the executive team or employees of the company in ways that would not have ever seen any other shareholders do before, and that leading to harassment of them, you know, him being a lightning rod for right-wingers, for his own cultists, you know, that may change some of the dynamics of it. But I think as other

people have observed over the past month, Elon Musk can't do too much to change it. I mean, the reason presumably he got it is because of the way it works. And the way it works is he tweets something, it makes him a lot of money, or it makes the thing a lot of money. You're not really going to tinker with that, especially when you took out $25 billion worth of loans, and half of that is against your own stock. You need to make some money out of it. So I don't think there are going to be real core fundamental changes to Twitter. I mean, Twitter used to be a private company. Twitter used to be obsessed with free speech or have rhetoric about obsessive free speech. And it used to be run by megalomaniac libertarian mystic. I mean, like, you know, so I don't think there's too many differences now besides some of how he's going to be talking

about the employees. I think then the question becomes how much of a difference will that make, you know, are employees going to revolt or shift under that? Is there going to be a change in the way that it feels on the website? Probably not. I mean, we're still going to have right wing trolls, harassment problems, the seemingly lackadaisical enforcement around them when the right wing violates them, still going to have policies that unfairly come down on leftists that unfairly come up down on dissidents unfairly come down on sex workers that fairly come down on

people that decide deems hey like you know like we can afford to experiment or crack the hammer on these people right so i don't think like those core things are changing and a lot of the discussion is kind of feels a little hysteric because it's like this is not a town square this is like a space that is largely used by people on media politics hollywood uh silicon valley uh washington dc new york city like it's it's like an elite space it's not it's not like where we all go to have uh discussions like it's like an elite space. It's not, it's not like where we all go to have discussions. Like it's, like it's classical Athens or some shit, you know? Yeah. You know, we're not all on the platform having like these really reasoned debates all

the time. It's like, you know, shit posting or, or people piling on to other people. Like it's not a platform that's designed for that kind of like reasoned discussion that you, that you would get an idea is actually happening on there based on the way that some people are talking about it. And I completely agree with you that I think that the changes that we're actually going to see are much more minor than what everyone is kind of making it out to be on the on the right who thinks that it's going to be like fair game, anything goes. And then, you know, people who are, I guess, more liberal or progressive who

feel like, oh my God, this is like an incredibly chilling moment that Elon Musk is going to be scrolling through all our DMs to see what we're saying. Like all this kind of stuff. I just think it's a bit overblown. I do think it's interesting though, you talked about the employees, you know, you have Ben Shapiro and people like that talking now about a Twitter deep state, which is going to stop Elon Musk from making the changes that he wants to make. And you can totally see a situation where Elon Musk doesn't actually change very much. He doesn't really intend to. And then because he doesn't change very much, that just kind of amps up the right wing's pressure and attacks on Twitter employees

themselves because they're not seeing the changes. And instead of blaming techno king God, Elon Musk gets put on the Twitter deep state, which is Twitter's employees. Yeah. You know, I think the dynamics, the social dynamics will probably change and that will feel a lot more present because it's a social media network. But the underlying structure, I can't imagine maybe like a paywall here or there, you know, some monetization, maybe some shift in the ad business. But, yeah, you know, like underlying what is going to change is probably like the experience of some people on it. But, you know, again, like Twitter has for years been like a cesspool. Like he's not going to make the bad side better. He's not going to make the bad side worse. And we're still going to all be on it for the most

part. Yeah. And he still wants the amplification that is built into the structure of Twitter, because that is essential for him to keep his following and the interest that exists for him, but also to have that capability that when he tweets, he drives the prices of cryptocurrencies or stocks or what have you, right? Yeah. If I was him, that's something kind of worth $44 billion, especially if you have a car company that's way overvalued. Yeah, why not spend $44 billion, some of it leveraged on the loans against the car company itself? It's poetic in a sense, right? Totally.

What you're talking about there is the benefit that Elon Musk gets from having these tweets and then those tweets then affecting these prices of things like cryptocurrencies and his stocks, the way that Tesla is valued way more than any other car company, even though it produces far fewer cars. But you get the promise that, oh my God, there's some grand vision of self-driving robo-taxis that is going to make a ton of money because Elon Musk has been talking about it for years and never delivering it. And then that distorts the value or the perceived value that exists with this company, which results in this like massive inflation in the actual price or the actual like stock value, share value of the company, which has massive benefits for Musk himself and has made him the richest man in the world yeah it was i think it was max reed who said like tesla's unit economics are a little bit better than others partly because like you don't need really need marketing you can just rely on twitter i mean you know maybe if we factored in the cost of

acquiring twitter be a little different but you know twitter is a good place to cultivate your fan base cultivate them to be as aggressive as possible, as fanatic as possible, right? And also rely on amplification of your claims, debating of the claims, and the tendency of the media at times, even though it's been years and years and years of Elon just lying to us, the tendency to kind of uncritically repeat what he says, you know, this is all stuff that is just incredibly helpful for him. And there's really no reason for him to do anything to change it, even if those changes might be good for the public square. Yeah. Which, you know, I'm not sure I'd describe Twitter that way. Key to democracy or whatever. But no, I completely agree with your perspective on Twitter. I think

that we have a lot of common views on that. And I would say that if people want to know more, you know, we're not going to have a whole episode of discussion on this. I'll link to our articles on Twitter and Elon Musk in the show notes. So if people want to read more about it, if they haven't already read enough already, then they can find it down there. But what we were talking about there with the way that Elon Musk is able to kind of drive these share prices and how these values can be completely distorted plays into other phenomenon that we've been seeing in recent years, as it feels like more and more of our lives are becoming financialized, involve speculation, whether it's on houses, on assets, on the cryptocurrencies that were all being sold. It seems increasingly there is this effort to turn more and more things that we are dealing with into things where the price is constantly fluctuating, where we need to pay attention to that, where there's even less stability than there used to be. And that is obviously having incredible effects on society, and also who benefits from those sorts of things. And the term that is often used is like, or that I hear or that I use is the financialization of everything

as these dynamics that have been slowly gaining ground over over a number of decades, now seem to be kind of infecting even more aspects of society. And so, you know, I have specific questions and aspects of this that I want to discuss with you. But I guess I just want to start with your broader thinking on this topic and how you think that this has been developing recently. I think financialization has been a big driver of crypto. I mean, you look at what Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned in the white paper versus what exists now, and they're wildly divergent visions of Bitcoin, Ethereum, crypto, so on and so forth. I mean, he was not envisioning a mechanism to create layers of

financialized instruments or financial instruments that allow you to turn parts of the world into digital assets or create digital assets that point to objects in the real world, right? This was initially envisioned as a way to transfer money and to create borderless or cross-border payment systems that would be faster and probably more instantaneous and cheaper eventually than equivalent systems based in fiat. But what you have today is a lot of people who are using these systems not really interested in that element, which is an interesting and an important one,

but as a result, a neglected one, right? Where people are not really interested in building out infrastructures that people all over the world, if they really wanted to, could instantly receive money from one another that wouldn't take a long time to get there, be subject to a lot of fees. Instead, what is happening is we're creating a pretty complicated, opaque, esoteric system where you can speculate, where you can pursue infinite leverage, where you can turn things that aren't commodities or shouldn't be commodities into commodities, trade them, bet against them in the future or bet on them in the future. If you're someone who does believe in crypto, I think on many levels, it's a per another one of the financial products that are rolled out

and make sense to be rolled out as capitalists are searching for more ways to make money and more ways to squeeze the last trenches of a return on their investments, right? I mean, most of the stuff just flat out doesn't exist. It refers to projects that won't exist and it offers solutions to problems that don't exist. And it offers solutions to problems that don't exist, right? So a lot of it is just like really just trying to make as much money as possible before the whole thing comes crashing down, in my opinion. Yeah, no, absolutely. One of the things that I find really interesting from your answer is this idea that there was this initial vision of creating this kind of peer-to-peer payment system that would make it easier to transfer money across borders, what have you. Yeah,

there's some kind of libertarian elements to that. But even if cross-border payments was made easier to do, I feel like that is still a key part of the rhetoric and the justification for these technologies that you often hear, both from the industry itself, but even from progressive supporters. If there's people who are more like liberal and left-leaning who support these things, that's usually something that is going to be brought up. But then when you see, for example, El Salvador, which adopted Bitcoin as one of its currencies, and in that case, one of the justifications was people will be able to send their remittances in Bitcoin. It'll be really convenient. But people found when looking into it, that in many cases, it was still easier to send remittances through the traditional means, you'd pay less fees that

way. And earlier this year, there was an analysis and like less than 2% of remittances were actually being sent in crypto, like it wasn't something that was popular and being used. It was a whole different kind of aspect to this that the government was really interested in and that was really driving it. And the remittances just serves as a marketing element of it rather than something that's actually at its core or at the core of what is actually driving these things. Yeah. I can send right now $100 worth of Ethereum to my cousin in Nairobi, and they will get $100 worth of Ethereum after whatever transaction fees I might have to pay on Coinbase or some other centralized exchange retains all that value, right? There's not an easy infrastructure for them to convert that into cash. And there's also not an easy infrastructure for them to pay for other goods with that instead of cash, right? And those are supposed to be two of the core things that come with a borderless payment system where it's peer-to-peer, right? The premise is

supposed to be I can send money to someone anywhere in the world. And it's not simply that they can receive the money. It's that they can actually use it then. They can either use it to get fiat or they can use it in lieu of fiat. And we're not anywhere near that. I mean, even in the United States, even in Europe, right? A lot of the times when we have these systems to onboard and offboard people, right, they're piecemeal. They're patchy. they're weird middlemen that

emerge in them, they're not consistent, and the overlying system is still a little too volatile, right? When you really step back and you look at a lot of the instances where that rhetoric is deployed, like you said, where it's a minimal amount of remittances in El Salvador, or where people are pointing to Ukraine as an example, saying that, you know, individuals were able to move their money out because the Western sanctions, which were crushing and froze, you know, liquidity in the banks and prevented, you know, regular people from being able to move money in and out of them. You know, and that's good. It's good in theory, right, that people are able to move their money in and out of this or that account or a place to store it,

and that they shouldn't be subject to sanctions because the war isn't their fault. But at the end of the day, this is still a minority of the people who are dealing with crypto, a minority of the use cases, and not the primary use case. Their success is incidental to the actual driving purpose of the building of this infrastructure today, right? Today, the primary focus of building out this infrastructure is to get more people onto it so they can gamble, speculate, throw money into it, increase trading volume, so on and so forth. Not so that they can send money back and forth to each other, to their families without fees and transaction taxes being extracted from the

payment itself, right? And so like you said, it's just marketing, I think, a lot of cases. Totally, you know, and one of the interesting things there is that Satoshi envisioned this, whoever Satoshi was, as this ability to have this peer-to-peer payment system. But one of the reasons that didn't work out is because of the structure of the mining and how that really limits the number of transactions that can reasonably be done on a network in a certain amount of time, but also because of this speculatory aspect of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies themselves, because you can't rely on that as a means to pay for things like in a day to day sense, when the values are fluctuating so much over small periods of time, right? And they can fluctuate really

significant amounts of money. And so then as that becomes the means through which you're supposed to like hold your money or store things, but also to buy things like, you know, whether it's NFTs or to participate in DAOs or things like that. But then also if the kind of visions of Web3 are able to take hold, and that becomes a central piece of how we transact on like a greater scale, then people are forced to then pay a lot more attention to the value of their money, to what is happening in their bank accounts, to, you know, what is happening in the markets in a way that, you know that when I look at my bank account with a regular bank, I don't have to open it up every day and see what the values of things are, see what the value of the Canadian dollar is. I know it's going to be relatively stable, and so I don't have those

worries. I think that's exactly right. Part of this idea of liberation or democratization of finance, the rhetoric there, is that you should be in control of your money and that banks should be in control of your money and that middlemen should be in control of your money. And part of that plays off of the fact that people don't trust these institutions, especially after the great financial crisis, right? Justifiably so up until the financial crisis they had everyone's money and they played around with it and they nearly destroyed the global economy because of it and then nothing happened to them as a result right it makes sense not to trust them and then even unrelated to that right they screw over racial minorities whenever they're able to right by taking extra fees out of their accounts by denying them loans or charging a higher interest rate.

So there's a lot of ample reason not to trust financial institutions. But that has then translated into people justifying the recreation of financial systems and institutions. But since it's associated with crypto, it's something that you can trust or by offloading all the risk, all the responsibility, all this micromanagement onto you and saying that if you fuck up, it's totally your fault, right? You just need to read up on all this. You need to follow my channel. You need to, you know, to read these resources, buy these books.

This is not financial advice, but this is the only way that you can, you know, manage your finances if you're closely managing this. I think that, yeah, certainly you want some sort of financial system that you don't have to deal with actors you don't trust, but you also shouldn't have one where you're expected to micromanage your money the way that someone who a lot more capital might desire and be more comfortable with having the ability to trade between multiple exchanges or be able to swap into multiple blockchains or be able to play around with multiple currencies right whereas you know your average individual trader doesn't have much of a need to do that they don't need to play in decentralized

finance and recreate credit default swaps right They don't need to trade derivatives. Maybe they're just interested in putting a little bit of money that they have now and trying to grow it as a trade in the regular financial market. But packaged in with this vision of financial liberation is also like, you can be like us. You can also be rich. And so that rhetoric is always locked into each other. When they're talking about financial liberation, it really just feels like they're saying you can vision of the world that rich people are familiar with convincing these regular individuals who are putting up their savings or putting up their weeks check or putting up stuff they can't afford to lose to play with them so that they can be like them right and really it's just like it's so they can eat their lunch essentially i think it's a

great point and i want to start expanding it out because crypto is one aspect of this, but there's much be owning stocks, should be participating in the stock market is really something that takes hold in the 1980s, right? After the neoliberal turn and you have the invention of like the retail trader, the idea that people should be buying stocks, participating in the stock market, trying to like increase their portfolios, what have you. And now a few decades down the line, these ideas have evolved, have grown. And early in the pandemic, when there are some people who are at home who have more money that they can spend, can risk on these sorts of things, now there is the use of Reddit and Discord servers and whatnot to look at different stocks to see if there's ways that you can play the market in the way that wealthy people do. But I guess it's this more kind of crowdsourced notion of it. And so you have the meme stocks, people playing with AMC and GameStop in particular, but there are a number of other stocks. And I believe this still goes on to a certain degree. But one of the things that stood out to me there was that it was positioned as this way for people who are participating in this to have

like financial liberation, right? You know, you're you're betting on these stocks, you might make a lot of money if it goes up. But what we found out later was actually a lot of people lost a lot of money when they were making the trades on that. And there were some people, there was a story in CNN, I believe, that spoke to a few of the people who made it big after this meme stock phenomenon, who actually pulled out like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars near the top. And they said that then they went into trading more full time. And what they found was that like, their mental health just went off a cliff because they were constantly worried about the values of these stocks. And if their money was still going up, and if they were making more money, it doesn't seem empowering at all. And it

seems to completely miss what is actually going on when we talk about it in that way. Yeah, you know, I think the idea that finance needs to be democratized plays on like a kind of understandable sentiment that maybe the economy shouldn't be privately controlled or centralized in the hands of people with interests far removed from ours, to introduce an even more sinister application of it, which is like your liberation is investing in their products, right? To democratize the stock market or to democratize finance is usually just to democratize the means of investing or gambling on the stock market and not actually anything that's on the stock market.

Right. Not democratizing any of the companies, not democratizing any of the workplaces, but instead just like allowing all of us to gamble on it. And that's not that's not really anything meaningful, liberatory. Right. You're playing even more into their hands of the very same people that you're trying to get away from. With that sentiment, I think it's part of this particularly dangerous strain of neoliberal, of libertarian, however you may frame it. It's a right-wing, and I think on a deeper level, capitalist sentiment that's pretty anti-human, that the idea that you need to sacrifice yourself or sacrifice pieces of yourself on the marketplace to be able to justify your place in the world

and that even if you lose a limb even if you lose your savings you're supposed to operate as if everything is okay because if you don't then you're weak then you are lazy then you have poor constitution that it's your fault and you're too risky. You know, it's a mark against you that you were able to play by these rules that are slanted against you. I mean, this is baked into the ethos on those markets. And I think it's also baked into the ethos or becoming baked into the ethos in crypto. Right. Where, you know, even if there are people who have genuine beliefs about or delusions about what it is that they can build, what it is they can invest in. They're incorporated into a culture where the risk is on you. Everyone knows that

they're trading on a risky thing. Everyone knows that they're speculating. Everyone knows that they're here for the profits and for the most part, not actually to build anything that might have any social utility. And it is your fault if you're not able to quickly move between the arbitrary whims of the market where the whales that are in control and dominating are individuals who are colluding to pump one coin or dump another, right? If you don't have a good grip on a market that is consolidated against you and rigged against you, then that's your fault and you suffer accordingly. This is one of the reasons why the financialization of

everything is particularly insidious because it just encourages people to accept privatization of everything to accept like these increasingly anti-human sentiments and to look to the market for salvation in more and more areas right to just keep going back to the casino to make the money that everyone just stole from you, essentially. Yeah, no. One of the things that stands out to me with the meme stock phenomenon and this notion that people should be investing in the stock market as well, and I would say even trading crypto, is that for your regular average trader, let's put it that way, you have to be constantly watching what's going on, paying attention to what's going on yourself. Whereas these really wealthy people have algorithmic tools

that do it for them. So long before you as an individual would be able to notice that a price has shifted or that something has changed, the algorithmic trading tools that whales and really wealthy people who are trading in the stock market are observing will have already taken their actions because they don't have to actually watch it in real time like that because they have tools that can just take advantage of it instead of distracting themselves, I guess, with what's going on. It's slated in their direction, right? You know, to step back, I mean, I think another way to compare it to is to think about like,

you know, when it comes to venture capitalists, how do venture capitalists invest? Like a lot of them invest because they're relying on social networks and connections to figure out and get a sense of what's something that they should invest in, what's something that other people have made money off of and jumping in as a result of it. Right. So a lot of like groups of people agreeing that something is worth something because other people have invested in it. And then sometimes investing in something, not even because other people think that it has value, but because they think or they anticipate that other people might believe that it has that value. And so they should get ahead of the curve. I think that this is ported over with meme stocks, with stock trading, with crypto, and that a lot of the people who are making money are making money because they're already early on a trade,

because they have some insider information, because they have access to tools that allow them to execute the trades like you were talking about before. Everyone else in front run them because they're lucky or because they just have enough money where they can throw it around like VCs to enough places where one of the wins is going to make up for a long string of losses and come out ahead still. Average person has access to none of that except luck. And sometimes maybe inside information if they've joined some group, right, which is part of the reason why there are pushes for these groups where you can learn about the next meme stock to pump and the next coin to pump, right? Or unless they are getting mentored on how to do it, which is why there's also a push for this sort of financial education on TikTok, on YouTube, on Reddit, on all these other social networks where you can learn from someone and they can mentor you on how to day trade, right? Or how to pick the next GameStop

or how to pick the next Ethereum and so on and so forth, right? So it's just like a lot of like, people don't have access to this stuff. Savvy people realize that and then market to the people who don't have access to it, simulacrum of it,

saying that with this, you can get wealthy, rich too, and climb up to the top. I can give you a ladder to get up to the top with me. Yeah. And that's always a false promise, right? Because as you're saying, they don't have the tools to actually be able to do that. But the wealthy people who are putting out that promise, who are saying that, are absolutely benefiting from the entry of all of these people with not a ton of money into the markets. I want to shift a little bit because we've been talking about trading and the stock markets and crypto. But there's another element of this that seems

particularly important, right? And this is the extension of gambling itself. And I think it's fair to say that some of these stock trading and crypto trading and meme stocks can be seen as a form of gambling. But I guess more explicitly, you know, what we've been seeing in the United States in recent years is the legalization of sports betting through a number of states. This is building on kind of the growth of gambling through through apps and playing game straps. I know that that's still illegal in a number of states, in more states than sports betting itself. But globally, that's something that has become more and more common and more and more frequent for people to be participating in.

Can you talk a bit about the legalization of sports betting and what we're seeing with that and how that is extending the degree of gambling that is happening in the United States. There has been a concerted effort, since the Supreme Court decision in 2018, I believe, struck down the explicit federal ban on gambling and opened the door for state-by-state legalization. I mean, it was still illegal. Most states had already made it illegal. But state-by-state lobbying, led largely by draft kings, was able to push through sports gambling and then outright gambling through online apps or the appearance of

bookies in stadiums, through partnerships or attempts at partnerships with industries outright like the NFL or the NBA. The most recent one, or maybe the most recent one to me because I live here is New York, where almost immediately after the legalization of gambling, you saw ads on the subway, you saw ads online, on social media. They had ridiculous promotions where you could basically get thousands of dollars of free money with which you could gamble. Part of this is because in the pandemic, people have been sitting around, got a bit of stimulus payments. And so these companies believe that this was an

opportunity to get people to start gambling and pour their money into it. And then if you could get them gambling with stimulus payments, and if the house wins over the long run, they lose that money, they come back for more, right? It's pretty easy to get someone hooked on gambling. It's constructed pretty well as an addictive experience. If you go in a casino, right? If any of you have ever been in a casino,

you notice like they serve you alcohol, there are no windows, the lights are pretty much designed to keep you focused solely on the machines. And even the interactive design of the machines is meant to keep you in and that this is a technique that has been structured to be adopted by apps like Robin Hood, right? They have psychologists come in and help design these places as well to ensure that people aren't easily able to exit a casino, right? It feels like a maze. It feels like you're stuck in. It feels like you're missing out, right? You don't see another area. It's another area where there's a lot of noise, a lot of machines or other types of games. These are sites where you're meant to spend as much money as possible. And so there's been a growth in that

sort of gambling, but it's with the apps and with the development of the apps and bringing in people to make these apps as addictive as possible as well, as enticing as possible in ways that mirror the machines and the physical places. There's been a huge growth in the app-based gambling, right, specifically around sports during the pandemic. And I think part of this is also not solely because of the stimulus payments and not to say stimulus payments made people say, I'm going to go gamble. It's more that the company saw you had the extra money and said, spend it on us gambling. But it's also that in general, people are suffering, right? A lot of people are not fully recovered from the Great Recession still. I mean, families still not recovered from that, right? A lot of people are still suffering with student debt. A lot of people are suffering with low-paying jobs. A lot of people have medical debt. A lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. The push by gambling

companies is a particularly insidious one to say like, yeah, you know, you are out of money right now, but one way you could make money is to come to the casino on your phone and make some money, right? We'll even give you a few thousand dollars and we'll match you so that you can come to the casino and spend as much time as we'd like for you to lose it on, keep coming back and back so we can make money, right? A lot of this, the casinos, the trading, the crypto, as we build up the analysis of more things that are speculative and gambling in the economy, the common theme is that they're all preying on people's desperation. People are living paycheck to paycheck in this country. People are starving in this country.

People are overwhelmed with debt in this country and are looking for an easy way out, not because they don't want to work or something like that, but because it's fucking hard and it sucks and it's miserable to be crushed by that much poverty, debt, desperation. This shouldn't be a surprise, right? Because we have known, we know that gambling is an incredibly predatory industry, right? Even like where, I don't know if in the States, if you have like public gambling agencies like we do, like with the scratch cards and things like that. But in Canada, we do. And like, it's very well known that these things like target the poor most of all, but they still continue

because they bring in tax revenue, right? And like, you know, the virtual lottery terminals that are at a ton of bars that like, again, we know like target people who have gambling addictions who generally make less money, it kind of destroys their lives, but they're still allowed to exist because they bring in revenue. And it seems like in the same way, like these sports betting apps and these just general gambling apps are being sold in a similar way where states in the United States are going to be able to make more money, some more tax revenue by allowing this to happen. And so for some reason, it's being allowed instead of the states actually considering the well-being of their citizens, of their residents.

I was listening to an episode of True and On recently where they were talking about the sports betting and sports gambling. And one of the things that really stood out to me was how it's not just betting on a game, but in the same way that these tech companies have expanded the degree of data collection, like online, but increasingly in our lives with smart home gadgets, wearables, and what have you, that when it comes to sports, there's also an effort to expand the amount of data that is collected on sports games. So then you don't just bet on the game itself and what is actually going to come out of it, but you can then make micro bets on different things that are happening throughout the games, different stats, things like that.

So it significantly expands the amount of potential gambling that you can do or that viewers can do. And there are increasingly these agreements being made between the teams and the sports gambling companies to promote it through the games and potentially to do more things to kind of integrate that betting into the games themselves. So this seems like a really dangerous and worrying development of where things are going and how poor regulation, but also how tech and what tech is able to do is enabling these really predatory and exploitative developments. Yeah, I mean, I think Uncut Gems is a good example of like a sort of pre-existing division of odds that you could do in a bet right where you could bet on who's going to get the tip off you can bet on who's going to be up at halftime you can bet on

if a certain player is going to hit this or that many shots how many times you're going to visit the free throw line who's going to get fouled out i mean they're already like a pretty wide variety of options but like you said data collection allows for the creation of more arbitrary data sets that you can assign probabilities to and then gamble on, right? And I think these companies have kind of perfected the way of presenting that information as, oh, if you don't bet on this, if you don't include this in the list of bets, you're missing out. These are great odds. You can make a little bit more money. Why don't you bet on this? Oh, why don't you bet on this?

Why don't you bet on this, right? It's a good way to increase the amount of money that people put into a bet because they think that they'll get even more out of it because they don't have a good estimation of what the probabilities actually are. And also, it's a good way to keep people coming back because it's unlikely that they're going to hit every possible part of their bet, but you can make them feel FOMO, right? Oh, if only you had gotten that one right, you would have gotten a 5X payout, right? If only you got that one out, you got a 9X payout. I mean, this feeling of missing out and this feeling of desperation mixed together, it's dangerous. It's really insidious.

These companies don't care, of course, right? They're just trying to get as much money as possible or figure out what is the most valuable product for them. How can we profit? Is the best way to profit offering all these options and cleaning up? Or is the best way to profit, you know, pulling together data that we might glean from this or that part of the transaction? Or is the best way, like you said, making deals with these partnerships so that we can offer that. Like, you know, where should our profits direct us? It doesn't matter the expense to the people and the population, right? All that really matters is the money that they make. And then they'll come up after the fact with why the money they make and the costs that they do on the population is not really accurate and they actually provide more good.

They give revenue to the education system, as a lot of casinos and gambling systems justify, right? Or that they help with this or that community initiative, or they help this or that aspect of the team. It doesn't matter. The point is, it's just bullshit. It's all bullshit to justify them stealing as much money as possible from people's pockets. One of the things that seems particularly interesting to me when I think about how these tech tools and this data collection makes these things possible, whether it's an increased amount of sports betting, but also like the crypto trading, the meme stocks, all these sorts of things, is how many of the tech services that we rely on have also found inspiration in financial markets and in gambling and in things like that, right? When we think about how Google itself designed its digital ad markets based on the stock market and took inspiration from that. Tim Wong has a book where he kind of lays that out. I'll put a link in the show notes with greater information to be able to allow people to like

more easily trade and do the algorithmic trading of digital ads. And you know, it's in a market that it completely controls. And then when we look at the social media apps, as you were talking about bringing on psychologists to tell them, like how people are going to react to try to keep them on and using the apps, social media apps also have used the same kind of tools that keep people engaged on the app to keep people working. And it seems kind of insidious then to consider those links between how the tech industry has been inspired by these financial technologies and integrated them themselves, and now how these technologies are then being used to extend the degree to which these kind of financial and speculative incentives are then permeating society yeah you know it's the drive for profit

and to externalize all the cost has infected every single institution and relation among people with the drive to profit and externalize every single cost, right? It's like how I think, you know, this idea or this vision or caricature of human beings as self-interested, greedy beings who maximize their own interest rationally ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because if that's your idea of society, then you design institutions and you design products and you design services and you design markets in a way very different than if people are altruistic or kind or show solidarity with one another. inculcate people with the idea that all they should be is greedy and self-interested and maximizing their own profit from any situation and transactional. And then they go on to create institutions that prioritize human beings and their relations when they are transactional and self-interested and so on and so forth, right? And make it much harder and create incentive

structures where it makes no sense for you to do a good thing or do something that costs you even if it benefits another individual or show solidarity in any way, shape, or form, right? I mean, institutions are, we all know, they're immoral things. They're profit vehicles. They're financial instruments, right? They're not arbiters' morality, right? But we are increasingly creating systems where individuals within them, it doesn't even really occur to them to think or to be uncomfortable with that sort of system. And that we should have a society where questions of morality and questions of what human beings should be able to do and their own freedom don't enter the picture. And where we don't ask,

is this thing that we're doing hurting people or helping people? Does this thing we're doing have any social utility beyond making money and a profit? And if it does, what's the actual social utility of the profit making that it's doing, right? Does it help people if the gambling sector's profits are up 40% or 50% in one year? Does it help people if crypto's adoption is 200% up right does it help people if financial apps and financial tools are used by 20% more people each year probably not right I mean they do in a narrow sense of the way that they're marketed right which is deliberate you from shackles of Fiat of your broker and of your bank right and

lift you up by your wallet into the hands of anonymous brokers and anonymous bankers who are role-playing as scrappy crypto day traders right um and lift you up into the pockets of whales you have already cornered this or that coin or this or that market right it's all pretty depressing picture that I think ends up lining up with what the picture of the world that libertarians or libertarian inspired people envision, which is one where you don't trust each other, where your connections with each other are voluntary and end the second you don't want them to, where everything is a transaction, where you're always maximizing your own benefit because everyone else is maximizing their own benefit.

I mean, that's a pretty disgusting, depressing world to live in. But that's the world that we're hurtling towards because these people have managed to infect everyone with that mindset and vision for how humans should act with each other. It really pisses you off to think that the tech industry for so long was able to sell this image of itself as like capitalist companies that can still do good in the world. And, you know, to a certain degree, still get away with that when you see the actual impacts that they have had and continue to have and enable to occur in society. Have you ever seen that show, Silicon Valley?

Absolutely. Yeah. I just started watching it a few months ago and i was kind of surprised with like i know the show of course is not itself like a perfect capture but you can tell when a show is referencing something that had tenor in the culture at the moment and the way that the idea that tech companies could do good had tenor the way it's established in the show the way the show talks about it is like yeah of course some companies can't do good but there are companies that clearly can do good and do good all the time right you know and that this company maybe is going to be one of them the search engine pied piper or whatever it is is one that could do it and all

these other ones they're nefarious they're run by individuals we don't trust these are the people we all make fun of and don't trust and know are the villains. But these guys are the good guys and there are others like them in Silicon Valley. It's insane that like that was from what I read about the reviews and what I read about the commentary at the time, like a really dominant, compelling vision of what Silicon Valley is. And when like this is an industry that was started because of the Cold War relationships, right? How to make the military kill people better, essentially. You know, like what world is it making better for who is it making the world better? We don't have nothing to gain from war. We have nothing to gain from the proliferation of gambling. We have nothing to gain from just creating a much more violent, trustless, anti-human world like the libertarians envisioned who created Silicon Valley. And yet, they had the audacity to say that they were going to save the world.

When really, it's the other way. We have to save the world from them, it feels like. Absolutely. That is essential to creating a better world. It's not what they want to do, right? And I think just to expand on that, to build on what you're saying, I wanted to mention a few of the other ways that tech has succeeded in. Obviously, we can't talk about every aspect of this in this conversation. It's just too big of a topic.

So I wanted to get to a few of the other technologies and how these have enabled this kind of expansion of financialization and speculation in society. Uber is a company that we both love to hate, that we've written a lot about. Its entire goal, even though it talked about making taxis more convenient and whatnot, was really to deregulate cabs. It brought in the surge pricing so you can never really depend on what the price of your ride is going to be. And now it's making agreements like in New York City with taxi companies that seems to be, at least to a certain degree, adding surge pricing to taxis now. So you lose your dependability of the price of that kind of service, right? And in a similar way, you have these companies, e-commerce, but I'm sure we'll increasingly start to see it in stores as well, where the price of

an item can be more dynamic, can change more easily. Online, there are reports that suggest that depending on what it knows about you, it might even alter prices, certain websites can. And so this allows this larger kind of shift in the way that commerce works, the way that consumerism works, the way that companies are able to specifically target you if they know that you will pay a higher price. But even if you look beyond that, like technologies have enabled this crypto boom, this kind of speculation on digital assets that don't actually have any foundation to them, the gambling apps and the data capture that allow us to gamble on more aspects of a sports game and who knows whatever else they'll have us gambling on in the

future. The algorithmic trading in stock markets and digital ad markets that puts these technologies, these algorithms in control of like all this trading that is going on most of the trading and occasionally has really weird effects on the market when they when they malfunction. And even when we look at the housing crisis, which was part of an article that you wrote, like looking at this kind of casino economy for vice last year, a key part of the financialization of housing that we've seen, like the growth of it, is the ability of private equity firms to buy up all of these houses. And yes, that was enabled by the price crash post 2008, but also by the

ability to use technologies to manage these houses from afar with smart locks, with different means of collecting data, of getting rent from people, of controlling the relationship between the renter and the private equity firm. And so there are just so many ways that technology is being used and certainly poor regulation and regulation that doesn't keep up with the times or that assumes that technology companies can be considered outside of usual regulations for a particular sector as part of that as well. But tech is key to creating these like financialized speculative relationships and extending them into more aspects of society. I don't know if there are aspects of

that you want to comment on or just the general kind of trend that we're seeing there. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Tech is being used to collect data and aggregated into arbitrary categories, which can then, you know, be put on the market and specifically to quantify as much as reality as possible. I've ever heard was spearheaded by Henry Paulson Jr., who was the Secretary of Treasury under George W. Bush when the housing crisis happened, saying that we need to quantify every single asset in nature, you know, his term, not mine, because only then can you properly calculate the cost at which a polluter should pay. You know, what costs will deter a polluter from polluting? How can we create markets for pollution credits? How can we incentivize investors to invest in the future? And it's like, shut the fuck up, dude. This is, what are you talking about to me? The drive to quantify

everything, I think also it speaks to people who just have no ambition and belief that anything can be done outside of the market. Like in New York City, when they integrated taxis into Uber app, I mean, that was a deeply pathetic and disappointing move by the city, proving that the city has no alternative to this company, no vision for it. It doesn't even take seriously its own history of regulation, right? There's been the understanding, right, that Uber is operating a taxi service and that it was operating illegally and that it made deals and then suddenly it was operating legally, but that it was still violating working conditions, getting around the city's minimum wage laws and should be dealt with. And so the solution was to just put every taxi onto Uber and subject them to what Uber workers have to deal with. It's ridiculous. The way that people's minds go blank when tech gets introduced sometimes is baffling, right? Because you've talked about it,

we've talked about it. Tech is thought of and is used as an excuse for people to just start talking in eschological terms, right? They start waxing mystically when tech is invoked, as if like they're about to give birth to God, as if we are about to, you know, abandon history and social forces and economics, because tech is here. And it's convenient narrative, which has been cultivated for decades and decades because the people who are at the helm of tech are financiers or warmongers or elites and speculators who have every reason for people to not critically analyze and engage with it because they're using it to enrich themselves off of people and to put their hands in their wallets and take as much money out as possible

hand over fist or to minimize their autonomy or to marginalize them further, right? And I'm encouraged why, you know, over the past decade, there's been more and more critical analysis of it. But I always worry if it's too late, because, like, it's not only that this tech is being used to quantify it, but now it's being adopted by these institutions, these financial institutions. Now it's being normalized by governance, by municipal governments, by city governments, by state governments, by national governments. Now it's being incorporated into how the markets are operating, how people are expected to socialize,

how people are expected to make economic decisions, right? That's dangerous because all of those interventions by tech are how do we squeeze more money out of people? How do we organize people to more profitable patterns? Not how do we do anything that prioritizes human beings and their agency and their welfare, right? In all the iterations or most of the iterations of tech, human beings are secondary concern. And the primary concern is how to make the markets happy or how to increase profits. And that is an incredibly worrying thing to spread further and further in society. And so there's always one concern I always have is like, is it too late? I don't think it's too late, but it's always a concern. Like, has this or that intervention by financiers, by Silicon Valley gone too far?

And even when we roll back all the other stuff, this mindset, this pattern will be locked in. I hope not. I feel the need to say that, like, yes, like, I completely agree with everything that you just said. Like, I think it's spot on. And I think I just want to build on that final point, you know, to end this conversation, right? It does feel to me like, you know, we have a lot of talk about regulating technology properly, about ensuring that, you know, we have the right guard rails in place, that we have the right regulatory structure there. But when you consider, like when you consider, as you were just saying, and as I discussed with all the ways that

technology is used in this really exploitative way, predatory way to enable these really terrible capitalist structures, at some point, you just get to a point where you're like, something has gone terribly wrong here, and we need a corrective to pull back on what has happened, to recognize that maybe what we need is more than regulation of these things to take off the worst edges, but a real kind of opposition to some of the ways that technology is being used in society, the kind of social forms and economic trajectories that it is creating that are incredibly harmful to society and don't deserve just to be regulated, but need to be considered unacceptable in society.

It is a concern that as technology, I guess, proliferates, and as some of these people who are pushing this or that development spread, right, even if we can push against it, that not so much the damage has been done, but the way that people view technology will morph around and center on that, as opposed to, you know, something that, you know, you talked about that a lot too, which is like things should be designed with intention, right? And purpose. One thing that I've seen some people talk about and that I've been interested in, you know, Corey Doctorow has written a bit about, you know, how China is doing a lot of things with technology. And the only thing that the United States and Europe have seen to learn from it is surveillance and social control. Whereas we should be thinking about planning and organizing the way that tech is developed and pushed forward, that there's a taboo around central management, centralization, especially in the midst of this wave of people insisting that decentralization is politics, right? So how do we get to the point of this wave of people insisting that decentralization is politics right

so how do we get to the point right where people take seriously the idea that if technology is supposed to save the world if technology is supposed to help us then like why are we letting the people who are always depicted as parasites you know banksCs, some of these founders, why are we letting them decide the development of it instead of people who need or might benefit from some creative technical solution to problem? Why are we not letting them think about if they need a technical solution or if they need instead of political or social economic solution right and getting to that point is part of that battle of trying to trying to mitigate the risk and all the concerns that we have about where tech will go because i do i think if if we had different ways of thinking about tech different philosophies about a different cultural understanding of it you know then it would be easier to resist you know the devil's insisting that like we need to use it to subjugate each other to more and more

depressing conditions. But the question is, like, how do we get there? Because in the meantime, the people who dominate the way that we talk about tech, the people who dominate the types of tech that are being developed, the people who dominate the funding and the signals for what matters and don't matter, are the people who have the exact opposite interests of what most people in the world and for certainty most people in this country, most people in every single country have on their mind when they think like,

what is something that can help me in my life? Are you saying my techno king Elon Musk is not going to save us? He's going to save somebody, just not us. Ed, incredible insights as always. It's been fantastic to speak with you to dig into this incredibly important topic. Thanks so much for taking the time. It's been awesome. speak with you to dig into this incredibly important topic. Thanks so much for taking the time.

It's been awesome. Thanks for having me. Always a great time talking with you, Paris. Edward Ongweso Jr. is a staff writer at Motherboard and a co-host of This Machine Kills. You can follow him on Twitter at BigBlackJackalman. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at TechWon'tSaveUs. TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show every week,

and to help hit the stretch goal for the membership drive I'm doing this month, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.