Tech Won't Save Us - The Year in Tech w/ Brian Merchant, Chris Gilliard, & Gita Jackson

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant, Chris Gilliard, and Gita Jackson to discuss the year in tech, including Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the biggest stories of the year, what they’ll be watching in 2023, and the worst person in tech of 2022.Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device and Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Chris Gilliard is a Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. Gita Jackson is a tech and culture journalist. You can follow them on Twitter at @bcmerchant, @hypervisible, and @xoxogossipgita.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris wrote about Netflix and streaming services for Business Insider.Brian wrote about how 2022 was a disastrous year for the tech industry for The Atlantic.Chris and Kishonna Gray wrote about digital migration and what it means for Black users for Wired.Gita wrote a review of Dwarf Fortress’s Stream release.Part of the show discusses a Twitter policy that was briefly launched to restrict sharing of links from several other social media platforms. It was rescinded after the initial discussion.Support the show

this kind of stuff, it's all based on his personal grievances. It's so obviously his personal grievances that it reminds me of like just some 20 something in their mom's basement that runs a pro board server and is just losing his mind because people won't stop talking about how stupid they think he is. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I have something a little bit different for you. On December 18th, I hosted a live stream for Patreon supporters of the show to, you know, discuss the year in tech, to go through everything, and to announce the winner of the competition that I was running on Tech Won't Save Us's Twitter account for the worst person in tech

of 2022. If you're listening now, you may have already heard the winner to that. But if not, well, you can stay tuned to the end and you can hear that announcement. My guests during this live stream were Brian Merchant, Chris Gillyard, and Gita Jackson. I'll introduce them more in the recording itself, but if you listen to the show regularly, you will likely be familiar with them and their work because they've all been on the show multiple times. And I was very happy to have them for this conversation as we discussed many of the things that happened in the tech industry over the past year. I'll keep this short because this is a long recording. We get into a lot, and I don't really feel the need to set it up so much,

but I did want to thank each and every one of you who listen to the show, particularly those of you who support the show on Patreon.com, who make it possible for me to continue doing this work, to have Eric, our producer, put it together every week, and to have Bridget doing the transcripts for the show that you can find on the website as I am able to upload them. None of that would be possible without the support that we get from you. And of course, just having so many people listen to it is fantastic because it ensures that these perspectives are getting out there more, that people are getting a more critical analysis of the tech industry, of things that are going on in this industry, and of the people who are making important decisions that affect all of our lives

every single day. And so, you know, it's been fascinating to see the listenership grow over the past year as it did the year before. So a big thanks to all of you. And in particular, there are some people who supported the show on patreon.com over the past couple months whose names I haven't read out on the show yet. So I want to get through a few of those as we end off the year.

So a big thanks to Praveen from Hyderabad in India, Lee in Philadelphia, David Schmoodie in Turin, Italy, Chase from Washington, D.C., Zach Odette from Cincinnati, Kelly from Pointe Claire, Quebec, Curtis from Chicago, Thanks to all of you. And if you want to have your name read out on the show, if you just want to support the work that goes into making this possible every single week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter.

And obviously I very much appreciate if you choose to do so. And if you support it $5 a month or above, you can also get some stickers in the mail. Now with that said, enjoy this end of year wrap up episode. And I hope you enjoy the new year. Have a happy holidays. And of course, you'll be hearing from me again in January. Thanks so much and enjoy this live stream recording.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Tech Won't Save Us live stream, where we are going to review the year in tech, we are going to talk about all of the biggest stories. And we're going to end off this live stream with the announcement of the winner of the Worst Person in Tech, a competition that you listeners, you know, people who are following on Twitter have been voting on for the past few days to pick who is the absolute worst person in the tech industry in the past year. And, you know, I'm sure that people are taking other things into account as well when they are making those decisions. I have a great lineup of people who will be joining us to have this discussion. If you are a regular listener of the show, which I imagine you must

be if you're tuning into this, then I think you're going to recognize some of these folks who we have for this discussion. I can see one of them is getting ready. So how about we bring him on right now, a name that you will be very familiar with. Hello, Brian Merchant, and very nice hat you have there. Thank you. It's unsustainable, but let it be known that I have signified some holiday spirit. Brian Claus is in the discussion today. That's right. Oh, ho, ho, ho. Thank you for today. That's right. Oh, ho, ho, ho. Thank you for that.

We needed it. For those of you who aren't familiar, of course, I think you all will be. Brian is the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone that we have, of course, discussed on the podcast. And he was on, I believe it was earlier this year, or maybe it was last year when we discussed the 15th anniversary of the iPhone. Yeah, that was this year, which is kind of wild. You are also the author of Blood in the Machine, the origins of the rebellion against big tech,

which comes out next May, I believe, you know, has kind of been in the works for a little while. It's this history of the Luddites, you know, looking back to what actually happened in that moment when people in, you know, kind of the middle of England, I guess, started fighting back against some of these technologies that were altering their way of life and connecting that to what is going on today to give us inspiration for what's actually happening. So, you know, I've had the chance to read the book. It is incredible. And I'm very excited for everyone else to be able to read it too. I will, of course, put a link where you can go and find out more in the chat. If you did want to go pre-order Brian's book, Brian, thanks so much for coming on the discussion on the live

stream. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is going to be a fun one. And up next, of course, someone that everyone will be familiar with as well. Hopefully you have read his work on luxury surveillance and many other topics. It is Chris Gileard, of course. He's joining us. Chris, very happy to have you on the live stream as well. We've had some fantastic discussions on the podcast over the past couple of years. Welcome. Oh, thank you for having me.

I'm really excited about this conversation. I'm very excited that you could join us. Chris, of course, is a Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council, and he's a recurring columnist at Wired as well, where he's written some really fantastic pieces lately. Very excited you could join us, Chris. I know I already said that. I'm just so excited. I'm just brimming over with excitement. I'm so happy. And of course, our fourth guest, we would not be complete without them joining us. I will bring them in right now. Gita Jackson, welcome so much to the stream. Hi, it's so wonderful to be here. I'm so excited to be here. I am so excited that you could join us as well. We've had some fantastic conversation about the games industry and the film industry this

year. I'm happy that you could join us to contribute to our roundup on the tech industry, on everything that has been happening. You are, of course, a tech and culture journalist, most recently at Motherboard, but also at Kotaku as well. You know, you write some fantastic pieces that I always love reading. And of course, you have one recently on Dwarf Fortress that, listen, I haven't read it yet, but I need to because I'm going to have to be playing this over the holidays.

Yeah, it's basically the most important game of all time, which my editor wouldn't let me say that in the article. I had to say one of, but I believe it's the most important game. I'm happy you were able to moderate yourself so you could get the piece past the finish line. You know, we all make sacrifices. We all do. We all do. I'll tell a brief story because I think I'm allowed to say this now. My editor has been laid off, so I don't really care anymore. I wrote a piece for Time magazine earlier this year. People might be familiar with it. It was about how much Elon Musk sucks. And of course, it came about eight months after he was named person of the year in Time

magazine, got all this recognition, despite the fact that, you know, he was an absolute terrible person through 2021. And I tried to reference the fact that they had named him person of the year and to take a little quote from their article that they wrote about him being person of the year, you know, in the piece that I wrote. And we went through several rounds of edits and everything looked good. It was in there. And then, you know, I got a note right before it was about to be published. And my editor called me up and was like, listen, they're really happy with the piece. They can't wait to run it. There's just one thing.

I was like, what is it? The reference to Time Magazine in person of the year has to go. I was like, look, I tried, you know, but to get this piece out there. All right, let's cut it. Unfortunately, you have to make sacrifices sometimes. As you, of course, are very familiar with all of you having written for many of these publications. So I'm very excited to have you all join us here. You know, you're obviously all familiar with one another, of course, and with one another's work. And the listeners of the show will be very familiar with you and your work as well. But there are a number of things that we want to get to in this discussion as we, you know, talk about what has happened this year in the tech industry.

But of course, I don't think that we can. Oh, you know what? Before we get to the first topic, there is one thing I did want us to start with. And apologies for the listeners on the podcast. You won't be able to relate to this. but I did ask you to wear some sweaters. So I think we need to take a look at our holiday sweaters first. I am of course, happy to start on this one because I'm very excited about mine. And of course, you know, if you've been on Twitter or like read the verge or something, you've probably already heard about it. Okay. I know. I know, but take a look at this, at this beauty of a holiday sweater okay

look at this thing it's so good it's so amazing cliffy is just the best right like i remember being a teenager and like having to write my essays in like microsoft office and like here's cliff you know, to guide me along, to give me all the tips that I need to like use the program properly. And here he is, you know, giving us a little happy holidays. Okay, Clippy, thank you so much. I would just like it for him to hang out, you know? I didn't ever need his tips.

I just wanted him to be there. Exactly. He was my buddy. He was accompanying me during these essay writing process. And now everything needs to be simplified right and and and made uh minimalist and so clippy got the boot um i think they should bring him back i think 2023 we should start the tech won't save us campaign to bring clippy back you know he's like one of those avatars for the simpler... He's like one of the last pure things.

Maybe let's not bring him into this. Let him rest. Let him keep him out of the metaverse. Keep him out of Web 3. That's just... Oh, you don't want the Clippy Fortnite experience? I want Clippy to have died never seeing what came after him yeah he'll be revived as a powered by chat gpt of course yeah oh my god chris i was thinking

the exact same thing i didn't want to say it and will it into being because now now it's now it's gonna be real i'll go so i have a this is the ugliest sweater yeah i i i went and i visited my friend in the in the eastern block when he was doing peace corps in moldova and i they had like this amazing sweater sale and like this thing is like i don't even know if it's it's like majestically ugly so i'm bringing it out as i do once a year yeah yeah i i love it i think it's great and to know the backstory behind it as well you know you didn't just order it off the xbox store like i did like no i bought it in like a like a christmas market underneath a giant hammer and sickle like moldova is like one of those few places that's completely unabashedly like still communist, like old guard, like they have the hammers and sickles,

they've got the Lenin statues. So it was, it was fun to buy some Christmas kitsch in such an environment. Talking about like the communism in the Eastern Bloc. I was in Romania a few years ago. And I was like, you know, looking around for some like communist stuff, like you'd find stuff every now and then. And I went into this, like, I think it was called the peasant museum. And it was about like, you know, how people kind of live like in the rural parts of the country, like back in the day and all this kind of stuff. And I like, you know, went through the first floor and I was like, okay, interesting. Went up to the second floor. I was looking around. I was like, all right, you know, cool little like costumes they had or like, you know, the way they dressed and like

the way their villages looked and stuff. All right. All right. And then there was like a little basement and I was like, you know, I was getting a bit bored with it then. I was like, do I go down into the basement? Like, I don't really know. I was like, all right, whatever. I'll just, you know, pop down there. So I go down these steps, turn the corner. All I see is these like hammer and sickles, like all over the wall, painted onto the wall, a wallpaper i'm like okay what's going on here turn the next corner there's like statues of stalin and lenin everywhere there's like this massive painting of stalin i was like holy shit like this was what i was looking for it was it was beautiful i was like can i just like take this whole wall and like put it in my bedroom like it was like blue with like gold or like brownish like hammer and sickles painted

yeah it was wonderful anyway gita you're up next let's see your sweater well i'm wearing the top half of my neon genesis evangelion uh track suit that i have. Nice. Hang on, we're going to have to go. Here we are. Yeah, it's in the Unit 01 colors. This is what I imagine Shinji wears when he's like courtside at an NBA game or something like that. I love it. I love it. It feels festive to me, even though, you know, it's all about coming together in the end, basically, just like Christmas.

It just takes a while to get there. Totally. And like we are today, you know about coming together in the end, basically, just like Christmas. It just takes a while to get there. Totally. And like we are today, you know, coming together. Exactly. Beautiful. Chris, did you want to add anything on this topic? Obviously, we're not forcing you to come on video with us. Anything to note?

No, I thought about like a festive glove or something. I didn't have time to acquire it unfortunately oh good man yeah you know to go along with the hand photo that we always share we could put that as your avatar photo right i was i was telling chris before this you know for the listeners for those of you watching you can see chris has a has a photo wearing like a ski mask on here and that's the photo that he uses on his mastodon profile as well. And when I was sharing the graphics for the live stream, I was going to use the updated photo.

I was like, this is the one that Chris is using now. You know, I'll use this one. And then I was about to share it. I was like, wait, every other time that Chris has been on the show, I've used his Twitter profile picture, which is, you know, his hand. And I was like, if I use a different one, will the people like know who I'm referring to if it's a different photo? So I was like, no, we have to use the hand. That's what it has to be. But I'm happy that Chris has updated it here in the live stream. You saw it here first. That's right. Yeah. The unveiling,

if you're not on Mastodon, which are, I'm sorry, I don't think we're allowed to talk about it now, actually. Elon Musk's new rules forbid us, I think. It's the forbidden website. Now that we've gone through our holiday sweaters, you know, had our fun little discussion about that, now we need to get to the serious topics of this live stream. And, you know, before we get into our big stories of the year, our look backs on what has happened, how can we not talk about Elon Musk and Twitter? You know, obviously, it's been a whole saga since like April and March and stuff when this all came to light. But especially since he took it over, and even just in the past few days, like, it's been wild, you know, he went and suspended temporarily, all of these journalists made a completely ridiculous excuse that it was because they shared his real time information, which are essentially assassination coordinates, that

people could have came and killed him and his family, you know, as if, you know, he hasn't had the location of his private jet being shared publicly for many, many years as every other plane is shared publicly. But this all of a sudden became a really big thing and the justification for a further crackdown on these journalists for a new change in policy. Then, of course, he was doxing himself today by saying that he was at the World Cup. But that's fine, apparently. And then, of course, you know, today, as he's at the World Cup, Twitter makes an announcement that now you can't post links to Mastodon, to Facebook, to Instagram, to Post News, and to so many other platforms that are either big competitors to Twitter, or that seem to be taking users from Twitter slowly, but surely. Who wants to start?

What do you think of all this stuff? I think it's just spectacular. What? What a glorious. I mean, it's like almost fitting. So like, I'll preface this. I've been writing a little bit about this. I have a piece coming out in a few days in The Atlantic that's kind of about a lot of and thin skinned and vindictive in sort of the tech titan as we know it today like i i'm arguing that like this like 2022 in a lot of ways was kind of it was like yeah it was like kind of a disaster year for tech because we have all these layoffs and valuations are down there's plenty more stories than the musk saga but like it just encapsulates it so neatly you have like this founder myth this like genius myth that's sort of like you disintegrating before your eyes every time he tweets and i think like the the the meme that's going around where it's comparing elon to just

like the ultimate mod like just getting furious just like raging at his own community and, and sort of blowing everything up. I have been like, really, my breath has been taken away by how foolish, like, I mean, yeah, sure. We expect all these things. We expect him to let the Nazis back on. We expect the crackdowns on sort of his enemies. Like anyone who knows, who's followed Musk knew that many of these things were probably coming, but to see it also transparently rolled out so nakedly. And he just looks so pathetic to me. I mean, I'm sure his fans maybe are sticking with him,

but it was like, even like, who was it? Was it like one of those V one? It was like Paul Graham or something. It was like, I'm out of here. Like,

it is even, even. Well, Barry Weiss, like backpedaled on her support for him. You know, like he's losing his own people. That's, that was the wildest thing to see him in real time, unfollow Bari Weiss and the free press and then follow JK Rowling. That was like a really big sign of bad things to come. It does resemble, I mean, a lot of things about the

things that are happening on Twitter right now remind me of other platform collapses. It reminds me of LiveJournal's strikethrough, which happened after they were bought by a weird Russian company that was actively trying to quash dissent against the Russian government on LiveJournal and silence the blogs of citizen journalists. And then coincidentally just caught up a bunch of fandom blogs in their wake. And fandom people on LiveJournal were an uproar. And after that, the platform really just collapsed. Or then more recently, the Tumblr porn ban, which is slowly being reversed, still not all the way reversed. But when Yahoo bought Tumblr, they banned all adult content on the platform, 100% all of it. And that really just led to Tumblr as it used to be completely collapsing.

But more so than that, this reminds me of something awful, which was a seminal internet forum in the early internet that was run by this person, Richard Kienka, who is an abuser and also in 2021 committed suicide after the site collapsed and was forcibly taken from him and he lost all of his money. He is like the preeminent forum mod tyrant. And the kinds of things that Elon Musk is doing right now are just straight out of low taxes book, like random bannings just based on vibes and then randomly taking them back to Taylor Lawrence was banned this morning and she was told that it was going to be permanent. And then they randomly for no reason gave her account back. It was wild. This kind of stuff, it's all based on his personal

grievances. It's so obviously his personal grievances that it reminds me of like just some 20-something in their mom's basement that runs a ProBoard server and is just losing his mind because people won't stop talking about how stupid they think he is. It's so true. It's so true. I think you all just don't see the master plan.

That's the problem here. The 3D chess. Oh, yeah. 4D chess. It's up to 60 now, I think. Wait, I thought I invited Chris Gileard on, not Kara Swisher. The thing that I do think is important to remember, though, is that, like, what – and I feel like we get, like, really swept up in all the Twitter. Rightfully so.

Like, you can't look away from it. Like, I've never been more been more like online than I have. Like I feel like I had been slowly weaning myself off Twitter. And then just this is just a car crash you can't look away from. But like the conditions that give rise to Musk in the first place, if we look back two years or so, we're targeting all the blame on Musk right now. But like, let's not forget about the board that like saw a chance to cash out. And just like, if anyone cared that this was a public square, or, you know, it was already clear that handing the keys to someone like Elon Musk would be a disaster. So they, I think they deserve as much blame for sort of seeing this cash out opportunity.

I mean, that's in a sense, that's what boards do. They see they were never going to get a higher return on our investment than we are right now because this insane person tweeted a weed joke and offered to buy the company for $54.20 a share. And the reason they were so willing to do so was because Twitter like let's be honest but Twitter we love we hate being on Twitter but it had been stagnant and toxic and misguided and poorly managed and all of these things pretty much since its inception like it was kind of a sub-monopoly it has always run up against like the rules, like the difficulty of forging rules

to moderate misinformation policy, toxicity. Nazis have always been a problem. And you get the sense that, you know, Jack Dorsey checked out last year and formally fully like this year, but he stepped down as CEO last year because, you know, you get the sense he just doesn't want to deal with it anymore. It's become too much of a problem. And this is sort of a running theme through a lot of these companies that have become so big that, you know, they started out with the only aim was to get big. Twitter did it. They got pretty, pretty big, if not as big as Facebook. You know, and there's a lot of parallels to Facebook where Dorsey just checked out.

Zuckerberg tries to invent the metaverse. People are left trying to pick up the pieces and govern these almost ungovernable things. And you run into this rock and then in walks a clown like Musk. And he says, I'll buy it. And they say, yep, you take it. And it's really like an occasion to think hard about. I know a lot of people don't really believe that it is a public square, but it's something. It has some value in the way that it transmits and connects people. And, and it's, it is an occasion for us all to think pretty hard about it. I mean, we're laughing as the ship goes down, but there's no really good alternative. I mean, we're on Mastodon, we're on whatever, but. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've been on Tumblr before.

I was on Tumblr before I was on Twitter and I ended up being on Twitter because I, as the Tumblr community was stagnating and the initial sale to Yahoo, most of the people I was on Tumblr before I was on Twitter, and I ended up being on Twitter because as the Tumblr community was stagnating and the initial sale to Yahoo, most of the people I was following went to Twitter. And I've done this song and dance dozens of times before. I have just run off different collapsing platforms trying to find the people I found the funniest and the smartest and the nicest somewhere else. And it really hurts to think again, that I'm going to end up losing serious friends. And it's going to hurt more now because I'm an adult and I like understand how hard one those connections are. That's really been bothering me, you know, even more than just like professionally. Yeah. It's kind of embarrassing, but it has been really helpful for

me professionally. I got tons of gigs off of Twitter, tons of them just because of how everyone was on there. It's a centralized resource of everybody. That's what made Facebook valuable after a while. That's why people started saying that Facebook should be like a utility. It's basically the phone book, you know, and it feels very similar to Twitter. These things should never have been in the hands of private corporations in the first place. These are now like part of

the fabric of our everyday life. And we are, it's like if someone just decided to cancel the phone you know, it's just gone. That feels so weird to think about, but that was like, if, if in the mid nineties pre-internet, there was someone when someone Elon Musk just bought whatever part of the government makes the phone book and was like, we're not going to have these anymore. It would be, this is kind of what it feels like. Yeah, I think to build on that, the ways that these systems, you know, I mean, Twitter in this case, operate as public infrastructure, makes it, you know, amidst the comedy makes this really tragic and dangerous, whether that's having a way to filter through the misinformation about COVID or, you know, disaster relief or, you know, all the ways that minoritized communities, you know, disabled folks have

found community. It's really worrisome because no other thing does that in quite the way that, you know, real time that Twitter does. And yeah, again, like I personally have benefited tremendously from being on it. And so that is the thing that worries me is, you know, I mean, I, I feel very privileged to, I mean, I left the day that the, the purchase became official and I have not tweeted since, but I'm very privileged to do that. You know, I think a lot of people don't have that available to them. Municipalities, as far as I know, there hasn't been some kind of massive disaster climate thing in the states since the takeover that I know of. But I'm afraid for that time to come and how people

are going to get information yeah no and especially now if they're limiting links from other platforms you know and a lot of local governments use facebook to to push a lot of stuff out right yeah absolutely yeah brian you're gonna ask something, I was just gonna say, Chris wrote a pretty great piece of a few just a few days ago with Kishana Gray in Wired talking about sort of this, the digital migration and how it's like yet another digital migration for these communities for black communities. And I was wondering if you had any insight, given that, like, I think I feel like if you are on Mastodon or something, you just see like people are just coming, like people are leaving. So like what you know, what is and again, most people are like making it this joke. And it is funny, because sometimes all you can do is laugh. But I do wonder, you know, what, you know, what is really sort of being torn apart as this happens, as these migrations happen? Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, Kashana is great to work with. And it was really interesting writing a piece where we were kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum. I mean, she was she's kind of team ride until the wheels fall off. You know, I think one of the things is that people want to go to something that's already Twitter, you know, like they want to go to the next Twitter. Kind of not, not understanding is not the right word, but sort of not realizing that the Twitter we all started on is far different from the Twitter that we're on today or, you know, have been on for the last couple of years.

Yeah. Back in the day when you would write rt and you know someone's username and sms it like it was literally i remember tweeting from my phone that was a real thing on my freaking college campus but i do think i mean the other thing is i think um the other big platforms have missed a gigantic opportunity you know to to spin out something on the fly. Another place where people can migrate to. I wouldn't do Facebook no matter what, but I know lots of people would. Weren't there some reports from Meta saying that they were trying to think about a text-based platform? If you look at Tumblr, it sounds like a joke. I'm going to be the Tumblr evangelist here, but if you look at Tumblr, they are trying to take advantage of this hard. It was

surprising to me that Elon Musk didn't explicitly ban Tumblr because they're using the official branded Tumblr account to promote their service every single day. They just launched a live streaming service too. They're trying to become a real competitor in the social media space. And I feel like for the people that get screwed over by the recent Twitter rules, I mean, it's dangerous, as Chris pointed out, in that governments can't use this to send out disaster relief information and stuff like that. But also, any kind of person who is creative on the internet is now completely screwed over by this rule. On the most basic sense, the class of people that get screwed over most frequently sex workers now rely on things like Linktree because their accounts get flat for adult content.

They have to link to platforms offsite. But then if you're also like if you're a visual artist that uses Twitter, and a lot of visual artists ironically moved from Tumblr to Twitter because of the porn ban, you now also have no way to direct people to your Instagram, which is like a much better venue for looking at drawn illustrated pictures than Twitter is because Twitter compresses your images. There's now no way to use Twitter for something that people have been using Twitter for this entire time, which is to promote yourself off platform to try to make some money because there's a horrible, like the economy is taking a huge downturn and everybody needs some cash. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And just for the listeners, you know, in the policy that was announced today, it's not just you can't link to Facebook or Instagram or Mastodon or whatever. You also can't use a link tree to link to a bunch of other services as well. It's explicitly outlined in the policy that they have promoted just to kind of back up what you're saying, Gita. You also, I saw, you can't DM these links to anyone either. Really? So not even a private DM. Say what? Yeah, they will block the DM. Oh my goodness. Yes, yes. I saw someone try with a Macedon link. You can't send a DM. It'll be blocked. Wow. Wild. Yeah, you need to remove Macedon usernames from your Twitter name or Twitter bio as well, or that could get you suspended, too,

is part of the new rules. Yeah, it's kind of very broad brush, you know? So, should I... I have the Mastodon link in my bio. Should I keep it in and see when they ban me, or should I take it out and try to ride the ship?

I think everyone is on the same username everywhere you know tip right now so people are just just tweeting out the same username everywhere and like letting people find you that way as a blue check i haven't been able to change my my name i got really lucky i was italian elon musk until yesterday and yesterday it worked you know before we move on to these kind of other stories that we've been talking about, I do just want to echo the things that, you know, all of you have been saying, right? Twitter has been very important for me for building this podcast, for building a writing

career that I have. And so I've certainly been very conflicted seeing Elon Musk take it over and kind of the consequences of that. And especially now, as we see it kind of splintering, right? As you know, Twitter was this kind of place where everyone kind of was, especially in this kind of ecosystem, right? Especially when it came to news and journalism and writing and whatnot. But also many other people who are reading those sorts of things who are engaging with it. And if it does splinter, like it's not like, you know, I think as Chris was saying, it's not like there's an obvious Twitter alternative, right? Whatever else we're going to is something that is different from what Twitter was. Maybe it has good things about it. Maybe it has drawbacks, but it's, it's not Twitter. There's not another Twitter. And so

whatever we choose, wherever people go next, however, that splinters, it's going to be different. And I think as you're, as you as you're saying gita like seeing people fan out to other platforms potentially losing people who you are connected with on a platform that already exists um or and that you've been active on for a long time like i think that's one of the biggest worries that i have as i see you know people move to macedon and post and co-host and tumblr and wherever else is that i'm not going to be on all those places. And I'm inevitably going to lose people that I like being in contact with. Also sort of just referencing what Chris and Gita were saying, it's the most interesting thing about Twitter is that it has everything that is good about Twitter, not just the communities

that have formed, but like from an engineering standpoint, all the features, like it was built by the user base, like the whole at symbol, like the whole RT mechanism. It was just a whole cycle of like looking at what are these people doing on the platform that's interesting and then actually implementing it. And then that allows communities to say, it says, okay, this is an interesting place to be. And it attracts people that way. So it has always been like a 90-10 split. I mean, the amount of actual governance that they do. I mean, it's been interesting to look at the Twitter, like the Twitter files, quote unquote, these, you know, whatever they it's. Yeah, it's like a room full of people like trying to make some tough content moderation calls and not always doing the best job and having some weird relationships.

But there's hundreds of millions of people that use Twitter. And for years and years and years, it was more or less being governed. I mean, this has led to a lot of problems, but we can safely say that everything good about Twitter was built by the user base. So the question now for me is like, how do you harness, how do we, can we take this as an opportunity to learn from this? Like

Mastodon is maybe too far the other direction where it's like, you actually have people having little power over their fiefdoms and they can just sort of like mass ban. It also gives me for a moderator vibes there a little bit, because it is, you are relying a lot more directly on your, the community that you place yourself into. And for me, that makes Mastodon a little bit because it is you are relying a lot more directly on your the community that you place yourself into. And for me, that makes Mastodon a little bit less attractive because due to my experience on the Internet, I don't really trust, you know, these self-moderated communities very much. I've been in too many bad forums. But there's also, you know, I was I'm thinking that we really might be headed in a direction that makes me a little sad, but feels like the most likely. I know people younger than me, they mostly interact with their peers on a my peers that are into the same things that I'm

into that are semi-anonymous, but also semi-friendly, which is sort of what I look for and enjoy about Twitter. But it's not the same thing. It's like not the same thing at all. It is more private, which is in some ways better, although Discord has a lot of problems as a program and Discord has a lot of issues as a company, but it is also, I mean, we're all going back to chat rooms. It feels like we had this great experiment with making all of our chat rooms public. And now we're all just going back to IRC.

And maybe that's healthier in some ways, but the, the thing that makes it great is also the thing that makes it terrible, you know? And so we have to reckon with that and, and maybe, you know, and when,

you know, Gita, you referred to as an experiment like it's very easy for me to say it was a failed experiment you know despite the successes because some of the affordances i mean like just some of the the things that come with it are like unquestionably bad you know and so like yeah that is um that's a hard sort of um hair to split yeah because like discord has issues but it doesn't have the issue that twitter did where like something like 80 percent of all black women on twitter on twitter were getting like intensely harassed daily yeah

no absolutely um thanks for this discussion on on elon musk uh obviously we could not uh avoid it and and twitter and social media and and all these other things i'm sure unfortunately it's going to be something that we're going to be returning to a lot in 2023 as well um as much as i'd love us not to be you know thinking about and talking about elon musk all the time but he knows that he benefits from having his name in the headlines, from having his name on everyone's tongue and in everyone's tweets constantly. And it's just hard to avoid that when everyone else is wrapped up in it too. I don't know what we do about Elon Musk, to be quite

honest. So I want to move on to some other big stories. I asked you all if you had a big story that you wanted to highlight. And I would say, I was saying big stories. Maybe this is like a massive story that we've all been talking about. Or maybe you have a story that is kind of maybe was under the radar, and that should have received more attention as well. And that we should have been talking about in 2022. That was really important and crucial and all these sorts of things. And so I let people in in the order of Brian, Chris, Gita, how about we do the reverse in talking about stories? I know I'm putting anyone on the spot, Gita. What do you think? What is your story that stands out to you? Well, I have a story. I have a story that might feel like it's not a tech story,

but I think people... I bring it up because I think it is a story that people should think of as a tech story. It's the story of HBO Max and Netflix this year, with the CEOs just massively changing how these platforms work and consumers and users of these platforms and the people who make content for these platforms suffering so greatly. I did some reporting talking to animators that have been affected by the cuts and layoffs at HBO Max and Warner Brothers. And it is like a pretty grim scenario out there for animation right now. Animation is very similar to freelance writing and that people kind of live gig to gig. And it's difficult to get a staff position because the experience you're expected to have is supposed to be as a staffer. And you are most likely going to just be working freelance to freelance to

freelance. I actually spoke with someone who went from a cushy paid gig to a contract gig at Warner Brothers and then was laid off like three weeks later, which really, really hurt her. And what she said was that throughout this experience, the level of disrespect to animation, she said, was like to her, like insane to her, because during the pandemic, animation was one of the few areas in entertainment that could continue to work exactly the same. And as soon as the budgets got tight for these companies, animation was the first to go. But what this person said to me was also that this will come to live action eventually. Everything that happens in animation, it's like a canary in a coal mine for the ways they will cut budgets in live action. And we are beginning to see this. And why is that?

It's because ultimately HBO Max, Netflix, those are tech platforms. Netflix especially is a tech company. It is a tech company that is trying to enter the entertainment industry, but it is running into problems because they were too successful, essentially. They no longer have the benefit of just being able to buy the back catalogs of a lot of wonderful movie studios because all of those studios have also started their own streaming platforms. If you go to Paramount, it's wild. The service is like not very good at all, but they do have all of Star Trek, which is great. And they have all these really good classic Westerns that you just can't watch anywhere else.

And they're like, well, the people like Westerns and Paramount historically has made a lot of westerns. So here we go. You know, and it's it's really, you know, it's the same for HBO Max, just Wild Warner Brothers has an incredible black catalog of really amazing films, and you can't watch them anywhere else. And you see, though, on HBO Max, it becomes once you look at these as tech platforms, it doesn't become about archiving that work, you know, in the way that the sort of the Criterion channel does or and it doesn't even become about creating and promoting good work. It becomes a crunching numbers to have the most financial success. You can see this in the way that Netflix cancels literally everything before it gets its third season, if it even gets a second season. Even if it's really successful, or even if they've spent a lot of money promoting it, like the Cowboy Bebop show, which people didn't like very much,

but they put everything they had into promoting that show. They got Yoko Kanno from the original Cowboy Bebop to do the score. They spent all that money and then it didn't reach a certain arbitrary metric and it was canceled immediately, like within a week, which was wild. And then you look at HBO Max, I saw the woman who wrote the book Made for Love, which was a big splashy pickup for HBO and was turned into a series with two seasons, a great sort of anti-tech show actually, which I think is fantastic. Alyssa Nutting, yeah, she was tweeting on Friday about how Netflix has not only canceled her show, they're going to take it, literally take it off of the platform so they don't have to pay royalties on it. These become anti-art companies when they use the same kind of same business thinking that

tech uses in order to maximize profit. And it's scary and it's going to keep happening. I'm so happy that you brought up that story because as you well know, and I think as listeners will know, this is also a topic that I pay a lot of attention to read a lot about, write a bit about, you know, I wrote a piece recently in Business Insider about Netflix and the whole streaming space and like how stuff is changing big time, right? And just to note, you know, you said Netflix cancelling series after the second season, usually the third season is when there's a bump in kind of pay and things like that for actors and,

you know, show creators and all that kind of stuff. And so they don't want to do that. And so that's why many of the shows get cancelled at that stage. I think it is so fascinating to see how things are changing in that space after what, like a decade of really positive headlines around streaming and how it was going to transform the entertainment industry and how it was going to be so positive for creators and viewers and everybody, right? And it's not exclusively negative in that it's really amazing that I think like everyone in the world can watch a movie like We're All Going to the World's Fair, which is now streaming on HBO Max. It's an incredible Sundance favorite that would have been really difficult to find and watch before the streaming era. It's just, I mean, have you looked at Steam recently,

the video game platform Steam? If you've ever tried to just browse Steam, there's just so many games, it becomes impossible to navigate without a human curator doing it for you. And we are approaching the place where I think all streaming services, because they are designed to give you everything, it becomes you end up not actually understanding how to watch things or what to watch. I feel the same way about Spotify, actually, where the lack of an actual human curator, the algorithm, I feel like is insufficient and actually giving me interesting new things that I want to listen to. And the glut of just here's everything, it becomes impossible to nap. So you're saying Geeta Jackson's favorite streaming platform is Apple TV Plus? I don't know about that.

They function more like a normal studio and that Apple has more money than God. So they can just make these really high production value things. Is it good? No, but I don't know. I'll take a season of C over like some random, horrible documentary on Netflix about something, some true crime

bullshit. Oh, a fellow C fan. Oh my goodness. This is Jason Momoa, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, it's very funny. Go on.

I hear that show is bonkers. Isn't the show just insane? It's wild. I mean, as a fan of fight choreography and filmic violence, it's something to see. Yeah, that's very true. I mean, no pun intended. I mean, yeah, I don't want to nerd out on it. I'll save you.

Yeah. I'll save you. We have a bonus bonus podcast. The C podcast. We all get together again. Not the Motherboard Dune series. The Tech Won't Save Us C series. Is that what?

There you go. But no, I, I do think it's fascinating to see that there's like a broader reorganization that seems to be happening, you know, after all of this kind of hype that was around streaming for so long, where we've not only seen so many other companies enter it because they felt forced to because of, you know, the success of Netflix, the demands of investors, the belief that streaming is the future, it's how everything needs to go, et cetera, et cetera. And how there's a realization that because of the shift in the funding model on these series, that often they're not even as financially lucrative as the model that existed before where you'd make your TV show or your movie.

And then there'd be multiple other releases and write sales and things like that. It wouldn't just sit in a streaming catalog. And it seems like this is one thing that Warner Discovery is trying to start to do is take things out of that catalog, resell them. I don't know how well it's going to work in their case because they seem to be just like destroying everything that they touch right now, David Zaslav. But I do think it suggests that there's going to be kind of a broader rethinking of what this actually looks like of whether it was positive to go down this road with this particular model to kind of put all the eggs in the streaming basket or many of the eggs. But then the other piece of that too, as you bring up in talking about the animators is that there's a big kind of worker piece to this, right? And we've already seen with the kind of threatened

IOTC strike, I believe that was earlier this year with the talks about producers and writers. There's the threat of a writer's strike next year, I believe, because the contract is coming back up for renewal and they chose not to really push too hard on it because last renewal was during the pandemic. It was really difficult, et cetera, et cetera. But this is kind of the moment where if things are going to happen, we're going to start to see it this year and next year with workers pushing back and demanding a lot better kind of pay and treatment from the streaming series as they've been carved out and not had the same expectation as like traditional productions for a long time yeah um we're also seeing some animation workers are

animation workers at nickelodeon are actually um trying to form a union which would become the largest animation union in the united states i I believe. For them, you know, the way that they were treated is really rank. I spoke to a creator who said he was not even given a physical copy of his own show that he created and pitched to them. The person that made Dexter's Lab and all those wonderful cartoons on Cartoon Network, he said that he came to Warner with 16 original IP and they only accepted it if he would do reboots of his old series. They don't get residuals. They only get flat fees. It is very, very difficult to make a living in animation right now. So imagine if they're treated so poorly, imagine what's going on also in live action and other sectors of animation where the people who are not the most

highly paid and the most highly lauded, they're also being treated terribly. Even on a television show like Apple TV's Severance, which was an incredible show about issues in labor, workers who worked in that show said that they had issues getting paid on time. And this is not an uncommon thing to hear. No matter the subject matter, no matter what, I've heard from many people that work in film and television that people really know the union codes because they know how to get around them. And workers are not only impacting their bag, but it's impacting their health and their safety. People die making movies and it shouldn't be. And Apple has more money than God. They can afford to pay this, this money. Bridget in the chat says that she would love to see a C tech won't save us, uh,

podcast. So maybe we'll have to follow up on that in the new year. Um, Chris over to you, do you have a story for us? Something that you've been following that you think we should have been paying more attention to that was really important that we should have been talking more about? Oh, there are so many i mean i think the building off of what it what gita talked about i mean i i'd love that we could talk more about um you know stable diffusion and dolly and um you know chat gbt which is you know they're either gonna save the world or destroy it depending on who you listen to but i'm also really interested in the work that the markup's been doing about the ways that like hospitals and banks and universities um are all still feeding

information to uh to meta and to into twitter you know i think i hope i mean like that there's going to be some reckoning with this particularly given everything that we talked about in the previous segment. I feel like Chicken Little talking about how dangerous things are. But again, it's super dangerous. Like, really? I mean, like a whole like this whole system should not exist. Right. Like if I go to a college website or if I go to a bank or if I go to like, you know, a portal for at a hospital,

like, why is that information going to Twitter? Why is that information going to Facebook? And, you know, it again, again, again, speaks to how little to no regulation there are in these spaces that we're all, you know, in a lot of ways, just kind of left to fend for ourselves. But like in, I mean, much like the pandemic, in ways that we're even prevented from doing that. So those are, to me, a couple of stories. I mean, certainly the machine learning, art, and text generating things have gotten tons of press. I think in many ways, though though like really poorly thought through press like if i see one more essay where they're like oh yeah we just wrote these you know chat chat gpt just wrote the first four paragraphs you read right like stop that okay could you tell could

you tell yeah yeah i mean like it's not cool and it's not interesting and it's also building on exploited labor and like i mean like just stop right like it reminds me of like when like vr was the thing for a while and every lead would be like i'm in a giant shining spaceship on hands down this isn't reality it's virtual reality like right and i mean my you know i i hate to like constantly hammer this but like i don't like we're doing a lot of the pr work for these companies when we do that right and i don't i wish people would understand that and like act upon it appropriately because every time you write some g-wiz thing about these things even like i mean i hate to be a curmudgeon but even when you

use them right you're like acting on like a foundation of like racism and misogyny and exploitation and like legitimizing it and i mean they've got like enough platforms to do that for themselves, right? We don't have to help them in that job. Yeah. And Sam Altman, who is, of course, leading OpenAI, which is funded by Elon Musk and many others, is basically out there arguing that even if there's racist stuff and whatnot in ChatGPT, for example, that's. Like whatever, we'll work it out. What have you, don't be too worried about it. And then the other thing is just like, when you see these stories that are reporting on it and like not kind of giving the critical perspective, like I wonder how long it takes for like tech media to really like learn its lesson or like to start thinking more critically, like just to give an example, like, you know, during the whole crypto boom, there were obviously a lot of skeptics like me and many of the guests

that I had on the podcast who were saying like tech media needs to be doing more to point out how this is all like a load of bullshit, right? It's a bunch of speculative scams that are really going to hurt a lot of people when this bubble kind of collapses. And, you know, as all these kind of rug pulls and things were happening in the moment. And I noticed the other day that Casey Newton, who, you know, runs Platformer, was formerly at The Verge, published like his kind of recaps of 2022 and what to look for in 2023. And one of his predictions was that pro-crypto and anti-crypto people were kind of going to go at each other more in 2022. And he was like, oh, but actually all the crypto skeptics were just right about everything. It was like, okay, awesome. But like, are you going to

like learn from that and take that forward when like the next big tech thing comes along that, you know, all the tech industry is promoting, or are you going to treat it again as a new thing that we need to kind of give the benefit of the doubt to and see if it's actually going to work and report what the industry is saying and then a bit about what the critics are saying, maybe if we let them into the stories at all? Or do we just go back to what happened before again and have to repeat this whole cycle? Yeah, as an erstwhile video game journalist, I have to say that it does really remind me of the lack of coverage that video games got up until the point where Epic Games became such a powerhouse

in the tech industry because of Fortnite, where there were always some incredibly intense issues about video games. Because one weird guy wanted to ban all of them from stores in America, we all decided they were unproblematic. But actually, there's a lot going on, and the critics should always be given way more room to talk about them instead of violently harassed out of journalism. I mean, I read something, and one of those prominent critics had said something to the extent of, I had to buy a bunch of crypto if i wanted to like adequately critique it and i'm like what like no wait like i don't own a ring doorbell right i don't have an election right like you know like that's actually like i'm not true we've certainly talked about

that uh tech journalist on the podcast before i will will say that like, what does it give me encouragement just to sort of temper some, I mean, I share all of your, um, uh, that the diagnoses and how grim this could be, but both with things like chat GPT and image generation and this precarious, the one thing that I will say, it also plugs back into Twitter where some of these communities live, but I will say one thing that heartens me are sort of the massive communities of people who are now willing to sort of stand up and say no. As the resident Luddite of the crew here, I will say that 10 years ago, that sort of reaction to like a new technology, like, yeah, there's all these people giving it oxygen and saying like, look at this

cool thing. But it's a lot of the usual suspects and just how unified a lot of the illustrators and the critics have been in saying like this is horseshit like i wish it was stronger and more powerful and i wish more institutional voices would lend credence to it and approach it with the same level of skepticism but seeing that that no and we saw a little bit of that with web 3 it's like oh this is the future and people were just like fuck no it's not it is not it's not like having been a tech journalist like for like 15 years now jesus uh that ages me uh but they but like would have been unthinkable like we got grandpa brian on here with us but you know like here's you know apple's new if apple like did some web 3 nft bs like 15 years ago would be like let's check this out people are like getting more comfortable just kind of

in the saying no or in that sort of in that true luddite mode just saying like this will not serve me or my community and the answer is no like smash it you know it's i mean we need to find ways to nurture and grow that and sort of give people more space to say like yes we can just reject technology but you know there are a few good instances like i mean even if it's a killer robot like that san francisco wanted to deploy to like murder people it was like there was enough of an outcry. It was like, OK, no, we've seen some cases with facial recognition tech where like there are red lines and we can't, you know, the work that I feel like a lot of you folks are doing are pushing it or pushing that line a little bit. You know, I feel like there's still hope is basically what I'm saying and seeing sort of the reaction to some of the chat gpt stuff some of the more like onerous overreaches of the tech industry there's still reason to think that it can be uh battened back sometimes yeah that's a super fair point and

i do think um the pushback has started to come sooner you know um then then we're typically accustomed to seeing in the last 15 or 20 years. Yeah, I don't want to overstate it. It's not like it has any real institutional power, but it's a start. Like, you know, it's a start. Yeah. The mere fact that Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton are being actually investigated for defrauding people, that does mean something.

And it is kind of remarkable to realize that we could yell crypto out of existence. I think artists might have a harder fight in that these tools could be used in conjunction with artists, with alongside artists for nonprofit reasons and to make tools that are interested in replacing artists. So it is neat to see artists on a website like ArtStation take a really strong stand and say they do not want any AI-generated art on the platform and continue to go. If you go to ArtStation, all the number one trending images of art right now, it's either stuff from the new WoW expansion or an image that just says no AI art. It's very, very cool. And it's cool that everyone's taken such a unified stance. I think it's also cool that some of the artists were like, we think that these data sets are unethically sourced and we need to have a way to have an ethically sourced data set if you want to continue to use this technology. It's neat that people are taking the time to learn how this technology works and to pinpoint the thing that is actually unethical in a really salient way.

But it is a hard fight because, as Paris mentioned, OpenAI is being funded by some incredibly powerful figures in a way. And because it is such a fun toy for other people, it is more of a commodity than NFTs were. Which, I mean, NFTs were just so immediately useless that you could just kind of shout at them and make fun of them until they went away. Yeah, I do feel kind of heartened that, you know, maybe this is overstating it, but I do feel like the criticism of Web3 and crypto really made a difference over the past two years, whether that was forcing journalists to have to say like, look, there's a lot of people who say that this is like a load of bullshit and it's actually going to hurt a lot of people. We're not really sure, but you know, some people are saying these things

and then to see it all collapse, like, you know, obviously it's been really great and really exciting. And just to pick up on the AI art point for a second, like, you know, part of it is to make you believe that there's no real kind of human input that's happening here. Right. Whereas obviously a lot of the art is kind of using work that has actually been created by humans and kind of recycling this into things that already exist. There was a story I read that open AI has people who are testing it, who are ranking things, who are kind of making adjustments to the AI and all these sorts of things, like

not the actual people who are kind of working on it in more of a development sense, but kind of like, you know, your content moderator type people who are poorly paid and who are kind of testing these things out. So all this is going on, but OpenAI and Sam Altman wouldn't want you to know those pieces of it, because it doesn't fit the narrative that they're selling. Brian, I want to move to you now. What is your kind of big story of the year that we should be talking about or that was particularly notable to you? This year, this year just kept happening. I'm going to cop out and cheat and sort of like reiterate what I was saying earlier, because I feel like one of the things that was really interesting about this year is that it really did feel like in a lot of ways of sort of a

year of reckonings for, for big tech and the big in, in that what had sort of been so key to their business models, which was so often sort of like just naked exploitation sort of, it finally hit, hit a wall. I mean, I think the biggest story of the year,

probably in my eyes, at least as somebody who follows tech and tech labor, was the Amazon labor union getting the first victory. It's been tumultuous since then. But what a historic moment. I mean, Amazon has just pulled out all the stops to be just sort of like the biggest, most organized union buster in modern history. I mean, they've just been ruthless as we would expect them to be. And to see that victory and sort of the effect that it had in sort of providing some further momentum to other organizing fights. I think the fact that organizing

continues to sort of, you know, move into tech spaces or history, you know, places that, that were thought of as tech companies, the horizons are expanding. So I mean, that was, you know, what was Amazon's secret sauce this entire time, like the only thing that they could do is, is further and further squeeze, surveil, and basically harass their their workforce into working more through these weird productivity games and through working alongside increasingly automated robotics. And finally, when workers say enough pandemic related, I think we finally saw that that was maybe just one bridge too far if they're not willing to, again, this huge company so rich and more resources, not willing to do the basic things to protect their workforces. It's led to this huge sort of, and now it is everywhere. Even if it's not, they're not, you know, they've, they've had a few setbacks. It's still stalling.

It was enough to stall Amazon out. It was Amazon lost 10,000. They had, they had to fire 10,000 people this year. They had to, they don't ever have to, but they claim they did because they growth was slowing. There really is a thorn in their side because if they can't exploit labor as cheaply, you know, as they could 10 years ago, then their whole equation is off. You see that now with Twitter and Facebook and the social media networks, if they can't don't want to solve content moderation, the whole thing comes apart. It's too toxic. It's a mess.

Founder gives up and the wheels come off. Even Apple, to some extent, you know, is having like a whole I mean, it's the only tech giant this year out the same devices year after year relying on the same exploited workforce in china year after year and you see ripples in that that and that whole thing could come apart too there you see they're trying to get into the ad business they're just giant monopolies and this year we saw them like you know doing things that were would apple would never saying we're gonna we're gonna start running you know ads on our app store. We're going to sort of turn the screws even harder on anybody that wants to post apps or anything in our ecosystem. Because it's basically an admission that they've become the monopoly that everyone's known them to be for a long time. So I think that it's really interesting, all of these factors coming into play. And that's without even touching on Google or Microsoft, who also both shed thousands of jobs and have missed their revenue targets and are kind of most powerful companies ever, but they're losing the plot in the face of labor uprisings, antitrust movements.

So you kind of get the sense that maybe they're more brittle than they seem to be. And with forceful organizing and some smart regulation or legal action, some serious blows could be dealt to their supremacy. Was that Chris Smalls-led organizing? That was this year? That was this year, May 2022. Wow. This year was 600 years long.

God. Lauren K. Gurley, now at the Washington Post, former Motherboarder. Just excellent, excellent coverage on that. If you want to read anything about the movements leading up to the fact that we're seeing a lot more sort of unionization movements in the entertainment industry as well, and in video games, which is, you know, there's a Raven QA, which is a part of the huge corporation Blizzard. They successfully unionized making them one of the first video game unions in the United States. And if you haven't read any of Jason Schreier's work about the working conditions in video games, I would definitely check out his book. I would also just check out any of the sort of deep dive, you know, post-mortems on video games he's written at both Kotaku and Bloomberg

News. I was kind of clout on him for working at Bloomberg News, but I love that dude. But it is, you know, like the most famous letter, I think, is the EA spouse letter of someone who's just a wife of someone who worked for EA describing moving every year, their kids becoming more and more depressed and not being able to make connections. And their husband just sleeping at the studio and becoming more and more sick and haggard as the studio essentially worked to death. So it's really needed. And for years, tech has been a sector where the workers there have said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We don't need unions because they've all been paper millionaires. And now you can have as much money as you want, the biggest salary, you know, that you could have. And you can still really be exploited, like really, really, really, really exploited. You know, I worked at Medium for a year and a half, which is a company founded by the Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. And, you know, during the pandemic,

he blamed us, the writers, for starting a union drive. But it was just as much the developers, the computer engineers, the coders who had been there for years and had been, as you just said, exploited in their own way. Just, you know, yeah, they're making some money, but I think events, shocks like the pandemic can make clear like the real value of some of that. And then when it's like, wait a minute, I am being asked to work around the clock. I'm being treated like garbage. I'm not being protected in ways that I need to be

protected. I'm subjected to harassment. It's like there was reason and you saw it catch fire. We saw like they were as much leading the organizing effort as the editorial staff who a lot of us had been through some organizing drives before, but the tech folks, they were excited about it in a way. They had talked to the folks at Kickstarter, the Google union, like that is coming to. Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, it's so exciting. Um, I just want to note Megan in the chat says the people make games crew has opened my eyes to some of the games industry issues. They're fantastic. Um, obviously Quinn was on the show earlier this year, um, talking about the Roblox investigation, which was really important. And Zachtronaut says, shout out to the Zenimax QA union as well. Of course, there is also a union

up here in Canada, in Alberta, that formed at BioWare, the QA workers there. So it's really been fantastic to see that happening in the video games industry. This kind of broader organizing that's happening in the tech industry as well. And I'll just say, you know, to pick up on the broader point that Brian was making, actually, I should note as well, we talked about some of these labor issues with Wendy Liu on the most recent episode of the podcast. If you haven't listened to that one, it's very good. We dig into a lot of these issues as well. But I think that we are in a moment where there's something going on with the tech industry, right? And I think it's very exciting.

Things are very much in flux. It's leading us to this kind of moment of recognition of really what is going on in this industry, what these companies are really all about after selling these images of themselves for the past few decades, really misleading people as to the effect that they were having in the world. And really, in the early 2010s, how incredibly positive a lot of the coverage was of these companies, the desire to believe that they were making this really positive difference in society. And then how that really started to change in the latter half of the

2010s as there was more of a critical look at these companies, at their impacts. And it does feel now that more tech workers are going to be forced to recognize the kind of contradictions of the industry as these companies cut more of the benefits, try to cut pay, lay off many thousands of workers, as you were describing, Brian. You know, Amazon has done 10,000. It says that it's actually probably going to do 20,000 going into next year, right? And many other companies have laid off a whole crazy ton of workers. You know, as these interest rates have been raised up, that has really put pressure on the model that the tech industry pursued of taking advantage of

this cheap money, being able to grow and not have to make incredible profits and things like that, though some companies certainly have. But it is kind of throwing a lot of the expectations of the industry into flux. And it allowed these workers in the industry to demand a lot, to expect a lot. And it's kind of forcing those things to change as well, or empowering the bosses to push back further on labor, on workers. And I think that is certainly going to come to a head in whether it's next year or the year to follow. But I think that there's a fight coming. I want to add that i think one thing that is maybe making that fight come faster or easier but as chris talked about like

these hospitals sending you know user data to facebook like the game like the if we look at the tech that we're actually using now and i think that's why i didn't bring it up to say that like oh like apple's not making new cool stuff anymore. But that cumulative effect, like if you look at the go online, like it sucks. Like you go on Twitter, you're larded with that. Go do a Google search. It sucks. It's ads. It's it's a terrible experience.

And now even your phone, it's shiny and nice or whatever, but it's the same. Like all it big tech can't even distract us now. Like their products are, are, are curdling it. That feel, it feels like people are looking at their online experiences, their experiences with technology. And increasingly, even if they are not realizing yet, and maybe it's the job of journalists and commentators and people to coax that out of them, but to say like, for what, for this, like, this is, this is what I'm handing over all of my data,ax that out of them, but to say like, for what, for this, like, this is, this is

what I'm handing over all of my data, like increasing amounts of my money, like paying rents on my creativity, paying actual rents, like to use these services for something that sucks. Like, and I think there's a sense, and even if it hasn't been articulated, that it's there and it's brewing. And so that's what I'm going to be, just to jump ahead, that's what I'm going to be looking for in 2023, the ways that this starts to manifest. And in some ways, these giants are making it easy for us. Zuckerberg's like, the next big thing is the metaverse.

By the way, it's the worst thing you've ever seen. The next best thing is legs. Wait, I can have legs. You can have legs in Final Fantasy 14. Paris, you of all people need to become an elf in Final Fantasy. I do love elves. I think this leads really well into the topic that I wanted to discuss and the story that's really stood out to me for the year, which is the radicalization of the tech billionaire class. This is not entirely new. We've seen it for a

while. It's been kind of bubbling, I think, under the surface to some degree and above the surface in other ways. Obviously, we've known about Teal and those folks for a long time, but I feel like a lot of other kind of tech billionaires have tried to keep their really right wing views, their kind of radical views under wraps for a while. But we can really see that kind of stepping up this year, in particular, in the past number of months, and to a lesser degree, like through the pandemic period, more broadly, I think, I often think back as like kind of a moment that really kind of says, you know, we need to further champion ourselves and what we're doing in the world. I believe it was April, 2020,

it's time to build essay from Marc Andreessen. That's really kind of saying, you know, the tech industry, we've done all these great things. We're not being properly appreciated for all that we're doing. We are making a big difference to responding to COVID, to making all these scientific advances, all these sorts of

things. And what we need to make the world a better place is not less tech, you know, not less of the tech industry, but rather for us to be present in more aspects of society and more aspects of life to really kind of push ourselves in this way. You also see kind of in the months following that a greater backlash against journalists. Andreessen is leading this to a certain degree, but many other billionaires are involved in it. Clubhouse is kind of big in pushing that sort of narrative in the time that it kind of has its moment. But now we've seen, I think it's fair to say, a lot more of these tech billionaires really come out and be very explicit about their politics,

about their belief that they should not be challenged, whether it's from journalists or average Twitter users or what have you. And I think that that is going to have a real impact in the year ahead. It's kind of like a mask off moment increasingly for the tech industry, for someone like Elon Musk, for many of these people. It also shows us that they are going to be, you know, there was this narrative of the tech industry as like diverse and as responding to concerns and as, you know, having a really positive impact in the world and all this kind of stuff in the 2010s. You know, I think we're seeing a very different picture of the tech industry and we need to recognize that and recognize the problems with the narratives that existed before as we move into this kind of new period or whatever you want to call it. And it also shows how they are going

to be pushing back more on workers as we were talking about with Brian's comment and your comment, Gita, but also how they're going to be more forceful as we're seeing must do with Twitter, but as we're seeing many of these other tech billionaires do as well in really trying to reshape the world around the way that they think it should work, but to serve their interests as well, because ultimately they think the world should serve their interests and they're going to pretend like it's something that serves everybody, but it's a world that's for them. It's kind of a politics that's about them. Yeah. So I think that is something that is really important. I mean, to me, I know she's not a tech billionaire, but the person that most exemplifies

this arc of keeping it under wraps and then going full mask off once you realize that you're insulated, how insulated you are by your money is J.K. Rowling. And I do think it's significant that someone like Musk is now giving J.K. Rowling attention and positive reinforcement by following her back on Twitter. You know, these are J.K. Rowling's violent anti-trans rhetoric, which she has now. She's now on the platform wishing people happy turfmas. So, so far gone. It is now so open and so unashamed because she knows she has nothing to lose. And I feel like at this point, people like Musk, he really is in an

enviable position. The company is private. He can enforce his rules and make whatever rules for his website he wants. It's what makes him a tyrannical forum mod is that literally no one can stop him. And that safety afforded to billionaires by their money, I think people like Thiel already knew it, but some people are newly realizing just literally how much power they have and they will do anything to protect their power. And it's terrifying. Yeah. And I would just note on the Musk piece, I can't not say this, but it's particularly, you know, Musk is a person who's surrounded by yes men, right?

People who will tell him what he wants to hear. A person who goes and seeks out the people who will tell him what he wants to hear, a person who goes and seeks out the people who will tell him what he wants to hear, as we've seen with the types of people who he's been interacting with on Twitter as he's been pursuing this sale. But he has David Sachs, who's a reactionary conservative, who's pushing particularly reactionary politics in California, who's taking Peter Thiel's lead on the types of candidates and causes that he should be funding in American politics. He is right now at Twitter, Musk's kind of right hand man, whispering in his ear, giving him advice on what to do. And then on the other side of Musk is Jason Calacanis, someone who has been, you know, licking Elon Musk's boots for a couple decades now, who will do anything to be close to Elon Musk, as we've seen most recently from the leaked text

messages from the Delaware court trial, where Jason Calacanis is sucking up to him so much harder than everyone else, telling him to put me in the game, boss, and telling him, I give you my sword, or like the Aragorn line from Lord of the Rings. And at one point, Musk has to kind of come back on him and say because he's he's out kind of selling the the twitter deal to all these other people and musk has to kind of message him and say like you're morgan stanley and and jared who's musk's like finance guy say that you're making me look bad like you need to stop this kind of stuff and then after the the twitter takeover happens jason is like tweeting as though he's in charge of all the policy and stuff and once again it's kind of leaked that musk has to tell him to like stop

tweeting so much because he's not as powerful as he's making it look so just that's just to say jason calacanis is like a total bootlicker and he sucks but yeah and i hope i mean maybe along with this we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the myth that Silicon Valley is liberal. You know? Yeah. Please. Because I think it's important that you named it as a mask off, right? Because this is always who all these folks have always been. This is the level of how conservative that Silicon Valley is, right? This year, there is a Dalit speaker from India that was supposed to come to Google and the Brahmin Indian Americans there protested until he was uninvited.

You know, importing conservatism from literally other countries at this point, it is nothing more than a hierarchy that is built to uphold the values of the most powerful, like no matter what genre of most powerful you are. I do hope that it is also a year in which an increasing number of people like look at somebody like Elon Musk and say, this is a clown. Like this is not like a visionary. Like this is, I mean, that myth is so powerful that, you know, this founder myth that we just, I mean, it's just built into sort of like the structural integrity of capitalism that you need to believe it. Otherwise the whole thing comes down. Like we need to believe that the most wealthy people are like capable, like visionary people. Otherwise the cracks start spreading. This is a pretty big crack. It's hard to look as anything, but sort of a diehard Musk fan at just his actions of the last two months and see anything other than sort of a diehard musk fan at just his actions of the last two months and see anything other than sort of pathetic like clown like in over his head you could see it real time you're like seeing

broadcast like how he's just like i mean everybody says like ultra divorce guy energy and he has it he does and on top of that it's just it's incompetence like he that he found an arena where he can't cosplay his way out of sort of like the archetypal entrepreneur he can't just like put on the fit and like rattle off a bunch of statistics that he memorized about you know launching rockets into orbit he has to actually sort of he's or he doesn't have to it which is the really interesting part. He's made it public. He's been tweeting. You know, he's been sharing all of this voluntarily.

And it's been like, again, yeah, Maskoff is right. And I hope that this translates into that sort of general sort of liberal founder, you know, founder genius myth sort of crumbling away. And I hope it's in time for folks to strike back at it. Yeah, I think, I mean, it's so strong, again, and not to hammer on the press, but there are people still invested in kind of designing these elaborate scenarios by which like this is a master plan, right?

Like, yeah, he totally thanked his other company right he was constantly leveraging like his other company and the stock isn't you know what half of what it used to be or something like that right but it's still a master plan right like this it's it's so deeply embedded in how we think about i mean i don't want to say we, right? It's how many people think about wealth and work and capitalism and this country, right? That they can't, like, operate outside of that, right? It must be that it's just something that we're all not, like, too dim to recognize. Because otherwise, like, everything, you know, every belief that people have about how this country works would crumble. 100%.

I mean, it's a testament to how strong this is. Like, we haven't even talked about Sam Bankman Freed in this. Like, this is another, he got away with that sort of visionary imprinting for so long. And it's just complete fraud. Adam Neumann before him, like Elizabeth Theranos. In so many ways, the genius founder myth is just the myth of America. And what we're watching is that myth collapsing in so many different kinds of arenas just in front of our eyes. Absolutely.

Yeah. And as Brian's saying, there's so many other topics that we could have discussed, right? From Sandbank Manfred, the wider crypto you know the organizing in the games industry we touched on that a little bit but i think that's an even bigger topic um you know the meta implosion everything that mark zuckerberg is up to there's so many other stories that happened this year you know even the the kind of ones that we forget like razzlecon and the $5 billion heist that we found out about and all these other kind of, you know, hilarious stories that were just make up the kind of weird space that we're all following so much and so involved in, you know, for better or worse. We're coming to the near the end of our hour and a half. There are a couple more things I wanted to

finish up with you. So I want to do a quick round on the things that you'll be looking forward to in 2023. I know we mentioned some of those things as we were going through those stories, but I think just to quickly, if there are certain things that you're looking out for, so maybe the audience can say, Hmm, you know, as they're observing stories next year, Hey, you know, Brian or Gita or Chris mentioned this, you know, that this is something that maybe I should pay a little bit more attention to in the year to come. So what do you think, Brian, let's start with you. Um, I will be looking just to pick up on something that maybe I should pay a little bit more attention to in the year to come. So what do you think, Brian? Let's start with you. I will be looking just to pick up on something that we haven't touched on yet is sort of the Biden administration signaled that it's going to be sort of changing how it looks at the classification of gig workers.

So I'm going to be watching that. And I've also I'm going to shout out Veena Dubal because I've been talking to Veena a little bit and she's flagged for me a lot of the fights that are coming down the pike potentially next year, where you're having a lot of sort of like Lyft and Uber and the gig app work platform companies are now trying to sort of enshrine in law this sort of third category of worker where they're not an employee they're not just a plain old sort of wantonly exploited uh you know contract worker they're just like they're a semi-exploited middle category where they're entitled to some like very meager benefits and vina and a lot of observers and scholars and myself think that this is a terrible deal. And in some cases, they're getting even some unions to sort of go along with it, thinking something's better than nothing.

But in some cases, it's being fought tooth and nail. It's usually on the state level. There are bills coming down in, I think, in New York, maybe Illinois. But it's basically what happened with Prop 22 here in California, where I am, where they sort of did this super expensive proposition campaign to sort of overturn a law that sort of classified gig workers who met the requirements as employees. And sort of instead it said, well, here's your consolation prize. You can get some minor benefits and it's really again all the things that geet is talking about like the direction and sort of the trend towards more precarious work orbiting like a more concentrated sort of

little bastion of wealth that can dictate all of these employment conditions and the games industry it's just that that is like more and more the model. And depending on what the circumstances are, it can look more or less, you know, the same. It's and it's being done even by some of the major tech companies, Google's and for like formerly, quote unquote, you know, white collar work like lawyers. And, you know, it's all being degraded into contract work very intentionally and people are being kept precarious. So I feel like it's a topic that has kind of been under the radar with everything else that's been going on this year, even though it was, I think, had a lot of focus in in past years. But these fights are still ongoing. Uber and these gig companies are still trying to pass these laws in parts of the United States and around the world.

We've seen it in Ontario, up here in Canada. You know, There are successes being won in other parts of the world, like in the UK we saw there was a success. Other countries in Europe, in Australia, there has been some progress. There was a ruling in New Zealand recently that was positive. So these things are still continuing, but I think this is an issue that's definitely coming back and is going to be more at the fore in 2023. Chris, what will you be watching for next year? Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, I'm really interested, obviously, in education technology.

I think some of the things we've talked about on the show today, my guess is that there'll be a sort of ramping up of the student surveillance industrial complex to try and, in their words, right, fight back against all these new methods that students have for cheating um but the other thing i'm i'm really interested is you know a thing we didn't get to talk about is um how amazon basically came out and said alexa was a failure you know um and so I'm super interested. Like, it's shocking that they admitted that, but I am pretty sure that this coming year we'll see lots of initiatives to try and convince people that it's actually not a failure, right? Whether it's putting it on wheels or whatever else they're going to do.

So that's a thing that I'm looking out for. That's fascinating. And yeah, that was a great story to see how Alexa hasn't worked out as planned. And certainly that's the case for other Amazon projects. Drone delivery is another one. There was a story earlier this year how they were promising that all these things were going to be delivered by drone and then that hasn't really worked out either. And I feel like there's been more admissions by more and more tech companies that some of these kind of bigger ideas, these kind of moonshot projects, these things that were positioned

as the future are maybe not working out as planned. And I think we're going to be seeing more of that as the cheap money dries up, as there's more pressure on business models, as these companies are reassessing what is going on with them. Gita, what will you be watching for in 2023? I'm most interested in the intersections of tech and the entertainment industry. So I am really going to be watching like a hawk the IATSE contract negotiation that's upcoming. But there is sort of a story that is also like kind of a tech story, which is all of my everything's technology to me.

But I've noticed over the past couple of years that there is a intense change in the availability and reach of non-American cultural products from other countries, you know, especially Japanese cultural products and Korean cultural products. They have broken through into mainstream music and culture and movies in a way that is, I think, unprecedented in the United States specifically. You know, NPR named Bad Bunny one of the biggest pop stars in the world. And RRR, there's a huge campaign to have it nominated for an Oscar. You know, these things are now accessible. Anime, I think, this year has had the most mainstream normal success that it's had, you know, not just among hyper fans, but among people that

just generally like good television. You will see more people trying out shows like Spy Family or even Chainsaw Man, which I think is going to explode in the coming year. Tech services, you know, the Shonen Jump app has made these things so much more accessible. Internet communities have made it way easier if you're a K-pop fan to learn everything about your favorite pop stars. And we're watching this sort of cultural hegemony that America has enjoyed for the entirety of my life. We called like one summer of two Latin American artists having what number one hits in America, the quote unquote Latin invasion when I was in middle school. Oh, my God. But now we're at a point where, yeah, it was wild.

Like, Livin' La Vida Loca was enough to call it a Latin invasion. That was how American our airwaves were at the time. And now that it's just not true, and it is not true anymore, like, BTS is unstoppable, and RM, the lead singer of BTS, just got interviewed by Vogue. You know, we are approaching a place where the global village of the internet, it is coming true. What we're finding is that people are not as interested in only keeping up with American art. So I'm really curious about how that story is going to continue to develop in the coming year. rates or is threatened. It's cultural hegemony is threatened as well. That's fascinating. And, you know, it's very much a story that I will be watching a lot next year as well. What goes on with, you know, the whole streaming services in particular, what goes on with these fights between workers and, you know, these major entertainment companies over trying to define what the future of the entertainment industry is really going to look like, how people are going to be compensated, all of these incredibly important questions that are

still in flux, that are still up in the air as a result of technological disruption, so to speak, but also corporate power and the consolidation that has enhanced it, that has allowed this to continue, and that has really required workers to kind of come back and try to force the companies to reorient and actually benefit them. You know, for me on my side, you know, obviously, we're in this moment now where the tech industry is in flux, as we were talking about as the companies are waging their war on workers to try to reduce benefits, reduce pay to cut the number of workers. I'm certainly interested in what that is going to mean for organizing, what that's going to look like next year. That connects to what we were talking about with the entertainment industry, but more specific to the tech industry

itself. But I'm also interested in after this moment of all the share prices are going down, these companies are cutting jobs, they're admitting that Alexa and things like that weren't working. We're obviously eventually going to come out on the other side of this thing. Interest rates are going to come back down a bit. I am looking forward to seeing what they're going to position the next big thing as being. During the pandemic, Web3, Metaverse, they were the next big things. I think we've kind of defeated those to a certain degree. I think there's a recognition that those are not going to be the next big thing. Maybe Metaverse will rear its head. We'll have to see. But I think that there's definitely going

to be something else. I think that AI and these AI tools is going to be part of it. I think that we're seeing these companies make a greater focus on health and health tech getting into the healthcare sector. So that's something I'll be watching in particular, but I think that there's going to be more than that as well. And I think that we're going to need to be on guard to see what they're going to try to do, to see the narratives they're going to try to push for what this future is going to be, what it's going to look like, how they're going to make the world such a better place through technology so that we can be prepared to push back as people so successfully did during this part of the pandemic where Web3 was ascendant, where the metaverse was not as ascendant,

but was still being pushed by companies with a lot of power and influence and things like that. So I think that's the thing that I'll be watching most. And so with that, I think we need to move on to announcing the worst person in tech of 2022. Now, oh my God, is there a drum roll? There's gotta be a drum roll. Are there any stats about how many people voted? Did we get a lot of votes? What do we? So we got many thousands of votes. You know, this has uh an exciting contest i kind of came up with it on a whim i saw other kind of um what uh brackets going around and i was like why is there not a bracket to pick out like the biggest piece of shit in the tech industry um we need to do this and if no one else

is going to do it tech won't save us as to do it so i very quickly put one of these together i realized that, you know, based on the time I was doing it, it would align perfectly with this live stream. So we could announce it here for the supporters, then put it up on Twitter for people to see afterward. You know, there were certainly a lot of people who loved it. Assuming you don't get banned. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I'll go back to Twitter in a minute and find I'm banned. As we were talking about earlier, Elon Musk did self-docs earlier. He said he was at the World Cup. He posted all of this. Yeah, I posted a picture of him and Kushner and picking up on David Sachs' tweet the other day, said there's a two-for-one deal here if anyone has a spare GPS-guided missile that they want to use, you know, on this world cup stadium.

So who knows, maybe I'll be, I'll be banned for live doxing, sharing assassination coordinates or whatever you want to call it. But maybe, maybe not, maybe I will return and I can still post the winner to Twitter as well. So I,

I think it was really fun for me to see, you know, people's thoughts on all of these tech billionaires to see who they thought were, not all of them were billionaires, let's be fair, to see who they thought were the worst. Like in round one, I was really surprised when Marc Andreessen beat Bill Gates. You know, I thought there'd be a bit more hate out there for Bill Gates, but his PR narrative has been really successful. Chris Dixon, of course, A16Z guy pushing crypto.

He beat Sam Altman, who was pushing, you know, these chat GPT, these other AI services. And that one was kind of back and forth for a while. Andy Jassy and David Sachs were paired up. Andy Sassy, CEO of Amazon now, David Sachs, venture capitalist, you know, whispering and Elon Musk, your reactionary conservative. I feel like not enough people know who David Sachs is. And that's part of the reason that Andy Jassy beat him. But that one went back and forth as well. Round two, we moved on. Dara Khosrowshahi was up against Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam took it because he's been in the news a lot. He's a big Ponzi king. But I think Dara Khosrowshahi's impact has actually been worse, if I'm being honest. As you were talking about, Brian, with trying to rewrite these laws, he's the CEO of Uber for people who don't know. I think he should have taken that one. But the people voted, you know, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, or however you pronounce it. You know, the people voted for Sam Bankman-Fried, he made it through. Round three, Bankman-Fried was up against Mark Zuckerberg. Now, Zuckerberg took this one. It's not super surprised, you know,

I think there were some people who were arguing Bankman-Fried should have taken it. But I think Zuckerberg is a much worse figure who has a much longer history of doing really terrible things. So I think that one was justified. Then we got to round four. That was the final four. We were down for, you know, the kind of semifinals. Semifinals, yeah.

I'm not a sports guy, okay? Peter Thiel versus Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos versus Elon Musk. This was a tough one, I think, you know, because we're really getting down to the end there, right? These are some really evil, horrible people, some real ghouls. But the people voted for Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to move on to the finals. Now, this is really interesting, right? These are the PayPal guys, right? Peter Thiel is Confinity. Elon Musk is X.com. Those companies merged. They're what we know as PayPal today. Elon Musk was the CEO of PayPal, and he was ousted by Peter Thiel and his people who came from Confinity. I believe X.com had more money, and that's part of the reason why

he became the CEO of this kind of merged company. There was a lot of bad blood there as a result. We don't really know what their relationship is like right now, but we do know, or it's been kind of reported, that Peter Thiel has called Elon Musk a fraud, and Elon Musk has called Peter Thiel a sociopath. So I think they're both right. Worst person you know. You know, it's wild to see this matchup because I used to work at a Gawker site. So it's like the guy who's ruining my life right now versus the guy that was ruining my life previously. Absolutely. And this is so fascinating to me, right? Like, it's a tech audience.

So people kind of know Peter Thiel. But I feel like Thiel kind of, he emerges sometimes, but usually he's under the radar. And a lot of people don't realize like all the shit that he's really up to, the stuff that he's funding, the stuff that he's been involved with over the years, you know, his really kind of racist background and pushing a lot of really terrible things when he was at Stanford. And after that, when he was trying to make this kind of conservative provocateur career work, then obviously later he found Palantir, which is this company that's

really working with the U.S. military, other U.S. government agencies, increasingly other militaries and things around the world, really involved in kind of mass data collection and things like that, enabling those kinds of business models, as you say, you know, funding the lawsuit against Gawker, you know, with Hulk Hogan to take down that, that website and, you know, so much else. He's a vampire. He's trying to get the blood of the young people so he can live forever. Like all, you know, all this stuff that I feel like, you know, people know a lot about Elon Musk. I feel like people don't know all the details on Peter Thiel. And so it's fascinating to me that see that there's still that kind of hatred there, of course, you know, funding fascists, the friends with Donald Trump, all these are maybe not friends,

but you know, close with them politically, all these sorts of things. Then Elon Musk, you know, geez, how long do we have to go through this list of just like terrible things that that he's done and been involved with over the years? I think it's fascinating that as we're having this mask off moment with him right now, there's a kind of remembrance that he's always been an asshole among some people. Like remember the Justine Musk essay going back, when was that? 2011, when she was talking about how terribly he treated her, how he called her like a starter wife and all this kind of stuff. And those sorts of things are kind of returning to the fore now in recognizing that Elon Musk is this like terrible hated figure as more people, you know, recognize that the narrative we've had about him for so long

has been wrong and he's just always been a terrible asshole. So with that said, let's get to the results. I was not surprised that this was very close. Okay. That it stayed close for a very long time. These are two people who are very hated. I watched the results. You know, some people were mad because I did Twitter polls before this, where you can just do your vote. You can see the results. This one, I wanted it to be private. So I moved it over to a Google forum. Some people were mad about that. I think it was justified, right? Like, you know, you want the surprise with this one. It's the end. Exactly. Exactly. You don't want to just click your button and see it. This one was very close. Okay. In the morning, one person was leading, then another person overtook and kind of kept a very,

very narrow margin of lead. I closed off the voting just over a half hour ago so that the votes are closed. Let me tell you, my Google thing says it's literally 50-50. Obviously one has more votes than the other, so it's good that I can see the difference. There's literally like a few votes in the difference between these two people. It was so close, but the winner of the worst person in tech of 2022, the tech won't save us competition to pick the worst tech person in of the year. I was going to say ever,

but it's of the year is none other than a horrible tech billionaire named Peter deal. Whoa. Wow. billionaire named peter teal wow i i mean i hear teal is playing a long game that's what's scary about teal is that this ideology has been festering for decades and he it's not just someone imploding in public. It's someone who has goals, and that's really fair. I thought recency bias was going to be in the day. Me too.

I didn't really do it. But it is. It's the difference between a buffoon and somebody who nominally sort of knows what they're doing. You talk about somebody who is at least aspiring to play 3D chess. Peter Thiel is content to do that he's content to not be in the spotlight most of the time he's content to fund like these neo-fascist candidates that may or may not win apparently he was really mad when blake masters lost that was a funny story but he's like just a teal clone he's like a mini teal just like this guy could go far and he's like just so strange i agree like he's the most he's like

very actively attempting to use his influence for anti-democratic racist fascistic like he's not you know he's not shy he's not shy about this that's what he's trying to do and i yeah i so i'm kind of glad that he won because i think he's the worst of the two evils you know obviously we were talking about like a mask off moment earlier i feel like peter teal has really been kind of living these values living these politics for a long time kind of showing a lot of the valley, you know, you can do this. Like there's a growing kind of constituency who is open to these things, who is willing to embrace you for saying these things, for championing these politics. And, you know, now we see after Peter Thiel has been very open about these things for such a long time, that more and more of the Valley are embracing it, are being open about it. Not to say that many of these people

never felt it before, but it's being open in a way that I think is more dangerous and more concerning than it's been in a long time. Just to close it off, as I said, one candidate was leading in the morning. Elon Musk was leading initially, but Peter Thiel overtook him this afternoon, my time, of course, and kept a very narrow lead. But as I said, it was a very, very narrow lead. It was kind of wild. It's pretty cool. Even a loser at being the worst. But yes, so I will post this on Twitter soon. So everyone else will will see it. For those of you who are in the live chat, you know, early, of course, I guess you can spoil it for your buddies if you want to, but it will be posted soon enough. I just made need to make a graphic. And I you know, obviously, I want to close by thanking our fantastic guests for joining us on this really, I think, you know, insightful live stream where we've discussed so many important topics about the tech industry, so many things that I think will be relevant in the year to come and even following years. So, Gita Jackson, tech and culture journalist, thank you so much for joining us.

Chris Gillyard, Just Tech fellow at Social Science Research Council. Thank you so much. Brian Merchant, the author of The One Device and next year, Blood in the Machine. We'll certainly be back

to talk about that. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to chat with us, to share this time. And of course, people on the regular podcast stream will be able to hear it

in the future too. Thanks so much to all of you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Thank you. This was so much fun. I had so much fun talking about horrible things and horrible people. You know, maybe we need to do a anime and NC podcast in the future. Just hit me up because I literally, all I can think about right now is Chainsaw Man and I need to deposit those thoughts. This has been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for including me.

And more pods emerging from the live stream. We love to see it. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Thanks, of course, for supporting the show. Just to close it off, it's really been a fantastic year for Tech Won't Save Us, for the podcast. You know, the listenership has just grown immensely.

You know, the support that you, the listeners, you know, the supporters on Patreon have given the show has just really been incredible. You know, it wouldn't be possible without you. Obviously, it also wouldn't be possible

with our fantastic guests. Some of them, three of them, are here with us on this live stream, you know, to be able to get their insights for them to give us the time to make these episodes, to do these interviews. Of course, it's so important

for us to hold these tech people to account, you know, to ensure that there's a critical narrative getting out there when, you know, there's such an overwhelmingly positive narrative with so much of this tech stuff, or at least, you know,

trying to be neutral and to play both sides and things like that. So thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for supporting the show. Thanks for watching this live stream. And of course, we'll be talking to you again soon. Thank you.