Is Elon Musk Providing Inspiration to Venture Capitalists?

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Sally Kohn: Elon Musk is providing inspiration to a whole load of venture capitalists, founders, CEOs who really want to push back on the workers. What do you think that the future of work in the tech industry is going to look like moving forward?Kohn: I don't want to make too many predictions and like concrete predictions, but it does really feel like more layoffs, less remote work, more probably more offshoring,. Probably more hiring freezes, fewer perksThat feels like that's going to happen. The only actual way to fight back is through solidarity, is through a collective struggle," she says.

Paris Marx is joined by Wendy Liu to discuss what it was like to work in tech in the 2010s and why structural changes in the industry are empowering an increasingly reactionary capitalist class to strike back at workers and upend the expectations of the boom period.

Wendy Liu is a writer and the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. You can follow her on Twitter at @dellsystem.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer wrote about how tech CEOs are inspired by what Musk is doing at Twitter
Mel Krantzler and Patricia Krantzler wrote Down and Out in Silicon Valley: The High Cost of the High-tech Dream
Jacob Silverman wrote about David Sacks and the reactionary turn of tech billionaires
Paris wrote about how longtermism is designed to justify the position of billionaires in society
Julia Black wrote about the embrace of pronatalism within the tech industry

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