Is Mastodon Too Far Away?

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Twitter has always been like a 90 10 split I mean the amount of actual governance that they do. Mastodon is maybe too far the other direction where it's like you actually have people having a little power over their fiefdoms and they can just sort of like mass ban, says Brian Gita. 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 our scene in some ways. Elon Musk obviously we could not avoid it and Twitter and social media and all these other things as well as much as I'd love us not to be thinking about and talking about Elon Musk all the

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 It was rescinded after the initial discussion.

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