The Anti-Dystopians

On this episode, Alina Utrata talks to Paris Marx, host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, about their upcoming book “Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.” They discuss the history of the automobile industry, how Tesla is not a “green company,” why Silicon Valley is lying to you about the self-driving car and their vision for the future of public transport. You can order Paris’s book here.You can follow Paris Marx on Twitter @parismarx, the Tech Won't Save Us at @techwontsaveus, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5X.All episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit our patreon at bit.ly/3mQFByq.Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata chats with Nanna Saeten, a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge about her research on time, temporality and technology. They discuss how technologies of time have been used as tools of nation-building, why high-frequency trading and blockchain depend on human understandings of time as well as algorithms, whether technology is really “speeding up” or changing our experience of time and how social media has changed the way we experience political events across time and space.You can follow Nanna on Twitter @NannaLS, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5X.All episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit our patreon at bit.ly/3mQFByq.Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of the Anti-Dystopians, Alina Utrata talks to Jennifer Cobbe, a senior research associate in the computer science department at Cambridge University. They discuss everything that’s wrong with surveillance capitalism, what the Tesco club card has to do with the surveillance state, the incoherent approach of the EU to regulating tech, how Brexit affected the UK’s ability of to control technology corporations, and how the law got us to where we are now.You can follow Jennifer on Twitter @jennifercobbe, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Articles Mentioned in this Podcast:Jennifer Cobbe, Algorithmic Censorship by Social Platforms: Power and ResistanceJulie Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational CapitalismEvgeny Morozov, Capitalism’s New Clothes (critique of Shoshana Zuboff)Vice, Facebook Doesn’t Know What It Does With Your Data, Or Where It Goes: Leaked DocumentNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata sits down with John Naughton, a technology columnist at the Observer, senior research fellow in CRASSH and co-founder of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge, and Josh Simmons, a postdoc in technology and democracy at Harvard University. They discuss Elon Musk’s recent bid for Twitter, what it shows about the power of digital platforms and wealthy men, and how to think about the challenges of reigning in Big Tech.You can follow, John Naughton on Twitter @jjn1, Josh Simons @joshsimonlabour, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4 For more articles, sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Runciman is a professor of Politics at Cambridge University and the host of the critically acclaimed podcast Talking Politics. In this episode of the Anti-Dystopians, he speaks to Alina Utrata about why corporations are robots, how singularity might have already come about, why we should think seriously about the political philosophy of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, and what technologies he worries about in the future.You can follow, Alina Utrata on Twitter @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4 For more articles, sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XArticles mentioned in this podcastSilicon Valley’s Vampire: David Runciman on Peter ThielI read Dominic Cummings blog so you don’t have to: David Runciman on Dominic CummingsElon Musk, Sea Turtles and the dangers of long-termismDangerous ideas of longtermismNick Clegg in profile in Politico The Evening Rocket: Jill Lepore’s podcast series on Elon Musk’s ideologyA long-read in the FT about how the US shut down Facebook’s crypto-currencyBooks mentioned in this podcast:The Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim HwangThe Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata speaks with Lauren Bridges, a PhD candidate at the the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania who studies big data infrastructures and surveillance regimes. They talk all about Amazon Ring: Why does Amazon want footage of your front door anyways? How is this surveillance shared with law enforcement agencies across the country? Where does this surveillance fit in with racialized notions of crime and policing? And what happens when Amazon Ring is hacked?You can follow Lauren Bridges on Twitter @Laurenebridges, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Articles by Lauren:Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen (Guardian Op-ed)Infrastructural obfuscation: unpacking the carceral logics of the Ring surveillant assemblage (Academic Article)Other articles:Who is Amazon? (Anti-Dystopians Podcast)A Black Woman Invented Home Security. Why Did It Go So Wrong? By Chris Gilliard (Wired)The IRS Should Stop Using Facial Recognition by Joy Buolamwini (The Atlantic)For more articles, sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alina Utrata talks to Dr Siân Brooke, a Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and an associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute. They discuss gender, memes and hackathons: What exactly is a meme? Do geeks have toxic masculinity? How does gender and femininity get marginalized in tech spaces? And how do fedoras lead down the road to incels?You can follow Siân Brooke on Twitter @SianJMBrooke, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Other articles by Siân:Siân's Website: https://www.sianbrooke.com/Siân's Thesis: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:76f836bf-880b-4902-9226-8d668726f4cfTrouble in Programmers Paradise: gender-biases in sharing and recognising technical knowledge on Stack Overflow: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1962943“There are no girls on the Internet”: Gender performances in Advice Animal memes: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/9593Further ReadingOII's Anti-Racists Annotated Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/146XaYuhUAng6rGV9mChDkvWdYIfwpSXlle1RUxUaBUE/edit?usp=sharingHacking Diversity by Dunbar Hester: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182070/hacking-diversityProgrammed Inequality by Mar Hicks: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequalityNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Alina Utrata talks to Dr Trishant Simlai, a conservation researcher studying the politics and geographies of wildlife conservation in India, who just received his PhD in the Department of Geography at Cambridge. They discuss wildlife surveillance in the Corbett Tiger Reserve, as well as conservation’s colonial origins, how camera traps can be used to uphold the patriarchy, and when workplace surveillance technologies literally lead to tiger attacks.You can follow Trishant Simlai on Twitter @trishantsimlai Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Further Reading: Negotiating the Gaze. Sanctuary Asia, December 2019Are Conservation Organizations Complicit in Ethnic Discrimination? The Wire 2017Grasslands of Grey: How the BBC's flawed Kaziranga muckraker has done harm. The Wire 2017:Are Treacherous Links and Claims an Illusion? Sanctuary Asia 2016Conservation 'Wars': The global rise of green militarization and trends in India. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol L No 50. 2015.Digital Surveillance Tech in Conservation and their social implicationsWhy we must question the militarisation of conservationHow does Conservation Tech Cause Harm?Conservation Surveillance as a means for state repression?Nowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the Anti-Dystopians, Rowena Squires, an ancient historian, asks Alina Utrata everything you ever wanted to know about Amazon. How did Amazon go from online bookstore to commercial empire? Is Amazon Alexa really recording everything you say? How was AWS cloud computing invented? And why is the Library of Alexandria such a good origin story for the Amazon Alexa?You can follow Rowena Squires on Twitter @RowenaSquires, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Articles mentioned in this episode:Business reporter Brad Stone's 2013 book “The Everything Store” and the 2020 follow-up “Amazon Unbound”Alec MacGillis’s book “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America” The US House Judiciary Report on Monopolies Franklin Foer’s deep-dive into Jeff Bezos’s brain in the AtlanticCharles Duhigg’s “Is Amazon Unstoppable?” For the rest of the articles mentioned in this episode, visit bit.ly/3kuGM5XNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talks to Stefanie Felsberger, a PhD in Gender Studies at Cambridge University, and Muskan Shafat, an MS in Data and Society at the London School of Economics, about gender and technology. They discuss the myth of neutral tech, how technology is embedded in systems of oppression, why using a dishwasher isn’t considered “technological innovation” and whether some AI is just machine learning for eugenics. You can follow Stefanie Felsberger on Twitter @Flsbrgr, Muskan Shafat @muskanmaraz, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on Twitter @AntiDystopians. Or sign up for the AD email newsletter: bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata, and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Books mentioned in the podcast:Race After Technology by Ruha BenjaminAlgorithms of Oppression by Safiya NobleProgrammed Inequality by Mar HicksWeapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’NeillWhat Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian DaubNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.