Paris Marx is joined by JS Tan to discuss how Chinese tech workers fought against “996” work practices and whether the its phaseout is being driven by that movement or by the changing needs of the government and tech companies.JS Tan is a graduate student at MIT, a former tech worker, and a member of Collective Action in Tech, a project to advance the tech worker movement. Follow JS on Twitter at @organizejs.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:JS wrote about why China’s 996 work schedules are changing and the factors driving it.Rest of World also had recent reporting on changes to 996 practices.Collective Action in Tech has an embedded organizer program that is open for applications.The Verge wrote about Justin Sun, a controversial figure in crypto.In 2020, Ant Group's US IPO was canceled.China has launched a number of policies to crack down on its tech industry in recent years.Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Kevin Driscoll to discuss the networks and services built by volunteers and hobbyists on top of the telephone network before the internet took over the in the 1990s, and what it can teach us about the internet and social media today.Kevin Driscoll is the author of The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media and an associate professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Follow Kevin on Twitter at @kevindriscoll.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Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Kevin wrote about The Modem World in Wired.textfiles.com is a good source for historical documents about the modem world.Find out more about Paris’ event with Sabrina Fernandes in Berlin on August 26!Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein to discuss the science behind the new space telescope, the problems with the billionaire space race, and why we need to challenge the capitalist and colonial forces driving the the effort to commercialize space.Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is the author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. She’s also an assistant professor of Physics and core faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire, and a  columnist at New Scientist and Physics World. Follow Chanda on Twitter at @IBJIYONGI.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:Chanda wrote “Becoming Martian” for the Baffler earlier this year, and called last year for the James Webb Space Telescope to be renamed.Paris wrote about the billionaire space race for Tribune Magazine.Of the five initial images released from the JW Space Telescope, Chanda described the First Deep Field and noted the accessibility of its alt-text on Twitter.As part of Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia in July 2022, the country signed onto the Artemis Accords. The Accords have faced criticism as a US-centric and commercial set of bilateral agreements that seek to set new norms beyond international law.Saturday Night Live made fun of the billionaire space race.In July, the head of Roscosmos indicated it planned to pull out of the International Space Station, though an official notice has not been made. The segment Paris mentioned on AlJazeera can be found here.Starlink is undemocratically altering how we see the night sky, which some Indigenous groups are calling “astro-colonialism.”Gil Scott-Heron released “Whitey on the Moon” in 1970.Chanda called attention to the Just Space Alliance.Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Fenwick McKelvey to discuss the massive outage at Rogers, why it’s challenging the narrative that more competition will fix Canada’s telecom sector, and the need for better regulation and even public ownership.Fenwick McKelvey is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed. He’s also an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University and a director of Machine Agencies at the Milieu Institute. Follow Fenwick on Twitter at @mckelveyf.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Fenwick spoke to CBC about the Rogers outage and previously spoke to Daniel Joseph about changing the way we think about media platforms in Canada.Paris has previously argued for telecom nationalization in Canada and has written about the history of Canadian telecom.After the outage, Canadian innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne forced telcos to come up with a new agreement on several key areas of emergency cooperation.The Competition Bureau is objecting to a proposed merger between Rogers and Shaw.Last year, the Rogers family was engaged in a protracted feud that affected management of the company.ZeD was an “open-source television” series aired by Canada’s public broadcaster from 2002 to 2006.Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Malcolm Harris to discuss the legacy of Stewart Brand and why the myth we’re often told about him overstates the reality of his impact.Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and his forthcoming book Palo Alto. He also writes for New York Magazine. Follow Malcolm on Twitter at @BigMeanInternet.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Malcolm Harris wrote a critical review of John Markoff’s Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.Benjamin Kunkel also wrote a critical review of Whole Earth.The Stewart Brand documentary We Are As Gods about his quest to bring back wholly mammoths to solve climate change is slowly being rolled out after two years of delay and seeming lack of sales interest.Brand’s Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000-year clock in Texas that’s funded by Jeff Bezos.We also mention Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture.Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Dwayne Monroe to discuss what it’s like to work in a data center, how the cloud came to hold a dominant position, and the consequences of its control by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.Dwayne Monroe is a cloud technologist and aspiring Marxist theorist of technology, with twenty years of experience architecting large-scale computational systems. Follow Dwayne on Twitter at @cloudquistador.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Dwayne wrote about cloud computing for Logic Magazine. He’s also written about a public cloud and the metaverse on his blog.Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in the eastern United States experienced a major outage in December 2021.Residents in various parts of the world have been questioning the logic of building data centers, including in the United States and New Zealand.In July, the network of Canadian telecom giant Rogers went down, leaving millions without service.Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss how the digital infrastructure that companies have built out over the past couple decades to track everything we do in order to serve us ads places us at risk, and how that’s come into focus since the overturning of abortion rights in Roe v Wade in the United States.Shoshana Wodinsky is a privacy reporter at Gizmodo. Follow Shoshana on Twitter at @swodinsky.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Shoshana wrote about getting an abortion in the age of surveillance and why every company is becoming an ad network. With her colleagues at Gizmodo, she also wrote about how Facebook perpetuated climate denial and killed news feed changes that would anger conservatives.Anti-abortion groups targeted ads at people who had visited abortion clinics.Data brokers have been selling data on people who visit abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood.Support the show

In a special episode to celebrate the release of host Paris Marx’s new book Road to Nowhere, Brian Merchant takes over as guest host to interview Paris about the book, the tech industry’s visions for transportation, and why they don’t solve our mobility challenges. Paris is the host of Tech Won’t Save Us and the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. Brian Merchant is a tech journalist, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant. 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. Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.  Also mentioned in this episode:Road to Nowhere is available anywhere you buy books, but Verso has it discounted until July 8 as part of its Summer Reads sale.An excerpt of Road to Nowhere about the dystopian future the tech industry is creating was recently published in Wired.Paris recently spoke to StreetsBlog USA about the problem with Apple CarPlay.Support the show

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant to discuss the impact of the iPhone after 15 years, including its effects on how we work, how we use technology, and what it’s meant for Apple.Brian Merchant is a tech journalist, author of  The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and co-editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn. Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:In 2011, Cory Moll tried to unionize Apple stores. In June 2022, a store in Maryland became the first to vote to form a union.Apple’s claims about privacy are, at least to some degree, a clever marketing campaign.Paris previously wrote about some of Apple’s environmental messaging.The previous episode with Brian on the iPhone is episode 78 (Sep 16, 2021), and I also spoke to Jenny Chan about the conditions at Foxconn factories where iPhones are manufactured on episode 27 (Sep 17, 2020).Support the show

To kick off a new monthly bonus series on tech in Canada, Paris Marx is joined by Bianca Wylie to discuss Canada’s COVID Alert app, the problems with the digital contract-tracing experiment, and why we need a public post-mortem so lessons are learned for next time.Bianca Wylie is a partner at Digital Public, a co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Follow Bianca on Twitter at @biancawylie.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.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:This series on Canadian tech is made in partnership with Passage, a left-wing publication in Canada. Passage published an edited transcript of the conversation.On June 17, 2022, Health Canada decommissioned the COVID Alert app.In April, Bianca wrote that the government needed to shut down the COVID Alert app because it wasn’t working (if it ever had). She also began writing a series on the app on her Medium blog that month.In July 2020, Bianca and her colleague Sean Mcdonald were already asking questions about the app and the planning around it.Other digital contact-tracing apps were launched in many other countries, including Australia, France, and Iceland, with poor results.Support the show