Missed Opportunities in Pandemic Response

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The pandemic was a missed opportunity to demand and implement more ambitious and permanent measures such as eviction moratorium, guaranteed livable income, and mobilizing emergency temporary measures into permanent solutions. The discourse on the left became very obedient, advocating for vaccines and playing by the rules, while missing the chance to push for ambitious programs such as hiring millions of young people for meaningful work like the civilian conservation core, addressing overcrowded classrooms by hiring more teachers, and creating a vision of a different world that integrates Black Lives Matter, the Green New Deal, and Indigenous rights.

Paris Marx is joined by Naomi Klein to discuss the problems with personal branding pushed social media, how the left’s insufficient response to the pandemic created an opening for the right, and the fight over the roots of Western society that will shape our future.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and a columnist with The Guardian. She is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.

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. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

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