Either we're gonna see more consolidation or the whole structure will be dramatically overthrown. I'm hoping for the latter.
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome to Tech Won's Save Us, a podcast that thinks there's no crisis Elon Musk won't try to turn into a PR opportunity. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Wendy Liu. Wendy is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. She's also written for Logic Magazine, Tribune Magazine, and The New Statesman. Today we talk about her book as well as the impact of COVID-19 on the tech industry and workers. Before we start the interview, I just want to say Tech Won't Save Us is a new podcast. This is our first episode. So if you like what you hear, consider going to Apple or anywhere else that you listen to podcasts and leaving a review. Also feel free to share the interview. Obviously that helps not just the podcast, but it would help Wendy and our other guests in the future as well to promote their books and what they're doing. You can also follow Tech Won't Save Us on Twitter where our handle is at Tech Won't Save Us. My handle is at ParisMarks. And you can also follow Wendy at at Dell System. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the interview. Wendy Lou, welcome to Tech Won's Save Us.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me on.
SPEAKER_00Obviously, we're in this kind of like unprecedented moment, this like really extraordinary situation with COVID-19 kind of shutting things down across the world. Um and tech is obviously having a very specific response to that. Um you know, we're seeing Amazon, Instacart are really benefiting from having everyone at home and people needing to order all of these different items um to try to avoid going to the shops and in response they're not treating their workers so great, and those workers are starting to kind of push back and demand better. So what are you sort of seeing in the response to these tech companies and what is your reaction to how they're taking advantage of this crisis?
SPEAKER_01I think what's really interesting is that we're seeing this crisis be good for some companies and bad for others. So for example, Yelp is suffering because people aren't going out to restaurants right now, and they've had to do massive layoffs in here in San Francisco. Whereas companies like Instacart and Amazon and you know, Uber Eat Uber Uber, because of Uber Eats mostly, um, they're they're benefiting somewhat from the surge. But I think what's true across the board is that it's not workers who are benefiting. It is the companies, the workers themselves, at best, they'll get a little more business. You know, like if they're peace workers, if they're contract workers, they're gonna maybe make more money, but they're just they're busier and they're probably not gonna make that much money. And so the fact that Amazon is hiring all these workers, uh, I think what gets lost in the mainstream discussion of this is that these workers are not gonna be greeted like royalty. They're gonna have the same horrible working conditions that workers at Amazon have always had, and that it will take, you know, it will take like a lot of uh struggle to be able to change that. And I think what's interesting in the tech industry is that while some see this as like a chance to, you know, adjust their priorities, to um to like hunker down and and uh focus on their business model, there are other people in the industry who see it as an opportunity to create a startup and just like find promising startups to invest in. And so Paul Graham, who uh was the co-founder of Why Combinator and who I'm not sure what he does now other than just like make spicy tweets all day, but he said that He loves spicy tweets. We we we all love spicy tweets. I've been blocked by him, but I I still see his tweets sometimes. Um, he was saying that like it is a good time for investors to invest in like promising startups because I don't know, I guess he doesn't understand survivorship bias, but the the idea is that during a downturn, the people who are motivated enough to work on their startup when the whole world is falling apart are just like the most determined, ruthless people and that you should invest in them. And it's like that's one reading. The other reading is that these people are just like delusional, that they're so trapped in their bubble that all they care about is whatever probably pointless startup they're working on instead of recognizing that the world around them is collapsing and that that there are other things that are more important than whatever idea they came up with, which is probably something blockchain related.
SPEAKER_00Always always blockchain, right? And cryptocurrencies. But yeah, so I think that's completely right. We're seeing that workers in general are not particularly benefiting. Um, you know, there's these stories of Uber workers who are kind of demanding better treatment from the company. Um, the company responded by saying that they were going to do these this two weeks of paid leave. Um, but now we're seeing stories from the workers who are saying, like, I even tested positive, I have my doctor's note, and Uber still won't give me the money that like they promised me, right? And and like these, I'm not sure if you saw this story I saw the other day. These Instacart workers who are seeing these orders come in with like massive tips, like 50 plus dollars. Then they make the order like and and they want to take this order because the tip is so large. And then when they finish it and they deliver the order, the customer changes it later, right? And like that's partly on the customer, but like why is that feature even built into the app in the first place, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And like I see even like when we talk about the companies themselves, um Brian Merchant has written about how they're they're kind of taking advantage of this and we're seeing the Amazonification of the economy. With all these traditional businesses shut down, these tech companies that kind of operate under this model can take advantage of it to kind of grow their piece of the economic tie, right? And so this this kind of creates these these issues where as you say, workers aren't benefiting and it's all going to the shareholders. Um are there are there any other like big examples of this that you're seeing that are really standing out to you? And do you think it presents problems like when we start to come out of COVID-19, uh when we start to come out of this crisis? Um like what are we going to be dealing with on the other side of this because of what tech companies are doing now?
SPEAKER_01It's it's pretty terrifying. And so, I mean, the the Amazon situation is probably the the one I'm worried about the most. But at the same time, it's not just like it's not just Amazon who's looking at this as an opportunity. You know, I think private equity is like the traditional villain here, and this is just what they do. They find um distressed assets and they buy them up and then do whatever they want with them. And like after the financial crisis, we saw all of these houses that were foreclosed upon and snatched up by private equity uh and just like milked for the all they were worth. And I so I think, yeah, after this is over, we're definitely gonna see more consolidation, you know, unless, unless either we're gonna see more consolidation or the whole structure will be dramatically overthrown. I'm hoping for the latter, but I think we'll have to resign ourselves to the former. Yeah. But I think um work is gonna change. And I I'm not like I don't really have a sense of how it's gonna look overall, but I feel like in tech, um, there are people who are working tech jobs that they thought were safe, that they had just like they they had, you know, there are people who have like not lived through the dot-com crash who don't really have a good memory of what things were like then. And they kind of, you know, graduated from college, got a job working in a prestigious tech company, and assumed that they would keep climbing the career ladder, that if they ever got fired, you know, they would always find another job, and that their career path, unlike every other, was just like guaranteed. And now we're seeing the beginning of layoffs and what happens when more layoffs happen, and then all these companies realize that like when the pandemic is over, they don't have to hire the same people back. They could just try to, you know, hire people in Eastern Europe or hire them from China or India or something. And this is something that like, you know, these companies have been doing for a while, but I think a lot of these high-tech companies, the the Facebooks, Googles, um, Netflix, whatever, they're they've been, I don't know, thought of in different terms where we, you know, we can just assume that they hire the best of the best in in quotes, people who graduated from like prestigious universities. But you know, these companies meritocracy, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think, you know, after this, after the pandemic, like if these companies have difficult um financial situations, they might think, well, why do we have to pay 500K like in terms of fully loaded cost for a software engineer in the Bay Area when we could just go to Eastern Europe? And the I think the the most um visible case of unionization among software engineers that happened recently was this company, um, Linetics, which, you know, based in San Francisco and a few other cities, uh, they fired all their software engineers and then outsourced those jobs to Eastern Europe because they could. And you know what, companies have been doing this for like a pretty long time, and it's not it's not a situation that they're, you know, they're always gonna go for. And they're always, there's always like variance among different, you know, CEOs and what they care about. And if um, and it depends on the kind of product they're building. Some products are harder to like offshore than others, but I think this is something we should be on the lookout for because like what is stopping companies from realizing that they can save on salary, like Zoom, for example, it's a US company. I believe a lot of its software is built in China. And, you know, there, I'm sure there are a lot more companies where they give the impression of being, you know, based in the Bay Area or whatever, but actually they've offshore a lot of their engineering at much lower labor costs. And unless those workers unionize and demand better treatment, then it's just going to be a race to the bottom. So that's something that worries me. And I mean, to the what you're saying about Instacart, I mean, I think I think you're absolutely right in that. It's partly to blame on the customer, but more so on the company, because the company is benefiting from the fact. Like it, it knows that customers are doing this and it's allowing it. And it's, you know, it's probably saying, like, well, if we didn't give customers the ability to do this, then they would just go with another app, in which case it's like they're aware that they're profiting from this feature and it's they know it's immoral. So yeah, I think this just illustrates the, I don't know, the moral failings of this idea of customer obsession, which Amazon also loves. And a lot of these companies are just like, all we have to do is satisfy the customer. Well, sometimes the customer is a jerk. Sometimes the customer is going to do things that are like bad for other people. And your job as a platform is to prevent that from happening. Because otherwise, then what what are you doing? Like, what are you what is the purpose of you having this power and making all this money?
SPEAKER_00I think that's a really good point. And with regard to what you're saying, like there are so many people working from home right now, and there are a lot of people who work in tech who might feel that like they have one of these kind of software jobs, they're one of these white-collar employees, so they are safe, right? I think there's been a lot more reporting that's been going on about this in the past few years, kind of the the sort of two-tier system that has developed at a lot of these tech companies. I know Google is the one that sort of gets the most attention for this, where um you have the full-time workers who kind of get all the benefits, um, get the better pay. But then there are contractors who are often doing the exact same sort of job, but they are paid worse, they don't get the benefits. And we saw in response to COVID-19 that the full-time employees were able to work from home, but then initially the contractors were not, right? And they were told that they still needed to go into the office because it wasn't like in their contract, you know, and they couldn't go away. Um But then there are also a lot of workers, especially with these startups that are going on and and with these companies that are trying to promote this concept of like remote work and working from anywhere anywhere and all this sort of stuff that take advantage of co-working spaces, WeWorks, things like that. And obviously, WeWork has been in the news a lot in the past year with kind of the collapse that has happened. Um, and you know, we we were all gawking a few months ago at how it looked like Adam Newman was getting this billion dollar payout, and now it looks like he's not gonna get that because SoftBank is pulling out. So if we're looking at WeWork in particular, are they going to come back? What is going to happen with coworking in the future? Like, is that gonna be a thing? Like, what's going on here, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the WeWork case is so interesting just because like the times we're living in now are the worst possible times for WeWork. And WeWork was already struggling before the pandemic, but they were struggling in a way that seemed like they could still turn it around. And now it's like it's very unclear what's gonna happen. I I think SouthBank is gonna try their best to do what they can with WeWork, even though it's not clear what they actually have other than just like contracts with um buildings, right? But SouthBank has said that they want to install a new management team and like try to turn profitable at some point. But I I think what's really interesting about WeWork is the fact that like it's easy for us to make fun of the business model just because there isn't really anything innovative there and it's not financially, you know, it doesn't actually make sense financially, right? Because they're they're counting on um making profit through just like branding, essentially. They they want to have these buildings that are WeWork branded with great like design and um aesthetics, but without anything, without actual technology. And we can make fun of that, but at the same time, I think it's important to remember that this is what most of the economy relies on. Like, what is Nike? What does Nike have that's technology? They they don't really have anything, they have a brand and they're good at coordinating. Um they they have contracts with like basketball players, universities, sport, sporting events, and they've used that to try to like inflate the value of the brand. Meanwhile, all the actual work is done by third-party suppliers who are paid like almost nothing to you know make the actual product. And I think the I think what WeWork is trying to do is like it's actually closer to you know a Nike, where the whole point is to create of create this brand with this artificially high value, get people uh to just like have loyalty to the brand, even though there's no actual reason to be loyal to the brand. And then through that, get this kind of like monopoly over real estate so that eventually it doesn't really matter if you like WeWork or not, you know, there's no choice. Everything is a WeWork. Um, and you know, I in a in a weird way, I almost feel bad for WeWork for not having achieved that because this is like the capitalist dream that, you know, that entrepreneurs were taught was uh attainable for them. And I think in a sense, like Adam Newman, he did almost everything right. Maybe he was just a little bit too uh, he was he was a little bit too off the rails, like you know, the whole walking around barefoot, just like saying really weird things. I think, I think he could have made it. I think in another world he would have been like hailed as Steve Jobs or something or Jeff Bezos and just he wasn't quite there. So, you know, let's pour one out for uh Adam Newman. He almost made it.
SPEAKER_00I I'm not sure I can join you on that one. I'm very sorry.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I don't feel too bad for him. He still has like six houses. He bought like a $20 million house just like um in Marin, like uh across across the bridge. And I've looked at photos of it. It's like it's absurd. Like no one deserves to live in a house like that. Um sorry, so to your to your point earlier, you were talking about uh what's gonna happen to like like software engineering jobs, like white-collar tech jobs. And I think the thing that I keep thinking about is there's always gonna be this like tech aristocracy, this like layer on top that coordinates everything. And so what we're seeing um with other sectors that have automated more and have uh found a way to expand their operations is that even though you can, you know, you you might hire like 100,000 more workers doing jobs that are coded as low skill, you still need some people on top to coordinate that. And so you can see this in like pretty much any company that uses any kind of technology. Um, company like Uber, they have software engineers writing the algorithms that coordinate um among the drivers. For a call center, you have uh people who are writing the algorithms that like surveil call center workers and make sure that they're always like happy. And I think with any of these companies, even as they automate away more of the work that software engineers would traditionally do, there's always gonna be a small layer of software engineers on top who are needed to like maintain that. And those jobs are, you know, of course, those are gonna go to the people who are already kind of privileged in the industry. It's gonna go to the white men who've gone to Stanford or whatever and who have been able to like, you know, have good resumes. Yeah. And I think as the industry gets more and more diverse, we're gonna see more of this stratification where the women, people of color, people who have non-traditional backgrounds, who just haven't been given as much um leeway in the industry, they're gonna get the like shitty contract jobs where, you know, there's no pay stability, there's no economic security, like it's just they're gonna get the the worst jobs. And I think this is something that we see in like other industries as well. Tech is not is not immune to that. Um, the tr the economic trends that drive bifurcation of um of work, you know, that's gonna come to tech eventually, and it already is, like as you're saying with the contract workers at Google.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and like I feel like we might even see um because you say that like this this automation also results in sort of greater surveillance of the workforce as well, right? And and keeping better track of everything that they're doing. Um, and I was just reading the other day that with everyone working at home now, all of a sudden um like companies are investing a ton of money to buy these systems that can like track everything that you're doing on your computer. And I remember like working in a call center when they had like they had these systems, right? So they could see like everything that you were doing, and you would just be like sitting there at your desk wondering like even like if you're taking a call, if you're not taking a call, like you're sitting there and you're like, is someone like is some manager somewhere sitting at their desk, like watching my screen and seeing everything that's happening right now? Like it's just mind-boggling, and then to think that like you're at home, you're like you know, you're like you're in the comfort of your home, you're in this private space, but like still they might be able to like log into your computer and like see what you're doing and see what you're typing at that moment, like it's madness, right? So like it I think it's really worrying that they're doing this in response to the working at home, but to what degree is this going to continue later? And and also like we're we're seeing these uh technologies increasingly um moving into our homes, moving into our cities that are tracking the things that we do in urban space, in our homes. Um, like there was this story I saw the other day, you were telling me about it, that is kind of tracking people who aren't paying their rents, right? So this tech is being used in this way at work, at home, in cities, everywhere that is kind of surveilling us, and it makes me very worried about where we're going. And so, like, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or if you're seeing any further progression in that direction. Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think what we're seeing now is this really dystopic future that maybe some of us have um I like I definitely did not see this coming when I, you know, first started learning about technology and the tech industry. It was, it always felt to me like something that was just for the better betterment of humanity or something, right? Like I didn't have a good understanding of the negative use cases that technology could be put to. But now it's I think it's it's becoming very clear that technology is going to be used for the most lucrative purposes. And what that means is like extracting money from workers, extracting money from renters. Um and I mean with uh with Zoom, I think what's interesting about Zoom is there's been some controversy over um if whether or not it's tracking the programs on your computer. And it's like, yeah, of course, of course it is. It's enterprise software. The whole purpose of enterprise software is to make your workers more productive. And maybe that comes in the form of you know surveillance. Um, I'm sure there are people working on like machine learning to figure out uh if a worker's be more or less productive, so you don't have to like physically, you know, have a manager watching them. It's just you're managed by an algorithm. I mean, that's that's exactly what I'd invest in if I was like an investor with no morals. This is just the the trend of where where technology is going. And you know, to what you were saying about the about tracking people who don't pay rent, yeah, there's this company called Neighborly, which I think is hilarious that they've called themselves that. It's spelled N-A-B-O-R-L-Y.
SPEAKER_00Of course, you have to misspell it, right? Like that's what every startup has to do.
SPEAKER_01It feels like something you'd find on HBO Silicon Valley. Like it's it's that bad. Um, and I think what's really sinister about them is that the the rhetoric around the company is that is that of like social justice language? They they talk about how they're like, you know, they they recognize that things are hard for renters, they're trying to help renters, but they're serving landlords. And like tenants don't really have a product for it's like it's not built for tenants, it's built for landlords so they can figure out like, you know, which tenant should they accept? And like it's basically like credit scores or like background check for tenants.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're trying to help you by making sure that you can never rent a place in the future, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and I think they so they they talk about how they're trying to end like discrimination. And it's like it sounds like it sounds like they're they almost believe it. Like the CEO seems like a guy who really believes what he's saying, and that the goal is to try to end discrimination based on like, I don't know, race or nationality or something like that. But at the same time, it's very obviously about discrimination based on economic circumstances. And like it's it's kind of funny to me how people like that can think, oh yeah, racism is bad, but discriminating against someone who works uh, you know, a low-wage job where they don't have a lot of savings, that's fine. That's just good business. And I think that to me speaks to the fundamental untenability of our economic system, where it's like, we've gone to the point where we've at least, you know, people who are more progressive agree that it's bad to discriminate for things like gender or race. But it's okay to discriminate if someone just is unable to make money. And it's like, that doesn't make any sense to me. And so I think, yeah, coming to that realization was part of what made me just so frustrated with Silicon Valley and like, you know, the world in the first place, because there's this um, this veneer of like social justice language that if you look closer, it's not being lived up to. Like all these tech companies that claim they're making the world a better place. Once you take a look at what they're actually doing and how they really operate behind the scenes, you realize that the the rhetoric is just it's just like PR. I don't think they actually believe in it, or if they do, they've found a way to rationalize to themselves um like the fact that they're not living up to it. And it's it's really, you know, it's really disorienting. It's really tragic.
SPEAKER_00I think that's a good transition to move us into talking about your book as well. Um, because obviously that kind of criticism of the way that Silicon Valley operates is is really core to what you're talking about, right? And before we get into your like specific criticisms and kind of your ideas for how we could make it better, I think that one of the most powerful aspects of your book is that you don't take this kind of like traditional left-wing nonfiction book where you kind of like give us the historical perspective and then give us a bit of theory, make your dig at neoliberalism, like kind of then kind of like give us our criticisms of like the near past and the present, and then give us a few chapters on like how to fix things, and then it's like, all right, perfect, here we go, right? Um because instead you treat it a bit more like a memoir, and you kind of bring us through your own personal development and how your ideas evolved over that time, right? So if you just want to tell me why you decided to structure it in that way and like how how that evolution worked for you and how you kind of went from really believing in these kind of mantras and kind of myths of the tech industry to seeing that, you know, maybe it's not all cracked up to be and doesn't work exactly the way that this top hierarchy that you're talking about is really presenting it to be.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. So I mean, first on the way I decided to structure the book, um, I wrote it as memoir, partly because that was the way that felt true to me, because I I wanted to make this case for how the tech industry had the seed of potential, but just blew it. And for for reasons that were maybe outside the control of the people in the industry. And I wanted to make clear that it was a structural problem. And so when I thought about how I could make that case, I had this, I guess the audience I pictured in my mind was like a younger myself. Like I was like, you know, me of like five years ago when I was just doing my startup. How would I explain to me then that all of these problems exist and that the, you know, the the worldview that you've been led to believe is wrong? And I thought, well, I I don't know how I got to this point really. All I know is like if I retrace my steps, I was a Silicon Valley believer like five years ago and now I'm not. So I thought, if I want to reach people who are kind of like I was five years ago, I would have to take them through the steps that I went to. Because otherwise, like I couldn't find a way to connect the dots without like going through my own personal story because that's just like how I lived it. Um and I also wanted to write a book that wasn't just for leftists. Like the hope with this book is that people who are either in tech or like interested in tech will read it, even if they've never heard of like anyone on the left before, and they'll think, oh, this is interesting. Like there's this book is hinting at a way of thinking that I've never come across before. And I want people to read the book and think, I should learn about the left. Like I should read, you know, theory, I should go to events, I should talk to people. That's kind of the point of the book. Um, and yeah, I guess to kind of summarize how I got from there there to here, it was just, it was partly the time I lived through, I think, because my startup started in 2014, summer of 2014. And at the time, that was like, at least from my perspective, that was like the peak of tech optimism. Right? Like there are all these startups being formed. Theranos had just been announced. Uh there was a feature all over Fortune. I think Fortune magazine was a was like the the first place to talk about Elizabeth Holmes. And like I remember reading that story, summer of 2014, and sending it to all my co-founders and saying, guys, like this, she's so cool. Like, she's such a boss. I want to be like her. Um and it was just, there are all these other startups coming out. It just felt really exciting. I think tech felt like this really fun, you know, dynamic place where uh it just it totally made sense for a motivated, ambitious young person to like try to join the tech industry and do a startup. And then, you know, things kind of started taking a turn for the worst. Maybe like 2015 for me. Um a lot of stories came out about tech companies that were just not doing what they were supposed to be doing. You know, Theranos, Theranos happened, like the fall of Theranos happened, um, Cambridge Analytica. Uh, you know, Trump, Trump getting elected in 2016 was a big part of it. But at the same time, there are all these other scandals around um tech in the way that tech was not actually doing what it was supposed to be doing. There are all these stories about venture capitalists and um other like well-known people in well-known men in the tech industry abusing their positions of power to sexually harass women. And I had I had a very until then I had a very um naive understanding of the tech industry where I really did believe in the idea of meritocracy and that people in the industry were just better than other industries. Um, and so I found it difficult to square my knowledge of what was happening with my prior beliefs. And so I was living through this weird time where um I was like watching what was happening in the world around me. Uh, you know, everything from like Trump being elected to just the student debt crisis, the European debt crisis, um, learning about what life was like for most people who didn't go to a good college and realizing that like, oh, this is what the world is like, my own personal experience of assuming upward mobility, of like never having to, you know, never being broke, never having to worry about money, that was the exception. And I think once that hit home for me, it I felt um, I was very confused, but I also found it hard to go back to the way I used to think about the world, which was just assuming that like the world is fine, it's a meritocracy. If you work hard, you'll get what you deserve. Um, because then it was very clear that that wasn't true. And the the more I learned about when I started reading about like Uber drivers and how how little money they actually made, I that's when I kind of thought, like, oh, well, I feel like I've been lied to. But if I if I if I've been lied to about that, then what else was I lied to about? And then, you know, it all kind of just started to unravel. And I started reading books about the financial crisis, and then from there, books about capitalism. I started like uh just, you know, going to like leftist events. So when I when I moved, I moved to London to do a master's degree at the London School of Inequality. And I mean, the degree was fine, but um I think what was the most eye-opening for me was like going to um protests and you know, like there'd be a bunch of Uber drivers or something who'd try to organize a strike and organize some sort of like protest at the Uber office. And I'd go there and I'd be like, oh, I just I didn't realize that this was like a thing people could do, that there were workers who were angry and that there was also this established framework for figuring that out for like for struggling within capitalism. Um so I mean, the the like year and a half that I spent in London was the the best time of my life. Like it really just changed my life. I was exposed to all these ideas. Um yeah, and so part of the reason I wrote the book is because I wanted to distill my experience in and like help people understand that there is a path from being skeptical of the tech industry to doing something about it. And you know, I'm not sure exactly what like doing something looks like. It's it's more that I think um I'm thinking a lot about the people I know in the tech industry or the you know, the people who are like unhappy with their jobs in the tech industry, and they don't really have time to do a master's degree or to like go to all these events or read all these books. But I think that they could they would find it valuable to have this um like a an attempt like my book to introduce them to these ideas that are you know maybe difficult to hear about otherwise because like it's not like left theory is that popular in mainstream media, uh, uh unfortunately.
SPEAKER_00It's a bit difficult to find, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, although in recent years, like with you know with Bernie Sanders and AOC and stuff like people are talking about the left more, but it's still still not really mainstream.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and the the perspective you get on it is always kind of I guess not necessarily how we would always describe it, right? When it's presented kind of from that liberal frame. You know, there are a lot of people who even say that sometimes you often get the best kind of analyses of these things in the FT and some of like the business press because they actually kind of look at things the way that uh that we look at things, right? And so obviously when you uh get into your uh critique, which is uh really based on kind of that understanding and that evolution that uh you went through uh through those years, and probably not coincidentally, your uh evolution kind of coincided with uh this larger kind of change in uh the uh the public opinion and the public view of the tech industry. Um and and you describe how kind of part of the issue here is that the system that tech is developed in results in like a a certain kind of technology that gets created because it needs to serve the profit motive, it needs to generate as much uh money as possible for the people who are investing in it, right? And so what are some of the uh solutions that you see to the way that tech is developed right now that would allow it to be developed in a way that actually serves the public good rather than the profit of you know, a really small number of really wealthy people?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great question. I I think so. I I have a chapter in the book that's dedicated to like um the five different directions that I lay out for how we could reclaim our world from capital. Because I see the problem here as you know, capital is directing the development of technology and it's directing it according to its interests, which could mean surveilling workers, surveilling tenants, um, can mean you know, locking people up in um in camps along the border. Uh and the purposes to which technology is being put right now are just are not what most of us would choose if we had to say. And so I think ultimately the goal is democratization of the development of technology and how we get there, I think there are like so many directions we can go to. And I'm I'm pretty excited about like any steps in that direction. But I think, you know, ultimately the world that I want to see will look very different to what we have today in a way that's like hard to imagine, right? Because the world that we live in now, I mean, I I live in San Francisco. Um I don't I don't leave the house these days, but when I was leaving the house, I would walk past all these like startup billboards. Um, I would walk past venture capital firms because they're a bunch in the area where I live. And that's just like we just take that for granted. That's such uh such a deep part of the social fabric. Um, this idea of a venture capital firm uh directing like which startups get big, and that you know, you have these billionaires who, because they they either invested in the right thing or they won the startup lottery, um, they're they're not billionaires and they can do whatever they want. And no one will ever hold them accountable for anything. I think that all that has to change. Like we can't have any more billionaires. Just no, no more billionaires ever. It's not okay.
SPEAKER_00I would I would like that, yeah. Yeah. What I noticed as well, like when I was in San Francisco, you would kind of see these these tech companies and these venture capital firms, but then the streets were just full of homeless people, right? Yes, yes, and like it's clear that there are a lot of people who are making a lot of money, but there are a lot of people who are really not benefiting from this at all and are actually being harmed by it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and this the way I see it is that's that's a feature, that's not a bug. That's what the system is designed to do. Like it's designed to increase inequality. And what increasing inequality means is that some people will always be at the bottom. And, you know, like the people who are in that system either have just have to find a way to live with that somehow, and they probably just tell themselves that they're better or something. I don't, I don't know. But um, going back to like things that we could do that that would be in the right direction, I think we should have more co-ops. I think um some companies should be kind of nationalized or otherwise made to public utilities. I think some things should be banned entirely. I think like the amount of advertising that we see in our daily lives is just like, isn't it okay? This we can't have this any longer. I think we need to step that back dramatically. And that means companies like Google and Facebook that operate primarily with advertising money, they need to find a different business model. Um, and that could just mean like maybe they're somehow like nationalized or otherwise made into like public goods. Um, maybe their code is open source and taken care of by some sort of nonprofit or government entity. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot of ways that this could happen. It's just ultimately comes down to like not having venture capitalists and then later like public shareholders owning these companies. I think we need a different model. Um, and a lot of the gig economy companies, they don't really have any anything other than just like this way of coordinating labor, right? Like they're the innovation that they've come up with is taking advantage of labor laws that are kind of confusing and finding a way to just like bulldoze over decades of worker struggle. So that we can just fix just by like not allowing this loophole, right? Um, it's it's absolutely ridiculous that companies like Uber can claim they're the drivers are independent contractors and they they aren't responsible for anything when they're, you know, they direct how drivers can work. Like they they have a lot of control over the way they work. Um, and it's just it's absurd. Uh I think we need to close that loophole. What else? I think, yeah, in general, more public services, um, more worker rights. Uh I think entrepreneurship should be thought of in a different way. Like, I don't think we should get rid of entrepreneurship. I think it's that entrepreneurship needs to be done without the profit motive, without like venture capitalists taking a stake. And the the goal should be like delivering a public service, right? The your goal should be um starting something that is useful to a lot of people, whether or not you get rich, like just the idea that people can become wealthy through entrepreneurship, I think completely skews um the whatever good there is in entrepreneurship. It has been completely twisted by the fact that people can get rich off of it, which is how you get to people like Adam Newman or Elizabeth Holmes. You have people who just, I don't know if maybe they they meant well in the first place, but what you end up with is someone who's so corrupted by the idea of like money and power that they're not, they just like lie and they cheat and they're basically grifters. And Billy McFarland of Fire Festival is another example. Um, the the a system that incentivizes people to follow the money, follow like the money and the power and the fame, it's just gonna breed the worst kinds of people. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's really a key piece, right? If we take these people out of their powerful positions and their ability to direct everything that happens, and we put the workers in control so they are actually deciding how these things get built, then we can potentially have a much better future and develop technology that works for the common good instead of the private profits of these individuals, right? So I think your book has a lot of like really big ideas that people can think about, right? And uh obviously I'm going to recommend everyone go buy your book. Um but if they want some other things to read as well, like obviously you need to buy Wendy's Abolish Silicon Valley. But what are some other things that you've been reading lately that really stands out to you that you think would help say the listeners think about the things that you're thinking about or see a new way to imagine text feature?
SPEAKER_01Great question. So I've been reading a lot of labor history lately, and that's something that really is just blowing my mind because you know, I didn't learn any of this stuff in school. I didn't learn it through like the media or anything. This is all stuff that happened that I just had no idea about. And I think that gave me a very naive and inaccurate understanding of how the world worked and my place in it. And so I would definitely recommend anyone who has a job or may have a job in the future to just like read labor history and understand where um workers' rights came from and how and the kind of struggle it took to get to the point where we are now. I recommend that. Um, in terms of tech criticism, I love Logic magazine. I think Logic Magazine has some of the most like fantastic writing on tech out there. So I'd recommend to anyone just like pick up um pick up an issue, any issue. Uh I read the Nature issue recently, and it's just it's stunning. It's so beautiful. Um, yeah, Logic magazine and labor history. Those are my recommendations.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic recommendations, and they go together really well because Ben Tarnoff, of course, who is one of the founders of Logic Magazine, is also very focused on the history, right? And knowing the history. Thank you so much, Wendy. It's been great talking with you, and hopefully we'll talk again soon.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_00Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. It was published by Repeater Books, and you can buy it at repeaterbooks.com. Hopefully from your local independent bookstore or library and anywhere else that sells books. Thanks for listening to Tech Won't Save Us. Make sure to leave a review on Apple or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to follow us on Twitter where our handle is at TechWon't Save Us. You can follow me, ParisMarks, at ParisMarks. Thanks for listening.