The first cut on this record has been cross-format focused for Airplay success.

The men beat on their drums. Thank you. I'm going to I'm going to

the Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other.

My name is Alex Doherty and today I'm joined by Wendy Lou to discuss Silicon Valley,

the platform economy and the democratization of technology.

You can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes and ACAST, and you can also follow on Facebook and Twitter at Poll Theory Other.

Wendy Lou is an economics editor at New Socialist, which is one of the best new resources for left politics and theory to have emerged in recent years in Britain.

I strongly recommend checking out their website, which is newsocialist.org.

And there you'll be able to find articles by Wendy on some of the topics that we discussed today.

I'm afraid the same quality on today's recording isn't fantastic, but hopefully it's still listenable.

It's possibly not one for playing through laptop speakers.

So Wendy, you've worked in the tech sector in startups, and I believe you also worked at Google for a short time. Could you say something about your experience of working in the

sector and also your political trajectory? Were you somebody who was on the left at the time

you were working in the sector and so on?

Or is that something that's kind of developed since?

Or did you sort of become disillusioned and so on?

And did that drive you to a more sort of leftist position?

Yeah, so I'm someone who's very new to the left, I guess.

For me, I just didn't really have any political awareness until quite recently. I started programming when I was pretty young.

I think I built my first website at the age of 12, and I think since then I just kind of started

writing code on my own, doing a lot of open source programming, and just generally being part of that community.

And in that world, I kind of got to a point where I figured,

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