Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast critical of the notion that technology alone can solve our problems.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this is Episode Zero. I don't have a guest today.

I'm just going to introduce you to the podcast and what you can expect from here on out.

The goal of Tech Won't Save Us is to be critical of the tech industry, tech companies, tech leaders, and particularly the worldview that's sort of pushed out from Silicon Valley around the world that says we don't need to worry so much about politics. We can just focus on technology and the improvement

of technology and new innovations. The idea has been described in several ways over the years.

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described it as the Californian ideology, which brought

together the neoliberal capitalist project of Thatcher and Reagan in the same way that

these tech leaders suggest technology will do. But it also brought together the countercultural

libertarianism of the time and this notion of technological determinism to create this ideology

that springs from Silicon Valley that puts technology at the forefront and suggests that

it is our main solution. And of course, this was developed further by Yevgeny Morozov,

who talks about technological solutionism, this notion that tech leaders, when they talk about the problems in our world, they design the

problem so it appears as though it can be solved through technological means instead of having

to deal with politics. Often their solutions sound really good in a TED talk, but when you actually

dig into what they're proposing and what they're doing, there are negative consequences to what's

happening that don't get the same kind of focus as the big idea, the big headline that graces the

cover of magazines and gets a ton of media attention.

When I think about this in particular, I think about the challenge that we face with regard to the

climate crisis and the different ways that we're told it can be solved.

On one hand right now, we have a political movement that is pushing

for a Green New Deal and radical policies that would not just address the climate crisis,

but significantly alter the way that our society is currently constructed, to make it fairer,

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