What you end up seeing as a picture is something where it's not actually a bunch of value-seeking

risks-taking investors, but a lot of risk-averse, lazy, parasitic, self-minded, and really

superficial investors who aren't really interested in or capable of doing the sort of due diligence

necessary to find things that are worth value.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Edward Ungoezo Jr. Ed is a freelance journalist and guest columnist at the nation, and he also co-hosts This Machine Kills. In his nation column, Ed has recently been writing a lot about the ideology of Silicon Valley and of venture capitalists in particular and why the approach of these very powerful, often men in the venture

capital industry leads the technology that we use. And as a result, you know, the society that

that technology shapes down a path that really doesn't work for us and really benefits these incredibly wealthy

people. And so I thought it was time for a deeper discussion of the venture capital industry,

what drives it, what their goals are, and how the reality of their impact on the world

differs immensely from the actual impact that they have because of

the types of technologies that they fund and are pushed to fund because of the need to turn a

profit and to try to make money off of technological development. I talked a bit about venture

capitalists earlier this year with Jacob Silverman when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, but I thought that it needed more exploration.

And Ed makes a direct link to how the work of these venture capitalists has really been making the society around us much worse, right?

Because they're constantly funding companies whose very business models are

about surveillance, about social control, and about really just trying to extract more profit

from us, and as a result, needing to further control us and surveil us and make sure that

everything that we do is aligned with the business models of the companies that they fund and hope to profit from.

And that's obviously very detrimental for all of us who don't have control over those things and who are subject to these technological forces that these companies and venture capitalists are unleashing in trying to shape the world for their purposes.

And some of them are much more explicit about that than others, but we can very much see it

in the work that they are doing. So I thought that this was an important conversation to have.

I was so happy to have Ed back on the show. I always love chatting with him and kind of digging

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