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I'm your host, Maris Marks, and this week my guest is Tante.

Tante is a sociotechnologist, writer, speaker, and Luddite who works on tech and its social impact. Throughout May, I was in a number of European countries, in Austria, in Germany,

and in Denmark, and got to have some conversations with, you know, a bunch of different people

about tech topics there to get an bunch of different people about tech topics

there to get an idea of how people are thinking about technology, about the tech industry,

in these different parts of Europe, and how they were reflecting on how their lawmakers

were approaching things, how Europe as a whole was doing on the tech front, especially as we increasingly have

this divide between the U.S. and China, and it feels like Europe is trying to find its place

between those two poles. And obviously, you know, those feelings are distinct between different

countries who have different approaches on technology. Europe is certainly not, you know,

one unified place. And even within those countries, there are obviously different groups that have

different opinions. But in this conversation, I wanted to try to distill some of those

conversations that I was having and some of the things that I was thinking after having those

conversations and reading a bit more about tech

politics in Europe with Tante, because he thinks a lot about these issues as well, and it happens

to be that he is European. You know, he's German, obviously, but I think it would be fair to say

that he has a better grasp on these things than I do, being that I come from North America.

But since we were in Europe, because this

episode was recorded live at Republica, a tech conference that happens in Berlin every year and

where I was speaking it about data centers and Tante was speaking about innovation, that it seemed

like a good opportunity since we were there, since we were recording it live in Berlin,

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