Corporate platforms, as they exist today, are essentially value-capture devices.

They'd rather be the troll under the bridge than the kid with the lemonade stand.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is James Muldoon.

James is the author of Platform Socialism, How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, and it comes out on January 20th from Pluto Press.

You can find a link in the show notes if you want to pre-order or buy it.

He's also a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and the head of digital research at the autonomy think tank.

As you can probably guess, our conversation today revolves around James's book, Platform

Socialism.

We dig into the concepts that he discusses in the book,

and what a better approach to platforms that serves the public good over the profit motive of

these major corporations might look like. And that involves, you know, a lot of important

topics, whether these platforms are really serving the community, as they often claim,

whether antitrust and

competition is the best way to approach this problem, and what dealing with the issue of platforms

looks like on several different levels. You know, the municipal level and what happens in cities,

the national level, and also the international level, recognizing that while many of the platforms

that we rely on are based in the United States, just having the U.S. and people in the United States

decide what happens with them if they continue to be international is not an equitable

or just approach to the governance of platforms. That international

question needs to be dealt with. So this is a really great conversation and I really enjoy James's

book. I would highly recommend picking it up if you're interested in these topics, which I think

many of you will be. So definitely consider grabbing a copy. Tech Won't Save Us is part of

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