Former Google PR chief Jessica Powell: "Light-sabre aerobics"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2018

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

TheThe Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jessica Powell, former Google communications chief, to talk about her new satire of Silicon Valley, The Big Disruption (2:35), how at her old job she called a hookup site a “meeting platform” (5:55), when noone was interested in a Silicon Valley satire (8:00), the lack of nuance in the industry’s perception (9:20), the growing number of critics (12:40), problem of the tech industry’s ‘sameness’ (14:30), how living in London made her look differently at the industry (20:45), the great oatmeal revolt (24:30), what made her leave and publish the book (26:00), the risk in criticising her own industry (29:55), the most urgent changes required (31:40), the value of diversity (34:15), how free speech is vaunted but devalued (37:25), and her most quintessential Silicon Valley moment (40:40).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo!
0:01.0	Technology.
0:02.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	If you're constantly processing everything as data, and you say we have a billion, we
0:09.0	have a million, we have whatever it is, and we have this percentage of stuff that we have to deal with,
0:13.0	it's reasonable to say, all right, we have to solve this at scale.
0:17.0	We can't solve this with humans, right?
0:19.0	The thing is, you actually could.
0:30.9	Hello and welcome to this very special bonus episode of Danny in the Valley.
0:36.9	That voice you just heard is Jessica Powell, who used to run communications for Google,
0:38.8	but she quit about a year ago,
0:45.7	and she has now published a satirical novel about Silicon Valley. And it is, shall we say,
0:52.8	painfully on the nose. So the book follows the adventures of a prince of a far-flung country called Pira, who ends up as a product manager
0:57.1	inside a fictional tech giant called Anahatta, which is run by, surprise, surprise, an awkward
1:03.3	data-obsessed chief executive.
1:06.4	It has a whole moon colony angle, there's plenty of misogyny, lots of organic potato chips and Red Bull,
1:12.9	and my personal favorite,
1:14.9	an app called Moodyfy,
1:16.8	which helps people find each other based on their mood.
1:21.7	The novel, which Powell very appropriately,
1:25.3	very on-brand,
1:26.5	she published it not physically, but on the website
	...

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