We are at this stage where Macron's tactics to prevent the far right to win the next presidential election is actually to endorse the far right himself.

So it's a very fucked up moment in French politics and a lot of people are fairly concerned.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and I have a fascinating interview for you today. As you know, the show often focuses on things that are happening in North America, in part because I'm here, but also, you know, because Silicon Valley is obviously in the United States. But there are also fascinating things happening in other parts of the world that I do want to look at a bit more. And so in this

conversation, I'm talking to Nastasia Ajaji. Nastasia is a journalist looking at the tech

industry from a political economy lens. And she's also the author of No Crypto,

Como Bitcoin Enfoute La Plan Planet, which is, of course,

a French book. In this week's conversation, we're talking about what has been going on in France,

and in particular, the policy that Emmanuel Macron put forward in 2017 that he called

the Startup Nation. This was his goal to not only make France a destination for tech

investment, but also to remake the government itself so that it acted more like a startup. What followed

was a neoliberal assault on the public sector and on the state and its capacities. And I think that this example serves as a really

important look at the way that the tech industry not only benefits from, but almost requires

these neoliberal policies that erode what the government can do so that the tech industry can

move into those spaces and take them over. It doesn't mean that

those processes then get better or more efficient as the tech industry promises us, but it

requires those narratives to get us to buy into the program in the first place. You can see similar

processes in other countries that have sought to attract tech investment. But I think that the

French example is really interesting because a lot of this happened in such a condensed period and

such a more recent period, whereas when we're talking about the United States, you know,

we're probably going back to like the Clinton administration and the policies that were put in

place in that moment around the privatization of the administration and the policies that were put in place in that moment

around the privatization of the internet and the narratives around how the internet was going to

...