My position is that the future has been halted by the tech industry.

It's presenting itself as giving us the future, but what it's really doing is preventing the future.

And so in order for us to actually craft a future for computation, we have to circumvent or somehow deal with them.

Music Hello and welcome.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dwayne Monroe.

Dwayne is a cloud technologist and aspiring Marxist theorist of technology with 20 years of experience architecting large-scale computational systems.

In this week's conversation, we talk about the cloud, this set of data centers that covers the world, but that because of the name we use to refer to it,

makes it sound as though, you know, when we access all these things online, we're just pulling this data and transmitting this data that just kind of floats out there in this ethereal way,

when actually there's a huge material footprint to that with a ton of workers, with a ton of

server farms, with a ton of energy use, and all of these things that come with it.

I really enjoyed this conversation because Dwayne has personal experience working in these data centers, but also has been working with cloud solutions for a long time.

And so he has a lot of insights to bring to this conversation from those periods and from

those experiences. And so we talk a lot about, you know, how the cloud, how this infrastructure

came to be, what its impacts have been in encouraging different types of computation, in

encouraging companies that are supposedly building these AI solutions, these thinking computers,

and whether that is an accurate representation of what is actually going on here, as well as

where this might be going in the future and how we should think about responding to it.

Just because this infrastructure exists, is it something that we should seek to dismantle

in favor of a more decentralized

computational process? Or should we instead be thinking about the types of regulations that

should be taken in order to rein these things in, in order to make them serve the public,

...