The thing that really drew me to the Luddites was understanding and seeing how they really embodied

that form of like sociotechnical knowledge and did so in a way that followed its conclusions to

their radical end.

Yeah. their radical in. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation

Magazine.

I'm your host,

Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jathan Sadowski. Jathan has been on the show before, but it's been a little while.

But he has a new book out called The Mechanic and the Luddite, so I knew I had to have him back on the show so we could discuss it.

Jathan, of course, is also a co-host of this machine kills and a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. Jathan's book is great for many reasons because

it digs into how so many different technologies and forms of technology affect our lives today.

But one of the things that I've really wanted to focus on in this interview, and it's kind of in the title of the book itself, is the way that Jathan frames how we should be thinking about technology, the approach that we should be taking to assessing how technologies affect our lives, how they actually work, and so that we can develop this critical, one might say, Luddite perspective that we need to

have in order to be able to grapple with the serious ways that all of these things being pushed

out from Silicon Valley and, you know, the wider tech industry are affecting and in many ways

degrading how we live. And so while there were many things I could have picked out of Jathan's

book for us to

discuss in this interview to dig in with because he does so much great work on technology

in the tech industry and actually looking into those wider impacts, I thought it would be a good

idea to explore that aspect of the book, maybe to help people to develop better skills at

assessing the technologies that they run to in their lives,

to start thinking through these important questions about how technologies are built,

about how technologies work, about the broader social repercussions that come of rolling,

you know, so many of these systems out into our society, and how there are certain ways of approaching them

...