I'm laughing a lot.

It is a dark humor.

It's like I am laughing into the void because banking on the ineptitude of would-be authoritarians

is one of the few things we've got right now, other than organizing, other than calling

the stuff out when we can.

So it is both comical and bleak and sort of terrifying all at once.

Hello and welcome to the 250th episode of Tech Won't Save Us.

I can't believe I'm saying that, and I can't believe what kind of episode this has to be because of the news that is happening right now.

The show is obviously made in partnership with The Nation magazine, and what an episode it is. I have a familiar guest for you, Brian Merchant, who, if you've

been listening to the show for quite a while, you will be used to hearing him, though he hasn't

been on for a while, actually, and we're going to have to change that. Brian is a long-time tech

writer and the author of Blood in the Machine, which if you haven't read,

you should probably go check out.

So first, let me say, I can't believe it's the 250th episode of this show.

If you had told me back in April of 2020 that I would still be doing this now and that it

would be what it is, I would probably be pretty surprised, I think.

But that's not to say that I don't love what the show has become. And I feel like, if anything, tech won't save us is just becoming more necessary now

as we head into a second Trump presidency that has such a significant backing from the tech industry,

a tech industry that is looking to remake the American government to ensure that they can do whatever

they want to do over the next four years and beyond. A couple weeks ago, I had Jacob Silverman

on the show to talk about what we learned about the tech industry through the last several months

as this election campaign has been escalating and as more people from the tech industry have

...