Some of the largest companies in the world that are barely suppressed monopolies that I think do harm, and also I just in general don't like, are going to burn themselves to the ground trying to force everyone to use a product that nobody wants to use. That is fucking funny.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Dave Karp.

Dave is an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the author of two books, The Move On Effect and Analytic Activism.

In this conversation, we talk about a lot of things.

It's a really wide-ranging discussion, but one that I really enjoyed, and I think that you're really going to enjoy as well. We start by discussing the history of VR, and in particular, a project that Dave embarked on where he read through all of Wired magazine since its beginning back in the early 1990s. And what he learned about,

you know, the wired ideology over that time, how it approached technology, its constant interest

in, you know, the next big thing, and then how those futures, those supposed ways that

technology was going to make the world so much better, just wouldn't arrive

and would flame out, and then there'd have to be a new thing to kind of pick up on it. We discuss

science fiction and how so many of these tech founders and tech leaders are inspired by

these particular visions, but also how they're really narrow, right, in the kind of worlds that they prescribe to us and lead the tech elite to try to realize.

We talk a lot about the really dystopian futures that those tech leaders are trying to bring into being, right?

And how they imagine them to be positive things for themselves while trying to carve the rest of us out of any kind

of good society, right? They're trying to escape the consequences of their own actions,

something that Douglas Rushkoff has written about in his recent book and that we discuss in

this conversation and how that's really not about trying to create a better world, but just

to insulate them from

the consequences of their actions, really. And we wrap up by talking about the Metaverse,

you know, Mark Zuckerberg's big plan for this virtual world, what is actually going to look

like, and how people like Zuckerberg and even Elon Musk with Twitter are burning massive amounts of money

right now in really poorly thought through plays for their idea of what the future or how we

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