We need to be thinking about how we reduce our dependence on the U.S.

and the ability of the U.S. government to wield its power over these, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week, well, there's no guest.

I figured this is the first new episode of 2026, and I thought it would be a good moment to kind of set the stage

for what I think this year is going to look like for Tech Won't Save Us, the kind of topics

that I want to focus on. And that means seizing this episode for myself to talk about some of the

things that I think are going on right now and some of the things that I will be paying attention

to and that I will be probably doing a fair number of episodes on through this year that you might be interested in.

Before we get a replay episodes that we did from last year to kind of get us into this year,

refresh us a bit on some of the topics that we were talking about last year, and those are, of course,

the interviews with Liz Pelly and Karen Howe on streaming services and Spotify and the music industry,

and then, of course, on the AI industry, Open AI, and the whole kind of vision for what this

future that Sam Altman and these AI companies have, and how that really does not

work for us. So I thought that they were great episodes to recap the year and some of the key

topics that we were talking about, and of course, things that still remain relevant moving

into 2026. It also helped me to get a little bit of a break and to get some edits done on my

book before I got back into recording

more podcast episodes. And I did initially have an interview recorded for this week, but as you'll

hear about very shortly, because of events that happened, I figured it was worth taking

this episode to talk about some bigger issues. And then, of course, you'll hear that next week as we

kick off the new interviews of 2026. So before we get into that, of course, I would just say that

if you do enjoy the podcast, if you do enjoy these critical in-depth, usually conversations, or

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