If you want to have a skeptical engagement with Silicon Valley rhetoric, it's really important to look at what isn't being shown.

And inevitably, it is the workers. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Anna Lee Newitz.

Anna Lee is an author who's written a bunch of incredible books.

Their most recent nonfiction book is Forlost Cities, a secret history of the urban age, and their most recent fiction book is the future of another timeline.

Anna Lee is also the co-host of Our Opinions Are Correct, and they write for New York Times opinion and new scientists.

Since Anna Lee is not only an author of science fiction, but also has a great knowledge of the genre and its history from their

journalistic and research work. In this week's conversation, we decided to dig into the relationship

between Silicon Valley and science fiction and how, you know, some of these powerful people

in the tech industry think about science fiction and use science

fiction to justify their companies, their business models, and the futures that they're trying

to sell us. You know, obviously this year we saw Mark Zuckerberg promoting the metaverse,

which is based on ideas from Neil Stevens' 1992 novel Snow Crash, but I think is also drawing from Ready Player

1, which we discussed with Brian Merchant earlier this year. But on top of that, we also see,

you know, people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos drawing from science fiction to justify

their grand plans for our futures in space. We see people like Peter Thiel drawing from the Lord of the Rings,

a fantasy series, in naming his businesses and inspiring some of his worldview. And we even see it in

smaller companies like Soylent, which you may remember from a few years ago, that was essentially

like a meal replacement drink so you could drink

this, keep working and not have to cook anything. And the name of that came from a science fiction

film called Soilank Green from the 1970s. So you can see that there are a lot of connections between

the tech industry and Silicon Valley. And that is probably not a surprise, given that a lot of these people grew up

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