What the history of technology teaches us is that it always enables things that people already wanted to do and people were already doing.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that's pretty concerned about how governments are using technology around the world.

I'm your host, Paris Marx, and today I'm speaking with Banu Subramaniam and Debjani Batacharya.

Banu is a professor of women gender sexuality

studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Holy Science, the Biopolitics of

Hindu Nationalism. Debjani is an assistant professor of history at Drexel University and the author

of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta,

The Making of Calcutta. In this episode, we talk about two recent articles that they co-wrote about

the response to COVID-19 in India that are really relevant to our discussions on this podcast

because they concern how technology is being used

in that response. And those articles are techno-fascism in India published by N-plus-1,

and viral education, scientific lessons from India's WhatsApp University published at Somatosphere.

Before we get into the conversation, I just want to note a few of the words and abbreviations that we use.

The Arrogia Setu is the contact tracing app that was rolled out in India.

It is defined in the episode, but it's mentioned a couple times before that actually happened,

so just so you know what is being referred to.

There's also reference to the BJP, which if you're not

familiar with Indian politics, is the right-wing political party of Narendra Modi, who is the current

prime minister. And then, of course, we also mentioned the CIA, which is the Central Intelligence

Agency in the United States, and the IDF, which is the Israel Defense Forces, essentially the

military in Israel.

And finally, if you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts

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