So it's not just that these capabilities don't exist in-house to do this in-house,

but also that the government has lost capacity often to assess whether what companies are saying to them makes sense. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Rosie Collington.

Rosie is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London,

and the co-author of the Big Con, How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes

Our Governments, and warps our economies with Mariana Masukato. And that is in the process

of coming out in the U.S. and the UK. There are different dates in each jurisdiction, but it'll be out soon if it's not out in your country yet.

I was really excited to talk to Rosie because she's done research on some topics that I find

really interesting.

In particular, I wanted to find out what the impact of tech has been on our governments

over the past couple of decades, especially as we've

had these narratives that anything that has to do with computers and technology has to be done

by the private sector, right? This is something that Silicon Valley and the wider tech industry

has been pushing for quite a while now. And this has obviously influenced the way that our

governments approach technology, especially during a period of neoliberalism. for quite a while now. And this has obviously influenced the way that our government's approach

technology, especially during a period of neoliberalism when there was this process of reducing

the scope of what government actually does and handing more of it over to the private sector.

And so this has obviously had consequences, not just for the ability for governments to run themselves effectively

and to respond to the needs of the public, but it has also affected public institutions, right,

that we expect to deliver services to us, to serve us properly, in particular in the healthcare

system, where there's a greater focus on using more tools developed by private

tech companies instead of developing these digital technologies publicly to ensure that

the technologies themselves, how they're developed, the capabilities that are within them,

...