We do tend to assume that technology is inherently progressive.

And I think it's really difficult to take away that facade and not only to say that technology can have unintended reactionary consequences, but also that there are people who are specifically building and using them towards reactionary ends.

Music specifically building and using them towards reactionary ends.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Usos made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks.

Last week, we celebrated 250 episodes of the show, and we had to reckon with some political developments that have been happening.

But this week, I have such a fascinating conversation for you that I think really gets to the heart of what this show is trying to do, right?

In trying to interrogate the politics of the tech industry, but also understand where

these things have come from and how ideas that have been around for a long time, how movements

that have been pushing these particular ideas for a long

time have influenced what we're dealing with today in ways that sometimes we don't even recognize.

And so my guest this week is Becca Lewis. Becca just finished her PhD. She is now a postdoctoral

research fellow at Stanford University. And so I had the great pleasure of being able to read

Becca's dissertation, which is not something that you usually say about a doctoral dissertation. Let's be

clear about that. But it was absolutely fascinating because it gets into the right-wing movements

that were organizing around computation and digital technologies and the

internet in the 1980s and 1990s and ultimately had a very significant impact on the way that we

think about these technologies and also the policy responses that existed to them and the

deregulation that happened in the 1990s that have

gone on to significantly shape not just how we think about these technologies today, but things

that are actually happening in this moment. And when we look back at the types of ideas that the

leaders of these movements, people like George Gilder and Newt Gingrich,

...