What's closer to the truth is that they have been right-wingers all along, and that the so-called heel turn, you know, because they haven't received enough praise, is like a very convenient fiction.

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

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and before we get to this week's episode, I feel like there's something I need to clarify from last week.

It seems that some listeners don't think I was equivocal enough in saying that Elon Musk was definitely doing a Nazi salute. So if you have any doubt about that, I just want to make it

very clear that that is what I think. And what I was trying to get to with the comment that I was

making about his Nazi salute is that I think on the one hand,

yes, he was very much doing a Nazi salute that was a message to his supporters, to MAGA supporters,

to show that he is on their side and that this is the kind of program that they are trying to move

forward on. But then alongside that, he can also take advantage of that moment to start trolling the libs and saying, of course I wasn't doing a Nazi salute.

Why would you even suggest that?

Anyone who suggests it is clearly buying into some like conspiracy theories or whatever.

So it works for him on both sides of this, which is not to say it wasn't a Nazi salute, but just to say that there are different ways to read it and different

ways that it is useful to him, even though he has done it to use it in a certain way. So anyway,

just so that is out of the way and you're clear on how I feel about it. If you want to know more,

I've also written something about it that you can find in the show notes. So with that said, this week my guest is Chris Gilliard.

Chris has been on the show in the past. He is the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, Luxury Surveillance, which will be out

through MIT Press in 2026. Now, in this episode, we are not actually talking about some of his

work specifically, but a book that came out near the end of last year called Cyber Libertarianism, the Right Wing Politics of Digital Technology, written by David

Columbia.

Now, David unfortunately passed away in 2023 of cancer, so he can't be here to actually

talk about this book with us.

And so since Chris knew him well, since they collaborated together, I felt like it would

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