you need to have some alternative or like, you need to get, you have Genie Morozov on the phone

and have him design a new tech industry for you or something like, because right now,

the right-wingers are trying to do it, however self-servingly and clumsily. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is returning friend of the show,

Jacob Silverman.

Jacob is the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book, Easy Money, cryptocurrency, casino capitalism, and the

Golden Age of Fraud. He's also an independent journalist who's written for a bunch of different

publications and the host of The Naked Emperor on CBC Podcasts. Now, Jacob recently wrote an article in The Nation about Rumble,

this right-wing video platform that you may have heard of or may not have heard of, that

is becoming increasingly influential, not just in the right, but beyond that as well, as

it uses, you know, the money that it has to bring on a lot of popular, especially right wing, but also

to a certain degree people who would traditionally identify themselves as being on the left, but

have kind of caught on to this big kind of trend of conspiracy theories over the past few years,

whether it's anti-vax or a number of other things, or, you know, they claim to be on the left but

frequently attack liberalism and their critiques line up very well with the right wing, so they're

kind of convenient allies for them to have. And of course, they don't often do much criticizing

of the right itself. So in this conversation, I wanted to understand, you know, what this platform was all about, why it seems to be doing well when so many other kind of right-wing efforts to start social media platforms have failed, things like Parlor, for example, or truth social. You know, it's still out there, but no one really uses it. And also how these people on the right who have a lot of money are able to

deploy that capital to make kind of media projects get attention, even if they don't have

a business model that makes sense, right? Unlike the left where there's not all of this money that's

just easily available and can fund these media initiatives. On the

right, there are a bunch of very wealthy funders who will fund a bunch of things to keep them going

to try to make them influential, even if they're not actually making money, right? And so I thought

...