Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free,

but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

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

I'm your host, Paris Marks.

And you might be thinking, hey, this isn't a usual episode.

This isn't dropping on Thursday.

And you would be exactly right if you thought that.

On Friday, March 8th, I did a live stream with Edong Wazzo Jr. and Brian Merchant, people who you will be very familiar with from the podcast where we discussed the new Dune Part 2 film.

And of course, you know, the first one made by Denny Villeneuve.

And also connected the story of Dune to, you know, the larger resurgence of the Luddites that we've been experiencing over the past few years now, I guess. Because in the Dune universe, there is, you know, this kind

of foundational event called the Butlerian jihad, where people destroy the thinking machines or

the intelligent machines that are taking over, and that really sets the technological

foundation for this world that we see in Denise films and, of course, read about in the books

by Frank Herbert. And that occurs 10,000 years before the events of the story of Dune. So this

recording might not sound as good as the usual episode, because it is just what we recorded live. And then Eric, my producer, cleaned it up a little bit. But if you are into the Dune film, you might still find it interesting. So I figured it was worth kind of putting it on the podcast feed here. So you can check it out. If you do just want to watch us on YouTube, you can of course find the link in the show notes to do that.

We spend about the first half of the conversation talking about our thoughts on the film itself,

you know, whether we liked it, the aspects of it that we thought were interesting and kind of

connected to these larger conversations that we're having around technology today.

And then we pivot into that deeper conversation about how it relates to

the Luddites and how it relates to the more critical perspectives that people have on technology

today. And, you know, what it means to have stories like this reflected in science fiction,

even if, of course, you know, the Denisville Nove films don't focus so much on the butlerian jihad or don't

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