Instead of taking an almost psychedelic trip together as a society, we used digital technology more like steroids or speed in order to double down on extractive corporate capitalism.

Music Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Douglas Roshkopf.

Douglas is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. He's the author of many books, including most recently Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

You might have heard me talk about it on our recent episode with Dave Karp. Douglas is also the host of the Team

Human podcast, which I appeared on a few months ago to talk about my book and had a fantastic

discussion with Douglas about it. I'm very excited to have Douglas on the show because he's been

writing critically about the tech industry for quite a long time. And I feel like this most recent

book of his, Survival of the Richest, not only digs

into some of these escape fantasies of the billionaires, you know, as they look at the

consequences of the societies that they're creating and try to find escape routes instead of

actually solving the problems that they are creating, but it also digs into the broader

mindset of the tech industry and the people

who are on top of it and how things went so wrong from those kind of early ideals around what

the internet and these tech companies were actually going to do to society. And I feel like in some

ways it's also, Douglas is able to reflect on these things as he's

been writing about them, commenting on them, watching them unfold over these past couple of decades.

So I really enjoyed the book, and I was very excited and happy to talk to Douglas about it, to

dig into it with him, to draw some parallels between the things that he was observing early on, you know,

as the internet revolution, so to speak, was taking off and these companies were being formed

in the dot-com boom period, and then linking that up to things that we've been seeing more recently,

both in the tech economy, but also among these really wealthy people who have benefited

from that explosion of capitalist wealth creation that followed the internet and how their

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