By disrupting the news media, you're disrupting it to your benefit and to make a more sycophantic tech coverage at a time when tech coverage is maybe being a little more skeptical of your claims than you would like.

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

Owen is a freelance journalist who's written for Business Insider, The Intercept among a number of other publications.

And he also writes on Substack under The Flashpoint, and you can find a link to that in the show notes. In April, Owen wrote an article for Business

Insider about how wealthy venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are increasingly investing in

and getting involved in media efforts. Last week, Andrewsson Horowitz launched its future blog,

which is kind of designed to promote a kind of techno-solutionist, techno-optimistic narrative on Silicon

Valley in response to what it perceives as a more critical media, a media that is publishing more

critical stories about the tech industry

and the companies that it's invested in. And so it wants to kind of push back on that with a

positive vision and a positive message. And so in this conversation, Owen and I talk about

what these venture capitalists are trying to achieve with these media investments, what has changed in tech

reporting to make them feel that they need to do this, and how this differs from how wealthy

people have invested in the media in the past, and in particular, even how there is still a, you know,

a different way of trying to get public opinion to reflect the ideas that you know

you want to see in the world as a really wealthy person as a billionaire. And Owen kind of draws

a distinction between what someone like Mark Andreessen is doing with his future blog and his

investments in substack and clubhouse and things like that. And then what Jeff Bezos is doing

by buying the Washington Post and putting a lot of money into that publication. So I think this is going to be a

really interesting conversation and will help to kind of inform us as we think about what wealthy

people in the tech industry are trying to achieve when they get involved in these media efforts.

Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of

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