Episode description

Playing for Team Human today, recorded live on the floor at the Personal Democracy Forum 2018, are Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff. Moira and Ben will be showing us how the tech industry’s promise to build less harmful products and programs is just capitalism’s way of proving that love means never having to say, “I’m sorry.”

Moira and Ben co-wrote the brilliant feature article in the Guardian, “Why Silicon Valley Can’t Fix Itself”

Just last week, Ben’s exposé and interview with an anonymous worker/organizer at Google revealed the internal fight led by workers against Google’s contracting with the Pentagon on Project Maven, a weaponized use of Google’s AI and cloud computing technology. The interview, published June 6th, can be found at Jacobin magazine: Tech Workers Versus the Pentagon 

Ben’s articles in the Guardian and Jacobin have been disrupting tech industry gospel for the past decade. He is also the author of The Bohemians.

Moira Weigel is a postdoc at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her recent book Labor of Love; The Invention of Dating looks at the commodification of courtship under consumer capitalism. 

Moira and Ben are editors of Logic, a print and digital magazine which features thought provoking journalism on technology. Like Team Human, Logic strives to host a “better conversation” about technology… learn more and subscribe here: https://logicmag.io/

Douglas opens the show with a monologue unpacking the bizarre news of the past week; G7, trade wars, and North Korea.

On today’s show you heard intro and outro music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord records, R.U. Sirius’s President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run On Time, and a Team Human original by Stephen Bartolomei. 

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