Big Tech S3E11: Naomi Klein On Entering the Tech Governance Debate

April 15, 2021

Listen to this week’s new episode of Big Tech, where Taylor Owen speaks to author, social activist and filmmaker, Naomi Klein on her rising concern about how tech companies are positioning themselves as essential services and capitalizing on this moment to enter new sectors, with little pushback.

Global technology companies that power websites and services, like Amazon and Microsoft, and platforms, like Facebook and Google, have created spaces and tools that allow corporations, states and themselves to exert power in many sectors of our lives.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Naomi Klein, author, social activist and filmmaker. Over her two decades of work, books such as No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism have, in many respects, foreshadowed the rise of big tech. For example, No Logo, published in 1999, long before the rise of Instagram and the influencer economy, examined the marketing trend of making citizens an extension of the corporations’ brand.

Recently, Klein has been raising concerns about how tech companies are positioning themselves as essential services and capitalizing on this moment to enter new sectors, with little pushback. For example, Klein explains how the education sector rushed to platforms to enable virtual learning at the start of the pandemic: “I wish public universities had been better prepared with our own technologies.” The education space is one example of how the public space is being eroded. “If we are going to be using these platforms, we have to be serious about developing public sector, common-space alternatives to these private platforms. I don’t think we did do that. And so, they moved very quickly. Shock Doctrine–style.”

While this situation may seem bleak, Klein does see a silver lining: “We probably would have ended up in this place in 10 years, and instead, we got there in a matter of months,” Klein says, in reference to the pandemic’s shelter-at-home and work-from-home orders around the world. “And we probably would have boiled slowly. And now I feel like we’re jumping around in this pot going, ‘This is terrible.’” This rapid shift has enabled us, as a society, to see more clearly how technology is impacting our lives, presenting an opportunity to course-correct.