Hard Reset Podcast

What do delivery drivers, software engineers, journalists, and concessions workers have in common? With increasing frequency, they’re no longer working directly for the companies who rely on their labor. Instead, they’re being funneled to subcontracted companies, who offer inferior benefits—or they’re asked to be independent contractors, who are often paid far less than full-time employees and ess...

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it. So you know, tech workers used to be the princes of labor, right? There’s a National Bureau of Economic Research study that pegged the average contribution of a Silicon Valley tech worker to their employers’ bottom line at about a million dollars per worker per year. That’s why tech workplaces were whimsical campuses with free kombu...

A lot of folks have left media over the years to go work in other industries — technology, communications, politics come to mind. It’s a pretty well-trod route, and one that has only grown more common as the news business has struggled. You take the hard-earned experience you gained in the trenches as a reporter, editor or leader, and cash it in for a position with more stability, maybe more comfo...

Twenty years after the preventable horrors of Hurricane Katrina, the advocacy organization MediaJustice —which challenges how corporations and governments use media and technology to shape our collective future—embarked on a research project to report on how communities of color in the South are continuing to be neglected and harmed by our elected leadership and by corporate power. We’ve spoken at...

This past week, President Trump hosted the who’s who of Big Tech at the White House. The videos are weird . As I watched, I wondered how long it will take for these CEOs to regret this display. The gathering didn’t muster nearly the level of shock and outrage among industry watchers that accompanied a similar conclave at Trump tower in December 2016. Less than a year after Trump won reelection, it...

Is A.I. beginning to affect the job market? A couple of studies that were released in the last week say so. A Stanford analysis, somewhat provocatively titled “ Canaries in the Coal Mine? ”, found a 13 percent decline in employment rates among early-career workers in sectors most vulnerable to A.I. And researchers at the St. Louis Fed found that higher rates of A.I. adoption by industry were direc...

Back in May, we sat down to interview Juan Sebastián Pinto , a writer and former strategist at Palantir. Just a few days after that interview, the New York Times came out with a piece about how the Trump administration is using Palantir to compose data profiles on Americans—and a few weeks after that , the protests against ICE broke out, where people started burning Waymo vehicles in a symbolic pr...