The Anti-Dystopians

For this week’s episode, Alina Utrata talked to Julia Rone, a post-doc at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at Cambridge University . They discussed the rise of the European far-right online—what's the relationship between online disinformation and political mobilization? Why is the far-right so much better at mobilizing online than the far-left? Can platforms or content moderation...

2020 was one hell of a year (literally). Alina Utrata, Mallika Balakrishnan and Kyra Jasper break down some of the things that happened in 2020’s technology politics—from the Trump Twitter ban, to content moderation, contact tracing and conspiracy theories, to how we design digital spaces that empower communities and bottom-up approaches to digital justice.  Follow Alina Utrata on Twitter . F...

Alina Utrata talks to Mallika Balakrishnan, one of the original founders of the collective No Tech for Tyrants. They discuss tech activism, problems with Palantir and how centering the conversation around the people and communities that tech and policies impact can help us frame discussions of technology and politics.  Tweet at Alina Tweet at Mallika Articles Mentioned In this Podcast A repor...

Anjali Katta and Alina Utrata talk about the Big Tech issues a Biden Administration will inherit, from the FTC and DOJ anti-monopoly cases against Facebook and Google to the DoD’s cloud computing contract JEDI. They also discuss links between many Biden Administration officials and the tech industry. To sign up for the email newsletter of the Anti-Dystopians, click here . CORRECTION: When talking...

Alina Utrata talks to Stefanie Felsberger, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University, about her research on surveillance, data flows and mensuration tracking apps. They discuss how colonization impacted the development of surveillance technologies, why we think (or shouldn’t think) about data as a commodity instead of labor, and how the ownership of knowledge about female bodies has translated into...

Alina Utrata talks with Andrew Granato about the so-called Philosopher King of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the original co-founders of Paypal, nicknamed the Paypal mafia, a co-founder of the data analytics firm Palantir, one of the first outside investors in Facebook, and the first high-level tech executive to come out in support of Donald Trump in 2016. Andrew’s researc...

For the first episode of the Anti-Dystopians, Kyra Jasper and Alina Utrata discuss the politics of anti-monopoly in tackling technology companies, focusing on the United States. October turned out to be a very significant month for Big Tech in the US. First, the US House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee released a report on Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google that found those companies had m...

The Anti-Dystopians is the politics podcast about tech. We'll be discussing questions, like: is social media really destroying democracy? Should Facebook be considered a public utility? How does crytpocurrency affect state sovereignty? And what exactly  is surveillance capitalism? For all your political questions about tech, mark your calendars for the launch of the Anti-Dystopians. Nowhere L...