Today I am delighted to welcome activist and scholar Erin McElroy to the podcast. She is the author of a remarkable book, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies in Postsocialist Times. At the center of this rich and provocative study is the Romanian city of Cluj, which has been dubbed the “Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.”  McElroy untangles this notion by going back to the socialist period, whose technological advances made Romania a particularly attractive site for foreign tech investment after the fall of Communism. Erin explains how the arrival of what were called “digital nomads” into Cluj was first made possible by the brutal eviction of its Roma population.  As enticing as it is to map these evictions to similar displacements of racial minorities and the poor in the San Francisco Bay Area, Erin explores the fissures and disconnects between the two cases, as well as their eerie convergences. We end by, as McElroy writes, “reflecting on what bringing abolitionist and ant- imperial geographies together in post-socialist contexts can do. Just as global capital connections mapped the Siliconizing moment, other connections scaffold the very possibilities of unbecoming Silicon Valley.”

Erin McElroy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, fascism, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024) and coeditor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021). Additionally, McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. At UW, McElroy runs Landlord Tech Watch and the Anti-Eviction Lab which produce collaborative research and collective knowledge focused on intersections of property, surveillance, technocapitalism, and technolibertarianism.

Today I am both excited and frightened to talk with Tamara Kneese and Xiaowei Wang, two individuals whose research, writing, and activism has for years insisted on the materiality of the technologies that have brought us things like artificial intelligence, the Cloud, data centers, and digital agriculture.  They explain why and how these technologies clothe themselves in ethereal garb and notions of a frictionless, beneficent capitalism while diverting attention from the vast natural and human resources they plunder to make a profit, and colonize more and more land, water, and minerals. We move from corrective histories and analyses to case histories that show how  these technologies materialize in settler colonial practices, and end decisively on stories of how people are fighting back, and creating alternate software, hardware, and cultural and social practices that offer a window onto a much less violent and dismal world than the one technofascism wants us to be hypnotized by.  Here, we set to break that spell.

Tamara Kneese directs Data & Society Research Institute’s Climate, Justice, and Technology program and previously led the Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab. Before joining D&S, she was director of developer engagement on the Green Software team at Intel and assistant professor of Media Studies and director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond (Yale University Press, 2023), co-author of Notes Toward a Digital Workers’ Inquiry (Common Notions Press, 2025), and the co-editor of The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century (School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press, 2022). Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Communication and in popular outlets such as Wired, The Verge, and The Baffler. Her research has been supported by the Internet Society Foundation, National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside, a 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award winner. Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15 years sits at the intersection of tech, digital media, art, and environmental justice. Currently, they are a Mancosh Fellow at Northwestern University and one of the stewards of Collective Action School (formerly known as Logic School), an organizing community for tech workers. In 2024 they were a Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow, which supported their work with forms of soft data storage and transmission using textiles.

Today I talk with Omar Zahzah about his new book, Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital/Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. This is an immensely informative study, which details the convergence of Zionism, Silicon Valley Big Tech, and the US political and governmental elites in what Zahzah calls the hegemonic form of Zionism. He shows how capitalist profit motives and Zionist settler colonialism and  ethnic cleansing go hand in hand with attempts to censor, silence, and erase Palestinian voices and the voices of those who act in solidarity with Palestine.  Nevertheless, and crucially, Omar fills his book with accounts of how Palestinians have found ways to appropriate, repurpose, and deploy technology in ingenious, creative, and subversive ways that keep the movement alive and growing globally.

Omar Zahzah is a poet, writer, independent journalist, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University.

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place, investigative journalist Karen Hao explains that OpenAI is anything but “open”—very early on, it left behind that marketing tag to become increasingly closed and elitist.  Her massive study, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI had a rather different subtitle in its UK edition: “Inside the reckless race of total domination.” In our conversation we flesh out the overlap between these two points of emphasis. Hao argues that in general the AI mission “centralizes talent around a grand ambition” and “centralizes capital and other resources while eliminating roadblocks, regulation, and dissent.” All the while “the mission remains so vague that it can be interpreted and reinterpreted to direct the centralization of talent, capital, resources however the centralizer wants.”  Karen explains that she chose the word “empire” precisely to indicate the colonial nature of AI’s domination: the tremendous damage this enterprise does to the poor, to racial and ethnic minorities, and to the Global South in general in terms of minds, bodies, the environment, natural resources, and any notion of democracy.  This is a discussion everyone should be part of.

Karen Hao is a bestselling author and award-winning reporter covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. She was the first journalist to profile OpenAI and wrote a book, EMPIRE OF AI, about the company and its global implications, which became an instant New York Times bestseller. She writes for publications including The Atlantic and leads the Pulitzer Center’s AI Spotlight Series, a program training thousands of journalists around the world on how to cover AI. She was formerly a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering American and Chinese tech companies, and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review. Her work is regularly taught in universities and cited by governments. She has received numerous accolades for her coverage, including an American Humanist Media Award, an American National Magazine Award for Journalists Under 30, and the TIME100 AI. She received her Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Today I’m delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We take a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” We talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. Our wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump’s tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.

Ever since its publication, Abolish Silicon Valley—How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism has proven to be more urgent and insightful. Today I talk with author Wendy Liu about how developments like AI and LLM, further erosions of intellectual property, and increased invasions of privacy make the case for abolishing Silicon Valley even more important. We talk about how abolition is critical at a time when more and more the private sector has come to eviscerate the public good. Turning to the genocide in Gaza, we discuss the ways Capital has enlisted technology in deadly and horrific manners. We end with a meditation on the commons and how one can live with fewer commodities and find value in common projects to make life more valuable and worthwhile outside of the logic of the market.

Wendy Liu is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism, a memoir/manifesto about the tech industry from the perspective of a former believer. She lives in San Francisco and is working on a novel.

Today I talk with M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi about their dazzling and challenging book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072. They imagine a world haunted by genocide, ecocide, disease, fascism, and viral capitalism, but rather than writing a dystopian novel, O’Brien and Abdelhadi create a complex mosaic of oral histories, in which they each play the part of interviewer. The result is a story that far exceeds New York, and the twenty years noted in the title.  The histories cover generations across the globe, and reach into the deep sources of trauma, and the kinds of mutual care we will need to not only survive, but also to thrive in these frightening times.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, organizer and writer based in Chicago. She is co-author of “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072,” a revolutionary sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities, and she is a columnist at In These Times magazine where she writes on the Palestine Liberation movement and American politics. Eman organizes with the Salon Kawakib collective, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago, Scholars for Social Justice and other formations.

M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has written two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish.

Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements.

She currently works a psychotherapist in private practice and is a psychoanalyst in formation.

Worries about the so-called “pussification of Silicon Valley” are not at all new.  Becca Lewis’ work reaches far back in American history to trace the nexus of gender, technology, and entrepreneurship, such that what we find today seems a foregone conclusion. In today’s wide-ranging discussion we talk about the central figure in this history—George Gilder, whose first book, Sexual Suicide, and subsequent forays into technology, conservative politics, and capitalism included much of what we see today in things like the echo chambers of misinformation of Fox News and the alienated “freedom” of Elon Musk’s SpaceX City. Who are these men, who Becca says, “leave behind the messy physical flows of women’s bodies in favor of the streamlined capitalism of male genius”?

Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University Department of Communication and an incoming assistant professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her work examines the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online. In September 2024, she received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published flagship reports on far-right online broadcasting, media manipulation, and disinformation. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as The Guardian and Business Insider. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Sarah T Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. We talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. We end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.

Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a full professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Lindsay Weinberg and Robert Ovetz about the use of Artificial Intelligence in higher education. Under the guise of “personalizing” education and increasing efficiency, universities are increasingly sold on AI as a cure to their financial ills as public funds dry up and college applications drop.  Rather than maintain  that education is an essential public good that needs broad support, universities are looking to technology in ways that are changing the nature of education in dangerous and destructive ways.  As Lindsay writes in the book, Smart University,

“Higher education is becoming increasingly synonymous with digital surveillance in the United States. Advanced network infrastructure, internet-­ connected devices and sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID), data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) are being celebrated as a means of ushering in the age of “smart universities,” one where institutions can run their ­ services more efficiently and strengthen the quality of higher education using digital tools. However, as this book demonstrates, ­ these tools have a darker side. They allow public universities to respond to and perpetuate corporate logics of austerity, use student data to reduce risk of financial investment in the face of dwindling public resources, and track student be­hav­ior to encourage compliance with institutional metrics of success. Surveillance of student be­hav­ior forms the foundation ofthe smart university, often in ways that prove harmful to students—­ particularly ­ those who are already marginalized within the acad­emy.”

We talk about these issues, and attach them to critical issues of labor—everything from the outsourcing of the most dangerous work to laborers in the Global South, to the way university workers at all levels are subordinated to the logic that drives AI.  We end with a discussion of what we can and should do about it.

Dr. Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical associate professor in the Honors College at Purdue University, and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical impacts of digital technology. She is interested in the constitutive role that history and unequal power relations play in shaping the design, application, and reception of technological innovations.

Her work has appeared in Lateral, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Impost: A Journal of Critical and Creative Work, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Frontiers: International Journal of Study Abroad. Her book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (John Hopkins UP, 2024) examines the proliferation of digital tools for higher education governance, and their impacts on marginalized people within and beyond the university’s walls. She has been the recipient of internal and external grants to support research, seminars, and workshops concerning the justice-related implications of digital technology, including from the National Science Foundation, the Indiana Humanities, and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence.

Robert Ovetz, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science and teaches non-profit management and labor relations in the Master of Public Administration program at San José State University. He is the author and editor of four books, including We the Elites (Pluto, 2022), and the forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs and Capitalism to be published in 2025 by Haymarket Press. Robert writes regularly for Dollars & Sense magazine.