CBC’s Spark on Solutionism & Mutual Aid

Nora Taylor, host of CBC Radio’s Spark radio show and podcast, invited me on to discuss early pandemic-era efforts to organize mutual aid efforts through the same corporate productivity tools remote workers relied on to continue business-as-usual: Slack, AirTable, Google Docs, and more. I’m in good company:

Big Tech aims to solve large social issues, from housing to urban transportation. We discuss tech solutionism with Paris Marx, host of Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. And, with massive layoffs happening all over Silicon Valley, and the sale of Twitter throwing social media into chaos, is it time to rekindle the cooperatives movement in tech? Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at University of Colorado, Boulder and director of the Media Enterprise Design Lab, talks about tech co-ops. Then, Greg Lindsay, urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech University and a senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collective, talks about peer-to-peer solutions focused on mutualism and solidarity in times of crisis.

Listen to the whole episode here.