A small group of high-tech-savvy entrepreneurs who understand the velocity of technological innovation have harnessed this new power to establish predatory high-tech monopolies such as Uber or Amazon. They subvert labor laws, strip the state of its powers, gut regulation, ignore legal norms and amass personal fortunes in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Their apps, services and private equity firms dominate our lives. They are technological predators seeing in every aspect of social existence commodification. The living wages of working people decline, the gig economy abolishes job protection, sustainable incomes and benefits, AI replaces humans. The most vulnerable are pillaged for profit. The sick feed the profits for Big Pharma. The bodies of poor men and women on the streets of our bleak, deindustrialized cities, are worth nothing until they are locked in a cage in the world’s largest prison system, generating 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year to the prison-industrial complex, including privatized phone services, money transfer services, commissary and medical services. Utilities, sold to private companies, gouge us with overpriced water, electrical, parking and sewage bills. At the same time, we are the most watched, photographed, spied upon and monitored population in human history. This technology, far from improving our lives, is creating a new serfdom, if not a new slavery, all the while propelling us at a dizzying rate towards ecocide. Joining me to discuss our dystopian present and our dystopian future is Loretta Napoleoni author of Techno-Capitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good. |
