When Tech Comes to Town

02/07/23 • 31 min

1 Listener

When a tech company moves to your city, the effects ripple far beyond just the people it employs. It can impact thousands of ancillary jobs – from teachers to nurses to construction workers – as well as the community’s housing, transportation, health care, and other businesses. And too often, these impacts can be negative.

Catherine Bracy, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based TechEquity Collaborative, has spent her career exploring ways to build a more equitable tech-driven economy. She believes that because the technology sector became a major economic driver at the same time deregulation became politically fashionable, tech companies often didn’t catch the “civic bug” – a sense of responsibility to the communities in which they’re based – in the way that industries of the past might have.

Bracy speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about following the money and changing the regulations that underpin the tech sector so that companies are more inclined to be thoughtful about supporting, not exploiting, the places and people they call home – creating stronger, thriving communities.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

How the venture capital model of funding contributes to tech’s reticence on civic engagement.
How the “platform mentality” affects non-tech workers and their communities.
Why the law should treat tech companies the same as other companies, without special carve-out exceptions and exemptions.
Why tech workers being well-informed about their companies’ and products’ impacts, as well as taking active roles in their communities, can be a game-changer.

Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. She is the co-founder and CEO of TechEquity Collaborative, an organization based in Oakland, CA, that mobilizes tech workers and companies to advocate for economic equity in our communities. She was previously Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem, where she grew the Brigade program into a network of over 50,000 civic tech volunteers in more than 80 U.S. cities. She also founded Code for All, the global network of Code-for organizations with partners on six continents. During the 2012 election cycle she was Director of Obama for America’s Technology Field Office in San Francisco, the first of its kind in American political history. Earlier, she was administrative director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. Please visit the site page at eff.org/pod302 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/59533

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http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703

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http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792

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Beatmower - Theme, Interstitial (Wonder) and Extro

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Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaëtan Harris

In this episode you’ll learn about:

How the venture capital model of funding contributes to tech’s reticence on civic engagement.
How the “platform mentality” affects non-tech workers and their communities.
Why the law should treat tech companies the same as other companies, without special carve-out exceptions and exemptions.
Why tech workers being well-informed about their companies’ and products’ impacts, as well as taking active roles in their communities, can be a game-changer.

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/59533

__________________________________

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703

__________________________________

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792

__________________________________

Beatmower - Theme, Interstitial (Wonder) and Extro

__________________________________

Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaëtan Harris

Previous Episode

Don’t Be Afraid to Poke the Tigers

What can a bustling electronic components bazaar in Shenzhen, China, tell us about building a better technology future? To researcher and hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, it symbolizes the boundless motivation, excitement, and innovation that can be unlocked if people have the rights to repair, tinker, and create.

Huang believes that to truly unleash innovation that betters everyone, we must replace our current patent and copyright culture with one that truly values making products better, cheaper, and more reliably by encouraging competition around production, quality, and cost optimization. He wants to remind people of the fun, inspiring era when makers didn’t have to live in fear of patent trolls, and to encourage them to demand a return of the “permissionless ecosystem” that nurtured so many great ideas.

Huang speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how we can have it all – from better phones to cooler drones, from handy medical devices to fun Star Wars fan gadgets – if we’re willing to share ideas and trade short-term profit for long-term advancement.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

How “rent-seeking behavior” stifles innovation.
Why questioning authority and “poking the tigers” of patent law is necessary to move things forward.
What China can teach the United States about competitive production that advances creative invention.
How uniting hardware and software hackers, fan fiction creators, farmers who want to repair their tractors, and other stakeholders into a single, focused right-to-repair movement could change the future of technology.

Andrew “bunnie” Huang is an American security researcher and hardware hacker with a long history in reverse engineering. He's the author of the widely respected 2003 book, “Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering,” and since then he served as a research affiliate for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and as a technical advisor for several hardware startups. EFF awarded him a Pioneer Award in 2012 for his work in hardware hacking, open source, and activism. He’s a native of Kalamazoo, MI, he holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, and he lives in Singapore.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod301

Find the podcast via RSS, Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. You can find an MP3 archive of all our episodes at the Internet Archive.

EFF is deeply grateful for the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, without whom this podcast would not be possible.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Nat Keefe of Beatmower with Reed Mathis. This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/59729
Probably Shouldn’t by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: Mr_Yesterday

Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaëtan Harris

Next Episode

The Right to Imagine Your Own Future

Too often we let the rich and powerful dictate what technology’s future will be, from Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse to Elon Musk’s neural implants. But what if we all were empowered to use our voices and perspectives to imagine a better world in which we all can thrive while creating and using technology as we choose?

That idea guides Deji Bryce Olukotun’s work both as a critically acclaimed author and as a tech company’s social impact chief. Instead of just envisioning the oligarch-dominated dystopia we fear, he believes speculative fiction can instead paint a picture of healthy, open societies in which all share in technology’s economic bounty. It can also help to free people’s imaginations to envision more competitive, level playing fields. Then we can use those diverse visions to guide policy solutions, from antitrust enforcement to knocking down the laws that stymie innovation.

Olukotun speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about rejecting the inevitability of the tech future that profit-driven corporate figureheads describe, and choosing instead to exercise the right to imagine our own future and leverage that vision into action.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

The influence of George W. Bush’s presidency and Silicon Valley’s rapid expansion on Olukotun’s seminal “Nigerians in Space.”
The value in envisioning a “post-scarcity” world.
Using speculative fiction to more accurately portray the long, complicated arc of civil liberties battles.
The importance of stakeholder-based activism in advancing solutions to critical issues from protecting democracy to combating climate change.

Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of two novels and his fiction has appeared in five book collections. His novel “After the Flare” won the 2018 Philip K. Dick special citation and was chosen as one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Syfy.com, Tor.com, Kirkus Reviews, among others. A former Future Tense Fellow at New America, Olukotun is Head of Social Impact at Sonos, leading the audio technology company’s grantmaking and social activations. He previously worked at the digital rights organization Access Now, where he drove campaigns on fighting internet shutdowns, cybersecurity, and online censorship. Olukotun graduated from Yale College and Stanford Law School, and earned a Master’s in creative writing at the University of Cape Town.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. Please visit the site page at eff.org/pod303 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792

http://ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/62475

__________________________________

http://ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/56377

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Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaëtan Harris

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