On the season finale of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen discusses the future of tech governance with Azeem Azhar, author of The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society. In addition to his writing, Azeem hosts the Exponential View podcast, which, much like this podcast, looks at how technology is transforming business and society. Taylor and Azeem reflect on some of the broad themes that have concerned them this season, from platform governance, antitrust and competition, to polarization, deliberative democracy and Web3. As listeners have come to ..read more

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Ephrat Livni, a lawyer and journalist who reports from Washington on the intersection of business and policy for DealBook at The New York Times. One of Livni’s focuses has been how cryptocurrencies have moved from the periphery of the financial world into the mainstream.  The cryptocurrency movement originated with a commitment to the decentralization of money and the removal of intermediaries and government to enable person-to-person financial transactions. Early on, governments viewed cryptocurrency as a tool for illicit criminal ..read more

The internet is an ever-evolving thing, with new features and services popping up daily. But these innovations are happening in the current internet space, known as Web 2.0. The potential next big leap is to what is being called Web3 or Web 3.0. You have likely heard some of the terms associated with this next age — the token economy, blockchain, NFTs. Our guest this week walks us through what all this “future stuff” means, and how it could impact our daily lives. In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Shermin Voshmgir, founder of Token Kitchen and BlockchainHub Berlin and t ..read more

A fundamental feature of the internet is its ability to transcend borders, connecting people to one another and all forms of information. The World Wide Web was heralded as a global village that would remove the traditional gatekeepers and allow anyone a platform to be heard. But the reality is that access to the internet and online services is very much bound to geography. A benign example is the location lockouts to online streaming platforms depending on which country you access. But more extreme examples of how location is inherently tied to internet access occur in authoritarian regimes t ..read more

The speed at which the Russia-Ukraine war has played out across the internet has led to some interesting insights about how different groups have been experiencing and responding to information and misinformation about it. The West found unity across political divides, and the big tech platforms, breaking their long-held stance, have quickly acted to limit the spread of disinformation by making changes to their algorithms. However, across much of the non-English-language internet, the information ecosystem is very different. Many Russians aren’t even aware that there is a war going on. And tec ..read more

In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Margaret O’Mara, a historian of modern America and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.  Silicon Valley and the massive wealth it has generated have long symbolized the wonders of free market capitalism, viewed as proof of how innovation can thrive when it is not burdened by government oversight. Silicon Valley is infused with this libertarian ethos, centred on the idea that it was guys in their garages, setting out to create something new and make the world a better place, who built the Valley. But O’Mar ..read more

Do you feel as if you can’t get through a single task without distractions? Perhaps you are watching a movie and stop it to check social media or respond to a message. You aren’t alone; studies show that collectively our attention spans have been shrinking for decades. Many factors contribute to our fractured focus, including the processed foods we eat, which cause energy highs and lows, but the greatest culprit of all is technology.  In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen speaks with Johann Hari, the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Stolen Focus, Lost Connections and Ch ..read more

In the history of computers and the internet, a few names likely come to mind: Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly, these men’s contributions to computer sciences have shaped much of our modern life. In the case of Jobs and Gates, their financial success shifted the landscape of software development and the metrics of success in Silicon Valley. Some sectors of the industry, such as programming, hypertext and databases, had been dominated by women in the early days, but once those areas became economic drivers, men flooded in, pushing aside the women. In the pro ..read more

Nicholas Carr is a prolific blogger, author and critic of technology since the early days of the social web. Carr began his blog Rough Type in 2005, at a time when some of today’s biggest companies where still start-ups operating out of college dorms. In 2010, he wrote the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction finalist The Shallows, in which he discussed how technology was changing the human brain. At the time, many were skeptical about Carr’s argument, but in just over a decade many of his predictions have come true.  In this episode of Big Tech, host Taylor Owen and guest Nicholas Carr reflect ..read more

People are divided: you are either pro-vaccination or against it, and there seems to be no middle ground. Whether around the dinner table or on social media, people are entrenched in their positions. A deep-seated mistrust in science, despite its contributions to the flourishing of human life, is being fuelled by online misinformation. For the first time in history, humanity is in the midst of a pandemic with communication tools of almost unlimited reach and potential benefit, yet social media and the information economy appear structured to promote polarization. Take the case of The Joe ..read more