Author: Alex Kantrowitz

Platformer's Casey Newton returns to Big Technology Podcast to discuss the intensifying battle among Facebook, Clubhouse, Spotify, Apple, and Twitter in the new, social audio space. Fresh off a conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Newton discusses Facebook's plans, Clubhouse's potential for longevity, and what empowering the individual vs. the institution really means. Plus we discuss this week's big Apple release event.

Elaine Kwon was a vendor manager in Amazon's retail organization when the company started to turn her tasks over to machine learning in a program called "Hands Off The Wheel." She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how and why Amazon rolled the program out, how she and her fellow vendor managers reacted, and what it portends for the rest of us.

ProPublica senior reporter Alec MacGillis highlights the growing economic divide in the U.S. — through the lens of Amazon — in his new book, Fulfillment. MacGillis joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the state of the union push inside Amazon, how labor has changed more broadly in the U.S., and the uneasy political coalition between those packing and delivering Amazon packages and those receiving them.

Carole Cadwalladr and Yael Eisenstat are two of the most prominent Facebook critics worldwide. Cadwalladr is the journalist who broke open the Cambridge Analytica story for the Guardian and The Observer. Eisenstat, a former CIA officer, worked on election integrity inside Facebook for six months before quitting and speaking out against the company. The two Facebook critics join Big Technology Podcast to discuss some people’s disenchantment with tech criticism, the role of Facebook’s Oversight Board, and how the company might fix its product.

BuzzFeed News executive editor Mat Honan has long covered the way society interacts with technology. He joins Big Technology Podcast this week to discuss the “Zoom Class,” the rise of NFTs, and how San Francisco may change after the pandemic.

Rest Of World is a new publication that covers technology outside of North America and Europe. Sophie Schmidt and Louise Matsakis join Big Technology Podcast to discuss why they believe it's setting a new path forward for international tech coverage. Schmidt founded the publication in 2019 after growing convinced that the next tech decade belongs to the rising giants outside of the Western world. Growing up while her father, Eric Schmidt, ran Google taught her some important lessons along the way. Matsakis, formerly of Wired, joined the publication after pitching Schmidt on a role for herself. She is now a senior editor. In this conversation, we discuss the publication's editorial philosophy, along with tech in China, South Korea, Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere.

Senator Amy Klobuchar will be leading the charge in Congress as the legislature interrogates the power of big tech, and potentially takes action to restrain it. She's the new Chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, so it's in her hands now.

Klobuchar and I spoke this past week ahead of the first hearing she held to kick the off process. And rather than simply writing the conversation up, which I did on the Big Technology newsletter this week, I wanted to make it available for you to listen to, in full.

Kayvon Beykpour is one of Silicon Valley’s busiest product executives. As Twitter’s head of product, he’s survived for years in a formerly-cursed role that seemed to turn over every few months. Now, Beykpour’s team is shipping. Twitter just released a Clubhouse clone, called Spaces. It bought Revue, a newsletter platform. And it just announced Super Follow, a feature that wraps it all together by letting you pay for added access and content from people you follow on Twitter. This is new territory for Twitter, which spent the past few years 

Artificial intelligence may take our jobs, or it may give us new freedom in the workplace. The debate is heating up as this technology is starting to enter the workplace in a real way. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose returns to Big Technology Podcast for a bonus episode for a discussion on what's actually happening based on the research. His book on the subject — Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation — comes out today.

You can order Futureproof here: https://www.kevinroose.com/futureproof

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Will Cathcart runs WhatsApp, the 2 billion user app that's the de facto tool for messaging and calling for many across the globe. Cathcart joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss Facebook's feud with Apple, its battle with Signal, its bungled privacy update, new laws in India that might force it to break encryption, the way it thinks about content moderation and advertising, and plenty more.