Author: Alex Kantrowitz

As the Media Equation columnist at The New York Times, Ben Smith is covering an industry going through transformation and turbulence. And as the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News — a place I worked until this June — he lived that change while managing a newsroom of reporters who lived online in a VC funded media company. 

 

In this week’s edition of the Big Technology Podcast, I caught up with Smith for a discussion focused on how tech is changing journalism, what media companies can do to connect with people that have shut them out, and where big tech regulation may lead.

You won’t find a more controversial film in Silicon Valley than The Social Dilemma. The film, now available on Netflix, features confessions from early consumer internet employees who rue the destruction their inventions have wrought.

  

To address the film and its critiques, Tristan Harris, its star and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, sat down for an interview on the Big Technology Podcast with no questions off limits. 

When the Big Technology Podcast debuted last month, The Verge’s Casey Newton joined to talk about why people can’t stand the tech press. Our wide-ranging discussion explored how tech reporters should be more upfront about their values, how algorithms and social media reframe their work, and why some go astray in the quest for retweets. But there was more to discuss. 

This week, three talented reporters—Bloomberg’s Eric Newcomer, the Financial Times’ Hannah Murphy, and OneZero’s Brian Merchant—join the show to pick up where Newton left off. 

Venture capitalists, founders, and others in the tech industry are feeling pretty raw these days. Once admired as upstarts fighting the status quo, they now feel under siege, under attack for the negative things their products do without being appreciated for how they improve our lives. Bloomberg Beta head Roy Bahat, a veteran venture capitalist, joins the Big Technology Podcast for a nuanced conversation about what's going with the tech world, how it's innovation may be connected to its problems, and how it should handle the criticism.

China’s mass internment of Muslims in its Xinjiang region is one of the world's most under-covered stories The country has detained one million people there, putting them through a “re-education” program meant to erase their language and culture, sometimes through forced labor and sterilization.

Though comprehensive, on-the-ground reporting from Xinjiang is sparse, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan has been on the story from the beginning. She joins the podcast to discuss her reports from Xinjiang itself, and how she worked with BuzzFeed contributors to monitor the internment camps using satellite imagery, finding that they are expanding.

For years, Apple had a clear identity: It was the world’s best devices maker. Today, the company is trying to balance that identity with a new emphasis on software and services. To discuss this shift and what it means for Apple’s future, I sat down with my favorite Apple writer, GV Partner M.G. Siegler, who once covered the company for Techcrunch and continues to write about it on Medium while still working his day job.

As the pandemic flattens much of the U.S. economy, many technology firms are doing just fine. Business is moving online, and they’re well positioned to benefit. For tech CEOs like Box’s Aaron Levie, the experience can be bewildering. While you’re riding a wave most companies can only dream about, you’re watching the rest of the economy — including many of your customers — struggle to get by. In this conversation, Levie says this economy is “not sustainable,” and offers a look into his mindset as he tries to make sense of where this is all heading.

In May, Amazon VP and distinguished engineer Tim Bray said he was leaving the company. Amazon had just fired employees who spoke out against its working conditions, and Bray couldn’t tolerate it. He handed in his resignation and published an astonishing blog post detailing his decision—an unprecedented move for an executive inside the tech giants. “I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison," he wrote. By listening to Bray, we can learn a bit more about how people inside the tech giants view their power, and how they might drive change as Congress and regulators stand still.

The Verge's Casey Newton writes The Interface, a daily newsletter about social media and democracy. He joins the podcast to talk about the tech press, Facebook, and the newsletter life.

Social media-fueled protests are a force to be reckoned with in politics today. Movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter have drawn millions into the streets in protest of central authorities. But can these movements be effective in the long term? Alex sits down with the field's leading writer and researcher, Zeynep Tufekci, to talk it through.