The future of transportation beyond Silicon Valley: interview with Paris Marx

Paris Marx, Canadian writer and host of the  Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, has just released their first book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. The work exposes flaws in Silicon Valley’s visions of the future and technology, with emphasis on transportation companies. Paris Marx suggests rethinking mobility in more collective and community-controlled ways rather than algorithmic management.

In a conversation with Rafael Grohmann, Paris Marx talked about Californian ideology, washing and lobbying by companies, frictionless city, autonomous cars, visions of technology on the left and the learnings from their successful podcast, a critical reference about technology.

DIGILABOUR: Why and how did you start to research and be interested in transportation and mobility?

PARIS MARX: It’s a really good question and it’s been an interest for me for quite a long time. I started writing about these issues around 2015 and 2016, about Uber and these other kinds of technological ideas for the city and for transportation. Then from there, I decided to do a Master’s degree starting in 2018, looking at these topics further. My Master’s degree is in Geography, and my focus was on what the tech industry was proposing for the future of transportation. So, my thesis was based around that and digging further into these issues. Once I finished that in 2020, I decided it would probably make a good book. There had been books that were written about Uber or written about Tesla that were really good, but no book that I knew of looked more broadly at the whole sector, at everything that these companies were proposing for transportation, or at least in a broader way, to try to have an analysis that went beyond one particular company or one particular sector. So, I spoke to Verso and my editor Leo Hollis to see if they were interested, and they were. Then I decided to write a book.

DIGILABOUR: In your vision, how do platforms update or strengthen Californian ideology?

PARIS MARX: The Californian ideology is really looking at the tech industry and how it brings together these ideas of counterculture individualism and personal empowerment, combining that with these notions of the free market and that we just need to rely on these particular companies and entrepreneurship in order to solve problems in society. Part of the means to do that is by relying on technology and believing that if we just allow this technology to continue to make progress and allow companies to wield that, we’re going to improve society and make things better. You can certainly see these ideas built into platforms that are seeking to change the city itself. The idea is that there are these problems with the way that we get around in the transportation system, which everyone kind of recognizes, the degree of traffic that people are stuck in, the people who die because of automobiles, the contribution to climate change, and many other issues that come of the transportation system that we’ve built up over the course of decades or centuries. So, these tech companies come along and they say we are offering you this solution that doesn’t require you to deal with the tricky politics of these issues because actually what we can just do is utilize these new technologies and implement them in this market fashion with these private companies and that will solve your problems of traffic congestion, climate change, of whatever else that you have an issue with in the transportation system. We don’t need to deal with complex political issues and why things are the way that they are. Rather if we just believe in technology, if we just have this faith in technology, if we have the faith in these markets to make things more efficient, then that will deliver benefits, and I think it’s pretty clear that that hasn’t worked out as they have promised to us.

DIGILABOUR: Companies are trying to convince public opinion about this. There are many campaigns and lobbying, as Uber Files has shown very well. What have you seen in relation to washing practices? Historically, we see many anti-union campaigns by companies in other sectors. What’s new in the transportation industry today?

PARIS MARX: It’s a good question, and these companies have obviously been unleashing these strategies for quite a long time. We can look at a whole range of them. Tesla, for example, is a key company when it comes to greenwashing. The idea is that they’re going to sell these electric cars, these luxury electric vehicles. They’re trying to dismiss or abstract the fact that there are really dirty supply chains that continue to exist as a result of these vehicles. Yes, they do have an improvement over the fossil fuel vehicles that many people use right now, but not the degree of improvement that we actually need if we’re going to deliver a sustainable transportation system and actually address the transportation system’s contribution to climate change. The electric car alone, and certainly not an electric car like a Tesla, is going to be the one to really fix that. Elon Musk will still say that Tesla is, and this isn’t a direct quote, it’s paraphrasing, but he will effectively say that Tesla is the company that is doing the most in the world to address climate change, just to show the degree of greenwashing that is going on there. And it’s just not true. It’s not accurate. If you really wanted to address climate change in the transportation system, you’d get as many people out of cars as possible, rather than just electrifying the cars. As you were saying, Uber is another really good example of this. Even from their beginning, part of their message was just not that they were going to make transportation more efficient for people living in cities, but also to make the work of delivering this transportation better for drivers. That was a really key part of the messaging because they needed the drivers on side to provide these services. So early on they would make it more lucrative for the drivers to come on to the system, but then, quite quickly afterward, cut the subsidized wages that they were getting to bring them back down to poverty levels and have continued to do that over a number of years. But even as you’re saying, their marketing strategies are still focused around making us believe that this is an ethical company, that it’s aligned with say Black Lives Matter and racial justice issues, and that it’s caring about workers and actually advancing workers’ rights, not rolling them back. So, it’s always necessary to pay attention to the public relations campaigns of these companies and how they’re trying to wield them in their favor because it’s not about making the world a better place for me or you or anyone else. It’s really about making the transportation system work for these companies and often that means the transportation system is not serving us as we would need it to and actually solving these very serious issues with the transportation system and more broadly.

DIGILABOUR: Regarding self-driving cars, what were your main findings in the midst of automation dreams on the part of companies?

PARIX MARX: That dream is always there. It’s certainly appealing to think that computers are just going to take over all of these aspects of life and society and make things more efficient and make it so we don’t ever need to work again. These were the kind of ideas that were floating around in the period where self-driving cars and the idea of self-driving cars were really popular. In the mid-2010s, there was this whole discourse for a few years that automation was going to eliminate all these jobs and what were people going to do as a result. We can clearly see that that was not really accurate because yes, there’s a bit of computers replacing the work of humans, but often it just disempowers those humans and those workers and makes the actual labor that goes on harder to see. It looks like a computer is doing it, and you don’t see the human behind the screen or behind the computer who is actually making that work. Just to give an example with self-driving cars, it looks like the cars are driving themselves, but a lot of the data that the cars are relying on is being processed by these micro-workers working for platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that are being paid absolutely terrible wages, but it’s impossible to recognize that they’re actually labeling all of this and doing all this work behind the scenes. Then of course, on top of that, if self-driving cars roll out in any meaningful way, you’re going to have a ton of remote drivers who will have to intervene in order to get around the sections that these algorithms can’t figure out, the situations that they run into that the computer is not equipped for, and we’re finding out is going to be quite a number of situations. So, self-driving cars were sold to us as something that was going to eliminate traffic congestion, solve the human deaths on the road, make the transportation system more efficient, and what we can see years down the line is that’s not actually what has happened.

There are very few self-driving cars on the road. They’re in places where the roads are very meticulously maintained because if not, and if there was too much traffic, they wouldn’t be able to operate properly. So, what actually happened with the self-driving car is we were sold this fantasy by these companies and by these tech executives who wanted to believe in it, and it worked for them. But that actually delayed the real action that we need to take on these real issues in the transportation system that the self-driving car offered a false solution to, and it just delayed the essential action that we need to make a better transport system.

DIGILABOUR:  What do you mean by frictionless city or frictionless society?

PARIS MARX: The frictionless society or frictionless city is this idea that this average interactions that we have with various humans as we go around the city will be eliminated and replaced with technology. The idea is that will make it easier to access all of these locations or services or anything else that we need to deal with when we just go through our daily lives. But actually, what is contained in that is this idealized idea of how technology can work and who it’s actually going to serve. The people who are putting out these ideas in the world often know, or believe at least, that technology is going to serve them and that they will never be on the more punitive or extractive side of these technologies. But there are a lot of people who will not have the degree of frictionlessness that these companies or that these executives promise. A good example that I always look to and maybe readers have heard of these is the Amazon stores where there’s no human cashier when you go up to check out, but the store is just full of cameras that watch everything that you do and that track what you pick up in the store. Just to enter into the store you need to have a smartphone with a data plan, an Amazon account, a credit card connected to it, and those are the necessities of admission to make this system actually work. You go around and you’re being constantly watched every moment that you’re in the store, everything that you do, then you walk out and the idea is that this is frictionless. It’s very easy because you don’t need to talk to somebody, but there’s actually a lot of friction in that experience. If you’re not someone who has an Amazon account, a smartphone, a data plan, or a credit card, it becomes much more difficult to access these locations. So for someone who works in tech who thinks “This is great, we’re extending these technologies, adding into the world,” and it’s making things better because it’s going to work for them, there’s not the consideration of what that means for everyone else, and whether it’s actually desirable to replace these human connections with technologies. I enjoy having those little moments when I talk to a cashier or whatever. Maybe they hate it, I don’t know, but I’ve worked in those positions and I like those little chitchats when I was doing it before. I just think that replacing those moments with technology and assuming that nobody wants those moments and those bits of human connection, I think really kind of sanitizes society and is ultimately a really negative development if we think about where things are actually going. It leads us to further question whether these people who are working in tech, who are leading these ideas, trying to push these ideas in the world, are really creating a world that benefits us, that really serves us, and that really creates the kind of society that we want to see or is just pushing a particular idea of society that will work particularly well for these corporations, but having little consideration for what that means more broadly, in the broader society.

DIGILABOUR: It’s a class point of view. In the other way, there is a belief also on some people of the left that tech can save us. What do you think about it?

PARIS MARX: Of course, I wouldn’t be of that opinion, for anyone who’s familiar with my work. I think that there is a general idea that certainly comes all the way back from Marx’s work to a certain degree that technology is a tool and it can be wielded in different ways. So, right now, because of the economic system that we live in, technology is wielded by capitalists toward capitalist ends, so that means that technology has negative outcomes. If we only change the larger economic system, then we could just kind of reorient those technologies for socialist uses, for socially beneficial purposes. I think that there’s some truth to that, but I don’t think it’s the full truth. I don’t think all technologies are just tools in that way. I think some technologies can be repurposed in those ways and that makes perfect sense to me. But I think that there are other technologies that have embedded politics, and we need to recognize that if we want to have a proper, critical assessment of technologies and the impacts that technologies are having on society. We need to recognize that some technologies as they develop are developed in a way that serves capitalist ends and entrenches capitalist politics, or capitalist economics, into the foundations of society, and even if we were to shift to a socialist society, those things would still be there and we would need to roll those things back or unpack those things. Certainly, I’m not anti-technology. I think that technology has obviously provided us a lot of benefits. Seeing the advancements of technologies through the course of hundreds of years has brought undeniable benefits, has allowed us to live longer lives, all these sorts of things. But at the same time, we need to recognize that not all technologies are positive and we need to be able to critically look at the technologies that are being pushed on us and rolled out to ensure that we’re fighting those technologies that make the world a worse place and that limits the ability for us to take on these negative developments, while embracing technologies that do make life better for us and that continues to do that. We need to be able to hold both of those ideas in our mind and take that critical view rather than just saying “Technology is great, we just need to have socialist technology instead of capitalist technology.”

DIGILABOUR: What are our main challenges to imagine other possible worlds in relation to the city, work, and technology, without falling in a techno-solutionism?

PARIS MARX: I think that over the course of a number of decades now, there’s really been a curtailing of the public imagination, of the ability to think beyond the present and the existing system that we live within, to actually imagine how things can operate differently. The dominance of capital and the success of the neoliberal project in a way has really curtailed the ability to think beyond today and to think beyond the present. So, I think there are many ways that we can imagine these things. Part of it is looking back to the history and seeing that things can be different. That’s something that the book certainly does in looking at the challenges that existed to automobility and to the automobile, as it was being rolled out in various societies, to recognize that it wasn’t just a natural development, but was something that was really pushed by capital on the rest of us and that served particular capitalist interests. But then, at the same time, I think that there’s also ways to see how other people have imagined the future in particular and to use that to allow us to kind of broaden our imagination and what we can imagine being possible within the world. We can certainly pull from examples from other parts of the world that have done things successfully, but I think the other piece of that is really that the collective organizations of the working class have really been attacked for a number of decades now. In the global North, certainly, I’m not sure about the situation in Brazil, unions have been decimated over the course of a number of decades, union membership, even the community and collective organizations that used to exist. So, you have less of this bringing together of the working class and presenting a different idea of society through those kinds of collective organizations and their ability to do that. I think that’s a really big loss as well because you lose that ability to imagine something better and fight for something better because the power just isn’t there anymore. There are a number of ways that we can look at to try to broaden that imagination once again and to think about how the world can work differently. But there are plenty of opportunities, and better worlds are certainly possible.

DIGILABOUR: You host a very successful and weekly podcast, Tech Won’t Save Us. What are the main lessons you are learning with your guests weekly during these two years?

PARIS MARX: It’s certainly been fantastic hosting the podcast. It’s a weekly podcast, and I also interview a different person every week, it’s not just me kind of talking to myself every single week. So that has allowed me to speak to a lot of people who have expertise on a lot of different subject matters in a lot of different areas focused on technology, but recognizing that technology is in so many different places now, in so many different industries…

DIGILABOUR:  Eco-socialism, like Sabrina Fernandes, for instance.

PARIS MARX: Yeah, absolutely. I love chatting with Sabrina Fernandes to learn more about the climate aspects of technologies, climate tech, and the issues with the framings around emissions reduction, net zero, and things like that, because she does absolutely fantastic work. Certainly, you’ve been on the podcast to talk to us about the gig economy, I know that’s not a term that you use as much, but to know what’s happening with workers. As I was saying, there are so many different topics that I talked to people about. Some of the ones that I often go back to are the gig economy and what’s happening to workers more broadly, the way that tech companies are not empowering workers but are really reducing the power of workers in a significant way by rolling out these technologies in a way that serve their ends, and how that really needs to be challenged and how I think there’s a lot of positive developments with both unions and workers just collectively organizing to push back against those technologies. We’ve been seeing that more and more, and I think that is really positive. Then another topic that’s a real interest to me, and that maybe listeners have noticed I’ve been doing a bit more on recently, is what’s happening more in the cultural sphere as these major entertainment companies have been consolidating, as there’s been this push for streaming services and the move to those away from more theatrical releases, conventional television, and things like that, and also the move to use greater amounts of visual effects in movies and the impacts of that. I think that’s a topic I’ll be exploring a bit more on the show in future, but I guess more broadly it’s really to recognize the degrees to which capital shapes technologies, these companies and the world around us, and that technology is very much integrated into that project. So, I think to really understand what capital is doing in this moment and how capitalism is evolving, there’s a real need to understand what is happening in the tech industry and with technology and how that’s helping to move things along.