The Hammer is a weekly newsletter from Tech Won’t Save Us. This week: Billionaires say they’re going to space for us, European gig workers are fighting back, and Airbnb should be banned.
As I said on Democracy Now! this week, the flight comes at the same time as we’re seeing the effects of climate change around the world — whether it’s flooding in Europe or wildfires in British Columbia — and after more than a year of a global pandemic which caused extensive suffering and poverty. When Bezos hit the ground, he once again talked about the need to move polluting industry to space, but given that we have a decade — maybe two — to transform those systems, we simply don’t have the time to wait. Such a claim is tantamount to climate denial, especially given Amazon’s emissions increased by 19% in 2020 and it’s helping oil companies extract fossil fuels. Of course, cable news was not accepting any criticisms. More Perfect Union put together a great video of the US networks’ defense of Bezos and his vanity trip. It’s sad to see so many people’s source of news acting as effective propaganda, but sadly it’s not a surprise when billionaires own the media. We desperately need to think more critically about the actions and visions of these tech billionaires. Their grand space visions are cover for the real attempts to control the infrastructure of space and seize the benefits for themselves as we do more outside the atmosphere. To that end, NASA gave SpaceX another $178 million on Friday.
