Ralph Nader: Workplace Surveillance + The Luddite Club

Reading

Image by Paul Bence via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Feb 4, 2023

Ralph welcomes professor Karen Levy, who talks to us about how regulations aimed at making trucking safer have been turned into a tool of corporate surveillance as chronicled in her book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.

And on the opposite side of the tech spectrum, high school senior, Logan Lane joins to tell us how she and her friends have liberated themselves from their iPhones and social media by forming a group they call “The Luddite Club.”

Karen Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Data Science. Her new book is Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.

“I think we’re actually all aligned in our interests. Truckers don’t want to die on the road any more than the rest of us do. So, if safety is really the motivation for the electronic logging device, it feels as though we might all be able to get behind legislation and regulation that helps address the root causes of this fatigue.” — Karen Levy

Logan Lane is a high school senior in Brooklyn and the founder of the Luddite Club.

It felt like when I became a Luddite, I started off on this reading journey. We’re all on our individual reading journeys. I saw mine starting with Anaïs Nin’s Collages, and it was amazing, and it was something I didn’t think I could have interacted with so much and been so passionate about if I had been on the phone. And from then onwards I started doing this reading challenge. Every year I would set a goal— so my first year I read 50 books, the second year 95 books… It felt like the friends I’d lost on social media; I’d picked up those friends in the authors I was reading.” — Logan Lane

Ralph Nader Radio Hour on Substack

From the archives:

Ralph Nader: Big Tech Spying

Will Griffin: Origins of the Modern Surveillance State

PSL Statement: Why Workers Should Oppose The Far Right Canadian “Trucker” Convoy

Thoughts on the “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa, by Kenn Orphan

The Omnipresent Pressure to Conform by Graham Peebles

Please add to the conversation.

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s