Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

We’ve reached the midyear mark for 2024, so for our weekly review show, “Tech Bytes,” we are breaking format and taking stock of the past six months in tech with Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali asked her what she thought was the most underreported story of the last six months. And what was the biggest flub? We’ll get to those, but we’ll start Curi’s pick for the most impactful story of the first half of the year.

Streaming giants Spotify and SoundCloud were both founded in Stockholm, and over the past two decades the Swedish capital has developed a reputation as a European hub for companies blending music and innovation. So why does this small Nordic city punch above its weight in music tech, and are start-ups still able to thrive there after a rocky few years for the global economy? The BBC’s Maddy Savage reports.

For the millions of residents and visitors who commute in and out of the areas daily, billboards in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area have long been a way to see where the state of tech is at the moment — and where it’s headed next.

Yesterday, we explained San Francisco’s fraught relationship with the tech industry. Tech workers weren’t always welcome in the eyes of many other residents, and when the COVID-19 pandemic began, a lot of them left, taking their dollars with them. But on a recent Thursday evening, organizers of a block party downtown were trying to bring people back. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to Manny Yekutiel and Katy Birnbaum about their efforts to revive the city’s downtown.

Cities across the country are still trying to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic changed how and where many of us work, leaving big holes in downtown office districts. San Francisco, once teeming with tech workers, is no exception. But few cities have suffered the sustained reputational damage that San Francisco has. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the city to meet with Heather Knight, The New York Times’ San Francisco bureau chief. Knight, who has been covering the city for more than two decades, offered her take on San Francisco’s image problem, economic situation and tech culture.

In the past week or so, Nvidia’s stock finally encountered the law of gravity — what goes up must eventually come down, at least a little bit. And we look under the hood of artificial intelligence companies that aren’t necessarily making headlines. Plus, the Supreme Court ruled against Republican-led states that accused the federal government of coercing social media companies into suppressing content. But first, major music labels, including Universal, Sony and Warner, are suing two startups that produce AI-generated music. The labels accuse Suno and Udio of using copyrighted works scraped from the internet to train their AI models. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, for her takes on these stories in this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.

It feels like eons ago, but during a town hall on violence in America in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton took to MTV to reach the nation’s youth. Clinton’s openness to MTV and what The New York Times called “other unconventional media” had helped pave his path to the White House two years earlier. Fast-forward to today, and even reluctant politicians use TikTok to reach younger voters — President Joe Biden is no exception. His first post came just ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. We invited Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams, and Joshua Scacco, professor of political communication and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to discuss the evolution of political messaging with Marketplace’s Lily Jamali. Scacco said Clinton’s MTV moment informed how future presidents, including his successor, George W. Bush, have engaged with Americans.

This week, we’ve been taking stock of how tech has both helped and harmed Americans trying to get abortions in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After the Dobbs decision, some experts warned consumers that menstrual tracking apps would provide a means of surveilling abortion seekers. There was even a social media campaign on what was then Twitter advising people to delete their period trackers. But it’s turned out that the threat to privacy isn’t limited to those apps. Other digital data can actually be more likely to reveal an illegal abortion. That’s according to Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that everyday consumer apps generate sensitive data that can be used for abortion surveillance.  

After the U.S. Supreme Court took away the federal right to abortion two years ago, telehealth has helped provide ongoing access, including to people in states where abortion is now banned. That was our subject Monday. Now we are looking into apps that link patients with abortion providers. Julie F. Kay, executive director at the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that digital privacy protections are far from equal across these services.

Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled that abortions are not constitutionally protected in the U.S., a decision that would draw protests across the country. Since then, 14 states have outlawed abortions. Still, some people in those states have been able to cut through barriers to get abortions via telehealth, according to a recent report from the research project #WeCount. Usually, this requires a virtual visit with a telehealth care provider. The provider assesses the patient and gets their information, then can mail them mifepristone and misoprostol, which aid in ending a pregnancy. The Supreme Court preserved access to mifepristone in a ruling this month, which means it can still be prescribed and mailed to patients. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali discussed the increase in telehealth abortions with Ushma Upadhyay, professor of OB-GYN and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a coauthor of the #WeCount report.

Big Tech subscription services are once again in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission, nonprofits with links to OpenAI are becoming less transparent, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is urging Congress to require warning labels on social media. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali speaks with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired magazine, for this week’s Tech Bytes: Week in Review

Picture this: The year is 2014. The song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams is playing on every top 100 station, and the Ellen DeGeneres star-studded Oscars selfie has just “broken Twitter.” As all of this is happening, a bunch of content creators in certain corners of social media are about to start making a whole lot of money. Culture reporter Steffi Cao recently wrote in The Ringer that 2014 was the year that shaped the internet we know today. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke to her about what happened online 10 years ago.

Shortly after the Union won the Civil War in 1865, a union major general issued an order: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” June 19, known as Juneteenth, has long been celebrated by African Americans. But in 2020, in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Juneteenth took the internet by storm. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Brandon Ogbunu, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, who wrote about that moment for WIRED back then. He revisited what was happening at that time a year before Juneteenth became a national holiday.

Marketplace’s Lily Jamali recently visited the headquarters of Nautilus Biotechnology to meet with Parag Mallick, the company’s founder and chief scientist, who is also a magician and an associate professor at Stanford University. Since 2016, Mallick and his team have been building a machine that they say will revolutionize biomedicine by unlocking the secrets of the “dark proteome.”

Brazil has densely populated low-income communities living on the outskirts of many cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Ordering online shopping just isn’t an option for residents as these towns don’t have an official address, but that may be changing. The BBC’s Ben Derico reports.

Ride-hailing company Uber has lost its challenge to the California law that requires gig companies to provide employment rights to workers. We’ll have more about the legal and political saga on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Also, X — formerly Twitter — has made user “likes” private, marking another change to the platform’s identity and functionality since Elon Musk took over the social media company. But first, they’re calling it Apple Intelligence. That phrase was used about 60 times Monday during Apple’s annual developers confab. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal tech columnist at The Wall Street Journal. She attended the Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, this week as Apple execs talked through the company’s entry into the AI race.  

Back in 2020, Microsoft made an ambitious pledge to go carbon negative by 2030. But that plan is encountering some headwinds, according to its latest sustainability report. It showed Microsoft’s carbon emissions have increased by 30% since it made that pledge four years ago and comes a reminder of the significant environmental cost of the AI boom. Just how significant? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino asked Emma Strubell, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who co-wrote a paper about the specific energy demands for common uses of this technology.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have been courting Latinos this election season. Relatedly, perhaps, this voting bloc has emerged as a target for disinformation. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Marketplace senior Washington correspondent Kimberly Adams and Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, to learn more about Spanish-language disinformation in the 2024 campaign. This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

Back in January, a U.S. Senate committee probed executives from Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord about social media’s effect on kids. During a heated exchange with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood, turned and apologized to families of victims who were sexually exploited on social media platforms. No federal legislation on the issue has become law, but some states are taking the lead. New York just passed two laws aimed at regulating social media, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta is pushing similar legislation in his state. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali sat down with Bonta to ask about what his state is doing to protect social media’s youngest users.

The network of online communities known as Reddit has millions of weekly active users. They post on “subreddit” forums like r/WhatShouldICook — a place where people just talk about their dinner plans — and r/ShowerThoughts, where participants share what they’re thinking during routine tasks. The co-founder and CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is a fan of r/Daddit, being a father himself. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Huffman at Reddit headquarters in San Francisco, where they talked about the company selling stock and its recent licensing agreements with the likes of Google and Open AI, which use Reddit content to train their large language models.