About the newsletter 💌
“Tech Without Losing Your Soul” examines tech’s influence across sectors and geographies, the ethical dilemmas facing tech workers today, burnout and loneliness, and the possibilities for balancing our relationship to technology. The goal is to examine, process, and challenge unsustainable and exclusionary ideas about innovation and restore old/explore new concepts to help us find our way in a world of algorithms, bots, and oligarchies.
You can expect a range of writing and interviews exploring timely analysis and lived experiences, delivered directly to your email. Recent essays have examined tech’s power struggles with AI, America’s algorithmic healthcare horror show, and an interview with Monika Jiang, where we examine the weaponization of loneliness and AI companions.
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About the author ✍🏼
I’m Lauren Celenza, (she/they, SE-LEN-ZA).
I’m a software designer, writer, and advocate for equity and care in technology and its industry. My work and essays have appeared in Fast Company, Forbes, NBC News, PBS News Hour, and In These Times. In 2022, I petitioned for the Silenced No More Act in Washington state, prohibiting employers from silencing workers on issues of discrimination, retaliation, and wage violations.
As a designer, I’ve led projects at Code for America, Google Maps, and The World Resources Institute, on new technology for free tax filing, inclusive maps, and land restoration. I teach design at Harbour.Space University in Barcelona and support scholarships for emerging designers worldwide. Views written in this newsletter, of course, are my own.
I’m also a moderator/interview journalist for UNFINISHED Festival, celebrating art, design, and democracy. At this festival, I’ve interviewed a range of people: from New York Times Modern Love editor Daniel Jones on love-hate in the digital age, visual artist and designer Dario Calmese on reimagining design, and award-winning Brazilian photographer-historian João Paulo Barbosa, on tech’s influence on the coldest regions of the world.
The finite nature of life and the infinite information around us makes our attention a remarkably powerful and rare thing, and I’m grateful that you’d consider giving this newsletter yours.
