About

Value Added is a newsletter about the political economy of innovation. I focus primarily on the U.S. and China and cover topics like industrial policy, green manufacturing, cloud computing/AI, and technology’s role in the emerging productivist era. Labor and its impact on the political economy of innovation is also central to my work.

The goal of this newsletter is to share what I’m reading and working on in a more digestible format. Partly, this is for myself—to summarize, synthesize, and explore new research ideas. But hopefully, it will also be useful for others who are interested in these topics.

A little about me: I’m JS Tan, a PhD student in the International Development Group at MIT DUSP, and a member of Collective Action in Tech, a non-profit that seeks to advance labor organizing in the tech industry. In the past, I’ve written on topics such as bullshit tech work, Big Tech’s collaboration with Big Oil, and industrial relations in China’s tech sector for venues like Dissent Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, The Guardian Opinion, Logic(s), and Jacobin. Some of my writing is archived here. Previously, I worked as a software engineer in the cloud computing industry.