“The first step is building a countervailing force. That means people getting organized and standing together. As individuals, we have no real power against this kind of entrenched wealth and control. But if the 99.99% came together, it wouldn’t take long to make change, and they know that. That’s what they’re most afraid of.”
I had the pleasure of talking with Maren Costa. Maren is a former tech industry executive turned climate and labor rights advocate who gained national attention for her organizing efforts within Amazon, one of the world’s largest and most influential companies. Costa, who began her career in user experience design during the early days of the internet, went on to co-found Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), a worker-led movement that sought to pressure the tech giant to take more aggressive action on climate change and worker treatment. Her activism led to her dismissal from the company in 2020 — a move widely criticized as retaliatory. The firing sparked public backlash, including an open letter signed by nine U.S. Senators, among them Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and then-Senator Kamala Harris, who demanded an explanation from Jeff Bezos and asserted that Amazon should not have terminated employees for speaking out. The episode culminated in a legal settlement and elevated Costa as a national voice on ethical leadership and corporate accountability.
Costa’s roots are in southern Minnesota, where she was raised in a college town surrounded by farmland. Her childhood, spent largely outdoors in a wooded area near the local college campus, helped develop a lifelong connection to nature. She studied English and women’s studies with a focus on eco-feminism in college, an interdisciplinary background that informed her later work connecting social, environmental, and economic systems.
Her professional trajectory began in creative publishing, where she co-founded a nonprofit women’s writing and arts collective that aimed to challenge gender imbalances in media. A self-taught designer, Costa eventually moved into the tech sector, joining Adobe in the early 1990s and later moving to Amazon in 2002. At the time, Amazon had fewer than 2,000 employees, and Costa became part of the early team working on user experience during a period when the field was still emerging.
During her tenure at Amazon, Costa worked on a number of initiatives, including Amazon Fresh and early efforts to sell apparel online. She earned multiple patents and collaborated directly with company founder Jeff Bezos. For a time, she found the company culture invigorating, describing it as fast-paced and open to bold, unconventional ideas, particularly those that promised financial returns. However, as the company grew, she became disillusioned with what she saw as a widening divide between corporate employees and warehouse workers, and a growing unwillingness to act on issues not directly tied to profitability.
Her concerns increasingly focused on Amazon’s environmental impact and its treatment of labor. She became vocal about what she viewed as the company’s failure to take responsibility for its role in the climate crisis and systemic inequality. In response, Costa co-founded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an internal advocacy group that brought together corporate employees calling for more transparent and effective climate policies.
The group organized petitions, walkouts, and internal discussions, including one virtual town hall in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that invited warehouse and corporate employees to share concerns about workplace safety. The event was quickly shut down by the company, and within hours, Costa and another organizer were terminated. Amazon cited policy violations, but the firings were widely interpreted as retaliation for labor organizing and drew attention from lawmakers and national media. The open letter from prominent U.S. senators highlighted the seriousness of the issue and marked a rare moment of bipartisan scrutiny for a tech giant. A legal settlement followed, and Costa emerged as a prominent advocate for ethical leadership and worker-driven change within the tech industry.
Since her departure from Amazon, Costa has used her platform to speak on the interconnected nature of environmental degradation, labor exploitation, and systemic inequality. She argues that climate change is not an isolated crisis but a symptom of larger systems, including colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and patriarchy, which prioritize profit and consumption at the expense of human and planetary health. Costa is especially critical of what she describes as the consolidation of power among a small class of tech elites who shape public discourse and policy while preparing for futures that exclude the majority of humanity.
Costa views the current climate emergency as inseparable from issues of labor and economic justice. She points to the disproportionate impact of carbon emissions and environmental harm caused by the wealthiest segments of society, alongside the pressure to suppress wages and exploit labor globally. She believes that overconsumption, corporate secrecy, and the externalization of environmental costs must be addressed through systemic change.
Her work now focuses on building networks of resistance and resilience. She encourages people to begin by assessing their privileges and using their positions to support broader movements for justice. She regularly speaks to audiences of tech workers, students, and activists, urging them to organize in their own communities and contribute to what she hopes will become a global coalition for climate and labor justice.
Costa describes herself as an “optimistic fatalist,” acknowledging the urgency of the current moment while holding on to the possibility of change. She draws hope from the fact that significant transformation can occur with the active engagement of a relatively small percentage of the population. Research suggests that mobilizing even 3.5 percent of people can be enough to shift the direction of large systems. Costa sees potential in existing grassroots movements and believes that connecting these efforts globally could generate meaningful impact.
She now runs MarenCosta.com, a website designed to serve as a hub for coordination and outreach. Following her appearance in the Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, Costa received thousands of messages from individuals looking to get involved in the fight for sustainability and equity. Her goal is to connect those individuals into autonomous, local “cells” that can take collective action and build solidarity across borders.
Costa remains committed to creating change from within systems where possible, but no longer believes that corporate goodwill alone is sufficient to address the scale of the crisis. Instead, she advocates for a reimagining of how we measure success, suggesting that metrics such as GDP fail to account for well-being, justice, and ecological stability. Her vision centers on building a regenerative and cooperative future that prioritizes planetary and human health over short-term profits.
Yitzi: Maren, this is an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep, our readers would love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share with us a story of your childhood and how you grew up?
Maren: Likewise. Great to be here, thank you. That’s a great way to start. I grew up in a small town in Southern Minnesota, in the cornfields, but it was a college town, so it had a little more culture than most of the towns around it. My dad worked at the college as a psychologist, so I was raised by a psychologist, I always love to go deep. My mom was an English teacher. I went to the college in my town because I got a great price and we were definitely not rich. I spent most of my childhood in this little woods that was actually on the college campus. It was called Norway Valley, because Norwegians were the ones who founded the school, up there in the cold flyover states.
My identical twin sister and I basically lived in that valley. We knew every little hill and tree. I was kind of a nature child. In college, I studied English and also women’s studies with a concentration in eco-feminism, which was part of the more recent wave of feminism. That really formed a lot of my thinking. I’ve added to it over time, but it was truly formative, learning about power and oppression, and how all oppression is interconnected. It got me into systems thinking early on, which I think is something we don’t teach well in this world, to our detriment.
Yitzi: That’s a great start. So let’s hear about the next chapter. You’re a successful technology leader and so much more. Tell us how you got started in the technology world.
Maren: I’m old, so when I came out of college with my, let’s say, not-so-marketable degree, I co-founded a nonprofit, it was sort of like today’s version of a startup. It was a women’s creativity and writing collective. We did an informal survey of the media landscape, airwaves, print, all of it, and it was about 80% men, 20% women. So we thought, why not create something that levels the playing field a bit? We curated art exhibits, published creative writing, and more. I learned how to do layout and design on the oldest version of PageMaker, which later moved to Quark, I think.
Eventually, I got a job at Adobe in the early ’90s. User experience still didn’t exist as a field. Later, in 2002, I got hired at Amazon as a designer. We didn’t even have a proper title for that kind of role yet. At the time, the extent of interactivity on the web was blue links, that was it. I learned by doing. Seattle became a tech town, and Amazon was still a small company, only about 2,000 people when I joined. At that time there was much less of a divide between corporate and warehouse workers. Around Christmas, Jeff Bezos himself would fly to Fernley, Nevada, and jump on the line in the warehouses with everyone else. The divide between corporate and warehouse workers grew very wide over the years, probably because were they to join forces it would be too powerful.
At first, I loved it. I loved learning about user experience design. It was the perfect mix of psychology, technology, and communication, and there was so much room for innovation. I started racking up patents and worked closely with Jeff Bezos. He was genuinely inspiring at the time. It was amazing to watch him walk into a room, read a six-page document, because Amazon meetings always start with those, and immediately call out exactly what wasn’t working and solve the problems we hadn’t been able to figure out. It was impressive.
I was working on making the web more inclusive, accessible, friendly, usable, and human, because back then, none of that existed. When I started at Amazon, it was a very white male geek culture. You can look it up on the Wayback Machine. I worked on challenges like figuring out how to sell jeans online when everyone said it would never work. I worked on Amazon Fresh too, which was the first real grocery delivery service. By that time, I had two kids under two, and being able to order groceries at 11 p.m. in five minutes saved me, but the fact that I had to work that much was a systemic problem. We didn’t need a solution for that. We needed to change the system.
Eventually, I realized Amazon was no longer a net good for the world. It was becoming this massive, unchecked behemoth. I became deeply concerned about two existential threats: the rapid, unregulated development of AI, and the urgency of the climate crisis. I knew I couldn’t keep working there, not with the way they treated workers and the scale of harm I was seeing. I felt I had two choices, walk away, or stay and fight to change Amazon from the inside. I figured changing a global corporation could have a far greater impact than starting another small nonprofit. So that’s what I did.
I co-founded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. We started organizing, speaking out. And then, of course, I got fired. That’s a whole other chapter, so I’ll stop there.
Yitzi: I’m excited to hear the next chapter. You mentioned Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. At that point, you were working with Amazon and your vision was to try to change the system from within. Tell us the story. Tell us your vision, and what you did.
Maren: When I decided to stay, I started with the inside track. I’d had great success pitching ideas directly to Jeff Bezos, saying, “This is what we should do, it’s radical,” and he’d say, “Yes, do that. Here’s an entire team. Clear your roadmap. This is your focus now.” You could move mountains. You could get things done, and it was actually really addicting. You felt empowered, like it was your influence making things happen.
But then I started pitching ideas about sustainability, and suddenly, nothing. Silence. No traction at all. I was confused. I had always been persuasive, I thought I had built up respect and credibility, but this was different. That’s when I realized people only loved my ideas when they made the company money. If there wasn’t a clear connection to profit, it was dead on arrival. It became clear that Amazon had no genuine interest in being a force for good in the world. They had the power to lead on issues like worker treatment, sustainability, corporate responsibility, but they chose not to.
So I realized that asking politely or pitching from the inside wasn’t going to work. That’s when I co-founded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. We shifted our lens to focus on power. To shift power, you need power. So we started organizing, joining with colleagues to petition, to walk out, to hold Amazon accountable. And employee organizing turned out to be more effective than what consumers,shareholders, and even politicians, had managed to do. That was powerful.
Of course now, power is so wildly concentrated and unbalanced. As a species, we really need to figure out what we’re going to do about that. Unless we’re fully on board with a tech-bro oligarchy ruling the world, we better create a countervailing force, and right now, we don’t have one.
Yitzi: Wow. I’ve read that part of your argument is that climate change is fundamentally a labor issue. Can you articulate that connection and what it means practically?
Maren: Yeah, and it’s not just a labor issue. Climate change is really just a symptom, one of many existential threats caused by our dominant global systems: patriarchy, supremacy, colonialism, neoliberal capitalism. These are all extractive, exploitative systems based on competition and domination. They’re not regenerative, sustainable, or equitable.
Right now, we’re seeing unprecedented inequality across the globe. The same people hoarding multi-billions are the ones contributing most to climate change. The top 0.01% create more carbon emissions than the bottom 66% of humanity combined. It’s insane. And in order to make those billions, they have to drive the price of everything down. What’s the top expense on any balance sheet? Labor. So they push down labor costs, whether in the U.S. or overseas, resulting in labor abuses.
Amazon represents a consumption lifestyle that simply wouldn’t be possible without essentially enslaving the Global South, extracting their resources, and destroying their ecosystems. We’re on a small, finite planet. What happens in one place will eventually happen everywhere. And yet here we are, partying on the top deck of the Titanic, thinking everything’s great. Like, “Woohoo! This is working for us. Let’s just keep going.” The question is, when are we going to wake up?
Yitzi: That’s a profound point. I never fully appreciated that. You’re saying the starting point is our relationship with labor and consumption, and the symptom is destroying the planet.
Maren: Yeah, and abusing labor. We get all of these so-called wonderful effects, even the arms race for AI, which is rooted in those same systems of domination. Instead of realizing, “Hey, we’re all on one planet, people. This is our lifeboat in space,” we’re on a trajectory that’s being driven by multi-billionaires. Eight of the ten richest people in the world right now come from Big Tech, and what are they doing? Building luxury bunkers and rocket ships. That’s their answer, leave the planet behind, exhaust its resources, and move on. And they don’t care about the rest of us.
Have you heard of Tescreal? It’s an acronym, T-E-S-C-R-E-A-L, that captures the ideologies of the tech-bro oligarchy, folks like Peter Thiel. One of the letters stands for “longtermism.” The idea is that their moral duty is to ensure the survival of a theoretical n-to-the-nth-billion future humans who could exist if we manage to escape this planet and populate space. To them, the current eight billion of us? We’re just a blip. If everything collapses here, it’s no big deal in their view, as long as they can ensure the future of humanity, somewhere else.
But we wouldn’t have to die here. We could evolve. We could build something actually worth sharing with the universe. Instead, they’re racing full-speed ahead with a singular focus on escape. Then there’s transhumanism, Elon Musk recently tweeted that the carbon-based body is just a “bootleg” version of a silicon one. They’re waiting for the moment they can upload their brains, download them into bionic bodies, and live forever. Then they’ll get on their ships and drift through space, even if it takes 400 million years. What’s time when you’re immortal, and your mission is to spread your seed across the universe?
Yitzi: Wow. I never made that connection between companies exhausting Earth’s resources and the people trying to escape the planet, and trying to live eternally.
Maren: Yeah. And part of the problem is how we teach these things, in silos. Climate is taught in isolation, as if reducing carbon emissions is the entire solution. But it’s not. If we don’t address the systems that enable exploitation and infinite resource extraction, those same actors will just continue doing damage. Ecosystem collapse will keep happening. And overconsumption itself has become an existential threat. I laugh sometimes, but it’s out of horror. We are quite possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to this planet.
Yitzi: You’re making a profound point. We talk so much about climate change, but really there’s a more existential problem: overconsumption.
Maren: Exactly. And if we keep focusing on the symptoms instead of the root causes, we’re not going to survive this. We’re facing multiple existential threats. Inequality, for one, massive inequality. Civilizations tend to last about 250 to 300 years, and we’re right around 250. One of the hallmarks of a society on the brink of collapse is vast inequality.
So, yes, we’re on a dangerous path. If we don’t come up with a countervailing force, something to push back, I don’t see a good outcome. I believe that force could be a global coalition of people who stand together and say, “We don’t want this. This is not the future we choose.” We want to live on this planet in a regenerative, cooperative, beautiful way. We want the bees. We want clean air. We don’t want six-year-olds sifting through garbage dumps to find something they can sell for pennies. These are basic values. And we have to choose them over a polluted, unequal, AI-driven dystopia. Because I really don’t love the path we’re on right now.
Yitzi: So if you could start a movement that would influence the entire planet, what would be the core principles to help redress the problems you’re naming? It sounds like it starts with a shift in our attitude about consumption.
Maren: Yes, but more fundamentally, it’s the 99.99% going up against the 0.01%. They’re the only ones benefiting from this system. Unless you’re in that tiniest sliver at the top, you’re being exploited, left behind, or ignored. And they’re always trying to get us to focus on some other group, someone who looks different, believes different things, lives a different way. But really, who on this planet has the least in common with the rest of us? It’s them. That’s the group we should be talking about, the ones hoarding power and wealth, the ones shaping a world that’s not good for most of us.
We need to limit wealth hoarding, limit overconsumption, and learn to live within the respectful, finite boundaries of this planet. And that is absolutely doable. We’ve had everything we need to make that happen for decades. The only reason we haven’t? Because the people benefiting from the current system are holding it in place. This isn’t really a carbon emissions problem. It’s a power and systems problem — systems they’re deeply invested in maintaining.
And we keep looking at issues in isolation. AI, climate, food insecurity, water scarcity, ecosystem collapse, we treat them all like separate problems. But they’re all symptoms of the same root issue. There are nine planetary boundaries, and we’re exceeding six of them. Climate is just one.
Yitzi: So you’re saying the first step is limiting the power that comes from hoarding, maybe something like an income cap?
Maren: The first step is building a countervailing force. That means people getting organized and standing together. As individuals, we have no real power against this kind of entrenched wealth and control. But if the 99.99% came together, it wouldn’t take long to make change, and they know that. That’s what they’re most afraid of.
That’s why I got fired from Amazon. Not for climate justice activism. It was because I helped set up a town hall between tech workers and warehouse workers at the beginning of COVID. Warehouse workers were telling us they weren’t getting proper safety protections. So we sent out an invite for a conversation. Within 90 minutes, 1,500 tech workers RSVP’d saying, “Yes, I want to hear from my warehouse colleagues.”
Amazon immediately deleted the invite from everyone’s inboxes and calendars. Then they fired me and my colleague in 30-second video calls, because all the tech workers were already working from home. The moment a single COVID case showed up on the tech campus, 9 blocks away from the building I was in at the time, everyone was sent home. But warehouse workers? They still had to show up. Meanwhile, Amazon’s narrative was, “They’re our heroes. We’re treating them so well.” But we were hearing a very different story directly from those workers.
They reached out to us because they’d seen our success in pressuring Amazon and asked us to stand with them. We said yes, let’s start with a simple conversation. And that’s what scared Amazon the most. That’s what made them move so fast. That fear tells you exactly where our greatest power lies.
Yitzi: Okay, so let’s play devil’s advocate. The argument’s going to be, you’re criticizing capitalism that has lifted millions out of poverty and brought prosperity to countless people. Many so-called Third World countries now have much higher standards of living because of this system. What you’re proposing could take us back to a pre-industrial era where people were poor.
Maren: Yeah. I don’t think the premise of capitalism is the issue by itself. The problem is the premise of unlimited growth. Right now, our primary measure of success as a civilization is GDP. And GDP rewards activity without caring whether it’s good or bad. A forest fire? Great for GDP. Tons of money spent putting it out, rebuilding afterward, all that economic activity looks like “growth.” But we’re not measuring the externalized costs, the destruction, the suffering, the long-term harm.
I don’t care what we call the system, capitalism, socialism, whatever ism. What we need is a way to measure real well-being. Planetary well-being. Human well-being. The well-being of all other species. And yes, lifting people out of poverty. We can absolutely do that. We’re not talking about going back to some pre-industrial world. We can do better than that. This isn’t about moving backward. It’s about moving forward with intention.
The problem is that certain words have become so polarizing they shut down conversation. You say “communism,” and people immediately think of authoritarianism. You say “socialism,” and people start panicking about food lines or think they’ll be forced to eat dirt. It’s absurd. And the irony is, if we stay on this current path, we’re all going to be eating dirt anyway. That’s not hyperbole, that’s ecological collapse.
We’ve gotten stuck in these semantic wars. It’s all just noise at this point. We’ve got to move past that. We’re way beyond the point of arguing about labels. I get that we’re still, in many ways, just a half-step out of the cave, but come on. We’ve got brains. Let’s use them. I love us. And I hate us.
Yitzi: So we said the first point is we have to organize the 99.9%. Okay, let’s say we’ve done that. What’s next? What are the principles we need to fix the system?
Maren: Yeah. One of the best “holy books” we have is planet Earth. We could start just by following its natural laws. Earth doesn’t destroy itself. It has built-in checks and balances. You don’t see a handful of giraffes hoarding everything from all the other giraffes. Nature operates with balance, reciprocity, and interdependence. There’s so much we could learn just by observing that.
And the truth is, we already know what needs to be done. I don’t need to list it all out, others have already done the work. There’s a great book called Earth for All that lays out the roadmap. This is not rocket science. We have the policies, the models, the solutions. We’re just not implementing them because the people benefiting from the current system have too much power.
But the moment we gain enough collective power, especially if we’re aligned, we can flip these systems. And we don’t even need all 99.99% of people. Studies suggest as little as 3.5% of a population, actively engaged, can create real systemic change. I like to safely say 10%. That’s doable. There are enough people suffering under the current system already. A lot of those people voted for Trump, because he told a story that sounded like, “I’ll make things better for you.” And honestly, some of what he does might have unexpected climate benefits, like tariffs shutting down business. When business slows, emissions drop. We saw that during COVID. It’s not good for the stock market or GDP, but the planet got a break.
So, yeah, we already know what we need to do. The challenge is doing it.
Yitzi: Fascinating. I think the first step is also breaking the information pipeline. So many people in power have everyone’s brains plugged into this constant stream of consumption propaganda. How do we help people think for themselves, to realize they’re just being fed information by the same systems we’re trapped in?
Maren: The 2024 Oxfam report listed misinformation and disinformation as the second greatest existential threat after climate change. It’s a huge issue, and it’s no accident. Controlling information is the first step in controlling people. And honestly, I’ve thought about this a lot, and it’s tough.
You see people leaving social media because they feel targeted or manipulated. We need our own information systems, but building something truly independent and trustworthy in the time frame we have is incredibly hard. I was talking to a Navajo woman who brought up something interesting, how the Navajo language was used as code during World War II because it couldn’t be understood by outsiders. It made me wonder: do we need to develop our own kind of “code”? Something that lets us communicate even within compromised systems?
Maybe we don’t even need to abandon the existing platforms, we could be speaking in plain sight, in language they don’t recognize. Go right onto Truth Social or whatever, and still be communicating strategically. I don’t know. That might sound far-fetched, but the problem is real, and I haven’t heard many good solutions yet. We might need to go back to carrier pigeons, seriously, it’s that bad.
Have you read The Deluge? It’s a novel about near-future civilizational collapse in the U.S. It starts in 2016 with Trump’s first term and eventually people are passing coded notes left in hidden spots just to communicate. That’s how bad it gets. And I don’t think we’ve done nearly enough to grapple with this problem. It’s one of the biggest, and it’s still so new that we’re barely scratching the surface.
Yitzi: What makes you optimistic about the next 10 years?
Maren: I call myself an optimistic fatalist. When people say, “Oh, I’m optimistic because of the younger generation,” I just think, no. That’s such a terrible burden to put on them. And frankly, it’s too late. We need change in the next few years, not decades from now. We don’t have time to wait for them to graduate college, find their footing, get into politics, or whatever they think they’ll do. It’s just not fast enough.
But I guess what makes me optimistic is that this is happening globally. The powers that be are thinking globally, and now people are starting to think globally too. More and more folks understand that we need a big-tent, global coalition. And the beauty is, it doesn’t take everyone. It just takes enough.
That’s really where I’m putting everything, my time, my energy, my resources. I’m trying to make that global coalition a reality, even as one person. Because the first step is turning your “me” into a “we,” like I always say. Find your people. Build your community. Build your power. Then connect the dots. Connect the cells. And there are so many of those “cells” all over the world right now.
It sounds like wartime sleeper cells, but I like thinking of them in a biological sense, independent but alive, waiting to link up. And once they do, that network could activate quickly. It could happen faster than we think. We’re hitting a tipping point, and it’s going to tip one way or another. Soon. So we still have a chance.
Yitzi: Please tell us about the exciting work you’re doing now and what we can do to support you.
Maren: I’m just trying to be part of the movement I’ve been describing, building solidarity across enough people globally in whatever way I can. Since I come out of Big Tech, one of the best places for me to start is with tech employees. I speak the language, I have a lot of contacts. And that’s what everyone needs to do: think about their strengths and privileges.
Another thing is, I made enough money in Big Tech that I don’t have to work and can still put food on the table. Those of us with privilege: with great power comes great responsibility. Please step up. There are people with their heads down, just trying to make ends meet, and they have no bandwidth or energy. That’s exactly what the system is trying to do, drive us all to that point where we have no power and all we can do is hope for scraps off the king’s table.
So really, before we get to that point, please step the fuck up. That’s what I’m doing. I’m going around speaking, wherever you give me a microphone, I’ll speak. I’ve launched my website now. It’s still in an early stage, but you can sign up there at MarenCosta.com.
Everyone has their movements. There are a million awesome grassroots movements out there. Join one. I don’t care if it’s mine. They’re all doing the same thing. Just start. Start where you are. Start your own in your community. Start a community garden where you bring people together. You’ll build some food sovereignty. Detroit had to do that because their industry collapsed and people left. They were on their own for food, and that can happen fast.
But then you’re also building community, and that’s what it’s going to take. We’re going to need close communities for resistance, resilience, and regeneration, if we get that far. Start where you are. Build a community. Join whatever movement is closest to you or where you feel like you can get plugged in easily. Just start fighting that fight.
Yitzi: Wonderful. This is what we call a matchmaker question, and it works a lot of the time. Is there someone in the world, or in the U.S., you’d love to sit down and have lunch or coffee with, or collaborate with? We could tag them on social media and maybe help make a connection.
Maren: I was just at Change Now, and my favorite person there, who really spoke with this systemic, larger-systems view, was Laurence Tubiana. She’s the leader of the European Climate Foundation. She goes to the COPs, to Davos, and she really gets it.
After her speech, I went up to her. I think I was a little bit like a fangirl, just, “Oh my God, I want to connect with you.” I can’t remember if she gave me her email, but she said email is best so we could set up a time. I don’t have it, and I pinged her on LinkedIn but haven’t heard back.
So yes, tag her. Maybe she’ll remember, “Oh yeah, that person who was right up in my face.” I would love to talk with her. I told her, “How can I help you? How can I forward your mission?”
Yitzi: Okay. We’ll try our best to get her attention. And even if she doesn’t respond immediately, it’ll be out there in perpetuity, in internet ink.
Maren: And it puts her name out there too. Like, who is this person that someone else is so eager to talk to? You know? So go follow her.
Yitzi: How can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they support you in any possible way?
Maren: MarenCosta.com is the best place to plug in, and of course, on social media. I’m most active on LinkedIn because all the socials these days are just so overwhelming. It’s like, who has time for this? LinkedIn seems like the least polluted right now, maybe the least echo chamber-y.
But yeah, MarenCosta.com is the best place. There’s a spot to enter your email, and I’ve had so many people reach out. I want to figure out how to use that energy, and I think it would be through building cells. If each of those people who say “I want to help” starts a cell in their community, I can connect them to all the other cells.
After that documentary, so many people reached out. I had over 3,000 messages just on LinkedIn. Who DMs someone from a documentary? Apparently, a lot of people do. So I have this great network I could really tap into if I can figure out how to plug everyone together, and that’s all I need to do.
So yes, go to MarenCosta.com, get in there, and we’ll figure out how to get everybody connected and build power together.
Yitzi: Maren, you’re so inspirational. You’re going to be successful in your mission. And I hope we can do this again next year.
Maren: I’d love to. That would be great.
From UX Pioneer to Corporate Dissident: Maren Costa on Speaking Truth to Tech Power was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.