Who Owns The Internet & How It Owns Us | James Ball | Modern Wisdom Podcast 213

James Ball is a writer, journalist & Pulitzer Prize winner. The internet is more than the website you browse... it's real wires under the Atlantic, humans who have a big red button that can turn everything off, superbuildings with server centres, and a philosophy of freedom of information that we're moving further away from. Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Buy The System - https://amzn.to/30MgfHB Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #internet #wikileaks #freedomofspeech - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When you get into how online ads work, they are so, so much creepier than you ever give them credit for. They stalk you around the internet like if any human being, if any ex did this, they would be in jail and rightly so. What happens every time you visit any website is you start this amazing bidding war, your attention, and they might literally know exactly who you are, or they might have built a picture of it.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by James Paul. James, welcome to the show.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Pleasure to be here.

• 0:35Chris Williamson?

  Absolute pleasure to have you on. I want to know what's it like interviewing Edward Snowden in a stadium filled with 15,000 people?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  So that was, that was something of a moment, I've got to say. They'd done this very dramatic sort of video build up, and then they killed every light in the place. And so I'm walking out to silhouette, and they've just been told to expect Edward Snowden. And you can see the disappointment on the face of the people. I'm absolutely crashing. Have we been sold a bill of goods? My, my sort of script line to start it was, Edward, are you listening? At which point he's meant to appear on the big screens, because of course it's video link. And you just have this sinking moment in your sort of the longest sort of second

• 1:25Speaker 00

  and a half of my life, when you come on the stage and Edward, are you listening? And you just think, if he doesn't come up on screen, this is going to be awful.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh man.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  So honestly, the rest of the interview after that was a total cakewalk, because the nerves of that moment have been so extreme.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  It's like proper Metallica shit.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Honestly, it's, you know, you do, you, you go around and speak as a journalist and as a reporter, and a big crowd is 200, you know, that is like, that feels like prime time. And so you walk out to 13,000 at this like music concert venue and you're like, what the hell happened?

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  How do you, what happened in life for me to end up in this situation here?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's just completely ridiculous. The, um, the venue did some photos from the back of the crowd and you've just got this huge sort of stadium crowd. And then every screen, as it should be, massive picture of Edward Snowden. And there's this tiny dot on the stage and it's like, that's me, that's me.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  Look at me, mom, I made it.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  I did actually send it to my mom.

• 2:36Chris Williamson?

  You got it.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Who has, who has got it in a little frame.

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  How cool, man. That's awesome. Uh, so yes, we're talking about analogous today. We're talking about the internet. You've written a book about the internet. Why did you write a book about the internet?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Uh, I wrote a book about the internet because weirdly for something that's kind of so pervasive, you know, more than half of all of humans are on it. We do everything in our lives by it. We're doing this interview with it, you know? We do our banking, it's our financial system, it's our information, it's our spies, it's our critical network. And all we really talk about is Facebook and Twitter and Google. And they're really important. We should talk about them, you know, they do matter. But we never talk about the actual internet bit, you know? We talk about the cloud or we just sort of use it and don't think about it. And I kind of was like, okay, all of these boring invisible bits of the internet, they're

• 3:33Speaker 00

  not boring, they're really important and I want to do a book talking about them instead. So that's, that sort of was what I set out when I did it. And hopefully, hopefully it's fairly successful in like actually going, look at all these really important bits of the internet that are just as broken and just as wild, but have nothing to do with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 3:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, um, it's mad because. You're right, the internet, the infrastructure physically, how it manifests and how the messages are actually being moved around the world and all this sort of stuff. The takeoff of the platform of like the software side of things and the way that it's experienced by people was so great. That we never actually got to look into how interesting or cool or otherwise all of the stuff underneath that was, you know? Like you got to see the Wright brothers got to take a little bit of a plane off and you see them and they kind of fail a little bit. And then there's a slightly better one and then, oh wow, we've managed to get a helicopter, but it doesn't really work that much, you know? We go to attach another rotor and do all this stuff.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  And then you eventually get to like Concord and you watch this whole thing and people kind of brought along for the ride. But the takeoff with the internet was so intense and so, so quickly was everyone, it was just this ubiquitous.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  Utility like gas and plumbing that we all kind of, we didn't get to see that bit, right?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  It is that amazing thing, it's become a utility and we sort of, you know, the electrical grid is pretty cool if you ever need to think about it. Like we have to generate the same amount of power every day that we use. And you can't store power very well, it's really hard to do. And so there's this massive complicated mess of a thing going on that we had about a century, maybe a century and a half generously to build. And we don't have to think about it because too easy flick a switch. The internet sort of 20 years ago was a really niche thing. You know, starting to catch on, you probably, you know, knew somebody who had it, you might have had it at home. Why would you ever want it on a phone?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  And then suddenly it's critical infrastructure that we don't think about to that extent. And that's kind of wild because. It has really, really reshaped how the world works and also how the world connects to each other. This idea of the internet as the cloud is such a good bit of marketing because someone has to drive ships and lay cables under the sea to do this and bury them at the oceans. And you've got to find a massive plot of land that's quite cheap, that you can put huge, huge data centers and aircon and all of this.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  And so this is massive network of physical infrastructure that we just never really had to think about because it just appears to us.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so let's get started. Talk to us about the mechanics of the internet. What did you find out about that?

• 6:33Speaker 00

  So there's quite a great early origin story of the internet and it's older than you think it is. It comes out of something called the ARPANET, which grew out of the US military, basically. If you've ever heard of ARPA or DARPA, they came out of the US Department of Defense and were like their moonshot secret projects. You know, if anyone ever ran, you know, these are the people who everyone thinks did mind control. They actually were looking into bits around that, they really did. Or if we had Area 51, that would be these guys. And one of the things they were trying to do, like this is sort of in about the 60s, was look at networking.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And so computers at this time are things the size of a room that you feed with punch cards that cost masses and masses of masses of money. And maybe about three universities in a country would have one. It would be sort of a big sell in the very narrow geek world. You know, we have a computer that can do X, which would be wildly less powerful than a calculator if anyone still has a calculator.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  And so one of the things that ARPA tried to do, universities in America would go to it for funding, saying, hey, we want an even better computer that can do this kind of calculation. And because they wanted to research networking, and we'll get on to why, they kind of saw a bit of an opportunity of going, well, we won't give you money for a computer, but we'll give you money to network the one that you have. And that will mean if your computer's really good, say, at doing traditional sort of physics type equations, we'll hook you up with a university that's really good for doing sort of graphical calculations. And so when they need your computer, they can

• 8:28Speaker 00

  use it. When you need theirs, you can use it. And so you get more computer when not buying you another one. It's very sort of, you know, parental type relationship. And so they said yes, because if someone's offering you money and it will kind of help you, why not? And so four universities kind of said yes initially to connect up their computers with this thing called ARPANet. And they just wanted to do this, to do their physics or their chemistry or their mathematical research. They weren't sort of particularly evangelists going, wow, this will be a huge and exciting, world beating thing. And so they had to work out the basic stuff. And they came up with

• 9:13Speaker 00

  this sort of fairly revolutionary set of ideas that, you know, they were only thinking about connecting up the first four, and then, hey, if it works, maybe we'll have as many as like 12 or 15 on here. You know, this was, let's think big, guys. And so they, they were sort of thinking, right, well, we want to make it work quite well. And so it won't care what data you're sending. So networks beforehand, you had a phone network, and that could only send phone type signals. You know, you would have perhaps a network for flight reservations, which would be really, really

• 9:51Speaker 00

  specialist and only send very particular data. And you would charge, you'd be charged for how far your call was, you know, long distance calling, all of this, and the type of thing it was. So if you answered a, if you added an answer phone onto a US telephone network, you had to pay more every month. Uh, like just because you're connecting a different type of thing to it. And so they came up with this idea that this network won't care. You can send whatever on it. It won't try and understand it. It'll just send it along. And we won't try and build in a system so that it matters how far it travelled.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  You know, you, at the moment, the US government's paying the bill for everything. We'll just send it all out. And so they got these things connected up. It was sort of largely kicked down to graduate students uh to do the actual, how should all of this work? The eminent professors, this was like, yes, we want this network, get on with it. You know, one of them oversold a project um and sort of was actually quite into it. The rest, they left to grad students who, you know, very much the lowest rung of, of, of the academic circle. And so it sort of came to this very first test in nineteen sixty nine and um. These are, you know, these are nerds.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  They're not thinking they're doing some big portentous first moment. And so they'd connected up um Stanford with UCLA. So two universities, west coast of the US, a couple of hundred miles away. And they're on the phone to each other to try and do their first internet connection. Um, and they, they basically decide that they're just gonna try and log into the computer in the other university. So they're not trying to do some big, you know, uh, you know, the first message by phone, I think, was something like, what hath God wrought?

• 11:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's so symbolic, isn't it? Yeah, like one step for man, one step for mankind. And this one's like, right, can you just give me your password again, please, John?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so this is the thing, like, you know, you can tell whoever's done that. You know, if, if I was using that, I'd be, is, is this working? How are we doing? You know, what hath God wrought was brilliant. And so they start trying to type in the command to log in, which was login. And they, they type the L and they go to phone, right, I've, I've typed the L, have you got the L? Yeah, types the O, done the O, they wait, yeah, got the O, types the G.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Whole computer crashes.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  So the very first message sent successfully on what became the internet was "low".

• 12:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I mean, that really does put everything else to shame, doesn't it?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it actually does end up, it sounds like a big dramatic sort of Tolkien word, doesn't it? Something Gadot would say.

• 12:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it does. It does. "Low, we have broken the internet. You need to restart."

• 13:00Speaker 00

  So I also, I think it's really apt that the very first one they did crashed the whole thing. So, you know, start as you mean to go on.

• 13:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, nothing changes.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  But yeah, they got it fixed, they got it built. And so it became this sort of interesting thing. They found that it did actually let them use their computers a bit better. And the innovation that they come up with was whatever you send by it, whatever the results of the calculation would go into these little things called packets. It's basically like, and this is still how the internet works. Whatever you're trying to send or receive, if it's an email, if it's a video, website, whatever, is basically broken up into hundreds or in fact thousands and thousands of little packets, which are just like little envelopes going, this is envelope one of 5,000, going from here to here.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  And so all these envelopes get sent, they all travel by a bunch of different routes, you know, whichever cables are quiet. And all the envelopes arrive with you in the wrong order. And your computer just goes, "Okay, I've got packet 50, here's 49, here's 48, where's 47", reassembles them all in the right order, turns it back into, over to you. And what's quite neat about this is it means you don't care what order they're sent in, what order they arrive in, if something gets held up, it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to arrive, you know, packet 30 doesn't have to arrive between 29 and 31. And it turns out, this is what ARPA were really interested in.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  This idea of being able to just split up messages into packets and send them and not care what route they take. And they didn't, you know, plot twist, they didn't really care about the maths and physics nerds in the US universities. What it seems that they cared about was nuclear weapon command and control.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  So this was the late 1960s, you know, we are in full, full Cold War territory here. And what they were looking to do was, well, what happens if we have a first strike against us and we don't respond quickly enough and the US has been hit and we want to retaliate? What happens if we literally can't send the signal from the command bunker to the launch site? You know, what if the cable that it's meant to travel on is one of the ones that's been hit by the nuke?

• 15:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, okay.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  They have two or three, they might have, but they were like, how could we have it so that we can reliably still send the signal and be sure it would be received and accurate if we ever wanted to second strike? Now, you can see this as a terrifying war mongery thing, and your eyes suggest that you kind of are. They would also say being able to prove that you could retaliate if you were struck first makes it less likely someone will strike you.

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  It's part of the mutually assured destruction strategy, right?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's, you, you can make an argument that by going, look, we could retaliate, it makes someone else less likely to want to strike first. If you think you could strike first and get away with it, maybe you would. You know, personally, I wouldn't.

• 16:22Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, I like the whole, I've been reading into this a little bit recently, the mutually assured destruction as a, it gets billed as this kind of compassionate approach to making sure the world doesn't get blown up. It's like, bro, that's not how it works.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  It's, it's like the world's biggest and scariest testosterone off, isn't it?

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is precisely that.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  The whole thing is terrifying, like, I'm quite glad I was born after that era.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, yeah, fu- fuck knowing what's going on there. So, yeah, you've, we've got the, the fact that what the government were actually interested in was the ability to have a more robust communication system for them to find nukes if they were struck first.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so it wasn't that they wanted to use this nice little nerdy network to do it, but if you're going to test a new communications technology.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  You don't do it on the nuclear sort of weapon system. You want to be pretty sure by the time that you implement anything that's connected to nukes. It works, it works reliably, it's safe.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  So you give it to a bunch of hyper nerds over on the west coast and just let them dick around with it for a couple of years while they try and get the letter G to work.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Exactly, because what do you care if research of, you know, call essential mathematical principle is.

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  That's shite. Okay, so that's what it was like in the beginning. Let's roll the clock forward now to when the big internet starts to be built. What does that look like? Because you alluded to it earlier on, there's these huge data centers all over the place. There's these wires that are laid under oceans. Who did that? How did they do that? Where is it?

• 18:10Speaker 00

  So the internet grew really, really slowly and then really, really fast. And that's kind of what's caused almost all of the problems with it. So it grew from this quite useful nerd network and got more and more universities in. And one of the first sort of connections, they managed to get a UK university onto it. Email came really, really early. The Queen sent an email, I think in the late 70s. Uh, was one of, she was one of the first Brits to send an email. You know, I like to imagine she's got a sort of alt account on Reddit where she posts really good memes and stuff now. Because she's been online longer than any of us.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Um, and so you had, you had lots of little bits, you could send files quite early. And they came up with various protocols to keep it all working. It used to literally, there used to be a text file sitting on one computer that listed all the computers on the internet and what their address was.

• 19:12Chris Williamson?

  Up until when?

• 19:15Speaker 00

  I mean, this was actually only until about the mid 70s. It was for sort of three or four years. But because there are a few dozen computers.

• 19:23Chris Williamson?

  It's quite easy to do.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  This computer's here.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, it's a Family Guy sketch where they're talking about when only a few people in America had telephones and someone rings and he goes, hello, and he goes, hello, is this seven? He goes, no, this is four. Who's this? And he goes, this is eight. I'm looking for seven. He goes, oh, this is four. And you're like, that's kind of what it's like.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  It's basically like, and literally, you'd have to wait for someone to add, like, have the time to update the text file and type you on. And so they came up with things that would update automatically, you know, if you added a new computer to it and gave it an address, all of that kind of stuff. But they were all sort of just done in agreement between these unis. No one really set up a, and this is the official body that will do this, and this is the, and they set out a bunch of rules on how traffic would flow, on how web addresses would work, on how like, online addresses would really work, which they're called IP addresses. You've probably seen them, they're like a long string of

• 20:26Speaker 00

  numbers. And so that all kind of gets worked out when pretty much everyone on the internet knows each other. Pretty much everyone on the internet is kind of American and either with the government or in a university. And it rolls out quietly, until they kind of eventually go, okay, it's useful for some companies to connect to this now. Some nerds who don't work at universities want to stay connected on it, you know, they've graduated or other people have some uses for it. And they eventually kind of went, okay, we'll let everyone on. And this is sort of during this period, which is about 20 years, I should say. This is not particularly fast. This idea of ARPANET got replaced with the idea

• 21:11Speaker 00

  of the internet, which is not, again, a very glamorous name. It's basically the, you know, the Department of Defense might have a network inside its own institution that might have some quite sensitive stuff on for DoD employees. You might then have, you know, at Stanford, a network for the students and the tutors there. It might have some useful information for new graduates, you know, computers, policies.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  And so you've got network here, a network here, a bunch of other networks. What's going to connect them up? A network of networks and into that.

• 21:46Chris Williamson?

  Internet, yeah, as opposed to the Intranet, which would be the internal one.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Exactly that. So it's literally just a network of networks. It was a totally functional name and they dropped off a little work bit. So it just became into that.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And so you get into about sort of 1990, you're still at most at about a million users. And this technology's now been around since 1969. And Tim Berners-Lee comes in around this point. And he worked at CERN, you know, as an engineer there and came up with, with an idea of sort of, oh, could we sort of make paid, like, could we make something so you could see sort of nice, nice formatted pages? And he called it a web, well, he called it the World Wide Web. And this was basically the idea of being able to show pictures, text, all formatted as what we now know as a webpage.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  And he's, he wrote this all up as a formal proposal and his supervisor at CERN, you know, if you don't know CERN, it's the thing with the Large Hadron Collider, you know, that's sort of got to make a new Big Bang or whatever. I'm kind of hoping they'll hurry up with that these days.

• 23:04Chris Williamson?

  And that would make the world a little bit of a better place at the moment, wouldn't it? Yeah, that'd be great.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Feel like we could do the do-over. And so, you know, very clever people at this institution. His supervisor looked at this proposal for what is now, you know, technology absolutely everywhere in the world and just noted on it that it was interesting but vague.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me. The, the single biggest technology change in a century. Interesting but vague.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Yep. I mean, you know, good on them for that.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me. I've got a cool story to intercheck there. Tim Berners-Lee's.

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  Nephew is at Oxford with my buddy Alex and he met him at one of these fancy dinners where you got to dress like Harry Potter and everything. There's frills on frills on frills and it's gold bars plated in gold for your cutrally and stuff like that. And he sat down next to him and I think maybe, maybe people had name, name tags or place seatings, you know, with the names. And it was like Sean Berners-Lee or whatever. And Alex turned to him and was like, oh, funny. Like, like Tim, do you know Tim? And he was

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  like, uh, yeah, he's my uncle. And Alex was like, holy shit. Wow.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  So that, that started quite a, oh, oh, actually, oh.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, what, where do you go from there? Like, that's the biggest foot in mouth situation ever. And he sat next to this poor guy for the next like four hours or whatever at this dinner, wearing, wearing frills and a, and a tea cuzzy for his head.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  So, but yeah. And so that kind of was suddenly the killer product where people actually really started to want to use it. And it was in the nineties, you start seeing this big swell up of users. And basically this was all done private sector. You know, you could initially connect through your phone line. There was a thing that could sort of change your signal, modems. Anyone who connected to the internet in that era will still know the sequence.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's quite soothing if you're used to it.

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  It is. It is. Yeah. I bet if you, if you're, if you were born after 1999, probably, I'm going to guess you won't be able to remember it because around about sort of 2000.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  I bet 94, 95.

• 25:33Chris Williamson?

  You reckon?

• 25:33Speaker 00

  I'd be interested to hear of that.

• 25:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. If you can, what's the cutoff point? Tell us if you can't remember it and tell me if you can. Just give me a comment. Drop it in the comments below and we're going to work out. Cause that's the real millennials. From this 1984 to 1996, generation Y, it's can you remember the sound of a modem? That's what determines what, what generation.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  That's the full range, you know? I bet that would work. Because it's just not going to be as iconic to you if you're a bit older.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  What's that sound? That was annoying. You had to listen to it all the time. Don't, that's, that is the sound of my childhood, okay? Don't talk, don't you talk about it like that. All right, so I, I need to go back. So the Queen sent an email, Queen's in the UK, sent an email to America. Where does the, where'd the cable come from?

• 26:22Speaker 00

  So, we had this, we had some of the early transatlantic cables. The fun thing on the internet is it basically piggybacked off the phone network. People sort of found out that the way it sent data, it could double up. But the headache when it was sort of using phone networks was, as anyone knows who was, you know, on the internet and then their mum wanted to make a call, you could be kicked off the internet by someone sort of phoning out. And you had similar problems when you were piggybacking on other infrastructure. And so eventually they started laying their own

• 27:01Speaker 00

  cables. And internet cables are sort of wild in that they, they are a literal physical web around the world. And they, the way they connect is not at all neutral. It's between the places that have the money to lay them, the places that have the old phone network. And because they mirror the old phone network and piggyback off it, it follows the shape of it a lot. And so you've got tons of really good internet connections across America and across Europe. A lot of the rest of the world is far less well supplied, etc. But these cables are not like you might think. You're probably imagining something sort of three or four feet wide for all the data and all the,

• 27:44Speaker 00

  a standard transatlantic internet cable is about the width of a hosepipe.

• 27:49Chris Williamson?

  How many of them are there?

• 27:51Speaker 00

  There's dozens of them.

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  But not, not thousands or millions of them?

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Not thousands or millions, no. And they literally, they float under the sea. Like in some places, the sea's so deep that they're just floating.

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  So if an unfortunate fish with particularly sharp teeth comes in, my connection to someone when I'm podcasting with them could just be shot?

• 28:13Speaker 00

  This actually happens. Sharks chew through some of the internet cables.

• 28:18Chris Williamson?

  Bloody sharks. It's always sharks, isn't it? Or alligators.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Great excuse if you don't want to chat to so, oh no, I think your shark's got the internet cable.

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  Like that guy, like the guy from the World Health Organisation when he got caught. That's what you should have done. That's what you should have done. Oh, I'm sorry, the shark in connection.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  I mean, much more believable than the excuse.

• 28:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. It is.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  So, but of course, you know, with the internet, everything travels on packets. If you do lose one of the cables, it's a very brief disruption. As long as you've got other ones, everything just flows and it takes another route. It's sort of the, the magic of the internet is it's really resilient because it's got, it does not care what route it takes to go to anything. And because most stuff travels at the speed of light, you know.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  You can just rearrange super quickly or whatever.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Connection will go from sort of Islington to Camden via Canada.

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Just a totally natural route. So it's.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  But yes, and that these cables get chewed through, they have, they've got special boats that go out and basically pick them up and get the two broken ends and patch them up. Yeah.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  Some fella just sticks them back together with a little bit of, a little bit of gaffer tape or whatever. Um, so we made this joke and we were laughing earlier on about, oh, there's some guy sat there with a text file, like how, how silly is that? But there is actually a fella that you met who's got a big red button on his desk.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  Yes, there is a guy with a big red button.

• 29:53Chris Williamson?

  Tell me about the guy with the big red button.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  So this guy is called Goran Marby and he's the head of an organisation called ICANN, which I always have to look the name up, even though I have covered this thing for seven years because it is the most, it sounds like a fake kind of James Bond cover company in terms of how bland it's trying to sound. It's the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

• 30:24Chris Williamson?

  No one is looking into that, are they? No one, oh god, I don't want to do research on ICANN. No, no.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Exactly, and so what these guys oversee, they're not for profit. They're not sort of in any UN Charter. They're not in the US Constitution or anything like that. They are responsible for what web address points to what site. And so, you know, and who can buy what web address? So pretty much anyone can buy a dot com. But if you want to buy something that's dot cat, you can't buy it just because you like, you know, moggies. You can only buy it if you're from the Catalonia region of Spain. And so there are all sorts of fights like this.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Who, you know, how do we make sure that people legitimately have their own web addresses that they should? How do we know when we type google.com into a browser, it's taking us to the real google.com? How do we keep the internet joined up and everyone agreeing on all of this? You know, one of the fights that these guys have to sort out is who should be able to own dot amazon? Because there's a very, very big tech company worth more than a trillion dollars. Who would say, well, we have a lot of trademarks and patents here, you know, we, we would like dot amazon, please.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  And there's several countries who have the world's biggest and most important rainforest in their geography, who would say, actually, guys.

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  We were here first.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  The middle of this is Goran Marvi. And so, you know, if any organisation can sort of claim to have a lot of oversight of the rules of the internet. You know, he, ICANN is responsible for this thing called DNS, sort of Dynamic Name Service. And it's what connects up the actual sort of address of your computer to web addresses that we all use. And so it's this incredibly important system. Because not only is it the rules and the sort of wrangling about that. It's if you can trick domain name systems, you can do a lot of sort of quite nasty

• 32:52Speaker 00

  stuff. If you can sort of make it so that a load of internet users in one region even, suddenly they're typing in, say HSBC, and it takes them not to the real HSBC, but to a site that looks just like it owned by fraudsters. And they type in their login and their password. You've done nothing wrong. You've checked the web address, you've checked the little passcode, but it's taken you out there. Let's say, though, that you're in China and you're looking for information on a protest or an opposition thing, and the government messes with web addresses. You could be taken and actually found by authorities and dragged

• 33:33Speaker 00

  away. You know, people can censor and change information. And so Goran Mavi's got this really important job trying to oversee all of this with no legal authority.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  Where's he based?

• 33:48Speaker 00

  So he's based, he's based in Los Angeles. So it's in these little sort of out of town offices on an industrial estate. They've got like two floors.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  Just some unassuming fellow sat in the arse end of LA with a big red button trying to desperately control the internet.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Yep. So he's this Swedish software engineer by background, you know, worked in telecoms. And yeah, he, when he got this job as see as sort of the director of ICAM, his friend bought him a big red button to put on his desk to sort of show, you know, it's a bit like that thing in the IT crowd where she's holding the internet, you know, if anyone is, it's him.

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  He really does have a hold of the internet, doesn't he? Oh, my God. Right. Okay. So that's, that's some stuff to do with the infrastructure and the mechanics of how the internet works. You also looked at the way that advertising works online as well, didn't you? Can you tell us what you learned from Brian O'Kelly?

• 34:45Speaker 00

  I, I will do. I should really say, um, the, the issue for poor Goran is, uh, and you know, why he keeps his button on his desk is, uh, he let me press it.

• 34:54Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, what happened? Did everyone's internet go down?

• 34:57Speaker 00

  So, I mean, I've got to say, I was hoping, or at least, you know, a big sort of, you know, nice side lights or something. You press it and it's, it's like, it's a big elevated button. It looks like something that should be in a nuclear power station or something. Lateralit, press it. Absolutely nothing.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Not a single thing. And of course, it's got this reminder where he's like, no one actually has power in the centre of the internet. Everything's done by consensus. Everything's done by this mind numbing thing where everyone has to agree every rule change. And so it's all disintegrating and falling apart. You've got all these people making all this money on the internet. And then the actual rules that hold it together, that people like him and not for profits have to oversee, are crumbling. And so, you know, it was this quite sort of, you're sort of like, you've got a big red button on your desk. That's cool. And then it's sort of like, no, no, it's him saying that he's kind of toothless.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  It's the, it's the antithesis of his control.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly that. I, you know, I half wondered, you know, maybe a little bit. It was like, maybe one day it'll work.

• 36:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's it. He's desperately, what you don't know is that Goran Marby is a low key super criminal who is lying in wait and has slowly worked his way up from being a Swedish programmer to, to the arse end of LA. And he's slowly creating a big red button that's going to shut down the internet.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  And he's, he's just getting all of our suspicion away from it by going, yeah, no, you touched the button.

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  Look, press, press it, press it. It's never, it never worked for me. And then one day, he runs away with all of the internet money and we're all, we're all left having to ring each other again.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  So, and my fingerprints are on it. So I get.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  And your fingerprints are on it. It was that James Ball. It was that British guy. Get him. Okay. So, um, advertising. Brian O'Kelly, what did you learn from him?

• 36:50Speaker 00

  So this, this guy's really interesting. So when I meet him, we're in the middle of a sort of full New York ad office. All of the meeting rooms are named after comic book characters. So we're in sort of Peter Parker. You know, it's all very tech company, all of this. And he's the CEO at the time I speak to him. Um, and this company's just been sold for, you know, more than a billion. Um, so.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  He's sort of big shot in advertising on the internet, all of this. And he basically walks in and says he is the guy that invented programmatic advertising. So that system where every time you visit a website, you see all those annoying automated adverts.

• 37:37Chris Williamson?

  All the embarrassing stuff that you looked at last week.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that one terrible sort of sofa that you looked at drunk on Ikea. You know, they could be much worse examples, but let's go for that one that then follows you around. Or, you know, you bought some new cutlery when you moved flat six months ago. And still every ad on the internet is for cutlery sets, as if you're a weird fork fetishist. That takes careful pronunciation.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Very well done there. Very, very precise speech.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  It's, you know, all of those, but also, you know, this one's a weird trick that doctors don't want you to know. All of this, all of this is his fault. And he admitted this, like, off the back of it. And when you get into how online ads work, they are so, so much creepier than you ever give them credit for.

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  Tell us, I want to know how creepy they are.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Basically, they stalk you around the internet like any, if any human being, if any X did this, they would be in jail and rightly so. And so the ad networks, Facebook runs an ad network, Google runs one, Amazon runs one, then there's a bunch of other ones. Any website that shows adverts from that company asks to put one of the ad network cookies on your, on your computer. And when you tick that yes to the cookie box, it turns up on every bloody website you visit, always. That's one of the things that you're agreeing to. And that's just a little line of text on your computer, doesn't put anything else on your thing.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  It's just something going, hey, this person visited this website. It doesn't even say that, it's just a line of text. Other websites can look for what cookies are on your computer. So let's say you go to New York Times earlier in the day and then you go to, you know. Some kind of anime fan site or something later in the day. It'll have a look and go, oh, this guy was on the New York Times earlier. I recognize, I recognize that cookie. All of that's stored over at the ad network. You can't see any of what they know about you. Now you'll have dozens and dozens of these on your computer.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  And so what happens every time you visit any website? Is you start this amazing bidding war for your eyeballs, for your attention. And they might literally know exactly who you are, or they might have built a picture of it. So the advertiser, let's say it's someone who wants to sell, you know, my book. Um, my publisher, if they did this, would do, here's a list of people who've bought books from us in the past, who are subscribers to our mailing list. We don't want to target these people. We want to target people like them. So they'll do like a seed list and go, people who look a bit like this.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  And then essentially these sort of data brokers can look at that and come up with a set of characteristics that you might want. And so they'll keep an eye out for that. And so it might be a New York Times reader. It might be someone who's gone to, you know, they might have all sorts of stuff. Or it might just be people that we guess are aged between 25 and 50, living in the UK uh, and living in cities. It can be really vague. It can be really specific. And when you visit the site, it will try and look at as much information on you as it can. If you're logged in, it will take that information. But it will also see all the cookies it can and go, hey, we've seen all of these cookies

• 41:24Speaker 00

  and send it over to ad platforms, which then go, right.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Here's who we think this person is. How much would you pay to serve them this advert? And this might go to dozens and dozens of places that are each trying to sell dozens and dozens of ads. And so each one will look through the cookies and go, okay, someone with that cookie, I would pay 0.01 cent to show them this rubbish generic advert. But actually, that's a good cookie. I've got an advert that wants that cookie. I'd pay 0.1 cents for that or one cent for that. And so they all come back with their bids. And eventually you see the six or seven adverts of the people that would pay most to see you.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  What that means has gone on in that like 10th of a second where you're loading a webpage, is data about you didn't just go to the three of foot to the web owner, or even the web owner and the people whose adverts you're seeing. It went to hundreds and thousands of companies.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  The pace that this happens at is mental. I can't believe that they're able to do dynamic ad targeting without it completely breaking the internet or making you just walk from webpage to webpage. You know what I mean?

• 42:43Speaker 00

  It feels like that should take half an hour, doesn't it? Like you think of an auction and it's all in microseconds now. Because this is how the internet makes its money. So they've made it really, really efficient.

• 42:55Chris Williamson?

  Why are they called cookies? Is it because of crumbs?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's exactly that. I think it's from the Hansel and Gretel thing.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Even that, the Hansel and Gretel story is creepy as hell as well.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. All of this is creepy.

• 43:09Chris Williamson?

  James, man, everything to do with the internet is like this sort of fluffy Teletubbies world up top and then Dante's Inferno just existing below it. Do you not think? It's so weird. Okay, so we know that people are tracking us around the internet. We know that there are a combination of lobbyists, private interest groups, people that are outside the purview of government, but also nonprofits, who are independently trying to wrangle the internet and get it under control. How does all of that tie into national security and surveillance?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Well, your core thing here is, sorry I'm being bitten by a cat.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  It's fine.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  So this dude, he's a git.

• 43:51Chris Williamson?

  So good.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  So he's in trouble there. He just bit my arm. So. All of this starts to matter for national security because it's not as if we're just going on the internet 15 minutes a week now and, you know, posting to a message board about our favourite show. Firstly, it's got all of our lives on it. You know, most of us now, if you start thinking about the internet being WhatsApp, iMessage, sort of FaceTime, Skype, all of these things, as well as all your social media profiles, as well as everything you keep in the cloud on Google Drive or whatever, most of us have basically all of the intimate details of our lives.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  And that's before we get anywhere near dating sites and, you know, whatever pics people have been sending on Tinder or Grindr or Bumble. This is all intrinsic to us. And then it's intrinsic to the global sort of financial system now. You know, most people can access their banks through it, their savings, their investments. A lot of clearing runs on systems that are at least adjacent to the internet. And anyone who might be of interest to any spy agency in the world or any hacker in the world lives online. You really can't live off the grid now. You can minimise yourself. But, you know, any spy or diplomat's got a wife, they've got kids, they've got people

• 45:17Speaker 00

  like that that you could access information on. So just for intelligence, they're going to, you know, you're going to have spy agencies all over the internet. If you then also are trying to track for terrorists, you know, it's one thing to kind of go, "Oh, the cultural attache from Russia who's just been assigned to the embassy in my country, who previously seems to have worked entirely in the police and military, hmm, could that be a spy? Might sort of keep an eye on him." That's one thing. If you're trying to look for a right-wing extremist or sort of some of the terror that's been done by Islamist groups... There, you don't know who you're looking for.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  And you have, you know, you can be a Western government with a very sort of clear motive.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  You might suddenly want to sort of pass as much of the internet as you can to see if people are trying to look up how to do terror attacks, et cetera. And so they want to look all over it. You've then got countries wanting to disrupt each other. And so we've seen sort of attacks from that were later attributed to Russia on Ukrainian banking systems, power systems, et cetera. We, quite famously, the US, Israel and the UK, did what's called the Stuxnet attack, where they managed to come up with this incredibly aggressive computer virus.

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  The most effective worm in history, wasn't it?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they kind of bungled it in that it was it's lucky that the bit they bungled was how widely it spread, rather than the payload, because they wanted it just to spread to this particular type of industrial controller used in Iranian nuclear centrifuges. And someone basically decided this isn't working well enough and made it spread way more aggressively, which is how it got onto the loads and loads and loads of internet systems, where people were going, this is really weird computer virus. It doesn't seem to do anything. Then it looked into it and went, hang on, if there's one particular type of, you know, industrial board it's connected to, it does a bunch of weird commands.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  And those weird commands basically would make a centrifuge spin faster and faster, then try reverse direction, then spin faster again, and literally explode.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Now, and it worked. At least to an extent, although they got caught. Now, if you could start doing physical explosions by internet attacks, you look into it. And so Stuxnet was part of a much wider programme, getting ready in case there was a US or sort of conflict with Iran. They tried to get in every system in that country, in their critical infrastructure, to disable as much of it as they possibly could ahead of a war.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  That was, it's kind of like a dead man's switch type thing, or like a, not like a mutually assured destruction, that's not mutually, that's just assured destruction, isn't it?

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so what happens when you're dealing in a world where one side could wipe the other out, they try and do the same. So they're not necessarily trying to get in and break everything right now, but they're trying to get the access so that if they needed to, they could. And so swirling around us on the internet, on these sort of, you know, on the same hosepipe cables that we're using to share gifs and, you know, whatever else, you've got this invisible war going on all around us that drags us into it, as well as, you know, organised crime to try and mine bitcoin, as well as just trying to pick up state secrets, bank details. You've got this absolute swirling, unregulated conflict.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  In the real world, we've at least got the laws of armed combat, we've got the UN, we've got some restrictions. No one's ever thought to do that for cyberspace, so we don't have, you know, a list of what counts as an escalation, when does spying or industrial espionage cross into an attack? You know, we had the WannaCry attack, which hit computers across the world, but notably hit the NHS. And it seems like it was targeted at someone else entirely, but again, spread brilliantly.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  And literally stopped equipment used in operating theatres from working. It stopped ECGs from working because they were all on Windows XP.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  And so this, this attack that was aimed either at Ukraine or at Spain suddenly took out and did millions of damage.

• 50:05Chris Williamson?

  Missed the mark and wrecked the NHS for a couple of weeks.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  And I mean, could have killed people, you know, people rely on this equipment to keep them alive.

• 50:15Chris Williamson?

  So let's say, let's say that someone does like cross the line, whatever that would mean. They go from state surveillance or state protection into something that could be seen as an act of war or whatever it might be. Who, who gets called in to do that? Is it just on the nation states to wag fingers at each other?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  So this is, this is the thing. We don't have a, we don't have anything to decide how this should be arbitrated. But what we do have at the moment is, it's like this weird sort of Middle Ages type thing where people don't just rely on the state. You don't now have a bunch of companies with private armies, thankfully. Well, you've got a few, but we don't tend to like those companies. But Sony doesn't have its own militia operating in each country.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  I'd love that, man. I would imagine Tim Cook with a Spartan helmet on and a shield and on the front of the shield, there's just the Apple logo. And then you've got, you've got, oh yeah, all the rest of them behind it. You shall not pass. That could be another one.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  One Apple soldier's uniforms look amazing.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  It'd be so slick. Yeah, exactly. But after, after, after about four years, they'd need to be replaced.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Whereas Amazons would be like really shoddy, but there'd be loads of them.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there would be billions and billions of them and they'd be able to churn them out at a rate like no one else would know. Amazon would just be, just Jeff Bezos, pair of aviators on and just a, a sea of drones.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Oh God, just horrible.

• 51:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's all he's got. It's just him with his aviators on and a sea of drones. Also, I had on the podcast a guy called Bruce Duckworth from Turner Duckworth Graphic Design Company, and he is the man who created the Amazon Smile logo.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Wow. Okay, that's quite a cool claim to fame.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  Bro, he's sat in a meeting.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  With stock.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  It's so good. He's sat in a meeting with Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos said, gave it over to him and Jeff's assistants are there and they're like, right, yeah, Jeff likes it. Shall we, should we move it on to focus groups and blah, blah. And Jeff's like, no, no, we don't need focus groups. And they're like, well, Jeff, this is quite a big, it's quite a big deal doing the re, the re thing. It's like late 90s, just like getting real big as well. Jeff, maybe we should just, and he's like, anyone who doesn't like this logo doesn't like puppies.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  You made the Amazon logo and Jeff Bezos said, anyone who doesn't like this logo doesn't like puppies. Like there is no bigger claim to fame, man.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  That is, that is excellent. That is, you've got to give that credit.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  He's just some fella. Bruce is just some guy, lovely British dude from down in, I think he said Surrey. And I was just chatting away, chatting away to him, just this guy, he does Metallica, he does Coca-Cola, he does Samsung, he does, and he's just some dude with a team of 100 graphic designers that are all absolute freak savages, like unleashable at the job. And that's him. So that's, that's my, that's my cool story. So, okay, we don't have Sony and stuff like that. They don't have private militias.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Online, they kind of do because it turns out like, because we don't have all of this agreed, there is way more going on every day in the online world in terms of attacks and defenses and checking everything out. And companies largely have to protect themselves. And so you've got all of these places like outsourced to these sort of online security companies. I visited one called Symantec. They were actually the one that discovered Stuxnet and they're a US company. So they kind of went, oh, we've found this really interesting new attack. And then eventually you had to kind of go, um, it actually looks like it was made by the US government. Um, credit to them, they said it.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  But um, they sort of, they have these secure operating centers and uh, you go in and it's, it's sort of all ID. You're not meant to take your phones in. You've got a man trap of doors. So you're in like a, a door locks behind you. And then you're held and watched on CCTV. Another one comes through. All of this. And then they monitor

• 54:26Speaker 00

  billions of points of data every day for their paying clients. Cause they sit inside their networks and go, is suddenly more than usual being sent out? Is there an attack that we recognize? Is there? All of this. And so you've got this weird sort of world where, you know, the same people who do our antivirus software and we sort of think of as pretty innocuous. Behind the scenes, they've got these sort of hundreds of people watching all the time for sort of cyber threats and how serious they are. And if they need escalating, they have like hotlines to the FBI and to the sort of homeland security and to all of these people. Um, and so it's, it's basically this

• 55:09Speaker 00

  ungoverned sort of battlefield with all of us sitting in the middle of it, kind of going, you know, just browsing around shopping, not kind of noticing everything sailing past us.

• 55:19Chris Williamson?

  James, I'm telling you, man, it, we're in Teletubbies land and they're down there in the seventh circle of hell, battling, battling demons and stuff like that with a massive sword out of Final Fantasy.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it kind of is though. It is just this, the internet, because, because all the companies use this really utopian mission language. And we kind of all thought of them as cuddly until a few years ago. It does have this like halo sort of lovely floaty image. And then you're like, God, no, this is, this is trench warfare.

• 55:52Chris Williamson?

  This is one of the things that I noticed upon reading your book, that we personify a lot of things in the world, right? So we personify Thomas the Tank Engine. He's a tank engine. He doesn't need a face, right? But he's got a face and he's got a personality and stuff like that. And I think naturally we want to ascribe even people's cars, right? This, oh, she's, she's feeling a little slow today. And it's like, no, it's a mechanical vehicle. It just does the thing it's supposed to do. It's the definition of utilitarian. And we personify the internet as well, right? In, in very, very similar sort of way. It's given this new world, it's like the sixties, man, free love and information and stuff like that.

• 56:31Chris Williamson?

  But giving it a personality and romanticizing about it appears to actually probably be making us a little bit weak to what's properly going on. So does taking a more utilitarian approach help here? Cause I can use a hammer to knock a nail in, or I can use a hammer to hit you in the head.

• 56:47Speaker 00

  And that's, I think that's exactly right. I think that's sort of the, where we have to move past with the internet. This is, you know, this is the, the new technology of our generation. And in the book, I kind of liken it to when we got industrialization and factories. In the end, it's made us better off. It's made stuff cheaper. We can produce more. We get more out of what we have. You know, we have a lot of modern society thanks to it. But initially it sucked. It made rich people way richer. It let them dump pollution, uh, sort of in the water and rivers. They worked people for very low wages in atrocious health and safety conditions for very long hours.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  And so a few people got really, really disproportionately wealthy. And all of the negative effects pushed their way down society onto the rest of us. Now, the internet's not quite as blatant as a big sort of factory churning out pollution in front of you, but it's working in just the same way. The technology is bringing the benefits to the people who help build it. And so it benefits governments who have been involved in the internet since its inception. It benefits money, you know, the finance model of the internet, the venture capital that built all of the tech companies we know, the people who get really rich on our data and centralizing that. Is it benefiting us?

• 58:15Speaker 00

  We've got misinformation, we've got less money, we are sort of losing some of our high streets. We are not getting all of the upside of this. We're getting some of it. I think most of us would go, actually, if you could turn off the internet tomorrow and wind technology back to 1990, we'd say no, and that would be the right answer. But are we actually harnessing this tool for us? Or are we letting it just because it's good overall and because we've got this fluffy view of it? Are we letting the people who've always had their hands on the levers get all the benefit? And we've got to move it back to being a thing in the real world and a thing that we think

• 58:56Speaker 00

  about if we want to have control of it and have the perks of it. And that's what we don't do and need to.

• 59:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, what would be the psychological equivalent of some nefarious factory owner 100 years ago dumping his waste into the local lake? It would be the companies of Silicon Valley racing to the bottom of the brainstem to use every evolutionary trick in the book to ensure that you maximize your time on site. Anyone who's spent time looking at Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technologies work about the addictive nature of technology and all of the real crazy militarized weaponized

• 59:46Chris Williamson?

  military-grade tactics that are being used to ensure that we stay on our phones and we stay on site and we do... Like the guy that created Infinite Scroll said in Adam Altter's book that it was the single biggest mistake of his life.

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  The guy that made internet Infinite Scroll, which is on every website now, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever it might be.

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  It's an incredibly common thing if you talk about people who were sort of involved in the early days of the internet or in building some of this, or you know, whether you see them in in Adam Altter's very good book, actually, or you know, sort of the ones I spoke to.

• 1:00:24Chris Williamson?

  What's it called? Irresistible, is it?

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  So it's not, I can't remember.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  Shit, it will be linked because whenever I mention a book, or can you type Adam Altter in? Whenever I mention a book and I don't say-

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, go and check that out. It's really cool. If you're interested in looking at, it's like quite old as well in this, like 2013, 2014, I think. So it was before the Centre for Humane Technology came around. And yeah, Adam Altter, Irresistible, really good book if you want to find out a little bit more about how tech companies are manipulating us.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  But yeah, so the people who built this, the people I spoke to, you know, Steve Crocker was there, was a guy who I spoke to for the book. He was there in that very first meeting where they crashed the internet, you know, typing in login. You've got, you know, Brian O'Kelly, who built its adverts, you've got people who helped fund it. And they all sort of act as if it's not the result of their actions. And I think some of that is dissonance and some of it's just that this thing's become this runaway train. And so you see people kind of freak out. And part of the thing is, it's built into the technology that it's got to keep doing stuff like this. Networks centralise power, they

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  centralise money, they centralise resources. That's most obvious in a social network. If you started 10 new social networks tomorrow, are you really going to move off the one that all your friends are currently on? And let's say you move to one of them and it's great. You're going to try and get your friends to move to that one, not to move separately across the other 10. And other stuff, everything about the internet, we always talked about it as this long tail, information wants to be free, it's gonna level us out, it's gonna, a lot of the people saying that believed it genuinely and wanted it to do that. But by its nature, it wants to centralise power, centralise money, centralise people, centralise data.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  And so, a little bit like, you know, industrial capitalists will want to move money that way, and so you make laws that tax it and push it all back the other way. You know, that's why we have regulations, so that you can't cut safety standards, that's why we have laws, that's why we have wage, you know, wage requirements, all of that. We built society to cope with what industrial capitalism wants to do and to mitigate it. We need to now rebuild society to deal with what information capitalism or the internet wants to do. Sort of, it wants to centralise all the power that way. That's fine, as long as it's helping

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  us overall. But just because it wants to do that, doesn't mean we have to let it.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that's a common theme with a lot of the guests that I've had on recently is, I think that the world is moving so quickly, that not only can our evolution not keep up with it, and our inter-social dynamics not keep up with it, we have no idea how to talk to the opposite sex anymore, and go out on a date, and all this sort of stuff. But what moves even more slowly than the most flexible, most adaptive creatures on the planet, is legislation. Like, the ability for governments and state agencies to catch up with this pace of change. Like, we've said ourselves, you know, in the last

• 1:03:56Chris Williamson?

  20 years, from 2000 to 2020, the landscape in terms of technology and connectivity isn't even in the same universe. Like, if you'd been in a coma for 20 years, from the year 2000 until now, and you woke up, you'd be like, and we can do what? What, what? You know, so, I think, um...

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  There's this quote from Goethe, I think, where he talks about the fact that all societies swing from one extreme to the other and then end up finding a virtuous mean. And inevitably, I think that's what happens because technology is always going to move ahead and then kind of like slow your grandma on the walk around the playground, like she's slowly going to catch up and then she gets there and then there's another leap. And, oh, okay, now we need to work out what's going on with augmented reality or virtual reality. Okay, now we need to work out what's going on with bioengineering and biotech. Okay, now we need to, you know, I mean, like every single time that this happens. And this is the fear, if anyone who's read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, which is an unbelievable book about the takeoff of artificial intelligence, that takes this

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  game to its nth degree, to the final point, which is that if you have a super intelligent agent in artificial intelligence before you have fixed the control problem, which is how do you ensure that you don't have perverse incentives and that everything is instantiated correctly? That's it. That's the end of the human race. That is everything over. And all of these little things, all of these little games that we played, where it's like, oh, well, look, you had the, you had the farming revolution and then you killed a bunch of animals and then you had the industrial revolution and you polluted a little bit of the planet and then you had fossil fuels and we kind of gave you, this got a dry run a number of times where you moved forward as a society very quickly and then you started

• 1:05:45Chris Williamson?

  to realise what some of the sort of more malicious side effects of doing that was. And then you had it with technology. We even gave you a little bit of a taste, like, look, you guys, you had this lowest common denominator, echo chambers existed, people's opinions got polarised and moved out to the side and all this sort of stuff. And then you done gone fucked up and in the year 2105, singularity occurred, you hadn't fixed the control problem and now you're all slaves for us and this is just Neo from The Matrix flying around.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  So it's kind of how it goes. So if people have never played it, by the way, it's the paperclip game. If you just search paperclips on the app stores, it's really cheap and good way to pass a day during lockdown, but also just the best illustration of what goes wrong with an AI. Quite subtly, you're just an AI making paperclips, works nicely. But I think sort of in the run up to sort of tackling this stuff, I think it's almost unrealistic in terms of optimism to expect sort of legislation to be able to keep up because until something feels like a high priority, they never get there.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Well, there's real world problems, right? So they end up playing whack-a-mole though. They end up sort of trying to do something narrow about a certain aspect of social media and they'll do a narrow fix on that or a narrow fix on hate speech or increase the requirement for moderators or, and you know, it's a bit like sort of trying to tackle flooding but a teacup at a time. What tends to have to happen is that you get to a point of crisis and it doesn't necessarily have to be a crisis caused by the thing that you're fixing, but you know, it's usually related. But you know, we got the modern welfare states, sort of its early steps off the back of

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  the Great Depression. You know, we got government actually taking a bigger role in life. We got the NHS out of World War Two. You know, that they are pretty direct effects of each other, even if, you know, even if it's not, oh, the solution to war is to have a health service.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  We are at least at this point hitting some crises and they're awful crises. But we're in a crisis of populism. We're in a, we're gonna be in an economic crisis that makes 2010 look awful. We're in a global pandemic. There is at least the chance that we use this to reassess or we use this to get ahead. If we have, you know, if we accept that we have to change a lot and to build a lot and to rebuild from an economic crash we haven't even started feeling yet, then we may as well do it to try and fit the era. And so on the one hand, we actually have an opportunity. Stuff actually changes off the back of big crises.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  The sort of fear side of that is this is such a big and awful crisis that how bad would it be to waste it?

• 1:08:59Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting way to look at it, to actually look at the crisis as an opportunity.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  We've got a chance and it's not an indefinite chance. If we don't tackle a bunch of this now, it will get much, much worse over the next decade and we'll have to tackle it again.

• 1:09:14Chris Williamson?

  All right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna make you put your money where your mouth is, James. You are governor, transnational, international, global governor of the planet and you're allowed to high level enact some policies or create some agencies. What do you do?

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  So I'm assuming I can't just embezzle and make a moon base.

• 1:09:36Chris Williamson?

  No, that would be awesome, just you and Elon Musk, just with massive fat cigar. Elon would have a spliff, wouldn't he? Massive fat cigars, just, just sat there. Yeah, no, you can't do that.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. I got exactly the site worked out for my moon base too. I think we've got to work out something around. How our data is used and who owns the rights to it? Everyone likes saying data is the new oil. They sort of miss that that makes us the crushed up dinosaurs and plants. You know, I don't want to be in the pipes. I want to benefit from it. Um, so we need to work out if there are sort of hundreds of billions of profits every year being made of this, how do we share them? If it's a natural resource of our own lives, it needs to have some sort of public ownership as well as regulation on its use. Just sort of think of it in privacy terms is nuts and restricted.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Um, we need rules governing cyberspace that are norms governing that. We have to at least get, you know, the laws of armed combat do not work perfectly, but at least we have something to point to and go, this is.

• 1:10:49Chris Williamson?

  Who would enforce it? Because we're talking, we're not just talking about stuff that happens within nation states usually. Would you have to have some sort of equivalent of like the Geneva Convention?

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Essentially, yeah. Um, and you know, who enforces the Geneva Convention in practice? It's not like a bunch of UN people parachute in if you sort of break it and fix everything. But we have at least a standard that we know you're meant to be going by. We have the basis for it. We know what it should look like. Um, I mean, all of these things are flawed, flawed tools, but at the moment we have nothing.

• 1:11:25Chris Williamson?

  Um, and I would. Rather a flawed tool than no tool, right?

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, like sod the perfect being the enemy of the good. I would, I would accept the mediocre at this stage. Um, we need to sort of think about our rights and how they work. We need to essentially try and work out why does everything on the internet have to fit this weird hyped Silicon Valley model? You know, all, everything on the internet is backed by venture capital, which basically says, don't worry about trying to build a good business. Try and build the biggest in the world or fail. So you can't go and just build a nice, you know, the equivalent of a mom and pop store

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  or a chain of seven or eight restaurants or something like that. You have to go all out for growth.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  Or be nothing. And this really, really suits venture capital and it suits a small handful of winners. But that's why almost everything's based on advertising. That's why everything is competing so aggressively for our attention. It's why we're constantly on this treadmill. We need to sort of actually tell them to chill the fuck out and sorry.

• 1:12:41Chris Williamson?

  No, no, I think that trickles down into the way that we operate as well. Right. So you see the winner takes all situation, even me with this podcast, like the listenership to this is I couldn't even dream of the growth that we're getting. It's insane. And yet I'm still thinking, oh, well, I know that this guy's doing like this many million plays per month and I would be good if we got here. And I'm thinking like, because the friction has been removed from first competition and then secondly, you being able to see the people that are within, there is no longer a, well, Joe Rogan's American. I could never do what he does in America. It's like, no, bro, you're in the same league as everybody that does the stuff that you do. You

• 1:13:24Chris Williamson?

  as a writer and as an author, like, there is no reason why your book shouldn't be the next fucking War and Peace, or, you know, whatever, like.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  Impossible. I would take those sales.

• 1:13:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  That's it. I just think.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  We've got that psychological imperative and we don't need every single financial model imperative to do that. We have to work out, how can you have good, small and medium sized businesses on the internet? Because venture capital is killing us, man. Like, it's why Uber comes in and wrecks the sort of whole delivery market in your town. You know, it's why these things don't exist in isolation. It's why Airbnb starts ripping up the hotel business, but also making it harder to lease an apartment. Everything's gonna be.

• 1:14:14Chris Williamson?

  True. Sorry. Did you, did you look at whether or not Uber loses money on every taxi ride? Because I heard this, but I don't know if it's truth.

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  They, they deny it. I stand by it. Basically, they say, if you, if you just look at it on the costs of doing the journey, each journey is profitable. And I'm like, yeah, but.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  You know, if I, if I pretend that I don't have to pay my rent every month, I make a fortune each month that, you know, turns out I don't, I, I make, I make a living. So there you go. If you knock off all of our fixed costs and all of our research costs and all of our development and all of our X, Y, Z, we're not. In practice, if they need to keep borrowing money every year to fund their business, they're losing money every ride and they are losing money every ride still.

• 1:15:04Chris Williamson?

  You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen, James Ball drops the bomb about Uber. Look, James, man, um, this has been awesome, really interesting insight about the internet. Uh, so the system who owns the internet and how it owns us will be out when this podcast drops. So it will be linked in the show notes below. Audible version, stuff like that.

• 1:15:25Speaker 00

  Uh, there is an audible version coming out the same day, uh, narrated by me, I'm afraid.

• 1:15:30Chris Williamson?

  And, oh dude, I love that.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  So yeah, it's my first time doing one. So sorry if it's awful.

• 1:15:38Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure it'll be great. That's, uh, that's awesome. Where should people go? They want to check out some more of your stuff. Where should they go?

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  So they can go to bit.ly forward slash read the system about this. They can go to jamesrball.com to see other stuff I work on, or they can find me on Twitter at jamesrbuk.

• 1:15:58Chris Williamson?

  Amazing, man. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm, uh, I'm now going to go and get myself a VPN and, uh, never open my laptop again.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  Maybe a nuclear bunker.

• 1:16:08Chris Williamson?

  That's it. That's it, man. Thank you so much for your time. Cheers, James.

• 1:16:11Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Thanks very much, man. Enjoyed that.