Tom Hodgkinson | What did Silicon Valley ever do for us? | Idler

[Music] hello my name is Tom Hodgkinson and this talk is called what is Silicon Valley ever do for us because we remember the scene in modified Life of Brian where a gang of revolutionaries like Astor gathering in the room and plotting against the Romans because the Romans have taken over everything and everyone feels enslaved to the Romans and and they say what does the Romans ever do for us well they built roads all right reading it they built the roads but on top of the roads what did they ever do for us and I don't really think there's a comparison with Silicon Valley today Silicon Valley so-called in my view is a sort of a group of quite strange people who have taken over the internet which used to be so exciting and has now become boring and so this talk is anti technology in the sense that I'm going to I want to sort of repeat a lot of stuff though a lot of people who said about Silicon Valley it's not especially original what I'm saying although I was what an early kind of critic of these businesses like Facebook and Twitter and so on but I'm not exactly anti-technology it's more sort of it's more anti what's been done with it ok so what does Silicon Valley ever do for us well ok we have we have lovely things which we think we like we have a smartphone we have email we have very quick very cheap grocery book food delivery there are companies like uber which have exploited the technology the tracking technology on phones and created this new sort of system where so-called self-employed people buy a car signed up to the app drive people around and then 30 percent or 20 percent of their earnings to a bank account in California now this is supposed to be called this is this is supposed to be progress in freedom but I want to argue that actually things are going backwards certainly with the gig economy things are going backwards to a sort of mid 19th century system where people are still turning up for work every day I'm hoping to get a few quid by working on the fringes of this sort of mega capitalist system now before we go into the problem and the problem as I see it is that well there are lots of problems with these different companies they have they all have the same business model we can talk about Facebook and Twitter particularly and Facebook and Twitter or ad sales companies you know when I was like sure analysts in the 90s I worked at the Guardian there was an ad sales department and we were journalists and we wrote the articles there was another department that sold the advertising that went in the newspaper and I remember they used to be out ads to the evenings sound of her what was called media sales and as I was a snooty journalist and writer media sales was look that the thing that he sort of was kind of at the bottom of the pile of you know media production obviously they had to exist I mean the woman who who ran the advertising department at the Guardian when I was there Carolyn McCall was a very brilliant person she went on to run easyJet and she's now running ITV so newspapers have always sold advertising you know but they also paid lots of journalists to create this object just thing which we read we say they worked on and researched and what Google and Facebook and these sorts of companies have done is essentially to steal that work steal the work that's being done get everybody to work for them for nothing and and that means whenever we tweet or write or on our Facebook profile or even sort of do searching on Google that's actually work that we're doing all these companies and not only are we giving them all creativity as a result of our fans here or desire for so to so-called connect with other people we're giving them our data and you know people like Jaron Lane EA who I'll come back to who's the great Silicon Valley sort of profit really a really super brainy geek he was one of the first virtual reality people and knows all the Silicon Valley people and respected by them he must be in his 50s now and he said you know data is the new oil and he could even imagine in ten years time why earth did we do this why did we give all our information to Facebook which then allowed them to still be advertising from thousands and thousands of newspapers and magazines all over the world but you've all closed since Facebook started because they can't sell and the advertising because Facebook invented a more sophisticated way of reaching a market of people so you know when you when you advertise in The Guardian you were reaching perhaps four or five hundred thousand people who bought the newspaper there was certain kind of person a bit progressive lefty but they still bought things and you know some people wanted to advertise those people but with Facebook of course you can target much more finally the people that you send your adverts to it's not just people who buy the Guardian it's someone who buys the Guardian who is also a fan of I don't know Coldplay who also is 32 who also lives in hack making it so you could you could target these you could target with far greater precision that at least is the promise of Facebook and there's a business that's what it's done it's going out to all the big companies the union levers and so on coca-cola and they said let's stop wasting our money with newspapers it's it's so on targeted spin your money with us you could spend half the money and get a much better rate of return and you can actually see what's going on with your advertising so that's why it's such a successful thing same with Twitter but in doing this sort of thing and then Amazon obviously the the point of Amazon is that everything is vague sheep they've done something which any student of the Middle Ages will know was prescribed or thought up was wrong in the Middle Ages like he's undercut on price so what Amazon have done is charge half price for books you know so that didn't make any money on the books they get charged half price and they invented this brilliant system of in a very quick delivery which we all thought was wonderful so we bought that and now we're dictor to it and we buy everything on Amazon people pay for Prime and so on it's the biggest company in the world I mean November um it started one year after the after the idler and we were kind of snooty about this is it's ridiculous company called Amazon which is like you know so doing mail order books apparently date their their turnover in England is falls and they called the shots you know and then 25 years later you know the ID was still pretty much the same sizes which is like about three people and I wasn't the biggest company in the world so I was obviously wrong about it but um that's what they've done and it's not I should fistic eight a business I don't think it's just and and in order to do that they spent a lot of money they spent spent spent money over about twenty years they lost money every year and these cheap prices are subsidized by the by the banks the shareholders the pension funds the big Saudi Arabian oil fund so this is kind of weird you know the oil money is then goes into the Silicon Valley companies it supports them for years and years and years and years and years of losing money hooba loses billions of pounds and dollars every year because it's undercutting affairs you know so every time you take an uber you're paying less than the uber really costs that fares being subsidized by a bank Softbank the Saudi Arabian war family or whatever it is in the hope the greedy greedy hope that this people would become an enormous business that will just suddenly bill the Amazon of you know transport which most could could still happen and people are willing to bet on that okay I just want to run through a few of the things that I think Silicon Valley have actually destroyed you know we're all encouraged to live in this sort of state of wonder look at these amazing brains like Sergey Brin you know these super brains in California all these incredible things they can do they're like a new sort of priesthood you know they can almost sort of take us to heaven and we had to sort of bow down in front them they're going to make self-driving cars they're going to send rockets to Mars thinking that you know they can help us to live forever all this sort of thing but what are they actually done to IV and isn't it wonderful how I can send an email my phone and this other thing what are they actually done I sometimes think well why are we so thinking they say wonderful I mean yeah aeroplanes okay that was the good invention trains you know the automobile you know people in the nineteen twenties felt they were at the cutting edge of modernity as well and they had some technology to shout about the technology now is just a telephone crossed with a tech with a television the goat sort of both ways but in this or the lust for profits and they're milking our data they've destroyed a lot a lot of things they destroyed privacy we don't have a nativity anymore you're tracked by the phone everything you do online is is recorded somewhere what you can't escape from it we'll come back to that but that's kind of work if you haven't got the any Till's and now so whatever to sort of resist this stuff and it takes a lot of resisting then everything you do is more or less recorded so obviously your if you have a sat-nav it's recorded where you are and even what you're thinking at 3:00 in the morning your your your your desires your your things you wouldn't tell to your partner the kind of weird stuff you might be googling and searching for you know legitimate reasons for divorce so you have to well this is all recorded you know a drunk it's opened up a whole new world of drunk and the shopping as well which wasn't didn't used to be such a thing so they gave us the smartphone but they destroyed privacy they've destroyed childhood yeah when I was a child we had long days of doing nothing being bored and being creative my children were staring at the screen all day they've destroyed the black cabs nearly not quite so they attempted to destroy you know mini cab firms all over the world black cabs is a kind of a guild not exactly Crossman but a guild was sort of semi professionals they set their own prices there wasn't a black cab company they they're genuinely individual individual self-employed people they've obviously been severely affected by uber Airbnb has destroyed cities you can't animals they want to rent to someone to live there anymore you know on a reasonable long-term rent they can make more money on on Airbnb if you go to the Naples you know there's quite a lot of anti air baby air B&B feeling because it's sort of wrecking your cities I mean again it seems magical it seems wonderful what a Verbier air B&B actually done it made sort of lost fortunes out of people letting their spare room there's another thing I think it's funny like in the old days these industries were considered to be incredibly unglamorous mail-order media sales advertising sales driving a cab in your spare time and if you had to let out your spare room that was you often slightly embarrassed about it because they make it fallen on hard times somehow Silicon Valley's made all these things into glamorous aspirations because they take a little cut off the top of everything they don't really do anything except for sort of sit there Silicon Valley has destroyed San Francisco I went to San Francisco in the 80s it was a still fantastic place Haight Ashbury and it had this sort of beatnik hippie vibe I meet people there who over the last 10 years have had to rent a smaller and smaller and smaller room until they can't lived there at all their teachers people you know ordinary people who previously would have been perfectly well-paid you know but because the young tech guys are earning you know two hundred thousand dollars a year in their sort of first job no one can afford to live in San Francisco and I haven't been but I hear it's also become extremely boring because of all these sort of tech nerds who don't who weird at the same time there's a wonderful technology's been going on to home this problem and the opiate problem have got worse and worse in the state so there are 10,000 people on the streets lying in the streets of San Francisco sorted out tech guys they destroyed our mental health the the Internet's great first sort of crazy people and for making you paranoid and angry I heard the phrase either you've gone to the internet to sort of self medicate it makes you worried it makes my it makes teenagers worried you're comparing yourself it mr. graham is a sort of massive lie about how great my life is you know we've all seen our friends send Instagram posts when we've been with them saying what a wonderful time they were having and you were there and they were having a terrible round with their boyfriend so that it's just a sort of huge lie the Amazon is a destroyer bookshop to book shops have been closing partly cause people get their stuff online Silicon Valley gives to give creative creativity away for nothing we used to pay for it this means that you know musicians don't have an income well they're calling it that cool it's called claim back but music is still generally free we all used to go and buy I used to go and save up and it's been fought $4.99 in our price and going by my cramped self and whatever well that money some of it went to the cramps they're also destroying the planet and again this is forgotten how much much energy electricity is used by electronic devices and Internet connected devices there are gigantic server farms of a million you know square feet all over the world processing our tweets and Facebook updates and it's a huge drain of electricity it's only going it's only going to get bigger they've also destroyed newspapers I mentioned that you know the guarding these to sell for 500,000 copies it now sells about 160 hundred seventy thousand they valent lee sort of reimagine themselves for the internet age they've given themselves away for free and they've been more less reduced to begging lenders attend the Gulf you know if you like this article the they're now trying to destroy walking with these bloody electric scooter rental companies that are popping up everywhere bicycle companies which are invading our shared pavements that we all pay for and littering them with these car bike bicycle rentals we all London we shouldn't allow them we already have a bicycle rental scheme in place which is perfectly good you know the poorest bikes and they're great and the the electric scooters that you now see all over Paris in San Francisco there's this thing about they invent the other day they say oh we fix problems in the world they don't they invent a problem which they later fixed the classic one in advertising was onion breath have you got oh he's got onion breath you know have I got onion I didn't even know onion breath was a thing so you in order to get over your onion breath you buy this chewing gum and they've embedded testing the problem of the last mile I didn't know that was a problem I just walked the last mile the problems look like you only way to a meeting and there's one more mile to go you can come out the tube the scooter solves that problem so you then put a pound in the scooter and then sort of go on this electric scooter and then scooter along to your important meeting at your startup and then leave the scooter there and then go in and that's the last mile problem and Paris is for these ridiculous excrescences and the whole world will be much better if it didn't exist in the first place we make it map energy electricity that's power that's being used to make these bicycles that letting them later thrown away and a lot of these scooter companies are sorted by people who used to work at uber and they're now like massively rich and make big investment into this next scooter company thing these are all completely stupid ideas I don't know why we think that sort of Silicon Valley are this needs for the priesthood when they cutter morons they've also destroys thinking because you know you have quite a lot of thinking time in the day train journeys as well because they destroyed train journeys I used to love a train journey it's great I can't work the ground got a break from work and stare at the window nod off read a book now if you have a smartphone you know you connect to the Wi-Fi on the train you could work on the train and if there's thinking time there's no time to stop you know you either want a scooter or you're on a train that connecting to the internet and you're in the office and you come home you've got a Carol working checking your emails and then you binge out on some kind of terrifying television program in the evening which you're paying Netflix for and go to bed and this close state of anxiety so horrifying scenes that you just seen on the telly we shall paying for so they destroy it they don't know no time for thought because they distracted by this nonsense stuff destroyed Ireland they destroyed our dignity you know I mean I think it's undignified to sort of I'm probably the worst shelter measure of all people but some it's undignified to go on Twitter and Instagram and boast about how great you are you know be a little bit more subtle about it they've destroyed maps now you feel like Maps getting the eh-2-zed and looking at a map and planning my route and now you have to you have to plug yourself into the Sat Nav so there's always more ones driving around the country like doing a three-point turns and little alleys because they don't have got no idea where they are because they're being a computer it's the sort of most abject servility you know we've enslaved ourselves to these systems and they're telling us how great they are in brave new world by Aldous Huxley he said the great trick of the future will be the Happiness Project so hapless projects where everyone we taught how to be happy and he said that means there's another way of saying that we're all taught how to be happy that means you've learned to love your slavery all the types you said that the whole point of brave brave new world you know you love your slavery it's great you've got lots of sex and drugs and you know rock and roll and they've got mini breaks in brave new world you know in in in 1984 which is a sort of odd birth of brave new world there's a kind of release valve that the people have called two minutes hates do you remember that in 1984 it's exactly like Twitter two minutes hate it so you go into a room and it's a screen and this hateful person comes on there was shouting and swearing going completely crazy with hatred and raised it so direct at the screen that's what happens when you go on Twitter although it's worth because you're you go you go from rage to Hue - laughing - come out regular really really quickly I don't know what that's doing to your brain they've destroyed musicians incomes photographers incomes and writers incomes you know and I'm one of those journalism used to be sort of reasonably well paid certainly my parents were in Fleet Street and it was very well paid in the seventies and eighties the papers sold a lot there were there was no competition I suppose you know we didn't have the Internet people said people paid for this on their people and the Sun and the Daily Mail or whatever and big companies paid for appetizing those newspapers so we're in this sort of you know there's a denuded middle class that can't make any money out of its creative activities anymore there's a sort of the working-class if you still have some dignity and you know that we reasonably well-paid unionized jobs then sort of printing and mining and things like this they have no dignity anymore because they have to sort of drive a cab for uber or you know the or so in some way joining the gig economy join the Amazon warehouse Amazon deliberately open their warehouses in areas of high unemployment obviously because they can get sort of cheap people to come and work there and this is all this is all the result of the internet or more precisely maybe a sort of result of the way the internet has been co-opted by a particular kind of libertarian free-market capitalism and one of the main architects of this whole thing is called Peter Thiel and we'll come back to him he was one of the first investors in the first investor in facebook and he made a fortune out of PayPal which he started with his friend Elon Musk now they made so much money out of his PayPal they were able to then invest in these other businesses but Elon Musk was certainly Peter Steele it's very far right-wing libertarian you know he's pro Trump he he's very anti PC when he was at Stanford he started this from the libertarian right wing review and his politics I think actually do inform these businesses and even though Facebook might look a little bit liberal the first investor the first money the half-million dollars that he put into it that money comes with his ideology in my view so what actually happened to this I just want to say you know I'm not personally anti technology in fact I was a very early adopter of the internet and I was looking at issue one of the idea which could be published in 1993 and that was before the World Wide Web it was being invented but it hadn't really got going there was something called mosaic and I guess to issue one of the idea which was printed in August 1993 and I'm trying to define what an idler is and I say as a headline be what you like and I said something like the world of technological advance is well suited to the idler with his computer connected to a modem he can work at home not only avoiding the office but also arming himself with the potential to enter his own head and I think that was the kind of slightly over written reference to the internet so you know that you can sort of explore these wonderful worlds through the connection of computers and we found this all very exciting and I said in the idler the 18th century meets the 21st century and it was an exciting time and later in the 90s went to work for the Guardian the idle had an email address in 1994 because way before the Guardian had even heard of the Internet we had pieces about the Internet we took a modem into The Guardian and showed them how it works and that was in the sort of early to mid 90s so I was very excited about the Internet and it was wonderful and you know I was an evangelist this is fantastic email you know connecting up with people around the world was a thing called the well it was kind of hippyish you know sharing information but this hippy hippy shiness was taken over by the libertarian capitalists so what happened was these Peter Thiel's and Elon Musk's and various authors with the kind of weird you know their awkward sort of probably a bit misanthropic misfits slightly but you know very hardworking and probably a very intelligent somehow invented his PayPal thing and they were called the PayPal mafia and they felt PayPal I think to eBay or something like that made these fortunes and then with his Peter steel started hedge funds and investment funds he's invested in a huge range of businesses now he's investing in magic mushrooms and you know he's got his fingers in a million different pies because they think that if you can get a magic mushroom pill that makes people happy then you're gonna make a lot of money we're out of the new prozac he Peter Thiel invests in life extension technology projects so there's a kind of weird guy called Aubrey de Grey a guarantor gist who thinks we could all live forever so they get this day for they think they can live forever take the LXE of eternal life but they're out sales guys you know and there's a limit to what they can do actually you know Amazon's got the big retailer that sells things a Half Price and delivers them very quickly that's not realistic ativ facebook is now sales business and so's twitter it's not that sophisticated uber is a sort of like a corn there's trying to steal the money from the world cabs that's also actually not that sophisticated just sort of lucky with but then the next thing if they start thinking they can fly to Mars and live forever and this next stake of hubris of these people is hopefully where they're gonna get to the bond the stock so I think people do I think people do basically understand that Facebook is an advertising sales platform now this wasn't so well understood in 2007 2008 so as I said what they've basically done is they've sold on the advertising show and so Twitter they don't they don't spend any wasn't what's amazing for an investor about these businesses is the margins are absolutely massive say if you think you know a book shop boys the books and sells the books Facebook gets its books for free and sells the books because as simple as that they get what they sell for nothing all businesses want to get well when we had a book shop I remember thinking this would be quite good businesses there we didn't actually have to pay for the bloody books you know if I got the books for free and then solved them it would be a really good business that's what Facebook do they get all the stuff for free we give it to them for free and then they sell it to advertisers so they get the data for free and they sell the data to advertisers mayonese advertising so there's it's all overhead there's no what you might call a sort of cost of sale and so that what's called the margins and business that you know the amount of money they make is absolutely massive and they have a sort of absolutely gigantic turnover and they're very a huge turnover per staff member much bigger than a normal biz so that's why people realize it was such an amazingly good business to invest in if you just look at it you know in a moral terms saying with Twitter and so when you go on Twitter you know you think oh that's funny that's interesting they're stealing it's just a theft job they've stolen Channel 4 News the BBC you know and they have they sell advertising against that stock because that's where you you see it Channel 4 News and the BBC have gone to all the enormous efforts of training people and buying cameras you know and doing journalism and they put their stuff on Facebook and Twitter because they want to communicate it out there and Facebook and Twitter were the ones selling the advertising against it I suddenly realized if you want to advertise the Guardian readers today you don't go to the Guardian you go to Facebook because Facebook has stolen all the Guardian readers and have more information about them so why would you bother advertising in The Guardian that's at least what they say maybe one day we'll find out that this stuff was not as sophisticated as as seems I haven't even talked about the political dimension of all this I'm late I was reading the great railway bizarre by Paul Theru which is written in about 1975 and he was in Singapore and there was a piece in the local paper that said um wouldn't it be amazing in making this new technology that's coming in it sounds crazy at the wide City a cable goes through every house delivers all your newspapers and everything through this cable straight into your house this could happen this is in 1974 this piece was predicting something like the internet and pull through amazingly brilliantly because quite commercially he said this technology sound is not good to me this was going to be a method of delivering propaganda into every household and who's seen in Singapore these signs on them you know if they're signed to who are telling you how to behave in the sort of state you know bureaucracy small families of good families pick up your list so it you know a little moral a four isms everywhere he said they wouldn't need to put them on a signpost anymore they could send them down the cable into every house I thought it's an amazingly saw prescient piece of writing because he the basis of predicting that the internet could be used for propaganda you know Sasha Baron Cohen says Facebook would sell advertising to Hitler is they got no morals you know so I didn't predict that in the piece I'm pissed about to talk about but obviously you know anyone can advertise on Facebook they didn't care they have no morals they don't can advertise in it they don't vet you they just want your cash so people can say the potential for changing people's minds to vote is absolutely huge and people are swayed by advertising and that's why people have people advertise if we won't sway by advertising there wouldn't be any advertising whether that's a corporation or a political party now I warned everybody in 2007 2008 I wrote a long piece for The Guardian 7,000 words that's about 12 years ago about face book it then had 60 million users in that has 2.5 billion and what I did was looked at the investors and who they were and all the various investors Silicon Valley and what other things they're the best of them and I called it an extension of the American imperialist program crossed with a massive information gathering tool if you ever didn't realize this at the time and I said the people who run Facebook just don't really do that much they filled with the program they sit back they watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily uploads their ID details photographs lists of their favorite consumer objects and once in receipt of this vast database of human beings what is now called data Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers and then I said by comparison with Facebook newspapers look like a hopelessly outdated business model and newspaper sales advertising space to businesses who look to sell stuff to their readers but the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook because the newspapers have to put up with the earth some expense of paying journalists to provide the content whereas faith for commerce that gets all its content completely for free the other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper admit on Facebook that your favorite film is spinal tap and when a film like that comes out you'll be getting adverts for it you know on your Facebook feed or whatever it's called so I wrote that in 2008 and people underneath it in the comments said to him you know get back in your caveman yeah like get with it you know below it was a description of exactly what you know it was all facts all the way through and where this money came from how much money faithful kids have invest in it and I said that the real people behind it were not so much Mark Zuckerberg but this Peter Thiel and the other investors and this stuff has generally started to come out a guy called Chamath palette Pattaya was in charge of used the growth at Facebook that's the team that sort of grows the the user base you know by all means necessary and he said the short-term dopamine driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works no civil discourse no cooperation misinformation mistruths and it's not an American problem it's not about Russian abs it's a global problem I feel tremendous guilt I think we all knew this in the back of our minds even though we feigned this whole line of like there probably aren't any bad unintended consequences I think in the deep recesses we kind of knew something bad could happen and what has happened you know the rise of populism even for the fascism as a result of these thought technologies we are in a really bad state of affairs right now in my opinion it is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by them between each other and I don't have a good solution my solution is I just don't use these tools anymore I haven't for years that's someone who's right at the top of Facebook his name was I'll come back to it in a sec now Jaron Lane ei I mentioned earlier is this brilliant computer scientist he's you no wonder they would there were loads of people who've spotted this the surveillance capitalism book which has been a big bestseller Joanne lanius be writing about this for donkey's years last year he did a book called ten arguments for deleting your social media account right now and you know he says you are the fuel so you are oil and you give your oil for nothing to these people the system's encourage fear and anger atom courtesy of angry people click more so at a deep level the system itself affects the nature of the poster to put on so Twitter posts all sound Twitter --is-- Facebook posts on the Facebook page and Twitter encourages a certain kind of anger because that gets more repeats and clicks think Nick and then say if you really want to get also it you're going to this to the competition don't use like a well and then wonder how many likes or relights I mean retweets I'll get some you know whatever I've got three on Gordon do you thing a bit difficulty so your behavior it starts modifying to get the reward that you want which is more likes and so it's gonna be so bit shocking a bit funny you know whatever a google Bala way did the same thing with search so based on but I sort of luck came across this kind of way the way you would search stuff on the antenna there weren't the only ones but this Google obviously became the biggest one and because all businesses are all the internet and they all want to be found this is just became the biggest business and they well because all the businesses want to give them money to advertise because they want to be in the top ten of you know the Google searches so so many businesses pay so much money to Google now to be found on online again Google sort of basically took over the whole internet but I'll point of the internet was it was like it decentralized it was about individuals like sharing on a communal level it was like I sort of communistic thing in a sense you know and you could communicate express yourself to screen the same size we all have around websites and you know and it was about competition and sharing and freedom and it's now the opposite we've taken over by the sort of handful of massive companies and all the other ones have been good but Ask Jeeves and you know MySpace there's always comforted so many deaths you know it sort of by its nature encourages them monopoly like I saw lied read out quickly Jaron Lane EA's ten arguments they're easily findable online have a look at his website because he's not on Twitter he's not on Facebook but he googled him he's his websites really good it's very simple and we've got lots of links to stuff that he said and he's a very entertaining person they're just so brainy and very witty one you were you were losing your free will you said so you know you're sort of more or less kind of like forced into these zone he calls it a behavior modification system so it sort of tell it kind of occurring we might not know it but it's telling you what to do to another argument quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times and that's definitely true I mean I have to confess we have an idler Facebook account of an idler Twitter account I'm very wary look at the Facebook one I sort of kept it up they seem to be expected it's a compromise and a colleague actually does the work on it we have a Twitter account again someone else to case dissenters tweeted that I limit myself to like 30 to 60 seconds a day on Twitter but even now I find that it has a really bad effect on my mood and if you have a week or two without Twitter your mood improves it just really does it's absolutely amazing and it's so addictive because it never ends there's always something else and it's never that good it's always quite good and hope you'll be something more when fun and more interesting when you go down I find myself getting stuck immediately the brain wants to close and Twitter never never never closes three social media is and you just avoid all the madness you know crazy people and everyone does it you know owing James is just as bad as you know anyone on the right he's always on Twitter doesn't he realize he's working for Twitter for free so all that work he puts into Twitter you know the overlords at Twitter I guess sort of rubbing their hands in glee he's like he's got working for nothing for the biggest uber capitalism one crack business in the entire world and he's blinded her because of his vanity social media was making you into an and I find that too it's sort of like something karaokes disallows holy behavior and people who were nice after a bit on Twitter sort of you know you see when people argue with each other and people he no perfectly nice people on their own or in the pub where this stuff should stay start behaving in the most unpleasant manner because they get self-righteous and Twitter encourage certain self-righteousness or hang out I know I've got the exact chance of this I'll send this tweet but I'll show everyone this is the truth and then people go no you're talking nonsense you idiot and you're like oh hang on you know you're an idiot and well obviously gets worse than that troll wasn't them I mean I think politicians they don't like being trolled should get off Twitter because Twitter encourages it by its nature you know all these people are out there they were out there there's not that many of them if you don't want to be trolled don't go on social media again the politicians vanity blinds them to this basic fact about it there are some politicians who aren't on it you know I'm not on it you can have a perfectly functioning sort of public life Jalen Laney if not on Twitter you don't need it I'll come back to the alternatives social media is making what you say meaningless so it sort of strips meaning out of stuff social media is destroying your capacity for empathy you don't really see things from other people's point of view it's like me me me it's like sort of cocaine taking social media is making you unhappy well I think that's probably true there's been some surveys about it I mean there's not that much good information on this subject but you can sort of sort of feel it it's not very happy making social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity so this is you're sort of working for free and you're giving your data away for free as well and I could feel when if I'm on social media I feel like I'm it's working for Facebook I'm working for Zuckerberg but he's not paying anything he's sucking all my creativity of my life force out of me I'm sending out into the ether and he's sort of taking notes and then selling this stuff back to somebody else social media hate sorry social media is making politics impossible it's really sort of I mean okay it's obviously overstated our divisive politics politics are divisive you vote for you know there are two parties they divide people some people that you know labor and some Ettore it's always being devised look at ho golf prints I mean our elections are sort of relatively sober Affairs compared to stuff that went on in the 18th century and round the world but still you know it's clearly we know from the Cowell Cadwallader pieces and stuff that social media has irresponsibly allowed propaganda to be sort of pumped out by these parties social media hates your soul I can absolutely I would love I don't even know what he means by that I think he means that it doesn't it doesn't really see you as a human being it's easy a utilitarian robots or something like that so what can we do about this stuff I just wanted to end with a few thoughts on you know sort of practical strategies because this is called a lot to make the internet great again you know it was a lovely beautiful idea that wasn't owned by anybody in particular and that stuff is still there we could still email each other and stuff but there's some other things that we can do I think to sort of take that card or digital dignity if you like Jaron Lane the air calls it dated dignity and that's probably worth looking up dated dignity and he thinks there actually will be systems where he thinks actually and he's worked this out for most people we give about 20,000 pounds worth of value to social media and Internet companies each year and I remember reading Peter Thiel saying when he was talking about Facebook in an interview there's on exploitive value in friendship friendship has a commercial value that haven't yet been exploited that's because you recommend products to each other or whatever and Jelena thinks that the amount of data the oil that we give to these companies to them if you could probably do this by dividing the number of people by their turnover you know to them it's worth something like 20,000 pounds a year per person do you really want to be doing that for them or would you rather direct that value that you have somewhere else so my first thing for me was to ditch the smartphone and get a dumb phone which is really nice because you just have phone and text and you have little periods of doing nothing open out on the tube you feel a bit left out perhaps because everyone is looking at something that looks interesting when I lean over they're not they just start playing candy crush or something and you're perfectly well go for half an hour without my smartphone so have a dumb phone and I keep up with that phone type stuff through mini iPad because just connected to the Internet when it's there so I can still carry around a little portable thing for emailing which is really nice and you could put your apps on that and Instagram and stuff when it's got a camera and say I split this into two and you also you save a fortune because a dumb phone only cost a few quid a month like six pounds seven pounds and I don't feel particularly cut off from the world or anything like that but we caught Amazon wool that is so hard to do especially got a family and I banned them from I thought I'd boycotted down with him and I look at my bank statement and every second thing is Amazon I don't know what to do about it I mean I'm finding some of this something called hive coat UK we can buy books because it alternative damson promises it's such a lot of work you know trying to avoid Amazon but it is possible in the office of Mike don't buy the bin bags if I can balance and buy them from Viking direct because this or the UK based office supplies firm so there's a tip like them direct again make Union we can make an effort to boycott Seaver it doesn't always happen I know you know I think we're boycotting you don't get to guilty fees sometimes that don't fulfill your own boycott it's not always that easy but there are alternative things like walking cycling the underground and sharing getting a local cab maybe some of these other new ubers are less evil than uber I don't know there are search engines you can use DuckDuckGo you can use Firefox browser these are all supposedly keep your circuits more private so that you know because if you use Safari and Google Chrome then obviously everything you do is being recorded by Google and that goes into their data banks and they make money out of you in some way or another and I think you know it's the web guys what I found exciting about the beginning was um having your own website and it's quite easy to set up your own website and I think that's something you could put your photos there your family can see your website you know you can have a little diary on it blogs and things and why not use that as your repository for your comments and you know photos and stuff rather than Facebook and what I do professionally or business-wise what I advise on the businesses to do is um you know I think small businesses put Farsi much working on social media you don't get much out of it they say oh it's awareness but so what you know what as a magazine publisher what we're really interested in as well as awareness if someone like you're buying a subscription or buying them the magazine in the shop you know we don't really want to give it to them away for free and I find it it's more direct way to communicate with people and you will get more sales for events and tickets and you know whatever it is that you're selling if you maintain it a good mailing list and it could be monthly or six monthly you know or to your friends you know like one they sort of round robins but I think you all control and if you have a large firm you might have to pay something to a company like MailChimp we're still using these big companies maybe they're evil too but I sort of think well pay for it if you get actually gets two more you get more freedom when the stuff is free you know the line you know when it's free you are the product you're the one being sold you when you pay for it you can keep yourself out of it so actually although frees obviously seductive because it's free if you can bear to like fall couch a little bit then and go to MailChimp for one these mailing list people and I love reading people's mailing lists you know they're mad at Sweden their news I don't want to follow them on Twitter and bloody Facebook to find out about their postings and things Instagram they both Twitter they complain Facebook are today but with the mailing list there's no structure issues you you know you know I'm going to force your emotions through someone else's algorithms and through that you know they're there so the system will in Blake said you know create your own system or be enslaved by another man's and I think on the internet your own website and your own mening list and stick to email is a good way of doing that the last few points a couple of points or antitrust law in the EU regulation we did a an event an online course with Andrew keen about three or four years ago he's like one these anti anti Silicon Valley campaigners and he said look it's not just down to your own individual work you know we got to campaign on a wider level and in fact the EU has done some great things you know with GDP are Margaret investiture he sort of seems to be perfectly fine in Google and you google those dudes really carefully google has fined a billion dollars for a data breach oh well we just given the billion dollars you know and then Facebook obviously employed Nick Clegg in order to avoid fines from the EU because Nick Clegg was such a kind of eue person it says like get someone really eue paved them millions and millions of dollars a year and give them a massive house in Palo Alto and maybe we will save so much money could you won't get so many fine so it'll beat and it will be up on the deal and if you were Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg called up and said we're going to give you a seven million pound house stock options and millions and millions and millions of dollars every year you know be quite difficult to say no I still think that these companies do that they employ really taught people as their lobbyists say the first person employed by uber in his country or one of them as a lobbyist was Rachel whetstone who is who was Godfather C David Cameron's son godmother and her grandfather sort of the first type of right-wing think tanks these TV comic Affairs he was called Anthony Fisher he was also the first person to bring Factory chicken farm into this country so he made a lot of money out of Factory chicken farming and with that money set up the first think tank she was also involved in Radio Caroline because not a fun part radio station there was an early form of the internet because they didn't pay the writer the artists so pirate radio which we all thought was really groovy it was actually aware of not paying the artists in the sixties and seventies if because if its proper radio you have to pay PRS of whatever it's called Tony Benn stood up in 1960 something and so these radio stations must be stopped they're pirates they're not paying the producers of the music well let's guess what happened with music and the internet so that if there's a similar mindset and this girl woman Rachel partner husband is steve hilton who was one of the main advisor to the tory party so someone like that google or uber will employ and pay the million pounds a year and they'll be their main sort of press person or whatever and they'll smooth away with the politicians because he's matric George Osborne she's mates with Cameron she's made with Boris Boris was cracking down on uber this is public record this story was in the Daily Mail I suspect she's at the time and then he suddenly changed his mind and it was obviously because Rachel whetstone had said Boris Uber's an amazing company you know it fits in with your politics you can't stop innovation you can't stop progress it's crazy you know there'd be a lot I could you know go go with the flow go with the new technology and that's why you know silicon Bose has such an easy ride probably all over the world apart from maybe France and some countries which are more a little bit strict about these things so an uber in the States was employing people who used to work for a bomber and all this other things they you see these names pop up they go from government to big companies back to the government again back to the big companies you know depending on who's in power and it's all very cozy there was people were surprised the other day that Peter Thiel who I mentioned and Zuckerberg had a meeting with Donald Trump there's no surprise about laughs you know that's called lobbying and in fact under Obama Obama was very weak in the face of these tech company it's the most frequent visitor I think this is her house the most frequent visitor to the White House to see a bomber was Eric Schmidt the chairman of Google and he was in and out of the White House almost every day pushing the agenda of the libertarian Google type people and Peter Steele is you know Trump's kind of tech advisor so there's no surprise that all these things are happening all the time and will continue to happen so Bill Gates when Facebook started having some problems Bill Gates this is another story I don't know if it's true Bill Gates it's reported rang up Mark Zuckerberg and said you know you need to open an office in Washington what that means is employ some lobbyists they were going to be sort of promoting your agenda to the politicians so it's very difficult to resist all this stuff and to make the Internet great again it's been essentially sort of hijacked by a group of you know quite sort of a moral businessmen really not really creative people they sort of make money out of other people's creativity and when these companies get very big they then become sort of financial entities that sort of move money around and buy other companies and that they become like bit like banks you know there's a piece saying that these big tech company actually like like banks and the way they can sort of move money around issue debt even perhaps I don't know so that's the end of my talk what has Silicon Valley ever done for us and the point of it really is to sort of get sort of get us thinking a little bit about these things we can take control of our own data we can take control of you know how we use technology in the internet and I think we all need to wake up a little bit before we get out there and make the internet great again thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Idler

Views: 747

Rating: 4.5862069 out of 5

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Id: xsl69loZjFc

Length: 53min 1sec (3181 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020