Modern Wisdom - #213 - James Ball - Who Owns The Internet & How It Owns Us

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

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: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) 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 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello friends. Welcome back. My guest today is James Ball. He's a British journalist and a writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, also been at the Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post. He also was the person who brought out Julian Assange on stage in a stadium with like 15,000 people there. So he's been around the block and his new book is talking about the internet, the history of the internet, who controls it and how it controls us. Really interesting deep dives, some investigative journalism, talking about the heritage of the internet, what it was supposed to do, what it actually is, there's these crazy lines that run underneath the Atlantic and there's not

very many of them and apparently sharks sometimes just cut them and then people's internet goes down really interesting episode. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful James Ball. I want to know what's it like interviewing Edward Snowden in a stadium filled with 15,000 people? Sir, that was something of a moment. I've got to say, they've done this very dramatic sort of video buildup 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's loaded and you can see the disappointment on the face of the people. I'm absolutely crashing. Have we been sold a bit of goods?

My sort of script line to start it 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 to the 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 great so honestly the rest of the interview after that was a total cake walk because the nerves of that moment have been so extreme. It's like proper Metallica shit. It honestly it's you know you do you you go around and speak as a journalist as a reporter and a big crowd is 200.

That feels like prime time. So you walk out to 13,000 and it's like music, concept, venue, and you're like, what the hell happened? What happened in life for me to end up in this situation here? Yeah, it's just completely ridiculous. The venue did some photos from the back of the crowd and you've just got this huge stadium crowd. And then every screen, as it should be massive picture of Edward Stoded, and this is tiny dot on the stage, he's like, that's me.

That's me. You're looking at me. Mama made it. I made it. I made it. I did actually send it to my mom. You've got it who has, who has got it in a little frame. How cool, man, that's awesome. 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? I wrote a book about the internet because weirdly, for something that's kind of so pervasive, you know, more than half of all the 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. They do matter. But we never talk about the actual internet bit. We talk about the cloud. Or we just sort of use it and don't think about it. And I kind of was like, OK, all of these boring invisible bits of the internet, they're not boring, they're really important. And I want to do a book talking about them

instead. So that's, that's sort of 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. Yeah, it's, 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 right 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 I didn't really work that much. You know, we go to attach another rotor and do all this stuff. And then you eventually get to like Concord,

and you just 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 utility, gas and plumbing. We didn't get to see that bit, right? 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 to us, you flick a switch. The internet, sort of 20 years ago, was a really niche thing.

Starting to catch on, you probably knew somebody who had it, you might have had it at home, why would you ever want it on your phone? Suddenly, it's critical infrastructure that we don't think about to that extent. That's kind of wild because it has really, really reshaped how the world works and also sort of 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 to find a massive plot of land that's quite cheap, that you can put huge, huge data centers and aircom and all of this. And so this is massive network of physical infrastructure that we just never really had to think about, because it just appears to us. Yeah, so let's get started.

Talk to us about the mechanics of the internet. What did you find out about that? 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. If anyone ever ran, these sort of people who ever on the things did mind control, and 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 60s, was look at networking. 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 money, and maybe about three universities in the 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 in a calculator, if anyone still has a calculator. And so one of the things that ARPA tried to do, university to the America would go to

it for funding, saying, hey, we want an even better computer that could do this kind of calculation. Because they wanted to research networking, 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 is really good at doing traditional physics type equations, we'll hook you up with a university that's really good for doing graphical calculations. And so when they need your computer, they can use it. When you need theirs, you can use it. And so you get more computer, we're 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 for 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 advantageous 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 this sort of fairly revolutionary set of ideas that 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 were sort of thinking, right, well, we wanna 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

specialist and only send very particular data. And you would charge, you would 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 an, if you added an answer phone onto a US telephone network, you have to pay more every month, 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 traveled.

You know, you, at the moment, the US government's paying a 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 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 oversaw the project

and sort of was actually quite into it. The rest, they left a grad student who, you know, very much the lowest rank of the academic circle. And so it sort of came to this very first test in 1969 and these are, you know, these are nerds, they're not thinking they're doing some big, potentious first moment. And so they connected up Stanford with UCLA. So two universities, West Coast, the US, couple of hundred miles away, and they're on the phone to each other to try and do their first into that connection. And they basically decide that they've just got to try and log in to the computer and the other university. So they're not trying to do

some big, you know, the first message by phone, I think was something like, what have got wrought? 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. And so this is the thing, like, you know, you can tell whoever's done that, you know, if I was using that, it'd be, is this working? How we do?

You know, what have got through it was brilliant. And so they start trying to type in the command to log in, which was log in. And they type the L, and they go to vote right. I've typed the L if you've got the L. Yeah. Type C O, W, they wait. Yep, got the O.

Type the G. Hall computer crashes. The very first message sent successfully on what became the internet was low. I mean, that really just put everything else to shame, doesn't it? It actually does end up, sounds like big dramatic sort of Tolkien word, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean it actually does end up sort of sounds like big dramatic sort of Tolkien word doesn't it? Something that would say yeah it does it does low we have broken the internet you need to restart. So I also I think it's really apt that the very first one they did crash the whole thing so you know it starts you mean to go on. Yeah nothing changes. But yeah they got it fixed they got 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 of thousands of little packets, which are just like little envelopes going,

this is envelope one of 5,000, going from here to here. 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 the 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 sending, 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, a 229 and 31. And it turns out this is what ARPA were really interested in. 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 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. 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 Nick. Okay, 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 an accurate

if we ever wanted to second strike. Now, you can see this as a terrifying warm-ungery 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. It's part of the mutually assured destruction. Yeah, exactly. You can make an argument that by going, look, we could retaliate, 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. I don't know. I'd like to hold. I've been reading into this a little bit recently. The mutually assured destruction as a, it gets build 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. It's like the world's biggest and scariest testosterone off, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is precisely that. The whole thing is terrifying. I'm quite glad I was born after that year. Absolutely. Yeah, fuck knowing what's going on there. So yeah, we've got 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. 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, 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, you don't do it on the nuclear sort of weapon system.

You want to be pretty sure by the time that you put implement anything that's connected to nukes. It works. It works reliably. It's safe. So you give it to a bunch of hyponodes over on the West Coast and just let them dig around with it for a couple of years while they try and get the letter G to work.

Exactly, because what do you care if research of, you know, called essential mathematical principle? Is that that's that's that's right. 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 places,

these wires that are laid under oceans. Who did that? How did they do that? Where is it? 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 an email came really, really early. The Queen sent an email I think in the late 70s was one of the, 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. And so 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. Open to slide. Open to slide.

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, it's quite easy to do. It's easy here and this computer's here. If you've seen them, 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. It's basically like, 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 or that kind of stuff.

But they were all sort of just done in agreement between these unies. 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 and how web addresses would work, on how like online addresses would really work, which the called IP addresses, you've probably seen them, they're like a long string of 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. I think 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 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 of the Internet, which is not, again, a very glamorous name. It's basically the Department of Defence 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, a Stanford, a network for the students and

the tutors there. It might have some useful information for new graduates, you know, computers, policies. And so you've got network here, a network here, bunch of other networks. What's going to connect them up? A network of networks? And into that? Internet, yeah, as opposed to the intranet, which would be internal one. Exactly that.

So it's literally just a network of networks. It was a totally functional name and they dropped off the little work bit. So it just became into that. So you're getting to about 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 SERN, you know, as an engineer there, and came up with an idea sort of, how could we sort of make, paid like, could we make something so you could see sort nice, nice formatted pages. And he called it a web,

what he called it, a worldwide web. And this was basically the idea of being able to show pictures, text, all formatted as what we now know as a web page. And he wrote this all up as a formal proposal. And his supervisor at at Sern, if you don't know Sern, it's the thing with the large Hadron Collider, you know, sort of going to make a new big bang or whatever. I'm kind of hoping they'll hurry up with that these days. That would make the world a little bit of a better place at the moment, wouldn't it? Yeah, that'd be great.

It's a bit 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 noticed on it that it was interesting, but vague. The single biggest technology change in a century, interesting, but vague.

Yep. I mean, you know, good on them for that. It's awesome. I've got a cool story to interject there. Tim Berners-Lee's nephew is an Oxford with my buddy, Alex. And he met him at one of these fancy dinners where you got a dress like Harry Potter and everything. There's frills on frills on frills and it's gold bars, played it in gold for you culturally 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. Yeah, and it was like Sean Bernisley or whatever. And Alex, I like sent him. I was like, oh, funny, like Tim, do you know Tim? And he was like, yeah, he's my uncle. And Alex was like, holy shit. Wow. Sir, that started quite a, oh, oh, actually, oh. Yeah.

Like, where'd you go from there? Like, that's the biggest foot in Mal's situation ever. And you sat next to this poor guy for the next like four hours or whatever at this dinner wearing frills and a tea cousin for his head. But yet, 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 90s 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 or is the thing that could sort of change your signal Modems anyone who connected to the internet in that era will still know the sequel. It could be dude. Yeah. It's quite soothing if you're used to it. It is. Yeah.

I bet 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. I bet 94.95. You're welcome. I'd be trusted to hear on that. Like, 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 because that's the real millennials. From this 1984 to 1996 generation, why it's, can you remember the sound of a modem? That's what determines what generation. That's the full range today. I bet that would work, because it's just not gonna be as iconic to you if you were a bit older. What's that sound?

That was annoying. But you had to listen to it all the time. That is the sound of my childhood, okay? Don't talk about it like that. All right, I need to go back. So the queen of my childhood, okay? Don't talk about it like that. I need to go back. So, the Queen sent an email, Queen's in the UK sent an email to America. Where was it?

Where'd the cable come from? So, 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 he was, you know, on the internet and then then mom wanted to make a call. You could be kicked off the internet by someone sort of phoning in. And

you had similar problems when you were picky backing on other infrastructure. And so eventually they started laying their own cables. And internet cables are sort of wild in that they are a little physical web around the world. And 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, et cetera.

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, a standard transatlantic into that cable is about the width of a hose pipe. How many of them are there? There's dozens of them. But? There's dozens of them. But not thousands or millions of them.

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. So it's an unfortunate fish with particularly sharp teeth comes in, my connection to someone when I'm podcasting with them could just be shot. This actually happens.

Sharks two through some of the internet cables. Bloody shucks. It's always sharks, isn't it? Or alligators. Great excuse if you don't want to chat to someone, oh no, I can't. I think your sharks got the internet cable. Like the guy from the World Health Organization when he got to That's what he should have done. That's what you should have done. I'm sorry the

Chuck in connection I think much more believable than the excuse Yeah, it is it is But of course, you know, we've the internet everything 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 on, it takes another route. It's sort of the magic of the internet, it's really resilient because it does not care

what route it takes to go to anything. And because most of travels at the speed of light, you know, you can just rearrange super quickly. Yeah, connection will go from sort of Islington to Camden via Canada. Yeah, yeah, just a totally natural route. So it's a, it's a nice cable to get to you too. 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. Some fellow just sticks them back together with a little bit of a little bit of gaffer tape or whatever. So we made this joke and we were laughing earlier on about, oh there's some guys out there with a text file like how how silly is that? But there is actually a fellow that you met who's got a big red button on his desk. Yes. There is a guy with a big red button. Tell me about the guy with a big red button.

So this guy is called Goran Marby and he's the head of an organization called Ican, which I always have to look the name up, even though I've 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. No one is looking into that, are they? No one. Oh, God, I don't want to do research on ICANN.

No, no. 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 .com, but if you want to buy something that's .cat, you can't buy it just because

you like, you know, Muggies. You can only buy it if you're from the Catalonia region of Spain. And so there are all sorts of fights like this. 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 is taking us to the real Google.com? How do we keep the internet joined up and everyone agreeing on all of this?

You know, what are 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 .amazon please. And there's several countries who have the world's biggest and most important rainforest in their geography, who would say, actually guys, we live here first. If this is Goran Marby, and so, you know, if any organization can sort of claim to have a lot of oversight of the rules of the internet, you know, I can is responsible for this thing called DNS, sort of dynamic name service. So 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 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 that's taken you out there. Let's say 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 away. People can censor and change information. So Gorah Mavis got this really important job trying to oversee all of this with no legal authority. What are they based? He's based in Los Angeles. It's in these little sort of out of town offices on an industrial estate. They've got like two floors. It's an unashuming fella. In the arsend of LA with a big red button trying to desperately control the internet. Yeah, so he's this Swedish software engineer by background. You know, worked in telecoms.

And yeah, he, when he got this job as sort of the director of ICAM, his friend bought him a big red button to part of 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. He really does have a hold of the internet, doesn't he? Oh my God. Right, okay, so that's some stuff really does have a hold of the internet, doesn't he? Oh my God. Right, okay, so 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? I will do. I should really say the issue for Paul Gauron is, and why he keeps his butter on his desk is, he let me press it. Fuck what happened? Did everyone's internet go down? So I mean, I've got to say I was hoping, or at least you know, a big sort of, you know, nice thing, or something. You press it and it's like, it's a big elevated button.

It looks like something that should be be a nuclear power station or something. Either they press it, absolutely nothing. Not a single thing. And of course, it's got this reminder where he's like, no one actually has power in the center of the internet. Everything's done by consensus. Everything's done by this. My 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 teasedless

It's the antithesis of his control. Yeah, exactly that. I you know, I half wonder, you know, maybe a little bit It's like maybe one day at work Yeah, that's it. He's desperately what you don't know is that Goran Marby is a low-key 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 the arsend of LA, and he's slowly creating a big red button

that's gonna shut down the internet. And he's just getting all of us as specialed away from it by going, yeah, don't touch the button, the button. Look, press it, press it, it's never worked. It never worked for me. And then one day he runs away with all of the internet money and where all, where all left, I'm gonna ring each other again.

Sir, and my fingerprints are on it. So I get my app app app app app app app app. It was that James Ball. It was that British guy. He said, get in. Okay, so advertising, Brian O'Kelly, what do you learn from him? So this guy is 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 a very tech company, all of this. And he's the CEO at the time I speak to him. And this company's just been sold for more than a billion. So 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. All the embarrassing stuff that you looked at last week. Yeah, yeah. That one terrible sort of safer that you looked at Drunk and I here. You know, they can be much worse examples, but let's go for that one that then follows you around or you bought some new cutlery when you moved flat six months ago and still every add on the internet is for cutlery sets as if you're a weird fork fetishist. That takes careful pronunciation. Very well done there, very, very precise speech. All of those, but also this one, to weird trick that doctors don't want you to know, all of those, but also, you know, this one, to 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. Tell us, I wanna to know how creepy it is. Basically, they stalk you around the internet like if any human being, if any ex did this, they would be in jail and rightly so.

And so the ad networks, Facebook run to the 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 computer. And when you tick that yes to the cookie box, it turns upon 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. It's just something going, hey, this person vis-to-this website, it doesn't even say that, 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 that cookie, all of that 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. 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 build a picture of it. So the advertiser, let's say it's someone who wants to sell my book. 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. 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 white, 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 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 the year 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 and send it over to ad platforms, which then go right. 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 0.0 1 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 paid 0.1 cents for that or 1 cent for that. And so they all come back with their bids,

and eventually you see the 6 or 7 adverts of the people that would pay most to see. seven adverts of the people that would pay most to see. What that means has gone on in that like 10th of a second where you're loading a web page, is data about you didn't just go to the three-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. The pace that this happens at is mental. I can't believe that they're able to do dynamic ads targeting without it completely breaking the internet or making you just walk from web page to web page.

You know what I mean? It feels like that should take half an hour, doesn't it? Like, you think it's an auction and it's all in microseconds now because because this is how the internet makes its money, so they've made it really, really efficient. Why are they called cookies? Is it because of crumbs? Yeah, it's exactly that. It's from, I think it's from the Hansel Agretto thing.

So... That's even the Hansel Agretto story's creepy as hell as well. Yeah, oh yeah, all of this is creepy. James, on everything to do with the internet is like this sort of fluffy tele-tubbies world up top and then Dante's in Ferno just exist in below it. You know, I 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 sort 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? Well, your course thing here is, sorry, I'm being bitten by a cat. This dude, he's a get so good. 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 favorite 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, I message, 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. And that's before we get anywhere near dating sites and whatever picks people have been sending on Tinder or Grindr or Bumble. This is all intrinsic to us and then it's intrinsic to the global financial system now.

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 minimize yourself. But, you know, any spy or diplomat has got a wife, they've got kids, they've got people like that that you can 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 attaché from Russia, who's just been assigned to the embassy in my country, who previously seems to have worked and tiling 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 sort of the terror that's been done by Islamist groups, there you don't know who you're looking for and you have, you know, you can be a Western government with a very sort of clear motive. 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, etc. 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, etc. 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. There's send the most effective worm in history, wasn't it? 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 control, they used in Iranian nuclear centrifuges. And someone basically decided, this is 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 are going, this is really weird computer virus.

It doesn't seem to do anything. Then it looked into it, and I'm like, hang on this, there's one particular type of, industrial board it's connected to. It does a bunch of weird commands. And those weird commands basically would make a centrifuge spin faster and faster than try reverse direction, then spin faster again, and literally explode. Now, and it worked, at least to an extent, although they got caught. Now, if you can start doing physical explosions by internet attacks, you look into them. And so Stuxnet was part of a much wider program, getting ready in case

there was a US or sort of conflict with Iran, they tried to get in every system in that country and that critical infrastructure to disable as much of it as they possibly could ahead of a war. That was kind of like a dead man switch type thing or like a, not like a mutually assured destruction. That's not mutually, that's just a assured destruction, isn't it? Yeah.

And so what happens when you're dealing in a world where one cycle wiped 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, on the same host pipe cables that we're using

to share gifts 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 mind Bitcoin, as well as just try to pick up state secret, bank details. You've got this absolute swirling, unregulated conflict. 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 a list of what counts as an escalation, when does spying or industrial espionage cross into an attack. You know, we had the Womacry 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 and literally stopped equipment used in operating theaters from working. It stopped ECGs from working because they were all on Windows XP. And so this attack that was aimed either at Ukraine or Spain suddenly took out and did millions of damage. We have missed the mark and wrecked the NHS

for a couple of weeks. And I mean, could have killed people, you know, people rely on this equipment to keep them alive. So let's say that someone does like cross the line, whatever that would mean. They go from states of aliens or state protection into something that could be seen as an act of war or whatever it might be. Who gets called in to do that? Is it just on the nation's states

to wag fingers at each other? So this is the thing we don't have anything to decide how this should be arbitrators. 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. I'd love that man. So I would look, imagine Tim Cook with a Spartan helmet on and and a shield, and on the front of the shield there's just the Apple logo, and then you've got, you've got, or yeah, all the rest of them behind it. You shall not pass! That could be another one. When Apple sold his uniforms look amazing. It'd be so slick, yeah, exactly.

But after about four years, they'd need to be replaced. Where his abasons would be like really scuddy, but there'd be loads of them. Yeah, there would be billions and billions of them and they'd be able to churn them out or write like no one else would know. I'm Amazon would just be just Jeff Bezos, pair of aviators on and just a sea of drones.

I can't just. I'm wearing a sealant. a sea of drones. Oh God, just a horror in the ceiling. 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's the man who created the Amazon Smile logo. Wow. Okay, that's quite a cool clay to fame. Bro, he's sat in a meeting with stock. It's so good. He sat in a meeting with Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos said, give it

over to him and Jeff's assistants are there and they're like, yeah, Jeff likes it. Should we move it on to focus groups and blah, blah. And Jeff's like, no, no, we don't need focus groups. And though, well, Jeff, this is quite a big deal doing the read, the read, the thing. It's like late 90s, just like getting real big as well. And Jeff, maybe we should just, he's like, anyone who doesn't like this logo doesn't like puppies.

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. That is excellent. You've got to give that credit. He's just some fella, Bruce, he's just some guy, lovely British dude from Downing, I think he said Surrey. I was just chatting to what, he's just this guy,

he does Metallica, he does Coca-Cola, he does Samsung, he does some dude with a team of 100 graphic designers that are all absolute freak savages, like Unleave at the job. And that's him. So that's my cool story. So, okay, we don't have Sony and stuff like that. They don't have private militias. Online, they kind of do, because it turns out, like, because we don't have all of this greed, there is way more going on every day in the online world in terms of attacks and defences 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 found this really interesting new attack. And then eventually, you had to kind of go, it actually looks like it was made by the US government. Credit to them, they said it. But they sort of, they have these secure operating centers. And you go in and 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 door locks behind you, and then you're held and watched on CCTV, another one comes through all of this, and then they monitor billions of points of data every day

for their paying clients, because 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, the same people who do our anti-virus software and we sort of think of it as pretty innocuous. Behind the scenes, they've got these hundreds of people

watching all the time for cyber threats and how serious they are. And if they need escalating, they have like hotlines to the FBI and to the Homeland Security and to all of these things. And so it's basically this ungoverned 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 it. I'm telling you, man, we're in Tully Tubby's land and they're down there in the seventh circle of hell, battling demons and stuff like that with a massive sword out of Final Fantasy. Yeah, I mean, it kind of is though, it is just this. The internet costs 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. 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 very, very similar sort of way, it's given this new world, like the 60s man,

free love and information and stuff like that. 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? Because I can use a hammer to knock a nail in or I can use a hammer to hit you in the head. 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 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. 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 in the water and rivers. They worked people for very low wages in atrocious health and safety conditions for very long hours.

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 factored 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 sort of who, but it's working in just the same way. The technology is bringing the benefits to the people who help build it. And so, 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 centralising that. Is it benefiting us? 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 about, if we want to have control of it, have the perks of it, and that's what we don't do, and need to. Well, I mean, what would be the psychological equivalent of some nefarious factory on a hundred years ago, dumping is waste into the local lake. Like, it would be the companies of Silicon Valley racing to the bottom of the brain stem

to use every evolutionary trick in the book to ensure that you're maximizing 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, 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 Al-Adamouta's book that it was the single biggest mistake of his life. The guy that made Infinite Scroll, which is on every website now, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever it might be.

It's an incredibly common thing if you talk about people who are sort of involved in the early days of the internet or in building some of this or, you know, when you see them in in animals is very good book actually or, you know, so the one side. It's called irresistible, is it? So it's not, I can't remember. Um, it will be linked because whenever I mention a book, can you type Adam Altarine? Whenever I mention a book, and I don't. So it's the whole, the rise of addictive technology

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

But yeah, so the people who built this, the people I spot here, you know, Steve Crocker was there, was a guy who I spoke to you 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'Kelley, 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 has dissidents 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 centralize power, they centralize money, they centralize 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 going to level us out, it's going to a lot of people saying that believed it genuinely and wanted it to do that. But by its nature, it wants to centralize power, centralize money, centralize people, centralize data. 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 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. So it wants to centralize all the power that way. That's fine as long as it's helping us overall, but just because it wants to do that, doesn't mean we have to let it. 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 revolution not keep up with it and our intersocial 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 20 years from 2000 to 2020, the landscape in terms of technology and connectivity isn't even in the same universe. Like if you've been in a coma for 20 years, from the year 2000 until now, and you woke up, you'd be now, and you woke

up, you'd be like, and we can do what? What do you want? And, you know, so I think, there's this quote from Gertr, I think, where he talked about the fact that all society's 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 grandmire on the walk around the playground. Like she's slowly going to catch up and then she get there and then there's another leap.

And 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 Super Intelligence by Nick Bostrom which is an unbelievable book about the takeoff of Artificial Intelligence, that takes this game to its end 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, 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 the planet and then you had fossil fuels and we kind of gave you a This got a dry run a number of times where you move forward as a site you very quickly and then you start to realize what some of the

Sort of more malicious side effects of doing that was and then you had it with technology the sort of more malicious side effects of doing that was. And then you had it with technology, where you 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 polarized and moved out to the side and all this sort of stuff. And then you done gone fucked up. And in the year 2,105 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. 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 paper clips on there, on 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 in the run up to tackling this stuff, I think it's almost unrealistic in terms of optimism to expect 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. And real world problems, right? So, playing whack-a-mold, 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 tea cup 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, it's early steps off the back of the Great Depression. You know, we got government actually taking a bigger role in life. We got the NHS out of World War II. They are pretty direct effects of each other, even if it's not, oh, the solution to war is to have a health service. 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 going to 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.

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? That's an interesting way to look at it. To actually look at the crisis as an opportunity. We've got a chance that 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. I'm going to 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?

high level enact some policies or create some agencies. What do you do? Sir, I'm assuming I can't just embezzle and make a moon base. No, that would be awesome. Just you and Elon Musk, just with massive fat cigar, Elon would have a split, wouldn't he? Massive fat cigars, just sat there, yeah, no, you can't do that. Yeah, I've 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 like 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. 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 these use. Just sort of think of it in privacy terms is nuts and restricted.

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 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? Essentially, yeah.

And 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. I mean, all of these things are flawed, flawed tools. But at the moment, we have nothing. And I would rather a flawed tool than no tool, right? Yeah. Like, so the perfect being the enemy of the good, I would accept

the mediocre at this stage. 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, that have to fit this weird hyped Silicon Valley model. All everything on the internet is backed by venture capital which basically says, don't worry about trying

to build a good business, trying to build the biggest in the world or fail. So you can't go and just build a nice, the equivalent of a mom and pop store or a chain of seven or eight restaurants or something like that. You have to go all out for grace or be nothing. And this really, really seats venture capital and it seats a small handful of winners. But that's why almost everything is 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. 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 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 is 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 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 whatever, like it would take those cells. That's it. I just think it's logic. We've got that psychological imperative and we don't need every single financial model

imperative. 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. It's why Uber comes in and wrecks the sort of whole delivery market in your town. 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. Is it true? Sorry, 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. They deny it. I stand by it. Basically, they say, if you just look at it on the costs of doing the journey, each journey is profitable. If I pretend that I don't have to pay my rent every month, I make a fortune each month that turns out I don't. I make a living. So they 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 XYZs, 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. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen. James Ball drops the bomb about Uber. Look, James Mann, this has been awesome, really interesting insight about the internet. So the system who wants 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 versions, stuff like that. There is an audible version coming out the same day narrated by me. I'm afraid. And I'll do that.

So yeah, it's my first time doing one. So sorry if it's awful. I'm sure it'll be great. That's awesome. Why should people go? They want to check out some more of your stuff. Where should they go? 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. Amazing man. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm now going to go and get myself a VPN and never open my laptop again. Maybe a nuclear bunker. That's it, man.

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