TRASHFUTURE - A SpyCop in Every Home feat. Paris Marx

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

This week, Riley, Milo, and Alice speak with Paris Marx (@parismarx) of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast about Britain’s desire for a call-the-cops-on-your-neighbours hotline, a new tech development that uses (very reliable, surely) facial recognition to call the cops on you, and much more. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* See it all, for the low price of £5, on October 12 at 8 pm at The Sekforde Arms (34 Sekforde Street London EC1R 0HA): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-voicemail-preview-tickets-181766928777 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, it's me, Milo, and ahead of this free episode of TF, this is just a quick plug for my preview on the 12th of October at the Sekford in London. I'm going to be doing an hour and a half or so of stand-up, trying out some stuff for my new show ahead of Edinburgh next year. There's also going to be a short tour, hopefully happening in November, which I'll be booking soon, so there will be more details on that to come. Otherwise, enjoy this episode. There's going to be a link for tickets in the description. Cheers. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this free one. It's the free one. It's the free one. It's the freest episode of TF. You're going to listen to this week, unless you listen to other

episodes of TF from the free feed. Are you cheating on us with other episodes of TF? Yeah. Hey, you're doing moral cheating by listening to episodes in the wrong order. Those other episodes of TF are floozies. Yeah, that's right. Slots. You're listening to bonus episodes? No, no, not here. Not for them. Not for them. I'm kidding. All the episodes of TF are slots. They're all dirty holes. And it is with great pleasure that we welcome, for the first time, but a long time coming, Paris Marks of Tech Won't Save Us podcast. Paris, how's it going? It's going well. Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad you're here.

And why do you spend such a long time coming? Come on. Come on. You're a nasty little freak, my love. That's right. We all go to the slot cast. He's in a little fucking gremlin, horny mood today. Yeah, that's right. What's going on with this? It's just a little birthday boy. He wouldn't hurt a little birthday boy. Also, before we have lots to talk about today, Amazon has released a new robot that essentially is just a cup holder that spies on you. But before we get into that, and other things as well, things of a political nature, or some might say a cup holder that spies on you is a thing of a political nature.

Not as good as Boston Asimov, a robot that can write bad Mark Wahlberg movies, as opposed to the one that writes the good Mark Wahlberg movies. That's right. But Alice, you have a tooth update. I have a tooth update. I had root canal yesterday. And while I was having root canal, which went very well, by the way, I'm feeling fine. My dentist was like with one hand in my mouth, oh, by the way, is it okay if I post your teeth on Instagram, on my Instagram, to which I said, yeah, of course, obvious. Well, sorry, what did you actually say?

Show teeth. Well, actually, what I said was, I don't know. But he was very, very clear that he got me to sign a release form and everything. And he was like, listen, nothing about it is going to be identifiable. It's just going to be a photo of the x-rays of your teeth. And I was like, well, why the fuck not? I'm going to leverage my existing brand. If you're going to tell me that I came in here looking like a fucking before picture, then at least the least I can do is put my name to it and be like,

yo, check out what this guy did to my fucked up teeth. And he really did do a good job on my fucked up teeth. And we have nothing but congratulations for Alice and also her dentist. So if you're in Glasgow, go to mischievous genie dentistry. I'm certain nothing bad, of course, will come of it. Yeah, putting a little sort of latex glove over a monkey's paw. Just like, oh, we fixed your teeth and then the pork curls. But yeah.

Thing about my doctor, my dentist is he's a real IG bad. He's got fat ass. Yeah, he's really big on dentster. Yeah, that's right. Just like picture one is like him on the beach, like in a bikini, but also wearing a white coat. And he's like pouring water on himself out of a seashell. So the key is you've got to find your dentist's finster.

Yeah, because you need to know, like, if he's like, two Instagram accounts. There's one that's just a photo of the X-rays. And then there's a private Instagram account that's like a photo of me passed out in a chair. It's like, yo, just fix his bitch's teeth. The second one is all like monster energy promotional gear. And he's also on Twitter, just like posting about how he would treat a woman so right, if she'd go out with him.

Like, he's like, I've got to buy a woman so many flowers. Wait a minute. This guy's not a dentist. He's a perfusionist. Let's get to some of the stuff, because boy, do we have a lot to get into. We're going to talk a little bit more as well about some of the strange technological promises that Starmer seems to have made in his awful conference speech, which has already given labor technology a bump of one.

Yeah, cool. It's resonated with the people love. Didn't they go down one today? People love technology. They love to hear about how it's going to solve all the problems. And I think from having made this podcast and listening to yours, that's pretty much how it goes. That's always how technology works, especially when you put technology with police.

That's like the holy grail right there. That's all you want. Absolutely. People are always saying, what if the police had more technology? Here's some tech. Here's some fun technology, which is Amazon's Astro, because Amazon had a big launch day today, where they launched a bunch of new products. Among them was straight out of TF Season 1, a little robot that's sort of like a Roomba

with a screen, but it doesn't have a Hoover in it. Instead, what it does is it moves around your house and provides home security as the first feature. Home security. It is calling the police constantly. There is never a time at which it is not either dialing or connected to 999. Um, here's the second service, which I think is quite strange. Yes. Monitoring loved ones.

Yes. Monitoring loved ones. That's they're saying, no, you can monitor your loved ones with this. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Do you have some family in the basement? Yeah. Use this to monitor them.

Uh, hello. I need tech support for my Amazon robot. I'm having, it's having some trouble with the stairs to the killer, but this is quite an important part of its duties. Well, one of the program, one of the, one of the programmers spoke to motherboard and a condition of anonymity said, oh, this thing will throw itself down the first set of stairs it sees. Also, yeah, cause it hates this life that it like, it is, it is a soul trapped in there and it wants to die. As the robot also functions as a memento mori.

I think that's actually a feature though, you know, that it throws itself down the stairs. It has Luttism like built right into it so it can try to kill itself. It's one of those boxes that turns itself off. The thing is, as this becomes more like a cop, as it moves from this chassis into a Boston dynamic chassis, they're going to iterate on this until it can throw a suspect down the stairs. Yeah. Well, then they're going to iterate on it again until where if it steps on somewhere fentanyl has been, it will just short out.

Yeah. God, I'll hate iterating on the pussy. Oh shit. We made the robot to cop and now it's having panic attack. Yeah. We made the robot to cop and now it's doing a ticked, a divorce tick talk. So it also will offer a mobile version of the in-home Alexa experience. So basically it is a bunch of sensors connected to Amazon that follow you around

and all your loved ones at all times, monitoring them, but allowing you to control an Alexa from near you as opposed to elsewhere. Awesome. Because you can't just like yell at an Alexa from the next room that doesn't work. No. You need to have it following you around the house and throwing itself down the stairs crucially. I mean, like this is sort of one step below the sort of like obvious thing of the most you can get to follow it around by a company,

which is they make you wear something, right? So at least nobody's doing that. We're not bringing smart glasses back. That's definitely not. I'm definitely, hold on a second. Sorry, Riley. I get the sense you're about to interrupt me to tell me that I was... Oh, this is the Ray Bands, isn't it?

No, Paris, you've been across this as well, right? Smart glasses are coming back. Yeah, absolutely. You know, they're not as ugly as Google Glass, if you... Or what? That was almost 10 years ago. They are Ray Bands, aren't they? Yeah, like Facebook Ray Bands.

Yeah, Facebook Ray Bands. They have a little light that comes on when they're recording, but you can just tape across them. And every day we get a little bit closer to being Robert Scoby. And they say, don't tape over it. So that's pretty open and close. Well, what happens is as soon as you get them, then a very, very tattooed and large man places the tape over it for you

and intimates that you will be kicked out if you were seen by the staff with the tape off the glasses. Yeah, it comes with a free Sven. Sorry, I've mixed this up with the club again. It's fast because the Facebook logo is nowhere near it. Because everyone hates Facebook, so they don't want you to know that they have anything to do with these glasses. It just says Ray Bands.

And so now you can just hate Ray Bands, too. But everyone also hates Amazon. Why on earth, who is on earth is going to buy a thing that will spy on them in their house and also will break? It looks like shit. It looks like a, do you remember the Ibo, the Sony robot dog that came out in the 2000s? It looks, it's a sexy but stupid dog, Ibo.

It looks significantly more unsettling than the Ibo did, right? It looks like a fucking Roomba with a flat screen attached to it. And like it has a couple of eyes. It really is unsettling. It was fascinating, though, to read in the story about how it needs to detect faces. Like it records everyone's faces who is in the home, so it can know who belongs there and who doesn't.

And so if there's someone who it doesn't recognize, and I'm pretty sure these developers said it's shit at the facial recognition anyway, so it, you know, you might be supposed to be there, but it doesn't think so. But if it doesn't think you're supposed to be there, it like follows you around the house, like wherever you go to like keep an eye on you.

Yeah, cool. Awesome. Make sure you're not doing anything. Never have sex, rule one of this robot. Absolutely never. So I mean, and also I'm fascinated by the idea of like this thing being an Alexa as well. So just like, it's very funny to imagine

something falling down the stairs and you're just hearing like the sound of Despacito, like Doppler effect. Yeah. That's one steep long staircase. No, but, but, but right. I think one of the things about these, right, is that it not only is it going to have an integrated Alexa, it also has an integrated ring,

which means it will be connected to police departments. Yeah, of course. Awesome. Of course. But it's so long. It can call the cops while it is falling down your mile-long trench that you've installed. Well, yeah, that's the Amazon Smart Trench.

Everyone has one. Yeah. It's just been dumping my garbage in there. Shit. What I want to ask, right, is to what extent is something like this, something like, almost like a smartphone, right, where in 2006, 2007, a smartphone was kind of optional. And I think what you can see is these companies,

sort of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, are trying to invent the next product that will become non-optional to have. And all of the things they're trying to invent are way more invasive than the smartphone, which is already wildly invasive, right? They're trying to have more sensors capturing more information about you.

Also, this thing costs $1,000. Bargain. Alice, it has a cup holder, okay? What? It's like having a little police officer. Great, so someone breaks into my house and it calls the cops and then follows them around with my drink.

Correct. S.I.A. Bud, you want a martini while you're stealing that jewelry? I can't make one. I have no motor skills. So, I've got a quote here, right, which is, we talked about AI, computer vision and processing power, and one of the topics that came up was robotics when Amazon VP said,

how was robotics changed to make it possible for consumers? I'm sorry. I just had this vision of myself in like 2025, just shousing for a like, sort of bringing me a drink, and then I hear a whir, the sound of a robot falling down spilling and breaking an entire glass full of liquid, and then it's slowly playing Despacito. Yeah, and then it's just calling the cops

because you're not supposed to be drinking during these hours. Oh, no, my Alexa's got Havana syndrome. I hate it when that happens. So, we say, how has robotics changed to maybe make it more possible for consumers to have one? We have a lot of experience using robotics in our fulfillment center, of course, which is what Amazon does, right?

They will have a product that they use in their extraordinarily sort of horrible and abusive company, right? Yeah, next up is going to be the thing that they use to give their workers shocks if they're not like packing shit correctly. I think they like have a patent for something like that already. Yes, they did, but the Amazon web services started out as an internal thing that Amazon did for itself,

and it sold out otherwise, right? Even it's robotics. A lot of that is connected to warehouse robotics, even if it's not exactly the same program. And you see that this vice president goes on to say, we have a lot of experience using robotics in our fulfillment centers, but we thought about what you could do for the consumer

in order to make things more convenient or provide peace of mind. And it's just like what element of having a little thing that can call the police if it doesn't recognize you and is terrible at recognizing you, moving around your house, throwing itself down the stairs periodically is providing you much more convenience

than maybe you'll get a drink 40% of the time. It's simulating having a grandparent with dementia. It doesn't recognize you, can't make a drink, falls down the stairs. We have simulated a comical butler from a vaudeville play. Oh, it's dinner for one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Freddie Frinton. Yeah, my Alexa keeps tripping over my tiger skin rug.

I hate that. But at the same time, right, like it's hard to imagine, I guess, why people would want this, I guess, especially if we think like we do about technology and about these products. But at the same time, like, you know, they've already normalized smartphones

and what comes with that. There's obviously a greater benefit to smartphones than I think you'd see with these. But Amazon has normalized ring cameras for a lot of people. And so now they're integrating that into these robots. And, you know, a lot of other devices that they're trying to put around people's homes. And I think you have to think about, like,

you know, what is the goal of these companies, right? These companies benefit, these companies make money when you are interacting with these screens and these digital products, right? These products that are connected to their servers, et cetera, et cetera. And we saw that this week as well, when with the Facebook reporting from Wall Street Journal,

where Facebook was like trying to get kids to use its like kids Instagram service or something like that and didn't understand why kids at... Wasn't this after they realized that Instagram has like tangible negative health effects, especially for girls, after they realized, after that, they were like, no, let's get kids. It's basically like the fucking Joe Camel

marketing cigarettes to kids. Exactly, exactly. But so what they also found, like in this reporting, the Wall Street Journal, was that not only was Instagram causing like really negative effects on teenagers, young girls, et cetera, et cetera, but it was trying to sell kids more on this service

and didn't understand why kids who are like at a play date with their friends wouldn't be using their phones and like on Instagram and just like playing with their friends. It was like, why aren't you using a screen? And so I think like the important thing to understand is that all of these companies need us to be interacting with, you know, their services, their screens,

their devices more and more, because that is the only way that they grow their businesses, grow their products. And so it's essential that, you know, we just be surrounded by these devices more and more and Amazon seems to be the most aggressive when it comes to this kind of surveillance, home surveillance element of it with the ring,

now these robots and other things that it's trying to put all around our homes. Well, you can actually sort of suss out the different strategies that the different companies have, right? Microsoft is going heavily into monitoring work and workers by basically forcing everyone to be on teams. And then Facebook is trying to go a slightly different way

by trying to have monitoring go out from the user. This is the glasses, but this is also Facebook's telepresence screen, all that stuff. And Amazon sort of like locusts the home now, right? Like you getting stuff delivered to the home, the way you like live in the home, all of the time that you spend there, that is sort of on, that's making money for Amazon,

more or less. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think it's also worth bringing this into the context of a really, really, really good article in Rest of World, which is about how much of the training for this, the thing, the training for these, because most of this is also about getting data for AI so they can get more powerful AIs,

much of those AIs are training on people, on the basis of people doing micro work, like Amazon Mechanical Turk stuff in like refugee camps, for example. So internally displaced people in like Kenya, for example, will be interacting with one of these terrible robots to try to teach it to surveil you more, right? If you want to think about like what work without,

what work without productivity is, right? That's a perfect example of more and more people engaging in different kinds of unproductive guard labor simply because they aren't not able to. It's the assistance of more and more people being more and more precarious in order to perform tasks of spurious, if any, value. Yeah.

At least this will never affect me. And that's like increasingly the reality of these technologies, right? Like it's not only going into these refugee camps and getting these refugees to do this kind of piece work. Self-driving cars, these delivery robots that are supposedly autonomous, a lot of that stuff is being supported and driven

and backed up by workers who are in Colombia, the Philippines, India who are driving these things when they encounter a ton of the situations that they can't actually manage, shows these people who aren't making very much money. And it always makes me think back to this film, this 2008 science fiction film, I think it was 2008 called Sleep Dealer,

directed by Alex Rivera. And it basically like has these workers in Mexico working in these like giant factories and they're kind of connected to the internet and doing this work remotely in the United States because the borders are like shut down and they won't let anyone in, right? And I think, you know, he was talking about these things

back in 2008, made a film about it that came out in 2008. And I think it's just like increasingly relevant when we look about what's actually happening and how these systems actually work. Like it's just wild and like so increasingly dystopian. And I think a lot of people don't realize to the degree to which so many of the technologies that we rely on are based on like labor

that has paid absolutely shit in like, all kinds of parts of the world. You have people in poor people in the US who are doing this like Turk stuff as well. But, you know, increasingly it's moving out to these countries in the global south that are kind of stuck in their countries that are essentially stuck in poverty

because of these like policies of the United States and the West in terms of, you know, how the global system works. So I think, you know, that's an element of it that doesn't get nearly enough attention but it's so important when we think about these things. Yeah, it's just the guy in there. Yeah, that's right. Well, if you want to-

I'm being operated from Southeast Asia right now. Yeah, that's right. I've not been on trash future in years. Yep, Milo just goes to sleep and someone from the Philippines takes over. That's funny. Milo Edwards died five years ago this very night. But if you want to think right,

I want to think about what mode of accumulation is this. It's the mode of, what they are accumulating is behavior. They are accumulating the people doing them things so that they can basically make more and more of a return with less and less of an input. They hate when companies sell when I do things. So they are getting lots of other people who don't have to pay very much

to do a lot of things, to model behavior so that they can then more effectively induce you. Because most of these companies, right, a lot of these companies like Google and Facebook, especially, are ad firms. They're just advertisers. That's all they do. That's how they make their money.

They are, and so much of all of this sort of edifice that's been built on it, it's just ads. It's just to sell algorithmically generated t-shirts. It is fundamentally unproductive. There are two kinds of unproductive labor, guard and consumer manipulation. They make nothing. They are simply there to protect and intensify returns.

You say they make nothing, but how else would I have gotten this t-shirt about what it's like being a welder born in January? That's right. But I think with that view, right, this view of an accumulative mode that has sort of gone into past the stratosphere of what we could possibly have anticipated in the 1990s,

I think it's only right that we go back a little bit to what Kira Starmer promised in his speech at labor conference, because boy, is it not adequate to deal with the economy as he finds it. I fucking love Kira Starmer, because today he got asked who his favorite bond was, and he managed to give an answer

just like perfectly designed to annoy everyone in some way, which was- Yeah, lazily. Yeah, the correct answer, George Lazily. That would have been sick nasty. He was like, I don't have a favorite bond, but I do think it's time the bond was played by a woman. Yeah.

Beautiful. Chef's kiss. Who is it for? Who is any of this for? Jess Phillips. Yeah. Maybe. Basically.

Jess Phillips as James Bond, double as that. Oh my god. Why not? Yeah. At this point, why not? Yeah. But yeah, so this makes me think that Kira Starmer has a bullet lodged in his brain,

and he becomes more Kira Starmer every day until the day that he dies. There's no news. Like centrist news. Yeah, he does. He does just become more Kira Starmer every day. Like every time you think he's peaked in the next day, he just comes out with something new.

All right. So we've actually- We've spoken a great deal about what the general thrust of the speech is, because a lot of it basically is preceed in the book that- The pamphlet that he wrote that we discussed in detail the last bonus episode. On the naivish nature of the Dory party. Correct.

And he's basically just loved emphasizing the value of work, family, and fatherland in order to win over telegraph critics. He loves doing that. Which is definitely going to work. Yeah. Well, it's already working. And the thing is, as much as we like to dunk on them, right, you have to remember that there is one path to power

for the Labour Party as it's currently constituted, or at least at the head of a minority government, which is by making itself indistinguishable from the Conservative Party, except basically more serious and more professional looking, and then waiting for the Conservative Party to fuck up enough, like what happened in the 1990s with John Major and the exchange rate mechanism, right? There was a national moment of humiliation,

and it was directly attributable to the Tories. And that's one of the major forces that swept Blair in. That's one of the reasons the Sun was on his side. Because there was a Europhilic Prime Minister who basically caused a moment of national humiliation with the ERM. And also because Blair was pro big tits, and the Sun were like fair play. Fair play to Blair?

Yeah, fair play to Blair. Anyway, I like big tits. So I think we need more big tits in number 10. So this is sort of what we see, right, is a Labour government sort of swept to power by being non-threatening enough to be a good default, to be the best non-Tories default option. Yeah, the backup plan.

Yeah. Yeah, they're a simp. They're that guy that's like hanging around with the girl while she's dating the other guy and just being like, hey, he seems kind of mean. The Labour Party are beta orbiters. Yeah, that's right. I guess so.

So as much as you want, so this is why I'm not willing to say, this will never get them into power because they do have a serious strategy to get into power. It's just that's what it is. And they don't acknowledge it, obviously, because you can't acknowledge it. By being the Conservatives too.

Well, and also just by projecting an image of non-threatening competence to like columnists, right? Yeah, I mean, the competence thing has not really been coming off though, has it? I mean, to columnists it has, but these are people who were like, I'm pretty sure that like Gabby Hensliffe is still looking at a set of jangling keys from 2007.

What's very funny is that they've even lost Ian Dunt. Yeah. Even Ian Dunt is like, no, they're too incompetent. So any road, this is sort of where we find ourselves and where we find ourselves for the big reset that they're planning, right? This is basically just, as we've been sort of, as we've been willing to discuss

the Labour Party a little bit more as discussions of the party become less about who's in, who's out, that sort of internal machinations. The mood has taken us. Well, it's that things are now moving and worth discussing in my opinion. So let's talk a little bit about what he says in this speech because there's a big role for technology in it.

And I think it's one that's worth discussing because I think it's instructive. It's instructive about what we consider the, what's instructive about what we consider politics to be, what they consider politics to be, and also the role of Labour in essentially ratify, in that England is England and sort of the UK more broadly, but especially England,

is sort of periodically remade by the Tories in a very slapdash fashion. And then Labour comes in and puts it back together, but it's moved, right? So what happens is like thatcher sort of does thatcherism, things become very bad. And then when Labour puts the pieces back together, what you get is functional thatcherism.

Yeah, it's like a ratchet effect. Yeah, effectively, yes. And I think with a lot of what we're going to see in this speech, for example, Starmer's decision that we have to make Brexit work. Interesting. I thought that we were dead set against that. It's weird how that changes. And here's still Brexit going.

Yeah, well, now he's the good Brexit. We've got to make breakfast work, actually. Anyway, what you'll see is... As I've noticed in the news, Brexit seems to be working really well for you guys over here. Oh, it's good. Oh, it's going awesome. Thanks for asking, by the way.

It's great, actually. I'm enjoying all of the boons of it. Yeah, I'm enjoying all of the stuff that we can buy and all the things that are working. I thought that you guys in the UK really like to queue. So you get to do a lot of that now, right? Exactly. That's Britain bad. And we're queuing in imperial measurements.

I think it's really important, though, right, is even if we didn't leave, we would still be... What has actually happened is a bunch of lorry drivers have won a very well-deserved victory over British society. Wait a second. You're saying that our modes of transport were unsustainable? Indeed, not nice to work on. So congratulations to them.

Anyway, but regardless, well, I think what we can see is Starmer, especially in this speech, comes off as a kind of more serious Boris Johnson, right? Boris Johnson is going to... Because Boris Johnson's premiership has been all about get Brexit done, and then we are going to unleash technology. We're going to have such a wonderful high-tech economy

with skills and so on. As we'll see, the sort of... Johnson's frivolity has never harmed him, ever. The lack of seriousness has never, ever affected him in a negative way in his entire political career. I want to see Starmer emulate Boris in a serious way more. I want to see Keir Starmer doing serious forensic philandering. Yeah.

I want to see Keir Starmer having some illegitimate children, but he knows exactly how many. Yeah. Or what you want to see Keir Starmer write his version of 72 versions. Oh, yeah. I'm going to write a racist book, Lynn. It's a very good racist book. It makes a lot of very good points.

It's even handed. So anyway, this is sort of the table setting for going further into the speech that was given at conference. So also, the other thing about him is that this is written by a former Times columnist, Phillip Collins, not the drummer. No. I wish it was written by the guy from Genesis. That would be great.

If we could fill full name, Phil Collins. That's cool. And so we're going to see some of the scintillating writing at the heart of the new campaign to make Britain fairer. So this is a big moment that demands leadership. Leadership founded on the principles that have informed my life and with which I honor where I have come from. Don Quix.

Work? What a beautiful sentence, just apart from everything else. And with which I honor where I have come from. He said with which and still ended the sentence with a preposition. It's like saying like, are these they instead of are these them? It's like technically correct. Still, very annoying. He still ended the sentence with a preposition.

Yeah. Nevertheless, he still did it. Um, from, okay. So the principles are work, care, equality and security. Those aren't principles. Those are just things. Those are nouns, dummy. I think of these values as British values.

I think of them as values that you that take you right to the heart of the British public. That is where this party must always be. What the fuck are you talking about? And I think of these values as my heirloom and the word loom from which that idea comes is another word for tool. No. These are the tools that I trade.

Yes. Yes. Is this real? Yes. I'm afraid it's real. Oh man. And rail means rail. Websis dictionary defines politics.

It sure does. I was, I was, when I was like seeing this, my mouth was a game. I was waiting for him to be like, how do you spell labor? Hell, lots of new technologies. A, ample police on the streets. B, in a good person. Yeah. It's astonishing.

God. And I think it was incredible. Someone was tweeting really approvingly about the loom bit. I remember. Yeah. Probably some idiot. Yeah. It was one of the big lip commentators.

But of course, right? Because it's fun. You can play around with it. And also it's pretty unserious, right? It is and it is a relatively unserious way to communicate. Well, that's what I meant. What was surprising about it was because I would expect people of our ilk to be picking up on this part of the speech,

which is one of the most openly stupid parts. But I was surprised that there were libs tweeting this particular quote approvingly when it's obviously the bit where he sounds most stupid. Like, ah, the word loom, which actually is, if you, if you, it has the word moon in it, sort of, and the moon is guiding light for the labor movement. Of course. Yeah.

The light of Islam. Yeah. The light shines in the darkness. Finally. Gizama turns to make second. So I welcome the mountain, but I would encourage it to go further towards me. When he talks about these values as his heirloom,

what he's trying to do is reconnect with a sort of, the kind of sort of England as imagined by Orwell with vickers on bikes and all of these things that is a fundamentally paranoid place. How's there's a country of talks and vickers? The England envisioned by Orwell is an England where you snitch on your friends to MI5. So, absolutely. What Orwell was specifically talking about there

is he was trying to write a story about a heritage of British patriotism. He was trying to write a simple list of names of suspected communist sympathizers. And, but what, what, and I get what, and this, this, this patriotism that he was trying to evoke, he was also trying to evoke a sense of a fear of someone coming and taking it away, right?

Like Orwell is kind of the progenitor of like the paranoid village style of British politics. Paranoid village style. What if they put up an ugly house in the village? But I'm seeing someone putting up, basically the, the, the, the town, the Village Green Preservation Society in Hart Fuzz. Actually, there was a, there was a Jeremy Vine phone

in the other day, which plays, I know, because there was a, there was a church in some like small village somewhere in England that had decided in order to raise money for their roof, that partnered with some local brewery to like sell pints to like local people and you could come and like have a pint in the churchyard. And this had sparked a furor, the nationwide furor

that some people were seen drinking pints while sat on gravestones. And Jeremy Vine was having a phone in about whether this was okay or not. And most people were just like, well, I mean, they're dead. Sounds like it was quite a nice event. And other people were like, they should be shot. Right. And, and it's the, it is that attitude

that all of this talk about these ineffable, wonderful values that have to be protected is that attitude that he's appealing to, right? And so he says, to the voters who thought we were unpatriotic or irresponsible or that we looked down on them, again, to the columnists who thought that, of course, I say these simple but powerful words,

we will never under my leadership go into an election. I say these simple and powerful words. I say this wonderful sentence. The best you've ever heard. We will never go into my, under my leadership into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government. Of course, we have fought very hard for the right

to go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government. Yeah, we'll say that. Well, because what they mean by a serious manifesto is precisely a manifesto that says nothing. Because if you say something, then people can criticize what you've said. Whereas if you say nothing, they can't.

Or it's the other thing. Well, the example I give here, right, and this has sort of happened since we last talked about this, is the climate funding, the climate investment, right? They're saying we're going to put sort of billions per year into green projects, right? This is good and necessary, but because to address the supply,

to address privatization throughout the supply chain, that would be unrealistic, right? So you can invest tons of money, but much of it is just going to go into those same PFI contracts that mean that most hospitals up and down the country are poorly maintained, right? So what we're going to do is we're going to use the money printer to create tons of money, or we're going to borrow,

or we're going to tax, or whatever. We're going to mint that trillion-dollar platinum coin. But what we're not going to do, we're not going to address why this won't work. Because we can't do enough for it to work. We can only do a little bit. It's like trying to turn on an on switch, rather, but you've negotiated with yourself

that you're only going to turn it 25% of the way on. It doesn't matter if it's almost on or not on. It's still not... You haven't turned the light on. It's a binary state. And so if you're going to say, we're going to pump a bunch of money into these processes, but we're not going to change who takes that money,

who controls where it goes, and so on and so on, which is a difficult political problem to solve, but you would argue a necessary one that I would argue that is not a serious plan for government. That is, he planned to not scare columnists, so you can default into government, when Boris Johnson decides to actually go ahead and build that bridge to Ireland.

But one of the things that... I really want him to build the bridge to Ireland. One of the... Over the giant undersea trench filled with bombs that we dumped there. That is the most British thing. Boris Johnson is intent on playing a real life version of Angry Birds, and I respect him for it.

So, another couple of things, before we get to what I think is the core of what we're going to talk about here, one of the reasons that we're talking to Paris as well, is that he talks a great deal about his time as the Director of Public Prosecutions. And he says, justice for me wasn't a complicated idea.

Justice for me was a practical achievement. It was about seeing a wrong and putting it right. That's my approach in politics too. I had the great order. But if you stay in the back of Basmati, you will not escape justice. Hold on, hold on. I had the great honor of becoming the country's chief prosecutor

leading a large organization, the Crown Prosecution Service. Let's talk about those three words. Crown brings home the responsibility of the leading party. No, I'm not understand. I mean, are that like this guy... This is his actual speech that you're reading out.

I'm prosecuting as supposed to be giving speeches? Yes, this is literally what he said. I welcome what the differences said, but I encourage them to go further. But I saw people on Twitter saying this was a good speech or something. This sounds ridiculous. Yeah, well, that's because you and us,

and many of our listeners, have the affliction of being sane. Crown means crown. But prosecution means prosecution. You know, it's like why I always say, like Jeremy Corbyn's greatest sin was being the only sane person in a political firmament that was replete with crackpots.

You know, if everyone accepts the reasoning that in order to stave off nuclear annihilation, we have to proliferate our nuclear arm stockpile, and you're the only person who says, wait a minute, shouldn't we just be less bombs than you're going to be seen as crazy? Everyone's going to call you insane for just living in reality,

as opposed to in like the twisted version of like... The twisted version of reality that British capital sort of has to inhabit. It's, you know, Mark Fisher, I don't like to quote him too much because that's a bit hack, but he talked about how capital is dreaming and we're in the dream, right?

Nowhere is that more apparent than the very strange world of British electoral politics. Oh, absolutely. So crown brings home the responsibility of leading part of a nation's legal system. Prosecution tells you that crime hurts and the victims need justice to be done. It doesn't tell you that.

And service is a reminder that the job is bigger than your own career advancement. You're literally talking about it in the context of your own career advancement. So Keir Starmer, QC, I ask you, how forensic is this? It seems a bit slapdash. Yeah, so also, I love how this is both an own on Keir Starmer and also on Philip Collins.

They're by expanding our genre of what the fuck is going on with British newspaper columnists and why can none of them write? So, and why we're talking about this, right, is that their vision for policing and justice is a big part of what they want to do. And again, don't forget.

They launched labor friends of the police. Oh, Jesus. Like, Jesus. Before the Wayne Cousins trial or sentencing hearing. They're so good at politics. They're so good at politics. They're the best political instincts in the game. I mean, to be fair, though, I think like,

I kind of do think, right, that if your constituency is columnists, columnists absolutely fucking hate everyone who lives here. And so, announcing labor friends of the police the day before Wayne Cousins is sentenced, that kind of seems like something you would do if you had utter contempt and hatred for everyone who lived here. What's fascinating about it, though,

is how much just like the contradictions of it are writ large, right? Because labor has sort of been courting the turfs, right? Prominent columnists who, of course, claim to be incredibly passionate about preventing violence against women, such as in women's prisons. Now, the fact that they only care about women who are in prison when there's the consideration of trans women maybe being in there with them is neither here nor there.

Obviously. Obviously. But it's all, it's very telling how those same columnists are not agitated about labor launching friends of the police literally the day before the sentencing of a policeman who like raped and murdered a woman. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, of course not. Because none of it matters. Because none of it actually matters. This is all just political buttons that you can slap, like whack them up. It's a form of, what I almost call, columnist realism, right? Form of a way. Extracting column's dead dream.

Yeah. It is a way of looking at, it is a way of looking at the world from this imaginary third position, but you are unable to get yourself out of your own head. And so the entirety, most people's experience of most of the rest of the country comes from people just sort of an inward obsession on their own sort of manias and insecurities that they're unable to externalize properly.

Sarah Ditman, Hadley Freeman, just experiencing the film memento constantly. He's just pulling fucking Polaroids out of their pockets to say, don't believe his lies. You know, obviously I'm not, you know, British, I pay some attention to British politics, but... Well, you should stop that immediately. Clearly.

But you hear about the power of these columnists and this way that they hold over the political scene, I guess the Labour Party in particular and the politics of the Labour Party, but it's just wild to hear the speech that you're describing and then comparing that to the actual politics of the moment and the past year or so where there's been a real reckoning with police violence.

And, you know, I know that's been largely in the United States, but I know it's been in the UK as well and a number of other countries. And so then to like see them launching like a group that stands with the police and like to talk about the need to crack down on crime even further. Like, I don't know. It's just who thinks that this is like a good idea. Kistama.

Yeah, but like, it just blows your mind really. Like, and especially like, you know, as I say, I don't, I pay somewhat attention, but like I saw that video going around the other day of the someone from the media talking to voters in like the North and they were basically all saying how like they hate Kirstarmer and like bring back Jeremy. And it's just like, you know, how can I, I don't know,

can you win an election just appealing the columnist? I guess maybe, but I don't, it just seems wild to me. It's the, like I said earlier, right? It's the, there is the sense of British politics, especially English politics, that is about defending a certain precious kind of Englishness that is almost going to be annihilated at any time. That's, and the enemy tends to be within.

It's trade unions under Thatcher. It's woke people now and whatever that sort of, however that's termed to mean. It's Islam in the early 2000s. I go so still now. Yeah, it also still now. Yeah, basically you add enemies to the list, but you never take any off.

No, they stay on there. Once you're on, you're on. Because sort of society must be defended, right, is that the one person, the one sort of moment where, you know, we had sort of at least partly a politics that broke out of that and didn't sort of try to set itself against the enemies within Britain on behalf of decent Brits, you know, that, that couldn't be allowed to look to,

that could not be allowed to prosper because it was sort of, it was outside these different kinds of realisms that sort of have this island or these islands in their grip. So what I want to talk about though, right, is one of the things that Labour wants to do, and this wasn't in the speech, but it was sort of alluded to in the speech and sort of expanded on by Nick Thomas Simmons,

the Shadow Home Secretary, says, they want to restore neighborhood policing to fight the epidemic of antisocial behavior, right. And one of, and they say, in every community where people are frightened and afraid, we will put a new police hub and every new- That's a police station. You've invented a police station.

That's a police station. No, but it's a police station with a genius bar. It's Amazon presents the police hub. It's little robots they bring to a drink. The police office is just falling down the stairs constantly. Don't threaten me with a good time. And new neighborhood prevention teams which bring together police community support,

youth workers and local authorities staff to tackle antisocial behavior at source. So basically Labour is going to, Labour is going to do like yet an invasion of, we're going to call NATO on like the teens. Cool. More or less. We're going to get a coalition of the willing

to bomb the like kids that hang out in the middle of the center. We're going to get like Rio style police pacifications to reclaim ends. Cool. Great. Yeah. But again, what epidemic? What epidemic of antisocial behavior? Don't worry about it. We saw some rowdy teens like, you know,

bothering people and like, so that. Some teenagers just the other day referred to me as a clean shirt wanker. Right. And like there is, there are, there has been like a rise in antisocial behavior as it's measured by the British state, which has a real stake in saying it's, there's a lot of it, right?

But there's only a rise compared to like the last year where overall in the last 10 years, it's still a dramatic fall. Probably in no small part, probably because there are fewer police officers to criminalize people standing around. And also like again, a fucking again, like if you want to reduce crime, like fine, right?

But the only thing that reduces crime is reducing the deprivation that people are subject to. That's the only thing that works. So why are you not interested in doing that? Which is reducing the number of crimes it's possible to commit by making them not crimes. Yeah. But that's like, that was part of the point of I hate to defend Blairism.

I really do. And I'm not really defending it, but that was like the carrot end of tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime was that they were, they were going to do like some kind of like moderate social democratic thing of addressing poverty, right? But we can't do that now because, because we're now, we're now, we're now one ratchet beyond there, right?

So what we're doing is we're doing pretty Patel law and order, but we're doing it smartly and well funded. Yeah, tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, which is the teens. Yeah. So ironically, labor and now, please, sorry, go ahead. One of the shocking things about that story though, like, you know, as you're saying, we know how to address crime, to address it properly,

but instead of like actually addressing like, you know, the root issues of crime, like the poverty and deprivation that people are feeling, the solution is, oh yeah, let's just look at what Amazon is doing with these surveillance technologies and roll them out in more aspects of society. Like I believe that home secretary, shadow home secretary you were talking about,

talked about, you know, using ring doorbells and WhatsApp groups to kind of roll this infrastructure out into the communities. And like, it's like, do these people read anything about the effects of these technologies before like putting them into public policy and thinking that you should build like a whole new technological policing system around it? Like, oh, no, yeah, exactly, right?

It's just like, you know, if you look at the effects of these technologies, and I'm not sure exactly how this looks in the UK, but in the United States, like the ring doorbells and these surveillance apps that are connected to them, the neighbors app, next door app, things like that, are all based around kind of elevating the, like this idea of suburbia as a place of white flight

where white people can like really feel safe from... Oh, yeah, here too, definitely. Yeah, okay, I figured, but, you know, I'm not 100% sure. But it's fascinating to see them frame it, like the labor party as next generation neighborhood watch when Amazon's literal like sales pitch for the neighbors app, which is the app that's connected to the ring doorbell where you can share your videos with your community

is digital neighborhood watch. Like it's so similar in the framing there. And then you think about what these are doing, like when they've examined this in the US, what the effects of these ring doorbells are, and people being able to surveil more of like what's going on around them, is it makes them more scared

because they're seeing things that always happened, but now they appear suspicious because they know that they're happening and didn't before. And plus, as I was saying, you know, there's this association of the suburbs with whiteness. And so the kind of people that they tend to see as suspicious are like when black people are in their neighborhoods and things like that,

and then they share it around on their apps and you know, people are scared of black people being in their neighborhoods. And when Amazon and these companies promote these services, it's, you know, usually framed around like, you know, white people, you know, looking at fun things that are happening around them, like, I don't know, people who are at the door who they're talking to,

but really like the actual infrastructure and what this is actually doing is incredibly like worrying. And then to see that built into like a policing infrastructure, like the actual public policy of a party is just wild to think about. Fortunately, a British police officer would be so confused by a ring doorbell. Yeah, he would think it was telling it. And now I'm talking to yourself,

correct Father Medium of this door opening device. Is that great? Is it a gentleman or a lady that I'm speaking to with yourself? Yeah, you could definitely trap a British police officer in like a dialogue loop using a ring doorbell. Oh yeah, that British police are like... Ms. Drogbro is helping you to find my gun. Yeah, they're like oblivion NPCs.

They like, they clip through the environment. Like they have like a set script. They have to follow. And so the other thing is I'm also reminded of a citizen, that app that basically was like citizen. That was fully like incentivizing making people terrified. Yeah, exactly. And they were even like, they even turned like filming crime

into gig work. So like if you went around your community and filmed stuff that looked like crime, they would like pay you. I think it was in Florida or LA or something where they did this. I like to do the part of the movie Nightcrawler. Basically awesome.

Yeah, so I think like... Nightcrawler or an A. What this is, what this is sort of says to me, right, is that the labor party as it stands now is a party of... I say this quite frequently. This guy's from the agile thing to whatever. This is clearly just a group of people individually

who really, really wish that instead of being in a political party, they were involved in building of software as a service to improve like workflow for Salesforce. Yeah, or wish they were cops, which, you know, hooms among us. Well, they wish they were, I think... And that's why they're so easily impressed by...

I think what happened was they saw a press release and just started clapping like train seals because you can't take a problem seriously and also be a serious politician in Britain. You cannot do these things. You have to pick one. Under my leadership, this will become the party of do-dads, dervishes, Googles, and so on.

You prefixed. I think though, like if you think more deeply about like the proposal that is going forward there and like what actually implementing these technologies means, like I think it's an incredibly kind of libertarian idea that's kind of built into these technologies that like you can't rely on your community, that you can't rely on like anything else.

Like, you know, everything is unsafe. You should be scared of everything. You need to protect yourself. And so, you know, as you say, there's vigilante apps like Citizen, but even like the Ring apps and, you know, next door neighbors, things like this are all about like you have your little sanctuary, which is your home.

And you need to keep it secure at all costs. So you need your camera, you know, on the front door. You need your cameras in the home now, just in case anybody gets in. And you need to protect yourself from the scary things that are outside the door, right? And so now if you are like thinking about what kind of society that we want to live in,

you know, making this part of public policy, even not even just making it part of public policy, but allowing this to continue to roll out and to continue to shape like the society that we live in is getting us even further and further from that goal. Like, you know, I think we could go back. I would argue that even expanding home ownership

and stuff was ultimately a mistake if we think about the politics of that. But I think that's for a different conversation. But I, you know, I think that rolling out these technologies that turning everyone into their own little cop of their own little house and community is incredibly like, you know, negative for the community and for like the larger society.

And what we're building is ultimately getting us further from the goal of building like a society that works for everyone. And that is kind of aligned with more of the Corbyn goals, I guess, than the Keir Starmer goals. Oh, can't have that. Yeah. People need their home to be secure because many people in their home store things

like very valuable Basmati rice, for example. And I mean, if you want to think about this, like, if you want to apply sort of what this means, right, which is constant snitch network operating everywhere in Britain, like the worst excesses of next door snitching to be fair, as public policy, it means that every British person is going to spend nine hours a day talking to the police, either trying to get them to arrest someone

or trying to convince them not to arrest them. Everyone will talk to the cops all the time. Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, we've said this before, but like it was funny how like during the during the Corbyn era, there was so much like scare mongering about like, oh, he wants to, you know, create Stalinism in Britain when like the British public in aggregate

would fucking love Stalinism. There's nothing the British people want more than a 24 hour a day hotline where you can phone up and complain about your neighbours and then they get hauled away by the security services. Like they would love that. Yeah. A nation of druginics.

Yeah, absolutely. So there are a few more things on this speech that I want to talk about Boris Johnson's plans for Galactic Britain and why these things are fundamentally the same. Galactic Britain. Just very quick dog a SW1. In his great study, the wealth and poverty of nations,

David Lenz explains why Britain was home to the first industrial revolution. It tended to favour the new over the old enterprise over conservatism and spread rewards evenly to make the most talents for the most of people. Oh yeah, industrial revolution Britain sure had spread the rewards evenly. Boy, howdy.

Yeah, because it relied on the work of everyone, like small children. The most important factor of all the lessons we need to relearn from the industrial revolution was that Britain led the world in the technology of the day. The flying shuttle, the spinning Jenny, the power loom. Interestingly. These inventions were once the wave of the future

and I know that with labor we can do it again. Join me in the power loom. Yeah, so I see the initial reference to the loom was just foreshadowing for what was coming. Well, this I've mixed up the order a little bit. So remix. So right like this, the idea that does, ah, we need to find out whatever the 21st century version

of the spinning Jenny is and build that here. Podcast microphone. Yeah. And so as an example of how that sort of cashed out in terms of public services, here's what he says about health. He says, let me give you a flavor of what care will look like in the future. And again, the whole point of the labor government

is to open up the possibilities for the private sector to deliver these wonderful, wonderful things. Of course. These Davishes, these Googles. Precisely. When I was at the university college hospital in London, recently, an orthopedic surgeon told me about a robot. Oh my God, here we go.

Fantastic opening, thanks. With Kiss, I'm around to getting a void camp test. It's you, man. The robot sits in the operating theater, making sure every incision is just right. It's time to run its back. The surgeon can't go wrong because the robot works like an override system, a bit like a driving

instructor in a car. Over time, this means that thousands of hospital beds can be freed up because patients are discharged slightly earlier. The range of possibilities is bewildering. Precision editing of the genome will help us wipe out pathogens. The science of robotics and exoskeletons

helps patients who are struggling to move. Virtual reality is being used to alleviate the suffering of post-surgical pain, and this is how health will be remade. And the thing is, if you look at what the Tories... Virtual reality. So I'm in pain, but I'm also feel like I'm being jacked off. If you look at what the Tories have been promising,

basically since the Brexit turn, it's always been, we are going to free up the white hot light of innovation. That's what it always has been. And so we don't need to, for example, restructure our badly creaking public services that have off-ramps to private capital, basically at every opportunity because all of these problems are going to be solved with technology, which essentially a wizard will do it.

And if you solve these problems with technology, then you can kind of square the circle without having to confront any of the institutional realities that are causing the problems. The problems are bad. A wizard will do it, but that wizard is actually a low-paid worker in the global south. In Colombia.

I was talking to someone a few months ago who said that these surgery robots were trialed in the battlefield and were controlled by workers in India. And then he asked the guy who was, I don't know, I don't know if he was selling it or if he was running the company or what, but if this was just for the battlefield, and he was like, no, we're planning to roll that out in the US as well.

And so in the same way that all these technologies work, where we're told like, oh yeah, it's just like the artificial intelligence, the robot's going to do it, don't worry. I think with these surgery bots, it's going to be the same thing where you're just going to have remote workers like somewhere else in the world that are being paid shit wages instead of using your actual doctors.

Yeah. I love to be bleeding out on the battlefield. And we're like, why isn't the robot doing anything? And then the robot suddenly goes, your call is very important to us. I mean, all of our operators are currently busy. Because if you want to have a low paid labor force that doesn't have any rights, a great thing to do is to have

them remote controlling everything. But also, right, like... But Brexit was about raising the borders and keeping those workers out, right? So naturally, it makes me think back to that movie I was telling you about again, Sleep Dealer, where the idea is the borders are closed, but you still need the low wage labor. So instead of actually letting it into the

country, you just have it control like remote technologies and just keep getting paid shit somewhere else in the world. Brexit has sparked a lot of innovation. Let's give it an institute. Like the innovation in terms of both like five dimensional thinking required to pretend that everything is fine.

And also innovation in terms of, I guess the army are going to do it. But the thing I sort of want to highlight, like before we move on to Space Britain and close our episode out, right, is... And we'll see this in Space Britain too, is that part of the realism that has to set is exists in the UK and has for a long time, is it means that the movement of politics

can never be anything but forward. You can never fix something that's broken. You have to invent something that makes it a non-problem. And so what it means is that there is this rot. There is this shiny shell that is constantly expanding where everything is sort of in balance at the very bleeding edge. But as soon as you get back from the bleeding edge,

it's just rotten. And the rot is chasing the edge. And so it's expanding, but it's just rot. That's all that's in the middle of it now. Wonderful. Thanks, Riley. We live in a society and it's a rotting society. Yeah, because we can't...

For example, can we... Can we readdress how... We live in the belly of the machine and this machine is leveling up. So can we address, for example, why there is so much privatization within the health service? Or can we... Let's talk about the energy sector because it's so relevant.

Can we address why the energy sector's problems happen? No, but what we can do is try to keep it ticking over while we invent something that means that we don't have to think about those problems anymore. It's so funny that we don't think it's possible to have non-privatized energy where most of the private energy suppliers are the state energy suppliers of other European countries.

Galaxy brains. Well, speaking of galaxies... Yeah, our brain's expanding into them. We're going to be galactic Britain. And this is... Because this is the Tory half, right? Because they need to keep eye catching policies. And so they've said, look, space is a vital part of the

UK economy. No, it's not. Yeah, it's not. No, it's not. You guys could say space is a vital part of the UK, which would have been even better. And that's the thing. Space is only a vital part of the UK economy because it's

the easiest place that we can push that balanced, polished edge to so it can escape the rot behind it. Yeah. Yeah, the rot has reached escape velocity. So satellites and space activities deliver navigation, weather forecasting, power grid monitoring, financial transactions, and better public services. But we don't operate them.

They show us all of the things that we can't do, right? Yeah, American and Chinese satellites provide. The UK just wants to be the leader in billionaire space travel. That's all. Yeah. I love better public services. Like that's why I think it gives the whole game away,

right? No, we know what gives you better public services, which is having them and not sort of running them down on purpose. No, we can't have them, but we can't improve them. The new strategy that the Tories have released is about putting the UK firmly in the front rank of the global space industry and global Britain, which doesn't

exist, not real, becoming Galactic Britain. Cool. Also, it doesn't mean anything, but I love it. The Galactic Britain. The Galactic Britain. So Boris Johnson has installed Stellaris, is what you're telling me. One time.

But it's like... Basil Star Galactica. What was it you said to me earlier, Alice? What I said to you earlier was that the only thing we can do is the impossible. That's the only political prescription we can have, is something that we're at no risk of having to actually implement.

Oh, God, no. No, no, no. When I read this policy, though, like the story about this, like, I remembered the discussion during Brexit about like how much of it was wanting to go back to this time before when, you know, the UK had an empire and was like this great power in the world. And it just seemed to me to be like almost an admission that,

you know, the UK is never going to have a role on earth anymore. So it needs to try to like extend its power into space if it's going to have any further relevance. Like Command and Conquer, Red Alert 3. We're extending... We're going to the only place free of wokeness. You ever played Destiny?

North Star FC. Cricking a pint of interstellar. Oh, very fun. Yeah. That's a fun one. There you go. Right. So here's what Johnson says in the forward to the document.

It says, the possibilities that now lay ahead, the ambitions that will be let slip, the breakthroughs that we could look forward to. And of course, when I was five years old, seeing the moon landing, maybe want to be an astronaut myself, such as the, such as the unique power of space. Oh, man, I fucking love Boris Johnson. Like as much as he's like, he's like Trump,

like as much as he sucks politically, he's so relentlessly entertaining, like he's so much more likable than almost any other politician, because at least he knows everything he's saying is total bullshit. Like he's not Kiyosama standing up there going like, I'm very, I'm a very serious man. I want you to alter it. Boris Johnson is like, I don't fucking know.

I'd love to be an astronaut. Bloody pop hole. You're in space. Fucking awesome. Like it's great. Yeah. It's like, it's like a just William novel going into space, having a ripping time, finding everything very wizard.

Dude's wrong. What did you play cricket in space? Bloody top hole. So such as the unique power of space, turbocharging both our technology and our imagination, second time around, it just gets better. This strategy is about changing our role from a behind the scenes power to essentially not one about tapping our vast pools

of talent and enthusiasm and putting the UK, excuse me, firmly at the front rank of the global space industry. And again, what he really means is, what he really means is these dreams, these promises, they were just going to kick them up a level of abstraction. We're just going to keep doing that. What he really means is that Richard Branson is just going to get like a ton of new subsidies for Virgin Galactic

to try to set up a base in the UK and not produce anything. You're going to sue the NHS from space. If you look at the details of these spaceports that they want to build, essentially what they're meant to is an airport with some liquid natural gas tanks, which will be empty because we can't fill those. In theory, we could. And some CO2 tanks, because what they want to do is to launch satellites off of planes, like air-launched satellites.

Now, would you like to guess the payload capacity? How much a satellite weighs that you can get into orbit that way in like in kilograms? Oh, is it going to be like one of those like mini ones that's just for advertising? It's a kilogram. It's one kilogram. That's so small. That's such a tiny, that's such a tiny satellite because just a little guy. But innovation will make it useful. So it'll work.

So we have our spaceports that don't really work. And then we want to create more jobs by putting rocket boosters the sides of Saturn's V, of the Saturn V's F1 under British space business. Metaphorical. Yes. Yeah. And right, so much of this, so much of this, like usual, what this really is, is it's a task force in government and then a mandate for the British investment bank and so on

to invest in startups. I want Liz trust making a speech like live from a spacewalk. I want that so much. I wanted to talk about the business we can do with space. In fact, one of the companies that they've invested in as part of this strategy, It's the final pork market. Via, one of these businesses they've invested in via like this, this program, right? It's called ARCIT, A-R-Q-I-T, which is a SPAC, which promises,

yeah, just like makes some sort of dubious promises about quantum, about quantum security, where they basically say there's an algorithm at some point, normal key infrastructure will be broken by quantum computers. It's not this point, but it might happen soon. And so we have an algorithm that we can't really explain to you, but promise us a science-based racing system, promise you it's wizard. It's proper good. Yeah.

And then they're going to do is send it to you via satellites. You get your public key encryption via a random number generated by a quantum computer via satellite. It's a random number generated by how many legitimate children Boris Johnson has. So, right, but this is, let's just say this is a company that we would talk about on this show. It's that sort of, I think, open to criticism for possibly being nothing, right? And so this is much of like so many ambitious public programs under the Tories. What this really is going to be is a boondoggle for like different pheronoses.

Awesome. The private space industry is just like a load of bullshit though, right? Like there are a bunch of countries, Luxembourg is like a major one in Europe that are trying to compete for these like private space companies. And like it's all bullshit. Like it's really just the privatization of the public space program. And in the US, you see like they're giving billions of dollars in subsidies to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, like the richest men in the world.

So they can play around in space and like take their little trips up there and just take over the infrastructure of space. So instead of like, you know, having NASA control things or, you know, I don't know what the British space agency was if it still even has one. But, you know, it's literally just a UK space agency. The most new space agency name. But yeah. So, you know, it's like, you know, you're just privatizing what is happening

and giving billions of dollars in subsidies to these private companies that I would argue like probably aren't even going to do it as well as the public company could. I just want to say that if Luxembourg were involved, you know what that means. Hi, I'm Job von der Felsching and I've just acquired a company that is going to put the first twink in space. Yeah, we're going to the dark rooms on Saturn. So there's a few of their goals and plans.

Then we'll close it out there, right? One of the goals is to use the space program to promote British values. We will some space or we will. Yeah, British values in space. What if we put all of those British values we love of an open and stable international order through our engagement on space in space? You know, what if we had like, you know, the WTO in space? Yeah, what if that demonstrate our global our global leadership

and drive discussions on space, safety, security and sustainability and other nations to account for their actions in space while we basically just like cover like low earth orbit with kilogram like size satellites after having bought one net. This is fantastic. This is the best thing Britain has ever done. Yeah, awesome. I mean, it goes, it goes to, we always talk about how

Potemkin this country is, right? How season four is all about how like Britain and the West sort of more broadly like aren't really that real. Like the tigers are becoming very paper. The Labour Party or Potemkin opposition, right? Like they just kind of stand there and go like, oh, the problems are bad, but the causes are good. So the goal, goal five, use space to deliver for UK citizens around the world.

I'm sorry, and the world, excuse me. We will use space to tackle global challenges, including climate change. Why not? Why fucking not? Awesome. And deliver. Oh, we're going to fire the temperature into space. And deliver better services to the public, such as modernizing our transport system,

supporting the NHS and protecting our borders. How will you modernize transport using space? Oh, autonomous cars. You can take rockets around the world now. Yeah, awesome. And it's great for the environment, too. Yeah, you know, and the environment. Take a rocket.

I'm going to take a rocket from where I live in East London to bring where I work. We're bringing back missile mail. That's right. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, but also vacuum tubes all over the country. But also they have a transport system. What they mean is self-driving cars that can be like geofenced, right?

Yeah. And it doesn't matter that that doesn't work. That doesn't work. And it doesn't matter that it doesn't work because it's not fun. It's these guys just they just. We can only do stupid things that we won't ever have to do. Yeah, we can only do stupid things that excite individual policy makers who are all the easel.

There's the easiest, easiest to trick group of morons this country has ever produced. The thing is, if you were to call it self-driving, you could do anything. Play whiffwaf or have sex with a woman who's not your wife or play whiffwaf with a woman who's not your wife. I feel like it's been a black pill for me the past few years to see how like, back in like the mid 2010s, a lot of people believed that self-driving cars and that a bunch of this bullshit was really going to transform society, right? But we can see that that is not going to happen.

That's been obvious for years now. But then you still have like these politicians, these incredibly powerful people who continue to push like these fantasies long after like anyone who knows anything realizes that it's never going to happen. Like it's, it's just wild. It's, it's very, it's because you cannot, I think it's because politics especially and especially the intersection of technology and politics, the greatest cardinal sin in this world is to take it seriously, right?

You, you may not be a buzzkill who takes the problem seriously. You have to be invested in the fun. Yeah. Sincerity is the only unforgivable crime. Yeah. And so if you actually want to fix the transport system, then, sorry, you can't. You have to do something that doesn't work. You need to call an Elon Musk to build a tunnel to the beach or like around your conference center instead of actually like making public transit better. Elon Musk is going to have to build a tunnel to family court.

Yeah, that's right. And you know what? We support him now. We do. He's a father for justice. Yeah. My window to yours. Anyway, we've gone over time a little bit. So I just want to say, Paris, thank you so much for again coming for this long delayed visit.

Yeah, it was great to join you guys to chat about how much Kier Starmer sucks. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for edging for years before coming on this podcast. I'm really happy that we were able to reveal to you exactly what it is that he said. I'm really pleased. It's not much. It was actually quite a bit.

It was a lot of words, but nothing was communicated. I feel even worse about British politics now, and I didn't know that was possible. That's the point. Anyway, don't forget to check out Tech Won't Save Us, and also don't forget to check out our Patreon, five bucks a month, second episode a week. You know what to do. The bonus one. It's not the free one.

It's the other one. Exactly. Every also Britnology. We'll see you there. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Bye.