TRASHFUTURE - Blockchain Border Blunders feat. Alex Hern

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

We’ve pivoted back from pivoting to video (it was a brief sojourn), and on this week’s Trashfuture, Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) spoke with Guardian tech reporter and TF veteran Alex Hern (@alexhern) about… the tech industry. Well, we actually speak about a number of things, to include Philip Hammond’s belief that blockchain will fix the Northern Ireland border crisis for Brexit, angry Conservative men yelling at children in hospital, Facebook’s pivot to video, and the fascist hell that threatens to consume us all. We’re doing a live show tonight in London. Get your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-halloween-spooktacular-tickets-51361920888 Also, remember that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Don’t forget that you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. Get whichever slogan you want, but get the damn shirts!

Cretan. Cretan is someone who's from Crete. Cretan is someone who's an idiot. Okay. I mean, calling someone a prophetic Cretan would be quite Brexit. Yeah, it would be amazing. Go back to your fucking island, impoverished island with a bad shitty fucking economy. Why don't you go around the labyrinth, tit? Why don't you leap over a ball? You don't like it. You don't like how laws would go back to fucking King Minos. Stuart Jackson, Chief of Staff to David Davis, who was actually published in the Telegraph earlier this week, so definitely still in polite society on the right. Huge. He went on Twitter and decided that he was having a really normal day

when he saw a little boy in an EU flag blanket on the day, a couple of days after the people. I think it was on the day. It was on the day of the people's march. The boy couldn't. He was like 12 or 13 and he was like critically ill and couldn't attend, but wanted to. Yeah. Now look, and that was the only blanket he could afford. Look, politically ineffective. Sure. But this is this is some kid who wants to be like, Hey, I wish I we could stay in the EU. I disagree with the kid, but fine. No, right. These six children have to be stopped. Well, but fine. He's making his voice heard. And then just in case terminal illness doesn't do it. We need online, middle-aged men.

So Stuart Jackson decides he's going to step in and responds. What a pathetic Cretan or rather Cretan. Cretan. Yeah. Just because I don't want people getting angry at me online for not correcting Riley's pronunciation anymore. I will be doing it this episode. That's how we say it in North American English. We say Cretan. We don't say Cretan, but that does mean someone from Crete. You are aware of this in North America. We have words that are there. This is why we're leaving Europe. But think about that. Stuart Jackson has such a powerful brain that he just sees like a sick kid expressing a political opinion he disagrees with. And his first instinct is you're where are you all fucking fight you

owning the lives by owning the 10 year olds. Oh yeah. It's easier at least. He's a sick 10 year old who's like who's sucking away state money while actually trying to undermine the state. If anything, he's a traitor. All right. All we need now is that 10 year old to throw off the EU blanket and do a quick fifth and then it'll be sick here. Well, if you remember clearly that there was a photo of the boy in the EU blanket and there was a photo of the boy in the EU blanket dabbing. So on one hand, you know, he he offends the the Brexiters by daring to brandish this EU flag on the other. I don't necessarily think he did himself any favors amongst the extremely online crowd that would otherwise defend him and be like, maybe he just no, maybe he deserves

of his dreams. That would be fucked up. But what I am saying is like we should leave the European Union hard Brexit because fuck dabbing. Sorry. Dabbing is a really complex issue though, because it's either ironic in which case it's amazing or it's not ironic in which case it's terrible or difficult to tell or third. Maybe that maybe this maybe this kid actually was talking sweet on Chief Keef on Instagram stories and and Stuart Jackson was stepping in. What? What? Stuart Jackson actually did later clarify his point that he wasn't talking to the kid. He was talking to the kid's father, which means no, no, no. I wasn't like I wasn't, you know, like trying to like talk shit about like an ill child in hospital. I was talking shit about his family.

Well, I mean, like, you know, the there's a little kid who runs like his the communism is good videos. Have you seen those before? He's like, yeah, yeah, he's like 10 or 11 year olds like yells on YouTube about how he loves communism. And it's like, but when people people get mad about those videos, they aren't like, why are your parents letting you use a phone and record things to YouTube? That's unsafe. They're like, fuck you. We hate communism. It's like the idea that you're going to turn around and just be like, well, no, I'm just mad at his dad for politicizing his child. It's like, I mean, no one gets mad at wake make a wish foundation kids because they want to be football players. You know, it's like no one says that's that's

inappropriate to give them dreams. I bet they are now though, because they want to join the NFL, which is a communist league. It's anti-american like the kid gets to be like a football player for the day. And then like all these are like, fuck you, the Denver Broncos. He's like, the kid, the kid, the make a wish kid who's just kneeling on the edge of the pitch. Please, his lower legs just don't work. No, fuck him. No, he's disrespecting the troops. I mean, that's, that's in a wheelchair. And we're going to we need to, we need to nuke the stadium with all the make a wish kids in it because they won't stand for the freaking flag. So I mean, the thing about this is we make the flag,

we make them to a huge joke, like obviously it's a joke, but like that there's an extent to which that's not that far off the mark with Americans. And it's just weird to see that paralleled in a way with people about the EU because like for whatever, you know, the Americans, insane nationalism, not withstanding, like they still make sense, like the flag, like this cogent thing for the country, right? But the EU, like the EU flag is representative of the organization, but it's nowhere near as big of a symbol in a way until like it became like the FBP symbol. And so it's like, it's just so strange to watch somebody's like, well, you've got your way already. Like clearly they're just going to shit the bed and

do a fucked up Brexit. Like you're going to get what you want. Why are you getting mad at kids online? If someone's anus doesn't work, they're going to have diarrhea all the time. Like that's just the nature of these people because none of these people actually really care about leaving the EU. They just care about like having the narrative be there. Insane right wing monsters under the bed. Like the Belgians are trying to take my pension and like it's like, that doesn't mean anything. It's all just nonsense. They just have to hate people who like want to believe that things can be nice, you know. And on that happy note, welcome back to this week's free episode of TF. It's me. I'm Riley. I'm here with Milo. Yes, it's me. I'm here with Nate. Hello. How are

you? And the three Pete, Alex Hearn. Hello. Nothing is up. I just got back from Paris. I don't want to be home. You're actually wearing a Bretton stripe shirt. I've got a bag of dried onions in my bag. I'm a mimeing half of this episode. They say cycled over, but instead of a water bottle in the caddy, there's just a bottle of red wine. Oh yeah, it's wonderful. Welcome to one of our welcome. Welcome to a at least in spirit drug, shouty episode. Hell yeah. Oh man. So this once again, we got some some some fricking politics happening this week. Huh? Oh no. I wish we could take the politics out of politics. Yeah, you know what? I sometimes worry that maybe maybe we're just too divided. I'm concerned that tribalism might be tearing our country apart,

which you divided on a pronunciation of Cretan. It's the new political schism. It's the new Brexit. Everyone versus Riley, like every other political schism. Nate is doing like a sort of libertarian party kind of like, well, maybe there's a third way. I'm not going to lie. There are times when I just pronounce things the way you guys pronounce things for clarity, but then there's also times when like, I just feel this deep shame. Like when I'm at home with my wife, I don't say kebab. I just can't. It's weird. But then when I want to clarify it with you, I'm like, yeah, we'll get kebabs because like that's how you say it. So it's just, it's strange. Riley, I realize the pain you've been living in for the last seven years and why it's driven you crazy, which you obviously

are to the last seven years. That's although if you want to say Libertarian, the way libertarians pronounce stuff is in their accent. Hello is actually am I being detained? And then goodbye is actually just a Google search for age of consent laws by country. Well, they're very good at pronunciation, because from a young age, they had to work out how the fuck I and Rand is pronounced. They're very good. They're very good at print because they try to tip the doctor when they're born. Oh, man. Anyway, so I wanted to sort of dive. Did I want to dive right in? We really, we really wasted a lot of time. We did dive right in and that was struggling for breath

at the surface. We never did. We never dove in. But before we get into the content, as you all know, we've got a live show later today. So maybe there are tickets left. Let's find out later today in the future. Yes, later today in the future. If you're listening to this later today, if it's us, not today. I wiped the sweat from my forehead. He's for a second there. I'm like, wait, what? Surprise bitch. So if it's if it's Tuesday, come on out to the Seckford and you can see all of this fun stuff happen in person. And also if you want to hear more of us, you can of course subscribe to our Patreon, where we're going to have some more of our more silly episodes up where we don't do serious analysis of the news, breaking events and other

lighthearted things like a parrot who's just learned to squawk the Hezbollah anthem. Exactly. The live show is for those people who are like, geez, this podcast is great. I'd love to hear an unedited version. What I really want to do is value Nate's contributions to the podcast more. How can I do? Oh, I know. I'd like to hear a version with all of the chaff left in. But I think what we need actually for the live shows, we need to give Nate an air horn so he can edit us on stage. I mean, in a way, like just wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard and writing down like and not even say anything in the live show. Just like, that's libel. That's defamation. You better believe that's a libel in. So I wanted to first talk about

Tommy Robinson, Stephen Yaxley Lennon, the sort of the bad smell haunting British politics that simply won't go away and seems to like be single-handedly keeping the hair gel industry afloat in this country. And he recently was because he keeps basically Tommy Robinson or Stephen Yaxley Lennon keeps going to jail for being really stupid and breaking laws that he's and breaking obvious laws like, you know, going in to make Instagram videos in courtrooms about how, you know, the George Soros is trying to replace everybody with Pakistani rape gangs. Because as we all know, in court, it's illegal to use the dog filter. That's actually the rule they got him on. So Tommy Robinson knows that actually the way to own Muslims is by filming them with

the dog filter because that's Haram being a dog. I think that you do also have to put in something here, which is obviously open for discussion as we discuss things in politics. But Tommy Robinson's prominence is also because British media cannot seem to stop falling all over themselves. Like, well, does he have a point that racism is good? Like it's absolutely a case of them enabling and them framing this by putting him on the goddamn news all the time. Like if they didn't want, if they wanted Tommy Robinson's politics, if they found his distasteful as they as they claim it to be, they wouldn't have, you know, what was it? Was it a question? There wasn't question time. What was the BBC? Sky News. It was most recent one was Sky News. News night. News night where

they had the photo of him fucking wearing like duct tape on his mouth. Like is he being silenced? Are we it's just liberals in their culture of politics and correctness? Like it's basically they found a way to make him into a martyr and thus allow him, if not mistaken, to buy a home in cash very recently for a lot of money. He has to buy home in cash because he's a fucking mortgage fraud. That's the thing. Like it's this is people say he is just like they say that Donald Trump is the guy who has sacrificed his good and plush life to fight for the dignity of America. They're like and is not just like, you know, a like an alleged sex offender and complete like just a New York real estate huckster. And it's like no, he's a crusader for truth and justice.

The same thing about Tommy Robinson. He's a, I believe convicted mortgage fraudster who's just found a new grift. Well, yeah. If you're having trouble getting a mortgage, why don't you consider it Islamic finance? It's helped a lot of people. I also love that. I mean, if I'm not mistaken, Tommy Robinson's first criminal conviction came from, well, he first he was he was punching his girlfriend in the street and then a cop tried to stop him. So he punched the cop instead and it's like this is the guy. I mean, it's alpha is what it just blows my mind because it's like if it weren't for a particularly, particularly virulent strain of reactionary politics, like nobody would associate with him. So it seems

to me like in a way all the respectable news figures are like, we don't like the racism. We just we're worried about the tone of discussion in this country. It's like, yeah, yeah, but if this was any other figure that wasn't espousing right wing fucking reactionary politics, you would find a way to disassociate yourself from him because he literally has done all these, you know, these things that you would eliminate someone from any kind of position of influence otherwise. Yeah. I what I take from that story is that Tommy Robinson is actually a deeply chivalrous man and he will only resort to punching women when there are no available men. And as soon as an appropriate man arrived, he immediately switched.

Actually, he's doing radical praxis by being anti police. It's like that part of it's actually quite similar to Islamic theology, that bit, you know, where you can you can eat pork if otherwise you would starve to death. It's a similar thing like there's no one else to punch. I'm not saying that it is. I mean, it advocates punching women in case you're confusing. We just got a new Patreon subscriber. It's S. Yaxley Lennon. But it was quite fun. Like I think this protest was the thing that really left the mainstream reverting to the original feeling about Tommy Robinson, which is that he is, you know, a huge cunt because you got things like the press association reporter who was outside outside

the court on the day of this rally. And press associations are not known for, you know, submitting vibrant, colourful reports. But they're like, it's not the point. That's not why they're there. But the reporter this week wrote, a supporter wearing a union flag suit said, and you know, like, do you really have to interview those people? It's either Tommy Robinson supported or someone on a stag do. It's weird how much overlap there is. I have come here to support Tommy because there's so many injustices going on in the world today. I've learned so many things in the last two years, such as the killings of anyone that's not of the Islamic faith. A passing cyclist said, fascist. A group of men wearing white power

morph suits. But here's the here's the interesting thing, though, is that is that the I say the legitimisation of the ideas pushed by Tommy Robinson, which again, for the American subscribers, the idea is pushed by Tommy Robinson is that his his key grift is he saying that there are organised gangs of Pakistani men who are raping white girls up and down the country. And the problem is in their culture. It's a problem of them being Asian and their Asianness is causing them to rape people. And the second order thing is that no one will report on this. No one's allowed to do anything about it because of political correctness. Precisely. So for context here, in the UK, he's a like really warringly popular weirdo, whereas in the US, he would be a

cabinet member. No, in the US, because the thing about Tommy Robinson is like the other thing about him is he's like a football hooligan. He's one of the lads, whereas part of the democratic football lads alive. I think he might be the best named organisation of all time. The thing is, like if he was in the US, he would be like Tom Cotton, who would be who's like a birthday cake eating puritan psychopath. He'd like go and have a fun little snowball fight with Cory Booker. Like he wouldn't be a fucking drunk, punchy psychopath. I would make the argument that actually he would be Steve Bannon and Tommy Robinson aren't that different, except Steve Bannon had a lot of shirts. He wears more shirts and he's burnished his credentials with all the

sort of elite institutions that make liberals sweaty in America. Like how can how can Steve Bannon be a dumbass? I mean, have you seen his writing? He's a fucking moron. But how can he be a dumbass? He went to Harvard and he worked at Golden Sacks. He read the Wikipedia page for the Prince and he was he was in the Navy. He was a Navy officer. So he's got those credentials, but in a way like like the kind of a canny sort of ability to manipulate people to figure out the pressure points, which is obviously a kind of intelligence. Obviously, Bannon's got that. Robinson's got that. But Rob Tommy Robinson is a fucking idiot. So is Steve Bannon. But Steve Bannon is seen as like this terrifying Spengali, whereas Tommy Robinson is like, like you said,

kind of a street hooligan. And I really just do think that it's more indicative of the fact that Tommy Robinson's politics isn't that different than the politics of like right-wing commentaries. Rod Little and Tommy Robinson could probably find a fuckload to agree upon. They probably would have a hard time finding something to not agree on. But because Rod Rod Little is ensconced in sort of respectability, there's a huge golf between them. Whereas in the United States, I think that well, I guess my comparison there is more that in the U.S., somebody like Steve Bannon, who's the base of the same, you know, has sort of figured that out and has gotten those credentials. I can't think of a figure in the U.S. that would be comfortable.

I mean, like maybe Richard Spencer, Joe the Plummer. Yeah, because Richard Spencer still is definitely in the University of Chicago like similar hair. That's it. Yeah, he has the he has the credentials to I'm trying to think of somebody who like is sort of uncredentialed in the U.S. but also was like a terrifyingly popular figure kind of thing and I'm not coming up with any joey's world tour. You go too deep in the meme knowledge, Riley. I just don't know he's a big fat guy who eats the twenty dollar fill up from KFC and then like talks about how he respects his the cops and fellow food bloggers while like drawing the grease off of his face with a beach towel. Tommy Robinson

is like wash myself with a rag. Honesty is just dark villainous young King Dave basically. So the but the people making Tommy Robinson's ideas respectable are the liberals who want to who are now agonizing about whether or not he's being silenced. Last week, a panel of like sort of journalists and public commentators all sat on a panel rising ethnic diversity, a threat to the West. And so at this event, co-sponsored by the Academy of Ideas and Unheard, a panel of leading academics, writers and thinkers will debate whether immigration and rising ethnic diversity really do challenge liberal democracy. If so, in what way and how democracy is in the

quote moderate middle might respond in the coming years. I'm so unused to hearing the Cal website actually read out with its real name that I forgot that it was called unheard. I A, I'd never realized that is a pun and B, like I see the letters UNHERD and when I read that out loud, I read it as the cow. We have a brain Google Chrome extension. Yeah, yeah, which just automatically switches it. So I, I, it took me a while to place what you were actually talking about there. I'm broken. Wait, how many minutes? There's a website called the cow. So I am behind unheard. I mean, no, I get, I get the pun. Sorry. I'm more,

I'm gay. I'm way more basic than that. I'm just like, I don't know about this. It's referred to as the Cal website. It's basically like it's a, you know, the, the economist is everything goes back to liberty. The financial times is everything goes back to markets. Unheard is everything goes back to community. It's basically says the solution to every problem is we've lost community. There's too much social media. It's basically it's saying we're going to have a liberal debate of ideas, but it always ends up with the conservative response as the natural one. It is also a website, which all of its iconography is based around a visual metaphor

that makes no sense, which is that the cow, like literally they had, they had this as a, as a paragraph on their about page for about a week before they took it down because they were too embarrassed by it, which is they, they based their iconography around the fact that the cow is the animal happiest to go alone. It's not content to stand out in the, to be part of the crowd. It wants to stand out and be unique. And it's like, that's, that's really not what cows do. Cow's work. It's the opposite. That's, that's kind of the thing about cows to really, to really form a good opinion. You have to mull over all the ideas in a long process using four stomachs. I'm also doing the many

times. Digest your racism, regurgitate it, digest it in the second stomach, regurgitate and then feed it to the children through your teats and then shit it out and it's communalism. And then it comes out as Sadji Javid responding to the, the, the sort of conclusion of the trial as these sick Asian pedophiles will have no space in our society. There will be no, no go areas of inquiry. So what happens is Tommy Robinson does a street protest about how he's being silenced. It gets chewed through the four stomachs of like David Aronovich and the liberal commentariat, trying to like be the bulwark against lies with their logic facts and how dare you sering. And then it gets shit out the home secretary's Twitter account as basically

legitimating Tommy Robinson's ideas. You could say it's like money laundering, but it is just like repeated digesting and cow shitting. Also, why is everything in British politics come back to a weird animal metaphor? I swear to God, there's just so much of it. You, you and I have had this conversation over and over again, Riley, about the weird, the Twitter ran in York. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here in an Oxford shirt or something like that. Strange blogs, centrist musk ox, strange conservative blogs that always seem to involve animals that they do in character. But like it's just that just I feel like that's the kind of thing that would never survive focus grouping in a sane political environment. But Britain's just different. We don't go back to a simpler

time when our prime minister was just fucking a pig in the mouth. This is this is the issue. The main sort of digestive operation in the cow stomach that is our media. You're doing the metaphors again, Riley. You've become English stops is I've been here for so long. Give me a break. The main operation is that they're that these sort of relatively prominent liberals. And whether it's this or whether it's the New York Times publishing like, well, maybe, maybe all these people that pissed off Trump had it coming or whatever. Again, they published that article. Here's what everyone did to piss off Trump. That's why they all got bombs. And it's like there is that they keep thinking that if they just air the neutral facts,

capital T, capital F, the facts that the public will sort of weigh them up rationally and discard them, right? And that that's how we're going to fix it is just with a full court facts press, which is hilarious because these same people also think that the public are made up of the dum-dums who can't sort through facts. And that's how Brexit happened. Yeah, it's a weird kind of selective populism isn't it? It's like the people need to know all the facts if it's racism. But if it's making a decision that's going to affect my ability to, you know, own a second home in Portugal, they can't be trusted with a decision. It's like nobody gets to know what I do with that second home in Portugal. That's my business.

Yeah, I disagree with the diagnosis. I think that actually what we're getting with Tommy Robinson in particular is, and you know, it always comes back to it, is the fault of tech. Tommy Robinson had and has had a second wave of his career, thanks to the ability of Facebook Livestreams and YouTube videos to grow his audience in America. And, you know, he's not, he's not the first British extremist who's gotten an American audience. But the earlier British extremists brought him into the fold, rejuvenated him. And that's why when he, I mean, firstly, that's why he gets arrested for contempt of court in the first place. Like he was broadcasting to his American audience outside court and breaking British law. Most people in Britain

got that, but none of his American audience do. And like, frankly, even once the facts of the case are explained to an American audience, they still reject it because that concept of contempt of court doesn't exist in America. And so it's kind of hard, like to an American eye, that actually is censorious. Even if you understand the facts of the case, that's still censorious. And in a way, it's correct. It is censorship. It's just fucking valid, valuable censorship to ensure you have a fair trial. I love it too, when Americans get mad about something like this. I'm like, what about his First Amendment rights? And it's like, oh my God, no, the best part, the best,

the best one was the, someone rewrote the lyrics to hallelujah to, and we're handing out on flyers outside the High Court. With Libertarian Jeff Buckley. With the chorus, this is how they do you, how they do you, how they do you, this is how they do you. I saw that. Yes. But that's just like, there is, there is 15 minutes of this episode alone on the one line in it that basically attributed Tommy Robinson's failure to be treated fairly on the absence of the Fifth Amendment, which, how, how does any British person even know what the Fifth Amendment is? But also the Fifth Amendment is like the most American thing, like no other legal system has anything even. He hasn't testified at all. He's not been asked to discriminate himself. Like,

what? If anything, he hasn't. Hey, everyone, the law says I'm not allowed to do this right now, but live on video, I'm breaking the law. He really recommends you plead the Fifth now, Tommy, and shut the live stream. The Fifth Amendment is the right to shut the fuck up a right which Tommy Robinson has never even tried to exercise. You have the right to remain silent. I violate that right. I love how, I love how America is now doing for like nut cases, what it was once doing for the Beatles and just offering them a much bigger audience over the like, it's incredible how like, it's just to a certain audience in America, you can just like play clips from Blade Runner 2049 where this is what London looks like now, thanks to the

muslimics, and they're like, God, we must do something about this. Everyone's Ryan Gosling. Dude, I mean, I can't even begin to describe it, you know, so I, when I shared with friends on Facebook, I don't post on Facebook very often, but I did post it be like, okay, I live in the United Kingdom now, like my wife and I have moved. And I got both posts and messages from guys that I was in the army with who were like, just be careful of those no go zones. And I'm just like, I don't want to get in the fucking argument with it. But I was like, what, what I'm seeing myself like, what no go zones because if you look at these fucking lunatics maps, they're like, well, whopping no go zone, Watney market, no go zone, Shadwell, no go zone, what is a no go zone? Have

you seen house prices there recently? I mean, you're like, right. It's just literally white chapel, but all of white chapel is the no go zone. It's like, it's interesting how they change the name of the captain kid to the caliph kid. I mean, I just, so it's just one of those things where we had this argument on my show before as well, that like, there's no point in going to like the Thanksgiving and arguing their Facebook uncle, because there's no point in trying to say here's objective fact. And that's something coming back to the root of this problem you're describing Riley and Alex, you were, you're touching on this too, is that for one, it doesn't matter if you have what's deemed objective fact because they're just going to attack the validity

of the source. And for another, you can't compete like you're sort of scrutinizing of things based on news, news sources that you trust that you could say are at least in some capacity regulated, you know, like whether it's whether it's here in the UK, where if I'm not mistaken, there is sort of like a press regulation authority. There's not that's it. Yeah, there's a press print media and not regulating online media. I guess I'm asking because this is we can cut this if we need to look. There's a thing where people have, correct me if I'm wrong, like where a story's been forced to be retracted or they've had to make a correction like because a body, I don't know what the body is. Some papers are voluntarily signed

up to. Got it. Okay. So it's not mandatory, but my employer is not signed up to it. So yeah, with the company hat on. Sure. Sure. Sure. Because the point I'm making here is that that doesn't matter whether or not there's any kind of authority that's invested in saying that this, you know, that these these reporting is held to any kind of standard. People aren't going to believe it. And then when you have a disinformation platform like Facebook that's so pervasive, in a way, it's like to the average person, it's going to seem far more authoritative when you've got constant live stream videos and insane disinformation coming out. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the thing. Like a live stream is a spectacularly convincing format because it,

you know, it's not edited. It's not faked. Everything on Tommy Robinson's live stream was first order true. He really was there. He really was saying that stuff. And actually, the, you know, the problem with telling this narrative to Americans is that broadly, what he was saying wasn't untrue on it, because what he was saying were the facts of the case. He just wasn't fucking allowed to say them at that point. Like, you know, it was under contempt of court. It was under subject. It was sort of an embargo, wasn't it? Like, he wasn't allowed to talk about it. Yeah. Like, and so that that's what that's what makes this particular thing so fertile for what then happened, which is the entirety of the American right coming

up and accusing him of being arrested by people who didn't want to speak the truth. I've actually found it's surprisingly enough. The person who wrote the Tommy Robinson song is Owen Benjamin, the like the only conservative comedian who is like routinely stop there. You know, there are three. There are three conservative comedians. And it's Andrew Lawrence as well. There are three conservative comedians in the States and you can rank them on how frequently they get and just relentlessly embarrass themselves online baked Alaska as tier one. Steven Crowder is tier two guy like puts on it like goes around puts on a dress and it's like I'm trans now. So I try and own trans people somehow. I want. I want to.

I don't know if you're familiar with Steven Crowder, Alex. I have seen the shouts of him doing exactly that. Have you seen this though? No, Steven Crowder trying to do his shtick getting punched in the face by the union guy. Yes, like he was an American hero. Yes. So when you talk about yes right wing comedians invariably not enough of this happens. In my opinion, that said, I mean, like, okay, I'm not advocating for violence against comedians, but if you go and film a stupid boxpot video, we're trying to be a dumbass, then like all bets are off. Yeah. Well, this is just and then someone is by the comedian and with you Phil's dumbass. Exactly. I'm preparing for that inevitable month. I know it's going to

happen. It's a tier one operator. Oh, yeah. Like camera operator. I need stealth fries. No. So it's there are three there. There is baked Alaska who just routinely gets owned who's gotten owned off the Internet just by just people. His own fans relentlessly disrespecting him. There is Steven Crowder who tries to like, you know, basically just he's like a lie down in a dumpster guy, and then there's Owen Benjamin, one of the most banned people in the world. Are you going to sing the song Riley? I don't. It's it's here's the thing. I would sing the song, but it's written in such a way that it doesn't scan. There was a time the press let you know who's really coming to your shores, but now they don't tell you the story ever true. Yeah.

That's so terrible. That was worse than I was expecting. Let's go. My expectations were low. Come on. Let me get some. Let's go. The state tries to say Tommy has racial hate, but really it's fear of the caliphate and the state says no, take it. This is how we rule. Yeah. That doesn't fucking scan at all. It isn't. You guys haven't been on Caliphate. It was amazing. Like just warmed my heart. That's that. That's what America A. That's what Americans believe. B. That's what Americans believe about songwriting. Oh, yeah. And and see he has effectively in defense of your initial statement rewritten the tune significantly by is a terrible attempt to write lyrics to fit the rhythm. Oh, yeah. It's now 13 eight time.

He's got the whole Dactyl Sponday thing going on. Right. So it's that that's his idea is that like the British state is so politically correct and has been has been taken over by like people who are fans of the Frankfurt school that they're intentionally self-destructing and trying to turn themselves into a caliphate. And then the thing the fact that we don't have the Fifth Amendment means that we don't have our rights protected and that's and let's go. But well, let's go back to the real target of this segment because it's not Tommy Robinson because Tommy gonna Tommy, but it's the people like like it's the liberal journalists who are constantly trying to have their how dare you sir moment who are constantly saying I'm going to be the one who

owns Tommy Robinson with facts. I'm going to be the at long last have you know decency and I'll be remembered as the guy. Can I put something out about that really quickly to the whole at long last have you know decency thing like that didn't end Joseph McCarthy's career like his career went on for a little while and his career was his liver and fucking alcohol. He was a complete boozer. He literally died of cirrhosis, but like he wasn't he didn't he got censured by the Senate, but like he still had influence in politics. He didn't just you know he was like I've been owned and he just turned into a puff of smoke like and they seem to believe that that's going to happen and it just it's not but also like there's an incredibly large

difference between destroying someone in that way because the source of their power was people's fear to speak up to them and destroying someone in that way when the source of their power is fundamentally relevant to you because they've got a separate power base like you can just about build a narrative where yeah, Joe McCarthy was kind of an Empress had Empress new clothes type of thing like he was awful, but no one felt like they were empowered to say that and that meant that there was no ability to build a coalition against him because everyone was acting individually and was too afraid to organize like so yeah big speak up speak out. That's not true with Tommy Robinson like people the big iconography in Britain for that is Nick Griffin on question

time where the narrative that the the liberal left hold is that Nick Griffin went on question time and all of the audience of question time told him he was a racist and the BNP died and it's kind of the that that's not true like Nick Griffin went on question time as the BNP was on a downward slope the BNP continued on it's downward slope. UKIP got their biggest electoral success ever and we left the EU like that's the that's the narrative yeah and now UKIP is like can we let Tommy Robinson be a member even though he was a BNP member it's like yeah but then but then amazingly fucking Nick Griffin went on to have a short lived second career as as a YouTube chef do we do we remember the time that fucking the Nick Griffin cooking channel on YouTube

I do not holy fucking oh yes because that was that was the thing that amongst other things got sued by Marmite wasn't it this is a whole other layer to this this was to love at the Marmite on top that's like uh the fucking BNP got sued by Marmite because the BNP tried to adopt Marmites love it or hate it slogan and claim that they were the Marmite political parties and Unilever were like because it was a really open and shut legal case oh wow I mean but just just briefly reminiscing about the Nick Griffin cooking channel the premise of it was to show BNP supporters how to cook balanced healthy meals on like a tight budget I've only ever seen one episode it was so fucking good where he's cooking like a kind of um

like a like half curry half stew type thing which all seems like it's fine he's wearing a help for heroes polo shirt which I really enjoy and um he's going through and at one point he starts talking about curried spices and then he just goes to his Santa Claus like actually the first recipe for curry was discovered in the UK in like the 1500s so whenever people tell you that we need Indian immigrants to get curry that's actually a lie he has to bring the racism even into the cooking redefining curry is they put some pepper in a stew I love you can always tell when you can always tell when cookies are made with love you can always tell when a stew is made with racism exactly yeah oh boy we need Indians to make

Edwina curry no um so yeah that's you you don't defeat ideas like Tommy Robinson's by inviting him on like on Sky News just so he can rebroadcast the unedited version to his audience you don't debate his ideas you marginalize them the best way to defeat Tommy Robinson is a 24 hour rolling news channel where Tommy Robinson is on it 24 hours a day and a rotating succession of liberal commentators come on and argue with him surely you know that way he's being owned 24 hours a day how can that do anything but harm his profile right what was it that Riley you said on twitter not that long ago we're like the way to defeat Steve Bannon is a 24 hour live stream of Steve Bannon so everyone can be like wow he's racist and bad I don't like if that what we know it's that

the way to defeat Steve Bannon is that we need to install a telescreen in everyone's house that has to be on 24 hours a day where Steve Bannon can promulgate his ideas and people can see how bad they are yeah well I thought the way for Steve Bannon the way to defeat this Steve Bannon was just to wait for gout to take his natural course it's actually make sure that he's out in sunlight Steve Bannon has been working way harder to defeat Steve Bannon than anyone ever will it does look a bit like did anyone see there was someone who was offering to make I can't remember where I saw this there was someone who was offering to make they're saying out of one turkey they can make two turkey teddy bears it's like great for your kids on Christmas day and they were the most

hellish looking things but they looked like Steve Bannon I think this is really how you defeat these people is like is instead of taking them seriously debating their ideas academically you basically need to always remind them that these are like hideous trolls or like lego lego man looking fascist who are a combination of like inept and just really fucking stupid so something that I wanted to ask and just like reframe this is also that invariably when these sorts of things are happening it seems to me that like the forum in which the debate the debate is taking place is is somewhat skewed like the idea that okay we'll put them in front of question time but if the question time audience is a bunch of fucking angry due to love Tommy Robinson

then like that doesn't necessarily accomplish that actually in a way turns it and makes it seem as though it's more of a there's more organic support yeah validates exactly I have a I have a question for for Tommy Robinson yeah um so what's the best way to defend yourself from a muslim attack exactly it's like well in the no go zone in my neighborhood to make yourself pretty big I just I just I guess more than anything else I bring that up because recently I've seen it put forth that a success story in a way of no platforming and showing that it the validity of this approach is Milo enopolis and the fact that like Milo finally not good Milo bad Milo finally did just he managed to offend a critical mass of people to the

point like yeah fuck this guy we don't want to hear from him anymore and like although he may have a resurgence of success in the one country racist enough to accept him Australia he he has been in a many ways shut out he's been pretty much destroyed he still doesn't have the career anymore his book fucking sucks his book didn't say if I'm not mistaken his old 52 copies to people dunking on it on podcast so so one of the things though that that I do want to bring up and and kind of pivot to you maybe getting a chance to talk on this Alex is we're talking about Facebook as this disinformation platform and at the same time in these recent last two weeks we've also heard that if we're not mistaken from a court case for from a from a

unsealed court documents yeah basically revealing that Facebook massively inflated its video views that in a way the the Facebook pivot to video as a means of Facebook Facebook never lied was a huge and I guess the reason I want to bring this up here is because as we're not aspiring pivot to video people we liked our dumb irony podcast but a lot of people a lot of people have had to either become video editors video producers or lose their jobs in journalism I mean it's like Facebook lied this is one of those things where I the current that the narrative of the last week isn't quite true but is not wrong enough to bother refuting like Facebook lied about their video views there were there are two things one

that we knew about a couple of years back which is basically the Facebook fucked up maths because how did they fuck up that that particular man also wait I thought the origin is company that was for like maths was just talking to their girlfriend they fucked him up Facebook counts a video view as a video that's watched for over three seconds Facebook counts total love to jack into Facebook videos for exactly three seconds but like how fucked up is the media already like you can see that the media ecosystem is incredibly fucked up but at least they do it that way so that if you're scrolling through the feed and something plays for a tenth of a second it doesn't count as a video view so that's a reasonable choice to make when reporting this to advertisers

and all of this is only about advertisers it's not how it's billed it's just the stats that reported Facebook also report to advertisers the total length of the videos that is that were watched and that includes everything no matter how long the view and Facebook reports average watch and the problem that Facebook had is to report the average length of video watched they divided the total length by the reported number of views but they reported the reported number of views of the views over three seconds so they artificially increased the average watch time because they were telling people the average watch time was never lower than three seconds which is not technically what average means and so that massively inflated in some cases by something

like 4600% if people were not watching a video for very long and they were repeatedly scrolling past it, it inflated the counts. Facebook apologized for that and found it. This lawsuit is over a second thing that they found which wasn't related to the fucking maths era which also inflated views by about 80% and which Facebook found and didn't tell anyone about for nine months they fixed it but they didn't reveal they'd fixed it so Facebook lied and advertisers thought the videos were being watched for a long time that's probably not why the pivot video happened although the pivot video did happen because Facebook lied and it did happen around the same time the pivot video happened because not because advertisers and certainly not because public

media institutions were lied to about how many people were watching their videos the problem was they were told the truth about how many people were watching their videos which was a fuckload Facebook changed its algorithm to artificially promote video everywhere for sure and everyone was watching video the lie was Facebook said this will last Facebook Mark Zuckerberg was basically doing media tours going we think in the in the future in the next 10 years that no one's going to read text on Facebook we think video is the future we think the video can and basically your facebook card will just be recording live streams and watching things about the truth which is what it was for a long time that's you know media organizations were basically being told

by Mark Zuckerberg if you don't make video your stuff will not be on Facebook and so everyone switched to video and the problem was about nine months later Facebook went uh actually no we've changed our mind and so everyone got fired again and reading is for squares like the next thing that facebook's it did was they just said media is for squares we're going to block all news and it's just going to be about meaningful connections with your friends and family yeah it's just going to be minion memes about how white genocide is really happening it's going to be your aunt writing about how she's read about this Tommy Robinson guy in the UK and like she's worried that a guy with a tan is going to move in and do terrorism it's worse it's going to be Tommy

Robinson who is not a media organization and is thus not deprioritized by this so Tommy Robinson you know his stuff from a personal page which is put up that that remains quite heavily prioritized because you know he's a friend on Facebook he's not a media organization so the algorithm doesn't penalize it your friend tell me you know because i mean i think the minions are the most trustworthy people on white genocide because you know they're they're yellow they have no skin in the game why would they lie why would they lie i do like the idea though that uh that because when you get down to it is is felonious grew for white genocide or against white genocide i mean if he wants he wants to commit crimes he wants to steal the moons like killing all the white people is a

bigger crime than stealing the moon in a way but at the same time it's like the minions do see so cuddly so i will i will say i used to work in corporate communications and i i noticed this when facebook changed its algorithm because there was a period of time in which even a text update or something with just a static image did quite well if you timed it correctly in terms of when it was published and then when they they reorganized how things how things publish how things displayed all of a sudden it really didn't matter and video did seem like it was getting if i posted up no matter if i use my old tricks a post that i did for a client would would would do quite well but then when it changed it would do very poorly even if i if i did it the exact same

ways before whereas when i ran a video it did quite well always out the numbers would be incredible so there was a certain kind of like you know feedback loop there yeah that if you're if you're someone who's putting together analytics for your media organization you know for a client whomever you're seeing that video is doing better than tax it makes sense why you would go that way but i mean for one thing i'd say video is so much more laborious to create to produce to make and to watch and to watch exactly it's it's exhausting do anything else i mean the best thing was like all of those media economics combined to mean that by the end of this period facebook was full of essentially text slideshows most facebook really like remember most facebook

videos at the end of this period were b-roll with text written over the top and people would just read an article presented to them slowly what has to be watch on silent which were just like videos of static oh god with triangles yeah or like business insider doing the same like loop of the this is the most expensive sandwich in the world and like thank you like that's the thing it's like is it every is there's the hue and cry oh tribalism is dividing us people don't have access to another the facts but like because of the just dunderheads who like ride buses like ride a company owned buses and sort of just decide hey video is new let's do that why not which group of the dunderheads there's like the proud boys

but something else i too i i think that makes sense is that in the aftermath of trump's election and in the aftermath of people really taking facebook to task for for disinformation for everything but specifically for like the one that at least from an americans perspective the one that really got got people enraged was like wait a minute there's teens in massedonia making stories about trump like the pope loving trump and that's making them thousands of dollars each month because they're sharing it on facebook because if i remember correctly the the idea was that they set up a google adsense account and they created a fake news page and they or they would do just dumb the dumbest stories they could think of and they would then you know run banner ads on

that they would make money off that because they were getting massive shares on facebook because it turns out it's easier to write a viral news story if you don't have to actually have viral news like yeah it truth makes it really hard to write interesting news and so face facebook because i've noticed this from when we run promos for this show if i run a link to like for example our pod bean or i run a link to itunes it does very poorly and for other for my other shows too the same thing whereas if i if i host a video on facebook i'm most likely going to get like i'm gonna i'm gonna do whatever needs to happen to convince facebook that more people even if they've signed up to the feed more people deserve to see this stop censoring our podcast zuckerberg and when

i run a link to magapillburnpakistan.com it does extremely well the best thing is like this was completely facebook shooting their balls off for another reason as well because facebook is moderately good at moderating text and image content and fucking awful at moderating video because it's really hard to use ai to moderate video for sure you have to like recognize the images recognizes the spoken stuff like that's hard to do it's hard enough to do images so just as they were entering this period where suddenly facebook's moderation practices and facebook's ability to clamp down on misinformation was becoming a political issue facebook just pushed forced every media outlet to switch to stuff that they can't automatically check

which yeah that that's been great that's gone well facebook likes a challenge as we imagine it's once again i mean i sort of harp on this quite a bit these are widely imagined to be sort of neutral arbiters almost people who've created the pipes of information but it seems like everyone constantly forgets that these are marketing firms they're basically large technological marketing companies that make money on advertising and it's hard to skip an ad when it's embedded in a video fake no no so that was that was one of the bigger problems with the pivot to video that's the reason why it died was because there were no fucking ads facebook pushed everyone to pivot to video but then they couldn't work out where to put the ad

that wouldn't kill the whole thing because if the average video watch is three and a half fucking seconds you can't put a pre-roll on it and people have already scrolled away before the post-roll so all the media companies weren't making any money on these videos that had 50 million viewers facebook couldn't work out to put adverts on it so facebook pushed away from it it's this sort of like ah fuck it let's give it a go approach that these fast to break things like it's a fucking it's a fucking cliche to bring it up when criticizing facebook but it is still facebook's fucking attitude to everything including democracy and like social norms what have we broken what happened then it's really amazing to know that like the the future of how humans communicate and

apparently the future of liberal democracy itself is basically being managed by the guys who put on the fire festival like because literally like the idea that you're like well we'll see what happens it's like oh wow fascism all over the world like you know you win some you lose some now we know not to do it again exactly it's like i mean and i bring this up because i've my wife's family is is part portuguese but she has relatives in brazil and seeing what's going on in brazil with the extent to which i mean the most shared articles on facebook are still insane right wing just like like rage sphere news like and but seeing what's happening in brazil where it's far less moderate because why would it be why would fucking facebook invest in portuguese language moderators

they uh that same level of insane fake news bullshit like viral video like the racism channel kind of stuff is happening there to disastrous effect there's it looks like tomorrow maybe in the future when this episode publishes that the full-on fascist candidate is going to win facebook brazil is about making meaningful connections with your fascist dictator but the thing to remember though is that obviously the problem isn't the video and the problem isn't the fake news like that's a symptom of a deep like people wouldn't be susceptible to it if they weren't sort of their lives weren't already hollowed out and the other thing is that like i see that facebook does try to moderate this stuff like i saw the most just an article that caused me like cringe

anarchy uh which is facebook has a war room for keeping the truth and they're they're gonna make sure that the we you know that we will fight them on the on conservative treehouse dot red pill dot maga or whatever but like even then they still are so careful not to say that it's about the truth they've decided that there is pretty much two categories of truth that they care about that they actually will clamp down on one is misinformation about actual elections so like if you lie about the polling station being closed or you lie about the day of the vote that they'll take down and the other is the other is impersonation if you say you are a candidate and you know and you're not they'll take that on everything else even after all of this they're still like no we we don't want

to be in the position of judging whether or not there's latino rape gangs going around new york that's uh that's a political call and we we want the marketplace of ideas to solve it i've also noticed this too because running ads for one of my shows um we we got put through the ringer on facebook to become a certified registered because literally because i i can't say a socialist podcast without being like oh you're you're you're a political ad but then they look at their definition of a political ad basically means um that it's uh like it's for a politician or it's for some sort of like political position and so it's an issue exactly so so when we try to run an ad they'd be like well no why is this market as a political ad this isn't political content but then if you

run it without the marker it's like wait this is a political ad this can't be run and now i don't live in the united states anymore so now i'm running fake news from abroad like next thing you know i'm gonna be posting from massedonia um you regressed to a teenage state now and i'm 17 too and i'm making a ton of money on like my weird popes stories that's an amazing um uh freaky friday switch you know how they don't regulate what you post the plimith herald comment section that's the only bastard free speech left that's one of the things that i i do think though also that needs to be brought up is that conservatives hate facebook because they're convinced that facebook is persecuting them and so facebook responds to conservative outrage by glad handing

them and then continues to let it shift rightward and it's not never nothing's going to appease you because they don't operate in good faith like that's not the point and so it's like it just seems like we've talked about the feedback loop and a couple issues here it seems like this is happening again where it's just become i mean like i can't i know we can't necessarily get you on record expressing it but like my contempt for facebook is limitless like i think they're the fucking worst like they're they're they're more in my opinion they are more of an amoral company than any of the other tech companies see i think i think that one of the problems that that uh fighting facebook in 2018 faces is that that's such a common view that a lot of people i think

i include myself in that judge efforts to fight facebook's damage based on whether or not those efforts will destroy facebook as in like you know amongst facebook critics uh regulation that might destroy facebook is seen as as good and regulation that might entrench facebook is seen as bad and i think that's gonna backfire because it's it's pretty clear now i think at least to me that facebook is in a position where it needs to be regulated utility you know it's not it's a big malevolent company but regulation kind you kind of need to assume that it's going to stick around and stop it being shit rather than vainly hope that you can pass regulation which it won't be able to deal with which in practice it can because it's one of those large companies that's got the

you know if you pass a real name law facebook can comply with that but little liberal facebook clone can't comply with and the real name law doesn't really do anything it's just like wow real names of really really racist people who are totally not afraid to be even yaksie lennon has to be racist to be fair they would destroy his brand if he had to rebuild all of those uh fans under a new name under a under a name that double barrel no less exactly part but then if he just if he just went to yaksie lennon he'd be like a sound found rapper lily axley he could just be steven sl that's absolutely a soundcloud rapper or steven yl i can't even fucking spell today so i think the the other but what that but i think the the pivot to video essentially encapsulates a kind of

fuck it let's do a thing um attitude that the tech sector has to go anything and and the other place where i think we get that all the time is just fuck it put it on the blockchain put it on the blockchain put it on the blockchain put them on the glass no put them on the blockchain um and why are i mean we say a why are we still talking sir mix a lot reference yes so we say like why are we still talking about it right like it's it it's sort of fervent coverage as the next big thing in the mainstream media has kind of died down because our instrumental variable for is it interesting i.e. is bitcoin worth 20 000 that era has sort of passed forever those are the biggest like we we did our tulip thing i've not heard of bitcoin in a while what's

he up to these days destroying actually it's destroying the planet slowly yeah yeah i know like the the turns out if you build a currency around the idea that people have to burn computing time to be paid for it then what happens is people burn a lot of computing time and it turns out that energy is what you use to make computing time and so you use the power demands of ireland no it's australian network it's australian actually i checked it you it was ireland last april okay it's austria now that's a big number because you know austrians have a lot of computers that used to be racist online so it's like yeah i mean this much computing time has not been used in austrian basements since one guy had a massive family in a basement that never

left oh fuck uh so the thing is it's it's the blood reaction to that was far better than the joke itself which is a no bar but you know the um the the thing about this though right is that we are is that is that if this is the technology just we'll put it on a distributed ledger that seems to be has the fewest use cases but the most investment there's a materialist explanation for why no one ever shuts up about blockchain which is that what the magic of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has been is it's taken the rough technological background of the open source movement which already is is kind of culty right it's already a movement where people give time voluntarily uh to to build software and argue that you know that basically e-communism is great

and gap here for nerds um but what bitcoin is is it's basically as though uh if you use Linux you get paid the more other people use Linux like that that is that is what bitcoin is it's a it's a moderately plausible e-money with massive massive inbuilt viral mechanics because your bitcoin is worth more the more other people use bitcoin where have i seen this before as a scheme is it a ziggurat scheme is that what we call it actually it's a ruthless trapezoid um but right like that's also a soundcloud rapper ruthless trapezoid the roofie trapezoid none of you guys listen to soundcloud rap fuck me little roof but no but like so that's the thing is that you what you end up with is this entire sector of stuff where user number one has as much or more of a

desire to get other people on this new cryptocurrency as as the creators do because every single person who comes in is in effect also holding equity in this ridiculous thing which means that no one shuts up about it because there is no there's no middle ground there is no interested amateur you're either invested in this and promoting it or you don't care alex as a tech reporter did you find that it was of the case or is still the case that people just put blockchain on shit because they knew that it could get press they get press and get money like absolutely yeah sort of um you will find one of the interesting things that we've seen over the last year is that a few of the pitches which actually made sense and appeared to solve a useful thing have quietly

dropped to the blockchain aspect like you kind of had two categories of pitch you had the ones which were here is a white paper and an ico and those have been pump and dump like they got a shitload of money and they've done nothing and then you have the ones that are sort of here is our app for trading uh hypebeast clothing you know here here is our and and it's selling on the blockchain and then if it gets a few users they kind of drop the blockchain because that's a really expensive and efficient way of running a database and then they just hypebeast ebay and and and fine and like that is a niche because there are there are you know ebay is bad at everything it does and if you can get any niche uh group of users that are tight enough that you've

got supply and demand then brilliant kill ebay do it but i was um two days ago i was uh actually one round by the principle of blockchain in use for the first time i was in paris like i said you've been a tech reporter for how long five years blockchain has been sort of in the news for how long six years and this is the first time yes okay good yes we were talking about this earlier actually and yeah i actually can i can see this is the first blockchain project i've ever seen the point of so you tell me about this one because i have two more that after this so this this one is i was at the second tech fugies conference which is broadly uh well-meaning liberal technologists who got together in 2015 to try and get a movement in their sector to help

people affected by the refugee crisis to help refugees coming from syria to help countries that were taking in lots of refugees deal with the new influx of arrivals like good well-meaning people generally not that much has come out of it although there are now more refugees who are CEOs of tech companies than there were three years ago which is kind of cool if not a way of enacting systemic change but one of the really interesting things about this one which was the second one was the way the tone had changed from last year last year a lot of the stuff was about things like financial inclusion it was about difficulties of if you're a registration desk in a refugee camp and it's all on paper the paper gets lost people lose their IDs so it's all about

bringing that into you know into databases it was about small free smartphone apps that let people get a driver's license and good and well-meaning what's happened in the last year is everyone making those so suddenly sat back and gone actually i do not want to build a government database of refugees this now looks like the kind of thing that could backfire enormously there was one woman on stage who said we don't want to build digitally yellow stars which is like quite good self-awareness for this industry i gotta say like well i mean you think about it like wow it'd be really great what if you have all the all the registration data of all these migrants like oh and then the italian government gets their hands on it exactly how that works exactly that so

like and italy is having history of fascism or and work but yeah like a bit uh not great that it took until 2018 for them for them to realize that but you know better better late than ever and so this is where the blockchain pitch actually made sense which is what you want is you do still want a digital ID paper has downsides you know it can get lost it can get destroyed it's paper like come on but you don't want to centralize database that kind of is the definition of what blockchain is for decentralized databases to replace paper transactions and paper records so the you know the the various ideas that you have is you don't put identity on the blockchain because that would be public but you put a

cryptographic hash on the blockchain that links back to your private record which you have hashed and signed so that if you show someone your personal record they can check on the blockchain make sure it's true make sure it's not forged and you have proven digitally that you're a refugee without there being a central database of refugees which kind of makes sense and it's really annoying because i can't be completely cynical anymore like i i do i do i now have to remove my automatic deleting any email that contains the word blockchain from my work inbox which i do and deletes about 150 emails a day and makes my life livable like wait no but then does that mean that now refugees are going to be cooking the planet and thereby ironically worsening the refugee

crisis shit oh fuck me well that's the everything is terrible don't worry i we can we can rebuild some of that cynicism because i've captured a couple here as we know htc has a launched its first blockchain phone which you can only buy with cryptocurrency which means this is a phone that has a blockchain app on it it doesn't store your bitcoin it doesn't do really anything it has somehow affiliated with the blockchain you can only buy it with bitcoin or ethereum and that means it's value wildly fluctuates it currently costs about 950 about 900 about 875 about 900 about 900 it's the time it takes you to type in your pin the you will either gain or lose money do you ever want every interaction with commerce in your life to be an old-timey

auction house now you can it's and what i loved about this is like this really goes to the core of what the what this technology is for people phil chen htc's chief decentralized officer which i assume means he's an ai with several nodes he doesn't exist in one place said basically and here's the thing he basically admitted that it didn't work they didn't know what to do with it but they're doing it anyway quote we are openly inviting the community and potential partners who share our vision to collaborate with us to bring in more applications and to help new users understand the technology this should be a collaborative work with the whole blockchain community to help expand the ecosystem it doesn't would do anything it's

not our fault you do it this is what happens when you sell your entire phone division to google and then carry on trying to make phones turns out you sold all your good people and now you you have one guy who's just a guy who's like what if we put an android our blockchain wallet on a phone and sold it for an indeterminate amount of money to people with too much fake money because i think and the net and right is it's they don't that doesn't do anything it's not their fault they don't know what it's going to do and you see the other thing with we even with brexit i say well because we see i remember at the conservative party conference speaking about the northern ireland problem which to clarify for american listeners is that ireland has been partitioned

into the republic of ireland which is the sort of republic of ireland then northern ireland ireland the country ireland that's a member of the e you that wants to stay member of the e you northern ireland part of the uk that's not going to be part of the e you anymore thereby a hard border and the thing that and the part of the big thing that stopped the war between these uh these two areas a sort of the troubles war between southern and northern ireland that's not no it was it was the troubles it was a time of conflict between it was more than the the all right my my can can one of the people who's actually from the uk do it because i'm going to fuck it up milo can you do it i kind of know i'm going to i'm going to preface this with

i'm not an expert on ireland i'm going to which posh southern english person should explain the troubles because that's so much less of a hot button issue than the north americans i'm just going to try and give a rough and dispassionate overview so you know britain britain invaded ireland a few hundred years ago and we'd we kind of we fucked a lot of shit up there you know we killed a lot of people we did a lot of bad things but one of the one of the hangovers of that was that some people in ireland kind of became Protestant as i understand it more some people from scotland went to ireland they colonized ireland yeah i think scottish presbyterians colonized ireland and then like yeah but also everyone in scotland is ethnically irish so that

that is like another weird so like irish people actually went back to ireland from scotland anyway because the irish went to scotland and killed all the pits who used to live in scotland and then anyway this is it okay so we need to go back to five hundred a day about the time the king was trying to fight the ocean i mean actually it's it is it is legitimately true it would not be a wanky thing to say that to understand the troubles you need to go back to five hundred eighty because like realistically danelord does kind of start affecting this and so in fact this is enough of an introduction to say that that philip hamann speaking at the conservative party conference said maybe blockchain will solve it yeah basically the troubles is one of the few

genuinely both sides issues so but he says but philip hamann aims to solve this issue that goes back like more than a millennium and he says because he says there is technology becoming available said philip hamann when asked about solutions to the border problem because one of the things that finally created some stability in the region was that northern ireland the uk and republic of ireland the like republic of ireland were integrated by the e you could they were basically catholic irish people in northern ireland we were integrated before the e you and then the e you overtook that but i think the point that you're coming to here is really valid riley which is that the the good friday agreement created a situation in northern ireland that it

has dissipated most of the tension to the point where people aren't worried about there being literal violence between parties like it's it's worth saying to american readers readers yeah some of you if it's a text yeah it's worth saying to american listeners that like growing up in britain before about 1997 was something that would have broken the american psyche like there were bombs somewhere in the uk most months a lot of them were in northern ireland but even the rest of britain what didn't get out of this they were frequently yeah well so to say the the the gherkin got built on a it was on a building that was bombed in like 1992 i think so i like when i grew up there was a mysterious figure who was known as the west london bomber

because it there seemed to be an ira affiliated bomber who focused on west london hammer smith bridge was bombed the bbc was bombed and like these were this is my neighborhood and it's like there are still not bins on the tube because the ira had a habit of putting bombs in bins it's it's very much affected like the geography of the ira didn't believe in littering say what you were and so and the good friday agreement depends on their yeah the good friday agreement ended that and the good friday agreement depends on their being a kind of frictionless sort of way to sort of get goods and people across the sort of faux border between northern ireland and ireland so basically republicans in northern ireland can go to southern ireland with no problem and

the ulster unionists can bully can be like no we're still a separate country yeah and and essentially brexit is going to make that impossible which is the northern ireland problem which is well how do we avoid getting a hard border between the eu and us when what we want is a hard border between the eu and us i mean i just remember this very clearly because i'm i'm 34 when i was 13 i was the same age as one of the kids that was killed in the omog bombings like it's recent enough that it's a huge problem so the idea is when we're like oh here's this massive problem going back literally to like the fucking 500 ad and their solution is the blockchain yeah and that philip hammond said there is technology becoming available i don't claim to be an expert

on it but the most obvious technology is blockchain and we say well the most obvious is a great it's not the best it's not the most appropriate but it is certainly the most obvious that's the thing it's i think what blockchain does is it takes a problem like social trust national interest or even sexual consent and it pretends that that problem is not even political it's technical i mean what if it was cooking africa that's what we're asking about the meanwhile the largest blockchain company in the world has just relocated it's you headquarters from london to dublin because they do not believe the blockchain will solve brexit yeah so they are preparing but they're saying that like the that essentially the the problem of the northern ireland problem by sort

of evoking blockchain they can say well this is a problem of customs arrangements it's not that we have espoused a fundamental contradiction it's like no we just need to refine it technology can resolve a thing that can't actually be resolved in politics because the tourists have now gotten to a point where they're literally disputing the rules of formal logic they're going well wait what if we can have p and not p like literally like no that's not how things work what could this possibly do what could this possibly do what could he possibly mean like i the the general Tory approach to this has been to argue that the problem that you are trying to solve it's not the regulatory hard border it is the physical infrastructure of a hard border so what

they're trying to suggest is that if you remove all of the physical infrastructure and replace it with magic digital infrastructure that there is not technically a hard border even though there is so for instance if you whack RFID chips on all of the stuff that's coming over and have a nice big RFID reader underneath the road so that all of the trucks zoom over and their goods are automatically registered and checked and then the RFID chips are written to the blockchain so that it's decentralized then you can automatically enforce the border without having someone at the checkpoint which wouldn't work would be too much money and would be just completely irrelevant anyway because like how would you make someone put the wait so like if you drove a truckload of cocaine across this

mythical irish border there would just be like a microsoft paperclip would come up and be like it seems like you're smuggling cocaine would you like to pull over and speak to the garden no no you've gone if such a solution existed you'd probably already see it in a place like Switzerland and you don't because it doesn't exist right like there are you know generally speaking the closest you get to a digital border is a lot of cameras that record number plates and like that's good if all you want to do is just record sort of how much traffic is going in and out it doesn't really do much more than that and if you want a hard border between you know a hard border and a customs border where you need to vet the provenance of every single fucking cow that

crosses the border in a country where there are fields that go on both sides of the border doesn't really help oh fuck we didn't count on the fields hey cow no come back here where do you mean unheard and so whether whether you're sort of just whether you're trying to make a marketing pitch for why your startup should exist or whether you're trying to sort of do a sort of bit of political hand waving like all of this just fuck it let's just let's pivot to video let's put it on the blockchain let's do it be legends yeah it's really just a way of saying don't worry about this problem watch the birdie watch the birdie watch the birdie it's it's a trick yeah it's a con like fundamental like in a really boring tech way the blockchain is basically a

replacement for fucking amazon web services like 90 at the time it's just a cloud but a decentralized cloud rather than a normal cloud you don't tend to hear pitches that like amazon web services is caught a wire product because if someone's talking about the fucking cloud service provider they're using they probably don't have anything else to say and much and just like the tori party probably don't have much else to say damn he went there insulting the tori party how could you riley that is a controversial view in this crowd i know that uh i mean we've we've kind of gone back and forth but i do think that's that that really does make a very forceful point in the sense that like this is a weird kind of worship of technology that it worships um the

i don't know that the the idea that a problem is solved by a nifty or like novel new thing as opposed to acknowledging that the problem is you know multi variable and i mean i'm not going to say okay i'm not attempting to say facebook pivot to video and blockchain for the irish border are the same but i think that faith and technology i think that credulousness and i think that more importantly that total disregard for consequence until it's absolutely in your face is is a thing that is just emerging as a theme of our time and that's the thing that scares me also the belief that technology is fundamentally apolitical that like yeah and you you you see the sense of how technology is governed in the uk government still that dcms

is seen as an apolitical job where the department for digital culture media and sport and that is digital used as a noun he is in charge of digital who is the current minister jeremy uh yeah jeremy right uh it used to be matt hancock the the oh we yes we love very digital the cool reimagined george osbourne second in command what if george osbourne was a geography teacher sitting backwards on the chair whereas it's now like an incredibly stuffy former lawyer who is clearly in over his head and like credit to the man he hasn't yet just gone in bleeps and bloops to speak to my underlings we've gone for a little while none of us have had lunch yet i i think it's time to eat before we bum ourselves out i vote for the fact that we both have lunch and don't have lunch which might seem

impossible but with the power of the blockchain oh my so per usual you can we have a patreon you can subscribe to it for five dollars a month and get the second episode uh i recommend it if you want to debate us you can debate who's saying for 25 um we have a live show in 8 10 or 15 you get whatever we give you some shit we'll figure some we'll figure something out free tickets to the live show um if you if you if it's today come to the live show that you're listening to it if it's after what you are doing if it's after october 30th i'm afraid you've missed it give me my podcast backlog i will be listening to this in february so hi future me and um otherwise i'm going to say you can commodify your descent with a t-shirt from will comrad of course uh maybe something maybe

you can buy a t-shirt on the blockchain you can decentralize your t-shirt you can have one sleeve in the kitchen one sleeve in the bathroom you can have the body of it in the back garden you can be the head of decentralized can be the head of decentralized for a little comrad decentralized head uh and like i'm gonna be a serial killer and just call myself like no no don't arrest me i'm just the head of decentralization oh wait also uh auko on broadway market will give me a free lunch if i plug them on the show this is different from the other hucksterism for reasons that i won't go into right i just loves a lunch i love a lunch also if you are listening to this after october the 30th on the 7th of november there's going to be another edition of uh of smoke smoke comedy

which i run at the sec food which is at the same place as the live shows you don't even have the excuse of not knowing where it is i mean it will still be happening if you're listening to it before october 30th it's not some weird conditional event but who plans more than a week in advance no one alex no one alex uh thank you very much for coming on thank you for having me for the third time it's always a pleasure always a nice to get a three-peat all right thanks everyone later