TRASHFUTURE - Datapocalypse: Tales from the Babestation ft. Alex Hern

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

Riley, Olga, and Milo sit down with Guardian technology reporter Alex Hern (@AlexHern) to talk about the latest round of devilry out of Silicon Valley, including Tesla's volunteer brigades, how Uber killed a lady, and then we go deep into Cambridge Analytica and why it doesn't really matter, but you should still be mad. I mean, none of that matters because we have an extended riff about babestation that absolutely slaps. Follow @raaleh @rocknrolga @milo_edwards @alexhern @trashfuturepod and our fearless producer @inthesedeserts on twitter love riley ps: commodify ur dissent w/ a shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/

This is our weekly microphone brunch. I'm like, I'm like Nixon. I like to record all my brunches. I'm just going to trick people into making content for me by inviting them for a weekly microphone brunch. Oh no, the mics that are everywhere. Ignore them. Be your sparkling cells. I just collect microphones and keep them on. Jack and this is what they say when they do those like fake shake exposés. Like, don't mind all the microphones. That's just my large microphone collection. Please continue telling me about the crime. Hey, do you want to be moderately prominent on Twitter?

Do I? This is not a lapel mic. It's just a brooch that's shaped like a lapel mic. I wear it to remind me of my many years as a fake exposé undercover reporter, which I don't do anymore. We have Alex turned back with us. Yeah, I'm here. I'm not going to be no platform by broken mic a second time. The snowflake microphone couldn't handle the realness you were dropping. We also have Olga and Milo coming at us from variously different places. Milo, you have an anecdote. I do. This is just a bit of news from Russia, which I greatly enjoyed this morning.

In recent months, we've all heard a lot about the dark and staggering high-tech competency of the Russian deep state, which is busy interfering in international elections. Today, some great Russian technology has been released because the Russian Postal Service did their first delivery of a parcel by drone. They invited all of the press to watch the drone take off with the parcel. Within five seconds of takeoff, it crashed at full speed into an apartment building. It was delivering it to that apartment. Everything went according to plan, Milo. I mean, did you even know that they'd ordered the parcel was known that they'd ordered drone rubble? It's the hottest gift. Check your facts for pronouncing fake news.

It's amazing. He'd barely, he'd barely even clicked check out on broken pieces of drugs when they came crashing through the window. That's what I call Amazon Prime. Oh, that's awesome. So why don't we just jump straight the fuck in? Why don't we? Why don't we start off with with an easy one? Then we start with an easy one. We got uber in Tesla, then we'll ramp up to Facebook and then we'll gently slide down into Nile Ferguson's pudding brain. So we're the easy one is corporate manslaughter allegedly potentially. That's that. That's the mellow trash future trash future gets all smooth and sexy trash future after dark. So I'm going to I'm just going to start one. One thing came out recently is famously

a guy strapped for cash. Elon Musk has asked the model three factory workers to volunteer over the weekend to pitch in and build instead of houses for homeless people, Teslas for people with lots of homes. Help a brother out. Strap for cash. Like, you know, it's really nice of him to give such a fresh example to his workers of why they should push for unionization. Literally like less than two weeks after going, you know, I don't think Teslas right free union. We're a modern workforce. Unions are old and they inhibit innovation also work for free work for free with no recourse like that. That please do that now. Well, to be fair, he wasn't saying that they'd work for completely free.

Oh my God, orange buzzweed beanies. I mean, that would have been cool. Poets. No, they quote Tesla. I'm reading from a Bloomberg technology article right here. Tesla incorporated. Tesla. I'm fully stashed up. Tesla incorporated exorted its factory workers to prove wrong the quote haters betting against and short selling the company and is letting a small number of volunteers during the effort to ramp up letting letting letting letting Hell yeah, post that shit on my LinkedIn timeline. It's like you want to rise and grind, right? Absolutely grind the poor into the dust is shit. Like it's it's a garbage car by by all accounts. It was their attempt to build this this

cheap cheap all all market car and it's just gone wrong in every single way. Any what I I know Jack all about cars. I can't drive. I never have but everyone who knows a cars who has touched one of these things says it feels like feels like a piece of junk apparently because Elon Musk being Elon Musk when yeah, I want I want robots just everywhere. Just fill my production line with robots. And it turns out that there's a reason why much bigger, much more experienced car companies like BMW and Ford don't use all robots, which is robots kind of suck. And the Tesla the Tesla Model 3 is a really good example of why you don't put too many robots in a thing. You have issues like it's the home of bill. That's the model X the model X is the

home of bill one where Elon Musk was like yeah, I want going doors and everyone went don't they kill everyone it was like I want going doors there's known as suicide going they were good enough for Doc Brown and that documentary back to the future and they're good enough for you and then this is little literally I'm just imagining in the future when the model X becomes self-driving and people of Silicon Valley are being terrorized by model X is swooping down. Can we just post Malo, you're under the impression that a go wing door is literally a wing. No, I'm just deeply facetious. Tesla model X swooping on its go wings. I like it like I'm not honestly clear that Elon Musk doesn't know that. What's like the problem with

Elon Musk is that like only like 2% of the world is INTJs right and so his workers like they just don't get INTJ intensity and so when he like you know does the INTJ stare you know the INTJ death stare famous thing that people do at the haters who are causing his shares to fall more than 22% this month in New York owned. The only thing that isn't falling is any woman for him. It's true. He's an INTJ in sale. Girls are intimidated by his intelligence probably. Right. Also, if he has all these robots, why can't they just work for the weekend? Alex, you were saying these robots are better unionized than his people obviously. That's why he's been investing so much in AI. Is it just that robots kind of just actually suck at this

work when they're not augmented by humans? The serious answer is that the problem with robots is say you have a robot drilling a hole. You have two options with that. You have either a person who then screws the next thing into the hole at the robot drills gets to see how misaligned it is gets to screw it in until it feels right gets to if they put it in wrongly for the first time you know you can feel it but robot robots are bad at that. Like it's really the sort of thing that you or I do instinctively when we are screwing something into a hole. A robot can't a robot a assembly line robot is very much geared to put the screw in the hole turn it 43 times and remove and if it fucks up with that it doesn't notice or at least making it notice is a

really hard advanced problem for a high-speed manufacturing line. So what you're getting is these issues. Sounds like complaints I've had from my ex-girlfriends. They're making it too easy man. But these issues like these issues aren't being caught until way down the line by which point it's far too late to fix that to go back and unscrew everything and go to the one screw that that robot put in. So you're getting just what looks like shit manufacturing quality and isn't actually any quicker or more efficient at building the cars as well. Maybe it will pan out in the future but it doesn't look like it. Instead of robots being bad at it the the rumor on the street is that women can't come. I just really want Musk to fail. I mean again this isn't unfortunately

some of the other choice quotes from this email I have aren't from Musk they're from this guy Field. But the tumble in the share price being driven by short sellers Field says. What's the publication again. Bloomberg technology seems like I learned how to do it. Check and meet every ex-girlfriend. Field says I find this personally insulting and you should too. Let's make them regret ever betting against us. You will prove a bunch of haters wrong. Who's they people who think that people should be paid for work. Well it's the short sellers the people who think that you think that Tesla is shit and doomed to fail. Yeah because it's if you are on the market think we won't go as far as slavery. Let's prove them wrong. If you're a non-unionized

worker being disrupted by robots and the short sellers think that's not going to work you should prove them right wrong. The logic just doesn't really work out here like well it's the it's the whole it which is the I love it but also it didn't Tesla didn't Elon Musk put the time constraints on himself. Yeah which is like I'm going to do it like that and then he's like fuck this is a promise he made with no no reason. Nobody asked for that time frame. That's the silly funny thing. It's what Elon Musk dancing down the street to the tune of this is how we do it and going straight well it's that it's that this is this is basically I think what what we get here what this tells us is that you know I think a lot of the time like neoliberal capitalism likes to likes us to have

this great man theory of technological achievement where Elon Musk is kind of responsible for the Nietzschean act of resting this wonderful thing and all of its value and and all of the great things it'll do for us and be rich and whatever out of kind of thin air as an act of will. What I'd like to propose as an alternative is the Wiley Coyote theory of technological development where using a massively over elaborate sort of scheme you basically managed to routinely publicly embarrass yourself while you go after what would be basically a very achievable target you know if you would perhaps recognize and fairly compensate all the people working for you field ends his memo we set high goals at Tesla but I know we can do this field rope if we keep climbing from 300

through the end of this week it will be an incredible victory your friends and family will hear about it in the news which is cool because you can spend that you won't see them for the foreseeable future because you'll be working 24 hours a day promise on your behalf and then it's your responsibility for free to make that promise happen yes that's why because they're an inspiring family didn't you see it's there they're pulling together to do it so Elon Musk can I think send more cars to Mars this is like this is like a basis for a very bad Disney Channel original movie the other thing about the Wiley Coyote approach to capitalism is that Elon Musk ran off the cliff like three beats ago and it's just when he looks down that it's gonna hurt yeah so that's that's

that's that's the tesla update uh that's that's the that's the basically the weekly tesla update are we ready to um take a hard left turn into the world of the much darker world of uber yeah yeah so we talked about we talked about this on last week but then we were no platformed by hot for tv we were to we were babestation extreme like waving a Nokia 3310 around sexily Alex was in this in the studio wearing wearing a wearing a thong if you want to see more just text kiss I think that I think that babe station must literally have the world's largest collection of remaining Nokia 3310s it's the only place I've ever seen one in the last about three years before the iPhone came out

they were like let's just let's just buy our next 15 years supply now like there's no way with this won't be the leading mobile phone in a decade's time right what possible other situation could that be going in hard on this they're like the inverse of tesla they're like tech technological regressive but very well unionized yeah I get aroused by just like women getting a fair wage and running their own business ah babe station red short sellers are taking aim at babe station on what other channel do you see that many women on tv at the same time without men panel shows and out of ten cats eat me babe station passes the backbell test oh my god strong female character hey all i'm saying is support women in technology i'm saying

maybe maybe maybe uh the next disney princess should be lacey lorenzo that's all i'm saying i think when you know the names of the babe station stars everyone else is like ah no that's the problem for some reason a predictive search algorithm has decided that every time i open up porn hub that's going to be the first suggested video it's like a 25 minute long clip of this same person i've never even watched it but presumably i've watched better porn the algorithms have your kink down man the if riley ever went on mastermind his special subject would be like incredibly niche marxist literature and you know you know that that famous new york time story of target discovering that a woman was pregnant before her own father

knew like you the algorithms know your kinks better than you and one day you're going to click on that video and you're going to come so hard because everything about it is right for you and porn hubs it's it's just lazy lazy lorenzo saying the bloomberg technology report just watching her it's my kink i guess is maybe watching a woman play snake while not making you trying to look like she's not playing they say that you know your formative years really generate your sexual identity and you were at home alone watching babe station a lot when you were like i couldn't have it's a pretty show i can you spent a lot on the fees to rebroadcast the time difference meant that they never got his sex message

haha not rebroadcasting it live actually watching it eight hours back oh god you know how like all these companies the terrible april fools jokes and then yesterday porn hub did one called horn hub and it's always just like horn instruments and then but i but i opened it when i was like ready to masturbate and you have no idea how disappointing it is when you're all like hell yeah you open it and you're like fuck the whole website has been redone they're all playing tuba and you don't know how to fucking exit out of it because the prank's so elaborate it was so annoying and that is when you went on bloomberg.com gotta bust somehow busted thing is if all of the developer time spent over the last month on

april fools slide into my hand i can be useful maybe uber wouldn't have killed someone yeah we have to we this babe station this babe station riff has been great guys but we can't we still get ground to cover um so uber uh uber uber seems to have been involved in the lady dying a couple weeks ago because of ai being more than what was that there was someone who did a tweet right with marketing materials artificial intelligence internal memo regression analysis no internal regress internal memo machine learning actual execution regressions yeah yeah like it's it's all it's all just numbers really it's all just numbers holy shit i mean if there's a phrase you don't want to use in that context it's actual execution oh damn it what happened was facts um an uber

self-driving car being tested in alabama hit and killed a woman crossing the road uh facts the uber safety driver um who was supposed to be uh supervising the self-driving car keeping her eyes on the road and her hands near the wheel sorry i think it was an arizona yep sorry right that was not a good people of alabama they're just racist and hate abortion the things i claimed as facts were in fact lies there was a self-driving car in alabama but they torched this witchcraft okay let's start again facts an uber self-driving car uh being tested on the streets of arizona hit and killed a woman crossing the road um facts the safety driver who was hired by uber to sit in the driver's seat of the car keep her eyes on the road and her hands near the steering wheel

was video evidence shows uh looking down at her phone until seconds before the crash facts the car did not appear to break appreciably at all despite the fact that it was using a lidar system which should give it effectively the ability to see in the dark up to 50 meters away something went wrong right but uh what what needs to be worked out now is what the initial reports suggested that uh the woman came out of nowhere which you hear after effectively every car related fatality ever and it is very rarely true in this case it wasn't true she was hit on the furthest right lane of a four-lane highway while crossing from the left so she very much didn't come out of nowhere the way these cars are supposed to work this should not have

happened um one prob one one potential thing is uber's self-driving car algorithm is shit wait did they develop their own they didn't like they developed they developed or anything no they developed their own uber is one of the companies which is developing its own self-driving cars uh google wemo has its other one it's partnering with lyft um but yeah uber effectively bought khanigimelon's robotics department um they they like they hired so many people from khanigimelon in such a short time that its robotics department was essentially good school rejected me when i applied fuck them its robotics department was essentially unstaffed for for quite a while it it was it was actually quite a discussion instead of academic ai circumstances of oh

shit academia is having to compete with tech firms in a way that hasn't happened before generally tech firms were happy to partner and uber was coming along just going no like we want you in house and we're going to pay you more than you can say no to but they fucked up like there there is there is essentially no question that they fucked up the the question now is whether whether that fuck up was something which was to a degree that they should be held liable for negligence of corporate manslaughter like this is this is what the uh investigation is are they trying to make the woman the the driver responsible for uh so this is this is the first thing that they will try and do is that yes because this woman wasn't doing what she was supposed to do are they going to hire an

80s stand-up comedian to make that case break it down for me uh but riley you you've made a reference here that i don't get and you're going to have to buy it like this i was i was indicating whereas uber self-driving car supervisors drive like this right there we go it was more of a it was more of a women drivers thing oh god yeah okay okay should we wow moment of silence while we all stare riley she was checking her nokia for text messages from eight hours away a live jasmine dashcam sorry sorry everybody looking at videos of sexy i'll do better um but yeah no like this is the problem right this the safety driver was not being an effective safety driver and in uber's defense in the tech industry's defense they do not claim that self-driving cars can drive without a

safety driver yet except wemo in its tests which does claim that and does in fact put them out without a safety driver uber doesn't put cars out without a safety driver because implicitly uber does not believe its cars are fully safe enough to drive without a human on backup and the problem is safety drivers don't work because it is essentially impossible for a human to sit and stare at the road for a working day having no input but being told that they need to be able to intervene with a split seconds notice at any time and it is a life or death situation that's not a thing that that the human mind can do right if if you get bored you zone out that's implicit this is something that all of the self-driving car companies have known for years i went to uh then

then google x then x then wemo i can't remember what corporate branding had at the time i went to visit them but i went to visit google's uh self-driving car thing and they were saying they had at that point and this was two and a half years ago they had then already had three years of uh experience finding that safety drivers do not work as safety drivers if you put someone alone in a car and tell them that that car is going to drive itself they let the car drive itself yeah they'll check the cars and they play games on their phones they want like google put cameras in its own cars and its own employees in its own cars and said we are watching you to gain data even in that situation the google employees still had naps in cars right like and these were not people doing it for eight

hours a day these were people doing it on commutes on highways so even in the the easiest situation for a safety driver to actually be an effective safety driver highly paid google engineers still were goofing off because that's what you do if you put someone in a car that drives itself so yes this woman wasn't doing her job but her job is an impossible job and it's a job that is vanishingly unlikely to be an effective way of saving someone's life and the problem is the better a self-driving car gets the less likely a safety driver is going to be to intervene you know if you need to intervene three or four times a day you can probably do that if you need to intervene three or four times an hour you're effectively driving the car on cruise control if you need to

intervene once a month the chances of you actually paying attention in that one time a month when you need to do it at the risk of being a logic pedant this is basically just like um this is just like this is just um fallacy like it's baseline attribution fallacy right where it's just that if you if you only need to intervene when it's extremely severe and you're less likely to intervene the less the less frequently it happens then all that's going to happen is that in in that sort of severe even though severe events might be averted more frequently they're more likely to happen when they they're more likely to get bad when they do yeah pop up yeah you know so it seems as though really what's the point of self-driving cars at this stage but the answer the and the

bigger problem is uh the problem that uber has is that's all true but uber self-driving cars are uniquely shit and this and this is the issue right this this is the problem that the problem that uber has is you can say we had a safety driver who was there and didn't do her job and that is factually correct even if her job was impossible but all of the evidence before this uh this accident this crash was that uber's self-driving cars were significantly worse than the competitions i am going to uh fudge the facts because i don't have them in front of me but it's something like wemos cars experience a disengagement which is when the car requires the human safety driver to take over wemos experiences disengagement on the order of one every million miles driven

by by the most recent figures that have been filed with the california uh state regulator ubers were on the order of one every hundred miles ubers were a thousand times worse than wemos there are some defenses on that ubers cars were until recently being tested in san francisco which is a much harsher driving environment way but way most city of arizona had to give them permission to drive around yeah i mean so this is this you know this is the the next twist is that arizona's governor has been extremely pro self-driving cars uh extremely pro uber he wants arizona to be the test bed and it's a very good test bed for self-driving cars right if you can crash in arizona you can crash anywhere the problem is ubers goal was transparently to carry on running

its self-driving car program as a uh competitive foil to get better terms when it eventually negotiates with wemo or with one of the uh major auto manufacturers to license in their tech it it's so bad it is it beggars belief that uber actually intends to bring a self-driving car project to market but it knows that if it can credibly go well we don't need to license your tech we have our own it'll get a better deal and someone's paid you know the ultimate price for that someone someone has died because uber has carried on testing self-driving cars way past the point when it was clear that they weren't viable to like to me that was again raises just one of the fundamental objections like again to the lot the logic of the market being anything reasonable which is when

you have sort of these large companies carrying on what is essentially then a large automated supply chain whether that's of taxis or freight or whatever um then at some point the cost of human life is just factored in as a cost of doing business so what how so you know it's do you have an x you have an acceptable acceptable rate of people sort of being being killed you have an an acceptable rate but of people being killed by an algorithm making a choice to do it that you sort of programmed in which to me is sort of morally on a different level than uh than an accident well but and what you do is you engineer your business so that you understand that that will happen but don't need to take the responsibility for and that's what the safety drivers are right that that's uber

builds its business around not needing to take ultimate responsibility for that because it can palm it off on this person who is doing an impossible job and even if there was no sort of safety driver so to speak of what how do you punish a company for killing someone expect if they're if if by to do it they're sort of if how do you punch if you how do you i'm saying is like if let's just say one of these cars just makes makes a mistake but one of these cars sort of fucks up and then like plows through a fucking playground and like kills you know 10 people you know how do you sort of understand that is oh well we will pay hefty fine but so the thing is i i actually i still have hope for self-driving cars in the abstract uh because some

of these problems we've solved in planes right we this is not an abstract question for aviation uh dlr or the dlr uh or you know a significant chunk of the underground a growing chunk of the underground um these are not abstract questions one of the things that we've done is we've essentially said okay you need to have a one in one billion passenger trip fatality rate one you know one passenger out of one billion is roughly seen as the acceptable rate for aviation and that is is kind of a societally accepted thing but we still investigate every crash but they are so rare that we kind of go okay you know what this is this is inherent to the nature of risk we have got the risk down to what we as a society see as an acceptable level like condoms you can still get

pregnant well it's no no i hate right like you don't you do not like eight percent is fine yeah you do not sue jurex when your condom fails because you jurex everyone involved understands that it is good for society that this thing which still has a risk is there the problem with self-driving cars is we've not had that conversation because the uh the promoters of progress hold that conversation up as uh as one the only enemies of progress want right they the idea that anyone should turn around to uber and go your self-driving cars are a death trap and shouldn't be on the streets is seen as naysaying as technological pessimism and it's it's not you know it's perfectly reasonable to go we wouldn't allow a plane that was a thousand times safer than your cars we would

not allow that plane to be in the skies you know we would scrap it as completely unfit for purpose and it's not it's not a big art well it is a big ask it's a huge ask because self-driving cars are extremely hard but it it's a baseline and it's a fair baseline and it's it's one that i think it i think works and you don't need to be completely uh self-driving cars are only a way for companies to abstract their responsibility you just need to have a society-wide a state-level conversation about what that responsibility is and that's what we've avoided i think then in that case that we can't let them have their conversation of how much responsibility they want to abstract exactly we have to we have to sort of stop allowing governments to see themselves as the handmaids of these companies

and instead start seeing themselves genuinely adversarily uber would like a situation in which it was deemed acceptable by society for itself driving cars to you know be used across america and kill about one person a day and uber's argument would be if that were the case it would be fewer fatalities than there are at the hands of the taxi industry or guns or guns you know right there are a lot of things that kill more than a person a day now let's not start on the guns we need those for when the self-driving cars come to kill us all that's actually that that's the solution isn't it you get self-driving cars no you get self-driving cars relitigated to be qualified as arms and then it is every american constitution right to have a self-driving car no matter how dangerous

it is yeah then they would actually be much easier to get hold of than they are now we should talk a little bit about um uh facebook and uh cambridge analytica and why it's kind of a non-story and why it kind of is a story and why it's so confusing and why maybe it's not that important to find out which that 70s show character you are i mean i vehemently disagree on the last part i i know you know i can't i don't know that show well enough to continue that bit i was a little bit done and a little bit of jackie i'm ashton kutcher i'm not the character literally the only person i know in that show is ashton kutcher that show is brilliant mostly because of your relationship with demi more the only the only thing is though that now we know more about the 70s we realized that all

of those characters would have been molesting children and in bits that are too hot for tv it's my low up go back to babestation edwards um i guess can you libel a fictional character i'd love to get sued by fez from that 70s show so cambridge analytica are wizards and they used our data to cast a spell that swung brexit oh my god dark dark evil pink hair wizards yeah um no this is this is now one of those stories two weeks on through two yeah two weeks on from it breaking where there is no short version of it um which is great it's at least two separate stories possibly three or four the one i care about and the one that ultimately uh slightly ignoring my employers i think will ultimately be the more important side of the story is facebook

um the facebook side of the story is for uh at least seven years um until 2015 facebook had a uh laughably lax attitude to uh user data protection and would while technically arguing that you consented to it would merrily hand over your data to effectively any third party app developer to ask including a guy whose name was dr specter yep yep apparently that was a that was changing his name after he got married which i quite like like just marrying a mus specter and then going i'll change my name do yours honey it's oh no this is a terrible idea well it was uh it was he married into a bond villain family in this household we take exterminating old life on earth very seriously and if you can't sign up i'm afraid you cannot be with my daughter honey i didn't

know phil specter got a ph i have told you not to come in here when i'm working on my space laser honey who wants to come in and carve the spy um but yeah so like that that side of the story is that facebook was for at least seven years merrily giving your data to anyone who asked i'm kicking everyone on the table it's adorable um facebook will give your data to anyone who asked uh and it was it was all uh an attempt of a very conscious attempt to build up a a third party uh app ecosystem by you know the trade was you build stuff that sits on facebook and we will give you unimaginable amounts of data like you build a cow clicker game where you click on cows and that is literally the entire game and you will get effectively all of the personal information of

not only every user but every friend of every user uh what kind of info i've always wondered what this was like what kinds of information would they really have they'd have not just your likes but they'd also have stuff you've typed you'd have no no so so those those are two different facebook has that stuff facebook itself uh will collect anything so facebook has famously in the past collected stuff you typed but deleted before sending facebook has collected uh videos that you shot using its in-app webcam service but decided not to post facebook uh tries to work out not your race your racial affinity uh which is very very legally important because you're not allowed to profile a significant number of things by race but hey if you just go this person really likes

how high and rap then you can discriminate against them with housing madverts um so when it really it's like um it's like the black the blind black white supremacist dave chapelle sketch exactly exactly it's that they're all they're all these dads going why do i keep getting advertised gammon products like well i didn't actually know they were black i just went with every stereotype in the book and discriminated against them in housing through that so it's fine it's completely legal um but so facebook has all of this the the the app ecosystem had less uh effectively all all it had was the uh the public facebook information if you if i as your friend could see something on your facebook profile i as your friend could export that to a third party app developer without

checking with you whether that was okay um you can also go and see your ad preferences have you ever checked out yours uh well i mean i'm i'm not really on facebook like i have uh i i have a facebook account which is uh which follows mark zookerberg and that's it because i love mark he's my best and only friend in the world but even that even that facebook had six apps that had uploaded my email address to facebook so i was being targeted by airbnb uber delivery a couple of other ones you're targeted by uber that's a real cause for concern i know right um so that's one world and that's having that's having these huge ramifications about uh it seems to finally be the thing that has made uh people who aren't richard stormen or me care about the vast quantities of data that are

being collected on us and the reason why people are caring is who in this particular instance received that large amount of data which was uh evil wizards Cambridge Analytica and the next story is but look guys i don't regret playing that clow kick cow clicking game that she was lit well i mean the cow clicking wild tangent but the specific cow clicking game was made by uh at the time nyu i think professor ian bogost who made this game to mock farmville and the game was you have a clow you can click on the cow every three minutes and it says you clicked on the cow and you can add friends and your friends can click on the cow and it says your friend clicked on a cow this game got a hundred and fifty thousand players because at the time you could literally

go viral with anything on facebook and and you know he made this this was a classic example of satire not working because turns out people will just click on cows this is like someone reading a modest proposal and starting a baby restaurant exactly right or it's yeah i like many gamers i'm immune to i'm a hardcore i'm a hardcore day one cow clicker i'm like my favorite esport is cow clicker so the problem was that cow the cow clicking games kept getting reviewed by women who were biased too much politics in this cow clicking game gamer cowgate that's an Edinburgh joke everybody just tell us objectively if the graphics are good give us an object i think i mean objectively the titties look good why does everyone why did she need giant jessica rabbit hair and huge human

boobs glistening hentai style udders you can definitely get a halloween costume which has precisely that can't you if you have human boobs you get a cow costume with udders yeah he totally can i now know what hessane is doing at home he's playing the cow clicking game yeah we were saying evil wizards cambridge analytical basically took your information harvested from you from playing a cow clicking game i mean it wasn't it was from a personality quiz it was from a personality quiz that people were paid to do that like a few hundred thousand people were paid to do this this quiz and in the process they agreed to export their friends data so you got between 1380 million facebook profiles i'm a bit of a hostage fortune here because i am going to be interviewing

wiley next week chris for wiley that the came gentlemen's whistleblower not not wearing my right i'm going to be interviewing him next week uh to try and get in detail specifically how this worked what they did uh to to break it down a bit more than than any of the people who spoke into him so far have because i'm the nerd who cares about this shit and wants to dig down into it so i'm a hostage fortune maybe i will come out the other side of that interview convinced right now this the position i'm at is that uh uh psychographics this this general idea of building a psychological profile of someone which uh builds on their publicly express publicly express preferences and desires uh build a psychological model of them and then create messages which

are designed to hit home with them for me all seems a bit hopeful it seems a bit like the sort of thing which uh definitely has strong academic roots that just get filtered through a far too many steps to end up in large claims that it you know it works on a on an actual level in terms of persuading actual people with actual adverts i'm not i don't fully buy that i don't really have a strip this is borne out by my attempts to seduce women on linkedin well because it's a little bit like like i sort of i've sort of found myself saying is a little bit like cambridge analytica like they're just doing they're taking all this information they're targeting ads to you but soap companies have been doing that unilever does that right and

well actually so i i come in from the opposite direction i i my go-to thing is if this worked if this worked as well as cambridge analytica and wiley say it does amazon ads would be psychographically targeted you know amazon is a huge data player with one of the largest advertising budgets on the planet and yet basically all it does is retargeting literally the most effective way amazon has found of converting uh views into purchase intentions is by advertising you for things that you've already bought or nearly bought but surely that's a little bit of what i imagine cambridge analytica must have been doing as well right like if you like a facebook page called hillary for prison then you they're going to target you with some pro

trump ads and they're basically just serving you stuff you've bought before conceptually yeah i mean they they had they like like okay they like any election consultant had two main three main goals depressing turnout for the enemy uh increasing turnout for your own side and winning a certain number of swing voters over and so yeah the the hillary for jail stuff your job there is boosting turnout and so yeah you you know you you are retargeting you you already have your your selected group the depressing turnout on others and the winning people round is perhaps a little less like retargeting i don't know wiley says that there were genuinely impressive results that aggregate iq achieved a seven to eight percent uh not click through rate uh actively expressed

intentions so signing up for a mailing list that that tier of things and if true that is high i'm not clear and i i'm not sure i believe fully that that is high because of the data wizardry that cambridge analytica did it is it is just as believable to me that donald trump was a unique candidate in the modern era who was very able to win people round because unlike any other republican candidate in living memory donald trump he specializes in deals he really he can just win you around with any deal like he's he's at his master deal mate that's that's really bad donald trump isn't it it's a it's a tremendous deal okay we're gonna we're gonna do deals with the electorate that you've not even seen before there's a there's a game now you click

on a cow it tells you clicked on the cow your friends can click on the cow you send it to all your friends i clicked on that cow i send it to all my friends okay what's hillary doing i don't know she's in that pizza restaurant nobody cares click on the cows but like it is that thing if we're talking about retargeting no other modern candidate in us political history has kind of expressly in their main campaign back to the idea of sending their opponent to jail which means it's much easier to retarget a hillary for jail uh someone who supports hillary for jail can be retargeted by the donald trump campaign in a way no previous campaign could so it's it is perhaps unsurprising to me that you could get a seven or eight percent actively expressed

intention because you're the only person going to people who want to lock up hillary clinton and going i too want to lock up hillary clinton like i i express that as a normal acceptable opinion to hold in a democratic race i like the idea of there being like a divergent group of people who will want to lock up hillary clinton for like different reasons i just people with like personal grudges that that message really spoke to them what they've all forgotten is that it's far more likely that hillary clinton would like step on a rake slip on a banana peel they fall into a closet that would lock itself behind her like everyone's just a closet full of pants seats so but this is like that that is the fundamental issue at the heart of a lot of this

right a lot of people want cambridge analytics to be data wizards because it proves that brexit or trump were were stolen yeah more russia it's more it's more russian interference looking for a thing which stole the election and the problem is it can both be true that uh in the uk spending limits were broken unlawfully and that in the us uh unlawfully obtained data was used to target people and that if that hadn't happened the outcome would perhaps have been largely the same because there were so many things in favor of don trump's election and of the leave campaign in winning brexit that that just you know pointing to any one thing it's it's probably not just that it's probably not just anything you know that's how elections work but then at the same time at

the same time there's a margin of what 77 000 people in trump's election so any one thing could have been it well it's the i think the when it when it comes down to it really i mean because if it wasn't cambridge analytical like any reasonable election has data people they do use data target like the only difference is you know hillary clinton's team was famously terrible yeah and this is then this is the other awkward thing right so the obama campaign had largely the same data acquisition structure uh in 2012 that cambridge analytical took advantage of for for trump's election the the obama the only real distinction is that the obama campaign acquired that data uh above you know in an overhand way they they went to people and said hey we're the

obama campaign you want us to be elected give us your data and give us your friend's data as well and a lot of people said yeah i'm happy to hand over my data and all my friend's data to the obama campaign whereas cambridge analytical went hey we're a personality quiz and we'll pay you a dollar to do the same thing which does sound shadier yeah but probably isn't distinct enough to say that one election was stolen and the other wasn't well it's surely the the real bogeyman at this point or sorry bogey person i mean to be true to fuck you being true to fuck you the real the real issue is right i think this is something we touched on in the great episode that got eaten the one where we were no platformed by our equipment uh which is that really is a good

is that is that it's easy to it's easy to point that finger towards just eyes that things fault we don't have to deal with any underlying fractures in society but really it seems like the thing that we should be more worried about is just that there is a company whose business model is basically spying on us but in a way where we totally volunteer all the information they're trying to get out of us well so i think i'd say that's the other the other interesting quote here is that it's kind of my big takeaway from this is it's put pay it's it's shown that lie up that actually we don't basically volunteer this information people have always known uh if you if you quiz them on it on an intellectual level they've always known that facebook is a data company

like if almost everyone if you ask them like do you think facebook well the same reason when they've found out about the nsa nobody really did anything right because yeah we kind of people intellectually knew it yeah but this is kind of the first time i think that people have actually connected on on an emotional level with what that means which is we you know nerds like me thought that people would just dislike the concept of data harvesting and it turns out people don't give a shit about the concept of data harvesting but when you connect that data harvesting to an outcome that people don't like that's that's the thing that gets to go oh actually i could give a shit that facebook is collecting my data but when you start connecting it to facebook connecting

my data and doing stuff i don't like with it then people start going actually i didn't really consent to that and that you know the nice thing about data protection law is actually what data is collected for does matter and what will what facebook is learning here is that you can't say to someone you know give me your likes and i'll give you a better news feed and then turn around and use your likes to help donald trump get elected that's not how it works so i think it's really interesting how cambridge analytica admitting to like they kind of want to say that they're good at what they do but saying they're good at what they do is admitting to something terrible they're so fucked like cambridge analytica or if they say we didn't do anything that means

they did a shitty job yeah yeah cambridge analytica literally they spent four years going we are data magicians and then about about three or four months ago they went actually no we're just doing whatever else does no we we are not unique in any way but cambridge analytica are dumb fucks like they are fantastically uh cinematically dumb fucks my favorite thing that's come out of this favorite single thing was cambridge analytica being secretly recorded saying what we do to win elections is we secretly record people and use those recordings against them and that recording was used against them and it's just like please just tell me about the secret recordings you use while not paying attention to my hat yeah why wearing this brooch that is a lapel yeah it's

brilliant what we do is we get people to speak into a lapel mic and i'm sorry while you're saying that could you just lean into the lapel mic and say oh oh sure yeah so just imagine i would secretly recording you what would you say that would get you in trouble oh wow that's like this is more of that uh this is more of that thing where everybody's like oh alexander nix and whatever the great man theory of people who are evil geniuses i think that was more wildly coyote is just all of these people are wildly coyote yeah i mean none of when you get alexander nix and secretly record him he doesn't really talk about data what he talks about is tricking people into sleeping with sex workers recording them and then showing the video

to them and going hey by the way maybe you should do something different that's that's not high tech that's hey by the way man you fuck good oh sorry we like you because i love getting recorded when i have sex can i get a copy of that with my skydive um for me the real scandal though was that the leave campaign was it being illegally supplied by the russians with broken pieces of drone come back before we uh switch on to dessert uh not Ferguson before we a delicious baked Ferguson uh what do you what do you think sort of facebook is going to do if anything like is this going to change anything i mean zekabug will testify in front of congress but i think that will probably be a positive because he's so unbelievably media trained these days that

he goes on is robotic delivers some moderately okay lines i think the what this will do is it will kickstart um like in europe it'll kickstart gdpr being taken seriously that from from from my job that's the biggest thing that i've seen as an outcome is this big important but ultimately boring data protection law that was coming in suddenly people are asking questions about it and caring and i think that's going to be the the the follow through is just this boring world of regulation might get a little bit more public attention the problem is and we won't go into now uh gdpr will help facebook ultimately gdpr will entrench their dominance and make it harder for another company to come in and disrupt them because almost always regulation is easier for

a large company to deal with than a small one barrier to entry it's barrier to entry and facebook who love damn barrier to entry anyway what we really need to get people interested in uh data regulation is to have someone explaining data regulation while there are like babes either side waggling knock your 33 tens at the camera babestation gdpr vote now i like to think of facebook as like a 13 year old girl that's like just obsessed with you and knows everything about you opens up the binder yeah mr mark herne mr mark herne mr mark herne mr mark herne mr mark herne mark herne so um guys let's uh shall we close out with a little uh a few words from our friend nyle

ferguson from our sponsor a few words from our sponsor nyle ferguson who actually has a humiliation fetish you say dessert i think of this is it gotta eat my vegetables i gotta i gotta deal with the current political discussion because it's healthy for me or something i mean for me it's all heal my leak of mine has started drinking now nyle nyle ferguson writes no it was an april first at 12 o one a.m the moment it was first possible to start fooling but but i don't think he was fooling uh or maybe is this nyle ferguson of the british empire was good comma actually yes yes this is not this is nyle ferguson of racism what racism now ferguson of world war one was a great war yeah great war not a great war a great war one of the best let's do it again

well war one was basically like an aggrandized stag do nyle ferguson who who looks at uh british india and only sees railways white men are bad even a six year old tells me so writes nyle ferguson as his headline starts promising yeah i'm into it yeah damascene conversions yeah so i'll begin the article it is not very fashionable to be a man these days especially a white one wearing boot cut jeans after the exposure of harvey winestein's record of alleged sexual assault and harassment the new york times ran a piece entitled the unexamined brutality of the male libido by canadian writer steven marsh again solid yes that seems this is a good beginning for now so far pretty reasonable i like i've had fantasies about my father coming to me with

those exact words like yeah it's it's this is what i always love about the every time we read these articles we always start with them actually making a pretty good expert english diction another recent headline from the washington post was masculinity not ideology drives extremist groups true also also bay yeah also quite reasonable like like a lot of like think about how like like people getting red pilled online and becoming alt right like they started through gamer gate and pua forums and stuff i clicked on too many cows and now i'm in ices a milo edwards story so here's where nile ferguson's article takes a small turn last month i organized a small

invitation only conference of historians who i knew shared my interest in trying to apply historical knowledge to contemporary policy problems again usually when he does this it's to be an apologist for genocide but no matter is this what he calls a nazi sex orgy was max mosley involved five of the people i invited to give papers were women but none was able to attend i should have tried harder to find other female speakers no doubt but my failure to do so elicit a disproportionately vitriolic response was it just like five iron rand account i ran fan account neither i ran quotes i ran lover i ran fan 12 or i ran fan 14 came i hire a necromancer to try and bring back i ran from the dead i mean i knew necromancy works

because the free market wouldn't permit something that didn't work to be sold i also invited hillary ben but it turns out he's actually a man and and zombie margaret thatcher i'm sorry margaret thatcher's monster around a dozen academics took a social media to call the conference stanford sausage fest can we say around a dozen means it's less than 12 right he's definitely around this is a piece about no one care a mini bus full of people dunked on him and he's spun a times calling from it i like the idea of that this is like completely overshadowed the real stanford sausage fest which was a sort of innocuous bavarian food festival that was going on at the same time they were applying

they were applying the policy problems that we found in bavarian beer halls our festival completely passed the bechtel test but now we've been the victim of this bad publicity had many babe station babes to sell sausages when he's doing a classic trick which is he's saying you well i the ones who could make it and who were right for the right for the conference just happened to be white and male couldn't imagine how that happened oh boy this coincidence just keeps cropping up huh i love the like even by his own extremely favorable telling he massively disproportionately waited the invitation list like five of was it 42 men who turned up around that don't actually know how many men turned up was it like you know it was a huge there were a lot of

people this you know this is not it was a four person panel and i asked eight people and uh four men and four women i mean that's a worse proportion than trash future he invited at least 40 men and five women that's from the off that's yeah so he kree was trying to start his own left his podcast so it will here is we invited lots of women just none of them came they were there they just didn't come all of his all of his historians were in canada they go to another school you wouldn't know them we actually met our female guests on holiday so now let's be clear as i recently and rather vehemently explained to novelist will self which i find myself doing all the time i was raised to believe in the he's just phone up will

self with complaints i was raised to believe in the equal right will is like please it's 3am no you're going to listen to this well novelist will sell i am but a novelist if you're going to listen to me i'm going to call you will selfish three o'clock in the morning i did such a double take when you started reading that quite i was like riley you did what i was i as i rather recently and vehemently explained to novelist will self i was no need to be so vehement i was raised to believe in the equal right to all people regardless of sex race creed or any other difference at the human past was characterized by discrimination of many kinds is not news to me however hideous new speak or well terms such as white explaining and mansplaining are symptoms of the degeneration

of humanities in the modern university it's a university cultural argument people that's what it turned out to be oh that's the great thing about this article it's like a medley of all that like terrible conservative shit that you get where it starts out making a decent point then it sort of tries to do so you so use some kind of fudged numbers to disguise that you know he just fucked up royally from the beginning then he evokes or well and then he's and then he says that actually it's the humanities in the modern university are degenerating because we're making claims based on sex and race it's conservative barbershop that i like have i would say like once a week rather vehemently with will self as i call will self in the middle of the night uh he calls me

under my no key as i work will self waggling is 33 10 at the camera but it's it's this like it's this uh it like it starts with sure i believe in gender equality but then feminism has gone too far hasn't it and then like this people who like they fake try to meet you halfway is the worst possible thing and it's like we how could we have possibly gone too far if we like still have fgm and don't have safe access to abortion we're not even halfway like how could we possibly have gone too far so this idea of that he's talking about these things that like oh no no we've gotten out of hand i love you know uh did you ever hear those edits of the audiobook version of dreams from my father uh which were

just shitloads of the times when obama was quoting his school friends and the uh radical activists who he knew uh quoting them dropping racial slurs swearing a lot there are some lovely edits which are just barack obama dropping racial slurs left right and center swearing a lot just cutting all of the bits where he's quoting other people really can't wait to do that with riley where just like accepting the bits where riley is saying now for person's words just imagining a version of barack obama's autobiography where it just sounds like gran terino all right dragon lady no i'm like i'm willing to drop this and i understand the point that you're making but i also don't know if i can like let people get away with that yeah i know that's like i round about say this

is okay i never said this thing that is a big part of it it's a rhetorical trick it's right it is but it's also something where if he is always said no i always was on record saying genocide is bad but the british empire was good he could sue us for saying he defends i mean honestly the follower boost from that worth it also i'm gonna say pretty much anyone you've ever discussed on trash future could probably sue you if they listen to the episode you are skating on the ice of we hope our subjects never listen to us oh no they won't never listen because there's at least one woman on here's now i guess it says speaking up against this kind of thing i can't remember what this kind of thing was i think it was something about pumba speaking up speaking up against

against people who are being overly pc or whatever is a risky business questioning the new orthodoxy on the identity of the sexes can get you fired just ask another conservative article claxon james demore extremely rational logic pedant engineer who lost his job at google for doing just that well yeah it's it's what i what i sort of noted and what alex said we were talking about earlier before we started the show is that this is basically the someone who has accepted a super liberal version of identity politics right where it's just where it's not but we don't see the power you don't see the power relationships between these groups you don't see that like white men have traditionally controlled more or less everything you just sort of internalize the idea

that it's bad to actively discriminate based on race or it is racist to discuss race it is sexist to discuss sex exactly yeah that's that's now focused in fallback like oh i don't see race so you're the real racist i i i didn't even know that there were no women there until you pointed it out sexist this is the great thing it's this double milo it's this double this is where this is where the article gets just great which is that this is the final claxon of conservative article writing recently the process of indoctrination because that's what people are being indoctrinated to like just try to try to understand power relationships through history the process of indoctrination starts early my six-year-old son stunned his parents presumably

one of them was not al Ferguson the other day when we asked what six-year-old boy stuns his parents at 30 seconds you'll cry my six-year-old son stunned his parents the other day when we asked what he had been studying at school he replied they had been finding out about the life of martin luther king jr what did you learn i asked that most white people are bad he replied sick in the context of that lesson that seems like strictly true yeah i cannot imagine you can learn about martin luther king and not come out going shit yeah yep nope no most white people are bad but then it's now ferguson just says well the point as i tried to explain to him is that quite a lot of people of skin colors are bad but probably not a majority most people of all

skin colors want to be good but they are in various ways weak and a few people of all skin colors are brave so race doesn't matter actually race only mattered race mattered from like the late 18th century till 1974 then it was gone the really important thing to take away from a lesson about martin luther king is that race doesn't matter like that if your son comes out of a lesson about martin luther king talking about race then your teachers have failed because clearly you know that's not the lesson you should draw what like wait his response to white people are bad he's like oh black people could be bad too right like is that it that's horrible how does he not work that back to the beginning of that paragraph and see that what he's written is

my teacher my son's teacher should have taught martin luther king without reference to race like that's the paragraph that he has written at no point did they cover that martin luther king king was black right martin luther king junior about whom we know very little does he practice this of live writing where he's not allowed to reread the beginning of a paragraph when he writes the end of it never refer back i can't remember how i went into this but by god i'm going to get out of it and so that's just right and so he if if you're not going to accept that like that you're talking about because you want it is that these people i don't think i think they don't see structures i think they look at a house and there's like oh what a pile of bricks what a

pile of bricks what a coincidence it fell into this shape huh guess i can never know why right it's like they don't see any of this stuff they don't they see like oh well it looks like what a coincidence all the best people for this during this conference were white men even the nine percent of the invitees who were a female that we invited when they didn't want to show up oh well i guess that's nothing that just must be down to individual choice oh well anyway off to another day of not recognizing myself in the mirror he says basically masculinity is also under attack as well you know referring back up to all that harvey winestein stuff at the beginning he says yet manliness has its uses just over a week ago a 44 year old french policeman named

lieutenant colonel arnaud beltramp basically took the place of a hostage in a french supermarket shooting um and what i again and and then was himself killed and what i sort of it what is it it shocks me that nile fercus and doesn't see as he doesn't see that couldn't masculinity have been why on the half of that shoot yeah couldn't masculinity be at the root of why someone got radicalized in the first place yeah well and also why is that why is that man in this he's disagreeing with his own previous fucking premise which is that like people of all races and genders can be both good or bad irrespective of their race which is true but then he's saying that like well this man only did that because he was a man because that's bravery which is man yeah it's it's like

this is why i think like this is one of the really like all like public intellectual i can't wait until that's no longer a job um and i can't wait preferably just after i get that job and then retire from that job i mean yeah absolutely up for pulling the ladder up behind me oh no if you listen you listen to uh use to my uh commie book club uh on the book psychopolitics which i really enjoyed i said i don't i don't want to be a public intellectual i want to be a public idiot that's that's that's the only thing i think that there is left to do i was going to say riley how many more followers do you have to get on twitter before your intellectualness goes public and you have to ipo follow me on twitter serbens oxley has really strict rules

for when when you aren't a public intellectual i'm gonna do some insider trading on riley stock all right um alex thank you very much thanks for having me back auger thank you for coming on milo thank you for phoning in uh it's been a pleasure more ways than one listener thank you for listening and thank you so much you didn't have to do that user come on yeah zune user we still want you to come on unless you're julien assange what i bet if you're listening on tape julien uh please just leave the building we'll love you well you'll be able to know if he doesn't download it you know if the zune user disappears it's julien assange because he's been cut off the internet any similarity to characters real or fictional is completely coincidental no libel

has been done in this no libel no libel hashtag no libel in our comedy show anyway and also thank you to jin sang for our theme song here we go you can find it on spotify i recommend you do it's very very good later everybody