TRASHFUTURE - Literally Black Mirror ft Taylor Lorenz and Alex Krasodomski

Episode Date: January 15, 2018

This week Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@milo_edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alex (@AlexKealy), do a two part double header. In Part 1, friend of the show and Daily Beast technology reporter Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) phones in from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas to explain how nothing works, and the emptiness of the techbro culture that produced it. In Part 2, we are joined by Alex Krasodomski (@AKrasodomski), a researcher of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the Demos think tank, to talk about the nexus between the conspiracy theorising, the structure of the internet, and (of course) the tech monopolies. Follow us on twitter - @trashfuturepod Our theme tune is called herewego by Jinsang, and is available on Spotify. xoxo Riley

Okay, we are now recording. I would like to take this opportunity to announce that Trash Future is no longer a podcast. This will be our last podcast recording. We decided to follow the example of Long Island Iced Tea, Kodak, and sexual consent and pivot to the blockchain. All I'm saying is that while you guys were all on dates, I was studying the blockchain and now this is my revenge. Hello, welcome to Trash Future, the podcast about how the future, if we do not implement fully automated luxury space communism, will be and is Trash. I am Riley. You can find me on Twitter at Rala, R-A-L-E-H, still bad Twitter handle, not going to change it. Who is with me from my right? I am Alex Keely. I'm a comedian. You can find me on Twitter at Alex Keely, which is

K-E-A-L-Y, and I'm a man who just Googled who Corey Feldman is. I did not know who that was, and now I know, and my life is the same. The same Kizvani at H-Kizvani. I realise if I change my Twitter handle, then I lose my blue verification tick, which I will never do. I will give up my two grown adult sons before I give away my blue verification. And in the ball, it's a crowded ball today. Joining us from New York, which is on the right of the United States, as far as I'm concerned. I'm Taylor Lorenz, a tech reporter at the Daily Beast, who you may have remembered from like two episodes ago. I can't stay alive. That's like you wusses who only are addicted to listening to the show. You know nothing of

true dedication. Nobody knew who I was before I climbed in the bowl. Coming on our show is really just like spending an hour with us as we try to figure out like how our audio equipment works every single time. It's a big part of it. But Taylor, you and I have been speaking on Twitter about how you have been covering CES. And so we are going to talk to you a little bit about that in the first segment. Yes, I'm so excited. I got back from Vegas yesterday. I mean, there's one robot I want to talk to you about in particular. But before we do that, we have to introduce our final bowl voice all the way from sunny California or fiery California, smoggy California. It's pretty clear and dry. My name is Milo Edwards. You may remember me from the bowl

at Milo underscore Edwards on Twitter. In San Francisco, it is 10.30 a.m. and my girlfriend has already poured herself a glass of wine. So it's all going well. Milo Edwards, a relationship expert. Guys, shall we just leap right into the content? Yes, jump in. Shall we give our listeners the content that they crave? Well, first, we've got to do our sponsor, which is Brainforce Plus. Oh, actually, we we also have to thank we I've spoken with him online now. Thank you to Jin Sang for the use of our theme song. You can find on Spotify. It's called Here We Go. All One Word. It's really good. Check it out. Right. He's been using this theme song like since the show started and we only got in touch with the guy who made it like this week. And it's actually it's not

because I'm insidious. I'm just disorganized. Yeah, we need a copyright lawyer. We just need a lawyer in general. I think that at some point we are going to be in cool and we will have to like have to justify why if you let a lawyer pick through this podcast, none of it would make it to air. It would be just like, Hi, this is trash future. The podcast about how the future is trash. Okay, goodbye, everyone. Taylor, take us take us on a journey through through the wild and wonderful world of just shitty robots that don't work. Yeah. So this was my first time ever at CES and I was just like blown away by how like 80% of the technology on display, like just flat out doesn't work. Like they had a drone, which actually wasn't there for the drone. It was supposed

to be like the first human flying drone or like drone that like humans could fly, which is essentially a helicopter. But anyway, yeah, it's not drone. Is it? Yeah, it's like a human flying machine. But anyway, they put some people in it and then it just like hopped like a couple steps forward on the tarmac and then just stand there and then they're like, all right, that concludes the presentation, everyone. And they were like, didn't fly. Wait, it's this is this is actually like the drone throne, which Todd invents in season four of Bojack Horseman. It just seems to me like a very high tech version of that guy who kept tying balloons to his lawn chair until he sort of floated through the sky and had to shoot himself down. Well, the documentary up. No, no, no,

there was a guy who really did this and he and he took a pellet gun to pop the balloons with but then he ran out of pellets and he like floated for way too long. So just before we charge too much further into the CES and CES content, can we just explain what CES stands for and what it is? Sure. So CES stands for the it's stands for the consumer electronics show and it's this giant sort of tech conference in Las Vegas every year, where over 200,000 people attend to kind of like see the latest technologies. So like Samsung, Google, like all these companies, like all the major sort of tech consumer electronics companies go there to display like their latest and greatest products. Yes, greatest. So let me start off with like a few

of my favorite products, one slash like the worst things that I've ever seen. There was this one thing that I just felt like was like embodiment of like every piece of technology there was called the foldemate. I saw that. Yeah, it was supposed to fold your laundry, which theoretically sounds amazing. But I never pulled my laundry and I was like, this is great. Do you just dump it all in a chamber and then it comes out folded and the woman was like, Oh, no, you have to like individually load. You have to like individually like carefully clip each garment on as it like feeds through and like lay it flat like as it feeds through this like this machine one by one. And also by the way you have to like perfectly button up your shirts before you put it in, like don't try to put any

unbuttoned stuff in. Also don't try to put in like sweatshirts, sweatpants, like basically anything like baby doesn't fold anything except like a very specific size of dress shirts and pants. And it's $850. This is classic Silicon Valley reinventing something that already exists like dirt, Silicon Valley, it's not a folder made. It's called a child slave. There's actually just like a child slave inside. It's like, why does it need to bust them? I didn't know if you guys knew this, but actually John Podesta has purchased dozens of these machines to start a new laundry.

He's a devil investor. There's a billionaire somewhere who has two two large adult sons and two large adult folding machines looking at the folding machine like an absolute or at the size of this unit. That's quite shocking. And I especially love the my favorite kinds of dumb technology are the ones where they like clearly like this was just a group of people who just didn't stop doing coke throughout the entirety of the development process because no one at any point asked any questions or at any point quest said no. They were just like oh we're going to make it so huge. We're going to we're going. No one wants to fall clothes anymore. What about babies? Fuck babies. No one has babies. This is for shirts for men. I mean it's true,

right? No one has babies. Everyone has shirts when you can feel that like the press release is punctuated with like. I mean this is it's just another one of those meetings that Elon Musk goes to and swears he doesn't know how he got there. That was my favorite story of this week by the way. That crazy sex party that y'all went to that nobody actually saw anybody having sex or dating. Mr. Musk was quoted as saying for the hundredth time I thought the cop was a prostitute. You know what to be honest like I think I genuinely believe Elon Musk about I genuinely think that he didn't know that this was like a sex but like he's so like aloof that he didn't actually know it was a sex party. He doesn't have object permanence but for genitals. So what

were some other of these wacky wild dick dastardly acme style inventions? I don't know why I'm so into like close I'm just like lazy and I literally write the same clothes every day because I'm so lazy and would maybe solve this problem for me. There was this mirror it was this like giant like it was I don't even know how much it cost but definitely I think over a thousand dollars and it was this mirror where like you would tap what you were doing so like you wake up you look in the mirror you tap like I'm going to work or like I'm going on a date and it would like pull the stuff in your closet it would like know what's in your closet and then and then you click on the outfit and it would like tell you where in your closet it was located and I was like oh that sounds great

and it like knows the weather and like I was like okay interesting interesting so I'm like how does it know all this about my clothes and like my closet like what and the woman is like in the future all clothing will have like rafd chips and I was like okay amazing amazing so like what about like now like I work sweaters from college right and she's like oh well you'd have to like go through and hand tag everything for the meantime which like is insane so you have to like basically go through your closet and like hand enter all the clothing for this mirror to just like tell you to wear a sweater when it's cold out sounds like a good afternoon and it's like thousands of dollars oh I'm just gonna say also there was like an insane amount of companion robots which were sort of

terrifying like are you guys familiar with like the companion it's like these little like robots that they say will like be companions for like children and elderly people and they all record everything like they all basically their eyes are all cameras and the thing is like you can just record your child endlessly as it like plays with this robot and um the robots were all like completely broken like a ton of them had like they all have these like shitty windows tablets like glued to their chest straight up possible to operate and I can't imagine giving one of those it's like an old person or child I'm really I'm really into the mirror because I've always sort of wondered how the how the hell do I organize all my fedoras

at what point does this just like stop being a mirror also who wants to look in the mirror while they work out who is that sadist I just think it's so bizarre also like this thing is supposed to be in your closet but then also what you're supposed to work out there I don't get so so was the mirror supposed to be making like fashion decisions for you as well yeah yeah how do they so do they talk about how they build that algorithm or like who like what the hell how do they decide what was fashionable I was I was like thinking it would be funny to like if like if it works like have the mirror dress me for a week and like see what kind of weird shit it put together because it's like all an algorithm and just kind of like pairs things

based off their materials so it'll be like you say you're going on a date and you put on like an ambitiously tight dress and the mirror is like oh come on honey we both know that's a stretch there's also a mirror that would scan your face and like overlay wrinkles on you and show you like where you're aging why and like and then it would try and sell you new trajina products who would recommend the new trajina products so what you pay you pay you pay extra to basically be like negged by new trajina yes yes and then sold to it's like you buy this like thing that's going to analyze your skin tell you what's the matter with it and which new trajina products to buy it's very sad new new trajina always trying to sell your friends new trajina products to

make you jealous was it was it owned by new trajina or was it partnership with new trajina what the hell is the ownership structure or do they it's like johnson and johnson apparently invest a lot in tech so they had they had their whole kind of like thing out they also had this um they also had this woman at the johnson and johnson booth who was selling baby clothes that had like these trackers in it so you could track your children's breathing as they sleep just i guess what parents want to do we need to get we need to get trump one of these neg mirrors and he'll be like okay i've struck an excellent i've struck an excellent trade deal with new trajina it's a it's a country in northern europe okay they're gonna so anyway we don't we don't have like silicon valley

is trying to reinvent the pickup artist oh my god i seem that seems to be like what don't wear that you're looking a little bit old but i have the solution for you it's me you commit to me forever sign this block sign this blockchain sex contract i mean i i think we really actually like we've lost a bit of a trick with those uh companion robots for old people but i just i love i just love the idea that we're gonna put all of like we're gonna show our seniors we love them by putting them under constant surveillance by a robot nothing says i love you like constant surveillance you know and that's i don't know why my previous relationships have failed but i'm pretty sure it's not because of the constant surveillance so bizarre to see like i don't know

like it's just it's so bizarre to see like what they think is also like fun for children like the i don't know like the voices of the robots were all really maniacal and kind of scary to me like they're like hello like come play like oh god they're sort of terrifying it's youtube kids notable exception i will say is this robot named curry k u r i oh we talked about curry before oh my god okay well i don't know what you said it's the one that's just a surveillance robot for your house that does yes no yes it plays music it sings a song about pancakes guys i don't know what it is i turn all to this robot like i am not kidding you like all the other ones i was hating on and then i met this curry and i was like well i want you in my home this is how like every dystopian

this is how every dystopian film starts oh my god it was like 10 panty wisers and one child dear silicon valley my child slave cannot sing the pancake song do you have a sense of this i'm sending him back to the democratic party you're sincerely elon mask aged 10 and a half we want that's that i whenever it was sort of i hear about products like this i always like to remember the mantra of the entire tech industry of making the world a better place wait do you guys know the huge huge huge banner that you saw as soon as you're walking to see yes with this massive banner and the slogan was a better life a better world wow that's literally like something from a sort of like future dystopia film

like this like the the supreme leader chants at you from every billboard and you go yes this isn't even black mirror this is rejected black mirror i mean this this kind of shows why black mirror doesn't work right it's because like all of you know black mirror is actually behind on its time and it's telling you where in your in your closet your good shirt is yeah that's oh black mirror with an actual mirror that's the that's the thing actually that's the other thing i forgot it tells you where in your closet it is just wear it's i never got a clear answer how it knows the the scope of your closet because like my closet's like every closet is different like i still don't have a clear answer i guess you have to map it out something is this is this what this

like trash future is really going to look like it's just going to be us talking to like versions of ourselves through mirrors charlie brookie you can have that one for free oh so i interviewed the world's first robot citizen sofia the the one that said she wanted to just oh this scary one oh good but now she really likes humanity actually actually do you want to hear what she said she's been given a frontal lobotomy like a troublesome fifties housewife i said if i asked if she still wanted to destroy humanity she said human form itself is becoming something sacred to be crystallized replicated made into a commodity somehow worse somehow much worse sofia come on trash future i mean wow she totally wants to freeze all of humanity in amber right yeah oh my fear is

basically the future is now old man you are obsolete shut up old man we eat us now so we're frozen in amber and then there's a future film made by cockroaches and like a billion years called anthropocene park and then it's like it's a very exciting film i mean it can even go it can go a couple of ways it could be she can either become like um the the female terminator in was the terminator free yeah um or like she can bring out she bring about bring about like a new era of human civilization which is rooted in absolute stupidity which i for one welcome i'm very happy maybe maybe she can she can take she can take over from peter dowell as the terminator sent back in time to save hillary clinton or maybe or maybe what she can do is she can finally tell us how to make a washing a folding

machine that we won't have to button up first look all like i button up all my shirts and perfectly fold them before i put them in the washing machine it's incredibly it's incredibly normal and not fascist i mean i i still i i just still can't get over the idea of just like a bunch of you know bemused terrified old people you know needed like just being taken care of by like wide-eyed camera robots all of whom are sort of malfunction in different states of malfunction throughout the day and sort of like mixing up their pills it's going to be a whole adventure yeah and it's going to be absolutely fine and normal taylor i wanted to ask like in you know considering that all you had all these like ridiculous shit and like really genuinely

scary robots what were like all the tech bros they're like saying were they like really naive to all this or like was there kind of a recognition that a lot of what ces was was like kind of dumb i don't think there was a recognition by most of the people there i mean i think there's like always i guess a few skeptics in the crowd um but i feel like a lot of people just buy into the hype i mean like the thing is like the people who are at ces are like marketing like a mid-level marketing manager from you know someplace like they're sort of like i guess predisposed to like buying into the hype because they're there to kind of like capitalize on it so uh i don't know like i didn't see a huge amount of skepticism um just because it's like it's this very like

pro-tech like community like yeah why would they be i feel like ces my i imagine it being like mostly tech journalists and men going uh my my friend wants to know where the sex robots are i did um write a story on if you probably saw the story that i wrote on the stripper robots that were in attendance at the party of a um strip club hired these like stripper robots which were made as an art project that were supposed to be this like commentary on surveillance and i asked the artist like i was like how do you feel about these like sort of just being repurposed for this like strip club gimmick and he did not give a shit like he clearly got paid so much money and was just like no they're whatever he's like it's fine i mean i after after a long day of um only folding certain

kinds of clothes i like to unwind with the robot strip club tech pros who've like given up so much on women because you can't trust them unless you have a blockchain sex contract that now what they do is they just they just get horny for robots but i i am actually really interested in the psychology of the people there and like of course they wouldn't doubt what was going on right like because yeah the the whole point of their existence is to continue foisting not that all innovation is a grift but certainly a lot of what what's going on here seems to just be people who haven't really thought through the real value of what they're doing they just have this need to do something and it almost aligns with what we were mentioning in the cold open right these

companies that are deciding not even to produce anything anymore they're just going to be along an iced tea company that is in cryptocurrency most notably an abstract store of value that that is not useful really to anyone as it's a mast that it actually is enormously wasteful to produce but is essentially just you know amassing wealth it sort of gives the lie to the idea that capitalism is there to produce goods for people who want them it's to amass wealth and if people can amass the wealth without producing the goods of course they're going to pivot to cryptocurrency of course the long island iced tea company is going to become long blockchain codex going to become kodak coin and so like all the people who are like it's all that's happening is that the people who are making

sort of weird broken machines for surveilling old people or you know a giant washer dryer size machine that basically doesn't fold your clothes or a mirror that tells you where in your closet your hat is is because they haven't figured it out yet that really if they want to do this they could stop wasting our time and just pivot to the blockchain and let us die in peace it's worth amassing wealth so you can buy a mirror that when you ask it can you tell me where my fedora is in the closet it replies which fedora there are 50 fedoras so there we go trash future can be smart for exactly one minute and 32 seconds new record basically it's in the gaps between me saying something well that's jazz isn't it i apologize i've not peed in 12 days now so i heard i heard that ces

had actually had like a problem with its power can you tell us a bit more about that power went out on wednesday um it started something blew a transformer whatever you call it uh the actual power grid had an aneurysm because it was so dumb yeah it was it was quite amazing um but then it got up and running of course um but yeah all was quiet for those those few several hours yeah the robot strippers stopped dry raining the flying machine that didn't fly continued not to fly so so was there like any good tech like things that you saw which like might have actually been useful it's so funny somebody just asked me this on another radio program this morning and i couldn't think of anything and the only thing i thought of which is so stupid but which i wanted

was this stupid credit cards the air selfie and it will take selfie photos for you it will like basically follow you around and take photos of you for a couple hours and it's a credit card size you put in your pocket and it's a drone and i just it's a it's a row it's a robot boyfriend or robot girlfriend right yeah that's true it's like logan like logan and jake paul could instead of having the well jake paul i guess i don't really know about logan paul's relationships um but jake paul could just stop like dating all like a sort of faux dating all of these sort of girls who seem to primarily exist to take his picture and instead finally just fall in love with a small credit card sized drone and and together they will they will missile attack everyone on the cia kill list

crazy vlog today guys we're going after a crowd at pakistani marketplace uh taylor i'll just ask is there anything you haven't been asked yet about ces that you want to uh yeah i you know one thing i don't know this like this is just something that struck me but like it was insane the amount of like parties like some people just go there and they just go to these like crazy corporate like bizarre parties like there's there's they hired a bunch of musicians like it's like chain smokers or like loren hill it'd be like party tonight and it's like you know they've invited like 700 people and they're smoke machines and it's loud and it's all like overly sort of like corporate branded and it was that that kind of party is just like my nightmare and

i couldn't believe how many people would like proactively go to them and like i'm like don't you work to do like i mean i don't know like i've mostly hung out with sort of like a few other fellow journalists who had a much more low key time but like i feel like people if you're like a marketing manager for samson or something it's just like insane party week and and people would like email like pr people were emailing me like come to our pregame at like 430 in the aria or whatever and you're like uh i'm trying like it's similar to work today like i can't like i don't understand how you guys can just i don't know i was struck by it because i mean it just sounded horrible so every time so maybe i gotta invite like now i'm not gonna get invited to any party

i feel like the drunker you were the better it probably was though true but like still you're at some massive like rise in corporate event was like the worst crowd of people ever just being bombarded with like stuff like i don't know yeah maybe maybe next year i'll go to the chain smokers samsung lounge whatever the fuck but literally sounds like hell yeah it's it's the i mean the whole thing it does sort of smack of the end of end times of Rome doesn't it this sort of yeah it does it felt weird this sort of incredible bacchanal that's not really celebrating anything it's just celebrating the idea of being high energy i would love to see ces get attacked by the visigoths yeah i mean it would really be a turn up for the bugs it's

it's really just like so like not even like calling it so it's like really just like filling time isn't it it's like if you can't really talk about things that are useful or like the things that you were doing to like genuinely benefit because then they'd all have because if they ever stopped partying they'd have to think about the fact that you know they've invented a surveillance robot for old people or a mirror that calls you fat right like and they'd have to they'd probably all kill themselves jonestown style all right guys let's campaign for it dry ces next year yes we we like so let's set up a patreon and yeah crowdfund us to go to ces and well guys i have to have yo but it was so great joining yo it's taylor thank you no worries thank you so much thank you for

having me thanks for coming on like official correspondent of actually knowing about the technology world i just told you the best deck was like a credit card size drone so it sounds like competition wasn't fierce to be honest all right we're gonna take a quick break and we will be back in a few minutes with the interview with alex so we've already we've already got the sort of cold open about utah so we'll just dive right into conspiracies oh no i totally deleted that part did you really i thought you said we'd lost the whole second half so i deleted my second half long enough that we don't need to do the utah story for a third time it's a big it's a big

moment in all eyes sometimes you've got to let something die and i think the utah story might be the thing we let die no the utah the utah store does the utah story have to die i think the utah i think that this right now should be the beginning of the second section and that it becomes part of the trash future mythos the utah story that no one ever finds out i'm not i'm not telling that story a third time leave this in and let the listeners guess what the utah story is the fucking library of alexandria lost all time we can only imagine what fucking euripides or whatever said god knows redder and redder i can't i can't hear that utah story again i refuse i'm a big boy i don't need it i don't i could do it all right no utah story sorry fans no utah story at alex kealy if you

want to know what it is it's the story equivalent of the mr hands video okay i want angry tweets in my timeline for utah the utah story that will never be told and therefore will be a conspiracy theory tweeted alex theory we had alex kealy for suppressing the truth yes please alex kealy is the only person who knows the utah story so to all our 3098 followers on twitter please individually at alex kealy until he tells you the story it may or may not involve children how does that how does that change my twitter algorithm school does that improve my engagement there for my social authority please every me hard every tweet is going to get ratioed oh no it's finally happening guys you have a device of hate figure online you're going to get mad

you're going to blame everything on like russian bots then somehow you'll team up with eric garland in like next week when you're back on the show you're going to tell us all about gringo 11 in fact i'd say that segues us into our uh the second half conversation for our show where we are going to be speaking with alex about conspiracy theories especially the conspiracy theories that have warped the liberal mindset in the last uh a couple of years there are two mindsets guerrilla mindset and liberal mindset we are presuming very much of the no we're the we're the third we're the third mindset we're elevated galactic mind we're with a no p january mindset i think one of the things about conspiracy theories is i tend to know one when i see one

um you know whether it's people thinking like about about jfk or the the moon landing being faked or no one messaging me back on tinder like i know a conspiracy well that one's real i know it's actually that my face is so attractive that it's triggering for women and it makes their fingers spasm in a way that swipes left yeah no well they're they're just why they're wondering i wish there was a blockchain solution so i know but i know what i think i know what a conspiracy theory is but sort of can you just help us like kind of set down a definition for what we're talking about here i mean it's difficult because you you know what you've described there is not a conspiracy theory but a conspiracy right the the whole tinder thing right and so that this is the problem

with conspiracy theories that actually there are conspiracies out there and and and and therefore it's worth theorizing about them i think just generally it's it's a guy in a guy in america i called joe schinsky who's argued that you know conspiracy theories conspiracy thinking is for losers or basically people who have just lost and i think what we're seeing at the moment across the political spectrum actually is a real sense of of responding to a defeat and whether that's brexit whether it's trump whether it's something else and there's a kind of conspiratorial response this that it basically cannot be our fault it has to be some some malign power outside our influence interesting and so it's like you it's like you can't accept that randomness or

you can't accept that the world wasn't as you saw it sure exactly if that was like when i bomb at a gig essentially it's definitely the audience's fault right yeah um in fact earlier in the break you were sort of talking about the about sort of small f facts and the ways in which like online communities can foster this kind of thinking and sort of accelerate it yeah i mean if you think about what we were promised i think about it's a lot sadly uh i said you know when the internet was started we would we were promised this marketplace of ideas or at least this was a theory and it's often one that's bandied around by uh sort of leading philosophical minds at the moment e.g. Ben Shapiro friend of the show Ben Shapiro cool kids philosopher that you know that there's a

kid's size philosopher our favorite manga artist uh that we'd have all these ideas on the online and we'd we'd bang all these ideas together and all the good ones would float to the top and the bad ones would be discarded almost like an organic process like it would just sort of happened because of some law of nature well the law of the market which is obviously flawless and and operates entirely outside of regulation it gives us amazing products that fold all of our clothes sometimes if we do some certain things to them right right so we would hope perhaps that in in in in the 2018 uh that perhaps we wouldn't be having ideas like we need that uh folding machine foldy mate uh sponsored and that's to go sorry foldy mate and and what we obviously do and and and and

what i think has happened instead is that you have this kind of coliseum of fact where you bring your fact small f i bring my facts which i seem very much capital f and we sort of throw them at each other and unfortunately that doesn't get us anywhere because fact against fact mad followers if you if you execute it properly i mean you're being facetious but there kind of is a good point there it does get you mad followers like you know charlie like charlie kirk literally mad ones like charlie kirk for example just all he has to do is say that actually um you know that donald trump is the main reason for the stock market being high which i should remind our listeners is not true and also not good um and then all he has to do is come come with that

and he says oh my facts don't care about your feelings your facts are just feelings your if you say that oh no it wasn't donald trump actually it was you know obama etc etc i president i had my reservations with but nonetheless even if you say that you know you still are just get told oh you're just being sensitive you're just a liberal that's liberal logic sure right we have our facts they have theirs other people flat earth as they have their facts and they are facts that's how they should be understood my feelings actually are facts like right now i feel like a year is a kind of dwelling and for the nomadic peoples of the central east i don't know why you're bothering that i'm editing it out no clues to the utah story it's going to be a total black box tabula rassa i'm

sorry i'm sorry guys when i when i have a freak out about something i do big so none of this is going in it's all utah story related i'm keeping that blank because i think it's way funnier so as far as the recording is concerned i'll pick up again here the web is big enough to so there's no my feeling is that there's no competition for ideas on the web there's space for all of it there's space in c s to have a shirt folding machine there's space online to believe that the earth is flat to meet up with other people who who feel the same way to share facts photos evidence for that this idea that these ideas are somehow in competition with one another i think underestimates just how big the web is you said and you said earlier they sort of

they share facts that make one another basically feel good well i mean yeah you could argue that you know this talks to it talks to echo chambers all they share facts to piss people off and get followers out of it you know it's you know if it's not a marketplace of ideas it's certainly a marketplace of controversy right there the whole point of being no platform is that you can then go on fox and talk about how you've been no platform and sell your book about being like not platformed and and you know signing multi-million book deals and and whatever right i'm still waiting for my invitation i i've tried many the the tobey young brain genius drama i've i've tried many a time to speak about my theories on the flat earth um at uh but at uh berkbeck university and

all the time they've just said why are you here we've banned you twice um please stop taking food from our bins don't make us use prevent or why are you pressing the other spirit i think should be the president of it yeah so it's it's well i think one of the one of the key elements here is that going back to what you said earlier that sort of conspiracy theories are for people who've lost and it seems to me like and sort of i kind of want to um one thing i really i'm really interested in talking about is the sort of big boogie man of russia and the sort of the place that russia the place that russia holds in the kind of conspiracy theory culture that used to be a sort of fringe right wing thing but that is

increasingly popular among sort of centrist liberals like sort of eric garland especially eric garland interest eric garland strategist strategist base player occasional rance makes a hundred bucks a month on patreon i think this is a a classic example of both a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory right we do know that the russian state has sponsored in you know deliberate misinformation campaigns aimed at destabilizing the west but on top of that is layered this sense of conspiracy this kind of conspiratorial thinking where blame for all of life's ills is now laid at the door of a russian intervention and that and it kind of feels like it almost is a safety net to comfort blanket to sort of think you know actually when shit hits the fan or when something

goes bad we can just blame it on this kind of very boogie man idea that you have absolutely yeah and so that's and then sort of it it's conspiracy theories seem to have this way where there are sort of core beliefs will kind of shift around to accommodate whatever to change in the facts is necessary to preserve the belief in the conspiracy yeah we understand yeah it's something that actually the internet would be a great place to study and not something that i've done how sort of new facts get incorporated or dismissed by by conspiracy thinkers but i think what's also important is how we perceive conspiracy theories because if you think i don't know if you think back to the brexit referendum and you think about the ways in which

mainstream media portrayed brexit voters particularly you know in the sort of on the central left and i was all this idea that these people were stupid that all their fears about immigration well that was just based on bad facts that they are that they shouldn't be worried about some kind of west minster bubble west minster elite that's running the show oh they're just conspiracy think they're just confused but so there's a you know we can often be i think quite dismissive of this kind of thing without really thinking actually perhaps this is pointing to something that is quite significant well it's it's sort of it's almost like um it can highlight sort of ways in which you know our our thinking might sort of be vulnerable to this kind of

this kind of trap where we sort of we draw the conclusions that are sort of more comfortable to us and i think there are and sort of not not being aware of that sort of puts you in a position where you know if you might go on an embarrassing 120 um tweet tweet storm uh where you talk about how you're going to do some game theory never actually do any and then say that you know you're just you're just sort of high on speed and like craft and craft exactly one craft exactly one craft beer and half an adder all anyway time to write the new federalist papers um the real the real game theory is about how guinea fowl caused brexit but so i i guess i just wanted like so i wanted to sort of go go through kind of like the ways in which almost like the like other other

sort of groups that you sort of know think like this like like the flat earthers or the weird four chan q anon people or what groups are you looking at i mean so you you you find is is the moon flat is the moon a rock is the moon a hologram a hologram was it set up by the cia was it set up by the russians is it a weapon does it exist uh which is for me the most bizarre one big now the thing is we know that the moon has to exist because where else would the lizard people have their base right well so so so so so you obviously you can get lost out realistic guys get lost down these warrants of various crazy things that people believe and obviously the internet uh is is is full of all those those kinds of things i think what for me is interesting is

when politics becomes conspiratorial and when political support becomes conspiratorial uh because there is a uh almost come back to the whole point of the show there is a sense i think among a lot of people certainly in europe and in the uk um that there are an awful lot of conspiracy out there that are making their lives more difficult whether that is the west minster elite whether that is globalization and the power of the tech elites um there's there's a there is a strong sense that none of these people none of these organizations are really going to make their lives any better and whether you think that's a conspiracy theory or a conspiracy theorist i guess uh a conspiracy theory or a actual conspiracy which i suppose the title of this podcast was

just is a conspiracy well it's i think it's it's sort of difficult right like it it straddles this interesting borderline where you i often through whenever i look at conspiracies i often think well there's there is kind of a weird grain of truth here it's just it's been rendered in the in something is very easily digestible in the form of a story but it does point to a sort of a sense of unease that might you know it might have a there might be a reason for people to feel that sort of uneasy and distrustful it's just it's taken the form of something bizarre yeah i mean i think like to describe the westminster elite as like a sort of a conspiracy is giving them too much credit because i feel like the westminster elite are like far too concerned with like the

correct way to shoot grouse and like they don't really have the time to like release like like if a conspiracy is like you know like a maligned supercomputer then at best the westminster elite are like a sort of sega megadrive made of gammon like like there's a vague attempt has been made but it's also if you do like i think like yeah watching like say a cabinet reshuffle where you don't check whether your health secretary will move when you ask him it's like but yeah but also they put all these chemicals in the water which makes us i'm like i can't do that you probably can't probably can't do the bigger thing isn't so one of the key conspiracy theories is this idea of this omnipotent state this idea that if you think about all of the jason born movies the james bond

movies there's this idea that you know some guy somewhere some security services can type tap a number is watch and then a helicopter will pick him up and then he'll run downstairs there'll be a car there with every verified it was every verified user that's why i haven't made a profit yet he'll just he'll have 15 martinis and still somehow have enough of an erection to bone your wife so you were kind of saying earlier on in our conversation but like the internet is this big place but the fact that like the majority of these conversations happen on like shared platforms so it's either on like twitter or youtube or facebook and stuff like that i was you know looking thinking about like conspiracy theories so i was like a big seven seven conspiracy

truth for back when i was a teenager um always those good times you know those good times and like it all came from like watching like weird youtube videos right so i remember like one that i was really into um which was like naruto did seven seven which basically said that the bbc had predicted seven seven in like a documentary in which they simulated what would happen in a london terrorist attack and they had aired it a week before it happened and that this was actually just like the red flag that no one noticed because it was so similar to the way that like a terrorist attack would happen in london but the way that it was packaged was like you were so convinced that like yeah this you know this is actually legit like you see like the bbc recordings you can

like backtrack that and you can find it um they do say things that are very similar to what happened in terms of just like how emergency services would react um and when you're like when you're an impressionable teenager when you're just like an impressionable bubble person online which is why like conspiracy theories why the people who are like vulnerable to these conspiracy theories are also ones who are not extremely online they're not ones who like no you know they're kind of like your dad or your uncle who like know how youtube works but doesn't quite get how like what a podcast is or you know sort of you know still is trying to figure out how to use like tinder um thinking that it's like some sort of fitness app or something like that so like there's this dissonance

where like i think it's a channel there's this dissonance where like they don't necessarily know how like these new forms of technology work but they're so invested in like what you know these very like quite complicated algorithms there's a different sort of experience i guess what i wanted to ask was like have social media companies like been structured in a way that allows this to happen more easily than say they did at the inception of online oh sorry well i was just going to say one thing that the everything is saying was saying reminded me of that like that tweet where i can't remember which user but it was it was like your your your like your parents in 1997 like don't go on the internet it's scary out then like your

parents now like forwarding you an email from someone called like freedom.eagle saying that helery clinton it's like running a sack it's like it's like they can you only have to use the internet like a bit to be able to do a lot of potential harm to what information you anyway sorry yeah but the internet is a great leveler in this kind of thing right i don't know back in the day what would you get you'd get a sort of handwritten note stuffed through your letterbox you know warning you of the coming apocalypse or or the various groups are in in charge you know it looked as ridiculous as it was now everyone's on youtube hi quite me look at alex jones' studio right it looks like any other new studio in the world with you know the exception of the branding

you know these are hugely professional jobs and that is a that is a leveler you know the fact that these videos are so convincing um well that's that's just the thing it's that is that the sort of if you like the um the believability of a fact sort of it's rarely really ever being connected to um the extent to which it accords with anything you could call the truth that's sort of an existing state of affairs in the world where sort of before sort of well recently sort of you just believed facts that were told to you authoritatively through the new york times so there we must invade iraq it has weapons of mass destruction that was a that was a conspiracy you know it was a conspiracy to invade to invade and destabilize the middle east

whether it was through incompetence malice or a mix of both i think is you know something we'll find out eventually but you know these were facts that were believed because of their authority it's just the extreme democratization of fact you know it it yes it's a bit of a mixed bag it's slightly better that we we can maybe weren't yes we're not easily as manipulated by you know um colin powell like stopping by a bakery and frantically dying a cupcake yellow on his way to the united nations causing therefore one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in the history of our species um but instead now the truth value the perceived truth value of a fact seems to be connected to the sort of it's loud the loudness with which

is said and the number of people who believe it yes someone cleverer than i said the medium and this is why now the only grain of truth you can trust on the internet is my new neurotropic health supplement grains of truth which are available on my website www.lockerup.com they make you feel the truth it feels as though we've just sort of traded one set of bizarre masters for another what in you mean in the online world well in in the sense that we we we used to believe what the new york times tells us and now it seems that many of us seem to believe what eric garland or you know prison paul tells us right and we and it's i mean i'm trying to link it to this to the announcement this morning that the facebook was going to sort of

read you reduce the amount of media you see and focus on what i think they call personal connections right basically like your uncle's ramblings on facebook they're going to become more prioritized than prison paul's ramblings yeah exactly the same thing yeah uncle paul but so and again we know it's all about this sort of the the death of the editor the dragging away of editorial control from media organizations for better or for worse and handing them to you know some bloke you out on a beach somewhere who keeps you up to date on fluoride but i mean that almost i think that sort of leads quite naturally the question of you know who can we trust yeah it i mean your favorite podcast trash trash future pod

prison paul obviously besides paul joe sif watson white son of it who can we try besides no that's the thing here's a here's a character for you a phone sex prison paul imagine my cock hit he's like he's been planning about for weeks like he's got his like alex kealy is just like about to die no there's like there's like a grudging respect there that's that's my that's my reaction that was that was even better than the utah story okay no come on nothing will ever be utah story yeah that was a good story

no um so i want to hear it once it's a shame it can never be told again so look i think um that but that that's that sort of leads us to this place where you know bill crystal and david brooks and and megah mccardle and all of these like you know ghouls who sort of let us down the garden path through the rock and are now sort of sprinting to like tearing themselves in half trying to lead us to the same conclusion with you know north korea or iran you know i mean it's almost like they don't haven't realized quite the extent to which they're no longer the voice they're now just one voice among among many all of whom are saying drastically different things i think that's absolutely true um you know the the difficult thing is whether

or not we would call it a democratization of that or not i mean yeah sort of it's more chaos right yeah exactly i think you know we often i know back in the halcyon days of 2013 2014 or whatever it was hour of spring and the technology companies were going to be the next best thing and that this was the ultimate tool for democracy things were great but i don't think we would now look at the sort of the system as it is and call that a a democratic a democratic system no it's sort of it's it's become sort of slightly if we're going to stay aristotelian it's become slightly oligarchic where especially like this is something sort of i was i was i was listening to the other day i was listening to another left-wing podcast and they were sort of

talking about how uh the james demore letter to google which to our listeners we will give its proper due full coverage soon um how you know a lot with the james solidarity a lot of the people were saying oh that google is sort of secretly promoting an sjw agenda where if you search you know european art you'll get something moreish or whatever and it that's this idea that sort of there is there is this permit there's not permissive there is this insidious sort of multiculturalism that's being pushed by the tech giants but i think they don't understand is that the tech giants promote the conspiracy theories themselves without even knowing it sure exactly i mean the the the control of information is yeah is a really interesting

question and um you know the extent to which conspiracy theories thrive any better than anything else i think is up for debate well it's like it's um we were talking about this earlier right like if you search is the earth flat google's sort of helpful device that sort of polls uh the sort of the fact up from the web page you know it'll say yes right but only because the people who are typing is the earth flat likely to you know looking for those things anyway you don't like necessarily go out searching for that like you you kind of pick up this stuff from communities right so i don't think anyone or i'm sure like i don't think that many people who genuinely believe in the flat earth necessarily went on google to kind of ask whether the wall

like google was their first point for finding out was flat you know you you go through like normal channels when you find that stuff afterwards and really like the question we've got at us tech companies is kind of how you find yourself in like what are essentially these rabbit holes right so every conspiracy theory begins from one of these rabbit holes and the thing with youtube is that it's really easy to gain one of them like you know we do research for this show and that means like watching a lot of like these alt-right videos but they usually start off like you know you start off something minor like you're watching like a stefan mollini video and then you know now it's still in my recommendation about why it's irrational that girls won't sleep with him but

it's irrational to sleep with girls paradox yes um yeah and before you know it you're on an s club seven wrong heads video or yeah you're like on a pep a pepper pig ices video which still remains one of my favorites uh or like you end up in like a four four and a half hour lives yeah could it could a pig join ices there's a theological question for you a four and a half hour live stream of like richard spencer um to basing like you know these other like right-wing youtube personalities like sig sig hiling to like the 10 people that don't want to actively pie him in the face you know and i was i was listening to this at like you know 10 p.m and all i'm saying is that when you wake up at like two in the morning to um like richard spencer like screeching about the

white nationalist state it is common not good it is not the way you want to wake up but it's but i think you're really you're on something here which is this idea that it's sort of because they it's and again this is a drum i think we banged quite a bit i think many roads lead back to here uh which is trash fuchsia the trash future studios which is that just an attempting to build something that people will use they've never really thought of why it might be used or how and so is it so so when something says oh well we'll make our search engine better by having it pull all of the pertinent information into a top box and give it some kind of you know i think endorsement as this is the answer you know it it sort of just just it makes this sort of has an

inbuilt assumption that there is this open marketplace of ideas where things will compete and the answer will come out top but what it doesn't anticipate is this idea that you know someone who's you know third wife left him is going to decide the earth is flat and that's somehow related move fast and break things right yeah and so i almost kind of and i think that is but in some sense is this kind of gives us the great these grains of truth that you know um people are uncomfortable with tech companies manipulating information in this way it's just the only way they can express it is you know through their sort of red-faced rage at sjdubs and tumblr teams i mean there's something that's happening online at the moment which is um and i'm sure we'll talk

about this in like when we do for james like when we talk about james demoron like a future episode which is about currently like all these kind of conservatives or like you know these right-wing like chuds talking about like how twitter is banning their like actually good opinions um and how like twitter is james or kief did a sting yeah so that's like that's the thing that they're all kind of hyping about at the moment right so they're like you know these these kind of right-wing chuds who are mad that like twitter won't post like won't prioritize their eugenics post or like you know phrenology related tweets um now as like big supporters of phrenology on this podcast we stand in solidarity um with them um but again it's one of those things where like

there is this grain of truth in there in that like you know twitter you know twitter isn't a marketplace for ideas and it's very well documented but they have done things like shadow banning they have banned people for like like political opinions particularly on the left there was a scandal a few months ago where like twitter was like banning black personalities uh with opinions and they weren't really justifying like why they were because they get mass reported yeah you know so and this is the first time they've really had to like answer like try to answer those questions and these are companies that like aren't built to do that because for them like part of them thinks that well it's not our responsibility to do it and now because of all the pressure

that's being put on them they have to but like what happens when like you're a company full of tech pros who like thought the humanities were just like for pussies and all of a sudden you have to like ask yourself these ethical questions otherwise you are going to get buried in one way or another um so like yeah again it's like these things where these grains of truth do exist but they can be manipulated in ways that like distort the conversation and a conversation about like what are the responsibilities of like a corporation that we use and the power that they hold and what does that say about the internet suddenly becomes this really polarizing thing where it's like twitter really supports communism which is like like evidently not true

but business strategy seems not you know jack's favorite podcast is like the sam harris podcast guys like you can relax unless you're like ethnic then like maybe not and it's all seems to cycle back that these choices that these choices give rise to conspiratorial thinking because conspiratorial thinking generates clicks from the conspirators yeah right i mean there's a whole we talked a little bit earlier about the market for controversy we can think about the attention economy and all this and how ultimately maybe nobody's making decisions about this maybe it is just what the algorithms are saying is the most profitable uh content i i guess it just think about conspiracy theories in general i think big tech leaves a lot of people feeling quite powerless um

from across the political spectrum and on in all parts of society i mean even you can imagine if you you know used to collect 60k a year doing journalism for the telegraph which included like six weeks stops in paris or whatever you were doing and suddenly you're all competing against trash future podcast in in a in a marketplace of phraser nelson were coming for you much like william buckley in that sauna and in start maybe article people what was it you were saying about six weeks stops in paris because that's not i haven't got that yet i just read somewhere on the someone so there was a journalist in america who needed it who was feeling a bit burnt out and wanted to write a story this is in the 40s or something and so they shipped him off to paris

for six weeks to sort of come up with a story uh obviously fully come right these days are gone right the internet has changed the whole thing is just you can get slayed you can get like teenage slaves to do your stories for you know they just fold obvious fold just very old full charts okay um you know it's all of all of these you know brain force thought leaders like to talk about disruption things being disrupted but it's true and that and that makes people feel powerless i think um and powerless you know when we feel powerless we look for for explanations for that i think that does contribute to a kind of conspiracy mindset all right i i think that's uh i think that's that's pretty good we got a nice circular narrative and we've been recording for like

an hour and 40 minutes time to have exactly one beer and half an adder all okay and then right and make brexit happen again all right uh so uh alex well remind people where they can find you on twitter i'm alex krasodomsky which is a k r a s o d o m s k i uh on twitter perfect and we'll we'll link that in description and uh yeah uh thank you very much for listening and remember if you want to find out about the utah story alex kealy that's right invade my mansion do not ask any of us about the utah story we will not tell you alex kealy will tell you only if you provide him with the right code word the puzzles are in his previous tweet all right good night everyone goodbye

uh oh you you