TRASHFUTURE - No Platforming the Platforms feat. Nick Srnicek

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

What is platform capitalism? And why is it that Amazon seems to be transitioning from online bookstore to perpetually-expanding defense contractor? This week’s episode features Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) in discussion with author and academic Nick Srnicek (@n_srnck). Nick’s previous books include “Platform Capitalism” and “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work.” He joins us to discuss a particularly non-HIPAA compliant app and his own work into the (monopolistic, bad) platforms that dominate our economy today. We have a Patreon and signing up at the $5 tier will give you an extra episode each week. You’ll also gain access to our incredibly powerful Discord server. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want to buy one of our recent special-edition phone-cops shirt, shoot us an email at trashfuturepodcast[at]gmail[dot]com and we can post it to you. (£20 for non-patrons, £15 for patrons) Do you want a mug to hold your soup? Perhaps you want one with the Trashfuture logo, which is available here: https://teespring.com/what-if-phone-cops#pid=659&cid=102968&sid=front

Wait, what's... What's that I hear in the distance? Is that...? Dear readers, it has been some time since we last spoke. I've spent many a long month in isolation searching the darkest corners of logic and rationality. But I've returned, and it gives me no pleasure to inform you that the chattering classes of this once great nation are at it again. This week, the queen of woke SJWTV, darling of the loony left, Ellen DeGeneres, posted a photo of herself at a Dallas Cowboys football game with former US president George W. Bush, and were the woke starsy excited to see one of their own extending an olive branch of free and fair debate across the aisle to one of their former opponents, of course they weren't. It seems that even her years of service in the PC trenches were not enough to save her from the onslaught of accusations of rehabilitating a war criminal.

Even when she issued a video clarifying that she, as a person of wealth, was only there to enjoy the company of her wealthy friends and former president Bush just happened to be there, this would not satisfy them either. Are the rich not entitled to a safe space like the rest of us? Is that not the lefty Ramona doctrine that everybody is entitled to be coddled and associate only with their own kind, brackets except in the toilet? Why cannot wealthy people, who have their own problems and lived experience just like the rest of us, congregate without fear of judgement and oppression? I'm sure, on the other hand, that if Mr. Generous had been photographed with a darling of the left such as Colonel Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, or dare I say it, Jeremy Corbyn, watching a much less capitalist sport like stoning infidels to death, she would have been praised to high heaven, she would have been showered with cries of what a forward-thinking lady, standing shoulder to shoulder with our multicultural brothers and sisters, so why can we not do this with conservatives? Is conservatism not as valid a belief system as Islam?

Why must conservatives be shunned and vilified while Osama bin Laden is adored by the champagne socialists of Islington? Preventing our so-called liberal celebrities from engaging with their conservative peers is not merely prescriptive, it is an infringement on every liberal value we hold dear, a veritable online Srebrenica in which the victim will not be innocent Bosnians but something far more precious, that most innocent of all victims, freedom of speech. As a wise clown known in France as Le Monsieur du Jokes once said, We live in a society and now dear reader, it is time to decide what society it is that we want to live in. One of rational discussion and debate or one in which you turn on the radio and hear the opening bars of Careless Whisper by George Michael, you turn to your steering wheel and see there's no airbag, you flip down the driver's mirror and see that you have a mullet but your mouth is covered in tape, your eyes slowly drift to the clock above the tape deck stereo, the date 1984.

Hello and welcome back to this free episode of Trash Future, the podcast you're listening to right now. It was very good I think to have Brendan back in the studio, I just wish he could have stayed to come and talk about the rest of the stuff. I know, he has to rush off to an appointment with his head doctor. He had to go get his forehead enlarged. It's a plastic surgery that you just get when you're Irish peasant stock. He has the opposite of a puppy in New Guinea, which doctor? Just a big forehead full of lip fillers, just delightful. Giant, giant head.

But we are here today is Riley Milo and Alice and we're joined by Nick Surnick. Hello. Nick is the author of books including Inventing the Future, Platform Capitalism and he's got After Work coming out in 2020, which I assume is a rundown of all the best spots to go for a drink after work. Top 20, yeah. They say it's a book but it's actually just an article on Londonist that says that you should go to Gordon's wine bar. We love it. We tried the new speakea that's opened up on the King's Road.

Oh, Christ. Do you think those are still happening? Yes. Oh, 100%. Weirdly, they haven't made it to Glasgow yet and we lag two to five years behind you on everything. So as soon as we get them, you won't. The idea of alcohol being banned in Scotland is too conceptual. It can't be imagined.

Actually though, on that note, Maddie and I, on short, it's the other night, walked past that ball pit bar and it's closed down. Oh, no. Tragedy, pressing F for respects. How are people going to go be babies now? Are they just going to have to regress beyond toddler? The adult diaper bar. Is it just the next bar just going to be like one of those koalic hair change stations?

Yes. That's our business plan for our small business loan after getting your dicksuck.com. That's our second thing as we diversify. Yeah. And the alcohol is actually skin, like you can absorb it through your skin and it's served in a gin talcum powder that's just put onto your ass so you get to feel like a baby again. In the future, every single bar will just be assigned a theme randomly

from an incredibly niche and upsetting subreddit. I love fully automated bar communism. I'm sorry, this bar is r slash ropes. That could go any number of ways. Yeah, we're not going to explore what that means. However, r slash ropes is not what it sounds like and it's not good, folks. We are going to explore a startup because I found a startup, folks. I found a startup and I think we should all invest in it.

It's called humanity.co. Wow. How are they spelling it just regularly, like humanity? Yeah, but there is a dash. It's h-u-manity.co. What's our first impression? This is my friend, humanity, whose father was a sea cow. But what do we think?

I do not think. I have no thoughts. This is a void to me. It sounds like something that the evil billionaire from the Simpsons, the one that Homer goes to work for, what's his name? Hank Scorpio. It sounds like a business Hank Scorpio would start. That's my thought.

Okay, yeah. That's so far so good. Could you please kill someone on the way out? That would really help me out. Nick, any idea? Humanity.co. Maybe huel-based food, you know. You're so beautifully wrong.

So one of the quote on their website is, know the rules well so you can break them effectively, Dalai Lama. Did the Dalai Lama say that? Buy low, sell high. That doesn't sound like saying the Dalai Lama's Aquinas. Michael Scott. Always be closing, John the Baptist. Just some really good advice about how to do crimes.

Our mission is to assist the world's leading brands to be more data driven by redesigning and transforming the contracting relationship with consumers at a global scale. Are they disrupting the Geneva Convention? They are actually trying to declare a 31st human right. They're trying to disrupt the terms and conditions. Yeah, unless you're onto it. Amazing.

Oh my God. So this is literally they're disrupting your statutory rights. I wasn't joking about the crimes thing. It's literally they have got the Dalai Lama to become an illegalist on their website. I mean, you know, the Tibetan state was a theocratic slave state, so maybe. Nick, any ideas about how to disrupt the terms and conditions? I have no idea about this one. No.

Humanity.co exists to empower individuals to own their blank as property. And then we fight for and provide the tools to receive fair market value for their blank as an asset. Blood. It's got to be data. Come on. Nick's got it. I was hoping it was going to be all of it.

I mean, usually actually per session, you only generate a couple of grams of data. The five humours, blood, bile, gall, whatever it is in the data. Yeah. I haven't released any data in months. It's just backing up in there. So humanity.co exists and to empower individuals to own their data as their property. And then we fight for and provide the tools for people to receive fair market value for their data as an asset.

Now, if you don't think about this very much, it seems fine. I think Nick, I'd given your area of academic interest. I figured this was perfect for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's an absolutely terrible idea. I mean, basically the complete marketization of the self, you know, sell every piece of yourself.

Yeah. But yeah, the other key sort of thing is, so the Financial Times has this wonderful little app on their website where you can enter in your personal sort of demographic information and you find out how much your data is worth. So I did this and I found out I'm worth 17 cents. Just being negged by the Financial Times. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Humanity is trying to get you to get a cut of that. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Okay. Look, are there these gigantic companies that are spying on every aspect of our lives and harvesting all of our data so it can be sold in aggregate to the highest bidder? Sure. But also, what if you got like 5P out of it?

I mean, it turns out there that my cum is worth at least $5. And we can all be rational actors. We can all just like be traders. It's wonderful. This is the thing that we all want. We want to be self-employed. We want to be day traders. And now we can just do that with like our Google results.

Awesome. Yeah. Like I could make, what if I Google the stock market a lot, then maybe my data could be worth 25 cents. Be careful not to Google Venezuela though, because that'll bring down the value of your data. So I'm going to jump into the FAQs here because regular listeners of the show will know the FAQs are always gold because you can think what Qs they think are FA.

Yeah. And they're very rarely actually FA. You can see what Qs they think are FA. How does humanity.co make money? The company was founded on a simple principle. We have to help a lot of people first and continue to help them in order to be successful. So it's a non-profit? It's like Oxfam.

It's very much a for-profit company. For just two pounds a month, you can help someone sell their hentai preferences to like Amazon web services. That's such an unsuspicious thing. How do you make money? Don't worry about it. How do we make money? We make money by helping them and then continuing to help people.

I tell you what, it's not to do with anything in that basement. So you won't need to look in there. That room labeled crimes, actually crimes is an acronym. Oh, that's just a bit of rubbed off. That was a G. That was Grimes. That's where Grimes lives. Yeah.

Grimes is sleepy. So humanity is declaring a 31st human right. In 1948, the United Nations enacted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There were 30 human rights listed in this document and these human rights are still very relevant to this day. Well, yes. Because we're still human. Once you've got a computer, you don't need the right to fucking freedom of assembly anymore. Suddenly none of it matters.

That's basically like the Gates Foundation's approach to fighting poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is like, look, we just have to get enough iPads to these people and then they'll learn to feed themselves with Ubuntu. I like the idea that this is like jumping the queue of international law. You can still have people trying to get more human rights like the Declaration on the Rights of the Child or Indigenous Peoples or the Yogyakarta Principles. And no, it's just that we have this startup, so we're 31st, fuck you. So these rights look at the mistakes of the past to make sure they will never happen again. What we are proposing is a new human right.

Like the Furby, for example. Proposing is a new human right, which looks at the challenges specifically faced in the digital age. The right to legal ownership of their inherent human data as property. Inherent human data. Inherent human data is a strange phrase. Humans don't have any inherent data apart from like your DNA. Yeah, but like it's because data is essentially just your predicted actions in the marketplace. And it's saying that those are sort of inherent to us, which is a very strange idea to me.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think we used to call this 31st human right just privacy, but I don't know. Oh, they have a take on why privacy is not good. They say privacy is a nebulous concept that doesn't have many robust legal protections. Property, however, has many more legal protections. You can't take that. You can just sort of violate someone's right to privacy and no one cares. But you can't violate someone's right to property unless you're the police.

What if that was somewhat revealing about the way in which we have built our legal systems? That property is very well defined and privacy isn't. I mean, that's just defined by magic. That's like that's you start out the game with those things. Nobody's made them that way. To be fair, if we made if we made privacy universal human right, then we couldn't have, you know, very exciting websites like live Jasmine and Chatterbait. So, you know, so once you claim your 31st human right by sharing the hashtag my 31 video.

I'll post this on your Facebook wall and then Facebook won't be able to like sell your data. The Treaty of Rome actually means that you can't share my posts without my permission. It's a boomer meme start. It means you have to fath my posts, actually. Once you claim your 31st human right, you'll receive a title for your digital data declaring it as your property. Because again, what we know is that when you put something on paper, everyone respects it. This is some sovereign citizen shit. I wasn't expecting this to go like into a boomer law episode.

Well, privacy is often misunderstood. Property is a powerful, well understood and comes with ownership. So, wait. This is basically like the start up equivalent of being like, are you a cop? Because if you're a cop legally, you have to tell me. Are you detaining my data? So is humanity a nonprofit? No.

Humanity.co is a for-profit company with a corporate mission to help millions of people around the world claim their data as their property. Have control around how their data is used, then receive fair market compensation for use of their data. Okay. If you're a for-profit company, that is not what your mission is. Your mission is to make money for your shell. Anyway, okay. I can't get that angry this early in the episode. Yeah, you got it close.

Sim it down a little bit. Yeah, you got to breathe. Let's all do yoga. Take a yoga break. Listener, take a yoga break. If you're at your desk, do a little stretch. Sorry, that was almost as bad as fucking Malcolm Gladwell pretending he's the first person to have discovered the concept of acting. Malcolm Gladwell, the episode that we just did for that yesterday was so draining that it's left us hungover into the next one.

Expect this on Thursday in the Patreon, Patreon, Patreon. But none of us are as hungover as my girlfriend who's asleep on the office sofa. Wait, so what does this mean claiming your data as your property? The My31 app is a tool that powers a movement for people to own their data as property. Anyone who claims their data as their property on our app, which is free, will get a digital title of ownership to their data, which is just like the title to the car or a house. Right now, we are focusing exclusively on medical data. So like what if they have for-profit company, but their service they provide to you is free?

How the ding-dang heck do they make money, Nick? I don't know. Maybe they sell that data to somebody. No, it couldn't be that. No, that doesn't sound reasonable. I think they make money with some side business like a lemonade stand or something. Oh, like Barone Sanitation. Although actually hang on a minute though.

Who doesn't own their medical data? I'm pretty sure there's a lot of regulations about your medical data. Especially in the US weirdly, like HIPAA is actually quite comprehensive. Yeah, and so that's like if you like here's the thing, that's why this startup exists. It exists because like most startups that are disruptive, it exists to circumvent an existing protection. Amazing. Under the guise of giving you somehow more protection.

Yeah. So it like taking back control in some way. Interesting. So they use this consent as a service model. That's what they call it, consent as a service. Wow. Extracting metal. Brian Singer.

Extracting medical information from users who consent for privacy and then authorize for permitted use. So essentially the idea is we want... All of this personal data has been this amazing treasure trove of money for marketers. We think we can do the same with medical data, but we need people to actively consent to give it to us so we can sell it on. So what we're doing is we're putting this... Because there's a reason they use the frame of property, right?

Because property is something you can buy and sell. And in a capitalist system, people with the capital has the ability to command property. So essentially what they're... It's a deal with the devil, except the devil has a double digit IQ, basically. It is the vampire trying to like finagle their way into being invited in. Come on. There's definitely a come town bit about like the mentally impaired devil. That's definitely...

It's like the vampire is like, come on, if you let me in, I can show you the power of this cut-co knife. It slices, it dices. I want to suck your dick. Honestly, nothing else. The vampire wants to suck your dick. They also have your data. Count Fuckula.

Anyways, most people who have a data privacy conversation are either having it from a pro consumer perspective or a pro corporate perspective, says humanity CEO Richie Atoiru. Corporations... Mr. Alucard. Corporations give free services to consumers in exchange for monetizing their data. So if consumers don't want their data monetized, they can't use the free services. The issue right now is that there's no choice.

And of course, there's no choice other than having either heavily extractive services based around selling data or just not having services. Right, Nick? This is a lot of what you talk about. Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of the business model of platform capitalism. I don't know if we want to get on to that yet. Yeah, so sort of in my own writing, I've talked about this idea of platform capitalism

where you have these platforms which are effectively intermediaries between a number of different groups. So platforms are, for instance, Facebook is a platform between users on one hand and advertisers on the other hand. And it sort of enables these two groups to come together, except, you know, it's siphoning off data from users in order to then sell advertising space to advertisers. I think there is one key thing to note here, though, is that a company like Facebook, a company like Google, doesn't actually sell data.

It doesn't sell data to advertisers, which a lot of people commonly think. What they sell is they use that data to build up sort of fantastic ad profiles of everybody, which is why you get sort of these eerily quite accurate advertisements popping up all over the place. Oh, that's why I got all the cum-flavoured vape slivered ads. The thing is, I'm an agent of chaos online. I always make sure, because I'm always Googling strange shit for this show, so I just get wish.com advertisements now.

Yeah, you get t-shirts that are like, don't fuck with a forklift operator who was born in July. Yeah, which is weird, because I wasn't even born in July. Born on the folk of July. Yes, thank you. And so I just get wish.com, because they just think that I'm in the market for like a penis sheath that you can wear on your nose or whatever else that they make. Look, if someone has a line on one of those, just, you know, my DMs are open,

but sorry, Nick, continue. Yeah, so basically, these platforms, they collect a lot of data. They use it to, you know, sell advertising in the case of Facebook and Google, rather. But also, there's platforms, for instance, Amazon, which, you know, started at least as an e-commerce company, sort of, as a platform between consumers buying a good and somebody selling a penis on their head sort of thing. Interestingly though.

Castle goods that we all need. Yeah, exactly. Of course, these summer goods. I mean, this makes sense though, because like it's, as we've just proven, it is a joke how bad these things are at marketing to you. So clearly, it's not you that's being sold, but like the profile they've built of you. Yeah. Yeah, the classic example being, you know, you buy a fridge on Amazon

and they try and sell you a second and a third fridge. Oh, this guy loves fridges. He's in the market. He's clearly starting a business where he sells fridges at a double retail market. Yeah, I mean, these things are quite terrible in many, many ways. They can be eerily accurate at times and you sort of, I mean, advertising is almost becoming your subconscious in many ways. It sort of pops up and you're like, oh, that is part of me, I guess.

But yeah, so you have platforms which sell advertising. You have platforms which do sort of e-commerce, again, connecting different groups. Interestingly though, Amazon is no longer really an e-commerce company. They make most of their money, most of their profit through Amazon Web Services, which effectively sells computing power to different users, including the American military, which we can maybe talk about later. Well, we will, in fact, get onto that later. Yeah.

Users who bombed Yemen also bombed. That's actually why the military industrial complex has increased the way it has, is that they bought one war and then Amazon was like, ah, you want to buy a second and a third? Yeah, they just, one statement department official once bought the movie Apocalypse Now, and now we just keep ending up in all of these scrapes. It seems like you're interested in counterinsurgency. Some guy at the Pentagon hadn't heard of the Vietnam War before,

so I better check out this movie. So just to, now we have a definition for platforms, right? We can see that what Richie Atwaru is saying, that no, if you want these services, they must be provided with a sort of extractive, exploitative model. There is no other way. That just seems like such a hollow statement, but I want to wrap up two more things before we finish up with Humanity

and then go into sort of a more detailed discussion of platforms. Humanity. Shut the fuck up. This is why you bring me on this thing. It's fine. So basically, you sign up to put your medical data on this database because right now, due to privacy laws and HIPAA and stuff, it's not possible to be an intermediary between pharmaceutical companies

and people with medical data. They're just, you can't do it. And so you do that and then Humanity sells it for cash. But what do you think you as the user get? Do I get like 23 and me? Like a little graph telling me what they're going to do with the knowledge that like, I don't know, I have emphysema or whatever. Nope.

Do I get a cool ass keychain? Nope. Do I get 17 cents? Nope. Just striking out every time. So what you get is this. Here's another frequently asked question. What is who?

Who? This is like the meme of fucking President Bush talking to Hu Jin Tao and then like, who is the new president of China thing? Just doing Abbott and Costello. Yeah. Well, who in this case is not on first, but rather is a reward token you can earn by completing actions within the app. Oh, you earn stars on the Jeremy Renner app.

You earn company script. Damn. Who cannot be converted into traditional currency, e.g. dollars at the moment? The implication of that is who would want traditional currency like a loser when you can have the imaginary come dollars. However, as both the movement and the adoption of the consent ledger grow, new kinds of offers and incentives may be offered including cash alongside who?

Is there anything as creepy as the words consent ledger? Just prick your finger and write in blood in my consent ledger, Madame. It's the sort of thing a president of the Cambridge or Oxford Union would keep in their desk. God, yes, that's exactly correct. So, here are their plans for user adoption. Their first goal is to share a video proclamation to earn some who? 25k users. Get out there and get some who.

We've literally evolved from the doorbell thing that was just slapstick to like, 20s Abbott and Costello quick fire comedy. So, I'm excited for Mark's brother's start up next time. Yeah, the exploding cigar company. So, 25,000 users premium printed title deeds to your data get sent to every user. Premium printed. Yeah, premium printed on like glossy magazine stock. You can frame it alongside your degree from Trump University.

American Psycho, but for your own data, like, oh, is that is that bone? No, it's your job. It's even it's embossed. 50k users. The humanity.co swag store opens, which is probably how they're going to make most of their money. Oh my God. 200,000 users. They notify the health care industry we're open for business and a million users.

Who bucks can be redeemed? 2 million users. The cash wallet for data opens and at 5 million users. They'll begin notifying other industries. So just notifying them. Just just phoning up like a strip mine in Western Australia and going like, oh, you know, we're doing pretty good over here. Yeah.

It's like Paris guy who decided that he was running a secret police department on his own and got busted because he just went into police stations. It was like, yeah, we're the cops now too. With the Kamala Harris brown shirts. Yeah. The secret Masonic police. So that's funny. I'm actually, I'm actually a cop too.

I've got my badge and everything. So that's pretty cool. We should hang out and talk about cops stuff. The Colgate cavity patrol. So it's, but it's not like this one startup has massive undue influence across state legislatures in the United States though, right? Like it's just some goofy startup. It's not, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds incredible. What? Played breaking news sting. So this basically what's happened is lots of privacy bills are extending as people are more concerned with data privacy.

And so what they're, what who is doing is they have bills in I think six to seven state legislatures right now that are allowing for the buying and selling of personal data as an asset, basically asking different states like Massachusetts, Vermont, California, California is a really sticky one to just create markets and allow them to do some primitive accumulation of everyone's data to then act as a platform between medical giants and you. Fortunately. But this has to be HIPAA's federal law. Like this has to be something that they know is just going to go to a lawsuit, right?

Yep. And then, you know, Brett Kavanaugh is just going to like look up from, he's just going to like look up with one eye closed and just like take a turkey leg out of his mouth and just say, yeah, it's fine. Consent ledger, you say? Because then everyone will like find out about Brett Kavanaugh's weird dick or something. I imagine he's probably got some skin in the game here. But also it's like the thing where like it doesn't matter, of course, if it gets thrown

by the Supreme Court or whatever, because that isn't what this company is designed for. Like all of these other companies, this company is designed to just like grift money from dumb investors. And it's all just a pyramid scheme of like, well, if one investor invests $10 million, then the next investor will invest $20 million on the basis of the previous one, invested $10 million. And just all the founders walk away with millions and millions of dollars. And eventually the company, of course, collapsed because it's a fucking stupid idea.

Oh, do you want to sell data about how many times a day you piss to like fucking cold stone creamery? Yeah. Fucking hell. Give me that. I want to earn some fake money that's called who for some reason. Oh, yeah. Give me some of those fucking Keith Moon dollars. Yeah, I love that shit.

I think you're right. But there's also a real danger here in that because America is a series of failed states, while that lawsuit is pending, I'm sure they'll be able to get medical data out of like some state or another. So whichever state has the lowest, the most easily bought legislature, like West Virginia or something, they will get a bunch of like black lung data from it. Oh, yeah. Like in Wisconsin or Indiana, they will like just, they'll just get permission to microchip

everyone. And like maybe a circle will be like stop doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So the thing is, it's even if it, like this is scam on two levels, if it works, it's a scam because people will get like fake money for their really valuable data, even though it's not valuable individually, it's only valuable and aggregate.

And if it doesn't work, then, you know, they'll just have defrauded a bunch of investors, which is genuinely the best outcome. Like not bad. I've often said what the left has to do is just come up with a lot of like a trendy disruptive platform ideas and then use all of that money for strike funds. That's true. I mean, Stalin used to rob banks in the Caucasus. We should be doing the modern day version of that is just like in terrible fast company

articles. Oh, yes. So Joseph Stalin, the terror of fucking Mahachkala's first shashlik bank. So I'd like to go back to platform capitalism because I think we've sort of, we war-gamed a little bit at its most stupid. And so we saw, we know that this platform is an intermediary and, but the platform has a sort of unique form of accumulation. I want to know if you could talk a little more about that.

Yeah. So what's sort of unique about it and why I think it's quite important is that by positioning itself between all these different groups, it's in a position like we've seen to collect a huge amount of data. And this is quite different from most businesses beforehand where, you know, you might sell a car to somebody, but then you have no idea what they do with it afterwards. You have no idea what they enjoy a bedroom or anything like that. Because with the platform, all the activity, all the behavior is going on, on the platform

and you can record all of that data. So as data has become, you know, to use the classic metaphor, oil of the sort of modern era, companies that are platforms are basically the oil rigs of the modern era. So this is why all the most valuable companies in the world right now are effectively platforms of some kind. Apple might be a sort of exception because they're, I mean, Apple is, they sell luxury goods, that's effectively their business model, although even they are starting to change now because everybody has bought, you know, 50 iPhones and doesn't need another one.

So they're moving towards a more platform based model as well. But yeah, the idea here is to collect as much data as possible, use it to improve the business, cut off competitors, gain a monopoly position and then just dominate the market. Yeah. I've been saying for years that that's just Metal Gear Solid 2 and it predicted this. But I have this feeling right where every time I hear that phrase, the data being the new oil, I sort of, I rankle a little bit because like oil may be destroying the planet, but like at least it's involved in the production of something.

At best what it seems you're able to do with data is model behavior and induce consumption. So it's like, it's, for someone saying data is the new oil, they have to think that like production and consumption are the same because they're both just these generic forms of value, which is just out there, but they're demonstrably not. Like production and consumption are distinct activities. And to say that data is the same as oil is to conflate the two, which I think is kind of weird. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think if you look at what's data is being used for right now, it is entirely for marketing. So it's, you know, it might be a recommendation algorithm on Amazon. It might be, you know, better advertising on, on Facebook, but it's entirely used just to sell you more stuff. And it's sort of interesting. You look at sort of pre 2008, you had all these smart people going into finance.

So you know, you do a physics degree and you could be studying, say black holes or something, but instead you realize you can make more money on Wall Street. So you go do that. And a huge waste of intellectual like resources just poured into making stupid money for people on Wall Street. After 2008. Podcast is tug at that collar with elite university degrees, sweating in our studio. Yeah.

And an unrelated subject. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But now they're in tech. Yeah. Exactly. They're an ad tech in particular.

I mean, the huge amount of resources poured into just developing more and more sophisticated and quicker ways to give you ads. It's just incredible. It's an absolute waste of human effort and resources. When you really think about it, like, because I, we talked about this a while ago, right? Where approximately 40% of the sort of mainstream of the U.S. economy is a custom combination of big tech, which is mostly selling ad space and then finance, which is lending you money to buy stuff.

Like 40% of the U.S. economy is essentially fraudulent. Yeah. Because we don't do production. Like it is all consumption. That's where the oil thing comes in. Because production just gets siloed off to somewhere else where they make the things and they can run things. The rice guys.

Authoritarian. The guys who learn their work ethic from making rice. That's the imperial assumption. Yeah. Milo, that episode comes out in two days. Okay. That's a reference to a bonus episode. I'm not making a racist comment.

It's actually a quote of racist comment Malcolm Gladwell makes about Asian people. It's true. It's also quite revealing. So subscribe to the Patreon and prove I'm not a racist to yourself. It's also quite revealing because that is sort of the world, that's the foreign policy of capitol, right? Is that you can just offshore all of this production and the domestic economy with the quote unquote people that matter in it is just a series of like short-term frauds.

Yeah. Because how do you unionize consumers? How do you unionize people whose job is basically to look at ads and shop? One word. Mumsnet. Essentially, your only option is like brand loyalty there and that's insane. Well, I mean, that's the strategy of the Democratic Party is essentially brand loyalty to the Democratic Party brand rather than loyalty to some kind of class consciousness.

They love a politics that is the early to mid 2000s gamer webcomic console wars. So back to the back to platforms though. What is that? It's also like you see your people say like that you generate more value for companies by posting on Facebook and looking at ads and stuff and working at your job. But you don't necessarily agree with this. Yeah. So it's it's somewhat of a complicated issue and I don't want to get into too much like

Marxology here. But the classic sort of idea in Marx is there's productive labor and then there's unproductive labor. Productive labor is what we've been talking about manufacturing traditionally. But often it's anything has to do with wage labor and sort of capitalist control over the production process. That has to do with productive labor. It creates value of some sort.

The real question here is does sharing a meme on Facebook does that actually produce value in any sense? It produces data. That's for sure. But does it actually produce a value which we would ascribe to say the production of a car. And I think that's how dang the meme is Nick. That's the.

Well that's a good point. Yeah. And one measure dankness. Up to about 17 cents. And around here we let the faves do the talking. So really what we can say right. We can say is that like the platforms represent an explosion of exploitative but unproductive labor.

Yeah. So if you look at a sort of traditional again Marxist analysis advertising was not a productive thing. It was entirely designed just to sell the goods that have already been produced. So it doesn't actually produce more value. It just sort of a concretizes the value that already exists. And I think that's what we see now. Facebook and Google they are advertising companies first and foremost.

I think Facebook is like 96% of its money comes from advertising. Something like Snapchat 100% of its money comes from advertising. These aren't productive companies in any traditional sense. And what they do. And so what we have essentially made again a deal. We've made a very stupid deal with the devil where yes we may have these extremely invasive these extremely invasive like platform monopolist but also we don't get anything from it. So great.

Yeah. I suppose this is just a genuine question. When it comes to I mean obviously a lot of advertising is advertising bullshit that people don't need and that's why it's so heavily advertised. But I guess in a sense like there's a reason why advertising exists in that like it's not a completely it's not a completely economically useless phenomenon in the sense that like if you have produced a genuinely good and useful product people still need to know that it exists.

So there is kind of like it's like one of those things that kind of like lubricates even like let's say we have a hypothetically sane economy where the products are all useful. Advertising would still probably exist because people would need to know that there's a new idea. Yes but it's not productive in the Marxist sense of like extracting surplus labour value right. It doesn't actually create something that can be sold or whatever. Also Milo what you're basically describing as well as like late 19th century advertising

where it just very verbose like a box of dildos for sale. Dildos for sale never won. Right. But so the standard answer that what we often get with how what's with how do we solve this problem of pervasive platforms is that the issue that what like they're not creating value for us they're not paying workers very well etc etc the standard diagnosis is up there monopolism. But monopolism isn't really the problem and so I have something here from your article

on nationalizing these tech giants. What if competition is actually the problem rather than the solution. After all it's competition not size that demands more data more attention more engagement and more profit at all costs. It's competition that demands the tech giants expand and it's competition over who will be the dominant AI provider that leads the tech giants to constantly colonize new sources of data. The government's efforts to increase competition risk simply aggravating these problems.

I don't know if you could go into that a little bit more. Yeah so I think there's this real problem where there's a knee jerk instinctual reaction to say well we need more competition which is I would say the classic sort of liberal belief that more competition is always the answer. I bet you me and my wife's boyfriend. So yeah there's this idea that we've got incredibly massive companies that's undoubtedly true. We've got all these problems from those same companies that's undoubtedly true and you get the sort of conflation of these two things together to say well the problems that they

are causing are because they're so big. Actually I don't think that's correct. I think we haven't linked up the source of those problems which stem precisely from competition. So I'll give a sort of brief example which is you know YouTube leading to far right radicalization. Well the reason why that happens is because the algorithms have learned that in order to keep people on YouTube you lead them towards these increasingly radical perspectives and they'll keep going further and further down the rabbit hole and suddenly you know they're

doing a shooting somewhere on live streaming and on Twitch. Good morning to our listeners. But yeah so the problem here is that they're competing for the attention of these people of the users. The problem is not that they're a monopoly which has total control over the process. They're desperate to keep those users from going to Facebook, going to Netflix, going to any other website. So the result is that these companies don't really care about what happens in terms of

say the recommendation algorithms or in terms of surveillance. They're just interested in keeping people on their platforms. Well like by way of contrast something that's much less of a monopoly and highly competitive in data gathering is surveillance. Like for instance all of the Chinese tech companies vying for contracts in Xinjiang right now and that's like that's incredibly a competitive environment and it's providing all of this duplication and stuff but it's all about gathering as much oppressive surveillance data as possible.

Just having one isn't going to like make that imperative disappear. I love being really lonely and depressed and buying myself a Huawei phone just so I know that somewhere there's actually a Chinese intelligence services agent who has to listen to my problems. And one of the things that you say Nick is that we have to look at these not as problems of competition, not as problems of the market of a broken market but that the market is itself the problem. What's surprising for us to say that on this show and so you could say you say that we

could go even further and socialize the platform instead of leaving them a private hand. So increasing competition won't hold big tech in check what will. So we can think of unions and public ownership as ways in which we could decrease tech's control over us rather than the assumption that competing tech companies will offer less and less invasive schemes if the market demands it. So with unions I often think like we need to stop seeing tech workers as just highly paid programmers like tech is a misnomer. Like a delivery rider winning basic employment rights is winning rights for tech workers

just not winning rights for people we think of as tech workers. Yeah and I think actually there's a sort of interesting analysis of different companies in terms of their workforce. So Google's workforce for instance is largely dependent on these sort of highly paid people and they've started to organize together and what they've been effectively able to do is to push back on Google's involvement in various military projects which is great. So it's nice to see them organizing together but then you look at Amazon and Amazon is much more reliant on low wage workers in the warehouse rather than these sort of highly

paid workers. So you've got workers who have much less power much less influence and there hasn't been as much pushback as a result on Amazon and their involvement with the military. So I think you know unionizing workers is quite important for that sort of internal influence that these workers can have. It's been really a great success for the Amazon strategy of keeping their workers in cages. You can't unionize if you can't move. Exactly.

It's not all the Amazon workers are just put into like hushed caskets like from Halo so they can mentally control robots. So the other solution is of course public ownership right where the whole idea is unions in public ownership are ways that we can try to democratize these businesses whether that's from below where unions like push back against their practices or from above where we just bring them into public ownership because like a publicly owned Uber could get a democratic mandate to ensure zero carbon transport which is in fact something like what was proposed to the labor conference this year was a people's car club.

Yeah but that's both getting a sort of more adversarial relationship with these corporations which is like as opposed to waiting for one that's our friend. Yeah well I mean like this is why American Democrats have the world's most peasant mindset. They trust specifically Amazon more than the American military or their own party. Like I mean all of these things are genuinely horrible institutions that should be demolished but like they love Amazon because it gives them their recommendations because they buy West Wing season one and it just knows that they want West Wing season two in newsroom season one.

It is that easy to fool your average Democrat. Well I mean the thing about the American military is that they definitely have suggested purchases for sure when they've been one place they often get offered next door and they do do one day delivery but there is a really bad returns policy. So before we go on to our final reading. Just having a horrible idea of having a little card through your letterbox. We've left your drone strike with your neighbor. But my neighbor's a hospital owner.

So before we get on to the final reading I've got two kind of examples of some more of the things in which like fuck me. I subscribe to love it or leave it. The positive America comedy podcast because they have the most insane titles. Because he really needs to relax and unwind like everyone else. I love to hear a funny podcast where Kamala Harris makes a stirring speech because they have the stupidest titles and this is because they can't do puns and this is the best one catch me if Ukraine.

Oh that's really bad. A guy who can't finish sentences shouting at a wading bird. Catch me if Ukraine. Really hard about what can we do with crimes and Ukraine and crimes and Ukraine and just coming up with catch me if Ukraine. Yes there's the Seinfeld episode Ukraine is not a game. There's that it's right fucking there. And yet all of these people they're all of their cultural reference points are just like

box office smashes from 2002 to 2009. They are they're snake people. But so I have two examples of the of the platform economy where I think are very interesting. The first is 23 and me and the platformization of the self. So Kathy Hibbs 23 and me's chief legal and regulatory officer said this the way we look at our business is as a virtuous circle we have consumers who are interested in motivated around their own health how our genetics might influence our risk for certain conditions. So what they want to do is make discoveries that give customers more information they can

use to inform their health decisions and then use that information to pharma companies so they can better develop products that customers need. I mean in theory not a horrible idea just so long as you never have a private company anywhere near it. For example a lot of our customers suffer from being incredibly smooth brained. Interesting that not a single one of our customers is at all Cherokee sorry Liz Warren. I actually did 23 and me because I'm stupid and it did tell me that I am 100% like Britain and Britain and Ireland so genetically pissed.

Yeah I am genetically pissed but it's also I don't know what I expected. I am the opposite of diversity. Right so but so Nick what do you think of that idea of the virtuous circle of 23 and me that we're collecting information for customers then giving it to companies so they can work together and everyone's everyone's boats are lifted. Yeah I mean this is as part of the strategy of a lot of platforms is that as more and more people come on to the platform it benefits the other side of the platform so classic example here is Uber as you get more drivers you end up it becomes better as a

rider because you don't have to wait for a cab for very long and likewise as you get more riders on the Uber platform drivers don't have to wait for a fare so there's a sense in which platforms try to get more and more people on and everybody benefits from it. Of course you know like we said here the issue really is that these are for profit companies the sort of basic idea I mean you can imagine a 23 and me which was not about making profit but instead about actually using this for public health purposes. It exists. The public body genomics England which is run by the DHSC has sequenced 100,000 genomes

which it uses to study and treat rare diseases but it has been specifically locked out of Germany's much larger private database which only pharma giants like GSK can pay to access. Do they give you a little graph telling you that you're like 5% Belgian? That kind of efficiency is something only the private sector could give you. That's why I'm always twiddling my moustache and looking at little boys. Right and the thing is like it's public genomics England is using genetic data to treat profitable but important diseases to treat whereas 23 and me is using this to like market profitable but let's say not socially useful things like keeping the antibiotic carousel going.

Making a more effective painkiller. Better Viagra. Yeah effectively. Hell yeah now I'm in favor. Viagra that makes your dick even harder. Whoa. Not only does it make it hard it gives you two extra inches. Your dick is actually so hard it becomes soft again.

It's like they're just making like a chewable raspberry flavored Viagra when we have actual medical problems to solve. That's what you can say chewable dick. Finally. Look I need that just chewable if I'm on a coward. You know and these companies like 23 and me they're sky high valuations aren't based on $200 test kits and this is from Katie Spector Baghdadi. Don't do it Milo.

An assistant professor at the University of Michigan's medical school. No relation. Do we know it's no relation. I assume no relation. Oh my god they're sending it to ISIS but frantically pinning red string across the board. ISIS knows where to shoot us. Damn they know that we're half Irish. We're really pissed.

ISIS knows which neighborhoods in Staten Island they shouldn't fuck with. And so the data becomes a great business asset but there's another way that platforms work which is I think they're very good at disappearing the military. They're very good at distributing and hiding the oppressive apparatus of the state. Damn much like Varys. So this is this is Amazon. We feel strongly that defense intelligence and national security companies deserve access to the best technology in the world.

Because they're our special boys and they deserve treats. Yeah because look they're if anything they're not they just they get all the best toys. They can never like they get the rewards for getting a C and they always get second chances. Our big messy sons. And we are committed to supporting their critical mission of protecting our citizens and defending our country. Such as you know from families fleeing genocide in Central America. Or like pulling out from the border between Turkey and Rajava. Yeah like Amazon such as from dudes in Raqqa who we're not related to.

Amazon could just have replaced that sentence with the 14 words. Ice literally did do that. So it's yeah they will dig ice does frequently use one thousand four hundred and eighty eight and most of its communicates like they frequently just reference that number which is very odd. They just fucking love the Canterbury tales. That's all that's about right and a night there was and that's a worthy man. So this is this is something that you've that you've sort of touched on earlier in the episode Nick where you said that like Amazon's main main sort of product now isn't selling you Gugas.

Amazon's main project is to provide computing power to some of the world's most reprehensible white nationalist organizations. White supremacist organizations like ICE like the Home Office like whoever else supplying them with the cloud computing power. That's Amazon's main business right through AWS. Yeah yeah. I mean so right now there's a $10 billion contract from I think it's a Pentagon. So looking to do cloud computing and they're they're sort of likely to offer it to Amazon. The one hold up is Trump really hates Bezos. So everybody was saying Amazon's going to get this contract.

Amazon's going to get it and then suddenly Trump's like wait a second Bezos is going to get our money. I love him doing good things by accident because of his terrible brain. Very bad at golf. He's so petty. Very impolite. He's like this is this is basically like the Colleen Rooney Rebecca Varney thing. You know what it is. It is Louis the 15th trying to like kill all of the Huguenots and then being like well the Comptor Ross is going to do it and I don't like him.

So I probably won't bother. That's what like look it's like Trump is like like if this was like what like Holly or Mitt Romney or whatever or another sort of more competent fascist. Done like that. But instead we have a child king and it's wonderful. It's like it's like his his obsession with media beef is one of the few things that's actually like holding back just the most awful manifestations of crushing techno fascism. My obsession with media beef has given me Crohn's disease. This is our salute to you President Trump. Keep fucking with Bezos because ultimately it's more important.

Yes. Do not impeach him because even if that were possible because Pence would just the genocide would just be on. But instead we just have this bizarre Hollywood guy. Trump's like there's no ketchup at his house. Bye bye Jeff. Bye bye. Very shiny head. Very shiny.

If observers and critics are right this is from the ACLU and Amazon's Pentagon contract provide cloud computing services just a stepping stone in their real goal. Like every platform is infinite expansion and to take over sort of the entire government to take. Metal Gear Solid 2. Metal Gear Solid 2 just arsenal gear with a big fucking smiley swoosh on it. And they're looking to take over like they want to have the they want to put all in under one roof all the records for the IRS or the HMRC or fucking the Department of Defense. Subway loyalty card. They want they want to put all of these things in one server. And there's a very short distance from that from looking at from looking at your let's say NSA surveillance data and deciding what your tax bracket is based on that.

It's almost as though the most oppressive things that we could imagine about Stalinism are just slowly being replaced in Western capitalism by these giant tech companies. We're very sorry to report that the one server where we keep all the data has been accessed by Macedonian teenagers and they're now sending us pictures of our own feet. It's the Syrian online army is just going to own all of our data but like Metal Gear Solid 2 again predicted this but predicted a facet of this which we haven't talked about I think which is that the real power of this isn't just like the invasiveness of your data although it will be very invasive. But this like the scale of it like being having access to big data like huge amounts of information that you can just sort of flood anything with is just incredibly dangerous and that's just going to be the future now it's great. We love it. You can't you won't be able to decide if anything is true or not because you will just be overwhelmed with stuff that you barely have time to process. Yeah I mean combine this as well with Amazon basically rolling out surveillance devices just absolutely everywhere. And there's no way they can like watch all of the footage or anyone can it's just going to have to be processed algorithmically or whatever and then like sort of barely sorted in this huge torrent of shit.

Oh I know what we're going into. Okay I figured it out. It's not night. Everyone who says it's 1984 is a hack. It's not 1984. It's the niche one shot role playing game pen and paper role playing game paranoia. Yes friend. Yeah it's just going.

We're just our future is just paranoia where it's a it's a it's just set in a bunker and you have and your player has five clones and they're just in their servants of a computer but the computer is also insane. Somebody is adapting that for steam by the way. Oh sick. Yes. Okay. If I playing playing games on stream I will play paranoia on stream. But that's what it is. We're going to end up on this podcast with nerds.

Because you're such a Chad. Such a Chad. I should be busting right now. We're living. We're going to live in a world where we are ruled by a psychotic computer that we have to figure out ways to appease at any minute or like a little turret will just pop up and poison us with some like some. Cyanide and it will say here's we've delivered your your asthma medication or whatever we're it's it's it's a slapstick future that we're going into. Laurel and hard drive anyway. So but there's my last question will end on this right IBM filled concentration camps for the Nazis like they did that they ran they gave the Nazi Party all the information they wanted on all the Jews of Europe so that they could be effectively rounded up.

This is on essentially is doing something very similar for Trump it's filling concentration camps using by supplying ice with computing power at the southern border right. Does your platform model does the platform model allow for a differentiation between the two or is it essentially nothing ever changes more of the same. Yeah I mean I think I think the historical parallels are quite close I think that the infrastructure to to build and manage these things is very very similar. I mean the technology has been updated but you know the the effective outcome is people stuck in camps in both cases. And somehow less accountability now because it's at one remove from a person like nobody has to actually file the punch cards. Yeah there's it's we keep abstracting things away from away from actual workers they keep getting you can imagine the people finding the punch cards maybe they could have been like the workers at Google they were able to resist providing. Maven I think it was to us drone strike program but like an algorithm once you once you automate that an algorithm can't possibly unionize an algorithm can't say no except to you to you the individual. Right the algorithm is just gonna do what you tell it to do and you can't put and you can't put the algorithm in the dock at Nuremberg.

And nobody's gonna ever gonna put the people who designed it there. No unless it's like Futurama and then you get like a robot court where like they judge. We said we said it's like robot jail. But look I want to end on a slightly more maybe not not positive note because there's not much to be hopeful about right now with regards to the tech giants and their. Aside from sentencing a robot to go to jail that's quite funny. We automate everything we fill the jails with robots guarded by robot guards and then everyone just lives in a kind of weird paradise. We just have we keep all the jails but they're fully automated including the inmates with luxury carceral state without sourced crimes to robots taking all the damn job. You don't have to feel bad about police brutality if it's robots beating up robots.

Yeah it's just that it's just that movie robot jocks keeping keeping the non Wolverine career of Hugh Jackman alive. But robot jocks like shock jocks you're listening to robot and the circuit. But like look when I say I have you know not because anything good's happening yet. No we did just we did just get to facilitating genocide like we but we know we know what we have to do to stop these things and that's nationalize these bitches. And unionize like organize from the bottom and like seize ownership from the top. All right everybody thinking they're your friends. They're not your friends. All right.

I don't like you before the next episode. If everyone could just unionize and nationalize the tech giants. That would be great. And that's us your friends in the fancy podcast asking you to do it. So come on. Come on. Come on. You know you want to nationalize them.

They're not your friends. They read your diary. They told everyone about that time that you shit yourself. No they're not good. Yeah. So it falls to me now only to say Nick thank you very much for coming and chilling with us today. Thank you for having me. Nick's book is going to be out in 2020.

So if you want to get it on a non-Amazon link I'm sure there will be one of those up. So we'll we'll plug that when it's out when it's available for pre-order. But in the meantime you could get Nick's existing books platform capitalism and inventing the future. So at least one of those on verse on one's on polity right. Yes. Yes. Get it out of directly from the publishers. Give them a those are good publishers.

Get it on wish.com. Why not? You can't search on wish.com. It needs to be the algorithm. So you just need to sort of alter your behavior enough for wish.com to sell you. Listen to this podcast several times in a row until it starts recommending you next books. But like a weird knockoff of Nick's book that like written in like Google translated from Chinese. Oh yeah.

And I'll have a picture of a dick on the front of the summary. We haven't been mentioning this lately but we're down to like our last like 10 or so shirts. And we only have them when medium large and then double XL. No. Fury the medium. I'm not sure there are any largest left actually. I think the largest might be gone. There are mediums left.

Yeah. And then there are double XL's left. So if you're a very thick boy. So if you like the show medium or the magazine double XL then you should purchase our shirts. Slick. Yeah. Thank you very much. Also Milo do you have comedy dates coming up?

This is coming up Tuesday. Yeah. I've got a I've got a smoke comedy on the 23rd of October which will be in a week after this episode comes out on the following Wednesday. So come down to that. The headline is going to be Dan Muggleton trash huge champion and also Victor Petrashkin and another trash huge champion. So there aren't three people who've been on Pope Lonergan. Yeah. Damn.

Yeah. It's a TF heavy lineup. It's TF heavy. Get yourself down there. You know it's going to be great. And otherwise like I said like I've been trying to tell myself to say again. Our theme song is provided by Jinseng. It's called Here We Go.

Listen to it on Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. And as we've teased we also have a Patreon episode coming out on Thursday which is the next in our explorations of of pop pop science writers with Chapeau Traphouse's Felix Biedermann. So do hop on our Patreon in anticipation of the the episode intelligence 3.0. That's right folks. We've released another update of intelligence.

But with with that in mind, I think we can sign off. Yeah. All right. Enjoy your commute or your shit or sitting in your bed waiting to fall asleep. Goodbye. Bye. Bye.