TRASHFUTURE - Operation Clippy feat. Edward Ongweso Jr

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

Oh, the UK has an algorithm that reinforces class hierarchy and suppresses social mobility in the education system? Weird how that happens--surely that's not the point! To discuss this, we’ve brought on tech journalist Edward Ongweso Jr (@bigblackjacobin) of the This Machine Kills podcast (@machinekillspod) to discuss it with Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum). We also discuss the UK’s fixation on murdering asylum seekers in the English Channel, as well as a Niall Ferguson article about how TikTok is ‘digital fentanyl.’ You will love it. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.  *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

Hi, friends. Just a quick heads up. In keeping with the tradition set and our earliest episodes, we had audio trouble on this recording. Riley introduces our guest, Edward, but right at the critical moment, everything failed. So, don't be surprised when there's a bit of an awkward transition when you're expecting a response. Thank you for your patience, and thank you so much for listening. Breaking news, breaking news, breaking news. New Matt Hancock photos have surfaced. I repeat, new Matt Hancock photos have surfaced. We have new Matt. The new Matt Strops. Yeah. Game set and Matt's, baby. All the cool Zoomers are queuing round the block outside,

just to see if they can cop the new Matt. Supreme X Matt Hancock. Yeah, that's right. I know that this is about Matt Hancock, but this could also mean, when you say Matt, say more so thinking about Matt the Telegraph cartoonist, who does all the kind of really clip you know. Who gets paid like 600 grand a year. To do like very bad comments. What about Matt Hancock Islamic prayer mats? Yeah. Well, they're, why not? I'd use that. I'd use that. So, we're going to do a quick Matt rundown here. The first new Matt. These are all old photos. They're Deadstock Vintage from a 2018 football game at, I believe, Torrey Party Conference

played between a political pundits, like centrist pundits and politics writers and Torrey MPs. Yeah. I have to say, the centrist pundits are looking surprisingly chad next to Torrey MPs. I mean, you'd think that would be easy, right? Yeah. I think in the first picture, and I might be wrong, but in the first picture, the blonde guy who's looking up is Robert the Kike, who used to be a mentor of mine back in the day. He looks like a lot like Dolph Lundgren. I've never seen his legs before, but he's surprisingly jacked. In this photo, Matt sees the ball coming.

Yeah. It's like feet apart, knees together. He sees the balls though. He's controlling a particularly errant kite. He does look as though he is trying to hold in a pee. In the next picture, it's time to go for the header, so he does what every pro does and closes his eyes and just tries to get his precious little forehead in contact with the ball. But his feet aren't leaving the ground. He's on tiptoes. He looks as though he's attempted to jump, but forgotten that you need to leave the ground. He's got to save his ankles for parkour.

Yeah. He's doing car phrases, always be doing leg day. And also, if anyone wants to ask, does he have a clear dick print through his football shorts? Yes. Yeah. Matt Hancock is hung like a fucking donkey. Actually, the blonde centrist pundit guy next to him, I've realized he doesn't look exactly like Dolph Lundgren. He looks like Mr. Stamper from Tomorrow Never Dies. Yes. The final of the new Matt's that we're revealing today. This is a real good Matt. On our Matt Hancock review podcast, you know we like to save the best Matt for last. We weren't going to let you go without like,

you know, really, really hitting it at the park in the last Matt. Yeah. Matt is doing a face looking at the ball that I can only describe as East Ender's character who's walked in to find his wife murdered. That is the face. So in the acting, yes. Yeah. He looks a lot like Ian Biel in this picture. He looks like he's just mid-kick figured out that he can levitate the ball with telekinesis. Two words for you. Telekinesis. Yes. So this is the best Matt, I think. This is the one that most of the resellers are going to

be going for. You know, if you see this Matt for less than $500 on the street, you should buy it. You're probably going to double your money. Yeah. Put it on Depop. Yeah. Absolutely. So yeah, these are the Matt's that the kids are going crazy for now. Collect him, trade him. We love the Matt's. Yeah. That bag, but in Pogful. Hello and welcome back to this free episode of TF. You know what it is. You know the podcast you're listening to. The only podcast that is also citations needed. We are talking today. We, of course, being myself, Riley Milo. Hello. Yeah. Welcome back to Thresh Future.

This is my voice now. Not again. I'm going to be talking like this for the whole episode. Yeah. Welcome to the podcast. No, you fucking cocks. It's great to be out here on the world to recording this podcast. For the love of God. No. No, we are not. No, off the rails. It's three minutes. Jerk van der Klerk has died on his way back to his home planet. Um, it's been so long since I've, we've heard from Jerk van der Klerk. And in my opinion, it should be a while before we do. So again, or Father McMurphy, fuck off. I will not be silenced on this podcast. Quite frankly, the disgrace attempts to ignore the

well of the Northern Irish people. Okay. We also have Hussein who thankfully does not do as many voices. I don't do any voices except on the M25 very late at night on my own. Yeah, that's right. But I'm fresh back from a cancelling Genghis Khan. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's so fucking stupid. He did some bad shit and he's got a, he's got to be held accountable. Yeah. Yeah. He can't work up and down, up and down the steps. He is persona non grada. We also, we also, he's going on Trigapod. We also have Alice. Yeah. Fresh off getting canceled for making fun of the New York city sanitation department's dress uniform. Excuse me. Some of them have medals. Like they have like, they have like,

um, like, no, like metals, like in mill, in the mill, in army. Yeah. Like genuinely, if you, if you would like get to a high enough rank in the New York city department of sanitation, they give you a kind of uniform that's like half troop, half cop. It looks like if you went to party city and just said army, please. Yeah, it's rules. Anyway, so that's what's, that's what's going on in our lives. But we are also very happy to be joined by Edward Anguiso Jr., who is a tech writer with Motherboard, any co-host of This Machine Kills podcast with friend of the show, Jathan Sudowski and former guest as well. Edward, welcome to the show.

We're going to talk about a few things today. We've got, we're going to do a few, a few bits of the news, current events. Yeah, we're going to do a few bits. We've got, um, we're going to talk about the, the sort of the, the UK giving itself over to the cult, continuing to give itself over to the cult of the, of the algorithm in terms of either public service or empire, whatever you want to call it, um, and allowing itself to be taken back to, eagerly allowing itself to be taken back to the 19th century by, um, a computer we're not allowed to understand, talk a little bit about surveillance. And then I have a very fun little reading for the end of everything. So let's get going. Um, we're going to start, I think, with, uh,

the A level crisis. Uh, yes, the, yeah, we, we couldn't not talk about it. It was so us. Um, yeah. Let me explain this for, for the listeners, right? The way things work in the UK with exams, uh, we kind of make you decide what you want to do with your entire life when you're 16, uh, you pick which subjects you do in school, you study them, uh, between 16 and 18 to get into university. And normally you apply to university and your teacher predicts what grades you'll get on an exam, uh, and universities make you an offer on that basis. And then you sit the exam and if you get those grades, then you take the offer. And if you don't, then you have to get another offer, right? Uh, what happened this time is because of the plague,

um, they can't sit any exams. And so what they decided is, well, we're not going to just use the predicted grades. That would be easy. What we're going to do, uh, is make everything nice and fair by feeding it into the racism computer. And the racism computer says, what the racism computer says is, wow, it looks like a bunch of poor kids would have fucked up these exams. And so students who have got like, uh, A's and A's stars their entire lives, uh, are getting like grades, not just predicted grades, but they grades for like an exam they quote unquote sat that are like B, C, C. Yeah. Sorry, we meant to use the sexism computer, but it was unavailable. It's, it's sort of like if you had a grade point average of like

3.9, right? And you went to sit the SAT and somebody came over and marked all of the answers for you and decided that you got like a 300. Yeah. But the way that they decided that was by going around your neighborhood and seeing how many broken windows there were. Oh, nice. Broken window examination. They had like a collaboration with Giuliani and some officials from the, uh, New York, uh, city education system is good. You know, strong relationship, but a special relationship is still strong. That's right. These kids are getting too many UCAS points. I mean, effectively, yeah. Um, that's, that's more or less what it is, right? Where, um, we have, we have decided collectively that we are going to, we are just going to assume

that if your class is, is large, we are just going to, um, school class rather than social classes. Well, if your school class is large and your social class is the largest one, the working class be so swollen and we are going to make, we are going to mark all of your exams down. And like this is, it's, it's actually, this is something it's difficult to, to talk about simply, right? Because on the one, well, the simple, the simple way is that we've just kind of disinherited an entire generation of 18 year olds. It's difficult to talk about simply, right? Because on the one hand, social mobility via education has been officially canceled for the year because the Tories were like, well, can't let anyone get great inflation because then

employers might not take them seriously. So in order to save some of them, we need to basically just fuck up a lot of their futures. So number one, on the obvious, on the obvious level, they have canceled social mobility for the year. Um, and they've done it via some kind of algorithm that they refuse to share. But the second level is that like, it's not like when this doesn't happen, when everyone can sit their A levels, like it's at any, in any way good that we're saying that, you know, someone's ability to meaningfully compare and contrast to Shakespeare plays the age of 17 is a really good way to allocate lifelong prosperity to them. We're the only country that makes you decide if you want to be a doctor, you had better have

that shit figured out at 15 and no later. Yeah, you better be wiping asses and a nursing home at 15. Otherwise you would never become a doctor. You got to work your way up. Exactly. Why is that the like sort of idea of the operating ideology for this, for the education system that you got to know everything by the time you're, you know, just about to enter like the part of the world where you might get some experience with what you're going to figure out you want to do. You're just about to enter it and then you have to sit like two sets of exams upon which you're like pretty much entire future depends. It's very healthy. It's very normal. And so what we're seeing here is another trash future classic of the thing that was bad before has become bad in a louder way.

Like it's just kind of taken the fig leaf away. Yeah, someone's turned up the enne. So I want to, I want to sort of bring this Edward into your realm of expertise and look at an example of how this algorithm actually worked. So basically, if you were giving your, you're going to get your teachers predicted grades or you could have it downgraded. Now, when they tried this in Scotland, only 6.9% of the marks that affluent schools were marked down versus 15.2% of grades in schools in poorer areas. So there is a, and they admit that it's biased. How could that happen in Scotland, the most left-wing country on earth? The funny part, the funny part is that this was a huge all-enveloping scandal for the S&P,

as well as should have been, mind you. And the people who are pursuing them on this most vigorously included the Scottish Conservatives, who then had to delete a bunch of tweets very hastily. So we see that there is this biased result. And one of the main, and they said, well, no, we're not biasing it against poor people. We didn't put wealth in as a criterion. Instead, what we used was, we used a number of cars. We used class size, which might as well be eccentricity of uniform. If you have to wear like a crevasse in a 15th century skirt to school, you are keeping your A. What they said was, they said, look, if you're in a class of under 15 people, then we're going to assume your teacher predicted correctly. And a class of under 15 people is

almost exclusively something that you'd have at like... Yeah, no state school has a class size under 15. So under 30, you'd be lucky. And so Edward, as someone who writes about this kind of thing quite a bit, how does that strike you? The fact they said, well, no, we haven't used wealth. We've just used something perfectly correlated with wealth. Yeah, you know what I mean? Everyone who loves their races, their sexes and computers, they always rely on proxies for the very thing that they're claiming they're rooting out the bias for. Like in the United States, though, one of the ways pre-algorithm school funding is... School funds are allocated as zip code, but what is zip code a proxy for? It's a proxy for race and it's a proxy for socioeconomic

status because of the way in which neighborhoods are redlined or segregated and those lines are enforced. And I think with algorithms, that's like a problem we're also seeing here where people are trying to be like, hey, it's evidence-based. There's no actual problem here. We're being fair, but the evidence they're using, the data they're using is still biased. When you're collecting data, usually that bias is a certain population so that you can watch that population closer and justify taking shit away from them. And the other thing here is that this is not just a hopes the government fucked up and canceled the main type of social mobility for the year that barely exists in a residualized form. It's not just that. It's also

a labor issue because teachers aren't trusted to evaluate their students, even though they're the ones doing the actual work of teaching. And the ones who work hardest and trusted the least, the ones with the largest class sizes, are the ones who's predicted grades just like, wow, you just made that up, didn't you? Yeah. So I'm also interested to hear your thoughts on this, right? That these algorithms aren't just ways to force through and depoliticize something that a revanchist right-wing government might want. It's also a way to massively disempower the workers that are involved. Right. I think it was Astra Taylor wrote something about thinking of capitalism as like an insecurity machine where you have algorithms that are

being deployed in digital technologies, not simply to discriminate or to justify discrimination, but also to create cycles of dispossession and disruption and de-legitimization so that future technologies can come in with now fallow ground and reap and harvest and build up new infrastructures that are privatized. Because now you don't trust the teachers, you're spreading the idea that their labor is not to be trusted, results are self-interested, that really the algorithm knows best, and then what happens after that? Then you come in with attempts to restructure the labor force or to teach a teacher force with private private partnerships with new systems and new organizations that allow for the algorithm to be centered more squarely as the way to justify

who gets insecure treatment and who's dispossessed and who's fucked up and not allowed to get the minimal level of social mobility and then who is allowed to be kept secure and whose investment in that new insecurity machine is kept secure. Because now you're prioritizing the people made the algorithm, the companies behind the algorithm, the welfare of these small state private schools that have those small classes in the first place, it just ends up being, I guess, another way to discipline labor and discipline the working class in a pretty sneaky way. For me, the funniest part about it, though, was that Gavin Williamson, our education secretary, who is a man who looks like the demon headmaster and must presumably have resulted from, like,

a Nazi experiment to transport a pig's brain into a human body, went on TV and said, well, we have to downgrade all the results to prevent people from being overpromoted into jobs they're underqualified for, and it's like, my guy. Actually, I think that was a misquote, I'm afraid. He said the problem was that the marks wouldn't mean as much and would be because people say, oh, well, those were the marks that weren't impartially given, so we're not going to trust them. People would act like giant shitheads, so we're going to preempt them. But I think the interesting thing here as well is that it's like, if you know in

Futurama, when you first, like, are born or come to the future, you're given a career chip, and it just analyzes your DNA, and it tells you what you're going to do, and at this point- It analyzes how much karma is in your body. It tells you whether you're going to be a podcast. Yeah, at this point, it seems to be like, you might as well, just depending on what postcode you're born in, you're then given your A-levels, and then you wait 18 years and you go to university. You may as well have a formalized caste system. What's the point at this stage of just making people go through the motions of comparing some Shakespeare plays? Why bother? Yeah, you just try and live a good life, and then you hopefully

get reincarnated as someone who goes to eat. It's also paranoia. Friend Computer assigns you into a security grade. Also, it's very funny to me that we don't have a vast recruitment need for new doctors or new nurses in the middle of the largest pandemic any of us have ever seen. We're not graduating medical school classes early in order to serve in hospitals, so it's fine that we're just taking all of these people who were presumably eminently qualified to get into medical school or get into law school or get into wherever else, and just being like, you know, actually, why don't you just do something else? It's the same thing where you have an eviction crisis where if half of America's renters can't

pay their rent, then they're all evicted. No one lives in those houses because the scarcity is important. You need to keep the scarcity. You need to keep social mobility scarce so people keep competing against each other. You need to keep housing scarce. I know it's a function of class, right? I know it's material, but it's so tempting to think, because I'll drive to personalize this stuff is so strong. It's so tempting to think whether you're looking at the government in the UK or the US, these people are all secret accelerationists, right? There is some shit with the old dudes from trading places happening here, where they're like, we're just going to take all of their exams away and see what happens.

Yeah, you know, or maybe the fail sons are like secretly trying to unionize and just like protect their own interests and prevent everybody. My 49M, 18M, 19M, 21M fail sons have unionized. I'm saying we haven't heard from you in a while. What do you think about all this? This is a crazy, crazy world as normal in the rainy islands of Britain. I think there's like, the things that I was noticing were, first of all, that I believe, and I'm not sure, I think I saw this tweeted out a couple of times, which was that the Royal Statistical Society actually did offer to help the government improve their algorithm in April. So before all this, so they sort of anticipated that like, this is going to be a lot of hard work. And you know,

there could be a huge margin of error if this isn't corrected. And the government had basically said, yes, but you have to sign these NDAs, which means that even if we fuck up, you're not allowed to talk about it for like five years or something like that, which is a very good example of like, maybe like this government sort of anticipating the kind of mountain of failure beforehand and their kind of priority was like, well, you know, just don't like, you know, damage the cloud too much. The second thing was more about the reaction of this. And I think that like, what's interesting is I was thinking about what happened, what would happen in a reverse situation

where the grades that were based on predicted grades, what if they all like increased? And will it feed into this narrative that has been going around tabloid newspapers in this country for a very long time, which is that exams are just too easy. And it's easy to walk out with an A or an A star. And then by extension, so it was easy to get into medical school because the algorithms all kind of like, let you do that. And I sort of wonder whether the outrage would actually in Britain would be greater if students had actually done better. Divinity and alchemy back on the curriculum. My question is like outrage from where? Because like, yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

I think that's what would like, actually cause an outrage that like, harmed the Tories because they're up in the polls by two points and labor it down. So all of the people, all of the people who are being polled, all of the people who are over 18 and do not have to worry about this and can just be, be spiteful towards the young are like, yeah, no, this is fine. Jeremy Clarkson can do his yearly tweet of, well, I got a C in two years at A level and my car goes 200 miles an hour. This was another thing too that I thought I noticed online when this was all happening, which was that it was very quick for lots of people to transition from like,

I feel very sorry for like these people, these young kids who have been working really hard and who are like getting screwed over by the government. It was very quick for that to turn into middle-aged people talking about like how valuable they felt their university experience was on campus and or how, you know, with a bit of hard work, you know, you can get to where you want to go to, et cetera, like all this kind of like, we have to make it about ourselves. Instagram motivational bullshit. Back in those days, you could say what you wanted to on a university campus. The best, the best kind of reply, and I saw this in a BBC Newsnight, when BBC Newsnight put out a segment this morning, and I think Nate tweeted this out,

there was like a guy whose bio, Twitter buyer was like 81 years old, XRAF, XNHS and he's responding to this Newsnight package about a young immigrant who learned English when he was in his teenage years and then got a place at UCL to study physics or something like that. He needed an A star and he got downgraded to an A by the algorithm. So this old guy who has like a stupidly funny name, I can't remember what it is, this guy basically responds saying, you know, welcome to the real world, Ibrahim. And like, it could be a fake account, but I feel like this is the sentiment, this is the sentiment for a lot of British people. It's not a lot in the Quran.

Britain is sadistic. It's a sadistic country that hates the idea that anyone anywhere could be possibly having a good time that they didn't suffer for. And the correct answer, if you have to guess between two options is always going to be the one with more sufferings. This island is diseased, but on the subject, listen to our next premium episode about trans rights. Really quickly, the one that really sent me was Catlin Moran, centrist shithead, who never cares about anything being fucked. But of course, her eldest daughter was getting her A level result. So suddenly this enters the mind sphere of Catlin Moran or something she actually cares about rather than another another thing to talk about, Joe Moicrobny for, right?

And so she was going like, Oh, you know, this is going to radicalize the young against this Tory government. Like this will have a long tail, believe me. And it's like, do you think young people are voting like, what do you like? Have you been asleep for 10 years? I wonder if in the last sort of several years, there was some kind of major crisis that curtailed the life chances of people who are sort of entering or were in their early stages of entering the workforce that caused them to, you know, sort of unify politically around some kind of and get owned. Like you can't be like, Oh, these people are going to coolly register to vote when you've spent the last five years making coolly and angrily waiting to register to vote, showing it to be as useless as possible.

Who are they going to? Who are the fuck are they going to register to vote for? Keir Starmer. Just very quickly, we had like the student protests in 2010, right? Like we've had that, we've had all that and it hasn't changed anything. If anything, like things have been worse and you've just been told to like suck it up and the only like the only kind of chance that you could kind of even get any mild sort of change, you were met with like, you know, you were kind of accused of facilitating racism or anti-Semitism. So I don't know, like, you know, maybe, but yeah. Guys, there's only one solution cut to a fog, a fog strewn Scottish moorland, me in a big hooded cloak hiking across it, going up, going up to someone standing on a cliff staring

aimlessly out to see... Swinson. It's time. You must return. No, I retired, you must. Yeah, we have to go back to the Swin Zone. My favorite one was the wallets, they're free of skills. My favorite one, yeah, well no one's getting skills in their wallets anymore. No, exactly. The algorithm took all the skills out of the wallets. We can no longer afford anyone to have skills. The first set of student protests were about the taking away all the money and now they've taken away all the grades. There's literally no point in doing anything except just, I don't know, Twitch streaming, I guess. This country would abolish the youth if it could vote to.

And it's trying. My favorite one, though, was from James Bethel, who said, I fluffed my A-levels, taught me how to hustle, first to get a place at university and haven't stopped ever since. Grades are great, but grit and perseverance win every time. Dispelled university wrong in the tweet. Now, Edward, do you want to guess what James Bethel's job is? Oh, God. I got money on financial services or maybe he's like some sort of Tory. Something like political. Getting warmer, but no, much older than that. James Bethel's a Lord. Oh, my God.

Hereditary Lord. He wasn't made a Lord. He was born one. He was born in a molded body. Yeah. You were really adopted the peerage. Just under a bunch of men like it an enormous cloak going, You're a big guy. You're a noble guy for you. So, and he basically, and he's actually a minister as a hereditary peer. He's a minister in the Department of Health, and he's the minister for innovation who works for Matt Hancock. So he's like Hancock squared. And here's the great thing.

He awarded a £191 million contract for COVID genetic sequencing to DNA Nudge, a company we've talked about on this podcast. Jesus. Fuck yeah. I love it when the alumni come back for a fucking cameo. So like, so it's just, it's, it is fucked on every level where the premise of meritocracy is fucked. The meritocracy itself, even in theory, which is already bad, isn't actually happening at all. And we seem to be taking every step in our arsenal to keep it from happening to preserve Britain's caste system. The patented trash-shoot your algorithm has downgraded the vibes too fucked. What if these people, when they talk about hard work and,

and grit and perseverance and just talking about like, you know, they had to work really hard to bribe people and to get into the right places. And like, you know, that's, that's, that's how you pick yourself up by the bootstraps. You learn who's corruptible and you learn who, you know, is willing to look the other way. Well, this guy hasn't even needed to do any corruption, right? You got to get your right A-levels to get out of the, you know, they're pushing back the relevant A-levels now to the sperm. Right. You have to make sure you get into the right uterus. Or you just have to- I mean, none of this, none of this means anything. I don't have any A-levels. I'm a podcaster now, right? But anyway, I have very good A-levels and I'm still a podcaster.

Exactly. There is, it's almost as if this isn't really tied to anything, except our insanely, like, ossified system of class. Yeah. So we appeared, so basically, through sheer ineptitude, we have created a situation where the entrance criteria for Oxbridge are exactly what they were in the 1800s, but we've used a bunch of algorithms and apps. Yeah, you have to, you have to sway your loyalty to God and the Queen. That's right. So. You are allowed to keep a bear as a pet though. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So the other thing that's been happening recently is we have, once again, sort of concocted out of nothing, a sort of moral and political panic about- That's right, alchemy back on the curriculum.

About people crossing the channel from Calais, refugees coming to Britain. Oh. Our very own migrant caravans at last. So just for some- Julius Caesar's legions are not welcome here. Yeah. For context, the number of refugees in Britain is one of the smallest of any country in Europe. It's about nine. And the percentage of those refugees that get here from crossing the channel is a vanishingly small proportion of that number. So, you know, I know it's liberal bullshit to be like, oh, crisis is not really a crisis, but just do keep in mind that this is entirely a media confection. No, but the thing is, it's a staging point for when it becomes one, right? Because

I know you put this ahead further up, but, you know, the last intact ice shelf in Canada has now like detached and melted. It's not to do Camp of the Saints, right? But like, it seems pretty obvious that the migration, quote unquote, crisis that we've seen so far is like a prelude to something much more dramatic in terms of necessary migration as big bits of the planet become unlivable. And it feels like it's a very calculated effort to get this stuff on the agenda now of, oh, we do the gunboats and the Navy, and we do the barbed wire. And that way, when we stop doing the dress rehearsal and the real thing happens, everybody's going to be that much more comfortable with just straight up ecofacets. And I've got some bad news. I just fed necessary migration

into the racism computer, and it's come back as an invasion. Oh, no. So, basically, a little more on this, what's happening, yes, is that a massive media circus has basically turned this into a crisis. We've gone from ferries doing donuts in the Thames to journalists' boats doing donuts in the fucking channels, trying to find these boaters, some of whom, like Bethel, are actual aristocrats have been getting into boats and then riding up beside my boats full of refugees who are frantically bailing water out, trying not to die, and shouting over to them, hey, are you from Syria? They've somehow done reverse Dunkirk. Like, they've got a bunch of guys in fishing boats to go out and scream at people who are

trying to cross the channel to get away from being murdered. So, again, once again, this country is a grim and sadistic place, and our media is deeply complicit in and active, not just complicit in. Do they have the Joe Rogan experience there? And as a result of this, right, there is now, of course, the Tories can say, well, there's pressure on us. They don't care. They can say whatever they want, but they say, oh, well, there's pressure on us to stop these crises, to stop these crossings. Oh, and of course, they're being done by the mafia. We don't have any proof for that. Oh, yeah. And Preeti Patel is basically appointed a military commander to oversee channel crossings. Good. And this is Dan Mahoney. He was appointed by Patel as the clandestine

channel threat commander said, these crossings are dangerous and unnecessary, and I'm determined to stop them, which I assume means by making them so dangerous that no one could possibly do one. This is exactly what Frontex was doing in the Mediterranean. I know FBPE people have had their moments in the sun of like, oh, well, you can't expect a coordinate security with France because you're not in the EU anymore. And you know who's really good at killing migrants is the EU, and everybody who was paying attention to that is just like, wait, what? That's what you thought was good about the EU. Yeah. So essentially, there has been a plan to try to put gunboats in the channel, but that has been scrapped because of, well, it's illegal international law. It's likely

very illegal. Don't get me wrong. I believe they want to do it. I think they'll probably find a way to do it. And if they're not going to do it now, then maybe once, because Greenland just went into something called an upward spiral of melting now. So it reached a tipping point the other day. So it's going to be like Ohio in 10 years. So at some point, it's going to be just drinking monster energy everywhere, but it's going to be that in about 10 years. So Alice, could you please play the drop? Well, you kill me. 100 years from now, there won't be one sad to look in any of this. What keeps you going? You know what it is? I just don't think about it.

That's right. Tori's trying to make Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men into a documentary. Get blackpilled. Get the thing above blackpilled, where you just like start day drinking, I guess. Yeah. Well, the thing about it is going to be like algorithmically adjusted children of men. So depending on which men you're the children of, that will affect your position in the ultimate dystopia. That is kind of the plan, which we're going to talk about after this. So of course, Paul Mason responded by saying, pushback of refugee boats would be illegal. I don't believe the first sea lord would sanction the Royal Navy doing it. And Preeti Patel is insulting our armed forces by even suggesting that they could intentionally put civilian lives at risk.

Sunday, buddy, Sunday. Really encapsulates the first price you've ever seen. Well, that's not me. I feel like it's not quite fair to equate the rest of the armed forces with the parachute regiment. Who are a special kind of psycho? Oh, sorry, liberal Milo. They invented a kind of boxing where you're not allowed to block or dodge punches. It's a special kind of psycho. So, you know, the Sensible's brigade is definitely out in force. Again, looking at the genuine demonization and the creation of a moral panic around people legally, like legally, again, it doesn't matter. It's the rule of power at this point. Claiming asylum in the country so they don't get killed. And a Tory MP commenting on Patel's plan

said, she talked about how the asylum system is broken and is exploited by lefty labor supporting lawyers who are sending us legal letters every day to try to stop us removing people from this country. Yes, pulling labor is a crime. It's not a political orientation. She said she has the legislation coming forward and it's going to be difficult, but it's going to give the left a meltdown. Trickering the lips. Sounds fucking great. Yeah, that's exactly it. Is it bringing back the despotty but only for illegal immigrants? You know, you know, the funny thing is that like, she might well be able to do all of this and then the bodies will like wash up on shore and then we'll have like 500 people sticking cameras in their faces and then we'll also have cameras doing

Vox pops from Marjorie and Dean in South End who will still hate Prissy Patel and think she's not going far enough because of, you know, cultural markers. I have to say, and this is one of the things I mean with the greatest sincerity is an incredible embarrassment to Britain that someone who's as much of a just evil bloodless psycho as Prissy Patel has been allowed to become like even by the standards of the current Tory administration, she really is a horrendous piece of shit. For international listeners, I cannot stress enough how much this woman would make Satan's asshole worse by her presence and I can't, I think it just indicates how morally bankrupt we've become that the woman who loves the death penalty and hates all immigrants has

somehow become like fucking the home section. I mean, her entire policy philosophy is one which is trying to evoke the most Krylaf emojis online as she can, right? Yes. Yeah, 100%. It is children of men. Government by boomer twister. Children of men but like where most of the people in dystopia in England fucking love it. Yeah. They love that only Britain soldiers on. They love that like everyone's in cages. I love that there are no young people left. Yeah. This is the world that they want. This is literally the world that they want. They want to live in children of men. They see children of men and they're like, fuck yeah, all the all of the art and like the all the all the arts away. There are no children and everywhere I look,

there are immigrants in cages. More of this. They love children of men because dudes rock. Yeah, that's right. So I want to sort of go going back a little bit to your sort of area of expertise, Edward. I want to talk about how this just sort of visceral evil, essentially, is able to be coolly detached and systematized and put into an algorithm. And it's all it's a similar thing. It's the second side of the coin of the algorithm with the education system, right? Where it's that feeling of it's the feeling of contempt for the young or hate of the four of the foreigner that is able to be detached and depersonalized and made to look objective. Yeah, you know, I think a lot of, you know, energy is spent trying to rescue policing, right?

Because it's in the midst of a legitimacy crisis, you know, as is a lot of society. And, you know, in the United United States, specifically, we have, you know, sort of the origins of this going back to this paper published in 2011, you know, called police science. And in it, they're basically calling for a reformation of science's role. They want it to be more embedded in policing so that we can have policies that are evidence based to convince the public, you know, that they're not racist and they're not violent. And actually, they're just they're using force the way that the data dictates that they should. And, you know, that I think this rings even more true in the middle of like a move, you know, with the defund the police movements,

right? Where you have, you know, calls for reducing funding to police departments, undermining their ability to extract resources from the public through, you know, either just seizing assets through forfeiture or through, you know, excessive fines, you know, all the ways in which police can plunder a community, you know, that is, you know, maintained also through a public funding initiative that they'll defend, you know, by saying, look, the world is competitive. And when it comes to public services, we need to be legitimate, we need to be seen as objective and evidence based. And so we have to use science, we have to do collaborations with university departments, we have to hire anthropologists, so that we can understand like

the lived experiences of people before we, you know, you cave their skulls in, like we have to, you know, appear as if we're really, you know, empathetic and caring so that people don't challenge it and so that we can continue to also gain more autonomy. But when you look at it, you know, when you look at the history of this attempt to use technology to depoliticize things, you know, there's a long track record, you know, in the United States going back to like, let's say the 1890 census where, you know, the reason why their computational devices were used and that was so they could, you know, justify why black people were being thrown into the prison system, which at that time was an immediate descendant of, you know, slavery, right? And

Well, thank God that that's changed, you know, exactly. And, you know, they were trying to figure out, you know, why is it that black people are so criminal? Why are they in jail all the time? It turns out that they're just inferior, they're, you know, they're wild, they're savage, they're, you know, whatever sort of, you know, narrative was you want to throw out was used to justify that. And I think that, you know, you can trace this in pretty much almost every major iterative stage of technological development, right? The attempt to say that what it is right now is because of history and, you know, or some inherent nature to it, it's liberalizing, it's, it's all consuming, it's, you know, impossible to contain, it's like fire.

And if you try to stand, you know, in front of it, you're actually holding back nature and you're holding back reality and you're trying to delude yourself into something that's not real. So, you know, that you end up with like, you know, shitheads and, you know, the states constantly quoting like FBI statistics, being like, well, you know, look, like crime statistics show that black people do disproportionate amount of crime, you know, towards each other, or in the society at large and ignoring the fact, you know, the way that statistics are collected. As, you know, some of the historians here are trying to tease out is, you know, certain communities are over police, they're going to have more eyes on them. And that data is going to be collected more than

like, you know, people doing suburban moms doing coke, or, you know, or pills in areas where there are no cops, or where if there are cops, they're like more integrated into friendly roles, or they're guarding the communities, or they're doing more, you know, they're occupying roles that are more service or more, you know, less violent, less confrontational, less surveillance than they would in the dangerous, you know, urban core and the dangerous black and brown communities. And I think like, this is this is very interesting, right, where what we're what we're doing is we have this we have this this this cloak of systematization, we have this cloak of science that you just sort of that you can hand wave anything away behind. Yeah, we wouldn't have

built a racism computer if it was bad. And invented by Dr. Racism, it's not a racist computer, it's named after its inventor. It's actually a peninsula. Yeah, he came over from Germany. He's a great guy. Some kind of operation office supplies, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And operation clippy. It looks like you're trying to do some racism. Yeah, episode title. But if you think about I think you can see you can see technology as far back as the fucking spinning Jenny as existing for two reasons, right, is existing to, you know, spin the Jenny, but also to obscure them right to obscure the social relationship between the capitalist and the worker, you know, because instead of just the spinning Jenny relative to

like modern police science does mangle fewer children, they're actually going to feed the GCSE results into the spinning Jenny and see what it does with them. Oh, you want your exam results reach in there and grab your child size hands. Yeah, I am serious though, right? Where what the what one of the functions of the spinning Jenny is to is to make the relationship between the employer and the employee look look natural and mutually beneficial because the employer is able to say, well, it's my spinning Jenny. So obviously all of the profits from the operation of that spinning Jenny are going to be mine to decide what to do with. And then that's just taken as red and the relationship of I give you all my labor and you give me enough back to like to live on

maybe that relationship is obscured by the fact of the of the technology itself. It's like, it's like your only friend who had the multi tap for PlayStation two when you were a kid. Exactly. So they kind of controlled the gaming agenda because it was their multi tap. That's actually a direct quote from Mark. Exactly. Yeah. They mentioned the multi tap will become so expensive to produce. So the tendency of the right kid will have everyone will be their friend. Welcome to 12 year old. Also, right? I really like that bit. We're going to go back to that. Your tendency of the rate of fortnight skins to fall.

So also, but that and I think that allows us to look at Luddism, right? Not just as something that was happening with the spinning Jenny of people who didn't want to be, you know, destroyed by the satanic mills. But also, you know, again, if you're saying, well, we don't want evidence based policy, you know, you can be portrayed as saying, what, you want more biased policy? But no, and so this is you want us turn off the racism computer. Why do you hate? Exactly. And so there's this concept that you were, you've talked about before, and this is this concept that's attributed to the Luddites of perceiving technology in the present tense. And I think like it's important to see when you,

when you look at whether it's the racism algorithm, or whether it's the, the social mobility destruction button, or, or what have you, or, or the spinning. Ah, ism button. Some letters have been rubbed off through constant use. When you're, when you're looking at that, right? It's important to break with that idea of determinism and that this is necessary progress, because all it's really doing is encoding and reifying particular interests. Right. You know, David Nobley talks a lot about perceiving technology in the present tense in this book of his forces of production. It's like a history of technology and, and, and science and how they're used to kind of obscure, like you said, relationships,

especially in capitalism between workers and, and capitalists or obscure the way their production actually happens. And you know, with technology, you know, they're, they're the main ways people are taught to think about tech is, you know, it's deterministic and, you know, that we cannot stop the past. It's just like this fucking, you know, like the snowpiercer train just barreling through the moment. And then there's, you know, progress that you also can't stop because the future is calling for us to just keep going forward and forward. And, you know, these two dual narratives prevent us from actually looking at what technology is doing in a moment and stopping it, you know, like when the Luddites were smashing the machines,

it's been reduced to an epitaph, an epitaph, because, you know, they dared to say that something that exists right now can be bad and that's something that exists right now can lead to bad things. And they were very conscious about the fact that you needed to break that shit, you needed to have like a militant uprising, you needed to confront the way that things were going. Because if you didn't, right, you would give, you know, machinery and the capitalist behind it more room to destroy your community, destroy your jobs, destroy the lives in the name of this progress and to, you know, sort of prevent any sort of criticism from them. And I think that's why the Luddites were successful in a lot of ways that, you know, other labor movements

haven't been and that, you know, this violent uprising was able to give them time and space to pressure, you know, the state to, you know, alter or at least concede some of the demands that they were making or change some of the ways that employers could, you know, dominate the lives of employees and workers in these mills. And it was violently put down. And I think, you know, that ends up one of the reasons why there's a lot of energy poured into dismissing it as just simply a nothing, you know, nothing and an epithet is because, you know, there's real power in that they were willing to, you know, risk themselves to stop something in the moment to try and renegotiate it, you know, when people are looking at surveillance systems, the solution is not to like, oh, imagine

a future where surveillance is kinder and democratized, it's to smash it, you know, it's to stop it. When people are talking about, you know, racism, computers and algorithms, like the solution is not to like, remove the bias and figure out how we can live with it, it's to smash it, you know, the end. And we lose sight of that because we they're, they're, you know, thought of as like eldritch magic, you know, and they're thought of like, oh, it's like, if we just harness it correctly, then we can get rid of this bad, you know, aspect of it. But in reality, you know, the bad aspect is a planned, you know, part of it, you need to destroy the thing. And then only after you get rid of this, you know, device, this technology, can you really get rid of the relationships and

the dynamics that is, you know, supercharged. And then from there, it's so it's, it's so like, tied into like, how conception history to like, we have this idea of the moral arc of the universe, right? Like, the instinct that we're given is so much towards reform that any kind of like, revolutionary change like that is incredibly threatening, is terrifying to us. That's because the Luddites had great foresight, and they were like, spinning Jenny, very bad, very bad Jenny, it's gonna, you know, right now, it's doing spinning, it's just spinning, you think you can't be a bad Jenny, but then sooner or later, it's the tic-tac, the tic-tac, the Chinese, they're making your children dance. You thought it was just spinning,

no, they're moving all around, they're becoming Chinese. Oh, yeah. But with those two concepts in mind, with the idea of police science as obscuring, as obscuring these relationships generally, and the idea that also taking that perceiving technology in the present tense, breaking from that determinism, we can then look at it and some actual programs. So, here's one that the EU's doing, we'll sort of go through this quickly, with the incredible name of I, lowercase I, because it's the early 2000s, border CTRL. Cool. I mean, fucking Frontex was bad enough.

Is this like a much more fashionable supply robot with Rosemary? So, I border control, this is actually from the EU's website. It says, it leverages the constellation of software and hardware technologies to enable a two-stage migration process into the EU. Now, what I've done is I've- Love when I leverage a constellation of software and hardware technologies. I actually, I've edited this for a length, I wrote that. Sorry, everyone. So, here's what's interesting, right? The two-stage process includes, and we can think about what this is really for. A, the registration before travel to gather

initial personal travel document and vehicle data, perform a short, automated, non-invasive interview with an avatar, subject to lie detection- You have to talk to Project Milo? Oh, no. Not me again. Um, subject to lie detection. So, phrenology, Project Milo, that's going to like, you know, do the plot of NBC's lie to me. I love to get fucking anal probed by my EU mandatory bonsai buddy. And link the traveler to any pre-existing authority data.

So, it's also public sector Palantir, basically. It's amazing. And this is the, this is, this is everyone's all liberal, darling, the EU, the beating heart of global liberalism. They are saying, we're going to create a giant publicly funded Palantir that if anyone wants to come into the country, they basically need to take a lie detector test. That do some skull measurements. And undertake some skull measurements. And then, go ahead. I was just thinking about how the, uh, it was few, maybe a few weeks ago, where like,

this EU commissioner was saying that, look, the policing crisis in the United States, it will never, ever happen in the EU. And it's like, meanwhile, they're doing supercharged shit like this, which is exactly what like our immigration authorities are doing and also feed into the whole crisis. Yeah. Because if, because all of this stuff never stays- Let me say Black Lives Matter, but in like a really like false way. I'm trying to find it. The thing is right, all of these technologies may start at the border or they start in the

empire, but they never stay there ever. So they say, using multi-factor analytics and risk and a risk-based approach, the data is registered and processed and correlated with publicly open data or external systems such as the SIS too. They're going to read your tweets. Awesome. So, right? So we- Oh, I found it. I found it. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josip Borrell,

that said, the people of Europe are shocked and appalled by the death of George Floyd. This is an abuse of power. It has to be renowned. It has to be combated everywhere in the United States. Allow me to repeat that all lives matter. Black lives also matter. That's why I'll be wearing Charlotte Barrity blackface. But no, of course, no one, no one in the Mediterranean, the European Union is very comfortable in having a blood-soaked southern border. Black lives also matter.

Black lives all matter. Thank you, European. That's new. I haven't heard some shit like that. I can't, I literally, I cannot believe that the cleavage, the cleave in our politics, what was around supporting this fucking thing. Anyway, the B, the actual control at the border that compliments the pre-registered information with the results of security controls that are performed with a portable wireless connected, hybrid or control unit that can be used inside buses or trains at any point.

The racism computer, they made it real. It's a portable. It's a repurposed T-Mobile sidekick. The data collected are encrypted securely transferred. I'd like to like hold up my Nokia N-Gage that displays a list of approved pre-cogs. Yes, just pre-cogs, you know. Nokia N-Gage. It's just racist pre-cogs and a machine, just like trying to see if you're actually

trying to get into the country or not. And this is the, and this is the other point. This is the other point that really caught me. The data collected are encrypted, transferred and analyzed in real time, providing automated decision support for the border control officers. Anytime you hear automated decision support, what it means is... The racism computer. It means the racism computer.

Yeah, because it's... What we've done is we've done the spinning journey on cops. And now, you don't even have to do the racism inside of the cops head anymore. They can just be like, yeah, now I've got, I press a button and it does the racism. So does this kind of work because it's going to lead to cops being made obsolete? Cops are going to be made redundant? No, they're not racist enough. That's the problem.

We need... Yeah. This is insulting to get those racism numbers. This is not smart enough to be sufficiently racist for our requirements. This is insulting to badge workers around the world. Oh, God, they're selling me some kind of computer, could be more racist than me. I'm Italian.

Wait, sorry. Are you doing the... Before that steam drill shall beat me down, I'll die with my hammer in my hand for police racism. That's right. Yes. John Henry is a cop. Yeah, because...

Got some guy called Algorithm. I don't know this fucking guy. Said he's a more racist than me. I'm from Staten Island. What the fuck? Yeah, we're doing John Henry. But yeah, also, it's like, it's all... It means, yeah, the police are going to be able to be racist in their own time.

They can, because the computer will take it over for them. Case hours for work, case hours for rest, case hours for screaming racial slurs out of my window. Like building a big model gollywag in your garage as a retirement project. So the other thing, right? So that's what's happening in the EU. There's this big new technology procurement that's basically going to try to automate

certain elements of the racism. In the UK, it's a little bit different. There's something called Project Nexus, which is something that has been... Oh, that doesn't sound ominous at all. It's been... Thank you for your work on Project Arcturus. It's not the Denver Broncos, but it'll have to do.

Project Nexus is absolutely not something that would be picked up on a Manila file by someone in an SS uniform and go, ah, yes, the time has come. So it is essentially... You alerted me to this thing's existence, Edward. It's essentially a data sharing arrangement between different police forces in the home office, where every interaction you have with the police

is recorded and tracked, and then can be used by the home office to remove you from the UK, even if you've never committed a crime. If you just get charged with several crimes, then the home office can say, he's been charged with several crimes. I think maybe they're on the balance of probabilities

they're dangerous to have in the UK. No, it's not without a file. And they'll deport you. Please, stop. You just have to have the Project Nexus is just literally a nexus of racism computers. Make it like a racism supercomputer. It'll get sentience,

and then I'll start restructuring society. It'll be great. But we have to talk about the antecedents to this, like the earlier generation of racism computers are still in use, Prevent, which is like turning your imam into a border guard, for instance. You're saying also...

Or like the... I'd like to hear from you a little bit about this as well, especially because it seems to be... From 2012, but it seems to be taking the Prevent idea of, if we don't like you, we can make a computer say that you're dangerous

and then do something about it. Yeah. I mean, there's very little to say about this, other than it's bad, actually, folks. But it's also, again, the most British thing possible. So I was on Nate's podcast a while ago, but anyone who's been tracking Prevent over the past decade knows that as the years have gone on,

and more importantly, as the Home Office has wanted to centralise Prevent more and more, to the point where basically the whole programme is run from quite a shady unit inside the Home Office, which is next to impossible to freedom of information, which means that we have no idea what metrics they use, what kind of algorithms they use. Also, a lot of that stuff is outsourced as well

to companies that have these types of national security protections, which means, again, it's very difficult to FOI people. So the kind of big leaks that we've had really galling to be racistly profiled by G4S. I mean, I at least want a racism algorithm that works. I mean, of the Prevent projects that we know, and they've all largely come from a few dogged journalists at the Middle East Eye and stuff, which is basically,

for people who don't know what the Middle East Eye is, they are a news website that mainly focuses on Middle East and politics, but they have a couple of UK-based reporters who are quite good, and this is solely their beat. But it's also testament to how much work needs to be done to even find out the basic elements of how this hugely expensive national security program works. But it's become more and more centralized by the Home Office

and also more and more obscured by the Home Office, but almost all of it is centered around surveillance. And the whole premise is that their belief is that, through surveillance, we can not only change behaviors, but we can also weed out people before they become potentially dangerous, but they don't really know how to expand any further. And this has kind of been like- Hey, it's literally Minority Report.

Yeah, I mean, like that's not, you know, Aaron Kudnani, who wrote the book on Prevent, it was called The Musms Are Coming. Like he basically said makes that point throughout the book. Wait, wait. But this is Minority Report without the cool aesthetics. Yeah, the book is called The Musms Are Coming. The book is called, oh my God.

Jesus. It's really, yeah, he's a, and it's kind of like the definitive book about Prevent. And like nothing else has really been written, but that's, that is that in depth. And I think a lot of that, again, comes down to the fact that how, like the, how difficult is to get information. The point that I was going to make was that this,

this follows a very kind of British Home Office tendency of like everything being about surveillance and getting as much information as we can, which eventually like does lead to phrenology. That's the thing. Like if all of this leads to phrenology, and even like the idea of like basing someone's deportation through whatever like interactions that they have

with like this famously fair police force, that definitely has never charged lots of innocent people with, with crimes that they haven't committed. And then also like gutting legal aid, which means that they don't have access to resources to like defend themselves. Like it's basically creating a system that's like even more stacked against them,

basically guaranteeing deportations, but allowing that to kind of like at least have some respectable legal cloaking around that. I, I was going to say again, as like another point, which is like, I wouldn't be surprised if like the type of EU systems where you're kind of being interrogated about like your kind of alleged torture by like an avatar,

giant red dog or something like that is going to be introduced to the UK. Like, you know, that is not something that is unfathomable to me. He's not gone rogue, is he? The other thing I wanted to say is that there's also like, there's a, there's a disability angle here, which is that like the other, the other surveillance thing that comes to mind is that if say you were on,

as it used to be incapacity benefit, right? And you say went to a protest for disability rights and got arrested or got charged, you even just got photographed, like walking around for five minutes at a time. It was entirely possible that the police would just send that to the home office who would be like, oh yeah,

we're just going to stop your benefits now because clearly you can get up and say, hey, maybe don't kill or deport me. So you can probably work for sports direct, I guess. Yeah. And the other thing, right, is that with- It's an irredeemable country. Put it in the fucking sea.

With all of this, with all of these relationships existing, it's very, you look like you look, you can be sort of derisively referred to as a lot. If you say, no, we need to break these chains, we need to remove these connections, these kind of surveillance, this kind of analytics, this kind of automation is generally bad.

And this is something also that I go back to the point that Ollie Philosophy Tube made on this show a while ago, which is that once you buy a tool, once you build a tool, it's hard to get rid of. It's hard to put it down. And so, but now so we're- And so- These callipers.

You can only keep ratcheting it up. So for example, the 2014 and 16 immigration acts introduced offenses like driving when unlawfully in the UK, which means- Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Basically, if you're- Woo! If you're here on-

Cycling while gay. Yeah. If you're here unlawfully and the police just notice you, they can ask you for your residency status, and then they can just punch that into a computer and then you'll get analyzed and possibly, and possibly have your life destroyed and have that just be like,

well, computer says deported, sorry. Yeah, we're just working on ways to make living in Britain more kind of stochastically terrible for everyone who isn't the worst person on earth. This is kind of how I end this segment, right? It's like, all of these developments mean that the UK has to be understood as being riven by two equal opposite forces.

Just the desire to surveil and criminalize refugees, to screw over the young, to just make the world the more bitter, rotten and miserable place by putting all of our productive energies behind that, but also the desire by the Tory party to give lucrative contracts to their moronic friends. I was going to add like,

and to check the genitals of everyone going into bathrooms, but I feel like that's also going to be part of the surveillance. That's the next thing coming along. We'll get to that in the next bonus episode, but yeah, I look forward to also the aspect of it that it's so farcical and incompetent because that's Britain. So, I look forward to a special camera coming out of the toilet system

and being like, hmm, seems like your genitals don't match. You will now be deported to a country we have picked at random by rolling this D20 on the screen. I think I figured out what it is. It is all of the political substance of children of men, but the aesthetics of the running man. I think that's also as a small point

why we really need to sort of embrace the idea that we need to delegitimize attack as some objective thing because like you said, it's hard to put down these tools. They're becoming pervasive everywhere. And if they become pervasive, they're not just collecting the data, they're then using it to control people, right?

And to legitimize all the ways that people can be controlled. And if those fail, then they penetrate further and further and further into your life until it's just all appendages of a nationwide or global wide system. And for a labor thing, people have to make these. And those people sometimes have consciences and other times are just allowed to be like, yeah, and I just work in tech. This is neutral to me.

The fact that I am doing a deportation algorithm, I don't actually know that that's what it's going to be used for. I just punch in the numbers. So like leave me alone. And I think that it's very encouraging to me that there has been pushback. It was very encouraging to me that Amazon Web Services was like, no, fuck off.

Absolutely do not use our software for drones. I think that's a good starting point. But this stuff is so embedded now that I worry that it's already kind of... Yeah, I can't believe it. The police stopped me in the Easter computer to tell me I wasn't legally in the UK. And I said, nah, that's ridiculous. Some of the Britishers, they come and I love gravy.

Milo, say gravy a bunch of times in Africa. Please, I find it very pleased. Okay, gravy. I want... Anyway, that seems mostly like a chilling portent of things to come. Loading up Easter's reds drop onto the soundboard. Yes. Nah, I don't think there'll be too much racism.

Don't worry about it. It's time for us to have a little bit of fun after talking about something that is grindingly depressing. That's right. We are reading an article that you have been asking for it. What's coming? Gabbo, Gabbo, Gabbo. That's right.

It's Niall Ferguson's moronic TikTok article, which was so delightful. Fucking yes. This is the hottest TikTok trend, Niall Ferguson's article. Yeah, all the teens are reading Niall Ferguson's article and then overlaying it with fart noises. Niall Ferguson's article was actually just a video of him dancing and pointing to speech bubbles of text that were coming up on the screen like a paragraph at a time.

Yeah, so here is the article. It was so fun. It is titled, TikTok is inane. China's imperial ambition is not. Hell yeah, baby. Yeah, so the subtitle, which I love, the U.S. won the Cold War by exporting its values. So now Ferguson's looking at the tourism bonus,

New York gets in Civilization 6, we're having Broadway. Well, Elliot Abrams teaches non-garodding lessons at the School of the Americas. Awesome. Yeah, if you export blue jeans, then people will want to wear the blue jeans and become capitalists. That's right. I mean, to be fair, I worked in Russia.

And China has a similar plan for Cold War II by Niall Ferguson. One of the second type of British historians. Yeah, there's two genders of British historian. First gender. Slap somebody else to know the other one. Shut the fuck up. Okay, there's two genders of British historian. Exactly.

Number one, slap side of tank and cause it an amazing bit of pit. Number two, ancient Greece wasn't Muslim. How the West became good. And Neil Ferguson is firmly in the second gender here. He is such a second type of British historian. So let's talk about it. It's hard to get past the initial sheer inanity of TikTok. As an INTJ, I actually predicted the contents of your TikToks

without even watching them. Perhaps a few incrispined truths. You're really adopted. Adopted. Adopted. I dip in you. Okay. No.

Hold up. Just one. You can do the Bane impression later. So, you know, already Niall Ferguson is being like, oh, yes, I'm far too smart for TikTok. He might as well be saying, yeah, I fucking hate Justin Bieber, who's trying to make us all Chinese. Yeah, exactly.

Before he tried to make us all gay before and now it's Chinese. Yeah. So he is, he's fully doing the, oh, I fucking hate Justin Bieber's music for little girls. And he's like a fucking 90 year old man or whatever. I don't know how old he is. Don't tell me. I don't know and won't learn. He's spiritually 90 years old.

I spent half an hour trying to make sense of the endless feed of video snippets of ordinary people doing daft things with their dogs or in the kitchens or in the gym. I figured out the viral memes of the moment. Animals dancing to tono Rosario's. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. He figured out the viral memes of the moment. That means Niall Ferguson has watched at least one Femboy TikTok.

What is this? Some kind of feeling like, well, their opinions on racial hygiene are surprisingly accurate. The suspenseful unveiling of punks or hounds to the repeated words. Please don't be ugly. I asked my eight year old son what I should look out for. He recommended the dancing ferret, but I never found it. Do you reckon his son is really eight years old, but he just doesn't remember that he's grown older?

Like his son is like 32 years old. So you're saying that this is the column of someone whose like last synapses are disconnecting? Yes, I think so. Yeah, it rules. It's just like, he's a guy's like, I don't get TikTok. It's stupid. It's for young people like that.

Watching a bunch of Femboys dancing and being like, well, those are surprisingly accurate uniforms of the Vafan SS. I wonder if he watched any of my TikToks. But also, right? It's his thing is he has the tone of like a 40 year old man who's like sat down to watch an episode of Sesame Street and is like, this is ridiculous. This is a bad television.

This bird is far too large. No chick would be of such an absurd and ungainly size. I shall write to complain that Sesame Street is not diverting to me a fucking million year old man. Who would live in a bin? It's ridiculous. Oh, this is ridiculous. And rising up the peer.

What kind of wealthy brown? This is my day of friend of the show, Pierre Nevelli's. I think his best bit is, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do the thing that everyone hates. I'm just going to talk about someone else's comedy bit. But he's like a guy who goes to the circus and doesn't fully understand that the clowns are supposed to be silly.

He goes and sits down. He's like, those trousers are far too big. Oh, anyway, that was Pierre Nevelli. No one could be this French. That was the Pierre Nevelli moment. Anyway, so back to this. 30 minutes of TikTok left me with just one burning question. How can this thing be a threat to US national security?

It can't. Thank you, Neil. That was the article ends here. Who's saying you like the internet? I do. I do like the internet. What was the sudden like, do we need to like establish that Neil Ferguson didn't actually go on TikTok

and he's just kind of bullshitting his way through this? Or I think he went on it and was just like, ah, this is baby stuff. This isn't for me. I'm going to write an article on how much I hate it. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the obvious point is that this is a guy who's definitely spent. He definitely just went on the trading section for a bit.

And if you go on the trending section of like any sort of UK platform or wherever he's based, like it's just very kind of cringeworthy stuff designed for teens because it like is a app for teenagers. But this is also a guy who like bearing in mind, he wrote that book. What was it called? Like the Citadel in the Square or something like that?

Oh, that's shit. The Tower in the Square. Yeah. Right. And his whole and his whole premise that he, well, he like marketed himself as like a social media guru, but like didn't actually say anything that useful. And he like, he's done this stick for a while of like,

you know, I'm going to hear like the he wrote another book where it's like eight apps to tell us why Western civilization is great. Oh yeah. Well, I remember we talked about this. Right. Not only was it like, yeah, it's like freedom and like, you know, rule of law and private property and all that stuff. So this is like a long standing stick of Neil Ferguson who is like,

you know, in all sense of words is a reactionary, but he's got like a Stanford position, which means he has to kind of at least kind of pretend that he like knows something new. Oh man. Well, dear Felix, I'm sorry I'm going to make you listen to me talk about civilization, the West and the rest and the killer apps of the West, because I found the next book for Intelligence 5.0.

I feel certain we've done that already. We've done things that are almost indistinguishable from it, but I'm sure I'm certain I will find something in it that makes it unique. Just like who knew that Matt Ridley, the thing that made it unique would be his when ideas have sex point of view. Anyway, listen to Intelligence 4 on the Patreon. So 30 minutes of TikTok left me with just one burning question. How can this be a threat to US national security?

Here's how. I've truncated this for length because this fucker needs an editor. I had the epiphany. TikTok is not just China's revenge for the century of humiliation between the opium wars and Mao's revolution. I hope your dog sings about us. I'm going to do this every time he does this kind of yellow peril clip. Number one though, encoded in that statement is the sort of underlying assumption,

no, we should impose humiliation on other people. It's wrong only if it flows the other way. It's also just hilarious to me that the idea, A, that China is trying to exact revenge for some stuff that happened well over 100 years ago, before the current state of China even came to exist. But also the idea that they would take revenge on it by a dancing app for teenagers. I will tell you how this works. It is the opium, a digital fentanyl, if you will,

to get our kids stoked for the oncoming Chinese Imperium. Okay, do you know what actually is the fentanyl that loads of kids in America are addicted to? Fucking fentanyl, which is being given to them by American companies. How fucking stupid do you have to be? Oh, the Chinese. Oh, those cunning Chinese. They've made an app that the youngsters are going on to do dances. No young person has ever danced before.

This will surely be the, yes, it is truly the fentanyl of its age, unlike fentanyl, which we just willfully send by the bucket load into our own poor communities. Thereby doing, ironically, the opium crisis on ourselves somehow, having gone bored of doing it to other people, we've turned it inwards. We've turned the gun on ourselves and our fucking companies are profiteering, off of getting children addicted to fentanyl. But no, the problem is that the Chinese have made an app where people can do dances about communism.

Yes, that is the main issue. You know, in many ways, fentanyl was the TikTok. Yes, because a cop will be like, why have I tactically watched one second of a TikTok? I'm about to go into cardiac arrest. This is an old argument, too, right? They did this with weed. They were like, you know, red Chinese, bringing in marijuana so that your children become communists,

so that they start to fall in love with black people. Rock and roll. Yeah, jazz is a Soviet plot to make people discontented with, I don't know. China is the least weed-smoking country. That's nothing about China that says to me like a stoner-ass country. So that's the idea, right? Is that we are going to get stoked for Chinese Imperium because of, I don't... The digital fentanyl.

And because kids are going to know that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is Chinese. I mean, he makes some sort of imbecilic point about digital surveillance, but again, they're already being surveilled more intensely by people who want to sell them predictive text t-shirts. That's right. You cannot escape the surveillance. It's not uniquely Chinese. You're fucking moron.

That's why my t-shirt says everything stopped. Spying on people is when you're Chinese. And the more Chinese you are, the more spying on people you are. Also, you have to like install this bonsai buddy to get into the EU now. And he said, the thing spreads faster than COVID-19. Again, that's off. No, it's fucking America, it doesn't. I'm wearing out the fucking button.

Jesus Christ. It's just, this is... That is a longer-winded way of doing China virus, right? China. Yeah, TikTok has 800 million monthly active users around the globe. And it's far more contagious. Just under a half... So I was saying, it's beginning to sound like marketing copy for TikTok.

Just under a half of US teenage internet users have used TikTok. If it were a pathogen, it would be the Black Deck. Black Deck, Black Death. But it's an app, so ByteDance is now worth $100 billion. Awesome. Thank you now for this win. And I'll make something else out of it. He's right that it's silly that the company is worth $100 billion off of it.

That's the only correct thing we've heard so far. He didn't say it silly. Yeah. He didn't say it silly. Mmm. He didn't say it silly. Anything that should be worth that much is... I don't recall saying good luck.

Exactly. So Ferguson then goes through a couple of problems with TikTok, a couple of which are legitimate and common to any social network. It steals all of your data, but not because it's Chinese, just because that's what social networks do. Child abuse and stuff, but most of them are Cold War related. So he says... That child abuse TikTok is the most fucked vibe you can possibly think of.

He's stealing all my data. For you. I've... Shut the... I've written before... Austria. We have banned TikTok in Austria and therefore solved this problem. I've written before in this space about Cold War II.

Well, TikTok has become the Sino-American conflict's latest casualty. Too cold to war. Unlike everything else in America, including COVID-19, shut the fuck up, Nile. Fuck off. Like the damn clowns in Congress. Absolutely. Just capital steps level satire here.

Call it the Rona or don't refer to it at all, first of all. Unlike everything else in America, including COVID-19, Cold War II is bipartisan. Just a fucking bang up sentence right there. Perfect. Unlike everything else in America, including COVID-19, Cold War II is bipartisan. What is he trying to say with this sentence?

I mean, I think the original Cold War was also bipartisan. I, too, remember when the Democrats were like, oh, we should give up or just be the Soviet Union. Famously. This is for babies. Last October, Senate Minority Leader... I, for one, love the Soviet Union. I don't have any plans to do it at all.

I'm wearing blackface right now. Last October, the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and the Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, jointly called for a national security investigation into bite dance. They had to stand quite close to each other to do that, right? Couldn't someone just have gone and just like slapped their heads together

in like a comical, like a student situation? Yeah. Like a Newton's cradle. Oh, wow. Chuck Schumer worked with the Republicans. Damn, TikTok must be a threat. The issue, they said, is that as a Chinese entity, bite dance is subject to China's cybersecurity rules,

which stipulates that it has to share data with the Chinese government. They should only share data with the government. That's the thing, right? Now Ferguson is saying, oh, I'm worried that China's not an offensive against liberalism with it, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, you're quoting Tom Cotton approvingly?

Yeah, yeah. Oh, the thing is that China puts Muslims in camps in the wrong way, where they should do it in the border in Libya, in the right way, like we do. You can't separate the families. If they didn't separate the families, then it would be okay. You know, then that's what we do. Yeah, so TikTok admits it does this in its privacy policy,

saying we may share your information with the parents, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group. And like, yeah, that's bad, but like now Ferguson sort of- Every social network does. Every single one does that. This guy just, he still says the Facebook.

Oh yeah. It's cool. Like crack, TikTok is dangerous. Like crack. What? Just like crack. Just exactly like crack. Like crack, TikTok is a racial panic.

For example, TikTok's users who are still mostly young and female love lip sync videos. These have become a magnet for pedophiles who can use the app to send girl with special explicit messages. You can tell because the keyboard smells like apples. I can just imagine just like fucking like now Ferguson is watching this,

just going like, well, I'm certainly aroused. Perhaps it could be a lure for pedophile. It's like, the only person who thought pedophile here is the writer of this article, dude. I initially discovered TikTok by Googling videos of children dancing. And I was horrified by what I found. And even remix videos and dance along with them

using a feature called duet. This, again, Chris Morris couldn't have written this. Oh, I know. This is amazing, isn't it? It's like the monsters are using an app called TikTok created by the Chinese and they can remix themselves into videos with children as young as Zygote.

Yeah. They're making cows into spears. China is making our boys nonsense. I can imagine just being like, hey, honey, have you heard about this thing? I saw it in a, you know, Epstein kept bringing out TikTok, you know, and he was talking about like this duet function. I don't know.

Should I look into it? I think though, British historians and right wingers of all stripes should be taking offense to this because the implication that Britain needs absolutely any foreign help with noncing is quite frankly, of the trail of the great British tradition of noncing. We, like, it's much like the railways. We invented it and exported it around the world.

It was much like liberalism. The idea was born in ancient Greece, but it was, it was perfected by Britain. Yeah, exactly. The bedrock of Western civilization. There we go. Jerusalem and Athens, baby. The pen Shapiro promise.

So for Ben Thompson, who's based in Taiwan, the past year has been revelatory. Having previously played down the political and ideological motivations of the Chinese government, he's now come out as a new Cold Warrior. Who the fuck is Ben Thompson? And why do I give a shit? Cold Warrior.

China's vision of the role of technology is fundamentally different from the West, he argues. And it fully intends to export its anti-liberal vision to the rest of the world. Sorry, can you run back the entirety of this podcast from before we started this reading series real quick? Racism. If China's on the offensive against liberalism,

not only within its borders. Because China uses computers differently to us. You can tell because the keyboards look different. And they've got a bunch of, like, different lines. So they think of them differently, probably. If China is on the offensive against liberalism, not only within its borders, but within ours, he asks, is it in liberalism's interest to cut off a vector

that has taken root precisely because it is so brilliantly engineered to give humans exactly what they want? How could China be on the offensive within its own borders? China's invading itself. Truly, it has happened. Chinese troops on the streets of China. This really is the last straw in the Western liberal order. Yeah, as Anderson puts it,

in the near future, every person who enters a public space in China can be identified instantly by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data. Imagine that. Listen to that for the first 20 minutes of the podcast again. In China, when you go outside, there's a bunch of stuff spying on you. Probably something that's up with China. Kind of weird how they do that.

We don't do that. Anyway, not going to think about this any further. That button is going to fall off. This is mad. Yeah. And in time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources, travel records, friends, and associates reading habits and purchases

to predict political resistance before it happens. Alice. You've described prevent. You have described prevent. And this is another thing, right? Like, I don't know. I saw someone might yell at me for saying this, but like Xi Jinping's Butler would hunt anyone on or listening

to this podcast for sport. Like, I'm under no illusions about that. I'm not trying to be like, oh, we should. We should all just like hunting if you meet to be fair. That'd be weird. Yeah. But just the idea that like... They're increasingly interchangeable aspects of neoliberalism.

That's kind of where I'm going with this. It's just like, man, it sure is great having all these choices as to who is going to do exactly this to me and everyone I know. But they're arguing over like the color of the hat that you wear when you're doing it. The Western Empire, he goes on, is under external attack from Russian resistance and Chinese competition. Oh, yeah.

The fucking Russians. Some people who are absolutely on top of their game. They're so desperate to do some great game shit at rules. If your empire can be destroyed by the fucking Russians, who I can tell you from experience are a bunch of people who spend like almost 19 hours a day piss drunk. Like, maybe it wasn't such a great empire. They are not an organized people.

Hussein, before we go on, I want to sort of, I want to pull you in here. Yeah. I mean, look, I think Alasak made my point already, which was like, what he's basically done is describe every kind of surveillance system that social media operates from. And like, the only sort of difference, I guess is kind of, it's one of the like the core philosophies of the show,

which is that like, maybe what he's envious of is like of a streamlined and like more effective surveillance system. Considering how like patchy and fucked like, you know, or like even just the reliance on like Facebook and like Silicon Valley startups as to like, you know, the reliance on like waiting on Silicon Valley to spin out surveillance systems. Whereas like the Chinese sort of just kind of gone and done it.

Oh yeah. If you take like the dominant like name of the ideology that is being applied, there's neoliberalism in either case. And like, if you call that in the US, if you call that liberalism or if you call that socialism with Chinese characteristics in China, this is the same guy. Like I guarantee you, there are a hundred Chinese versions of this guy who are just like, well, it's fine.

So long as we like maintain, we do the surveillance, but we maintain a role for socialism with Chinese characteristics or liberalism. But when they do it, it's illiberal and therefore very dangerous and foreign and alien. I think it's worth bearing in mind that like in my view, Neil Ferguson is a guy who's like very aware of being outdated, like very aware that he's close to being like fully outdated.

And as the guy who like was once the kind of poster boy in Britain and later in America for defending Western values and defending like the legacy of like the British empire and just like American imperialism, he sits at this very weird position where like as everything is sort of crumbling, like he, you know, when you sort of like hitch your career to that, then you're in a very uncomfortable position

when that all starts falling apart. So the way that I was reading his TikTok piece, but really just the way that I've been reading his tweets and like his general output over the years, is one of like real kind of like personal anxiety, right? I don't know if any of you guys remember like his whole shtick with a Pankaj Mishra, where like light criticism in the London review of books

caused Neil Ferguson to like get his lawyers to try to sue Pankaj Mishra for just like, I think Pankaj Mishra accused Neil Ferguson's academic work of like perpetuating a kind of racism. So not that he was racist, but like just kind of perpetuating like racial viewpoints. What a baseless accusation. Right, you know, if like it's for, you know, fairly mild,

but I feel like whenever I think of Neil Ferguson, I just think about like here is a guy who like, can no longer really claim himself to be the kind of great intellectual that he fashioned himself out to be. So as a result, like he's sort of going to be, you know, seeing out the end of empire by writing these inane think pieces about like why,

like the D'Amelio sisters are the great threat to America since the Taliban. Yeah, so I think what it's interesting then actually, what Neil Ferguson is, is a washed up 40 year old standup comedian who's trying to do TikToks and failing to be convincing. Yeah. But he's the historian version of that.

The Taliban are actually on TikTok now, so drop them a follow. I mean, I mean, I mean, say what you will, the Islamic dialogue guys are very good on that. So just. They're competing against the Fen boys. And I like the Fen boys best one. So just, just, just rounding this out, he says, one of the many ways America

sought to undermine the Soviet Union in Cold War One was by waging a cultural Cold War. They stopped saying Cold War One. This was partly about, about being seen to beat the Soviets at their own games, chess, ballet, ice hockey. But it was mainly about corrupting the Soviet people. The Soviets didn't invent any of those things. Yeah.

Neil Ferguson just sort of thought of some stuff and then was like, well, here are our victories. So these are their main trophies. They, we couldn't beat them in drinking. No. No, but we got, we got the cultural victory and civilization. We got the cultural victory of having the fated family.

They're the great, a great people person was born in Civ 6. You will never beat Russia in having crumbling infrastructure. Create great work. Chug four leaders of Asahi in puke, 25% of the way through it. Sorry.

So, but it was mainly about corrupting the Soviet people with the irresistible temptations of American popular culture. So yeah, again, we're just going to forget. I just, I feel like the, oh my God, he admitted to me here. So why did you defect? You're Cindy Lauper. She is vetted to sex.

But also it's like, again, we're going to forget about the garroting lessons. We're going to forget about the assassinations. We're going to forget about like, arming reactionary right wing groups around the world. We're going to forget about Gladio. No, it was Jeans. It was all Jeans.

There's also a section a little bit earlier where he like quotes at length, some Chinese scholar and says, look, this is proof they, they're thinking about geopolitics. And it's like, dude, we, how many? All right, hold on, hold on. And it's like, how many fucking people do we have in the West

that whose their whole entire careers are like looking at geopolitics and figuring out how to make Western civilization like the last empire, how to make American empire, the last empire, how to restore the British empire. I mean, like when we do it, it's fine. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's logical. It makes sense.

We're just perpetuating Western values. But when they like, they don't even do the same thing. When they just notice that the American empire is falling apart, all right, it's cold war too. I've actually, I've actually discovered that the Chinese are squaring up for a war. I've been reading about this guy who keeps talking about ways that you're going to admit your enemies.

I'm some Chinese government advisor called Sun Zou. So final, final, final paragraph. This one is incredible. Alice, hoise yourself over the drop, please. Yes. The tables have been turned in a debate I hosted at Stanford in 2018. The tech billionaire Peter Thiel

used the memorable aphorism. Ai is give me your blood. Ai is communist, cryptography is libertarian. TikTok validates the first half of that. In the late 1960s, during the cultural revolution, Chinese children denounced their parents for rightist deviants in 20. In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown and black lives matter protests,

American teenagers posted videos of themselves, berating their parents for racism, and they did it on TikTok article. These two things are the same. So essentially, what we conclude from this is that Niall Ferguson's child has been owning him repeatedly. You're a fucking rightist, dad. Just screaming it over and over.

Just like his child is dancing and pointing to a text box that says, can't believe my dad is a historian in America. And he has felt the most owned. He has shown his child at home. Whipped Niall Ferguson. His child is just whipping him while he builds a pig-iron furnace in their back garden. That's exactly it.

This is a fucking like a Valium overdose of an article. Of just some fever dreams and imaginations of Cold War II. And he's terrified that like, because TikTok operates like any social network in the world, that somehow it is uniquely evil. And it's fucking great. I loved hearing it. I loved hearing about it.

I loved reading it. I loved listening. I bet you loved listening to it. You fucking hogs. We loved it. It was very good. Tremendous. My favorite part is that he says that China is seeking to take over Empire 1.0,

implying that the like, I guess a Western liberal post-Westphalian order is like the first empire. It's all been the same since, remember the book, Jerusalem and Athens. It's all the same kind of thing. You know, for the fullest of time. There's never been any kind of... And Genghis Khan. Yeah, you know, it's all that stuff.

Anyway, look, it's been going for a million years. Edward, I want to thank you very much. And I want to say, thank you for coming on. Thank you for calling in. Where can people find you? I'm on Twitter. I'm at Big Black Jackabin. And also this machine or Machine Kills pod.

And that's pretty much it. I just like tween to their best all day. Hell yeah. Well, give the podcast a listen because Jathan and Edward are both really smart and well-informed over technology. Certainly more than we are. And they're funded completely by the Chinese.

So you know it's good. Yeah. Yeah, money from the Chinese is soft bank. You know, we've got to play both sides. That's right. Exactly. And additionally, you know, you know what it is, all the usual Edmatter,

Patreon, Bale Fund, Shirt. Bronx still in jail shirts, Twitch streaming, things of that nature. Galane Maxwell, Bale Fund. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Galane Maxwell, Bale Fund, Marcus Braun, Bale Fund.

Denounce your parents on TikTok. Denounce your parents on TikTok. Stronger sessions. It's far too hot. Yeah. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, baby. All right.

So we will catch you on the Patreon. Later, everybody. Catch you later. Start taking notes.