TRASHFUTURE - Uber for the Spirit feat. Mathew Lawrence

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

We can’t get enough of IPPR reports (and insane conservative meltdowns in response to them) and this week, Riley (@raaleh), and Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Hussein (@HKesvani ) join IPPR researcher Matthew Lawrence (@DantonsHead) to discuss his recent report entitled ‘The Digital Commonwealth: From private enclosure to collective benefit,’ which you can read here. Also, remember that your favourite moron lads have a Patreon now. You too can support us here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview Don’t forget that you can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. You can also purchase useful kitchen implements from our socialist cookware sponsor, Vremi (https://vremi.com/). Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this from the famous no-go zone of Dawlat al-Southwark, where no one dares sell pork products, except for basically every shop on the street.

I heard that you actually went on vacation recently to Salisbury as well. Oh, yes. Yes. Is that how you say that? Salisbury? It's like Salisbury steak. Salisbury. Much like that. I love working in the famous anti-white cafe, but after a while you have to like take a break. So I have been thinking for a long time that I needed to go on vacation and you know, I went through lots of like lonely planet manuals. I went through all like the trip advisor stuff and then I just decided that there was this one place that was missing in my life,

but I felt would be the perfect blend of relaxation, fun, education and general beauty. And that place is Salisbury. So it just so happened I went to Salisbury to go see the 123 meter cathedral and some stuff happened. You couldn't really control it, right? I mean, what's that guy's name who thought, who had the theory about the two Russian guys? Can we first of all settle the main conspiracy theory of why neither of you can say Salisbury? Is it Salisbury? It's Salisbury. We both have Canadian passports.

Yeah, we both have Canadian passports so that, you know, when... Is there anywhere called Salisbury in Canada? No, there's the steak. It's Salisbury steak. But isn't that from the US? Well, I don't know, maybe. Do you think I'm a steer as a steak expert? I mean, why was it vegetarian at some point briefly? Briefly. And why was that?

This part of the recording was lost. Who was the reporter who sort of had the theory about the two Russian guys? Okay, so there's this guy called Craig Murray, right? Yeah. We're not, we're going to try not to do libel because even though we have set up a Patreon, we can't afford a lawyer. No promises, lads. So there's this guy called Craig Murray.

He used to work for The Guardian. Now he's a freelance researcher, commentator, etc. And a male may not be called Craig Murray. And he kind of appears on like RT a lot and stuff like that. So he's been on Twitter today, like basically trying to like, you know, separate the lies from the truth and figure out why these two guys were in Salisbury, right? Salisbury. Fucking nerds.

Nerds knowing how things are said. So here's his theory. His theory is, is that these guys are actually 100% gay for each other. But they were going on a lads holiday, a romantic holiday, not a lads holiday. Sorry. They were going on a romantic holiday, which you can't really do in Russia in his words, sadly. And then Craig Murray says, he says to this, he says to like, one of these guys, oh, by my research, what I found, what I believe is that, you know, they're both bodybuilders

and, you know, they kind of like push these, like, we know, weight supplements. I don't understand where that came from. He also claimed that they were in Salisbury. There you go. They were in Salisbury because it was featured in a lonely planet guy in 2010. As like one of the places you should go to if you're visiting England. That's the thing. What he's actually done is he has created the best potential Coen Brothers movie ever.

Where like two, like a sort of a bickering couple of Russian bodybuilders just tries to fix their relationship by going on vacation to Salisbury because their vitamin sales business is faltering and then get mixed up in an international poisoning incident. I would love to see this movie. And that movie, that's going to be, it's going to be made. It'll be, it'll feature Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson. Volva, we're going in search of the most extreme poppers there is. Nerve gas.

Hello and welcome once again to Trash Future, the podcast that we do some of the time. Sadly. We are here once again today with the original lineup, sort of version two of the lineup. Hussein is back from Canada. Back from Vancouver. Yeah, back from Canada, back from the place where everyone is just referred to as a person because you can't refer to gender in Canada. And that's why Lauren Southern was kicked out and it's not allowed to go back.

Yeah, Vancouver is, Vancouver was nice. I was on a show. I was on a show while I was in Vancouver and I fell asleep. So I actually literally remember nothing of what happened other than a bunch of people who would just DM me saying like, do you know you were snoring on the episode? I was like, no, obviously not because I was asleep. Yeah, owned with logic. Owned our fans.

Thank you. Vancouver is like a very strange place because it's basically surround. It's like their property market is even more fucked than in London. Yeah. So everywhere is surrounded by like super nice condos that look exactly like the ones that Patrick Bateman has in American Psycho, that famous film about business. Yeah, that film about a cool business guy who does business stuff. Good skincare regime.

It's a cool film about a guy who takes care of his skin. I don't understand what you people are reading into it. So it's this place that's basically been built on like illicit money coming from like mainly from Hong Kong, but from other places too. There's lots of kind of rich kids in Vancouver and like you've got the 17 year olds who like drive in Porsches and that's a normal thing over there, right? They drive in like Porsches and Audis. Like one of these guys had like a Lamborghini.

Well, they're like that. They're like that financier who just got like repeatedly owned by people on mopeds. It's going to be the inspiration for like Death Wish 2018 Britain Edition. More on that later. Yes. Yeah. So it's and yeah, it's just this weird place where there's like lots of these like empty condos that all look exactly the same. Vancouver was a weird place.

And we also, I'm going to move us along here. We're also joined by a series regular Milo Edwards. Yeah, it's me, boy. At Milo underscore Edwards on Twitter. As a bit of Vancouver. At me with any questions about the current Russian incident. My current theory is that these two guys are the most unlucky tourists of all time. They're currently embroiled in a massive argument.

And he's like, fuck you, Vladimir. Oh yes, I wanted to go on a cruise, but you had to see Salisbury Cathedral. It has excellent stained glass. Now look what has happened. I remember 1963. We had to go on tour of all the grassy knolls of Texas. How did that turn out? 1997.

Now summer holiday driving through Paris in a white fear tunnel. Why do you always do this? And we are joined by our guest today, the IPPR's Matthew Lawrence. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here. My favorite part of like having smart guests on the show is like that period of time where they're just like sitting back and thinking like, what the fuck have I gotten myself? Why did I do this? Why am I on this?

The show is dumbest up top. We, you may, you may note that we've, we've had it. It's been IPPR, IPPR heavy content recently because they keep releasing reports and we keep wanting to talk about them. So you guys are all just gonna have to sit there and enjoy it because we're definitely not being paid by the IPPR. You're hogs. We're sponsored by Vremi, the socialist cochlear company.

Remember that. Buy Vremi products. This thing tank analysis, you hogs. So Matthew is one of the two principal authors of a report called the digital commonwealth that the IPPR recently released, which is about understanding how we can kind of democratize the data economy more or less. Yeah, I think that's a good snapshot. Just imagine like digital colonialism.

Yeah. No, it's, we know what we have is it's like we have Osimo, but he's dressed up as a conquistador. But we're going to go through a, we're actually going to do a classic trash future bit first. So this product, what we're doing, we're going to run through this one. It's got a really deceptively simple name. It is called the mirror. Oh, not leaving much to, well, it's leaving much to the imagination, but at the same time, it doesn't.

Oh, damn, that's pretty profound, dude. Yeah, you've been on the Joe Rogan podcast. This isn't the Joe Rogan show. No, I was saying you're on DMT. It appears to be, it indeed appears to be any, any, any initial thoughts, what jumps into your head? Mirror. Is it like, is it, is it, is it like a type of like Siri based system where you say something and it repeats the same thing, but in like a foreign accent, foreign accent, not even a foreign

language. So it's like a, it's a yak back that makes you yak off. Yeah, it's basically just like you say something and it repeats the same thing back, but in Milo's like English, Russian. So it's an, it's an in Soviet Union mirror. Watch you think basically. In Soviet Union mirror, yak you off. Well, you really bailed off that one quick.

It's a, it's a digital, it's a digital, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a tablet computer type thing, but it will cut cocaine on it for you. That is what I was thinking. That helped me the obvious of innovation. Draws out the size of line for an appropriate dose and you like match it. Yeah. Okay. It is the future of blank is at your place, the nearly invisible interactive blank.

Wife. Hashtag wife. Or I voice my wife. Right. It's a real puzzler. This one is the future of blank is at your place, the nearly invisible interactive blank. Listeners, I'd feel free to all I'm, all I'm thinking is I probably have something to do with like a hand job.

I mean, it can help you get one. Well, I made a very sort of like distributed. Is it like, is it like a dating? Is it like a weird dating blockchain thing? It's like very secure dating. Listeners, listeners, if you have any guesses, feel free to shout them at your phone. Okay. It helps you to get a hand job.

Is it having a podcast? So when it's on, it's a, when it's off rather, it's a full length mirror. But when it's on, you can see yourself. Well, that sounds like a record. Well, not broke for vampires. You can see yourself, your instructor and your classmates in a sleek interactive display, complete with embedded camera and your mirror instructor. It's something to do with yoga.

Yeah, yeah, Matthew's got it. I can't do jokes. I can just do, you know, detailed, analytical. You can do logic, which is why you should really be on, you should really be on the Sam Harris podcast. Yeah. Sorry, too logical for us. Yeah. The future of fitness is at your place.

The mirror is the nearly invisible interactive home gym that when it's off, it's a mirror. Fucking wow. And when it's on, well, when it's on, it appears to be a just a video screen that shows workouts. Okay. Can anybody else think of another product that contains a video screen that you can show workouts on? That thing that made two pack of a two pack hologram. Is it the telescreen from 1984? The only good book?

The only book ever written. Yes. Yeah. That and Harry Potter. Yeah. The only books ever written. Because Harry Potter is like Lib 1984 and like 1984 is all right 1984. Well, it's classical liberal. So isn't this essentially just like a television, right?

In the sense that like if you had a shiny screen on your television, you would literally be able to see yourself anyway. Here's a key difference between it and a television, which as a television, you can watch like shows and stuff. Yeah. So you can do more stuff with the television. Yeah. You could also have like workout routines on your television,

but this is. It's a motivate. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. However, it also plugs into your phone and shows you some of your biometric health information that otherwise you'd have to look at on your phone. It just tells you how fat you are.

You look fucking gross. Oh my God. Like I'm like a mirror and even I am disgusted by this. Like a bitchy mirror. Yeah. I'm not even real. Yeah. So it's just, it's a less functional television screen that can also show you information

from your phone, but that you don't have to look at your phone. And it's a mirror. I hear if you break it, you're left with seven years of now completely pointless repayments. Speaking of repayments, anyone want to guess how much it costs? Going to go for that golden 690 pounds. It's in dollars. Give me dollars. So how much do we think it costs for a mirror, which again, I'll remind you,

has the functionality of a mirror and then a broken TV? Is it nothing but exclusive rights over all the data generated? No, that is, that's foreshadowing. You're smarter than us. You're also smarter than us because I wouldn't have thought to say that. Yeah. Shit. Oh yeah.

And give me a quick, delete the podcast. Give me a dollar, give me a dollar amount. I reckon it's about $420. Hilarious. Very fun. I already do think it's about that. I already said mine. Yeah, but we came in and then we did that hilarious Timothy Spalbit off my Kajoleba.

So. 690 pounds. Very good. No, you did all the funny numbers, but none of them were even close. They were all less than half the actual price, which is $1,500. Jeez. Holy shit. But that's plus a 12 month subscription to your mirror.

I'm so like, why is your mirror black on the fucking money's run out on my mirror? I've not seen myself in weeks. I have to look at myself in shop windows. I can no longer afford the monthly payments on my mirror. In my, in the student house I lived in, there was not a single mirror in the house, right? So we actually did have to go to like our friend's houses to shave. Or like sometimes. Surely you could have bought a mirror.

Yeah, we could have done, but like we fucking did. Why was the issue, right? No, it was. Yeah, it's you can live for at least six months without a mirror. But if there was an option to buy a $1,500, is it $1,500 mirror? $1,500 mirror plus plus plus the $39 a month subscription to your mirror. $39 a month. But maybe my university life would have been half our Patreon.

That's what the Patreon really is. It's absolutely incorrect. That's why we said don't donate more to our Patreon and we will get a mirror. That's not a promise. I like the idea that like maybe if you're behind with your payments, they don't actually cut off your mirror, but they just like throw all the bit rate, like your internet service right now. So you get like a really low res image of your own face.

It's that you get, you get, because it streams workouts basically to your mirror. Yeah. Again, you can't do that with any other screen. Internet connected stream. That's super creepy, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Like imagine, imagine if like the sound, imagine if like the sound dies on that mirror, right?

Oh, or like it goes on accidentally and like you're coming back home one day and you're just seeing this like ultra realistic figure, like doing fucking Pilates. Well, you're just trying to shave. Well, yeah. What all you're trying to do is like shave and have a piss. Yeah, absolutely. The Pilates person turns to you and is like, if you strike me down, I'll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

And don't worry, it has a five megapixel front facing camera. That's so low res. That's like for like, for that much money, could they not have just put a bare camera in it? Like the Samsung, the new Samsung note is like 10, right? Something like that. Yeah. Oh, and it weighs 70 pounds also. Oh, nice.

But I have a sturdy wall. Yeah. So yeah. So we would get to call the mirror like our son or something. Yeah. The mirror is like as big as, heavy as like a large child and about as expensive. A large reflective son. Yeah. So that's the, that's the mirror.

It costs $1,500, $39 a month. It is, it offers you as sort of a slightly personalized workout program. But mostly it just seems to be doing what someone could do by watching fitness videos on YouTube for far less money. Thank you, mirror. Have you ever thought, my mirror hasn't asked me for any money this month? Pussy. Train hard, train hard, pay regularly.

I'm looking forward to like the Jake Paul mirror. Okay. Go on, elaborate on that idea. Well, he's just like, I feel like the next frontier will just be everyone will have their own mirrors, right? So it's everyone's just going to do live casting from their bathrooms. Yeah. Team 10, more like team 20, if you're using the mirror. Come on, that's better than you gave it credit for.

Goodness. Yeah. Everybody say to your iPhones what you thought of Milo's joke. A Logan Paul mirror where it's like a mirror from one of those horror films where you look into it and you just see someone hanging from a tree in the background. Anyway, okay. That's the mirror. I can't wait till the social media star vloggers all get their own. So that you can see like Jake Paul doing social experiments every day

for like $39 a month. Social experiment. I'm turning on one mirror, one mirror user's camera. So everyone can see them sweat like a hog doing Pilates. Anyway. So we've got, we have some actual stuff, actual politics to talk now. Yeah, right? Shame. I was going to do a mirror check.

Dumb as hell. Yeah. Oh man. Can't we just talk about the mirror every episode? Oh yeah. No. So, so Sam Jima, a conservative MP, minister for education, made a speech entitled reinvigorating capitalism, a conservative approach to growing the economic cake post-Brexit to the CPS think tank recently.

And it was perhaps one of the, it was perhaps one of, it was the most garbled right-wing pablum I have heard in a very long time. Well, what's a pablum? Pablum is like a sort of, it's like a soft food you'd give like an infant. It's like Latin for pablo. This is my friend pablum. So Sam's speech, and we're sort of getting into this because Sam's speech focuses on this sort of the optimistic potential of the UK tech sector

to basically save us from a decade of more abundant productivity growth in the sort of aftermath of the financial crisis. And so I wanted to go, and also it is a response to a lot of what people like the Archbishop of Canterbury have been saying directly calling out the fact that capitalism simply isn't working for people. And so Sam is sort of as one of the sort of cool or younger conservative MPs is sort of- He knows how to tie a tie properly.

He knows how to tie a tie. And apparently he's really good at posting according to Sebastian Payne. He gets it. Who's Sebastian Payne? He's the guy with like the famous tweet which goes something along the lines of the conservative, slowly but surely the conservatives are learning how to use social media. Sam Gema gets it. So Sam's speech is essentially based on the idea that there's a necessary difference between

growing the cake, which is definitely not a horrifyingly mixed metaphor, and distributing the cake fairly. Cakes which famously grow from the ground. See that's the conservative understanding of how baking works, is you get a red velvet cupcake and then you bury it. And then everybody gets cake. We just have to bury the cake. And the fact that it hasn't grown anymore just means we haven't buried enough cupcakes,

bury more cupcakes, so we can finally have cake as a nation. That's a new trash feature campaign. All people say they want to succeed, but if they have a buried a cupcake, and why does it grow into a beautiful tree? No, because they have no commitment. But he says that we must prioritize the former. Now, we all around this table know that that's absolutely ridiculous, that this idea that growth and fairness are not necessarily juxtaposed.

Matthew, a lot of what you write sort of talks about that. Yeah, I mean, I guess there's sort of two things there to pick out. One is, you know, that phrase, well, I'm phrased now on the left, it's sort of tech won't save us. And let's go to Sam's talk, where he sort of leans into sort of technology as our savior. I guess Paul's direct into that trap. And I think clearly sort of there are things technologically that are being advanced, which are quite interesting, could be emancipatory in some form.

But I think the key question we have to ask is, do technologies, do technical systems simply reproduce, reinforce existing inequalities of power, reinforce existing circuits for accumulation? And that clearly appears to be how most technological developments are being directed to shaping them, who's using them and whose interests they operate on. So there's a sort of deeper question around the politics of technology, which we can get into. And then on the sort of specifics of, you know, the UK's economic model,

it's clearly not working as IPR's work has been showing, as many people have been saying, wage stagnation, deep regional inequalities, deep inequalities between gender, between occupation, between class, investment challenges, we could go on and on. Sam actually has a response to that. He says, and I quote, capitalism is not perfect, but it's the best system we've got. So I'm sorry, but you've been owned. I mean, has got me there.

I mean, yeah. You blew my mind. We only have one system. I mean, this is really low on competition. It's not like there are like concurrently other systems running. Like, oh yeah, there's like a small part of Middlesbrough, which is running on a narco feudalism. So he trots out the usual talking points, which are the rise of employment

without mentioning that wages have not concomitantly risen, that the conservatives have reduced the deficit, which is an achievement for some reason. And also they haven't, like even if you want to take that as an achievement, like, yeah, that's just not true. And then a restatement that austerity was necessary. So he actually says, they think that I've, critics of conservatives say that austerity,

we think austerity was a religion, but I remind you that it was necessary. Anyway, on to my next point. Whereas in fact, austerity was my great-grandmother's name. And he seems to say the constant thanks we owe capitalists and the baseless optimism in the future that we must plaster on our faces, will we simply allow technology to just almost,

development of technology to proceed as a natural process that will just sort of emancipate us somehow. Yeah, I mean, I think just taking it back a bit, I mean, when he talks about capitalism, I guess the intersection between capitalism and technology and where we're going on is that capitalism always expands at the frontier, always exhausts of certain modes of social reproduction, of resources, of material or social,

and then moves on to the next domain. And I guess what we're seeing here, whether it's uberization, whether it's of the enclosure of the information commons, that it's not necessarily producing genuine value, but it's enclosing, extracting, often quite brutalizing in the protest. So I think when he talks about capitalism,

as the only system, I think that's, you know, clearly Middlesbrough might have something to say about that. What about Salisbury? One thing about Salisbury, it's spire. This is the only thing I know about it, which kind of reinforces it well. I know a few things about it, but you know, the one thing you did previously.

Yeah, I've actually been, well, exactly. I've been searching times to the very pub where it happened. But yeah, the spire is the spire that inspired the book, The Spire by William Golding, who taught in Salisbury. Why does the name rhyme with spire? That would have been so much better. There you go. That's the true question. William Golding, change your name.

Change your name to William Spire. So to go, going back to, going back to Big Sam, right? Oh yeah. So the one thing I was, I was, I was, I was, the Dory is of English football. I forgot. The niche like fake shake scandal where like, he just said, well, I'm not sure I could do any of that

without talking to the FA and he somehow still got fired, better baffling genuinely. A man who said, well, I couldn't do that because that would be corrupt, but was just fired for even taking the meeting. So, pouring one out for my boy. Yeah. Me, me, me.

He had a house in Middlesbrough, actually. I'm pretty sure he did. God, this case is blowing right now. But it's all connected. I was like, for people who can't see what's going on in the studio, we've got like red string being pinned across the board. That's it in places. There's as easy as two for one voucher in the middle.

So, this is going to be like the spin-off trash future where we're going to make, when we do like our own true crime podcast. It's like cereal, but for dumb ass. It just ties into QAnon somehow. Okay. So, like medium Sam. So, he's, I don't know if he, he used to be university's minister.

He still is. Is he still is. So, I was wondering why his name sounded familiar. And he was the guy who was basically like doing the whole free speech, we'll find universities if like, they prevent like, they do know no platforming and stuff like that.

And really like it kind of, this is just really an exemplification of like this man's, you know, at the best, at best it's like a naivety, but at worst and probably more likely is that like, he's very well aware that these arguments are bullshit. And like maybe not, because like the argument that he's making in terms of like,

yeah, capitalism is imperfect, but it's the best system we've got. Like that's something that like I read, we read on like internet forums all the time, right? From these like fucking like Adam Smith, like dipshits, you know, or like the idea that, oh, you haven't tried true capitalism yet, because true capitalism like lasse fair free mark.

Oh yeah. No, capitalism would be a great system if only we could ever actually try it for real. Yeah. And it sort of feels as if like, this is just like a talking point, but he is recycling from these types of like libertarian online. Absolutely is following on from like other Tory ministers who are pretty much doing the same thing.

Like he's basically even in this particular instance, what he's doing is like waging a culture war rather than any sort of like pragmatic. Oh shit. I hadn't thought of it. That's absolutely what he's doing. This is absolutely a culture war for them. Because he actually, because then you know why is you can tell it's a culture war for conservatives,

because they always trot out that people who are agitating for socialism should be thankful for what capitalism gave them, essentially. That is, is that we owe the, is that, we, is that, oh, you think you're, it's the, all you're posting about socialism on an iPhone, how ironic. But in this, in a speech by a government minister,

essentially. But of course that's what it is. It's absolutely a culture war. And he often does refer to momentum as a horde as well, which is fun. Yeah. It's the biggest horde since the Mongols I'd say. Yeah. Yeah. Is there a specific number of people

you need for it to be a horde? It's slower than that. Is it, is it a rowdy band? A merry band of rowdy men. A plucky unit. So he says, um, as con, as conservatives, we believe individuals are better interpreters of their own destiny than the collective.

Anyone want to say why that's nonsense? Well, I mean, I think what's confusing about sort of this mentality is, this is a zoning of sort of agency gets on the individual where it's like, I guess the left would say, well, yeah, of course the individual should be able to interpret their own destiny of capability. It's just that you can't really do that with institutions

arranged and they are under the neoliberal capitalism. And the challenge is exactly how do you expand domains of freedom by rethinking institutions around debt, around governance, around technology that actually you can expand freedom. And the left is actually about sort of deep freedom, not this pretty superficial sort of uber freedom, which I guess is what Sam is aiming towards.

Yeah. It's the episode titled Uber for Freedom. It's the assumption that it's made freedom so much more quick, just five minutes and it's here. I didn't enjoy this freedom, three stars. Yeah. Cause it's the assumption that like any, any left-wing politics immediately results in the Soviet Union and like you can't,

you have no choice of bread anymore. And you, you have to queue to see your own children. Well, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's the, they see the, We, we, I already have to queue to see my own children outside family court because you kept, you kept extracting jizya for that guy in the Bentley. Bentley's and watches aren't streetwear. So yeah, but so yeah, he just thinks that when he's,

when he says we believe individuals are the best interpreters of their own destiny, what he means is individuals who have proved themselves amazing like Richard Branson are the best interpreters of all of our destinies, more or less. It's kind of the same argument that like the kind of apologists for Elon Musk make, right? Which is that, yeah, we kind of understand

in theory that he hasn't really produced anything, but just the fact that like he does space stuff means that he operates on like a higher plane and the rest of us. I mean, Elon Musk is exactly the example of the sort of frontier capitalism at work. Yeah, they can't produce value on terra firma. And so the way to extract value as well, let's go to another planet.

So it's like the ultimate expression of this mode of capitalism, which expands the frontier. And now we've run out of frontiers because we're on a planet that's like closed and frying and we're running out of sort of, you know, second stagnation, et cetera, et cetera. Where do we go? We go to moon. We go to the Mars. The moon?

Mars. I mean, extra planetary life. He has talked about the moon as well, right? We've got a Mars. He has talked about like setting up camp on the moon as well. So no one will fuck me on earth. Well, I've got news for you. I'm going to go get some moon ass.

He wants, he thinks Iron Sky was a documentary and he wants to go to the moon to fucking destroy the Nazis once and for all. He's totally the guy who's basically like fat, like he couldn't get laid in high school or college. So his literal thing was like, okay, well, my only real option is to go have sex in space. My only real option is to basically be like Wiley Coyote, but have my crazy ACME inventions kill all my workers.

So, but, but Jima says that if Jima sort of locates the frontier on the gig economy more or less and suggests that the flexibility that will be delivered to workers from being in the gig economy. And he says, he handwaves away the fact that it's used to sort of systematically deprive low income people of their rights and sort of push the frontiers into what is tolerable for them. He handwaves that away and says, yeah, but what about a mother who wants, what about a mother who's just given birth and wants to,

and I'm doing air quotes around that so big my fingers fell off, wants to make a little extra money? And he says, that's what the gig economy is good for. I mean, if that was his example, I mean, surely the answer is like, we shouldn't be in a society where, you know, new mothers have to go out to earn enough money to sustain themselves. And they're, I mean, that is such a bizarre example to choose to me that it just strikes.

Yeah. So what's striking about this really for me is that that's like, that's like, definitely like the main thing that mothers think about when they give birth to their kids. It's like, damn, I hope I get out of this hospital soon so that I can give more like, you know, dumb fucking leftist podcast as Uber rides. I'm just really passionate about connecting with people.

All right. I'm really passionate about connecting with people. I'm really passionate about like delivering customer service. And so it doesn't matter that one of my legs has been like, smashed off in a Tesla factory or that I've got a burst bladder from working on Amazon and never pissing. I'm really excited to actually get back into the gig economy and work for three hours so I can afford to get myself the Peter Teal blood bank.

Hire more women delivery riders. More pregnant delivery. They're going to be riding really fast. You're going to get your food there faster. So but what's striking here is that basically his point is that we have to have blind optimism in the tech center and that assume that it's just going to raise all of our standards of living and that if we interfere in it, then all we're doing is being afraid of progress.

That's more or less the point he's making. Or that's the way I kind of see it. And what really gets me about this is that essentially this speech was made more or less in response to Justin Welby because he actually says, if Justin Welby wants to debate the merits of capitalism, because these people are fucking addicted to debate for some reason, then he's welcome to come over to my house, have a delivery and take an Uber ride home. Sorry, Justin, I guess you're not staying over.

I'm pretty sure Justin Welby like has a driver. He lives in Lamb of Palace. Yeah, he probably has a chef. I mean, like the man wears a fucking cape to work. You don't go talking this kind of shit to a man who wears a cape to work, Sam. This guy is far more of a big dick player than you. And again, he completely just tells on himself because, oh yeah, he wanted to debate the merits of capitalism, just forgetting that the delivery was delivered by a person and the Uber is driven

by a person and all of these people are suffering under that business model. With a man also whose entire religion is based on like a poor dude who was like rising up against systems of oppression. I think this is like, so what's interesting to me about this is that this is very much like an extension of like George Osborneism, right? So like, you know, it's pretty well documented that like George Osborne has had this like very strong and David Cameron had this very strong relationship with Uber back during like the Cameron years when the Tories were trying to be like the progressive, you know, and when

they were trying to be like the progressive right wing party, they allied with tech companies, right? They kind of looked at like, you know, Wait, tech companies and the right allying? Astonishing. Well, this was like during the Obama years, right? So they were like, Oh, you know, well, this is kind of like the benevolence of tech. And, you know, they're all like really nice liberal people. And there's this kind of culture that kind of projects progress.

And, you know, all that kind of all the stuff is really all this stuff is like fairly new. And the thing about the thing about Sam is that he's also one of these new batch of MPs that kind of came through during the during the Cameron years. Fresh out of the allotment, grown especially. You know, so he comes he comes from that like sort of, you know, I guess you could call it tradition becomes from that sort of political angle. Yeah, the chum, the chumocracy. So for him, like because like the ascension was really one in which kind of, you know,

liberal, like so-called liberal conservatism allies with tech. This is the kind of the way that he thinks is the way that his politics is like orientated. It's difficult for him. And I imagine that it's difficult for him to kind of even view these companies who have like these cool apps and these cool logos and work in these cool offices. Like they could even possibly be bad or they could possibly like have negative outcomes. For him, it's just all my dinner's quicker. I'm at my destination easily. It's for him. It's just he doesn't notice how easy his life has become. And the fact that orange chicken, man, the fact that more and more people

are then just sort of are getting beaten down under this system to make life easier for like 10 of them. Remember that lady that we talked about a couple episodes ago who worked at like CNBC and like shocked her dogs? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's the same thing where she just totally, she totally, yeah, they just, they sort of just completely forget that all of these tech advances are really just making it a more easy and efficient to expand workers. She was so great. Like consumer capitalism is so good because it means I can order dog torture equipment and the touch of a button. Go back to that one. That's pretty much, that's pretty much what she said. She was talking about how like

online shopping and consumer capitalism by extension is so great because you can like sit on her, sit on her couch and like order whatever she wants to the touch of a button. And like she lists like all the stuff she orders like in the course of one evening. And most of it was like various things you would use to harm a dog. It was a dog shock collar. It's like a dog shock collar. It was like something else weird for a dog as well. I think it was, I think we might have made the rest of it up. It was a dog shock collar. But here's the thing. This is, this is the best the conservative party can do as a vision for the future at this point. It's the best they can do. Yet let's hear what big dick Justin

Welby has to say. After the IPPR report was released and he was roundly criticized by a bunch of people misunderstanding the render unto Caesar passage from the Bible. He said, today there are some who view this kind of oppression, referring to the gig economy, of the employed as a virtue. The gig economy, zero hours contracts, it's nothing new. It is simply the reincarnation of an ancient evil. When justice rolls down like waters in righteousness like an ever flowing stream, the food banks close, the night shelters are empty. Families and households are hopeful of better lives for their selves and their children, themselves and their children, rather. Money is not a tyrant and justice is seen. Is he always tall brothers? I fucking,

that'd be sick. Vos with bars. Vos with bars. Just down the path. I think he has, he has identified a malefactor and he has put forward a vision of a society that will be better in several concrete ways without just relying on the sort of unspecified beneficence of the tech sector. It's an enormous dick opinion on the on the second mention of the word malefactor. Women can have big dick opinions as well. Can we pour one out for our boy, a boss of terrible enemy of the show who shall not be named, whose name is like a really shady capitalist and whose name is literally Mallory Factor? Oh, wow. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. God, what a weird name. Yeah. Yeah. So, but I think that's the, this should give British socialists some hope,

which is that we have reclaimed the territory of understanding who the malefactor in society is, and the right has lost this. And that means that essentially they can simply defend their record on the economy and warn that accepting the politics of Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott and Welby will change the country for the worse. And we actually have something to not just to respond to that, but to absolutely steamroll it in terms of getting people excited about politics. The only problem is the only thing the right can do beyond this is accept fascism, which they kind of have and are. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things that just, it does seem to me, and I would say this because they're working sort of like the broad lefts of think tanks of policy space,

but the right does seem like desperately out of ideas. Now, they're basically exhaust the intellectual and indeed sort of material realms, which they can reproduce themselves. You know, they've privatized all this of social housing they can, you know, they've run out of sort of both material and intellectual ideas. And you can really see that if you look at like Adam Smith Institute, they've obviously done this of quite cunning rebranding, being like with a think tank for neoliberalism. And you look at what they actually say, they kind of say like, well, just like abolish planning laws. And you're like, okay, like, I mean, if that's literally your solution to serve crisis of capitalism, it's a bit, it's a bit, it's a week. Build anything anywhere.

It's your statue of a dick. Okay. That's what freedom is. Yeah. It's a monument to Justin Welby's awesome opinions. Massive dick. Redevelop landless palace into a huge dick in honor of Justin Welby. In a good way. So the other thing is the super point about sort of politics without an enemy and a sort of demoralized politics. I think the left always struggles on that terrain because you need that you need, you know, enemies in a broad sense. Like, well, what, what are we trying to overcome here? What can we mobilize around? What are the institutions, what sort of actors we're trying to push back or reform or democratize? And I think, you know, Welby's intervention, naming sort of some of

these evils, you know, exploitation, the gig economy as the obvious one is a useful sort of intervention in that sense. Absolutely. It's, we, I'd say, it's, we have this, we have very much in the vein of Stella gotten our groove back. Two. No, again, it's how Stella got her groove back again. Fuck. Nate, fix my mistaken post. I can't let the Stella heads get on my case. So, but one of the, I don't understand any of that. I'm just, I'm just smiling and pretending. I know exactly. You guys know nothing of the late period comedies of Whoopi Goldberg. I thought the Stella heads, the Stella heads were like people down weather spoons at 11 in the morning. Yeah. Like really pro Stella Creasy, like 25. Oh yeah, niche. Did you, did you see

this morning actually, you know, the, well, I know you saw it because it was about DM, but the video of, of Jeremy Corbyn going into his house, it was a classic one of those like, Jeremy Corbyn entering his 700,000 pound house, which actually looks like a shit. When you actually see it, you're like, Oh, that's not impressive at all. And then, and then they're like, Oh, Jeremy Corbyn, what are your thoughts on being so rich? And he's like wearing like a fucking track suit, top shorts and trainers. He literally looks like he's been doing the fruit machines down the bubble morning. And then trying to portray him as this like arched capitalists. Like, yeah. Hey, Jeremy Corbyn, you live in a house and yet you're

a socialist. This is why the left will always win because when the right ones show their rich, they'll kind of like wear cravats and like they're like, they'll just buy like really baggy like streetwear. Stop calling me out on the podcast. This is anyone wants to know where their Patreon money is going. More Supreme for Riley. One of the ways in which the left actually does have ideas at Riley said doing a super cool segue. Is this like an actual segue? Yeah, it's I'm zipping along on my segue into the next part of the show where we're talking about the digital Commonwealth report itself, which is, as we said earlier, sort of looking at the data economy and how to democratize it. Yeah, so it came out last week and I guess the core of it is

that at the moment, there are three, four, five dominant firms, which are basically enclosing the information commons, dominating the development of the infrastructure upon which we all rely, whether it's cloud computing, search technology, analytical capability. And if we actually want to repurpose technologies, not simply reproducing the qualities, not simply reproduced of anti emancipatory politics, we need to think about how can we move from its enclosure to a commons where data and the digital infrastructure that sits behind it are organized as a collective good as a resource for emancipation, for innovation, for, you know, inclusiveness, not in a sort of bland sort of speak, but actually enabling people to have

data and control both individually, but also collectively around how they shape their lives. How does something like Facebook, you say, enclose data? What's going on there? I mean, I think of enclosures, I think of a 17th century fop putting up a bunch of hedges and then, you know, getting fucking the shit kicked out of him by his peasants. Soft play areas, you know, stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So it's more the former than the latter in terms of the analogy in the land analogy works quite well. So what is the business model of a company like Facebook? It is to create a platform in which users go on it. They generate data through using that platform that data is then used by Facebook at scale,

aggregated, analyzed, and the insights generated from that is then sold to a third party normally advertisers for profit. The analysts, the analytical data is also then used to sort of train machine learning to sort of develop AI systems to improve the platform. So you have this very circular dynamic where you want to get more and more data, more and more users, more and more data around and around it goes and the enclosure is that the control of that data, the access to that data is often very tightly controlled. So what could be a really sort of useful social resource or social good is in fact controlled, dominated, monopolized by Facebook. And then it's used to sell us like slightly personalized t-shirts that'll say stuff like,

yeah, I'm strong, I'm fast, I drive a big car and you wouldn't know it because it's a being born in June thing. I mean, I guess if that's what you all think. Those weird custom t-shirts that computer generated, they're so weird. I love it when people accidentally buy those thinking they're a real thing and then they get one of that, yeah, they're really bad. Yeah, it's like Facebook is essentially using its business model to try and transition the entire world to like clothing and mugs generated by bad Markov chains like, you know, the world's greatest Ford truck driving, gun toning, Reagan loving dad, but then it gets shipped to your aunt.

I was in Ikea today and I think like they're like the signs in Ikea are generated by those because they had a big sign on the wall that was like, I guess ostensibly an artwork and it just said, a love of things. Yeah, you wouldn't get it. It's a love of things thing. I mean, but what I mean, I think one of the things that is challenging though is that, yeah, absolutely right in this primary phase of their development. Like, yeah, their thing is selling information to advertisers to sell like pretty rubbish products quite often. But the point is this of big dominant platforms, if you look at Alphabet, if you look at sort of Apple to an extent, certainly to Facebook and Amazon,

their sort of goal is not just to stop there, but to basically enclose us in a sort of totality of themselves that we will exist within Amazon. So Amazon's got 5000 patents now. And they're, you know, you can see a world in which Facebook, they, you know, they'll move into healthcare, they'll move into banking and they'll move it and you will end up having four or five major platforms, which aren't just selling you sort of, you know, or sort of selling information about you to advertisers. They have whole sector controls over vast ways of the economy. And not least they'll be able to do that because they have the data and the analytical capability to just move into more and more sectors, knocking them out. And you

can see that, you know, you can see, you know, Uber, yeah, Uber small fry wouldn't worry about Uber. But like if you can see sort of like, you know, Amazon is moving into a whole host of areas and moving into some physical retail with their all foods. Now, even just today, Jeff Bezos said he wanted to open a school where he thinks of the kids as customers. Well, exactly. And so in some ways, I do think that the sort of platformization, the sort of datification society is sort of neoliberalism at its most extreme, at least in its current situation, in the sense that neoliberalism is about sort of the marketization and sort of transformation of political act into sort of economic act.

And so why is that, you know, why is customer, obviously the customer thing, you don't need to explain the kids thing, but I think looking at their business model as neoliberalism, what it does is it tracks, traces and transforms everything we do in the digital realm and increasing the physical realm, you know, as we're traced through cities, as we're traced in our sleep, you know, this mirror thing we were talking about, what that is a way of tracing the most intimate moments data, which is then generated at scale to be transformed into economic information. And so in that sense, it really is a sort of transformation of sort of homo, politicus, homo, you know, the person as a political social animal,

into we inescapably become a generator of value for these firms, we're ensnared in the net of the platform. And so politically, if you think about how can you move beyond neoliberalism, you can't do that without thinking about how you reorganize the digital economy, and in particular, those who occupy the commanding heights of the economy. I'm very excited for Facebook to take over the entire justice system. I mean, every day have them put just the pettiest arguments with like shitheads I knew in high school or whatever, just sort of decided on the blockchain automatically with smart contracts. Like it's going to be incredible when Facebook also takes over family

court. Oh, yeah. I mean, to be honest, if you look at the work of someone like Kathy O'Neill in the States and Frank Pasquale, who look at sort of algorithmic justice, much more serious, brother. Yeah, much, much, much more serious. But you look at what they're doing, you know, ultimately, the justice system in the States, you know, is very deformed, obviously, but it does rely on a lot of these sort of indicators, which ultimately are generated from social data. And therefore, in some ways, you are sort of seeing this bleed across from, you know, digital information into the most fundamental questions of, you know, justice, human rights, et cetera, et cetera, which pros deeply problematic sort of issues towards

democratic governance and judicial norms. I thought I'm looking forward to sending my high school rival to death in Facebook court because he took the girl that I fancied to prom and I had to go and I had to go on my own. I know it's been like over a decade, but like I'm still mad about it. Facebook's robot judge is like, that's not what friends do. Facebook's robot judge sentences you to being a fake friend. It plays it plays you. It plays him a video of his friendship with Hussain immediately before he's executed. Like if Twitter took over like the justice system and Twitter took over the justice system, like if you have enough followers, you can just murder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it'll be extremely, it'll be extremely funny then that basically like drill

will be the person sending. No, this is the world that drill the sort of the character that the guy behind drill create created is he was actually saying, this is a guy who is like permanently enraged and sort of lives in hell more or less. And we are creating a world where we're all becoming drill. Like that's the thing. Everyone's like, oh, idiocracy was a documentary. No, drill was a documentary. Holy shit. No, but the other thing I kind of want to want to talk about here is like, I don't think of a lot of these platforms really, we were talking about this earlier. I don't even think of a lot of these platforms as tech companies. I think of them rather as incidentally, technology companies that in fact, many of them are just ways to push worker exploitation further

and then use a sleek app to more or less cover up what they're actually doing. Yes. I think when we talk about sort of platform economies as a whole and the individuals of companies within that, I think it's important to try and distinguish between sort of a bucket of companies, which I think kind of do what you say in some ways, which is that they're not really advancing sort of huge technical insights. They're often just picking up stuff that you know, as per the Mariana Mazakata arguments of public investment has helped to generate. So, if you look at GPS coordinating technologies, mapping technologies to sit behind something like Uber, that is ultimately, you know, it's a snazzy app and it creates, you know, it's very useful

and slick, but it obviously relies on sort of pushing down and putting a hell of a lot of pressure and exploitation on the sort of driver. So that's one, and then you can think of lots of sort of, you know, platforms that do that. They're kind of intermediate between labor or between the supply of assets. They don't really create something new, but they sort of play a coordinating role. Yeah. A matching role. I've invented a button that makes a Toyota Prius come to your house. Yeah. I mean, six in here. I've invented a button. One of these guys is going to invent a button where you pay like a pound and someone somewhere gets hit in the nuts and that's it. You don't even receive proof that they were hitting the nuts. You just have to believe it.

So there is a Japanese game show that, and again, this is not the racial slur. This is just what the thing is called the chinko machine. It's just, that's just its real name. You can look it up. C-H-I-N-K-O. And what it does is you stand on top of it and you say a tongue twister or you answer a skill testing question. And if you get it wrong, then a little catapult arm comes up and flicks you in the nuts. It's my favorite thing to watch. Ah, that sounds dope. Miwa in Japan. We should go on. Yeah. We should definitely go on. I would get flicked immediately, but that's the future in many of this kind of gig economy is that it's going to be like,

I want to flick someone in the nuts. I'm not even getting to say a tongue twister. I push a button and boom, off they go. Yeah. Exactly. So I think, and that's the thing. I mean, the positive story here, apart from this of button pressing is the sort of gig economy. A lot of it can be, you know, some pretty old fashioned regulations of labor rights and of employment rights can kind of fix a lot of the things going wrong there. And so you can kind of address some of the exploitation that Justin Welby was talking about, that you guys have been referring to in that. And so that's one category of platform company. I think the harder thing, and frankly,

the bigger challenge, the more interesting thing is not these sort of companies, which I think often they're Ponzi schemes that sort of in the other type, or they'd rely on exploitation. It's the big sort of companies, which are clearly doing technological innovation. Amazons and so forth. Yeah. Amazon, you know, sort of alphabets, sort of, you know, machine learning technologies, Apple, etc. And they're sort of mixed. So again, you've got to unpick them. They're a mix of, you know, clearly technological advance. They spend a lot of money on research and development. So they're not just run tiers. They do clear economics of investment,

creation of some new product lines, of which there are many sort of, you know, lots of people benefit from their access in exchange for their data, which, you know, many people I'm sure would give up that trade off still. So that's an interesting sort of, I guess, question for the left around sort of where that trade off lies. But then they also obviously are quite a sort of infrastructural power. You know, they are much, much more powerful than your Uber's, your Air Beans, etc. Air Beans and B. Do you just try to turn these general Air Beans? Exactly. Well, why? Someone's got to, but... So it's really sort of what do you do about

Air Beans companies? You know, what do you do? They've accumulated the most data, so most analytical capability, the biggest cash bars, got huge cash bars. They're very financialized corporations. You know, what can we do, given our limited jurisdictional sort of power, to actually say, actually, we can reimagine the use of technologies to deepen freedom, to deepen capability, not just sort of, you know, the tech oligarchs at the center of this, but actually much more broadly and so profusely. And I'm afraid Sam Jima has you owned in the argument again, because we owe them thanks for inventing all this stuff for us, remember? I mean, yeah. I feel he's going to own me

every time. He's got some snappy line up his sleeve every time. I'll just Google a response. He's always going to own. Yeah, well, that's precisely the question is, is not... And here's the thing, a lot of liberals will say this as well, where it's like, well, you want socialism, but don't you like your Facebook and your Google and so on? And it's like, sure, I do like those things. I don't understand the social worth of Jeff Bezos making more money than most people in London will ever make combined in a minute. So, yeah. So there's, I don't know if you've seen that stat from earlier this year, but Jeff Bezos, I was never sure if it was Bezos or Bezos. So that's useful contribution.

We call it Jeffrey Kisses, I'm sure that. His net worth has gone up every day in 2018 by four hundred and five million dollars. So, you know, we're talking about a scale of accumulation, a scale of concentration, which is really, you know, I mean, he's the richest man in history now. Can I be Jeff Bezos for a day or like an hour? That'd be great. I just, I just like, I'd siphon it off into an offshore account. If you couldn't siphon it off, what would you do as Jeff Bezos for an hour? I'd just run out in the street and whank. I'd just take him down that way.

I'd Coney 2012 him. Remember Coney 2012? That's the only acceptable answer. Thank you. But right. So, when platforms are organized as private goods, because that's the other thing that the Gimas of the world sort of forget, is he's saying, well, you can't organize an economy because the economy is self-organizing. Well, no, it has been organized this way. It's been organized so that, you know, the only way to defeat Jeff Bezos is like being John Malkovich into his head and then do a Coney 2012. It's interesting how doing a Coney 2012 doesn't involve Joseph Coney in any way.

So, the question is, how can we organize platforms as a public good? Yeah. I mean, I guess that's central. So, I think you've got to start by sort of, again, I'm picking where they're parallelized. So, party is the control of digital infrastructure. So, I think it's partly developing some of, publicly and democratically, infrastructures around cloud computing and local capability that sort of takes out that Rontier position and expands who can access it, can expand, can use it, so decommodify it, sort of creates of the technology for the many. So, I saw FairBnB as an example. Yeah. So, I mean, with all these things, they can... So, I think what I think we need to think

about, sort of in terms of policy, at least, is that FairBnB as a sort of model, sort of like an ethical platform, because, you know, as you say, the platform is not the problem, it's sort of the undergirding of it. It's sort of the cycles of accumulation, it dries, power inequality, etc. For just for listeners, FairBnB is sort of alternative to Airbnb that is sort of more kind of community-owned and organized. It's in Barcelona? Yeah, it's Barcelona, I think Amsterdam as well, a number of cities. But I think, realistically, given the scale of the sort of the Airbnb's as well, particularly the role of sort

of, you know, venture capital, etc., flooding into these types of platforms, you need public policy to say, actually, actively, we want these things to scale and we're going to shape, promote, incubate, and expand them. What it shows us is that it's possible to do this without the capitalist at the top becoming unimaginably wealthy. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely possible to unmoor sort of technologies from cycles of capitalist accumulation, but it needs a politics which is much more critical about technologies, much more serious about getting into the weeds of the institutions and how sort of

laws, governance, technologies interact and sort of reshaping them towards, you know, different outcomes. That's precisely it. And that's why I think I will sort of return back sort of code alike to Sam James' speech, where he says that capitalism gave us Amazon, Deliveroo, Airbnb, Alphabet, whatever. Yet that's true, because it gave those to us in their current extractive forms. And we, and it is up to us to actually decide that we want something different. And so the, and I think your, your report, sorry, I said something and then I just kept going. So I'll say that again. And it's up to us to decide that we actually want something different.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think we've got, we've got to have a politics that's much more serious about technology and the development of technology and sort of interrogates link between sort of capitalist dynamics and technological dynamics. Precisely. So one of the proposals, like the report has several proposals, some of which I are sort of, you know, relatively sort of kind of common sense regulations. But one of the ones that jumped out to me was one of the things we can start doing is looking at regulating platform companies like utilities. Yeah, absolutely. So I think this is again, this goal of how we can create sort of digital commons, opening up sort of access.

And while also reining in the power of some of these sort of, you know, ginormously powerful companies. And our idea was actually, if you look at what they do, increasingly, their services are basically, you know, they are provided in some monopoly way, you know, Gmail has got a huge sort of share of the market, similar to sort of Googling, similar to Facebook's social networks, similar for Amazon, sort of deliver of a huge range of products. And those services of matching, searching, mapping that is fundamental to life is very hard to sort of exist in many ways as sort of citizen of a digitalized society without those services. And so they occupy the

equivalent of utility functions in our economy, they're infrastructural sort of services, infrastructural goods, we need them to go about our life. So rather than allowing these to be sort of controlled and sort of extracted, extracted great wealth from that control in their currents of dynamic, we're saying, actually, we should regulate them like we regulate water companies. I mean, obviously, there's a debate about public ownership of those companies, but sort of a series of utilities, regulate them and say, if you want to operate in this country, your license to operate requires you to do a certain things. And I suppose the biggest thing that we sort of suggest is that to operate in these areas, it's sort of your Google's,

your Facebook's, your Amazon's would have to be required to open up their data. So what's that mean? So it means their data, which ultimately sits at the heart of their economic power, their ability to sort of create artificial intelligence systems, their ability to generate revenue through selling on to sort of information on to advertisers, which is the core of their revenue model. They would turn that data into machine-readable sources of data, sources of information that we can then extract socially information from that other companies could potentially extract information from, that sort of civil society could extract information

from. And they would put it out there. I mean, one good way of thinking about how this could work is if you actually go on sort of the TFL, so if you just Google TFL open data, it has a really good example of what it would mean. So if you go on the TFL sort of website or TFL open data, you can basically see it arranges in a very accessible way a huge range of datasets that TFL generates. So everything from air quality to traffic numbers to fatalities to whatever it would be. And the idea almost is at scale do that. So you can have it, all this information, which is currently siloed and generating fast economic reward for a few can actually be opened up and you could create a whole range of products, services,

value, social value from it. And so it's worth looking at that sort of TFL side just to get a sense of it. I mean, I think, you know, because ultimately, when you're regulating this data to be an open good, I think the key thing to remember is that in some ways, the platform economy and the digital economy is in some ways the expression of us of the growth of social intelligence, which is in some ways what this is analysis at scale from data is in some ways a form of contemporaries of non state socialism. It is our collective data, ours of thoughts, experiments with our digital footprint as a result, collected at scale socially because ultimately, you know, data has no value if it's not aggregated, individual data doesn't work.

So privatizing data doesn't work, but aggregated at scale is, you know, in some ways, a great sort of socialist achievement if socialism is the collective effort and endeavor of people's great information and cultures and freedoms. And so in some ways, we need to think, well, actually, the resource being created is in some ways of emblematic of a type of politics that we should be aiming for in some ways, but it's how do we get the institutions to do that? And one of the things we suggest is regulating these companies as utilities. So, you know, they still exist, they'd still, you know, create money, but probably much less. And hopefully, you know, focus a lot more on creating some real products of value,

but you also, do you not remember the whole like weird custom mugs and t-shirts and so on? So it's funny enough, in our report, we have it, we sort of look at Amazon as a case study, and we end up by suggesting in the future, we wouldn't be surprised if you look at their business model and their sort of patterns of development that you will end up having sort of a Amazon coffee mug, which is linked like an Amazon sort of coffee store, and you go in, you put it in, it automatically does it, it's linked up to a sort of Amazon account, like Amazon Prime coffee. And so it's, you know, it's not inconceivable that somebody's like ridiculous suggestions could become reality.

That, that, I mean, the world, the world that was continuing to be created by sort of closed data monopolies is essentially going to be one where there are five coffee shops, and you have to have the special proprietary cup that only works with each of them. And it's like, I prefer Facebook coffee. I wish I could get one from Amazon, but you know, I'm not a Prime member. Oh yeah, I'm not a Prime citizen. Alex Jones is preferred brand now. He's banned from any other platform. But I mean, I think that, I mean, that's an allergy of like, you know, oh, you can get

coffee anyway, as long as it's on my proprietary sort of Amazon mug. I mean, that, that's the heart of it, actually. I mean, despite seeing a bit stupid, like platform capitalism, kind of mirrors neoliberalism and capitalism sort of as a mode of production in its duality. So yes, obviously it is expansive. It expands potential opportunities and freedoms and, you know, gives you more choice and whatnot in some realms and domains, not particularly as a consumer. Obviously, you know, the wall sort of caveats around that. But at the same time, it might much more deeply constricts and contracts freedom, and whether it's in staring you with debt, whether it's actually like proprietary controls over

mugs, which really, there's really no need for that. It could be so, you know, much more freely open source and created. That would never work because the only reason people go to coffee shops anymore is to like, get like, I support Trump mega patriot written on their mugs. Damn right. I thought it was to sort of be like, my name is I support the second referendum. What was that thing? Those on Twitter, whatever my name.

I went into the coffee shop and said, my name is whatever and everyone cheers. No, voting is that's the other thing in the platform, in the in the private platform economy, all voting is just replaced with what name you choose on your coffee order. Interesting. I am excited for Amazon open data, though, because we can finally find out what the fuck is behind the suggested items for you algorithm, because there's never been, I've never had worse suggestions in my life. I like a lot of my friends have serious drug problems and they make better suggestions to me than the suggested items for you algorithm.

That's essentially the world of the closed platform sort of seeping into the physical realm. Yeah, exactly. And you would imagine that this sort of interconnection in sort of the physical and the digital become much more intense and they will be aiming for a world, they're going back to the enclosure point, they'll be aiming for a world in which they enclose you in totality in their systems, whether that is, you know, running sort of a physical infrastructure, physical sort of goods and services or in the digital realm, you know, whether, you know, that is their goal. You know, each of these companies, their goal is quite is universal in a way that

sort of industrial capitalism is distinct and actually much more limited in how it sort of goes about making money and it's of is objects and it's sort of goals. Platform capitalism is just much, much more expansive. And I think we've sort of failed to grasp that really they are seeking and snaring within their networks to generate data and sort of control through the infrastructure of all of society. And there's this quote by Lenin saying like, all of society will become a factory and really that is all of society will become a Facebook group. Exactly. But the Facebook group is a factory. I mean, it is a sort of digital labor

factory. Yeah, it's not just what's going on Facebook because lots of us, you know, but you won't be able to escape the fact because you'll move through a city and sort of Siemens will have lots of, you know, Internet of Things devices in like five years across all the cities. That will, you know, you will inescapable, you're generating revenue for Siemens. So unless we have a different urban politics, different sort of democratic policies. So it's official posting is labor. I mean, this is my point about, you know, in your liberal and snares you because it is, I mean, it is like a form of emotional and sort of digital labor.

You know what, if you love what you're doing, you never work in there, exactly. So this enclosed economy actually is going to be a soft play area because it's going to be like a padded brightly colored dystopia and you're not going to be wearing shoes because your shoes aren't compatible with it. Your shoes. So you can wear shoes, just you can only wear, you can only wear Amazon shoes that talk about how cool it is to be a Gemini. Hush kisses by Jeffrey. But our Amazon shoes hype beast. That's really the most important question. Listeners, yell at your phone the answer. I think that's a good place as any to wrap things up. We aren't quite like Joe Rogan level yet, where you can do like free hour,

free hour podcasts, digressions about how a chimp would tear you to shreds, mid sentence digressions about chimp. We don't have any kush to like offy. No, I know. I know. We're not proprietary. I'm sorry. I'm my two co hosts appear to want to apologize that you we that you didn't mistakenly come on the Joe Rogan experience. I'm not gonna lie. I don't know who Joe Rogan is. He's the guy who made people eat insects in the late nineties and inexplicably like a podcast philosopher. I understand. You hear it here first, first folks yell who Joe Rogan is at your phone. All right. So here, once again, goes the the end matter of the show. Matthew, thank you very much for coming on. This was a genuine pleasure. Number two, we have a patreon. You know it. We

know it. All of our coolest drunkest antics go on the patreon. We have a lot of good fun on the patreon. Give us money so that we can pay for family. Is this coming out before the matzab? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, there's going to be the matzab up on the patreon after this one. So if you like your matzabs nice and cousin, if you like to keep it in the family, I'm going to replace you with a fish. I swear to Christ. Oh, you can marry matzab. It's technically legal. You see, you never let me get through the end matter. So subscribe to our patreon. It's very fun. And we're the first left this podcast to ever do that. Pay our child support. Yeah, pay your family court bills. Pay your family court Facebook group bills.

And then also we, of course, have to thank Jinseng for our theme song. It's called Here We Go. You can find it on Spotify. It's very good. You should listen to it. And in fact, I've already done the Vremi plug for today, but you can also commodify your descent with a t-shirt from Lil Comrade. Hey, guys, isn't it ironic that we're complaining about capitalism using all of this equipment capitalism gave us? Fuck, he got us again. Damn. Well, best. So, yeah, best quit the show and join the Adam Smith Institute. Nope. You know, we have to do the only thing that aren't that sort of extremely online leftists are allowed to do by the logic of conservatives, which is just go live in a forest under a rock because everything else is capitalism.

No, I don't think isn't that what the ultra capitalists are doing. They're all like buying a forest in New Zealand and going to like escape there. The real horseshoe theory. Good night, everybody. Cheers, guys.