Who Owns The Internet & How It Owns Us | James Ball | Modern Wisdom Podcast 213

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   When you get into…

   1. JBJames Ball0:00

      When you get into how online ads work, they are so, so much creepier than you ever give them credit for. They stalk you around the internet. Like, if any human being, if any ex did this, they would be in jail, and rightly so. What happens every time you visit any website is you start this amazing bidding war for your attention. And they might literally know exactly who you are, or they might have built a picture of it.

   2. CWChris Williamson0:31

      I'm joined by James Ball. James, welcome to the show.

   3. JBJames Ball0:34

      Pleasure to be here.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:35

      Absolute pleasure to have you on. I want to know, what's it like interviewing Edward Snowden in a stadium filled with 15,000 people?

   5. JBJames Ball0:44

      So that was, that was something of a moment. I've got to say, they'd done this very dramatic sort of in, uh, video build-up, and then they killed every light in the place. And so I'm walking out to silhouette, and they've just been told to expect Edward Snowden. And you can see the disappointment on the face of the people (both laughing) around me. Like absolute crashing, "Have we been sold a bill of goods?"

   6. CWChris Williamson1:08

      (laughs) Yeah.

   7. JBJames Ball1:09

      And, uh, my, my sort of script line to start it was, "Edward, are you listening?" At which point he's meant to appear on the big screens because, of course, it's video link. And you just have this sinking moment in your sort of, the longest sort of second and a half of my life, when you come on stage and, "Edward, are you listening?" And you just think, "If he doesn't come up on screen, this is going to be awful." (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson1:38

      Oh, man.

   9. JBJames Ball1:39

      So, so obviously the rest of the interview after that was a total cakewalk because the nerves of that moment were so extreme.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:46

       Dude, it's like proper Metallica shit.

   11. JBJames Ball1:49

       It, uh, honestly, it's... You know, you do, you, you go around and speak as a journalist, as a reporter, and a big crowd is 200. You know, that is like, that feels like prime time. And so you walk out to 13,000 at this like music concert venue.

   12. CWChris Williamson2:04

       (laughs)

   13. JBJames Ball2:04

       And you're like, "Well, what the hell happened?"

   14. CWChris Williamson2:07

       How do you-

   15. JBJames Ball2:08

       Like, I mean, I (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson2:08

       What happened in life for me to end up in this situation here?

   17. JBJames Ball2:12

       Yeah. It's, it's just completely ridiculous. The, um, the venue did some photos from the back of the crowd, and you've just got this huge sort of stadium crowd. And then every screen, as it should be, massive picture of Edward Snowden. And there's this tiny dot on the stage.

   18. CWChris Williamson2:28

       (laughs)

   19. JBJames Ball2:28

       It was like, "That's me! That's me!" (laughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson2:30

       "Yeah, look at me! Mom, I made it! I made it."

   21. JBJames Ball2:34

       I did actually send it to my mom...

   22. CWChris Williamson2:36

       You've got it?

   23. JBJames Ball2:36

       ... uh, who has, who has got it in a little frame. (laughs)

   24. CWChris Williamson2:40

       How cool, man. That's awesome. Uh, so yes, we're talking about Analogous today. We're talking about the internet. You've written a book about the internet. Why did you write a book about the internet?

   25. JBJames Ball2:51

       Uh, I wrote a book about the internet because weirdly, for something that's kind of so pervasive, you know, more than half of all of humans are on it. We do everything in our lives by it. We're doing this interview with it. You know, we do our banking. It's our financial system. It's our information. It's our spies. It's our critical network. And all we really talk about is Facebook and Twitter and Google. And they're really important. We should talk about them. You know, they do matter. But we never talk about the actual internet bit. You know, we talk about the cloud, or we just sort of use it and don't think about it. And I kind of was like, okay, all of these boring, invisible bits of the internet, they're not boring, they're really important, and I want to do a book talking about them instead. So, that's, that sort of was what I set out when I did it. And hopefully, hopefully it's fairly successful in like actually going, "Look at all these really important bits of the internet that are just as broken and just as wild, but have nothing to do with Mark Zuckerberg."

   26. CWChris Williamson3:55

       Yeah, it's, um, it's mad because you're right. The internet, the infrastructure, physically how it manifests and how the, the messages are actually being moved around the world and all this sort of stuff, the takeoff of the platform of like the software side of things and the way that it's experienced by people was so great that we never actually got to look into how interesting or cool or otherwise all of the stuff underneath that was. You know? Like, you got to see... The Wright brothers got to take a little bit of a plane off, and you see them, and they kind of fail a little bit. And then there's a slightly better one, and then, "Oh, wow, we've managed to get a helicopter, but it doesn't really work that much. You know, we've got to attach another rotor and do all this stuff." And then you eventually get to like Concorde, and you just watch this whole thing, and people are kind of brought along for the ride. But the takeoff with the internet was so intense and so, so quickly was everyone... It was just this ubiquitous, uh, th- utility, like gas and plumbing, that, um, we all kind of... We didn't get to see that bit, right?

   27. JBJames Ball4:58

       It is that amazing thing. It's become a utility, and we sort of... You know, the electrical grid is pretty cool if you ever need to think about it. Like, we have to generate the same amount of power every day that we use. Um, you can't store power very well. It's really hard to do. And so there's this massive, complicated mess of a thing going on that we had about a century, maybe a century and a half, generously to build. And we don't have to think about it because, to us, you flick a switch. The internet, sort of 20 years ago, was a really niche thing. Meh, you know, starting to catch on. You probably, you know, knew someone who had it. You might have had it at home. Why would you ever want it on a phone? (laughs) Um, and then suddenly, it's critical infrastructure that we don't think about to that extent. And that's kind of wild because it has really, really like reshaped how the world works, and also sort of how the world connects to each other. This idea of the internet as the cloud is such a good bit of marketing 'cause...... someone has to, like, drive ships and lay cables under the sea to do this, and bury them at the oceans. And you've gotta find sort of a massive plot of land that is quite cheap that you can put huge, huge data centers and air-con and all of this. And so, there's this massive network of physical infrastructure that we just never really had to think about because it just appears to us.

   28. CWChris Williamson6:26

       Mm. Yeah. So, let's, let's get started. Talk to us about the mechanics of the internet. What did you find out about that?

   29. JBJames Ball6:33

       So, there's quite an, a great, like, early origin story of the internet, and it's older than you think it is. It comes out of something called the ARPANET, which grew out of the US military, basically. Um, if you've ever heard of ARPA or DARPA, they came out of the US Department of Defense and were, like, their moonshot secret projects. Uh, you know, if anyone ever ran sort of... You know, these are the people who everyone thinks did mind control, and they actually were looking into bits around that. They really did. (laughs) Um, or if we had Area 51, that would be these guys. And one of the things they were trying to do, like, this is sort of in about the '60s, was look at networking. And so, computers at this ti- this time are things the size of a room that you feed with punch cards, that cost masses and masses and masses of money. And maybe about three universities in a country would have one. It would be sort of a big sell in the very narrow geek world. You know, we have a computer that can do X, which would be wildly less powerful than a calculator, if anyone still has a calculator. Um, and so one of the things that ARPA tried to do, um, universities in America would go to it for funding saying, "Hey, we want an even better computer that can do this kind of calculation." And because they wanted to research networking, and we'll get onto why, um, they kind of saw a bit of an opportunity of going, "Well, we won't give you money for a computer, but we'll give you money to network the one that you have. And that will mean if your computer's really good, say, at doing traditional sort of physics-type equations, we'll hook you up with a university that's really good for doing sort of graphical calculations. And so, when they need your computer, they can use it. When you need theirs, you can use it. And so, you get more computer, we're not buying you another one."

   30. CWChris Williamson8:36

       (laughs)
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Mm-hmm, okay. …

   1. JBJames Ball15:00

      you know, we are in full, full Cold War territory here. And what they were looking to do was, well, what happens if we have a first strike against us and we don't respond quickly enough and the US has been hit and we want to retaliate? What happens if we literally can't send the signal from the command bunker to the launch site? You know, what if the cable that it's meant to travel on is one of the ones that's been hit by the nuke?

   2. CWChris Williamson15:32

      Mm-hmm, okay.

   3. JBJames Ball15:32

      They have two or three, they might have... but they were like, how could we have it so that we can reliably still send the signal and be sure it would be received and accurate if we ever wanted to second strike? Now, you can see this as a terrifying warmongery thing, and your eyes suggest that you kind of are. (laughs) Um, they would also say being able to prove that you could retaliate if you were struck first makes it less likely someone will strike you and make it-

   4. CWChris Williamson16:04

      It's part, part of their mutually assured destruction strategy, right?

   5. JBJames Ball16:06

      Yeah, exactly. It's, you, you can make an argument that by going, "Look, we could retaliate," it makes someone else less likely to want to strike first. If you think you could strike first and get away with it, maybe you would. You know, personally, I wouldn't. (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson16:23

      I don't know, I like the whole... I've been lo- reading into this a little bit recently, the mutually assured destruction as a... it, it gets billed as this kind of compassionate approach to making sure the world doesn't get blown up. It's like, bro, that's not how it works. (laughs)

   7. JBJames Ball16:40

      It's, it's like a, the world's biggest and scariest testosterone-off, isn't it?

   8. CWChris Williamson16:44

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is precisely that.

   9. JBJames Ball16:47

      It... the whole thing is terrifying. Like, I'm quite glad I was born after that era. It, it just apes-

   10. CWChris Williamson16:53

       Oh, abso- absolutely. Yeah, fu- fuck knowing what's going on there. So yeah, you've, we've got the, the fact that what the government were actually interested in was the ability to have a more robust communication system for them to fire nukes if they were struck first.

   11. JBJames Ball17:06

       Yeah. And so it wasn't that they wanted to use this nice little nerdy network to do it, but if you're gonna test a new communications technology, you don't do it on a nuclear (laughs) sort of weapons system. You want to be pretty sure by the time that you put, implement anything that's connected to nukes, it works, it works reliably, it's safe.

   12. CWChris Williamson17:29

       So you give it to a bunch of hyper nerds over on the West Coast-

   13. JBJames Ball17:33

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson17:33

       ... and just let them, let them dick around with it for a couple of years while they try and get the letter G to work.

   15. JBJames Ball17:39

       Exactly. 'Cause what do you care if, uh, researcher f- uh, you know, call essential mathematical principle is held up? <|agent|><|en|>

   16. CWChris Williamson17:48

       No, that's, that's, that's, that's shite. Okay, so that's what it was like in the beginning. Let's roll the clock forward now to when the big internet starts to be built. What does that look like? 'Cause you alluded to it earlier on, there's these huge data centers all over the place, there's these wires that are laid under oceans. Uh, who did that? How did they do that? Where is it?

   17. JBJames Ball18:11

       So the internet grew really, really slowly, and then really, really fast. And that's kind of what's caused almost all of the problems with it. So it grew from this quite useful nerds' network and got more and more universities in. And one of the first sort of connections, they managed to get a UK university onto it. Email came really, really early. The Queen sent an email, I think, in the late '70s. Uh, was one of the, she was one of the first Brits to send an email. You know, I like to imagine she's got a sort of alt account on Reddit where she posts really good memes and stuff now 'cause she's been online longer than any of us. Um, and so you had, you had lots of little bits. You could send files quite early. And they came up with various protocols to keep it all working. It used to literally, there used to be a text file sitting on one computer that listed all the computers on the internet and what their address was. Um-

   18. CWChris Williamson19:13

       Up until when?

   19. JBJames Ball19:15

       ... it was like ... Uh, I mean, this was actually only until about the mid-'70s. It was for sort of three or four years. But because there are-

   20. CWChris Williamson19:21

       (laughs)

   21. JBJames Ball19:21

       ... only a few dozen computers-

   22. CWChris Williamson19:23

       It's quite easy to do. (laughs)

   23. JBJames Ball19:25

       ... this computer's here and this computer's here-

   24. CWChris Williamson19:27

       Have you seen, um ... It's a Family Guy sketch where they're talking about when only a few people in America had telephones. And someone rings and he goes, "Hello?" And he goes, "Hello?" "Is this seven?" And he goes, "No, this is four. Who's this?" And he goes, "This is eight." "I'm, uh, I'm looking for seven." He goes, "Oh, this is four."

   25. JBJames Ball19:45

       (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson19:45

       And you're like, "That's kind of what it's like."

   27. JBJames Ball19:46

       It's basically (laughs) like that. And literally, you'd have to wait for someone to add, like have the time to update the text file and type you on. Uh, and so they came up with things that would update automatically, you know, if you added a new computer to it and gave it an address, all of that kind of stuff. But they were all sort of just done in agreement between these unis. No one really set up a, "And this is the official body that will do this, and this is the ..." And they set out a bunch of rules on how traffic would flow, on how web addresses would work, um, on how, like, online addresses would really work, which they're called IP addresses. You've probably seen them. They're like a long string of numbers. And so that all kind of gets worked out when pretty much everyone on the internet knows each other. Pretty much everyone on the internet is kind of American and either with the government or in a university. And it rolls out quietly, um, until they kind of eventually go, "Okay, it's useful for some companies to connect to this now. Some nerds who don't work at universities want to stay connected on it. You know, they've graduated, or other people have some uses for it." And they eventually kind of went, "Okay, we'll let everyone on." And this is sort of during this period, which is about 20 years, I should say. This is not particularly fast. Uh, this idea of ARPANET got replaced with the idea of the internet, which is not, again, a very glamorous name. It's basically the, you know, the m- the Department of Defense might have a network inside its own institution that might have some quite sensitive stuff on for DoD employees. You might then have, you know, at Stanford, a network for the students and the tutors there. It might have some useful information for new graduates, you know, computer use policies. And so you've got a network here, a network here, bunch of other networks. What's gonna connect them up? A network of networks, ah, an internet.

   28. CWChris Williamson21:46

       Internet. Yeah, as opposed to-

   29. JBJames Ball21:48

       Yep.

   30. CWChris Williamson21:48

       ... the intranet, which would be the internal one.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   No one is looking…

   1. JBJames Ball30:00

      uh, he's the head of an organization called uh, ICANN, which, uh, I always have to look the name up even though I have covered this thing for seven years, because it is the most... It sounds like a fake kind of James Bond cover company, uh, in terms of how bland it's trying to sound. It's the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

   2. CWChris Williamson30:25

      No one is looking into that, are they? No one-

   3. JBJames Ball30:27

      So-

   4. CWChris Williamson30:27

      Oh God, I don't want to do research on ICANN. No, no.

   5. JBJames Ball30:32

      Exactly.

   6. CWChris Williamson30:32

      Yeah.

   7. JBJames Ball30:32

      And so...What these guys oversee, they're a not for profit. They're not, sort of, in any UN charter. They're not in the US constitution or anything like that. They are responsible for what web address points to what site. And so, you know, and who can buy what web address. So pretty much anyone can buy a .com, but if you wanna buy something that's .cat, you can't buy it just because you like, you know, moggies. Uh, you can only buy it if you're from the Catalonia region of Spain. Um, and so there are all sorts of fights like this. Who, you know, how do we make sure that people legitimately have their own web addresses that they should? How do we know when we type google.com into a browser, it's taking us to the real google.com? Um, how do we keep the internet joined up and everyone agreeing on all of this? Um, you know, one of the fights that these guys have to sort out is who should be able to own .amazon, um, because there's a very, very big tech company worth more than a trillion dollars-

   8. CWChris Williamson31:47

      (laughs)

   9. JBJames Ball31:47

      ... uh, who would say, "Well, we have a lot of trademarks and patents here. You know, we, we would like .amazon please." And there's several countries who have the world's biggest and most important rainforest, uh, in their geography who would say, "Actually guys, um, this is-"

   10. CWChris Williamson32:06

       "We were here first. Argh." (laughs)

   11. JBJames Ball32:08

       So the pinnacle of this is, uh, Göran Marby, and so, you know, if any organization can sort of claim to have a lot of oversight of the rules of the internet, you know, he- ICANN is responsible for this thing called DNS, D- um, sort of dynamic, um, name service and it's what connects up the actual, sort of address of your computer, um, to web, web addresses that we all use. Um, and so it's this incredibly important system, um, because not only is it the rules and the sort of wrangling about that, it's if you can trick domain name systems, you can do a lot of, sort of quite nasty stuff. If you can sort of make it so that a load of internet users, in one region even, suddenly they're typing in, say, HSBC and it takes them not to the real HSBC, but to a site that looks just like it owned by fraudsters, and they type in their login and their password, you've done nothing wrong. You've checked the web address, you've checked the little passcode, it's taken you out there. Um, let's say though that you're in China and you're looking for information on a protest or an opposition thing, and the government messes with web addresses. You could be taken and actually found by authorities and dragged away. Um, you know, people can censor and change information. And so Göran Marby's got this really important job trying to oversee all of this with no legal authority. The t-

   12. CWChris Williamson33:46

       What are the... Where's he based?

   13. JBJames Ball33:48

       So he's based, he's based in Los Angeles. It's, uh, it's in these little sort of out of town offices on an industrial estate. They've got, like, two floors. It's, uh-

   14. CWChris Williamson33:58

       Just some unassuming fella sat in the arse end of LA with a big red button, trying to desperately control the internet.

   15. JBJames Ball34:07

       Yeah. So he's this Swedish software engineer by background, you know, worked in telecoms and, uh, yeah, he, uh, when he got this job as c- as sort of the director of ICANN, his friend bought him a big red button to put on his desk to sort of show... You know, it's a bit like that thing in The IT Crowd where she's holding the internet. You know, if, if anyone is, it's him.

   16. CWChris Williamson34:29

       He really does have a hold of the internet, doesn't he? Oh my God. Right, okay. So that's, that's some stuff to do with the infrastructure and the mechanics of how the internet works. You also looked at the way that advertising works online as well, didn't you? Can you tell us-

   17. JBJames Ball34:43

       Yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson34:43

       ... what you learned from Brian O'Kelly?

   19. JBJames Ball34:45

       I, I will do. I should really say, um, the, the issue for poor Göran is, uh, and you know, why he keeps his button on his desk is, uh, he let me press it. (laughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson34:55

       Oh fuck, what happened? Did everyone's internet go down?

   21. JBJames Ball34:57

       So, I mean, I've gotta say, I was hoping, or at least, you know, a big sort of, you know, nice sci-fi film or something.

   22. CWChris Williamson35:04

       Something.

   23. JBJames Ball35:04

       You press it and it's, it's like it's a big elevated button. It looks like something that should be in a nuclear power station or something. Literally press it, absolutely nothing.

   24. CWChris Williamson35:14

       (sighs)

   25. JBJames Ball35:15

       Not a single thing. And of course, it's got this reminder where he's like, "No one actually has power in the center of the internet. Everything's done by consensus. Everything's done by this mind-numbing thing where everyone has to agree every rule change." And so it's all disintegrating and falling apart.

   26. CWChris Williamson35:33

       (groans)

   27. JBJames Ball35:33

       You've got all these people making all this money on the internet, and then the actual rules that hold it together, that people like him and not-for-profits have to oversee, are crumbling. And so, you know, it was this quite sort of, you're sort of like, "You've got a big red button on your desk. That's cool." And then it's sort of like, "Nope, no." It's him saying that he's kind of toothless. (laughs)

   28. CWChris Williamson35:54

       Ah, it's the, it's the antithesis of his control.

   29. JBJames Ball35:58

       Yeah, exactly that. I, you know, I half wondered, you know, maybe a little bit it was like, "Maybe one day it'll work." (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson36:04

       Yeah, that's it. He's desperately... What you don't know is that Göran M- M- Marby is a low-key super criminal who is lying in wait and has slowly worked his way up from being a Swedish programmer to w- to the arse end of LA, and he's slowly creating a big red button that's gonna shut down the internet.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   The most effective worm…

   1. JBJames Ball45:00

      to the internet, and anyone who might be of interest to any spy agency in the world, or any hacker in the world, lives online. You really can't live off the grid now. You can minimize yourself, but, you know, any spy or diplomat's got a wife, they've got kids, they've got people like that, that you could access information on. So just for intelligence, they're going to, you know, you're going to have spy agencies all over the internet. If you then also are trying to track for terrorists, you know, it's one thing to kind of go, "Oh, the cultural attaché, uh, from Russia who's just been assigned to the embassy in my country, who previously seems to have worked entirely in the police and military. Hmm, could that be a spy? Might sort of keep an eye on him." That's one thing. If you're trying to look for a right-wing extremist or sort of some of the terror that's been done by Islamist groups, there you, you don't know who you're looking for. And you have, you know, you can be a Western government with a very sort of clear motive. Um, you might suddenly want to sort of parse as much of the internet as you can, to see if people are trying to look up how to do terror attacks, et cetera. And so they want to look all over it. You've then got countries wanting to disrupt each other. And so we've seen sort of attacks from, that were later attributed to Russia, on Ukrainian banking systems, power systems, et cetera. Um, we, quite famously, the US, Israel and the UK did what's called the Stuxnet attack, where they managed to come up with this incredibly aggressive computer virus that sent-

   2. CWChris Williamson46:51

      The most effective worm in history, wasn't it?

   3. JBJames Ball46:54

      Yeah. I mean, they kind of bungled it in that it was, it's lucky that the bit they bungled was how widely it spread rather than the payload. 'Cause they wanted it just to spread to this particular type of industrial controller used in Iranian nuclear centrifuges. And someone basically decided this isn't working well enough and made it spread way more aggressively, which is how it got onto the loads and loads and loads of internet systems where people were going, "There's this really weird computer virus. It doesn't seem to do anything." And then they looked into it and went, "Hang on, there's this one particular type of, you know, industrial board it's connected to. It does a bunch of weird commands, and those weird commands basically would make a, a centrifuge spin faster and faster, then try and reverse direction, then spin faster again, and literally explode." Um, now... And it worked, at least to an extent, although they got caught. Now, if you can start doing physical explosions by internet attacks, you look into it. And so Stuxnet was part of a much wider program getting ready in case there was a US or sort of conflict with Iran. They tried to get in every system in that country, in their critical infrastructure, to disable as much of it as they possibly could ahead of a war.

   4. CWChris Williamson48:19

      That was, it's kind of like a, um, like a dead man switch type thing, or like a k- not like a mutually assured destruction. That's not mutually, that's just assured destruction, isn't it?

   5. JBJames Ball48:28

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson48:28

      (laughs)

   7. JBJames Ball48:29

      And so what happens when you're dealing in a world where one side could wipe the other out, they try and do the same. So they're not necessarily trying to get in and break everything right now, but they're trying to get the access so that if they needed to, they could.... and so swirling around us on the internet, on these sort of, you know, on the same hosepipe cables that we're using to share GIFs and, uh, you know, whatever else, you've got this invisible war going on all around us that drags us into it, as well as, you know, organized crime to try and mine Bitcoin, as well as just trying to pick up state secrets, bank details. You've got this absolute swirling unregulated conflict. In the real world, we've at least got the laws of armed combat, we've got the UN, we've got some restrictions. No one's ever thought to do that for cyberspace. So, we don't have, you know, a list of what counts as an escalation. When does spying or industrial espionage cross into an attack? You know, we had, um, the WannaCry attack which hit computers across the world, but notably hit the NHS, um, and it seems like it was targeted at someone else entirely. But again, spread brilliantly and literally stopped equipment used in operating theaters from working. It stopped ECGs from working, uh, 'cause they were all on Windows XP. (laughs) Um, and so this, this attack that was aimed either at Ukraine or at Spain suddenly took out and did millions of damage We missed- missed the mark and wrecked the NHS for a couple of weeks. And, I mean, could have killed people. You know, people rely on this equipment to keep them alive. And-

   8. CWChris Williamson50:15

      So let's say, let's say that someone does, like, cross the line, whatever that would mean, they go from state surveillance or, um, uh, state protection into something that could be seen as an act of war or whatever it might be. Who, who gets called in to do that? Is it just on the nation states to, to wag fingers at each other?

   9. JBJames Ball50:37

      So this is, this is the thing, we don't have a, we don't have anything to decide how this should be arbitrated. But what we do have at the moment is, it's like this weird sort of Middle Ages type thing where people don't just rely on the state. You don't now have a bunch of companies with private armies, thankfully. Well, you've got a few, (laughs) but we don't tend to like those companies, but Sony doesn't have its own militia operating in each country-

   10. CWChris Williamson51:03

       I'd love that, man.

   11. JBJames Ball51:04

       So, like if you-

   12. CWChris Williamson51:05

       I would lo- imagine Tim Cook with a Spartan helmet on-

   13. JBJames Ball51:09

       (laughs)

   14. CWChris Williamson51:10

       ... and a shield. And on the front of the shield there's just the Apple logo and-

   15. JBJames Ball51:14

       (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson51:14

       ... then you've got, you've got-

   17. JBJames Ball51:16

       Could have put ... all, yeah, all the rest of them behind it, "You shall not pass." That could be another one. Wouldn't Apple soldiers uniforms look amazing?

   18. CWChris Williamson51:26

       It'd be so slick. Yeah, exactly. But after-

   19. JBJames Ball51:28

       Stoop-

   20. CWChris Williamson51:29

       ... after, after about four years they'd need to be replaced.

   21. JBJames Ball51:31

       (laughs) Whereas Amazon's would be like really shoddy but there'd be loads of them.

   22. CWChris Williamson51:36

       Yeah, there would be billions and billions of them and they'd be able to churn them out at a rate like no one else would know. Am- Am- Amazon would just be s- just Jeff Bezos, pair of aviators on, and just a, a sea of drones.

   23. JBJames Ball51:51

       (laughs) Oh, God, just hovering Yep, yep. ... literally.

   24. CWChris Williamson51:54

       That's all he's got. It's just him with his aviators on and a sea of drones. Also, I, uh, ha- had on the podcast a guy called Bruce Duckworth from Turner Duckworth graphic design company, and he's the man who created the Amazon smile logo.

   25. JBJames Ball52:08

       Wow. Okay, that's quite a cool claim to fame.

   26. CWChris Williamson52:12

       Bro, j- he's sitting in, he's sitting in a meeting-

   27. JBJames Ball52:14

       S- so in stock.

   28. CWChris Williamson52:15

       It's so good. He's sat in a meeting with Jeff Bezos and Jeff Bezos said, uh, th- th- they gave it over to him and, uh, Jeff's assistants are there and they're like, "Right, yeah, yeah, Jeff likes it. Should we, should we move it on to focus groups and blah, blah?" And Jeff's like, "No, no, we don't need focus groups." And they're, "Well, Jeff, this is quite a big, it's quite a big deal doing the re- the, the re- thing." It's like late '90s, just like getting real big as well and he says, "Jeff, we, maybe we should just..." And he's like, "Anyone who doesn't like this logo doesn't like puppies."

   29. JBJames Ball52:45

       (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson52:46

       You made the Amazon logo and Jeff Bezos said, "Anyone who doesn't like this logo doesn't like puppies." Like there is no bigger claim to fame, man.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   So- …

   1. CWChris Williamson1:00:00

      biggest mistake of his life.

   2. JBJames Ball1:00:02

      So-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:00:02

      The guy that made int- Infinite Scroll, which is on every website now, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever it might be.

   4. JBJames Ball1:00:10

      It's n- an incredibly common thing if you talk about people who were sort of involved in the early days of the internet or in building some of this or, you know, whether you see them in, in Adam Alter's very good book actually or, um, you know, sort of the ones I speak to.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:00:24

      What's it called? I- Irresistible, is it?

   6. JBJames Ball1:00:27

      Uh, it's not... I can't remember. Um-

   7. CWChris Williamson1:00:29

      Shit. Um, it will be linked 'cause w- whenever I mention a b- Can you type Adam Alter in? Um, whenever I mention a book and I don't say-

   8. JBJames Ball1:00:36

      Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:00:41

      Yeah. Um, go and check that out. It's really cool. If you're interested in looking at... It's like, it's quite o- old as well in this. Like, 2013, 2014, I think. So, it was before the Center for Humane Technology came around. And, um, yeah, Adam Alter, Irresistible, really good book if you want to find out a little bit more about how tech companies are manipulating us.

   10. JBJames Ball1:01:01

       ... but yeah, so the people who built this, the people I spoke to, you know, Steve Crocker was there, uh, was a guy who I spoke to for the book. He was there in that very first meeting where they crashed the internet, um, you know, typing in login. Um, you've got, you know, Brian O'Kelly who built its adverts. You've got people who helped fund it. And they all sort of act as if it's not the result of their actions, and I think some of that is dissonance and some of it's just that this thing's become this runaway train. And so you see people kind of freak out and part of the thing is, it's built into the technology that it's gotta keep doing stuff like this. Networks centralize power. They centralize money, they centralize resources. Um, that's most obvious in a social network. If you started 10 new social networks tomorrow, um, are you really gonna move off the one that all your friends are currently on? And let's say you move to one of them and it's great. You're gonna try and get your friends to move to that one, not to move separately across the other 10. And other stuff, everything about the internet, we always talked about it as this long tail, information wants to be free, it's gonna level us out, it's gonna... A lot of the people saying that believed it, genuinely, and wanted it to do that. But by its nature, it wants to centralize power, centralize money, centralize people, centralize data. And so a little bit like, you know, industrial capitalists will want to move money that way, and so you make laws that tax it and push it all back the other way. You know, that's why we have regulations, so that you can't cut safety standards. That's why we have laws, that's why we have wage, you know, wage requirements, all of that. We built society to cope with what industrial capitalism wants to do and to mitigate it. We need to now rebuild society to deal with what information capitalism or the internet wants to do. Sort of, it wants to centralize all the power that way. That's fine as long as it's helping us overall, but just because it wants to do that doesn't mean we have to let it.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:03:15

       One of the things that's a common theme with a lot of the guests that I've had on recently is, I think that the world is moving so quickly that not only can our evolution not keep up with it and our inter-social dynamics not keep up with it, we have no idea how to talk to the opposite sex anymore and, and go out on a date and all this sort of stuff. But what moves even more slowly than the most flexible, most adaptive creatures on the planet is legislation. Like-

   12. JBJames Ball1:03:46

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:03:47

       ... the (laughs) ability for governments and s- state agencies to catch up with this pace of change, like we've said ourselves, you know, i- in the last 20 years, from 2000 to 2020, the landscape in terms of technology and, um, connectivity isn't even in the same universe. Like, if you'd been in a coma for 20 years from the year 2000 until now, and you woke up, you'd be like, "And we can do what? What? Do what?"

   14. JBJames Ball1:04:15

       (laughs) .

   15. CWChris Williamson1:04:16

       You know? So I think, um, there's this quote from Goethe, I think, where he talks about the fact that all societies swing from one extreme to the other and then end up finding a virtuous mean.

   16. JBJames Ball1:04:28

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:04:28

       And inevitably, I think that's what happens because technology is always going to move ahead and then kind of like slow your grandma on the walk around the playground, like she's slowly gonna catch up and then she gets there and then there's another leap and, oh-

   18. JBJames Ball1:04:42

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:04:42

       ... okay, now we need to work out what's going on with augmented reality or virtual reality. Okay, now we need to work out what's going on with, uh, bioengineering and biotech. Okay, now we need to... You know what I mean? Like, every single time that this happens, and this is the fear, if anyone who's read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, which is an unbelievable book about the takeoff o- of artificial intelligence, um, that takes this game to its nth degree, to the final point, which is that if you have a superintelligent agent in artificial intelligence before you have fixed the control problem, which is how do you ensure that you don't have perverse, uh, incentives and that everything is instantiated correctly, that's it. That's the end of the human race. That is everything over, and all of these little things, all of these little games that we played where it's like, oh well, look, you had the- you had the farming revolution and then you killed a bunch of animals and then you had the industrial revolution and you polluted a little bit of the planet and then you had fossil fuels-

   20. JBJames Ball1:05:39

       (laughs) .

   21. CWChris Williamson1:05:40

       ... and we kind of gave you a... Th- this got a dry run a number of times where you move forward as a society very quickly and then you start to realize what some of the sort of more malicious side effects of doing that was. And then you had it with technology, we even gave you a little bit of a taste like, "Look, you guys, you had this lowest common denominator, echo chambers existed, people's opinions got polarized and moved out to the side and all this sort of stuff, and then you'd done gone fucked up and in the year 2105, singularity occurred, you hadn't fixed the control problem, and now you're all slaves for us and this is just Neo from The Matrix flying around."

   22. JBJames Ball1:06:13

       So (laughs) that's kind of how it goes. So if people have never played it, by the way, it's, um, the Paperclip game. If you just search for Paperclips on, uh, on, on the app stores. It's really cheap and good way to pass a day during lockdown, but also just the best illustration of what goes wrong with an AI. Uh, quite subtly. Y- you're just an AI making paperclips, works nicely. But I think sort of in, in the run up to sort of tackling this stuff, I think it's almost unrealistic in terms of optimism to expect sort of re- legislation to be able to keep up because until something feels like the, a high priority, they never get there.... um, and-

   23. CWChris Williamson1:06:59

       Well, there's real-world problems, right?

   24. JBJames Ball1:07:01

       ... so they end up playing Whac-A-Mole though. They end up sort of trying to do something narrow about a certain aspect of social media and they'll do a narrow fix on that, or a narrow fix on hate speech, or increase the requirement for moderators or... and, you know, it's, it's a bit like sort of trying to tackle flooding, but a teacup at a time. What tends to have to happen is that you get to a point of crisis. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a crisis caused by the thing that you're fixing, but, you know, it's usually related. But you, you know, we got the modern welfare states, sort of its early steps off the back of the Great Depression. You know, we got government actually taking a bigger role in life. We got the NHS out of World War II. Um, you know, that they, they are pretty direct effects of each other even if, you know, even if it's not, "Oh, the solution to war is to have a health service." (laughs) Um, we are at least at this point hitting some crises, and they're awful crises, but we're in a crisis of populism. We're in a, uh, we're gonna be in an economic crisis that makes 2010 look awful. We're in a global pandemic. There is at least the chance that we use this to reassess and we use this to get ahead. If we have, you know, if we accept that we have to change a lot and to build a lot and to rebuild from an economic crash we haven't even started feeling yet, then we may as well do it to try and fit the era. And so on the one hand, we actually have an opportunity, stuff actually changes off the back of big crises. The sort of fear side of that is this is such a big and awful crisis that, how bad would it be to waste it?

   25. CWChris Williamson1:08:58

       Mm. That's an interesting way to look at it-

   26. JBJames Ball1:09:01

       We've got-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:09:01

       ... to actually look at the crisis as an opportunity.

   28. JBJames Ball1:09:03

       We've got a chance that it's not an indefinite chance. If we don't tackle a bunch of this now, it will get much, much worse over the next decade, and we'll have to tackle it again in a big way.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:09:15

       All right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna make you put your money where your mouth is, James. You are governor, transnational, international, global governor of the planet and you're allowed to high level enact some policies or create some agencies. What do you do?

   30. JBJames Ball1:09:32

       So I'm assuming I can't just embezzle and, uh, make a moon base? (laughs)
6. 1:15:00 – 1:16:30

   You heard it here…

   1. JBJames Ball1:15:00

      fund their business, they're losing money every ride, and they are losing money every ride still.

   2. CWChris Williamson1:15:05

      You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen, James Ball drops the bomb about Uber. Look, James, man, um, this has been awesome. Really interesting insight about the internet. Uh, so The System: Who Owns the Internet and How It Owns Us will be out when this podcast drops, so it'll be linked in the show notes below. Audible version, stuff like that?

   3. JBJames Ball1:15:25

      Uh, there is an audible version coming out the same day, uh, narrated by me, I'm afraid (laughs) .

   4. CWChris Williamson1:15:31

      Amazing. Oh, dude, I love that.

   5. JBJames Ball1:15:33

      It's, uh, yeah, it's my first time doing one, so sorry if it's awful.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:15:37

      (laughs) I'm sure it'll be great. That's, uh, that's awesome. Where should people go if they wanna check out some more of your stuff? Where should they go?

   7. JBJames Ball1:15:44

      So, they can go to bit.ly/readthesystemaboutthis. They can go to jamesarball.com to see other stuff I work on, or they can find me on Twitter @jamesrbuk.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:15:58

      Amazing, man. Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'm, uh, I'm now gonna go and get myself a VPN and, uh, never open my laptop again.

   9. JBJames Ball1:16:07

      Maybe a nuclear bunker (laughs) .

   10. CWChris Williamson1:16:09

       That's it. That's it, man. Thank you so much for your time. Cheers, James.

   11. JBJames Ball1:16:11

       Fantastic. Thanks very much, man. Enjoyed that.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:16:16

       Yeah, yeah. Love is. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. Love is.

Episode duration: 1:16:30