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

1. 0:00 – 0:30

   Intro

   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. 0:30 – 2:42

   Interview with Ed Sheeran

   1. CWChris Williamson0:31

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

   2. JBJames Ball0:34

      Pleasure to be here.

   3. 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?

   4. 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?"

   5. CWChris Williamson1:08

      (laughs) Yeah.

   6. 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)

   7. CWChris Williamson1:38

      Oh, man.

   8. 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.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:46

      Dude, it's like proper Metallica shit.

   10. 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.

   11. CWChris Williamson2:04

       (laughs)

   12. JBJames Ball2:04

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

   13. CWChris Williamson2:07

       How do you-

   14. JBJames Ball2:08

       Like, I mean, I (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson2:08

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

   16. 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.

   17. CWChris Williamson2:28

       (laughs)

   18. JBJames Ball2:28

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

   19. CWChris Williamson2:30

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

   20. JBJames Ball2:34

       I did actually send it to my mom...

   21. CWChris Williamson2:36

       You've got it?

   22. JBJames Ball2:36

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

   23. CWChris Williamson2:40

       How cool, man. That's awesome.

3. 2:42 – 3:55

   Why James wrote a book about the internet

   1. CWChris Williamson2:42

      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?

   2. 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."

4. 3:55 – 5:56

   The internet as a utility

   1. JBJames Ball3:55

   2. 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?

   3. 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

5. 5:56 – 6:27

   The internet as a critical infrastructure

   1. JBJames Ball5:56

      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.

   2. CWChris Williamson6:26

      Mm.

6. 6:27 – 11:50

   The mechanics of the internet

   1. CWChris Williamson6:27

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

   2. 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."

   3. CWChris Williamson8:36

      (laughs)

   4. JBJames Ball8:36

      Uh, it's very sort of, you know, parental-type relationship. And so, they said yes, 'cause if someone's offering you money and it will kinda help you, why not? And so, four universities kind of said yes initially to connect up their computers with this thing called ARPANET. And they just wanted to do this to do their physics or their chemistry or their mathematical research. They weren't sort of particularly evangelists going, "Wow, this will be a huge and exciting world-beating thing." Um, and so, they had to work out the basic stuff. And they came up with this sort of fairly revolutionary set of ideas that bec-... You know, they were only thinking about connecting up the first four, and then, "Hey, if it works, maybe we'll have as many as, like, 12 or 15 on here."

   5. CWChris Williamson9:28

      (laughs)

   6. JBJames Ball9:28

      You know, this was, "Let's think big, guys." Um, and so they, they were sort of thinking, "Right, well, we wanna make it work quite well, and so it won't care what data you're sending." Uh, so networks beforehand, you had a phone network, and that could only send phone-type signals. Uh, you know, you would have perhaps a network for flight reservations, which would be really, really specialist and only send very particular data. Um, and you would charge, you would be charged for how far your call was, you know, long distance calling, all of this, and the type of thing it was. So, if you answered a, if you added an answerphone onto a US telephone network, you had to pay more every month, uh, like, just because you're connecting a different type of thing to it. And so, they came up with this idea that, "This network won't care. You can send whatever on it. It won't try and understand it, it'll just send it along. And we won't try and build in a system so that it matters how far it traveled." You know, you... At the moment, the US government's paying the bill for everything, we'll just send it all out. And so, they got these things connected up. It was sort of largely kicked down to graduate students, uh, to do the actual, how should all of this work? The eminent professors, this was like, "Yes, we want this network. Get on with it." You know, one of them oversaw the project, um, and sort of was actually quite into it. The rest, they left to grad students, who, you know, very much the lowest rung of, of, of the academic circle. And so, it sort of came to this very first test in 1969, and, um, these are, you know, these are nerds. They're not thinking they're doing some big, portentous first moment. And so, they'd connected up, um, Stanford with UCLA. So, two universities, West Coast of the US, couple of hundred miles away, and they're on the phone to each other to try do their first internet connection. Um, and they, they basically decide that they're just gonna try and log into the computer in the other university. So, they're not trying to do some big, you know... Uh, you know, the first message by phone, I think, was something like, "What hath God wrought?"

7. 11:50 – 13:09

   What hath God wrought

   1. JBJames Ball11:50

      Uh-

   2. CWChris Williamson11:50

      Oh, God. It's so symbolic, isn't it? Yeah, like one step for man, one step for mankind. And this one's like, "Right, can you just give me your password again please, John?"

   3. JBJames Ball11:59

      Yeah. (laughs) And so, this is the thing. Like, you know, you can tell whoever's done that. You know, if, if I was using that, I'd be, "Is, is this working? How are we doing?"

   4. CWChris Williamson12:07

      (laughs)

   5. JBJames Ball12:07

      You know, what hath Goth wrought? It was brilliant.... and so they start trying to type in the command to log in, which was log in. And they, they typed the L and they go on the phone, "Right. I've, I've typed the L. Have you got the L?" "Yeah." Types the O. Done the O. They wait. "Yeah, got the O." Types the G, whole computer crashes.

   6. CWChris Williamson12:34

      (laughs)

   7. JBJames Ball12:36

      So the very first message, uh, sent successfully on what became the internet was lo.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:43

      Oh, I'm- th- I mean, that really does put everything else to shame, doesn't it?

   9. JBJames Ball12:48

      Yeah, I mean, it actually does end up s- sounds like big dramatic sort of Tolkien word, doesn't it?

   10. CWChris Williamson12:53

       No.

   11. JBJames Ball12:53

       Something Gandalf would say.

   12. CWChris Williamson12:54

       Yeah. Yeah, it does. It does, "Lo, we have broken the internet. You need to restart."

   13. JBJames Ball13:00

       (laughs) So I also, I think it's really apt that the very first one they did crashed the whole thing. So, you know, you start as you mean to go on.

   14. CWChris Williamson13:08

       Yeah, nothing changes.

8. 13:09 – 16:23

   Packets

   1. CWChris Williamson13:09

   2. JBJames Ball13:09

      But yeah, they got it fixed. They got it built. And so it became this sort of interesting thing. They found that it did actually let them use their computers a bit better. And the innovation that they'd come up with was whatever you send by it, whatever the results of the calculation, would go into these little things called packets. It's basically like, and this is still how the internet works, whatever you're trying to send or receive, if it's an email, if it's a video, website, whatever, it's basically broken up into hundreds or in fact thousands and thousands of little packets, which are just like little envelopes going, this is envelope one of 5,000 going from here to here. And so all these envelopes get sent. They all travel by a bunch of different routes, you know, whichever cables are quiet, and all the envelopes arrive with you in the wrong order, and your computer just goes, "Okay, I've got packet 50, here's 49, here's 48, where's 47?" Reassembles them all in the right order, turns it back into y- over to you. And what's quite neat about this is it means you don't care what order they're sent in, what order they arrive in. If something gets held up, it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to arrive... you know, packet 30 doesn't have to arrive between 29 and 31. And it turns out this is what ARPA were really interested in, this idea of being able to just split up messages into packets and send them and not care what route they take. And they didn't, you know, plot twist, they didn't really care about the maths and physics nerds in the US universities. What it seems that they cared about was nuclear weapon command and control. So this was the late 1960s, 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?

   3. CWChris Williamson15:32

      Mm-hmm, okay.

   4. 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-

   5. CWChris Williamson16:04

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

   6. 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.

9. 16:23 – 17:48

   Mutually Assured Destruction

   1. JBJames Ball16:23

      (laughs)

   2. 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)

   3. JBJames Ball16:40

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

   4. CWChris Williamson16:44

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

   5. JBJames Ball16:47

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

   6. 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.

   7. 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.

   8. CWChris Williamson17:29

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

   9. JBJames Ball17:33

      Yeah.

   10. 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.

   11. JBJames Ball17:39

       Exactly. 'Cause what do you care if, uh, researcher f- uh, you know, call essential mathematical principle

10. 17:48 – 19:28

    The Big Internet

    1. JBJames Ball17:48

       is held up? <|agent|><|en|>

    2. 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?

    3. 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-

    4. CWChris Williamson19:13

       Up until when?

    5. 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-

    6. CWChris Williamson19:21

       (laughs)

    7. JBJames Ball19:21

       ... only a few dozen computers-

    8. CWChris Williamson19:23

       It's quite easy to do. (laughs)

    9. JBJames Ball19:25

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

    10. CWChris Williamson19:27

        Have you seen, um

11. 19:28 – 23:26

    The Internet

    1. CWChris Williamson19:28

       ... 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."

    2. JBJames Ball19:45

       (laughs)

    3. CWChris Williamson19:45

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

    4. 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.

    5. CWChris Williamson21:46

       Internet. Yeah, as opposed to-

    6. JBJames Ball21:48

       Yep.

    7. CWChris Williamson21:48

       ... the intranet, which would be the internal one.

    8. JBJames Ball21:50

       Exactly that. So it's literally just a network of networks. It was a totally functional name, and they dropped off the little work bit, so it just became internet. Um, and so you're getting to about sort of 1990. You're still, at most, at about a million users. Uh, and this technology's now been around since 1969. And, uh, Tim Berners-Lee comes in around this point. Um, and he worked at CERN, um, you know, was an engineer there, and came up with, um, with an idea of sort of, "Um, oh, could we sort of make page ... Like, could we make something so you could see sort of nice, nice formatted pages?" And he called it a web. Well, he called it the World Wide Web. And this was basically the idea of being able to show pictures, text, all formatted as what we now know as a web page. And, um, his, he wrote this all up as a formal proposal, and his supervisor at, uh, CERN, uh, y- I, you know, if you don't know CERN, it's the thing with the larg- Large Hadron Collider, you know. They're sort of gonna make a new Big Bang or whatever. Um, I'm kind of hoping they'll hurry up with that these days, so. (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson23:04

       Uh, that would make the world a little bit of a better place at the moment, wouldn't it? Yeah, that'd be great.

    10. JBJames Ball23:08

        Feel like we could do with a do-over. Um, and so, you know, very clever people at this institution, his, uh, supervisor looked at this proposal for what is now, you know, technology absolutely everywhere in the world, and, uh, just noted on it that it was interesting but vague.

12. 23:26 – 25:19

    Tim BernersLees nephew

    1. JBJames Ball23:27

       (laughs)

    2. CWChris Williamson23:27

       Funny. The, the single biggest technology change in a century, interesting-

    3. JBJames Ball23:34

       Yep.

    4. CWChris Williamson23:34

       ... but vague.

    5. JBJames Ball23:35

       Yep. I mean, you know, good on them for that. It's, um-

    6. CWChris Williamson23:38

       Fuck, mate. I've got a cool story to interject there. Tim Berners-Lee's nephew is at Oxford with my buddy, Alex. And, um, he m- he met him at one of these fancy dinners where you gotta dress like Harry Potter and everyth- everything, there's frills on frills on frills, and it's gold bars plated in gold for you culturally-

    7. JBJames Ball24:00

       (laughs)

    8. CWChris Williamson24:00

       ... and stuff like that. And, uh, he sat down next to him, and I think, and maybe, maybe people had, um, name, name tags or, or, uh, uh, place seatings. You know, with the names?

    9. JBJames Ball24:11

       Yeah.

    10. CWChris Williamson24:11

        And, uh, it was like Shaun Berners-Lee or whatever. And Ali- (laughs) Alex turned to him and was like, "Uh, yeah, funny. Like, like Tim, do you know Tim?" And he's like, "Uh, yeah, he's my uncle."

    11. JBJames Ball24:23

        (laughs)

    12. CWChris Williamson24:23

        (laughs) And Alex was like ...Holy shit. Wow.

    13. JBJames Ball24:30

        So that, that was sort of quite a, "Oh. Oh, actually. Oh." (laughs)

    14. CWChris Williamson24:34

        Yeah, yeah. (laughs) Like what, where do you go from there? Like that's the biggest foot in mouth situation ever. And you sat next to this poor guy for the next like four hours or whatever at this dinner-

    15. JBJames Ball24:42

        Oh, uh-

    16. CWChris Williamson24:42

        ... wearing, wearing frills and a, and a, a tea cuzzy for his head.

    17. JBJames Ball24:47

        So, (laughs) but yeah. And so that kind of was suddenly the killer product, where people actually really started to want to use it. And it was in the '90s you start seeing this big swell up of users. And basically, this was all done private sector. You know, you could initially connect through your phone line. There was a thing that could sort of change your signal, modems. Anyone who connected to the internet in that era will still know the sequence-

    18. CWChris Williamson25:14

        Be-do, be-do, do. (modem sounds)

    19. JBJames Ball25:15

        Yeah. It's quite soothing if you're used to it, isn't

13. 25:19 – 28:20

    Can you remember the modem

    1. JBJames Ball25:19

       it?

    2. CWChris Williamson25:19

       It is, it is, yeah. I bet if you, if you're, if you were born after 1999 probably, I'm gonna guess you won't be able to remember it, because around about sort of 2000-

    3. JBJames Ball25:31

       Uh, okay. I bet '94, '95.

    4. CWChris Williamson25:33

       You reckon?

    5. JBJames Ball25:34

       I'd be interested to hear on that, like what's the, what-

    6. CWChris Williamson25:35

       Yeah, if you can... What's the cutoff point? Tell us if you can't remember it and tell me if you can. Just gimme a comment, uh, uh, drop, drop it in the comments below and we're gonna work out... 'Cause that's the real millennials.

    7. JBJames Ball25:47

       Yeah.

    8. CWChris Williamson25:47

       Fuck this 1984 to 1996 Generation Y. It's, can you remember the sound of a modem? That's what determines what, what generation you're in.

    9. JBJames Ball25:56

       I bet that gets the full range, you know? I bet that would work. 'Cause it's just not gonna be as iconic to you if you're a bit older.

    10. CWChris Williamson26:02

        Uh, what's that sound? That was annoying. You had to listen to that all the time. Don't... That, that is the sound of my childhood, okay?

    11. JBJames Ball26:09

        (laughs)

    12. CWChris Williamson26:09

        Don't talk, don't you talk about it like that.

    13. JBJames Ball26:12

        Well, it's also-

    14. CWChris Williamson26:13

        All right, so I, hang on, I need to go back. So the queen sent an email. Queen's in the UK, sent an email to America.

    15. JBJames Ball26:20

        Yeah.

    16. CWChris Williamson26:20

        Where was the, where'd the cable come from?

    17. JBJames Ball26:23

        So we had this, we had some of the early transatlantic cables. The fun thing on the internet is it basically piggybacked off the phone network. People sort of found out that the way it sent data, it could double up. Um, but the headache when it was sort of using phone networks was, as anyone knows who was, um, you know, on the internet and then their mum wanted to make a call, you could be kicked off the internet by, uh, someone-

    18. CWChris Williamson26:51

        Mum!

    19. JBJames Ball26:51

        ... sort of phoning it. (laughs) And you had similar problems when you were piggybacking on other infrastructure. And so eventually they started laying their own cables. And internet cables are sort of wild in that they, they are a literal physical web around the world. And they, the way they connect is not at all neutral. It's between the places that had the money to lay them, the places that had the old, old phone network. And because they mirror the old phone network and piggyback off it, it follows the shape of it a lot, and so you've got tons of really good internet connections across America and across Europe. Uh, a lot of the rest of the world is far less well supplied, et cetera. But these cables are not like you might think. You're probably imagining something sort of three or four feet wide for all the data and all the... A, a standard transatlantic internet cable is about the width of a hose pipe.

    20. CWChris Williamson27:50

        How many of them are there?

    21. JBJames Ball27:51

        Uh, there's dozens of them. Um, but-

    22. CWChris Williamson27:53

        But not, not thousands or millions of them?

    23. JBJames Ball27:56

        Not thousands or millions, no. And they literally, they float under the sea. Like in some places, the sea is so deep that they're just floating. Um, they-

    24. CWChris Williamson28:07

        So if an unfortunate fish with particularly sharp teeth comes in, my connection to someone when I'm podcasting with them could just be shot?

    25. JBJames Ball28:13

        This actually happens. Sharks chew through some of the internet cables.

    26. CWChris Williamson28:19

        Bloody

14. 28:20 – 29:39

    Sharks chew through internet cables

    1. CWChris Williamson28:20

       sharks.

    2. JBJames Ball28:20

       So-

    3. CWChris Williamson28:20

       It's always sharks, isn't it? Or alligators.

    4. JBJames Ball28:24

       Great excuse if you don't want to chat to someone. "Oh, no, I..." (choking sound)

    5. CWChris Williamson28:27

       Yeah.

    6. JBJames Ball28:27

       "I think a shark's got the internet cable."

    7. CWChris Williamson28:29

       Like that guy, like the guy from the World Health Organization when he got caught.

    8. JBJames Ball28:33

       (laughs)

    9. CWChris Williamson28:33

       "That's what you should have done. That's what you should have done."

    10. JBJames Ball28:36

        Yeah.

    11. CWChris Williamson28:36

        "Oh, I'm sorry, the shark in... connection..."

    12. JBJames Ball28:40

        I mean, much more believable than the excuse you just gave.

    13. CWChris Williamson28:44

        (laughs) Yeah, it is. It is.

    14. JBJames Ball28:46

        So, but of course, you know, with the internet, everything travels on packets. If you do lose one of the cables, it's a very brief disruption as long as you've got other ones. Everything just flows and it takes another route. It's sort of the, the magic of the internet is it's really resilient, because it, it's got... It does not care what route it takes to go to anything. And because most stuff travels at the speed of light, you know, you will not see-

    15. CWChris Williamson29:12

        You can just rearrange super quickly or whatever.

    16. JBJames Ball29:14

        ... your internet connection will go from sort of Islington to Camden via Canada. Uh-

    17. CWChris Williamson29:19

        (laughs) Yeah, yeah, of course. Just a na- a totally natural route. So it's a, it's, um-

    18. JBJames Ball29:24

        So, but yeah, so no, these cables get chewed through. They have, they've got special boats that go out and basically pick them up and get the two broken ends and, uh, patch them up. Yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson29:34

        Some fella just sticks them back together with a little bit of, uh, a little bit of gaffer tape or whatever. Um,

15. 29:39 – 34:29

    Who owns the internet

    1. CWChris Williamson29:39

       so-

    2. JBJames Ball29:39

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson29:40

       We made this joke and we were laughing earlier on about, oh, there's some guy sat there with a text file. Like how, how silly is that? But there is actually a fella that you met who's got a big red button on his desk.

    4. JBJames Ball29:52

       Yes. There is a guy with a big red button.

    5. CWChris Williamson29:53

       Tell me about the guy with the big red button.

    6. JBJames Ball29:56

       So this guy is, uh, called Goren Moby, and 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.

    7. CWChris Williamson30:25

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

    8. JBJames Ball30:27

       So-

    9. CWChris Williamson30:27

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

    10. JBJames Ball30:32

        Exactly.

    11. CWChris Williamson30:32

        Yeah.

    12. 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-

    13. CWChris Williamson31:47

        (laughs)

    14. 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-"

    15. CWChris Williamson32:06

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

    16. 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-

    17. CWChris Williamson33:46

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

    18. 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-

    19. 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.

    20. 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. 34:29 – 42:29

    Brian OKeefe

    1. JBJames Ball34:29

    2. 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-

    3. JBJames Ball34:43

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson34:43

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

    5. 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)

    6. CWChris Williamson34:55

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

    7. 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.

    8. CWChris Williamson35:04

       Something.

    9. 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.

    10. CWChris Williamson35:14

        (sighs)

    11. 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.

    12. CWChris Williamson35:33

        (groans)

    13. 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)

    14. CWChris Williamson35:54

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

    15. 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)

    16. 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.

    17. JBJames Ball36:24

        And he's, he's just getting all of our suspicion away from it by going, "Yeah, no, touch the button. The button doesn't..."

    18. CWChris Williamson36:29

        Yeah. "Look, press it, press it, press it. It's never worked, it never worked for me." And then one day he runs away with all of the internet money and we're all, we're all left having to ring each other again.

    19. JBJames Ball36:39

        ... so, and my fingerprints are on it, so I get-

    20. CWChris Williamson36:41

        And your fingerprints are on it. "It was that James Ball. It was that British guy."

    21. JBJames Ball36:44

        (laughs)

    22. CWChris Williamson36:45

        "Get him." Uh, okay, so, um, advertising. Brian O'Kelly, what'd you learn from him?

    23. JBJames Ball36:50

        So this, this guy's really interesting. So when I meet him, we're in the middle of a sort of full New York ad office. Uh, all of the meeting rooms are named after, uh, comic book characters, so we're in sort of Peter Parker. You know, it's all very tech company, all of this, and he's the CEO at, at the time I speak to him. Um, and this company's just been sold for, you know, more than a billion. Um, so he's sort of big shot in advertising on the internet, all of this, and he basically walks in and says he is the guy that invented programmatic advertising. So that system where every time you visit a website you see all those annoying automated adverts, uh-

    24. CWChris Williamson37:37

        All the embarrassing stuff that you looked at last week.

    25. JBJames Ball37:40

        Yeah, yeah. That one terrible sort of sofa that you looked at drunk on Ikea. Um, you know, there, there could be much worse examples, but let's go for that one, that then follows you around. Or, you know, you bought some new cutlery when you moved flat six months ago, and still every ad on the internet is for cutlery sets as if you're a weird fork fetishist. That takes careful pronunciation. (laughs)

    26. CWChris Williamson38:04

        Very well done there. Very, very precise speech.

    27. JBJames Ball38:08

        It's, um, you know, all of those, but also, you know, this one weird trick that doctors don't want you to know. All of this, all of this is his fault. Um, and he admitted this, like off the back of it. And when you get into how online ads work, they are so, so much creepier than you ever give them credit for.

    28. CWChris Williamson38:30

        Tell us. I wanna know how creepy they are.

    29. JBJames Ball38:32

        Basically, they stalk you around the internet like any, if any human being, if any ex did this, they would be in jail and rightly so. And so the ad networks, Facebook runs an ad network, Google runs one, Amazon runs one, then, then there's a bunch of other ones. Any website that shows adverts from that company asks to put one of the ad network cookies on your, on your computer. Um, and when you tick that yes to the cookie box, it turns up on every bloody website you visit always. That's one of the things that you're agreeing to. And that's just a little line of text on your computer. Doesn't de- put anything else on your thing. It's just something going, "Hey, this person visited this website." It doesn't even say that. It's just a line of text. Other websites can look for what cookies are on your computer. So let's say you go to New York Times, um, earlier in the day, and then you go to, you know, some kind of anime fan site or something later in the day. It'll have a look and go, "Oh, this guy was on the New York Times earlier. I recognize, I recognize that cookie." All of that's stored over at the ad network. You can't see any of what they know about you. Now, you'll have dozens and dozens of these on your computer, and so what happens every time you visit any website is you start this amazing bidding war for your eyeballs, for your attention. And they might literally know exactly who you are or they might have built a picture of it. So the advertiser, let's say it's someone who wants to sell, you know, my book. Um, my publisher, if they did this, would do, "Here's a list of people who've bought books from us in the past who are subscribers to our mailing list. We don't want to target these people. We want to target people like them." So they'll do like a seed list and go, "People who look a bit like this." And then, essentially, it's these sort of data brokers can look at that and come up with a set of characteristics that you might want, and so they'll keep an eye out for that. And so it might be a New York Times reader, it might be someone who's gone to y- You know, they might have all sorts of stuff, or it might just be people that we guess are aged between 25 and 50 living in the UK, uh, and living in cities. It could be really vague. It could be really specific. And when you visit the site, it will try and look at as much information on you as it can. If you're logged in, it will take that information, but it will also see all the cookies it can and go, "Hey, we've seen all of these cookies," and send it over to ad platforms which then go, "Right, here's who we think this person is. Um, how much would you pay to serve them this advert?" And this might go to dozens and dozens of places that are each trying to sell dozens and dozens of ads. And so each one will look through the cookies and go, "Okay, someone with that cookie, I would pay 0.01 cent to show them this rubbish generic advert. But actually, that's a good cookie. I've got an advert that wants that cookie. I'd pay 0.1 cents for that or one cent for that." And so they all come back with their bids, and eventually you see the six or seven adverts of the people that would pay most to see you. What that means has gone on, in that like tenth of a second where you're loading a webpage, is data about you didn't just go to three or four... To the web owner, or even the web owner and the people whose adverts you're seeing. It went to hundreds

17. 42:29 – 43:44

    Dynamic ad targeting

    1. JBJames Ball42:29

       and thousands of companies.

    2. CWChris Williamson42:31

       The pace that this happens at is mental. I can't believe that they're able to do dynamic ad targeting without it completely breaking the internet or making you just walk from webpage to webpage. You know what I mean?

    3. JBJames Ball42:43

       ... it feels like that should take half an hour, doesn't it?

    4. CWChris Williamson42:46

       Yeah.

    5. JBJames Ball42:46

       Like you think of an auction and it sort of, it's all in microseconds now, 'cause this is how the internet makes its money. So they've made it really, really efficient.

    6. CWChris Williamson42:56

       Wh- why are they called cookies? Is it 'cause of crumbs?

    7. JBJames Ball42:59

       Uh, yeah. It's exactly that. It's from, I think it's from the Hansel and Gretel thing. So-

    8. CWChris Williamson43:04

       And that's even that, the Hansel and Gretel story's creepy as hell as well.

    9. JBJames Ball43:08

       Yeah. Oh, yeah, all of this is creepy. There's-

    10. CWChris Williamson43:10

        James, man, everything to do with the internet is like this k- sort of fluffy Teletubbies world up top, and then Dante's Inferno just existing below it.

    11. JBJames Ball43:20

        (laughs) .

    12. CWChris Williamson43:20

        Do you not think? It's so weird. Okay, so we know that people are tracking us around the internet. We know that there are a combination of sort of lobbyists, private interest groups, people that are outside the purview of government, but also nonprofits who are independently trying to wrangle the internet and get it under control. How does all of that tie into national security and surveillance?

18. 43:44 – 46:49

    National security

    1. CWChris Williamson43:44

    2. JBJames Ball43:44

       Well, your core thing here is... Sorry, I'm being bitten by a cat. Hi.

    3. CWChris Williamson43:47

       It's fine.

    4. JBJames Ball43:48

       Hi. (laughs) So this dude, he's a git.

    5. CWChris Williamson43:51

       So good.

    6. JBJames Ball43:53

       So, he's in trouble there, he just bit my arm. (laughs) Um, so all of this starts to matter for national security because it's not as if we're just going on the internet 15 minutes a week now and, you know, posting to a message board about our favorite show. Firstly, it's got all of our lives on it. You know, most of us now, if you start thinking about the internet being WhatsApp, iMessage, sort of FaceTime, Skype, all of these things, as well as all your social media profiles, as well as everything you keep in the cloud on Google Drive or whatever, most of us have basically all of the intimate details of our lives. And that's before we get anywhere near dating sites and, you know, whatever pics people have been sending on Tinder or Grindr or Bumble. Um, this is all intrinsic to us, and then it's intrinsic to the global sort of financial system now. You know, most people a- can access their banks through it, their savings, their investments. A lot of clearing runs on systems that are at least adjacent 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

19. 46:49 – 48:19

    Stuxnet

    1. JBJames Ball46:49

       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.

20. 48:19 – 50:06

    War

    1. JBJames Ball48:19

    2. 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?

    3. JBJames Ball48:28

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson48:28

       (laughs)

    5. 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-

21. 50:06 – 53:23

    Private armies

    1. JBJames Ball50:06

       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-

    2. 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?

    3. 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-

    4. CWChris Williamson51:03

       I'd love that, man.

    5. JBJames Ball51:04

       So, like if you-

    6. CWChris Williamson51:05

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

    7. JBJames Ball51:09

       (laughs)

    8. CWChris Williamson51:10

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

    9. JBJames Ball51:14

       (laughs)

    10. CWChris Williamson51:14

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

    11. 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?

    12. CWChris Williamson51:26

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

    13. JBJames Ball51:28

        Stoop-

    14. CWChris Williamson51:29

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

    15. JBJames Ball51:31

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

    16. 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.

    17. JBJames Ball51:51

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

    18. 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.

    19. JBJames Ball52:08

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

    20. CWChris Williamson52:12

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

    21. JBJames Ball52:14

        S- so in stock.

    22. 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."

    23. JBJames Ball52:45

        (laughs)

    24. 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.

    25. JBJames Ball52:52

        That is, that is excellent. That is... You've got to give that credit.

    26. CWChris Williamson52:56

        He's just some fella. Bruce is just some guy, lovely British dude from down in, I think he said Surrey, and, um, I was just chatting aw- chatting away to him, just this guy, he does Metallica, he does Coca-Cola, he does Samsung, he does... And he's just some dude with a team of 100 graphic designers that are all absolute freak savages, like unbelievable at their job and that's him. So that's, that's my, that's my cool story. So okay, we don't have... Sony and stuff like that, they don't have private militias.

    27. JBJames Ball53:21

        Yeah.

22. 53:23 – 56:48

    Online security

    1. JBJames Ball53:23

       Online they kind of do 'cause it turns out, like because we don't have all of this agreed, there is way more going on every day in the online world in terms of attacks and defenses and checking everything out, and companies largely have to protect themselves. And so you've got all of these places, like outsourced to these sort of online security companies. Um, I visited one, uh, called Symantec. They were actually the one that discovered Stuxnet and they're a US company, so they kind of went, "Oh, we've found this really interesting new attack." And then eventually you had to kind of go, "Um, it actually looks like it was made by the US government." (laughs) Um, credited them, they said it, but, um, they sort of, they have these secure operating centers and, uh, you go in and it's, it's sort of all ID, you're not meant to take your phones in, you've got a man trap of doors so you're in like, um, a door locks behind you and then you're held and watched on CCTV, another one comes through, all of this and then they monitor billions of points of data every day for their paying clients 'cause they sit inside their networks and go, "Is suddenly more than usual being sent out? Is there an attack that we recognize? Is there..." All of this and so you've got this weird sort of world where, you know, the same people who do our antivirus software and we sort of think of as pretty innocuous, behind the scenes they've got these sort of hundreds of people watching all the time for sort of cyber threats and how serious they are.... and if they need escalating, they have like hotlines to the FBI and to the sort of Homeland Security and to all of these people.

    2. CWChris Williamson55:06

       Shit.

    3. JBJames Ball55:06

       Um, and so it's, it's basically this ungoverned sort of battlefield with all of us sitting in the middle of it kind of going, you know, just browsing around shopping, not kind of noticing everything sailing past us.

    4. CWChris Williamson55:19

       Uh, James, I'm telling you, man, it, we're in Teletubbies land and they're down there in the seventh circle of hell, battling, battling demons and stuff like that with a massive sword out of Final Fantasy.

    5. JBJames Ball55:29

       (laughs) Yeah. I mean, it kind of is though. It is just this, the internet, 'cause, because all the companies use this really utopian mission language and we kind of all thought of them as cuddly until a few years ago, it does have this like halo, sort of lovely floaty image. And then you're like, "God no, this is, this is trench warfare."

    6. CWChris Williamson55:52

       Mm. This is one of the things that I noticed upon reading your book, that we personify a lot of things in the world, right? So, uh, we personify Thomas the Tank Engine. He's a tank engine. He doesn't need a face, right? But he's got a face and-

    7. JBJames Ball56:06

       Yeah.

    8. CWChris Williamson56:06

       ... he's got a personality and stuff like that. And I think naturally we want to ascribe even people's cars, right? They say, "Oh, she's, she's feeling a little slow today." And it's like, "No-

    9. JBJames Ball56:14

       Yeah.

    10. CWChris Williamson56:14

        ... it's a mechanical vehicle. It just does the thing it's supposed to do." It's the m- it's the definition of utilitarian. Um, and we personify the internet as well, right? In i- in very, very similar sort of way. It's given this new world, it's like the '60s, man, free love and information and stuff like that. But giving it a personality and romanticizing about it appears to actually probably be making us a little bit weak to what's properly going on. So does taking a more utilitarian approach help here? 'Cause I can use a hammer to knock a nail in or I can use a hammer to hit you in the head.

23. 56:48 – 1:16:30

    Moving past the internet

    1. CWChris Williamson56:48

    2. JBJames Ball56:48

       And that's, I think that's exactly right. I think that's sort of the, where we have to move past with the internet. This is, you know, this is the, the new technology of our generation. And in the book, I kind of liken it to when we got industrialization and factories. In the end, it's made us better off. It's made stuff cheaper, we can produce more, we get more out of what we have. You know, we have a lot of modern society thanks to it. But initially, it sucked. It made rich people way richer. It let them dump pollution, uh, sort of into water and rivers. They worked people for very low wages in atrocious health and safety conditions for very long hours. And so a few people got really, really disproportionately wealthy and all of the negative effects pushed their way down society onto the rest of us. Now, the internet's not quite as blatant as a big sort of factory churning out pollution in front of you, but it's working in just the same way. The technology is bringing the benefits to the people sort of who helped build it. And so it benefits governments who have been involved in the internet since its inception. It benefits money, you know, the finance model of the internet, the venture capital that built all of the tech companies we know, the people who get really rich on our data and centralizing that. Is it benefiting us? We've got misinformation, we've got less money, we are sort of losing some of our high streets. We are not getting all of the upside of this. We're getting some of it. I think most of us would go, actually, if you could turn off the internet tomorrow and wind technology back to 1990, we'd say no, and that would be the right answer. But are we actually harnessing this tool for us or are we letting it just because it's good overall and because we've got this fluffy view of it, are we letting the people who've always had their, like, hands on the levers get all the benefit? And we've got to move it back to being a thing in the real world and a thing that we think about if we want to sort of have control of it and have the perks of it, and that's what we don't do and need to.

    3. CWChris Williamson59:05

       Well, I mean, what would be the psychological equivalent of some nefarious factory owner 100 years ago dumping his waste into the local lake? Like, it would be the companies of Silicon Valley racing to the bottom of the brainstem to use every evolutionary trick in the book to ensure that you h- you maximize your time on site, anyone who's spent time looking at Tristan Harris from the, uh, Center for Humane Technology's work about the a- addictive nature of technology and, and all of the real crazy militarized weapon, weaponized, uh, military grade tactics that are being used to ensure that we stay on our phones and we stay on site and we do... Like the guy that created Infinite Scroll said in Al- Adam Alter's book that it was the single biggest mistake of his life.

    4. JBJames Ball1:00:02

       So-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:00:02

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

    6. 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.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:00:24

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

    8. JBJames Ball1:00:27

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

    9. 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-

    10. JBJames Ball1:00:36

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

    11. 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.

    12. 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.

    13. 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-

    14. JBJames Ball1:03:46

        Yeah.

    15. 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?"

    16. JBJames Ball1:04:15

        (laughs) .

    17. 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.

    18. JBJames Ball1:04:28

        Yeah.

    19. 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-

    20. JBJames Ball1:04:42

        Yeah.

    21. 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-

    22. JBJames Ball1:05:39

        (laughs) .

    23. 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."

    24. 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-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:06:59

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

    26. 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?

    27. CWChris Williamson1:08:58

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

    28. JBJames Ball1:09:01

        We've got-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:09:01

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

    30. 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.

Episode duration: 1:16:30