Greetings, Future Fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to another episode of Podcast that explores our place and time. There are, of course, a lot of ways to guide that inquiry, evolutionary, historical, psychological dimensions, to understanding what is unique and precious about the moment that we live in. And for me, all of these streams come together at the investigation of human technology, co-evolution, and the psychological and social consequences of our changing relationship to our communications media.
Specifically, what does it mean to live in a glass house? The modern construction of the private individual, as you'll hear in this fabulous conversation with cybersecurity specialist Dylan Kern, is a relatively recent innovation, and for the 300,000 years or so that we've been anatomically modern human beings, most of the time we've lived in extremely intimate, transparent social groups where the identity of the individual is subsumed within the tribal identity. So as hyper-connectivity through electronic technology reshapes the landscape of identity and community in this age, it should come as no surprise that it's sending us down some very familiar gullies and into some ancient future aroios well-carved already by thousands upon thousands of years of human habit and biology. Knowing that, though, doesn't necessarily make the transition into the end of privacy as we know it any easier, and anyone who's listening to the show around the time of its recording, not by digging it out of some distant future hard drive archaeological dig.
If you're listening, you almost certainly have a direct and very uncomfortable experience with how much information it is that we're sharing online, which usually these days comes in the form of some kind of awful surprise when we realize that our artificially intelligent assistants know us far better than we intentionally allowed them to. You might say that this is the age of the Faustian binding end-user agreement by which each of us is given vast, almost godlike powers, in exchange for offering everything that we are into the maw of entropy and its avatars, the five great data companies that possess the closest thing that we have these days to a signature in blood, namely your emails, your Fitbit data, everywhere you've been on Google Maps since you started using it, everything you like, everything you buy, everyone you hang out with, all the comments that you type, and then think that you've deleted all of your passwords, all of your conversations, all of your medical data. We're living in what I called in 2013 the Glass Age, an age defined not only by the transparency of our lives to the digital panopticon, but also our total material dependence on the substance of glass for the silicon chips, the fiber optic cables, and the screens that have become the dominant abode for our fragmented attentions. And yet in this decay of the boundaries and membranes of identity and propriety that we once were taught to believe and accept as real objective phenomena, a new interdependent, collaborative, fluid, and agile selfhood is emerging.
And I have a lot of hope for this next thing as awkward and turbulent as the transition into it might be. So I'm going to ring out this episode with a song I wrote about all of this called Transparent, the refrain of which is, we would be scared if we weren't sharing it. Now that is not a low-key reminder to share the show with your friends, although I do appreciate everybody who has been reviewing future fossils on iTunes, it's hugely helpful. As well as all of the new Patreon supporters this week, Samuel Spencer, Jason Albert Hall, Scott Meyer, thank you all so much for joining the decentralized intelligence agency that is the future fossils listening community.
Go to patreon.com slash Michael Garfield if you would like to stick your face in the firehose of psychedelic science fictional media that I produce, including early and exclusive episodes of this show, original music, coloring book pages, and more. And if you're the chatty type, I hope you'll join us in the future fossils Facebook discussion group where you can't possibly say anything they don't already know, so you might as well join us and enjoy a daily flow of interesting news and conversations there. But for now, thank you all so much for listening and enjoy this very blunt and practical conversation with Dylan Curran about just how deep we're in it and the practical strategies for living a safe and hygienic but convenient and empowered life online. Dylan, it's a pleasure to have you on future fossils.
Thanks, Michael. Yeah, I can't remember who it was that shared your Twitter thread, but obviously a lot of people have including Edward Snowden, which is pretty dope. Yeah, just a little bit there. I mean, it's important though, and I'll post the link to the thread in the show notes because it's really helpful to see in one place all of these things that I think people have sort of either suspected or found out through different news outlets, but to have it all in front of you in one sort of digestible readable format is really epic.
So what are we talking about here? What is the drop in this? So, especially a quick summary is one Saturday morning I was really hung over and I decided to for some for some whatever reason I went on Twitter and I thought Twitter was really, really similar to mine, but I was going through say in the other way Facebook stories you're call records and your text messages. So, I was like, but they saw them regardless and this guy posted Twitter thread pretty much it was kind of like mine.
It was going through that and people's shock was absolutely insane. Like there's people who had no clue at all that this was going on. So, I've seen that I was like, oh, you have no idea. Oh boy.
You have no clue what's actually going on. So, I actually went on and done an archive and I went through my Google Maps, my Gmail, Google Drive, Google Fish. So, this sort like everything, all the locations I've been, all the searches I've made, all the websites I've visited, all the ads I've either clicked on, all the images files I've downloaded, all the workouts and yoga, etc. Just like virtually everything I've ever done online was in these archives.
So, I just broke it down into an essay and tried to show like say on like an individual level what they store about me and not on a broad scale. So, I think that's one of the biggest mistakes people make in tech industry when they talk about privacy. They talk about it on a broad scale. So, for instance, when I came to Canada, people are constantly talking about the fact that they sell 89 million Facebook worth of information.
But that number is so big, you can't even process that. Like, 89 million means nothing to you. You just kind of go like, eh, like Equifax was that two years ago? Yeah.
I was like, I was like 20 million financial statements leaked, stuff like that. No one really cared because do they get a number? Why don't you show an individual level? How much is it about me?
Then I do think about what they store on you. That's probably why it was so shocking. Yeah. I mean, that's actually related to Edward Snowden.
I was invited into the Google Glass Explorer program, which is in 2013, that beta tester round, which is when I started thinking about this stuff all the time. And it was a funny kind of convergence of moments historically because right as everyone starts waking up to the reality of this sort of mass surveillance bulk data collection. We're going to sweep everything and we'll pick it apart later. We don't care if we can properly analyze it now or not.
It happened at the same time that I started experimentally wearing a camera on a computer on my face in certain public spots as a sort of an artistic thing. But it became really clear that this device, which is basically doing all of the same sensors and has the same sort of surveillance potential as a phone. But the fact that it's not in your pocket, it's actually on your head. And it's in between you and someone else when you're having a conversation literally physically made it so much more uncomfortable for people.
And it was hilarious because to me, I was like, you realize there's no difference here. Like, all of you are voluntarily carrying around these extraordinarily sophisticated surveillance devices in your pocket all the time. But as soon as somebody brings it up in polite conversation, it's no longer polite conversation. And so there's something beautiful about that human piece of this, which is making it human scale, making it, oh, this is what they, this is me, this is my data, this is the complete portrait.
And not this like, you know, Carl Sagan billions and billions of stars kind of thing. So now that you know, and you know, you're a cybersecurity professional, now that you know what people are collecting about you, what have you done about that knowledge? Like, how has it inspired a new behaviors? Well, see, like if you're in a tech industry, you would know that this kind of stuff is going on all the time regardless.
So like, my behavior has always kind of been very much the same, which is mostly to be careful online. So like the best, like the best antivirus is common sense. That's not normally what I'll say. And that the same thing applies when it comes to privacy because the fact is like, you can go to extraordinary extends to hydrodynamic online, but you make the internet virtually unusable.
So for instance, you can use that like a VPN with a proxy, which essentially is just masking your location. So that's just saying that instead of me being an island, I'll say I'll be an Amsterdam. But then the browsers, like Mozilla and Chrome, et cetera, they came out with a new technological web RTC, which is live communication between the website and your computer, which means that they can get past the VPN and proxy and detect where you are regardless. So if you use a VPN and proxy, they still know where you are.
And then even then, like if you're still using the same device, that device love a unique ID. So even if it says you're not an Amsterdam, they'll know that that device is normally in my house in Ireland. So that's how there's really no way to hide like who you are. And then terms of like what's online, you can go to like Google Facebook and turn off the privacy settings.
So you can stop their data collection entirely. But like there's not really, they're gonna have to collect something. Like for you to use those services, they have to collect something. So for instance, like if you're using Google Maps, like you need to give your location, like there's no way like they can't, they usually they can't, they can't be to be fair to them.
Like they cannot figure out the distance between you and wherever you're going with that location. And they're going to log that location. And then even after all that, you know, if you're doing any of the internet services, like Google Facebook and stuff like that, your internet service provider is going to be collecting information about what you're doing. Anyway, so like there's a whole lot you can do in terms of stuff just like this.
All you have to do is be careful about what you do put online. That's it. Like if there's nothing like liable or suspicious online, then you have nothing to worry about in terms of that. But if you do value privacy, like the best you can do is just find alternatives like Dr.
Go for instance, he is Dr. Go instead of Google like that. It's not like a search history. I'm working with a company called pre search.
They're like a blockchain alternative to Google. So they'll be like collecting information about the anonymous. So they'll get the same benefits of Google, but you won't have to give you have to have that information to tell your person like to tell you anymore. So there's stuff like that out there.
You have to go look for it. But in general, like do you think if you're using internet, you're going to be trying somewhere. It's like if you walk on the street, you're going to be a cop-ic TV camera. There's not really much you can do about it.
So there are two things coming up for me listening to you talk about this. And one of them I just want to put a pin in for later, which is the issue of the cultural reaction around this stuff and our idea of privacy and how people with sort of different sets of cultural expectations are going to react to this differently. And some people don't care that they're living in a glass house to put it one way. But let's put that aside from it because you mentioned that you are working on a sort of secure and anonymous blockchain-based search project.
And this may be a bit too technical, I don't know of a question. But I'm curious how that's actually implemented because I know that a lot of the hype surrounding the anonymity of Bitcoin in particular is sort of overblown and that entities like the IRS are using complicated network analysis tools like chain analysis to identify the players on the Bitcoin blockchain, even though they're pseudonymous. Yeah, right. That's the difference to the anonymous is pseudonymous.
Because if there's no way to be truly anonymous on the internet, there's going to be something leading back to you. So pseudonymous is just saying that makes it much, much, much more harder. So like for instance, if I say like what's this Bitcoin blockchain, for example, and if I send a Bitcoin transaction to you and then we both have our public addresses, a few of us, that's recorded in the blockchain. But the difference is that they can just figure out what they have to tie that public address to my identity some way through my computer.
And the only way that the IRS manages to figure out these kind of things is because they get the biggest transactions. So they take these huge like 4,000, 5,000 bitcoins. And there's only a couple of people who are able to do that. And then they'll just use that information to figure out who did it.
So in terms of like smaller transactions, maybe in like the, you know, like 0.25 to 0.5 kind of of Bitcoin realm, where it's, you know, a couple of thousand dollars, it's virtually impossible and will take them years to figure out who you are. Unless they get access to your computer and wallet and then they get your public key. And then they know that that transaction was you. And even then they have no idea that you are you and I always sent that to you.
So they have no idea like why or why I gave the money. So it's not like if I sent, you know, like if I sent $20 to Amazon for a product, they don't want to buy a buy send $20 Bitcoin to you, they have no clue why I did it or that's you at all. Like, so there is that is like an important distinction, but it's relatively anonymous. Like it's very difficult to take to your.
So I mean, that and I guess that sort of fades into the other question, which is, are we basically operating under a hopelessly obsolete naive understanding of this sort of division between public and private? Like, did these things ever even really exist in the first place? You know, because this in some sense is just the latest iteration of, you know, a kind of cat and mouse game of sense, evolving new ways of like detecting things in spite of the fact that they're camouflaged, you know, that's been going on for hundreds of millions of years. Like, do you think that we're just in conversation about these things that we're just being oversimplistic and naive here?
Yeah, well, what I mostly think of this kind of conversation is that I do not try to encourage people too much to be to try and I do not try to encourage people too much to try and remain anonymous online. So I don't really see the point because realistically, like, you're never going to be able to truly do it. And in the sense, you're going to go to a whole year identity is virtually impossible. And then you can't really use this.
So you cannot use Facebook without giving your identity. Like, you can't like there's simply no way. So it's like, if you are anonymous, logging into your Facebook, like that's, you know, that's kind of that clue. So I normally try to, why don't we try to argue on the basis of is that we need to kind of change how society wants to work and it's that we want to not use these kind of services and get right down these that because we can use the similar similar services without compromising our identity and privacy.
So like, it's very much more of like an ethical and moral situation where I try to tell people like, no, look, I'm not trying to encourage you to talk to go and stuff. I'm like, what do we think is right? And then innovation will solve that issue. Like, if we all if we want to use those kind of services, innovation will rise up and fix it.
We don't have to strictly think of the solution now. So, so it sounds like you are suggesting that we may continue wanting to use these sort of high bandwidth, sharing technologies for certain things. I mean, obviously, there are certain things that are impossible without them, but that maybe we've gotten sort of zealous in our so like an ideological devotion to this kind of transparency. I mean, ultimately, it seems like it all comes down to power.
Like I heard John Perry Barlow speak a couple of years ago and he talked about, he's like, I don't mind living transparently. I just want to know who's looking. Like, I want to know who's watching me who has access to my data. Otherwise, you know, the fact that my living in public is not an issue of concern because I've grown up on a small Wyoming ranch town where everybody knew everybody else's business.
But it was that it was that what Kevin Kelly and other folks have called covalence, you know, which is like horizontal. It's like a neighborhood watch. You know, people are watching each other laterally rather than surveillance where it's, you know, the eye on the pyramid kind of thing. So do you think that this, I mean, is ultimately this just, it's not so much a matter of data transparency as it is a matter of power inequality?
Yeah, kind of. I mean, like the centralization of power in terms of data collection is very much centered around like the big four, which we like Facebook, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and probably Instagram. So like those who are collecting the most, maybe LinkedIn. So those five collecting most information about people and they're courting that information like crazy.
So it's, I mean, they're not technically doing anything malicious or nefarious, whether we don't know that I can't say for certain that Facebook or Google are actually doing anything bad with the data. Like what's much, much, much more likely is that they're just using it to make money. So they're just using it to target advertising, which isn't too nefarious. You know, that's how they have to make money.
So, and then we also go into stuff where, you know, the NSA prison program. Yeah, we're talking about that a little, please. Yeah. So the prison program was just where the NSA basically worked with a lot of big tech companies to install back doors into their software and services so that the NSA commercial connects that's all the company's information virtually at any time without having to go through the hassle of a subpoena or through a course or to actually ask companies for data.
So that means at the end of the end of the day, so like while the companies might be like very responsible with their handling of the information, you do know for a fact that a government has access to it. And then we also don't know what companies like certain companies or countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, India are doing that information because they're not like in Iran, for instance, do you remember about maybe things that four or five months ago when there was a virtual civil war? So when that happened, Iran shut down the internet access and normally the way you get it, they shut the internet access for people living in Iran and monitored any traffic going out. And normally how you get it around that is using VPN to encrypt your traffic.
So I'm also masking your location so that Iran could monitor their internet traffic. But then, then Iran actually put in new advanced software to detect and someone's using VPN, which is just basically because when you use VPN, all of your traffic is encrypted, so everything's hidden. But that's really obvious when you're using VPN. So they just literally find a VPN and then kill them or through them in jail.
So there's very little ways around these kind of things. But that just shows what, you know, what fall out there can be even this kind of data monetization. How do we get from here to there? Like, how do you see the global IT and like cybersecurity communities that are concerned about keeping the best of the digital revolution and curtailing the worst of this sort of data power inequity?
What kind of steps? I mean, like you mentioned, you know, this particular blockchain search project, what else out there do you see as sort of like vectors or strategies in moving towards a more desirable outcome here? Well, like I said before, like it's probably going to be more future innovation. I think it's going to be a very much as to be a desire that people want.
Because, you know, like any sort of entrepreneurs and that rises to me, just kind of demand is only going to be there if the demand is there. So at the moment, it's a very small minority people who are actually willing to maybe go out of their way to take care of their privacy. It's very much like taking care of your weight. I mean, like, how much do we tell people that they're going to get fat and tired of high attack, if they keep eating, you know, loads of burgers, they're going to keep doing it.
The vast majority of people are going to keep doing it. But there's always going to be that small subsection of people who go to the gym or, you know, to actually take care of their privacy. So really, like, it's you have to make people want to do things. Because if you just keep like, alarming them and stuff like that, that's not really going to do anything, that you have to offer them a service that's as good as the rival services or food, say that's as tasty as a bad food, but it also has to be just as quick to get and stuff like that.
That's the only way that you're ever going to work it out. So like, like, I'm actually, I'm working on a startup at the moment that will, it'll basically catalog all the information on the internet that's related to you. So he's like, your name, your location, your date of birth, and then all of your social media handles to figure out everywhere you appear on the internet. And then it's going to actually email and contact all these companies and websites that you appear on and ask them to take down the information.
But the sad thing is this only applies to EU citizens because of GDPR. So for GDPR, like if you, if you ask a company or if an agent on your behalf asks a company to remove your information, they have to legally do it. So but that doesn't work in the US because the US isn't taking part in GDPR. And neither are any American companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter aren't putting in GDPR for the US citizens only EU citizens.
Yeah, that reminds me of Charles Dross and Corey Doctorow's novel Rapture of the Nerds, where they talk about how in a hundred years, parents will scare their little children to sleep with horror stories of what Facebook did with everyone's data. You know, like, you think about these, like films like Ex Machina, where your digital simulacrum is used to create, I mean, this is the Cambridge Analytica, like to the extent, you know, the ultimate sort of extension that's, you know, beyond just targeted posts and into machines, you know, lovers or just like smart homes that know how to manipulate our cognitive biases and personal preferences. And so we lose in this process. I think this is, this is sort of, you know, what I ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal was made public, this has been the sort of looming spectrum on the horizon, which is that to the extent that people's opinions can be swayed in this way, we've broken apart the coherent cultural narrative that enables and empowers an informed citizenry to participate in democracy.
And that basically right now what we have is a political system of social engineering and programmatic control through what is essentially subliminal messaging and like UX, like sort of Blackmagic UX. And so we're at a point now where it's like we're cussing back into an age where the environment is the, like our actual homes are the, and the tools that we surround ourselves with in the day are determining our political behaviors. And that, that's like unacceptable, right? Like on some level, like we've got to be able to get more people literate to the way that these media are used in order to manipulate public opinion and like mass behavior.
And to me, it's not at all clear except through a really articulate Twitter feed shared by a world famous cyber revolutionary. How we do that? Like how, how else can we possibly make this, you already compared it to getting people to take care of their waste? Is it the same kind of issue?
I mean, ultimately, is it the same kind of issue with the same kind of psychology? Is there just no way to get people to take care of this before it's catastrophic? Well, I like to be optimistic and say yes, but like the realist, the realist I mean is going to like, I mean, like, say, like my Twitter might have gotten, I got in the end 200 million views, that's 200 million unique views. So we'll say, how many of them might have really read it was like 10%.
So say 20 million, those people really read the thread. And then if we're going to take the portion of those people who actually acted on it, who actually went and changed, hey, for the privacy settings, you're probably looking at that 1 to 2% so you're looking at 200 to 400,000. So for a thread, I got 200 million views for only 200 to 400,000 people to change something. That's nothing.
Like, then the grand scale of things. And I don't think people are really going to make the effort to change things. That's why, like, that's why I always say like we need to offer something, we need to offer something that's as good, if not better than Google. Like, for instance, with research, they give you something called pre-search tokens.
So basically, you get a little bit of money every time you search. So that's offering people that will make them want to use the service as long as it's good as Google. So it needs to be as good as Google and also have an extra incentivization. And that's the only real way that we're going to change things that we have to actually offer things that are as good.
Because it's hard work. Like, if you want to actually go off and not use Google and Facebook, that's tough. That's genuinely tough. And then if you want to remain anonymous, you have to pay extra money and make the internet worse for you to use.
I'm wearing convenient for you to do it. So it's like going to the gym. It's hard. It's worth it.
Well, it's hard. So people are not going to do it on a broad scale. And people don't do it on a general scale. It doesn't matter.
Everyone has to do it together. Otherwise, it doesn't make a difference. Going to the gym is a really interesting comparison, right? Because exercise is something that everybody used to get.
Just living. You're running down a buffalo or whatever. And we were originally a species of runners. Our whole body is designed for this endurance running.
Everybody can run a marathon. Grandma can run a marathon. It might take her a while. But the body is set up for this.
It's not set up necessarily for sprinting. But the more that we removed the incentive for physical exercise and replaced it with the incentive for desk work, then suddenly now we're paying to go to the gym. It's really the exact same thing. So this whole bit about the incentive structure.
And actually, I feel like you're answered in my question of how do we deal with the threat of media being used for malevolent political persuasion? We use it for benevolent political persuasion. We use it basically to trick people into doing the right thing for themselves by paying them. Kind of.
So if I was going to say more political manipulation, actually, I was talking about this on Twitter before. During the Mark Zuckerberg trial. Tech cruise was, when everything about tech cruise is conservative, that's nothing to do with it. It's just that whatever tech cruise saying to Mark Zuckerberg that he was censoring, Facebook was censoring conservatives.
That's a full blown fact. That's an obvious because Facebook is one of the most left leading places in America or even the world. So he admitted that. He said, yeah, look, that's what you expect.
It's like, of course, but people don't care because it's conservatives. But they don't realize that they're having their sphere of influence being really narrowed. The reason that the system works is because you have two extreme sides and most people go to the middle. So they get to meet in the middle.
They bang off each other constantly and then it creates a middle sphere. So the government system is not changing too much all the time. It's very stable. It's one of the most stable currencies in the world, to the stage that it's the world currency.
And that's because America's political system is extremely grounded and it does not move because it's just two sides constantly crashing and nothing gets done. But that's good. You want something to be stable. You need a very stable, very stable foundation for things to grow.
And what happens online when you narrow people's spheres, they start going in the other direction. And when they start going in their direction, they just keep going. And they have no other actual view to bang off. So they just keep going.
And then if you're on Twitter, for instance, you narrow it so just here even more to people you only agree with. So now we have social media where people only follow people they agree with. Then they have Facebook, which is a public platform where they don't see any other points of view. And if they do see other points of view, there's probably lots of abuse, which is also agreeing with you because Facebook's going to lean towards showing you comments that you're going to agree with and you're more likely to like.
So and in terms of that kind of stuff, I do, I'm kind of torn between legislation and people just opting to use something else. But it's hard to actually keep free speech going online. It's really difficult. Like where do you draw the line?
No one knows where to draw the line, which is where I normally like, you keep things just total freedom. Like usually people post whatever they want unless it's something illegal. You leave the polls, whatever they want. You do not take down anything that's an opinion.
No matter what it says. It doesn't matter how racist or anything like it is. If it's in America and it's freedom of speech, it gets pulled up. As long as you're not inside violence, that's the fifth amendment, isn't it?
Or the fifth amendment? First amendment? First amendment. Sorry.
It's a free speech, though. You basically, as long as not inside violence, you're good. And that's the way it should be. But now, like, I don't even know how to monitor it because Facebook's a private company and they're allowed to do whatever they want on their platform.
So I don't know how to change that, like whether it's through legislation or through people just refusing to use service. I honestly have no idea. So I mean, do you think that we could design systems like you're talking about designing a search that pays for search? Do you think that we could design systems that incentivize people to cross the political aisle and engage in?
That already exists, Reddit. Reddit already encourages you to cross the political aisle. It's unfortunate, though, that's gone very left-leaning as well. So now it's not down the middle.
I say, for instance, on Reddit, or politics, that's a very known for censoring conservatives as well. I'm not even trying to defend either viewpoint. I don't care. But it's bad when one viewpoint gets censored.
But Reddit doesn't encourage you to go to sub Reddit of people who agree with you or disagree with you. And you might be like, there's a sub Reddit like, change my mind, for instance, where it's like, you basically go to post something, people trying to change your mind, and then you get up votes, etc. So that is encouraging people to have a more thorough debate. But again, that can get into ecosphere is where you only go on sub Reddit to people you agree with.
So again, it's on both sides. The companies should try to maintain effort to keep free speech. But people should also search for other viewpoints. You shouldn't just watch Fox News, you shouldn't just watch CNN, you should watch both, and I mean the middle.
That's how your viewpoint should always go. So you watch both extremes. And then the truth is probably directly in the middle. Hmm.
It seems like the Reddit example, though, to prove me wrong or change my mind, rather, change my mind. That's a cultural phenomenon that's taken up because, like on a grassroots level, people realize the need for this. It doesn't seem like it's baked into the platform, really. I wonder what it would look like to have a platform that rewards cultural synthesis in this way, that rewards, like I think about the end of apartheid in South Africa and how this movement of discussion and forgiveness and cultural healing occurred.
And I wonder what would catalyze something like that in the United States, which is so polarized and so centrifugal now that it seems like we need a centripetal structure to keep it together at all, or we're at risk of tearing down the middle. What do you mean by that? What's the apartheid America? What's the comparison?
I mean, in some sense, it's a coast to center kind of issue, liberal coast, but in another sense, it's the diminishing sort of middle class creating filter bubbles of the plutocrats and then everyone else. And I was actually really disturbed on some level as hopeful as Occupy Wall Street was to see people become aware of the financial situation. It was also disturbing. The response was to continue to pose the conversation as us versus them.
It's 99% versus 1%. Because what you're doing is you're gathering a popular movement that admits it actually lacks the resources that the other side has to solve this problem and pits your cultural identity against those people. So what is it going to take to get everyone to recognize a sort of deeper solidarity and encourage those aisle crossing conversations? I mean, the only thing I can really think of that might work, it seems like it's sort of working in Europe is climate change.
But then again, if the narrative is broken and you can't even get everybody to agree that climate change is happening, then you're kind of up shit creek. So I guess I'm just asking you, do you think that this is even a design problem? I think it's a big kind of one of the biggest things, like the fake news issue, which is that people have just disregarded facts entirely. They don't care about that.
If a fact works in their favor, it's true. It doesn't matter if the fact is true or not, if it works in their favor, it's true. In my climate change and stuff like that, a lot of the times people don't even disagree with the fact that climate change is occurring. They're just disagreeing on whether it's technically bad for the earth because there's no evidence.
Because I've looked at the evidence myself and I used to think very much so. This might be the other time to always think that climate change is obviously true. Like Bill and I said it, but then I actually looked at the information and looked at the studies. The earth goes through global heating and cooling periods roughly every 20,000 years.
And there was an Ice Age 20,000 years ago, and the earth is probably just heating itself. Now, as a being accelerated by humans, probably, but it's right. I think we can really, like, are we really going to uproot the entire earth's technological and financial economy for the sake of maybe reducing our output to maybe like minus one or minus two degrees, which doesn't even have a broad effect because the earth naturally glove heats anyway. We have to destroy all the progress we've made over the last 150 years.
So unless people are willing to do that, unless they're willing to give up all of the nice because you think it's having their life, then nothing's going to happen because of it. But that doesn't really matter. What I'm saying is that you do need to look at the studies and facts yourself. So in terms of like being by design, I think it's more an individual level.
People need to very much actually start doing their own research and stuff like that. Like say, for instance, like 100 years, you have to read a newspaper to find out any facts. And when you went into reading newspapers, people think, tend to think more for themselves. I think they have much more discussions with their friends and their family and stuff like that, which will open their mind a bit more.
But nowadays, it's very much like you see something on CNN and then you share it on Twitter and then everyone who agrees you want to and replies to you. And some of this views you block them. So like, it's you know, there's actually there's no open discussion. And then people just hate the other sides constantly on every side.
They are nearly every single country. The only play this does not seem to happen in EU that much. Like in Ireland, for instance, there's none of this political rampage that's going on in the US. Like there's no left versus right.
There's pretty much, you know, we very much are you on the basis of policies. Like, for instance, there's like, there's the repeal the eighth right now, which is the eighth amendment to the Irish Constitution for a bad abortion. So people want to repeal, you know, don't appeal to a level of abortion in Ireland. But there's no left versus right.
It's who agrees with that policy and who disagrees with it. And that's it. There's no actual, there's no like a no I'm liberal, like you're wrong, you're conservative. It's not that it's just all policies.
And for some reason, that's just not happening in the US. It does not even know what you would fix that issue. That's that really comes into the individual as much as the public platforms. Mm.
You're making a point about voting by policy rather than voting by political affiliation. Kind of strikes to the heart of this this other issue seems to emerge from the way that the filter bubble and the social profiling through bulk data collection created or maybe not created, but at least participated in the emergence of identity politics in the modern world. And like specifically this notion of intersectional identity. I mean, in some sense, these are ideas that emerged out of the, you know, PR and like propaganda interface with capitalism in the 20th century, like the desire, the documentary film, Century of the Self talking about moving from selling a product to selling a lifestyle and identity as a consumer, right?
And so we've all been spoon fed this stuff for our entire lives, you and I and probably most people listening. And it seems like, like that is a huge piece of this in some way that like it's the desire to understand the human being as an aggregate of data points. It's dissolving our coherent identity as a, you know, this liberal modern citizen, this cohesive person into just like a constellation of programs and preferences. And that the consequences of that are social media that align us along these cultural fault lines.
So I don't know, I don't know if it's even a question I can like tie a belt around. It's like, it's like, you can do it. You can do it. Yeah, but it is there basically does it require an entirely new socio economic paradigm with a different notion of identity?
Like, how is it different in Ireland? Like, what do you think are the cultural factors that encourage this policy based political engagement, even in a world where you're dealing with the same sort of technological challenges that we are in the States? Well, it was mostly going to impact the American as a two party system. So you really only have two hours to go down.
It doesn't tend to get two parties system, but it really is. Well, it has a multi party system. So we have, you know, like, we have like six or seven competing. So like you can't really be a line behind any sort of like single party that much because I don't actually really know why it's so different.
Like, I know like, so for instance, it's this kind of left right divide really happened in like the city's 70s when it was very much, say, when like the hippies came around, that's when like hippies came and they were tolerant and it's peace and then they were coming out against the Vietnam War. And that really split people straight down the middle. That was like, you're either pro war anti war, if you're anti war, you're a hippie, if you're pro war, you're hardworking American. And like, that's kind of where it went.
From there, it just kept escalating. Then it was those kind of people raising their children and then went to millennials and else gone this stage, where you're very much encouraged to be as tolerant. And if you don't agree with something, if you don't agree with someone saying like who they are, what they are, what they want to know, like, what race they are, what sexuality they are, what gender they are, then you're not being tolerant enough. So like, but then now people have like an innate desire to be people have always had an innate desire to be a part of groups.
But that innate desire was counteracted by individualism, you know, the bitch came back in the last like 200 years roughly. And we've already we've proven very much the individual individualism works and capitalism works, they both work together. And that's kind of gave a reason to the greatest of basically empires in the world, which we, you know, it's dates. But now we're going back to a stage where it's all about like group identity or identity politics, where we all feel the need to be a private group.
And we want to put ourselves into as say like as money groups as we kind of possibly can, which is why you see people coming out and they want to have like this random gender, when they want to kind of like have this diverse sexuality and so that puts them into this big LGBTQ plus society group, where they're all bonded together and they always fly together and they're all with their big clam. And then the rest of people disappear, don't dare the enemy. And that's like, so we do need to go back to the individualism where you're a person, you're not a group, you know, like where you have your own personality and you have your own like self identity, like who you are. And you don't have to be a part of group, you just be who you are, you work off your personality and like your work ethic and like your value as human being and not just well, I'm gay, you're like, or like I'm trans, whatever, like X, Y, what do they have that Z Sir Day, you know, the gender pronouns, what is it?
Oh, yeah, Z and Sir and you have a lot of stuff. Greg, Greg, you can talk about those in his science fiction novel distress, you know, sort of suggested a seven gender system by 2050, which I thought was sounds kind of like it might actually balance out the war of the sexes in the same way that seven political parties in Ireland, you sort of lose the political charge, you know, the political. Vote for, Xerxes, vote for, Xerxes, vote for conservative. That's how it goes over here.
Like that's where we go. Yeah, it's, it's, it's in Sandy, like I noticed 89 genders, I think now last track of the new record, I see 89, no, you just make that up and add it, but that's just, that stuff's incredible to me. I find that so strange. Like that's like the problems that the young people are trying to solve nowadays, you know, like if it was 40 years ago, like back in like the 70s and 80s, the young population was trying to stop wars, the young population was trying to stop wars around the world.
And now we're deciding on like 89 different genders, like there's no, and that doesn't help people, like that doesn't benefit the global population in any way. Do you think like a starving kid in Africa or a war towards civilian and Syria gives a shit about what gender people are like, no, like that's not a problem. The youth should be solving. I thought we were the really tolerant world changing people, but we're not, like not now.
This generation is just not doing that. Well, I mean, in defense of a yes and the more, the merrier kind of theory of gender, as opposed to like we need to find the objective number and be like, we all need to agree that there are 87, no, there are 88, you know, this idea of shit, why not throw another ornament on that tree is I think trending toward Pierre Teardis Choudin talked about hypercollectivization leading to hyper specialization. And it seems like we're getting more and more differentiated as individuals as we become more and more integrated as a global civilization. So you get these people like, I know so many people whose job descriptions myself included, I'm like, what and what do you do exactly?
Like you came up with your own name for your job, because your job is sort of this pattern of activity that's unique to you. You know, I totally made up my job. I was born with the rest. I was going on foxing and like, so what's your job title?
I was like, I'm seeing something. Like, I'll do. So yeah, I mean, in a sense, it seems like maybe there's a little hope at the end of this, like a light at the end of the tunnel. If we think that basically it just continues to fragment to the degree that everyone is their own political party, like everyone is their own demographic, everybody is their own religion, you know, and it just at that point we can encounter one another as sovereigns rather than citizens, you know, and then then it's a whole different conversation because everyone is speaking peer to peer.
And like probably literally in that case, because I don't really know how that kind of a culture can exist without a techno-economic base in which people own their own data. So, okay, you tried to tell you that. You tried to twist that in. Well, no, it's a real one.
You know, the blockchain thing is a fascinating sort of, it doesn't seem like a coincidence that all of this conversation about bulk data collection and, you know, digital feudalism and people working on indentured servants on the Facebook farm are, you know, it's intimately connected with the desire to create alternatives that reward people for their participation and allow them agent-centric data ownership. So, I mean, again, like, you know, just to turn it back to how you see this growing over the next five years, where you feel these sort of like obvious growth vectors are, you know, and how we're going to pivot into a space that rewards this sort of educated individual that you're talking about, you know, pulling it back to the fringe and to the individual players involved. I do think that, to me, I think we're pretty much fucked for like the next five years. I don't think that I think it's drastically going to change for at least five years.
I think what's going to happen is we're going to keep seeing these little small disasters like in the context of the world, like it's pretty small. We're going to keep seeing it happening. And then I think maybe within four or five years, we're going to see some ridiculous disaster. We're going to see something that's so crazy that we need to change our view on data.
It's going to be something insane, like a huge government taking control of, like, say like India, China, Russia, something like that. It's going to take control of a data center from some company we're going to hack into and get access and they can use information to basically influence the world. So like that's like, and then once that happens, we're going to see a massive population-based change on our views and these kinds of things. So, once that happens, convenience is always going to win over any sort of health-based activity.
So, if it's privacy health, unless something comes out that's as good as Google or as good as Facebook or as easy to use, while also still somehow managing to maintain some sort of privacy-based system, nothing's really going to change. The vast bulk population is going to keep using what's easy. They're going to get their own phone, they're going to get their Android phone, it's going to have Facebook and Twitter and stuff pre-installed. Then like, how can you really get around that?
Like, you have to keep going out of their way to do these kind of things, and they're not going to do it. So, and I think what a good system might be to happen is if someone has a phone manufacturer create their own OS and offer their phone dirt cheap, they found some sort of new way of developing a phone that was dirt cheap and just as good as the others, and they have their own OS that's privacy-based, then maybe. Maybe then. But like, that's the only scenario I really see things changing.
I really do think things are going to stay the same for four or five years. I'm going to do my absolute best to try and make as many people change their minds possible. But I think in the long term, we're going to have to wait for something kind of catastrophic happens in the data scene and then things will change. It's only when it's like, airplanes don't change their laws until the plane crashes.
They don't change their regulations. It's like, until something disastrous happens, nothing changes. So, it's the only situation I see it really. Great.
I mean, I come from a lifetime of studying mass extinctions and other sort of planet-scale catastrophes. So, a nation-level data breach in light of the end of dinosaurs doesn't actually sound that bad. If that's all it takes. Yeah, that's a pretty small price to pay.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, there's utility attacks, like cyber warfare and that kind of thing. And again, that level of a cyber attack on infrastructure seems also to suggest the exact same adaptive response, which is decentralizing the electrical utility grid, or like decentralizing our water collection and water treatment that you can't attack a billion people all at once if the architectural decentralization is like sufficient. So, I don't know.
I guess maybe I'm a bit more hopeful that progressive developers, such as yourself, see this problem clearly enough that the majority of people don't need to get on board before alternatives with sort of more insightful incentive structures are deployed. Well, I guess I could go and shoot off now, but if you had decentralized data storage, they've heard of it in bulletproof servers. No. So, bulletproof servers are just, you know, the Pyrebay.
So, the Pyrebay locates their servers on a bulletproof server, which is run by typically Dutch companies. And they basically, they make it so the company doesn't have access to the server, and it has a highest level encryption. So, even if the Dutch police come to this company and go, like, it gives access to the server, the Pyrebay is a legally-conducting service on a server, then the company go, we actually don't have access to it, because the companies lock off their own access to the servers. Like physically, physically, like they can't get in there.
Yeah. No, no, they literally, they can't touch them. Well, they can, sorry, they can't, they can touch them, but they can't access it. Like, it's only accessible by the company.
Why do you use something like DigitalOcean or Amazon Web Services, Amazon can access that information. And a lot of the information is into the highest level of 512, 512 encryption or whatever it is. So, that'll be a good step. Like, as long as the information is encrypted sufficiently, there's no chance of a massive data breach, but that's one of the biggest problems that not every website uses HTTPS.
So, that means that the web traffic's encrypted, most things like 60% don't use that, and a lot of servers aren't encrypted. So, that's what happens with data breaches. So, for instance, like, an underarmour recently had their servers hacked for my fitness file, and they leaked 150 million users' information, like unencrypted. Like, there was, like, there was, like, that's a big data massive breach, and like, no one heard about it.
Did you know that? No, I mean, it's on, it's on par with the Ashley Madison thing, but it doesn't sound quite as bad. Well, Ashley Madison was hilarious. Like, that was, it's, when these things happen, it's just, it's just such a damn shame.
It's like, it's so easy to encrypt and protect information, but companies just aren't incentivized to do it. Because people don't care. So, like, I think like a very good start for every company is some sort of national data standard, which is why I'm hoping to do it going forward, is doing, um, it'd be like a privacy auditing, you know, like the way, um, public companies have to do, uh, they have to get an auditor to, like, some like, PwC, if they have to get them to sign off on their accounts and say that this company's legit, and they've conducted business property, everything's cool. I would do the same with privacy auditors, so I'd go in and be like, okay, everything's encrypted, everything's safe.
So, you know, if there's a half-hour breach, everyone's information is safe, and then it would just be a little tick of approval, and that would be, it would be a nice, low-level data standard that maybe public companies should have to abide by, just like nonprofits have to abide by, um, getting an auditor. So, like, that's sort of the realm I'm hoping to go into, and I hope that's a direction people go into, I think, other companies do, but I don't know how viable that is. And then, so, I mean, we're coming up on an hour. So, let's drill down into some specifics again.
I mean, you know, you said basically a lot of this stuff, you really can't change it without targeting yourself because you are clearly from the gods I view trying to hide something, you know, like you mentioned with Iran and the VPN issue. So, you use, what, like, proton mail and signal, like, what is your, like, what is your personal digital hygiene regimen? Mostly, I chose to not find privacy collection settings like I want to, and I thought that's like a good start. I use NordVPN, so that's a traffic description.
See, like, we're NordVPNs, the good thing is, is that like, we're in the West, kind of Western countries, we're fine. Like, you're generally okay. It's when you get into, like, Iran and Syria, all those kind of places where you can see VPN is dangerous, or China, you're like, not like, these VPNs, China. So, yeah, getting NordVPNs is a good start, it's pretty cheap, like, $99 for three years, and it's almost as fast as using a normal internet.
Then you can also use proton mail or fast mail, so they're just encrypted mail services that don't store your emails at Google. Then you can also use WebRTC leak preventer that's an extension on Chrome, which will stop the browser being able to live, see your location on your traffic, and what else can you do? You can also use presearch.go, some working with both those companies, a nice little plug, but they're both nice privacy-based alternatives for searching, and yeah, mostly just common sense, like, just, like, if you're living in a Western country, you can, like, Google or search whatever you want, realistically, as long as it's not, like, child-born, like, you can research virtually any topic and be okay. Well, I would encourage people to do it, though, is not send, like, nudes.
Like, just don't, don't send nudes. Like, that's just, that's, there's my tip. Any of you do want Snapchat? That can be tracked.
Not tracked, sorry, that can be captured very easily. And Snapchat stores a lot of that stuff on your phone temporarily. But anyway, yeah, I'm going to be careful, like, messes you send. Just keep in mind that this stuff can't come back to bite you, and it's always going to be stored.
So if you put something online, it's there forever. So that's it, just common sense, that's your best, that's your best safety. Well, now, if everybody sends nudes, then it's a Mexican standoff, right? Like, it's like the end of a Quentin Tarantino film.
Like, I've got your dick pics, but you've got my dick pics and nothing. You know, it's like nobody's embarrassed and a nudist colony, right? I don't watch it. I don't watch asking him right now.
I'm not participating. I'm not going to do that. I'm trying to podcast, but I'm not sending dick pics. Yeah.
Well, I mean, just to the point of, like, you know, thinking about the kids these days that are not growing up with the proper sort of eldership around digital hygiene and privacy concern, they're going to mature into a generation where everyone has the ability to, you know, extort everyone else. And so it sort of becomes a non-issue, right? At that point? This generation is the first generation that's actually smarter as teenagers and kids than the generation before.
So like, it's because when you live your life almost entirely digitally, it's very hard to learn and I think reappearance in terms of like more or less ethics, because you're probably going to find that almost entirely online. So like, that is a big issue. Well, I think that will rectify itself going forward a bit, because now when the millennial generation has kids, then we'll actually be able to instruct our children on what to do in the future. Well, we never have that.
Like, my mother has no clue at his computer. How could she possibly have taught me how to correctly do stuff online? Like, I mean, she had no idea. So like, I just do whatever I had to do.
So like, I think that problem will probably rectify itself in the future, because it's the only generation that is more technologically advanced than the generation before. Like, that's never happened before. That's literally never ever in even history has the younger generation been smarter than the one before. It's a very weird situation to be in.
So telescoping that forward, I like ending these calls typically by inviting the guests to play a particular thought experiment, which is this recording is going into an archive that will be discovered by historians that you just made the case. It sounds to me, are going to be way way smarter than we are. But they're going to be looking back on this to understand what it was like to be stupid old us. What message of value do you feel that you have for those hyperliterate digital, native or possibly even digital historians?
Like, what would you communicate to them if you could? George Bush did not 11. That's the only one I have. Jeff, you don't melt steel beams.
That's the voice of generation. That's our generation message. Yeah, I don't know. I guess don't look too negatively back on humanity because I have no doubt that we're going to commit unbelievable mistakes going forward in the next 50 to 100 to 2,000 years.
It's a big learning process. I think we are really excited by how cool things are nowadays. There's no time and things through technology advancing so quickly. We can't think things through.
They're out and we're all using them before. Uber came in like three years ago. I know everyone in the USU has actually got a lot of Nisland, but everyone in the USU is like, this stuff's happening so quickly. We literally cannot keep up.
Don't judge us too harshly. It's an incredible time to be alive, but also a terrible time to be alive in that kind of sense. Awesome. Obviously, I would think you would encourage people to go check out Pre-Search.
Where else can people, you got your Twitter, where can people find you? Explain me on Twitter.com slash I am Dylan Kern. I am a YouTube channel. It's just Dylan Kern.
Oh, I just went to Patreon page on page.com slash I am Dylan Kern. And then I'll be tweeting like my projects and stuff going forward too. Awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show, man.
Really appreciate you. Thanks for having me. It was great. Thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed that conversation and which is I did. Big thanks to the MindPod Network for syndicating the show. And if you're going to be in the area this coming weekend, June 7th and 8th, I will be performing and speaking at the Santa Fe Institute Interplanetary Festival, a confluence of art, music, and rigorous planetology. Co-produced by Meow Wolf.
If you go back and listen to episode 75 with SFI's President David Krakauer, maybe you can catch some of my enthusiasm for this event. Anyway, as promised, here is a recording of my song Transparent, which is the musical equivalent of the conversation you just listened to. This is a live take from my performance at my Sealyum Studios in Melbourne, Australia, last February. You can find this track and the entire concert available on michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com for free.
Enjoy. You're bound to find some bones in there and the holy mountain of the separate zone falls into ocean like an ice shell into ocean like an ice shell. But as our skeletons become transparent, we would be scared if we weren't sharing him.