This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. This is Stack Talk and it is Matt's plane yet again. It's actually three more shows before the year in, so we decided that me and Matt Amadeh from Culture Pro, who's here with me in the studio. So we decided that the last show of the year we will be doing a recap and also look forward to what's going to happen in the game.
I usually will geeks round up, but for extended geeks in session. But for these two shows I thought I'd do, you know, the things that I've learned in 2017, rather than say the things that you should learn from 2017, these are the things that I have learned. So we've taken a different approach this time around. It's things that Matt Amadeh has learned in 2017.
So Matt, how has your 2017 been then? Well, I'll be really honest. This has been quite a profound year for me. It's been one of those years where a lot of things in my worldview have changed.
And I think a lot of that has to do with global politics. I think a lot of us who work in technology and the media, you know, in the past we've had these very utopian notions that technology, particularly when it comes to social media and communications, that technology was a way of bringing people together. That subsequent events like Brexit and the US presidential election, which of course brought Donald Trump to their presidency, they've kind of proved that the opposite is the case, or rather that the opposite can be the case. So in a lot of ways it's turned the tech world upside down, certainly my cozy little world.
And I think a lot of people, including me, have had their expectations changed. So how has your expectations changed? Actually in a lot of very straightforward ways. You know, one of the things that we talk about a lot on this show is that, you know, technology is not neutral.
A lot of people say, well, technology is neutral. Technology isn't neutral. It can be used in both positive and negative ways. So the power that it's given us to come together and to communicate and to broaden our horizons is also the same power that has allowed people who don't feel like that, people who feel disenfranchised by this broadening of horizons, to find other people who feel disenfranchised and for those people to come together.
And it's, you know, since the end of, I think the Second World War, since we've gone into this sort of really rapid technological change, period of technological change, we've had this myth that it's only people on the kind of liberal and progressive side that really understand how to get the best use out of all of this new technology. And that has been borne out in a lot of political events around the world over the last few decades. And very often, it has been the progressives who have made the best use of the latest technologies and conservatives who have lagged behind. However, as the election of Donald Trump has shown, people on the conservative end of the spectrum have also become very adept at using the same technologies, especially when it comes to creating memes and viral talking points.
And they've been particularly skillful in using these kind of highly targeted demographics and geolocation data that the social media and technology companies have pioneered. And I think the exploitation of that information especially has changed the way people, myself included, now look at technology companies. Now that's looking at things in the broader sense. How is your view of technology companies changed at a more granular level?
Well, this has definitely been the year of fake news. Of course, you know, what you think of the concept of fake news also depends where you sit on the political spectrum. Fake news has become, in a sense, the war against facts. We aren't talking about what is true anymore.
We're talking about what we choose to believe, which is we live. Because we're in the era of the internet where information is supposed to set free. Instead, what seems to have happened. We have so much information, like you said, we're confused.
We've got no idea how to filter the truth from the lies. And I don't want to talk about fake news particularly because that's not a technology issue. You know, it's as old as the ages. But it has become a bellwether for the technology industry.
In particular, it has demonstrated how insular Silicon Valley is and how easy it was for Silicon Valley to be blindsided by the fake news epidemic and how countries have been able to use these platforms to meddle in each other's affairs. So do you like the way that the current anti-media climate has shown a light on companies like Facebook and Google? Yeah, I think it's been a long time coming. You know, we've treated Silicon Valley's gurus as though they were, you know, a new generation of gods.
We've treated them as though they're infallible. And we've hung on their every word and thought. You know, a press release seems to go out every time Elon Musk sneezes. And we treat it like, you know, some kind of global epiphany.
And I'm not trying to single Elon Musk out. It's just that the way we treat him is really at the far end of the spectrum. So he makes a very useful example. But we've all been guilty of hanging on the words of these so-called geniuses.
We haven't really given them the kind of critical attention that they deserved until very recently. You know, Mark Zuckerberg was adamant that Facebook could not be used to meddle or influence an election. And then he had to eat his words over the summer. So it kind of goes to showing how complacent corporate leaders like him were and how thoroughly and completely social media has penetrated our daily lives.
Surely that's not a surprise, right? You wouldn't have waited until 2017 to realize just how dependent we are in social media. No, I think it's much more about that trust relationship, that damage to the trust relationship. And along with that realization, you know, we've seen a lot of the big technology companies making misstep after misstep this year.
I kind of feel bad singling out all the usual suspects again. But it has been an appalling year or year plus for Uber. You know, the company is being sued left, right and center, including by the people it employs, rather by the people it claims not to employ. And the cases are increasingly being settled in favor of the not employees who are now becoming employees.
So if you're listening to this on the podcast, you might want to rewind that and check that I got it right. Uber's had to withdraw from some markets. It's had its licenses to operate revoked in some cities. We've also learned of a rather toxic internal corporate structure.
There have been various reshufflings of its senior management. And we've also heard stories of its so-called grey software that has been used to target people who've been critical of the company. And I don't want this to be an endless list of the failings of Uber. It isn't just Uber.
It's just that Uber is the big daddy of negative publicity. Although to be fair, Twitter is starting to give Uber a run for its money. But it is a problem that's industry-wide. This year we found that a lot of technology companies and their behavior have fallen really far short of the standards that we expect.
And I mean Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, Apple, and on and on and on. We had very high hopes for these companies. We bought into the dream. We swallowed the marketing speak.
We thought that they weren't evil. And like I said, they would help to set us free. But all they really want to do is to lock us into their walled garden and enjoy their exclusive rights to sell us things and monetize our lives. And that falls very short to the expectations we had for them.
Whether our expectations were fair, that's an entirely different discussion. But it doesn't stop you from feeling disheartened. So it's obvious that you feel disappointed with the tech world, right? And so do I as well.
But what is it that stands out for most of the data defines their behavior in 2017, man? Well, I think it's something that's made both of us laugh a lot over the last 12 months. And that's the general level of tone deafness. And that's really what's been most evident.
You know, we've seen technology companies make their mistakes. It might have some words of contrition in the media and then assume that, you know, they're all good with the normies. And then it backfires on them all over again. You know, there's the CEO who uses the natural disaster as a backdrop to the latest video conferencing to the line is site.
There's the company that charges exorbitant fees to drive people out of the site of terror incidents. There's the board member force to resign over sexist comments he made while making an announcement about new management hires brought into combat sexism. That made me laugh probably the hardest. There's the company leader who alleges that hate speech rather by some people is acceptable because it's newsworthy while his service suspends rape victims when they point out inconsistencies in other people's denials.
Or at least that's what we think the suspension was for because they refuse to tell us what the criteria actually are. You know, it's not the happiest thing to say as we go into the break. But I think 2017 is really the year when we started to see the darker and less user-friendly face of the technology industry. Things have taken a change from the time when we spoke in 2016 and how optimism we are about the technology space.
Well, it looks like it's been disappointing. Well, we'll get to the optimism in just a moment. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
We have 89.9. Bankers, financiers and money makers. BFM, 89.9. And we're back and we're doing a Matt's Blaining episode about the things that Matt Outage has learned in 2017.
And so far it's been all disappointment because despite it being a profound year, the world has turned upside down. The tech companies, they can't seem to protect us fake news. It's a new thing. Technologies companies keep getting it wrong and wrong and wrong.
They've got this thing where we just mentioned tone deafness, which is every time when we talk about something like this. It's a face pump. And you can't hear it on radio, but honestly, the amount of times that we have slept ourselves daily on our four kids talking about stories. I'm not quite allowed.
It's ridiculous. But yeah, so we're just talking about the things that we've learned in 2017. Yeah, and it's the end of the year. And you've already had far too much doom and gloom from me.
So now I get to turn the tables and ask Jeff, what have been some of the more profound trends in technology for him this year? Well, I think if you're going to say profound tech trends, I would say just the crypto world has really taken me by surprise. And I have to say that I do invest in the cryptocurrency world as well, not just one, but a whole bunch of them, Bitcoin, Ethereum and all this. But for me, it's like the whole talk about it was like, oh, this is going to be 2020, 2019, 2019, and that will explode.
So I thought I had like a leeway where I could understand the technology while I invest into it. But this whole year, I think the past three months have seen it just rose dramatically. You see Wall Street now talking about it. You hear Morning Run with breakfast grill, they talk about cryptocurrency and they're trying to understand Richard Bradbury's like, you know, he's like the guru of cryptocurrency, which I don't know still, like how much.
I think he knows the words a lot and like he would, he knows how to spell it out. But I don't think that the entire technology itself that we could fully understand. And that's for me, it's something that kind of really puts 2017 into perspective in the sense that we blindly would jump into it because it's hot. It's a new thing.
Oh, it's cool. And do we actually fully understand the entire technology? I don't think anyone understands it, but you're not scared. I mean, you're saying you're invested.
You're not scared that there's a bubble there? No, so I don't think it's a bubble though. So that is my argument. I don't think it's a bubble.
I think there's good. You're saying that investments that have risen by 7 or 8,000% in under a year is not a bubble. It's not a bubble because a bubble would burst almost immediately or so, right? And Bitcoin has been around for three years.
Yeah, but nearly all the current big brokers out there are saying don't invest in Bitcoin because it's overpriced and it's in a bubble and it's going to burst. It's extremely volatile. That's what it is. So you are at risk.
Hang on, volatile is bubble. You're not going to, I don't think it will break that Bitcoin will just disappear one day and then you will lose all your money. No, but you don't do that with any investment. You don't lose all your money.
You just lose most of it. Yeah. So up until now, I've not heard of anyone who's actually lost money in the crypto world unless they've gone to 10. Until the bubble burst.
That's why it's been three years and counting. And now it seems like it says a longer runway because initially it felt like a real bubble because a lot of corporate banks and a lot of central government agencies were trying to ban the use cases of bitcoins or blockchain. Technology. But now it seems like they've taken it around and they seem to like let's work with these guys.
Let's work with blockchain. Let's work with Bitcoin and see how it works. So now instead of the only problem I have with Bitcoin is that it came out because it hated the current system of money itself, right? It came out to set itself apart where it's not dictated by any central bank or any political movement or any commodities and so on and so forth.
But the thing is now it feels like it's following along the same path. No, of course it was because as soon as the money man get into it, then it goes along the same path. And that's the thing with Wall Street getting into Bitcoin because it's the money man who will now dictate it. And hence you see the surge in the pricing in Bitcoin is because these money men who was previously just against Bitcoin, they've decided like, you know what, let's just accept Bitcoin, let's make the pick back and then we get up.
That's going to cause the bubble. I think the issue for me and it was shown with Ethereum earlier in the year is that when people tried to cash out of these currencies because the value is increasing so much, but actually the supply is very, very small. So when even a relatively small shareholder tries to catch out, cash out rather, it really tanks the price. We saw that with Ethereum, somebody tried to take out 300,000 US dollars and the price went down by something like 80% of the money.
That is not a sensible investment. I mean, okay, if you want to invest a little bit of money and you want to do it very quickly and get out, but for somebody to put in large sums of money, because I think that's going to be the big issue. When people start to say, right, now I'm taking the money out, that's when the problems are going to occur and that's when the value is really going to start dropping. And the problem with that is because you can't actually use it as a transaction, you still have to trade it using a dollar.
Yes, which is precisely the reason that it's ridiculous investing in this kind of currency because it's not even tradable. It's an entirely imagined value to a large degree. Which I guess goes back to the whole 2017 thing. Everyone would jump into it because it's like a new thing, be doubtful and the whole concept of what exists.
So I'm very cautious in what I invest in cryptocurrency. I just feel like I would like to be a part of it being part of tech talk and being part of a tech journalist. It's nice to get a part of it. I've seen some returns from it, not anything around 300,000 US pounds or so.
It's small amounts, but it's a amount that I feel comfortable and it's trying to understand the whole thing. It's trying to, people don't understand a lot of things these days though. It just reminds me of the commoditized subprime mortgages in the US, which is what caused the last financial crash because nobody understood the algorithms. So we're actually putting these things together and packaging them.
They just saw the fact that they were increasing in value, increasing in value. What they didn't understand was the actual products themselves had no value because you're selling a mortgage that has no value. You're not even selling the property it's based on. You're selling the value of the debt and you're selling high risk debt that people default on.
So once you start to see a collapse in confidence, that chain reaction nearly tanked the global economy. And partly that was because people didn't understand the technology that put it together. And that's what worries me about that. I could see that with Bitcoin and crypto currency as well.
I think cryptocurrencies are very useful. I think we're all going to be switching to crypto currencies in some form. But they will be a currency. They won't be an investment vehicle.
They will be our form of money. Anyways, we've got to go on to something about cryptocurrency. We've got to just agree to disagree. I know.
And yes, well, OK, I think we should agree that you're wrong and you agreed that I'm right. That sounds like a fair trade. As do you. Yeah.
But it does lead me into something else that we talked about this year, which is venture dementia, which was actually on a show that I did with Richard. Yeah. But it goes back to what I was talking about before the break. You know, it's that sense of groupthink that seems to be coming out in Silicon Valley.
The kind of groupthink that allows our favorite juicer to be funded to the tune of $150 million. When any kindergarten child could have told you, you know, it wasn't going to work. When you live in an era of escalating food prices, who needs a $700 Wi-Fi connected juicing machine that will only allow you to use the company's own pre-package fruit product products? Let's just not talk about juicers anymore, man.
No, because we're going to talk about optimism and trust. As I said, 2017 has been a year which has dented the faith of a lot of people in the tech world. But what came as I think the biggest surprise to me was the reaction of people who are much younger than I am. You know, very often when we talk about millennials and the generation that will come after, who I hope we're going to call the naughties because it's been a while since a generation was really naughty.
Anyway, when we talk about millennials, it's often, you know, it's with a sneering tone and we're not going to have all complacency and entitlements. Oh, God, entitlements. And it's easy to forget that these are people who have grown up in a very different world. They've grown up in the world that has always had the internet, it's always had Facebook.
If you think that we struggle with the concept of fake news, at least we lived through a period where facts were a lot more solid. For these two generations, information and truth have always been built on these very shifting sounds. They haven't had the benefits of a lot of the certainties that the generations before them have had. So perhaps they have more material benefits and privileges, but they've been born in the middle of, you know, this tremendous social upheaval.
And they've had to navigate in ways that are really quite alien to people like me. And they really are the ones who are going to be shaping the way society looks in the next 50 years because I'm going to be dead. And I think it's going to look very different. So you're talking about this generation.
And I know you've mentioned on the show before a few times that you've been very surprised about the R relationship with big technology companies. Yeah, and I honestly think that was the biggest shock I've had this year. For people who have never known a world without Facebook or Twitter, they see these companies as being these inviolable giants, these economic and political monoliths that pretty much govern their lives. And there's a very kind of strong current of codependency in the relationship between the millennial generation and social media.
They rely on sites like Facebook and Instagram. These services form part of their daily lives. And at the same time, they resent the companies for having this presence in power, which is understandable. But because they haven't seen a world without these companies, they don't have the same notion that we have of the ebb and flow of social media and tech companies, the trends and social tides that can just wash them away.
So in a very real sense, they feel powerless. You know, when we talk about walled gardens, I certainly don't feel like I live inside the walled garden. But I get the feeling that a lot of kids feel that they really are living inside these walled gardens and they don't even know if there is a door, let alone, you know, how or where to find it. Your idea of optimism is how can I say this?
It's not very happy one, Matt. I'm trying to get all the negative stuff out of this way, out of the way in part one. So the next week I can be happy. Joy, Joy.
Wow, I'm going to be bothered. But for the last part of the show, I do want to move on to my new favorite topic, which is optimism. So I know that's right. If we go back to the walled gardens I was talking about a minute ago, you know, I don't feel like I live in one because those walls are virtually.
They're not real to me. But the tech companies would like us to believe that they're real, because it's the tech companies who are actually scared of us. Now, I've used this example quite a few times on the show, but we've seen a lot of the tech companies forced to hire large numbers of content moderators this year to weed out unpleasant content that upsets users and, you know, is likely to make news with you. Because however dependent people feel on social media companies and technology companies in general, those companies are actually a lot more reliant on us.
Look at our consumer goods. They used to be absolutely awful. They were badly made. They were unreliable.
They were always breaking down. Now, most consumer goods, unless they come from Apple, are very cheap and incredibly good value. And the profit margins for the companies are usually extremely thin. And there's very little to separate products from one company to another anymore.
Everybody makes really good stuff. And if you're a large manufacturer, the fact that most of your competitors are pretty much identical when it comes to product range, pricing, quality. It's really terrible for their bottom line and predicting growth. And I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing so many of these walled gardens emerge, because locking you into a product ecosystem is the only sure-fire way for companies to turn a profit.
And the same goes for social media companies then. Exactly the same. You know, we think that they have this dominion over our lives. They don't.
They actually have a very weak hand. Making money from us is very, very hard for them. The constant product innovation, the testing, the increasing focus that we have on privacy and safeguards makes their life very, very hard. And that gives us an awful lot of power.
These companies tend to be reactive effectively. They have to do exactly what we want. And they also give us precisely the tools we need to find other people who share our opinion, our viewpoint. And they allow us to organise and they allow us to turn that single opinion into a collective opinion and a much louder voice.
So you often hear the social media leaders talking about their community, you know, the people in these companies. They talk about their community, but it isn't their community. It's actually our community. We're just renting that community space from them.
And we can just as easily rent that space from somewhere else. That's easy to say. How do you communicate that message to, as you say, the generation that doesn't remember will be for these companies? Well, that's one of the nice things about, you know, insecurity.
Even if our newest generations don't realise how brittle and precarious that position is, the companies do. Somewhere in Facebook, there's a giant picture of the MySpace logo with a clock next to it and the hand's ticking down. Because companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the hundreds of others are beholden to a user base that is using today's technology. So that means most of their attention and focus is on preserving that user base and giving the best experience that current technology allows.
That also makes it very hard for them to be the leader in the next technology, in the next jump. And this is something that we'll definitely talk about more next week, because we really are on the verge of that next leap in consumer technology. And by that, I mean, you know, moving into a world beyond screens with voice technology. And it's going to lead to another shift in how we use our devices.
For example, when we have machines with artificial intelligence talking to us, listening to us, and acting on our commands, what will the value of a service like Twitter actually be? The next generation of technology companies are going to need an entirely new business model. And the companies that dominate our social lives will probably look very, very different. Like I said, the optimism and we'll get to that next week.
Apparently next week is all happy, happy joy, so we will stay tuned for that. Because this week is just all been doing with you. So that's all I've got in so far. I don't show about the optimism part as well.
That's I know. I left for one. I know. Nobody's dead.
According to Matt, I'm the only one who died during this show. Let us know if that was optimism for you. Well, according to Matt, that's his optimism for 2017. Next week, we will hold his word.
Happy, happy joy, joy next week, Matt. Make sure you stay tuned for that. This has been Matt's Blaine, episode one of Things He's Learned. And I mean, he has in the doom and gloom Matt Ameth from culture.
BFM 89.9 Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes. BFM 89.9, the Business Station.