This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jeff Sandut. Now, before we start today's show and get to the Met's Plaining Bit, there's something I need to clear up. Last week, we talked about Met's Magic Diet.
Hey, Met, what's the joke? Hey, Jeff, why have you got a problem? Yeah, so I'm pleased to say that I've been following the diet for the week, and the results have been astonishing. One of the things Met pointed out was that following a monotonous diet is a great way to show the effect of that specific food I have on your body.
As Met suggested, I increased my exercise regime to two hours a day, and I believed with my whole heart that I would get thinner. In just seven days and 14 hours of extreme running and countless hours of meditation, I managed to put on five kilograms. So, Matt, would you like to tell me what the beat is going on? Jeff, as I said last week, the Magic Diet is all about belief.
If you follow the diet to the letter, you ate nothing, but the Magic Diet suspension, and you exercised as hard as you said you did, all I can say is that you just didn't believe hard enough. What we've discovered isn't a weakness in the diet, it's a weakness in yourself. This diet is a journey of discovery. The physical exercise is part of that journey.
You're exercising the self, not trying to beat the calories. The fact that you put on weights suggests that you actually need further assistance rather than the standard Magic Diet program. I think you probably need the platinum program where you get daily contact with one of CulturePops highly trained online life coaches graduated from the University of CulturePop. Calls cost five US dollars per 30 second block, so it's very reasonable, it's very affordable.
And in less than six months, I can guarantee that you will either become a more complete person or you will discover that the inner you thinks you deserve to be a diabetic. That's not going to happen, Matt. You are not getting your hands on any more of my money. We'll talk about this off air, but this is a very strange day for you to choose this as your topic.
Trust in technology and technology makers. I don't think it's a strange topic at all. You're the one who's got the issues, not me. But I think we can safely say that the technology industry does have some issues as well.
Since the start of this year, we've seen a lot more pressure being brought to bear on the companies and the visionaries that we have been trusting the future of our society to. Even on this show, we've had plenty to say about the social responsibility of technology companies and we've put them under the microscope to determine whether or not we feel that they are meeting those responsibilities. Now, it's true to say that there are plenty of issues when it comes to technology and the way that it's being implemented, but also about the legal and legislative frameworks in which those companies operate. And I think it's right and I think it's good that the media and consumers are putting these companies to the test in a variety of ways, because we want to interact with companies that are fit for purpose.
And at the same time, we want to serve notice to those companies that we don't think are performing correctly and tell them either improve or get out of the way. And has the balance of thrust shifted? I think it has, but I think we need to break it down into a few areas. Firstly, we've got the social media companies, which have come in for sustained attack over the last year or so.
We've also got this perception of Silicon Valley being elitist and out of touch with ordinary people. And as a result, the companies and the products that they're making are reflective of the needs and attitudes of this elite rather than the wider public. We also have our politicised media, which seems to be making war on the tech companies to further political aims that are coming from both the left and the right. And at the same time, we have so much exciting and genuinely groundbreaking innovation, which could massively improve our lives.
Let's tackle the social media angles. I think most people are aware of the fake news epidemic and the rather deaf ear with which it was treated. Totally. I mean, I'm not going to spend masses of time on this because we've covered it and covered it over the last few months and loads of other shows on BFM have covered it.
If you have been hiking through the jungle for the last year and haven't had access to any kind of global information in that time, here's a news flash for you. The rather lax approach of the technology companies in terms of vetting advertisers and ordinary users of the site seems to have led to a situation where a relatively small number of political actors were able to wield enormous influence on the last round of presidential elections in the United States. I think what I find most notable about all of this is encapsulated in the indictment this week by the FBI of 13 Russian citizens relating to what is known as a troll farm, a place where it's been alleged that people would pose as US citizens and set up Facebook groups and actual real-world events promoting causes as wide and disparate as Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter. I think what interests me most about this is when we look at conspiracies at this scale, we tend to think of them as being enormous and they have to involve huge numbers of people.
It's interesting because this conspiracy essentially alleges that there were probably no more than a few hundred active participants scattered around the globe, but they were able to tap into the anger of ordinary people in the United States and that anger translated into action on the ground. In fact, it's like using real people as your bot army in the same way that you would use hijacked computers in a DDOS attack. It's not sophisticated, it's blunt, but that's its purpose. Its purpose is to block, to confuse, to create discord and it has been remarkably effective.
What about that Silicon Valley elitism? Oh yeah, Silicon Valley seems to have been caught up in its own vortex. It seems to be spiraling towards the botanite. It's really weird.
I mean, if we go back to the story that we disagreed about a couple of weeks ago, the Tesla Roadster that was released on a rocket-propelled super highway to Mars. You know, let's not forget that that stunt was done to promote a company which is in the commercial space industry. So while it seems quite funny and jokey, when you compare it to Neil Armstrong's line, you know, a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, it does start to look a little bit hollow. Or the revelations that Facebook's on Buffins define middle-class as being a homeowner in Palo Alto, one of the most expensive property areas in the entire US continent.
And then of course, there are the products themselves, such as the iPhone X, I'm not calling it the 10, which has to be one of the most unjustifiably expensive pieces of kit in recent memory. On top of that, there's a class of venture capitalists who insist that every new product comes with an innovative way to lock consumers in and restrict their choices and essentially create a monopoly position in the industry they're disrupting. You know, to misquote the band pulp, is this the way the future was supposed to be? If that's the case, isn't it a good thing that the media is treating technology with a more critical eye?
Of course it is. For far too long, I think the media has been fawning in its attitude towards the people that we call tech visionaries. I wouldn't say there has been a culture of acquiescence but I think there was a feeling within certainly the more mainstream media that these companies were such beacons of progressive thought and ideology, that there was no way that anything more sinister could be going on beneath that glossy surface. It was simply inconceivable that women or minorities might be excluded from them or underpaid or mistreated within those companies.
You know, these were basically nerd paradises they were created for and by fellow geeks. So there's no way that those could become frat boy party zones or, you know, so we thought. So I have to say that the media, myself included, did drop the ball on that one. We stuck to the surface, we repeated the press releases and we didn't stop to consider what kind of companies these product visionaries in their early 20s with little or no business experience might create.
Matt Amatech is asking you to trust in tech. We'll be right back after this, BfM 89.9. Vodacious fabulous minds, BfM 89.9, the business station. And we're back.
My name is Jasandu together with CulturePops Matt Amatech. Before the break, we were talking about the role of media to the issue is trust in tech. Matt, is that where you're picking up the story then? It's as good a place as any.
We frequently hear that the media in the social media age has become very binary, that it's lost a sense of nuance. Everything has to be white or black or one or zero, everything is good or it's bad. And this attitude colours our own thinking as well. In what sense?
Well, there was a story earlier this week about Google removing the image button from, yeah, view image. I spotted it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, from its search results.
So ostensibly after lobbying from photo agencies and copyright owners who are fed up with people stealing their pictures. Of course, that provokes the usual howls of online furies. The toddlers get upset that someone's taken one of the toys at their pram. The attitude seems to be something that we had before has now gone and it isn't fair.
They don't stop to think that that functionality, which actually hasn't been removed. It's just been rendered less easy, has been taken away because people were abusing it, abused by people who thought they had a right to take other people's images and have loudly taken to their favourite social media channels to complain that they've got to make an extra couple of clicks before they can download someone else's content and turn it into their hack need inspirational Instagram post of today. But that's the consumer behaviour rather than the media, right? The media behaves in a very similar all or nothing way.
Look at the way the attitudes towards the tech industry have changed in the media. Go back a couple of years and it was quite hard to find a lot of negative stories. Look at the same news outlets today and it's very hard to find the positive ones. You know, we've done a full 180 and we haven't achieved more balance.
We've just gone from one extreme to another. And if you cherry pick these maths plane shows as well, you might also consider us as being guilty at the same set of biases because we've been pretty excoriating when it comes to Silicon Valley and venture capitalists over the past few months including today. If you look at a lot of the major news media outlets at the moment, you will find plenty of stories around the theme of the technology industry is now getting its reckoning. Partly this is about the growing maturity of the tech sector, by which I mean maturity in terms of age and vintage rather than behaviour.
Tech is no longer the new thing. It's actually part of the state of Squana. It is part of mainstream society. And as such, it does tend to come under great scrutiny.
And of course, I welcome that. But do you think that there's a danger there as well? Undoubtedly, because as I said, we've gone from tech being all good to tech being all bad. So that is a shift that is quite dangerous because it too easily plays into the hands of people who want to manipulate the situation.
So on the one side, you've got a set of media convinced that the world is full of false flag operations and new world borders and hostile takeovers of civilian institutions and a global conspiracy of space aliens masquerading as the 1%. You know, the sensible side of the debate. But there are still a lot more sides in the debate. You know, it's a bit like the giant disco ball that was launched into space in New Zealand last month.
It's a shape with many sides, not just two. We have activists like the ones I just described to at angry because Google has taken some of their toys away, a toy that was free, I might add. Then we have another set of media convinced that a conspiracy of injustices is taking place amongst the world's corporations, especially within the tech field. So on every side, the echo chambers are growing and we're becoming increasingly intolerant or dismissive towards anyone who expresses views that are contrary to our own.
So it's dangerous because it's very easy for everything that comes out of the technology sector to be automatically labelled as bad or viewed through a negative prism. Why does it worry you? Because it makes it acceptable and fashionable to have this kind of luddite response to technology. You know, it's that pretense we've talked about this so many times, the pretense that there was once this golden age before computers and phones where filthy-footed urchins played happily in the street kicking balls made out of, I don't know, the hair of their dead relatives.
You know the story, you know, it's the one that forgets that most people died before their 60th birthday, that crippling and debilitating illnesses were common, that women expected to lose some of their children in childbirth or potentially even their own lives. And if we give into these fantasies, then we do fall into a trap because we lose that sense of critical thinking and evaluation. Every piece of new technology comes us versus them, and everything that this they want to do is automatically and inherently bad. Is it such a bad thing if someone says they don't want to use any social media anymore?
No, of course it isn't. But it is a bad thing if that person says they don't want to use computers or go online anymore, because that's the first step towards excluding themselves from society. More and more of our information and services are online, partly it's about convenience, but also it's about the use of resources. We're finding that governments are increasingly putting this information online and scaling back access to physical information sources and services, so you could end up excluding yourself from banking, health, education, housing, pensions, all kinds of essential services.
Again, is it so bad that some people want to live off the grid? Well, I'm kind of a professional outsider, you know, this job puts me on the periphery of the sidelines of most of the movements I'm interested in, and I comment on, you can be outside of a group and still be aware of what's going on in a broader sense, and I think that's the key thing for me. Otherwise, you become one of those people who falls between the cracks, and that can be a really nice place to be for a while, you know, you're overlooked, you're anonymous, you get to do your own thing. But it's not a place that most people want to spend their entire lives in.
We see the results in some of the more fundamental or literal religious groups who reject certain medical treatments as being incompatible with their faith. Now, in some countries, those beliefs have been challenged in court with the state taking over the care of children, whose health and interests that it felt were not being properly represented. I say this far too often on the show, our actions have consequences, those consequences can sometimes go a lot further than firing off an angry tweet at Google for making me use, suddenly. Why do you think we should trust the tech industry?
I think this is where we get back to the idea of nuance in rejecting the idea of the black and white and the good and bad. I'm not saying we should trust the technology industry. I'm not saying we should give them a blank sheet or, you know, any kind of carte blanche. We should always examine what they're doing and hold them accountable when we find their actions wanting.
Now is not the time to turn our backs on technology. We're on the cusp of revolutionary breakthroughs that are going to make the smartphone look like the historical blip that it is. Some of these are advances in screenless technologies and invisible operating systems that we've talked about here quite a few times. We're making enormous discoveries in the realms of health and human enhancement.
We're making advances that would actually make medicines and drugs irrelevant because we can simply engineer illnesses or disabilities out of our cellular structure. Technologies that are designed to help elderly patients with dementia may help to enhance the memories of healthy people. As we look across the vast plane that is technology, there are all these incredible achievements sitting there just on the horizon. If we stop looking towards the horizon, if we stop moving towards it, someone else is going to take charge of those discoveries.
And for me, that's probably the most dangerous part of all of this because we should be the ones who get to decide how these technologies are used and we should be doing what we have to do in order to be aware and informed. I'm not trying to paint the companies and organisations behind these developments as being inherently bad, but in the same way that the staff at Facebook believes that a Palo Alto income puts you in the middle class rather than the upper reaches of the upper class, the people at those companies may simply be unaware of the substance of our lives. But some people might find your approach a little contradictory. I admit that some people might think I'm sitting on the fence that I'm afraid to take aside.
I'm just trying to be objective. That means calling companies out on their failures and praising them for their successes. We have to constantly remind them that they're working for us and that their livelihood, their future, depends on us remaining customers. And I'm saying that we should also have a bit of humility.
We should be able to admit our own mistakes instead of launching a Twitter tirade of misdirection and name calling. Blind faith and blind rejection, these things put you in a place where you can be easily manipulated. And if you're being manipulated, you're not really working in your own interests. And if there's one thing that these shows are about, it's about figuring out what is in our best interests.
And I'm a page that they're asking you to trust in tech and also trust in him in some ways. Also, if you have any doubts of trusting man, I'm just going to go onto his Facebook page, which is a Matt's Blained, and you can find information about today's show. And also some other shows from the past. You can also visit culturepop.com.
It's culture with a cake or some match to school like that. I'm cool with the cake. It's cool with the cake. And apparently, there's a photo of him on his side.
So if you ever wonder how man, I'm a page looks like, you could go on and try to... Well, that's what I've heard. So I guess I have to go on to the side and just check it out. It's very inspiring.
So before he takes it down, go on to the side, check it out. You can also find a full transcript of these shows as well as information about Matt's services. We'll be right back at the FM 89.9.