Mattsplained - Uberitis

This is a download from BFM 89.9, The Business Station. BFM 89.9, The Business Station. It is Fun Friday. My name is Rich Bradbury, sitting in for Jeff Sandu.

In the studio with me, of course, is Culture Pop's Matt Armitage. He managed to get away with a little bit too much last time I was on the show. I did, and I was thinking as well, you've probably announced this as It Isn't Fun Friday. I don't know, I thought it was pretty good.

Right, so if you've accidentally come into contact with the news over the past few weeks, you might have noticed a series of apologies and admissions from tech companies that show them in less than their best light. From Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging that Facebook underestimated the manipulation of its site, both during and after the US presidential election, to huge personal data breaches from companies like US credit ratings, giant Equifax. Today, of course, Matt is trying to Matt's plane, the sickness he sees at the heart of our technology culture. Right, last week, you explained, you Matt's plane, why we can't cure the common cold.

Why do you think we'll do any better at curing technology of all of its ills? I told you it's not fun Friday. Now, as some of you can hear, I seem to have tempted the gods with last week's show, and they've rewarded me with my very own cold yet to prove just how weak and futile I am against the power of nature. So I am Julie Humboldt.

So, is that why we're talking about tech companies today? You've seen them as a sickness that we can control? Well, it's a nice jump and it fits quite well. Right, the idea that if we can't cure the common cold, we can give Twitter a rub down with an antiseptic wipe.

I think we'll have to do that. Yeah, exactly. Now, most of us have waterproof smartphones and devices. There is actually no excuse for wiping them down once in a while.

That's true. Seriously, that thing you hold in one hand while you eat with the other has more germs on it than the other thing you hold with one hand hopefully while you're not eating. You know, and at least you wash your pores after touching that one. Right.

Your phone is a health hazard and if you don't believe me, Google what's on your screen. Yes. Okay. So what are we calling this new disease that you discovered?

Originally, I was going to call it Uberitis. I like that. Yes, it's a disease where no matter what treatment options you follow, it just makes the underlying problem worse. But then I thought, you know, actually, that's kind of unfair.

Uber does have its problems, but they're kind of symptomatic of Silicon Valley rather than being the actual cause. So calling it Uberitis would suggest that the company is kind of patient zero, which it obviously isn't. The problems have been around far longer than Uber. Plus, the company does seem to have been making concrete moves this year to step up its game and resolve some of the issues that have tarred it over the last couple of years.

So naming a sickness after it kind of in perpetuity does seem a little disproportionate. Mainly I stuck to it because it was really hard to come up with anything that sounded as good. Does that mean we're going with the variety of things? No, I do want to be fair.

So for today, at least I'm going with digital sclerosis. I know it's not quite as catchy. You can also think of it as a valley foot and mouth disease because that way it makes those infected with it behave. It's a bit like one of those hysterical disorders, like the dancing manias they had in Europe during the Middle Ages, where thousands of people would spontaneously start to dance and they would just dance until they dropped from exhaustion.

Except in this version, they're the ones who have the condition and we're the ones who are dropping with exhaustion. You're going to have to explain that analogy a little bit further. Okay, all of those things that you mentioned at the start, the things like Facebook, Google, and Twitter looking into state manipulation of their platforms to influence public sentiment. As you mentioned, the data breaches or companies producing devices like TU Sero that get enormous amounts of venture capital despite being an obvious and appalling idea.

Or even things like the announcement that companies like Alphabet are being awarded contracts to regenerate urban areas or the fact that various tech luminaries want to form their own independent states free of regulation and oversight. We're transferring lots of power and influence to these companies, yet they seem to be infected with this very weird form of groupthink. We joked on the show earlier in the year about how many tech startups have tried to invent the bus. You know, it's like a prism.

They're on one side of the prism. We're on the other side of the prism. And our views of each other are just completely distorted. And you think this distortion is a disease thing?

Almost. You can think of it as venture dementia if it makes you laugh. But it's better than a digital space. Absolutely.

But I prefer to think of it as a form of silicon poisoning. So when you think about silicon, it's a material that's very, very useful to us. It's basically non-toxic. We use it for all kinds of products in our daily lives, from heat resistant oven gloves to the chips in our phones and our computers.

But in its crystalline form, silicon is an absolute health hazard. And that's what we're getting from our technology leaders. We're getting this concentrated, supposedly pure crystalline view of silicon valley. And so you think then that we should be viewing this as a hazard?

Yeah, because it's the same as any largely theoretical model that we see in social sciences, whether it's the pure form of socialism or neoliberalism or any other kind of market-related model. In their pure form, they simply don't work because they don't really account for the complex nature of people. They only work when we're these kind of one-dimensional beings that observe all the rules of the theory. So it's that term that you often see in textbooks, other things being equal.

Right, right. Or they're not. They're very unequal and they're unpredictable. But at the same time, we're still transferring all this power and influence to the technology companies as they extend their business models into every aspect of our lives.

Look at some of the problems we've seen in the tech sector recently. We've seen a lot of the big tech firms trying to come to grips with sexism and racism, especially in their coding divisions. We've seen tone-deaf CEOs abusing their own employees or self-employees, as they like to call them, or even indulging in disaster tourism to show off the shiny new toys that their platforms serve. Right.

Devout. Even the money that the companies bring into local environments can distort them. They push up housing and other costs, and they can actually force local residents to move out of the area. But they still have to commute back to serve the new people who replace them.

So there's this huge distortion effect at work as a result of the technology. That's in the mouse syndrome, imagine. Exactly. And that's one of the reasons that I retracted the Uberitis, because the companies seem to have been trying very hard of late to avoid those pitfalls and showing the world a better face.

Right now, it seems to be Twitter that is the company that can do no right. Suspending users like actress Rose McAllen when she was talking about these sexual abuse revelations about Harvey Weinstein, for instance, or the fact that it seems a number of accounts that were operated by Russian-controlled activists was about 10 times greater than the company thought. And at the same time, President Trump gets to say what he likes on the platform, because it's newsworthy. I think just yesterday he called for the death penalty for the guy in the US who was involved in the, or who allegedly perpetrated the attacks in New York.

Now again, you can't call for somebody to die on a social media platform. That's not the place for it. But he's allowed to say what he likes because Twitter considers it to be newsworthy, whereas other people get suspended for far less. And it's that same prism that I mentioned, the people running Twitter don't seem to be able to fathom how their conduct is seen by the millions of people who use the service.

It's like a scene from a comedy horror movie, the scary clown ricks your arm off and your friend comes up and tries to fix it within the last class. It's a completely empty gesture. The only thing it does is to remind you that you should never have been in a room with a clown in the first place. Yeah, the clown is scary.

Don't those companies though, don't they argue that their position in society is a neutral one that they provide tools that encourage democracy, you know, they shy away from making political judgments? Yes, that is what they say. And I say I'm an oboe machine, but it doesn't make it true. And since the, no, you're looking at it a little bit.

A little pink. Yeah, a little pink. Um, since the tech boom of the 1970s, where a lot of this kind of older generation of technology leaders got their boots wet, we've brought into that vision that idea of neutrality and encouraging democracy. But increasingly, over the decades, we've brought these companies into the heart of our economies.

Look at Malaysia, the efforts that have been made here to build and promote an knowledge economy. Now, that's not a bad thing, but it is a thing. And you have to keep your eye on things because things change. They start off as one thing and they turn into something else.

So technology companies have asked us to leave them alone and let them get on with making fantastic things for us to buy that will improve and enrich the our lives and the infrastructure of our societies. And as a, you know, the corollary to that they pushed for freedom and deregulation. But going back to the question, their position in society is not a neutral one. They are by necessity agents of change and change cannot be neutral.

All right. We're gonna have to take a little break though at that point. We'll be back after a short break when Matt, I will explore this idea of, you know, what do you mean when you say it is neutral? We'll come back with a little bit there.

You are of course listening to Matt's explaining here on, I assure you, it is fun Friday with me, Rich Bradbury, sitting in for Jeff Sandow here on BFM 89.9. Be firmly motivated. BFM 89.9. Welcome back.

It is BFM 89.9, the Business Station Fun Friday in the studio with Matt Armitage from Culture Pop, of course, we have been talking about what Matt is christening digital sclerosis. Yeah, let's go with venture dimension. I like venture dimension. How much better ring to it.

I think so digital sclerosis is just rubbish. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. It's not the answer I was looking for.

Thank you for your honesty. I really liked it. So just before the break, we were talking about a lot of these tech companies, you know, and you seeing them as agents of change. Yes.

And like you say, change is not neutral. No, I mean, I'll give you two examples using Facebook. Firstly, we use Facebook in an ever-increasing number of ways. Part of that is because the company actively seeks to find ways to engage us and to get us to spend as much time as possible in the platform as it can.

And part of it is actually the company responding to what we want, which is an algorithm that serves up never-ending cat videos in my wife's case. But there is a generation of people now who don't know a world without Facebook. And it's what they use to organize their lives. It's their journal.

It's their diary. If you were to shut her Facebook tomorrow, it would have a social impact. For sure. Facebook has altered our social behavior.

People would have to find other ways to connect. They would have to find other ways to share information. And they would have to use other tools to figure out, you know, what they're doing today and what they're going to, you know, where they're going after work. So it isn't neutral.

And it does have a progressive ideology, which kind of makes it ironic that it's become such a useful tool to social conservatives. Right. You know, Facebook wants to break down barriers. It's kind of underrated and under the radar, but Facebook's translation tools make it easy for me to carry on a natural conversation with friends who are posting in other languages.

You know, I've got friends who are posting in Iranian and French and all these other languages. Before, I would just see the posts in my feed and I couldn't really engage. Now I can, because everything's translated. And what I write back to them in English is...

Oh, to be translated. Yeah. So, you know, that's incredible. It's truly amazing, in fact, but it isn't neutral.

So what's the second example? Well, Facebook made embedded staff available to both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, although I think the Clinton campaign actually turned it down. The purpose was to help the campaign to make the best use of Facebook to get their message across to voters. Now, that's a fair-handed approach, but it's not in any way neutral.

Right. Both campaigns, and as we've since found out, outside political interests invested very heavily in Facebook ads. If Facebook and Twitter and Google are neutral, as they claim, they would refuse to take political advertising. Yeah.

As it is, we're starting to find out this week, and I think we're going to talk a bit in geeks as well. You know, we now know that Facebook profiles and groups that were most probably backed by Russia reached almost 126 million Americans in the period leading up to and just after the presidential election. Now, that is the majority of voting- Americans. So while the CEOs were busily defending their neutrality, the openness of their sites was being subverted to spread this fake news and these fake messages.

Okay. Why are we kind of targeting and, you know, honing in on Facebook? Well, because Facebook has actually been the most forthcoming about the extent of the most honest. The most honest.

Yeah. And, you know, they're starting to make public this stuff. We're only really starting to find out the extent of the efforts that have been taking place on other social media platforms. As I mentioned earlier, Twitter, it turns out that the problem was 10 times as big as the people in Twitter realize what's been going on, on say, Snapchat or Instagram, we really don't know.

And Google hasn't been too forthcoming thus far. I mean, I think they mentioned an amount of money that was something like $3,000 or something very inconsequential. And obviously the problem is going to be much, much bigger than that. So how do we get to this point so quickly so fast?

Well, everything in tech happens fast. You know, companies appear, they get funded. Yeah, exactly. And they go bus before you can say IPO.

So in a sense, you almost feel sorry for them. A lot of startups seem to think that all they need is an attitude. You know, I disrupt, therefore, I am. That word again.

I know. Traditional companies take their time. They grow slowly and they gradually achieve this kind of monolithic position. But they do it with people.

One of the reasons a lot of companies become so bureaucratic is simply because of the number of people that they employ and they manage. So the leaders by and large are skilled at managing people because their businesses revolve around moving large numbers of humans and coordinating their actions. Let's say, you know, you want to launch a new range of instant noodles. There's a lot of processes there.

You have to sort out your financial planning, your production, your raw materials. You have to look at distribution and sales channels. You have to get your branding right. You have to sort out your packaging and your marketing.

That's a lot of people and very different people that you have to coordinate and organize. Tech companies seem to do it the other way around. They sell services that are used by millions but employ relatively few people to do it. So very often the visionaries that they're home have limited experience of people and actually in dealing with the world.

So even when these companies sell and go public, often these vision refounders manage to retain control of the company like Facebook. So they're immune from the usual shareholder intervention route as well. So you have all of these startups that have no easy route to solve any institutional problems. Okay.

So what is the risk to ordinary folk and how would we weren't calling it? How would a venture-dimension effect people are listening up? Well, our economies are changing. A lot of these emerging businesses can be run globally by handful of people, as I just said.

At the same time, automation and artificial intelligence are eroding jobs in traditional industries. The last thing global society needs is a generation of entrepreneurs who are willing to base their service in outer space to avoid paying taxes on earth and employ a handful of people at peace work rates to work when and if they're required to. That scenario has the potential to undo a lot of the progress we've made over the last 100 years. Surely it's not going to get that bad.

No, it probably isn't. I mean, we're unlikely to see the Orion server belt anytime soon. I don't know. I mean, if Elon has his way.

Yeah, I know it'd be cool. Yeah. Let's go and see the Orion server belt. But there are other areas where we could be impacted.

I'm not sure how many of our listeners picked up on this story from a couple of weeks ago, but an urban regeneration arm of Google's parent alphabet has been given the go ahead to run a pilot regeneration scheme on Toronto's waterfront. Now on the surface, this seems like a good thing. It's a way for alphabet to see how all kinds of approaches to urban design, data gathering, and technology can be combined to regenerate depressed urban areas. But it's also a warning light for a lot of privacy and freedom activists, because Alphabet has its own operating systems.

It has Android. It has Chrome. It has its own smart homes projects. It's working on self-driving cars.

So we have to wonder, do we want a future where tech companies can own the very roads and pavements that we walk on, where we could be evicted from our home for a comment that doesn't meet community standards or for not sharing enough quality data? It could be a society or a community where you can only use alphabet compatible products or drive a Waymo. I'm not saying that it's going to come to that. And I don't think that that's what alphabet intends.

But as people, we tend to be very short-sighted. We look at the companies and their leaders today. And we're not thinking about who might be leading those companies in 50 years time. So a company that's been named today may not be tomorrow.

People forget that the British Empire was actually forged by a private company, the East India Company, which accounted for nearly half the world's trade at the peak. It was the East India Company that ruled India and most of these other colonial properties for over 100 years. In fact, they only transferred power in India to the British government in 1858. They ruled India for over 100 years.

So we live in a world where laws are set by precedent. So once rights are very innocently given up, it's very hard to regain them to call them back. And we already talk about our online lives being hemmed in by these kind of walled gardens of Google and Apple. Are we willing to accept living inside real-life walled economies?

I think a lot of people would be willing to make that trade off if it improved their lives. And of course, that's their right. That's their choice. But I can invert that analogy.

Instead of alphabet, let's look at the city of London, the most powerful financial center in the world. Why not have the city take over the running of Kale's financial district, the lovely Golden Triangle? Might make the country more wealthy. They can come in, they can bring in their own bylaws and go to conduct.

They can block the streets in and out. They can decide who comes into the area. Maybe they can even have a toll for people to come in. Definitely they'll get to decide who lives in the area.

They might decide, you know, you need a special past to come into the city zone, just to prove that you have a reason to be there. And of course, they'll have their own security, which can clear the streets of non-residents, say, after 9pm. That's a picture that a lot of people in Malaysia know only too well. When people like you and me get to decide what Malaysians could and couldn't do in their own country.

And that's the reality of this kind of project. We're opening the door to a world of corporate colonialism. You know, freedom has a price and you certainly shouldn't be surrendering your freedoms and rights to private companies. That's why we have government.

All right. You're scaring the heck out of me. So, come Friday, give me a sliver of hope. Well, that is the hope, really.

Do you mean that is the hope? Well, Malaysians know firsthand what it's like to be treated as a colony. In countries like the UK and the US, that memory has faded. But people are waking up, the supposedly apathetic millennial generation is proving to be anything but they're opinionated, they're informed, they're passionate.

And even if they do feel disenfranchised, they are finding their voice. And they understand the implications of this new digital world in ways that I really struggle to. For the rest of us, I suggest that we fight back against this venture dimension with something that I'm calling disruption aversion. Oh, I like that.

Yeah. Every time you see an article or watch a news piece, even when you listen to this show, because you don't have to believe what I say, every time you watch a piece and the pundits or the entrepreneurs start talking about disruption, ask yourself, what is it that they're disrupting? They're disrupting a regulated and well functioning market. Get personal about it.

Do you trust that person? Do you trust me? Would I buy what that person is selling? Is this a person that I can see leading me?

Don't be passive, you don't have to accept somebody else's vision, because your role in their vision is usually to make them rich and powerful. Their vision of the future will usually have themselves or their company at the forefront of that future, which means you also have a choice. You can choose to reject their vision or you can demand that they come up with a new one. And to his credit, that's a lesson that Mark Zuckerberg does seem to be learning.

He seems to have eaten a lot of humble pie this year. But how many of his peers are going to follow that example? I don't know. Only times I'm going to tell.

So that is venture dementia. Venture dementia, yes. We'll be hearing more about that. Yes.

I like that term. You're going to have to do something with that. Like copyright it or trademark it or something. Yeah, it's copyright.

I've just copyrighted it on there. Yeah. So we can do that, right? I can.

Okay, fine. Right then. So that was venture dementia. Matt Splain here on Fun Friday.

I'll say it again. Fun Friday. I'm Richard Bradbury standing in for Jeff Sander, of course. I do stick with us because a little bit later on, we'll be swabing, right?

We will be. What are we talking about? Anyway, we'll just let people find out later, shall we? Right.

Stick around. Some music going for you up right now here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. 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.