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The Cambridge Analytica story doesn't look like it's showing any signs of slowing down. Facebook is still under fire for its data policies and this week, dating app Grindr has been under the microscope amid allegations of sharing the HIV status of its users with third parties. It doesn't sound like much of a recipe for fun Friday, so we're going to leave the present behind and join Future Mat in a world where they got data policies right. Well, heading for the future, it's time for Mat's Blade.
Boom, what was that noise? Hey Jeff, that was the sound of every atom in your body being torn apart and reassembled. We're calling this time machine the Banshee because of that whale. It does sound a lot worse than the old machine, but apart from a little spinal contraction, most people lose around, I think, three centimeters in height every time they jump.
It's really very safe compared to the last one. I think in the last one, the gamma radiation leakage killed pretty much every follicle on your body and it made your brains well, which wasn't ideal. So as long as you don't do this too often, in which case you're going to end up being very short, you shouldn't have too many problems. Well, I have to say, this doesn't look too different from the place where I came from.
I'm not sure what you expect. Every time you come out to the past to see me, you seem to think you're going to jump into some episode of Sartre. Things look pretty similar because that's the way we like them to look. It's all the things that are underneath.
That's where there's a real difference. Anyway, before I can tell you what you want to know, you're going to have to tell me when you've come from. All right, so we're in 2018. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has blown the lid off the way technology companies handle our personal information and they're using it to make money.
OK, I remember that. This is just before Europe's general data protection regulations came into force in May 2018. I'd like to say that those regulations completely transformed society, but of course they didn't. They were a useful step on the path, but it still took Europe and most other national governments and super national collective organisations, quite a few years to coordinate and give us all data autonomy.
What? Data autonomy? Well, firstly, we managed to put an end to the indiscriminate harvesting of information. Now, it sounds easy when you condense it into that one sentence, but it was probably one of the most hard-fought battles in consumer history.
The amount of pushback that came from companies that had vast financial resources, companies that physically had more money on hand to spend than many countries had at the time. Those companies lobbied really hard. They sponsored legislation. They used fake consumer advocacy groups.
They spent incredible sums of money, which is kind of ironic. They were spending so much money that they had to put up their own prices. And the knock-on effects were so great that we ended up paying more for everyday goods to pay for their battle to take and use our private information. Crazy times, really, really crazy times.
You frame it as a battle. How did we win from where our listeners are looking in 2018? It looks like such an unequal battle, something unwinnable. I can understand why your listeners might be feeling that way.
They're surrounded by choices, but they're never sure whether those choices are real or whether they've just been pushed or manipulated into making certain decisions. You have to admit, it is quite a weird world that you're living in. If I remember correctly, you've been in from the week that one of now Matt's favourite companies, Spotify, held its IPO. Spotify, a successful tech company that had managed to lose around a billion dollars in its previous few years of operation.
In our time, getting rich from unprofitable companies, is called Musking. We named it for the pheromones that some dear exude during mating. Because as many a dough has found out to her cost, the most powerful musk doesn't always come from the most suitable male. In our world, musking is illegal.
We're still dancing around the question here, man. How did society move from this speculative model of free services? How do we and a hit to say this become you? Well, don't forget that there are plenty of branches of the future where you don't get to be me.
There's at least one branch of the future where you rock up in the banshee and FutureMap wearing nothing but a loincloth made out of someone who used to be his neighbour, stabs you through the brain with a spear. Or as he calls it, he top trumps you. Yeah, again, time travel seems to involve a lot of me dying or nearly dying here. Which is why BFM pays you the big bucks.
Otherwise, you'd just be sitting there doing call-in phone pranks every day. Going back to all that social upheaval, you had a secret weapon in your time. You had millennials and centenials. Centenials, you mean like Gen Z.
Well, we narrowly avoided the zombie apocalypse. That turned out to be the one conspiracy theory that was actually true. So we don't call them Gen Z, we call them centenials. If I remember my history correctly, your present is about the time of the Florida school shootings.
And that was actually quite a pivotal point. It was the first step in the social media revolution. You'd already experienced things like the Arab Spring where long extinct services like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have to coordinate the fight for democracy in some countries. This went way beyond that.
Because they were the first generations that were brought up with digital technology in their blood. Partly, they were also the first generation that regarded the big tech companies as institutions. So to many people in that generation, companies like Facebook had more power over them, particularly when it came to day-to-day life than their elected governments. Social media was used kind of like a background check.
If they applied to go to universities or for jobs, it was routine for their social media profiles to be checked. It also became normal for countries to ask for access to social media accounts as a condition of tourists and work visa applications. So when you combine that with the revelations about all the data harvesting, you have this strange dichotomy where a generation was extremely reliant on these services, very savvy in the way it used them, and suddenly realized that there was a mechanism built into those services that allowed them to vent those frustrations. So what happened?
The technology companies had been so used to being ahead of the curve that they didn't realize that they were suddenly behind it. They were no longer the companies of tomorrow. They were the companies of today. And in many instances, they were more interested in building multi-billion dollar walled-off campuses than they were in engaging with people and innovating.
So in the end, they simply weren't able to keep up with their own consumers. People started to disort their data or dump the services entirely. A lot of rivals popped up promising to protect data. Most of them were short-lived because they didn't have the critical mass that allowed them to be self-funding and profitable, but the changes were already underway.
You mentioned the European data protection regulations. What partly dately? Well, as I said, they were very much a case of too little, too late. But it did mark a realization amongst lawmakers that they were out of step.
You know, politics is very often a propaganda game, and political parties the world over also found themselves behind this generational curve. This was a generation that didn't believe the hype and wouldn't even read the propaganda. Long before artificial intelligence was able to successfully weave out fake news, this generation found a more novel solution. All the news is fake until somebody proves that it isn't.
This was something that affected politics as much as it affected commercial companies. This was the first generation that you couldn't sell to, which in a sense turned the tables because political parties now had to start listening to become genuine the answerable to the people that voted for them. So people power movement? Well, it was part of a social movement that didn't really belong to any of the old notions of left or right.
Both sides tried to co-op the movement. Both sides largely failed. In essence, the movement co-op did the left and the right rather than the other way around. Anyway, all of that is old school politics, and you're here really to talk about the technology.
So what happened is that over a period of about five years, users largely blew up the business model of the services they were using. It didn't matter how much money the tech giants used to try and build laws and their favour. Users would sign off, they would disrupt, and they would just generally make the data irrelevant. Some companies like Google and Amazon had already spotted the way the wind was blowing and were diversifying into revenue-generating services like cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
They were already exiting the data game, or at least reducing its importance by the term of the Cambridge Analytica files. In fact, President Bezos enjoyed the tumultuous term in the mid-20s, but that marked the high point and the start of the rapid decline of Silicon Valley. As the data flows became less reliable, their value to advertisers fell, not to mention the fact that the growth in targeted ambient advertising things like projections and holograms that appear in public places made screen-based advertising largely irrelevant. The social media giants tried lots of combinations of models, balancing user subscriptions with less injuries of advertising, but with the passing of the 2030 Global Data Act, the few companies that were still in the game were forced to stop sharing any data with third parties and effectively had to adopt subscription-only models.
Actually, I think it might be a good idea for you to take a break now. I can get my chiropractor bot to zap you and try and pull that spine-shrinkage out. We're with Future Matte, and apparently a future where data is good. We'll be right back.
We have 89.9. Best flipping moments, the FM 89.9, the Business Station. And we're back. My name is Jeff Zandu, together with Future Matte, Madamatte from College of Bob.
Now, before the break, Future Matte was telling us some of the history of his world, one of many possible futures we face, and how, in that world, society overcame its data issues. I have to say, Future Matte is very easy to understand, although I die, or nearly die again. I wouldn't have thought that language would have changed more between my time and yours. Well, of course, we communicate with neural nets amongst ourselves.
There's a lot more blurring between humans and machines in this time, but if I tried to hook you up to the neural net, your brain would melt like cheese in a toasted sandwich. It happened again. Exactly. To make it easier for you, I'm accessing a programme that translates my thoughts into 21st century English, actually, pretty much 20th century English, so that I sound a lot more like the old foggy now, Matt.
And then, while my mouth repeats the words to you, my brain goes offline from a microphone app. One more off-topic question. How old is Future Matte? I don't really have an age.
I just exist at every point beyond your own. Wherever you travel, whatever timeline, you will find some version of me. I'm like that light that keeps you awake at night. You can't switch me off and I will drive you insane.
You're really lucky. You get to work with now, Matt. He's a good guy. He doesn't always get things right, but he tries his best.
He's not as funny as he thinks he is, but then who is? You're really lucky that you don't have to hang out with ye oldy Matt. That guy is a complete and utter no-nothing idiot. He gets everything wrong.
He's the human embodiment of Betamax. So what does the world with data freedom look like, Future Matte? As I mentioned to you before, data activists made life very difficult for the social media companies by disrupting their revenue stream. People would sign up for multiple accounts and use them to exercise different aspects of their personality.
And every few months they would close the account and start a new one in another name, while swapping the new account details over secure incident messaging accounts. They would also push the boundaries of the terms and conditions of the sites by using them to organise protests against the company. In that way, any pushback from their social media hosts could then be reported back to national regulators and lawmakers as examples of overreach by the companies in blocking free speech and free expression. There was a lot of this kind of jousting for, you know, quite a few years for four or five years.
These huge tech companies using their money to try and sway lawmakers, while the activists used the company's own platforms against them. It was in a bloody struggle. No, it wasn't a physical thing. I mean, we had a zombie uprising brewing, so we weren't going to start to war over likes.
This was about rights rather than actions. What was more interesting was the way that nations started to respond. As I mentioned, politicians were very much behind the curve on this one. Worldwide, what we started to see was people voting for candidates who were tech literate and data savvy.
Many of those candidates were or had been data activists themselves. This coincided or maybe resulted in national governments waking up to the power of social media platforms. They were an information and communication platform. So even in your time, some governments were already giving citizens a national email address.
That address functioned a little like an identification number. You would use it to access government services, for example, filing your taxes, and the government could use it to communicate with you. And as members of governments became more technology literate, they began to see the value of social media platforms that operated at the national level. Like a kind of participatory democracy.
Yeah, exactly. It was a great way for politicians to check how receptive the electorate was to ideas and policies. It was like holding a referendum except that it was instant, there was next to no cost, and people could respond with kitten gifts. And it quickly became obvious that this wasn't the kind of tool that countries wanted to be in private hands.
This was something that should be viewed as a national resource. And as it was in the case of privacy regulation, the European Union was the first to build an open source pan-continental social media service. And to stress the public ownership of the model, they called it you. Something that would easily translate into any language to in French, to in German, you get the idea.
Once people started logging on to you and other similar systems in other countries, which of course were quickly networked together, there seemed very little reason to be on a commercial social media site. Is the UK back in the European Union? No, I Future Matt, I'm a proud Irish citizen, thanks to my Nana's Irish ancestry. Loincliff Matt, who I mentioned earlier, is British.
He lives in a man cave, a converted garage without power or running water on the outskirts of what was once known as Chelsea, and is now the self-declared protectorate of someone called Lord Wario. Things didn't go well for the Brits post-Brexit. Leaving NATO to start the military alliance with Soutome was probably about as wise as calling that same alliance stuck. But let's leave footnotes of history and get back to the relevant questions.
Yeah, well, can governments be trusted with data? Well, can anyone be trusted with data? The key to you when it was introduced was that you, as the user, decide what information goes in, how it's shared, how it's used, and how long the information is retained. Now, I never get this social architectural stuff, right?
Whether it's top-down or bottom-up, but it was one of those things and it was bottom of the other one. The beauty of the system was that it operated on a local level. Yes, you could use it in the same way that you would use Facebook or Twitter in your time, but it was designed to feed information back to local communities, because a large part of what the data activists had a problem with was the centralization of information and how that information could be misused. They could see that the information and power was much more dynamic when it was used at a local level where it could affect genuine change.
Where did the advertisers go? Well, as I said before, when you look out of the window at our world, it looks very similar to yours, but underneath it's very different. We stopped being scared of artificial intelligence. In fact, we realized that it was machines that lacked intelligence that were really the dangerous ones.
And although we are market-focused, we live in a post-capitalist era. Now, you can only sell things to people when those things have value. When technology reduces your production cost to almost zero, then your goods have very little value. We buy what we need, so there's not really a need for companies to advertise.
When you want something, you look it up in a sales directory, put in the keywords, and you choose the option you want. It's the same for work. We don't really have jobs in the way that you would recognize them. I think we now have something like 100 million professional video gamers, that's our e-sports stars, but that's outweighed by the fact that we now have more theoretical physicists than the cantons.
In fact, I think the last accountant died of old age about a decade ago. So how does a post-capitalist economy work? I can't give you all of the secrets. This isn't back to the future.
You've got to work out this stuff for yourselves. I know it doesn't look like it from where you guys are right now, but the journey is actually a relatively simple one. It's just a little slow. It takes time.
I think one of the things that was overlooked in your era is the fact that all this private data is actually your information. It shouldn't be the property of a company or anybody else except you. You make it. It belongs to you.
That's why the European project was called you. It was about using that information to create something for yourself. There was a lot of talk in your time about the tech CEOs being smarter than politicians and the lawmakers. They weren't.
They were just a lot younger. So once your centennial generation came of age, they were able to turn that around. First, they voted for millennials and eventually they started voting for themselves and their peers. These people were technology insiders and they viewed the technology as something they had a right to rather than something that should be viewed as a commodity.
And in our era, that starts with us paying for Facebook. Not just Facebook, a lot of other services as well. I remember that some people mocked now Matt for backing this as a model, but history has a way of choosing a sign. Yes, a lot of people grumbled when the free model of the internet was replaced by subscriptions.
That was also a necessary part of the process that forced national government to reassess what those technologies meant to their people and to ensure that digital services were offered to everyone equally. Hey Jeff, I've been looking at your timestamps and you're going to have to get them back to 2018 now or risk permanent damage. I thought you said the banshee was safe. Safe fur.
This is the future, not some perfect paradise. If you don't leave now, your spine is going to shredle like a sponge because the temporal mass is going to compress it into a ball. That'd be Sammar, are you all right? Mm, Lizzy.
Yeah, you can't trust that future, Matt. He'll tell you all kinds of things, but actually he lives in a bombed out garage on the edge of Chelsea. He hangs out with some guy who likes to call himself Lord Wario. Thank you for listening to this podcast.
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