This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jeff Zundu, masculine inferiority. It's something that CulturePops' man Amity has been accused of all of his life. But until last week, he thought it was just him.
Now the massed ranks of Star Wars' Ultra have broken cover to try and force deavius emperor-like across the internet. Confused, you will be, because it's time to Matt's plane. Hey Matt, the fanboys will be very happy today, because we're talking about Star Wars. Hey Jeff, welcome back.
Well, yeah, I think the Star Wars fans are going to be less happy than you might imagine. The fanboys are kind of very much in our crosshairs this week, as well as everyone else who thinks that the internet is the sole preserver of their point of view. Everyone knows that the internet is reserved for my point of view. And when that point of view is interrupted, I have to conjure up these 20 minute sermons to bring everyone to heel.
You're quite full of yourself, aren't you? I'm happy to see that your holiday has improved your mood. And it's me that gets called Uncle Angry. Yes, I know I'm full of myself, but you know, that's not really what I'm trying to do here.
I'm just trying to prove a point. Everyone thinks the internet is for them, and anyone who dares to disagree with their opinion is committing some kind of attack on them, or rather threatening that little piece of the internet that they call their own. And so what the Star Wars have to do with any of these? Well, I don't know if you caught this while you were away, and I'm not sure how long the post is going around, but the last couple of weeks there's been a manifesto purporting to be from the fans of Star Wars going around on social media and asking Disney to stop its campaign of perverting the franchise to further a sociopolitical agenda of inclusion that promotes masculine inferiority.
I briefly saw this on Reddit before I just shrugged it out, like, come on, like, really? No, I don't understand how having strong female characters equates to masculine inferiority. I'm also not quite sure how promoting different sexes or genders and races upsets anyone in a fictional universe that's populated by creatures like Java. It was a cross between a slug and a lump of fecal matter, and somehow he's more disgusting than either of those things.
You know, I consider myself to be a Star Wars fan, and I actually like where the franchise is headed. Anyone who is flabbergasted by Luke Skywalker's transition into a cantankerous old goat obviously hasn't met a lot of old people, and thinks that, you know, there really are old duffas like the ones in the world. There's originals commercials. You're definitely going to be like Luke, because you don't have to get much older.
Well, it's a bit of respect, thank you very much. People might be wondering what relevance this has as a topic for our show. Yeah, but I think listeners have just sort of given up, trying to connect your dots a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Yes, you get the bonus Star Wars points.
We've heard a lot of talk over the last few months about how the internet is being weaponised by countries and companies with an agenda, but we can't blame what's happening online entirely on external actors and agents. You have people like the guys who put the Star Wars memorandum together who I'm guessing are mainly white males. And a quick note to those guys, Star Wars is a global franchise. When you look at the population of our planet and I'm guessing the population of the wider universe, the majority of those people aren't white or male, or probably even human.
And then there are the WhatsApp killings in India? Yeah, rumors have been spreading in rural parts of India about people trying to steal children as a result to a risk and strangers and just generally people who are unknown in a particular village have been attacked by mobs and killed. I think the figure I read was something like 22 people over the last few months. Thing is there's nothing to suggest that anyone is actually stealing children.
It's scaremongering that's being spread widely and instantly via instant message. It's not something that you can blame Cambridge Analytica for or despotic bot networks. This is the fault of normal and ordinarily sane people who are blindly passing on untrue and toxic messages from one to another. So where are the ones killing people?
It's not something that you want to put to anyone at an individual level, but how many of our listeners have posted something on a social media feed about how they don't trust the mainstream media anymore? Well, last week, a guy who didn't trust the media anymore took a gun and walked into the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis and murdered five members of the senior editorial staff. The suspected killer was known to harass journalists online. So once again, I'm paraphrasing when owner-eyed ring-heathers.
Our teenage angst has a body count. And it's something that we're seeing across the world. Journalists are increasingly becoming both targets and casualties of the so-called culture wars. Now, this is Matt Splain.
So we have to assume that you have an equally unpleasant cure for society's ills. So what poison are you describing this week? A very radical and extreme one. I think it's high time that using the internet required a license.
Wow, wait, before. No, I mean, just like driving a car, you don't get behind the wheel until you're qualified. So I'm saying that if you want to go online, you'll have to prove that you're licensed and that you've got insurance. It doesn't sound very practical to me.
It probably isn't. But I think we're past the point where we can sit back and do nothing. When cars were first introduced, you didn't need a license or insurance to drive. Anyone could just get behind the wheel.
What happened? Well, lots of people died or were horribly maimed. So governments and the powers that be stepped in to regulate the sector and the industry. And they pushed that regulation in both directions.
They pushed it towards us in that drivers have to learn to drive and prove that they're competent. And they also pushed it towards the companies making cars. They forced them to adopt a set of standards that make the car as safe as possible for the people inside it and for the people and things that the car might crash into. I don't want to be new slash to you here, man, but the internet's not a car.
No, but it is a tool that has increasingly deadly applications. We talk a lot on the show about the norms of social behavior and how technology allows us to advance faster than the norms that govern what we consider to be acceptable social behavior. I think that as a mass of people, we've shown that we're not responsible enough to use the internet without some kind of training or responsibility. So where does the insurance part come in?
When it's like when you jump a red light and you get fined by the police or if you get into an accident and your car damages someone else's. The insurance would be like a system of fines and payments to regulate people's behavior online. If you insult someone online, they get to claim damages from your insurer and your premium to use the internet will increase. If you commit serious infractions like using the internet while intoxicated, you lose your license.
The first time just for a week or so and then it gradually increases to months, years, or even lifetime bans. What are you hoping to achieve from this? Well, at one end, just some basic stuff, like a little more civility. Put an end to all the shouty people who post things in capital letters.
In fact, I would make all cats a fine about the face. TechSpeak is fine, but bad grammar would also count against you. I think someone should actually do a study into the correlation between trolling and the correct use of cars. Yes.
I think that would be quite interesting. But more seriously, I think it might help to kind of filter out the extremists, the terrorists and the trolls who happily operate under a clog of anonymity. Who would be on your Nazi and Niseless? Mark Zuckerberg is automatically going to get a two-year ban and mandatory sensitivity training.
So we learned this week that Facebook gave dozens of firms access to its data, even though it claimed it hadn't. Not to mention that patent application last week for a widget that would turn on your phone's microphone so that it could listen to your TV. Facebook has persistent offender written all over it. It seems like every other week that a very contrite Mark Zuckerberg appears to apologise for something that the company had claimed not to have done in the first place.
Not good enough. Reeducation. So who else would you re-educate then? Forget the reeducation.
I would ban the entire staff of Twitter. What? In the form. There'd be a sliding scale, senior executives for a lifetime, down to six months for entry-level staff.
Because I just don't see the benefit of Twitter anymore. Donald Trump would disagree with you here. Well, that's kind of a point. So get rid of it and you immediately choke off the loudest amplifier of the pollers and the trolls.
Other social networks just aren't as loud or easy to troll. And yes, I think that particular man would instantly be needed if Twitter disappeared. You know, I think it's time we had a discussion about making voices less universal. What about free speech?
Don't you risk putting people's freedom at risk? Well, we act as though speech is inviolable. It isn't. It has always been subject to constraints.
A lot of what happens online is kind of the virtual equivalent of the teenagers driving past your car and mooning at you out of the window. It's a little bit of shock horror to the victim and a quick titillation for the perpetrators. But ultimately, it's nothing really serious. But if you wanted to, you could go and report those kids for public indecency.
Both parties have a choice. The kids are free to moon you, but society places are tariff on that behavior. So you can either choose to write the incident off as youthful hijinks or you can make a complaint to the police. If you want a more serious example, I'm free to make a bomb threat.
But I don't have the right to make a bomb threat. And that's something we seem to be confused about online. Being free to say something isn't the same as saying that you have the right to say it. Which is why society makes it a criminal event to make a bomb threat.
I still have the freedom to do it. But if I choose to go ahead and exercise that freedom, I should expect to be prosecuted by society for the fear and the damage that I've inflicted. You can't argue that for a lot of people. It's just blowing off scene.
It's online. It's just not real mad. Well, in some countries, there are already laws to protect humour and satire so that jokes aren't taken out of context. They are protected.
But I would argue that a lot of people who are hiding behind the lulls have no objective sense of humour. What they're doing is good old-fashioned bullying and nastiness that veers into intimidation. Why should the internet be any different from real life? Where's the logic in saying that I can insult or threaten you because it's online?
It's exactly the same as going up to someone or walking up to their front door and saying something horrendous to them. It's a public forum. Our words and our actions have consequences. So I think a licence would help to reinforce that sense of responsibility.
There are some obvious and huge issues with the idea of a licence for internet and also retraining here, man. And we will get to them. I think a lot of people agree with me that the internet should not be a haven for hateful and horrible views. But the thing is, the internet is global, so that presents a problem because there's no real consensus in terms of what constitutes hateful and horrible.
What's hateful to one person is simply skidding a bear for dinner for someone else. As I've always said, when someone starts skidding a bear, it's time to take a break. We'll be right back with the College Pops and Met Amityc after this, BFM 89.9. Vodacious, fabulous minds.
BFM 89.9, the business station. We're back with the Swan Friday, my name is JazZandra together with the College Pops and Met Amityc. We're explaining, I just, it's this whole bunch of things. We're coming up with an idea for license for the internet.
License and insurance and all kinds of stuff to regulate people's behavior. And before the break, Matt, you outlined your plans for this license to surf. See, it even sounds really cool. It's very James Bond.
And I should point out that no bears were skined during that break. And it's possibly the first time that anyone has said that on BFM. Probably. I'm happy to protect the bears.
But let's talk about the license. What about the license? How would it actually work here? Honestly, I've got no idea.
That's what engineers and bureaucrats are for. I'm just doing a visionary thing that we talked about last week. I'm doing the envisioning. Other people are going to have to do the hard stuff.
How all would you have to be to get online? Well, I think that's the nice thing about this system. The license could give control levels of access. We could have a series of sandboxes for kids.
So they get a junior license at the age of two that allows them into some corners of the internet. And that increases as they get older, a bit like a movie rating system. And just like when you're a learner driver, you have to be supervised by a full license holder all times until you move higher up the rating system. Who can you imagine running it?
It would be a lot of moving parts, not to mention the coordination aspect. Do you see it being operated with national characteristics and qualities or more? It's like an international thing. Well, my preference would be for it to be a super national thing.
A single body that coordinated the license globally. But the body would have to be neutral, not linked to any particular government. Personally, I'd hand it over to Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder. I'm sure he'd have some idea of the rules he used to police it.
And then of course, the license fees could be used to fund the Wikipedia foundation. Sounds good. Yeah. And all of those weird bits and pieces of technology and organizing bodies that the internet relies on and runs on, but are all chronically underfunded.
What about the service providers? How do they fit into this model? Well, as we know, the FCC in the US made huge changes to net neutrality regulations. Yeah.
And those came into force a few weeks ago. Now that allows telcos and service providers in the US to offer preferential access to some sites and relegate other parts of the internet to lower speed connections. One of the policy arguments to the change was that it would make ISPs more competitive. So I'm getting behind that idea.
I'm saying bring on the competition. Yeah. Let's really give the providers the market treatment. And we could give them ratings just like moody does with securities, right?
Yes. Countries and bond issues are ranked according to their trustworthiness. So let's do exactly the same thing with ISPs. We'll rate them according to factors like how free and open they are.
Do they operate dual track systems that favor some sites over others? Are they openly hostile to VPNs? You know, those kind of conditions. It's very simple.
If the market likes you and that means consumers, you can justify charging them more money. If your consumers don't like you, well, a lower rating serves as a warning to potential customers. Of course, moodies is already being used. So we could use grumpy to reflect our typical level with ISPs.
Yeah. If you get a high grumpy rating, you're not pleasing your customers. The lower your grumpy's rating, the better you're doing. Do you think any of these could actually happen?
Like we're discussing setting up a super national organization to uphold a license that individual countries would have to put ease and prosecute. Look, all of this, everything I've just said over the last 10 minutes is basically impossible. You might be able to achieve it from a process and technology point of view, but I think it would be unworkable. And I saw the look of concern and dubiousness on your face.
You mentioned a license, yeah. You know, worse than that, I think this is one of those you have to be careful what you wish for, Thomas. I don't think any of us would really want this to come to pass. It would be impossible to do without a lot of government involvement and intervention.
So we would likely see it being used as an excuse for censorship more than as a tool to make people behave a little bit better online. But that's not to say that the problems we've talked about aren't real. Yeah. It's just rather than come up with a set of coherent solutions, I've outlined a sweeping and kind of unworkable knee-jerk solution instead.
So should the internet stay as it is? Honestly, I don't know. I mean, you look at the numbers of younger consumers who are either turning their backs on or simply not signing up for services like Facebook and Twitter in the first place. So they already don't consider the internet and these social media sites to be a safe place.
So maybe they're going to places where there isn't as much comment or discussion, like Instagram, where you have more control, or they're using instant messaging apps to curate and create their own safe spaces, which are away from public gaze. Here's our Norboders all-around world approach to the internet failed. Well, as I keep saying, the technology moves faster than our ability to adopt codes of behaviour to cope with it. There's too much information and not enough editing, and it's eroding trust.
Now somebody can take old footage of a disaster, say, an earthquake or a terror incident, and cause a panic on social media by posting it and claiming that it's something that's happening in real time. And that message can spread very rapidly because it isn't subject to the same kind of editorial control that traditional information has been subject to, and that can become deadly when you see rumors of child abductions in India turning into murders. Is it something we can solve with algorithms? I know it's nice to wrap the show up in a ribbon and present a nice knee package, but honestly, I don't think it's something that we can solve right now.
We've got the tools to create, but we don't have the tools to patrol or control with any degree of finesse. The algorithms that we have right now are dumb, they're very blunt, they do what we tell them to do, but they're working in a forum that is so enormously complex that it would probably be nearly impossible to program them how to operate and behave. The result, our current suite of solutions is going to fall short. We're going back to the your more and better AI argument here.
Yeah, we already know that you can't use human beings to police sites like YouTube. There's too much content being posted. The volumes are too great for any kind of realistic oversight. The sites rely on automation and algorithms as very blunt tools.
So, dumb algorithms can only do half the job because they don't understand anything. What we really need, a machine that are capable of discussing why a piece of content should or shouldn't be allowed with a human being. It's not just AI. There are lots of other technologies that I'd like to see being integrated.
Like blockchain. Yeah, I mean, there's great potential for the use of blockchain in terms of copyrighting content, verifying its origin, identifying the journey and the trail that it's taken, but it's not something that's ready to rock and roll out today. Blockchain and self-loathing AI are solutions we can see, but not quite touch yet. So, we have the tools, as I said, to create, but not to control.
If you want those kind of blunt edges of control, we can opt for a more restrictive solution like the Great Firewall of China. Do you think that could happen that we age closer to the internet autocracy? The lawlessness and askiness of some parts of the internet helped to make the case for wide-ranging censorship seem more reasonable. When that kind of censorship happens, you lose access to information, you lose your luck to have a voice.
We started the show with Star Wars, so maybe we should end it with Star Wars as well. Well, you know, the world changes and the world that Star Wars inhabits has changed as well. And none of us read those swashbuckling Victorian novels about gentlemen, explorers with a title and lots of daring do anymore. You know, we accept that they were racist and sexist that everything was done for the perpody of Albion.
The world has moved on from there, and I think Star Wars should too. Calling yourself a fan doesn't mean that you have any more right to ownership than somebody who isn't interested in the whole slavish adulation thing and just wants to pay their 15 bucks and enjoy the show. So, Star Wars is the internet in your microcosm? Yeah, because it gives disproportionate weight to the views of minorities, and by minorities, I don't mean marginalised groups for people who have been overlooked or disenfranchised.
I mean people with minority opinions. Sometimes it feels that we hear more from people with minority points of view than we do from the centre. We have this commitment to balance, but we seem to think that balance means taking viewpoints from both far reaches of the opinion spectrum. But those voices don't represent balance.
They are simply the extremes. And as a result, we indulge those extremes. We give them validity. And instead of calling them out for bigotry or racism or whatever unpleasant content their message contains, we give them this sense of validation.
As for Luke Skywalker, his rebellion ultimately failed, his best pupil turned to the dark side. That's enough for anyone to want to go and sit on an island and sulk for a few decades. And that's exactly what I would do. And Wobotide, any stupid kid who turned up on my island, offering me Butterscotch?
Yeah, I told you you were very much like Luke, and yeah, I definitely can see you sitting on an island just sulk in there for a few decades. Yeah, and no Butterscotch. Anyways, that was Matt, now with H from Akartipal, talking about license to surf. You can also take Akartipal.com for transcripts of the shows, and you can also find out how to bring a little bit of Matt's explaining to your company.
Don't go anywhere because Geeksforks, it's after this. The event 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.