This is a download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jaffsan Du, problems. The things that science and technology are supposed to solve, that the solutions are themselves problem, is not an original thought, which is good because culture pops matte amity isn't very good at originality. But are we slipping into an era of bad ideas with a great execution?
I don't know, and I'm not sure I care. But someone does, and he's here to Matt's plane. Matt, you've been a little bit under the weather this week. Hey, Jeff, that's right, nothing major, just a little bit of a cold, but it does mean that there's a couple of small changes to this week's show.
So instead of 20 minutes of unrelenting misery, which is punctuated by a couple of jokes, this week we just have the misery, because my sense of humour is the first thing to go when I'm sick. Well, that's the production crew gone. I'm Jeff, you're still here? Well, I've been doing this show for far too long to get spooked because you're feeling grumpy.
I believe we're starting with librarians. Not often we do that on Matt's plane. That's very true. People don't make an obvious link between libraries and technologies, so they don't often come up on this show.
But they have done this week because an economist at Long Island University wrote a piece for Forbes that suggested that the US replace its public libraries with Amazon.com, run bookshops. But before we get to that, remember how you spent a lot of the last show trying to stop me talking about the nitty gritty of positional navigational systems like GPS and Lauren? Yes, didn't work though. Well, this week I thought I'd reward you by dedicating the first half of the show to explaining one of the technological miracles of our age, which of course is the Jewy decimal system and how it revolutionised the library system.
See, I didn't think you'd have a smart comeback for that one. And anyway, I'm just kidding. So maybe my sense of humour isn't as damaged as I thought. Getting back to the libraries in Amazon, a professor of economics at LIU, Panos Mulducatus, whose name is obviously designed to trip us up, wrote a piece for Forbes that hit the web waves last weekend.
So the gist of that article seems to be that libraries are archaic and that in a digital world they don't have the same value that they used to for our analogue world. I guess the question that we need to answer is that new libraries have value in a digital world. Exactly, and at first glance, there's quite a compelling argument there. We have other public and semi-public spaces like school auditoria available for community events, for-profit companies that Amazon could do a better job at running this kind of information service and without the drain on the public purse.
I have to admit, I'm not quite going on here, say, but I can only quote from other reports on the article, I couldn't read the actual source because it seems to have been removed from Forbes' website sometime between Monday and Tuesday. That's kind of weird, right? Why wouldn't article about libraries disappear? We talk about conspiracies and the deep state, and it seems that the line is right there with libraries.
You don't take on the librarians unless you're gearing up for a major fight. I saw there was a lot of pushback online. Loads, my favourite put down was from the Harris County Library in Texas, as quoted in The Guardian. No offence to y'all at Forbes, but a little research would prevent you from publishing this kind of Twaddle.
And I really love that it manages to be down home and folksy, and it uses the word Twaddle, which is easily one of the best words in the English language. We cover a lot of stories like this on BFM and in tactile particularly. Isn't this another area that technology could be used to disrupt an industry that is probably quite immune to innovation? I think that's the real issue there.
It's not that library systems are immune to innovation. It's that we're immune to library systems. They could well be the most progressive and forward-thinking institutions in the world. After all, that's where we keep knowledge.
But most of us don't know because we don't really use them that much anymore. How do we know that libraries need disrupting? Maybe we should be learning from the libraries rather than talking down to them. And you think that's why Forbes pulled the piece?
To be honest, I don't know why they pulled the piece. I do hope they put it back up. It doesn't really matter if it's wrong-headed or it looks at libraries down a very narrow lens. That's something we've talked about in terms of the technology industry over the last few weeks, that the focus of the technocrats can be very narrow.
But opinion not pieces like this, even if they are wrong-headed, are still worthwhile. Maybe Professor Morducatus was dashing off a few hundred words and just wanted to be provocative. You say that a lot better than me. And sure, he's a regular Forbes writer and this is the time of year when not much is happening in the tech world and the business world.
So the editor could just have said, give me 800 words on anything equally. Maybe he genuinely believes that Amazon would do a better job and he stands by his comments. In any case, the article is useful in two ways. Firstly, it shines a light on how relevant and necessary libraries still are.
And secondly, it illustrates that shallowness of vision that we've been talking about in previous shows. We can Google most of that information in just a few seconds. Some people probably think that the idea of going to build... Some people probably think that the idea of going to building and scrolling through some dusty books is a bit last century.
Isn't it better to spend public money on services like better internet access that connects them to that information? And I'm sure that's part of the argument. I think we're all a little guilty of misunderstanding the purpose of libraries. We get caught up on the books.
But libraries are much more than that. They're a publicly owned meeting and learning space. I think that Professor Modecartas mentioned in his piece that there are other spaces that could be used for meeting schools, auditorium or even Starbucks. But it's also important to note that those spaces aren't actually public.
In the case of schools, people can't walk in and out at will because the students have to be safe and free from disruption. As from Starbucks, well, we've already seen the kind of reception that a couple of their US customers received earlier this year. Of course, arrested for the crime of waiting for a friend. And what you've described is a community centre.
Well, that's part of the function of libraries. We have to remember that not everyone can afford or has access to high speed internet. So libraries are the place where people can come to use free computers and internet, obviously in some countries, not necessarily in all. Or they can write job applications or term papers.
They serve a very vital function. So they serve a purpose in connecting people to technology? And not just that. They can educate people about technology too.
We forget that there are generations of people who struggle with the concepts of the technology that we kind of just take for granted on this show. We've all been behind someone at an ATM who looks like they've been presented with the Da Vinci Code to crack. You know, a lot of libraries run courses that help people with phone or computer operating systems, show them how to use the internet, how to set up Wi-Fi. You know, we take it for granted that these are easy skills to pick up.
But for a lot of people, when something goes wrong with their Wi-Fi, they genuinely have no idea what to do about from to turn it off and on. So libraries can actually help to bridge that skills gap. And presumably as more government services move online, libraries can help customers to connect to their services? Exactly.
In a lot of ways libraries have always been advice centres. You know, that's what books are. They're information. And librarians have really just human search engines.
They help people get legal advice. They connect them to local services and support groups. They can help immigrants who are struggling with the language or people with vision problems who can't go online on their own. You know, they connect people with the information they need and they help them to understand it, just like the internet does.
In some countries like Finland, they're actually expanding their library systems and investing in state-of-the-art buildings. They treat them as social centres. There are cafes and restaurants inside them. Some of them even have saunas.
There are meeting rooms, courses, talks are held. And of course, there are lots and lots of books. Finland has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. And its people are very proud of that.
I'm very sure Matt's Finnish citizenship is in the meal as we speak, as well as his platinum library card. After the break, less about libraries, more fun Friday conversations. BfM 89.9. Bureaucratic failures multiply.
BfM 89.9. And we're back. It's fun Friday. My name's Jazan Du together with College of Pop's Matt Amatage.
Before the break, we were talking about engaging in a tech-fueled war of words with librarians. Where are we hating with this, Matt? Well, a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the visionary deficit, the way our technology leaders are letting us down. So let me read another quote from Professor Morducatus.
I'm going to pronounce it your way because that's the right way, I think, via the Guardian. So at the core, Amazon has provided something better than a local library without the tax fees. This is why Amazon should replace local libraries. The move would save taxpayers money and enhance the stockholder value of Amazon, all in one fell swoop.
Well, you can see the issue with that straight away, right? Why we give a darn about Amazon's share price? Precisely, I know it was from Forbes, but it assumes that we're all part of that investor class. That Amazon's share price is our first concern, rather than the well-being of our communities.
We make this assumption that the private sector does everything better because there's a profit motive. But increasingly, in the real world, where people with limited incomes are forced to live, we see the profit motive being shorthand for customers and employees being shortchanged. As other economists and technologists and librarians quickly pointed out via social media, library systems are actually generally profit-making. The net contribution to society, and I'll express it here in terms of dollar value, because apparently that's the only thing that counts, the net contribution to society in doing things that are helping people into work and off benefits in providing alternative routes to education, and a million other things, it far outweighs the tax dollars that are put in.
Libraries are actually a really good social investment. I originally wanted to talk about the piece there. The Author and Tech Generalist Douglas Rushkoffer, he wrote for medium.com from Geekscops, but you wanted to connect it to this topic, is that right? Yeah, I hijack your story, so I'm sorry about that.
For those of you who don't know Rushkoff, he writes widely on the implications and inequalities that Silicon Valley and technology creates. You can check out his most recent book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, for a statement of where he's at. But this particular article, the title is 100% Matt's Blaine Clickbait. How Text Richest Plan to Save Themselves After the Apocalypse, I could have written that myself.
I'm not going to summarise the whole thing, but here's a little backstory. Now, Rushkoff was invited to speak at one of those rich people events that Jeff gets invited to speak out all the time, and they put armed guards in towers to prevent me from attending. So he turns up at this luxury private resort, ready to talk about the future of technology. Instead of talking to about 100 investment bankers, as he imagined, a group of five super rich guys come into a small room and start to pepper him with questions, rather than wait for him to give a presentation.
I'm not sure it's not that weird for him to be giving advice to business leaders. No, it isn't, but what he found weird was the nature of the questioning. These guys were preoccupied with societal collapse, the event, as they called it, and they were concerned with how they could survive it. Now, we've talked about the Uber-rich techies and their bolt holes before, so Rushkoff mentions people like Peter Thiel and his attempts to live forever.
We've talked about fields, fields, attempts to set up his own Pacific Island, utopias, people buying up land in New Zealand, then of course there's good old Elan and his plans to colonise Mars, and of course Sam Altman and Ray Kurzwell trying to upload their consciousness into supercomputers. Because they think that the end is coming, the event. It's really weird, isn't it? These are the guys with the hands on the tiller of the global economy.
So you do find yourself wondering, are they paranoid or do they know something that the rest of us don't know? This is my own half-bait theory here, so I don't blame Douglas Rushkoff for this. I've said on the show before that though technology is making a lot of money for people, it's also ending the system that that money generation is built on. That disruption we love to talk about is also disrupting capitalism, it's chipping away at the foundations of the consumer class and concentrating the wealth upwards.
And they think that at some point there will be a total meltdown? Yeah, either technology puts everyone out of work and the economic order breaks down, or we see growing political chaos and the economic order breaks down, or there are a series of climate or environmental disasters and guess what? A shot in the dark, the economic order breaks down. Yes, that's what I was talking about in our visionary deficit episode.
Our thought and business and technology visionaries aren't really engaged in building a better tomorrow, because they think that the day after tomorrow everything's just going to fall apart. Is it? If this was an explicit rated show, if you have a much stronger answer, what I can say without the station being fined is, who knows? But we're certainly not going to get anywhere if the pilots of the craft think that all hope is lost.
It's a bit like a ship's captain deliberately sailing into an iceberg because he's watched Titanic. There is another option, you can sail around the iceberg. And where does Douglas Rushkoff fit in? Well, apart from having lots of good ideas himself, it's also the weirdness of what he reported that these global visionaries, who he didn't name, which I assume is because of confidentiality agreements, it was the weirdness of what they were asking him.
What would happen when money wasn't worth anything anymore and couldn't be used as a tool or leverage? How could these guys ensure that their own security personnel wouldn't turn on them and choose their own leader? I know it's insane. Could they restrict access to food supply?
Could they make the guards wear some kind of weaponized collar to control them? Could robots and AI be built to do the job of guarding them? And how long will it take to get to that technology? You know, they were looking at a future where everything breaks down and the only way they get to stay in control is with this army of willing or coerced slaves.
It's weird. And how does this relate back to today's topic of bad ideas? Because we're relying on these people to come up with the good ideas to steer society, to create the future that we want to bring about. But what kind of future are they actually pushing us towards?
We talk about the nightmare vision of super clever AI-wiping humanity out. What if some tech billionaire decides to wipe humanity out, to save himself from the super clever AI he thinks is going to destroy him? You know, as Rushkoff points out, these things are all about escape. They're about escaping the confines of this world, escaping our bodies and escaping death.
But you know what it really sounds like? I know you're going to tell us. It sounds like the fantasies of a 10-year-old boy, you know, to go and live beyond the stars, to live forever, or to be a castaway on a desert island. Building your own utopia is something that you do with Lego.
Yet somehow we've gotten to a point where a bunch of immature boy men think that they're running the world. Playing devil's advocate here, don't you think that the more reason and same voices will eventually prevail? Well, despite the nightmare visions we often paint on the show, I generally do lean towards the hopeful side, but those dreams in that sense of hope, if they come true, could be the worst nightmare for the tech elite. Because it means people like us taking back power and control.
And let's not forget, one of the things that this group of people is most fearful of is us. That's why they're so desperate to replace us with machines because we scare them. We like really badly trained puppies. We meet and play for most of the time, but we can give you an nasty bite when you least expect it.
That said, I think we have plenty of bad decisions ahead of us. And of course, there was another one this week. I think I know where you're heading with this one. The US State of Department has cleared the way for 3D printed guns to be legal in US.
Absolutely. It had been earlier argued that the blueprints for these 3D printed guns contravened US armed export regulations because they could be used to manufacture weapons across national borders. Now, the gun lobby in the US rallied behind the US student activist Cody Wilson, who first proposed the idea and came up with the plans for a single shop pistol called the Liberator. And I do find this all a bit hard because the last thing most gun makers want is for people to shortcut them and make their own assault rifles.
What are those blueprints available in the dark web already? Sure, but everything is available somewhere. The point is to kind of red flag and restrict the things we want to make as hard as possible to find. Otherwise, we have landmine vending machines on street corners and Christmas crackers with white phosphorus grenades in them.
It might be a huge victory for gun activists in the US, but it makes control much harder in countries with much stricter gun laws. So, for example, would possessing the gun blueprints be a crime in Malaysia, for example? Of course, printing the gun would be, but we have some of the harshest gun laws in the world in Malaysia. On the other hand, the gun isn't completed, though, because it still needs a metal firing pin.
Sure, but it's only a matter of time before technology catches up with that too. We can already 3D print in metals as well as plastic. It's just that technology isn't as accessible to home users. Or someone will come up with something using a strong composite material like graphite, and the entire gun will be undetectable and untraceable, and you can make it in minutes from a machine that fits in your suitcase.
Is there any good news on the horizon? Yes. A venture capitalist called Tim Draper has spent the last few years fighting to have California split into six different states, and when that failed, he's now pushing for three different states. So, he was an early investor in things like Skype and Bitcoin.
He was a major supporter of Theranos, the House of Cards blood testing company we talked about a couple of months ago. Draper managed to get his proposal to split the US's wealthiest state into three onto the ballot for this November. He's arguing that California has become ungovernable, and of course, no one argues that California isn't in the midst of a huge number of challenges from income equality to resource depletion, drought and plenty of others. What no one can quite understand is why cutting it into three would solve any of those problems.
Why not cut it into two, or cut it into 100? It just seems to be very arbitrary. How is this good news? Because California's state Supreme Court is holding it up for further examination.
It could be clear to appear on a ballot in the future, but a lot of folks are skeptical, not least because it would potentially fall into the category of revision to the state's constitution rather than an amendment. So, it would actually require a different regulatory approach. But even if it did succeed, it would require approval from the US National Congress for the new states to effectively secede from one another. So, despite the fact that there are reports that Draper paid canvases up to $3 per signature required, and he spent millions of his own money on this and the 2014 Division campaign.
The billionaires and their money don't always get away. Exactly. And I've got a suggestion. We crowd-sourced some catastrophic event.
It could be a zombie apocalypse alien invasion. We cede it through social media as though it's real. So, the techno babies get scared and they retreat to their underground bunkers. And once they're down there, we can keep up the act.
We can put the Cloverfield movies on loop on giant screens in front of their video cameras, keep the loops rolling for a couple of hundred years while we get on with building a better society and they get to live out their little boy fantasies underground. I'm glad we've come to the end of Matt's Blaining and I sincerely hope that you feel better next week. Anyways, if you missed any parts of the show, you could download the podcast as available on the BFM app or the BFM website. You can also check out culturepops.com for transcripts of these shows.
And of course, you can find out just how to bring a little bit of the under-the-weather Matt's Blaining to your company. We'll be right back with GeekSwap to 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.