MSP75 [] The 100: Paying for Privacy

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's Tech Talk, my name is Jasandu, as this show is airing on May 3rd, you might expect that Uber Geek, Matt Amadege, would be doing a Matt's Blaine Star Wars tribute today. The answer is, of course, no. It seems like we're going to the return of the slightly trashy steampunk sci-fi show, The 100 Instead.

Matt, are we continuing last week's disruption theme with a TV show about the most disrupted future you can imagine? Hey Jeff, yes, I'm continuing with the disrupted world theme that we started last week. So, originally, I was going to do something that tied in with Star Wars a little more closely. In fact, I was planning to do a show about how movies now seem a little disappointing compared to games.

I watched Avengers Endgame this week, and I have to admit, I was actually slightly disappointed. I'd heard all the hype and I kept away from the spoilers, and don't worry, no spoilers here. But I was imagining how it might work, especially now Captain Marvel has been admitted into the cinematic universe. Yeah, so what disappointed you?

Well, it turned out that my imagination was taking me way further out than the movie went. Don't get me wrong, it is a really good movie, but I found it fairly predictable. That spun me back to the idea I'd had about so many movies being a little bit underwhelming compared to the streaming shows, and of course, increasingly to those vast universes that games now seem to inhabit. But you don't know enough about gaming, man?

Yeah, so it made my comments seem a little bit trivial and from nowhere. But I do stand by that idea. The complexity of the worlds you can now explore and inhabit in gaming is astonishing, especially those titles that don't have a standardized gameplay. You can explore the world of worlds.

Obviously, you can bash a few heads along the way when you get bored, but you can basically define your own role and your own place within those worlds. And that's far more interesting to me than this kind of linear narrative that we're getting from movies at the moment. And you're going to be talking about books again? I am because I love books.

I think what disappointed me most about Endgame, and if some of you are wondering if you're listening to a text show or a movie review, this is a text show and I will get to the point eventually, the thing about Endgame was the idea of all the realms and dimensions that the previous movie Infinity War had laid open for us. So I imagined it spinning off a bit like the Terry Pratchett and Steven Back to series The Long Earth, where the population of Earth suddenly gains access to an almost infinite number of parallel Earths and just spreads out. Before this gets any complicated, let's summarize things a little. You decided not to talk about Star Wars because you were disappointed in the Avengers movie.

You didn't know enough about gaming to make it as your central point, and now you want to talk about the 100 because it's the ultimate example of a disrupted world. Very nearly right. Well, listen, but still so wrong. No, for two reasons which I hope will become clear.

When we started talking about Disruption last week, I thought it was going to be a one-off show. But since then, and thanks to comments and feedback from listeners on that show, it's going to be more of a mini-series, so probably a four-part of this is number two. And I was expecting the comments to go the other way, to be honest. I thought that the haters would pile on me, but it didn't happen, which just goes to show how few startup operators are actually listening to this show.

Maybe they were too busy making disruptive proposals to angel investors who were intending to disrupt them out of their own ship steps. So this is like a continuation, then? In some ways, but it's more about how we can stage our own interruptions. I'm going to call that instead of disruptions.

And the second reason? Well, this week we received an enormous gift from Mark Zuckerberg. The statement from him that the future is private. So Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook doesn't have the best reputation in that aspect, and as well as integrating the messaging apps of all Facebook's products and bringing them together, he also announced that the company would trial a payment system via WhatsApp in countries like India.

But what does this have to do with the 100? Well, firstly, because we have to be totally committed to the idea of protecting our privacy, the idea that any company, let alone Facebook, is going to do that is a notion that we have to just get rid of immediately. Government and lawmakers can help us, but only if we actually elect the ones who are truly committed to making the changes that we need them to make. And lastly, because it's going to take a lot of effort and commitment from us to get us back on track to a world where we are connected, but still private citizens.

And the TV show? Well, because we briefly touched on the idea of pivoting last week. So pivoting is the kind of ultimate startup admission that your business model doesn't work. Usually it means pivoting to another model that doesn't work, but it will raise a little more capital and keep the lights on for a few more weeks.

So the chat, I was having a chat with a client about it, but I was saying that if a business has flexibility, it can move in different directions without having to pivot. And of course, then you're bringing more revenue systems online. And that's what the 100 is about. A steampunk world with multiple revenue streams?

No, not quite. As the great romantic poet Chris Martin once said, nobody said it was easy. No, the 100 is a great example of a TV show that can completely reboot from one season to the next, without ever disrupting what it's about. It doesn't pivot.

It literally blows up the world it lives in and reinvents itself a season later. Nearly every season ends with nuclear Armageddon. And it's a great idea because it allows the characters to change as well. The heroes and villains of the show are always the same people.

One season, you're the good guy. The next year, a despot who spent five years in an underground bunker forcing your subjects to fight each other so everyone else can eat the loser. It's the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. Isn't that just confusing?

Absolutely. And it refuses to apologize for it either. And that's what I love about the show. It's as messy as real life is.

And it always fully commits. That's why the 100 is my blueprint for dealing with pivots like the one that Facebook is attempting. See what I did there? We're the 100 and Facebook is the one.

And this is a pivot in the true sense. This is Facebook saying what we were doing wasn't working. We need to do things differently. And that's a good thing, right?

Well, this is part of what's at the heart of the debate. We already know that the tech industry in general means something very different when they talk about privacy. And it's the same with this Facebook pivot. What they mean when they look at this model is that they will protect our privacy within their apps and services.

So we'll have encryption on all our posts and messages. No outsiders will be able to see them. Facebook will be enhancing the functionality of its groups features, presumably so users who prefer the lockdown groups of instant messaging. So you think that this is the answer to the younger users who are hitting straight for apps like the WhatsApp and Instagram and bypassing the more open world of social media services?

I think that's definitely part of it. So E-wallets are kind of transforming this space. They're becoming this one-stop shop for everything from ordering food to lending friends money to booking a hotel or a taxi to messaging your friends and sharing videos and doing all the other stuff that we love to do online. Isn't that what social media services like Facebook have always wanted to be?

I think so. I mean, we've seen so many efforts by all of these companies to become more of a kind of revenue hub. Facebook has its marketplace, which kind of competes with services like Carousel. I mean, it seems so obvious that Twitter should be a way to transfer money and make micro-abandonets.

But I think what the E-wallets providers have found is that it's easier to expand outwards from financial services and into content rather than the other way around. Because people are already spending their money with you. You can just introduce a new tab and see if people are interested in streaming movies or DMing each other or taking photos. If it doesn't work, there's no great loss?

No, because the majority of your revenue still comes from financial transactions of, you know, numerous descriptions. And that's what I meant when I talked about flexibility. Facebook has to pivot towards privacy and try to demonstrate that in some ways it's a fundamentally different company. E-wallets have the flexibility to just add new revenue streams.

Their business models can adapt and grow a lot more easily, largely because they're built around a transaction between them and their users. And of course, the service that the app connects them to. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even Google to an extent are kind of back to front. We interact with those services and those services sell the interactions to third parties, which is why this whole discussion about privacy is just kind of crazy.

All right. When we come back, and I think you've probably guessed it already, Matt's 100 Field Manifesto for protecting your privacy will be right back. 89.9. Bluff free medium, BFM 89.9.

And we're back. And my name is Joss and I'm together with CollegeBobs and Admitedge. Today's MSP is looking at privacy in the disruptive age before the brick. I was thoroughly confused when Matt Matt's playing the connection between social media, business models to movies and TV shows.

Is this the part of the show where you tell us all to disrupt the future? Well, it's a little bit of a dismissive way to describe it. But yeah, I think it's a fairly good description. I think I called them interruptions before the break, but we can reclaim Disrupt and you know, make it more positive.

Do we need to make that distinction? I think we do. If there's anyone listening in who hasn't heard last week's show on Disruption, it might be a good idea to go back and play that one first. As I mentioned last week, we're actually the ones who tend to get disrupted.

We get disrupted out of stable jobs, good salaries, and working conditions. Disruptors often claim that what they do is good for consumers. By lowering costs. Amongst other things, yes.

But often those lower costs are artificial because they're made with borrowed money, not because the business operates at lower costs and passes the savings off to consumers. And specifically because it's a strategy to put the existing base in that industry out of business. What happens to prices after that is pretty much anyone's guess. But economic and social history tends to show us that monopolies will have a tendency to put up prices, decrease innovation and investment and of course, wallow in the high priced soup of our suffering.

But when we hear that a company like Facebook is making privacy, it's focused that it's reorienting its business around what its consumers are asking for. To most people, that does sound like a good thing. And it can be, first and foremost, we'll throw this consumer term around a lot. We are consumers.

We're also customers. But those things are only part of our lives, part of what we do. Companies look at people in very reductionist terms. They're really only interested in the parts of our lives that they can monetize.

We're not fully rounded human beings to them. We are just consumers. And if you look at social media apps in general, they're essentially an attempt to commoditize our conversations. Well, you could say the same thing about the telephone.

Which is a completely valid point. I'm not saying that any of this is new. It's just the digital medium that's new. Whether it's a phone, a social media network or a messaging app, you know, those things are great tools.

They can bridge enormous distances. But how many of our communications actually take place over vast distances? How many of our listeners have messaged a friend or family member in the next room or even across the table from them? You know, we've already allowed those conversations to be commoditized and data mined.

It's easier to speak via a third party than it is to speak face to face, even when you're physically sitting face to face. Which brings us back to privacy. How? Because when I talk about my own sense of privacy, I'm talking about something that's much larger than the kind of encryption that an app on my phone is using.

My privacy is about how thick the walls on my house are. Are there cameras in the street monitoring where I go? Is my phone or my TV listening to me? Is my boss snooping on my email and browser?

He isn't because I'm a boss. Do my digital devices contain malware either from third parties or even from the manufacturer itself? And if the answer to any of those questions is yes? Then you have to wonder where does that information go?

Who gets that information? What are they doing with that information? Because there's no point having people around me. I can trust with my secrets.

If there are devices and apps capturing my words and sharing them with anyone who can pay. So I guess the point is not to have secrets. But the thing is we all have secrets. Even if it's as small as that secret ingredient that makes your French toast different from all the other French toast out there.

To which my answer is mutton fact. No, I didn't say nicer French toast. I just said different. The point is that we should be able to choose what we share.

Surely that's the point of what Facebook is doing, moving towards the privacy of its users. But there's a fundamental and inherent disconnect there. Facebook or any other communication service is enticing us to channel our communications and conversations through its servers. And then we're demanding that it keeps all our information safe.

So going back to your question, yes, it's a good thing. We want Facebook to encrypt our data so that bosses can't read it or to stop third parties like Google from being able to grab cash and analyze that information. Even for something as simple as stopping another person from ripping off your cat videos and putting them onto their own monetized insta feed for which you receive no credit or revenue. Those of course are all good things.

Now, if we've resolved that, we still have another seven minutes of time to fill. Unless you're about to say yes and no. Yes, I am about to say yes and no. No, this refers to Facebook only because Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about it publicly this week.

It could apply equally to any number of digital companies that use this same revenue model that Facebook uses. And the reason we don't trust companies like Facebook is not because their services are insecure and allow third parties to mine our lives. The problem is the companies themselves. So it goes back to what you were saying about privacy having a different meaning depending on who's using it.

Yeah, it's another one of those them and us things. So having a company like Facebook or Twitter or even Google pivoting towards privacy is not going to solve our most fundamental problems with them, which is rooted in their actual business model. And you were saying that e-wallets don't face the same issues? No, because they have a fairly straightforward business model.

They're a payment gateway or they're a payment aggregator or both and probably a lot more besides. So take the social aspect of them away and they still make money. And there's a mind shift that we have to make as well. We use those services when we want to make a transaction.

We've already decided to become consumers by the time we open up the app. And we're working with different mindsets. Well, when your world is based on a free or freemium model, you're essentially a business gymnast. You're taking a bunch of people who don't think of themselves as consumers or who don't understand that they're making a transaction and you're trying to turn those people into a source of revenue.

So as much as any tech company with a seemingly free business model values your privacy, it has to turn your life into money. And that's the essential problem that I don't think any company can overcome, which is why you think we should start to interrupt or disrupt those conversations. Yeah, you know, for me, the only way we will ever have privacy is if we pay for it, you know, look at the rest of your life. How do you stop your neighbors from overhearing your conversations?

Well, you buy a piece of land and put as much distance between yourself and the next human beings as you can afford, or you book yourself into the VIP room at a bar or restaurant, or you invest your time, energy and probably money in politicians or activists willing to fight for your privacy vision. So the money is the key. Not always, but in this instance, yes, I think it is, you know, we treat social media companies as though they're some kind of community service, but they're not their private profit seeking companies. And they can't guarantee your privacy when they rely on auctioning your privacy to the highest biders as their main source of revenue.

It's like if you're using Amazon's S three servers to store your data, you have a right to demand that Amazon makes your information secure and it protects that information. You're paying them to do that with free services, your private data is the fee. It's what you're paying them with. They can't protect it because it's the only currency they have.

They have to exchange it with someone else for money just to pay their own stuff and to pay for all those content moderators whose horrible job is to keep all those terrestreams off your feed. You think we're asking them for something that's impossible. Absolutely. And that's why their definition of privacy is so different from ours.

The worst thing is we can really only blame ourselves. We're the ones who decided we preferred not paying for stuff and it's messed up our expectations completely. You know, think of it as buying a juicer. I don't know why we always choose this whole, yeah, it's always the option.

You know, you can't afford that Philip Stark designed one that would make your kitchen look awesome. So you find a knockoff on Alibaba for a tenth of the price. You don't expect it to juice as well as start its machine. In fact, you've probably got to juice the fruit before you can even put it in the in the juicer itself, even then it shorts out the whole house and probably gives you an electric shop as well.

But that's okay because that's what you expect it to do. It looks good in your kitchen, but it was cheaper than it should be to do its job. Whereas with the tech companies, we got a free juice and we're expecting it to work like these designer ones. Yes, because our expectations are nuts.

But as we chose their business model for them, we're the ones who can change. We can disrupt that business model and that brings us back to that 100% from the beginning because it's going to take commitment and it's going to take a bit of tough love. No one wants to deliberately choose to pay for stuff. Anyone who is paying subscriptions for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple, HBO to go, cable and the high-speed connection to support it all can tell you that paying for stuff sucks, but not paying for stuff sucks a lot worse.

And if the 100 can reinvent itself from season to season, we can do the same. If you want Facebook to guarantee your privacy and your best interests, the simplest way is to give it money to protect them. Preach to Manama Deitch. Preach.

I totally agree. Manama Deitch, they're talking about the 100 paying for privacy. If you miss any parts of the show, you can get the transcripts actually on culturebox.com and also you can find out the podcast on the BFM app. All you can get it on Spotify.

My name is Jasmine, I'm with Culturebox Man. I think we'll be right back after this. It keeps us up 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 for the business station.