Can you do it? In half an hour? Yeah. I mean Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes about.

I'm a realist. You know, this idea of tech skeptic means somehow I don't trust tech. And this is a radio thing, so you weren't full of full of digital items in my bag, phones and computers and all the rest of it. I'm not a tech skeptic. I'm skeptical of the utopian claims of the first and second wave innovators in Silicon Valley who promised everything and delivered very little. But that doesn't make me a tech skeptic. I'm a realist, so I I I don't I'm not sure I actually like the term skeptic. Well, I'll strike it. Team is using that.

So It's

sorry. How to Fix the Future is my fourth book. My first three were books that I think were realistic and were pointing out the problems with the promises of Silicon Valley. First was called Cult of the Amateur, which warned of the implications of the so called democratization of media, the doing away of gatekeepers. I warned that it would undermine truth, it would undermine expertise, and we would have a more and more ignorant and self opinionated population, which is something that certainly has come true. You know, it's epitomized by our new president or your new president. You're not gonna claim him, Well, I'm not an American citizen, so he's not mine. I can't take responsibility for that one. Second book was called Digital Vertigo that argued that social media was actually antisocial, that it actually bred narcissism and an inwardness and an echo chamber culture. And the last one was called the Internet's Not the Answer that suggested that the perfectly free market of the of of of the digital economy was actually creating a winner take all economy of more and more powerful oligarchists, maybe even monopolies. There's no skepticism there. I was simply pointing out the reality. And I think over the last ten years, my argument, which was originally made by a small minority of authors, has now become mainstream. There's Yeah. Has shifted. The so called edge companies are now being seen as the new Wall Street. They're the problem rather than the solution. So having written those first three books, I've written a book now which focuses on solutions. We know what the problems are. Inequality, the looming crisis of unemployment, the break cultural crisis, instability, undermining of truth, and the surveillance capitalist business model of free companies like Google and Facebook, which it might be doesn't work because it acts against the consumer's real interest. So given all those things, more and more people actually agree with me. Yeah. So I guess everyone now is a scam. You were ahead of the game, and now, you're mainstream. But I would rather say, we've all become come down to Earth. We've stopped drinking the Kool Aid. So what are we gonna do about it? Yeah. This book is a very down to Earth, very focused way. I spent a year traveling around the world, not just in Silicon Valley, not just on the East Coast Of The US either. I went to Estonia and India and Singapore, spent a lot of time in Western Europe, and figuring out what are people actually doing to fix this stuff, because they are. Because the ultimate issue is agency. I I invent my own law. We will know more Gordon Moore's law, which is the engine, the driver of the economy. I come up with my own Moore's law, which is Thomas Moore's law, which is derived from Thomas Moore, sixteenth century author of Utopia. And it's a law that suggests and, again, I don't think it's particularly original about this. Even Moore took it from someone else, probably took it from Plato, Esophrages, or something. But Moore was saying that the ultimate responsibility of human beings is to shape their future of society and not to imagine perfect worlds. Moore's Utopia was actually a dystopian book or a warning against being Utopian. So, so,

top level, what are the solutions here? Well, I what I argue in the book, the book is very historical that, in terms of determining agency and, reforming disruption or dealing with disruption, we've been through this before. We went through it in the industrial age. We went through it in the renaissance, the reformation. These upheavals are ones these dramatic socioeconomic and cultural upheavals happen every century or two. And this is a big one. The last time it happened was the industrial revolution. And we've always we've we've always had as human beings, five tools to fix the future. The first is regulatory through government. The second is through innovation through entrepreneurs. The third is through consumer and worker activism. The fourth is through citizen engagement, and the fifth is through education. Those tools don't change. There's no app to fix the future. Often in Silicon Valley, you hear this idea, oh, well, this is the first time this has ever happened in history, or this is the first time we've ever had technology new in the sense that we've never had smart machines before, but we've always had technology that undermines people's work and labor and sense of who they are. So none of this is new. And the tools we have for pushing back, the tools we have for determining our agency and fixing the future aren't new either. So those are the five tools. You might even think of them as technologies we have as human beings as citizens for making a better

Is that likely? Is regulation something that's coming? And is that something that you you are advocating for? It's it's interesting that anytime I have this conversation in America, people always bring up the regulation issue first. Now we're in DC, so you guys are actually, I'm guessing, slightly more sympathetic to regulation.

You know, I think we should think of regulation as a kind of innovation. We should think of this stuff historically. For example, in the '19 in the mid to late nineteen nineties, we had a a very dominant company, Microsoft, which illegally or illegally, and you can argue either way, crushed all competition and destroyed innovation. And had we not had an antitrust an aggressive antitrust case against Microsoft, we never would have had the explosion, the innovative explosion of Web two point a. We never would have had Google or Facebook or any of these other amazing companies. And Microsoft would have transformed the Internet into just an extension of Microsoft itself. As all companies wanna do, it doesn't make them evil. That's just the nature of dominant companies. So regulation is important. We've come we're back to the future. We're back to the mid nineties. Only back then, you had Microsoft, which, I guess, then seemed like a large powerful company. Today, we have five or five companies, including Microsoft, which actually are way larger than Microsoft ever was. Way more political and economic heft. Five largest companies in the world now are all tech companies. They're all West Coast companies. You know, Google, obviously, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. And we need regulation. I I one of the chapters in the book I I interview, I spent some time with a woman called Margaret Festinger. You know, she's the EU commissioner of antitrust. And she is there's a single person standing up to the private superpowers of Silicon Valley. It's it's Vestager. She's doing a remarkable job. And, I think that's good. I think what the Europeans are pioneering on the pioneering on the data protection front is also extremely important. That 20 this year's law, the

Yeah. This is an important beginning. It may not be perfect, like the right to be forgotten EU law wasn't perfect, but it's Sure. A move in the right place. I think the Americans are following suit as they always do, of course, with Saint Churchill has his famous quote about America. They always do everything wrong until finally they get it right. Americans have always lagged behind on on on on much stuff. And particularly when it comes to regulation, they've always lagged behind the Europeans. But I think more and more people in congress from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren, they're all coming around to the same conclusion, Whether you're a conservative or a liberal, it's unhealthy for an economy to have such dominant companies. It's unhealthy for consumers. Consumers don't have choice. Their business models are corrosive. And so the time is coming, I think. The zeitgeist has shifted, and the time is coming where, perhaps organizations like you will put put together alliances and initiatives that will, begin to Yeah. Establish creative regulation, innovation that enables sorry. Regulation that enables innovation. So, and and and even people in Silicon Valley are coming around to understanding that this is a reality. Whatever one says about Silicon Valley, it's full of very, very smart people and people whose job it is to predict the future.

that That is that's the problem. Look. The whole essence of my book is about agency. If we feel so disempowered, so irrelevant that we can't get anything done, then we lose. It's always the case in history that the darkest time again and I keep on meaning to bring up Churchill, but, you know, he's on all our minds because lots of movies and stuff about him. But in the darkest time is also where there's the most hope and where we need to push back most aggressively. Sure. Look. DC. I don't need to tell you guys. DC is dysfunctional. We've got lots of political problems, and certainly the American political system, has has has a lot of dysfunctionality about it, which I can't solve and which the tech industry can't solve. But having said that, this issue of agency is so important. If we just sit back and say, well, smart machines are gonna take our jobs. Well, what can we do? We're just gonna become unemployed and starve to death. Or, you know, these companies are so sure. There's nothing we can do, and their business models are so dominant that we're just gonna allow our privacy be to be destroyed and live in a completely transparent world where these huge face as companies watch us in everything we do. Then then we are screwed. I could use another word, but I'm sure this is a family controlled podcast. We can keep it out. Right. We we we really are screwed. So the issue is agency. The issue is believing. The issue is putting together coalitions, Working with those five tools. Showing that collectively whether we're consumers or workers in the sharing economy, whether we are, citizens, parents, teachers, educators, whether we're regulators, whether we're entrepreneurs, we're all on the same page. Now it isn't some concerted action. The five tools don't always come together. They tend to be chaotic as they were in the industrial revolution. But history is moving in the right way now. And and it's not gonna happen overnight. We live in an age where we're so impatient unless something happens immediately, it's not gonna get fixed. There's no app to fix the future. None of these tools get done in a year. Look at the example of the industrial revolution. Many of the most troubling consequences were fixed over fifty or a hundred years. You had social security systems and insurance systems and protection of child labor. It took generations. The same is true today because what's happening are profound. There's structural shifts in how we organize, how we think of ourselves, how we work. And so it's gonna take time. But if we go into this saying, well, there's nothing we can do. It's it's it's hopeless. We're gonna lose. We will lose.

Well, I and I and this answer is not all citizens are gonna like this. Is, you know, citizens have a responsibility. Citizens need to be accountable too. In the old media world, a good citizen was someone who read newspapers. A good citizen was someone who read different people's opinion. They might read both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. They wouldn't agree on everything. And certainly, their editorial pages didn't, but they would have the ability to, to, to consume different points of view and be open to other people's opinions. I think the problem with, and this isn't just a technological issue. I don't it's always too easy to blame everything on technology, and that's part of the problem. It's not the solution. You know, television does this as well. MSNBC and, and MSNBC and Fox are dreadful echo chamber networks where they just confirm what their viewers already think in the first place. I tell all my friends who are angry, stop watching cable TV. You're gonna be less angry. I'm looking at the Internet. I mean, you know, Facebook is the friends and family syndrome where everything that gets dished up, every news story confirms what we already think. It's McLuhan's global village in the worst sense. We're becoming more and more like villages. And villages don't make good citizens. In the modern world, in a global world, in the large countries like The United States, the good citizen becomes open to other people's opinion and is well informed. There is great information on the network. I mean, the Internet's been amazing in terms of producing very high quality curated news sites like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Financial Times. But consumers have to pay for it. Consumer citizens, whatever you wanna call them. I think one of the problems is we've reduced citizenship into consumption. And we've reduced the the idea of the we've idealized, we fetishized the consumer so much on the Internet that somehow they have the right to everything for free. So anytime they should pay for anything, the existence of paywalls or news sites, for example, it's somehow unfair. It's anti democratic. It isn't. We, you know, we we pay for our rent. We pay for our clothes and our cars and our food. We should be paying for our news too. So I would say the good citizen is well informed. The good citizen escapes the parochialism, the localism, the xenophobia of social networks, whether it's Twitter or Facebook. And they reengage with high quality curated news. One of the encouraging things I found in my book is the free movement of culture seems to have collapsed. And people now are once again buying, spending money on information. So I would say a good citizen, pays. I mean, not everyone has huge amounts of money, but everyone can afford, at least a book like the how to fix the future. Right? Right. Obviously, I it'd be lovely if everyone bought the book. But everyone can afford an, a monthly subscription, say, on The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, where they're well informed. So I think this issue of of of information and and and high quality information, the Internet promised a renaissance of information, of learning. It still has that potential. It's disappointed so far because of the degeneration into a kind of village like culture. But we can escape that, and consumers can do it. But it won't be consumer citizens can do it, but it can't be delivered on a plate. We've become lazy too, and the engaged citizen is not a lazy citizen.

Well, some are getting it more right than others. The the two that are getting it completely wrong in my view, are China and Russia. There's a sort of a new ideological cold war. The Chinese are rebuilding a a kind of a digital we're using digital tools, a big brother state. So we have the reappearance of totalitarianism in Russia, in China, using digital tools, and and that's really a nightmare. Russia has become this sort of, den, to to use a polite word, of of, of, of trollery where Putin is taking advantage of the uncurated nature of the democracy where we're supposed to get all this free information to pay for trolls who are undermining our democracy or interfering with our elections and corroding our civic lives. So Russia and China, I think, are the bad guys in all this. The place I went to that I was really amazed with was the Stoner. It's a small country on the Northeastern border of Russia, Baltic State. Not large, not important in economic terms. But they're really pioneering lots of interesting experiments, particularly one experiment that I was very fascinated with was a new kind of social contract on data between citizen and government. In the big data age, we are gonna be or we are spewing huge amounts of data about ourselves out into the world. We're doing it with our smartphones now. We will do it with our smart cars and our smart homes. And eventually, for better or worse, with our smart bodies. What becomes of all that data? And how do we relate to government? Now, of course, we have the Orwellian nightmare of a Chinese style government that collects all that data and then determines housing policy and job policy in terms of our ideological correctness. That's that's the nightmare. What the Estonians are doing are building a much more transparent and accountable, if you like, a data democracy between government and, and citizen. Where everyone is wired, it's one of the most with Singapore, it's one of the most wired countries in the world. The government does acquire the data, but the government is required to be very transparent when it accesses that data. So what's happening, I think, in Estonia is particularly interesting. Also in Singapore, I I I have two chapters which I call utopia, which aren't really utopian, but at least sort of point to the utopian elements in these cultures. Estonia and Singapore are both very, very interesting.

Absolutely. We have to do it. I mean, we we live in an age of smart. We're living in the in the century of smart machines. We're invented. Every tech company now is essentially an AI company. Whether it's Google or Facebook or Microsoft, they're all in the same business. We this is the century of smart machines. These smart machines, some people believe, will eventually enslave us. May or may not be true. At the moment, I think that's somewhat of a scientific and a science fictional scenario. But it's not entirely unrealistic. We have to get this right because if we don't, these smart machines are gonna take away our jobs. They may enslave us in the long run. And above all else, they're creating, they're gonna be owned by these increasingly unaccountable, massively powerful monopolistic companies that don't respect us as human beings or as citizens. So we gotta get it right. We have no alternative. Just as in the middle of the nineteenth century, we needed to get the industrial revolution right. When 11 year olds were working in factories, when cities were so badly polluted that you couldn't go out at night. Where if you lost your hand in a factory accident, you starved in the street because there was no government government insurance. We got it right then, not ideally. We still have an environmental crisis. But at the same time, we were forced as human beings. That's what we do as human beings. We we fix the future. That's our business. That's what we are as a species. That's what distinguishes us from smart machines. So it's both the medium and the message, if you like, of the twenty first century to respond to the threat, the challenge, and also the opportunity of smart machines, because they're amazing in many ways. We have to be more human. So the, the subtitle of my UK book, not The US book, is is how to remain human in the digital age. And that's the essence. That's why this is such an important issue. This isn't marginal. This isn't just for geeks. This is not just for the the tech aisle of the bookstore. This needs to be right up front. This is the great question of twenty first century.