Less attainabletoday the later , Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof and sheryl wu dont report on the issues facing the working class in rural america. An enjoyable tv now and over the weekend on cspan2. Great to sit down with you and your book, dont be evil is contained plenty on a timely subject given the political times we are in , given the heights that the stocks of apple, amazon, google and facebook and others have reached but you normally have a pretty broad scope to your coverage. Why is this book, why now mark. At you for having me by the way. I started this book i guess it was in 2017. And i had just taken a job as a columnist for the Financial Times and my mandate was to figure out are the worlds biggest business and economic stories and cover them in opinion form is a rather large mandate and in order for the to narrow the funnel i started looking through wealth figures and i thought i saw an amazing numbers in terms of how well to transition to the technology sector. Since the great financial crisis and one of the numbers that really stuck out was the Mckinsey Global institute figure looking at how 80 percent of corporate wealth was being held in just 10 percent of firms and those were the firms that were richest in personal data, intellectual property so basically if you were trafficking in these things , you were holding the majority of the world corporate wealth and the biggest of those firms were the ones that i profiled in the book, facebook, apple, amazon, netflix a little bit and google most of all. They make money all of them pretty differently theres some overlap facebook and google , they dig into Digital Advertising but look at apple. Theyve mostly shunned advertising unless they sell their devices, their technology. Uber isnt an ad driven company, not a profitable Country Company either but making money on a whole differentbasis. Besides the fact that we think of them as all being tech , they all have one thing in common. Its a great question and its an interesting point you make because right now theyre all trying to separate each other as regulators to look more tightly at the space. I think the thing they do all have in common is the Network Effect and the Network Effect is something i talk about in my book, its the idea that as you get big you get bigger. The Business Model of these companies and of many unicorns in Silicon Valley, those giant private billiondollar firms is to reign in as much territory as possible as quickly as possible. Everybody wants a moat, move fast and break things you get in and you do this in many cases by sacrificing margins so Companies Like amazon also like uber. You go and you undercut the world taxi services. You take over the entire industry and worry about profits later area this is something that businesses simply havent been able to do at scale in this way until now. That in and of itself has a lot of ramifications. It cuts competitors in ways that may in fact the anticompetitive and point to monopoly power. The book is called dont be evil which harks back to googles now i guess inappropriate motto. But original very optimistic and yet complex simplistic statement about itself. What was going to adhere to. The implication is that its not evil, they certainly gotten kindof bad. So whats bad about being big and powerful and successful. Where to start. I wrote 350 pages on. Dont be evil was the mantra of course that the google guys came up with in the mid1990s which is when the internet really was a garage industry. The Consumer Internet was just being born and you had all these individual fulltime entrepreneurs coming up with these monies and the reason i decided to focus on google and on this idea of not being evil is that google was there really in the beginning so when you write a book , particularly a complicated book looks at economic and political and social issues you want to find a continuous narrative arc and at the time that i started looking at this facebook was really the company was in the news for elections manipulation, although theres been plenty of that on google but election manipulation, monopoly power grid of bad behavior in general but if you go back and you look at google and its surroundings, i read a paper that larry page and survey brain, the founders of google wrote in 1998 and combined this paper on the internet, it looks at what are the Search Engines, how would you run a Search Engine , how would you pay for the Search Engine and they at the end in an appendix section have a paragraph on advertising and they talk about how targeted advertising, which is the Business Model of essentially watching what you are doing online, seeing what youre clicking on, what are you searching, building a kind of a digital voodoo doll of you showing that advertisers and auctioning your eyeballs off to the highest bidder. That Business Model would eventually bring users of search and advertisers into conflict read their interest would not be the same bday companies or large state entities like russia or iran or rightwing nationalists or whoever might want to reach you and try to influence you so this was amazing to me. Its like a grim prophecy. This is one of the things that bugs me when i see tech ceos get up on the hill and say were so sorry, we could never have imagined all these terrible things. Go back to that paper in 1998, it was kind of air in the small print. The unspoken foil inthe statement dont be evil was microsoft. So at the time in the 90s, especially the mid to late 90s they were seen as this ascendant evil empire that had stepped on apple with windows 3. 1 and formed into the internet and trying to own everything. Its odd now that bill gates is now this sainted figure in technology, getting all this money away and why does every billionaire do what he does and the current ceo of microsoft is seen as this kindly exemplar and yet effective ceo. They owned, under two much fire or scrutiny with the rest of the groups. Its true, i didnt focus on microsoft and you know, i think if microsoft had their way im sure that they be happy to have a very successful Search Engine , bing is not that Search Engine but that actually goes to the point. Everything youre saying kind of cones in on what constitutes monopoly power, what constitutes anticompetitive behavior. The microsoft antitrust case which actually sort of allow a lot of people would say the space for google to be born and to grow. That happened over 20 years ago at this point. That was the last time that regulators and the public really look at a con valley, took a hard look at the tech sector and said we have to competition problems here. Microsoft spent so much time grappling with those issues. Being drawn into legal battles google was able to get this leg up. Google was tracking not in software but in the data. And surveillance capitalism as shoshana wrote a wonderful book on that topic and dumped it really hold the world. And if you go to some of the books that were written about data economics by people like house. Who is the economist at google, they talk a lot about the power of network, how in this new world the Network Effect of surveillance capitalism, that the company would become natural anomalies read the whole thing, these guys didnt want to get into the business unless they thought they could create monopolies so it away sort of comes into conflict with the dont be evil slogan pretty early on. Its complicated to because while we talk about them as being monopolies and having monopoly power in a lot of cases at the same time theyre all competing with each other is what they would argue. They say the cloud, amazon, microsoft is the challenger and in operating systems microsoft, and smart phones apple is in the lead. If youre counting devices google is in the lead if youre counting operating systems, they would argue look how much competition there is but were looking at the wrong numbers. Theres so much wrong with that argument and in fact youre amending me an early conversation i had with google when i started thinking about this book, and with one of their strategy falls and put forward my idea you guys are natural monopolists. We have a Companies Competition issue here and she looked surprised and said we feel like were competing against the big guys all the time but thats the issue. Its the lot of the goliath at this point. You have a handful of players really basically three or four companies. The have taken over everything and are actually moving into an entirely new heels so look in the last few months the landgrab thats happening on the part of apple, amazon, google and areas like healthcare, in areas like finance. Weve seenamazon overnight into the grocery business. Theres, its hard to think of a business that could be disrupted by these giant firms. That might beg the question of why havent you seen other Major Industries saying hey, we need a monopoly. A very Faustian Bargain because they benefit. Every company in the world that fits on the power of targeted advertising. Theyre all using it and increasingly, the model has been pioneered by these businesses , harvesting our personal data for free, imagine if gm got out of steel for free, that they would have doubledigit Profit Margins to read harvesting our data for free red telling it, collating it across devices, across industries. Look at some of the privacy and security monopoly issues with a company like facebook. Then think about laying a Checking Account on on that and your healthcare data onto that and think about the world of smart speakers. And how the surveillance thats all around us now, its not just online. Itsin our smart home. You know what, my husband loves an and hes in his office. I insist he turns the darn thing off every time i go in there. I cannot imagine. Particularly at the political moments we live in i do not want a surveillance device in my home. You mentionedshoshanas surveillance capitalism, lets talk about what that is. The idea and then fill in the details. The idea that by watching people, by collecting data on what people are doing, you can build all Economic System that doesnt necessarily benefit them. Theyre not necessarily the consumer but they are the good. Its funny, just the word consumer. Shoshana goes back and its a wonderful book and i read it as i was doing my research. She looked in a very academic way almost through a marxist lens at the history of capitalism and how this new kind of surveillance capitalism is in some ways ultimate fruition of corrupting society or the citizen, turning a citizen into a consumer and now turning a consumer, a person into a rawmaterial. So as we are followed around online, these digital patterns are developed. We get none of that resource. So my shopping patterns, the fact i have an issue with buying shoes and the same kind of dresses over and over again. Thats my desire, thats my habit, my personal information. Thats my behavior. It is no longer mine. It is being harvested by google and by amazon and used to sell me more things. Now we havent even gotten into, we have plenty of time to go into the political but take what weve been talking about in terms of purchasing and or print monopoly power and start to put that in the political arena. One of the things that happens online is you get more of what you click on so if youre clicking on, lets say youre on youtube and youre clicking on lebron james videos all the time, youre getting a lot of those area it can give you any stat about the nba if youre clicking on rightwing speech are also getting more of that red called a filter bubble. And that benefits these companies because they monetize us by keeping us online longer. This though polarizes us politically and if you think about the power of these tech buttons. Corporate giants have always had political power. The robber barons, the railroad tightens. Every ceo, every counter, every billionaire when they get to be a certain size in half, by politicians, by lobbying power but we have a new system in this world of surveillance where that power comes not just topdown and we can get into how big tech is by dollar the largest lobbying group in washington comes from thebottom of. Because our behavior can be manipulated area these are the rhythms in some ways better than we know ourselves so george arose, the financier and political activist gave a speech couple of years ago at novels which you may have heard talking about do we even have free will in this world anymore . Are we really in danger of losing john stuart mill, the kind of ability to be free citizens in an open society in a world in which we can be controlled at this level by algorithms. It sounds like some of the original questions about advertising in the nation of it. And you probably read the attention merchant from another great book area im giving all this great promo for other peoples books but were all in the same game. Tim wu at columbia, and antitrust scholar get a book looking at the similarities but i think that this world of digital surveillance capitalism isfundamentally different. Itis everywhere all the time, these services are like utilities. And imagine having searched for ecommerce or your uber apps cold . Its a whole new world and where only at the beginning because we talk about smart speakers for example. Those sales are going up exponentially three digits per year. That has more of a cognitive power. When you hear a suggestion given to you by voice, its even more powerful in terms of influencing your behavior and if you type in a search and you go where google tells you to do and weve already seen and we are seeing as more antitrust actions rollout the power of these companies. They can erase you as a product, as a person. If they want to, its too much power. Tim cook, apple ceo would probably say we are not a problem, were part of the solution. We have this idea, this concept. Differential privacy that we are building into our products where we are not sucking peoples actual identifying data out of their devices and using that to inform our ai. Were shielding that and taking general insight and keeping ourselves, our own hands clean from personal data that we are not traffickingin it. Is that true . Is that right or is there a hole in thatargument . I think its largely true but there are several holes in the argument for starters apple certainly has had more of a commitment to privacy to be fair for its own competitive advantage and an google or a facebook is not a data harvester in the same way that a google or facebook is. Those companiesmake 85, 89 percent of the revenue Digital Advertising, apple makes the majority telling devices. It wantsto create that network. Once to create that ecosystem and move you into buying as many apple products and services as possible so in that way uses the Network Effect that i would point out a couple of things. For starters apples commitment to privacy has very very much depending on what country youre talking about so apple will capitulate on privacy in china in ways that it would not dream of doing in the us. So its certainly subject to political pressure, differences in the way Different Countries regulate data and is not going to stand up and fight beijing on these things really. I would also say that a couple of other problems with apple that overlap with some of the problems i see with google and facebook. One is in terms of who gets what part of the innovation by. So one of the big arguments right now when regulators in the public say these companies are too big, we need to make them, bring them to heal and make them smaller, maybe break them up they will say this is a battle between regulation and innovation. We have to stay big to innovate. I would argue these companies and apple foremost among this are implementers. Not innovators. Implement, they are implementers of pretty much other peoples technology. And you can see this playing out. Theres a great story and headlines read the sonos google battle. And sonos also has a beef with apple. Sonos is a major with a small innovator, a guy came up with this way smart speakers very innovative company. It came up with a lot of technologies that were adapted by both google and apple as those companies started getting bigger and more powerful started infringing on those patents area sonos has taken apple to court over patentinfringement. It couldnt afford to take on both google and apple over Patent Infringement but apple has had major fights with other big Companies Like qualcomm for example red apple actually in some ways is responsible much more so than huawei which the chinese chipmaker a lot of flak for okay, theyre becoming the new go to chip company. There infringing on qualcomm but apple was on a three continent qualcomm , the biggest 5g innovator in the world infringing on at some point it got so big they said they dont want to pay what youre asking so these companies are implementing thousands of technologies written they want them to be inexpensive. They are in some cases legally taking opensource information. In other cases they are infringing onpatents. Sometimes they simply buy up small companies. In order to get rid of competition again, its getting bigger and using the system i think you read the innovation environment in ways that are a zerosum game so to make one more point you can have an economy in which four companies are taking all the area you have a bigger Innovation Ecosystem. So sonos is suing google, said they would have sued amazon to a couldnt afford to take both of them on at the same time. Although apples been taken on bikes modified. Throw all the names in. Its the same story. Couldnt you argue that implementation is innovation . In a lot of cases, even at the beginnings of apple, xerox park had a graphical user interface. How could you have this just sitting here, somebody ought to bring this to the world and put out this version. Theft is one thing and thats the allegation in sonoss case but couldnt one argue that no matter what companies and maybe even Big Companies become good at is actually bringing that innovation into life, into the economy and getting it to people . A lot of people would argue that. I guess i would say i dont see a Consumer Electronics product that really lets face it, havent had a Game Changing innovation since the smart phone which was in 2007. Everything else has been more or less iterative. And its been about apple being extremely clever as a marketer. As a brand creator. Value at this point lives in three places. It lives globally, lives in it and data, in big brands to create kind of the near and a desirability and in real estate. Thats kind of where value lives. I think in the new world where moving into, i think that theres going to be an environment of deflation, of commoditization of everything you see apple fighting hard to keep market share. Look at losing the battle say show me which is a big chinese smartphone maker in emerging markets red apple apple success in being able to continue packaging expensive products and selling them in giant glass boxes is actually not helping more americans to work area and its not helping create the next big productive bubble say in Green Technologies or in things that would really bring along a Critical Mass of workers and kind of fault our economy to the next good place. Its just about selling more expensive stuff i would argue a company like a qualcomm, not a Perfect Company to read it on plenty of things that i wouldnt want long but thats a company that came up with the 5g chip. This is something that makes the smartphone smart. They are in the current environment having to do get out just to stay alive in three continental legal battles with other American Companies at the same time that you have to china for example rolling out one road, working seamlessly to institute checks and technology into an entirely new ecosystem area i think that that is the model we should be looking more carefully at then this sort of lies a fair zerosum game keep margins as tight as you can , put jobs and products out for the supply chains wherever you want. We see in the last few weeks and months the number of corporate scandals that kind of zerosum Balance Sheet driven financial lies taking has led to and i dont think its leading us to a good place. So if we think about the difference systems for dealing with the challenges of Big Companies, the legacy in the us is very different from europe and in europe its more about protecting competition. And in the us its more been more about protecting the consumer. It seems like in this digital era, that kind of distinction doesnt work the same way it used to because when we talk about facebook or we talk about google, very often the Companies Want to say well, look at the consumer. Theyre paying nothing red so this is good for the consumer. Other people say thats not the consumer. The customer then is the advertiser, thats the consumer and theyre paying a lot more than you doesnt old model for antitrust when dealing with Big Companies and competition, the Network Still in the us . Is the european model any better . These are Great Questions. Two or three points i would make. One of the things the giants in particular google likes to say is accommodation is a click away eric schmidt, these guys are saying that all the time. Lets be serious, to go back to your question about microsoft, if you were doing a Google Search on your computer and it stopped working for a minutewould you go to being orwould you get up and have a cup of coffee and come back and try to get in five minutes. I think you would do the latter. I do use bing. I usegoogle sometimes. I do some shopping on walmart. There as well as amazon. I got, im spreading my data allover the place. Equal opportunity surveillance area thats, but a, the Network Effect actually creates that mode that youre talking about but the deeper point is i think that the rules of freemarket capitalism actually do stop working really like these laws of gravity that okay, as long as both sides know what the transaction is, and races are going down, then whats the problem . In this world in which you are paying nine dollar inyour data , neither of those things old. So you dont know what youre getting up for what youre getting. You search but you dont know how much the data is worth thatyou just gave google or amazon for that search. So its a very asymmetric transaction and thats a problem right away. Also, when you are doing barter and youre not paying in dollars, thats not freemarket. Thats not the way adam smith would have envisioned the market working. Adam smith would have said you need equal access data and a shared moral framework in order for markets to function properly. You do not have those in any of those things when youre dealing with digital giants. Also called in a very technical way into question this 1980s robert bork school of thought that if just Consumer Prices that matter. Thats the school of thought that allowed walmart to get this big and destroyed town squares. Fair enough, we get our cheap stuff so thats good for us i guess there are a lot of negative externalities to. You get less choice but in this world of free and i put quotation marks around three because when you download these to do the searches you think its free but you are paying, you just dont know how much you that model really doesnt work anymore so i think you have to look at two things. I think you can look at the Innovation Ecosystem which is the way that the europeans do it. They look at, and also look at markets like biological systems. Youre looking in a petri dish or a pond and theres all these Different Things read in the plant and the frogs in the fisherman. How do we make sure the system isworking for everyone , thats a very european way of doing things. Its, okay, its timeconsuming and thats what antitrust cases take decades. The outcomes are questionable. Although interestingly, theres an nyu academic thomasville cant get a wonderful book looking at how by many measures, european markets work better and are freer in terms of the diversey of players in the tech space because they then have been more expensive to our Small Businesses doing well or consumers doing well. Due to Big Companies, the ones that depend on patents versus open software, everybody getting a fair shot. But that aside for a moment read i think you have to start thinking about political power and the political economy. In a way that we had thought about in this country were 40 or 50 years. So one of the things in my book that i spent a lot of timethinking about, reading about was a 19thcentury railroad paradigm. So you go back to the sellers and the vanderbilts and you havethese networks , the networks of the 19th century and 20th century economy being built either railroad companies. At one point the Company Owned not just the railroads but they own the cars sat on the railroads. They own the whole and the weekend of the commodities that would go in them and they could clearly preference who was traveling, out of the way. They would literally, these guys would hand out free passes to their favorite politicians to ride here or there for their political rallies so i think you have to look at the big tech firms very much in that way. You should not be able to both control the network and control all the commerce that happens on the network is then you inevitably come into conflict your own suppliers. You look at amazon for example area a lot of companies will simply not take on antitrust issues with amazon because they can be disappeared from their business. They can just be cut off from all the consumers if amazon decides that they dont want an algorithmic preference on their product in the search results. Same goes for google and youre now saying antitrust cases come to light around this but they are very very difficult to prove again because there this black box of algorithms frankly made, and we should dig into that. To clarify, with amazon its about amazon having both the ecommerce fights and the Logistics Networks that deliver packages. And its own brand of products. And allows certain must operate but at the same time have its own Branded Products competing against its customers and in this case its about having a app store where third parties have to do business but at the same time having its own apps on that platform for podcasts, for music competing against spot if i that competitors might argue if im netflix, find spotify i have to pay to beon here and apple youre competing in the same way. Ask for decoding all my academic wanting us and fundamentally there are rules in place already two separate networks and commerce. What youre describing is a company that provides a network competing against third parties in ways that are not very transparent and are unfair. And in the Financial Sector forexample , which my last book was about big finance, you have rules that are not only always enforced what you have rules that say goldman sachs, you can trade aluminum you cant own all the aluminum in the world and corner the market which was an issue. Its a fundamental and dont cover in my first book at one point to get around those rules amazon or excuse me, not amazon but goldman sachs, other Big Companies had bought a bunch of aluminum and they were moving it from one warehouse to another get around the Commerce Network rules so there are loopholes but theres a precedent that doesexist and that precedent existed in the Railroad Business as well. Eventually you had a reformer come in and say hey, were going to bust out these trusts and he took on the system and he looked at the idea that political power exists. We are not living in this area world of everyones making efficient choices all the time and free markets are perfect. If we think about economic certainly since 2008 but really always, they are not perfect. Markets dont always help us and they need rules to function properly. We are talking about dont be evil, your book thatcame out in november. Really puts a spotlight on the life of google, facebook, apple, amazon. A few others as well and how their eyes, some would say success, certainly their treatment of data and marketplaces is having an impact not just on customers but on all of the global society. Specifically in the us. I wonder, can we regulate data, information without at the same time even unintentionally regulating speech . Because people are choosing in a lot of these cases to talk to alexa read their choosing to put information into the social networks etc. Pictures on instagram. That are giving away little beats bits of location information, preference information, commerce information and iftheyre making that choice what to do with their speech, how can they be stopped . These are Big Questions and its something that i grappled with was this idea of whether or not platforms like facebook or google should be liable for what happens on them. Because on the one hand yes, you dont want facebook monetizing the massacre of people in new zealand, but you also dont necessarily want Mark Zuckerberg to be the minister of truth so thats the line that we are walking here but let me point out a few things. As folks think about this argument, these companies have this get out of jail free loophole which is called cda 230, its a loophole written in the coming occasions decency act in 1986 and and allow them as an industry to not be liable the way that you or i as journalists working for major media sources for what we say or do so if i print something thats inaccurate, we could be sued and i could lose my job. Not so for google or facebook but look at what these companies do. They essentially put tons and tons of content online and then they sell advertising against it thats kind of what media does. They want to have it both ways. They want to say where the town square but have a Business Model that eats the lunch of traditional media and has created a post fact world which has led to all other kinds of problems and challenges to liberal democracy. So i think we have to consider rethinking cda 230. Already youre seeing chinks being carved into it. There was a high profile case a couple of years ago around backpage. Com which is a website that was knowingly trafficking minors as prostitutes and this was something that both the right and the left took on and now the platforms do have a liability if theres sex trafficking to minors or other federal high crimes they have a liability for those things. They do a good job using all the rhythms to get child pornography forexample all their website. I think we have to look closely at how much more they can do and also have to think about if they cant do it, should they be allowed to monetize content scale in the way they do . Could argue you cant have youtube where people can upload User Generated Content if, as soon as some rogue uploads a bad piece of content, youtube will be liable. Interesting question. At the Financial Times we do look over and have numerous human employees the lookover user content and comments and if there are inappropriate or hateful we get them down quickly. Thats a decision the publication has taken. I think these are decisions that each government will have to make individually. You are saying already countries like germany, france, eu, china, singapore make different judgment calls in terms of how content is going to be policed. I think it is so important that this be a democratically led conversation and a government decision. I do not want individual private Companies One by one making these decisions. In part, because look, they will do what is best for their own Profit Margins bid one of the just too tangential one of the key anecdotes and one of the reasons i wrote this book aside from looking at the sheer economic power of these companies was that full disclosure, my own son became completely addicted to a free online soccer game and i discovered this because i come home one day and i open up the credit card bill 947 worth of tiny little charges and i was like who could have done this . My ten yearold son, alex but he had become addicted to a free app that uses persuasive called Persuasive Technology but there literally casino game techniques vs skinner with the dog salivating and all of this persuasive stuff takes you down a rabbit hole when you are spending, spending and miners are being marketed to in ways that may actually fall foul of existing rules around children media but i thought about this as it is like nicotine. This is as addictive, in the case of my son, you know, as addictive and nefarious in some ways as they bean or smoking. We need a government to put limits on things like that and we will probably eat a Government Agency of some kind perhaps even an fda of technology to really look at what are the whole battery of effects here. Our Brain Science is being changed. One of the things i have a chapter in my book that gets into the ways in which children are being reshaped and the Digital Natives that of come of age using their phones. They read it lasts, their Attention Spans are lower, there are higher levels of anxiety and depression. Its difficult to prove causality in the research is pretty new but there are some strong sociological research to show that we are being effected in serious ways by this technology they need to take probability for. Can we get this genie back in the bottle . In a sense, the goal of marketing and advertising has been to influence people and arguably its gotten so good with data and these sites are constantly, based on little pieces of information, tweaking the layout of the app and of their site to drive engagement higher into gain a bias and give people doses of dopamine to keep them engaged an industry would say hey, thats why stock is so high, love that. Do we need to have data on exactly how that works . I think we do. You are already seen social scientists come out. There was a wonderful book i quoted and i cant remember the academic right now but looking at the last ten years or so of usage by tweens in teams of local technology and correlating it with things like depression and anxiety and isolation so you have a body of research that is developing and i think that needs to be looked at. You have now in the dsm diagnostic handbook for physicians. You have new ailments that relate to digital usage, digital addiction. These are real things. We need to treat them as such and i think ultimately Silicon Valley has a real problem and they are very good at taking credit for the wonderful thing that they do and have given us this technology, entertaining, productivity enhancing, to a certain extent but theyre not good at taking responsibility for the downsides. Theyre also not so great at admitting that they did do it all themselves but these technologies were basically built on federally funded r d and think about the internet touchscreen technology, gps, these were things that came out of the pentagon actually in taxpayerfunded innovations that were commercialized by the valley and so you have very similar to the 2008 crisis, privatization of profit but socialization of losses in so many ways and the human cost of automation and we not even gone into all the chapters of that but you and i, robots will be doing our job at some point. Reuters has already experimented with algorithmic reporters and there is going to be disruption higher and higher up the food chain. You got a handful of companies doubledigit profits not not taking response ability for any of this. Roberts are already doing my old job. Writing earning releases. Now, hey, thats not the story you write. You frame the issue this way early in the book. You write the issue is the periods of great technological change are also characterized by great disruption, which needs to be managed for the sake of society as a whole, otherwise you end up with the events like the religious war of the 16th and 17th century which, as historian Niall Ferguson has outlined in his book, the square and the tower, might not have happened while the advent of major new technologies like the pretty press which eventually brought with it the age of enlightenment but not before an upset old orders in the same way that the internet and social media have upended society today. Okay, time machine yeah, theres a lot in there and very compelling but time machine how do you go back to that period of time . How do you fix that . Printing press is good, information is good but that bad things happen for it is there a way and other lessons we can even extract from looking back at the pass that help us figure out what to do now . Yet, i think there are. There is not one Silver Bullet and that is the problem narratively. As you know, when you come on programs and even when you write a book my publishers are like we want the solution chapter and they want there to be Free Solutions to a problem that is taken 20 years to create or depending on where you want to put the markers some of these are about capitalism in general and how markets are regular aided and thats been decades in the making. I saw that chapter so thank you for solving that for us. Thank you bob. More than three solutions but i think the first step is creating a proper narrative and this is something i thought a lot about because i think that one of the many reasons we are at such a politically polarized moment has to do with the fact that we did not create a proper narrative about why we had such disruption from globalization and finance delay station and tech related job disruptions in rich countries like the u. S. We thought markets should be allowed to do whatever they want and thats fine and we do not talk about the fact that there would be big pockets of pain. We need to look now at where this technology is going, where is it taking us and do we want to go there and have a chapter in my book that juxtaposes the situation in the u. S. With the situation in china. If you want to look at what a surveillance state looks at like all we have to do is go to china but china right now theres no debate, obviously, in an autocratic society about privacy but does no assumption about that. The key government can and does track everyone. They harvest that data and theres a system of social credit so if you are i are doing something that is judged to be rightthinking by the party than you might find it easier to get a job or fight healthcare but if we file fall afoul we may find ourselves like [inaudible] that is where this could go. That power can wield it by countries or wielded by corporations as it is potentially in the u. S. I think there is a third way and i think there are bright spots with a big rich to break. I did a rich book tour in europe i was phenomenally impressed by average people who turned out to hear these kind of wonky complex debates about what should the Digital Economy look like and what should capitalism look like in the era of data and there was this robust public debate and people are making different decisions in Different Countries but it is happening. In this country you look at california which interested me has been way ahead of legislation and is the birthplace of these companies but also the birthplace of a lot of solutions and you have california looking at that digital dividend cap going back to one of the first points we discussed. If data is the new oil should these comedies be able to harvest it for free or might they share some of that value and put back in to say, a digital Sovereign Wealth Fund so that just like norway or alaska can do things for the Public Benefit with the monies collected from resources, less used data as a resource and help people along and suffer the problems in labor dislocation from automation. That sounds like a tax. It kind of is just a tax. [laughter] but especially targeted tax that for comedies that do well with data. Right. Its interesting that the Trump Administration is fighting france for trying to implement attacks like this right now and that gets into it going to the proper narrative. There is a debate in a real push right now in washington and brussels and another capitals to create what i think is a very problematic nationalistic debate about dont regulate big tech, dont regulate google or amazon or facebook because we are your National Champions in the battle against china. Right. I dont believe there should be National Champions but i think we should have a National Industrial policy and a competitive strategy by doling individual companies, particularly not one that operate in the very countries they are complaining or claiming to want to go to battle with, big r d operation in china and they are a national champion. They are a forprofit comedy that will do it in the best interest but they need to be forced to do what is in the Public Interest by the public and we do need to have a real conversation. Forced to do what is in the Public Interest by the public is hard when the public is the sort of mob, this unruly mob and its easier when youre an authoritarian government like china taking rule and i wonder if it is one or the other . These days the government and not just the Trump Administration is trying to push apple to create a backdoor in the iphone so they could or when they have good reason they say open up the device and see everything that has been done on its but apple argues for give you a backdoor then china will want it and russia will want it in iran will want it in turkey will want it and is that the kind of privacy free world that we want to live in . These are Great Questions and not easy questions. I would look to a couple of examples in taiwan, for example. You have a really rich, vibrant democracy that is being enabled by very decentralized technologies so in the same way for china is using the big tech, big state model to create the surveillance state you have taiwan using block chain to create digital i entities so people can vote through quadratic voting on issues so you can capture the kind of nuance that you are talking about that we have in our society. We do have a democracy is messy. We know that. I would like to see some of these technologies being used in service to democracy rather than degrading it which is what you seen in the last few years. A solution, possible solution, lets mention that you cover in your book is the idea of individuals getting a cut from the use of their data. This one makes me queasy. You talk about social dividend which is a big difference but some peoples data is worth more than others if i am in the right demographic do i get a bigger payment and then is the question of event Network Effects and data in the sense that my data might not be worth that much but my data plus your data plus one other persons data is worth exponentially more than any individual data. Is it even possible by the individual basis to capture the value . Great question. I think the idea of a digital Sovereign Wealth Fund probably makes more sense because of the things you are pointing out. One of the reasons i wanted to present this idea of should individuals get a cut is there are some people that sane look, we are moving in the era of ai and of more and more automation they could do more and more human labor and we are moving into a post work world. Sounds great at first. Yet, think about it. All of us have been on vacation for two weeks and then we get cranky and bored and a lot of economists are saying hey, wait a minute, maybe our data is our labor maybe we need to start thinking about that as something that is of value. I wanted to point that out i also wanted to show some of the numbers and it is true, its almost impossible unless you are inside the companies and in the black box to get a realistic view of how much the value of the data is worth because it varies by individuals and varies by how much you are layering but just a conservative in estimate shows you that this is an enormous industry and the fastest industry in the world and that is worth thinking about when you have Companies Making these doubledigit Profit Margins, harvesting our data for free and listening about what that man the appropriate tax systems for it and this really gets to a bigger and more profound point about the way capitalism and globalization works. Laissezfaire globalization, freemarket capitalism practiced in the u. S. Has been exported in many countries and the idea was that goods, capital and people should be able to go wherever they wanted to and the problem is that capital can cross borders much more freely than goods and people. In this Digital World it puts all these problems, liberalism, or companies can slide above National Problems but labor is down here having to deal with the reality on the ground and the digital and the transaction puts us on steroids because if capital can move across borders man, data can move across borders fast. You got to look at where this is going and set up parameters so that we dont end up with what we seen in swing states and the steel towns and red states that have been decimated by globalization having the kind of fractious ugly politics that weve had. We will get that in a much broader level if we are not careful. Rain at half weve been talking about where you take a close look at google, amazon, facebook other Tech Companies that traffic in data that have marketplaces and networks that have gotten enormous power. So much work goes into writing Something Like this and so much learning, i imagine too. How did it change you, reina . Do you do your personal life firmly dealing with these companies and networks differently because of what you discovered while writing this . The very first thing i did was to take my sons phone after he racked up at 949dollar bill and did something very analog that forced him to get out on the street and make lemonade money. How long did that take . Several months but in my part in brooklyn on a hot date you can do pretty well. [laughter] i do not do smart speakers. I will often use encrypted email and different more private apps when i am reporting but it has made me think a lot about the value of my own intellectual property. You know, i think we are moving to a very decentralized world in which really the only value we have is what is in our heads and what is in our the intellectual property and data we bring and you have to keep control of that and so when i am negotiating contracts and thinking about my next project i make sure i keep control of my own data in my own intellectual property. You talk about solutions toward the end of the book and what you hope will happen. What you think will happen . Or if youre a generally optimistic person but that on its had and what do you hope doesnt happen . What is the coast cost we dont do anything . I think in this is going to be the topic of my next book that i think we could see a rise in fascism because i think particularly in the u. S. Because i think that we are in a post truth world, a world in which it is so easy to create political manipulation and there are all these economic and now technical changes that are driving changes so quickly and dislocating some of and that creates the condition for extreme and hateful politics. That is the risk. I think the upside could be if we get the framework right could be a world in which this is a stretch and i will be optimistic but Digital Technologies to allow distributive power and that is one of the things that is interesting here. We can be sliced and diced by the big Tech Companies but each of us have the power of our own data and of our own behavior online and businesses can be started much more cheaply now in the digital era. This could be a boon for labor if we get the framework right. Digital, crossborder digital trade can be done much more easily now by small and midsize businesses the back and 80s when if you wanted to be an International Company you needed to have size in half. These are comp gated things there is potential there that the post work world could be a world in which labor is empowered relative to capital in ways that werent possible in the past. That would certainly be an interesting outcome. Let me give you a concrete example to help you. Uber. This is just a piece of software but why should Taxi Workers Union not have that same software . They do now. There are apps that are run by workers themselves, drivers who share the profits from that and its a cooperative model. One can imagine those were the things being done at scale and one can imagine the Labor Movement himself being reinvigorated. You see now the Freelancers Union or the cif oh trying to organize tech workers insane high paid graphic designers in Silicon Valley you are a freelancer and you have the same problems of asymmetry of power with your employer as a cleaning lady in the bronx does. Thats an important point to make. Many are bringing up those points in 2020 and its a very active year politically as well as technologically. The book is dont be evil, rana f. I suppose one of the things that the rest of us can do is at least get smarter. Thank you so much. Its been a great conversation. Thank you for having me. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago but our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government come. Already this year we brought you primary collection coverage, the president ial impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus. 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