Episode: 1054
Title: HPR1054: Becky Hogge: Barefoot into Cyberspace
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1054/hpr1054.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:02:16

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The full circle podcast on hacker public radio in this episode Becky Harb barefoot into
Cyberspace Hello world and welcome to the full circle podcast on hacker public radio.
This episode consists of an interview with journalist and author Becky Harb. Her book,
barefoot into cyberspace, adventures in search of techno utopia, came out last year around
the time of the extradition case surrounding WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The book explores
modern technology and society through activism and journalism, covering the hacker counterculture
from Storman and Lessig, the Chaos Club through to WikiLeaks Julian Assange and Rock Gongrip.
The full circle podcast is the companion to full circle magazine, the independent magazine for the
Ubuntu community. Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
Yep so I thought where's the best place to interview Rock and I thought well why don't I go to the
Chaos Communications Congress which is an event that takes place at the end of the year,
the day after boxing day in Berlin. You say that I felt like was it uncomfortable experience?
Well maybe, I mean it certainly wasn't somewhere where I felt like I particularly fitted in,
but everyone there was really really friendly and I think there's maybe a misconception about
hackers that they're unfriendly people. Certainly the people I met at the Chaos Communications
Congress were really really friendly, really open and actually really interested in talking about
some of the stuff they were doing, messing about with code, creating stuff, seeing how stuff worked,
putting it apart, putting it back together again. There was this thing where if you came as I did
accredited with the press for a start and this was kind of a new thing for me as a journalist,
you actually had to pay to go there. I mean they weren't going to give you a freebie just because
you said you were a journalist, you know, so what? Everyone was there doing something useful.
But you also had to tell everybody that you were a journalist, that was one of the rules because
there were certain parts of the congress which they preferred to keep under wraps or not to be
there in the news. Having said that some of the major things like, for example, the first year I went,
they cracked and they then, this guy called, he got cast and knoll, announced that he and he and
colleagues had cracked the GSM standard, but that was headline news around the world. That wasn't
something they were trying to keep under wraps, but then there was a kind of basement area where
no photos at all were allowed, which was basically all the different hacking clubs working on,
all sorts of things really. A lot of which I didn't quite understand, but all looked really interesting.
So, Rob, you interviewed and he kind of pops up as a continuous figure all the way through to
the end of the book. That's right. That sounds like a pretty wise character to have there as your
geodimental, if you like. Yeah, he's a great guy, really great guy, and you probably haven't
seen this because I think you've read the HTML version. It's that right or the e-pub version.
I've got the e-pub version. Yeah, so the versions that you pay for have illustrations based around
John Daniels' illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Rob in those illustrations
is the white rabbit. He's caught up in the fallow down the rabbit hole and is there throughout,
and yeah, actually, I mean, of course, it was 2009 when I started out to interview Rob.
What I didn't know is that he was going to become involved in WikiLeaks, and I had no idea that
WikiLeaks was even going to kick off the way it obviously did in 2010, and that provided just
the most amazing narrative thrust for what was otherwise going to be a book about ideas and
about people. So that really brought the book together and Rob being a key figure in that
was really important, and he was so supportive of the project. I interviewed him again,
the following December at his house in Amsterdam. He'd read the first draft of the book by then,
and he was just like, you've got to get this out there. This is great. I love it. On the basis of
that, you know, did a second interview and really kind of came forward, and actually the book ends
with him talking, not with me talking, and I really like that. And at one point, he's invited you
to join in as part of WikiLeaks, and you come across as a bit of a reluctant activist, and you
step back. Yeah, so that's, I was really uncertain about whether to include her in the book,
because it's kind of a non-story. Becky Hogue doesn't get involved in it. So here's the story
of how I didn't get involved in WikiLeaks. But yeah, sure. So he contacted me from Reciavik
when they were all making the collateral murder video there that they would later air
at the Washington Press Club in April, and I guess he contacted me first around February and then
again in March. And yeah, I was really reluctant to get involved. I was reluctant for quite a few
reasons I was working, I guess, with the first thing, but that's really just an excuse. I kind of
got a bit burnt out, I think, when I was working as an activist at the Open Rights Group. I was
really unsure of myself at that time and unsure of the kind of values behind a lot of what I had
thought for at the Open Rights Group, or not unsure of their values, I guess, but unsure of
my own techno utopianism had become kind of bruised and blunted by knocking up against the kind
of cold hard services of the institutions of the old world. And I had been sicked by politics
a little bit. And so I was, yeah, I was reluctant to get involved in another activist project.
And I was also reluctant to get involved in a project that was going to have, I mean,
having seen WikiLeaks speak at the 2009 conference, I had a massive load of respect for what they
were doing, but I also didn't feel like I was brave enough to get involved. And every single person,
not every single person, but there are five people now who, it appears, are being investigated by
the US Department of State, because Twitter, I don't know if you saw that story, but Twitter
was subpoenaed by, in fact, it was a debate with Justice, sorry, Twitter was subpoenaed by the DOJ
for the communications records of five of the people that were working on that video in
Reykjavik at that time. And yeah, had I said yes, I would have probably been person number six.
Rob is certainly involved in that at the moment. So is a guy called Jake Applebaum. So is Daniel
Domsch, like Berg, Julian Assange, and Bridget John Stottier, who's an Icelandic politician.
So yeah, I mean, this wasn't playtime anymore. This wasn't nice political campaigning with
serious activism. And yeah, I just didn't have the balls for it. Can I say balls on your show?
I've died, yes, compared to some of the things I have to bleep out. I think that's fine.
I just didn't have the balls for it. Even now, I feel like I made the right decision.
Although, certainly, I would be in a very different position now, I think if I had gone.
I think so, yes. You wouldn't have too much trouble selling a few more books. I did say.
I mean, I tell you what, in November, when I had the first draft, it was right around the time
when everything was kicking off. I was there thinking, wow, you know, this book that I've just written,
this book is going to get, you know, a serious book deal at this point, because everyone is spending
stupid money on books about where he leaks. And in the end, that didn't happen at all.
A few people, a sandwich being, you know, the headline one, getting a million-pound book deal.
But also Heather Brook, who did go out to Reykjavik as a journalist, interview those guys,
and then got more heavily involved. Daniel Thomsiteberg, the guy who was Julian's colleague
for a lot of 2010, they got some stupendous book deals. And I think I haven't read the Guardian book,
but I've read Daniel's book. I think it's great. I'm looking forward to reading Heather's book.
I'm skeptical as to whether Julian's book will ever appear. But yeah, so as it goes,
I didn't get a single book deal. It really colored the market. And actually, I'm cool with that,
because I think, in a way, this book, it is kind of part adventure story, part self-reflection.
I've had really great feedback from people who've read it, about how readable and how accessible it is.
And I don't think, I think, a major publishing house would have wanted to glamorize it,
or would have wanted it to be more polemical. And that's absolutely what I didn't want,
because I think that these ideas are so amorphous. I don't think anyone has really nailed down
what exactly the future looks like enabled by network digital technology. And I just think
there are too many books in the market that say, this is what it's going to happen. And you know,
that you know the kind of books, I mean, they all have colorful network cables on them,
or else like digits, green and black, green on black. And they say, the internet is going to kill us,
or the internet is going to free us. And I just wanted to get beyond that kind of discourse and
just share how confused I was, and yet still how engaged I was in the subject.
I think we all will slightly skeptical about the idea of techno-utopia. But so from your point of
view, what are a few headline points? I mean, where is it going to take us? I can see an awful lot
of benefits and disbenefits, even just looking for my little side vantage point.
Well, the thing that I'm most interested in at the moment is the idea that we thought that the
internet and the web was a disintermediating space, was a space by which I mean was a space
that put us directly in touch with each other. We called it a many-to-many communications
environment, and attached to our thrill around that idea. If the idea that institutions into
majorities of the world, which came before, be they multi-globalized media corporations,
be they government, be they advertising companies, whatever, blanche, global corporations,
they would somehow be circumvented with this new technology. We would all be in touch with one
another, and that would be some kind of glorious utopian thing. Now, you can question that in two
ways. You can say, well, actually, will that be some kind of glorious utopian thing, or will it be
a cacophony chaos, that sort of thing? That I found interesting, but I don't feel cross-eyed
to talk about that so much. I'm not a sociologist. Or the other way you can talk about it is,
well, actually, is that going to happen? Because you see, you've seen over the past four,
five years, the web utterly consolidate around a few platforms and a few companies, the biggest one,
of course, being Google, but also, I mean, web hosting companies like Rackspace, who are now hosting
a significant percentage of websites and a significant percentage of web traffic is resolving
just to their service. Google, I think, has a 6% of all web traffic now, which is a huge, huge
percentage. And it's only going to get bigger. And one of my favorite interviews in the book is
where I speak to a guy called Egan Zuckerman, who works out of the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society. And he says, you know, nobody saw this coming, but it's sort of like the high street,
what's happened to the British high street over the last 20 years, it's happened to the web in one
year. And why the hell has this happened? Why now is Facebook the web? Why is Google the web?
And what does this mean for things like three speech and privacy? And does this actually make
the virtual world a more constrained environment than the real world? And so that's my most
interesting take home from the book, for sure. And I'm still thinking about that. I'm still
interested in that, because I think that the dominance now that major corporations have in this
space coupled with the idea that we think of it as a space, a space where we have rights and a
space where we, you know, have, space we have hopes for, you know, to liberate not just people
in Tunisia or Egypt or wherever they're having revolutions, but here in, in the West as well,
where we're perhaps suffering from, well, I mean, we're speaking, of course, in the week where
there are riots all over the streets. But the world is looking like an increasingly scary place.
But yeah, so, so how does the fact that corporations now dominate a place we thought would liberate
us? What does that mean for regulation? Now, after the, I don't know if I'm going too much into
this now, but after the Second World War, we conceived of a human rights framework that would
guarantee, you know, that a measure of liberty and freedom for all. What does the human rights
framework for the digital age look like, given the political and economic conditions of now,
of when we might write it? Because the fact that corporations are governing this space,
rather than governments, I think it's a really, it would really color the answer to that question.
Does that make sense? It does. Yeah, it does. And you've kind of reframed one of the,
one of the questions that I was going to ask. I hate it when people do that. I'm so sorry.
The, that's fine. What struck me is that, yes, we all have that expectation that the internet
was going to set us free and disintermediate all these old institutions. Unfortunately, nobody's
told the old institutions that and they keep getting in the way as long, alongside the money men
because they've got money, they keep buying their way back into the spaces that we keep trying
to throw them out of. And I don't know, I don't know if anybody's yet found the answers of that one.
I have been to think that you would call it that, that buying their way back in, because what
exactly are they buying? Like the projects that, you know, that I, projects is a really
bulletinling world. But stuff like Linux or Wikipedia or Apache or, you know, stuff that's
been built in a kind of floss model. That, that's the kind of inspiring stuff. That's the stuff
that makes you think, hey, we can get by without the institution. And yet, it's not the stuff that
garners mass adoption. And I guess people within the floss community say that, well, we don't have
the marketing or we don't have the UI design. We don't have the, the nice bells and whistles that
get the, you know, the little people interested. Maybe, I mean, that's, that's a characterization,
that's a kind of crass characterization of that view. And I remember, we imagine that only money
can buy us those things, I think, which is interesting. And I don't know, I read that into your question
a little bit. But I didn't finish answering. Sorry. I don't know, maybe that, maybe that is the answer.
I mean, certainly, certainly, the, the, the open source community have got the UI design,
they've, they've, they've got the coding expertise. That's where a lot of the innovation comes
from, because companies keep hiring people from that kind of space. But I do, I'm becoming increasingly
convinced that the money that talks is the money that buys up all the display ads and buys up all
the advertising campaigns in the traditional media and throws all of that exposure to their services
at us and drowns out the, the, the free and open source side of things, which left to its own
devices would, would, would kind of just germinate and, and start to push through at its own speed,
at its own pace, on merit, but it doesn't. If you watch TV now, half of the adverts in the ad
breaks are for websites. Yeah. So I, I don't know, it's, it's not that disintermediating space. And that's,
that's a little bit sad. But I don't think, I don't think the battles lost. But if we're not careful,
we're just going to sleepwalk into, into the same control that the big brands had all the way
through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. So here's another way of looking at it, which I kind of come around to,
by the end of the book, which is we're focusing now as we're talking you and I about mass adoption.
I'm saying we won't have won until everyone's running in it. Ah, that's, that's not the one,
that's not the thing I'm going to say. I'm far too savvy to make a sweeping statement that way.
Sure, sure. But I mean, we are, in a sense, talking about mass adoption, you know, whether it's like,
oh, people, why don't people, why don't, why do people use Twitter not identical? Why do people use
Facebook, not diaspora, blah, blah, blah. But the thing that I come around to in the book is that
maybe, so long as a section, maybe called them a vanguard or whatever, you want to call them
of the community, like the community at K, also like the community that, you know, contribute
and to Floss projects more generally. So long as they are still able to function,
able to exist and create and innovate, as you say, whether that's innovation in terms of building
software or innovation in terms of journalism with WikiLeaks and how they've changed,
that whole scene so quickly. Maybe that's okay. Maybe we just need, you know, the open
community, the hacker community to act as a kind of stalking horse, to continue to provide alternatives,
even if those alternatives aren't taken up by everyone. I don't know. I don't know. I mean,
it's still the case that in Egypt, they were using things like Facebook and Twitter. They weren't,
you know, but they were probably also using other technologies that we don't hear about, like,
tour and, you know, things like that. I know that some hackers in mainland Europe set up some,
some kind of connectivity. I don't quite understand how, but for people in Egypt, when they were,
when they were, I think they were using packs of machines. I just really don't understand,
I should look into it actually, but I think there was some contribution that was made by the kind
of outside tech. So maybe, what I'm trying to say is maybe it's okay if there's just a small bunch
of us that are still, you know, keeping it real, is it worse, so that we can either provide
technology when it's needed, provide a stalking horse kind of innovation type thing, or just
burst onto the scene. I mean, when I set out to write this book, I really thought I was writing
a kind of eulogy, is it, where a cultural anthropology of a dying culture, I was that pessimistic
about web culture and hacker culture and its future and the commercial internet. But, of course,
I hadn't figured on Wikileaks, and from the very beginning, their story kind of trespassed on
mine, and they started to install a bit of hope back in me, which was great, actually, it was a great
personal journey to write this book, because I'm a lot happier now than I was when I started writing
it, and I know a lot more hope. Well, that's good. Yeah, I think they'll always be that, that
underbelly, the outsiders who's intent is to try and keep the rest of us honest, and keep
looking for alternative ways of doing it. I'm just slightly pessimistic as to whether their voices
will ever be loud enough to really make a difference, because, as we've said, all of those
big corporate interests are just shouting so much louder than everyone else. But I tell you
point, and I did pick up some of Rob's words of wisdom from near the end of the book, and I liked
them, because they echo so much of what I say, and, well, think an occasionally say. Mary said,
I think most of what we were fighting still today in the world is incompetence, which said a lot
to me, because I see time. Most of what we're fighting is stupidity, and maybe a little bit of
opportunism, opportunism. I think he's doing most of the planet a disservice. I think most of what
we're fighting is stupidity, and a lot of opportunism. Right, yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean,
well, that's a big topic, but I suppose there's always that little bit of the hacker that enjoys
looking down on people, so maybe that's why he's just going to keep at a play over opportunism
for sure. The other thing that he says near the end, talking about the Chaos Computer Club,
not setting out to cause Chaos, saying that maybe a lot of our collective work has actually
prevented Chaos by pointing out that maybe we should lay some decent virtual foundations before
we build any more virtual skyscrapers. Please tell me there's an illustration to go with that quote.
I wish there were. There should be, shouldn't there? Yeah, no. I mean, I used the kind of architectural
metaphor as well quite a lot. I mentioned that Rob read the book before he wrote that speech. Maybe
he nicked it off me. I should call him out on that. No, you know, the famous phrase architecture
is a politics, but I just don't think that a lot of people understand security hack that when
they're doing things like breaking GSM, for example, what they think they're doing and what they
what you know, the frame in which they're doing it anyway publicly is as these sort of vigilante
building inspectors of the architecture on which we build our digital life. If GSM isn't secure,
we need to know about it. I mean, this has happened maybe a year before the phone hacking
scandal really went nuclear. I think people have an interest in their telecommunications being secure,
and if GSM isn't secure, I think that people should be told. And in a sense, the framework that's
built up around hacking for for doing that, keeping track of corporations who have no interest in
disclosing security vulnerabilities themselves is a very good one, but I don't think it's very
well understood by the world at large that these kind of security hackers working for the public
good, the white hackers working for the public good. And they're doing a really tough job. I was
just reading a story in the newspaper today about a Dutch journalist who had been publicizing
the work that a group of hackers had done around the chip that runs the My Fair travel. It's like
the oyster card, but in the Netherlands, the kind of contactless payment systems for the travel
thing there, which you could basically hack and which you could hack to credit yourself
way more money than you had on the actual card. And so he had been out there talking about how
on secure this chip was. And now the manufacturers of this chip have lodged a criminal complaint
with the Dutch public prosecutor against this journalist for even talking about the flaws in their
product. So that's very scary. And I think there needs to be about a public understanding about
the public service people do in exposing security flaws. Because I mean, you get to maybe places
like anonymous hacking. Was it maybe that's taking it a little too far? But if Sony aren't storing
their customer details securely, then it is right that that is exposed in some way. Because I mean,
for a start, the amount of sweat they put into making their products secure through DRM and then
the absolute hypocrisy of not securing their customers' detail is outrageous. But also, you know,
we have laws in this country that say they should be securing their car details. So they need to be
exposed if that's not what's happening. And what chance is there that we will have any privacy or
security guaranteed us in the future. Because at the moment, the only truly hack-proof
telecommunications device appears to be the Blackberry, which has communication, communications
encryption built-in outsource. And just about everything else, has the opportunities for
cracking or backdoors to be put into it. And I'm sure the Blackberry itself is only a matter of
time before somebody hooks one up to a supercomputer and just cracks it by brute force.
Are we ever going to be in that techno-youtube where privacy and security can be guaranteed?
Well, I think we have to... I mean, I don't know. It's not the techno-youtube that we're looking for
where privacy and security are guaranteed. Because don't forget the privacy of the contingent
right. And this is what's so hard about technology and law. So in the universal declaration of
human rights, there are some rights which are absolute. And I'm going to say the right to life
is one of them, but I'm not sure now in the... Sorry, it's... But anyway, privacy is a right that is,
you know, contingent on... Well, not contingent, but it's qualified, sorry. So you shall have the
right to privacy unless there is a good national security reason for you not to have the right to
privacy. And that's how a functioning society kind of works. It's actually the same with free
expression and hate speech, at least in the European concept of human rights law. And technology
can't really deal with that. You either have a bad door, you don't. And human nature being what it
is, the security services are likely to abuse whatever powers, technical powers we give them to monitor
people in situations of grave national security. Do you follow me here? So it's quite tough and
blackberries are really, because yes, they've got end-to-end encrypted technologies, but
they still have an obligation to make communications traffic data available to the security services
in particular circumstances. And I think if they're storing messages, there may be some powers
under repair for them, at least to share the content of those messages with the security services,
even if that evidence can't then be made available in court, because intercepted evidence
at the moment in this country isn't routinely allowed in court. In fact, I don't think it's permitted
to be used in court, which is interesting. I think we're going to see a lot of really interesting
legal questions pop up around Blackberry on the basis of the fact that the BBM system was used
allegedly by a lot of these people who were running rampage over the country now, these young
people were at least young writers. And that's going to be really interesting. Where, I mean,
so it's in a sense, no one really has an answer to this question yet about what privacy means
in a digital age. There are plenty of people theorizing about things like contextual privacy,
so you should expect your data to be safe in particular contexts if it's disclosed in particular
context, but not if it's disclosed in other contexts. But how do you then implement that
at a technical layer? I mean, it's just anyone's guess. I don't see people
having very great solutions to that anymore. There are things like vendor relationship
management, which now we're getting into the more privacy from corporations area of things,
where instead of having loads of companies having one company having a customer relationship
management system that manages all their customer's data, all the customers have a vendor
relationship management system installed, which manages the data that they disclose to others.
And you see this also in Evan Moglin's concept of the freedom box. I don't know if you
caught that lecture that he gave in January to the Internet Society, but he talked about going
back to having your server in your house under your control so that you know if the police are
knocking on your door and having that then being a kind of data hub about you, containing all
of your traffic data, all of your personal details, which you then have control over physically,
and you can also have control over technically as well through things like select a disclosure
to whatever parties you want to go and do business with. So there are ideas like this which are
interesting and out there, it's beyond my pay grade to really answer the question about where
there will have it. No one has a good answer to this yet. I read a lot about privacy online,
and people have flamics, but I also don't think the transparent society people have got it right.
And actually there's an interesting disconnect in the open community around this because
open source is good, right? Open data is good. I sit on the board of the Open Knowledge Foundation
and I believe that Open Knowledge is good. But when it comes to say my health records,
I don't view that as public data, regardless of how much good it could do if all of the records
about all of our conditions, you know, whatever horrible health conditions we're kind of harboring
and don't want to tell anyone about. If all of that was disclosed, yeah, maybe medical research
would advance a lot, but there would be a significant downside and less society was to change
radically. And so yeah, I think there's even scope for fishes within our own community around
this subject. That sounds to me like the the first trailer for volume two of your book in
how however long it takes you to come up with it. Yeah, I don't want to write about privacy,
it's too confusing, but maybe it should be. I really, my next book I really want to write is about
intellectual property and the way that not the kind of stuff that we all know about, you know,
about how great it is when you give up a little bit if your intellectual property rights say
or you use the copyright system to like hack copy left and then make these amazing, you know,
new paradigms of organizational structure that is lost, that is Wikipedia, that is creative
comments, not so much that which we all know about them, which is, you know, I've done to death
anyway, but more the way that IP has been used as a tool at the highest levels of government
at places like the World Trade Organization to shore up economic futures for the West and the
kind of icky way that Hollywood and the music industry and all the people that we look to for
kind of cultural inspiration have been complicit in that. So I want to look at IP lobbying, I want to
look at the way that lobbying and that strong IP legislation creates really crazy situations in
places like South Africa where librarians cannot actually archive the recordings of Nelson Mandela
making his speech when he's freed from prison because it's against copyright law for them to
preserve that recording right over to why India has been on better mobile phone models than the UK
because of where patents get registered and open up that world, hopefully in a similar way as I
have done with best fit into cyberspace to a lay reader to people who aren't copyright and IP
geeks because it continues to fascinate me and I think information is so core to the human
condition that we really should know more about how we govern it. And in post-industrial age,
if that's what we're in now, information is everything. Yeah, sure, sure, absolutely, absolutely.
It's interesting how early the US kind of grogged that, I mean in the 1970s they were already starting
to devise trade laws that made them the knowledge providers and the yeast, the kind of manufacturers
and how that played out. And actually a lot of the crazy rhetoric around piracy is the kind of shrill,
it comes from that quarter, you know, because it didn't work basically, they're pirating everything
in the East. Yeah, I think our friends in America learned very early from the two Thomas's,
Thomas Edison and Thomas Watson who patented absolutely everything they could get their hands on.
Whether or not they had, in fact, invented it themselves. Oh yeah.
The lessons of the industrial age haven't been lost on them.
But it didn't do Edison any good because he patented the projector, he patented the moving image,
but something about the moving image, I don't know which bits. And then Hollywood just bugged
off to the other side of the country and sort of arose of this pirate nation and made films,
despite his patented. Yeah, but the Hollywood crew were the underbelly and the radical innovators
that cleared off, but look at them now, they're the ones doing all the copyright lobbying.
I know. How the mighty fall off their pedestal. As soon as commercial interests pop up and
somebody says, you do know how much money you're losing through this, don't you?
I am just an old cynic. No, of course, but then look to Google. Maybe that's what happens next.
Google are pushing the, pushing the boundaries of copyright law and have done since the very
beginning of their existence as a corporation. As soon as they have enough market power, I don't
expect them to continue to have such an open viewpoint, but we'll see. Well, perhaps, perhaps,
we're safe as long as Larian Sergei are in charge. Yeah, maybe. And Google Books is still worth
worthwhile as a project, as long as the search results bring in plenty of ad revenue.
If another Eric Schmidt comes along and takes over from them, who knows where it's going to go,
such as the nature of corporations. Especially publicly traded ones. I mean, we all think they're
great now because they pulled out of China, but that was a business decision. And when they went
after much, much deliberation, it took them about six months longer to pull out than it should have
done. And there are those who are still saying they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
But they had to go in there. It's a massive market and they're publicly traded cooperation.
They would actually be in derelict of their duties for their share. Well, that's the problem
with corporations. They can stamp, do no evil on as much stationary as they like, but corporate
entity has no morality. It's an amoral thing. In fact, there's been plenty of books written to say
that it's a psychopathic entity, which I find fascinating. And then just imagine that there
are people who are maintaining and creating most of what we imagine to be the public space
that we call the internet, you know, on Facebook, on blogger, on YouTube, on Flickr.
These are the entities that are governing our freedoms now. It's scary.
I think Schmidt and Zuckerberg have both made their statements about there is no privacy
anymore. Get over it. And only backed off in the face of huge public outcry, but
very clear where the where the corporates are putting their faith. They they have the keys.
I'm nearly in danger of regurgitating half of Jeff Jarvis's essays from another network.
Well, we're giving them the keys. This is an amazing thing. We're giving them the keys
for convenience and for fun and to promote ourselves. I mean, that's what's so fabulous. We're
giving them the information every day. And we're calling people in countries and repressive
regimes that are giving the information. We're calling them revolutionaries and we're cheering
them on. And it's it's the frightening situation for sure. So are we are we sleepwalking our way into
a cage society? Well, I don't know about a cage society. I mean, the information commissioner
of this country said in 2006 or five that we were sleepwalking into a surveillance society.
And in 2006, we've woken up in one. So yeah, we're here. It's here. But again, I don't know,
I don't know where that leaves us. And also, I mean, let's let's have a look how CCTV affects,
you know, whether CCTV actually turns out to be useful for these riots because it's been a long
understood truth in the security community that CCTV is rubbish at solving crimes. I think what
it does is it moves criminality elsewhere and it's good in car parks. But beyond that, it's rubbish.
It's it's a it's a stop, isn't it? To reassure people call it surveillance security theatre. I
mean, it's exactly the same that happens at airports. And it's just it's just it's no
V and boffy and rude and upsetting. It's not just not British. And oh, let's let's not get into
what's what's what's British and what isn't. Well, you could say that that writing in the streets
isn't British, but we haven't haven't had any of that since. So when did we last have a
conservative government? I'm feeling very I'm feeling very French at the moment. It's feeling
very French, very good. Yes, let's let's let's do more let's do more rising up. Let's man the
barricades and set fires and set fires and lorries or something. The cynical part of me just knows
that whatever knee jerk reactions we get out of the current right situation is going to be the
wrong reaction in the wrong direction. Well, let's let's let's let's put it in that kind of
cynicism of bay before we put off all the listeners. They say go back to looking at pictures of
tax. Legert reactions are never good. A bit more a bit more wisdom. Virtual foundations and virtual
skyscrapers required. But before we before we give away the entire contents of the book
and and leave nobody with any reason to go and go and read it. If we haven't talked about
it to a brand and acid and easy rider and talk about it. No, well, yeah, the early stuff of
I mean, we kind of jumped in in media reds. We were kind of halfway in to the story and there's
the the whole the whole front half of the book about how we got here and the sixth is counterculture.
Well, we don't we don't have to talk about that now. People in the book need the book. They can read
the book and John Perry Barlow, who's a who's a fantastic hero of modern culture and deserves to
be hailed as such. So all of that's in in the book as well. That's their foot into cyberspace.
Cologne, get it right here's time. Adventures in search of techno utopia. Like Becky Hogg. Thank you
very much for coming on. It's been a great pleasure that you were having me. Look forward to you
writing sequel in a in a couple of years time and you can come and come and beat me up with it
about how wrong and pessimistic I was. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Bye.
Barefoot into cyberspace. Adventures in search of techno utopia is available as a hardback
and as a Kindle ebook. We've more interviews coming up on the full circle podcast very soon.
For now, I'm Robin Ketling. Thank you and goodbye.
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