MSP [] MATTSPLAINED [] MSPx

Are you selling the dream or running a long con? How to sort the Silicon Valley spin from the outright lies.

We've got a ton of show links this week. Great reporting from all these sources. Support content makers!!!

Show Links:
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/26/8114391/inventions-dumb-fads
http://fortune.com/silicon-valley-startups-fraud-venture-capital/
https://www.wired.com/story/theranos-and-silicon-valleys-fake-it-till-you-make-it-culture/
https://www.wired.com/story/theranos-and-silicon-valleys-fake-it-till-you-make-it-culture/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/big-tech-products-silicon-valley
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Spectacular-recent-Bay-Area-tech-startup-failures-12378764.php#photo-14592820
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/elizabeth-holmes-and-her-firm-theranos-show-why-we-must-stop-fetishising-entrepreneurs

Episode Transcript

These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the typos and grammar flaws.

Technology can be a harsh business. You spend years and millions of dollars developing a product, only to find out no one wants it, or that another innovator has turned your invention from a product into a feature.

With the release this week of The Inventor, a documentary about the failed startup Theranos, we thought it was time that MSP took a deeper look into the industry’s fake it till you make it ethos.

Matt, I can’t believe that you are going to be the one telling people about the dangers of faking it.
•Who better than me?
•I’ve spent my entire life faking it.
•I’ve got a masters degree in faking it from Stanford.

That’s a lie!
•Exactly. If you want to catch a conman, you get a con man.
•If you want to talk about lies, find a liar.
•That kind of the point about today’s show.
•There’s a fine line between promoting your invention, giving it enough hype to get yourself some media coverage and some venture capital and flat out lying.

Juicero!
•Exactly. Now Juicero wasn’t a lie.
•But it was very weird. And it was a great example of giving customers exactly what they don’t want at a price they can’t afford.
•Which, in Silicon Valley speak, is the perfect business model.

We haven’t talked about this for ages. Go on. Remind everyone what’s it’s all about.
•People like juices. And I imagine, people who have millions of dollars of stock options can afford to buy really fancy juicers.
•Juicero was an attempt to meet the market’s need for slow pressed juices.
•So they marketed a really expensive juicer – I think it was USD700 or something – which had to be connected to the Internet.
•And you could only use it with really expensive bags of the company’s own pre-mulched juices.
•Which, incidentally, thanks to reasons of perishability, they could only supply to around half, or even less, of the continental USA.

But still. It’s

Is your technology working for you, or are you working for it? Why machines want us to prove that we are human.

Produced by Jeff Sandhu for BFM89.9

Show Links:

Episode Transcript

These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the typos and grammar flaws.

One of the reasons that this show exists is to demonstrate some of the many ways that technology is dramatically improving our lives. But what do you do when the technology that is supposed to be making our lives easier seems to be serving other masters?

This sounds like another of those Game of Thrones inspired episodes. Are we back to your master and servant theme?
•Indirectly, I guess.
•This is another one of those episodes I’ve had sitting on the burner for a while.
•And then the brouhaha about Facebook’s supposed pivot towards privacy broke cover last week and I thought it was time to tackle this one.

Before we head into Facebook land again, do you want to give us a little background for today’s show?
•As you mentioned in the intro, I think technology is fantastic.
•For the majority of humans – in the developed world at least – this is still the best time to be alive.
•And part of the reason for that is technology.
•Whether it’s technology delivering information to your hand, safer and more reliable modes of transport, cheap and plentiful food, incredible medical advances.
•Everywhere you look, technology is chipping away at the brutality of the past.

You could argue that some of that technology is pretty brutal too.
•Absolutely. We have an enormous capacity for violence and destruction.
•And one of the first things we do with a lot of technological developments is to weaponise them and use them for so-called defence or security purposes.
•Whether it’s video cameras or advances in sonics.
•It’s not what we’re talking about today, but if you are interested in that part of our development, there’s a great article at New Scientist called How Humans Evolved to be both shockingly violent and super co-operative.
•Not the snappiest title, but the piece, written by Richard Wrangham, looks at the evolutionary and societal case for violence and cooperation.

When do you think we lost control of the technology?
•I’m not there’s even an answer to that question.
•You could say that we lost control of technology hundreds of years ago.
•Donald Trump loves to tell people how well walls have worked for millennia.
•And yes, they keep marauders and bandits out.
•History is full of walled cities that fell to invaders.
•Some were more technologically advanced than the invaders, who simply encircled them and starved them out.
•But often it was technology that breached the walls.
•Siege engines. Catapults. Crossbows.

I thought we weren’t talking about wars and violence?
•Yeah, but if I start talking about looms and steel mills people are going to switch off.
•The things most people seem to remember from their history classes are the battles and the wars.
•And greater technology has often – not always – played a decisive role in who wins wars.
•The US Civil War is a good example. The industrialised Union States literally had an enormous war machine that the more agricultural and slave based economy of the Confederate States couldn’t compete with.

From the moment of conception to the time they die, the next generation of children may be tracked, monitored and surveilled every minute of every day.

Produced by Jeff Sandhu

Transcripts & more at www.kulturpop.com

Episode Excerpt

When I first saw that today’s show had Babies in the title, I assumed it had to be a joke. Matt Armitage is not known for being child friendly. In fact, I’m fairly sure that he thinks they should be farmed. Or grown in vats, like clean meat. But it would seem he’s genuinely worried about generations still to come.

Matt. Data Babies and trackable humans. What’s going on?
•You sound like one of those local TV news anchors in the US doing a hard hitting interview.
•Mrs McGillicutty’s slipped on ice because no one salter her path. Here to answer our questions is city representative, Jeff Sandhu. Councillor, what’s going on?

It really must be hurting you to devote an entire episode to children.
•I prefer to think of them as boxed in adults.
•In that you keep them in a box until they’re 18.
•I had one of those weird realisations over the weekend.
•I’ve been listening to and watching a bunch of anti-vaxxer information over the last couple of weeks.
•To the point where parents are turning down routine vitamin K injections for newborns in some countries, while in other places we’re seeing the return of infectious diseases like measles because fewer kids are being inoculated against them

This doesn’t sound as though it’s related to data…
•Because there’s a weird corollary.
•At a time when parents are rejecting medical interventions for their kids in increasing numbers, ignoring the science that shows these interventions lead to better health outcomes.
•Yet, despite the concerns people have about data privacy with Facebook, Google and the scores of apps and companies that track our habits and movements every second of the day.
•Despite those facts, plenty of people are willing to use services that offer them utility in helping to raise their kids in exchange for a very rich stream of data.

The Dream is fame, riches, untold power. Why do thousands of people dedicate years of their lives to making it, despite the tiny odds?

What would it be like if you cut Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google & Microsoft out of your life completely?

We knew it would be a living hell and never had the nerve to do it. Kashmir Hill, a writer at Gizmodo did. We chat about her experiences and their implications for the world we live in.

Show Links:
https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/17/almost-impossible-to-function-without-big-five-tech-giants
https://securitytrails.com

Episode Transcript

These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the typos and grammar flaws.

What would your life look like if you cut the big five tech companies out of your life? Is it possible to live without using Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple at all?

With a statement like that, you might think that MSP’s Matt Armitage has embarked on some kind of giant and heroic experiment. Well, sorry to disappoint you. He hasn’t.

So, Matt, you want to talk about cutting the tech giants out of your life without actually cutting any of the tech giants out of your life? I know you said that 2019 is the year we should embrace the hypocrisy, but isn’t that pushing the limits; even for you?
•We’ve done a lot of shows on MSP based on the creep and spread of the tentacles of companies like Amazon and Google.
•For many of us we associate these companies mostly with one or two products:
oApple is the iPhone
oGoogle is search and maps
oMicrosoft is windows, and equally, office
oFacebook is, well, Facebook
oAnd Amazon is what people do instead of going to the mall..

But that public facing aspect is really only a tiny part of what these companies are and do?
•Especially when it comes to the cloud, which Amazon, Google and Microsoft all control huge chunks of.
•A lot of us are using 3rd party services that rely on these companies, simply by buying a cup of tea in a café that uses a POS sitting on a cloud run by one of these companies.
•A lot of our interactions with them are seamless and invisible, which is why the idea of living without them is at once v intriguing and impractical.

This is something we’re increasingly seeing right across the tech landscape, isn’t it? This spread of function, and acquisition of other companies that operate in neighbouring spaces?
•There’s nothing new about it.
•Mergers and acquisitions is how the world of commerce works.
•What’s different when you relate it to tech, is the speed of the rise of some of the bigger players, and the sheer amounts of money they have to fund themselves or buy themselves into new market sectors.
•So their growth – in terms of scale and function – is quite amazing.
•Especially as the technology evolves so fast.
•What we aren’t even imagining today, is something that is a daily use necessity tomorrow.

How does that bring us back to life without the Big 5?
•It’s an experiment I’ve been really interested in for a long time.
•Can you consciously decouple yourself from these companies?

But not something you were interested enough in to actually try?
•Every time I ran it as a thought experiment, or tried to figure it out in terms of practicalities, I quickly realized that I couldn’t do it.
•For example, just to do these shows.
•Can I do them from paper? Yes, I could make my notes by hand.
•I could research with an independent like Duck Duck Go, if I got myself a computer with Linux.
•But the computers running the studio sit on MS Windows.

Utopia or Mattopia? We use today’s technology to create Matt’s perfect world of tomorrow. And introduce the term ‘bests of burden’.

Excerpt:

Then let’s start with money and finance as this is a business station.
•I like your commitment to keeping this fun.

Will money be digital?
•Eventually, of course. But it won’t be the kind of digital currency we have now.
•At the moment we have two major routes – the decentralised crypto currency route and the controlled, centralised currency, whether it’s physical or digital, like Sweden’s e-kronor.
•We talked about some of the risks of independent crypto currency last week when we discussed Quadriga CX and the money that is stuck in an encrypted cold store.

[Jeff ad libs reply]
•So there’s a real need for forms of money that are instant, robust and safe.
•At the moment, physical currency does that most successfully.
•But as we’ve seen from the growing power and success of e-wallet technologies, the currency itself is becoming more invisible.
•Most existing e-wallets link to your bank account or you pre-load the wallet.
•What I think we’ll see – what we’re already seeing – in China, Alipay is a bank as well as all the thousands of other things it is - is a growing merger of these systems and banking.

Can you imagine these payment systems becoming completely invisible and frictionless?
•Absolutely. What we have to figure out is the new relationship between central banks and retail banks.
•For example, a number of countries are starting to introduce electronic IDs that are a default access point for citizens to access government services, file taxes etc.
•In the future, why wouldn’t that central ID become our default payment account?
•At the moment, when we make a big transaction, we show a government approved ID, like a passport of driving licence.
•If everything is digitised, why do we need all these other layers.
•That one ID can be your payment account, your driving license, your marriage certificate, your passport.

You mean like a chip?
•I wonder if that idea if putting an identity chip in people is actually just an old sci fi idea.
•If you think about it, high speed web access allows you to do all the same things and more with biometric data and a cloud account.
•How that will look, I don’t know. It’s possible we’re be able to do on the spot DNA processing within a decade or two.
•Possibly even less.
•You get stopped for a traffic offence, it might be as simple as holding a sensor in your hand and that processes your DNA or other identifiers from from your sweat.
•The police can instantly see who you are, if the car is yours, if it’s insured, whether you have a license. Even whether you’re under the influence.
•And any fines or penalties can instantly be registered and debited from your account.

Welcome to MSP the Musical. It’s hard to think of the world without Facebook. MSP looks at the central role Facebook has assumed in the digital economy and wonders: can it last another 15 years?

Episode Transcript

These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the typos and grammar flaws.

We’re celebrating a birthday this week. No, not mine or Matt’s or BFM’s. On Monday 4th February, Facebook turned 15 years old. Today MSP takes a look at the impact of that legacy.

Hang on. It says here that today’s show is a Space Opera. Are you going to be singing?
•You know how most musicals have two parts the speak-y part and the sing-y part.
•I thought I’d do the speak-y part and you could sing the questions.

I’m not singing.
•But I’ve told the listeners it will be a Space Opera.
•They’re expecting this to be our Mamma Mia or We Will Rock You
•We’ve got CO2 cannons and pyrotechnics and everything.
•Rich was going to run through the studio in one of those flame suits, screaming.
•It was going to be legendary.

My contract says I have to sit in this studio with you. It doesn’t say anything about singing.
•Does it say no singing?

It doesn’t tell me if I should or shouldn’t kick you under the table. There are some things that you assume. Not singing is one of them.
•I’ll be honest. I’m a little disappointed.

It’s not my name on the show’s title.
•Then we’ll just have to apologize to the listeners.

Show Links:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2011/01/14/why-facebook-beat-myspace/#1a784be0147e
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-year-facebook-finally-tried-make-some-money/320493/
https://yourstory.com/2018/02/facebook-turns-14/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facts-about-facebook-11548374613
https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-wsj-op-ed/#0O3rCvqIcsqI
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/wsj-op-ed-mark-zuckerberg-speaks-down-users-and-misses-point

Surveillance Capitalism is turning us all into robots. Don’t fear the machines: they are us.

Show Links:

•https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
•https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754
•https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html
•https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/
•https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/13/dont-believe-the-hype-media-are-selling-us-an-ai-fantasy


Episode Excerpt

On last week’s MSP, Matt Armitage thrilled us with a tale of swashbuckling misadventure and mis-spoken grammar. This week we’re heading further beyond the edge of sanity to ask: whose robot are you?

Should we assume that this is another one of those shows talking about our entire existence being a computer simulation and that the creator of our Universe is actually a pre-teen working on a school computer project?
•That’s a very specific example.
•Have you spent a lot of time thinking about this?

What’s the point of it all is if we’re only ones and zeroes?
•I’d probably point you in the direction of Rod Rees’s Demi-Monde series of books.
•Simulations aren’t what we’re talking about today btw, but if it was, then your life still has as much meaning as it did before you realised it was all a simulation.
•It’s not like pain or joy is any less real. Or the taste of food.
•It’s unlikely to be a Matrix type situation:
oI don’t think anyone is holding our bodies prisoner while our minds are plunged into some fiction.
•This is our existence – simulation or not – and it’s really as simple as that.

So, why are we robots?
•This is building on from something we were talking about in last week’s Geeks Squawk.
•Radio listeners will know that these shows, MSP and Geeks Squawk, are kind of a pair.
•but I have had some of our podcast listeners tell me that they know about one show but not the other.
•Both shows are me and Jeff.
•I get to wander off into fantasy realms and thought experiments on MSP whereas on Geeks we’re a bit more grounded in the events of the week, looking at big or quirky stories from the world of tech and culture.

That’s the cross-promotion done. How does this follow from last week’s Geeks.
•We were talking about the 10 year challenge and how that information can be used to train machine intelligence to identify, track and even age humans more effectively.
•We also mentioned some other areas where we are inadvertently helping to train AI

So you’re being literal? You’re actually saying that we’re robots?
•Not in a mechanical sense. But in the sense that we are often used as objects that are the possession of someone or something.
•Which, of course, begs the question: whose robots are we?
•Who thinks they own us?

Make 2019 the year you take responsibility; stop caring and own it.

Want to know what happens in 2019? Future Matt looks to the past to tell us about the year to come