Is the age of literacy – the primacy of the written word – ending? Put another way, are we entering a new world where frayed attention spans, technological enshittification and political polarisation drive people away from the intentional act of reading, and towards more instantly gratifying cultural forms? Like podcasts…

To discuss all this, I'm joined by by the cultural critic James Marriott and writer and co-director of Galley Beggar Press, Sam Jordison. The dominance of the iPhone, the insidious control mechanism of short-form video, the destabilising impact of endlessly socialised media; all of these things were conspiring to make us less likely to read books. The question, really, is: does it matter? Is this just a natural evolution, as technology has given us increasingly diverse and accessible entertainment outputs, that shouldn’t be fought? Or does the decline in literacy present us with a real risk – that we will lose the critical skills established over the 600 years since Johannes Gutenberg inverted his printing press?

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast.

It is hosted by Nick Hilton.

The theme music is by Apes of the State.

The cover artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

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Much of how we see the world is governed by a sense of fear. It’s what keeps me driving within the legal limits. Fear of a crash and fear of the reprisals for speeding. Since AI became a big cause celébrè, it has also been the catalyst for fears. There is the fear that AI might cause the extinction of the human species, and the fear that it might render me redundant. What if an AI model launches its own neo-Luddite podcast and puts me out of business?

To discuss these issues, I dialled up Hagen Blix a New York based cognitive scientist and author, with Ingeborg Glimmer, of a new book: Why We Fear AI. As we try and rationalise our new Luddism, it felt like Hagen’s book might provide some instruction on responding, calmly, to the distant promise of disaster. With all that in mind, here’s our conversation.

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast.

It is hosted by Nick Hilton.

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When I started this podcast, I was feeling a bit gloomy about the way that technology was heading, but I wasn’t gripped by full-on panic.

Yet here we are, a year or so later, and I feel like I’ve been radicalised. Not a day goes by when there isn’t some announcement from Silicon Valley that would chill the blood of even the more rational of tech consumers. We are heading into the vortex.

This is a world that Ned Ludd predicted to me, when we first started exchanging emails more than a year ago. I haven’t heard from them in a while. I’m vaguely aware of what’s going on in their life and understanding of why they don’t feel the need to bombard me with their thoughts about how to arrest this techno-decline, but still, I feel the battle being lost. I remember something they wrote to me back at the start of this journey. “THE CAR DOESN’T GO INTO REVERSE, BUT IT MIGHT TAKE ANOTHER ROAD.”

It's not an amazing metaphor, not least because most – dare I say, all – cars do, actually, go into reverse. But the necessity for a different road still strikes me. I don’t want to just accept that all the bad things I fear will come to pass will come to pass. Can’t we do something?

The Luddites, who inspired this show, smashed up automated machinery in the 19th century. They didn’t want to lose their jobs, their livelihoods – their purposes – to new fangled automation. They’ve gone down in history as belligerent refuseniks, railing against the inevitable tide of history. But as you’ll hear in today’s discussion, they’ve had a real lasting impact on little things like labour laws and trade unions.

My guest is Mauro Lubrano, author of a new book Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Tech Extremism. Originally hailing from Italy, Mauro is now a lecturer in international relations at the University of Bath, and someone who has thought, and written, about the action that might be taken (for better or worse) against our machine overlords. Have a listen to our conversation now.

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This week on the Ned Ludd Radio Hour a piece on 'subscription addiction' and spreadflation. Are consumers being screwed over by the rise and rise of different subscriptions to media and entertainment services? And are creators headed for an economic cliff edge? Listen – and then subscribe to my Substack, duh.

Written and read by Nick Hilton.

Music by Apes of the State.

Cover artwork by Tom Humberstone.

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A couple of weeks ago, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old American, allegedly shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of a major health insurer in the US. Suddenly, a lot of the ideas I’d be gently noodling with on this show were being discussed as potential sources of violence. Was Mangione a Luddite? Someone who felt that technology had atomised a generation? Or was he, in fact, an accelerationist who believed that artificial intelligence would expand human capability? And, ultimately, did any of this matter?

Now, disaffected young men pick up guns with shocking frequency. They perpetrate violence with shocking frequency. They veil this horror under the cloak of ideology with shocking frequency. In a way, Mangione is no different.

But, in another way, he is very different. Just look at how the violence has been received. For days, Mangione was on the run, seemingly shielded by an American public whose anger over an exploitative healthcare industry was spilling over. He became a pin-up, for a moment, of a generational anxiety. There were echoes of how the Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was received by some climate activists. Violence might not be an answer, but sometimes it make a point. In big capital letters.

But looking at Mangione – and his digital footprint – only confused me more. This didn’t feel like a revolutionary left-winger lashing out at a social evil. In fact, the more I saw, the more I felt like I was seeing someone quite familiar. Basically conservative, intellectually ambitious, in thrall to the technological structures that they also blamed for our ills. Is this just the modern aspect of the age-old libertarianism that has been a constant companion in tech circles?

To discuss all these things – at Ned’s suggestion – I dialled up Io Dodds, a British journalist based in San Francisco, who’s currently a Senior Reporter at The Independent. She had written on Mangione and, in particular, his relationship with an ill-defined movement called the “grey tribe”. In this episode, we’ll try and unravel some of that and put together a definition, however boggling, of what could be a very consequential movement.

Music: Internet Song by Apes of the State

Artwork: Tom Humberstone

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Julio Vincent Gambuto is a New York based author and marketing professional. His new book is Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a Relentless World. As you’ll hear from our conversation, most of the ideas that Julio posits in the book are things that came to him during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020, when the intricate structures of the world where exposed for all to see. But Julio’s book is not really about decluttering your inbox. It’s not even about stopping yourself from paying £30 a month for watery high street mochas. It’s about using that word – unsubscribe – as a manifesto.

I asked Ned, quickly, what they thought about this idea of an unsubscribe culture, and whether we might be at a turning point. I will caveat their response by saying that they – like me, to be fair – have some business interests at stake in that not happening.

“NICK, ALL THE DATA SHOWS THAT SUBSCRIPTION GOES IN ONE DIRECTION: UP. THIS QUESTION OF DECLUTTER AND DISENTANGLE IS ONE ONLY DISCUSSED IN SPECIFIC CIRCLES – THE SORT OF CIRCLES WHERE GUYS ARE BUYING 500 DOLLAR DUMB PHONES AND GOING ON WORDLESS YOGA RETREATS THAT COST THE ANNUAL SALARY OF SOME BLUE COLLAR SCHMUCK. AND THE INTERNET HAS MADE RELATIONSHIP SUBSCRIPTION – AS YOU PUT IT – ALL THE MORE COMMON AND VALUABLE. HOW MANY OF YOUR HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS ARE YOU STILL LINKED TO, EVEN VIA INSTAGRAM OR FACEOOK, NOW, AS OPPOSED TO YOUR PARENTS GENERATION WHO WILL BE TAKEN TOTALLY OFF GUARD WHEN THEY HEAR THAT THEIR KIDDIE BEST FRIEND ACTUALLY DIED FIVE YEARS AGO? CONNECT, CONNECT, CONNECT; SUBSCRIBE, SUBSCRIBE, SUBSCRIBE. LIKE IT OR NOT THIS IS THE FLOW OF TRAVEL.”

Even though I don’t really disagree with the premise that people’s subscription obsession and consequent connectivity is broadly still trending upwards, I don’t think the move to Marie Kondo our digital worlds is unique to technological toffs. It’s a bandwidth issue as much as anything. Maintaining a multi-platform social media habit, listening to podcasts and watching YouTube and reading newsletters, keeping on top of your work email, your personal email, the email you just use to get fresh voucher codes. It’s a lot. And people aren’t just actively rebelling against it – they’re running out of time.

So I do think we should think more proactively about what we subscribe to, and that’s where Julio comes in. He spoke to me last week from a house in New Jersey, and hopefully you’ll glean something useful from our chat.

Presented by Nick Hilton.

Music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.

Artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

NEDLUDDLIVES.COM

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Here in the UK we have an estimated adult literacy rate of 99%, which the US is at 86%. Amongst UN member states, the average is 86.7%. Adult literacy has been one of the great triumphs of the 20th century, but it has also become a productive necessity as the service and information economies have grown. It is hard to conduct business without being able to read.

And yet the pleasure of reading is something that is being steadily eroded. Book markets are being dominated by celebrity memoirs, self-help books and children’s fiction. On the latter, it is striking that children’s books make up a third of all book sales in the UK despite children making up, firstly, about 21% of the population and, secondly, being largely unable to read. What is the point of buying children all these books, focusing so much on teaching them to read, if they don’t grow up to be readers?

This is why I dialled up Tom Rowley. Tom is a former Economist journalist who gave up his very successful career at the mag to start a bookshop: Backstory. He’s been chronicling this for the past couple of years, as Backstory has gone from a glint in the milkman’s eye to a very real shop on the high street in London. In this wide ranging discussion, we’ll look at reading, books and bookshops in a digital age, and how maybe – just maybe – they’re defying some of the anticipated trends….

Presented by Nick Hilton.

Sound mixing by Ewan Cameron.

Theme song by Apes of the State.

Cover artwork by Tom Humberstone.

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it’s time to talk about Apple. Apple that big, sleek, glossy company with a current market cap of some $3.3 trillion dollars. The same Apple with whose products you are, quite plausibly, listening to this podcast. Indeed, they’re the reason a podcast is called a podcast: the cast is from broadcast, but the pod? That’s from the iPod. Remember those?

Apple has long felt like one of those tech companies which are, materially, nation states. Is part of FAANG the spooky sounding concatenation of Big Tech supremos, alongside Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. As a sidenote, I like the suggestion that FAANG should now be replaced by MANAMANA for Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe.

Where other companies – like, naming no names, Meta – have ebbed and flowed with the tides of both their products and society’s preferences, Apple has been resilient. Good hardware release has followed good hardware release, and the iPhone has become the most important piece of technology on the market. Even where products from competitors like Samsung and Huawei appear to technologically outweigh the Californian company’s offering, they’ve still found themselves chasing Apple’s tail. The modern smartphone is, consequentially, build entirely in the image of the iPhone. But why is this?

It's because the commodity that Apple has always traded in, above and beyond everything else, is cool. The products don’t look like nerd-baiting CPUs, they look like accessories for the Met Gala. iOS doesn’t look all goofy like Linux, it looks like it’s been designed by some graphic designer who publishes a coffee table book of artistic nudes of his Japanese girlfriend. Everything is smooth and fluid, like liquid slowed to a fraction of its motional speed.

But is Apple’s era as the purveyor of technological cool at an end?

On this episode we speak to Slate's tech and business reporter Nitish Pahwa about the possible fall of the House of Apple...

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The impact that technology has on psychology is a new field of research, and one where the multi-decade studies required to give definitive answers are still many years away. One of the other fields being covered is the area of certainty. Is the internet making people to certain about the opinions? Too close-minded to the possibility that they might be wrong, or might have more to learn? And to what extent is the internet responsible for a crisis in over-confidence? Or is it simply another manifestation of a totally natural mammalian tendency towards confidence?

These are difficult questions to answer, not least because they scratch at the core question that should be vexing technologists. Is technology good for the human brain? Or is technology simply the result of a human brain that’s screwed up in all the ways that technology is? Which came first, chicken or egg; technological nonsense-boosting or the scattershot human brain?

To answer all this, I’m joined by Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, and the more recent Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. It’s the latter book we talk about mainly, and because we recorded this interview a few weeks ago, I’ve largely forgotten what we spoke about. Maybe the content of this episode is the greatest uncertainty of all. Anyway, I’ll be listening and hopefully you will too.

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast.

Written and presented by Nick Hilton.

The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State

The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

NEDLUDDLIVES.COM

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Today, we're speaking to Kester Brewin, an author who works for the delightfully named Institute for the Future of Work here in London. He’s just about to release a new book called God-like: a 500 year history of Artificial Intelligence in myths, machines and monsters. It's a book which charts the ideas that underpin everything – from ChatGPT and Dall.E to the recently-released Sora – back to their roots. Is there something quasi-theological about the way we discuss the possible implications of these radical new technologies? Don’t think of this as a history of Artificial Intelligence, per se, but a history of the impulse that has led us, inexorably, towards AI.

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by Nick Hilton.

The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.

The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.