← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
Can human solidarity survive social media and what if it can’t?
01:27:49
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:02]
LSE Events Host
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
- [00:17]
Miria Giorgi
Welcome everyone. Welcome to the LSE and to this hybrid event titled Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and Vote if it can. My name is Miria Giorgi. I'm a professor and the head of department in the Department of Media and Communications here at the lse. I'm very pleased to act as a chair of tonight's event and to welcome Professor Nick Coultre and Baroness Bibakittron. To all of you, to the audience here in the room and to our audience online. Let me first very briefly introduce you our wonderful speakers to you. I will introduce them with the order in which they will speak. Nick Coltrey is a sociologist of media and culture, Professor Emeritus and professorial research fellow at the LSE and a faculty associate at Harvard's Bergman Klein center for Internet and Society. Nick co founded the Diera Commune Network and was awarded the 2025 Dallas Smythe Prize for the Union of Democratic Communications. He's the author or editor of 17 books including most recently Data Graph, the New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back with Ulises Mejias, published by Penguin and his solo latest book the Space of the World, which he will be talking to about on tonight. Baroness Vivan Kidron is a crossbencher Peer at the House of Lords. She's also a leading voice on children's rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation and accountability. Baroness Kidron is a Visiting professor in practice here at the London School of Economics where she also chairs the Digital Future for Children Research Center. She founded the Five Rights foundation, is a Commissioner on the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development and advisor for the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Before she became a peer, Baroness Kidron was an award winning film director with many titles including the BAFTA winning Oranges Are not the Only Fruit and Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason. For those we're a media department after for those ex users, the audience. Let me remind you that the hashtag for today's event is lsevents and I would like to invite you to tweet on the event if you like, but I would also like to invite you to now switch off your phones or put them on silence so that you do not disrupt the event. The event is actually being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast subject to no technical difficulties. We will now move to our two speakers hearing first from Professor Coltry and then from Baroness Kittern. As usually, you will have the chance to put your questions to our speakers. For the online audience, please use the Q and A feature, identify who you are and include brief questions. And for those in the theater, I will come back to you to explain how we will move to the Q and A after we hear from our two speakers. For now, let me please join me to welcome Nicole.
- [03:37]
Moderator/Interviewer
Dr.
- [03:45]
Professor Nick Couldry
Well, thank you very much, Miria. It's hello everyone, including those online. It's great to have the chance to talk about my recent book, and I'm particularly grateful to Baroness Kidron for kindly agreeing to respond to my talk. It's great to have you here. The title of my lecture is, in fact the book's subtitle. Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media? And what if It Can't? The title of my lecture. There it is. But that's the question I'm trying to answer in the book. But the book's actual title is the Space of the World. And I want to start the lecture by explaining what I could mean by that mysterious phrase, because I believe it's the key to seeing really clearly the problems that we have created through social media, commercial social media. And let me start with two quotations. The first comes from the Danish philosopher Karl Jaspers, writing in the Second World War, where he wrote the question, what shall I do? That's the question of ethics for millennia presupposes another, more practical question which is actually core to our discipline. How is communication possible? The second quote comes from half a century later from the Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells, who's very famous for his theory of the networked society, which analyzed how the Internet profoundly changed our spaces of communication. And at the end of his first book of his trilogy, the Networked Society, he wrote that the networked society increasingly appears to most people as a meta social disorder. What could that mean? Well, it's certainly not a particular social problem. Too much alcohol there, too many drugs over there. No, it's a problem in how we make the social. It's a problem in how we are putting the social together. So if the question of ethics, what should I do with my one life? Is deeply linked to our spaces of communication. And if, as Castells tells us, our spaces of communication have been changing in a very deep way, then maybe we need to think a bit more about space and the difference it makes to our social lives. Problem is, space is very difficult to think about. Most writers write about space as if it was just a medium for content to pass through. Not much to say about it once the contents pass through it. But that misses out completely questions about how we configure space. And those questions really matter today, because as Castell's anticipated, In the past 30 years, the space of social life really has been radically reconfigured. Now, one aspect of this will already be familiar to you, which is that big tech and social media have acquired a massive power over the media economy. They completely changed the economics of local journalism, the economics of the national press. But during the same period, social media have acquired an even deeper power, which is the power to design, to reconfigure what I call the space of the world. And before I explain that term, the space of the world, let me just give you a simple example of how even really smart people can not see the profound change in space that we've all just lived through. And my example comes from a great piece of journalism, the articles that the Wall street journal published in September 21, reporting on the incredible revelations of Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who had worked inside Instagram until she decided she could no longer work inside Instagram. For example, she reported how Instagram executives had heard their very own research proving that their platform was damaging the mental health of young women, but they decided to go on anyway because that was how they were going to make money. She made many other revelations like that, but what interested me in particular was one sentence the Wall Street Journal used in the course of this great set of reports. They said, well, Instagram is the online equivalent of. Of the high school cafeteria sort of thing we all say, isn't it? Well, let's think what we know about Instagram. Instagram is a space of continuous data capture. You can't do anything on Instagram except by the data from it being captured by Instagram. Secondly, Instagram is a space that enables everyone on Instagram to surveil everyone else on Instagram continuously. There's no escape. Thirdly, Instagram is a space that brings each of us up very close to people, to contents which are in fact, very far away from us. They come right up to us when someone presses send on their phone for an Instagram post. Now think about it. Do you know any physical room that has any of those three features? There is no such physical room. So if we pretend that Instagram is just like a physical cafeteria, but we just moved it online, then we miss the whole point of what's changed, which is the configuration of space. So maybe we need a new language to Talk about that. Which is where we come to the word, the phrase, the space of the world, which I define as the space of all possible spaces, all possible social spaces that results from us doing what we do, which is interacting on digital platforms. Put another way, the space of the world is the actual social world in which we end up living when we do what we do, just interacting on digital platforms. So what I'm saying is in the book that through the particular way we designed our particular social media, we've actually created, without intending it, a social world with radically different properties from the pre digital social world. Now, of course, it's not unusual to say that something's wrong with social media. Almost everyone's saying that these days. But what if all those critiques actually miss the most important point, which is about space? It's about the type of space that social media, commercial social media have made possible. So let's briefly go over again and we've started to look at them and what are the special features of this space of digital platform? First of all, as I said, it exposes us to people, to content regardless of distance, regardless of time. Instantly they tap something into their phone. It's right there on our phone, the other side of the planet. Secondly, in ordinary offline space, we think we move around, we go left, we go right, we talk to this person, that person. No one's following it, no one really cares most of the time, unless there's a camera in the back of the room. But online, everything we do, everything we interact with is tracked. It's an algorithmic input into the platform. So in that sense, it's not free because it's going to influence what happens to us next on the platform. And all of this is driven by the goal of increasing the circulation of whatever it is that will drive what the platforms call engagement, whether it's good stuff or bad stuff. And the result of this is, and this is the core argument of my book, summarizing thousands of pieces of research, not by me, obviously, but by all sorts of people, is that today I believe we're living in a new space of the world that considered as an ecology, is overall toxic. It's not healthy, it can't be healthy. And there's just one piece of evidence for how bad things are and how we have to think about this. Let me just mention a paper by some global group of social scientists who just before the pandemic, the paper came out, in the early pandemic, they published a sort of crisis paper, very urgent paper, saying that the Increased scale of our social networks has created a crisis in global collective behavior so serious that we need a new crisis discipline to pay attention to what's going on. So you might be thinking then, well, if the things of that bad, why didn't we stop this? Why did we let this happen? I think one reason we didn't is very simple. We didn't stop it happening because no one before in advance believed that the space of the world was something that could be designed by anyone or anything. Think of past emperors and kings. If someone had told them, you have the power to design every possible space in which people can interact, they would have said, yes, please, I want that now. But they never thought they could do that. No one believed that that was possible until it was. It became possible at a certain point in history in all of our lives, when particular small elites in US and then in China, overwhelmingly male, largely white, increasingly very wealthy, found they had this power. And the story of what unfolded next is so strange that for the next few minutes I want to tell it to you, excuse me, as a fable, or if you like, a bedtime story. So a story maybe I want to tell to a child to get them to sleep and say, well, the world actually really makes sense for good, sometimes for bad. So let's tell the story that way. Let's go back to the late 1980s, early 1990s, and I'll keep to the west just to keep things simple, given the time limits. Let's go back. Once upon a time in the west, where were we? Well, we thought we were living in democratic societies broadly characterized by a centralization of power and authority that broadly could be understood in terms of Thomas Hobbes famous vision of the Leviathan, his 1651 book, and you may recognize there, the famous Frankfurt cover of the Leviathan, where he imagined, in the wake of the English Civil War, that the only way you could hold the society together without violence was to have one central authority there represented in the body of the king, before which everyone else was completely powerless. And there you see everyone inside the body of the king, they're all men, although someone told me they saw a woman in there once looking towards the king. Everyone is the same before that authority. And that was broadly true in the 90s too, except it was a democratic system that was the Leviathan. But we were also living in a globalized world characterized by increasing subtle conflicts over culture, politics, values that we didn't really understand. And increasingly in societies marked by declining trust in institutions and also declining respect for centralized media and so this was how it came about, that there was a readiness at this time to experiment. Let's start to have new relations between our media and our society. Summed up by the MIT data scientist Nicholas Negroponti in his famous phrase prime time. The night of the time of the 9 o' clock news channel on BBC or CNN becomes my time. The information flows on my personal computer. And what happened next was a social experiment that has had, I believe, profound impacts on Hobbes model of how societies and politics can hold together. And remember, I'm telling this in a really simple terms as a fable. What did we do next? Well, we connected every computer to every other computer, the Internet. Then we massively multiplied the number of computers. It's amazing to remember that in 1994, the year when Tim Berners Lee publicized the protocols of the World Wide Web, There were only 2 million computers in the whole planet. Now there are many billions, which means many trillions of computer connections. Now those first two steps wouldn't have changed society, they would have just met to lots and lots of misconnections. The third step was the crucial one, a radical new invention that we know as the platform, which was a way of focusing those infinite connections in a very particular way under the control of privately owned entities we call platforms. And then as we acquire mobile devices to ensure we have continuous access to those platforms at all times. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in the planet as of 2023. The latest figures, 1.2 billion tablets as of 2021. So the question is, what was the result of this very simplified history? For purposes of my fable, let me first of all, oh, I forgot one thing. We just let the platforms grow super large. They're bigger than the largest nation states, as you know, TikTok almost and certainly Facebook. So that's what I think then happened. So you can see in this diagram, citizens are still there looking towards that imagine central authority, the imagine central media, but they're also encased in a red line which is their social grouping on social media. And they're actually really interested in what's circulating in that group. What are people saying? What media are people watching? What are they saying about those media? And then also the arrows in the diagram, they are exposed to what's circulating in other groups that they're not part of. What's the result? That everyone is hugely distracted these days from the sort of central authority that Hobbes talked about. The sort of centralized media no longer has the same authority that it once did. This is if you like a leviathan in fragments, you might say, though, why am I complaining? This is all good. Isn't this what we wanted in the 1990s and the 1980s? We wanted a civil society much closer to the home where each of us were. And that would be a great argument if it was civil society that had built this. But it wasn't. This happened because of a business model, a very particular business model that all of us in this room know very well. A business model that is designed to do one thing, to maximize engagement, what the platforms call engagement at all costs. That is platform traffic. That is just us jumping up and down in front of the latest thing on our phones because that is potential attention which can be sold to advertisers. Now you know that, but let's think about the consequences of that. This means that we are happy to encourage interactions that circulate media and the comments about media as much as possible. Doesn't matter how, regardless of the quality of the media or the comments, and regardless of the scale on which this happens, let's involve the whole world, because that's how you maximize profit. This means there really is no limit to what you will want to have circulating on your platform. From the point of view of the business model, there's no limit to how bad it can be. And there are some terrifying documented examples of this, of mass murderers broadcasting their mass murder via their GoPro camera linked to their live Facebook account. You may know the terrifying example I'm talking about. This was consistent with the business model, which was about ensuring that since, okay, there are bad actors everywhere in the world, there's no world without bad people. There will be bad stuff out there. But if you want to just maximize the circulation to get us jumping up and down, you will ensure the circulation of bad information in the world. We have countless examples of this from Myanmar to Kenya, Brazil to the Philippines, the UK to the US that's enough of the fable or nightmare. Let's now return to the detailed research that backs up why I'm worried about the story I've just told you. We know these problems in our daily lives. The first problem with social media is the problem of polarization. And here I'm drawing of the work of the famous Stanford political scientist Shanto Yanga and colleagues who argued 10 years ago that polarization is growing in almost every society. And they didn't mean polarization of opinions. Let's be honest, there's so much stuff out there online, there's no way our opinions fall neatly into all in favor of this or all against that. It can't be that simple. But polarization of emotions is another matter. Affective polarization. What's really interesting is the theory of affective polarization. They bring out in their. They go back to the social psychology of the 1970s, 20, 30 years before the social media platforms we talked about, which said something astonishingly insightful. That because human beings have a natural tendency to polarize, after all, we're social animals who fight for scarce resources. We can be polarized. That means we can be more polarized under certain very simple conditions. One, that we are able to mark our identity of a group. Second, that we have an incentive to do so. And they did some very simple experiments. For example, they take 100 people, put them in a room. I could do it tonight. Divide. One side arbitrary, your group A, the other side your group B. Who cares what A and B are? Now we all do some simple tasks, but keep remembering you're in group A or you're in group baby. And don't be afraid to tell people that you're in group A. So we do it this way in group A over in group B, they do it differently. They don't do it as well as us. Within an hour or two, they had a room that was polarized against itself for reasons it didn't understand. Now think about what is a social media platform as we now so far know it. It is a space where people are able and encouraged to signal their identity. That is what we do when we like on Facebook, as we naturally like people, when we tag people. That is what we are doing. We're playing an experiment. Polarization becomes, and already was from the beginning, an inbuilt feature to the design of commercial social media. But worse than that, its impacts were intensified by the business models I've been talking about, which are there to drive whatever engagement comes out of that crazy experiment we have. In other words, a polarization machine. Then there's the second problem about truth. Important paper by MIT data scientists cited thousands of times from 2018 seems to show that on Twitter, the platform most of us have now left Twitter as it then was. When we compare the circulation of truth and falsity, let's assume we can agree some sort of objective measure that's certified is probably true by various authorities, that certified is definitely false. When we compare the circulation of falsehoods and truths, we found that falsehoods spread faster, deeper, wider than truths. Now, it's not that people want to spread inaccuracies. They probably they want to pass on what they think is true. But under these conditions, it's very hard to do that all the time. How often if you forwarded something, you haven't opened the link? Everyone does that because we're incentivized to do that. Democracies, however, depend on a certain common set of truths, basic facts that are things we're struggling about. And as Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier pointed out in another paper from 2018, social media make attacks on common knowledge very, very easy. They build distrust, which creates a really big problem, because as we just saw, the global scale of social media platforms has removed all those old physical barriers around rumor. Rumor used to stay just in one village or maybe in one small street corner. You wouldn't hear about it the other side of the city. Now someone can put something on their phone and it's all around the world within a few minutes. That's a big change. And even worse, because of this polarized nature of social media, the costs of challenging what we know to be a lie are so high that normally we don't want to pay that cost, leading to what's called a spiral of silence. We had examples in the pandemic. All sorts of nonsense was spoken about vaccines causing diseases. People knew it was nonsense, but most people were too terrified to speak up on social media. And there's political science research to back that as a real phenomenon. There was a spiral of silence. So we have allowed the industrialization of gossip. So those are two big problems from the social media. We have intensified polarization and the undermining of truth. Now, you might think there's side effects of the business model. They certainly weren't deliberately planned by social media. But then there's a third problem from social media, which is more than just a side effect. It's in part a direct result of how social media businesses deliberately configured the space of the world. This is complex. So we'll go a bit more slowly here. Let's think about what a healthy society needs. It needs boundaries and bridges. Let me explain what I mean. You can't socialize a child, help them to grow from being a child to an adult without boundaries of some sort. You can't socialize a child by presenting to them everything out there, however bad, in the adult world, all at once. They cannot process that. You have to have boundaries in time and space to make growing up even possible. In fact, all social contexts require specific boundaries. You wouldn't be able to hear me now unless we were sitting in a room with actual physical Boundaries we call walls. And you wouldn't want to hear me if you do, unless we define the context of this meeting as a lecture where I'm going to talk about a certain topic. You can't have a context without a boundary. And also within boundaries, we can grow social bonds and solidarity, as in a family and community, friends, political movements, but we can't have a healthy society only with boundaries and bonds, because a healthy society also needs us to cooperate more widely. And that is only possible if we build bridges across boundaries which make possible new forms of solidarity, unexpected solidarity with people we don't know, we may not care about. We don't have any bond with them, but we suddenly find we share an interest in doing stuff together. And we know this matters above all in relation to our biggest existential challenge, the climate emergency. Because all of us have to change how we live. And there's no way we would change how we live successfully unless most of us do, which means in sync with people we don't know, who we don't have a bond with. So we need solidarity to grow. Okay, if that's what a healthy society needs, let's reassess what commercial social media have given us. They have given us, as we've seen, the undermining of boundaries between context. Boyd and Mark Witz pointed this out years ago. You have to be very careful what you post on social media in case your parents might see it and you didn't intend them to. You've lost the boundary around the context with a conversation with a friend. This clearly distorts the socialization of children profoundly. Secondly, because of the business models I've been talking about, this taking away of boundaries has the effect that it risks exposing everyone, including children, to the full scope of toxic material that's online, out there somewhere in the world. And this harms especially young people, but it also undermines the spaces where new solidarities could grow. And I guess this second point was the main emphasis, emphasis in my book. We can't have a better politics under these conditions. So, summarizing everything I've said so far because of these various deliberate and not deliberate aspects of social media, commercial social media, we're living in a space of world with more polarization, more exposure to the bad stuff, therefore reduced trust in each other and less possibilities for new solidarity. To sum up where we've got to, I want to give you two quotations. The first comes from the American Psychological Association, May 2023. They issued a health advisory, not on drugs or, you know, various various Aspects that we worry about with kids, but no on social media use in adolescents. And one sentence in their announcement interested me. They said, designs created for adults may not be appropriate for children. It's obvious, isn't it? But what does it mean? It means that for nearly two decades, societies have allowed their most vulnerable members to be exposed to something that probably wasn't safe for them. Astonishing, isn't it? An astonishing admission. The other sentence comes from two years before the UN Secretary General speaking at the General assembly in September 21, where he said, increasingly people are turning their backs on the values of trust and solidarity. So I hope it's becoming clear to you what I'm saying in this book, that how deep we need to realize, how deep is this error we have made in allowing businesses driven by profit to build our space of social interaction, to design our space of the world to suit their ends. So I think, and I'm pretty sure Baroness Kidron agrees, when they're here, we have to do something about. And I think young people in particular are now demanding change. Let me give you three examples from surveys this year in Britain alone. The first said that 2/3 of 16 to 24 year olds think that social media does more harm than good. Two thirds. Second survey found that 2/3 again of 16 to 29 year olds want under 16s banned from social media. So many of those were just under 16 just a few years ago. So what they're saying is, please don't let my younger brother or sister go through what I just went through. Astonishing. And then the third survey figure, nearly half, 46% of 16 to 21 year olds would prefer to grow up in a world without the Internet. It's not possible. We can't grow up in a world without the Internet. But that is a cry of pain, isn't it, saying we want the world so radically different from the one we know is possible because this one, this Internet is not working. 46% of young people in Britain said that. These are astonishing figures. Now, there is one big uncertainty about any proposal for change, which is, what is Meta going to do? You may have noticed that in Europe they offer an ad free, but you pay for it service on all their platforms. And just last Friday in the uk, they offered this to the UK as well. I think they think this probably won't make much difference because that's how they make their money and they hope it won't make much difference. If not, they'll make their money from AI, but this could complicate things. But meanwhile, a Number of people have been doing important things to try and protect young people. So we have the proposals, often from people themselves, organizing this. Smartphone bans in schools in various places. Smartphone bans by age in certain places in France has been proposed in 2024. I don't think these are the answer because the problem is not the smartphone. I like to know when my bus is coming on time or not. The problem is the content on the apps on the smartphone. It's a very blunt instrument. Second approach is to have age restrictions on social media altogether. Australia is trying this. It's coming in December. Young people simply won't be able to access the more general aspects of social media again. Will that work? We'll see. VPNs are another way of getting access and so on. We'll see. Then looking at the UK Online Safety act, there is an approach to say, well, let's specifically ban certain types of content so that children don't have access to those. And there's a lot of impressive detail in that legislation, but my position is, and we'll debate this later, no doubt, is that none of these proposals actually adequately address the core problem I've been outlining, which is a problem that affects all ages and it affects children, young people in much deeper ways than these measures actually are able to target, which is that the business models that drive our current social media are toxic and that the social media as they exist have the wrong approach to scale. Let's scale at any cost to society, regardless of the boundaries that we know healthy social life needs. These are deep problems that we won't get rid of by targeting particular problems as they pop up. What we need is a much bolder approach, which I can condense into three things. First of all, let's consider not allowing businesses to design social space to their ends for their profit, or at the very least encourage non profit social media which already exists. There are platforms like Mastodon that do not make any profit at all, but they'll need governments to help them do this. So why not have governments impose penal taxes on commercial social media to combat society for the damage they've done? Second principle, let's stop allowing the prioritizing of scalability, which is a business idea, to maximize profit across the world, overriding the scales on which we know human life can be managed safely. This is why the Fediverse of which Mastodon is part, is built on the right principle, which is you try to build social media on scales closer to action communities. It's not easy, but it's the Right principle. Again, we need regulators to help this. Why shouldn't we be allowed to transfer our contacts, our conversations, our photos from any platform we don't like to any other platform we do like? That's not possible at the moment because the platforms block it. Regulators need to make it possible. And third point, let's stop believing that we can solve all the problems that commercial social media have caused by simply writing more code, by designing a better platform. Why don't we start trusting again the offline context that are still healthy and think they might be rather good places to start a social media experiment where we hope that community scale, non profit social media could build. I started with two very theoretical abstract quotes from Karl Jasper's Emmanuel Castells. I want to end by giving you a third, which comes from the African American philosopher Daniel Allen, who's based at Harvard, from her wonderful book justice by Means of Democracy. We're so often told by big tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg that it's they who enabled us to connect. Astonishing. They helped us connect well. As Alan points out, a truly connected society is one in which people can enjoy the bonds of solidarity and community, but are equally engaged in the bridging work of bringing diverse communities into positive relations. And that is exactly the type of truly connected society that commercial social media have prevented us from building over the past two decades. So, and this is my conclusion, instead of today's misconnected space of the world, which is what commercial social media have given us, we need somehow to start the task of collectively building a less toxic one. But you might say there's another alternative, which is to say this challenge is just too great. So let's do nothing but to say that that would mean giving up as societies on the possibility of ever regaining control of the spaces where we can be social. Now ask yourself, why would any responsible society want to make that choice? Thank you for this.
- [37:32]
Moderator/Interviewer
Thank you, Nick.
- [37:33]
Miria Giorgi
I would like now to invite Baroness Kidron to the podium and then we will take your questions for both speakers together.
- [37:44]
Moderator/Interviewer
Thank you very much, Banks. Nick, for both book and lecture and actually for asking me to be the respondent. I've never done that before and I'm very pleased to to have a go. You can judge whether I did a good go afterwards. Nick quoted a lot of people, so I'm actually going to start by quoting Nick. And very early on in the book he says between two or three decades ago, humanity made a huge mistake. The mistake was to delegate to businesses whose overriding goal is profit and value extraction the construction and management of the spaces where our social life unfolds. We handed over to business the design of our social world. This is something that we should never have done. And I have to say he had me at hello. The tech sector, through the design and deployment of social media, have fundamentally, fundamentally changed our society. The way we communicate, learn our friendships, our relationships, our political and social culture, our tastes and our pastimes, just about everything else you can think of. And as Nick presents it, Big Tech has changed the space in which we do all of these things, not in the interest of common values or democratic administration, or with democratic agreement, but in the interest of a small number of men. And they are mainly men in Silicon Valley and for neg, you know, this reconfiguration of this space has made it harder for us to overcome the big challenges that we face as a society as a whole. Those challenges require collaboration and solidarity, which are the opposite of what the space of the world has created. Now, Nick said that very clearly just now. But the reason that I wanted to reiterate it, and this is probably a moment where I'm going to make two admissions, is first, that I violently agree with this analysis that the design of the digital world, the way it has seeped into and reordered our economic, public and private life, has both carelessly and willfully contributed to a broad list of social pills that policymakers like me look at individually. But what they refuse to look at is the overarching toxicity rather than this series of problems. And I think that. That the policymaker assumption is that this series of ills are the outcomes, the unfortunate outcomes of something that is assumed to be a progressive good. And I think that Nick's book really tackles that head on. And saying, no, it is fundamental to what has happened, that the space, the overarching space, is the toxic problem. And I think that's a really good, enormously helpful way of thinking it. I think the second admission I'm actually going to make, which is that I felt a wave of panic when I read it, because there are some passages that mirror very, at times, mirror almost exactly something I'm writing. And I wondered whether unknowingly I had been gazumped, and I was very happy, you know, with this theme of solidarity, because I realized, you know, that both he and I arguing for something that might be conceived of as a citizen revolt or at least grabbing back power. And at least there was two of us in the room. So, you know, I decided that it was. That it was good. Now I really Want to really both of those admissions really speak to my support of his thesis and of his book. And I want to say three things that I liked, and then I'm going to tackle him on the outcomes on the last bit. So the three things that I really wanted to pick out first is this description of digital and social space. And I think that when we think about tech and space, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking about a different space that we have moved into, that we have migrated to, from somewhere different. And I point at the book of Jonathan Hay, controversial book, very influential book. But he talks about children having moved from playing outdoors with their friends to an online space indoors and alone. And I think what's important in space of the world, that it explores space not as a migration, but as a transformation. And I think that's really fundamental the idea that space itself has changed the space in the. In which our public discourse, friendship, child development, decision making, is now different. And that impacts on the way and on the conclusions that we come to, on our tastes, on our activities. It is not benign. It is. We are enveloped in this space. And I think, and I'm going to quote Nick again, he said, in past eras, new technologies circulated, circulated information across space. And of course, that had consequences. But there remained plenty of spaces, real social spaces, where the information that technologies circulated did not reach, where the influence of business was not present. When we started carrying around connected computer devices wherever we went, and it allowed commercial forces to manage those devices. At that point, mere information space began to overlay with the physical, with the emotional, with our bodies, with the social space. It comprised all our everyday actions. I think that that speaks to the cloud in which we all live. Not the cloud up there where we shove things, but the cloud in which we all live. And I think it comes very strongly and is very important when we get to the end and we think about the way in which we might tackle it. I think the framing helps us to understand the scale of the change that our society has undergone and the way in which we relate and work in different physical and emotional places because of this constant interaction with business. The other thing that I very much appreciated about the book was actually the focus on a sort of a long history of economic and political thought. And that just sort of seems to suggest that it just happens, you know, it's inevitable. And I remember having a conversation with Nick Clegg when he was very early in his job, and he told me very earnestly, you know, Meta was doing all that it could do you know, to keep children safe? And I turned around to him and I went, well, it's clearly not doing all it could do because children are not very safe. But more than that, you could switch off. And his face was a picture, his face was a picture. And I don't say that as someone, you know, who doesn't love tech and doesn't want tech and so on, but this arrangement in which there is an inevitability about the way it presents in our lives is a choice, is designed, is made, is, is created by business. And I think that again, you know, I just really, you know, love the fact that it kept on coming up that you know, this, the inference that, you know, the two handed inference that tech innovation is in itself progress in which harms are an unfortunate outcome of an unassailable net positive, you know, and the other is, you know, the idea that this just happens instead of human beings make decisions to optimize for certain outcomes. That is truly trashed in the book. And I really appreciated it as someone who has been fighting that fight for some time. And then the third thing that I really did like, and I think that this is particularly sort of visible in our new era of AI, is the idea of presenting the power of big tech as a new form of colonialism. And this is something that, those of you who know Nick's work knows, that he's talked about before in other research sort of more explicitly. And you know, it is actually a case that I've been making in Parliament. But this idea that US firms have spread globally to extract as much profit as possible, they are western, they are exploitative, they are extractive. And I think that, you know, the way that they impose on people and places and spaces that are underserved and extract even more and provide even less is sort of something that's mirrored and, and I would say anyone who's really interested in what's happening right now around politics and AI and the deal we just made should really read the submissions of OpenAI and Google to the US government for their AI strategy. And the reason that I suggest you read them a, they're online, they're available and they're quite short. Excellent. But what they are is a unfettered, unapologetic offer of a 21st century East India company. Not all, it is unequivocal and it's in their own words. And I think that that is something that is really important to understand about where we are. Those of you who are, you know, living and working and studying here. In the uk, But I think that without understanding that ambition, we understand nothing. So I really do commend Nick on all of those things. And now I'm going to have a go because, you know, in the way forward, there's quite a lot of recommendations. We saw three of them, them just at the end there. At the heart of them in the book, there's this idea of resonance, the idea that social media and the spaces it creates need to resonate with our interests of a society and in practice, what we are offered. And, you know, as a policymaker, you know, I do accept the difficulty of creating solutions, believe me, you know, 24 hours a day difficulty. But, you know, in practice, this idea, we need to overhaul the business model that big tech depends on, make social media platforms inoperable and transferable, change the norms of information production, harness the power of communities, change norms of privacy and exposure, and crucially, break up the commercial players whilst leveraging public investment. And to me, this list felt like way too ambitious on the one hand and not ambitious enough on the other. And I want to just say a little bit about each. The way in which it's too ambitious is that the solutions, when added up, are little short of revolution, in which power is transferred to the people, the state acts in their collective interest. And I remember, and in fact, it was the very last time I was standing on this stage in this room, someone asked a question and said, you know, are you going to lead the revolution? And I went, look, I'm an unelected peer with no party. I don't think that's quite my gig. But if, you know, but I'll meet you at the barricades. I'm in, I'm in. But I think that, you know, when we look at what's happening in the world, at the geopolitics, at the positioning of tech in relation to Trump's second term administration, you know, the idea that we could do all of those things just seems sort of impossible and maybe we'd be better off, you know, grasping the bottle and pouring another glass of red wine, you know, so it's not that I don't think those things would be good, it's actually if we're talking about Sten, I think that those are too difficult for people to imagine, engage with and get to in the time frame that we need this issue to play out. But the second on the not bash. So I turn to the not ambitious enough and I, again, I have two observations. One is that, you know, that Nick in public, in the book Just now is a little bit dismissive about, you know, various regulation, online safety acts, specifically, I think, similarly, the European Digital Services Act. And I think that doesn't accurately point at something very, very important that I know to be important to him, which is I have seen the changes that have come in, you know, hundreds of them. But, you know, for example, preventing strange adults connecting kids on certain services, or stopping pornography or. Or making indecent image with, you know, spreading an offence without consent or, you know, a number of things. And for the people who suffer at the hands of those features, I will say, you know, those are really, really important changes for them. But I think the important thing, and where, you know, where I point back at your work, Nick, is it. It proves you can design tech for a social purpose. It's a proof point. Every single change that we have imposed on the tech companies since about 2017 has proved that people make tech, not tech is inevitable. So I think that is a reason for celebrating some of those things. And, you know, while I've got a lot of criticism, as you know, and I've been very publicly critical of the implementation of some of those things, I do think we have to hold on to that thing. And then the second area, which I think is missing, and frankly, I think it's missing everywhere, and it's something I'm looking at and colleagues are looking at, which is, you know, we really need to think about existing domain regulation and law. You know, why do we let them get away with pretending, tending to be platforms? What is a platform? They are businesses, they are hoteliers, they are taxi firms, they are publishers, they are, you know, financiers. They are all the things that we have in the world, except they're not regulated and do not have the legal structures, the cultural structures and the responsibilities to individuals, to communities, to states for those things. And I think that that is the one thing I would say I would like to see, you know, in your next book, is this idea of smashing tech exceptionalism. I think, you know, that while I absolutely agree that three decades ago humanity made a huge mistake by delegating social space to business, I think side by side, we made an equal. An equal mistake, which was to allow to pretend they were not businesses. And in doing so, we allowed them to avoid their responsibility. Finally, I just really wanted to say something about solidarity and how incredibly important it is and, you know, and how accurate how I felt your account was of how social media undermines solidarity and how a lack of solidarity absolutely undermines our ability to deal with Collective action problems, you know, as you say, climate crisis, but actually also how to solve the problem that we are discussing right now, the problem of tech. And, you know, I think that the lack of solidarity is in itself a social ill. You know, atomization, isolation, you talked about polarization, loneliness, you know, these are all ills in their own right. And we're all poorer and worse off for a lack of power and a lack of connection, a lack of belonging and a sense of helpless, helplessness. And I would like to finish by saying two things. One is simply to say that helplessness is designed into the products. We are not helpless, but we do have to take steps forward. And the other thing that I just wanted to say, which was as Nick was talking about young people, I thought of a piece of research, a different kind of survey in which the researchers were trying to work out how valuable social media was to some American students, you know, first year American students, and they couldn't find a figure. There was no amount of dollars that they were willing to pay for social media, but it turned out that they were willing to pay 50 bucks a month for everyone to get off. And I think that that is something that we should hold in our minds that actually this is a collective problem. This is a problem of solidarity, and that actually we need all to do something in order for one person to be free. Thank you very much.
- [57:13]
LSE Events Host
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. LSE IQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [57:46]
Miria Giorgi
Thank you both. We will open the floor in a couple of minutes, but I want to give Nick first the chance to respond to response.
- [57:54]
Professor Nick Couldry
Well, thank you very much and thanks for the positive words about the book. And I'll admit the bit of the book that was by far the hardest to write was the final chapter on solutions. I almost gave up. I didn't really struggle with that because I had quite deliberately tried to see the problem of social media as clearly as I could. And once you see it clearly, it is a deep problem in the design of the societies that every single one in this room is now suffering from. The problem goes as deep as you can go. So that means solutions cannot be easy. And I like what you said just at the end, one possible solution. All of us realize this and start to have a Pact, we're going to use it less and there are signs of movements in this direction. That will be one solution given that the practice policies are so profoundly difficult, as you say, towards the end, I admit it, if we're going to change social media as much as I would like, we are almost on the way to beginning a socialist revolution. And I actually say that towards the end, if we can solve that problem, we are on the way to really profound change. But maybe that's what it will take to solve this. However, I never meant to minimize the work of regulators and the thing is just to put context, I finished this book in February 24th and I wrote most of it in October, in the autumn of 23. I didn't imagine the current US government, I don't know anyone who did. It's truly a terrifying convergence of forces when the darkest tech forces, the very worst seen at their worst, are now in league with the most powerful political power in the planet. I didn't anticipate that. So I didn't anticipate quite how difficult the geopolitics were going to be. And it does make it mind wrenchingly difficult. So maybe we have to step back. And I do agree when I read the Online Safety act, there's a lot of really smart stuff in there. It's a very good attempt to develop a sort of tool that gets inside the. The gearbox and messes with certain things. The harm, the duty not to do harm. It's a clever way of messing with the mechanism. What I'm saying is it's not dealing with the underlying driver of the engine that's the problem. It may work or it may not work. We've just seen this week a few things. Guardian reports of online radicalization or mass Facebook groups happening through the basic workings of Facebook, through the sheer ease which you can do that on something the scale of Facebook. I think there's a problem with scale. It's not to say that drives political rightening, of course, that has many other drivers, but we make it, we provide the oxygen through the structure and I think we need to think about the deeper problems. But that goes to the third point you make. I exactly agree. We should say to business, we don't think you were dishonest. This wasn't a conspiracy to mess up the world, you just did mess it up. So let's look at what you've done honestly and you have changed the structure of space. Now let's think maybe not about penal taxes. That was. I floated that to see what you'd say, but let's think, okay, if that's what you've done, what are you going to do to fix it? What are you going to do to your business model so that it never has this risk of constantly pushing potentially bad stuff out there, because none of us know what is potentially bad until it does its harm. You can't fix this in advance. That's what the Online Safety act tries to do. It's a brilliant attempt. The issue around GDPR and the European legislation is more complex. Again, they do some sensible things. They never challenge the business model. It's very clear they don't. And the GDPR was also a brilliant attempt, relying on consent. But as countless lawyers have pointed out, it's pretty easy to get someone's consent. The whole history of crime is based around getting consent. That's what crime very often is. So we have to really look hard at the apparent solutions. I do think the Online Safety act you're involved in is important, but it cannot be insignificant that people like Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, still is strongly dissatisfied with what is offered. And there's a reason for that. Because we haven't yet got down to the core thing. If we could have an honest debate about what's wrong, I think we have a chance of coming up with even better solutions. My book was simply trying to provide a horizon, okay? An idealistic one towards which we know we should be going because otherwise we know we are going in the wrong direction.
- [62:36]
Miria Giorgi
Thank you. We'll now open the floor for questions both online and in the room. Let me also remind you please to stick around because we will have book signing after the event and there's a reception following the event also on the fifth floor upstairs. So can we start with the room? We have our stewards with a roving mic. Can I see signs of humor? And please identify yourselves when the mic comes to you. We'll start downstairs. There's one question there. Two, three. Can we take the three questions from downstairs and then we'll move up? Thank you so much.
- [63:19]
Laura (PhD student)
That was brilliant. My name is Laura. I'm a PhD student here. And my question was around the fact that most dominant platform platforms will argue that if any regulators put any sort of barriers to their operations or growth, they will be stalling innovation and censoring or curtailing users access to the public square and the right to freedom of expression. And even more, in this current climate, there might be quite a lot of distrust of regulators or governments which undertake some of the tasks you propose. So what is Your take on that and how do we build trust?
- [63:54]
Miria Giorgi
Okay, we will take two more questions from the middle of the room. The person with the black top there. I know that there are a few more questions. We'll go with the person with a black top and perhaps the person with the scarf behind them.
- [64:11]
Akanksha (MSc student)
Hello, my name is akanksha. I'm an MSc student in politics and communication. I agree and believe that the majority of the younger generation and the younger populations do believe that social media is bad and would pay money to have people get off of it. But the execution of that amongst the younger generation is really not seen because of the fact that it is an addictive kind of platform where even if we want to, it has become quite difficult to let go of that kind of validation, social validation. So what is your take on how Indian it can. How social media platforms can, say, regulate it, or in such a way where that addictive kind of aspect of it reduces or can be monitored in a sense.
- [65:00]
Fiona
Hi, my name is Fiona and I kind of want to catch on that point, actually, you said. Because I feel like social media is really. Or I could do an analogy with smoking because I think smoking is the exact fact where you know it's bad for you, but still you do it. And especially smoke, like passive smoking. So, like, even if you tell people and they know and they stop smoking, as long as there are people smoking, everyone else is passively smoking as well. And at the end of the day, it's the social health care system which tries to, like, figure out the consequences of the smokers. So what do you think? How can social media kind of like, be an analogy to this and how can we solve it?
- [65:41]
Miria Giorgi
Thank you, Nick. If you'd like to start, I think someone, you might have some comments too.
- [65:47]
Professor Nick Couldry
Well, the first point about freedom of expression, that is certainly what the platforms say and they're saying it very strongly in the US at the moment. Well, the question obviously is freedom of expression for who? There were so many people who are silenced by the polarizing force, particularly men against them on platforms. This is the real force on social media, the crushing of voice under the apparent freeing up of voice. And often new people are able to speak. And let me just stress, I never minimize in the book that there are some movements, Black lives matter, the MeToo movement, that were given important energy by social media. I never did. The question is whether overall this is the best way of helping that sort of movement to grow rather than in the end to diminish and creating toxic backlash and so on. So they will say it's freedom of expression. And also the issue, do we trust regulators? Well, I think again we have to ask, who would we trust more Regulators who are honestly trying to solve problems which they're transparent about. What they're trying to to solve are corporations, where virtually every statement they've ever made on these issues has proved to have been a lie when they were forced to admit it. I think I know who I trust and it's pretty clear. Thank you for the second question. It's really hard to get off. I don't talk about addiction in the book for very deliberate reasons. I'm very cautious as a sociologist about the individualizing of this story, which is so easy. Those people are addicted. That's the problem. It's them. The problem is the whole thing, the whole set thing in which we are having relations. But then there is a deep particular problem about addiction. We're all addicted. I like to be liked. My brain lights up when someone says, I like you, I love you. It lights up. Everyone's brain is like that. Social media knew that from the beginning. They designed it on that basis. We really have to look at the fundamental design of the platforms and that's the area where the online safety bill is excellent in talking about functionalities with really smart detail, I thought. However, it doesn't make that basic point that a platform with likes built into it is going to be addictive and so on and so. So we need to tackle that. And we also need to think socially. Maybe we have to start helping each other. This is a collective problem which we suffer individually. We have to help each other deal with the cost of spending less time on connected platforms. And we know we can do that because people are already doing it, including a lot of young people are learning how to do that. The last point, again a similar sort of question. I think there are people with some really interesting experiments. So I'm not against online connection. Don't get me wrong. It has some great purposes. It's good to deliberate with people about complex problems. You don't know them, but we have to solve things. Let's generate some ideas. There are platforms that have been developed that don't allow you to comment on each other's comments. You just make the proposal. Then an AI, fine. If it's AI analyzes the sort of consensus, then you put that back to people. People comment on that. So it's somehow talking into a mirror without getting into the fight with the person behind the mirror. There's a lot to be said for smarter Ways of designing this to take on this addiction problem, which me, just as you, we all suffer from, because it's a basic aspect without even getting into polarization.
- [69:32]
Moderator/Interviewer
I think on the freedom of expression, I think what Nick said is basically the truth is they don't. There is not freedom of reach. And freedom of expression does generally mean the right to be heard as well as the right to speak. And I think once you deal with those two things, you can rebalance what the technology is doing, which is actually commercializing reach rather than speech. And as a woman in politics who's got a lot of things to say critically about the tech sector, I can tell you there is no freedom of expression for me. I just have to be off. Yeah. So I think it's a false God, that one. And I think most people who are critical of tech are not trying to chill speech. And I think it's been really interesting the last two or three weeks watching people from the right who are, you know, cutting down people from other sides, you know, even the comedian, etc, etc. I think we're getting to a point where this argument is actually going to disappear a bit. On the addiction thing. I want to say a couple of things. I mean, first of all, you know, there is a big battle in parliament. Parliament thought that it had addiction compulsion. Deliberately designing to be compulsive in it was one of our big battles ofcom. Don't agree, we don't agree that they shouldn't agree. And it's ongoing. And I really think that we do have to look at, you know, rating rankings, products that are deliberately designed to be compulsive. And I also think that the medical community is moving towards addiction word. You know, Sonia Livingston's in the audience over there. We have suffered for many years about the word addiction. And we were very carefully using the word compulsion. I think medicine and I spent half of today with medical leaders. They're getting pretty comfortable with the idea of deliberately designed to addict. And then I'm going to say something challenging to two people who are a bit younger than me who kind of. I think you have to get a sense of agency about this. What world do you want, guys? And what life do you want? And you have to make those steps. And I'm not saying it's easy, but I was in a very similar situation to this at Harvard a few months ago. And so many of the questions from the students were, how do we be politically active without our phone? Yeah. And I was sort of. I got infuriated by the end and I Went, now hang on a minute. You know, When I was 20, I was at Greenham Common and we actually walked to the, you know, we walked to the phone and then we each phoned someone and they each phoned 10 people and they each phoned it and 32,000 women showed up, you know, and I'm not saying we want to go back to those days, but I am saying that there is something between the work that people like me absolutely have to do and the fact that I think it's criminal what the tech companies are doing to you. To me also. Yeah, absolutely. With you all the way. But at some point I do think there's a sense of agency in this and there is a sort of the solidarity point. We've got to find solidarity with each other and with others and take those steps that make it easier. And I don't know how to say it better than that.
- [73:06]
Miria Giorgi
Thank you. Shall we take some questions from the online audience?
- [73:16]
Moderator/Interviewer
Yeah.
- [73:18]
Online Audience Member
A question from, from Corinne Rus from Sao Paulo in Brazil. How do you see communities being able to reclaim solidarity in the age of platforms using bottom up practices such as assemblies, audits, petitions to reshape technological power? Second question is from Mohammed Saleem Shaikh, Pakistan's Climate Change Ministry. If human solidarity cannot survive in the current social media environment, who bears the primary responsibilities? Is it governments, tech companies or individuals? And the last question from Jada Paramansamvim. Given how central social media is to young people's lives, what can they do collectively and individually to resist its decisive effects and use it in a way to strengthen solidarity?
- [74:08]
Professor Nick Couldry
Okay, well, great questions. Thank you to everyone. Online writing is just atrocious. How come communities reclaim solidarity? Well, I think we started to talk about this, in effect, I think, and this is what I was getting at in my point right at the end, and I'll be honest, it was this research that helped me finish that terrible chapter on solutions. Because I discovered two researchers, both in Holland and in Canada, who thought, well, maybe the problem isn't by smart tweaking of platforms, it's actually going back to places where people are not shooting each other, where there actually is a reasonably healthy context, maybe around a particular school, a hospital where people are collaborating largely offline, a sports club. And think of that as a place where you take those people and say, actually, would you like to have a better relation to social media? Everyone says, yes, let's start doing it in this group of people. Let's help each other do it. Let's start from here. Let's try this Non for profit social media platform in this group and people actually tried this research in Holland and amongst even indigenous communities in Canada try Mastodon and it's been quite successful. So this can. So I think that means basically connecting the online and the offline in more imaginative ways and not going back to Beavan's point about inevitableism. Not saying the only inevitable solution is the one that techie's on offer. Instagram's wonderful ways of making it a little bit safer for kids and parents. Let's ignore those so called pseudo solutions and start to come up with smarter social solutions. Solutions amongst the group of people that we actually are. So I think that's one way it can be done and there is some evidence it's happening. Who bears responsibility for all this? Well, I think I would primarily blame corporations not because they knew what they were doing. And that's the real moral blame. I've just published a piece on Facebook's early patents. How they disappear. Designed the space of Facebook to be as addictive as possible to make sure that everything you could possibly do there would be counted towards this overall goal of counting engagement. And they did it without any reference to morality, without any sense of what they were doing. We call it, I'm writing with a wonderful Brazilian researcher, Joao Magalaj. We call it blind social engineering. Engineering the social blind. Messing with the engine of our lives without even knowing what you're doing. That is deeply immoral. Deeply immoral. So I would blame techs, but I also blame governments for allowing this to happen. Not listening enough to people like Beban and many others early enough to see quite how deep the mess was because they were already in various ways in thrall of this new form of tech power, which is actually much more powerful than theirs political power these days for many complex reasons. So I blame governments, corporations and then governments. I do not blame us. We're doing what we want to do, which is to connect. We're doing a bit more of it in ways that seem really good at first, but under conditions that we had no understanding of. And it's those conditions that we couldn't grasp that are the ones we're paying the price for now. So I don't want. What can young people do? Well, I agree with what Vivian just said is build solidarity. Accept how hard this problem is, though. This is not about a matter of changing this or that terms of condition. A small change here or maybe you leave Facebook, but I'll stay on it so that we can do. I can organize the party. It's about helping each other all start to get off these platforms, all spend this time. And that is what solid solidarity is. Incurring costs, doing what's really inconvenient and expensive, in league with other people who are. You're not necessarily your family, but, you know, you have to act with them if we're ever going to solve this. Solidarity is the core solving this. I agree.
- [78:19]
Moderator/Interviewer
I'm going to answer the questions in the, in the reverse order. I do quite a lot of workshops with young kids. I mean, young, young people with various ages, actually, you know, probably the youngest is around 8, 9. And you know, they generally go up to 21. And I think that they are very often good about solutions and about collective solutions. And I think that, you know, just as Nick's book is really about the way space has been invaded, I think that young people are quite clever about sharpening their elbows and kind of going, in this space, you know, we don't want to be disturbed or in this space, this is how we're going to behave, or in this space. So I do think that there is something about, you know, having collected collective practice, even if it's between two of you or four of you or 30 of you, but the, the idea of collective practice is indeed, you know, designed by yourselves, is, is actually what the youngest of the young people really want to do. And, and I've done a number of workshops in schools and a number of workshops, you know, in which, and in which, interestingly, they are very keen on no messages, no posting, just pictures, no beef, etc. Etc. So I do think there's something there. I don't think, I mean, obviously, you know, who's to blame, 21st century capitalism, lobbyists, governments, you know, etc. Etc. I don't think it's so interesting to blame. I think it's really interesting to find paths out and in particular to the first question about solidarity, I think we slightly skipped over and also perhaps were negative about those parents who gathered together to try and do foam free schools. And I would say that's an act of solidarity. They have moved, they have spoken, they know what is not working for their kids and they are doing what they can with the voice they have, with the power they have. And whether it is crude, whether it is blunt, I think, as you know, the legislation, I mean, I gotta say that legislation is a tenth of what I wanted and a bloody victory both at the same time, you know, but that other 90% has to be built somehow. And these parents are involved in an act of solidarity. And I very much suspect they will win that fight and we will get phone free schools. Yeah. So I think activism is all of our jobs and I think activism on behalf of other people as well as ourselves is really, really both enriching and an incredible learning experience, you know, as you do it. And that's where I think solidarity comes from. From a combination of kind of, you know, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore on the one hand. And on the other hand, you know, a slightly, you know, hang on. I don't like what's happening here to this person. I'm going to stand in solidarity and I think it's that double whammy.
- [81:55]
Professor Nick Couldry
And if I could just say I didn't in any way mean to dismiss the child. Phone. I don't agree with the solution, but I actually think it's a very important sign of profound social unrest and concern. I think it's really significant. I just happen to think there are even better ways of dealing with the problem they've rightly identified.
- [82:13]
Miria Giorgi
We're almost out of time, so we'll take just one question from the talk. The person with the brown cardigan, please. Please keep it short so that they have time for final comments.
- [82:27]
Professor Nick Couldry
Sounds good.
- [82:27]
Miria Giorgi
Thank you.
- [82:28]
Fiona
My name is Jasmine Powell.
- [82:29]
Professor Nick Couldry
I'm an LSE alum and a public health physician.
- [82:32]
Fiona
I've heard the term techno feudalism to.
- [82:34]
Miria Giorgi
Describe the current state of affairs and.
- [82:36]
Fiona
I was curious what you thought of the term, the concept, if it's something.
- [82:39]
Professor Nick Couldry
We should use or not use. Thanks. Okay, well. Well, Bieber very kindly mentioned my work on data colonialism, which is joint work with the Mexican research Ulysses Mejias. I could go on for a long time about that. But basically the idea is we have allowed and well, rather we haven't allowed this just happened. Tech has taken the social space as its source of its extraction. It's taken human life in a much more radical way than colonialism attempted in any case previous point in history. And that is what we're all living through. And this is just one side effect of it. So techno feudalism. I greatly respect Yanis Varoufakis. I'm a member of the DiEM25 movement. However, I don't agree with his solution because or his phrasing of what's gone wrong. I think it's strange to say what's gone on is somehow a reversal back to feudalism, which was a very successful way of organizing life 500 plus years ago. I don't think history. I'm not, I don't believe in forward progress automatically. But the idea of skipping back 500 years is profoundly weird. And I don't think it takes seriously enough that this, there is a much deeper continuity which is the continuity with colonialism. Colonialism has not gone away, it's continued. Capitalism has not gone away, it's continued. They've in fact been intertwined together in what we call a sort of double helix for 500 years. It was only because of colonialism and the taking of everything that you could have the fuel to start the engine of capitalism. So I think it's the wrong approach. Some of what he says, of course I completely agree with, I agree with the anger, but I don't think it's the right theoretical approach. Colonialism is much clearer to look at and I think it comes back to what you said Bibin. The idea that we would allow our lives to just be there, to be extracted from not just this or that product, but literally the stuff of our lives. This is profoundly close to the violence that happened 500 years ago, but without the physical violence. That is a really useful parallel to see how upside down we're getting things and how up upside down many people at the beginning of colonialism got it because many people thought colonizers were bringing gifts originally. They were deceived into that they were tricked into. So we have to see how dislocated this is. And that's the reason I talk about colonists, feudalism.
- [85:09]
Moderator/Interviewer
I do want to say not without violence, not without violence. I mean, you know, today I was listening to people from the medical profession. 50% of young women report having strangulation during sex. 50%, yeah. Now teenagers are as likely to die from suicide as they are from cancer, etc. Not without violence on the question. You know, I'm not an academic, you know, I'm a politician and before I was a filmmaker and I'm trying to, you know, engage people in this discussion and I find it a useful term, a useful image and I maybe I'll finish my contribution by saying I was once giving a speech and I answered a question and I said oh God, you know that, you know, it's just the kids are like serfs in the, you know, hoeing Silicon Valley or something. And the representative of Facebook as it was there, leapt out of his seat and started red faced shouting at me. And I thought maybe I've got onto something here. So I'm fine with the term as a way of trying to make people understand this extraction problem. The worst working for free, the working for the man, the being entrapped in space. Yeah, I'm totally fine, but I do actually profoundly agree with this colonialism analysis.
- [86:48]
Miria Giorgi
Thank you both. And just to before we close to remind everyone about also the great inspirational ideas about solidarity that have come on the table, not just the the challenges and the problems we face with we have come to the end of this event. I want to thank everyone for being here. To remind everyone that there will be book signing outside and then a reception on the fifth floor and everyone is welcome. But before we go, please join me to thank our two great speakers.
- [87:26]
LSE Events Host
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.