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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first.
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Broadcast on 18 September 2025 on Monaco Radio.
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Earth's most powerful individual continues getting even with comedians who said mean things about him on television. Protests in France. Yes, we know, but bear with us, they're really quite big. And has AI taken another step towards rendering us all unnecessary? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now.
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FOREIGN.
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Hello, and welcome to the Monocle Daily, coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Marta Lorimer and Marion Messmer will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the author, Matthew Ford, about his new book, looking at how the smartphone enables all of us not to just watch wars up close, but potentially participate in them. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Marion Mesmer, Senior Research Fellow in International Security at Chatham House, and Marta Lorimer, Lecturer in Politics at Cardiff University. Hello to you both. Hello, Marta. First of all, you return pith helmet barely off from safari.
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Yes. I just spent around 10 days in South Africa. Eight of those were spent in the Kruger. So I've seen all of the animals except for the cheetahs, but I saw two leopards.
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C
The cheetahs are hard to spot. They're famously very quick.
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Yes. Whereas the leopards were really super relaxed and, you know, they were enjoying a little bit of quiet time together.
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Did you enjoy the trip? Had you done something before? Because as we were discussing before we came on air, I did something similar many years ago on a travel writing commission from a magazine that I had never written for before and have never written for since. I am convinced that I was commissioned by Autocorrect and they were too embarrassed to tell me that they'd offered the job to the wrong writer. But I was. I mean, I thought it was a wonderful trip. It was to a reserve very near the Kruger in South Africa. I have to say, I found the whole thing. I thought it was going to be cool, like you would see lots of cool animals. I actually found it unexpectedly, quite moving.
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Yeah. I really. I mean, this is not the first time I've done this. I actually lived in South Africa as a child, so I did that as a child a few times. No recollection. Well, not many recollections. And then a couple of years ago, we went to the Kruger again with my husband for our honeymoon and we did this Sort of safari experience in one of the reserves close to the Kruger. And that really made me want to just go back and spend more time and go there in the right season because we went in December, whereas this is a really good season if you need to spot animals. And we're really quite happy with it.
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C
Marion, you are shortly going to Germany where there will be fewer leopards.
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Fewer leopards, I hope. But I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but there's a monkey sanctuary near where I grew up.
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C
You had not mentioned the monkey sanctuary near where you grow up. Please go on.
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B
Well, it's a really cute concept. So I feel like these days the monkeys probably steal smartphones, so maybe you have to be a bit careful, but you can basically go. It's this hill, they call it a mountain. It's not really a mountain, but it's essentially this hilly area that's very foresty and they have a whole bunch of monkeys there that are very used to people. And so you can go. People tend to go with small kids. That's probably last context I went in, where you then buy a lot of unseasoned popcorn, which has the double effect that it's healthy for the monkeys and the kids don't snack on it. And then the idea is that the, the kids can go around and like feed the monkeys. And because they are so used to seeing people, they really come up very close and like, you know, pick popcorn out of your hand and that sort of thing. So it's very sweet.
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Well, sticking with the subject perhaps of screeching, unruly creatures flinging stuff at each other, we will start in the United States. And with the determination of the administration of President Donald Trump to address the terrible menace of late night television show hosts taking wry sidelong looks at the day's news. Like Stephen Colbert before him, Jimmy Kimmel has now been hounded out of a job. His show on Disney owned ABC suspended indefinitely after Kimmel made extremely mild satirical sport. Not of last week's murder of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, but certain reactions to apparently not satisfied with being able to mount Kimmel's head on his wall alongside Colbert's. Trump has declared that Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are next. Marta, is this all basically as simple as Trump wanting to get even with the cool kids who made fun of him?
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Yes, one has to wonder whether he does have a sense of humor or whether his problem is that he doesn't understand that these things are meant to be fun. So there's one of the explanations is just that he doesn't really understand what's going on and unhappy about it. The other explanation, which I think is probably the real one, is that Donald Trump does not like anyone who dissents with him. Like most, we're going to call them.
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Authoritarian leaders, at which you can really only note, Marion, that he is in the wrong job in the wrong country.
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Yeah, certainly. I mean, also, if you think back, there's this theory that he was sort of first provoked to run for president when then President Obama made fun of him at a White House press dinner. Right. So I think Marta is right, that part of the challenge is that he's very thin skinned. But I think the other huge part of the challenge is that it seems like there are certain right wing parts of the Republican Party that are very willing to exploit that in order to preserve their power in what seems to be a very authoritarian playbook kind of a way. And that's actually quite scary because it suggests to me that even if you were to be able to replace Trump at a future election or on a future occasion, there might still be a significant part of the Republican Party that's actually quite okay with how things have become and there being a risk that it actually significantly damages US Democracy in the longer run.
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Marta, some of us are old enough to remember, by which I mean we have memories reaching back till February when Vice President J.D. vance came to the Munich Security Conference and yelled at America's European allies about their failure to uphold, you know, the fundamentals of free speech. He is this week urging people to call the employers of wrong thinkers and attempt to get them hounded from their jobs. How is it possible, do you think, that someone like Vice President Vance now extend him the credit of saying, I don't think he is a foolish man, is able to keep both those thoughts in his head at once?
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My understanding of the, let's call it the average free speech advocate is that the average free speech advocate thinks that free speech is, most of the time haze speech, not really free speech in general. This has become part of a broader culture war waged particularly by the right around anyone who dissents with them. So they'll start saying things like, oh, yeah, we are defenders of free speech, and free speech means being able to say anything that is not politically correct. And the point is that this discourse around free speech only applies to what they're saying. The moment you're saying something that goes against their own agenda, then immediately they are going to try and silence you. They are not really going to be engaging with this and you know they are going to try and get you fired. So I think that what J.D. vance is doing, I don't think he's a stupid man, but he's very much playing into this right wing agenda of talking about free speech, but in fact meaning something quite different, which is all you can hear is whatever we have to tell you.
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Marion, how disappointed, surprised are you that so many media organizations and other entities, especially universities, have buckled before Trump's threats. And again, a reminder that we are what now only eight months into this, there could be another three years, four months to go. The latest being this umpty gajillion dollar lawsuit in inverted commas he's launched at the York Times. I do commend the full 85 pages to our listeners. It's available online. It is quite mad. And something I am old enough to remember is when newspapers got letters like that, they tended to be handwritten in green ink and would drift out of eight or nine different kinds of handwriting as they went along. But clearly he doesn't expect the New York Times to pay him $15 billion. What he expects is the New York Times to write him a check for several million dollars in the hope that he'll leave them alone.
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Yeah, I mean it's incredibly worrying and I'm really curious to see where organizations are willing to draw the red line. Right. I mean it seems to me that there is a sort of general cultural drift in the US where you also see a lot of self censorship happening already or a lot of appeals to a more like general, a more conservative culture also or whatever. Like I don't know if either of you notice, but a lot of pop culture in the US is all of a sudden about cowboys. Like it's a real not shift this this year. And I mean it seems really silly but like if you look at recent Netflix films, right, Like a lot of them are set in sort of southwest US like on forums and so on. And maybe that's me sort of putting dots together I shouldn't be putting together, but it really like it. It sort of seems to me to be a wider trend where you've got this cultural shift and a lot of for profit, for profit corporations are essentially trying to preempt where they think the taste is going to go and like what is going to be easy for them. But I feel like there's going to be a line somewhere and it's going to come sooner for some organizations than others. I mean a really good example I think is Target that sort of preemptively gutted that Pride campaign and sort of was one of the first to get rid of DEI policies, which is diversity, equity and inclusion policies in their workforce, and then ended up being boycotted for a few weeks, which was a boycott that was organized by some black churches that have a long history of sort of, you know, organizing community, so on. And a Target stock and Target revenue still hasn't recovered. So that's an, that's an example of something where Trump is not going to come to Target's rescue, even though they've done exactly what he expected. But it's had a real impact on their bottom line. So I don't know like it. I'm not sure how hopeful I'm feeling myself. Always depends on how things are going on a given day. But there are some really interesting sort of protest movements in the US and I'm really curious to see how things are going to shape out over the next three and a bit years.
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Mart, just finally on this, is it too much of a reach to say that this crackdown upon the late night TV show host is in itself an indicator of creeping authoritarianism? Because it strikes me in my own experiences travelling to and reporting from actually full blown authoritarian states, the, the autocrat is very often, in fact usually ridiculous. But autocracies are by definition completely humorless.
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You know what, I am actually old enough to remember. I'm old enough to remember Silvio Berlusconi and the thing that we call the Bulgarian edict in Italian, when from Bulgaria he said that an Italian journalist, Lutazi, should basically be taken off tv. Guess what happened? Lutzi was taken off tv. And I think that this is really part of the authoritarian playbook. One of the things that you want to get control of is the free press. And satire is part of that. And I think that this is where I sort of. I really agree with something that Marian said earlier. What's worrying is also what happens next because this might last for, you know, three years and however longer we have. But undoing what has been done by an authoritarian leader can take a huge amount of time and it's very, very, very difficult to do. So I have a colleague who's recently published a book on it. I can't remember the title of the book, but I remember the name of the authors. It's be Stanley and Stanley Bill.
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I know Ben, he is a friend of both this presenter and this program.
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Exactly. And they've just written a book looking at the Polish case specifically and how difficult it is to undo anything that has currently. That was done by the previous government.
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Well, here in London, work is continuing in several boroughs at the taxpayer's expense to clean off St. George's crosses sprayed upon homes and businesses by English patriots. Acting at the encouragement of an African immigrant to the United States. Possibly by way of response, London's mayor Sadiq has announced the release of another £900,000 of taxpayers money in the service of his somewhat agonisingly named Loved and wanted fund 15 grants of up to 60 grand each to civil society organisations to, it says here, bring Londoners together and support them to take part fully in community and city life. I think we're all foreigners at this table. Marion, do you now feel more loved and wanted?
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I mean, I watched the video a few days ago and it is a bit cringe, but also at a time when everything is so blue, I thought it was really sweet.
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This is the video of Sadiq Khan and a poem.
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That's right, yeah. It's like very sort of saccharine images of Londoners getting along, you know, various like cultural festivals and so on. And then there's like a poem about belonging, what it means in London on top of it and like. Yeah, as I say, you know, like bits of it are maybe a bit over the top and like, if you're very cynical then it all feels a little too much. But at the same time I think it is a lovely message that is very much needed and it reflects much more the London that I've experienced in my time in the UK than the, you know, the London of the Republican Party that's like full of no go areas or whatnot or the London of the right wing march. So I do think that it's a lovely message at a time when we haven't got a lot of those.
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Marta. I think we should further acknowledge that foreign though everybody at this table is, I suspect for some unimaginable reason or another, we're not the kind of foreigners that the people who marched in London on Saturday are really all that upset about. But did that march, as a foreigner in London make you feel sort of particularly anxious or. Well, no anxious will do us because just talking to, you know, various friends and associates of mine, a great many shrugged, as Londoners do, frankly, about most things, but some did confess that they were discomforted by it and there has been a lot of chat where I live in London because we were one of the neighbourhoods in which council workers have been obliged to spend the last few days scraping stuff off people's walls.
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Yeah, as a I Mean, I would. I'll say I actually got British citizenship after living in this country for a very long time, because it's a place where I felt that even though, you know, I was. I came here as a foreigner, that I was welcome. And, of course, you're probably right. I am not the kind of migrant that these people are concerned about, although I do have a PhD and I research the far right.
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Yeah, yeah, you're in real trouble.
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So I'm kind of trouble. But I think for me, it was. It was quite shocking to see the number of people that turned up because I wasn't expecting such a large number of protesters. And I realize, you know, this tells us that they're very. Or that they were organized on this occasion. And it is disturbing to see this happen in a city like London that is, to me, a place that is really diverse, and that has really gotten a lot out of that diversity, which is why I think, you know, I haven't seen the video, so I don't know how cringe we're talking, but I think it's in a moment where politically, no one is willing to say much about the good things that come out of migration, that it's good that someone is actually taking the time to get that message through, particularly in a place that really gains a lot from being so diverse.
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Marta, we don't know yet what this new tranche of 900 grand will be spent on. The offer is 15 grants of up to £60,000 each. And to be clear, not just anybody can write off to the mayor and say, can I have 60 grand, please? You have to be an established civil society organization, et cetera, et cetera. But does official encouragement like this actually help the process? Is proper social cohesion not the thing that just develops organically when people just live alongside and work alongside each other and realize it's basically fine?
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I think community building does actually take a lot of work, and it takes a lot of work in ways that perhaps happened a bit more organically in the past than they do now, now. And so I think, you know, grants for grassroots charities and that sort of thing actually make a lot of sense because those are often the organizations in the UK that provide, you know, after school programs or, you know, whatever it might be like some sort of a cultural club or a cultural experience, and I think that's really valuable. And. And what we're seeing in communities where the sort of perhaps organic social cohesion doesn't necessarily happen as much anymore because those kind of spaces have disappeared or because people tend to spend much more time in front of screens and are much more polarised and so on. I think having that purposeful engagement is really useful and it can hopefully help with keeping London more cohesive and building these communities and making sure that people know each other in their neighbourhoods and so on. So I do think that's a really good initiative.
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Well, to France now. And to a larger than usual scale demonstration of the contradiction whereby France rarely seems happier than when given excuses or encouragement towards theatrical public complaint. Hundreds of thousands of citizens and tens of thousands of police officers have taken to the streets of cities across the country, apparently unhappy that France's fifth prime minister in the last 20 months is trying to explain that France's colossal public debt is not going to pay itself back. There also seems generalised annoyance with President Emmanuel Macron, who some are urging to call an early presidential election, even though he is entirely entitled to stay put until 2020. Marta, as far as it is possible to tell so far, does this look any more or less than just France being France?
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I mean, a lot of this is France being France, but it is also France being France in a moment, in quite a delicate political moment for the country. Because right now we are dealing with a country that had an early election last year that returned a divided parliament. The reason they had this election was because they had a divided parliament before. The result didn't really help because it's even more divided than it was. And you have this moment of political instability where pretty much everyone agrees that there's, economically speaking, there's an issue that they have to deal with, the budget deficit, but they're radically different views in terms of how is it that we're going to do anything about it. And this is really where this contestation comes in, because the people who are protesting in the streets, for a lot of them, the problem is that they feel that they are being made, they are paying for that deficit, that they're not much better off and that it should really be, you know, corporations paying, that they shouldn't be paying more taxes. They've already got enough problems. So I think in the sense it's a slightly different moment because you have some fairly legitimate social grievances that are being expressed in the streets. But politically speaking, there's not much that can be done about it because there is no functioning political power.
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C
Well, indeed not. And on that front, Marion, France, unbowed left wing party, its leader, Jean Luc Melanchon, is already calling for a vote of confidence in the new Prime Minister, Sebastien Lecorgnou. He said, this is melanchon. Let's just get it over with. Is this just nihilism, though, which there is a hearty tradition of on the French left in particular? I mean, not these protests, but recent protests were spearheaded by a movement which has coalesced around the name block everything.
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B
I mean, I don't want to be too glib about it because as Marta said, you know, this is really serious and could have really serious repercussions for Europe, but it sometimes feels a bit like we're all dealing with the same challenge at different points in time. And the sort of protest is kind of like jumping around Europe and then finding a national expression in a different country and maybe it's just France's turn once again. So in that sense, you know, like, I, I don't really know to what extent it's a real grievance among, among the politicians, to what extent it's just an expression of trying to improve one's own party position in all of this jockeying. And, but what I'm just, you know, forever concerned about in all of this is essentially to what extent far right parties are gaining from it. And, you know, I think that's, that's, for me, that's the worst specter, especially when we're talking about France where the right has massively surged, you know, and so I think, you know, like the, the common challenge of the high debt and the, the like salami slicing of social welfare nets and so on is something that we all need to figure out. And I keep wondering if there isn't some sort of a better solution that one could reach for at least a more common solution, so that we don't end up in the same position in a different European country or in several European countries sort of on a six month rolling basis, while there's also, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine that rolls on and all of these other challenges that we're dealing with.
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C
But is there a wider problem, Martin, not just for the French government, but for all governments that quite large and certainly political crucial cohorts of the population have wound themselves up into a position in which you literally cannot tell them anything. Like in the French example, you cannot tell them, for example, that it is absurd that the pension age is 62 only now rising to 64 versus 67 in the Netherlands and Italy, for example, which I would say, with all due respect, that I don't have to sort of go to work and do hard physical labour day in, day out. But nonetheless, this is absurd. These are Ages that were decided at a time when it was expected that most people would retire, have a couple of years state pension and then drop obligingly dead. They were never intended to underwrite 30 year long holidays.
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A
It is a problem. I was recently reading another bit of research around sort of how elites essentially feel about their role and their relationship to voters. And this is a problem that they grapple with where they feel that they don't have the power to do much match and what they can do does not match the expectations of their voters. And this is a serious problem because I think on the one hand it's probably true that elites can do a lot less than they could before because they are increasingly being limited by a variety of external constraints. So, you know, if you're a member of the European Union, there are a bunch of things that you can't really do do and those constraints are real and they exist and to some extent they are there for a reason. But it's also true that it limits the amount of things that you can actually do as a democratic government. On the other hand, you have voters who may feel that, you know, there are still things that they, they want and that they don't feel that it's that much, that they have that much privilege in a way to justify the fact that you're trying to take them away from them. So it is, politically speaking, it's a very, very difficult circle to square because and until you've worked out a way to do that, you are going to have massive issues in terms of people's levels of trust.
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C
Well to now the latest step towards a brave new world in which programs such as this can be simulated with voice replication software intoning the sorts of things that Monocle Daily hosts and panellists might have said, perhaps indeed events that never really happened and people who don't exist. Google Deep Minds AI thing. Gemini has won a gold medal at a programming competition in Azerbaijan. Elbowing off the top of the podium, human programmers who found themselves stumped by a problem which Gemini solved. Marion People who get excited about this sort of stuff are comparing this to Deep Blue, the chess program beating Gary kasparov back in 1997. How excited are you about this?
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B
I personally am not excited excited about this in the least, I'm afraid. I'm such an AI skeptic and hater and for that reason I, yeah, I, I don't know enough about programming to be able to assess this exact achievement. But whenever I've personally tried to use AI for anything that's like Even moderately complicated. It's worse than any, you know, human admin assistant or research assistant, and it does learn from itself. So I always find myself correcting massive mistakes and so on, which is, to be honest, why I don't really bother in the first place.
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C
Marta, just before the mics went live, you did share with us a scorching hot Google tip, which is if you search anything on Google and then add AI to it, you will not get those annoying and frequently inaccurate AI overviews at the top of your search, which I can already see is going to be life changing. So thank you for that. But. But have you so far found it useful for anything? Because so far I have only found Gemini useful, for example, for designing a logo for my fantasy NFL team.
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A
Well, I found it useful because I've written a paper on AI, so that's a research output for me. No, seriously, I think I still, personally, I haven't really worked out a way to integrate AI into my workflow because the one thing I really wish AI was able to do is work out if my students have used AI, and that it cannot do. But this afternoon I was trying to, I was working on something and I logged on to ChatGPT, wrote a beautiful prompt because I had to ask ChatGPT to write a paragraph on how I could use ChatGPT to do a bit of research. And it wrote a very, very nice paragraph that I will be reworking. But I have to say in that case, it's. It was, it was something that was quite useful because it was a. I had a very clear sense of the process that needed to be followed. I just was missing a few gaps.
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C
But genuine follow up to that because this is what puts me off using it as any sort of assistant in that respect. Well, there's partly just my own, you know, ingrained luddism, basic professional pride, but also I would get to the point of just thinking it's quicker just to do this myself.
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A
In this case it wasn't precisely because there's a part of it that was sort of slightly technical and I almost wanted to see if I had a sense of the process. I wanted to see if ChatGPT would have written it the same way. And it did, which gives me some sort of confidence that this might work. And now what I'm going to do next is I'm going to go and read a couple of papers that have used similar processes in terms of using AI in research and sort of draw from those and make sure that this actually makes sense. So for me it was almost useful in terms of having a second sense check. But this is genuinely the first time I found it useful. The previous time I'd used ChatGPT, I asked it to format a bibliography for me and it managed to do that incorrectly.
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C
Excellent, Marion. Even speaking as a fellow AI skeptic, I think we should acknowledge that we are in the very early, very, very early stages of what this thing is and what it might yet become. Have you had even any glimmers of how it might actually be useful in your work?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I always want to really differentiate that between AI as a concept and then large language models. Right. Because I genuinely think large language models are not the best expression of AI. And I have come across really good machine learning algorithm examples or whatever that their specific job very well. And so something that I've seen that I found just incredible is I saw an output from a different organization, not my own, that had done a very in depth literature review over a time span where I could only assume that they must have used a very sophisticated research support software that was bespoke, like a large language model would have never done it to that level of accuracy, but they were able to accurately review and tag and categorize like hundreds of articles on a very, very specific subfield of international relations that would have taken such a long period of time had you done it with human researchers, but they did it in three months or something like that. And that was super impressive. And I think if you have these very bespoke software solutions that are targeted for a specific thing and well trained, then it works really well. But I just think the large language models and maybe they'll get better. But I think for now the large language models just try to do too much and then kind of get it wrong and also lie to you about getting it wrong.
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C
Well, on that semi hopeful note, Marion Mesmer and Marta Lorimer, thanks both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, the device you probably have in your pocket on which you may be listening to this show, is also, among much else, a portal into every current conflict. Any owner of a smartphone can immerse themselves in any war to a degree, until recently imaginable only for people with access to satellites and intelligence services. But a smartphone is yet more than that. It is also increasing, interestingly, a weapon. It can create and propagate disinformation that can cause havoc among one's enemies and control the drones which are becoming a dominant feature of modern battlescapes. All of which and more is considered in A new book by Matthew Ford, War in the Smartphone Conflict, Connectivity and the Crises at Our Fingertips. I spoke to Matthew earlier and started by asking at which point the smartphone age of warfare actually began. Began.
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D
There are lots and lots of antecedents, and a lot of people say to me that the smartphone is just like any other revolution in communications, radio, television, all that stuff. You know, I think genuinely there are a lot of differences, mainly in terms of speed and scale at which some of these things can evolve on, in terms of war and the data that you collect out of your smartphone. But evolution of these things start really during the war on terror. I think, you know, you can see how mainstream media gets undermined as a result of people posting images of War on YouTube. You know, it's an actual strategy that's employed by insurgents. The bomb is one thing, but filming it going off is another. Right. But then when you can do that all from one device, you can literally take an image, post it. And all that technology started around 2008, but only really became, I think, widespread over the last 10 years, maybe. I mean, there are antecedents in Syria with Islamic State, but you can see a lot of these things really rather dramatically in Somalia and the Sahal, where people aren't really talking about this stuff, and it's gone sort of unnoticed. So what's happening in Ukraine, I don't think, has come out of nowhere, but we've just not thought about it in the way that we see it so dramatically over the last few years on our smartphones as we're going to work or whatever we're doing.
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C
But as the book makes clear, the smartphone, it's not just an incredibly efficient and arguably dangerous means of being able to collect and disseminate information very, very quickly. It is actually being used, especially in Ukraine, as a weapon of war. It has become, well, it has become literally a tool that soldiers are using.
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D
Absolutely. Soldiers, but also civilians, you know, and that becomes a real problem because, you know, when you're filming someone or filming an enemy column or something, you know, you do. You become a combatant at that point, and you are literally part of an extended intelligence collection exercise. And the information you provide can be fused at a brigade headquarters with all other sources of intelligence. And then you can, you know, whatever you're filming can be targeted. So the device is mundanity, I think, is the thing that makes it so very interesting as a device to study, because we just don't think about it. We don't realize how embedded our lives are on our smartphones. And then to think, you know, we do these things ordinarily in peacetime, but then, you know, there's a war on and how much are things to really change under those circumstances? People still connected and doing things on an everyday basis.
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B
This.
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D
And of course, you know, soldiers are told not to take smartphones with them, but you know, when communications fail and you know, they regularly do, you've got, you need something as a backup device to be able to communicate with your commanding officers or. And even if you step away from the front line, of course, then, you know, you take, you get on the phone, talk to your family, watch films, play games and all that stuff. So it's an integral part, I think, of just how people live in a war zone. I don't think that's, you know, that, that just really obvious as a result, you can see that very clearly in Ukraine.
- [34:30]
C
Has anybody made any strides, do you think though, in being able to steer people or educate people towards. And we're going back to the idea of the spectator at this point as to what is verifiable footage, because the astonishing amounts of rubbish that get deposited, whether deliberately or inadvertently on your smartphone do not necessarily help anybody's understanding of anything. We've seen the, the reductio ad absurdum of it, of actual video game footage being disseminated and believed as genuine Frontline, you know, verite.
- [35:05]
D
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, real experts, people who are studying this a lot have to compete with social media influencers for, you know, there's someone making something up. They've got open source intelligence in their handle on social media. And the next thing you know is you're having someone who really has spent a lot of time still studying things, an expert in competition with someone who absolutely has no idea whatsoever. And of course the expert is drowned out and that relationship is entirely flattened. And we, you know, the things that go viral are the things that are clickbait, things that look pretty, you know, exactly. The armor footage of video game where there's no nothing, you know, you can't substantiate anything. And I think actually tracing that forensically on an everyday, that's almost impossible to do. And you need to really have a good sense of as to what sources of information. I mean, you almost need to be an intelligence analyst, to be honest, to do it properly, I think. But in my book I kind of just say, well, how did I go about trying to make sense of stuff? And that's why I, you know, I pulled a team of people together to try and do some experimental work to understand what could be done as an ordinary person. And that was a very, very instructive. But it does take time and effort and given the way social media works, you know, good luck in actually cutting through all of that. That's basically the problem for people like me and others I know, which prompts.
- [36:18]
C
The question of how do you see this evolving? Are we just going to get bombarded with more and more images of warfare which may be accurate, may not be accurate, or do you, do you nurture any hope that there will be a backlash against this and people will eventually retreat to more reliable and verified sources of information, even though the information they may receive from those sources, sources takes a bit more time to get to them and is possibly a lot more complicated and difficult to understand?
- [36:48]
D
That's a very good question. I kind of worry that we're actually locked into the social media framing for all things to do with war. We're going to, you know, we keep getting lots and lots of odd images. One I saw the other day was someone playing a saxophone whilst they were being recorded on a smartphone. Two people in front of them recording missile attack into Israel trail at night. And it was just surreal. I mean, is that AI generated? Is that real? I mean, I've got no idea. Content generation can work so quickly. You know, I think we kind of get, get locked into a hall of mirrors, into the prison that social media. The obvious way to solve some of these things is sort of reform section 230, the clause in the U. S. Communications act, and then treat social media platforms like they're publishers rather than just places where you can write any old crap, which is what most people, it seems to me, do on social media, including me, I might add.
- [37:43]
C
That was Matthew Ford. His new book, war in the Smartphone, conflict, Connectivity and the crises at our fingertips is available now. And that is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Marta Lorimer and Marion Mesmer. Today's show was produced by Anita Riota and researched by Danielle abroad Smith. Our sound engineer was Steph Chongu, Amandra Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
- [38:28]
B
Sam.