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Luigi Mangione and the Gray Tribe
35:44|A couple of weeks ago, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old American, allegedly shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of a major health insurer in the US. Suddenly, a lot of the ideas I’d be gently noodling with on this show were being discussed as potential sources of violence. Was Mangione a Luddite? Someone who felt that technology had atomised a generation? Or was he, in fact, an accelerationist who believed that artificial intelligence would expand human capability? And, ultimately, did any of this matter?Now, disaffected young men pick up guns with shocking frequency. They perpetrate violence with shocking frequency. They veil this horror under the cloak of ideology with shocking frequency. In a way, Mangione is no different.But, in another way, he is very different. Just look at how the violence has been received. For days, Mangione was on the run, seemingly shielded by an American public whose anger over an exploitative healthcare industry was spilling over. He became a pin-up, for a moment, of a generational anxiety. There were echoes of how the Unabomber, Ted Kaszynski, was received by some climate activists. Violence might not be an answer, but sometimes it make a point. In big capital letters.But looking at Mangione – and his digital footprint – only confused me more. This didn’t feel like a revolutionary left-winger lashing out at a social evil. In fact, the more I saw, the more I felt like I was seeing someone quite familiar. Basically conservative, intellectually ambitious, in thrall to the technological structures that they also blamed for our ills. Is this just the modern aspect of the age-old libertarianism that has been a constant companion in tech circles?To discuss all these things – at Ned’s suggestion – I dialled up Io Dodds, a British journalist based in San Francisco, who’s currently a Senior Reporter at The Independent. She had written on Mangione and, in particular, his relationship with an ill-defined movement called the “grey tribe”. In this episode, we’ll try and unravel some of that and put together a definition, however boggling, of what could be a very consequential movement.Music: Internet Song by Apes of the StateArtwork: Tom Humberstone
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25:33|Julio Vincent Gambuto is a New York based author and marketing professional. His new book is Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!: How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a Relentless World. As you’ll hear from our conversation, most of the ideas that Julio posits in the book are things that came to him during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020, when the intricate structures of the world where exposed for all to see. But Julio’s book is not really about decluttering your inbox. It’s not even about stopping yourself from paying £30 a month for watery high street mochas. It’s about using that word – unsubscribe – as a manifesto. I asked Ned, quickly, what they thought about this idea of an unsubscribe culture, and whether we might be at a turning point. I will caveat their response by saying that they – like me, to be fair – have some business interests at stake in that not happening. “NICK, ALL THE DATA SHOWS THAT SUBSCRIPTION GOES IN ONE DIRECTION: UP. THIS QUESTION OF DECLUTTER AND DISENTANGLE IS ONE ONLY DISCUSSED IN SPECIFIC CIRCLES – THE SORT OF CIRCLES WHERE GUYS ARE BUYING 500 DOLLAR DUMB PHONES AND GOING ON WORDLESS YOGA RETREATS THAT COST THE ANNUAL SALARY OF SOME BLUE COLLAR SCHMUCK. AND THE INTERNET HAS MADE RELATIONSHIP SUBSCRIPTION – AS YOU PUT IT – ALL THE MORE COMMON AND VALUABLE. HOW MANY OF YOUR HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS ARE YOU STILL LINKED TO, EVEN VIA INSTAGRAM OR FACEOOK, NOW, AS OPPOSED TO YOUR PARENTS GENERATION WHO WILL BE TAKEN TOTALLY OFF GUARD WHEN THEY HEAR THAT THEIR KIDDIE BEST FRIEND ACTUALLY DIED FIVE YEARS AGO? CONNECT, CONNECT, CONNECT; SUBSCRIBE, SUBSCRIBE, SUBSCRIBE. LIKE IT OR NOT THIS IS THE FLOW OF TRAVEL.” Even though I don’t really disagree with the premise that people’s subscription obsession and consequent connectivity is broadly still trending upwards, I don’t think the move to Marie Kondo our digital worlds is unique to technological toffs. It’s a bandwidth issue as much as anything. Maintaining a multi-platform social media habit, listening to podcasts and watching YouTube and reading newsletters, keeping on top of your work email, your personal email, the email you just use to get fresh voucher codes. It’s a lot. And people aren’t just actively rebelling against it – they’re running out of time. So I do think we should think more proactively about what we subscribe to, and that’s where Julio comes in. He spoke to me last week from a house in New Jersey, and hopefully you’ll glean something useful from our chat.Presented by Nick Hilton.Music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.Artwork is by Tom Humberstone.NEDLUDDLIVES.COM15. The Case for Reading: do we need to rediscover a love of books?
34:11||Season 1, Ep. 15Here in the UK we have an estimated adult literacy rate of 99%, which the US is at 86%. Amongst UN member states, the average is 86.7%. Adult literacy has been one of the great triumphs of the 20th century, but it has also become a productive necessity as the service and information economies have grown. It is hard to conduct business without being able to read.And yet the pleasure of reading is something that is being steadily eroded. Book markets are being dominated by celebrity memoirs, self-help books and children’s fiction. On the latter, it is striking that children’s books make up a third of all book sales in the UK despite children making up, firstly, about 21% of the population and, secondly, being largely unable to read. What is the point of buying children all these books, focusing so much on teaching them to read, if they don’t grow up to be readers?This is why I dialled up Tom Rowley. Tom is a former Economist journalist who gave up his very successful career at the mag to start a bookshop: Backstory. He’s been chronicling this for the past couple of years, as Backstory has gone from a glint in the milkman’s eye to a very real shop on the high street in London. In this wide ranging discussion, we’ll look at reading, books and bookshops in a digital age, and how maybe – just maybe – they’re defying some of the anticipated trends….Presented by Nick Hilton.Sound mixing by Ewan Cameron.Theme song by Apes of the State.Cover artwork by Tom Humberstone.More video on COOLER.NEWS14. The Fall of the House of Apple: has the Silicon Valley giant become deeply uncool?
26:10||Season 1, Ep. 14it’s time to talk about Apple. Apple that big, sleek, glossy company with a current market cap of some $3.3 trillion dollars. The same Apple with whose products you are, quite plausibly, listening to this podcast. Indeed, they’re the reason a podcast is called a podcast: the cast is from broadcast, but the pod? That’s from the iPod. Remember those?Apple has long felt like one of those tech companies which are, materially, nation states. Is part of FAANG the spooky sounding concatenation of Big Tech supremos, alongside Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. As a sidenote, I like the suggestion that FAANG should now be replaced by MANAMANA for Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe. Where other companies – like, naming no names, Meta – have ebbed and flowed with the tides of both their products and society’s preferences, Apple has been resilient. Good hardware release has followed good hardware release, and the iPhone has become the most important piece of technology on the market. Even where products from competitors like Samsung and Huawei appear to technologically outweigh the Californian company’s offering, they’ve still found themselves chasing Apple’s tail. The modern smartphone is, consequentially, build entirely in the image of the iPhone. But why is this?It's because the commodity that Apple has always traded in, above and beyond everything else, is cool. The products don’t look like nerd-baiting CPUs, they look like accessories for the Met Gala. iOS doesn’t look all goofy like Linux, it looks like it’s been designed by some graphic designer who publishes a coffee table book of artistic nudes of his Japanese girlfriend. Everything is smooth and fluid, like liquid slowed to a fraction of its motional speed.But is Apple’s era as the purveyor of technological cool at an end?On this episode we speak to Slate's tech and business reporter Nitish Pahwa about the possible fall of the House of Apple...13. The Uncertainty Paradox
34:37||Season 1, Ep. 13The impact that technology has on psychology is a new field of research, and one where the multi-decade studies required to give definitive answers are still many years away. One of the other fields being covered is the area of certainty. Is the internet making people to certain about the opinions? Too close-minded to the possibility that they might be wrong, or might have more to learn? And to what extent is the internet responsible for a crisis in over-confidence? Or is it simply another manifestation of a totally natural mammalian tendency towards confidence?These are difficult questions to answer, not least because they scratch at the core question that should be vexing technologists. Is technology good for the human brain? Or is technology simply the result of a human brain that’s screwed up in all the ways that technology is? Which came first, chicken or egg; technological nonsense-boosting or the scattershot human brain?To answer all this, I’m joined by Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, and the more recent Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. It’s the latter book we talk about mainly, and because we recorded this interview a few weeks ago, I’ve largely forgotten what we spoke about. Maybe the content of this episode is the greatest uncertainty of all. Anyway, I’ll be listening and hopefully you will too.The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast.Written and presented by Nick Hilton.The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the StateThe artwork is by Tom Humberstone.NEDLUDDLIVES.COM12. A Brief History of (predominantly Artificial) Intelligence
34:52||Season 1, Ep. 12Today, we're speaking to Kester Brewin, an author who works for the delightfully named Institute for the Future of Work here in London. He’s just about to release a new book called God-like: a 500 year history of Artificial Intelligence in myths, machines and monsters. It's a book which charts the ideas that underpin everything – from ChatGPT and Dall.E to the recently-released Sora – back to their roots. Is there something quasi-theological about the way we discuss the possible implications of these radical new technologies? Don’t think of this as a history of Artificial Intelligence, per se, but a history of the impulse that has led us, inexorably, towards AI.The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by Nick Hilton.The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.11. The Age of Enshittification
29:36||Season 1, Ep. 11'Enshittification' is a word coined by the Canadian writer and technologist Cory Doctorow to describe, to filch Wikipedia’s definition, “the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets”. This is the tension behind much of Big Tech. How do businesses extract value without destroying the identity that they built, and, as a result, alienating their userbase? Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and it feels to me like it has captured a moment of social media in full maturity. After more than a decade of mass uptake – whether that’s a microblogging platform like Twitter, a network like Facebook, or even streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, which owe much to the social revolution – there is a cooling off of the desire to endlessly solicit new users. A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A viable revenue stream.Cory Doctorow's new book, The Internet Con, is available wherever you could reasonably expect to purchase books (or online).The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by Nick Hilton.The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.