New Corporate Power Concentrations and How to Check Them
before we start and get into all of this in 2019 you wrote a book called don't be evil and first of all i'd like to congratulate you because the book is uh currently being pressed and printed and it will it will appear within the netherlands within a few weeks we have the first copy here so congratulations with the book and uh yeah let's uh i hope that a lot of dutch people read as well yeah the title is in dutch very dutch big tech it's a very dutch title indeed i guess that's part of the of the global is a globalized world we live in today but uh yeah it has a very dutch title thank you for having me and thank you for the chemical mix about the book i i i hope a lot of people read it there too i think you'll find it interesting yeah yeah yeah sure do so let's get to it but let's not give everything away for our dutch audience so that they will still have a reason to to buy the book today we are talking about monopolies and new forms of power concentrations obviously and there's a lot to discuss here the internet now is about 30 years old and in human years you could say that we could consider that maturely adult yet the image you paint in your book is in don't be evil is more of an internet which is an adolescent gone astray now you give several explanations for that and i'd like to explore all of them but i hope we can get to it but the crux of it if i understand it correctly is that at some point the internet lost its innocence and that moment coincides with the rising influence of finance within silicon valley so to speak and what happened there what happened at the moment and what has been the effect of this collision for the internet as we know it so big question um but let me throw out a few thoughts to begin um the consumer internet as we know it really you know started to take shape in the mid-1990s um in silicon valley and that's right about the time that google was started and one of the things i did in my book to really understand where we were and where we are today is to go back to the paper that was done by the founders of google sergey brin and larry page and to sort of see what were they thinking what did they think the search engine would be and it's quite a fascinating paper anyone can find it online one of the most fascinating details and i i encourage you to keep reading to the very end is in the appendix section on page 37 where they talk about what could be the problems of a large-scale search engine that was run um for profit and what they made clear was that they expected that there could be misuse disinformation manipulation by both private sector and public sector actors if you were using targeted advertising as a as a way of monetizing a search engine for those that don't understand what that phrase targeted advertising means it's what uh shoshan azuboff of a harvard academic would call surveillance capitalism it's the idea that you as a user are being tracked your movements are being tracked online and then your behavioral voodoo doll as you might call it is being sold to the highest bidder to advertisers who can then target you more precisely so the founders of google knew at the very beginning that this was uh rife for manipulation and that's exactly what we've seen going forward unfortunately um you know when companies are born and they're idealistic they have venture capitalists and they eventually have to go public and make money and as i tell in my book the story of um google and its you know its early motto don't be evil uh began to be discarded basically right after the ipo um you know the company decided to go with uh targeted advertising as a as a model it really ramped up that process in the early days after going public um eventually because of the network effects which allow the biggest platforms to get bigger and bigger and bigger and ring fence data it was able to essentially uh each pretty much all media basically most of the new 90 of the new advertising dollars go to either google or facebook uh it was able to become the purveyor of the world's information or misinformation as the case may be and it has grown to a size that is really even by the standards of past monopoly powers the 19th century railroad trust etc is gargantuan you know i mean google has 92 percent of the world's search engine action and one of the things that i'm very interested that i think europe came to see early and america is now beginning to see is that this isn't really about the price of goods it's about power so in in the past in america the way in which we have thought about antitrust policy for the last you know 40 years or so the idea is hey as long as things are getting cheaper as long as consumers can buy products and services more cheaply there's no problem there's no monopoly but in this new world of surveillance capitalism you are not paying in dollars you are paying in data so so we all go online we type in our google search we we think we're getting something for free but in fact we're being monitored and we are giving away a lot of value in the form of our data we don't understand how much that's worth to the company that is an opaque transaction that actually goes against the very basic notion of how free markets should work i mean adam smith the father of modern capitalism would have said that you needed three things in order for markets to work properly you need equal access to information you need transparency meaning a shared understanding of what is happening amongst both parties and you need a shared moral framework i would argue that none of those things are in effect in the digital world and so really this is about power it's not about price it's about power europe understands that america now with the big doj antitrust suit against google i think is beginning to understand that um our house judiciary subcommittee put out a 450-page report looking at how big tech operates this is a lot about power it's a lot about cognitive capture it's a lot about um the way in which uh the network effects work so i'll stop right there but i think basically we are headed into a new world where we're really beginning to see uh the ramifications of what the transformation has been in the last 20 years now at some point in your book ms furuhar you mentioned that these firms have kind of convinced us that instead of the usual thinking that monopolies are bad full stop they've they've taunted us into convincing us they tried to convince us that monopolies aren't necessarily bad as long as they don't um well for example as long as they don't pose a hazard towards consumers for example right so they've kind of whitewashed the idea of monopolies how did they do that and why are we why is it so nefarious to to markets well again this really goes to the idea of this not being about consumer price right and also the power of the network effect so the truth of the matter is um as these platforms get bigger as they collect more data they become more powerful they become more predictive they do in some cases provide better services i mean there's no there's no question about that but what is the definition of better we don't really know we don't understand how much value we're giving up to get what is supposedly better meanwhile different actors smaller companies european companies competitors from outside the tech space are being cut out of potential competition because they don't have access to this data they they they don't they they can now even get into the ecosystem to start their new place perfect example i mean there are a number of search alternatives excuse me out there in the universe right now some of them um have been started by long-time founders in silicon valley that are concerned about surveillance and about privacy and about antitrust but it's very difficult for them to gain traction in a world in which the largest platforms are are basically unregulated so you know as marguerite vestige in brussels has said this is not about price this is not even just about consumer welfare it's about the broader health of an ecosystem you need to have many many different companies and even public sector actors being able to get access to that information you need individuals being able to um recapture some of the wealth be it in the form of a digital dividend tax which is something france california australia many other nations have considered um power has to be shared so we've now discussed about google but the big tech is often mentioned as a group right they're a group of of silicon valley firms and one of the things that you mentioned in the book is that um they share certain interests with one another especially when you con for example when we can consider the patent law reforms which they advocated under the obama administration you mentioned right so they wanted these patent law reforms under the guise of that information wants to be free and i'd like to ask you how successful have they been at the attempt to to in within these these panel law reforms what has changed in their favor and how does that influence us today how can we how can we visualize for example the the monopoly power that you mentioned yeah so it's it's very interesting um and jonathan i'm sure we'll have things to say about this as well because the way in which the big tech players manipulated patent law is very similar to the way in which they manipulated copyright law so the idea is they are they are trying to monopolize whatever is out there and make it free so that it can be searched and monetized on their platforms um that is harmful to creators to musicians to artists who might have copyrights on things but it's also harmful um in many cases to inventors who happen to have patents on technologies that they might need and this really played out um this was something that played out in a little over 10 years ago or so in the wake of the obama administration um there was a lot of capture actually within the white house by google a lot of um google employees went to work in the white house a lot of silicon valley employees went to work there by the way that's another thing that we do in the us that's kind of unique is there's a tremendous back and forth between the private sector and the public sector no time limits lots of vested interests so um you had you know companies not just google but apple you know intel others that wanted to incorporate bits and bobs of technology that was patented well they want to have to pay as little as possible for those technologies and so they want to shift the patent system so that it favors their business model which is essentially about aggregation rather than at this stage innovation the innovation tends to happen in much smaller firms typically before they go public the aggregation happens later so the fact that they were able to do this i think the core point here goes to what i consider to be the biggest problem in america today which is money politics you know big tech is the largest single lobbying force in washington right now um there is a tremendous amount of cognitive capture of regulators there's there's a lot of sort of expert speak a lot of blurring and complication of issues that really can be made quite simple do we have a regulatory system that serves consumers citizens and a broad swath of businesses or do we not you know there's a lot of um uh you know sort of hordes of silicon valley technocrats that come to washington tell us it's all too complicated and really only they can regulate it this is all part of the problem that we have where there has been a hijacking of economic and political power and it needs to be curved thank you thank you miss faruha thank you looking forward to the next part of the discussion where we will discuss this at length let's go to the second person international guest david from overbake is going to interview jonathan taplin the floor is yours yours david thank you natasha thank you mr taplin for being here with us tonight your book move fast and break things from 2017 is kind of a reference i guess to a slogan or a sort of mentality within silicon valley could you before we dive into that book quickly describe what that um what the slogan what the motto what it amounts to within silicon valley what does it boil down to well it's it's a kind of rethinking of what we used to call creative destruction the notion is that silicon valley was the only really unregulated business in america and so the ability to go and create things without any body stopping you was race towards that thing and then essentially what we've got is a set of systems that only work for the platforms and don't work for all the other parts of society that goes into it i would argue that facebook and social media in general are a net negative to our society essentially we've just gone through a very harrowing election in which the amount of disinformation propaganda and lies that were circulated at great volumes on social networks almost created um an end of our democracy now fortunately we managed to escape that system but it seems to me that at the core these companies need to stop having what we call in america safe harbor and in that sense i think europe is really leading uh i've spent some time with miss vestiger and i think she has a much better sense of what needs to be done and when i say safe harbor what it what i mean is that in the united states if youtube puts up a piece of music by bob dylan on youtube there's nothing bob dylan can do against youtube to bring it down he can file a takedown notice and maybe in a week or so it'll go down but it can go back up the next day from another user because essentially youtube is saying we have no responsibility for anything that's on our platform now this is a complete lie because as you well know there's very little outright pornography on facebook or youtube and so they'd spend a lot of money filtering out pornography they spend a lot of money filtering out total uh incitement to violence but they don't spend much money on filtering out just blatant untruths and so if the same laws that apply to a newspaper or applied to a broadcasting station had applied to facebook google and youtube then i think there would be a lot more responsibility to police the platforms and a great deal less of the the kind of crazy i i don't know if you're aware of this theory called q anon but there's a group of people in america who now got maybe 50 to 60 of the republican party believing that america is run by a secret group of pedophiles that uh drink the blood of children i mean it's it's like insane so the idea of is that move fast and break things it boils down to that these companies they fail to take the responsibility they fail to take in some sense responsibility for the broader context in which they operate the country which provides them safe harbors so to speak and of course there's a lot of talks these days about the detrimental side effects of of the social media on democracy you mentioned some of them i guess most people have seen the social dilemma as well in which this is also part of discussion the the documentary um what do you think is the most urgent issue within that um that needs to be addressed right now well you mentioned before i mean there are two elements one of which is at least in the united states to revoke both the section 530 230 safe harbor and the section 512 safe harbor around uh copyright if those two things were revoked then these companies would have the financial incentive to address these things because they could be sued uh and that tends to focus the line the second thing is to think about the nature of monopoly and whether a company like google is really a public utility now we have privately held public utilities united states um but they're regulated and you know i would cite the example uh in the 1950s in the united states we had a monopoly phone company called atnt and we forced atnt in 1956 to make all the patents that it owned free to any american company or entrepreneur um without license fee so in amongst those patents were the semiconductor the transistor the laser the satellite system the cellular code so essentially silicon valley was built on these free patents without those free patents there would have been no intel there would have been no texas instrument there would have been no fairchild semiconductor none of the major forces like hewlett packard that formed the beginning of silicon valley could have existed without the free patents from att so google has a giant patent portfolio from everything from search engine algorithms to car you know autonomous car vehicle patents you know it has a giant patent portfolio and if google was made to give all of that for free to any other american company i think we would see a lot more competition which is essentially what lana's book is about we need competition uh you know regulation can help but as she points out the regulators end up getting captured quite often people they're regulating so we need true competition if facebook had to compete with instagram and whatsapp on things like privacy and you know it might be a much better system now on the other hand you could say that big tech is sort of recognizing the problems that they are causing the problems they are facing with respect to society and they're trying to reach out begging sometimes almost to help them out to regulate them please help regulate us google puts out white papers for example asking society to help out with the moral dilemmas that they encounter do you think do you find this plea of them to be honest and convincing no it's a pr strategy mark zuckerberg doesn't really want facebook to be regulated if the safe harbors were revoked he would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to reverse that just like in california california passed a law that said that employees of firms like uber and lyft had to have you know pensions and had to have be considered actual employees not independent contract uber lyft and a few other companies spent a hundred million dollars fighting that successfully last tuesday and now that once again they're free to completely exploit their employees now people say that we should you know that if we want a solution to this it has to come from silicon valley as well that we need more technology so to speak in order to solve this problem and some of the societal problems that these technologies have caused well if i understand you correctly it's not just regulation that needs to be enhanced because that is not that's not enough actually it needs to be more competition we need to create for example our own big tech firms new big tag firms that can compete with these firms um of course tonight we're also talking about europe and i was wondering what you're thinking about that as natasha mentioned here in europe we don't have our big tech giants but is there an opportunity for europe there and should it perhaps create their own an environment in which these big tech giants can foster and can grow well i mean not to say that the the chinese are any shining light of uh you know open society but certainly china has its own champions in every space that it is led and there's no reason to me that the european union couldn't have a search engine that was much more attuned to people's privacy than google is uh and to me that would be a good use of social capital and and european investment to do that um but also europe can play a great role in just leading in the regulation field although i'm skeptical about the ability to regulate the united states i'm not skeptical about the ability the force that the eu has had in changing conduct i have to give permission for people companies to take my information now before your gdpr we never had to do that so um you are making an effect on the whole world by imposing certain regulations that needless because the nature of the internet then become worldwide regulations so should we for example also consider to convert the big internet platforms to public utilities but i do think you can make them for instance pay producers of content a legitimate rate of money uh in order to do that you know i mean one of the things that concerns me most about what big tech has done is it's created a new class of people which economists are calling the precariat and that is people who on one hand work above the api and tell computers what to do and below the api are people that computers tell them what to do that's the kid that drives your uber or the person that works in the amazon warehouse those people have no health care no unions no security of any kind no pensions and they're essentially forced to be freelancers in a way that giant companies usually had to have some responsibility for their employees and of course uber or lyft or amazon has no responsibility for its employees and gives them no benefits whatsoever so you know we are creating this precarious put aside the horrible effects on the culture that it's had as i've pointed out in my book you know it used to be you could make a living selling recordings uh as a musician you cannot do that anymore you have to be on the road 200 days a year in order to require thank you mr taplin looking forward to the next part of the discussion where we will have a broader discussion with ms faroha as well thank you for now yes mr rouhar let me just start this group discussion amongst us um to give you uh a possibility to respond of course uh uh to jonathan taplin's professor jones and taplin's uh interview because i saw already you wanted to do that well i was i was nodding at a few different points and um and i have additional thoughts as well um i think i think the truth of the matter is let me step back i think we are headed towards a future in which not just in the digital space but in many spaces there is going to be more regional fragmentation i think that the us europe and china you know have somewhat different value systems um which is only appropriate uh that you know different countries should have different value systems and different forms of governance and um my hope personally now that we've um elected a normal president is that we're going to see um some more transatlantic cooperation that we're going to see some real discussions about all right what are our values around surveillance capitalism what what kind of competition law do we think we need to have i mean what what is competition and antitrust really about can we say definitively that we have moved beyond um the the the borkian era of price as a metric into some new era in which power and and the effects of concentration of power on a broader broader ecosystem is the standard i think yes uh i personally think um that we're going to see this biden administration in if not you know immediately very soon after taking office in conversations with europe about how there can be more broad digital agreement how can we shape um the world of intangibles i mean right now um as jonathan pointed out we we have this system in which as we move and it's been sped up by covet as we move to all things digital you really get the problems of neoliberalism have been put on steroids so you know the last the political system of the last 40 years assumed that capital goods and people were equally mobile and now we can add data into that well capital is quite mobile data has been extremely mobile physical goods a little less so people not at all and so what happens is you get this divide this massive divide between the fortunes of companies and in particular the top you know 10 or 20 of companies that are basically all about capital and data i'll give you a fascinating statistic before covet hit just a few years ago mackenzie the consulting firm did a tally of where corporate value lives and they found that throughout big companies all over the world that about 80 of corporate value was held in just 10 percent of firms and those tended to be the firms that were richest in intellectual property in personal data in you know in the sort of currency digital currency of our age um i suspect that that's probably gone to 90 95 at this point of value being held in those firms and of course the big tech platform firms are the largest of them but in this new world in which china has announced it's going its own way you know i mean as we were electing a new president the chinese communist party was actually laying down its plans for 2035 which is all about being independent of western technology western supply chains europe is saying we want more intra-regional trade we want a tax structure that works for us we want to have public access to data because that's important in liberal democracies and so um the question is are we going to be in a tri-polar world or are we going to potentially be in a bipolar world in which there can be more transatlantic alliances um i'm hopeful at this point that it might be the latter um i'm hopeful about that and i also think that as we shift i'll just say one more thing quickly as we shift from really the consumer internet to the internet of things you know all the things that we know about in our in our phone all the things that make this so powerful that's now coming into the industrial space into the machine space into the manufacturing space europe has world-beating firms um in that area i mean the german middlestand um the italian export companies and so many french tech innovators a lot of that is in the business to business space and so i think if there's a regulatory framework that simply allows competition to happen i think that europe can do pretty well in that world um interesting in this series which is the cult future of capitalism we look for indeed new values new practices and new institutions what should we amend in our current economic models or uh economy uh that that that well um helps us deal with societal challenges and also the problems it creates themselves right like for instance the creation of a proletariat a new proletariat or as you called precariat as you called it uh professor taplin um so if if i would ask you what kind of new institutions should we envision what would be your answer my my problem is that i always have believed that culture precedes politics yes i'm the oldest person in this gathering i was lucky enough to be involved in the civil rights movement the united states in 1963 and 1964 and by a lot of ways it was led by cultural figures and what's the problem for me today is that the culture of the united states at least is a very nihilistic culture you look at all what is the popular television shows whether it's succession or breaking bad or game of thrones or strange things it is all dark the world is coming to an end dystopian kind of sense and the heroes are all the worst kind of people you can possibly imagine now some people say well that's just an effect of the donald trump world view you know that a reality tv star can become president and so everything is just about what you can make but i i also see that in the music business i mean i grew up in a time when you know there were inspirational anthems like times they are changing or we shall overcome but if you listen to the hip-hop and rap music of today it is very dark dystopian and angry and so i think that a culture needs some kind of aspirational culture now all of this is reflected of course in the fact that particularly the united states what angus didn't call deaths of despair are going through the roof that is people who are killing themselves through alcohol drugs suicide and so needless to say the politics of the moment play off of all of that right i mean you have a candidate who whose whole thing was american carnage the society is going down the tubes you know this is all horrible and all this change is bad for us if we somehow can get out of that mindset then i think there's some great possibilities for positive change but right now we're in a very dark place and you know i was struck by the fact that the only hope in the pre-election time coming out of the culture was coming from the nba the athletes the basketball players you know lebron james with his shirt saying vote that you saw every day and the fact that he forced the nba to put on a one-minute commercial for voting every 30 minutes of the whole nba finals was an act of power that used to come from the musicians is now coming from the african-american you know sports stars and so maybe that's a possibility of hope as well you know but quite frankly i have been saying for a long time that we're stuck in an interregnum and the italian philosopher said gramsci said the old is dying and the new cannot be born in this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear yeah and we're caught in this place where the old systems are clearly going out the route but this new system whether it's social networks or autonomous cars or autonomous airplanes like the boeing 737 max they're not working right yet and so we're taught if we're in a bad place all right well miss furuhar what do you think of this well i can almost say cultural analysis of nihilism within american or european culture and what is the relation to your in your mind with uh the digital world that we've created it's it's a fascinating question i i love i don't agree entirely with with jonathan's dark view but it's a fascinating it's a fascinating point and um i do think that artists creators are sort of canaries in the coal mine here um of what what is happening i completely agree with that um i will say it's funny i i live in brooklyn new york which is a very very blue borough very blue part of a blue city in a blue state and i was struck because i heard uh sam cook's version of a change is going to come blasting from one of the windows when biden was elected so you would have been happy about that jonathan i think i i know we're eyes from the 1950s well it's true and you know it's reminding me i mean just to stay on culture for a minute it's reminding me of a conversation i'm sure you'll remember when neil young was um was he he put out an album i forget when but um keep on rocking the free world was on it um and i remember he asked about that and he's like well you know i looked around and nobody was none of the younger people were you know was putting out this music and so i thought i got to keep doing some protests here and that is fascinating i think the part of that you would know better about the the creators but i think that part of it comes from the fragmentation that is part and parcel of the new technology i mean you know neil ferguson a historian wrote a wonderful book called the tower and the square and he likened the change that we're going through now to the advent of the printing press where you know suddenly you could read the bible in your own language and there was all this sort of um fragmentation and individualism and chaos and eventually you come out in a better place but first you have 150 years of religious wars and so it does feel a bit like we are all and we see it in our own households we're all in our little silos and the high speed nature of it i mean just the the kind of attention span issues that come with this technology are i'm going to date myself i'm 50 years old but it's stunning to me you know that my son but i'll just get one stat my son who is a you know just turned 14 um briefly became a tick tock star literally coming up with some 15 second video of himself doing pull-ups with aspirational music and suddenly he's got 5 million hits i don't think i've ever had 50 000 hits for something in my life i mean this is i'm like i'm a professional this is what we're dealing with but jonathan what were you going to say well i'm just worried that we're we're in this kind of strange world in which there's there's it's very hard to be kind of optimistic and the default position is nihilistic um you know there was a wonderful book about a movie called chinatown um and sam watson wrote and he said look if you think about the great books of america you know the great gatsby or uh moby dick the symbol of the green light or the symbol of the whale were all kind of aspirational symbols in some sense but if you think about chinatown it's chinatown shake the fix is in there's no nobody is going to win here at all and that sense is what leads to people for instance say why should i bother to vote yeah nothing's going to happen and you know i mean as much as the vote went up quite a bit this last tuesday it it's still 79 million people didn't bother to vote in indeed but but i also saw a lot of hope speeches and internet tweets on the fact that kamala harris now is the the the vice president-elect and and let me let me let me go on the gramski quote from you if the new times haven't been born yet professor taplin what do we need to envision organize debate about um um how can we stop this nihilistic default um in to to imagine or envision a a society and an economic system that functions uh that is just that doesn't create a prokaryote but that produces fair results for everybody well i mean one of the thoughts i've had for a long time is that the digital economy lends itself to a kind of new cooperative ventures in other words if a group of musicians in the netherlands decided to form a music distribution co-op yes they could use all the tools that are out there and even if they rented some space from amazon web services to run their system they could end up taking the majority of the economics out of the system as opposed to letting youtube take the majority of the economics out of every music video that gets posted on youtube in other words cooperative ventures could change the nature of the way this society works and besides the very fact that the distribution costs of moving a piece of music across the internet are almost zero makes it kind of an attractive way to do things yes yeah of course yeah can i jump in and just give an example too in the in the democracy space taiwan is a is a terrific example of how decentralized technologies can be used to enhance participatory democracy they have a terrific digital minister audrey tang who um has made a big push to give everybody um using blockchain technologies uh digital ids you can do voting online you know there's every little decision you can weigh in on and so trust in the technology allows for trust in government trust and government allows for better government which creates more trust so it becomes a virtuous circle yes yeah that is that is very interesting because in our series this is the eighth edition and the commoning of the economy um creating these these co-ops is mentioned a lot from different uh uh theoretical backgrounds also if you look about the future of the corporation for instance um we have a question from the audience for you uh uh mr faruha and that is from connie and i always like to to name the name but do you see an escape in unbundling the private and the public sector like creating for instance with public money a public good or public internet that is and we always say here in the house we talk a lot about commons the commons is not private not public but something in between but this question is about the public side of the debate i i absolutely think that that's going to happen i mean a couple of couple of points um google has a an arm called sidewalk which creates smart cities all over the world and there was a big and interesting example in toronto recently over the last couple of years they developed essentially took over a large swath of the toronto waterfront and put sensors everywhere and there's a lot of good reasons for this you know you can get a lot of energy efficiency better traffic patterns etc etc but what was fascinating is that google was going to own all this data the city of toronto was not going to own the data and suddenly when activists began to expose this there was this oh wait a minute we know what if a what if the public i.e taxpayers and voters and citizens want to keep some of the value of that data what if some small canadian companies want to have access to it for innovation purposes so um that was that was changed the rules of the game were changed in fact it was agreed that um the data would go into kind of a public data bank that would be governed and companies would get equal access now interestingly in the wake of covid uh google shut down that project they said that it was no longer viable they wouldn't say why um but i suspect that we're going to see more situations like that i do think though that the pandemic has really um just as it has been kind of a scrim that has been pulled up on so many existing problems that are there it has brought forward this notion of public investment for public goods i mean the truth of the matter is that there are some things that the private sector either doesn't want to invest in because the margins aren't high enough or they find too risky um and so you know things like laying down broadband cable or you know to go back in the past seating the railroad businesses the internet itself came out of the military came out of darpa you know and so i think that you're now going to see um not just in the u.s but also in europe and certainly in china this sense of the public sector needs to come in first and say here's an area we care about we feel this this thing is a public good we need investment we need a national strategy for how to get that and then you will see the private sector um probably because they have more safety and certainty coming in and helping to commercialize so uh professor taplin just to ask you the question as well what do you think of the comments submiss of of what miss farruhar has said and perhaps you want to tie that into your story of um this nihilism this kind of stalemate that we are in as well because this this sounds quite hopeful what we need to do what needs to be done and what can be envisioned just over the horizon but if i understand you correctly it also takes some form of to put in my own terms kind of cultural momentum to get us there who is going to take the charge in that well i think this is a bottom-up issue you know quite honestly i i i've been talking about one in the u.s maybe we could call new federalism the idea that innovation in society has to come from the edge uh it never you know i i one of the first sponsors of the innovation lab was ibm and sam palmisano was the president of ibm at the time said to me in a meeting we need to lower the center of gravity of ibm which meant that we had to get decision making outside of the central armonk headquarters to let people in india make the decision for what ibm should be doing in india and let people in japan make decisions for document and and that is true in governance as well so we were lucky enough to work with the the city of uh chattanooga tennessee in which the local utility which was publicly owned in other words owned by the people uh called epb built a broadband network fiber to every single home in chattanooga and you know they went up against comcast which was the big uh you know centralized player and they underpriced them they gave people you know 200 megabits per second at 28 a month for internet yeah and now they have about 65 market share and and it's not that they're pricing it so low as a charity they're actually making money off of that so i mean the point is that you know innovation can happen in all sorts of ways and of course what that did was bring all sorts of things like video game companies to chattanooga because it was such screamingly fast internet uh you know and and now you know they're giving people a gigabit per second and it's interesting because that that sounds also as a organized like a common right um and of course uh uh uh miss faruha you already said that innovation tends to come from a company who has not yet had his ipo um or will never have uh their ipo right um so so there is some hope because other uh economists as well mentioned the bottom of movement for instance the youth climate movement who has really gone to the streets to demand better policies uh to fight climate change yeah and i you know i would also encourage there's a wonderful book by a friend of mine glenn weil called uh radical markets um that talks about all the ways in which decentralized technologies are now make possible um more democratic participation in ways that they couldn't before things like quadratic voting um you know there's there's we're at a really interesting moment and the outcomes even though they could be scary we could see more monopoly power you know you could see a kind of world in which we've got the washington consensus the basic beijing consensus and the facebook consensus or you could imagine a world in which um these decentralized technologies allow individuals really to have much more of a voice yeah i'm hopeful about the latter yeah and then the question of course is if that has a potential what should we how can can societies pave the way for these examples to be successful and be a true alternative right and then you of course come to the question of institutions uh uh and and is and we talked a little bit about antitrust law and and and your your your ideas about that that is of course a clear suggestion for institutional change do you have any other suggestions which we should um consider for this well let me just um i'll i'll have one final thought and then i'll sadly have to come off of the call but um and not to plug my third book but i'm actually getting ready to auction my third book which is about this very topic um i think we are headed towards a post post-neoliberal world and by neoliberalism i mean the sort of anglo-american la say fair let capital goods people go wherever they want with without understanding that that is going to privilege the wealthiest and the most mobile relative to everybody else and so i think and that that theory by the way i mean it came from the 1930s montpellier in society but it was really sort of institutionalized in the u.s by milton friedman and the university of chicago so that's that's been something that has been institutionally um dominant really now for half a century pendulum swings in the political economy tend to happen about every 50 to 70 years and we're due for one and so i think that what you're going to see is across a wide swath of society and a wide swath of sort of academic thinking not just law with anti-trust policy but also economics with what does the the post milton friedman world look like you're going to see conversations between economists and biologists because frankly economists have been living in an ivory tower thinking that they were you know could just do mathematical models and they were much more like physicists guess what no the world is messy people aren't rational you know everybody except for economists has sort of known that intuitively for a while now they're getting on the bandwagon um so you're going to see a really interesting and rich conversation going on i mean i'm already part of some of these at the oecd's new economic initiatives group i'm i'm taking part in some of those at open markets in the us we're having them in many many places it's exciting you know i mean jonathan's right the new the new new thing has yet to be born but the conversation about it has started and it's a really it's a really cool one yeah actually this of course this series is also in the eye of that storm right uh trying to trying to talk to people to envision what's what's up what's what's going to be next after neoliberalism thank you so much for joining us uh congratulations with your dutch translation uh let me repeat it in dutch but you can buy the book of rana for um in dutch it's called big death and now we're going to say something in dutch hoover owns a privacy fair martin democracy in the out for cope doom that's the dutch undertight subtitle um i i thank you so much for joining us and take care there thank you so much thanks for having me yeah because uh for for a few moments now i want to go back to professor taplin because you started with quite a groomy uh uh analysis right you said culture should pre uh uh should come before politics and our culture if you looked at the music and the series which are popular tend to be nihilists and you said we need to change that otherwise we won't change politics and then we won't change our economic models um but uh but of course uh rana has tried to persuade you in to to opening up to a possibility of the alternative well i i think the two go together obviously if if you had a better economic model uh in terms of how culture makers could produce their content yes then the the nature of the content might be different in other words there's an interaction the marvel the marvel tv movies or films that dominate the you know film business when it when there was a film business uh are of necessity dystopian right i mean it assumes that there's some superhero going to come down and save the universe from horrible bad forces you know and you know perhaps that was you know donald trump's pitch in 2016. you know but those are always lies those are not true those are fantasies and as long as the culture lives in this fantasy universe we're not going to really deal with the reality so if the culture had ways that people could make things that weren't necessarily going to cost 100 million dollars to make a movie and stuff like that you know maybe a different kind of more optimistic culture might exist i mean certainly that was my experience in the 60s when bob dylan made a record it cost like ten thousand dollars to make you know and and so he could he could say whatever he wanted to say nobody was going to object to what what his songs were or tell him oh that doesn't fit the algorithm of what spotify wants to hear right now you know i mean it wasn't that but quite honestly the big tech guys are going the exact opposite direction i was at a conference at google last year when they they were suggesting that artificial intelligence could write the screenplays that artificial intelligence could edit the movies and i said well why do you want to do that you're just going to get what you already had yeah i mean that so you feed 10 000 screenplays into an ar thing and what is it going to spit out you know so i mean it's actually a really hopeful message because you're saying be a maker produce your own culture uh and start start being start start being an artist and start making stuff and and and and try to find your connection to audiences uh without using these big platforms and by the way the tools are all there yeah well it's to make your own album in your basement with your mac and i you know pro tools or the tools cut a movie that you made with your iphone are all there yeah it's wired yeah that's that's actually really i mean being part of the revolution if you want to be part of the revolution become an artist and start making stuff yeah beautiful that that that is actually a very nice thought um and we're going to go to the last part of this talk and i i'm going to invite some the monk to join us at this table the the young economist who was opening uh this session with his uh text and column and my my question of course to you is uh you listen to this conversation it was an open explorative conversation actually and we got all these notions from uh uh um ms rana ferruar and and professor johnson taplin what you you post some questions right how can we solve some of the issues you're dealing with or you you mentioned what did you think about what did what were your thoughts during the conversation yeah um i've have many points and just to tie in a bit to the the last point i i completely agree that uh you can make make stuff and music i'm myself also one of the guys with cheap yeah cheap material uh mics recording an album so so i very very much agree with that um but of course yeah getting out and reaching an audience there the whole business becomes an issue um but uh coming back a bit to your question about the solutions for today i think uh one of the main things that is raised is sort of the political will to actually go through with these actions that seem to me to be the key issue it's not that it's too complicated and we don't know what the solution is sort of but it's more do we have the people in power who are actually going through with this uh and for me um i've been for the last year also for my master thesis looking into research on political power and for me it was quite shocking to read that not only in the us you might expect with all the money involved in politics that indeed big business rich people have disproportionate influence on what comes out but even in a country like like the netherlands where money plays almost no role in politics virtually the same outcomes can be observed in research and for me this is really concerning so what can we do that taking out the money to money of politics doesn't seem to solve the problem because the the influence of big tech for instance on lobbying on the political process is still a powerful it's still a powerful process that is what you're saying yeah yeah and i think there might be a difference in europe since it's not our big tech that in that way maybe here their influence is a bit less but our local or our national companies maybe have similar impacts so i'm also thinking if we want to have our own big tech firms how can we sort of ensure that they won't become just as influential as these big type firms are in the us right now yeah yeah good question very interesting thought and i think also what um thinking about what professor taplin has said during the discussion about this notion of nihilism is that there's something that goes beyond just the power of the money question here i think so it's also about kind of worldview or kind of a way that we tend to think about technology or the role that it plays within society and we're kind of on the one hand comforted by these technologies but on these on the same side you can say that they are creating all these new precarious elements within society but we don't care enough actually to do something about it because we're also very comfortable in our own little bubble and watching game of thrones and watching game of thrones yeah so there's there's uh which i find very interesting something deeper going on there yeah something which is it kind of transcends just purely the the idea of money or influence or power over this it's really maybe a cultural issue as well yeah that that is of course an important takeaway of of of tonight right yeah i'm not entirely sure whether it's completely separate from the power question though because i think the things you mentioned that for example increasing like what was also mentioned earlier a pre pre-carry it i think creating that sort of new social class that's also a power question so i think the power involved in running these these kind of companies these platforms making sure that artists don't earn money anymore i think these these things are more of power and i think these could be embedded in corporate governance so your question actually is but we don't we only have one minute left for this evening is is there a political will to actually deal with these issues on the level where which should be dealt with and of course uh that is an open question i think i'm looking at uh as professor javelin do you think there is a political will a very short answer we we only have time for a very short answer for that well i think the whole notion for me that just because you have money taken out of politics doesn't really change the game is kind of frightening yeah our assumption has been all we had to do was get the money out of politics and and everything would be fine but maybe that's not true we'll send you uh his master thesis so you can study it i want to read it yeah well i'm going to leave it at that but thank you so much uh professor and thank you all the viewers for watching and asking all these questions next week we'll be back with the ninth edition of the series with uh luigi zingales and christian falber on the viability of a new market system if you want more uh information of the coming editions you can go to the swag harpoons nl and for more information on the future market consultations you can go to morrowmarkets.org future market consultation uh we're very proud uh that we had you here
thank you so much also to you some uh for your um contribution today and uh um that that that then the only thing which is left is to say thank you and have a great evening thank you so much
2021-04-10 17:33
