Contains on a timely subject that the height of stocks of amazon and google and others and with a broad scope why this book and why now . Thank you for having me by the way. I started this book in 2017. I had just taken a job as a columnist the mandate was to figure out the World Biggest business in opinion form which is a rather large mandate and in order to narrow the funnel, started to look through corporate numbers i saw how well they transition from the Financial Sector to the Technology Sector since a great financial crisis and one number that stuck out was looking at how 80 percent of corporate wealth was being held than 10 percent of the firms. Those were the richest in personal data and intellectual property. You are holding the majority of the worlds corporate wealth and the majority of those are that i profile in the book. Netflix and google. Host there are some overlap like facebook and google with Digital Advertising and apple has shunned advertising and technology. Huber is of the optical Optimal Company either but. That we think of them as all things tech. Its a great question and an interesting point because we are trying to separate each other as regulators look more tightly in the space. So what they do in the calm one in common is the Network Effect with the idea as you get big, you get bigger. The Business Model of these companies and many firms to bring as much territory as possible as quickly as possible. Everybody wants them out. You get in and to sacrifice so a company like amazon but also like bluebird to undercut the worlds Taxi Services and worry about profits later. This is something businesses havent been able to do at scale until now. So that in itself has a lot of ramification and it cuts competitors out and with that monopoly power. So a reasonable and optimistic and simplistic statement of what it would adhere to but that implication is you got bad. So to be powerful and successful . Where to start. I 350 pages on it. [laughter] it was the mantra the evil one the google guys came up with in the nineties when the internet was a garage industry it was just born with a small time entrepreneurs coming up with these companies and the reason i decided to focus on google and the idea of not being able is that it was a bear in the beginning. If you write a complicated book with social and political and Economic Issues you want a narrative arc. Buildingl voodoo doll of you and of ensuring data to advertisers. The Business Model would eventually bring the users of search. And the state entities like russia, iran or the rightwing nationalists. We are so sorry we could never have imagined all of these terrible things. Go back to the paper it was kind of all there in small print. Host in the statement at the time in the 90s they were seen as this evil empire with windows, 3. 1 storming into everything and its odd now bill gates is this figure in Technology Getting all this money away and why doesnt every billionaire do what he does and the ceo of microsoft is seen as a kindly, you know, gentler effective ceo. They dont come under too much fire or scrutiny like the rest of us who do that. I didnt really focus on microsoft, and i think that if they had their way, im sure they would be happy to have a successful Search Engine. But that actually goes to the point, and everything you are saying phones in on what constitutes monopoly power and what constitutes anticompetitive behavior. The microsoft antitrust case, which actually sort of allowed people with this space for google to be born and grow, that happened over 20 years ago at this point. That was the last time regulators and the public really looked at Silicon Valley and took a hard look at the sector and said okay we have competition problems here. That is a whole new world and if you go to some of the books that were written about the data economics. They talk a lot about the power of networks and how in this new world the Network Effect of the surveillance capitalism these companies would become natural monopolies. Thats the whole thing they didnt want to get into the business unless they thought they could create monopolies of thatothat in a way sort of comeo conflict with the dont be evil slogan pretty early on. Host while we talk about them as being monopolies and having monopoly power come at the same time they are all competing with each other is what they would argue. They say look, amazon is in the lead, and microsoft is the challenger and then in the operating systems into smart phones. We had a competition issue and she looked surprised and said we feel like we are competing against the big guys all the time but that is the issue, it is goliath at this point. You have a handful of players basically three or four companies that have taken over everything and are actually moving into an entirely new fields to. Those Like Health Care in areas like finance. We have seen amazon go overnight into the grocery business. I havent seen you see another industry is saying we need a monopoly case or bring suit into the bargain because they benefit. Every company in the world benefits from the power of the targeted advertising. The model that has been hiding here in the personal data imagine if they got all of their steel for free they would have doubledigit Profit Margins. Selling it across the devices and industries. You look at some of the privacy, Security Issues like facebook, then think about leaving your Checking Account onto that and healthcare data onto that and the world of smart speakers and how the surveillance is all around us now. Its the idea and filling in the detail here, the idea that by watching people and collecting data on what people are doing, you can build a whole Economic System that doesnt necessarily benefit them. They are not necessarily the consumer, but they are the good. Guest its funny, just the word consumer. Shoshana goes back i read it as i was doing my research she looked in an academic way almost through a marxist lens at the history of capitalism and how this new kind of surveillance capitalism is in some ways the ultimate fruition of corrupting society for the citizen into a consumer and now turning a consumer into a raw material. These digital patterns are developed. We get none of that resource. The fact i have an issue with buying shoes and the same kind of dresses over and over again, that is my desire, my habit, my personal information. That is my behavior. It is no longer mine. It is being harvested by google and beit amazon and it is used to sell me more thing. Now we havent even gotten, theres plenty of time to go into the political but take what we have been talking about in terms of purchasing the corporate monopoly power in the store to put them in the political arena. Lets say you are on youtube and like my son you are clicking on lebron james videos come he can give you any stats about the nba, but if you are clicking on rightwing hate speech, you are getting more of that. That is called a filter bubble and that the benefits these companies because they monetize us by keeping us online longer. This polarizes us politically if you think about the power of these titans, Corporate Giants have always had political power. Its not just from top down and we can get into it how it is by dollar to the lobbying group in washington that it comes from the bottom up because our behavior can be manipulated to. A couple of years ago they talk about do we even have free well in this world area are we in danger of losing john stuart mills, the ability to be free citizens in an open society in the world in which we can be controlled at this level by algorithms. Host it sounds like from the questions of advertising addiction to television. Guest the antitrust scholar at columbia looking at some of the similarities, i do think that this world of digital surveillance capitalism is fundamentally different. It is everywhere all the time. The services are like utilities. Can you imagine having search for ecommerce or your asp pulled. We only have the beginning of it really because we talked a little bit about smart speakers for example there is more of a cognitive power and you hear a suggestion given to you by voice is even more powerful in terms of influencing your behavior. The power of these companies, they can either race you as a product, as a person if they want to. Its too much power. Host the apple ceo would probably say we are not the problem, we are part of the solution. We have this idea come of this concept, differential privacy that we are building into our products and we are not taking peoples actual identifying data out of their devices and using that to inform our ai. We are shielding that and taking general insight into keeping ourselves clean from personal data so that we are not trafficking in it. Is that true or is there a hole in the argument . Guest i think it is largely true but there are several holes in the argument. Apple certainly has had more of a commitment to privacy to be fair for its own competitive advantage than google or facebook. It isnt a data harvester in the same way google or facebook is. They make their revenue on Digital Advertising and selling hardware devices. Now it wants to create the network and ecosystem and loop you into buying as many products and services as possible, so ino enough he uses a Network Effect by what they got a couple of things. Things. For starters, the commitment to privacy has very much depending on which country you are talking about so apple will capitulate on privacy in china in ways that it wouldnt dream of doing in the u. S. So its certainly subject to the political pressures, differences in the way of. I would say theres a couple of other problems with apple that overlap some of the problems i see with google and facebook. One is who gets what part of the innovation and high so one of the big arguments right now when the regulators and the public see these companies are too big a to make them smaller and to bring them up they say this is the battle between regulation and innovation. We have to stay big to innovate. I would argue these companies, and apple is foremost among those over implementors, not innovators. They are implementing pretty much other peoples technologi technologies. And you can see this playing out. There is a great story right now in the headline of the google battle. They also have a beef to pick. They are the maker of a small innovator, he came up with a way to make smart speakers, very innovative company, came up with a lot of technologies that were adapted by both google and apple and as the companies started getting bigger and more powerful, they started infringing on those patents. Theyve now taken them to court over the infringements. They couldnt afford to take on both google and apple over the infringements. Apple has had major fights with other Big Companies. Apple actually in some ways is responsible much more so than a huawei. Infringing and at some point it got bigger and decide we dont want to pay what youre asking. So, they are implementing thousands of technologies. They wan wanted to be an expense and they are taking opensource and implications. Sometimes they buy out a Small Company to get rid of competition. So again it is getting bigger and using the system i think to raise the innovation environment in ways that are actually a zerosum game. To make one point, you cannot have an economy in which the four companies are taking all the wealth. Youve got to have a bigger innovation ecosystem. Host so, sonos is suing google and would have sued amazon but they couldnt afford to take them both on at the same time. Guest im sorry, amazon, not apple. Apple has beeapple has been taky spot if spotify. Host even at the beginning of apple, xerox parc had graphical userinterface and steve jobs how could you have this just sitting here somebody ought to bring this to the world and put out his version. That is one thing and that is the allegation in the case but one could argue that part of what the companies and maybe even Big Companies become good at is actually bringing that innovation into life come into the economy and giving it to people. Guest a lot of people would argue that. I guess i would say i do not see the consumer electronic product that lets face it hasnt had a Game Changing innovation since the smartphone which was in 2007. Everything else has been more or less iterative and its been about apple being extremely clever as a marketer and is a brand creator. Value at this point was in three places, globally it lives in the ip and data and big brands that are able to create the kind of near and desirability and in real estate that is kind of where the value lives. I think in the new world that we are moving into there is going to be an environment of deflation and commoditization. You can see apple fighting hard to keep the market share. Look at apple losing the battle to save a smart phone game maker in a number of emerging markets. Apples success in being able to continue packaging expensive products and selling them in giant glass boxes is actually not helping to put more americans to work. It isnt helping to create the next big productive bubble. Things that would bring along a Critical Mass of workers to the next that place is just about selling more expensive stuff. I would argue that a company like qualcomm is the company that came up and that makes the smartphone smart. In three continental legal battles with other American Companies at the same time that china for example rolling out bundles, one road, working seamlessly to the institute huawei chips and technology into the entirely new ecosystem. I think that that is a model they should bweshould be lookine carefully at dan the sort of blase fair keep margins as tight as you can. We see in the last few weeks and months the number of corporate scandals that kind of zerosum financial is thinking has led to. For the challenges of the companies the legacy in the u. S. Is very different from europe. In europe it is more about protecting competition. In the u. S. Its been more about protecting the consumer. It seems like in the digital era that kind of distinction doesnt work the same way it used to because when we talk about facebook or we talk about google, very often the Companies Want to say look at the consumer. They are paying nothing. So, this is good for the consumer. Other people say thats not the consumer. The customer for them if the advertiser and they are paying a lot more. Theres the old model for antitrust and dealing with the companies and competition. Guest two or three points that i would make, one of the things they like to see his competition is just a click away. They say this whole time. Lets be serious. To go back to the question about microsoft. If you are doing a Google Search and or computer stopped working for a minute, would you go to bing or get up and have a cup of coffee and come back in five minutes. Im guessing the latter. Host i do use bing, sometimes. I use google sometimes, do some shopping on walmart as well as amazon. Guest mix it up. Host its all over the place. Guest equal opportunity surveillance. So, the Network Effect actually creates that mode you are talking about. But the deeper point is i think that the rules of the freemarket capitalism actually do stop working. Its like the law of gravity as long as both sides know what the transaction is. Neither of these things hold so you do not know what you are giving up on what you are getting. You know that you are getting a search but you dont know how much the data is worth you gave for the search so it is a very asymmetric transaction and that is the problem right away. Also when you are not paying in dollars, that isnt a free market. That is in the way adam smith would have envisioned. You need equal access to data, transparency and the moral framework to function properly. You do not have that in any of these things and you are dealing with the digital giants. It also calls in a very technical waiting to question this 19 80s school of thought that its just Consumer Prices that matter. But the school of thought that allowed walmart to get this big and destroy the town square. Okay. Fair enough. Thats good enough for us i guess. There are a lot of negative externalities. You get with choice. But in this world of free come and i put quotation marks around it because when you download these and do these searches, you think that its free but you just dont know how much. That model really doesnt work anymore. You can look at the innovation ecosystem, which is the way the europeans do it. They look at almost the markets like biological systems like a petri dish and theres all these different things. The plans and the frogs and fishermen. How do we make sure that its working for everyone that is the way of doing things. Its complicated and timeconsuming. Thats why they take years and decades. Interestingly, there is an academic who had a wonderful book looking at how by many measures european markets work better and are free in terms of the diversity of players because theyve been more sensitive to our Small Businesses doing well or consumers doing well to the Big Companies, the ones that depend on patterns versus open markets and everybody getting a fair shot. Putting that aside for a moment, i think you have to start thinking about political power and the political economy in a way we havent thought about in this country for 40 or 50 years. And so one of the things in my book i spent a lot of time thinking about and reading about was the 19th Century Railroad paradigm. So, you go back to the rockefellers and vanderbilt and you have these networks being built by the Railroad Companies and at one point they owned not just the railroad the cars that sat on the railroad and the cold hand of the week and the commodities that would go in them and they could clearly preference who was traveling, how and when. I think you have to look at this very much in that way that you should not be able to both control the network and control all the commerce that happens on the network because then you inevitably come into conflict with your own suppliers. Look at amazon for example. A lot of companies will simply not take on antitrust issues with amazon because they can be disappeared from their business. They can be just cut off from the consumers if amazon decides they do not want to algorithmically preface in a search result. The same goes for google and now you see these cases come to light around this. But they are difficult to prove because there is a black box of algorithms. Host with amazon its about having the ecommerce and to deliver packages and it allows third parties to operate at the same time to have its own brand of products competing against. Its about having the store where the third parties an coult have to do this. But at the same time having its own applications on the platform of podcast or music some might argue that i have to pay the toll and apple, you are competing with me in the same place. Host thank you for there are rules in place already to separate the networks and commerce. The company that provides a network of competing against third parties to. You have fools. They are not always enforced but they say okay, goldman sachs, you can trade aluminum that you cant own all of the aluminum in the world in the corner market, which actually was an issue. It is a funny little anecdote that i covered in my first book where to get around those rules they bought up a bunch of aluminum and they were moving it from one warehouse to another but the president does exist. He took on the system and he looked at the idea that the political power exists. We are not living in this world of everyone making efficient choices all the time and free markets are perfect. If we think about economics since 2008 cut the markets do not always know best and they do need the rules to function properly. Host we are talking about your book that came out in november i believe. It really puts a spotlight on the likes of google, facebook, apple and a few others and the size and success in the treatment of data and marketplace is having an impact not just on customers that all of the global society. Specifically in the u. S. Can we regulate Data Information without regulating speech, because people are choosing a lot of these cases come to talk to alexei and put information in the Search Engine onto the social networks, etc. Pictures on instead instagram, commerce information, they are giving it away for free making that choice what to do with their speech, how can it be stopped . Guest these are Great Questions and something ive really grappled with was this idea of whether or not platforms like facebook or google should be liable for what happens to. You also dont want mark to be the minister of truth i ministes the wine we are walking. Let me point out a few things as folks think about this argument. These companies have this get out of jail free loopholes that was written in the Communications Act of 1996. It allowed them to not be liable the way that you or i as journalists was looking for the media sources for what they say or do. So if i print something that is inaccurate, then we could be sued and i could lose my job. Not so for google or facebook. But look at what these companies do. They essentially put a lot of content online and then they advertise against it. Thats kind of what the media does. They want to have it both ways. We are the town square but they want a Business Model in the traditional media and its created a kind of postfact world which has led to all other kinds of problems and challenges in the liberal democracy. So, i think that we really have to consider the. There was a high profile case a couple of years ago around backstage. Com which is a website that was knowingly trafficking minors as prostitutes. This was something both the right and the left took on and now the platforms do have a liability if their other federal high crimes they have a liability for those things. They do a pretty good job of using algorithms to get child pornography off of their websites. Website. I think that we have to look closely at how much more they can do and if they cant do it, should they be allowed to monetize content at scale in the way that they do. Host some have turned the entire internet outsid internetr inside out if you miss the section 230 the idea being that even the comments on the news sites were covered under that. I have no idea what they are going to say. Shiny liable for that and a lot of news organizations have backed away from the site for some of these reasons that you could argue people upload User Generated Content if as soon as some row uploads a piece of content you would be liable. Guest at the Financial Times we do look over and we have numerous employees to look over the user content and comments and if they are inappropriate or hateful, we get them down quickly. That is a decision the publication has taken a. I think that these are decisions that each government is going to have to make individually. You are seeing already countries like germany, france, the eu, they make very different judgment calls in terms of how the content is going to be policed. I think it is so important that this be a democratically led conversation a government decision. I do not want individual private Companies One by one making these decisions. In part because they are going to do what is best for their own Profit Margins. One of the key anecdote and reasons i wrote this but aside from just looking at the sheer economic power of the companies, full disclosure, my own son became completely addicted to a free online soccer game. I discovered this because i come home one day, open up the credit card bill and 47 worth of time and i thought who could have done this. My 10yearold son. He had become addicted to a free app that uses its called persuasive technology. They are literally kind of a casino game technique. There are some existing rules around children and the media, but i thought about this as it is like nicotine. It is as addictive and terri is in some ways as they think. We needed the government puts limits on things like that, and i think that we are probably going to need a Government Agency of some kind, perhaps even fda of technology to look at the whole battery of the effect. Our Brain Science is being changed. I have a chapter in my book that looks into the ways children are being reshaped. The Digital Natives have come of age using their phone, they read less. Attention span is the work of the levels of anxiety and depression. They are effective in serious ways. Host can we get the genie back in the bottle . In a sense, the goal of marketing and advertising has always been to influence people, and arguably its gotten so good with the data. The sites are constantly little pieces of information tweaking the layout to drive the engagement, to give people little doses of dopamine and keep them engaged. They say that is why the stock is so high. We need to have data on exactly how that works to be able to regulate . I think we do and you are already seeing social science. There was a wonderful book i quoted and i cant remember the academic right now, but looking at the last ten years or so, the usage of mobile technology and correlating it with things like depression and anxiety and isolation. You have a diagnostic handbook for physicians. You have new elements that relate to the digital usage and addiction. These are real things and we need to treat them as such. I think alternately, Silicon Valley has a problem. They are very good at taking credit for the wonderful things that they do, and theyve given us all this terrific technology. Entertaining, productivity enhancing to a certain extent, but they are not so good at taking responsibility for the downside. And i think they are also a also a good aso good at admitting tht have it all themselves. As technologies were basically built on federally funded r d to think about the internet touchscreen technology. You have this kind of privatization that the socialization of the losses in so many ways the human cost of automation. We havent even gotten into that. I have a chapter you and i. , robot will be doing our job at some point. Theyve already experimented with algorithmic reporters. Theres going to be a disruption higher and higher up the food chain. You have doubledigit profits not taking responsibility for any of this. Host robots are already doing my job. I first started in business now that isnt the story that you write. You frame the issue in this way early in the book. You write the issue is the period of great technological change also characterized by great disruption which needs to be managed for the sake of society as a whole otherwise you end up with events with religious worteven sort ofreligd 17th century which has outlined a like the Printing Press and it brought with it at the age of enlightenment in the same way that the internet social media have offended society today. So, theres a lot in there. And very compelling. How do you go back to the period of time, the press is good, information is good but bad things happen. Is there a way, are there lessons that we could even extract from looking back that help us figure out . Guest ther guest there isnt one silver bullet. As you know even when you write a book my publishers are like okay we want the Solutions Chapter to the problem has taken 20 years to create or depending on where you want to put the markers some of capitalism in general and how the markets are regulated. Host i solve it, so thank you. Guest there is more than three solutions. I think the first step is creating the proper narrative, and this is something i thought a lot about because i think that one of the many reasons that we are at such a politically polarized moment has to do with the fact we didnt create a proper narrative about why we have such disruption from globalization from financial tech related Job Description in the countries like the u. S. We thought they should be able to do whatever they want, thats fine. We didnt talk about the fact that there would be these pockets of pain. We have to look now where the technology is going. Where is it taking us and do we want to go there. I have a chapter in my book juxtaposes the situation in the u. S. With the situation of china. If we want to look at what the surveillance state looks like, we have to go to china and right now there is no debate obviously it is an autocratic society. There is no assumption about that and the government can and does track everyone. If we are doing things by the party we might find it easier to get a job or get health car heat if we follow through you might find ourselves like so many minority muslims have in the gulags. It can be yielded by the corporations as it is in the u. S. I think that there is a third way. You are starting to see some bright spots already in europe. I was phenomenally impressed by average people who turned out to hear these debates about what should the visual economy look like and what should capitalism look like and there is a really robust public debate. People are making different decisions in different companies. In this country look at california which interestingly has been way ahead on the legislation. Its the birthplace of these companies but its also the alse birthplace of a lot of solutions. You have california looking at the digital dividend going back to one of the first points we discussed. Might they share some of that value just like norway or alaska to do thing for the Public Benefit and use the data as a resource to maybe help people along, help them but for the problem of labor dislocation from automation. It is especially targeted for those that do well with data. Its interesting the Trump Administration is fighting to implement a tax like this right now. Again, going back to the proper narrative, there is a debate and a push right now in washington and brussels and others to create what i think is a very problematic and nationalistic debate about dont regulate big tech or google or amazon or facebook. We are the National Champions in the battle against china. I dont think there should be National Champions. We should have a National Industrial policy and competitiveness strategy. They are claiming they wanted it to battle into google has a big operation in china they are not a national champion, they are a forprofit company that is going to do what is in their best interest. They need to be forced to do with this in the publics interest and we need to have a conversation about a. Host forced to do what is in the interest of the public is hard when its a sort of unruly mob and its a lot easier when you are an authoritarian governments like china. I wonder is if one or another . In these days the government come in at just the Trump Administration because Obama Administration was doing the same thing. Its time to when they have good reason they say open up the device and see everything that has been done. But apple argues if we give you the backdoor than china is going to want in, turkey is going to want in. Is that the kind of world we want to live . Guest they are Great Questions. I did wit would with the couples in taiwan. You have a vibrant democracy that is being enabled by. Decentralized technologies. In the same way china is confusing the big tech big state model to create the surveillance state, you have taiwan using the block chain for the voting on issues so you can capture the kind of nuance that you are talking about that we have in our society. We have a democracy that is messy. We know that. But id like to see some of these technologies being used in service to democracy rather than the grading of which is what you have seen in the last few years. Host a possible solution that gets mentioned that you covered in the book is the idea of individuals getting a cut. You talk about the social dividend which is a little different with some peoples data is worth more than others. So if im in the right demographic, do i get a bigger payment and then theres the question of the Network Effects and data that mine may not be worth that much but mine plus yours plus another persons is worth exponentially more than any individuals data. So is it even possible on the individual basis to capture the value . Guest great question. The idea of wealth fund probably makes more sense because of the thing is that you are pointing out. One of the reasons i wanted to present this idea of should individuals get a cut is there are some people that are saying we are moving in the era of ai and more and more automation that can do more and more human labor and we are moving to a post work world. It sounds great at first. Think about it. All of us have been on vacation for 20. We start to get a little cranky, a little bored. A lot of economists are saying wait a minute, maybe our data is our labor and we need to start thinking about that as something that is of value so i wanted to point that out and also show some of the numbers and its true its almost impossible unless you are in these Companies Come to get a realistic view of how much of that data is worth because it varies by individuals and how much your layering. But just a conservative estimate shows you that this is an enormous industry the fastest industry in the world. And so, i think that is worth thinking about when u. S. You hae Companies Making these doubledigit Profit Margins harvesting the data for free. Lets think about that as word and the appropriate taxes for it. That gets to a bigger and more profound point about the way that capitalism and globalization works. So, lost a fair globalization, freemarket capitalism as practiced in the u. S. Has been exported to many countries. The idea was the goods, capital and people should be able to go wherever they wanted to. The point is the capital can jump across the border is much more freely than the goods and certainly people. In this Digital World it puts all of those problems where the companies can fly above the National Problems but here they have to deal with the reality on the ground. The Digital Transaction puts that on steroids because if they come across the borders and thought the data can move across the borders really fast and so weve got to just look at where this is going in t to set up the parameters so you dont end up with what we have seen in the swing states and the steel towns and red states that have just been decimated by globalization, having the kind of fractious and ugly politics that we have had. We are going to get that at a much broader level if we are not careful. Host you take a close look at google, apple, amazon, facebook, other companies that traffic data and have marketplaces with enormous power. I wonder with so much work that goes into. Do they do to her work, do they do this differently because of what you discovered while writing this . Guest the first thing i did is t was to take my sons pe after he wrapped up that bill and do something analog. I dont do sports speakers. I often use encrypted email and more private acts when im reporting. It made me think a lot about the value of my own intellectual property. I think that we are moving to a very decentralized world in which are really the only value they have is what is in our head, what is in our intellectual property in the data that we bring if we have to take control of that and so when im negotiating contracts and thinking about my next project, i make sure that they take control of my own data and intellectual property. Host you talk about solutions towards the end the book and what you hope will happen. Host what do you hope doesnt happen and what is the cost if we dont do anything . Guest this is going to be the topic of my next book that we could theorize a there are all of these technical changes that are driving change so quickly and that creates the conditions for our very extreme and hateful politics, so that is the risk. I think that the upside could be if we get the framework right it could be a world in which come into this is a stretch. Digital technologies do allow distributed power. Thats one of the things thats kind of interesting. Yes, we can be sliced and diced by the tech companies. But each of us has the power of our own data and behavior online. Businesses can be stored more cheaply now. This could actually be a boom for labor if we get the framework right. The digital trade could be done more easily than if you wanted to be an international company. These are complicated things, but there is a potential that the post work world could be one in which they are in power relative to capital in ways that were not possible in the past. Host that would certainly be an interesting outcome. Guest that the guest but they give you a concrete example. Uber is just a piece of software. Why should a Taxi Workers Union nounionnot have that same softw . They do now. There are apps that are run by the workers themselves, drivers that share the profit and its kind of a cooperative model. One could imagine those sort of things being done on the scale and the Labor Movement itself being reinvigorated. You see the freelancers movement and the aflcio trying to organize and say hi. Graphic designers in Silicon Valley, you are actually a freelancer and have the same problems with asymmetry of power as say a cleaning lady in the box, and i think that that is an important point to make. Host many are bringing up those points in 2020 which is an active here politically as the moshas themost technologically. The book is dont be evil. A lot of good thoughts in here. I suppose one of the things that the rest of us can do is at least get smarter and read it so thank you. Its been a great conversation. Was really concerned by what we felt was a gross of impact in the false narratives about the fbi and the impact that they were having on the people of the fbi and the ability to do their work, and if people really understood more about the organization, who we are, how we work, what kind of people were drawn to the fbi and how we make the decisions they did. There are policies given to us by the department o department t based on politics and personal preference. How a person became the jews are. It describes how internet use shifted from being individualistic, spontaneous involuntary to being data and advertising driven and dominated by corporations