I knew from the beginning I’d have to consult the outside world. I knew there were no quick answers, and that I couldn’t employ some surprise reveal at the end, which would point the way forward.
The best we can do is ask questions, and keep asking variations on those questions, keep reaching out to those who can provide their own particular truths at the time.
Throughout this book I’ve tried to bring together a range of views both from within and outside the tech world – I’ve captured just a small segment of the multitude of ways of thinking about the situation we’re in. There’s always room for more. Some people weren’t as worried as I am about what’s coming up. Some seem to inhabit their new digital selves with no hesitation, as if all will be well in the years to come. Some just do not care about the data collection I’ve outlined in these previous pages. For them, it’s thrilling to be known in such a complete way.
With all these differing attitudes, we’re hurtling towards the future. We’re all going to have to grapple with it.
I’ve now been introduced to a few different survival tactics.
I’ve seen in bookstores ‘fill this journal’-type books, and noticed in previous years the adult colouring book trend. This book has no blank pages or outlines of Mark Zuckerberg to fill in with pencil crayons, but I’d love for this final section to contain a grain of DIY spirit.
For instance, I was able to find a way to sit down with Stephen Fry. If you can do the same, I’d recommend the experience – for many reasons. But even if that’s not possible – and please don’t bombard his Twitter account with requests – there are individuals in your life who would like you to broach the subjects I’ve raised in this book.
These days, we need more conversation. There will be opportunities – even simply across age ranges – to ask people to outline their own views of where we’re going. There are a million variations on fear out there; there are an equal number of reasons to feel confident. Each person brings a view of privacy, a standpoint on what’s acceptable, a belief in what’s right, a visceral reaction to these entities – Apple, Google, Facebook – that have come to define our lives. Some want change, some are irked, some are acquiescent, some glow with the fire of a new convert.
If there’s one point to this book, it is this: examine.
Interrogate what’s in front of you. Your questions will rarely be greeted with silence.
Ask a potential business partner: ‘How do you want to confront issues of data collection and privacy?’ It’s a subject that’s moving up from third date to first date material, and the great thing about taking on this bit of citizen journalism is that it leads to the heart of how people view themselves.
How should we be known? How much do you want to be known? Do we need to live in subservience to these Big Tech companies? How will you deal with the oncoming world of virtual reality? Could you ever take a trip without using Google Maps? Could I be part of your life without appearing on your Instagram?
Ask the questions. You’ll be surprised at what you find.
Our relationships with machines are many things: sometimes cooperative, sometimes antagonistic. I had always wanted to talk to Garry Kasparov because he was one of the first – and he certainly won’t be the last – to take on machines, head to head. Kasparov single-handedly defeated 32 chess computers in 1985, and then defeated Deep Thought in 1989. In 1997, he lost to the infamous Deep Blue – but only after beating it 4-2 in the previous year. Garry’s understanding of AI is unparalleled. Combine this love of knowledge with his fiery political insight, and Garry’s one of the most fascinating and opinionated people I’ve ever encountered. I wanted to speak to him about this intersection between the online and offline worlds, as well as social media, politics and AI.
Talking about data extraction always seemed like a good way to break the ice.
Damian: Part of the issue that I see with Silicon Valley, and the way that the shift has moved to literally four companies that dominate the entire internet, is that the money associated with those companies and the VCs driving it are pushing them to continually have to search for better and smarter ways to extract data and to monetize the message or the news, whatever it is, whether it’s fake or not. And so long as there’s big money attached to it, surely there’s that complexity.
Garry: That’s a financial element of the story.
Because a lot of people, they are willing to buy fake news, they are willing to buy something that is contrarian, something that is sensational. Then these corporations that are basing their revenues and their fortune on advertising – and it means the number of clicks, the number of people who follow the certain items on their menu – then they have no incentives of fighting fake news. Moreover, unless they are pressured by the public through the political institutions, unless it happens, they will be just amplifiers of the fake news, and as a result in 2016, it could play quite a considerable role in deciding the future even of the greatest democracy on the planet.
People want new tools; they want maximum convenience. They want life to be turned into a flood of digital data, and then they complain about their privacy being infringed.
It’s an interesting moment because it’s the first time when technology is available to everybody. And people can basically enjoy the same services as those who are on the very top of the social pyramid. But the cost of that is that your information now, it’s a part of the global network. And I think it’s amazing people don’t recognize that it’s not a free lunch. The expectation from day one is that the internet is free, and it just brings us many good things.
Now, it is recognized that the price you pay is to download your data and basically to share your most intimate moments with, okay, maybe with a trusted source. Maybe with a corporation that can protect it. But at the end of the day, even if the company, say Google, is not violating your rights, then every company now is a subject for potential hacking. So technically you are investing your own personality. And you are at risk of being exposed.
That’s a price to pay for many convenient things that make your life more exciting. And you have so many attractive options in front of you that you can reach out.
Again, it’s an interesting psychological trade-off. A lot of people just haven’t thought about it, and now we’re at just the very beginning of this process of actually realizing that we are in the position to make these hard choices. Because if we leave it to others, then we should stop complaining.
Damian: In Germany, it’s a prominent conversation. Because they’ve always been very aware of the internet, they are well educated and wealthy. Whereas, I can imagine in other poorer countries they’re grateful to get access to the internet and grateful for what it can bring in terms of education. They’re far less critical of what is being given away.
Garry: Look, the problem is universal. It’s a problem of relations between providers and data collectors and individual customers. The consequences are different. Obviously, in a developed world, there are ways of fighting back, there are ways of putting pressure on these big corporations. There are ways to protect individual freedom. But at the same time, people should realize that if they want Alexa at home, for their own convenience, for maximizing the effect of their time, of purchasing goods, they are sharing information with Amazon. And potentially with these others.
Damian: So how can an individual put pressure on a corporation then?
Garry: I believe that all these corporations, they are subject to political regulations and people who can vote, and by doing so they can change the government. The citizens in a free country, they have the means to create political conditions that will make it very costly for corporations to infringe their privacy.
Again, it doesn’t mean that their data will be protected. But at least in Europe and America, citizens, they have an ability to constrain large corporations that are in charge of their data, to use it for their interests, to enhance their financial interest.
Now, as someone who was raised and born in a communist country, I’m really concerned about people who were not lucky to be born and raised in the free world. Because in China and Russia, in Iran and now in Turkey and in many other countries – actually, we’re talking about 60 per cent of mankind – data being collected by state authorities will not just create problems for your consumer profile, it could sometimes even be a matter of life and death.
It’s a serious moral challenge that while Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook pretend – or at least they try to do their best to demonstrate – that they care about the protection of individual rights in the developed world, they willingly concede any data that is being demanded by dictators, just to protect their businesses in these countries.
Countries like India, I mean. Poor people – millions, hundreds of millions of them – who cares about privacy or security if there’s free internet, and access to some of the services improves health and gives them a chance to sort of go ahead with their lives?
Damian: So what we’re talking about really, at the moment, is the web as we know it. As we move into AI, as we start thinking about privacy and data and also ethics, how do you see the world moving around AI and how are we going to try and control some of that?
Garry: What’s the difference? It’s a new set of technologies, but it will not sort out all our problems – social, political, or economic problems. It offers opportunities. But unfortunately, you know, as every new technology, it offers opportunities for creation and destruction. Unfortunately, as every major technological breakthrough, it could be used for destroying, for a negative agenda, since it’s easier. And at the end of the day it’s still about people making decisions.
And the capacity for evil is uniquely human.
AI will be reflecting – as I said, the internet will be reflecting – our nature and our prejudices, and our beliefs. And it’s, again, [a case of] while machines will know the odds … I don’t believe they will be able to go beyond sort of calculating their decisions … based on odds that are, in turn, a part of the data that have been collected from human history.
Damian: Apparently, a third of US internet browsing has been done through private browsing. And apparently, there are 12.5 million people in the US that use VPN for private use. So let’s play this forward, that people are using VPN, they’re using private browsing, and we’re no longer able to target advertising, and advertising is no longer the future of the monetization of the web.
Any thoughts on what the future of the monetization of the web might look like?
Garry: I’m a great believer in the invisible hand of the markets, you know? I think if technology is in great demand, there will be a way to pay for that, and again, if Google doesn’t manage to adjust to new realities, there will be another Google.
Damian: Who is in control?
The perception of the man on the street is that Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon are in control. However, they’re only in control so long as we’ll allow them to be, and we as consumers totally determine whether or not their business exists. We could collectively change their business tomorrow.
Garry: But we go back to the same issue: people want convenience.
They want new tools. If you have something better on the market, they’ll buy it, but you need something truly revolutionary to appear, which I doubt very much can happen since these corporations, they are quite good, not at inventing new things, but at buying any potential inventions and killing them if they could threaten their business model.
*
Garry: We have to come up with a new vision. That’s why I’m also interested in just asking the same questions, but probably in a broader sense. So what would you expect from this great technology? Say, how soon we will walk in the red dust of Mars? Not for the sake of actually having a great movie, or just another bunch of tweets coming from the first crew, or from the president who authorized this flight. But to restart the process of exploration. To make sure that we will bring back risk as a factor in our lives. We will not be, we will no longer be afraid of taking risky endeavours, and we will actually recognize that risk is a necessary part of any profitable business.
Damian: Elon Musk is clearly not afraid of risk.
Garry: I’m in awe with what he’s doing, but it’s not about one individual, it’s about the drive of society. One of the most quoted phrases from inaugural speeches, most likely, comes from 1961, JFK’s, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you.’ And now, can you imagine a politician today asking this question?
How long will he or she survive? By basically telling people that they’re responsible for their own future, they’re responsible for the well-being of their country. Or coming from the same speaker, JFK, the moon speech. So, we’re going to land on the moon and do the other things in the next decade, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard. Again, can you imagine any politician today rallying people behind something which is hard, not easy?
It’s very important that we recover this spirit, because that’s the only way to fix things. It’s a big picture issue, and that’s what I’m interested in. It’s not about something being broken and [needing] to be fixed, in one compartment or another. It’s, I think, about trying to compartmentalize things, to sort of micromanage them. We’re losing the big picture, the vision of the future.
Again, I wish more people will recognize that we have to expand. Physical expansion was always a very important, if not the crucial factor, of human progress.
It’s horizontal versus vertical development.
And we are staying horizontal for a long time.
•••
Sarah Drinkwater moved from Google to the Omidyar Network, the firm created by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, to continue her work with communities and to really try to test and scale interventions that help maximize the tech industry’s positive contributions to a healthy society.
Omidyar Network is one of the very few investment firms that are looking at sustainable investments. ‘We seek to create a more equitable economy, promote responsible technology that improves lives, expand human capability, and discover the emergent issues that will shape our future.’ Who would ever have imagined this statement would be on the home page of a venture capitalist firm?
Sarah: What’s so interesting about Omidyar is we’re investing for profit and grant making from the same pot of monies. It’s the same fund.
We were founded in 2004 with this really cool belief: technology being a force for good. At the time, we were imbuing the notion of tech itself with certain values that we presumed to be across the board.
I think it’s become obvious that was perhaps naive of us in 2004.
Look at tech now. It is very clearly a tool. And it’s very clearly imbued with the values of the person that’s created it.
So the metrics that we assign to the investments we make are really untraditional. We’re looking at positive impact on the overall scene. When we’re looking at growth, it’s traditional and atypical.
We have the freedom to do that partly because we have one funder. If I were based in a very different fund, we’d have a certain number of stakeholders to please.
That’s why having one fund can be powerful. As long as that person agrees with the mission you’re working on. It helps you to work in a way that is more positive, I think.
Damian: Omidyar has this thesis of investments in positive returns, right?
Sarah: Positive returns is broader than just money, if that makes sense. It’s broader than just a financial goal. So when we talk about our impact report, when we talk about positive returns, it’s partly financial, but the return is a small part of that.
We’re far more interested in overall system change. So when we’re looking at things like financial inclusion, how do we change systems in an entire scene? Visual ID. How do we drive adoption of digital ID across West African countries, for example.
It’s this unusual space between social impact and traditional VC. And that’s what really appealed to me as a person when I recently joined this team.
Damian: It appears to me to be a million miles away from Google. When you’re talking about a company that has best intentions, or that’s looking for positive returns, did you see any of that in Google?
Sarah: I was really insulated in some ways.
The field that I’ve always worked in is community.
The last ten years of my career has been around pulling people together – in a way that is making sense of big cities, making sense of the internet, making sense of this distraction economy where everyone’s trying to get your attention the entire time, but there’s no real value in it.
This goes back to Instagram. Instagram is full of people who want to show stuff that you can buy or experiences you’re not having right now.
So I joined Google. I was hired by them to run a community on Google Maps. I worked on an engineering team I loved. It was really, really, really far away from making money.
The last four years, I was running a physical space. I had this really unusual experience. It was quite naive in some ways. I experienced the best part of Google.
In the last year, all of these things began appearing in the press that made me pause and question where I was working. I was running a space of entrepreneurs, it was free, it was open access. It lived a lot of values that I have: it was global, diverse, it was helping people start companies.
I believe in that notion of micro-entrepreneurship and growing in a way that’s right for you.
In the last year, I kept thinking: I’m pro-business, but I don’t think of business as being pure – ‘make money at all costs’. I believe in this notion of business being a powerful force for good change in communities.
That was the driver behind my move into the Omidyar Network. When I was thinking about leaving Google, I began looking for opportunities elsewhere, and a lot of traditional VCs really didn’t appeal at all.
The reason why this particular role was interesting was, okay, I believe in better business, but I also believe that traditional tech must change – whether it’s classic ‘VC baking better ethical decisions into the decisions they take when they invest in the company’, or whether it’s starting out with the right process.
When you guys began WeTransfer, it was just part of your ethos. It was who you were as people.
The challenge that we have is that it’s just not on the horizon for a lot of tech founders. That’s because they are too similar as a group. They’re based in very particular parts of the world.
How do I take what I liked about Google – the openness, the transparency? People there generally are really nice and really kind. How do you take that, but leave behind a lot of the naivety about what you’re actually building at heart?
Damian: Within a company like Google, do you think it’s fair to assume best intent?
Sarah: I guess my experience has always been that you lead with trust – whether it’s in your personal relationships, or whether it’s in your work relationships, or whether you’re building a team. That’s the only way that you can build something strong for the long term. And that’s the only way to live, I think.
What’s interesting about Google, at this point in time, is I think they have the mindset they’re still a very small company. And they’re not. They’re a massive company with incredible, incredible influence in many, many, many areas of life.
When they began, tech was its own thing in the corner. It was a silo. And tech now: it’s government, it’s shopping, it’s democracy. It’s all of these things that it wasn’t ten years ago. A lot of the leaders have been with them since the early days. They’ve been working in classic tech for ten, fifteen years. Part of the reason why you guys are different is you’re not from classic tech backgrounds. If I’m right in thinking, a lot of your founders are designers or have a design background.
And this is partly the reason why you see Zuckerberg being shocked and surprised, again and again and again, about the influence of his platform – in a way that, to me, feels a bit disingenuous sometimes. It’s a little bit like, don’t be ridiculous. Of course you have this power. But it’s almost as if, in his mind, he’s still got this small company that is doing one very particular thing, with this altruistic mission to connect the world.
With Google it’s the same thing. I saw a lot of really, really, really, really good intent up close. I didn’t have experiences working with people who genuinely did things for the wrong reason. And that’s why, when press stories would come out about Project Maven, for example, it was horrible, as somebody who worked there.
That’s why it’s so hard for those companies to change. They’re not challenged enough internally. They’re not humble enough, I would say, about who they are in the world. They have these grand intentions and these grand ambitions.
I particularly point to the way Silicon Valley looks at European regulation. I definitely saw a lot of, ‘Oh, well, in Europe it’s all about regulation. It’s all about politics.’ That felt patronizing. When actually, increasingly, with tech being so borderless, I’m personally pro-regulation. There’s a lot of positive regulation out there. I love what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus ASC is doing around tax reform in the US Congress, for example. These ideas that could be seen as quite radical, six months ago, are now quite mainstream. I love the Overton window shifting on that kind of thing.
It’s really interesting to analyse setting up the version of the first phase of any company. Are you a B Corp? How do you think through setting up in the right way? Because the minute you’re off to the races, it’s too late a lot of the time. There’s a lot of good intent out there, but increasingly, to a point, the structures that we live in make it really, really, really hard.
I’m excited about companies that don’t take VC funding. I’m excited about companies that start small and are revenue positive to start with. I’m excited about companies that put themselves out of that whole system to start with.
It seems to me that that’s the only way you can grow differently.
Damian: In Holland, it’s really difficult to raise money. So it’s more common that people will bootstrap. You have much more control over your business.
Sarah: It’s also good that it is harder to raise money.
Damian: It was the greatest pain point for us at the time, but in hindsight it was the best move, because we were able to keep the values that we had. As soon as you’ve got forty million in the bank, everything changes.
Sarah: And then you have the pressure of spending the money as well.
If I think back to my last start-up, we didn’t know any better. We were very naive. You do stupid things when you’re naive. And one of the worst things that could have happened to us is somebody saying yes – in terms of money.
We’re in a very different world now, where founders that I respect are choosing to go it alone. If you are in the fortunate position that you guys were in – 2009 or whatever – of nobody saying yes, that is the really great thing in the long term.
Damian: What’s it going to take for VCs to change and to look at businesses that are perhaps values-driven, or responsible data, or much more trust orientated. Is it possible? Can VCs do that?
Sarah: I’m an optimist. I think things are possible. But I guess, if you think about trust, we’re living in this quite sort of trust-deficient world, where we don’t really trust in government, we don’t really trust each other.
With the model of VCs, it’s all about people. And there are people who work as VCs that I like an awful lot, that are trying to be different, that are working on very different models. I’m thinking of people like Indie.vc, et cetera.
In this world where share prices are going down, economic growth is slowing, it is really hard for VCs, because they’re ultimately responsible to their investors, the partners, et cetera.
Conversely, it makes it harder for VCs to experiment. It makes it easier for small companies to be experimental themselves. We’ve been searching for the last ten years for the next Google, the next this, the next that. I think we’ve all realized now that a lot of those companies came from a particular moment in time, and we might not see them again. That’s not a bad thing.
I’m interested in sustainable growth, and VC money that is appropriate in terms of scale that gives you more than just the money, that gives you that real support, the opening of doors, the network effect that you’re looking for.
There are funds working in that space that are quite interesting. Not enough right now, but I think there are increasingly experiments that are happening in that space.
Will it come out of Silicon Valley? I don’t know. I personally suspect not, and that’s partly just my cynicism about the Valley as a whole, which is even funnier now that I’m moving there.
Damian: I was going to say.
Sarah: Europe gets overlooked the entire time in terms of this space. Toronto has loads of really interesting work in this space. So does New York. So does London, I would argue, but that’s because I’m a biased Londoner.
Damian: Will consumers lead the change?
Sarah: They have, in some ways. Certainly not with massive companies. If you look at campaigns like DeleteUber, they don’t really matter to Uber, if that makes sense.
They cause a splash on social media, they get written about in the papers. You read about it in The Economist, for example, but it’s not enough. It doesn’t drive real change, I would argue. I can’t imagine that Uber is sitting at their desks worrying about that – certainly not somewhere like London, where there are no real competitors.
We’re still using those products. We use them and we hate them in the same way that I still have Facebook, but I hate it. I still have Uber, but I feel bad about it. It just leads to consumer guilt and shame, and that’s not good.
If I think about how good I feel using products like Glitch, how bad I feel using products like Uber, that’s a really strong comparison of how I as a consumer feel using those different things.
You want your brand to be loved, right? Not used under sufferance.
Consumers can help, but I don’t think it’s enough, ultimately, while you’re making money. If you look at Facebook in the last year and the incredible decrease in stats, I still think it will take a lot more for them to change what they’re doing.
Damian: But is it down to Facebook to change it?
Sarah: No. I think that’s a really interesting question because I think one thing Rachel [Doteveryone] and I talked about a lot is it doesn’t take one group alone. It takes industry plus government plus citizens. It takes all of us as a group to say this must change, this must be better.
But while those groups want and need such different things, while government is so bad at designing tech itself, it’s hard for them to be leading it.
And particularly with the UK and the US, you’ve got Brexit as a distraction, you’ve got Trump as a distraction. You’ve got the hyperbole of the press. I think a lot of the media coverage has been not as rational as I’d like it to be.
Industry itself is not there strongly enough.
There’s a really interesting moment where we need change. It’s not really clear yet where it will come from. We’re seeing pockets of positivity, bits of good behaviour and pockets of good stuff.
Our work has been very cross-functional in that way. We decided that one challenge was this problem is too big to be solved by any one group individually. We had to find a way to convene quite different actors, if that makes sense.
We’ve not done a lot with policy makers, but we have been speaking to them. We’ve done quite a lot with product teams at large and mid-sized companies.
There are companies that we think do great work: you guys are one. I think Stripe are doing really interesting work. That’s part of the reason why we’ve worked with pockets of good industry, if that makes sense. For example, Responsible Computer Science Challenge, the letter for that was signed by investors, funders, founders, product leads, government people like Nicole Wong, for example, who are thought leaders in that space.
That’s part of the reason why we’ve really tried to have that approach of working across systems in the same way that everyone does too, I guess. Having that approach of community building, which again is my great passion.
How do we build shared trust even though we have different takes on different things? How do you build a movement in that way?
Damian: Where would you like it to go? What do you think it could be like?
Sarah: We’re at a really interesting inflection point.
I grew up with tech. My dad has worked in cybersecurity and military systems really since the seventies, and we have lots of debates around this. My dad is highly ethical, a kind of old-school developer, if that makes sense. He calls Apple ‘Macintosh’, has massive problems with Google and Amazon, which is why it’s so funny two of his kids work there.
Have worked there, I should say.
His approach was always that a lot of the systems we use now were developed by the military in a way that had to be highly regulated and highly thoughtful.
I’m kind of a pacifist. I’m quite anti-military as a person. He always said the reason it was so good that DARPA funded the original internet was because it had very clear constraints, because it was developed for military systems.
The military had to be incredibly thoughtful in how they were developing things. I think we forget the origins of the internet a lot of the time. We think of the internet as Facebook, we think of the internet as XYZ, we think it’s a noughties phenomenon. It really is not. It’s decades old. Centuries, in many cases, for things like algorithms and stuff. Charles Babbage and all that kind of thing.
In the future, we’ll hopefully have a clearer understanding that technology is all around us. It’s embedded in everything that we’re using, whether it’s our tube pass in London, whether it’s CCTV as we walk around the streets. I hope that as individuals we’ll have an increased understanding of the kind of world we want to live in.
If you look at Chinese value systems and Russian value systems of the internet, they are very different to the world I want – as a European and as a person.
I hope that, in the future, we have more individual control, but also that we have an understanding as a group and a community of what technology is for.
With my interest in building communities, I see the internet as a bit like a hammer, right. You can use it to build a house or use it to smash things up.
Where I believe tech is used most powerfully is where it’s helped me make new friends, it’s helped me keep in touch with my husband when I’ve been away from home. It’s helped me have new experiences, and it’s driven me offline quite fast.
That’s where it’s really powerful. The internet that loops you, that keeps you online the entire time, it’s not a good thing. The internet that discriminates is not a good thing.
People talk about humane tech, and I don’t love that because ultimately everything we do is humane. We’re humans. But I mean the humanity of tech, if that makes sense: taking decisions thoughtfully, being offline more than online, being communal rather than individual.
What is difficult is much of this rests on us dismantling capitalism, which is my personal hope. That’s really hard to do, because we live in it, right? But I guess my hope would be that we have continued debates around this, that we have companies that we hold up as beacons of hope, like yours, who are doing cool shit, and we keep asking the right questions, particularly for Omidyar, for us as a team. Keep challenging, keep bringing the right people together, keep testing possible solutions, and hopefully striving towards answers, I guess.
Damian: Your family Christmas dining table is an example of how we need to progress. You, your brother or sister at Amazon, and your father, who despises both. On the internet we’re living in an echo chamber. The future needs to be more of a debate club.
Sarah:That’s really interesting.
The first time my husband, who also works in the internet, came home, he was so terrified because his family don’t talk about tough things. That’s all we talk about as a family. That’s all we debate.
•••
Not only does he bear an uncanny resemblance to Jeff Bridges, Peter Thum is a master of holding the silent pause. But when he does speak, he’s an eloquent person who can be relied upon to discuss another of the strands I’m interested in exploring. How do we act with responsibility within our current framework? We can’t change everything, right now. Thum founded Ethos Water back in 2005. He later sold the company to Starbucks. Since then he has also co-founded Fonderie 47, an organization that takes assault rifles from war zones and turns them into jewellery, and Liberty United, which takes illegal guns from US cities and turns them into jewellery. The proceeds from both ventures fund programmes to reduce gun violence.
Peter: My mom was a teacher, and my dad was a surgeon. They were very involved in the community where we lived. They were very involved in the church that I was raised attending. It was clear what their values were. Not necessarily by talking about them, but by demonstrating them: you live in a place, and you’re part of a community, and you look out for your neighbours, and you look out for people who maybe aren’t necessarily your neighbours, through the way that you live your life and the work that you do on a daily basis.
Those values are part of what led me to come up with Ethos Water.
When I was graduating from college, instead of taking one of the jobs that I was offered, I moved to Berlin. I thought it would be very interesting to live and work in a place where the world was changing so rapidly, rather than reading about it in the newspaper. After several years of working in Germany, I went off to business school, and then I joined McKinsey & Company, because it seemed the best place to learn, at a high level, across functions and issues.
Because I had previously worked in the wine industry, one of the assignments I got was to work on the merger of two wineries in South Africa. I ended up working and living in South Africa for about half a year. As I travelled around the country doing my work on the project, I spent a lot of time around people who were very poor. On the other hand, the client employees were comparatively very wealthy.
Water was one of the big problems I saw first-hand.
I left South Africa thinking that this is a problem that affects hundreds of millions of people – about 1.2 billion people at the time. I wanted to try to do something about it, but didn’t really have any specific idea what I could do.
The next McKinsey project that I was assigned to involved helping a soft drink manufacturer with profitability. During the project, I realized that bottled water was not only a growing business, but also a business where there were a set of brands that sold themselves to consumers based on origin and fancy packaging.
It occurred to me that I could create a competitor brand where the emotional benefit wasn’t that the water came from some remote place where it was supposed to be pristine and better, but rather the benefit was that when you buy a bottle of water, that bottle, that purchase, is funding water access for somebody in need, in a place in the world where clean water access is not available.
That idea became a plan. The plan became Ethos Water while I was still working at McKinsey. I left McKinsey, and the UK, to come home to the US, which at the time seemed like the only place that had a big enough market for a brand idea like Ethos Water. I understood the UK wasn’t going to be a large enough market, and that the structure of the trade there wasn’t going to be favourable enough. Long story short: after trying to start it as a not-for-profit organization, Ethos Water became a business, we raised some money at the TED conference, and then were acquired by Starbucks.
But the really interesting thing is that Ethos started as an idea to try to address the problem: a mission with a business. It didn’t start as a business that was modulated after the fact by the value system of its owner.
In this way, it was more like Paul Newman’s business than it was like Ben & Jerry’s.
Ben & Jerry’s was an ice cream shop that was filtered through the value system of its two founders. They made business decisions in their supply chain, and in the charitable giving of the company, that were about who they were, as people, not about what they were trying to accomplish by creating a company.
Ethos existed only because of its mission. I never would have started that business had I not believed that the intersection between this huge issue and the burgeoning bottled water business provided an opportunity to potentially create dissonance in the problem.
A fundamental core purpose at the centre of a business, which drives strategic decision making for that business, and positioning over time, is critical for that business to be able to answer these kinds of fundamental entity questions about pursuing purpose over time.
One of the reasons why technology companies struggle with this is because, in a culture that’s dominated by engineers and Darwinian product focus, there really isn’t a lot of consideration given to what they’re going to stand for.
Ethos has been an interesting case because it’s a single-purpose brand, and it has one product that stands for one thing. That message – helping children get clean water – has a lot of leverage.
Ethos was acquired by Starbucks in 2005. It is their bottled water brand in all of North America, certainly in the US and Canada.
Damian: Were there any other benefits from focusing on water?
Peter: Yeah. I had intended to create multiple products under one brand and filed for trademarks under multiple categories. Bottled water for Ethos was a lot like books for Amazon. The reason that Bezos started with books was because they were easy to ship, there was a big catalogue, people wanted books, they would appreciate the ability to get a book shipped to them that they were interested in. There are a host of reasons why books were good, but they were also a good starting point upon which you could build the rest of the business.
The question is whether or not large companies can create businesses like Ethos or Ben & Jerry’s, without the values that the founders started with.
I don’t know that it is impossible, but I think it’s very hard, because the people involved are driven by traditional views of business strategy, economics and shareholder value. Their careers are shaped by this culture, and markets still are dominated by these ways of thinking.
In addition, social purpose is very difficult to retrofit on to a business – whether it is a small company or a large, publicly traded company – that has been built and financed with this traditional set of lenses. Here’s an example from my own experience of the possibilities and the limitations of social impact. When Starbucks was looking at buying Ethos, Pepsi – which had a joint venture with Starbucks – heard about it. They came up with a competitive brand concept. They basically said: ‘Here, we can do this too. You don’t need this Ethos brand. And you don’t have to donate as much money to the cause.’ At the time, Starbucks was an $8 billion company that was growing rapidly, and they had a joint venture with Pepsi, a $35 billion company, to make and market beverages. In this context, the decision to go with Ethos Water was unorthodox to say the least, but it paid off.
Following the acquisition, I said to the Starbucks team: ‘Look, we should donate ten cents per bottle sold. You’re going to be able to increase the donation by this much, but you also should increase the price to the consumer more than you are planning to do.’ But they didn’t want to increase the price to the consumer the way that I was suggesting, because it would have increased the total basket price of the average Starbucks consumer purchase for anyone buying bottled water, in addition to other products, above a threshold that they did not want to cross.
They had more to take into consideration than just my wants as the guy who was running their water brand.
But they later told me about the economics of the Pepsi proposal. Pepsi was proposing giving something like half a penny per bottle, or something like that – some ridiculously small amount of money in comparison with our plan.
But Starbucks made the choice to go with Ethos Water and then they enabled us to give more than two and a half times more money per unit sold than we were able to do as a stand-alone company. Then they agreed to a public commitment to donate $5 million to projects over the next several years, which was not trivial and required approval from the CFO and the board.
Ultimately, over time, I realized that all large companies view the financial aspect of the social mission as a cost.
The people who run big companies are, as individuals, not generally rewarded in their careers for leading with social purpose or for taking risks. Understandably, they make career and business choices that are primarily about competing for positions and influence rather than about creating things or considering social impact.
Damian: When you started Ethos, did you raise money, or did you start it before raising money?
Peter: I started it before raising money.
Damian: Do you think you could have started it raising money?
Peter: I tried.
Damian: The people that make up the VC world are in control of a lot of tech destiny. They’re basically deciding whether or not something is going to be made or broken. The thing that we’re seeing today is a lot of tech companies want to be bootstrapped. They don’t want to take VC money because of the fact that those VCs are often dressed in the same blue shirts, khakis, Patagonia jackets. They look the same, think the same, decide the same things for everybody, using calculations based on the past to determine the future.
With WeTransfer, we couldn’t raise money in the beginning, because we didn’t fit the mould.
Peter: I have a friend who’s a former McKinsey guy, former bank guy, former VC. He’s had a lot of business lives, and he recently said: ‘If you can’t raise friends and family money, you don’t deserve to get VC money.’ And I said: ‘I understand what you’re saying, and that sounds really pithy, but that’s wrong.’ There are companies that should raise no outside money. There are companies that should raise only friends and family money, and there are some companies that should only raise VC money. If you are starting the latter type of company and the capital is available and you need to go fast then don’t go get friends and family money, just go get the VC money, because your business is probably intended to get bought in a trade sale after rapid growth in a rapidly changing market. Of course, these statements might all be different in a recession when the pool of VC capital that is available shrinks dramatically.
There are people who see things, about the way that they think they can create something, or the way that the world could be, the future could be, and no one in their right mind would give them any money. And they’ll still make it happen.
And for those people, financing isn’t even really a question. They don’t give a shit about the money. They’re going to do it anyway. It’s going be uncomfortable to not have money, but that’s not going to stop them.
They would be the wrong people to be the founders of something that’s purely about creating a component to be added to Google.
When you started WeTransfer, you didn’t really exactly know what was going to happen. Right?
Damian: No, no we didn’t.
The majority say that when they started a business that becomes successful, that they just knew from day one that it was gonna work out.
How much of that is true?
Maybe you have an idea that, in some way, shape or form, you believe in yourself that you can pull something off, you can make it happen. But actually, the thing that ends up being a success, is that the thing that you really bet on in the beginning, or is it 20 per cent of the original concept that you have?
Certainly that’s the case with WeTransfer.
There was something in it, but the lever that worked the best wasn’t the lever that we thought was going to be the business. It was nice to have.
Peter: If you brought together a group of people who didn’t know each other to create WeTransfer, do you think it would have succeeded?
Damian: No.
Pretty much everybody that joined has tried to erode, at some point in time, the key factors that are the biggest success at WeTransfer today.
And that leads to the following. At a certain point, people would say: ‘You’ve got a great brand, it’s doing really well. Why don’t you drop that ten cents to three? Why don’t you just sell it as water, and forget about all the other complicated bits?’
Peter: Absolutely.
It’s this idea of purpose. At those times you don’t necessarily have to double down, but you have to ask yourself: ‘Why am I doing this?’
If you’re pursuing social purpose in a way that you can modify the mission, should you be running a company that has the mission at all, anyway?
If some percentage of the top line is being used for the purpose of accomplishing a social mission, then …
Maybe I can put it another way. I’ve had people come to me and say: ‘I’m starting a company that’s gonna do X. How can I incorporate social mission?’ My advice is usually: ‘Don’t even try to do it.’
Damian: I hear that a lot too.
Peter: ‘Don’t waste your money.’
Damian: If it’s not the core foundation of the house, if it’s not the core foundation of the building, someone comes along and knocks it down, because they think it’s ugly, or it doesn’t fit, and it doesn’t quite match, and it needs to be amended. That will be almost guaranteed to happen.
You’ve chosen to start a company that’s got a very strong mission.
I believe it’s the right thing to do today, whatever industry you’re in.
We should be operating and thinking like that. And I think the market is looking for more people who start companies thinking in such a way.
I see it being a bigger part of the employment and recruitment process going forward. Graduates will be much more selective, looking for those values, rather than travel allowance or whatever it was that I was looking for when I graduated, looking to be working in a consultancy.
Peter: Do you find they’re looking for jobs at companies that have mission at the core of their founding?
Or do you think that they’re looking for companies that have the essence of missions sprinkled around their office?
Damian: I can’t speak for everybody.
The ones who are critical thinkers, better educated, more questioning when coming into a company, want to find out what the diversity policy is. What is the ethnic diversity split amongst employees? What does the company do in terms of giving back? What role can they play in serving the local community?
We hear those sorts of things a lot more – one of the reasons that people come to work for WeTransfer, to be frank, for less money than most other companies in tech. Not because of the aspiration to build and work with the best engineers, but mostly because of the aspiration to work in a company that does good, in some shape or form.
Peter: Your employees are choosing to come to belong somewhere, and be a part of something, because of the way that the company impacts the world. And your company is capitalized differently, probably has a different ability to incentivize those people, both in terms of pay and equity: future equity, exit options, things like that.
Most people in a publicly traded company would look at that the same way that they look at Ethos giving away a nickel, as being a cost problem.
To me, it’s just a positioning choice.
Damian: And it’s a risk. The differentiator we have in the marketplace enables us to employ people that will be considering us against a company like Dropbox, and choose us over them, even for less money, and less equity, because of the values that we have.
When you’re talking about ‘mission’, anybody that you speak to in the VC world treats you differently. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience, but certainly, in a room of VCs and tech entrepreneurs, there is a very clear line as to which side of the room I sit on, and which side of the room the guys with the money sit on.
It takes a long time for that line to blur, for those traditional VCs or traditional business people to understand the difference, and actually to see the potential in a company like ours. It’s really fascinating to watch. Have you had the same experience?
Peter: Somewhat, but in a different way. I’ve never sought capital from any of those people, so I haven’t had to be in conversations where I have to deal with the fact that they’re going to judge me.
They may be judging me, but they’re not judging me based on the way that they think the business world should work. But I have had conversations with guys like that, and we sort of agree that we don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with the way that the other person thinks about the world.
We just don’t necessarily think that the way that they think about the world is necessarily right.
•••
Was there a more interesting approach to the state of the internet? Was there a way to smuggle in more values? Aaron Koblin is known for his data visualization. As the founder and CTO of virtual reality company Within, he’s thinking deeply about the future of VR, which will be upon us sooner than expected. My conversation with Aaron led me to return to some of my old questions: How can trust and empathy exist online as we migrate to these new forms?
If we can make the internet a better place, what does that better place look like, and how do we get there? Whatever you think of it, VR will play a crucial role in where we’re going. What’s the best way to integrate it? Will it help with flow? Or will it just be a way to gather more data?
Damian: With VR there are some capabilities and attributes that lead you into a flow state really easily because you have this focus. First of all, it’s one of the places in this day and age where you can avoid notifications and pop-up interruptions, at least for now. I predict that is going to change pretty soon, but for now you can actually find yourself in a completely different environment that is totally immersive.
Aaron: We’re now thinking about more ideas around taking that physical embodiment side even further. We haven’t really talked publicly too much about this new area that we’re investigating. Flow – this idea that you can get lost in something and time passes.
I’m interested right now in how we can get away from the computing paradigms that we’ve had for the last sixty years – hunched over a monitor and keyboard – into using your body in a computational context. Also, creating flow states that are very responsive.
Not to go into the dystopic social media side, but there’s a hidden cost that we’re not thinking about in society. Yes, we’re thinking about data privacy. Yes, we’re thinking about all kinds of social ramifications. But I think the interruption aspect is something that we’re going to look back on. We’ll think it’s mind-blowing that we disrupted all of our flow states and all of our attention time with various forms of digital introduction that we didn’t actually want and weren’t that conscious of.
My public art making has slowed, as you may have noticed, since I started this company.
Building museum installations was gratifying, but you get a very small percentage of the population, at best, that can get access to that kind of visceral real-life experience.
With virtual reality, the promise was democratization of experience. You could actually have something that was related to your body and to the life scale, and the kind of impact and visceral sensation you get by going into a museum, but you can deliver that to millions of people across the planet instantly, and that felt like it was something worth experimenting with.
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Aaron: The idea that you can feel embodied and present in a completely virtual environment is already here. It’s not evenly distributed, but there are people who are experiencing that.
The other thing about virtual reality is it is a spectrum of immersion. Some might argue that video games are already a form of virtual reality. It’s a field of view into that world. And then when you wrap it around yourself and get lost in it, there is some point where your embodiment is a different form of reality.
You’re no longer using a controller to fire your bow and arrow. You’re literally grabbing it, pulling it back and shooting it. And you can feel like you’re there. If you want to get something off the table, you can walk up to the table, you can squeeze your hand like you’re grabbing something and you can pick it up. You can eat it and you can throw it.
To me, it’s about forgetting that you’re not actually in this context. That’s what immersion really is. So I think that’s already happening.
We’re not fully there yet in terms of tracking one’s body, but it’s a pretty compelling virtual recreation. And I think we will see that stuff get infinitely better over the next couple of years.
Damian: I can totally understand, in those immersive experiences, where you can get into the flow of that experience, but for the majority of the world, that is going to take them out of the flow of learning, studying, earning an income, talking, communicating with people.
Aaron: We’re very wedded to more traditional ideas of existence. If you took the ten-year-old me, hanging out in the very early nineties, and you threw me into the same area of Los Angeles today, it’s a completely different world. People are sitting there staring at their devices. They’re zipping around on these electric scooters that they’re paying for with these devices. There are screens everywhere. They can’t get around without maps. They call Uber to come pick them up. The whole world has been transformed by these technologies that we’re not really aware of, but we are living in a virtual world. We’re not yet at the stage of real-time augmentation of that data, but we have these devices that we strap on our wrists and carry in our pockets and we hold them up to the world to tell us what we believe in.
I think, arguably, the kind of communication that I grew up with, to a large extent, was typing to people through keyboards. Now it’s typing to people on a screen. And virtual reality is actually using your voice.
These technologies are actually starting to bend back towards [being] more human. Right now, it’s a conversation between humans and machines, which is kind of bent. For a huge part of my generation we’ve bowed to the technology – I will learn how to program in this language, I will speak computer, and then I will use keyboards and interfaces that are made more for computers than they are for people.
Right now, it’s all going towards voice. I think the virtual reality interface is going towards emotion, human hand motions. It’s going towards more natural interfaces.
I would actually argue that, in some strange way, being in a rich virtual environment may be more naturally human than a lot of the computer world that we’ve spent a lot of our time in.
Damian: I’ve seen VR and technology also be really powerful tools for empathy, because you can see right there what’s happening to someone and give live reactions. Where do you think that it’s going? How does VR contribute to either the mob mentality of separation of people, or do you think it has the power to bring us together?
Aaron: Both. I mean, I think it’s similar to film. We talk about empathy a lot because Chris [Milk] gave that TED Talk about virtual reality as an empathy machine. Which was really borrowed from Roger Ebert, who was using that empathy machine for the movie camera. It holds true.
But I think that plays into this idea of mob mentality and empathy. These tools can be used for good or evil, to misguide or to educate. And I think the challenge is that they become just way more effective.
Damian: Is it possible for a computer to display any sort of empathy? There are companies that exist today where employees don’t have a boss who is a person. Their boss is an AI. Uber is the biggest example of that. People are driving every day and have no interaction with a boss at any point, a human. Every decision that they take is made, and their future is determined by, an AI. There’s no empathy whatsoever involved in that decision making. If you play on VR, the experience is quite insular. I can totally envision, again, how that experience would be phenomenal, but the empathy side is going to be predetermined by a machine, and predetermined by developers who – you excluded – are not generally always the most empathetic people.
Aaron: The empathy is in the human. That’s definitely not in the machine, right? It’s an interesting conversation and thought experiment to imagine an inorganic thing having empathy. It gets into a lot of questions about consciousness and value systems and, I guess, whether algorithms can exhibit empathy. It’s really [how to] program attributes of the side effects of empathy into algorithms, but I’m not sure if that actually qualifies as real empathy.
Most of the experiences that we’ve been focused on have been either about showing stories of real people to people, to the virtual reality, or actually connecting real humans to each other in virtual spaces, which I think is really exciting and valuable.
If one does think that one of the root sources of happiness is providing value to a community, then people are at the root of that and the idea of separating out humans and human values is a pretty scary and dangerous thing, because it questions where happiness will come from, where true happiness will come from.
You look at Amazon, at all the food delivery services at home. I have wondered if people will even see other people in the future. Will there be classes of people that are just isolated in their ivory towers and get all of their things given to them and provided for them and only communicate with each other on rare occasions when they summon each other? Will there be completely different ways of life, or will we all be homogenizing?
Damian: Virtual reality is everywhere.
Aaron: It is, yeah. We’re already living in it. The question is just, do we accept it? Do we embrace it consciously?
Damian: So, you don’t have any kids, right?
Aaron: Not yet, no.
Damian: When your kids come to the age that you think it’s acceptable for them to be on the internet – or connected, let’s say – what advice do you think you’ll give them?
Aaron: It’ll be interesting. I imagine that that’s going to be quite a while from now. So I can only imagine what the internet is going to be.
Damian: But you’re helping to shape it, right? I mean, at least, my perception of what you guys are building is basically the sort of cable operator of VR. So somewhere between Netflix and HBO, or something, for VR. It hopefully won’t be called VR, it’ll be called something a little bit more accessible.
Aaron: We’re still working on that.
Damian: You are at the forefront of this, sort of, race. And assuming that you believe in this future – and that’s the future that you’re creating for your potential kids – what would you tell them? What do you think it’s going to look like?
Aaron: I think immersive technologies are going to be a while before they truly displace much of what we currently do. I think, eventually, one could imagine that the screens in our houses and in our pockets go away and that there is some kind of more wearable display that augments our world and gives us access to digital environments in a more intuitive, more impactful way.
So, that’s, let’s say, twenty years from now, I could imagine that kind of reality.
Damian: What should they look out for?
Aaron: There’s the same stuff we grapple with today, but more extreme versions of it.
It’s probably data.
It’ll be interesting to see if the trends that we’re on continue, with data aggregation. And does something completely unexpected and new emerge – probably out of blockchain technology – that allows us to own more of our own data? A lot of people are thinking about that.
Damian: So what sort of data, actually, are you tracking? I can imagine that in an immersive world of an amazing VR experience, where you’re replicating something like my son’s obsessive interaction with Fortnite, you’re going to be able to check emotion and – if it’s connected enough – increases in his blood pressure, and to actually build a complete character profile as to what sort of individual my son is. Is he stimulated more with fear, or does he shy away from fear? If he’s stimulated more by that sensation, then you know that he’s probably going to be more susceptible to X drug or Y toy. And targeting them becomes so much more insane than it is today.
Do you track that sort of information?
Aaron: Currently, no. I think … as a company, to date, that’s not been our goal. We don’t even have advertising yet. I don’t know that we ever will.
Damian: It will come.
Aaron: Not necessarily. I think … it’s polarizing between advertising and subscription, and right now we are actually, very much more thinking about subscription.
I know there have been lots of conversations at various large tech companies, at a different place and time, about whether they should offer a premium service that’s completely sans advertising for people who are willing to pay for it.
Which also paints this dystopian future, where only the poor are advertised to.
Damian: Or it paints a place where only quality advertising exists. I believe in the premise that everybody actually likes advertising but they hate bad advertising. If it’s relevant …
Aaron: The fact that we’re tailoring it to you, as in your best interest, to get a feel for the stuff you like. And it will provide value.
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Damian: Do you think there’s a limit to how much you can be in that experience?
Aaron: With VR, the question that you are asking is the one that many people were asking. It’s a physiological question. I think the immediate answer would probably be a physiological one. Like, ‘Oh I’ve spent enough time on the headset now.’ It’s gotten to the point where it’s good enough, where it’s not about the physiological question. It’s about the content question.
I think that’s actually good and important, because that medium can’t exist if it’s still at those baseline physiological questions. Like, ‘Oh God, am I getting sick?’ Or, ‘Is this weighing on my head too hard?’ Those problems, I think, are solved. To the extent that any computer device has solved that problem, like, probably staring at a screen for five hours a day is terrible for you as well – and certainly my posture reflects the hunched over-ness. One of the things I’ve been using VR for lately is trying to improve my posture.
So, there are actually a lot of physiological benefits that could come from prolonged VR use. I’m a little bit reluctant to talk too much publicly about this, because we’re still doing some interesting research.
You talked earlier about how your son would drop any sport that he could do. I think you could have sport-like things that are digital that are really interesting and fun. Our bodies aren’t going away yet. If you look at the trends, glamour now means fitness, it means eating well, it means treating your body as a temple. I try and have adequate posture by getting a standing desk. But there are ways to use technology that can actually respect our bodies more than we have in the past.
Damian: There’s this idea that you are the product. In the VR world, is that not more the case?
Aaron: It could be. I think it’s just another medium. It’s a more immersive and more body-centric way of computing. But you can be the product, or you can not be.
Damian: You are certainly setting a standard in terms of quality. There are not many companies producing the quality of output that you are.
Aaron: I certainly hold us responsible for thinking about all these topics and hopefully making smart decisions. But, unfortunately, I think it will be up to the large tech companies that are making the hardware – and therefore the platform – to make the smart decisions. And ideally also enable the level of control. Just the idea that we all exist more and more in somebody else’s sandbox. As entrepreneurs, you’re not necessarily in a completely free and open marketplace. You’re existing in one that is controlled by one of a small number of partners.
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No one can tell us, in detail, what the future holds, but there are a few people who hold a vivid view of the past. Out of all the popular thinkers of our time, Stephen Fry is the person I want in charge of finding the soul of whatever comes next in tech, because he has spent his life investigating meaning. He ensures we don’t discard all that is meaningful from our past as we plunge ahead.
For me, he has been a contextualizer. He provides intellectual context that feels vital, he makes ideas vital, and describes our place in this continuum. Not every business gets the opportunity to install someone like Fry on their board, or in their conference room, to dispense general wisdom. But any business operating in this new environment, any business that wants to understand why we need to remember the offline world as we plunge forward online, could do worse than turn to Fry. He’s able to eloquently remind me how we’ve always been locked in a bitter duel with technological advancement, for hundreds of years, accepting what works and rejecting what doesn’t.
Good business in the new trust environment means listening to those who can both assuage and challenge us on some of these ideas. Fry is a technophile but in our conversations I’ve always got the sense he’s thought about his own barter. How much of himself was he willing to give up? How much of his own data would he allow the miners to mine? All of this should be taken with a grain of salt.
It’s easy to be elusive, or to refrain from getting into the trenches of Twitter, when you’re already broadcasting to 13 million people. Fry is in a privileged position. But he’s also chosen to be aligned with what is healthiest, or brightest, in this new world.
What I like about him is the way he refuses to disconnect our current age from the past. We are not – even though much of Silicon Valley might like us to believe – living in some brand-new age, we are not brand-new creatures, we do not have new values.
The tools we are creating do not elevate us in any new and vaulted ways. We’re ruled by the old gods, Fry reminds us. Nothing has changed; these are new tools for old urges. The urge to data mine, to know more than we should, has been in humans since we became human.
‘You’ve mentioned you’re writing about the relationship between what one might call the cold machine world and the human heart,’ Stephen Fry said to me when we met. I agreed. I tried to explain, in the most eloquent and interesting way possible, what we were up to at WeTransfer: the no-sign-up, the refusal to collect data. I told him that, since 2009, straight through to the moment when Cambridge Analytica closed down, the tech industry was not in the slightest bit interested in talking to us. Then, suddenly, everybody became interested in companies that were online and not using data.
Stephen: So suddenly, a lack of vulgarity and commercial sort of violence, as it were, and the presence of empathy and sweetness of tone becomes a selling point.
Damian: It just happened.
Stephen: It just happened. And that’s very pleasing.
Damian: I think one of the most critical actions for us all is to determine who’s in charge.
Stephen: The buzzword at the moment is agency, isn’t it?
Whether we have agency in our online world and our online existence or whether we don’t, whether we’re puppets with invisible strings pulling us and moving us around that we’re unaware of. It is very interesting.
I come from the point of view that I think the human mind and body and all the bits in between that we give different names to – the spirit, the soul, the personality, character – are infinitely stronger than any technology we’ve yet arrived at.
I often use the image of the fact we can stand in a field – we could go to one now, outside London, somewhere in the countryside, where there are no roads and no phones – and look. And without any change in our brain or thinking, but purely instinctively, if there was a breath of wind that turned a leaf over in the distance from being dark green to being the silvery underside, miles away, we’d see it. Because, you know, we’ve evolved either to look for lunch or to look out for being lunch for someone else.
So we’re able to concentrate, focus, here, on the most extraordinary detail.
But half an hour later, on the train, we’re on Oxford Street, there’s a thousand people in our eyeline and music coming out of every shop, phone on, and traffic going. We’re crossing and talking to someone. It’s a miracle what our brain is doing and not doing.
People forget that a lot of brain processing is in the inhibition, not action – as in stopping you from falling over, stopping you from doing this, blanking that out, not seeing that, not taking account of this. And we don’t even have to think about doing that. It’s extraordinary how our brains respond. They haven’t evolved for Oxford Street, and yet they cope with it, and it’s quite remarkable.
The idea that we’re being controlled by invisible forces in the internet may be worrying for us, but our ancestors always thought that anyway. That’s what they thought the gods were. And they thought that was exactly what we were, that every time we moved, we were being watched and that everything we did was registered. There was providence in the fall of a sparrow. It says that in the Bible, doesn’t it?
*
Damian: Do you use Facebook?
Stephen: No. I killed that recently.
Damian: Instagram? You left it?
Stephen: I use Instagram only because if I’m doing a project, the publicity department asks me to use it. I’ve only got 100 million followers, I think. You can look it up. I don’t know. It’s not very important to me, and I can’t see what the point is.
Damian: You’re still on Twitter?
Stephen: Yes. I do it a lot. I do it in a friendly way, and I’ve learned to be at peace with not following anybody, not following any threads, not looking at anybody’s tweets. It’s a notice. I put a notice up, and I run away. I don’t watch people come up to it and look at it to make comments. You just put it up, and if people want to read it, they read it. Unlike noticeboards, they can’t take it down. It’s like one of those school noticeboards in the glass cases, locked.
When I first had an email address, which was in the 1980s, which is the world before there was a worldwide web or anything, I slowly watched it grow. I really thought it was Pandora, which is the Greek word for ‘all-gifted’. She was this all-gifted woman who Zeus had created. He wanted to punish mankind, so he sent down this jar, which she wasn’t allowed to open.
As the worldwide web arrived and Web 2.0 came on, and the first social media, I really thought that now, online, you have a city. There’s museums, art galleries, concert halls, libraries, gathering places, red-light districts of course, no-go areas for children, like any good city. But it’s all-gifted. There’s everything there, and people can connect to each other with hobbies and interests and ideas that used to be in some badly smeared, printed fanzine that you had to wait a month to arrive as a quarterly thing. Now, you can connect with people all over the world with shared interests, and it will melt away differences. Mankind will become one, and we’ll no longer hate each other.
And then, at some point, like Pandora’s box – which is what we called this jar, whatever you call it – the lid got opened and, in the myth, out flew all the ills of the world. You know, lies, war, starvation. All the miseries of the world arrived, or were given to us, after Pandora’s box. It was like that. Instead of it being this perfect thing, it turned out to be this ghastly thing, in one’s worst moods. It turned out to be actually full of stinging, nattering, wheeling, chattering creatures that bit you. In Pandora’s box, she closed the lid so firmly, she was so frightened by these animals.
Damian: Who’s going to close the lid?
Stephen: She closed it too quickly, and she left inside hope, which beats its wings inside to this day, not being released. It’s a very good image, because it’s basically just saying that everything casts a shadow. Of course, the light of the internet was so bright at first, you didn’t notice the shadows it was casting. Nobody did. Now we see nothing but the shadows. We forget the light.
*
Damian: Could it be self-regulated?
Stephen: That’s the interesting point. How much could you sandbox your world? How much do you have to give up of your independent agency in order to gain some of the benefits, which will be astounding, of AI and related technologies? Granted, it’s a really interesting point. When you talk about AI, you’re also talking about some of the developments in the Internet of Things that are getting more and more remarkable because of the convergence of so many of these technologies.
A lot of the world will have the personal touch, and it will allow you to interface with the world wherever you are, and it all comes from a place that you can’t really imagine.
*
Damian: Who can be trusted?
Stephen: Apple, for all that they get, obviously, a huge amount of hatred from all kinds of people in the weirdest way, they’ve chosen a path for their devices with privacy, which has denied them … They would be three times bigger as a company if they had decided to allow all kinds [of access], but in fact Tim, I know, is really strong on this. It doesn’t matter how much the stockholders say, ‘Think about how much we could get if we opened up just this much.’ No. This is our contract with our users. Absolute privacy. They control everything. That’s why the FBI were going, ‘Fuck you. We need to open this phone,’ and Apple was saying, ‘No, fuck you. You can’t.’
Damian: They are the good guys?
Stephen: I really do think they are. Of course, people are.
*
Stephen: Interestingly, I have a friend who’s in security services, the secret service, from university. He’s very quiet, honestly. Perhaps you have to be. I said to him, ‘I’m asking you, because – of course, you know nothing about MI5 – but let’s pretend you know someone in MI5.’ He goes, ‘All right.’ I said, ‘Would it be fair to say that people are rediscovering the tradecraft of the Le Carré days – one-time pads, dead letter boxes, those sorts of things – rather than relying on digital technology, which is hackable?’ He said it would be very fair to say that. Very fair.
A couple of months later, he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It is absolutely true. A lot of agents in the field now don’t use phones, don’t use computers.’ I thought, that’s fantastic.
Damian: How do they communicate, then?
Stephen: By the old ways, the ways they used to. Old spycraft. Human intervention, writing down one-time pads, code books, memory, all those things that used to work in fieldcraft. You can’t rely on, ‘Here’s a phone, it’s totally secure.’ Bollocks, it is. I thought it all really interesting. In the case that you want an agent in the field somewhere who’s actually doing old-type spying, you’re not going to give him GPS or Apple Watch. Exactly. Nothing like that stuff. Nothing hackable. It’s much harder. You can’t really hack a good, old-fashioned code in the one-time pad style. It’s unhackable, and that’s rather good. It is.
*
Damian: You must be able to focus.
Stephen: Actually, focus is a very interesting word. One of the things I like about myth is it comes from people sitting around the fire. That made me examine the whole nature of this. The very first god, born as opposed to Titan, was not Zeus, it was the lesser-known Hestia, or Vesta. She was the goddess of the hearth, and it’s minor compared to Poseidon being [god of] the sea. To our ancestors, the hearth is the absolute – literally central. Ancient language reveals this. Hearth is cognate, as a linguist would say, with heart. It’s the same word – heart, hearth – as it is in Greek. The Greek word for hearth is ‘cardia’, as in cardiac and cardiology, heart.
The Latin word for hearth is ‘focus’. We’ve taken that as a metaphor.
We’ve taken the Latin word for hearth to be a metaphor for anything that we concentrate our energies around. We call that a focus, a hearth.
It’s only in the last twenty, thirty, forty years that we’ve stopped having hearths. Even the television used to be a hearth. It literally was the nation’s fireplace. In one room, the same people gathered around the fire, the flicker that came from the television, and we all saw the same programme at the same time. It was a national conversation, a national hearth. That no longer exists.
The dining-room table no longer exists. Families go into their house; everyone has their own bedroom, their own game console, their own laptop, and they don’t see each other.
I think that – more than any other aspect of the digital world – may well be deleterious to our species. The fact that we no longer, every day, sit around with family, friends, whatever, and in common share stories, share the day, plan the future.
You can plan. You can talk. You can bond. You can define your separateness and your commonality.
That’s all been broken up. Rather, we talk about corporate powers, but we no longer have that glue, which is so important.
*
Stephen: I believe in the human spirit. I believe in the human mind. But I don’t believe in it in a wishy-washy way. I do think … what I would say is this.
If we’re talking about the poetry of the world, or anything like that, poetry is as hard won as gold. It’s a real thing, gold, but to get it, you have to have knowledge of a geologist as to where it’s most likely to be. Then you have to excavate. Someone has to bark their knuckles and make their fingers bleed and live in hot, hideous conditions to bring out the mineral, which then has to be smelted. It’s incredibly hard work. But then you have gold. It’s not handed down by an angel, ever, ever.
Same with poetry and truth – poetic truth and scientific truth. They’re real. They’re achievable. But only through the sweat of your brow can you experience knowledge, understanding, trial and error, failure. You come up with a real poetic insight, a real moment of breathtaking clarity, into who we are and how we can be better. It connects us and makes us smile, but it’s not easily done.
It’s the same with scientific truth. Endless hard work, endless failure. The only problem with culture, and the speed and everything else, is we somehow think that along with it will come a short cut. This is the problem with the literature of mindfulness and empathy, the literature of ‘Things They Didn’t Teach You At Harvard’ that will make you a great CEO. All bullshit, trying to suggest these are short cuts: when you do this, this can happen quicker. The real secret is, it can’t happen quicker, but that doesn’t make it bad.
There is the destination, and here you are. It’s not going to be a straight journey. It’s not going to be a straight line. You’ll have to find out how to get there. There will be a lot of effort. You will get there.
Damian: Is part of the problem we face the fact that the power in the tech industry is in the hands of those who are too young?
Stephen: In a way, yes. I think that, unfortunately, by being incredibly spoiled in their early twenties and their late twenties, they’ve become billionaires. At some point, without them really knowing how it happened, they’ve become entitled, and they think their view of the world and politics and society must be correct because they’re a genius, because they’ve achieved something through their own brilliance, and they must be right.
If you look at Steve Jobs’ commencement speech, when he talks about the horror when he was sacked from the company he founded. How hurt he was, how angry he was, and how he now thinks it was the best thing to ever happen to him. His wilderness.
You know, not that he’s a faultless human, I’m not suggesting that. But he’s an example of someone who didn’t quite do the Zuckerberg thing and have just a completely perfect, smooth transition at all. He had to fight, and he had to focus and rethink and reset, recalibrate.
Damian: Do you think that could be because Steve Jobs was more of a designer than a technologist?
Stephen: Design, absolutely. Not design merely in the sense of how it looks. Design in the sense of how it works for you.
Damian: I’m not saying that this is always the case, but I can see that in companies that are being run by developers who are trained to code and to build algorithms, that most of them are not the most empathetic on earth.
Stephen: No. It’s very rare that nature gives the brain the ability to code, which is an astonishing gift of mathematics and abstract thought, giving abstract ideas a numerical value that has a function. To give someone that gift and give them a social gift and an insight into the human spirit, or even a curiosity about human history and human culture and philosophy, is very rare. Very few of them have it. They’re just not curious about it. I just think that’s where everything lives, and they don’t look up. There’s a film infinitely better than The Revenant that never got a single award, years ago, called Jeremiah Johnson. Robert Redford plays a guy who goes out into the wild exactly like the Leo character. There’s an old boy he meets, covered in skins and pelts and fur and things, in this terribly cold place, this very frightening wilderness. He has this line: ‘Keep your nose to the wind and your eye to the skyline.’ Don’t look down.
Steve Jobs kept his nose to the wind and his eye to the skyline, but at the same time, he was very, very focused. It’s that weird thing: how can you be both? He kept his nose to the wind and his eye to the skyline. Steve Wozniak was the one who was doing all the tech, building the circuit in the seventies.
I’ve never met anybody who’s successfully prophesied anything technologically. I remember, in November 1999, sitting in the BBC Radio 4 studio with someone from Adobe – I can’t remember her name, she was the head of Adobe UK at the time, which was a big thing to be – Douglas Adams and myself, and we were being asked about the twenty-first century. Douglas said, ‘I think we ought to say straight away that you’re asking people interested in computers about the twenty-first century. We should bear in mind that the fact that the year 1999 is followed by the year 2000 has caught a lot of us horribly by surprise. Our ability to forecast the future really must be in question if we didn’t see 2000 coming as a number.’
Every year, there’s someone writing about what we’re going to see, and I just have no idea, but the one stable thing is the human spirit and the human heart, human ambition, human greed, human appetite, human propensity to be addicted to pleasure and repelled by pain and labour and toil and all the difficult things.
All of that is stable, has never changed, as far as I can tell by reading the first poetry ever written, which is Homer, all the way to the modern age through history. All the evidence we have about ourselves as a species is we have never altered.
We haven’t changed.
Our technology has never changed us. The industrial revolution didn’t change the human spirit. It enslaved people in different ways. That enslavement was of an order that was predictable, according to: if you treat a human like that, they will behave like that. It was a new way and a new scale, perhaps. But it didn’t alter us. It didn’t alter the fact that we murder. We murder for gain and for sexual pleasure – whatever – anger, greed. All those things are the same. The same gods … Dionysus. The god of addiction and frenzy.
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