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The Big Tech Heel Turn · Journalism 2050

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everybody and welcome to Journalism 2050.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is our podcast about the future of journalism, how we got here, and where we're going next.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I am thrilled today that oh, I'm sorry, I forgot.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hello my co-host here, Heather Chaplin.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So hi Heather.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Hi Emily.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's good to see you.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: I now I know where I stand and things, at least everything's on the table.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I did what I so yeah, sure.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so that so Heather is my co-host.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Heather Chaplin.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Heather Chaplin.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh founder director of journalism and design at the New School and Emily's PN.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Sweep.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Heather and I are both delighted to have with us today Natalia Antilova, who is the founder of Coda Story and also has been foreign correspondent for the BBC.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And is I think somebody who's you almost uniquely placed to help us figure out the question that we always have on this podcast, which is how should we understand the present moment and how should we think about things going forward?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: But first, Natalia, I'm gonna ask you about a recent interview you did uh with our mutual friend Richard Gingras, who former head of the Google News Initiative, which has had a lot of attention and headlines and coverage, um, because you really pressed uh Richard, not as a person, I think, but as a representative of Google and the GNI um Google News Initiative and their role in getting us to where we are now.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do you want to just give us a very quick summary of what you said and why it was quite, I think, controversial for some people, not necessarily for sure, sure.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I was asked uh a couple of months ago uh to uh have a conversation with Richard at a journalism conference in Vienna.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those of us in the media space, and I'm sure many of your listeners are, uh know Richard well because he has become this quite towering figure in small circles of media media people.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And um I have seen him speak many times.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: He has also been uh obviously in charge of kind of shaping Google's relationship with the journalism industry.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um he speaks very often at conferences, he's a very prolific writer who writes a lot about publishing and media.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh he um also is the founder of these news guys conferences which Google, this and conferences which Google through for media executives across um the world, really, in Asia, in Europe, in uh in the United States.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he's been this very pro prominent kind of part of this bubble that I'm part of and you are part of.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I've never heard him really questioned on some of the things that I wanted to ask him.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um because um Coda from its very we started Coda in 2016, started publishing in 2017, and from the very start, um at the heart of all our coverage has been the authoritarian tide.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, now we've um you know done so much on tech and platforms and accountability, but when we set out, we really um we didn't set out to be tech reporters at all, and actually we're trying hard not to become tech reporters now.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: But um it was very clear to us from the very start, it became very apparent that in order to cover the authoritarian tide and just the shifting um power of the world that is like reshaping our societies and uh the communities we live in, we really had to look at the role that tech platforms and big tech companies were playing in this process.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we started covering them.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in the process of covering them, uh we learned uh through many, many stories and uh investigations that we've done that um Silicon Valley companies are among the most intransparent and difficult to access and hold accountable out there.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I used to cover uh fossil fuel companies, um, I did a lot of kind of on oil and gas when I was based in Central Asia and and Caspian region, and uh like I've never I've dealt with VP and chevrons of this world.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: I have never dealt with companies like Google.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: It is literally impossible to get an answer.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: So um I have also watched throughout as so as that was my journalism head on.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to find a way of like talking to Richard about some of these things that uh asking him some of the questions without holding him personally accountable because obviously he was just one part of this giant enterprise.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then the second thing, with more of less of a journalist hat on and more of my like media founder hat on, I really wanted to ask him about the relationship that he developed with the uh with my industry because I always found it very puzzling.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: More from frankly, I personally blame the industry rather than him, but I've I've constantly seen my colleagues kind of give Richard and his team a very easy pass and never question the nature of the relationship that we're getting ourselves into.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: So these were like two things that and that's partly because they had money.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like a lot of the people focused at journalism, I think.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone, you know, everyone basically took I I I think it is uh because they had money, but it's also deeper than that.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think because they were friendly, relatable, smart, they were people like us.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And putting themselves out there.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And they put themselves out there.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and we'll help we'll give you money to help you do whatever it is that you're doing.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think what what we as an industry were quite bad at connecting is the um, you know, what was happening in the world as the authoritarians got more and more powerful, often using these platforms.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Richard is a v a very articulate man and he um uh deflects uh very masterfully.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I w thought hard about like, well, what is my line of questioning in this case?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: And really what I really kind of picked was the without making it, trying not to make it personal because it wasn't about him, it was about the kind of the power structures that we allowed to create, was like the conversation about the power asymmetry.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, did he and you know, I started the conversation with the question that puzzled me for a long time, which was, you know, he always refers to himself using we as in like media.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And like I said, well, why do you say we when you talk about journalism when you represented like that's the pronoun you would use when you represented Google?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the goal was really to see whether someone who was in truly in a position of of power and continues to be in a position of great influence over the industry could reflect honestly on the role that he played and on the bigger picture in which uh kind of in which he operated, because I think there is a lot we can learn from people like Richard Gingrich at a time when journalism is uh creating uh going into this roof the repeating some of these patterns with AI and Microsoft's of this world and the new players on the scene.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the I I I mean, I'm sure, you know, and they helped some fantastic journalists and newsrooms, but we can't sort of separate that and just let it live in silo from the fact that they also pa played uh uh a a really kind a crucial role in creating a bigger information ecosystem in which journalism, the prints journalism not as an industry even, but journalism as a kind of an institution of liberal democracy uh cannot really thr survive or punch through because it the whole thing is built on generating noise.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting that you used to cover fossil fuels because it it's basically like is it chevron paying for for local uh wetlands initiatives.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like completely fine, but guys.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's that's exactly the right comparison.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Emily m mentioned the backlash to the interview because I think you know it was not a comfortable interview to do.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Richard was um, I think he would agree that he was deeply uncomfortable.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone in the room was very uncomfortable.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: You can uh you can tell that uh uh it was uncomfortable from the transcript.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's on codestory.com on our website.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, and and a lot of the people, and I had this like two polar opposite reactions where there were lots of people who came up to me and said, Thank you, these are questions that I've always wanted to ask him and never um never had a chance or never did.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then there was another group of people who said, like, why did you have to be so aggressive and so confrontational?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um and like why did you like why did you need to like challenge him on things like pronouns and using we?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, like I I don't understand I don't really truly understand that question because I just think I was doing my job and asking an obvious question.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Committing journalism at a journalism conference.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: At a journalism conference, which is outrageous.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: How dare you an obvious thing seems to be.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: That was one example that I always brought up.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, one of the things that people say is like, look, I know Richard worked so hard to lobby for publishers inside Google, and his team worked so hard to and got into trouble inside Google, like on behalf.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, look, I accept like I have no doubt that they did.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Possibly I don't question that, but that's not what this is about.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine if imagine um principled uh senior executive in a fossil fuel company who is actually trying to push the company towards um uh adapting more environmentally friendly policies, that person doesn't then get to go to a Greenpeace conference and refer to himself as we with a bunch of environmentalists.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's but that's on us.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's not on Google.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I think so.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think so we're all about discussing problems here, and I do think that you know one of the things about Richard is uh or rather the Google News Initiative is that is that they were kind of leaning on a rotten door, and in fact we were just talking about the fact that Heather and I, one of the first This is our origin story.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Our origin story was indeed meeting at uh news.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: The story I always tell is that as a as a young uh young Young, very young.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: Much younger than me.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Much younger than Emily.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: No, but one of my first I only sort of stumbled into the future of journalism because there stopped being any work as a journalist, and I got invited to Newsgeist when it was Newsfoo.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: Did you play and I Did you play werewolf?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: I did not play.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Play Werewolf because wait, wait, let me f and my I I really I just came in and I said, why is Google the sponsor?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: And and nobody would answer.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so I f was ashamed that something was wrong with me for asking this question because it creates a reality.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the only person who wanted to discuss it with me was a German guy who also had the same question, and then when I met Emily, she also had that skepticism.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: We um boycotted werewolf, so which is the game that you were talking about, and I know that I've I again when I first met you, Natalia, we I interviewed you actually about that dynamic between the news initiative and because I was particularly interested in newsrooms like Coda, which is like Coda story has you were based partly in Georgia, right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we were always based headquartered here, but our team is very distributed.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I was in I was at the time of the U.S.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, so so in fact based here, but you were in Georgia.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that I asked you about the European perspective on this, and you gave me such a brilliant answer, which is I can't really understand newsgeist because I went to one in Europe and all the European publishers sat there with their eyes closed while Google executives literally decided who was going to live and die.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Yeah, and frankly, this is one of the reasons why I said yes to that to sitting down with Richard at this conference, is because I genuinely always wanted to ask him about this game that they play at every newsgeist, where um it's a power and deception game, and it's you know, all the journal all the senior editors sit around, it's like mafia like game.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone, after everyone's has had lots of drinks at the bar, you know, they all piled into I've only been to one newsgeist in Athens, and everyone piled into this big ballroom and sat on this in these circles, and I did play one round, and then I was like, oh, I don't think I can do this anymore.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then I just like stood in the corner and I watched as these like senior editors of like major European publications sat blindfolded in circles, as Google executives kind of being the game masters walked around and like literally assigned who lives and who dies.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, it was such an incredible metaphor to the relationship that we got ourselves in with these tech platforms.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I really wanted to s ask Richard whether he ever thought to it as a and he was just so genuinely outraged by that question and uh bewildered, actually, maybe is the right word, not outraged.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: He was like, no, no, I never I never did.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, I think that too is on us because the number of emails that I got saying, like, oh, I werewolf made me so like well why didn't you tell him?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why didn't we tell him?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a good idea.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Heather and I told him by um going to the bar and not playing werewolf.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: But it's interesting because when I think back to that, it it it wasn't really even anything intellectual, it was more like a gut reaction that I had that I felt a sort of visceral rage at having s an ex executives from Google talking at me about what the future of journalism should be, and that there was just something so wrong with this.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: But the part that I still don't understand is it's not even like it was a room full of accountants whose job is it isn't to ask hard questions.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think it's because of the friendly faces that represented the company within the journalism community that we let our guard down.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I d I think there is no excuse for letting the guard down because we literally wouldn't do it with any other industry.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's um uh and I and I'm also not advocating like I'm very aware that I would not exist, my company would not exist if it hadn't been for Google and social media and all of that, right?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like there is there is an opportunity here for like people who would have never existed because the media companies were the gatekeepers.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: The gatekeeping, you know, role has someone else took on the gatekeeping role.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I think we're we were very naive, and I think what's really terrible is that it stripped us of our ability to hold as as as tech companies emerged increasingly as the most powerful players on global stage, which you know we saw the culmination of it um in the Oval Office at the inauguration, but this was long coming.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: As they emerged, we put ourselves increasingly into the position where we couldn't we as an industry could not fulfill our function of holding the most powerful players in the world accountable in any shape or form.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so and suddenly uh, you know, we have these uh situation where they there are these sovereign individuals that are acting as uh uh nation states basically, um, that have more money than nation states, that uh are running healthcare systems, defense systems, and uh, you know, believe that they should be holding seats in the Security Council at the UN.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And they you know, it's a global there is no end to their appetite.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're on a roll, they're having a great time.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we have lost that function in the society where we can say, no, hold on a second.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, or or even if we do say that it gets lost amidst the noise.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: That that I feel like the function of the free press cannot um survive in the environment, even if it is good journalism being done.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's also I think it's also something that we've talked about and we'll be talking about on other other episodes of this podcast, which is the all-out attack globally on the knowledge economy.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very difficult for us to adjust our thinking to go, we have handed a tremendous amount of power right in the centre of the knowledge economy to these companies to store it, to sort it, to help us find it, to help us spread it.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they are actually not getting up in the morning and thinking, how can I help the knowledge economy?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: They are thinking to quote say that's they're thinking about their shareholders, which is how can we sell, how can we sell one more ad?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: How can we get somebody to click on this?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: How can we and uh there was a moment the other day watching a live stream from an open markets initiative um conference in Belgium where Kate Brennan, who's um at AI uh now, said you have to understand that there are two predominant business models for the AI companies.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we should talk about those right now, which is and she said one of them is advertising, which is not working, and the other is government contracts, and when you think about that as being these are the companies that now we're kind of rushing into relationships with, yeah, but now it's a sort of the stakes feel sort of slightly different to me, which is it's like we need to extract the money from them.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: How can how can we do it?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: How do you see it, Natalia, in terms of what are the things that we have learnt where you can see a change in terms of how journalism organizations are orienting themselves with AI, and where do we think we haven't learned anything and we're just repeating the mistakes that we've made over the past 25 years?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that like on a more fundamental uh level, and I think that the the the issue hasn't changed and it's still as as um as current as it was when I left the BBC to create coda.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the reason why I did it was because ultimately, even though I I did have the best job in the world and I would go to all these amazing places and I did a mix of documentary work and hard news and it was it was great for um but at the same time I I became so disillusioned with the the media's uh the frame that the mainstream media uses to look at the world where every story is incremental and nothing is connected.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's just not how people understand the world, and I thought I was doing such a disservice to the audience and it was so unhelpful to them in the c in the way that I was explaining the world to them as if everything came out of the blue.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: So what I really wanted to create was um with coda was like journalism that that uh you know followed a through line that connected things, that showed how something that starts in, I don't know, Bangladesh, pops its head in Missouri and how it all like it all because that's how the world functions, right?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And um I I I think what media uh the media's greatest uh fault is that the structure uh which we used to operate and primarily the breaking news structure, the twenty-four that concept of twenty-four-hour news cycle that has become such a um uh uh s such kind of common frame for everyone to use, even if you don't have to use it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's in its nature, it's so reactive that you always you always delegate, you always give away your right to set an agenda to someone else and you end up telling serving someone else's narrative just because you're being so reactive.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I think uh I forgot your question entirely, but like somehow it led me there.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: But um I I I think we continue to be reactive and and I think in this era of this overwhelming noise, uh I think one way of standing out and punching through it, and I really believe that noise is basically the new censorship, right?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's yes, that's what you know we have completely misunderstood the disinformation problem.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about individual lies, it's not about fact checking, it's about noise, and noise is the censorship, and I think we as journalists have A real responsibility to make sure that we're not adding to the noise.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I can tell on a very like personal individual level how hard it is because you know Coda is like this constant balancing act of being both relevant but not a slave to the news cycle.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a hard thing to do.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: But it and it requires a muscle that in me wasn't like I had to develop it, right?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: I had to kind of find it and train it because the instinct that we have as journalists is to react.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: But that is no longer a useful thing to be doing in this day and age.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's making me think uh the journalism and design lab, which I run, we used to do before COVID, um, go around doing systems thinking for journalists at at newsrooms.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so much of your language really resonates with me because we used to try to explain that like the breaking news story, it's like a stake in the ground, but really what it's doing is an indicator of these sort of roiling forces beneath.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: But it's really hard to tell the stories of these roiling forces, which is one reason I think what Coda is doing is so important.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: But it is hard to tell those stories because they are inherently complex.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: And as humans, we are not that good at grappling with complexity.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I disagree with that about complexity, but yeah, science don't like interrupting Emily.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, that's first of all, that's lie.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to hear why about why complexity isn't it?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's could can I to Yeah, let's do that, but then I want to come back to the breaking news issue.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: So complexity.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think I disagree with that.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think people I I think people have an inherent ability to grapple with complexity and understand complexity.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, I was thinking uh just on the way here about how we like we focus so much on this like death of truth.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: But if you really think about it, there was never one truth for like for anyone ever, right?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: There were always multiple truths.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that one of the most important thing roles that journalists can play now is to be the translator between which it always was.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like as a BBC journalist, it was kind of drooled into me that somebody's tr terrorist is someone else's freedom fighter.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like these are two different set, like two different truths, right?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And as a journalist, you can translate between them.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like that is about how you And it's it's really important more than ever to be able to do that.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now and people understand I think people understand that we have to do it through stories that are well told.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have to do it by not giving in into what the news media created uh ultimately, which I think authoritarians manipulated and weaponized really well, is that the the whole like he said, she said objectivity facade, which is bullshit, right?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: But uh we there are so what we need to do, and I don't think it's that hard.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like we did it we did it at Coda with very little money just because we thought hard and long about it, we figured out what frame we could have used to give complexity a space to live, and and the frame that we could have used to ask the questions that are about the underlying currents and not about what's happening on top.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like not the tsunami, but the wave on it, right?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: So this is where I want to come back to my breaking news thing, which is I d so I'm gonna disagree now, which is to say You disagree with her disagreement?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: I disagree with her disagreement.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: I poo-poo her poo-pooing.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: I would like to preemptively disagree with my disagreement.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I think so so I think that all of this sounds intellectually great and fine, but if you've ever sat and looked at, say, engagement um metrics for a live blog when something is happening out there in the world, we it you know, when I was at the Guardian, we invented live blogging.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm apologizing to everybody now who has to run one of those things or read them.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: But there is an instinct, it's um the fast slow thinking.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to go all Les recline about this, etc.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a bit of your kind of it's your point as well, Heather, lizard brain versus kind of you know, sort of rational brain.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um actually knowing what's going on in the world right now and what is breaking is not a bad thing, and journalism does do that, and I don't think that that is something that is we should be ashamed of getting right and bringing to people, but I think we have to do more, and it could be that in a pluralistic industry that you need code of stories to not go, we're going to somebody else needs to do that.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of I don't know that people knowing what's going on when it go when it's happening is a bad thing.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think we're saying it's a bad thing, but that can't be.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: It can be interpreted when people go, breaking news, we've just chased breaking news, and that's wrong.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I don't know.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of feel like I want to know when something happen, you know, I want to know that I'm gonna be hit by a bus when I cross the roads.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, there is no question.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I hate to agree with you, Emily, but I'm gonna have to.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: There is no question that there is space and time for I mean I've also been I've also been the live monkey who sits there like just filling air between uh, you know, this presidential speeches and things like that.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now they just cut cut that out and they put all the presidential speeches together in like six seconds.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then they get sued for a billion dollars.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I don't know.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's that's right, they've moved on.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, you're sitting there with the live monkey dead air time, that's a bad thing.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's a bad thing.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm saying that you know, that whole like conceptually, that frame that 24-7 news happens and we need to be reporting it.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think in that there are loads of situations happening at every moment around the world that require and benefit from breaking news alerts and so on.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying it needs to go away.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I also think it shouldn't be the organizing principle.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it is the organizing principle of the media industry in general, and it shouldn't be.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think AI in that sense could be quite a good thing because I think increasingly news will get automated.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh increasingly, I think there will be news and there will be journalism and there will be slightly different.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: However, the one thing that AI can't do is report on things that has have just happened.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually again like to disagree because we actually really enjoy disagreeing with each other.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: But but I I it so one of the things that I've been thinking conceptually about in terms of um AI is that when you look at uh the things that news organizations produce which AI companies are prepared to pay for, unfortunately, one of them is uh breaking news because actually the AI like like like the one thing that AI has not uh replaced at all is reporting.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: So so if something happens, if if there's a very controversial interview with somebody from Google, for instance, until somebody reports it and puts it on the internet, the you know the the your LLMs, your L it doesn't exist.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I wonder whether in the pursuit of value from these new gatekeepers who have money that they are being either forced to spread around or are willingly spread around, that actually every news organizations now are going, well that well actually maybe what we should be doing is more of the kind of um immediate stuff because that is what AI companies will pay for in the future.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I you know I don't I just Well yeah, because like now it's just going to be like content race, right?
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: And who can generate more and more original content will have greater value than the context.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the context can all be generated by the LLMs.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, poor, shoddy, inaccurate context.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and so that's one of the things that when we're looking at it from the town centre perspective of what are the real problems here, it's like you know, search doesn't really work well for news with LLMs because it doesn't cite properly, and then you talk to the engineers who are like, well, this is a really interesting study, and they're like why why do you need to know the source of news?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you just should believe Google overviews or something like that.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right, right.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, I think I think we're talking about it's just slightly different things because like for example, when I was talking about sort of the 24-hour news thing, is you know, the like Reuters would hire and every every wire would hire reporters who just were on Twitter duty, right?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like just so you're watching so in in that case, journalists themselves acting almost like AI where they're kind of re-regurgating the existing material and like reporting on what Trump says on truth social and like all of that.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that just that's just kind of like noise generation.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's more noise generation, but yeah, like sure, there is space for the I don't know.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: I d I suppose what I'm asking is whether or not we think that AI is actually gonna make that better or or is it actually gonna make it worse?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my instinct is it might there's there's a risk it's gonna actually make it worse.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: But tell us what you're thinking at Coda about the big money that OpenAI are offering you to um give up your archive.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh god, I haven't had that call, by the way.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: Open AI, you haven't.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I'm sure they will any day now.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that people can find stories.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was actually, I was I actually it was the we have been offered some AI money, but not not Microsoft money.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: But uh Have you taken it?
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, we uh we haven't we had we did think about taking it uh just for a laugh.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a lot of money.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: But it was hilariously.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: There were a bunch of uh people from um effective altruism uh affiliated um uh uh organization, and I'm blanking on the name, but I can follow up.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they were in Perugia at the International Journalism Conference, and they were like approaching journalists and offering them grants.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not you're not doing the you're not doing the effective altruism vertical on the code.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we did, we did, we did, um we did think of taking the money to do like to investigate effective altruism, but we've done a lot on effective altruism as part.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: One of the uh kind of big series that we're running this year is called Capture.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's basically all about how tech has captured different aspects of our lives from like media to intimacy, right?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: And like looking at from this frame of capture.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: So um uh yeah, like uh we I mean f funny enough, uh this was partially possible because we um had a we did a deal with Audible uh to uh to do a narrative podcast around it.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of um, you know, uh uh it paid for a lot of journalism that went into it.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's also a bunch of stories that are on the website as well, but the podcast itself is behind the it's captured by Audible, which is obviously Amazon company.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and it is about capture so you can't get away you can't get away from them.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's part of the reality as well.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the things that in terms of what what I'm thinking about, you know, like I think about a lot of this as like a founder and as someone who's trying to like do the right thing by like my loyalty is to my craft, I think, more than anything else, right?
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: But um uh uh in terms of the stories, the stories we're looking at and are interested in, um are not necessarily our audience is not necessarily so interested in the relationship.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is, I think, is very consequential story, the relationship with media, because media has been captured.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: But it's more about, you know, some of the things that we're really interested in is this um, you know, what's happening with sovereignty, like the concept of sovereignty, like what we're looking at this like capture and what are the stories.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And these are kind of like a little highbrow academic key concepts, but the stories that live in these are very kind of human stories that I've done.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: I was just gonna ask, can you be a bit more specific about either of those concepts?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're super interesting.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: So when you talk about capture for somebody who maybe isn't familiar with that term, what what do you mean?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: Can you articulate it?
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the capture, the capture out capture series really looks about, um really looks at how Silicon Valley has uh basically promised salvation um to us as a society and talks uh uh it looks at the concept of inevitability as like uh there are only two stories that we are told about AI.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in one of them it's doomsday, in the other story it's um uh it's b basically everything is great and works out.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a religious uh but both of them are inevitable.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there is very little space for anything in between.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then these narratives have had an enormous impact on all aspects of our lives, uh be it politics, uh be it um health, medicine, labor.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: So uh for this series, you know, we went to we sent a reporter to Kenya to spend time with people who are working uh for Chat GPT, uh, you know, training AI models, uh we uh spent time with people in the Vatican, uh we uh lost.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: What were we doing with the big hats?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: The people in big hats.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um we uh because I think the religious aspect of it is incredibly, yeah, incredibly important.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a story that we've kind of paid a lot of attention to.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, spent a lot of time in in the valley, in Silicon Valley as well, um looking at and trying to like really understand what um those who are part of this, like the whole I mean I I think there is not enough connections are being made between the politics and the whole like longevity game that so many are obsessed with in the valley.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's really, really important.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so trying to understand like what it is, like why these people want to live forever and how they're gonna live forever.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: So and that's what like our journalism is really all about is trying to sort of connect those silos and see show how they're they're connected.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean with sovereignty, like we do a lot of stuff on, you know, I'm not gonna get into debate who came up with broligarchy as a term, but um, you know, the b we we've used it for a while and um uh we do a lot on oligarchy and dirty money and kind of the Maori, like anything around kind of power basically.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think sovereignty, like it's very clear that uh like the very concept of sovereignty has changed and the rhetoric around sovereignty and what it means to be a sovereign nation state um has changed as increasingly individuals have gained the power that is comparable to nation states.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I spent last two years in in the in Silicon Valley.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: I was at Stanford doing a fellowship for a for a year, and then we were um doing this work on the captured series, and like I'm amazed by how like popularized is the idea that nation states are like the concept of nation states is soon going to be the thing of the past.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um Do you think that is actually gonna be the case though?
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I don't know, but like that is not for me to say, but I think it's really important to understand what Sam Altman means when he says geopolitic is gonna be.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I feel I feel like that Sam Altman creating in his so he's the founder of OpenAI, um creating in his mind and in the narrative an inevitable an inevitability.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're back to this inevitability, which actually favours him, doesn't really favour anybody else.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, this is kind of where that power of oh, these things are all going to be something in the past.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, well, wait a minute, if nation set states are in the past, who benefits from that?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is that these borderless people who want to be able to extract data from anywhere and build products and then roll all of the wealth back up to themselves wherever they happen to be living at the time, hopefully on Mars.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, who are these guys?
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, it does it feel to you like the world has been taken over by a bunch of like 13-year-old boys who aren't so good at human relationships.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because earlier I was mentioning to Emily that uh my father was an early computer programmer, you know, Johns Hopkins in the 60s, and was one of these guys, and he was uh consumed with immortality.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_02: He thought that he would get to be immortal, the Ray Kurtzweil upload your soul.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember even as a kid being like, what is wrong with you that you actually think you should get to be immortal, the hubris of it.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: And as Emily knows, I And lots of fascists that as well.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and I actually think it's like a personality that there is so I also I used to cover the video game industry in the 2000s, and so a lot of what we're seeing now, I feel a little Cassandra-ish, because I feel like I could have told you in 2005 sort of who these guys were and what the world view is.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm just as you're talking, I'm wondering if you've ever thought about it at that level is just who are these guys and how have we let them take our world over?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did because I lived there and it was like it was just a fascinating experience to spend time there kind of up close.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh look, I don't know whether my observations will be all that insightful, but it did feel like living in the heart of the Roman Empire where like it's uh just incredible intellectual and financial abundance and complete detachment from the rest of the world.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's uh an extremely contagious enthusiasm about what they're building.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's very exciting and they're all nice guys.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_02: But they're not really nice.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'd see that like even at these news guys, I didn't find the Google guys appear to be.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: But that's you, right?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's the way.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: But they I think they come across um as nice, approachable people who are, you know, I I mean I think a lot about it, how like it it is incredible how like there's not that much.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, my reference points are different, right?
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: I uh was born in the country that doesn't exist anymore.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Georgia at kind of the independent like collapse of the Soviet Union.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I watched as sort of the that my part of the world got overtaken by um pretty some a few of them brilliant but overwhelmingly mediocre but ballsy man who got incredibly rich and took over, right?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and these were the oligarchs, these were the you know, the new Russians they called them, and they they became the oligarchs who then you know came to power.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like the whole story.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like their aesthetics were different.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: They wore big gold chains and Adidas tracksuits and uh not that different.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: These tactics have come closer, actually, interestingly, as well.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I think it was fascinating to see how, but there's so much sort of punditry around it, how like, you know, Trump has allowed people like Zuckerberg to be what they probably truly always were, you know, shut down that school and put on the big gold chain and be what, you know, like shut down the whatever they DI.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think it is the same personality, these silicon tech guys and the and the I I think it is in a sense of this like uh and I don't want to be like a male bashing here at all because I think they're I I don't think women are immune from the same power tendencies at all.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I think it is a little bit of like the world is my oyster.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: The world is my oyster.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember talking to, you know, an ex-Googler who was at Google at the time when we were talking, and I uh I'm friends with that person, and he said to and I was challenging him.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of the few people that whom I met who actually will engage and listen.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: There are not that many of them.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I was challenging him on the fact that like how do you and I tried to do that in this interview with Richard Gingras as well.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I said to him, Look, you are someone I c I know I can't hold you personally responsible for any of this, but you are someone who uses in your a lot of your writing, um, you know, your father-in-law who Dalton Trumble who was like stood up to McCarthy is malignant and was blacklisted and went to prison.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh Richard Gingras in this case uses it as an example of like that he understands how authoritarianism works and how power works.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's he's compelling he makes a compelling argument.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I said like as someone who has this deep personal experience as you describe it with authoritarianism, how do you square that with the fact that the company you worked for, you know, obeyed Putin's orders, pulled out of Russia, pulled the uh and pulled um the opposition's um app and all the YouTube and all the Google Docs, and basically uh you know uh uh you can actually draw a direct line from that decision to the death of Alexei Navalny.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Who died in prison because he was, I mean, for those your listeners who don't know, in one of the in one of the pre-COVID elections in 2019, I think, or 2020, 2019, um, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny could not run anymore.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: He was banned from running, but he came up with a very simple and pretty like uh genius idea of subverting the elections by uh through a very simple app which would basically tell people to vote uh according to their postcode for anyone but a certain party.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was the this like whole thing, and it could have become a really interesting blueprint for elections around the world.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: He never got to do it because um Russians demanded, Putin demanded for the apps to be pulled from Google and Apple stores, from all the YouTube to be pulled down and Google Docs to be pulled down, and they complied.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I said to Gingrass, like, how do you square that?
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't want to engage in it.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he he didn't he would not engage with that or with Hashogji or with how like how do you work for a company that makes this?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: You're a worldly man.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: When I talked to this guy uh who is a whom I consider a friend in in the valley about it, and I said the same thing to him, he said to me, he said, look, it's very sad and it bothers me, but it's collateral damage because what we are building is greater than that.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is part of that personality.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: They are on a mission, they believe in it.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the same thing.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well what are those, but what?
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like so the the the I think and I think that's the problem.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: We you mentioned the ex-risker, what we call ex-riskers.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: So people who are like AI is put is posing an existential risk, which is why people like uh us should be in charge of it, and it shouldn't, you know, that that they they use that argument to actually gain more power because there is this goal, but I don't know what they think the goal is.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think the goal is the same as it has ever been.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's like more money, more power.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what they that's not how they articulate it to themselves.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not saying I don't think anyone articulates it like that.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I don't think Putin ar articulates it like that.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: No, so no, but I'm interested in what the Silicon Valley people articulate the greater good to be, which is what is that?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because now we're beginning to see an end game.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: And they're all building their escape latches, right?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: They're all building And they're going, we need to get out of here, we need to go, we need to get to get to Mars.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and that I think is really interesting in terms of the let's bring it back to journalism, how they think their relationship with the knowledge economy and with preservation of archives, freedom of speech, freedom of the press actually works because that was a part of their vision.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: And now it feels like that's it.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: They they can't honestly now look at what is happening and say, yes, we are still coming.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think they can, I but I think they can, and I think I just don't think they think about these things, and I think we'll let them not think about these things.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was uh I made a point of every engineering student I met at Stanford when I was there, I made a point of asking them how many times Myanmar came up and Rohingya came up in the classes that you take in your four years of the best engineering school in the country or one of the best.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: Most of them said never.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let me step back.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: When I was covering video games, the the prism of it was show me the games of the future and I'll show you the next hundred years, you know, which is this idea from anthropology that you can kind of learn from the games what you're preparing people for.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what I really came to believe is that it was a very particular kind of intelligence that was being fostered to the detriment of everything else.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the kind of intelligence that can write computer programs and do business, but it is not really the kind of intelligence that is empathetic or can see, oh well, maybe if I do this and it leads to the collapse of democratic society, that's not so that essentially the goal is to avoid eye contact.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: The goal is I can't do this, but I can sit, right?
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we have allowed our world to be rebuilt by these guys, and it's very 13-gate.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's like very like reverent how you know how AI is so reverential too, that like sucks up to.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to disagree.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I do want to disagree, but no, what I want to say, I think what I want to say is that even if you disagree with me?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if you accept that premise to be true, which I think is a kind of broad pejorative about people in technology, which I think is is partially true or maybe even overwhelmingly true.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact is we're not there anymore.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_00: The fact is we're now at a point where those systems are coupled with um and possibly even under the control of people who completely understand eye contact and understand populism and understand how to connect and manipulate people.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there was a joke, there used to be a joke about um Google building social platforms and what happened when you put, you know, 150 Google engineers onto something that was a social product, it would inevitably fail because they, as you say, there's a sort of but but but I think that you know, when we're looking forward, I think this idea of like there's a particular kind of nerd type personality and a particular kind of motivation for these companies.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: Surely now, Natalia.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think what Coda Story does is exactly around this.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll be really interested to see what you think.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is that we're not there anymore.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're now at a place where those systems are part of a movement to be anti-democratic and pro-populist, and they're operating in different political economies across the world, whether it's China, whether it's India, whether it's America.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of what what what do we as journalists do in in that framework?
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe I'm wrong, maybe that's not the framework we're currently looking at, but it seems to me that there's No, I think you're right.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think we it is the I I I think uh I think we're I mean we're kind of still there because there's still uh this kind of like nerdy guy, but like that's that's also a little bit irrelevant.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: I do think that um we have I think what we got a little bit wrong is that we often think uh I always think of Trump as the tool for the valley rather than the other way around.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I think that populist politicians are a tool.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I I think it's very interesting that comment about the business model being government contracts.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think we are seeing increasingly, and this is why we're really interested in sovereignty idea and how sovereignty is changing.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are gonna increasingly see the um uh kind of the takeover of, you know, from meta-taking over NHS in the UK to like there's so many examples, right?
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because there are no checks on their power.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we have missed um that moment where it was possible to regulate something, even though like the regulation debate was completely derailed by them and they uh you know the First Amendment was weaponized just the same way that the gun lobby weaponized the Second Amendment, they weaponized it.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: And there's like there's there's regulation in Europe, right?
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but like I think I personally believe the regulation has to be at a design and a product level, and I think you know it it can't be at a at a publishing level.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell And also something else that we've talked about on other episodes of this podcast, which is there is regulation, but there's the enforcement.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: The enforcement is like it has to be.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it but the alliances that have been created now are uh uh incredibly powerful, and I personally believe they are gonna run the world.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are still at the beginning of the tide that is still will continue to rise.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, this is not about the midterms and it's not about the next presidential election.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is the beginning, and I think that at some point a new kind of thinking will emerge, but there will have to be, you know, it has to be truly new thinking.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I ask myself a lot, so what can we do as journalists?
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't have a recipe for everyone.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: I know what we are doing.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: We are kind of um we're really doubling down on um like all things human and trying to be this translators between the worlds.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I think more than ever that kind of I I I think it is important to find the allies.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think we had gone to bed with the wrong guys, and I think we got ourselves in big trouble.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the people who are our natural allies are other people who are on these front lines, and they these are people who work in culture, in anything that requires depth and context, the knowledge economy.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to figure out how to work with them.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm also increasingly like I spend a lot of time thinking how you know it is sad that this like my interview with like really a former Google um executive is suddenly like being talked about so much, like it's sad how we lost our accountability muscle because because because the knowledge the the information ecosystem is not like we're not gatekeepers anymore.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, what can we do if we can no longer influence the policymakers?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: We can no longer we can we can like have this incredible investigations, but we can't, you know, like they don't have impact because we live in the age of impunity and there is an alliance between the authoritarians and the uh the richest men in the world and women in the world, men primarily in the world.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I think for me the answer has increasingly been, and that's why we have really focused on, you know, we um it started as a storytelling festival in Georgia, it's called ZEG, which means the day after tomorrow.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh we're now growing it beyond Georgia, and we just had our first event in London and before that in Amsterdam, and it's all about bringing together like cross-discipline or like storytellers from across different fields to like try to imagine what the day after tomorrow is uh looks like.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I think sort of that's a small point within that big point which relates to your interview with Richard, um, which is about how we seek accountability from these companies as well.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you're completely right to say they're impenetrably difficult.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I've listened to people like Karen Howe, who wrote Empire of AI, and when she which is it, she's an excellent journalist, and um I know she's she's talked to us and and and our students before about what it's like to run a story that Meta didn't like and the blowback you get, and suddenly everybody's on the call and calling for you to be fired, etc.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: etc.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that this idea that we've been trying to settle for data to tell us what the platforms are up to, please open up your API.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all of their APIs have degraded.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually is about people.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's a there's an academic uh called Mike Annoney who works at USC um who made this point to me um a while ago, and it's such a powerful one, which is like, you know, we're looking we're we're we're standing in line like Oliver Twist going, please uh can we have some more data?
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be asking for accountability from the humans, you know, that that run these things.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you were asking, I think one of the reasons that your interview got such reaction was that you were asking accountability for a tech company from a human, and it's unfortunate for Richard that he's one of the humans who's put himself forward without really expecting maybe questions about true accountability.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we kind of crack that, do we think?
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: What should we do?
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: Should we be should should local journalists?
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I kind of think local journals should should be seeking out the heads of the data centers that are kind of made, you know, that there's something about big tech that almost is off putting to journalists about just going, go and find the person who is responsible for this or for that or for whatever.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Is that too is that something that we could ever do or should be doing?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it just has to be part of the job and we need to keep doing it.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think we will be very unsuccessful at it because I think that's right, Richard felt safe in a dead conference because he's been going to these conferences for years and years and no one has put him on a spot.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: We have performed accountability conversations with these people.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: We ask them performative questions, but we don't get to the Well and also there's there's the sense of that there's a sense of bite the hand.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you know, you bit the hand.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh that was never feeding me, which was why I could do it.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe maybe the first thing we do is like not take their money if we need to hold them accountable.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big believer in that.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: But uh so um I think recalibrating our relationship with them is really important.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because I I can see ma, you know, I have friends going to dinners now with the Microsoft leads and the PRSI, and these are all very nice people.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think just seeing clearly, like, okay, this is what they represent, and maybe there is a way of doing some sort of deals with them, but I think recalibrating that relationship is really important.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it has fair value, fair value exchange, it's not you're being that's right.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: We do we do this at the end, and there's some debate between Heather and myself at both a end or beginning, but we ask people to define the problem that we have right now.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: After we've talked about the problems for an hour.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I think for me is noise is the new censorship.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's the problem.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: Noise is the new censorship.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's harder to fight, isn't it?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's a bit amorphous.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it requires new kind of thinking.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: It it it requires us to rethink what we're doing, and it requires us to um re remind ourselves what it is that we're about and what our values are and align with people on the values and not on you know the immediate interests.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_02: Great place to stop.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much for coming in.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: Journalism 2050 is a co-production of the Tent Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, the Columbia Journalism Review, with help from our friends at the Journalism and Design Lab at the New School.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Our producer is Amanda Dack, our production coordinator is Hannah Joy, and our researcher is Sam Earl.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: Find us wherever you get your podcasts.