PassW0rd – 13th March 2019

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Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password, or should I call it Passport? I’m Peter Warren, the editor of Future Intelligence, and in the next hour I’m exploring the idea of sovereignty, or taking back control of our data, our identity, and even our nationality. In the online world, which knows no frontiers, it’s hard to define those concepts. Most people don’t bother to hide their whereabouts and habits. They check into their social media every time they go somewhere new. But if you’re one of the growing number of people who values privacy and mobility, Then there are many new apps on offer and one old familiar one— Facebook. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg’s published a long post explaining how he’s shifting his multi-billion-dollar network towards a privacy focus. You probably didn’t read it all when it popped up in your newsfeed, but basically it’s about private interactions. Zuckerberg says people should have simple intimate places where they have clear control over who they can communicate with in them and confidence that no one else can access what they share. Facebook also intends to offer encryption, reduce the permanence of the data, and improve safety, interoperability, and promises secure data storage. Sovereignty, it would seem, is all about locking down your data, making it portable, and controlling who does what with it. But if you can’t wait for that promised land and you want to get ahead, you could get a HAT. That’s a 3-letter acronym, a T-L-A, and it means the Hub of All Things. And it’s a neat metaphor for a secret storage space for your personal information You can keep it under your hat. And if this sounds familiar, you’re clearly a regular listener to Password. We first featured it back in July 2016, but as hat inventor Professor Irene Ng, a Turing Fellow at Warwick University, tells me, it’s now become a vital tool for governing our digital persona.

Speaker D: Okay, let me put it this way. Pete, let me ask you a question. Have you ever walked up to Tesco and said, oh, would you like information of how much and what did I buy from Sainsbury’s?

Speaker A: No, I haven’t. I have— I’ve honestly not thought of doing that, but the next time I am in Tesco, I am going to say that, I promise you.

Speaker D: Look, these data are collected at different places. Your medical records served the medical community. But could very well serve the well-being community. Your running data about where you run and how you run may well serve the running community, but it’s also just as important to be shared with perhaps your medical provider or insurance because of your health. It is these cross-contact and the cross-use of data that is most important and most valuable. The issue is individuals do not have data rights to them. And as long as we do not have data rights, it is not mobile. I mean, the government has just issued a whole report on data mobility.

Speaker A: So how do we go, Irene, how do we go about getting that data mobility then? You’ve put this together, this thing called a HAT. Is that data mobility?

Speaker D: Well, it is a form of data mobility because organizations have such major difficulties sharing data amongst themselves. I mean, look at NHS. They made a contract legally to give data to DeepMind. It was all legal. They scrubbed off certain things. They learned certain lessons. They made sure it was all properly anonymized. But somehow, at the end of it, we all felt like there was kind of a bad taste in our mouths about how the whole thing went. Let me tell you why it is. Because when you pass my data between A and B without— even if it’s my consent, even if it’s meaningful, then yes, we’re talking about data mobility. But meaningful consent is really hard when you start moving into more chunks of data because the individual just gets a lot of fatigue in terms of when you keep asking me these questions. I don’t understand what are you using it for. So, there is some data mobility in sharing between organizations, but not a lot because of so much friction and so much difficulties and privacy incursions. And because I’m not party to the contract between the sharing of two organizations, I kind of get a little bit miffed, as you can see with the NHS one. They have to create it because if you give it back to the individual and give it back easily so that individual can reuse and reshare across many contexts as easy as the touch of a button, going through the individuals and making the individual the first-party contractor, that matters. And that creates greater mobility because I can just combine different kinds of data. I can combine Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and all these data and give it perhaps to the government who wants to understand shopping habits or some kind of service that tells me where I should buy things that are cheaper based on my purchases across all supermarkets. That’s data mobility.

Speaker A: So what you’re saying is that data defines you, but also that data is mutable. I.e., it’s changing all of the time, and it’s you in this data form that is changing.

Speaker D: Correct. You can take my data, go and do all your big data analytics, but it’s not very fresh data, is it? It’s probably expired because I’m no longer in that location, I’m no longer looking for lunch. So it’s very real-time data, we call it real-time on-demand data. And the speed, that is the reason why we’re talking I talk about data mobility, of which data being exchanged that needs to be fast, create better services, better benefits for me, and for companies that want to serve, provide services to me. And also getting the data directly from the user, from the individual himself, means in our world, if you want to use analogy, data is then ethically sourced. I mean, we are tuna, I think.

Speaker A: That data has sovereignty. That, that, as you say, it’s your persona. In a sense, it can have a passport too, can’t it?

Speaker D: You get into the internet, it makes a netizen out of you. It makes you behave digitally in a certain way and do certain things. Now, in that space of the internet, which is a You could say lawless because it transcends all boundaries and territories. You could say it’s a bit of the Wild West. There are no real laws on the internet in terms of what a net citizen can or cannot do. And so when you talk about sovereignty, I’m nervous because which laws, which land, where do I exist? And that suggests that there’s some kind of man-made institutional laws being imposed on something implicitly, which I do not know which one it is, so I’d rather stay away from that word. However, I like the word of persona, I like the word of digital twin, I like the idea that we’re netizens, but the current internet is all commercial. It’s kind of weird because the infrastructure is not, it’s a nonprofit, but it is like going into a space and the moment you walk out of the door, you need to pay a toll, whether it’s through your debit card, through your data or through your money. On the internet, there is no public good, there is no private good, there is no community good. It’s all commercial good. You go onto a browser, it exacts some— it’s free, but it exacts some payment in terms of your data, which comes through ads. So that’s why people get nervous. When people get nervous about privacy and data and who am I and so sovereignty, that’s a symptomatic reaction to what the internet is currently, which is a lot of centralized powers, the current kings of the internet space, holding the property of data as though they are actually kings holding real property. And what everybody is asking for is the Magna Carta.

Speaker A: Irene Ng, She’s not the only one who wants a Magna Carta for the web. The original Magna Carta was the charter of human rights demanded by the wealthy barons and signed by bad King John at Runnymede in 1215. It’s the basis for the rule of law and the closest thing Britain has to a written constitution. “To none will we sell, to none will we deny, to none will we delay right or justice,” it promises. Amongst many stipulations on taxes, the weirs on the River Thames, and how many ells should be in the standard measure of a breadth of cloth. It’s 2, since you ask. Lawyers I’ve talked to say that while Magna Carta’s principles remain sound, actual legislation needs to catch up with today’s technology industry. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, has even called for a new Magna Carta for the digital age. And whilst that’s being formulated, he’s busy building an alternative web that will allow users to take back control. So Tim is doing this because he’s worried about the future of the internet, which he says is hanging in the balance.

Speaker E: Right now I think it’s really in the balance whether— you know, I think I’m very concerned about about nastiness and misinformation spreading. I think with a mid-course correction, if the contract for the web is about, let’s all stop this downward plunge towards a very dysfunctional future, let’s turn it around, with a turnaround, a mid-course correction, I am then optimistic again.

Speaker A: Sir Tim’s initiative is called SOLID, perhaps because the first time he presented his proposal for the web to his then boss, His boss wrote on it: “Vague, but exciting.” Here’s Sir Tim talking about his plans, which sound remarkably like Irene Ng’s.

Speaker E: Okay, so we got this project called Solid. It was solid.mit.edu. Solid thinks that you should have complete control of all your data. That is difficult to achieve, you think. Well, we’re going to build a small community in which we believe that people should completely own their data. And so to be able to control your data, that means you’ve got to be able to choose where it’s stored. So that means you’ve got to be able to have several places, well, at least one place to store it. If you go to solid.community or inrupts.net, then you’ll be able to go and get yourself an account there, and that will give you a place to store some data. That’ll be in a cloud that at the moment is run by Inrupts. Down the road, clouds will be run by all kinds of people. You will have personal clouds, and hopefully you’ll be able to find people who run them that you really, really trust.

Speaker A: Password reporter Jane Wyatt’s been getting on solid ground and meeting some of its evangelists. Among them Software developer Hashir Rizwan.

Speaker C: So I am a member of the Solid community and I’m contributing to some of their GitHub repositories. I am very actively involved in their community efforts and I really like the things that they’re doing. So what Solid is basically is giving back control to the user, giving back the data control back to the user. So right now, if you use a couple of social medias, they’re storing your data, they’re giving you hectic advertisements, and sometimes you get annoyed. Sometimes your data is being used on psychological researches and you don’t know. So what Solid says is that you as a person, as an entity, should own your own data. So I really like the concept and the frameworks behind Solid, so that’s why I’m really interested in this project. And apart from that, I’m also working at Prisma, where we are today. So Prisma is a European gas capacity trading platform. You must have heard of National Grid. So National Grid is one of our customers. Here I’m working as a BI analyst and pulling out some reports from the database.

Speaker F: I’ve heard that Solid was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the next iteration of the web to avoid many of the problems that the World Wide Web has got into. How is it going to change things?

Speaker C: As I mentioned today as well, that the web started as a permissionless innovation stage. So everyone had the control, everyone wanted to do whatever they can, but then these, uh, some of the people use these permissionless innovation to, for their own empowerment. And then when they reached to a certain position, they kicked the ladder of personal permission and innovation. So because of this, right now what we are facing is that we are, we are in a centralized environment. So there are basically two challenges that I cannot share my data from one part to another, to another website. So for example, if I share something on Facebook, I have to recreate the content on LinkedIn, I have to recreate the content on Twitter. So this is one of the problems of centralized environment. Another problem is that synchronization. So for example, if I’m using Google Calendars, I put an event there that I would be attending that my Facebook calendar or my Doodle calendar wouldn’t know that. So there is a kind of a synchronization problem also. So what Solid solves is that Solid gives a user a choice. So it starts with the choice. So Solid is an ecosystem which says that it is the user who has the right to choose whatever app he wants to use, he or she wants to use, and the data should stay with the user, and he should have multiple options to choose applications. So for example, if I want to view my photos, I could use maybe Photo Viewer, maybe Social Feed, maybe another application, but that all of these applications point to the same data source, and that data source is on my own online data store. So Solid gives a lot of privacy, a lot of interoperability, a lot of portability true data ownership to its users. So the value of— so this is how we see the value of user, uh, to the value of Solid.

Speaker F: So if I can just kind of bring it into a real world analogy, would it be like putting everything about you, all your family photographs, all your jobs you’ve ever had, places you’ve ever been, and so on and so on, into a a big storeroom and then inviting in some apps.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker F: Who can use this bit of—

Speaker G: from this shelf.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker F: But can’t have access to the whole storeroom.

Speaker C: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker F: So then, and whereas now you just give everything to Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever and they choose what to use of it. And how to use it.

Speaker C: Yeah, so this brings this— the value of Solid, in my opinion, is more than just this. It’s about innovation. It gives you the chance to innovate again. So you don’t think about how the user’s data or the data or the backend is looking like. You just think of a crazy idea and you think of an innovative idea. So you built that idea first and then you look for the data. And data then you can get from the different, from the users’ part. So this—

Speaker F: But surely you need the data so that you can monetize it, because data is the new oil, as we all know.

Speaker C: And the philosophy of Solid behind this data is the new oil is that this oil tanker belongs to you. So Facebook should not monetize on your data. It is you that you should monetize on your data. So if someone comes to you and says, I want to give you an advertisement, so you say, if you want my data, you pay me, not anyone else. So this is one of the points that people usually miss about Solid. They think that Solid is about true data ownership and nobody can access your data, but it’s about giving back the control to the user.

Speaker A: There it is again, the mantra of taking back control, getting hold of our data and deciding how it is used, getting sovereignty over it. How that might take shape is a project of another solid developer with his own social network, Christian Buggerdai. He has a new app called Darcy, which will offer a walled garden where groups of people can meet online but not in full view of everyone else.

Speaker B: Big change that we do is that we don’t have advertising at all. We will have an advertisement-free space, and that takes a lot of pressure away in terms that you have to design in otherwise. If you design a space to sell advertising, you rely on certain patterns. You need to engage people way more often than you would do if you don’t have advertising. That doesn’t mean that we’re not a for-profit company. We do want to earn money, We do want to pay our people even though if you don’t have the funds to do it right now. We are a very young company. What we want to achieve is that everyone can install an open source version of our product. It’s a social media open source space. All these installations can talk to each other. So it’s decentralized but global. And then we offer services on top of that. And these services are not aimed to the end user directly, as in here is storage, here is extra new features, but at the community as a whole. That means moderation, for example. So if you have a problem that people bully people there, or that there is hate speech, or there is spam— that’s a common problem on the internet— then our content policy team will work on that and will help you combat these things. This team will work according to transparent guidelines. So it’s not a black box where content just gets deleted. These are transparent guidelines that are understandable, that are created with the community. So it’s not that there’s a top-down, this is what keeps us safe from litigation. Thing, but something that serves the community.

Speaker F: Can’t you just block it?

Speaker B: The end user can still block it. We will give a lot of power to the end user. But if you have, for example, a concerted hate campaign where a bunch of people come together and harass a person, then that person alone cannot defend itself. Then that person gets overwhelmed.

Speaker F: So how would Darcy change that?

Speaker B: Darcy will in technical terms not do a lot of things different than what the big companies like Facebook and Google do right now. We will have automatic filters where our moderation team gets automatically alerted if certain words or sentences will be uttered. Then our moderation team will have a look at it, but according to these guidelines. This will not be 5-second, let’s quickly look at it and then ban it because there is a harmful there’s one word in it, they will look at cultural context, but we’ll be a lot more trained.

Speaker F: So you have human moderators?

Speaker B: We have human moderators.

Speaker F: And how will you pay them? Where’s the money coming from?

Speaker B: The money will come from the instance owners. So if you install a Darcy instance, you can either say, okay, I’m doing the moderation myself, or eventually you say this is too much work, and then you you hire Darcy. That will cost money. And yet then this money will either come from, for example, private organizations like your local sports club installs a Darcy instance, gives this to their members for free. They can use that. And the moderation then gets paid out of a budget from the sports club because they value having a social media instance. That is one example. Or the instance owner can collect donations from the users and then pays the moderators with those.

Speaker F: So you’re looking at launching Darcy on a Solid platform?

Speaker H: Yes.

Speaker F: How will that work?

Speaker B: We don’t quite know yet. We have a— that sounds more naive, but we know how Solid works. We know how the web itself works. And we know how social media, a civic online space, works. But there are a bunch of challenges that just are created by how Solid works. And Solid itself does not yet work very well if there is a lot of content on the same display page from a variety of different pods.

Speaker H: Pods.

Speaker F: What are pods?

Speaker B: A Solid pod is a data store that is owned by one user. So in a Solid world, every user has their own data store, maybe even several data stores. And whatever the user creates as content, a post, a video, a picture, a comment on a different person’s post gets stored on their social media on their solid pod. So if we have a social media page with maybe— we open the page, we see 5 different posts from people, and each of these posts have a few different comments by other people. The page that you’re loading needs to load the content from all the different pods of everyone who contributed content to the page I’m looking at right now.

Speaker F: That sounds very complicated.

Speaker B: That is very complicated. It’s doable, it’s not rocket science, but it needs to be very carefully thought through, and that’s why I say I don’t know yet.

Speaker F: Okay, but what’s the advantage of having pods for your data?

Speaker B: The first thing is you own the data. The data is on a storage that is completely under your control. So if at any point you decide, I don’t want to have my content visible on social media anymore, you just tell your storage, don’t display this to anyone anymore. And then with one click of a button, all your content gets invisible. It’s still there, but no one else can see it anymore.

Speaker F: But you could do that on Facebook, just click the hide button.

Speaker B: Yes, but then it’s somewhere on Facebook. So you need to trust Facebook to keep it hidden and to not make use of that data. You know which data is linked to you. You can see that. You can verify that. And if one of these links don’t work for you because it’s some information that shouldn’t be out there, you can delete that link and it stays deleted.

Speaker A: Good.

Speaker F: Why did you call it Darcy?

Speaker B: Ooh, it is a fun story. So whenever you start a project, you need some name to refer the project to. Usually in large companies, they use things like Timber or some codename. I just reread Pride and Prejudice. So Darcy is a very polite social media that we want to do, so it’s of course named after Mr. Darcy. Mostly because Elizabeth Bennet in all the main name variants was already taken.

Speaker F: So it’s not an acronym?

Speaker B: It is not an acronym, it is literally Jane Austen.

Speaker F: It’s an homage to Jane Austen.

Speaker B: It is an homage to Dame Austen.

Speaker F: Well, I’m sure if she’s looking down from heaven, she’ll be very pleased.

Speaker B: I do hope so, and I do hope that our users will write plenty of letters to each other.

Speaker A: Now, in Jane Austen’s classic The first impression of Mr. Darcy was that he was a fine figure of a man, until his manners turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could prevent him from having the most disagreeable countenance. Sounds like some of the internet companies. His namesake In Bridget Jones’s Diary, he’s a similar character. Yes, first impressions are often deceptive. So how handy is it that now there’s a social network that lets you get to know your neighbours without ever having to chat to them over the garden fence or ask to borrow their Wi-Fi because you’ve just moved in and yours has not yet been installed? It’s often said that in England Your home is your castle. But now, with the internet, we need a moat around that castle. And that is what the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations are meant to be. Known as GDPR, and made part of UK law in mid-2018, the regulations are intended to protect your 21st-century identity and keep your data sacrosanct. So, the possibility of keeping your castle private and yet still enjoying the social life of your neighbours appears to be possible at first glance. Indeed, being a neighbour, a good neighbour, is the basis for another social network that only wants a little of that data: your name and address. The network is called Nextdoor, and it’s been set up by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in California. Its UK country manager is Nick Lisher.

Speaker I: Nextdoor, at its heart, is the, the world’s largest social network for the neighborhood. And what we’re trying to do is enable truly local conversations that empower neighbors to build stronger and safer communities. And so, you know, about 7 or 8 years ago, when the founders in San Francisco started the company, really what they’d seen is they’d seen that there’d been ways of connecting people online regarding their work life in LinkedIn or their social life in Facebook at the time. But really, there’d been nothing that had connected people more to one of the most fundamental networks that we can experience, which is our local neighborhood. And everyone lives in a neighborhood right now. When the company was set up 7 or 8 years ago, the founders saw a gap. They saw that social, Social networks had helped us stay more connected with our friends. For example, Facebook had helped us stay in touch with news and current affairs and entertainment on Twitter and had connected us more in our vocational lives with LinkedIn. But there was nothing that connected us to one of the most important networks, which is our neighborhood. And everyone lives in a neighborhood. And actually, there was an argument at the time, and there still is, that social media is making us more disconnected from what’s around us. It’s making us less present. There’s a tremendous amount of sociological research out there that encourages social cohesion, that says that if we are more connected with the people that we live around, with the people that run our local stores, with the people that teach our children, with the people that serve us our coffee in the morning, at the train station that will actually lead happier, healthier lives. And that’s got to be a good thing. Now, the truth is that whenever you join a social network, there is an exchange going on in terms of the amount of your data, the amount of your privacy that you’re willing to give to the network in order to get something out. Now, we made a choice early on. We could have said, listen, you can sign up without giving us any proof of your address. And using any sort of nickname you want. Now, the, the issue I think with that is there were a few sites that existed at the time that were like that, that really didn’t have the, the right dynamics in place to foster that kind of neighborly communication. And the reason being really was that anyone could join any network. And so you didn’t have to prove that you lived in the area. For one, and for a second one, anonymity, as we know on the web, is quite a dangerous thing. Sometimes it can promote the wrong sort of behavior. And so, you know, from our perspective, what we encourage people to do is firstly to use their real name and secondly to verify their address. And really, apart from, you know, apart from a few other details, that’s all the data we ask for. And that data, as we feel, is intrinsic for people joining the network and acting and acting with each other in a neighborly way. And so far, that’s been pretty successful.

Speaker A: That’s Nick Lisher from next door. Except it isn’t, of course. It’s not next door. It’s headquartered in California, where the tech giants of Silicon Valley are digging in for a long fight with the state authorities about tax and regulation. A strict new privacy law is expected to come into effect in 2020. Over here, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, has made users’ privacy a legal necessity for businesses and public authorities. And Professor Obama’s former advisor, Harvard professor Jason Furman, has just completed a 6-month review for the UK government in which one of his conclusions was that people should be given more control over their own data to allow them to switch platforms more easily. Control, as we’ve heard, is a new watchword, but it is very difficult, technologically speaking, to take on the tech giants at the moment. There are very many different ways of being able to extrude data, so unscrupulous companies that want to avoid the restrictions of the GDPR can take data from EU member states and use it elsewhere. It’s a kind of digital smuggling. Campaigner Jim Killock of the UK’s Open Rights Group tells me that our data sovereignty needs protection from these unscrupulous multinationals. But politicians are not the people to do this job.

Speaker E: We want them to do more, for certain. I mean, I think we really need to see the ICO, the Information Commissioner in the UK, grow in power and do more. They’re ambitious at the moment. That’s really, really important. I always get a little bit worried when governments get involved in this space because, you know, bluntly, their attitudes and motivations are very mixed. Often governments want data just as much as companies. They’re quite, you know, the argument we’re currently having about social media regulation is really an argument about who’s going to impose how much control. Government is really saying, we want more control over the online space, will you do it for us? And, you know, that’s kind of quite problematic. And the same goes for privacy often. Also, we have to remember, with privacy laws, you know, whenever they get negotiated, there is a huge industry lobby to make the laws weaker, and that gets listened to. So it was kind of miraculous that the GDPR, for instance, ended up in good shape through that. It very nearly ended up a complete dog’s dinner and could have ended up at various points weakening our data protection laws across Europe rather than making them better and stronger. So, you know, we have to remember the huge forces against this and to control regulation from industry You know, it’s a dangerous thing when they, they get involved. Sometimes we have to have that fight, but it’s always a very risky business.

Speaker A: Surely a big issue here though is most of the companies that are actually involved in this battle for our data are American, and the GDPR, while it covers data in the EU and what our relationship will be with that is yet to be decided because of Brexit it. But because of those American companies, that creates an issue, doesn’t it? Well, it does.

Speaker E: It’s on many levels though. I mean, a lot of those American companies are now— particularly the big ones— are in the European market and regulated out of European countries for these purposes. A lot of them are in, in Ireland, for instance. Others, yeah, they’re going to be in the USA. And the question then is, how do they get involved in that regulatory framework. And that has been done, but yeah, it is problematic. The enforcement of that is very problematic. Some comp— you know, many US companies do sign up to what’s now called Privacy Shield and give us apparently similar regulations, but you know, it isn’t ideal at all. It would of course be a lot better if if the US did change its, its rules on, on data privacy and personal data. And, you know, there are constantly moves towards that, particularly from Californian state and so on, but whether we ever get there, that’s another question.

Speaker A: Well, that’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because in California, the Californians have now said that they’ve taken their last hearing on this issue to do with developing data protection laws which some say are relatively similar to GDPR.

Speaker E: The European Union is effectively a global rule-setter in this area, and it leveling the standards up is forcing other jurisdictions, including the US, where it’s hardest to get this right and most important to get it right, it’s forcing them to consider similar regimes.

Speaker A: Well, California is very interesting too because that is of course where Silicon Valley is. That’s where all of these big American companies are based. So that’s a very promising sign.

Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, it shows that this matters, and one of the things that matters to companies is consistent regulation and rules that are, you know, roughly similar. So so they don’t have to engineer their systems and processes differently for every jurisdiction. At the same time, they all need everyone to act in the same way. I mean, this is another problem, is companies will follow the market lead, and what regulation does is set baselines so that companies can act more ethically than they might if everything is left to the market.

Speaker A: Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group. You’re listening to Password with Peter Warren on Resonance FM, where we’re wondering whether we can take back control and regain sovereignty over our digital data. After this, you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. Just as in the olden days when bad King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, It’s the wealthy barons—the big tech companies—who call the shots in the 21st century. And the super-rich can choose where to live, irrespective of their nationality. Most choose tax havens, taking their cue from the late billionaire hotel chain owner Leona Helmsley, otherwise known as the Queen of Mean, who famously once said, “We don’t pay taxes.” Only the little people pay taxes. When she died, she left $12 million to her pet dog Trouble and $3 million for the daily cleaning of her private mausoleum from her $8 billion fortune. Privacy is a perk of being rich, and the rich know no country. Hiding behind the tinted windows of a limousine, the walls of a gated mansion, or the secrecy of a numbered Swiss bank account. As we found from the Panama Papers, the riches of the rich flow, as the economist Adam Smith said, to the places where they will make the rich most money. According to Nietzschean disciple Ian Angel, Emeritus Professor of Computing at the London School of Economics, the practices of the rich are about to lead to an age of rage and social discontent from the unemployed and abused masses. He’s the author of the New Barbarian Manifesto, and he predicts true sovereignty will become a plaything of the oligarchs when the rage really starts.

Speaker J: All the rich people in the world, the ones who say, “To hell with you! If I want to spend my money on good works, I will spend it, and I will watch over it and make sure it’s not wasted.” because you simply give it to civil servants who are pensions-in-waiting, and they’re not interested in doing good works. They want to just keep their jobs going. If the super-rich decide to do this, then there is going to be serious problems for people like you and me. And so what we have to do is to make sure our governments make the rich welcome, not treat them as pariahs, as demons. But basically saying, we’ll give you tax breaks to come because you spend money, you employ people, and those people will spend the— will pay the taxes. Because when you actually count the tax that a company pays, you should actually look at the total second-order and third-order tax payments, because everybody they employ pays taxes, and without that company those taxes wouldn’t hit the Treasury. So it’s a naive form of accounting.

Speaker A: But doesn’t that then mean that we’re going to have some big problems? Because if, as you say, the— and as indeed the Bank of England, Oxford University, and a number of other organizations have said— that AI and the way that the economy is going will mean that one-third of all people will not have jobs in the future.

Speaker J: In my new Barbarian Manifesto, which I wrote I wrote back in 2000, or published in 2000, I actually talked about how technology is moving up through the levels of employment. It started off with labor, but it will be going up through the semi-skilled and even the skilled. So for example, I could see huge problems in the legal system where a lot of the low-hanging fruit will be picked off by technology.

Speaker A: So the robots will remove the lawyers?

Speaker J: Yes, but of the low-hanging fruit, which is where the big profits are made, the easy money.

Speaker A: But that does leave one very significant problem, which is how do you pay the people who can’t get work? What do they do?

Speaker J: That is why I talk about the age of rage, because you are going to have Communities that are right-sized, that cope with these problems and these changes, and you have communities that are wrong-sized. Basically, the rich will run away, and they will form their own communities, and they will form their own military because they can afford it. They’ll have their own protection, and they would— they— all of this sort of nastiness that are aimed on companies saying, you know, you’re not paying enough taxes, and all the bile that’s poured on them, they can say, you know what, to hell with you. And of course, this raises the question of where are the markets? And this is highly complicated. So some of the big organizations will fail because the markets that they rely on won’t have any money, so they will collapse.

Speaker A: Can we achieve a digital identity?

Speaker J: Can we create it that will work 99% of the time? Yes. 100% of the time? No. The issue is, are we on the road to serfdom, as von Hayek in his book said, you know? And I’m convinced that the West is doomed because the economic structures were designed for the industrial age. And we have to find a way of transitioning to other alternative economic structures for the new age. And something like India is in a much better position to take advantage because it’s institutionalized poverty. You know, this is sounding really nasty and evil, you know, but that’s just sentimentality. The Indians have a social structure that will allow the rich to prosper. Without spending money on the poor, which will then dissipate. So, you know, the idea of moving wealth among the various sections is a utopian nonsense.

Speaker A: Some people, rich and poor, still dream of utopia and build entities known as intentional communities in the real known world and beyond. Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World in 1492, and on his anniversary, October 12th, 2016, Asgardia was founded by a Russian oligarch, Dr. Igor Agyubeyli, based in Austria and calling himself the head of the space nation. He’s represented Asgardia at the World Economic Forum in Davos and governs it like a monarch. Last week he met the Queen’s cousin, Prince Michael of Kent, at Kensington Palace in London, according to the Space Nation’s website. Nothing unusual about that. They’ve been friends for over 15 years since they got together at the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, and they talked about creating a World Council of Royal Dynasties on Earth. The website points out that As a monarchy, it is essential for Asgardia to establish relations with conventional earthen royal dynasties. As well as being cousin to Elizabeth II, Prince Michael is related to the former Romanov dynasty. He was named after Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, younger brother of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. But the real point here. It’s not dynasties, it’s this data sovereignty. Because Asgardia wants to allow us to put our data on a satellite, to go on satellite and off planet. Though according to Ian Angel, this will really only be an option for the rich. One of the first subjects of Asgardia is Lena de Wynne. She explained to me how the kingdom, which will eventually be located on a satellite in Earth’s orbit, will defend itself.

Speaker G: Defense is a very confusing word when we talk to normal people because unfortunately the situation in the world is such that the moment you talk about any Department of Defense, the Ministry of Defense, It effectively means offense in the modern Earth world. Defense is a natural part, is like more self-security, self-preservation, making sure that your citizens are taken care of and your structures are taken care of. So of course by launching hardware into space with running research activities, we need to guarantee that it’s safe and secure and works up to its expectations. So we will have whatever you call it, I don’t have the title yet, but we’ll have the system by which we will protect first of all our assets, and then of course we will have a system by which citizens can be in touch with the governmental structures which allows them their citizens’ benefits.

Speaker A: It sounds like an enormous project. I mean, just getting the people signed up to it was a big enough endeavor. But now to actually go on to these next stages where you are actually fleshing out a virtual state in space is going to be an amazing exercise. Absolutely.

Speaker G: And I’m still can’t quite get my mind wrapped around it. And I’m in the senior management. Right. It’s so much bigger than all of us. It’s beyond comprehension. We were assuming we will maybe reach 100,000 by Christmas and we reached 140,000. In 48 hours. So we left, we literally, we left all the other projects we worked on. We urgently hired extra people, we passed on responsibilities to the next level of management, and we now are all busy only with Asgardia. And I tell you, I haven’t slept more than 3 hours a night in the last 10 days.

Speaker A: Yeah, it must be very exciting for you. Presumably though, many of those people who have currently signed up, they must have dual citizenship.

Speaker G: As far as Asgard is concerned, we will allow dual citizenship, but then it’s about the country of origin, how it will take the permission to give dual citizenship to their citizens. It’s not up to us. We allow it.

Speaker A: I see. So given the terrible problems that the UK is about to face with Brexit, what is your relationship going to be with the EU? Are you going to be asked to become a member of the EU?

Speaker G: Haven’t thought about it, honestly. Becoming a member of the EU, I believe, originally means being geographically in the European territory. And since our whole point of being geographically outside of Earth’s surface, I don’t believe we qualify to be a member of the EU just by the merit of our territory.

Speaker A: I was only asking that question obviously because being British and currently being a member of the EU, I was wanting to know that if I became a member of Asgardia, would I be able to work in the European single digit a single market?

Speaker G: This is unfortunately very far away. If you ask me personally, I would love to say yes, but we are not there yet. It also would depend how the countries would recognize us in terms of openness of trade and borders and economic exchanges and citizen benefits. Because like now, as a British citizen, you also cannot just go and work in the United States or in China or in Japan.. And it’s reciprocal. So it’s a question of economic agreements between the countries. Maybe by then there will be an agreement whereby citizens do not need to be part of the European Union, but individual countries have agreements about working permits. Because, for example, now you can be a part of Schengen but not be part of European Union, like Switzerland or Norway. But as a Norwegian person, I believe you can work in the European Union.

Speaker A: Do you think that this is basically a protest vote by people?

Speaker G: We have not had any comments to that length. We certainly have had enough comments saying like, yes, please sign me up. The planet is such a mess. I want off it. I did not see— and of course, I do not read every comment posted. There are thousands of them per day. But when I scroll through what’s happening on our Facebook page, I see that there are enough comments and at least as they were at the beginning, saying that the planet is such a mess that I want to reboot my life. And that’s why I was saying earlier that it seems that people are lacking the meaning and the value their life is provided for. We are in the top section of Maslow’s pyramid, everything is provided for and we are grateful for it, but now the meaning is needed. People need to be given a purpose and if they see that themselves having a purpose in building out the new nation, while they understand that of course maybe the real flight will happen to the generation of their children or grandchildren. I think that this is a very interesting sign and it’s of course for us very rewarding to have provided people with this opportunity. We are very grateful for all the trust and support we are getting. You know, like in any community which you start with, you always get criticism and you always get people people who are a little bit like strange and want to go against the proposal and immediately prove you wrong. It’s normal, it’s part of human society. It makes different people to make the world. And we have all those walks of life with us. We have all those people who already have joined and are very vocal. And I also find it very rewarding because it means that what we say resonates with all kinds of people with different backgrounds, different interests, from different country, and it just means that we have caught on something which has a meaning transcending nationalities. And that’s exactly the point— we’re a nation transcending nationalities.

Speaker A: It’s easy to dismiss Asgardians as a weird cult, but Richard Branson and Elon Musk are both working on more straightforwardly commercial space travel projects, and the International Space Station has been up in orbit for 20 years, staffed by astronauts from different nations. It’s about to reach another milestone with the first all-female spacewalk. We have the technology to extend our sovereignty beyond the Earth, and although there is no Planet B, we know we can live in space for extended periods. It takes a further leap of faith to imagine you’re a citizen of a state in time, a collective united by a common artistic and musical aesthetic. There are at least 15,000 passport holders of the NSK state, which, like Asgardia, doesn’t exist as a territory. NSK stands for Noj Slovenič Kunst, New Slovenian Art, and erupted as a protest against German colonialism in the former Yugoslavia. Using ancient Slovenian, Soviet, and Nazi symbols with industrial music, NSK presents the dark side of statehood—repression and genocide—while celebrating a utopian ideal of artists working together across national boundaries and followers contributing their own folk art. Dr. Alexei Monroe is a citizen of NSK UK and has written two books about it.

Speaker H: So in 1980, a group of youth in Tobolia in Slovenia, they are looking to explore this repressed history within Slovenia, and they’re partly inspired by groups in Britain like Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle, who also make use of controversial imagery and motifs and refer to or invoke the Second World War. However, when you transfer these practices to socialist Yugoslavia just following the death of Tito, it has a far more explosive effect. So this group decided to use the name Laibach, which was the name used for Ljubljana, the Slovene capital, under the occupation from 1943 to 1945. After the collapse of Italy, there was a Slovene puppet government working in collaboration with the Nazis, and at that time Ljubljana had already been named as the first hero city of Yugoslavia in recognition of its role in the resistance. However, as Laibach were alluding to, there was also this other history of collaboration that wasn’t discussed. So by using the German language in Slovenia, and paradoxically by using the German language to assert Slovene identity and Slovene culture, the NSKO groups were opening up debate, shattering historical myths, and continuing a paradoxical tradition of strengthening Slovene culture through the use of German. And we can see the way that this has paid off in that the last 15 years or so, increasing numbers of Germans and Austrians are inspired by Laibach and by NSK, and they come to Slovenia wanting to learn the Slovene language and wanting to identify with Slovene culture. And this is historically almost unprecedented, because remember Slovenia was marked for assimilation. It was seen as Germanic, so the fact that the Germans are choosing to identify with Slovene culture is a massive historical reversal which would never have taken place without Ljubac and NSK. Now, it might be assumed that the NSK groups were nationalistic. They were certainly arguing for Slovene cultural independence and maximum autonomy, and once it became clear that the rest of Yugoslavia Yugoslavia, particularly Serbia, Montenegro, under Milošević, would be going in an authoritarian nationalist direction. Most of the Slovene population decided that they wished to secede and to escape from what was coming, and NSK groups certainly played their part in that. Now they faced a choice in 1992 of whether to accept the role of national icons in that sense, and whether to be content with the spiritual and mental frontiers of the new Slovenia. And they created the NSK State in Time precisely in order to reopen up space again, just as they had done in 1980 by exploring all these difficult questions. They decided that that Slovenia wasn’t a sufficient space for them to operate in, and they needed to symbolically create this new space for new connections, new ideas, and also to continue, continue their role of transmitting Slovene culture in the West and beyond. And as I said, that’s been very successful.

Speaker A: The NSK national anthem played by layback. As we have seen, identity in the information age is all about your data. Data sovereignty is the key to that. It’s all about the sanctity of your data and your ability to be able to move it. Data sovereignty may even enable you to stay in the EU if the new data nation nations like Asgardia are allowed to join it. Then its citizens could even avoid the Brexit apocalypse, something that the politicians at the moment do not appear to understand. But then, their grasp on Brexit doesn’t seem too firm either. It would appear that the only person who may be able to bring us to some sort of solid ground in the new shaky age of rage is the one who started all of this in the first place? Sir Tim Berners-Lee, aided perhaps by Professor Ng? Let’s hope so. That’s all from Passport, or should I say Password, a Future Intelligence production for Resonance FM. Blue Buffer is the producer, Jane Wyatt wrote the script, and I’m Peter Worring. Thanks for listening.

Speaker B: Goodbye.

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