Full transcript: Jamie Bartlett on London Real
7:31 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jamie Bartlett, who is the author of The Dark Net, Inside the Digital Underworld. You are the director of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media at the Think Tank Demos, where you head the Violence and Extremism Program, which researches a range of terrorist and extremist groups. To research this book, you immerse yourself in The Dark Net, buying marijuana from the Silk Road, watching the production of Internet porn, and meeting British neo-Nazis.
8:00 Jamie, welcome to London Real. Thanks very much for having me. My pleasure, you know, the more I read about you, the more I like you, you know, you have a kind of a John Ronson, Louis Thoreau way of just, you know, getting into your content. And I think it really, it opens people’s eyes up. So it’s kind of a refreshing, you know, take on things.
8:19 So it’s been nice to see that. That’s what I was going for, actually. You’re one of the first people to spot that. Really? I want, I thought that, I really like Louis Thoreau and John Ronson.
8:29 I love the way they try and immerse themselves in these weird subcultures and sort of understand the people, the protagonists, why they’re doing what they’re doing and see them objectively, not patronizing them, not trying to judge them, but just understand how their lives work. And I just thought there was something that we sort of missed that online. We have never seen anybody doing the same thing with these internet subcultures. And so when I set out writing this book, The Darknet, that was exactly what I had in mind.
8:57 I’m gonna do something like a John Ronson, but I’m gonna do it online. I’m gonna get into all the sort of shocking, hidden, obscured subcultures that we always hear a little bit about and get myself right into them. And John Ronson’s been there in that seat and he’s everything you would expect him to be. And yeah, it’s gonzo journalism, he gets right in there. What I find fascinating about what you do is you take these two-dimensional images we have of the sex worker online, the child pornography consumer, the neo-Nazi, and then you kind of go in and show the real stories behind, what you found, and I want to get into the normalization and how you found that you felt empathy for some of these people, and I want to get into all of it because I think it’s a fascinating side.
9:41 Like you said, it doesn’t get reported. The news says, these people bad, bad, bad, bad, but we never get to meet them, and online, like you said, they’re almost anonymous. That’s the, that was, I suppose, part of the motivation here as well. You know, I’m sick of seeing these two-dimensional characters because every time I see something, a story about some kind of online predator or the neo-Nazi or the drug dealer or whoever, whoever, whoever it is, I just always felt the human element was missing.
10:15 We never really knew who they were or why they did it or what else they did in their lives or or what they looked like, or were they married, where did they live, why did they get into this? But that is a central part of understanding why people do what they do on the internet. So you’re never getting, it’s literally sort of two dimensional because you’re just looking at it on a screen. And so I suppose alongside the sort of the Ronson, the Ronson aim of this book was really to get up close and personal with the people themselves, spend time with them offline, trying to understand what they get, I suppose, really, what they miss in their offline worlds that they find in their online ones.
10:56 Right, and you’re talking about kind of the online personalities of some of these people. And I kind of want to go through the stories, but I saw something that you tweet today and I kind of wanted to address this issue before we get deep into the book. Oh no, what have I said? No, no, it’s, you know, you’re a man in high demand these days and I think it’s because of some recent news that came up over the killing of Lee Rigby last year who was a British off-duty soldier that was hit by a car and then stabbed and hacked to death, but I guess you describe him as Muslim extremists, I guess you would.
11:24 And now it seems there might’ve been a Facebook message passed between the killers and everyone is kind of asking what’s happening, they’re asking you, and you tweeted out, quote, “‘Predicting who of those that post extremism online “‘will act isn’t like finding a needle in a haystack. “‘It’s like finding a specific piece of hay. “‘What’s your take on is Facebook responsible for this? Did MI5 not act? You wrote an article about this a year ago in the Huffington Post.
11:49 I did, well, I did, I did. No, I don’t think Facebook is responsible for this. In the same way that this committee that reported yesterday, this independent committee that was looking at the intelligence failure, I suppose, that led up to the murder of Drummerly Rigby, They found that while there were some mistakes made, MI5 could not reasonably have stopped this murder from taking place. And the reason for that is the way terrorists operate has changed rather a lot in the last couple of years.
12:25 Now, there’s very little planning involved. There’s very little coordination. Think about it. It takes one guy with a knife to go out on the streets and murder someone and say, I’m doing it in the name of religion. That’s an act of terrorism.
12:39 It takes five minutes. You need no planning or preparation whatsoever. And we can’t stop that from happening. As much as I wish we could prevent these things, it is simply not possible. Now, the added difficulty for someone like Facebook is they have millions upon millions of users, many of whom are posting very aggressive, virulent, hate-filled content.
13:04 Of those, a tiny number may go on to do something about it and I’ve spent years trying to understand can we predict from what people are saying online who those people are that might take it a step further and for all my best efforts I’m afraid I just cannot tell you and I don’t think Facebook can tell you and I don’t think MI5 can tell you I don’t think anybody can tell you because human behavior is just so damn unpredictable so I think it’s unreasonable to expect Facebook to be trawling through every post that anybody on its site ever makes, and then trying to pick out those that it thinks are a problem and pass them straight over to the authorities. It’s just not going to work. And you cover this in chapter two, Lone Wolves.
13:50 And yeah, the interesting thing about the Lone Wolf attacker is their trade craft is usually quite basic. It’s very minimal. They’ve maybe read it online or maybe they have nothing and then they act kind of in an independent manner and it’s not a coordinated attack. I think any attack on the US since 9-11 has been Lone Wolf style. Well, you know, and in a sense, that is a mark of how successful the intelligence agencies have been at preventing the big attacks.
14:14 The reason terrorists are now sort of reduced to these smaller, more rudimentary types of operation is because they cannot any longer prepare these big attacks because the intelligence agencies have got so good at stopping them. And so as a result, it’s a slightly strange irony. It’s become harder to stop the smaller attacks, because that is where they see that they have no choice but to do that kind of thing, because people like Michael Adebolajo would prefer to put a bomb on London Underground and murder hundreds of people.
14:54 But he cannot do that. Right, because he couldn’t get the sort of… He wouldn’t be able to prepare it, he would, you know, and so as a result, we’re talking about things that are very simple and easy to do. And it’s in a way remarkable that there’s been so few attacks of this type. Yeah, I agree with that.
15:12 A lot of people don’t want to talk about that, but I do agree with that, especially people kind of on the left. They don’t want to kind of give the credit where it’s due, but it is true. And in the US, they, you know, when there’s anyone’s, this tries to organize or acquire a large quantity of explosive, you know, they usually run into, you know, someone, FBI or CIA or something. Yeah, you know, the intelligence agencies, they’re like a good referee at a football match.
15:32 You don’t hear from them, you don’t see anything, but the match just carries on smoothly and it flows, and then if they make a little mistake, all the attention’s on them. Right. And that’s, I suppose, the way that it should be, but as a result, I think sometimes we sort of forget just how hard their job is and how good they are at it. Right. Yeah, sure, they overstep the mark sometimes.
15:54 But ultimately, to me anyway, and it’s my political worldview that security is the basis from which all our other liberties ultimately flow. So it is pretty damn important, even if yes, internet privacy and all the rest is important to me. I suppose I’m getting older and I’m more conservative than I used to be. And I sort of think I understand how important that is for society. That’s a refreshing point of view.
16:23 I’ve had a lot of whistleblowers in here that would disagree with you, but that’s good. That’s why we had this show. I was wondering if you could tell me about what you’ve seen and what has impressed you or not with the recent use of social media by groups like ISIS. It’s one thing I remember noticing when Al-Qaeda moved into Yemen. They started doing some very interesting things.
16:43 They were producing an English-language monthly magazine that was produced by, I think, an American or ex-American. I forgot the name of it. In Spire? Yeah, in Spire. What a great name like that.
16:52 I can never get a copy of that. Maybe I didn’t go on to tour or something. But it was an amazing, it was like a magazine and they were encouraging people. But ISIS seems to have really taken that to the next level. What do you see when you see their use of social media?
17:07 I’m torn on this question because on the one hand, there’s no doubt that they have worked out pretty quickly how useful social media is as a way of propagating their message. Yeah, they’re very, very smart at using Twitter. They’ve worked out how you get subject matter trending. They’ve built their own apps. They use far more than just Twitter.
17:31 They will use a range of different platforms. They use tall browsers as well. They use open source encryption software. And they do this in quite a coordinated way sometimes, and sometimes in a very clever, decentralized way so that anybody can contribute to the, sort of, jihadist noise on lionry. Now, that’s all rather impressive.
17:58 It’s certainly a step forward for the Islamist movements. Although Al-Qaeda, like you say, they’ve always been looking for ways to exploit modern communications. And actually, this is why I’m torn, because it is often those extremist groups who are quick to pick up on new technology. It’s the far right group, the English Defense League, or the British National Party that are miles ahead of the big political parties at how to exploit Facebook to organise demonstrations, miles ahead of them. I would say that the Labour Party could learn a thing or two from how the British National Party has gamified its social media content to create competition between users about who can share the best content. We’re talking about pretty smart stuff here. Now, the other thing though that sort of that slightly prickles me when I hear it that these guys are these ISIS operatives are social media geniuses they’re like Shoreditch advertising types I’m afraid that is not completely true because what they are doing is actually pretty standard stuff for anybody in their 20s from Western from the Western world and that is who these people are they’re young men they’re young men in their 20s most of them. For goodness sake if they haven’t worked out that to get stuff trending on Twitter you use a popular hashtag like iPhone 6 then on what planet have you been living for goodness sake. So obviously these guys know what they’re doing. They’re men in their 20s how would they not?
19:32 Building an app is pretty simple for these people. What’s surprising is I think the journalists of our time, the government officials of our time, they They have no clue. So they’re looking down at ISIS thinking these people are geniuses, while everybody else in their 20s is thinking, well, they’re just doing what the rest of us are doing. There’s no surprise there. Right.
19:52 They’re almost an ultimate startup, aren’t they? They’re using whatever resources they can on a very low budget, and so they use the media and the social media, whereas these other established brands, they have news channels, they have… Yeah, but they’re doing stuff that a lot of people are doing, you know? They’ve built an app. Wow.
20:10 My goodness. They’ve built an app. Anyone can build an app these days. It’s incredibly simple. Kids are building apps.
20:16 So in a sense, what I’m just… All this is to me is this sort of distance between young people who know what they’re doing with technology. ISIS are no different. And I suppose the older generation looking at them feeling rather terrified that they have seemingly this sort of remarkable talent for modern technology. Okay, now you collected, I think you surveyed 13,000 Facebook supporters of kind of the right wing parties here in Europe, and you just mentioned the BNP here, you know, what have you learned about what I mean, you know, terrorism is just a word, isn’t it? One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, etc. So are these groups similar in what they’re using? I mean, you just kind of mentioned it.
21:00 Well, yeah, I mean, I was looking at the Facebook supporters of different sort of anti-establishment far-right parties and you know I mean in the end with these people I sort of found that for a lot of them they’re just incredibly frustrated with how society’s going they feel rather left behind they feel like the political establishment is utterly out of class with their out of touch with their concerns they don’t represent them in any way they feel terrified that the values of their country, whether it’s like French values, British values, potentially even European values, are being steadily eroded, steadily chipped away by this strange combination of mass immigration, multiculturalism and out-of-touch establishment, which is a sort of weird blend of media and government people, all to the detriment of their culture. And they’re frustrated and they feel like they want to say, they want to speak up, they want to do something about it.
22:09 A lot of them are not raving racists who want to deport everybody. They just, I think, feel that their culture and their community in the last 20 years especially has changed rather dramatically without them ever having had a say over that. And that’s how I see most of the supporters of these parties, sort of disgruntled, frustrated, angry, angry, but Democrats, people that still do believe in politics. Now, they’re slightly different from Uranus Breivik types. You’re like neo-Nazis who are willing to murder people who are white supremacists who want to get rid of people of minority background. And I think the problem is sometimes we push them all together. We make them all into this big one lump, but that’s not fair. And I think in democracies, you need difference.
22:58 You need people to be controversial, you need to be tough enough to accept that people are going to say things that you find offensive and controversial, but you know what democracy is a way of dealing with that, and it’s big enough to deal with that. So in writing these papers, I hoped also a little bit to humanise those people, to understand what they’re really saying, what they’re really frustrated about, and make sure that these people have a right to say what they think. They have a right to express their opinions, and frankly, the more you try and shut them down, the angrier they’re going to get.
23:26 So let’s try and bring them in. Take them seriously. patronize them, listen to what they’ve got to say, debate with them, discuss with them. You met with one of them, I think you called him Paul, was a neo-nazi from Northern England. He was at the radical end of that spectrum, he was really at the radical end of that spectrum. Can you tell me a bit about what you thought you might find and then what you found when you met him and just your impressions there? Yeah it’s a story that I suppose is really like many of those in the book which is I’d formed an impression of this guy based on what had seen of in online. Online Paul really was a virulent neo-Nazi, a sort of one-man propaganda machine who would spend, he later told me, 90% of his time pushing out this sort of white supremacist propaganda, get rid of the immigrants, you know, we haven’t got any space for them anymore and they’re all sneering, violent thugs, whereas white people by contrast are beautiful, intelligent so when I look to what he was posting online and my god does he post a lot I thought this guy is gonna be a pretty terrifying individual and I’m not gonna like him very much at all so I’m waiting and the other spot I communicate with him for a while and he agrees to meet me so are you posing as a neo-nazi I’m posing as myself I’m in myself I mean overall I’m always trying to be myself because I think it’s the fairest way of going about this type of
24:53 Research but he agrees to meet me so I go up north this tiny town I can’t tell you where it is but a small town it could have been one of hundreds up there not very much going on there pretty run down and I’m waiting he’s gonna meet me at the train station and I’m thinking oh Jesus I’m like who’s this guy gonna be and you know what this handsome friendly looking dude walks up to me looks quite trendy looks a bit he’s got a few tattoos he looks pretty cool and he’s like oh you’re right Jamie it’s me Paul I can’t believe you’ve come it’s so nice to meet you and I’m thinking who’s that what who’s this guy and you know immediately I really liked him I just and for all his terrible views which I disagreed with virulently he on a personal level we got on really well I Felt like we could have been mates in a different in a different world and different time. We could have been mates So on a personal level when I stripped away the screen when I saw what he was really like and I could see his face I could see how frustrated he was how few opportunities he had where he was living There was nothing for him to do. There was no jobs for him. He hadn’t had a job since he was 16 And he got sort of warped and sucked into this online world where people listened to him, where he had an identity that meant something, that people would follow him and pay attention to his words.
26:24 The offline pull, no one cared about him and no one was interested. It sounds like my life, by the way. It sounds like a lot of people’s lives in a sense that you find you can recreate an identity that’s a sort of better version of yourself that’s tailored to a particular community and you live up to that because you want to keep that community that watches you happy. You’re playing to the audience and that’s what he did. So offline I really liked him, online he was appalling.
26:56 And you said there was an incident where he had kind of walked by some fellow supporters of his party and he didn’t really want to interact with them offline, even though they were of the same thinking, because then they might know that he was just him offline. That was the moment, I think, more than any other that made me sort of realize what was going on with him. He’s walking down to get a sandwich from a petrol station at three o’clock in the morning, morning after a heavy session of being guess what on the internet. Right. And he goes and gets a sandwich and as he’s going down there he sees three blokes walking past him wearing the English Defence League hoodie and the English Defence League caps chanting English Defence League songs.
27:42 This is the movement that Paul was a member of and he never really saw anyone in his town that was from the English Defence League. But rather than speaking to them he just kept quiet, kept walking got his sandwich went back home and the reason he said was because offline who was he they didn’t know him i bet they knew who he was online i bet they knew who he was because he was notorious but offline he’s just an ordinary guy and he’s quite shy he’s actually quite nervous and shy getting behind the screen however and it’s a different matter altogether so it was no surprise to me when i thought about it that he would prefer to keep those two bits of his life set pro fascinating fascinating you talk about a few other places where you researched you know one of them I’d love to hear your thoughts on which was the Silk Road which has now been constructed and torn down and reconstructed in various different iterations you know you gave a talk recently at Google where you asked the audience who had been on the Silk Road of 20-somethings and one raised their hand I was wondering what you found when you went to this you you know, DarkNet via Tor Browser, Silk Road, and what were your impressions?
28:52 So the Silk Road is one of many markets that are operating on the Tor hidden services using this Tor browser that allows you to browse the internet more or less anonymously and it’s very hard to shut down the site. So it’s a bit of a free for all and there’s all sorts on this Tor hidden service network which is sometimes called the DarkNet. But the most, I think, popular bit of the site is probably the marketplaces. And the Silk Road was one of the biggest, but like I said, there’s many others.
29:22 Now, the amazing thing when you sign into the Silk Road is just the sort of how familiar it all looks. Anyone that’s been onto Amazon or eBay would immediately know what to do. The only difference is, is the products that they’re offering are obviously completely different to what you find there. It’s not just drugs that are for sale on these markets, although that’s the main fare. It’s more or less anything, and actually in April of this year, the most popular item on the Silk Road was fake £20 Tesco vouchers.
29:55 They were being sold for about £8 each. It’s fascinating to see what is actually of value and what isn’t, because the market itself selects. I mean, it exists where there’s demand, right? Right. So this is the key to the Silk Road.
30:06 Now, everybody talks about the Silk Road and goes on about how clever it is because because it does, you know, you use it, tour to get to it, you pay with Bitcoin, which is a pseudonymous cryptocurrency that’s hard to trace and you give your address where the drugs are posted with pretty good privacy encryption keys, so it obscures, so it makes it difficult to decipher where your address is. All that stuff, brilliant, very clever. But the real trick, the real secret of the Silk Road is actually customer service.
30:38 That’s what keeps it together, because what’s happening there is it’s like Amazon in the sense that it is a genuinely functioning marketplace. Hundreds of vendors offering thousands of products. The key is, how do you choose between them? Everyone like on Amazon has a little picture, a little product description, and it has a price, and it has a vendor. It looks maybe like eBay did in 2006.
31:03 Looks like eBay. That sounds about right. Sounds about right. I have been on this other, I said it. But the real secret is that the user reviews.
31:15 So just like on Amazon, people that buy products, probably even more than on Amazon, people that buy products feel obligated to rate the product they have received. They give it a score out of five and they give it a product description. So was it good? Was the purity good? Was the packaging good?
31:33 Was the value for money good? And so on. What this does is create, of course, a functioning marketplace. You’ve got competition and choice. And what happens in a marketplace when you have competition and choice?
31:46 The price starts going down and the quality starts going up. Of course it does. And as a result, the drug dealers on the Silk Road are among the most attentive, most polite people you’ll ever find on the internet, believe it or not. So glad you articulated that Jamie, because it is it’s more than a marketplace. It’s like a community.
32:09 It’s almost like people have left the breadcrumb trail of the dark that they’ve gone through for the people behind them to find to find where to go and to give those reviews and to say look out for this guy or stay away from this guy or it’s that’s right. That’s right. It’s an incredibly interesting community of people who are sort of committed for various reasons to keeping mark these online marketplaces up. For many of them, actually, they see it as more than just about drugs.
32:35 They see it as a sort of digital front on a war for individual freedom. If you saw the open letter from the Dread Pirate Roberts or whoever is that guy, if you see his manifesto that used to be up there, it was about, by doing this, by this market existing, we are making a statement to the world. It’s less about, you can buy some weed here. It’s more about, this is our right. That’s right.
32:56 That’s right. Of course, there are people that are on there because they just want to get a score. the people behind it there’s a definitely they feel like they’re part of a social revolution you know now and they’re pretty in a funny way they’re sort of proving it to be true because the market works very very well I emailed I but I’d browsed a lot of different vendors to try and find someone that would sell me a tiny amount of marijuana because obviously I was worried about you know didn’t want to break the law too seriously right so I’m emailing but you had to get involved I had to do I felt like to write this book honestly I had to actually go through the process of making a purchase yes risky but but important so I’m emailing these these vendors asking them and they’re just unfailingly polite and they’re responsive you know you email them a couple of hours later you get a response dear sir thank you for your inquiry yes we would love to do you know why why don’t you try this one gram of this Afghan Kush. It’s fantastic. I hope we can do business together, you know, get back to me with any questions, best wishes. It’s really like you’re dealing. Well, you’re the customer, you’re the king. They are going to respond to you. And, you know, as a result, probably the most surprising thing I found there was the overall satisfaction scores.
34:18 I managed to pull off the Silk Road, 120,000 reviews that people had left about their products. average score out of five was about 4.9. We’re talking about some very, very satisfied people out there. Is there an Amazon average? It ain’t going to be as high as that, yeah.
34:36 And the thing is, of course, that creates something of a dilemma for people who work in the drugs industry because it makes drug buying far safer, the purity is more predictable, which is really good. A lot of people overdose because they don’t know what they’re actually taking, this actually, the Silk Road provides some kind of consumer-led mechanism that gives you some sort of quality assurance. You take away a lot of the street dealing, which is where a lot of the social costs associated with drugs takes place, but it makes it far easier to get hold of far more drugs. So you’re suddenly faced with this dilemma that actually, in the beginning when I first went on the site, I was sort of appalled and I thought is this is terrible this is awful for society after I’d finished the book I wasn’t quite so sure I read a quote that you said you know ultimately you know that act that access to drugs will tend towards higher levels of use and drug use so you think that might create more misery do you still feel that way well yeah but it’s partly that you know experts in in the drugs field will tell you that how difficult it is to get a drug is the main driver of whether people will take it or not. And so if it’s very easy to get hold of heroin or crack cocaine then more people will get hold of it and frankly there are some pretty bad health and social costs for individuals and all of us associated with high
36:06 Levels of use of particularly those class A drugs. Now the other Another problem of course is that if you create anonymous marketplace, you sort of don’t get to decide what’s bought and sold there. So it isn’t only drugs, it is also, Silk Road does have a few rules attached, but it is also on some of the other sites, it is also weapons, it is also fake identification, it is also hacking services like, you know, would you like to buy my hacking services?
36:37 And for some of those things, I think because that’s less about individual liberty and more about directly doing harm to other people, I’m less comfortable with that. And the problem is once the cat’s out of the bag and you make an anonymous marketplace that functions, how are you going to control it? Anything can be bought and sold. So it just, it keeps getting more complicated the more you think about it. Yeah, it’s an interesting point.
36:59 I had two thoughts on that. We had Howard Marks in here who was the infamous, you know, marijuana smuggler, a book written about a Mr. Nice that he wrote, movie, etc. And he said something really interesting when he was here. He said, Brian, I know people that won’t take drugs because they’re illegal.
37:15 And my co-host at the time said, what are you talking about? And he said, just the fact that they’re illegal will keep a certain percentage of the citizens away from them. Like you said, if you don’t have the crack, you won’t necessarily have, take the crack. So he says there is something there. I’ve also had Professor David Nutt in here and Professor Nutt talks about knowing what you’re getting.
37:32 And when you have these deaths from MDMA overdose, it’s because no one knows what the quality is and no one knows the dose. And so that’s when you get deaths and all these things. So Professor Nutt would be one to say, let’s get it out there, let’s get it regulated, let’s know what you’re buying, and then you’ll actually find out that these drugs are much safer than alcohol and tobacco, and then he goes down that route, so. Well, yeah, and that’s the dilemma, you know?
37:55 And in a sense, I suppose what the Silk Road proved to me more than anything, it was quite an interesting revelation, I think, was that, I mean, it wasn’t necessarily that it gave me a roadmap for how we should deal with illegal narcotics. I could see the benefits of it, of there being a regulated market or even a free market. I could see the risks. What it reminded me of was the power of the market to act in the interest of a consumer. You know, more than anything else, I saw how people who are desperately getting, trying to get hold of drugs on the streets, getting ripped off because it’s a monopoly in a cartel, suddenly the power dynamic changes in the market and the consumer is the person that drives the deal.
38:38 And it sort of renewed my faith in the market as the best way of allocating resources. And I didn’t expect to find that on the Silk Road at all, I can tell you. You’re a goddamn capitalist, Jamie. Well, the Silk Road’s making one of me. That’s an interesting observation.
38:53 One thing we noted is as soon as it gets shut down, something else gets restarted and in multiple iterations it gets restarted. Incredibly innovative places. Innovative because they are on the fringes, Because the FBI is always trying to shut them down, they’re always learning. They’re always figuring out new ways of avoiding detection. They’re becoming more decentralized.
39:11 And as a result, my prediction is they ain’t going anywhere and they’re gonna keep getting bigger. And you know the other thing here? They’re constantly coming up with interesting new ways of reaching out to consumers. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years there’ll be a Silk Road app. Download your app.
39:28 I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years you’ll be able to buy drugs from the online marketplace that will be delivered to your house that night because let’s face it, a lot of people are, how should we put it, impulse buyers and they don’t wanna wait three days for the delivery. Then if they can crack that market, it’s a game changer. And I’ve seen stuff on the Silk Road that I just, it was absolutely remarkable. A couple of months ago, somebody on the Silk Road was selling organic free trade cocaine that they claimed was not sourced from a dodgy Colombian warlord or a bent copper, but was grass of homegrown stuff from a Guatemalan farmer.
40:10 And what’s more, they were promising to reinvest 20% of any profits they made into local education programs in Guatemala. This is what a market can do. I love this stuff. Look out, Ronson, that’s all I have to say. All right, as we continue our journey through the dark web, where do we go, let’s take a left turn and get into the online sex trade or the live pornography, or what did you see of that? I know you were, again, in a room with some girls being naked online. You really immerse yourself, Jamie.
40:42 I did it, but I did it for the readers. I’m sure a few times you said, I’m doing this for the book, when you were about to do things you didn’t want to do. Yeah, that was one of the easier things to do. What happened there? Well, I think I was a little bit naive to be honest, I hadn’t really heard much of this webcamming, this webcamming industry.
41:04 This is where particularly young women perform sexually explicit acts at home on their web cameras to thousands of anonymous viewers who will tip them, who will pay them if they like what they see. Simple concept. But it’s being, I’m estimating about 30,000 or so women are doing this around the world. Okay, around the world. And you just, and with broadband speeds going up, you can literally be anywhere.
41:33 You can be anywhere. And I think the point really is this, that this sector of the adult entertainment industry is the only one that is growing. the only one that is financially viable. It’s a classic story of sort of the decentralization of an industry. So suddenly, to make decent pornography, you used to need a studio like this.
42:03 Maybe even, I don’t know what you do outside of this show, but you need a studio like this. You’ve got to put the bills around here. So it was pretty expensive. Right, and you would need proper cameras and the editing. camera, cameraman, all of that stuff. Now what you need is a decent broadband and a webcam and you can make decent homemade pornography filmed in real time that responds to individuals requests and preferences. And so, as a result, people have spotted there’s a really decent market opportunity here. I can just go straight to market, I can go straight to the consumer And if there’s enough people contributing small amounts of money, I can actually make decent amount for myself.
42:48 So this is how I found Vex. Vex, who is one of the UK’s leading webcam models and who performs a show probably two or three times a week on her webcam from her home to her thousands of viewers who tip her very generously indeed. And she makes more money than I do, working probably one or two days a week doing it. I mean, she’s an incredibly good performer, make no mistake about that. She’s very, very talented.
43:21 She was gracious enough, I was very surprised, but she was gracious enough to allow me to attend in person one of her shows. So it was actually a rather strange experience because I’m sitting there having a coffee with her thinking I’m gonna have to ask her to go to a show, this is gonna be really embarrassing, but I have to ask her. Before I could even ask, she said, oh Jamie, why don’t you come along to one of my shows? And I was like, oh, well, I mean, well, if you insist, yeah, that would be great.
43:49 So six weeks after that, I found myself in this messy bedroom in Leeds in the north of England, sitting there, just as far as I am from you, slightly off camera, with three girls on a bed, ready to perform a three-hour, mammoth, sort of lesbian orgy show to 5,000 people that were watching from home. Three hours. Three long hours. I haven’t been on mine in a while. If I may be, if I may, because that’s quite an important point in that three hours thing.
44:23 If I may be slightly explicit about this. I’m sure your listeners knew as well. This is the place to do it, yeah. You don’t need three hours to sort of relieve yourself you’re watching pornography and that’s why this this show is not just about pornography it’s not just about sex it was a really interesting sort of social entertainment there were jokes they were laughing playing games they knew many of the people that were watching they would communicate with them talk about all sorts of things there’d be low moments there’d be high moments but these people they’d spend they spent the whole three they were there for three hours watching this they were chatting away on their keyboards tapping to each other sending messages to each other and the girls would perform depending on what they asked now at the end of the show a dramatic climax and I mean that in every sense of the word they had earned each of them I think it was about three or four hundred quid each for three hours work okay you know and it was a strange an enlightened experience but they deserved every penny of it and you know in a funny sense and it’s a little bit like the Silk Road it made me it made me sort of think about the nature of pornography itself so a lot of pornography now is absurd ridiculous unrealistic hardcore pornography this is a very different type this is real this is ordinary people in ordinary bedrooms doing ordinary things. Cats wander in and out, there’s chat, there’s
46:00 Things go wrong, the webcam breaks, someone falls over. That is actually what sex is really like and so in a strange way this is a more natural, more meaningful type of pornography for people to watch. And like you said it’s not about the climax because people don’t watch that for three hours or even an hour or even half an hour so there’s people are getting more out of this somehow they enjoy the show that she puts on they I mean I suppose it’s a little bit like a weird mix of a burlesque show pornography a Skype conversation with a girlfriend and reality TV and reality TV right exactly and she’s incredibly creative so creative she’s always trying to come up with ways of keeping the sort of something interesting happening in the show and I interviewed her and some other girls that do this and they all said the same thing. It sounded like teachers at a school saying the hardest thing is how to keep the lesson exciting. And there’s actually a little chat forum for cam girls and the most popular subject apart from how do you fill in your tax return is how do you keep your show interesting.
47:14 So she’s always looking for interesting new ways of getting things different. So at one moment she suddenly turns to the camera and says hi everybody I have a journalist in the room with me today and I’m sitting there shaking my head thinking oh god I will not go we didn’t agree to this and then she looks at me and sort of gives me a cheeky smile and she says and he just told me and I hadn’t told her anything by the way he just told me that if you all tip a a hundred dollars in the next two minutes he’s gonna come and say hello to you all and nobody believed I was there so these guys are all tipping away tip tip tip tip ding ding ding ding within about thirty seconds a hundred dollars has been tipped she comes over grabs hold of me pulls me onto the bed with these three naked women and I’m just sitting at the staring at the screen I was like hello everybody poor guys they were not expecting to see my mug on this show Can we get that footage?
48:14 You know, somebody screen-grubbed it and sent it to me, so I do have it. And if you’re nice, I’ll give it to you and you can post it. So your final takeaway from this business, is it just going to grow, is it going to continue, is it going to get bigger? Well, you know, the continued improvement in internet broadband speed, the inevitable improvement in different quality of camera, of visuals, of 3D stuff, of course it’s going to grow. You’re going to have more immersive experiences, sexual experiences with people based all around the world. We’ve been talking about this for decades, really. People have been going on about this since the early 90s, but I think we’ve started to see it actually happen and we’ve seen how it can be a viable business model. There are people, by the way, that do this because they’re voyeuristic and they just enjoy it. And there are lots of people that do this and earn very little money. Like, dare I say, if I set myself up on these sites and did my show I don’t think I would be quite as successful as Vex but there are a lot of people that do it just for fun they’re not doing it for the money so yeah I think absolutely it’s gonna continue to grow and I think that’s probably a good thing on balance fascinating okay I’m reading your book tomorrow let’s move through our adventure here on the dark web you went into some suicide and bulimia forums I think you saw a snapshot of that can you tell us what what did you see there? Yeah the
49:44 Suicide in the pro-anorexia forums very was very difficult to study actually the hardest subject of all I think so let’s take the pro-anorexia the pro bulimia sites and there’s thousands of these sites sites and forums and blogs they’re run by people that suffer with anorexia which is a very serious eating disorder and there are thousands upon thousands of young women aged between 13 and 17 in particular that visit them every day. And they’re pro anorexia. Pro anorexia. I’m an anorexican proud. I’m anorexican proud and I’m part of a community of people who will support me, help me, encourage me in my efforts of extreme weight loss. Now I’m gonna say one thing about those sites really which Which is, I imagine them to be very, very, it’s sort of evil and full of mean-spirited people that were trying to cause harm to these young girls.
50:42 But that is the precise opposite, and that’s really why the sites are so dangerous. Because they’re very supportive, they’re a very strong community, they will always be there to listen to you, they’re always there to support you, they’ll give you encouragement as you’re trying to lose weight. post pictures to inspire you. But what they’re doing is constantly nudging you imperceptibly towards destructive, sometimes even deadly behaviours. So after a couple of years of girls being on these sites, becoming part of a tight-knit community, where they come to be a nerd to the things they’re seeing and what they’re talking about, they’re They’re eating 500 calories a day, they’re surrounding themselves with images of emaciated bodies that they have come to see as being glamorously skinny, and because they are starving their body of much needed calorific intake, they’re incapable of thinking straight.
51:41 They don’t even realise they’re ill. That’s a factor you think, definitely. That is a huge factor because if you reduced your calorific intake by over half, you You went from 3,000 calories a day, let’s say down to even 1,000 calories a day, for any extended period of time, you’d start acting very irrationally. You’d develop body dysmorphia. People start self-harming.
52:02 You start having sort of obsessional and depressional episodes. And this is what’s happening. So it’s a strange, very dangerous combination of a physical and a mental illness, wrapped into one, but crucially, all tied together by a supporting, loving community. That’s what makes them so serious and so dangerous because people who suffer with this illness need somewhere to go where they will find other people to talk to and at the moment that is the only place for them to go.
52:33 So what we need to do is find better alternatives. We need to find non-judgmental online sites for people with anorexia who can go and be honest but who aren’t going to be encouraged to carry on with this really destructive behaviour. Wow, that’s fascinating, I didn’t even know that existed, so yeah, the web has a funny way of, like you said, supplying, meeting supply with demand. That’s right. And I think one of the reasons they are there is because the National Health Service and others don’t provide anything like this.
53:06 And so they’ve created, there’s a demand there and they’ve filled it. And unless we fill it with something better, they’re going to carry on going there. You must do it. I do it. Everybody listening does it, you’re feeling a little bit unwell, you’ve got a weird symptom, a stranger, especially as you get a bit older, you start getting weird aches and pains in new places, and the first thing you do is start googling your symptoms, and half the time convincing yourself you’ve got a brain aneurysm or a, you know, some blood clot or whatever it is, and then you very quickly get sucked in, and I think you see a little glimpse of it, you get sucked into these little communities where everyone’s talking about this stuff.
53:46 It can be very, very dangerous if you’re not careful. And remember, we’re talking about adolescent girls. We’re talking about 13, 14, 15-year-old girls, and they’re eating 500 calories a day. I think it suddenly makes you see just how warped it is, what they’re seeing and how they see themselves. They’re not thinking like me or you.
54:06 Talk to me about child pornography. It’s an issue that’s been talked about a lot in this country. You happened to meet someone I think you named him, Michael who who consumed it but you learned the history of him what did you learn about the whole industry the habits yeah what was the enlightenment there it’s one of the most difficult but most misunderstood subjects I think and I used Michael as a he’s a good example of actually for most of the people that are convicted of being in possession of child pornography his story is typical and people might not want to hear it and they might not believe it but it is typical of those who are convicted of this crime this is what happened to him he started off watching legal pornography but of teenagers 18 19 younger women now the unfortunate and uncomfortable truth is that teenage pornography is by far the the most popular category of legal pornography. For whatever reason, that is it. It’s the most popular, millions of people watching it and millions of people making it. Now he starts there. He then gets offered, because of his browsing history, he then gets offered pop-up other pornography, which is a little bit shady, a little bit more, how do you say sort of in the grey area and it’s called barely legal or it’s called jail bait pornography. It’s typically girls between 14 and 18. That’s all illegal and that is technically child pornography although for a lot of people it isn’t
55:50 What you’d imagine child pornography to be. Now there’s a huge amount of this stuff this grey area and no one quite knows what to do about it. It’s illegal but it’s hard to prosecute. The age is the difference between a 14 year old an 18 year old is not always obvious. So he then spends a couple of years watching this pornography and it becomes something of a release for him. When he’s stressed, when he’s under pressure, whatever, he goes and watches that type of pornography. Slowly what happens is much like human nature, he starts pushing the taboo. He wants to see a little bit further, a little bit younger. He starts getting a sort of attracted by the taboo aspect of of what he’s seeing.
56:31 So he goes down another age category. And he normalizes as a big theme of your book. He normalizes, because it takes place over a couple of years, he stops sort of seeing what it is that he’s doing is wrong because it’s taken such a gradual process. So before he knows it, it’s 13 and 12-year-olds. And then a little while later, it’s 10 and 9-year-olds.
56:54 And each time, he’s not really searching for it. It just sort of pops up somewhere, or he finds it as a link that he’s linking to something and that’s offered to him as another link. And the truth is, is that some people in the industry call this the three-click theory, and that’s the chapter title, that from a legal porn site to illegal porn, you can go from just three clicks because it all sort of links together. And so that’s what he did. And so by the end, sort of three or four years later, he’s got 3,000 images, indecent images of children on his hard drive.
57:26 And he is convinced that he’s not done anything wrong. And we’re talking about children as young as eight, nine years old. And he is convinced that they’re enjoying it, that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not even illegal. And it’s only when the police come knocking on his door that I think it really dawned on him what had actually happened.
57:46 Now, that is the journey that most people go on. It’s not what you’d imagine it to be. It’s gradual, it’s slow, it’s driven partly by stress and by pressure and by normalization of these images. And there’s no way that he’d have jumped straight in to watching kids under 10, no way. But if you go very slowly towards it, each step doesn’t seem quite as serious.
58:15 And then you justify to yourself that it’s not so bad. And I think especially because you’re not caught straight away, you get away with it for months on end. And so it seems like, wow, if I’m not being caught, it can’t be that bad, can it? So that’s what happened to him. And that’s what happens to a lot of men.
58:31 And I think one of the problems is there is so much of it available and it is not hard to find. And unfortunately, a little bit like the drugs, if the barriers to entry are sufficiently lowered, more and more people like him who ordinarily wouldn’t have looked for this, they wouldn’t have sought it out, will get sucked into this world. Right, and that’s where it becomes dangerous having everything accessible. Kind of like you were saying, having the crack cocaine everywhere.
58:57 Exactly, because for some people, it is going to cause a serious, serious harm. And the more people that consume this stuff, the more images are going to be made, the more kids are going to suffer. So it’s a really difficult subject because it’s close to impossible to entirely remove this content from the internet. The way that the Tor Hidden Services work, like a recycling factory, it’s people can upload illegal images onto these sites that are very hard to shut down and everyone can just upload them a bit like YouTube and then everyone can then download them as well. So then each time a site is knocked offline for whatever reason, thousands of people around the world have all those images on their hard drives and they just re-upload them again. We’ve essentially distributed and decentralised the supply of images and multiplied them so much that in 1990 the NSPCC, the body that is for the protection of children, estimated I think that there were 7,000 indecent images of children in circulation in the UK. A couple of years back the National Crime Agency found one offender with over a million images on on his computer.
1:00:13 It’s just a completely different scale of problem. Now, a million images is strange to me because it sort of suggests that people aren’t collecting it only to watch it. You can’t look at a million images of anything. People collect it. Is that a hoarder?
1:00:30 There are people that collect it because they just like having a big collection. It’s inside the community, and yes, it is a community of people. There is a certain pride to having the largest collection. There’s certain classics that everyone wants to have. And it takes on this sort of the pedophile community, takes on all the traits of any other community of people.
1:00:54 There’s jealousies, there’s rivalries, there’s competition for who has the best material, there’s arguments amongst themselves. And again, that sort of suddenly struck me that even in the sort of darkest depths, there’s very familiar human traits to be found. Is there any takeaway or any conclusion you make from understanding that normalization process? Is there a way that you can say, okay, because we know that now we can do this? You know, I think really in the end, the whole of my book concluded with a similar line, which was each of us now has more power and freedom over the ability to access things, to communicate with people, to download things, to cause harm, to purchase things.
1:01:38 We just have more freedom and power than ever, and ultimately that requires us to be more responsible with it, to be more discerning about what we do, to be more aware of the risks for ourselves, because we’re going to have to take more responsibility ourselves over what we do. And I think part of the reason for writing this book was, you know, people need to be aware of the normalisation of bad things. So I would love it if somebody else who is dabbling in this grey area of quasi-legal jail bait pornography reads that chapter and thinks, you know what, I better stop here because I can see where this could take me.
1:02:19 And that was the purpose of writing my book really, to get people thinking, to get people aware. Right, because when it’s peer to peer that way, when you’re a consumer, you’re also a distributor. So when you’re part of the problem, you exacerbate the problem. It’s not a victimless crime, it’s not a one-off, it can kind of continue to spiral. Recently I was up in Scotland for a week and I found myself not connected, not online.
1:02:43 And I found that normally before I would go to sleep and I would check a Twitter feed or check an online news site, I didn’t have the option and I just realized that much of the time I was using it as a distraction, an addictive distraction. And it was absolutely not necessary and it was value to me being with my own thoughts. And I just really noticed for the first time about how, and I do a lot of things offline like talking to you right now, so I’m maybe even a bit more normal than some people that really live a lot of their lives online.
1:03:14 And I know you made an interesting conclusion at the end about the time that we spend online and offline and I just wondered what your conclusion was from a lot of the research you did. Yeah. Well, funnily enough, I sort of have quite a strict rule with myself now that I try not to look at any internet stuff after nine or ten o’clock at night because it just I’m doing the same I’m just checking it checking it for no reason right it is an addiction and you know you have that have you ever had that feeling in your on your leg where you think it’s like it’s like it’s what it was called phantom phone ringing was that a vibrate you feel like it’s vibrating and there’s nothing there because apparently that that is it’s so hardwired into us to desire affirmation communication with other human beings that will look, we need it. We die without it. And social media sites in particular are brilliant at this because they’ve worked out. That’s our oxygen.
1:04:09 So I concluded a couple of things from all of this, from the whole experience. And one was I really took from it that I guess I’d also built all these people up to be monsters in my head, that they were demons, that they were nasty, they were terrible people, and I guess once I met them in person, and it didn’t matter whether it was internet trolls, home-made, people that make home-made porn, or even dare I say it, the neo-Nazis and the convicted child sex offender, they were far more interesting, far more multifaceted, far more nuanced in their morality than I had anticipated. And I think part of the story there is that any time something is obscure, hidden away under the bed, we make monsters of that.
1:04:59 We will begin to project our own fears onto them. There’s a fascinating, people always talk about the internet disinhibition effect. That because you’re behind a screen, you’re nastier to other people because you’re not accountable for it. But I think the other side of that is you judge other people more harshly when they’re communicating on from a screen as well. And there’s a fascinating quote, lovely quote from George Orwell when he talks about how in the Spanish Civil War, which he went to go and fight with the Communists, that he found himself pointing a gun at a Nazi who was fleeing. And suddenly this Nazi that was fleeing stumbled over his trousers because his trousers were falling down and he was running trying to keep his trousers up at the same time. Quite a comical image. And he said, I couldn’t shoot this man. I had come to Spain to shoot Nazis. This was a man running away trying to hold his trousers up. He’s not a Nazi. He’s a man who’s trying to desperately run while having one hand on his belt. And it suddenly changed. It sort of changed the way that he saw this individual. Not a one dimensional Nazi, but a human being. And that’s the sort of experience that I had. The neo-nazis online, they’re human beings as well, and you learn a lot from going to meet them. And then the second bit, which is the thing that you just mentioned really, I guess I found myself feeling rather depressed after a
1:06:24 Year of this, immersed in all of these subcultures, and I reflected on why that was and, you know, I suppose I imagined it was because I’d surrounded myself with very dark and difficult subjects, but I don’t think that was it. I think what What really was behind my sort of mild sort of malaise that I found myself in was that I’d sacrificed so much of my offline life. I hadn’t been out with friends, I hadn’t been going and spending time with my family, I hadn’t been reading books, I hadn’t been playing sport, whatever, whatever it is that we do.
1:06:59 I’ve been spending all my life, lived through this tiny box, staring at a screen from six inches away until the dark you know the dark hours of the night and that’s such a reductive experience of for a human being and so I think that in the end it was it was it was the cost what was missing out on by being online 24 hours a day that was making me down and that is why I began this rule that I’ve stuck to is trying to stay offline for at least two or three hours every evening before it goes to bed and it works. Part of me wants to laugh that that’s your online diet you know it’s a it’s a it’s not an anorexic diet by any means so tell me about we had an MP resign recently over a tweet or or something like that and we had this real culture of of kind of a shaming culture when someone kind of is at a line and I just wonder what you see this from a social perspective is that is that us you know hating ourselves or or getting together you know for this kind of social media shaming that happens on a really a more and more regular basis. I’m really worried about this I’m really worried about this because I think what’s happening is public figures have realized that they need to be online they need to get into the space they need to debate they want to speak to people they want to hear from people directly and politicians in particular with their duties of being representatives they see that social media is a brilliant way of hearing people and
1:08:30 Talking to people. But what’s happened as a result is this sort of new political tactic of trying to dig up dirt on what people say have said either in the past like trawling back through someone’s Facebook page from five years ago and seeing something silly they said or monitoring every post, every picture, everything we ever put online and then trying to turn it into something that can be used against them. That I suppose in a sense is quite a predictable political strategy. I talked about that six months ago, that it would mark this election, that it would be all about social media dirt digging and frankly it’s infantilizing. It’s infantilizing for the viewers. It’s pathetic it you know I think what’s the real risk here is that people politicians in particular will become terrified of saying what they really think they’ll become terrified of being able to speak their mind online for fear that it will be taken out of context for fear that it will be used against them in a press briefing or it will be blown out of all proportion and what we may end up with is politicians that are even more boring dull and on message than what we have already and I think most of us can agree that is not where we want politics to go. It’s hard to imagine. It’s hard to imagine but there’s nearly always a lower level to which politics can reach if you give it the chance. So what is the future of one’s digital footprint? Is it one that you think in ten years
1:10:14 From now it’s going to be something that no one talks about because everyone’s got a dirty footprint or will it be cleansed so much? It’s going to go one or two ways and I desperately hope that enough people post enough controversial offensive things that everyone will get used to it, that actually we won’t be bothered by dirty footprints because frankly we’ve all got it. And a strange thing is that for internet trolls that part of what they’re trying to to do is that. They’re trying to say nasty things just to make sure everybody I suppose is kept alert. And I hope it goes that way because I think for a democratic society that is a much healthier direction than this sterilised, cleansed social space where everybody is saying exactly what they think they’re supposed to say. That is not what social media should be for. It should be raucous, it should be difficult, it should be offensive sometimes, and I hope and I pray that it remains that way.
1:11:15 Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to, we might get there, but right now we’re not going that way, are we? I once mentioned during one of our shows that Obama had come out with one of his books and talked about his open use of cocaine and marijuana, and I was like, and then once he addressed it, then he moved on, and then one of my guests said, yeah, but there’s no YouTube video of him doing a line, and they’re like, that would make a difference. And I was like, maybe that would make a difference.
1:11:38 Maybe that would make a difference. Well, what might happen is it will make a difference for the first few people that it happens to. And then that will be normal. And then in 10 years after that, they won’t bother with that anymore. So, yeah, it’s gonna happen.
1:11:51 Of course it’s gonna happen. But I think we’re gonna get used to that as well. Especially if the silk road continues to grow. Yeah, I think everyone’s gonna have a footprint in 10 or 20 years that, you know, oh, you don’t have a picture of you smoking weed when you’re 15? why not everyone else does and you know so well your politics is also it’s because politics has also become about being authentic being normal I’m an ordinary person I’ve done the stuff you’ve done right and so actually Obama kind of did well yeah right exactly so and you see a lot of the language that politicians use they’re trying to be like the ordinary man on the street even when they’re not so there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t be the same with what videos are available about them embarrassing pictures of them being really drunk and doing this and doing that stupid stuff posting rubbish that is what all of us do so damn it our politicians should have been able to do that as well right indeed do you think we’re gonna look back at the 2000s and 2010s the way that we look back at say the 1920s in America where you know heroin and cocaine were legal and people were getting addicted or they were smoking in the 60s and doctors were saying choose lucky strike you think we’ll look back at as these like social media dark days when we should have known better not to get these addictions and will now in 20 or 30 or 50 years be these kind of zen individuals that know that online should be taken in small
1:13:10 Measures or is the future something very different? I mean I’m really hesitant about making any predictions because… But this is your field. Well yeah but this is this is people consider that I know something more about it which is why I’m even more hesitant because they might think that I am very confident in my predictions and I’m not. What I would, I suppose, hint at is that I imagine we’ll have some inequalities in society about how we use the internet. So you will have the well-educated, the well-integrated individuals who will be far more sensible and I suppose more far more balanced about the digital footprints and And they’ll work out how to spend their time online effectively and how to make sure they have a good work, life, digital balance.
1:14:02 And there’ll be others who don’t. There’ll be others that will become more addicted. And it could be a new type of inequality in society. Because I think of all the different lessons that you learn about looking back across history about technology, one is that the way that it’s taken up usually results some inequalities between the people that are doing it well and it’s helping them and the people that aren’t and it’s hindering them. And I imagine that is going to be the same for all the social media stuff. Beyond that, I really wouldn’t like to speculate.
1:14:33 Okay. Fair enough. What is next on your plate? What is the big project that’s next or the book or I’ll dare say, what is going to be written on Jamie Bartlett’s obituary as And what did this man do? That’s an absolute, well obituaries, I mean, I’ll probably have a tombstone that’s a digital tombstone which is a revolving and constantly updating story of my life, of my social media data.
1:15:02 I thought of that months ago. Right. Yeah, why not? Why would you? Why wouldn’t you?
1:15:07 Why would you just have a gravestone? Why would you not? History of my life? History of my life? Like, do you want to zoom in?
1:15:12 Touchscreen? Look at what I did there? everything. Why not? As opposed to a typical graveyard it’s like who I can barely read the name I don’t know anything about him I don’t care. I want to go and sit so I want my grandchildren to go to my teams and they’ll be able to remember me rather than just see a tomb so I don’t know what that stuff is gonna be yet and I hope it will be interesting and fulfilling and people will enjoy it and I just want to write stuff that people gets people thinking I don’t care whether they disagree with me and I don’t mind being controversial controversial, but I feel my role in intellectual life is to write stuff that gets people thinking.
1:15:49 That’s all. And if I manage to do that, then I’ll manage more than I ever dreamt of. And if I can get some of that onto my digital, constantly updating gravestone, so much the better. Excellent. Well, maybe we’ll get the next book will be kind of men who stare at goats-ish, you know, or you go down a rabbit hole.
1:16:05 I can’t wait. Jamie, I ask everyone that comes on the show a couple questions at the end. I’m going to ask you. If you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Jamie Bartlett and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? I probably would have, goodness me, I’ve got a, sounds rather self satisfying but I don’t think I’d tell him anything because I’m rather happy with the way things turned out and all the mistakes that I’ve made and I’ve learnt from and I’ve made loads of mistakes But I wouldn’t want to not make those mistakes.
1:16:46 I wouldn’t want to have circumnavigated what was a natural thing for me to do at the time. So I probably wouldn’t say, I’d probably give him a little bit of advice about style, you know, and the boring sort of unnamed stuff about enjoying the moment. But the 20 year old Jamie wouldn’t have listened to that anyway, so what’s the point? So I probably would have just, you know, walked on by, gone to a coffee shop, had a little coffee and then come back here again because I’m rather have a little bit like any of those back-to-the-future things I would not be giving myself a copy of the Almanac right because my life would have gone in some way terribly badly undoubtedly and I’m relatively satisfied that I’m on the level at the moment and I wouldn’t want to risk changing it okay well said the second part of that question is best advice you’ve ever received business personal writing they’re really difficult questions and you know I’ve never been asked questions like this before. I think with writing the best advice I ever received was that writing is a lot more, it’s more about editing than it is writing. So much of the good stuff that you do is not in the writing itself, it’s in when you’ve written words and then you give yourself the time to think about them, change them, play around with them. I think Ernest Hemingway said, always write drunk, but edit sober.
1:18:16 Yeah. And that is a really, really good piece of advice for anyone that’s trying writing out. And just keep writing, writing, writing, there’s no such thing as sort of a bad practice. You just keep going and you learn an awful lot just from the way that you write. Beyond that, again, I don’t want to give any sort of silly, silly and unnecessary and dull pieces of advice.
1:18:41 And that’s what I’m here to talk about, is a book. That was the best piece of advice that I received about writing. They say writing is rewriting. That’s another way of saying that. And then I think it was Mark Twain that once wrote someone a note and said, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.
1:18:57 So again, edit what you write and that takes time. Final part of the question is, to the 20 year old that’s listening to us around the world, could be in Brazil, China, anywhere. Who wants to make a difference? who wants to do something that’s going to affect some change, what do you tell them? What’s a way for them to get active?
1:19:18 I think that what the internet and social media is offering is just a remarkable array of ways for people to change the world. I used to think about changing the world as being something that the big superhero would come along and fix everything. But I realized that each of us can play a very small role in a much bigger change, every purchase we make online, every comment we leave online, every post we write, everything we tweet and retweet, every email we send is also in some sense is a political gesture.
1:19:53 You’re putting things out into the public domain about what you think, what you feel, what you want to happen with your society. Each of those may be minuscule, but each of those, when part of the whole, begin to sort of create the social cultural environment in which big changes happen. So I want people to think that everything they do is in some sense is political. And even if they can’t see the change of what they’re doing directly, it is all creating this much larger sort of messy and complicated environment in which the world does change and I think will change for the better in years ahead.
1:20:33 So I think it’s a terribly exciting time And I think everybody can and must play a role in doing that with every little thing they do. Right, including personal interactions as well. I’m absolutely right. Those don’t get saved forever. I’ve got digital on my mind, but of course, it’s the personal interactions that matter most.
1:20:56 Whatever out of your book that I saw on Amazon is fascinating and fantastic. How do people get a copy? Is Amazon the best way? Or what’s the best? Well, I mean, but you know, I’m a big fan of books, books, local bookstores, independent bookstores.
1:21:10 A lot of those are selling it. All the bigger bookshops are selling it too. It’s currently only available in hard black, which is available in the shops and on most of the online retailers, you can get it direct from Random House as well. E-reader, of course, you can get an e-reader one online and I think it will be coming out in paperback for those who don’t want to spend all their money on the hardback in January. Okay.
1:21:38 Fantastic. I know you’re having plenty of success with it. You’re going around talking about it. I just love the fact that you’re willing to go places other people don’t go. You’re willing to admit you went on the Silk Road.
1:21:46 You went up and watched this online sex event and the web. And then you personalize these stories because I always think to myself, all these bad people in the news. I mean, there are people that are around me every day, you know, is 0.1% of person, every person I meet, the job partner for a consumer, so, you know, these are your uncles and your aunts and your cousins. That’s right. And so it’s all of us.
1:22:08 That’s right. When I get on my bike after this and I cycle back home, I’ll be going past people that have done all of this stuff online, and they’re ordinary people, and they’re not just digital avatars, they’re human beings, and they’re human beings that you will know, And I think that, I suppose, above all, is the message of the book. Yeah. And if you have any sense of community or even collective consciousness, you can argue that a small percentage of you is that person.
1:22:35 And so it’s up to you to help, to make yourself better, to make these interactions better, because we really ultimately have this kind of responsibility for our people as we go forward. And the older I get, the more responsible I feel of leaving something important behind, teaching the younger kids to do things in a better way. So it’s a fascinating way of looking at things. and the internet pushes it right back in our face, doesn’t it? Because it’s a reflection of us, isn’t it?
1:22:58 Yeah, that’s right. And the dark net is a reflection of our dark side. That’s absolutely right. Right, there you go. Jamie, this has been one of my most favorite episodes in this entire year.
1:23:07 Thank you so much for coming. This has just been so much fun. Everyone’s gonna love this show. And yeah, I can’t wait to keep reading your Twitter feed and hearing more about you. So thank you so much.
1:23:16 As we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours and all the best. Thank you very much indeed. All right, take care.
