Rewilding the Internet with Maria Farrell

00:00:07.74
Caitlin
Welcome to The Technology Pill, a podcast that looks at how technology is reshaping our lives every day and exploring the different ways that governments and companies use tech to increase their power. I'm Caitlin and I'm PI's campaigns coordinator. Hi.

Gus
My name is Gus Hosein and I'm the executive director at Privacy International and I am happy to solicit any comments from listeners who want to change Caitlin's job title to something with smaller words.

00:00:31.20
Caitlin
That she can pronounce. Yes. Shorter words. Sorry.

00:00:39.30
Gus
So we're really excited about our guest today. Really excited because she's an old friend of the organization. I've known Maria for going on close to 30 years and yet we've never worked together on something.

00:00:56.09
Gus
And so it's really nice to be able to work with her on this. So just to give you some context, it's it's ah funny because I went to Maria Farrell's website and the way that her bio is there and the tagline there is like one of the best I've ever seen. It says she's a speaker and writer imagining a technological future we actively choose to live in.

00:01:17.36
Gus
And that's kind of neat. That kind of summarizes exactly the reason why wanted her to join us. She's an Irish writer and speaker who who's based in London.

00:01:28.07
Gus
She's navigated the depths of tech policy, but also speaks about possible future and politics and what she calls the duty of hope.

00:01:39.21
Gus
Previously, she's worked at and advised a number of organizations like the World Bank, ICANN, the International Chamber of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industries, and the Law Society.

00:01:52.37
Gus
And we're so grateful she's joining us today. And was actually Caitlin who begged for me to reach out and and see if she'd want to join us because Caitlin's really enjoyed her writing over the years, in particular her most recent one that maybe you could introduce, Caitlin.

00:02:06.49
Caitlin
Yeah, so um Maria's written this incredibly cool article in Noema Mag. Apologies if I'm saying that wrong, but it's called Noema. And it's called We Need to Rewild the Internet. And she'll explain it.

00:02:17.56
Caitlin
I'm not going to get into it. But it's this really fascinating idea for kind of a new way of thinking about the future and and what we do and the kind of systems that we work in.

00:02:28.74
Caitlin
And the ways that we work. I'm making it sound revolutionary because I kind of think it is, and I'm really excited to get to talk to her. So let's just get right ahead and and jump in. Yes, let's invite into the room Maria Farrell.

00:02:54.43
Gus
As a ex-academic, I have to say, i love when frameworks or lenses can be given to people to give them a different way of looking at the world. And somehow you did that in a relatively short piece and arguably even with the great title alone.

00:03:12.99
Caitlin
Speaking of which. Maria, what is rewilding the internet? Do you want to start with that?

Maria
Yeah - well, let's do that. Well, so rewilding the internet, some people think of it as a metaphor, I think of it as a system.

00:03:23.93
Maria
It is an idea that I came up with with Robin Berjon, who is an incredible public interest technologist. He used to be VP of data governance for the New York Times. So his job there was trying to figure out like, how do we, yeah, how do we keep media alive while interacting with the, you know, the ad click universe of digital advertising?

00:03:42.34
Maria
And now he is doing Free Our Feeds, which is basically about algorithmic plurality for social media. And also he is doing um public interest social media protocols.

00:03:53.83
Maria
So that was kind of what I was in Norway recently talking to NORAD, which is the um Norwegian Aid and Development Agency there. and looking at doing some support for digital public goods.

00:04:05.32
Maria
So, yeah, so so all to say, like, rewilding the internet is an idea where we worked on it together. We produced this article for Noema magazine in New York, and now I'm doing the writing side of it, and Robin's doing the actual building side of it.

00:04:19.80
Maria
So that's kind of the workflow answer. The actual answer of what is rewilding the internet is... I suppose it just starts with the insight that the internet, and all the way from the you know the visible social media and application layers down through the the protocol, the network connectivity layers, you know all the way down to the subsea cables on the bottom of the the oceans, and and and indeed way back up to the the satellites float floating above us owned 90% by one really appallingly fascist guy.

00:04:47.62
Maria
And that basically that this is not what those guys often call it. They often call it an ecosystem, which just, you know, offends me to my core. um It's more like an agricultural plantation, and you know, in that it's monocultural, it's extremely intensively extractive.

00:05:07.18
Maria
And you know it tends to have incredibly hierarchical relations, power relations, both with the people who work for those platforms and and infrastructure, and also obviously us as the users.

00:05:17.95
Maria
And so these are not ecosystems, they are plantations. And that's fine. That's a good critique. That's like, you'll get an article out of that. Yay, good for you...you're...you...you launched a metaphor. But then the idea of rewilding is, for us as technologists, and I use that in the broad sense because my tech skills are not great.

00:05:34.91
Maria
But, you know, for us in technology and public interest technology basically says, look, we have this, you know, planetary size problem of concentration and consolidation and the strong lean in to fascism of that kind of control of networks.

00:05:51.13
Maria
But guess what? and There are these people over here. They're called ecologists. They already know how to regenerate really captured habitats, you know, really unwell,

00:06:02.21
Maria
and non-biodiverse habitats and make them into actual functional habitats again. And they've got a bunch of skills, they've got a bunch of science, they have you know a way of kind of having the human and institutional networks, both of the science and the people who are able to do this.

00:06:19.40
Maria
They also have like a bunch of people running around you know releasing otters and badgers. and all sorts of stuff into the wilds of Dorset and Devon and where have you up in Scotland. But I suppose it's basically all to say there are these people over here, they've got some wisdom, they've got some practice, and also they have some emotional backbone and resilience in calling this thing that they're doing a crisis discipline and kind of turning the ship around and saying, you know, it's not just enough to be studying conservation or to be studying this particular charismatic species.

00:06:50.24
Maria
We are studying systems, but we're also now looking at: How do we fix this? Or more, how do we make room for this thing to fix itself? So, yeah, that's internet rewilding is basically saying, let's apply some of that, that knowledge, wisdom, practice and organisation from ecology and bring it over to us in tech and say, yeah, you know, we can help systems to regenerate and we can, guess, just also...

00:07:15.23
Maria
understand that you know technology and and the internet and the networks all the way up and down it are not just kind of tools, they're not just companies or business models, they're places where we live and work and play and you know become the people we want to be, build the networks we want to be.

00:07:32.06
Maria
And so they're habitats. And, you know, I think as I've kind of gone around ah bit of Europe speaking about it over the last months, like we have a different set of feelings about habitats than we do about companies, so you know, and habitats basically represent to us home.

00:07:48.49
Maria
And there is so much more radically that we will do and urgently to protect and defend our homes and to allow them to be homes for us. You know, a home is in the ideal sense. I know it's not been for everybody growing up, but for in the ideal, home is a place where you can flourish and also where you can kind of go and be your smaller or more embarrassing self.

00:08:11.35
Maria
And a home is a place that allows you to launch yourself out of the world and then come back in You know, so i just feel that and rewilding the internet is... not just a metaphor, it's a system because it gives us access to so much more in terms of like active hope, you know, the agency of hope. Hope is as a muscle in something that we do.

00:08:31.90
Maria
And so, and also honestly, and we can get into this in a bit, but so many more cool ideas that we can kind of use to defamiliarize the internet and tech right now and go, yeah: Not just like, this is awful and it's terrible and I hate it, but like, ah this is a system that's not working in this very specific way.

00:08:49.89
Maria
And here are interventions that people can make.

Gus
So just before it sounds like I'm talking over you and presenting ideas at you, let me just say I am such a fanboy. I have read everything that you've written in the last year and I've watched some of your presentations. And so anything I'm going to say is me just saying what I loved about some of the things that you've said.

00:09:09.59
Gus
So it's not me trying to contribute new ideas, but... just on what you said right there, like as somebody who in the 1990s was fighting for internet freedom and free speech on the internet and stuff like that, it's so hard to reconcile that with what to fight for now when it comes to those issues.

00:09:26.94
Gus
And it what you said completely fills that gap for me, which was, At that time, so much more was possible. And then it all collapsed into this very specific environment within which we work, this ecosystem built by these tech bros within which we work. And your critique of the ecosystem and what you call the monoculture around it, I think is fantastic.

00:09:51.09
Gus
And it's you're right, it's not just a metaphor, but even as you're speaking, to me, it also sounds like a destination that you're trying to describe. And it's a destination where you're being honest with people about how it might not be pretty and sanitized.

00:10:07.38
Gus
ah In some of your talks, you talk about how there's diversity, with that diversity comes strength and resilience, with that complexity can be good and that messiness is beautiful.

00:10:17.91
Gus
And these are like these are challenging ideas. You know, as as as a parent, you want an antiseptic Internet experience almost. You want you want to keep out all the bad. And so, you you know, it's just yeah, it's very challenging what you're proposing as much as it is full of hope.

00:10:34.70
Maria
Yeah. It's funny. In the first year or two that, you know, Robin and I were kind of talking about and developing this idea. One of the the little bits of pushback we would get from the people that we kind of chatted to about it was, you know, wildness. Like, wildness is not something that people want on the internet. And, you know, you you will have heard policymakers over the last 20 years talking about the internet's a wild west, and that's and that's a bad thing.

00:10:59.11
Maria
And, you know, and i think for all of the kind of the untrammeled, liberatory possibility that the internet, and specifically the web, was, I think what has actually happened, it has been, you know, captured and narrowed down into some very, very narrow and really specific channels. And, you know, aside from the idea of wildness and and how problematic that concept is for some people, and I and i get that, but but I do think that the first thing we can do is just break this monoculture of the business model.

00:11:29.06
Maria
Because, you know, the the alternative everybody's on Facebook and everybody's on TikTok and WhatsApp, is not just, oh, it's going to be a dreadful place where nobody knows what's happening and you don't know what your kids are doing. It's more like, no, it's like a bunch of different business models where we're not all tend in like cattle into a you know one of these massive feedlots or chickens in a battery farm where you see this just unnatural behaviors of like chickens pecking each other to death.

00:11:59.73
Maria
Like they don't do that when they're rootling around in the garden outside, you know, but they do do that when you lock them in away from sunlight, away from space. They literally peck each other to death. and And, you know, frankly, some of them would rather die than be in the conditions they're in or piggeries the same. And one, this should probably make us be a lot more concerned about where our food comes from. i know I'm definitely on that journey myself.

00:12:19.61
Maria
But two, i just think ah what people perceive as the wildness of the internet is really specific to the concentrated, inhumane conditions of the the plantation web.

00:12:33.58
Maria
And that's kind of where the wildness comes from. So, yeah your teenage son is being radicalised into radical misogyny because he is getting all of this stuff blasted at him because it increases engagement.

00:12:45.53
Maria
And we all, we know this, but I think kind of think we have to we can't stop hammering at home because it's happening to kids every day. You know, I've got members of my extended family who sat crying in their GP's office when they were getting their COVID vaccination because they were convinced it was going to turn their kids sterile.

00:13:03.25
Maria
Thank you, Facebook, for that. You know, this is the, like the wildness of the internet, and what we perceive, I guess, as the wildness of the internet is actually very specific and damaging and really horrific to experience behaviours and conditions that are set by, you know, four companies, four or five companies in the world that are the opposite of wildness.

00:13:25.26
Maria
So, yeah. and and And we can talk about, you know, diversity and complexity as well in addition to that. But like, yeah, the wild internet is going to feel a lot less wild in terms of crazy making than the current internet does.

00:13:37.77
Caitlin
How much of rewilding or like how much of it is a system and how much is... it like a path towards a specific goal because I think pulling apart or trying to understand it conceptually it feels more like it's a system of kind of governance and understanding which doesn't really prescribe a specific goal it's more about creating opportunity for possibility without necessarily saying what that possibility should look like. In the Noema article you talk a bit about kind of not going back necessarily, not using like a purity test of what the old internet looked like as the ideal.

00:14:17.06
Caitlin
And I wondered like how much of it is system versus goal and how much is there a goal of like what is valuable kind of in the internet that rewilding seeks to preserve or like create?

00:14:28.18
Caitlin
Does that make sense?

Maria
Yeah, it totally does. would say it's both in the sense that one is, I think, a rewilded internet is one that is techno diverse, you know, has different types of technologies, but specifically, you know, different business models that allows for different kinds of relationship.

00:14:44.68
Maria
So, for example, that the present day internet and web specifically really kind of smushed down what were a lot of very complex and collaborative, cooperative and different kinds of relationships in terms of how we deliver the internet into just one very, very simple one, which is predation.

00:15:00.74
Maria
You know and an ecosystem cannot have just one kind of relation between all the complex elements in it. It's also, you know, so you've got that and then you've got the both the diversity and complexity, the interdependence. I think I would say that these are features of how healthy or how yeah how how functional ecosystems behave.

00:15:21.19
Maria
And so you've got kind of a set of, I suppose, principled values or ways to describe what it is that do not prescribe what it will be. But at the same time, this is also a political movement.

00:15:32.08
Maria
And, you know, we're not going to get there to a multiplicity and plurality of theirs. But unless we kind of have some collective sense of, well, how is it going feel? Like, you know, how will I feel when I'm looking, using this? How will it look?

00:15:44.46
Maria
How do I describe it to, you know, to my to my siblings, to the other people that I want to get off WhatsApp or whatever it is? And so I think it's So part of part of, I think, the project of rewilding is also, certainly for me, a lot of it is pulling up, here are examples of people who are doing this already.

00:16:02.08
Maria
And that's the incredible fun part of this last year has been going around and meeting different people, talking about the rewilding. Somebody will come up afterwards and say, yeah, we're a sex worker collective in Sydney, Australia, and here is what we're doing to build a social, sort of a social media space for us that is both secure and open and kind of toggles between the both because, you know, we need to to be able to exchange information about bad dates, about bad, you know, scary people, but we also want to be able to to run our business.

00:16:32.10
Maria
So we kind of, different people using tools to develop their own versions of um what is a safe kind of social internet for me. so I don't necessarily always lead with a sex worker example because, you know, not everyone is is, I guess, embraces that in that sense. But it's just so many people are out there already doing this stuff, you know. And so that's so it's it's a bit of a bit of a mix, I guess, of both.

00:16:56.47
Maria
How do we get there? How will it look and feel when we get there? But also the plurality of theirs when we're there.

Caitlin
I think it's cool to talk about how it feels, like how it feels to use it versus how it feels now.

00:17:08.57
Caitlin
And that's maybe something we don't do so much because we think so much about like, this is how the data moves and this is how the data should move. But we'd miss that like, yeah, but the way that it feels now sucks. And actually you wrote an article called This Is Your Phone on Feminism, which I think really talks about like that relationship of how it feels like to use a phone.

00:17:26.68
Caitlin
yeah Do you want to explain the central metaphor of that article a bit?

Maria
Thanks, Caitlin. Basically, it came from, i was giving a talk in Austria. yeah This was post-Trump. so This was post-2016, literally the day that Trump got elected first time around.

00:17:40.71
Maria
I walked out of my therapist's office and got my smartphone. I literally i took the SIM out of it and I put the phone in the bin. LAUGHTER So it was just, I cannot be having social media on this device anymore. And I just, I don't like it. I don't trust it. It doesn't make me feel good.

00:17:54.92
Maria
I'm never happy after I've used it, all of that. So anyway, so we're kind of, at this talk that I gave a couple of years after that, I basically held up my then dumb phone, but just said like, okay, so who here in this audience are likes or even loves their smartphone and what it does for them.

00:18:15.16
Maria
And, you know, 98% of the people just put their hand up and like, yeah, I like our, ah to be fair, I actually even love this thing. um It's such an intimate device I carry around all the time. It does, you know, it's my interface with the world.

00:18:28.04
Maria
And then I said, okay, so could you put your hand up if you trust this device? And there was one guy, one lone guy at the back, and that had his hand up.

00:18:39.98
Maria
And after we'd finished kind of giggling about that, i just said, like, you know, if you love someone or something and you don't trust them and you shouldn't trust them, that is kind of the basis of potentially an abusive relationship. Like that is that kind of really that emotional toggle between love and distrust, love and fear, love and not knowing the, not being sure of the ground that you stand on.

00:19:03.43
Maria
you know, that I think is fundamental to our relationships with, to be honest, with social media and most of these companies. So I guess the article came out of that and it wasn't trying to trivialise intimate partner violence and abuse, but more to say, look, one, law without trust is is something you need to like take a very careful look at and see, like, what's going on here?

00:19:26.43
Maria
And two, look at the the kind of the methods, the the playbook really of how these social media companies work so a lot of it is very very similar to an abuser's playbook so you know they love bomb you at the very very beginning they're going to give you everything and as Cory Doctorow was really you know showed so effectively with his concept of enshittification.

00:19:50.56
Maria
They start with the love bombing and then they start, you know, pulling away the stuff that you like. And bit by bit, the service becomes so rubbish that you're like, why am I still on here?

00:20:01.37
Maria
I don't want to really be on here, but I'm still on here. The other thing that they do is they, of course, um isolate you from family and friends. So, you know, however many times you tell Instagram that you want to follow these people and see this content, it is going to just be blasting stuff into your feed that you didn't ask for, that you don't want.

00:20:19.32
Maria
You know, ah recently, Marie Le Conte, the brilliant journalist, political journalist in the UK, she told this story online of she's on Instagram and she got a ah congratulatory message from Instagram to her saying, Marie, this is amazing.

00:20:33.56
Maria
This, um some content you put up last week, it got more than 50% engagement from your family and friends. We just want to celebrate that and really encourage you to just keep on doing what you're doing, you know?

00:20:44.08
Maria
You just, you just keep on doing that, Marie, and you'll get over 50% of the people who have strenuously opted in to see what you post are going to see it because we decided that that would happen.

00:20:55.56
Maria
So again, it's that instrumental isolating of people from their real life connections. you know and And you could sort of see it in the sense that maybe 10 or 15 years ago, you could organize to some extent, overblown by the Arab Spring, using some of what social media's affordances were.

00:21:14.68
Maria
My God, you could not do that now. You know, you can just about get people together for a riot or to burn some stuff down. But you cannot build a movement on it because it is constantly working proactively to disrupt your meaningful relationships and meaningful social ties, both strong and weak.

00:21:30.03
Maria
So you've got that. you've also so you've got the love bombing. You've got the isolating. You've also got... they're making it hard for you to leave, you know. And this is, again, where interoperability for us as tech people comes in.

00:21:42.69
Maria
Interoperability is, and data portability, are fundamental concepts that would allow you to use, let's say, social media the way we use email. You know, so i can send an email from ProtonMail or from Gmail, and it will go to whoever just because it uses the, you know,

00:22:01.12
Maria
At some basic level of remove, it uses the single mail transfer protocol, the SMTP protocol, and a bunch of other webby stuff on top of that. But and it will get there, you know, or if you send a fax.

00:22:13.09
Maria
God, back in the days of people sending faxes or you make a phone call, somebody on a different network will get your phone phone call. There are some gnarly technical and social issues to work out, but fundamentally, social media can and should work like that.

00:22:27.57
Maria
But it doesn't. And so you see the, you know, just... strong resistance of tech platforms from allowing you to leave. So it's basically the equivalent of, you know, taking your car keys so you can't get away.

00:22:40.74
Maria
So we've got all of that kind of that this kind of creeps charter of how these platforms work is very similar to how abusive relationships work. But Yeah, when I was in Oslo recently, they they asked me to give a talk there about public interest social media and what it would look and feel like. And they kind of specifically said, when I go back and give a talk, kind of based on, this is your phone on social media, this is your phone on on feminism.

00:23:06.61
Maria
And then I kind of and rounded off the talk with really, I kind of, it went deep poetry. I'm not going to lie because you sort of want to like, the feeling of how it will be to trust your phone is a bit like the feeling of that you may have seen on the face or that people may have experienced themselves of someone who got out of it bad, bad relationship, you know, and it's like the look on their face, like the day they got the keys to the new apartment or got the kids back into school or, you know, were able to drive into town to like get shopping or whatever, just able to do really basic, simple, but like personally empowering and enabling things that you could not do for a long time and that you felt bad and you were, you were disempowered. You were, you know, what's that word?

00:23:51.16
Maria
There's a phrase for how we're kind of just kind of de-skilled in a way, made feel that kind of learned dependency. And part of the the the looking and the feeling of how it will be to trust your phone is like, oh, that would feel amazing. Like, what would it be if I thought my phone wasn't getting between me and my friends or social media?

00:24:10.38
Maria
You know, it wasn't getting between me and the life's work I want to do. Like, it wasn't a a distraction engine that is designed to to to hack the you know the weaknesses of the human brain in terms of all of that. So anyway, that's a really long answer. And just to say, like I think both the systems of thinking of what this looks like, but also the systems of feeling When we kind of unleash those emotions of what it will look and feel like when we do have trustworthy, kind of life-enhancing technology affordances and tools, it's it kind of makes you kind of go, number one, I want this, but number two, okay, who else can I find and reach out to and connect to that also wants this?

00:24:51.12
Maria
You know, and I think my job as a writer is to just try and like provide some of that language and metaphor and structure of feeling that then allows people to to then build political and collective action movements on top of.

**music**

00:25:13.85
Gus
Do you think that maybe, it's not that it's too late, but it's kind of over in the sense that the web is a concept that's arguably pretty much done in that Google was the application that made the web possible.

00:25:31.92
Gus
That is, you would search through Google and you would find these disparate websites out in the in the wilderness and they would become part of your life. And now, Google search is being reduced to AI and AI summaries where people, when they want to search for something, Google is going to tell you the answer.

00:25:52.09
Gus
And the websites are going, as we've seen with media, they're dying ah slow death. Is there, apart from telling people to surf the web more, is it over for rewilding the web?

00:26:05.82
Gus
And equally with social media, when you see even the social media companies get obsessed with AI to the point where it's it's almost like it's a different direction.

00:26:17.63
Gus
I don't think Mark Zuckerberg cares much about Facebook. I think it's an income generator for him, but he wants to own the future and he's imagining a different future where it's AI enabled, AI driven.

00:26:29.43
Gus
And your experience is going to be through that lens of the AI bots, chat bots or or or assistants or agents. And so like is rewilding a bit of a, i know it's so it's not conservation, but is it is it a picture of an alternative internet for what it was up until now?

00:26:48.83
Gus
Or do you think it's generative enough an idea that we can imagine a complete, imagine, feel and smell a different future, even with this AI hovering over it?

Maria
Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure what the future is for the web.

00:27:03.34
Maria
I mean, I know the future that the tech companies have in mind for it, which is basically it goes away from being something that has you know words and images and dreams and connections that are made by people for people and becomes instead of a many-to-many connection tool, it becomes ah every individual interacting directly with the tech company, essentially.

00:27:27.58
Maria
Like you say, you know the the content gets scraped. Increasingly, it degenerates. You disintermediate the relationships between the people who create Content.

00:27:38.81
Maria
We all hate that term. But anyway, you disintermediate the relationships between people who create things and getting money for things. So you kind of get this kind of crappy, you know as as Ted Chiang put it, this lossy JPEG of the web, but that gets increasingly poor in quality.

00:27:55.60
Maria
But it doesn't matter because part of their business model is really, you know it doesn't matter if we we fire all the people because the AI can do a really crappy job. The quality of the job does not matter.

00:28:06.33
Maria
And so that is their, and then their vision of the future is just all of us kind of in a very atomized sense, interacting not with other people using the platform as the the the means, but just interacting directly with the chatbot, directly with the AI slop, directly with the company generated third generation crappiness content.

00:28:24.85
Maria
And it's, in some respect, it's hard to see how you can go back from that once they have taken over, once they have enclosed the entire thing. And one of the ways that people are responding to it is to kind of to withdraw from the open web, you know, be it writers. I mean, honestly, i put a couple of days ago, I put out the first newsletter that I've done in a year because I've just stopped wanting to write on the web.

00:28:47.82
Maria
And it's not like even a conscious policy decision I've made, but I just I feel crappy about it. I know my stuff is getting ripped off. as a writer, I just don't feel good. like it's it kind of creates almost like a a barrier I feel in my belly. you know this is just This is wrong.

00:29:02.80
Maria
I don't like it. So how do we come back from that? Well, a lot of people are, you know as you know, kind of moving into like discords or, God love them, telegram groups. um of her um you know are are like you know You can see Signal kind of going down the road of being more a a space than a ah messaging platform. And Kind of almost like weird little microclimates, I guess, microspaces.

00:29:24.71
Maria
And I think it's a totally natural reaction. I feel it myself. And at the same time, I think it has been a mistake to say that we just have, you know, three or four big spaces for the world. You know, we're all herded in.

00:29:36.88
Maria
so I don't know exactly what the shape is going to be of the web in particular as we're going forward, because the need and the drive to to write, to share, to photograph, to make art, to connect to people, that doesn't go away.

00:29:54.21
Maria
And I do wonder, are these big companies, because of the amount of capital they've sunk into AI, you know are they sort of throwing their own business model out because they're so kind of, I don't know, delusional about what they're doing? I'm not sure is the honest answer on it.

00:30:09.85
Maria
you know And I'm not a Pollyanna about this by any means, but I do know that we always do find ways to to connect to other people. But what the companies are doing, which is structurally determinative,

00:30:22.57
Maria
And an existential for art and for creation and for connection is they're taking away people's ability to make a living while doing it. So I'm just really not sure what's going to happen is the true honest a answer. I mean, how do you how do you guys see that one going?

00:30:36.57
Caitlin
I mean, as Gus was saying with Google, isn't that some of that, I think, is a certain level of learned dependency where people like Google has some crazy market sharing searches, still like 80, 90% globally.

00:30:50.19
Caitlin
And so the only way to get any growth in search is just to raise a whole... I was reading something Corey posted on weirdly Tumblr, which is one of the few social media platforms I'm still on. And he was saying it's basically to raise a whole new generation of people who only use Google search, which cough, cough, Google classrooms.

00:31:07.62
Caitlin
um but like But some of that is learned... dependency, there are other search platforms, there are other ways of navigating the internet, but they're hard to imagine because, you know, since I was little, like Google is the beginning of the internet. It's the gateway you pass through.

00:31:23.86
Caitlin
And I'm learning now how to move away from that. And like Instagram, I'm only on Instagram now because my goddaughter's parents have set them up a private Instagram that I follow for pictures of my goddaughter. I follow other people, but that's literally only because unless I pick people to follow, it's just, here's one picture of your goddaughter and then there's slop that Instagram thinks I might like and that's it. yeah And I recently, it's so stupid, but because I've grown up, like the the way that you do social connection, if you're not hanging out with someone all the time at school, it's like, you know, it's Facebook, it's Instagram, it's WhatsApp.

00:31:55.29
Caitlin
And literally recently, me and my friend have been like, actually, let's have a phone call. so That's just not something we've ever really done. And it turns out that that all the people for decades who've been phoning each other and having conversations, it's such a big difference compared to thinking you know what's going on in someone's life because you follow them on Instagram.

00:32:12.32
Caitlin
And it's really basic, simple things that like just don't feel like they should be a leap to imagine or to start doing, but they are a leap to imagine and they are a leap to start doing. And I think part of what I like about rewilding is it doesn't require you to know what the outcome looks like, it requires you to value certain things and to value wildness and to value options and possibility outside of that monoculture. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about that you talk about in the article, actually in both of them, is it attentional labour.

00:32:45.41
Caitlin
And I think that's where, like it it drives me crazy. It's crazy to me how much stuff is just driven by advertising and how much stuff is justified by advertising and how much making advertising more efficient is the basis of our entire online existence.

00:33:00.45
Caitlin
yeah And it's also where so much of our choice is important because the only way these companies make money or work is on the basis of advertising and on the basis of what the stock market is willing to give them or value them as.

00:33:16.54
Caitlin
And so my choice of Google or not Google or, you know, Tumblr or Instagram or, you know, like following which sub stacks or like whatever it is, feels really tiny.

00:33:30.77
Caitlin
And it feels like you're being pushed towards, you know, certain things. That's where all your friends are, whatever. But it's actually much bigger potentially than it feels like it is because so much is ad powered. And like the more people engage in other consumption mechanisms or like move away from that and disempower advertising as the central organizing model of our like online universe.

00:33:56.93
Caitlin
I think it is valuable. And so you know choosing to spend money on people and things and services that are valuable rather than allowing yourself to kind of get used to or rely on or believe that the only way to engage with stuff is the freemium model of advertising.

00:34:17.78
Caitlin
I think is one of those leaps of imagination that is central to what comes next. like yeah It's what we value that kind of drives like the world. Does that make sense?

00:34:28.34
Maria
Yeah, absolutely. first thing you me you remind me to note is that we have a lot to learn from various civil and human rights movements um over the decades. And one of the key lessons that they often show is that human rights and rights generally are additive.

00:34:45.67
Maria
So, you know, you you get a bit more freedom of expression over here. It means you might have a bit more access to education over there and a bit more, oh well, let's do voting rights over here. And every single one of them is a is kind of something that helps, you know, is generative and additive in terms of all of the other ones.

00:35:02.46
Maria
and And of course, as movements, you know, movements are designed to kind of keep a ratchet up. And so every time that we kind of go, yeah, actually, you know, maybe this was an email or maybe this was a walk, you know, are or coffee or, or ah you know, maybe I will revive my Tumblr or, you know, me or like, sort it okay, it's been a year. I'm a bit mortified. I'll send out my newsletter again.

00:35:26.30
Maria
Everything that we do, I think, just does kind of retrain us and reskill us and, you know, keep us having that more confidence. And it has been a time where, you know, people have felt powerless.

00:35:37.23
Maria
And so I think, you know, just an an individual behaviour level that works. But then the more also, it's this is not you know it's not like we're going to solve the climate crisis by drinking, you know, abandoning our use of plastic straws.

00:35:49.94
Maria
So these are also structural. so like And like the American competition authorities were asleep. at the wheel for 20 years and allowed three or four companies to become massive national and then global monopolies.

00:36:03.53
Maria
Because, you know, reasons because of ideology and, oh, well, you know, the internet is different, technology is special, network effects are apparently like the laws of physics. hmm, I'm not sure they are actually, um and you know are basically like gravity.

00:36:18.04
Maria
And also they just didn't do their job. And so you do see that this is you know when we have to put barriers and in the way of structural economic power, which is rapidly becoming structural political power, which is a lot harder to break, we use the coercive power of the state.

00:36:35.87
Maria
And one of those is competition. Antitrust, as the Americans call it, when it comes to criminal sanctions. And so, you know, we do use, like, in, while we still have decent social democratic states in many parts of the world, like,

00:36:48.84
Maria
The reason the Americans came up with antitrust in the first place was because of their late 19th century, early 20th century robber barons were becoming so powerful that they were existential threat to the continued existence of the federal and state governments.

00:37:05.44
Maria
like It was a defensive play. That's where competition policy and regulation comes from. So straight up, we've got you know people who have been asleep at the wheel and frankly cannot be allowed to be.

00:37:16.79
Maria
And so I think there has been a growing recognition amongst some competition regulators, certainly in the europe, across the European Union, to say like, yeah, oh and you know they had that ridiculous model of, well, if you're giving stuff away for free, then it doesn't matter that it's a monopoly because the monopoly is not making the price go higher.

00:37:36.57
Maria
I've had that conversation with competition economists, you know and finally they've kind of come away from that and gone, oh, okay, I see our job is about defending democracy. aha, okay, that's that's literally why we are here.

00:37:48.23
Maria
So you've got that side of things. And then, but also you have the, you know part of their job is also to make space and for policymakers is to make space for other business models.

00:37:59.14
Maria
Because it is, I don't know, like, it just seems to me kind of daft, like we're waking up from a bad dream of going, yeah, the only way we can have internet is we fund it by advertising. Like, with that nonsense.

00:38:09.92
Maria
um You know, you've got the ah CEO of NVIDIA saying that what he does is basic infrastructure, and that's why he has to be allowed to sell it into China. Well, dude, infrastructure is fundamental operational stuff that we need as a society.

00:38:25.06
Maria
And in order to provide that, you may not have noticed, but we usually structure it as a commodity and think about it as utilities and heavily regulated. And also when we need to, we nationalize it because we recognize that clean water is fundamental to ah you know operational society. So I think we do also have the the small B alternative business models of, yeah, I i pay a 10 or a month to signal because it's worth it to me, you know and that's a behavioural thing we can all do.

00:38:54.85
Maria
But also the big business model changes of, no, some of this stuff is critical infrastructure. And so we have different ways of funding that. And so I think we've got a bunch of you know different levers that we can pull.

00:39:06.92
Maria
And so in that sense, I think internet rewilding, it's not necessarily saying new things about everything, but it's saying, here's the urgency, here's the existential threat, and here's the scale of of action that we need to do. And here's why, you know here's how it all fits together.

00:39:24.14
Caitlin
I also think it's cool that rewilding projects are often not like we're going to buy a patch of land and let it go crazy. Rewilding projects were normally intentional. And as a reason...Very nerdy,

00:39:34.99
Caitlin
I got into bird ringing for a while and then found out that the early mornings weren't really compatible with also having a job. But nonetheless, one of the places that they do the bird ringing, which where you capture birds and put little tags on their legs for science.

00:39:47.04
Caitlin
have to surround this entire woodland with deer fences because deer are such a horrific problem for like biodiversity in in that area. yeah like You have to keep the deer out. Deer are lovely and they're cute and they're wonderful, but they are the exact opposite of biodiversity in a lot of areas.

00:40:05.27
Caitlin
And so... In order to allow for rewilding and for choice and for all these other things, you have to have a structure and a system which creates the conditions which allow those things to thrive.

00:40:18.08
Caitlin
And it's interesting that the competition regulators kind of older understanding of what harm looks like. It's the same in government procurement. And we've done a lot of work in public private partnerships.

00:40:28.50
Caitlin
And what government procurement often is, is, well, what's the cheapest? Because it's fundamental to... kind of everything is how do we get something cheaply that saves the public money and and also, you know, works like we need to build a bridge, the bridge has to to stand up, but it also has to limit graft. Like it's it's very focused on value for money.

00:40:48.94
Caitlin
And then what happens when a company like Palantir comes along and says, well, we'll give you all our software for a pound. And then next year, we'll give it all to you for 300 odd million because you can't take the data out.

00:40:59.53
Caitlin
Like what happens when people say, well, we'll give you it for free. like in the pandemic, we'll give you Google Classroom for free. And then you're going to have to work out in a couple of years, how do you undo that? And like Denmark is finding now, how do you how do we undo all the Google systems that we've integrated into our classrooms now that we've realized that they don't comply with our laws, they don't work for us, they they don't work for our kids. Like, well, they're now and they were free or they were cheap. And it's hard to justify spending loads of educational money on things when someone's giving you something for free.

00:41:30.48
Caitlin
But there's more to life. you know There's more to our understanding now of value for money. And there has to be more than free. And and yeah harm to consumer has to be more than cost.

00:41:43.87
Maria
Yeah, there's there's a whole, and within kind of ecological rewilding, it is if you think we are splittist in the progressive community or the leftist community or the tech activism community,

00:41:55.72
Maria
There's you know so much Judean People's Front and People's Front of Judea going on in rewilding. And that's kind of, it's it's good because it's really healthy. but So there's massive debates on intervention, yes or no. you know Does your intervention stop at where I am right now in Kerry in the southwest of Ireland...

00:42:14.59
Maria
Yeah, deer and sheep are the two destroyers of biodiversity. And one of them is wild and one of them is cultivated. So does your intervention start and finish at building massive deer-proof, sheep-proof fences around a patch of land and allowing it to regenerate... There's definitely, yeah,there's a fantastic book by a guy called Owen Dalton who lives on the next peninsula down from here called The Wild Atlantical Rainforest, basically how to rewilding in in the southwest of Ireland.

00:42:41.58
Maria
And his his position is just like build a fence and pretty much you know stuff will grow. Do not plant trees, just see what will will grow. And then you've got you know other people who are just like, no, I need to put down my trees because I want to grow stuff. And I'm a human, I want to see things develop.

00:42:59.05
Maria
And then you also have they're kind of the biologists, you know scientific research people who say, look, you will get beautiful trees seeding themselves, but only if you're already beside somewhere where they already are. So all to say like there's a really vibrant, thriving, and sometimes occasionally quite vicious debate, and which will be familiar to us all about like what is the level and type of intervention and what are the goals and what are the outcomes. and and And I think one of the...You know, there's so many useful biological concepts that we can take, but one of them is that news to me, but there is no balance of nature.

00:43:34.62
Maria
It's an expression that we all have in our mind that we think an ecosystem is going to come to more or less an equilibrium, like our point of rest where everything is set, everything is kind of in balance with each other.

00:43:45.09
Maria
It doesn't actually happen. You kind of have occasionally ah system will get to equilibrium for a while and then it will shift or, you know, then the weather will change or, you know, an invasive species or just like, just honestly, you'll have ah one difficult winter and that means that, you know, there are cascading effects. But all to say that you have so many different approaches to how you do this.

00:44:06.34
Maria
And I think it's something we can take a lot of inspiration and courage from in that there's not just one way to have a rewilded internet, but it's more about making space for everyone to do their own stuff.

00:44:18.75
Maria
But again, there's another concept to which I kind of have been drawing down on recently, which is one thing that rewilders are really interested in is mosaic habitats. So it's the idea that like even I'm always inclined to look out the window where I am, but you might have like, you know, a few acres of kind of undrained bog where you allow it to, you know, you stop cutting the turf, which is such an inimical concept to a lot of people, but you have to stop cutting the turf. It is not, you know, it's taken tens of thousands of years to create.

00:44:47.66
Maria
You do not drain the bogs, you let the, what's going to grow in them grow. But then next door to that, you might have, you know, a mixed use, largely deciduous forest. Next door to that, again, you can have some like wild meadow grasslands, because a lot of the land around here is pretty marginal in terms of agricultural production.

00:45:05.60
Maria
You just change the the funding incentives and boom, you've got, you know, a lot of rewilding. But you have a mosaic of different habitats. And think about it this way. You're a wild honeybee and you need to eat not just, you know, for like a wild two months of the year where like the rapeseed oil crop is going crazy in these 200 acres around you and there's literally nothing to eat for the rest of the year.

00:45:30.06
Maria
You want to be like those wild, diverse species that we all depend on for pollination and for agriculture. They do best when you have different kinds of ah mosaic of different habitats beside each other and also connective tissue between them of hedgerows, you know, and streams.

00:45:46.14
Maria
And again, I bring it back to the internet, like what does that look like for us? And I think it looks like we have different business models for how we do social media. We have different kinds of spaces with different levels of, you know, porousness of like how easy transparency, how easy they are to get in and out of, how private or otherwise they are.

00:46:04.63
Maria
You know, we have different ah ways of, for example, internet exchange points, the kind of generally cooperative, associative organisations where people participate. in universities, in tech firms, in telecoms and internet service providers all meet up to say, OK, I'll take some of your traffic if you take some mine.

00:46:24.57
Maria
Like those are kind of different kinds of relationship to top down one ring to rule them all. And so what you need in the internet is this kind of mosaic development where every bit of biodiversity technical diversity you have in one place kind of helps to generate and boost it in another place.

00:46:43.45
Maria
And also, of course, you know, that in this kind of virtuous circle, the skills, you know, the reskilling, upskilling of people to run all of those different spaces and the social networks and connections that you need to make them all work.

00:46:57.20
Maria
Each of those kind of brings the other up all of the time. So, yeah, I just feel like we can learn so much from what we can see working over there.

Gus
Yeah. I really hope in your book you're going to develop this mosaic idea more because that I find terribly exciting.

00:47:14.56
Gus
it like I'll make myself slightly unpopular in this conversation because earlier on when you were talking about interoperability as the unlocking or the role of the state to build infrastructure as a hope.

00:47:28.38
Gus
To me, both those things are mildly terrifying. i like This is where I go a little bit against the grain of most of the people in this sector. I don't like the idea of interoperability to the same degree as everybody else gets excited about it because I see the virtues in Choosing to have different spaces for different things. I don't want to see your LinkedIn account the same time as I see your Blue Sky account. my conversations on Signal to be confused with the conversations I'm having on WhatsApp.

00:47:56.52
Gus
And so for me, that's part of my segmentation, but also just I'm trying to simplify it. Really, it's about security for me. and how security would be undermined in that interoperability. And the same way when the when the government has a say into how a stack is built, we've seen what that ends up like. That's the telephone system.

00:48:14.77
Gus
And that telephone system, not only was it painful to deploy to people in rural communities or for a lower cost, it was also that had surveillance built in by design.

00:48:27.64
Gus
And so I'm nervous about some of those options, whereas the idea of mosaics, i find so much more exciting and let the diversity and diverse circumstances exhibit itself.

00:48:39.88
Gus
So I really do hope you explore that. And I'm not trying to start a fight. Like one last thing I want to explore with you is... One of my favorite ah ideas that you have, and it shouldn't be so radical. I shouldn't say it's your idea, but the way you are you articulate hope is a muscle and that despair is unethical.

00:48:59.31
Gus
It's like, just with my rant I just gave right there, my rant is so grounded in realism that it's so depressing. you know ah Governments will do as governments do. you know That kind of thing. Whereas every part of this conversation, what I enjoy is that with ah a different lens, with a different destination, you can hope for more. And I think I need to be reminded of hope.

00:49:22.81
gus
And yeah, as a muscle is such an empowering idea too, which is like, even if you can't think about hope, you have to. Because it will get easier. Is that kind of what you're saying? Or is it or was this something different? It is.

00:49:35.00
Maria
No, that definitely is it. But also, like, to go back to some of the, you know, I'll circle back again. But like, yeah, the gnarly stuff of, let's say, security and interoperability. I mean, this is tough stuff. You know, I remember being, in a small way, part of an interoperability group with a couple of big tech company people kind of.

00:49:54.11
Speaker
I think, it was organised by the Internet Society, it was a good few years ago now. And the Google people on it called themselves, what do they call themselves? Oh, it's like the the digital, not the digital resistance front, but some like, so i'm like this is how we we build escape valves for people from the company.

00:50:13.47
Maria
But like, you know, and remember one of the things they brought up at the time was, or maybe it was the Facebook people that were on the group basically said, Interoperability is great, but how do I, if I'm a person who has suffered from abuse or stalking, how do I bring my block list with me?

00:50:29.83
Maria
And it's not like it's impossible to do, but it it's very tricky and you know, life-dependingly important to get right. So yeah, those, you know, making interoperability work in a way that is secure, that does not take away from people's security for the the, like, the vast array of security use cases there are is vitally important. And I do think, actually, that, yeah, that the hope is a muscle thing is kind of ah about the you know what, guys, this is not just some beautiful promised land where the birds are going to be singing and, you know, we're all going to get there and it's going to be happily ever after and we'll never have to do anything again. Because in a way, that's sort of the the story that the tech company sold us was we will solve email, you know, we will solve spam. You will literally never have to think about spam again day in your life.

00:51:17.78
Maria
You will not provide your own email server, you know, we'll handle that for you. We'll also send most of the spam, but we'll filter most of it too. you know and like And I think kind of the sunny uplands, obviously, we you know in in the UK, we we know that the damage of that kind of nonsense magical thinking can lead us to.

00:51:35.73
Maria
But more, I think, the so the hope is a muscle thing for me anyway, it's about just having the kind of developing the emotional resilience, both internally and I just think like collectively. For me, hope is just not like a, it's not sort of a solo project, you know, or an individual experience.

00:51:49.94
Maria
Hope is like, it's it's the thing that you get when you kind of look and go, I've been thinking about this idea. I wonder, is it possible? And go, oh, somebody over there is already doing it.

00:52:02.01
Maria
You know, like I've been kind of wondering about, like, obviously in these times, like one of the chapters of my book is to be about The very difficult material of um internet in time of war, you know, which is is like tomorrow's internet is, you know, Beirut's internet today or Gaza's internet today.

00:52:21.42
Maria
Like that's, you know, with Russia on the march and for many of us in Europe, like I don't want to be too bleak, but it like planning and and being resilient and developing resilient networks and capabilities is the muscle of hope. It's kind of going, we can see what's coming.

00:52:35.28
Maria
We're not going to kind of laugh and go, well, I hope I perish in the first wave. um never It's more like, okay, how is it that we can learn from people and also offer assistance to the extent we can to people who are building you know hardening and resilient networks today?

00:52:52.78
Maria
Like that is hope in practice. That is hope in the form of copper and laser. you know so yeah

Caitlin
I remember, Gus has a friend who was a teacher, and we had a school group come into PI and I remember one of them saying, oh, you know we get it a lot like, oh, well, if privacy is dead, why does it matter?

00:53:08.88
Caitlin
And I think hope kind of is an inevitable answer to that question, which is who cares? Like If privacy is dead, who cares? Like it's It's up to us to revive it. And if it's not dead, then it's up to us to protect it.

00:53:21.54
Cailtin
Because I think it's kind of a stupid question. because like Do we think it matters? Yes, no. well it Who cares it's dead? well we do we think it matters? Yes, no. In which case, like it's up to us to vivify I guess, or revivify it or do something about it.

00:53:38.20
Caitlin
It's not up to us to say, well, well it's dead. Okay, great. Let's all move on from something that we think is fundamental and matters and we care about. You made me think actually, I was reading, speaking of newsletters, there's a really cool one called London Centric, which is like a London local news network run by Jim Waterston.

00:53:54.37
Caitlin
who's a fantastic journalist and he got someone else who writes fantastically about travel and trains and things to write an article about after 7/7 which was the uk kind of oh yes yes so people who don't know aren't in the uk it's terrible terrorist attacks the entire transport network in London is shut down no one can get anywhere. If you're coming to central london for work you're stuck you're done. And it was about how TfL got the buses back up and running by the end of the day so everyone could get home.

00:54:22.72
Caitlin
And they're in these meetings, they're in these COVID meetings, they're trying to get permission to get it done. And the guy in London who's responsible for trying to beg central government permission texts the guy who is the bus drivers union to say, hey, you know like if we can make this happen, will you guys come in? Because the fellow bus driver just got blown up. yeah And he texts back saying, yeah, yeah.

00:54:43.88
Caitlin
Like if you need us with that, we'll make it happen. And by the end of the day, everyone was able to get home and um someone called them F**k you buses. yeah And I think that's what I like so much. like I think is so central to this. it's like disaster is not solvable.

00:54:58.78
Caitlin
Disaster is built in, crisis is built in, but making sure the F**k you bus runs and having the hope to reach out and say, like, you're in a terrible situation, help is kind of central to that. And people answer, like if you ask.

00:55:13.36
Maria
Yeah, we're all desperate to like find things to do. And, you know, as somebody who who's owned a charismatic dog in London for the last 10 or 11 years, like you realise people are are looking for opportunities to kind of to make random chit chat with somebody who's just walking around the street. Like we're always seeking out connection.

00:55:30.24
Maria
Yeah. And I think like the story of the bus drivers, I think, you know, key aspect to to that was also the The idea that the you know the security honchos at the very, very centre kept saying, you know and you had hundreds of thousands of people who'd come into London that day who were already there, and they were like kept saying to the the transport people and to the Mayor of London, no, it's too early to think about how to get people, like we can't think about that right now, and that's not something we're going to... And it was like they kept pushing it forward hour by hour.

00:55:59.96
Maria
And, you know, and there was a fair amount of institutional naughtiness and f***iness from the mayor of London, from the transport head and, you know, and who knew to phone up the union and say, listen, if like, will your guys run, you know, for for non-gendered version of guys?

00:56:15.72
Maria
And they said, yeah, hell yes. Like, of course we will. And that's, you know I think it's really you kind of get that pushing back against people in the centre of some kind of power structure who are saying certain things are and aren't important and certain things can and cannot be dealt with. you know The people are just all going to have to walk home.

00:56:36.20
Maria
There you go. That's all. And no, actually, there were so many people who were sitting there just eager to deal with this. And I think that's also where, you know, what I take from that also is this is where the hope thing comes in.

00:56:49.57
Maria
It's just refusing to accept that cynicism is an acceptable mindset. If you look at cynicism, the cynicism of your privacy is already dead, get over it, you know, from Sun Microsystems back in 1990, whatever.

00:57:02.36
Maria
That's basically a way of telling people, like, it's already gone, you can't fix it, and you don't even get to think about it. You know, I am delineating the markers of your consciousness and saying there will be no talk about other forms of doing things.

00:57:15.42
Maria
And it's also, you know, cynicism, I think, is the... is fundamental to the fascist project. Because the fascist project that we see right now is the idea that the future is only going to be awful.

00:57:27.54
Maria
It's going to continue getting worse and will getting worse it will get worse in ways that multiply. And so all we can do is batten down the hatches, is stop immigrants from coming in, is like guarding what we have. And and if it's you're super rich, it's like buying a bit of New Zealand and saying, I'm going to go and live there, you know, or like maybe eventually we'll go to Mars and that's so much more important than starving babies.

00:57:47.66
Maria
But it's the entire project is about saying that you know the fascists and the tech company CEOs and their various bootlickers in government, including the Starmer government, that only they get to dream about and imagine and project a future.

00:58:03.00
Maria
And the hope thing is just saying, like, no, like, we've been through the 80s and 90s. We know that this is no alternative nonsense. Like, we didn't accept it then, we don't accept it now. You know, the hope thing is basically saying, we are, you know, asserting our right to imagine and build alternatives and refusing. And, you know, Gus and I have talked about this, but refusing to always be in the position of the people who are saying no to your crazy shit.

00:58:27.72
Maria
The people who, you know, spend all of our time and effort and the limited years that we have and the energy that we have to be like, no, like, You know, don't do ID cards. No, please don't. you like, you know, backdoor encryption again. How many times have been through that debate? I think I'm on my sixth go around.

00:58:43.41
Maria
You know, it's like we refuse to spend all of our waking hours on just saying no to the stupid crap that they're coming up with, the harmful crap. And I think we're just constantly asserting our right to say we're imagining a different future to the one that's on offer.

00:58:58.03
Maria
Yes, we're probably going to have less resources and less stuff, but we're still have pretty good lives because we're going to be connected to other people, building stuff we care about and building places to live in that we want to live in.

00:59:09.61
Maria
So that's where the hope comes from. it's It's the muscle. And it's it's like, it's not just a muscle. It's it's a clenched bloody fist you know that just says, ah no, i'm not taking I'm not lying down and taking this rubbish view of what all of our futures are going to be like. You don't get to say.

00:59:24.78
Maria
We get to say.

Gus
That's beautiful. So the next generation of builders will be motivated not only by hope, but with a vision of rewilding. And that's why like I want you to go away now.

00:59:38.67
Gus
and write that damn book and get it out there. because I'm gonna end where I started, which is there's something that you do by putting words together and drawing a narrative around that it's just so, it unlocks something in the brain and makes the brain think differently and think that something's possible.

00:59:59.48
Gus
And i I just, I'm so grateful for you. I'm grateful for you what you do and please keep doing it faster, faster, faster.

Maria
Thank you. Yeah, that's the one thing I'll say about writing a book. You really kind of feel like, oh, hells bells. Like we don't have time to spend you know two years doing this.

01:00:15.83
Maria
But I'm trying to make something, if I can, that is just stands the test of time a bit. You know, it's not just like more diagnosis of the problem, but is something that is is a bit odd, a bit strange and a bit but new and different that can kind of, you know, help do like we've we've all got our parts to play in this.

01:00:34.08
Maria
And, you know, Gus, as you know, you've been a long term inspiration for me. And I'm not going to some bolt blow smoke up your ass, but Caitlin, he's a pretty special person. He's built an amazing organisation. But also, you know what I will just say? Like the thing that unlocked all of this kind of present writing moment in my life, I guess, for me and That kind of gave me the, the okay, times are are crummy, but I know what I'm doing. I've got my shoulders to the wheel and I'm so glad for that. But the thing that unlocked that for me was actually was learning how to write fiction.

01:01:05.14
Maria
It was like taking a complete kind of handbrake turn in my life and going, do you know what? I'm going to spend a year learning how to write novels. And that like learning about like dialogue, about fiction.

01:01:16.37
Maria
feeling about how you generate and bring people along with you in a story, you know, and how a story is sort of like a, each story just generates a shared space of possibility where we kind of go, yeah, I could believe in this.

01:01:30.03
Maria
And also I'm feeling this thing. And then you kind of take the story and you hand it to somebody else and then they feel those things, you know, it's almost hackneyed to say that stories are one of the oldest human technologies, but they truly, they are like, they're how we,

01:01:43.50
Maria
kind of hand our feelings and our experiences to each other in ways that allow us to do things with them. You know, and that's, I think, what I'm trying to do with with the rewilding book.

01:01:55.07
Maria
um And you sound just like my editor, Gus, just like, sit down and write the damn thing now.

Gus
I have a PhD. You've been on the PhD staff, you know, ah the PhD, you know, the what I'm channeling.

01:02:05.91
Gus
PhD supervisors saying, please get this out. Get this thing done. Just get it done.

Maria
Yeah. So anyway, yeah, I just, you know, we live in it in in times that are dark to some extent, but times that are clear, you know, we know what the stakes are.

01:02:20.51
Maria
Like we know the urgency. We've got our F**king shoulders to the wheel and we are, excuse my language, I'm so fortunate that we know at this moment in our lives and in history, we know we're pulling in the right direction.

01:02:31.92
Maria
You know, I mean, that is a gift and I am glad for every day. It's such gift. Totally. Such a gift, man. Yeah. And so is this time. Thank you very much.

Cailtin
Thank you. It's awesome to meet you. I've been really excited to have you since I started at PI.

Gus
Yeah. And the only reason I reached out to you, because I'm so nervous about taking up your time, is that I saw from social media that you have been busy going around giving talks.

01:02:54.34
Gus
So I thought, OK, it's it's safe to approach her and ask for her time.

Maria
I'm sorry, this is just a bit too gushing. But basically, Gus is saying, ask me, you ask me something. I'm just like, the answer is always going to be yes. So.

01:03:05.12
Maria
Oh. But no, I have been rushing around doing a bunch of different things all on the kind of rewilding the internet theme. And now I am just sitting in kind of book purdah, if that's an expression I could use to basically just like sit down and get some writing done for a couple of months before then trying to recombine writing and rushing around.

01:03:23.09
Maria
and But hopefully trying to get it because I'm writing the book. um So, yeah. About rewilding. About rewilding. Rewilding the internet layer by layer all the way up and down the the stack. That is the idea.

Caitlin
That is incredibly cool.

Gus
Are we allowed to include that fact in this podcast?

Maria
Yes, please. Yes, please. Because I i just, I won't say who for just quite yet because I haven't an announced it, but a publisher, US publisher and UK publisher.

01:03:45.16
Maria
So fingers crossed all will be wow

Caitlin
well. That is amazing. And also when you have a pre-order link, send it to us and we'll update the description to include it.

Maria
Oh, thank you. I'd say that's probably a year out because I actually now I've gone from the dizzy heights of, oh, my God, I've got a book contract to the horrendous doldrums of, oh, my God, I've got a book contract. I have to write a book now.

01:04:09.58
Maria
But yeah, pleasure. Thank you both.

01:04:23.76
Caitlin
Thanks for listening. You can sign up to be the first to learn more about our work at:
pvcy.org/podsignup. And we'll include some links to Maria's articles and other content that we mentioned throughout this podcast.

01:04:37.41
Cailtin
And we'll include that information in the description wherever you're listening or on our website at pvcy.org/techpill. Don't forget to rate and subscribe to the podcast on whichever platform you use. Music is courtesy of Sepia.

01:04:52.75
Speaker
This podcast was produced by Max Burnell for Privacy International.