 Felly, rwy'n fywd o'r panel iawn. Rwy'n fywd o'n ddigonol i'r ddechrau. Rwy'n fywd o'r panel iawn. Rwy'n fywd o'n ddigonol i'r ddechrau. Pwiel mason. Rhyw o'r perthyniad o'r ffordd. Rwy'n fywd o'r pwiel o'r pwiel o'r technologi ac oed yn y gwelodau a'r amlwg. Rydyn ni'n rhoi, rydyn ni'n David Harvey, rydyn ni'n David Harvey, proffianthrofoedd anthropologio a geograffu yng nghymru ffoblwch gyda'u Y Cymru, yng Nghymru yng ngheilio a ddiffenwch ddifenwch ar gyfer y newb yw'r bobl? Dwi'n wedi ymwneud yn rhan o'r David? Ymwneud yn rhan o'r David? Valencia? Valencia, dwi'n wedi'n ddifenwch? Ymwneud. Yn ymwneud yn rhan o'r boblwch, ydych yn yr ymddangos, ymddangos yn rhan o'r ymdangos gweithio'r boblwch. David is very happy to sign them, I believe, after the event. Are you? Yeah, great. David's very happy to, here we go. It's a very good book. Mark's cap on the madness of economic reason, and somebody jokingly said, has David read anything but capital for the last 20 years? I mean, that's a good question, but in this book, in this book, no, no, no, in this book you'll be absolutely shocked because there's capital one, two and three and the Grunrissa. So revelatory. In 220 pages. In 220 pages. Really excellent book and some really important new stuff in his work. Then to my left I have Alice Bell, who is a co-director in the head of communications at 1010. Is that right? Alice has a, you have a PhD in the history of science, don't you? And we did a podcast a few years ago on climate change and I think that podcast opened my eyes as to just how critical climate change is in any transition of capitalism. Something we'll really address as the evening proceeds. And to the left of Alice we have James Medway. James is the political adviser to John McDonald, is that correct? And the former chief economist or senior economist, chief economist at the New Economics Foundation. So I'll start with a blurb from the TWT website for this evening. Since the inventions of agriculture and writing, technology has endured an intimate relationship with politics, serving to both disrupt and uphold concentrations of power. But do the technologies of the new century from computing to synthetic biology create a new set of possibilities? Are they the bridge to a different kind of society? And I'll start with you, Paul. That fundamentally seems to me to be the hypothesis underlying your book Post Capitalism. In your vision of post capitalism, what is the relationship between technology and politics? Well, thank you. Let me just try and explain what I mean by post capitalism. In one of the books that Aaron just mentioned, The Grundrisa, Marx's 1858 notebook that he used to try and work on capital, there is a passage which when people discovered it, because this thing was lost for a long time, were quite shocked. Many people of my age went to university in a crisis ridden era in the 1970s and 80s and they saw the profit margins of capitalist companies collapsing. They saw the business model of capitalism, the model Keynesianism failing. And they kind of assumed that this would be the end. And we weren't the first because the same illusion was there in the 1930s and indeed in the 1890s. Every generation of radicals has had this moment where capitalism looks finished and isn't. And of course technology explains, it's one of the explanations and it's in there in Marx's capital as to why. Because technology allows various escape routes from crisis. You can cheapen what it costs to create a worker. You can cheapen what it costs to create a machine. And these things in Marx's capital that I'll refer to as the counteracting tendencies to the fundamental tendency, which is the rate of profit shrinking, are for the kind of, to me, permanent escape mechanisms until a kind of technology comes along that cheapens machines and labour and goods faster than they can create expensive ones. And it eradicates labour out of the workforce faster than new jobs can be created. So 100 years ago, Rosa Luxembourg, the noted Marxist revolutionary, she was the teacher, she did this job. She was the head teacher of the German Labour Party's school. She wrote, capitalism is about to reach the limits of the new markets it can find. And in the time it took her to write the book, The Accumulation of Capital, the number of movie theatres in Berlin went from one to 168. So capitalism did find a new market and it did create a new, more expensive product. My thesis is that information technology is different. It's not mystically different. It doesn't create abstract, mystical, cyber things. It just cheapens real things so rapidly that it disrupts capitalism's normal mechanism of adaptation and survival. And so what does it mean going forward for us? I mean, I hope we'll talk about Uber, et cetera. Let's keep it at the abstract level now. It means that we have to deal as a radical social democratic party, which is what I hope Labour will become, with a situation where our utopia for 200 years, as for Marx, was based on work. But we matter to change that. We have to come up with utopias that are no longer based on work because work isn't going to be necessary for our great-grandchildren. And in addition, we've kind of seen, you know, a lot of us call us of socialists, and in its technical sense, socialism is the management of scarcity in favour of poor people, in favour of social justice. You have to plan, you have to nationalise, you have to take control of various means of production. But I think we will also be facing the problem of communism. That is, the problem of certain things being so easy and cheap to produce that they become abundant before we even get there. So that's the outline of my basic set of ideas. OK. I'm going to stick with you for a second. Is it fair to say, quite briefly, are you a technological determinist? I'm more of a one than probably other people on this platform, but nobody should be a technological determinist in the sense that the certain kind of technology produces a certain kind of ideas and a certain kind of society. However, I think we're living through a very big inflection point in technology. And to this extent, technology, it's not just that it created the Arab Spring, or it created the Occupy movement, and that it created new networked ways of thinking and interacting, but that the way networked technology is interacting with the human brain and psyche and that old thing, human nature seems to be very interesting. It is creating people with multiple selves, people with multiple channels of expression into society, whereas, and here again, for those of us who have studied politics, probably most people in this room have been to any university and anywhere near a politics department, the subject of politics is the individual, this kind of person with rights created by 250 years of bourgeois society. I see that fragmenting. I see people able to manage their selves in a way that they can accept different amounts of rights, and that's both terrifying and interesting to me. Sticking with the idea of technological determinism, I'm going to come to you, David. You say in this book, as you've said previously on your very eminent lectures on capital, that technology should be understood as just one moment within a broader constellation of change and that history proceeds through these moments which are all in tension with one another. Can you just outline those moments and how you understand social transformation unfolding through them? I used this footnote in Marx's capital which talked about the way in which technology reveals or discloses the relation to nature, the social relations which we produce, the manner of production, a whole set of things. I always dwell on the fact that reveals or discloses is not determined, and therefore you have to look at the way in which technology is embedded in other forms of social relations and the like. But I also took seriously the organisation that Marx laid out in capital, where in fact the chapter on technology and the machine system and all the rest of it comes at the end of the transition from feudalism, not at the beginning. That chapter on cooperation and then divisions of labour and detailed divisions of labour says that capital was being erected on a technological foundation of a certain sort, but it was capital was being erected on it. And then in the chapter on machinery kind of says, well finally capital found its own technological base, but it was the last thing it found. And in the process of finding it, when you're reading that chapter you see that he talks about the way in which mental conceptions of the world had to change. That nature could no longer be looked upon as something organic and alive, it had to be turned into a dead object that could be exploited, that art was displaced by science and technology. You see all these transitions in the chapter and actually you see that all of those elements at work in the chapter. And the other thing he kind of points out is that we can misread situations if we concentrate merely on the technology. He opens the chapter for example by saying, John Stuart Mill expressed considerable consternation and was puzzled by the fact that new technologies and machines which are supposed to lighten the load of labour end up making the load of the labour worse. And John Stuart Mill says this is very perplexing and Mark Sky says well it's not perplexing at all because the technologies used by capital is to extract more value from labour and to squeeze the labour even more than before. And this is one of the things you see historically that every time a new wave of technology comes along it does indeed seem to suggest some beautiful new future that can be constructed out of it. And so we see that in the 1960s, we saw it in the 19th century, you see it in the 1990s with the internet and all this sort of stuff. You say you see it again and again and people kind of say well you know this is the basis for a social society. The answer is well it could be but it's not going to be because the capitalist social relations are dominant and all time the capitalist social relations are dominant and the class domination is there. They are going to make sure that these new technologies get used to squeeze value out of labour, to squeeze the population, to steal as well from the population as much as they can. So the technology becomes instead of vehicle for emancipation it becomes a vehicle for greater and greater levels of oppression and we see that with things like the internet. We see it with all of the kind of surveillance articles that are around and the NSA and all the other stuff that's going on. This technology which was being sort of looked on as somehow or other liberatory is now being turned into kind of a real, real tough system of oppression but that's because of the domination of the class relation. So I'm going to say look if there is something fundamental we've got to really look at it's the nature of the class relation and contemporary society and what it's likely to do with the new intelligence. I hope we get into this particularly artificial intelligence because there's something we need to discuss and debate about then right now. I'm sticking on this topic just initially. We will have a very round discussion. We've already discussed this as a panel. You specifically take Umbridge with Paul's concept of post capitalism. Now as I understand it from what you have both already said is that Paul essentially inverts what Marx is outlining in capital. So you're saying that the institutional structures are there, wage labour, the proletariat is there in Elizabethan England, a bunch of things are there, the social relations are there, relationship to nature and then finally capitalism creates technologies. Paul with post capitalism I think you're inverting that. I'm not saying it's wrong or right but your thesis fundamentally is that we have these disruptive technologies and gradually the social relations relationship to nature etc will overlap on them. Is that fair Paul or not? I wouldn't frame it like that because everything you just said about technology is a mediator of social relations I also agree with but the transition however I envisage beyond capitalism is one in which the relation to use Marx's terminology, hopefully we're not excluding the two thirds of the room, the relations of production, the social relations that we all live with him can't tolerate for any great length of time a situation where the technology is producing abundance one and what Marx talks about in the Grundriser which is social knowledge. Mark says as soon as knowledge becomes social and embodied in the general intellect it will blow the foundations of capitalism sky high, not the superstructure, the foundations and that's what I believe that's the transition we're in, not the one I believe 30 years ago as a student studying capital which was profit collapses, economic crisis, long period of scarcity. Okay so we're going to move on, I'm going to come to Alice, we're talking about the issue of obviously climate change is one of the fundamental crises of the 21st century, I put it alongside probably ageing, the collapse of our economic system, resource scarcity. The green left for decades, at least that's my interpretation, has viewed any transition beyond fossil fuels, i.e. to solar, to wind and so on, as necessarily having to mean that we consume less energy. Is that a fair summation and is that correct in your view? In terms of whether it's fair, I think we should remember that the green movement is currently and has always been very diverse so there is a thread of green thought that would advocate that sort of point of view but there's always been many other types of green thought and they've often argued with each other and they have different views about different types of technologies and notions of abundance or scarcity or all sorts of other words we might bring along with that. So I mean I guess we could say a bit of it's true, whether it's a good idea or not. It's easy to see a kind of message from greens is like use less, we just need to stop living the way. Small is beautiful. Small is beautiful, actually that's another way of putting it, yeah. And I think that probably works in some contexts and nots in others so I don't want to, I mean I would say that one of the things that we need to do to tackle climate change is build more forms of other types of energy and switch where we're getting our energy from. So it's not just about not having fossil fuels, it's about moving from fossil fuels to wind or solar and has everyone seen the massive big offshore wind turbines on the beach now, last time I came to Brighton that wasn't the view. We're seeing these things shifting already but on top of that energy efficiency is an important thing that doesn't necessarily mean that we all need to be cold. It means actually that we can be warm, it means that along with these big shiny wind turbines and solar panels and bits of new kit that people seem to get very excited about, we should also be getting really excited about loft insulation. Seriously, I keep trying to tell people that we shouldn't say loft insulation is boring because that just makes it more boring. It's really important as well and it's an example of how green action can intersect quite strongly with all sorts of other forms of activism, particularly housing rights. So at the moment one of the things that happened in the coalition government was we got a new law that meant that landlords had to make the houses that they were renting out couldn't be the lowest energy efficiency. Basically like one public health person I spoke to would be like living in a sieve if you lived in a house that's like D or E rated. So if you were renting out home you would have to make some very basic changes to it to stop from being completely leaky. Which has an impact on climate change, it will save energy but it also means that people will live in more comfortable homes. Now this policy has now been screwed around loads. Sorry man I'd say that word. Facebook isn't regulated well. That's why you're on Facebook. You can use all sorts of words. This is an example of if we're fighting for movement to save energy actually it can be done in a way that we are making homes more comfortable that we are asking for renters rights. That we are building better buildings that last long. It's not necessarily about having less of something it's about having better stuff. So I worry a bit when we have this dichotomy about a sort of green saying small is beautiful and less is more. And like a sort of other movement which is like yay warm, abundance, great stuff. You're like well we can have both and it's just about looking at where we're going to be using our technology sufficiently. So I mean for me my view of the green left historically is that that's been the tendency. I think that's probably going but that's been the historic tendency and the question I'd ask as a result would be Do you think that the historic mistake of the green movement in the last 30 years is an inability to generate a populist politics around actually saying look your lives could be better beyond fossil fuels. Here's why. Rather than saying well actually you're going to have to be very restrained, be very austere. You can only eat food in season from 50 miles away which in England is not great. Do you think that's been a political failure of the green left? Possibly yes and I'd say that alongside that we've also got kind of messages about climate change being just that we're all going to die. I mean I don't want to sugarcoat this. We're all going to die. But that's the jokey way of putting it. It's hard to not be really crass when you talk about climate change because it's really really bad. Really really bad and I don't want to say that what I'm about to advocate is that we also need to be able to give people a positive vision of the future and there's a danger there because you sound like you're saying it's all going to be okay. But we need something to motivate us to go alongside appreciating how awful it is. This is not to say we're giving you some hope and that's all you're going to look at. It is awful but there is some light. There is ways that we can tackle it and we can make it less awful and there are new ways that we can rebuild the world as we are rebuilding it to tackle climate change that will also make the world better for other reasons. Like energy democracy, like clean air, there's all sorts of other things that are tackling climate change we will also be able to tackle. I think you're right to say that they haven't been able to give a positive vision but it's not necessarily just been about saying we all need to eat potatoes. Final question. Would a post capitalist society necessarily have to transition to renewables? I suppose it depends on what you want that to look like. I think any society if you want people to live on this planet we're going to have to stop using fossil fuels last week. James, let's get this mic over here. So we've talked on the level of theory, we've discussed economy, technology, climate and then we've got the policy wonk. One of the sort of, you know, sorry. James, James is a PhD in economics. He's very happy to be called a wonk. One of the sort of these hallmark policies of the labour manifesto was the idea of national investment banks. What would the role of a national investment bank be within what Paul's calling radical social democracy? What kinds of things could it do? There's two bits. I think it fits in hopefully with what Paul and David and Alice had talked about which is two parts of this. One of them is, and this is striking, and it's probably obvious to people in this room, it's obviously just walk out the door, particularly since the recession and the crash, is that for all the talk of this big technological shift that's taking place, the fourth industrial revolution or whatever you want to call it, the kinds of technologies that Paul has been talking about and the acceleration of technological changes that implies what's actually happened very, very clearly since 2008 and accelerating, as you might expect, since 2010 is that we've substituted cheap labour for investment in any of this new technology or capital on any particular scale, like very, very strikingly so. So instead of, we basically have a kind of an economy that works towards because the incentives are set out like this and the labour market works like this and your institutions think like this that works towards saying, well, we could invest in new technology, we could make other things happen. We could, for instance, if you're talking about investment in renewables, this is a relatively quick way to generate some highly skilled, well paid, relatively secure jobs and do something that would get you some distance towards meeting any kind of climate change objectives. You could do something like that. In fact, all your incentives are to say, well, actually, we don't do that because we can just effectively cut people's wages, mess around with their hours, put them on zero out contracts and all of these things instead. So one of the things in the manifesto and probably building on this going ahead is that the fundamental bit we have to get old of is how investment happens and where it goes. We need more investment in this sort of technology on a very, very large scale and it's embarrassing some of it. If you see, we can sit here and talk about digital technologies about what we can do online and the rest of it. I mean, just wondering around Brighton, the broadband drops on your mobile phone, that sort of thing, that you pay a fortune for these things from these companies. It doesn't work across great sways of the country, that sort of thing. And you talk about, oh, there's this big new world we could be part of. As an economy, where we live is lagging behind on all these things and starting to seriously lag behind. So one part of what you have to do, and if you want a positive vision of this, there's like you have to solve a problem that this government in particular and the British economy in a more fundamental sense isn't really solving itself, which is that if you want some of these things to happen, there has to be a way, there has to be the institutions that will deliver that investment. So that's what you say, a national investment bank and regional development banks. That's one part of it. The other part of it I think is exactly what Alice said, which is this question of energy democracy and democratising the ownership of the technology that's there. Now, I don't know. I mean, exactly the same thing last time I came to Brighton and there wasn't a great big new wind farm on the horizon. And now there is, and this is good in and of itself. It's better than that not happening. I won't speculate on who owns it, but my guess is this isn't, you know, some sort of local cooperative. If any of us from Brighton can tell me otherwise. Right? So they can tell me that this isn't going to be some sort of locally owned... The German government. There you go. The German government. Right. I'm impressed at the depth of knowledge and local knowledge on this particular subject. It's good. It's a general interest. It's back to the grunderist. So it's not owned locally. It's not controlled locally. Now that's less of a problem for offshore in practice. There are issues around, you know, kind of the ownership of the skyline, if you like, and the sea underneath and the coast and that sort of thing. It's more of a problem you're talking about onshore wind, which is where the really big obvious economic wind is just in terms of this stuff is now really cheap. About as cheap as gas it will get cheaper to install. And if you want to make a very rapid transition to low-carbon energy production, this is one of the routes to do it. Now the issue there, of course, is that if you don't own the wind farm yourself that's now sitting on top of what was otherwise un-spoiled bit of landscape was lo and behold, this is where the wind tends to be. You won't feel too pleased about that, but you'll feel very differently if you own that and your community owns that and you collectively own that. That would change how you feel about this. It would also generate incomes. It would also start to introduce some economic activity locally. So there's two parts, I think, to this. One is there's the big national collective effort that has to be made to try and knock the economy we're in into somewhere that isn't basically low investment and crap jobs for evermore, cos that's the downward spiral that we're starting to look at. That's the big national part of it. The other part is the democratisation and ownership of that economy, giving people the chance to actually take some parts of the wealth that's there and use it for themselves and use it in a way that's, you know, collective and fair and democratic and all the rest. I just wanted to echo that. Particularly on offshore wind, I completely agree with it, but I would disagree and say that it does matter on offshore wind, too. And there was a really interesting paper from the Labour Energy Forum just out last week. I would recommend that you Google and try and find it on this very issue, on the ownership of UK offshore wind. And what's useful about it, it doesn't just put some data on it, it gives some really good arguments about why that matters and why we shouldn't just say community energy is for little projects in solar farms or a small wind turbine, of which there are several actually. Sussex, Brighton is a really good hub, a particularly community solar. But we could have community wind, offshore wind. They have community offshore wind in Denmark. Why couldn't we have it here? And I think we'll see people locally who probably are thinking, oh, my views changed. I used to live in Brighton. It was a bit of an emotional shock for me to see the view being changed today when I came down here. I quite liked it because I like wind turbines, but at the same time, I can imagine people looking over and going, that's owned by German Bank. That's not really us. And if there was ownership, and also it affects our public engagement with renewable energy, but also it means that our supply chains are going to be in the UK and it's going to mean that we have more jobs here. It has all sorts of economic impact, so let's not lose the opportunity of offshore wind at all. James, you can say what you like, but I'm just going to ask you a quick question. Collectively owned forms of renewable energy locally, be it solar or wind. Is that the kind of investment that a national investment bank would be making? That would be the source. The principle barrier, and I think Alice is absolutely right in this, is no reason why you can't do this at scale. You have to do it at a fairly large scale if you're doing offshore wind ideally. You can think of other big renewable projects that would look like that. The issue here, to get back to what other people are talking about, is that we do not have a financial system that is particularly well geared to saying, hey, we're going to provide the finance, the capital necessary for your local community or your bigger than your local community, your town, your city, to actually set up something like this. These are the barriers. This is a real barrier to getting these things up and running in this country, which is partly why, and that's probably mostly why the scale so far has tended to be more limited for community projects. Now, there are local councils and local authorities trying to get into doing this, to setting up their own sort of wind farms, to making these things happen, but the big barrier there is that if you don't have a financial system that can deliver the investment to do this, it will give people the capital that understands what a cooperative might be or what a collective form of ownership might be of something like a wind farm, then you won't get the money to do it, and if you don't get the money to do it, it won't happen. So you have to think about building new institutions that can start to deliver this sort of thing. Of course, then, once you've got that, you can talk about scaling up, I think. Alex, very quickly, then I'm going to pull. To give people a concrete example of this, this idea of people owning their own solar farms and wind farms and stuff isn't some imaginary thing that happens in the future. It has happened in the last several decades in the UK, and I've got a really nice example of one that happened just locally recently. The town of Borkham, which you might have known for its anti-fracking process, the first place where we really saw anti-fracking process happening in the UK. After all the protesters went and the frackers went, they decided not to frack. The local community felt kind of bruised by the experience and was sort of left with this thought, well, how should we power ourselves? And they decided what they wanted was community-owned solar. They wanted to own it themselves and not have fracking companies running, like, floating in. And they wanted it to be solar. And they tried to build a community-owned solar farm. And there is a beautiful solar farm in Borkham that produces enough electricity to power Borkham and the village next door. But because of the changes in policy and how difficult it is to run an energy co-op in the UK now, it had to end up being commercially run. And you can go and see it. It's beautiful. It's designed really well because it was designed with the community. Because right up into the stage they were about to plug it in, it was going to be community-owned. But in the end it couldn't be. And that was a few years ago. This isn't some imaginary thing in the future. This is actually our history. And it could still be our present and our future too if we just had some small changes in policy. Paul. To transition to post-capitalism, would we need to completely socialise finance or would an institution like National Investment Banks be sufficient? What I think is, let's take the example of energy because, or not just energy, of decarbonising. OK. Because as well as energy, the circularity, that is designing products so that they never extract any more raw materials from the world ever again. That is possible. Ellen MacArthur, perfectly capitalist and liberal person, has done a lot of work with corporations about how you do this. So if you think about the two things, decarbonising energy production and circularising the production of things, these are two important building blocks for, let's be clear, what I want to do is to transition not just beyond the carbon world but beyond the world dominated by market forces. That's what the socialist or communist project or post-capitalist project is. Now, what do we do concretely? I think the first thing is, obviously, you turn off the most important thing, the most important element of neoliberalism is the neo bit, the one that all the 1930s thinkers were obsessed with, you must continually, every morning, recreate the market because it doesn't recreate itself. You have a privatisation machine. Quickly for the audience, what's neoliberalism and what's the difference between it and liberalism? Very quickly. No, because... It's a key term. We should never shy away from using this term. For me, I describe an object, it's the system we live in. But the theory of it is, liberalism is laissez-faire. The state stands above the market and the market interacts and it reaches equilibrium itself. The theorists of neoliberalism in the 1930s, Hayek and a guy called Fougier in France, said, look, the market doesn't recreate itself. Left to itself, it produces monopolies and states, and the state takes over. So we must forever use the state to coercively reinsert private sector values into the economy. So the first thing we do to come back to the argument is switch off the privatisation machine. We switch off the constant incentive, what you just described, for a community-run thing to go private into the commercial sector. But here's the thing. In general, what I would like to see are small-scale, diverse projects of non-profit nature, whether they're co-ops, whether they're credit unions, whether they are small worker co-op on factories, et cetera. But I make an exception on energy because when it comes to this big transition we have to make beyond carbon. The weirdest thing is, the neoliberal elite told us that a 4 billion-year-old planet, a 25-year-old system is the solution to saving it, i.e. the free market. We don't necessarily think that that is true, but the horrible truth might be something akin to Stalinism is the only thing that will rapidly take control and decarbonise. No, I don't like that either. But one has to begin from the technology. We need big, decarbonised energy systems which don't make any profit and that sink into the ground this 4 trillion of market capitalisation, i.e. the shares of energy companies are worth 4 trillion, and if they produce all the energy the planet burns a lot quicker than any of us imagine. So I think state ownership and intervention into the energy system is for me the most important, or rather the most radical bit of what I want to do. Rest can be done through a mixture of market, non-market and state. But do we need to socialise finance in so much as the incentives right now are completely misaligned? Socialise finance is important, isn't it? But it doesn't necessarily mean nationalised. Finance is essentially in Britain anyway, partly socialised already. There's an implicit guarantee to all banks that if they go bust, first of all you will lose some of your savings and then the state will step in, bail in then bail out. We need to socialise, it's partly socialised, the risks are socialised, the rewards are still privatised. I think you need to step carefully, we're talking about a Labour government here, not a student union debate, a step carefully, but I would take RBS accept the fact that it's never going to recover as a proper capitalist bank. It's one of the biggest institutions in the world, even now, and then to the debate, is it going to be a socialised bank or would you then break up its capital into regional banks? But for me RBS should be the number one candidate for this national investment bank. There's no need to create, we could create a new one, we still have to have the problem of what to do with RBS. We could create a good bank, bad bank with RBS and the good bank should be refocused to do what you see Barclays always did in this country. Barclays was a preeminent lender to SMEs, it's useless now, but if you had a business that was literally brimming with money to lend at very decent rates to the kind of businesses that you might want to form people around here and already have formed, and Brighton's full of small innovative businesses, that and then HS2 and then a new motorway and then a title barrage in Swansea, these are tens of billions and it could have 200, the programme is 250 or we need to spend it in 10 years. Sorry, can I jump in here? I want to say thank you. Neo-liberalism for me is very simple, it was a class project from the very beginning, it was not about the market, it was about consolidating class power and I tried to write that out and it's very interesting what's happened, I tried to write that out in the brief history of neoliberalism, there are lots of books coming on about neoliberalism right now and one tries to treat it as an ideology and other tries to treat it as about the market and other about that and that to the point where the concept becomes incoherent and half of people say you shouldn't use it anymore, which means great, we don't have to talk about the concentration of class power anymore, well fuck you, that's what we've got to talk about. That's going straight to Facebook and I'm tired of this kind of stupid debate, it's about consolidation, it's consolidation and as you said one of the bits of consolidation is you use the banks in a certain kind of way. Going off the gold standard in 1971 was the beginning point of a lot of this it then allowed the credit system to be used in a certain kind of way where you could actually start robbing the world like crazy so actually when you look at something like the South East Asian crisis it was a thing where perfectly good economy was forced into bankruptcy by financial means then instept the banks bought all the things up and then sold them back at some vast things. The Chinese understand this by the way they have a little thing where they kind of say that the United States right now is economy is two thirds based on robbing the rest of the world and one third based on making things and the robbery comes about through these institutions that get set up, the investment bank I think it's a great idea but one of the things it's got to do is A be democratised itself it's all very well to say we're in a patriarchal way we're going to encourage democratisation in a village you know that's very nice, centralised decentralisation or or we have to actually experiment with new ways in which that investment bank could itself be democratised and the second thing is it's got to challenge the main centre of neoliberal power which lies in what I call the state finance nexus which is a coalition between the Treasury Department and the Bank of England in this country between the Treasury Department in the United States and the Federal Reserve in the United States because that's where a lot of the power is located and you can play around with the rest of the economy all you like but those are the people who really really put it together and it was great in 2008 when after Lehman went bankrupt Congress didn't know what to do they all ran away and were all kind of silent Bush the President didn't know what to do and he disappeared down some rabbit hole and who came out and said this is what we do the chair of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke plus Hank Paulson came out and stood in front of the television and had a three page piece of paper and said this is what we do and what did we do, we didn't bail the people out no, we bailed the banks out that's what they said that's neoliberalism in power for you and we've got to keep that concept straight in our mind we can chuck neoliberalism out if you want that's fine but don't forget the incredible importance of the class power that is being assembled right now it is more more concentrated and powerful now than it's ever been and the big question for me is how are they going to use that power to take these new technologies which do indeed have lots of emancipatory possibilities and all the rest of it and actually turn it to their advantage how are they going to do that that's the thing and it's interesting one of the things that we can discuss this a bit is the universal basic income now, you know, the left autonomistas have this but who else has it all the Silicon Valley people all the Silicon Valley people that's what they want universal basic income they want to have people delivered enough money to buy their products and it has nothing to do with being nice to people having a basic my God, who's going to buy Netflix if they have no money and when we get that sort of economy is set up that's what Silicon Valley wants and so we've got to start thinking about that and artificial intelligence is coming down very strong what worries me is in the same way that the left fought in the manufacturing sector against automation and new organisational forms and all the rest of it and basically lost again and again and again as working class were destroyed by sort of deindustrialisation and all of that we're now going to see the same story repeated again in the service sector and the big question for the left is are we going to fight resistance to artificial intelligence coming in in hospitals or this kind of stuff are we going to fight it and lose or are we going to use it creatively and actually then push with it in certain kinds of ways that's one of the big technological issues that I think we should be discussing Do you want to sponsor that point? Let's get to the issue of Uber and let's try and this is my understanding forget what's going on right now but in 50 years time most cities will have a transport system that is automated it's entirely possible, intelligently run but the question is the question of class power is posed right now today for everybody who understands that that will happen because either London's transport system will be run by an automated system that is centralised and whose logic runs on behalf of everybody and therefore social justice debates and values will feed into it should we have a tube station down in this poverty stricken borough or all things like that or the system will reside in every atom of the transport network that is the system will be the operating system in every car and every autonomous bus and every other thing that's in that system if it's centralised it will be entirely possible and I think necessary to cheapen it all because the point will be this thing will run itself so its production cost cost of producer car, producer bus, producer train will be the cost of running it and you can subsidise it or not but you could very easily reduce the cost of transport to pennies for everybody if the system is the operating system of every vehicle that can't happen in fact that having the operating system of every vehicle run the system will necessitate a transactional thing so basically can my car go in front of viewers in this traffic jam becomes a question of cost and that is where Uber is a company designed to prevent the emergence of centralised transport systems in cities that's what it is it's nothing to do with providing employment or poorly paid cabbies it is now but they're designing the company for when autonomous cars come about not the word autonomous not driverless they want the cars to have an operating system that allows them to operate independently of and actually in defiance of any traffic management system that's actually already in place so this conflict we're having right now about Uber which I think we should all be very clear about is not just a massively exploitative rip-off system is a conflict about who owns the data and who controls the smart city and the people who put the money into Uber the Saudi Arabia monarchy and the Silicon Valley guys they're very clear that unless they produce a disruptive business model the natural outcome of the business model would be a centralised democratically controlled and ultra cheap and ultimately non-market transport system in every city within 50 years that's what we should want and they are the rebels they are rebelling against modernity so Paul said a few minutes ago that potentially any transition beyond fossil fuels to renewable energy may necessitate something akin to Stalinism and I saw Alice start writing something down do you want to tell us what you wrote? I think I just wrote Stalinism this is an opportunity to write Stalinism I think it is a really provocative point and I think it's really important I think it is something that we should all think about so there was a paper that came out last week about whether we could whether it said that it was they'd done the maths again and they thought it was geophysically possible that we might be able to keep to 1.5 degrees warming which then got spun as oh actually climate change isn't going to be a big problem anymore the scientists have discovered it is still going to be a problem there's a lot of big difference between being geophysically possible or not being geophysically impossible I think was their phrase and being a political and a cultural and a social and economic inevitability and there's a massive gap between those things for us from where we are socially, politically, economically and to some extent technologically although I think that's less of an issue one way of looking at looking at fear of climate change in the eye is to go we want some kind of Stalinist response but I would still say that we cannot do that I really quite I think that is what powers me to go to work every day is not just that I'm scared of climate change is that I'm terrified about the way we may respond to climate change and we may do it very, very badly I'm glad I'm glad that I'm not the only one who feels this way so I think we should heed like warnings like the thing that Paul just said properly and we should think about that but at the same time we should be working to try and do community energy alongside large scale we can have big and small and medium together we can have things like we have the Oréan Denmark which has got a community offshore wind turbine it's alongside a larger commercial one owned by the part state owned dong there are ways of doing this to different hybrids and I also really like that you mentioned the Tidol Lagoon project in Swansea because one of the really interesting things about this project is it's not just about imagining renewable energy and a lot of the rhetoric about the Tidol Lagoon project is all about how many jobs it's going to create how much money it's going to save how much carbon it's going to save all of those things are important but it misses a very beautiful bit of that project which is still very important if you talk to the people involved in it which is totally reimagining what we mean by a energy a way of producing energy a power station so this is a power station that's not just going to be making power and giving jobs a park and a cultural space and that you can go to art concerts there and they'll be like wildlife and birds and you'll spend time there and you'll know people who work there and you'll have an opportunity to argue about climate change in the building just completely different from a nuclear power plant with loads of get out of here security alerts around the side of it it's completely reimagining our relationship to energy and that can be done alongside very large scale state sponsored, state funded projects so that's different from a Stalinist vision of rapid decarbonisation I'm going to come to you in a second James I wanted to just build on what you were saying Alice I think it's Peter Thiel who talks about this stuff and you were saying that Silicon Valley is now saying maybe heating maybe sort of kept to 1.5 Peter Thiel talks about us launching something into space where we sort of block out a certain amount of sunlight the geoengineering stuff and then the carbon sequestration and I say these guys are the most interested in that stuff because it means that they could basically persist with the current mode of production that really belies the fundamental point about the relationship between technology and capitalist social relations James would a national investment bank fund a People's Uber? Yes, I think we said it would so there you go I think I was pretty certain that we even said that somewhere in the manifesto and John said it on occasion A People's Uber? This is what I meant about the finance not just national investment bank but other new financial institutions on a local scale on whatever scale really you need if we're talking about finance part of the issue here is that we basically have five very very large banks that behave in one particular way and then that's kind of it if you have multiple different institutions under different kinds of control with different priorities other than trying to make it as much money as possible as fast as possible seamless as possible for your shareholders then you could start to talk about funding different things so of course things like platform co-operatives things like saying actually why can't we take this technology which is relatively easy to reproduce this is the big dirty secret I suppose behind some of this relatively easy to reproduce and put it in the hands of the people actually work with that technology and use that technology so of course something like the People's Uber, why not? I mean that I think would be an essential part of what you want to do I mean it's classical Keynesianism you've got all the labour the fixed capital, the cars are there but Uber could disappear in a couple of months and all of a sudden 40,000 people are unemployed so what would that kind of intervention of saying of people what did you call it? platform co-operatives what would that look like in that instance would it be all of a sudden injection of hundreds of millions what would that mean in this particular incidence of 40,000 workers all of a sudden I'm going to annoy you by stepping away from the particular instance of Uber in this one but more generally the bit that we're pushing up against here I'll rephrase it would it be would you give work you've learnt well James we've got the Blairites of the left now but would you say I'm a policy wonk I'm a Blairite of the left we go back it's fine no that's true, seven years not a long would you give work as the means to buy their work places that's basically what we're getting at the bit here is what you're talking about is two things I think in terms of the manifesto this year and what people have said and what we've done and how far the whole movement has gotten is that in order to pay for a whole load of public services we need to tax more effectively than you are and that means tax people have money more effectively and that's what the manifesto has said that was the 5% 95% division that was saying that we need to tax big corporations more than they are, not actually that much more it's back up to the level of George Osborne even in 2011 we're saying with corporation tax if you do that then we can pay for public services and things, this does not get us into some of the more fundamental problems in the economy over the longer term which is this enormous distribution mal-distribution concentration of wealth of power in a few hands and what you start to do about that it's an exciting thing about some of these technologies and it's not just the digital stuff where you can see straight away that you can copy software incredibly rapidly and cheaply and it's just there and you've got it so why not have it more collectively owned that's what lurks behind Uber and other such companies why not have that more collectively and democratically owned you can see how you do that but also on the level of manufacturing on the level of production you can see the scale of production needed now an enormous scale in assembly lines to things are done in 3D printing to things can be done in other different forms of technology now if you start to think about that and if you have this capital that can operate on a smaller scale it becomes a lot easier to see how you can democratise it decentralise it, give it to people and fund the institutions that will do that and those institutions should ideally be owned by the people who are working there and that would be a more democratic better fairer more egalitarian way of running society to make that happen you need new institutions you do need something like a national investment bank the regional development banks it does need to be under democratic control it does need to have that sense that this is what we're going to do that we're taking the wealth that's there and we're giving it back into the hands of people so instead of saying that you have this incredible concentration of wealth and power at the top we can use the technology that we have we can take the technology that you have and give it back into the hands of people but to do that requires institutional change talking about the national investment bank and finance more generally the fundamental point I suppose is would you trust the people who crash the banks to also run the robots that's kind of the note of the argument so in other words you have to try and take that technology and give it to people and find different ways of running we have to have very very few choices on this otherwise the system runs away with it great that sounds like I like the framing of the real right to buy you know and I think that's absolutely right the right to buy your workplace is phenomenal David we've got just under 15 minutes left then we'll go to questions and we finish at 20 past I believe that's still okay with the TWT gang good you mentioned briefly AI David how would you manage it because Elon Musk has talked about this hasn't he he said the big problem is when we get AI is that all of a sudden are phenomenal they'll augment human intelligence in a way but all of a sudden people have access to a resource which is more valuable than thousands of human brains etc how can we manage that in a post capitalist way frankly I don't know to begin with I think this is where for most of us we're at the edge of this and I think that we don't know quite what all is involved but we should be sitting around thinking about it and getting lots and lots of ideas about it because it is now possible and partly because AI itself as I understand it is doubling in capacity almost every two years or something so in ten years time we'll likely to find all kinds of things which will be possible to do I'm interested in questions of how AI might relate to more concretely questions of urban and regional planning because I think it's all very well saying we want to reduce fossil fuels and we want to have driverless cars and all that kind of stuff but we also got to think about why people are making journeys in the first place and what kind of journeys they are and what they're for and one of the things that is a bit astonishing about contemporary society is the way in which everything seems to be quite upside down I mean we have all of this immense labour saving equipment in household I mean household technologies for example have gone through the roof over the last 30, 40 years but if you kind of say has that made life easier for people the answer we generally get back is no so there's a whole kind of question of what emancipation is about and what freedom is about and I think this is where it comes back to I think some of the things you're interested in I mean I think disposable time free time is one of the great things that we can aim for that is where we go back to the pre-capitalist world in which the working day was four hours and under those circumstances you have a much more civilised society when actually we cover all of the basics and as Marx kind of puts it the realm of freedom begins when you leave the realm of necessity behind and we have to think about that necessity now in the middle of this of course what we do what we're getting is an incredible pressure coming from capital to create new forms of necessity and when I talk about this I sometimes find myself being dubbed as anti-consumerist no I think it's good that we have certain levels of consumption but there is a form of conspicuous consumption which is kind of and waste which is going on in the world of consumerism which also needs to be paid very close attention to about 40% of the food supply in the United States goes to waste and you kind of go well we've got to think about how to pull that all back in and are there AI techniques that could address those sorts of questions so for me one of the issues is not to necessarily dwell entirely on AI although we need to know a lot about its capacities and its powers but we have to also have some vision in a society we want to live in what kind of people we want to be and there is a moral argument being made right now I mean it's very strong in the United States do we all want to live like Donald Trump and be like Donald Trump and a lot of the other people are saying hell no that's not who we are and that's not what a human being should be and I think that actually actually you know I mean this can get a misi washi kind of moralistic debate but on the other hand I think it's worth having because then the question of it's not simply about AI it's what it is that we want to harness AI to do which would liberate us from the kind of drudgery that many people live in right now I mean just quickly responding to that for me when you look at AI and renewable energy Jeremy Rifkin talks about the technology energy matrix of fossil fuels with the steam engine if you view this pairing of AI with ever cheaper solar in particular I think it could be just as disruptive as this technology which like you say really underpinned the globalisation of capitalism remarkably quickly Mark Cuban who's a technology entrepreneur owns a basketball team I believe he said that AI would create the world's first trillionaire Paul why is it easier in the head of Mark Cuban to conceive of a trillionaire than post-scarcity communism I'm surprised he said trillionaire I don't think it's a quadrillionaire Exorcillionaire Look the challenge and the immense potential are summed up in that question when Google's deep mind computer beat the best go player in the world last year the move that made everybody cry was the ninth dance at Go Go was a Japanese board game that's much more complex than chess and therefore a computer can easily win at chess but one had never beaten the best go player in the world so it made a move what it asked itself is what's the best move I can make that a human wouldn't make and it found a 10,000 to one chance move that no human would have made and all the guys were like oh my gosh, it won so what does that mean because it was told to me by somebody who works closely to that team for 3,000 years we had an orchard an orchard is a technology that's more or less stayed the same since Iran in 1500 BC about 30 years ago you could put a barcode on an apple from about 10 years ago you could have drones fly in sniff the apple pick it and fly it you automate the orchard what the google deep mind thing means is that you show the computer in apple and say what's the best way to make 10 million of these that's the difference it will think of things we can't think of now from that you can see why it might make a trillionaire because unlike the internet is today it's an incredibly distributed power system it's networked it has nodes and the nodes can talk to each other or do on our cell phones without a centralized gatekeeper of the information the real danger of AI to me is it's going to give social power to the organisation that controls the inputs and the outputs in other words it takes you back to Alan Turing's for anti massive supercomputer was one it takes you back to a world where computing is in the hands of somebody and that's a really big thing because that somebody is either going to be Peter Thiel and his proto-fascist right wing silicon valley people or it's going to be the state which is equally frightening to me or there's a very legit since we're talking sort of think piece think tank kind of stuff there's a very legitimate argument that says until you can control it democratically don't invent it Alice any thoughts on artificial intelligence transition beyond fossil fuels maybe not artificial intelligence but there's sort of element of the mixture you were talking about a mixture of artificial intelligence and solar but there's a sort of stage before artificial intelligence the moment one of the problems we've got with our energy system is it's really analog it's not moved to digital and we're seeing some movement of digital one of the big transitions in our energy system we're going to see in the next few years being more digital which is going to allow it to start feeding into that you're going to start to be able to see that intersection of energy and AI but we're also seeing just this stage at the moment where some people are getting smart meters it's a very basic level of trust who owns that information about your home and I worry about the way that we're doing smart meters are great potentially there could be a lot of power in smart meters for us to reduce the amount of energy we're using and make ourselves more comfortable without feeling like we just have to reduce everything in a kind of like we have to make everything scarce we have to just put on a jumper this is about being efficient about our homes and looking out where we're losing energy and where we can use it more maybe being efficient working with local renewables as a project we're working with a community in Wales where it means that they can using a network of smart meters and they're working with co-op energies so they're a club they can club together and they can act as a buyer of renewable energy for the local hydro plant that all normally do when we buy energy from the grid so if you live here and you live opposite those giant wind turbines you can't buy electricity from those wind turbines you have to buy it from the grid and the people who own the wind turbines have to sell it to the grid and it's not necessarily giving everyone the best deal but this community that we're working with in Wales they can buy direct from their hydro plant they save money and the hydro plant can get more money because they also get a better price which means that they can invest in renewables there's all sorts of things that we could be doing brilliant but I'm really worried about the way we're doing it and I think we should have lots of expansive interesting conversations about AI but I don't want us to miss this kind of more everyday conversation about Nest or whatever technology some of you may be being offered and who owns that and how we do that and I'd like to see groups like the Labour Party talking about how we might think about community owned forms of that public owned forms of that and who owns these platforms is Alexa right, Amazon Alexa which is obviously or Google Home which is in your home and it's eventually what you're going to see within homes and obviously within communities is an energy internet where energy is distributed in ways and channeled in ways which is optimal similarly objects like your phone will be able to store energy and when something else in the home needs it it'll go there and so on this may also sound very strange but fundamentally it's the same ecology that we see with the formation of a logistical internet and robots and trains and buses which are all entirely autonomous all integrated in a manner in which we have optimal outputs so but who controls it but who controls it and fundamentally like you say unless it's withdrawn from capitalist social relations it's not good potentially, I mean certainly it'll mean things like your washing machine working at the best time of day for when your solar panels are working which is potentially really good but you might worry about your washing machine but there's perfectly reasonable reasons why people would worry about that sort of thing and we need to be careful about how fast we go and make sure that we're transparent about it and take people with us otherwise I think we'll get backlash this is one of the reasons why I worry about a kind of very heavy top down we can say Stalinist or some other word like revolution in terms of how we use energy is that people will be left behind and then they're going to start to hate it and then we're going to get festering of people not wanting to move we'll get people hating smart meters and if we want to do this well and fast I think we do need to bring people with us and work with them otherwise I don't think it will happen that fast at all, it won't happen fast enough and it won't happen well in a fair way that's not going to cause other problems in other places James, finally and then we're going to have questions very quickly did you want to respond to anything in particular or I've got a question for you at the level of government we've got a shadow cabinet which is many people presume as a government in ways to what extent of the people that would be going into the treasury business innovation skills etc etc are they thinking concretely about these challenges around for instance solar, who owns data, AI and is that the role of the Labour party or would you say well actually no think tanks should be thinking about these things and there should be a broader conversation whatever happens there's a broader conversation about it, I mean we put out it was published during the election campaign a document on alternative models of ownership which went into some of this many of people are interested in having a look through and precisely makes the case for how you create new institutions that democratise the economy that give people a biggest stake in the wealth of society that is things like everything from public ownership of major bits of infrastructure like the railways for instance all the way down to what do we do on a smaller scale with this problem of large numbers of baby boomers retiring leaving behind small businesses with no obvious people to sell it to potentially there's a very large number of businesses that just cease because no one's going to buy it there's no one else there now there are solutions to this that might well involve well for instance the people who work in that business could take it over for instance so it's a relatively sort of mundane smaller scale things it goes through some of that and it's worth a read the broader question I think is the one that people have touched on it is about power and it is about power in society and that's really what economics ends up being about when you look at it what we have at the minute I think and this is exciting around what's happening with the Labour Party and more generally is that you can see that there's a series of problems in society the underlying ones for the British economy in particular and I think it is nice to have a conversation about this technological new world that could be out there the truth of the British economy is that the institutions we have are poorly set up to deal with any of this aren't going to deliver much of this the crudest indicator of that is that there's a need in investment in high-tech manufacturing in lots and lots of other things you might expect an economy that was working towards getting any of this stuff to be investing in the slide in research and development spending for a number of years, the actual cuts in research spending that this government under George Osborne pushed through so you can see that these institutions don't work they don't get you that they get you a different version of that which is the low wages the labour market that produces insecure work all the period of time now if we have an economy as institutions can't deliver these things the question to us is how would you get institutions that can and that's when you get the steps down the road towards saying well this is how the whole society could look different this is where we start to address some of the questions of who benefits from this technology how can we make it work better how can we make it work for the benefit of everyone right good we have 20 minutes left I believe there are two roving mics yes please put your hands up and then there'll be two people walking around giving the mics out we'll take three questions at a time and then the people that are addressed can respond to them so where are the microphones there's a mic yeah do you want to just one of you guys goes first and then just pick three people whoever gets the mic first asks the first question this person at the back here with their hand up right at the back right at the back on the left and then excuse me my eyes are so terrible you know this chap here shall I just crack on capitalism isn't just a concentration of class power it's also a concentration of geopolitical power so in the context of capitalism today where the materials that we're talking about for the technologies we're talking about come from the earth materials which are pulled out of the ground in areas with poor working conditions and cause a lot of environmental degradation what are the risks attendant to the project that we're talking about here because you can quite easily I mean we can envision the world we're talking about now but to me it could become more of like a fortress Europe becomes starship Europe like the west gets a lot and the rest of the world kind of has to suffer so we get we get maybe Elysium and the rest of the world gets Mad Max very good this chap here hello I'm back to the technology and its misuse as Masson said if it is not socially controlled don't invent it and I concur with him and his sentiments completely because the technology that has been invented these days is such that it is used not only to manipulate but to victimize individuals some of us who are minorities of who we talk about the extremism of capitalism and we are seen as a danger to the establishment and society to the point where we are vulgarized, paravarized and completely misused as individuals as well as world so that we as we see it actually it is the so-called middle class who are aware and know including such a public public on the companies like BBC who are helping on playing or whatever place they put on or the arts they make and all these things paravising individuals and all these things just because to making them a laughing stock so that they may have no integrity or no purpose for their lives for which we must disabuse socially and collectively thanks. I'll take one more. Yes, this woman here. Just listening to your discussion of artificial intelligence prior to AI is the massive accumulation of data personal data and as more devices come on the internet energy devices other household devices a massive amount of information about people's everyday lives in a situation where and I cannot emphasize this enough of prevalent and endemic insecurity and we don't have enough people working on that at the moment and the problem is getting bigger and bigger is the question and we live in an era where that aggregation of data is happening already is the key question about who owns that data and how it's controlled or should we be trying to resist that further aggregation entirely, that's it. So we've got three questions we'll start with you David, you can answer all of them or none of them obviously try and be as concise as possible we'll do another round of questions. Well the thing about data is there's some things you can collect data about and some you can't and one of the big problems that exist right now is if you can't convert something into data the tendency is to believe it doesn't exist now here's one of the major contradictions that how do you get data on alienation for example that's very difficult and in fact we're living in a world in which almost two thirds of the population of the world are alienated deeply alienated so you're collecting data on all kinds of things like your traffic habits and what you bought in the store yesterday and a lot of it is being used I think also for this kind of question that the contemporary state has become essentially a militarised state apparatus which is into punitive politics rather than into actual social serving. And again there is a big political kind of problem of conversion of that because otherwise to the degree that you try to maintain any kind of democracy then the democracy is going to end up with some crazy electoral results which of course is the sort of thing we're seeing and again so you're right, there's a lot of data which is all kind of getting out all over the place and people use it for all sorts of reasons I'm very much in habit these days of when something comes up I lie so maybe we should have a mass lying kind of a thing when anybody wants to know and so the various things like that geopolitically I think we haven't discussed the whole kind of question of geopolitics it's too big to go into here and I think the whole kind of question of where China is going I'm very much into that these days and what's going on with the Chinese economy and what that bodes for everything from energy consumption to technological transformations and the geopolitics of the one belt one road all those sorts of things so there are all sorts of issues of that kind but we haven't had a chance to and I think it's probably impossible for us to get in any depth about here Can I answer your question slightly tangentially what are the important things that information capitalism does is that it creates an industry around what economists call externalities externalities used to be if you've got a power station and here's my washing line your pollution hits my washing line how do I solve the problem that I'm not doing business with you how do I charge you and the capitalist economists said well you create taxation you create penalties for the polluting power station but now we have positive externalities information that the idea that somebody who can look at all the aggregated data of Tesco's Tesco's consumer everything we do in a Tesco can work out a lot of things that can work out do you know what street all the diseases of poverty and obesity are in where I come from south London if you knew what those people were buying in Tesco you could work out to tell them not to buy it in other words there are huge social power residing in this data but the question is what do we do with it the positive externality of network data creating new knowledge is all being controlled by giant monopolies whose entire existence they're pre-designed to know what you're doing Uber is pre-designed not just to know where you travel from it's imputed who you are it's working out what you've done now this is incredible we need social power over reality the project of progressive politic socialism is to create social power for everybody overall reality but we need to so you ask should it be centralized or decentralized I would argue the moment where decentralized control over data is going to solve this has kind of gone so in a city like Barcelona Ada Colau who's the radical left mayor of Barcelona said information sovereignty for the city so insofar as it becomes smart that it has a smart health system a smart public transport system that sees your phone as you go in and works at what station you use to come out at we own the data the data is a public good now the moment Colau said this the global consultancy and IT industry went nuts they're the only customer in the entire world that's told them they can't have the data and I think Brighton could do it I think London could do it it's a templated idea you take the data and you say data is a public good and it's almost like saying I'm a luxury communist it's almost like the most radical thing you can say is that data should be a commonly owned public good as long as of course it's anonymized because the worst thing you want is but you say well I think I think the creation of data sets that are anonymized is actually weirdly what Facebook that's its business it sells anonymized data sets so look we could get into a discussion about how possible it is but if we can't anonymize it again we shouldn't be using it but I think the immense social power that we could gain over reality by using our our data as a public good has to be aeim for me anyway and that means centralized data storage that's a really that's a really appealing vision that Paul's given although it's reminding me of back when I used to work more in health policy we had conversations about NHS data and a lot of arguments about that this will be owned by the NHS we trust the NHS this is using data for social good and there are a lot of very good medical reasons why this would help researchers it would help us find new ways to treat medical conditions and it was a very appealing vision at the end it didn't work for lots of political reasons but I was still very dubious I was a bit scared of it basically because I thought there were other things in our society and our economics especially the way the NHS is going that made me worry a bit about it being okay now like is an idea, I like it I'd like us to be able to move to that I don't think there are other things that we are ready for but I wanted to thank you for raising that issue the one about rare earth minerals and one of the things that it really made me think about which we haven't really touched on enough so far was the gap that a lot of us have when we between the knowledge about the technological objects that we use and our everyday experience of them and particularly how that is encouraged by people who make a lot of the technological objects to sell to us but the iPhone is the perfect example of that is the black box that looks very shiny it's wonderful it gives you so much power when you use it but it's impossible to have a sense of what's inside it and it's very difficult to understand what was put in it and it's even difficult for Apple at least they say to know where the minerals that it was made from came from if you contrast that with the Fairphone I don't know if any of you have ever encountered the Fairphone it's a wonderful half art project activist piece, half actual smartphone some people who use it is anyone here got a Fairphone some people use it some people use it, love it my partner will still say even when he's annoyed at it not working that it's a brilliant bit of tech some people use it, hate them but I think the fact that it's trying to be a Fairphone a Fairtrade smartphone and they will admit that it's almost impossible to do that that it's actually impossible to have a Fairtrade smartphone but the process that it's made from is to invite you to ask questions about it this is why I think of it a bit like an art project it invites you to question where things come from and it's physically put together so you can take it apart and you can understand a bit about what it's made from the website tells you where everything comes from but completely opposite to the beautiful black shiny black mirror of the iPhone and I think that we need more technological objects like the Fairphone that invite us to ask questions about that and that would also relate to understanding our data and thinking about at the moment I think we're sleepwalking into a lot of really dangerous things with tech and that's partly because we're being encouraged not to pay attention to what we're doing and where things are coming from and it may be that we just need to I think if we're going to do tech well we need to build a better relationship to our knowledge of where those technological objects come from and what we're doing when we're sharing data on things like Facebook or stuff like that so it's a knowledge gap I think for us Right we've got five more minutes so I'm going to take two more questions that'd be very very very concise my eyes are so bad tell you what there's a person here in the red scarf just to the front yep red scarf Hi so you mentioned obviously what place AI could have in the process of technological emancipation on a similar vein what do you think of the place of space exploration and technology in the in that similar process I don't want to make a dichotomy but could it be emancipating or is it more of like a kind of narcissistic utopian fantasy that provides a get out for the past sins and actions of capitalism and if space travel became socialised with this effect if what became socialised space travel and exploration would that effect that relation one more um this person here with the maroon top actually go on we'll take you as well this young woman at the back quite like this, making the big decisions I used a bit of tech recently on a conference called Slidio which I would, we're talking about tech it worked really well for avoiding this is more of a comment than a question just as a recommendation for people who find that frustrating Slidio it allows people in the audience to type in their questions and then the chair can see them and can also it works really well, it's great very destructive too many questions right let's do this one data is already a public good and we call it academia is it is a public good it's like the current idea of academia producing more and more accessible data sets is a new thing and actually something I'm worried about is because as Nick I can never process last name keeps pointed out about data accumulation that it is necessarily the business model is necessarily monopolistic I don't, what I'm actually worried about is do you think Facebook is going to start coming for universities as a competitor of data production good yes the panel have to be very very quick 30 seconds to a minute each the answers will be quick to this one but basically Alice I really liked how you spoke about how we have to bring people along with this idea about technological advancement particularly around energy but if we think that a lot of the consumption and this links it back earlier on as well a lot of our consumption is connected to notions of fetishisation of this romantic notions we have about products like Apple like whatever it is how can we recreate things that are in public ownership but that's still appeal to people in a way that is real and that is sexy and that is appealing and that it hits our desire right in the core shall we start with do you want to respond to these James or how can we make public ownership sexy also producing public goods which I suppose appeal to an aesthetic sensibility quick answer Tom Ford heading up the ministry of aesthetic that's it's going off in a tangent slightly I'm going to give you such a dull answer to this one so it's why is it that rail renationalisation is still popular is it because everyone misses British rail and everything it's still for no it isn't it's because what we've got at the minute doesn't work very well what tends to produce answers like wouldn't it be better if someone else ran this is like the experience of trying to get here in southern rail you know that sort of thing but and that's how you start with an appeal now the step beyond this is how do we get to a point where instead of an argument being roughly okay whoever's got all this money and they're investing technology they're the innovator and anybody who questions this is basically some sort of luddite and that's the kind of dichotomy is it's really seen as in the last few days that if you sort of suggest that the market solutions or the market outcome that you're getting to here is problematic in some way then in fact you're opposed to technology itself I think disentangling those two things is a challenge I suspect it's already happening because technology itself is getting us to the point where actually you know you can produce something very cheaply and distribute it very cheaply and it's just obvious that it can be shared and it's a collective production of something that is the internet and we already see what technology disassociated from immediate explicit private ownership starts to look like so I suspect there's already bits of examples there it's just spreading that example around Alice You said when you said about making things appealing you also said making them real and that was maybe just because you were you know forming the question but I don't think our desire for a lot of these objects is real I think some of it is real but I think some of it isn't real too and part of what we can offer is just different forms of desire but also I don't see why we couldn't have Topshop destroyed and remade as a workers cooperative really I mean I don't see why we can't have cool things and maybe that goes back to the space travel thing maybe we could have space travel you know under fully automated luxury communism I would worry a bit about space travel because apparently there's something to do with where it admits where you would be you could be particularly environmentally damaging apparently space travel so let's not do that but we could create one that's like a low I don't know a non-emission spacecraft and then let's all go to the moon because that would be fun Space socialism beauty interesting what's interesting is that when I said Peter Thiel of PayPal is a proto fascist I mean it he has theorised he's written in 2009 I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible this is what the American writer doing and what he said is what he said is there's two things we can do we can colonise outer space we can colonise the sea or we can colonise the cyberspace and create that they did the third they created the alt right there so they have a project and they are imagining human life a hundred years hence and they control the access to capital capital such as exist on a scale that can invest in these massive space travel projects are is owned by Silicon Valley no okay from how do we go from there to things we can do I want to finish with this with a proposal Viennawerkstater was the beautiful R Nouveau publicly financed design bureau in Vienna house in 1920s Germany Russia also had the constructivist artists in Russia had their equivalent of the Bauhaus what they were all trying to do was to create beautiful trendy mass producible things for workers that would make workers lives more beautiful than anybody else's and ultra cheap and I think one thing the first left government that comes to power series that should have done this should have created or like fostered the creation of a new design bureau that is there to create cheap recyclable circularly producible goods that have the believe me kids age 16 would be wearing that logo for series because it means I'm saving the god damn planet and I'm fucking capitalism at the same time who doesn't want to do both of those things David my views of space travel have been perverted a bit by reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novels but the key thing there is that you kind of if you replicate the same social relations as you go then make any difference and this is the problem and this brings me if you like to the again we have a tremendous amount of information you have a tremendous amount of data right and this can be used and is used of course by the corporations those instruments of domination and we could use it and you know quite a few people on the left are pretty adapted using it too and and I think that we also have a pretty sophisticated system of communication though of course we find out right now that the National Security Administration is listening to all of it and so so it's not as great as it is but I think the one thing we're really short of we've got the information we've got the social communication but the big problem we've got right now is the organisation where's the organisation and I think that that is not something that is given if you like by the tech data and the tech question and all the rest of it it's saying well until we have a really good organisation on the ground we're not in a position to look at AI and say no we don't want that kind of AI we want something else we're not in a position to actually say look the state apparatus is behaving like a sort of repressive monolith and it's time it's stopped we're not going to have the capacity to do those things so that the big whole if you like politically for me is that properly organising thanks