 Sure, well, I come from Belarus. This is where I grew up. I spent the first 17 years of my life living there. I come also not from the capital, but from a very small city of miners. So my entire family is in mining, who spends a lot of time underground. And I was the one who managed to have escaped. So with regards to authoritarianism, of course, Belarus is known for having one litter in place since 1995. And this political situation there is not entirely enviable. And if you listen to some of the pundits in America, they would often describe it as the lost outpost of tyranny in Europe. I started working on technology very indirectly. I started working for a non-profit organization called Transitions Online, which was one of those Western NGOs that was primarily interested in promoting freedom of expression, professional journalism, but also we can say democracy and human rights in the former Soviet Union. And my contribution to their work was to figure out how to build their new media strategy. And of course, coming from Belarus at the very beginning, I was very excited about the potential of these new tools because the way I looked at it is that everything else has been tried. We've tried NGOs, we've tried political parties, we've tried building nationalist movements. Everything in the case of Belarus has been tried and failed. And here comes this new technology. You can use text messages to mobilize people. You can use blogs to discuss things. You cannot discuss in the traditional media. You can rely on the power of cell phones to capture police brutality. I mean, there was a lot of excitement around 2005-2006, which partly, again, derives from the political climate in Eastern Europe at the time. You had the revolution in Serbia, then you had the few years later revolution in Ukraine. You had the revolution before that in Georgia. Something was brewing in Eastern Europe, and we had a lot of hope. And I invested a lot of hope in technology. But then I think my other cynical Eastern European part took over, and I have to add that I also spent four years in Bulgaria. This is where I got educated. And Bulgaria is known as the rest of the Balkans for its cynicism. And my cynical Bulgarian side, I think, took over at some point in 2006-2007, and I became very skeptical of the very tools and platforms we were using, in part because I saw that they were actually making very little difference to the situation on the ground, to people who were on the ground using those tools. But I also noticed that the Syrian governments themselves were actually actively deploying those tools to spy on their population, to engage in propaganda by paying and training bloggers to spread the kind of truth that the government wanted to spread by engaging in new forms of censorship or cyber attacks. And I basically saw the other side of this digitization, and I saw that if we lift things as they are and we engage in this very happy, cheerful celebration of the power of the Internet, we would miss the real story. And the real story, unfortunately, was that Syrian governments were getting empowered as well. So in my own case, those two utopian projects on the one hand coming from me, hoping that this might change the world for the better, and at the same time, a dystopian cynical side trying to show how well-meaning schemes all end up in disaster somehow came together and produced my first book, which I think is entirely dependent on my professional experience as someone who worked for NGEO, but also someone who saw many of those early intervention schemes on the ground, as someone who lived in Bowlers and that in the Balkans. You know how many times I've been asked that question on the radio. I think Rob talked about a second book. He hasn't shared that with me. What is it about? What is it about? So my next book is called To Save Everything. Click here, the folder of technological solutionism. And this book is, in some sense, a continuation of the net delusion in that I'm shifting my attention away from authoritarian countries, from authoritarian governments, and I'm looking much closer to liberal democracies. I'm trying to understand what makes liberal democracies work, why they work as they do politically, why they work as they do socially. And my hunch when I was beginning to write that book was that there is a new player in town, and this player is Silicon Valley. It's geeks, engineers, technologists, innovators who, because our world became so mediated through technology, suddenly acquired power. They are the new elite, but they are an acknowledged elite, in some sense. And I also sensed, when I began writing that book, was that they're very different from typical commercial players. They're not like Coca-Cola or McDonald's that just wants to go and sell you another hamburger or another Coke. They actually want to change the world, and they want to change the world for the better. And all being engineers, they have their own ideas about how to do that. And they have the means, they have the tools, and they are lucky in that we tend to view any initiative that involves technology and information as being beneficial, because somehow there is this bias in society that as long as you have more information, things automatically batter because you have more knowledge. It's a bias that goes all the way back to the Enlightenment. There is no earlier bias about technology, that technology is great for liberating us from nature, and we should invest more power and energy into harvesting it to liberate ourselves from the burdens of the world. So in a sense, we tend to be far less critical of them as players because we already have existing biases about technology and information. So what I discovered is that there is a sustained effort in Silicon Valley to make the world a better place, and this is more or less what I call solutionism. But to really understand its nature, you have to see how they go about defining their problems. So part of my argument is that Silicon Valley is now empowered to solve problems that may not actually exist. They think that politics is bad because there is hypocrisy in politics, or politics is bad because there is partisanship in politics. So if only we can make everything open and transparent, if only we can make people more honest and replace political parties with direct democracy, which we can now do because we can now vote on anything, there are mobile phones, and we can read about anything, there are mobile phones, democracy will automatically improve. That's one of the assumptions that geeks make, and one of the justifications for that assumption is not just how they think about democracy, it's also how they think about our unique historical situation. They think that because Wikipedia and open source software and Google and Facebook have succeeded, we are on the edge of a new society, with entirely new rules, with entirely new practices, with entirely new institutions. So many of the schemes which would look outright cookie to us 10 or 15 years ago, or 20 years ago, suddenly look normal because we are prepared for the next rupture. We have seen that rupture in the world of education and the world of knowledge production, and we expect that rupture will now happen elsewhere, be it politics, be it the world of fighting crime, be it the world of healthcare, where now we can actually have consumers monitor their health and self-diagnose instead of having them go to the doctor. This is wonderful for many people in Silicon Valley because you destroy intermediaries, because the idea is that intermediaries are bad. The flatter the world, the more easy it is for people to live in it. That's the template of Silicon Valley, and I'm trying to challenge it because I think hierarchies are often good, verticality is often good, networks often far less effective than hierarchies, and then efficiency, ambiguity, opacity, hypocrisy, all of those in small doses are positive values. They're not vices, they're virtues, and we need to learn how to recognize them as virtues, and we need to celebrate them.