Who Owns The Internet & How It Owns Us - James Ball - #213

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends. Welcome back. My guest today is James Ball. He's a British journalist and a writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, also been at The Guardian, WikiLeaks, BuzzFeed, and The Washington Post. He also was the person who brought out Julian Assange on stage in a stadium with like 15,000 people there. So he's been around the block, and his new book is talking about the internet, the history of the internet, who controls it, and how it controls us. Really interesting deep dives, some investigative journalism, talking about the heritage of the internet, what it was supposed to do, what it actually is. Like there's these crazy lines that run underneath the Atlantic, and there's not very many of them. And apparently sharks sometimes just cut them, and then people's internet goes down. Really interesting episode. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful James Ball.
I want to know, what's it like interviewing Edward Snowden in a stadium filled with 15,000 people?

**James Ball** (1:16)
Sir, that was something of a moment, I've got to say. They've done this very dramatic sort of video buildup, and then they killed every light in the place. And so I'm walking out to Silhouette, and they've just been told to expect Edward Snowden. And you can see the disappointment on the face of the people in front of you, right? Like, absolutely crashing, have we been sold a bill of goods?
My sort of script line to start it was, Edward, are you listening? At which point he's meant to appear on the big screens, because of course it's video link. And you just have this sinking moment in your sort of, the longest sort of second and a half of my life, when you come on the stage and Edward, are you listening? And you just think, if he doesn't come up on the screen, this is going to be awful. So honestly, the rest of the interview after that was a total cakewalk, because the nerves of that moment have been so extreme.

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
Dude, you just look proper metallic as shit.

**James Ball** (2:22)
Honestly, you go around and speak as a journalist, as a reporter, and a big crowd is 200 That feels like primetime. And so you walk out to 13,000 at this music concert venue, and you're like, what the hell happened?

**Chris Williamson** (2:40)
What happened in life for me to end up in this situation here?

**James Ball** (2:44)
Yeah, it's just completely ridiculous. The venue did some photos from the back of the crowd, and you've just got this huge sort of stadium crowd. And then every screen, as it should be, massive picture of Edward Snowden. And there's this tiny dot on the stage. It's like, that's me, that's me.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
You look at me, mom, I made it. I made it.

**James Ball** (3:06)
I did actually send it to my mom.

**Chris Williamson** (3:08)
You got it.

**James Ball** (3:09)
Who has got it in a little frame.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
How cool, man. That's awesome. So yes, we're talking about analogous today. We're talking about the internet. You've written a book about the internet. Why did you write a book about the internet?

**James Ball** (3:23)
I wrote a book about the internet because weirdly, for something that's kind of so pervasive, more than half of all of humans are on it. We do everything in our lives by it. We're doing this interview with it. We do our banking. It's our financial system. It's our information. It's our spies. It's our critical network. And all we really talk about is Facebook and Twitter and Google. And they're really important. We should talk about them. They do matter. But we never talk about the actual internet bit. We talk about the cloud or we just sort of use it and don't think about it.
And I kind of was like, OK, all of these boring, invisible bits of the internet, they're not boring. They're really important. And I want to do a book talking about them instead. So that sort of was what I set out when I did it. And hopefully, hopefully it's fairly successful in like actually going, look at all these really important bits of the internet that are just as broken and just as wild, but have nothing to do with Mark Zuckerberg.

**Chris Williamson** (4:27)
Yeah, it's, it's mad because you're right, the internet, the infrastructure, physically how it manifests and how the messages are actually being moved around the world and all this sort of stuff. The takeoff of the platform of like the software side of things and the way that it's experienced by people was so great, that we never actually got to look into how interesting or cool or otherwise, all of the stuff underneath that was, you know? Like, you got to see the Wright brothers got to take a little bit of a plane off and you see them and they kind of fail a little bit and then there's a slightly better one and then oh wow we've managed to get a helicopter but it doesn't really work that much you know we got to attach another rotor and do all this stuff and then you eventually get to like Concord and you watch this whole thing and people kind of brought along for the ride but the takeoff with the internet was so intense and so so quickly was everyone it was just this ubiquitous utility like gas and plumbing that we all kind of we didn't get to see that bit right it is that amazing thing it's become a utility and we sort of you know the electrical grid is pretty cool if you ever need to think about it like we have to generate the same amount of power every day that we use and you can't store power very well it's really hard to do and so there's this massive complicated mess of a thing going on that we had I think we have about a century, maybe a century and a half generously to build.