The Ned Ludd Radio Hour Podot

it’s time to talk about Apple. Apple that big, sleek, glossy company with a current market cap of some $3.3 trillion dollars. The same Apple with whose products you are, quite plausibly, listening to this podcast. Indeed, they’re the reason a podcast is called a podcast: the cast is from broadcast, but the pod? That’s from the iPod. Remember those?
Apple has long felt like one of those tech companies which are, materially, nation states. Is part of FAANG the spooky sounding concatenation of Big Tech supremos, alongside Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. As a sidenote, I like the suggestion that FAANG should now be replaced by MANAMANA for Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe.
 
Where other companies – like, naming no names, Meta – have ebbed and flowed with the tides of both their products and society’s preferences, Apple has been resilient. Good hardware release has followed good hardware release, and the iPhone has become the most important piece of technology on the market. Even where products from competitors like Samsung and Huawei appear to technologically outweigh the Californian company’s offering, they’ve still found themselves chasing Apple’s tail. The modern smartphone is, consequentially, build entirely in the image of the iPhone. But why is this?
It's because the commodity that Apple has always traded in, above and beyond everything else, is cool. The products don’t look like nerd-baiting CPUs, they look like accessories for the Met Gala. iOS doesn’t look all goofy like Linux, it looks like it’s been designed by some graphic designer who publishes a coffee table book of artistic nudes of his Japanese girlfriend. Everything is smooth and fluid, like liquid slowed to a fraction of its motional speed.
But is Apple’s era as the purveyor of technological cool at an end?
On this episode we speak to Slate's tech and business reporter Nitish Pahwa about the possible fall of the House of Apple...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The impact that technology has on psychology is a new field of research, and one where the multi-decade studies required to give definitive answers are still many years away. One of the other fields being covered is the area of certainty. Is the internet making people to certain about the opinions? Too close-minded to the possibility that they might be wrong, or might have more to learn? And to what extent is the internet responsible for a crisis in over-confidence? Or is it simply another manifestation of a totally natural mammalian tendency towards confidence?
These are difficult questions to answer, not least because they scratch at the core question that should be vexing technologists. Is technology good for the human brain? Or is technology simply the result of a human brain that’s screwed up in all the ways that technology is? Which came first, chicken or egg; technological nonsense-boosting or the scattershot human brain?
To answer all this, I’m joined by Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, and the more recent Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. It’s the latter book we talk about mainly, and because we recorded this interview a few weeks ago, I’ve largely forgotten what we spoke about. Maybe the content of this episode is the greatest uncertainty of all. Anyway, I’ll be listening and hopefully you will too.
The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast.
Written and presented by Nick Hilton.
The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State
The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.
NEDLUDDLIVES.COM

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, we're speaking to Kester Brewin, an author who works for the delightfully named Institute for the Future of Work here in London. He’s just about to release a new book called God-like: a 500 year history of Artificial Intelligence in myths, machines and monsters. It's a book which charts the ideas that underpin everything – from ChatGPT and Dall.E to the recently-released Sora – back to their roots. Is there something quasi-theological about the way we discuss the possible implications of these radical new technologies? Don’t think of this as a history of Artificial Intelligence, per se, but a history of the impulse that has led us, inexorably, towards AI.
The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by Nick Hilton.
The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.
The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Enshittification' is a word coined by the Canadian writer and technologist Cory Doctorow to describe, to filch Wikipedia’s definition, “the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that function as two-sided markets”. This is the tension behind much of Big Tech. How do businesses extract value without destroying the identity that they built, and, as a result, alienating their userbase? Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and it feels to me like it has captured a moment of social media in full maturity. After more than a decade of mass uptake – whether that’s a microblogging platform like Twitter, a network like Facebook, or even streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, which owe much to the social revolution – there is a cooling off of the desire to endlessly solicit new users. A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A viable revenue stream.
Cory Doctorow's new book, The Internet Con, is available wherever you could reasonably expect to purchase books (or online).
The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by Nick Hilton.
The theme music is 'Internet Song' by Apes of the State.
The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I don’t want to be too pearl clutching in all this, but there are some kids who never touch grass, figuratively or literally. I see these groups of teenagers in London who seem to be chatting but seem also to have their headphones in, like they’re living some strange hybrid life. How long is it before the ability to function, in a society that has long prizes independence, is irreparably eroded?
To discuss all this, I dialled up Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is a writer, activist and president of Let Grow, a parenting organisation. Her book Free-Range Parenting outlines her stance on giving children more, not less, independence. She even hosted a show on Cineflix called World’s Worst Mom, a moniker she was given after she wrote a column about letting her 9-year-old ride the subway alone (but more on that in a second). Anyway, here’s our conversation, which hopefully gives you something to think about…
The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast.
For sales and advertising email nick@podotpods.com
NEDLUDDLIVES.COM

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Look, let’s get real: if you’re a bricklayer or a pilot or a veterinary nurse or a paediatric orthodontist or the pest control guy who delicately places pieces of cheese in mouse traps, there hasn’t been a work from home revolution. The revolution, in so much as there has been one, has been in the information services sector, an area that probably over-hired, over-invested in real estate, and was probably desperate to slash both those costs. But if you are a professional in one of these industries, I’m sure you’ve noticed a very real change in the world of work. Work from home and hybrid working has gone from the strange preserve of senior executives and recent relocaters, to an almost default presumption.
Research in 2021 by IWG found that 85% of 18-24 year olds would take flexible working as a perk ahead of a 10% salary bump. A 2023 survey of possible business perks found that 94% felt that work from home would improve their wellbeing, making it the most desired perk. What were the other top perks, I hear you ask. In second plays, flexi-hours, in bronze medal, flexi-location. All of these beat out number four: a bonus cheque.
I happened upon a business called Ashore and found it an interesting premise. It is, essentially, a way of making remote work more appealing to the human instinct. They market a bunch of properties set up for remote working, but which are set in beautiful landscapes or interesting parts of the world. They see it as a way, I think, of breaking out of the home and office binary, and offering a third space. A work space that encourages humans to be humans rather than pure working drones.
Anyway, I wanted to get the company’s co-founder Aled Maclean-Jones on to discuss his journey to Ashore, what they’re trying to build there and how he views the work from home revolution. He’s a really interesting, clear thinker, so do stick around now to hear what he thinks…
The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.
The music is Internet Song by Apes of the State and the artwork is by Tom Humberstone.
For all queries, go to PODOTPODS.COM
 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.