Jamie Bartlett | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

How the world’s biggest crypto-scam targeted British Muslims

Back in 2016, thousands of Brits thought they’d struck gold. Word was spreading through WhatsApp and Facebook groups about an exciting new crypto-currency called OneCoin. It was rumoured to be the next Bitcoin – that strange digital currency that had been shooting up in value and minting millionaires. OneCoin’s founder, a Bulgarian-German businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova had impeccable credentials – a degree from Oxford and a stint at the respected McKinsey’s. OneCoin, Dr Ruja said, was the ‘Bitcoin Killer', heralding a financial revolution and, if you got in early, a unique new investment opportunity. Driven on by the crypto hype, OneCoin reached 175 countries around the world, and over €4bn was poured in from hopeful investors.

Jamie Bartlett

What Rory Stewart and Donald Trump have in common

Jamie Bartlett

What Rory Stewart and Donald Trump have in common

What the hell has got into Rory Stewart? The man’s everywhere, outstretched phone in hand, like an Instagram influencer on the edge, asking people to come and talk to him about Brexit. He’s at the Lewisham market by the stinky fish! No wait – now he’s on a train to Wigan. Now he’s talking Dari in Barking; now he’s in Kew Gardens searching for a Brexiteer. But wait: he’s on the move again, chatting in a taxi! Then to Borough Market, filling the tiny screen with his distinctive features. He has more energy than the rest of his rivals put together, and is even making arch-careerist Boris Johnson look indifferent about the leadership contest. This is all very smart. He seems to be the only one in the whole football team of Tory contenders who has realised the way to win a popularity contest in the age of social media is to get people talking about you.

Jamie Bartlett

The Met Police’s sinister facial recognition trial should worry us all

Jamie Bartlett

The Met Police’s sinister facial recognition trial should worry us all

We are extremely good at accusing others of doing the very thing we excel at. A case in point: we rightly criticise the Chinese government with its dystopian surveillance and social score systems, when we are considering building something similar. In a recent episode of BBC Click, journalist Geoff White followed the police’s pilot of live facial recognition technology. (The Metropolitan Police are running a number of pilots). In one chilling moment, a man walked past the facial recognition cameras and covered his face. The police stopped him, forced him to uncover and then took a photograph of him anyway. ‘This gives us grounds to stop and verify him,’ one officer said. The man got angry – understandably, I’d have done the same – which landed him a £90 fine for disorderly behaviour.

Jamie Bartlett

How we lost to Big Brother

Jamie Bartlett

How we lost to Big Brother

There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately — to reveal things. Apparently, readers like to feel they’ve got the inside track, even when there are no secrets to uncover. Perhaps this drove Yasha Levine to call his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. It promises to shine a light on the close and ongoing relationship between state surveillance and Silicon Valley. There are two problems with this. First, most of it is not secret. Second, I don’t think it’s right. For all its later ubiquity, the internet started life as a niche project funded by the US Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s to connect the tiny number of computers engaged in the computer science projects it supported.

Jamie Bartlett

How social media turned us into a nation of pub bores

Jamie Bartlett

How social media turned us into a nation of pub bores

Opinions are like social media accounts: approximately 2.7 billion people have one. I’ve no problem with people having an opinion of course. Quite the reverse: a nation without opinions is one without thoughts, ideas or morals. But over the last decade something has changed. We’ve always had opinions but now we feel compelled to share them with the world. And that is a problem. A few years ago, I had opinions about everything. I had strong views on Peter Mandelson and BSE and Sierra Leone and 7/7 and the price of bus fares and Uri Geller’s friendship with Michael Jackson. But none of these opinions were good enough to share in public, much less put down in writing and publish to potentially everyone on the planet.

Jamie Bartlett

Finally, politicians have realised how to hold Facebook to account

Jamie Bartlett

Finally, politicians have realised how to hold Facebook to account

This week, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee looking into fake news convened for a special session. For the first time since 1933, when the joint committee on Indian constitutional reform included parliamentarians from India, politicians from nine other countries joined Damian Collins and other MPs to cross-examine Facebook and others. A couple of days earlier, Collins had used an arcane parliamentary procedure to send a representative of the sarjeant at arms to a hotel room in order to squeeze documents from an app developer who made software to locate Facebook photos of people wearing bikinis. (You read that right). This, it seems, is what it takes to hold large international tech firms to account these days.

Jamie Bartlett

Nick Clegg is perfect for Facebook

Jamie Bartlett

Nick Clegg is perfect for Facebook

In his brilliant insider-account of his time at Facebook, Chaos Monkey, Antonio Garcia Martinez describes the process of ‘onboarding’. It’s the quasi-religious ceremony of inducting new staff into the company. “Whatever you learned at your previous job” Martinez was told, “whatever politics and bullshit you’re bringing with you, just leave all that shit behind.” I doubt Nick Clegg will do the same when he takes up his new role as Facebook’s head of global affairs. I’m guessing that his politics and bullshit is the reason he got the job. While his reputation was – slightly unfairly – damaged by the student fees debacle, Clegg is someone with pretty solid liberal credentials. He took a real interest in issues of surveillance and privacy throughout his time in government.

Jamie Bartlett

Why Labour’s new video should worry the Tories

Jamie Bartlett

Why Labour’s new video should worry the Tories

Last week, the Labour Party released a video called Our Town. It is a genuine piece of art, which shows that Labour takes the medium of video seriously. The Tories need to take note. It’s not impressive because of the message itself, since the message itself is familiar: we’re going to kick-start the economy, we’re going to create decent jobs, we’re going to magic-up smaller class sizes. Everyone says that. No, it’s a piece of art because of how it’s produced. Every medium of communication has styles and modes that suit it – the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously once said. Video, as an audio and visual medium, trades on emotional resonance, feeling and mood. Our Town takes those features seriously.

Jamie Bartlett

Lucy Powell’s bill is the wrong way to tackle online hate

Jamie Bartlett

Lucy Powell’s bill is the wrong way to tackle online hate

Politicians and the internet still don’t seem to get on. Yesterday Labour’s Lucy Powell put forward a bill proposing two peculiar new suggestions for tackling online hate: first, that moderators and administrators (the people that run online groups and forums) be held legally responsible for what’s posted in their groups. Second, that the name of any large Secret Facebook group, and the number of members it has, be made public Powell has pulled together an impressive array of signatories, including David Lammy and Jacob Rees-Mogg. It’s nice to see that bi-partisanship is still alive and well, even if the proposal itself is completely unworkable. I understand the aspiration – we need to stem the flow of online hate, and make tech companies more accountable.

Jamie Bartlett

It’s time to stop the digital mudracking

Jamie Bartlett

It’s time to stop the digital mudracking

What do Jeremy Corbyn, Stormzy, film director James Gunn and former Gay Times editor Josh Rivers all have in common? Answer: in the last year or so, they've all been publicly shamed for things they’ve posted online in the past. They’ve all been victims of the lazy new political attack technique: the digital mudrack. One of the more interesting changes in politics is the fact most of us now have a public record of every idiotic thing we’ve ever tweeted, posted, uploaded or said. This, of course, is a giant honey pot for political research teams, time-squeezed journalists and the endless horde of social media users who shark around the net looking for reasons to be outraged. An embarrassing drunk post, an off-message tweet before you were famous, a sexy selfie – it’s all fair game.

Jamie Bartlett

Turn off and tune out

Jamie Bartlett

Turn off and tune out

All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have an additional challenge, however, of combining all this with boring technical detail. How to explain the mechanical stuff without being either too dry or too simple? What’s the reader’s likely level of knowledge? These questions can eat an author up. I imagine science writers have the same difficulty, but this problem weighs especially on tech writers, because the composition of a piece of software, an encryption standard, or a machine-learning algorithm has a direct bearing on how it works and therefore how it affects the world. You can’t really understand the social or economic impact of bitcoin, for example, without understanding — to a reasonable degree — how the thing works.

Jamie Bartlett

Not so fast

Jamie Bartlett

Not so fast

I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days for the next instalment of my favourite television programme. It didn’t seem to bother me in the slightest that my holiday photos would not be seen until I’d picked them up from the chemist. I even went to the library to get information from an encyclopaedia. Life, in short, used to be a waiting game, and patience was not just a virtue but a habit. Now I wonder how I survived in a world without Google Maps, Uber or smartphones with in-built cameras. The whole direction and purpose of modern life, at least on the surface and for those well-off enough to benefit, is to make everything frictionless, personalised, easy.

Jamie Bartlett

Ireland’s abortion vote and the wild west of online adverts

Jamie Bartlett

Ireland’s abortion vote and the wild west of online adverts

It’s sometimes hard to know who’s really behind decisions at big tech firms. It could have been the PR team (‘we don’t want more negative press’), the policy team (‘the luddites in parliament want to regulate us’) or the engineers (‘we can’t stop it’). Whoever it was, a couple of weeks back both Google and Facebook announced measures to prevent foreign interference in tomorrow's Irish referendum on the eighth amendment, which effectively outlaws abortion. Facebook is only allowing organisations based in Ireland to run ads about the subject; Google’s gone one further and banned them all. I suspect it was a rare instance of everyone agreeing. After relentless stories about Cambridge Analytica and Russia meddling, the tech firms – especially Facebook – promised action.

Jamie Bartlett

The joy of GDPR

Jamie Bartlett

The joy of GDPR

Happy GDPR week everyone! This Friday, the General Data Protection Regulation comes into force, the most ambitious data privacy ruling since, well, ever. I’m not going to go through the specifics – there are plenty of vastly overpriced seminars for that – but it’s basically about giving EU citizens more rights and control over their personal information, info on how and why it’s being collected and used, and the chance to opt out if they want. Some of this was already in law – but now there are monster fines if companies don’t comply. You will probably know it from those endless emails. Hundreds of them, from places and people you’d completely forgotten. All of them cajoling, begging or pleading for you to ‘stay in touch’ or ‘to never let go’.

Jamie Bartlett

Why politicians love to blame an algorithm

Jamie Bartlett

Why politicians love to blame an algorithm

Yesterday Jeremy Hunt said something very important by mistake. He told the Commons that ‘a computer algorithm failure’ meant that 450,000 patients in England missed breast cancer screenings. As many as 270 women might have had their lives shortened as a result. This point hasn't received the analysis it deserves. Scores of women died sooner than they should have done, because of an algorithm. He’s probably right, you know. It really could have been a computer model to blame here. But that’s obviously unsatisfactory, since we need humans to hold to account when things go wrong. Let’s say it was a poorly programmed algorithm – who’s at fault? The tech guy who wrote it, years ago? The person who commissioned it? The people feeding the data in? The more we outsource decisions to machines, the more blurred the lines of accountability will become.

Jamie Bartlett

The Facebook scandal exposes our politicians’ technical illiteracy

Jamie Bartlett

The Facebook scandal exposes our politicians’ technical illiteracy

Imagine a world in which all politicians were computer scientists. What a dreary dystopia that would be. It’s hard to think of anything worse than a nation ruled by people with PhDs in machine learning. That said, politicians do need to know something about the digital world. It’s no longer good enough for our elected representatives to feign technical illiteracy, throw up their arms in defeat, and ask the office twenty-something to fix it. Every professional thinks politicians are clueless about their particular area of expertise – doctors complain that MPs are medically illiterate, teachers moan that they don't get pedagogy and so on. But a special case can be made for upping the digital literacy of our elected, because unlike the many, many subjects about which our politicians know little, digital technology increasingly concerns foundational questions of accountability, fairness, and abuse of power.

Jamie Bartlett

Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘team’ are the real losers of the Facebook hearing

Jamie Bartlett

Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘team’ are the real losers of the Facebook hearing

Right now, in some tasteful open plan office in California, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘team’ is hard at work. Or at least they should be, because they have a lot to do. When he wasn’t trying to explain the 101 basics of how the internet actually works, Zuck was telling senators that his team would look into the details, and would be in touch. The reason he was there at all, subjecting himself to five gruelling hours of intensive and sometimes wildly misdirected questioning, was to reassure three groups of people: Facebook users, who need to know Zuck cares about privacy. Investors, who need to know the company is dealing with the crisis. And finally the politicians themselves, who are wondering if more rules and laws are needed to tame the giant.

Jamie Bartlett

Big data is watching you

Jamie Bartlett

Big data is watching you

From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters. Joining them were 13 employees from the UK-based data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, who were led by chief product officer Matt ‘Oz’ Oczkowski, who had enormous biceps and walked around the office carrying a golf club.

Jamie Bartlett

The Cambridge Analytica row shows politics moving in a disturbing direction

Jamie Bartlett

The Cambridge Analytica row shows politics moving in a disturbing direction

From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was -skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters. Joining them were 13 employees from the UK-based data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, who were led by chief product officer Matt ‘Oz’ Oczkowski, who had enormous biceps and walked around the office carrying a golf club.

Jamie Bartlett

Facebook’s enemies are relishing Mark Zuckerberg’s troubles

Jamie Bartlett

Facebook’s enemies are relishing Mark Zuckerberg’s troubles

Jamie Bartlett

Italy’s Five Star Movement and the triumph of digital populism

Jamie Bartlett

Italy’s Five Star Movement and the triumph of digital populism

A couple of years back, while writing my book Radicals, I secured an interview with Beppe Grillo, leader of the Italian Five Star Movement. M5S (its Italian abbreviation) is the radical anti-establishment party that’s on track to top next week’s general election. We met in the restaurant of the hotel he always stays when in Rome. There was a small crowd outside as I walked in, hoping to get a glimpse of the man. Beppe wandered in late – he enjoys daily siestas – waving his smartphone. ‘This,’ he said, as he sat down, ‘this is what changes everything!’ Then something weird happened. Before I’d even pressed ‘record’, he picked up the small spoon that came with his espresso, and starting staring at it, making it bend like a la Uri Geller.

Jamie Bartlett

Should we believe the hype about blockchains?

Jamie Bartlett

Should we believe the hype about blockchains?

Blockchain is an idea whose time has come. By which I mean it’s still mostly an idea, and is currently the only thing tech people want to talk about. But it’s in danger of getting hyped out of control, which in the end will damage it. So what actually is a blockchain? Very broadly speaking, a blockchain is a way to store information. Boring, yet possibly revolutionary. A copy of every transaction between people is stored on a chronologically ordered, secure database, and identical copies of that database are hosted on multiple computers. New transactions can only be added once they have been verified by other computers, and it’s not possible to edit, change or delete old entries. It’s like a massive, public, tamperproof spreadsheet that everyone can view or add to but no-one is in charge of.

Jamie Bartlett

The trouble with ‘activists’

Jamie Bartlett

The trouble with ‘activists’

I often ask myself why there aren’t more people on the streets over climate change. After all, there is a near scientific consensus that we’re on the path to destroying every single living thing on the planet, including ourselves. Seems a pretty worthwhile cause. Yet you’ll typically find more people attending an English Defence League demo or a bitcoin conference than trying to close a coal mine. I’d like to propose an answer: ‘the activist’. I don’t mean the gran who donates each month to Greenpeace, or even Caroline Lucas. I mean the pros who roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. The people for whom being a climate activist is part of their identity and social circle. The soft moralisers for whom it is not just something they do, but something they are, like being a ‘hacker’ or a yoga person.

Jamie Bartlett

The great online advertising swindle

Jamie Bartlett

The great online advertising swindle

Conmen and fraudsters thrive in confusion. And few places are more confusing and opaque than the jargon-ridden world of online advertising. Which is odd really, since the entire social media edifice – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat – depends on it. 2017 was the year of the tech-lash, when people and politicians started to push back against tech-led disruption. But there’s potentially a far more significant threat looming for the tech giants: ad fraud. On one level, online advertising is very simple: you get shown endless adverts as you bounce your way around the net, and an advertiser pays whenever someone either looks at, or – the holy grail! – clicks on one of the damn things. Every year tens of billions of pounds are spent in this war for your attention, and some of the world’s finest minds are engaged.

Jamie Bartlett

Bitcoin’s rocketing value is undermining its original purpose

Jamie Bartlett

Bitcoin’s rocketing value is undermining its original purpose

Everyone interested in technology has their own bitcoin story. As is the way with these things, the earlier you were on the scene the better. I cashed out back in 2012 when a bitcoin was worth just £7, says one. Well, I bought a pizza in 2014 with bitcoin which, at today’s rate, cost me almost ten grand, replies another. And so on. These stories are usually told with a hint of pride. The more you lost the better in fact, since it signifies that you were in the know before everyone else, long before it was cool. I have my own story too of course, involving dark net drugs markets back in 2013, when drug pushing was the main use of bitcoin. I will tell it to anyone who listens, especially if they are Johnny-come-latelies.

Jamie Bartlett

The driverless car revolution will open up all sorts of dilemmas

Jamie Bartlett

The driverless car revolution will open up all sorts of dilemmas

Philip Hammond wants fully autonomous driverless cars on our roads by 2021. That’s not too far away, is it? I know it sounds like a science fiction year, but it’s only about fifty months off. Technologically, it’s plausible. Earlier this year I travelled over 100 miles in a driverless truck across Florida with the BBC. True, it was on long straight highways and not through Slough town centre in the rain, but still. Millions are being spent on this technology, and in the race between Google, Uber, Tesla and the rest, there will be rapid progress. And there is no doubt that driverless cars will be safer than these killing machines being operated by texting, confused and tired humans. Thousands are killed every year by human drivers.

Jamie Bartlett

Can you distinguish between a bot and a human?

Jamie Bartlett

Can you distinguish between a bot and a human?

We’ve all gone a bit bot-mad in the past few weeks. Automated accounts have invaded our civic life – especially pesky Russian ones – and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have woken up to the fact that a new propaganda war is taking place online. Bots – which is of course short for robot – are essentially accounts which can be programmed to automatically post, share, re-tweet, or do whatever the programmer chooses. Creating a bot is extremely easy, and huge amounts of cheap bots are available on dark net markets for next to nothing. There are millions of harmless bots out there doing all sorts of helpful and funny things, including breaking news stories. But Russia twigged early that bots can also be usefully deployed to influence public opinion.

Jamie Bartlett

The Russia US election probe is lose-lose for Facebook

Jamie Bartlett

The Russia US election probe is lose-lose for Facebook

The ongoing investigation into Russian influence in the US election is looking more and more like an existential threat to big tech. A couple of weeks back, Facebook, hauled up in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that up to 126 million people saw political adverts that had been purchased by the Kremlin backed ‘Internet Research Agency’, between 2015-2017. It turned over 3,000 ads to investigators, which had been placed through almost 500 accounts and 120 pages. It's not just Facebook, of course. Twitter also provided Congress with the handles of around 36,000 Russian linked bots who tweeted a total of 1.4 million times in the two months before the election. The company estimates that their tweets were viewed nearly 300 million times.

Jamie Bartlett

The backlash against big tech is in danger of going too far

Jamie Bartlett

The backlash against big tech is in danger of going too far

I’ve long believed the public has a good bullshit meter. It’s imprecise and sometimes temporarily misdirected, but people usually sense when something’s up. And they smell a problem with big tech. Think back a few years. Remember how optimistic you were about the digital revolution and how total connectivity and limitless information would make us all wiser, freer, kinder and happier? Lots of extremely intelligent people swallowed this guff. Sure, there were sceptics who warned that the coming digital utopia wasn’t nailed on. But these miserable old farts were easy to ignore because they didn’t ‘get it’. So we galloped ahead, embracing every new gadget, phone, platform, website and app. It obviously helped that Facebook, YouTube et al cost nothing to use and were incredibly useful – Google Maps alone has saved me hundreds of lost hours – but more importantly, they were cool.