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The Current Transcript for April 27, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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I saw men cut their stomach open with glass. Men suffocating themselves, men stitching their lips; one man stitched his eyelid.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She is talking about asylum seekers, often war refugees, so despondent that they would harm themselves. For years, successive Australian governments diverted boatloads of refugees to camps on two remote islands to hold them in indefinite detention. No journalists are allowed in, no information is allowed out. It has been illegal for those who work there to even talk about it. But the harsh conditions created more than one whistle blower, and somehow filmmaker Eva Orner managed to get hidden cameras inside, documenting devastating conditions. In half an hour, Eva Orner on the plight of those Chasing Asylum. Also today, if we want it, there will be an app for that.

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McDonald's didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there. Walmart didn't have organic food until the consumer demand was there. We have to demand this new kind of technology.

AMT: Tristan Harris wants tech companies to rethink the kind of products they offer us. All those distracting devices loaded with distracting messages, notifications, click bait. Right now, many of us are doing some sort of task on a mobile device more than 200 times a day, and that distraction has spawned a new attraction: companies that will take your money to help you ignore all the incoming data. In an hour, we enter the world of the anti-technology technology. But we begin with the ideas of another upstart/ The 30-year-old who is second in line to the throne in Saudi Arabia who wants to wean the kingdom off oil.

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[speaking alternate language]

VOICE OF TRANSLATOR: The oil today became like the constitution -- the holy book, the Sunnah, and the oil -- and that is very dangerous. We have addiction to oil in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Everyone has it.

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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Saudi Arabia announces plan to end 'addiction' to fossil fuels

Guests: Aya Batrawy, Karen Young

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[speaking alternate language]

VOICE OF TRANSLATOR: King Abdulaziz and the men who worked with him in all parts of the kingdom for the establishment of the state did not depend on oil, and they established the kingdom without depending on oil, and they ran this state without oil and lived in this state without oil. They defied British colonialism where Britain could not take an inch from Saudi Arabia’s land without depending on oil, but depending on men only.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Saudi Arabia without the oil. It may be hard to picture, but that is the vision. You heard the deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, on Saudi TV there this week, selling what he calls his Vision 2030 plan. It would mean big changes for a kingdom synonymous with oil and oil wealth. At a time when crude prices are low and the world is focused on cutting carbon, the plan sees Saudi Arabia setting up a massive sovereign wealth fund. It would make investments in the country's future source of wealth rather than oil sales. And that's not all. Vision 2030 includes plans to relax residency laws, build affordable housing, and even start collecting some taxes. All changes with the potential for major ripple effects inside Saudi Arabia, across the Arab World, and throughout the global economy. Aya Batrawy reports on the Arabian Peninsula for the Associated Press. And she joins us from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Hello!

AYA BATRAWY: Hi.

AMT: How does the Saudi government say it will be able to survive without oil by 2030?

AYA BATRAWY: Well, that's exactly what this plan is about. It's about how to create a blueprint for a country that has been entirely reliant on its main export of oil for the last several decades. Their economy had been booming when oil prices were above a hundred dollars a barrel, they were able to spend lavishly on building universities, roads, hospitals, basic infrastructure for the country, expanding government perks, creating more jobs in the government, cushy jobs, mortgage-free loans on housing all kinds of great perks. And I think people in Western countries may take for granted, or not even have, great health care, that kind of thing; scholarships, study at the best universities abroad for students. And now with oil prices obviously sinking to, even earlier this year, $30 a barrel, the kingdom has really had to look into how are we going to move forward, and how are we going to support the more than 50 per cent of our population that is under 25 years old that are going to be looking for jobs, looking for affordable housing, when the government simply cannot absorb these millions of people in the public sector. So really, what this plan is a blueprint for how to move away from total reliance on oil and how to create a more sufficient economy that is privatized, liberalized, more open to foreign investment, more open to foreigners, as well, and a country that can sustain itself going into the future.

AMT: and they're talking about selling a five per cent share of the state-owned oil company Aramco. How significant is that, what would that get them?

AYA BATRAWY: So the deputy Crown Prince said estimates have put Aramco possibly at the value of two trillion dollars, so 5 per cent of that would be the largest IPO ever. And so they're hoping that the revenue that could come from publicly listing even just five per cent would be then used to create a huge sovereign wealth fund, which the government would then use the revenue from to build its infrastructure and cities. But there have been some analysts who say, look, that's a great plan, but you're still, at the end of the day, revenue would be still coming, in a way, from oil. So there are questions on how exactly that can be implemented and will that be enough, certainly not. You still have to look at creating jobs, you still have to look at boosting a private interest infrastructure, you have to look at liberalizing laws to encourage entrepreneurship, educating your population for the skills of the future, for the IT skills, and thinking about how to really reform society, not just the economy

AMT: And there's also talk of reducing energy subsidies. What does that really mean, how would that affect the Saudi people?

AYA BATRAWY: So there's already been a reduction of subsidies that happened in December, when the government posted nearly 100 billion-dollar deficit in its budget. So they did lift some subsidies already, but still, gasoline is so cheap in Saudi Arabia, it's, I think, one of the cheapest in the world, if not the cheapest. So it costs just a few cents to really fill up your car, a few dollars. So the subsidies were lifted, but still not at the price that you'd pay in Canada or the U.S. or other countries. The bigger issue is people have been complaining on social media that even public sector wages haven't been enough to cover their basic cost of living. So, some people are making three or four hundred dollars a month. So if you were to remove all kinds of subsidies, or suddenly lift them dramatically, people simply wouldn't be able to afford the cost. So one thing that Riyadh, for example, the capital is doing, is they're trying to build a public transport system, so metro system, a subway system. Same in Jeddah. And sort of maybe wean people off of reliance on cars, and that kind of thing. But the government currently spends around $61 billion on energy subsidies. So they can definitely save some money if they were to rein some of that back.

AMT: How has the Saudi economy been affected by the plummet in oil prices?

AYA BATRAWY: It has really restricted and eroded their ability to continue this lavish spending that was happening before. I mean, it's really playing a catch up game trying to build the universities of the future, trying to build quality infrastructure for the country. This drop in oil means that it's become much more difficult to continue on that path. And so they'll need to put their hands together with the private sector and the wealthy businessmen of Saudi Arabia to really pull their weight and build the country with them through public-private partnerships in order to also avert the kinds of upheaval we saw in other Arab countries when youth you couldn't find jobs and when youth were struggling to see opportunity before them.

AMT: It was a Saudi decision, though, was it not, that triggered, in a saturated market, to keep pumping oil at high numbers, that triggered some of this decline?

AYA BATRAWY: Yes. I mean, Saudi Arabia has definitely played a risky game. They could have, early on, pulled back production and maybe that would have driven up oil prices. But at the same time, OPEC isn't what it used to be, and there's other players out there right now, like Iran and Russia that are keeping their production levels high, as well. And it's good to keep in mind that this isn't the first visionary ten or fifteen or five year plan; this is maybe the tenth that Saudi Arabia has talked about. But what makes this time different is that the challenges are much more urgent; there's a new king and a new generation of princes who are coming into the fold and making huge, very important leadership decisions. The challenges in the region around them are certainly different. You have the regional instability at every corner of the Middle East, really.

AMT: And speaking of what you're talking about, the new generation with the Deputy Crown Prince, I have a clip I’d like you to hear of Fahad Nazer, worked at the Saudi embassy in Washington and is now a political analyst at JTG Incorporated, an independent government consultant agency. Listen to this clip.

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You know, one has to take into account the fact that some 70 per cent of Saudis are under the age of 30. Prince Mohammed is about 30, 31. So I think there is quite a bit of enthusiasm and excitement about the way he is doing things. And he is doing things in a very different manner. He is setting short and long term goals. He is putting a lot of emphasis on performance. Saudi Arabia has long been known for a very kind of a slow pace of change. You know, in the eyes of many Saudis, I think these measures are long overdue.

AMT: Aya Batrawy, what do you think of what he says?

AYA BATRAWY: I've spoken to young Saudis and there is, I think, mixed reaction toward the way that he has assumed power. His father is king, yes, but he's not the eldest son and he's not necessarily the most well-known when he came to power. His only position before becoming defense minister, really, that made him somewhat known to the public was as his father-- the head of the royal court when his father was Crown Prince. So when he became defense minister, which is a massive portfolio for Saudi Arabia, and then when he became Deputy Crown Prince, and then also chaired, became chair of this newly formed Economic Policy Committee, it was a lot. Maybe some even say a power grab. Yes, he is from a younger generation of Saudis. At the same time, this younger generation of Saudis, there's a huge, I would say gap between the average Saudi and a senior royal. So to close that gap and bridge that gap I think will take more than barometers of seeing how the performance is. I think it will take some social reforms, as well. Women make up more than 50 per cent of university students in Saudi Arabia. And they want to work, and not just for purposes of boosting the economy, a lot of homes now require two income households. And they want to use their knowledge. They want to travel abroad without the permission of a male guardian. They want to drive, a lot of them. Not all of them, of course, but many of them do want those opportunities. So I think it will require more than just economic reform, I think, really, to bridge that gap, and for young people to really feel like they're part of this decision making process.

AMT: And so given the kind of change that would ripple out from that, that 14-year timeline, is that realistic?

AYA BATRAWY: Well, he's even set a closer timeline of saying by 2020 they won't really need to rely on oil at all. So that's four years from now. And again, some analysts said that's just not practical, but the IMF has said, the International Monetary Fund has said, you know, these are the exact kinds of plans that Saudi Arabia needs to embark on. And if anything, it's late, but it's good that it's happening now. Definitely encouraging, I think, to see that there really is this massive national effort to transform the country economically, and possibly even socially, to some extent.

AMT: Okay, well, Aya Batrawy, thank you for your insights.

AYA BATRAWY: Thank you.

AMT: Aya Batrawy is a reporter with the Associated Press, she covers the Arabian Peninsula. We reached her in Dubai. Saudi Arabia's citizens have grown used to a lot of perks of living in a wealthy oil state, such as highly subsidized fuel, water, electricity. Even with the latest price hikes, gas at the pump costs about 32 cents a litre. But the country's middle class has been watching anxiously as oil prices have fallen for months, and continue to stay low. Even before the announcement of the Vision 2030 plan, it has been clear that big changes were on their way. Karen Young is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. She joins us from Washington, DC. Hello.

KAREN YOUNG: Good morning.

AMT: From the outside, we see Saudi Arabia as a wealthy country. But how do regular Saudis, middle class Saudis, see themselves?

KAREN YOUNG: I think it's a misperception. Saudi is a rich country, but it's not full of rich people. And for many people on public sector salaries, it is difficult to meet housing needs. There's a big housing crunch in Saudi Arabia right now, especially for young people. It's difficult to buy a home. It's difficult to find a job for many young people. So there's pressure that's been mounting, and part of it is demographic. Just the proportion of young people sort of entering the market and trying to start families and buy homes. But some of it is also just the structure of the labour market, which is not very flexible.

AMT: And so, how deeply will regular Saudis be affected by cuts to social spending?

KAREN YOUNG: Well, we're already seeing a bit of dissent, in a very moderated tone, in Saudi Arabia with the cuts to subsidies to electricity and water. So many people were unhappy about that, and the minister of electricity and water was actually fired over the weekend in response. So the government, I think, is trying to gauge public reaction to changes in fiscal policy. And it will be sort of experimental and slow going. The reduction of subsidies in gasoline is another example. Gasoline, as Aya said, remains very inexpensive, but it's a fairly large portion of the average Saudi budget, is spent on transportation. So it becomes something that normal people have to take into account in their weekly budget. Will I be able to make that extra trip to the shopping mall, or should I maybe stay home over the weekend? Those are the kind of questions that people are now asking.

AMT: You talk about dissent. You dissent at your peril in Saudi Arabia, do you not?

KAREN YOUNG: Yeah, I say it's very-- you know, our idea of dissent in the West is certainly not the way that politics plays out in inside of Saudi Arabia. But the people were voicing concerns on social media, and that's kind of the one mechanism where people might feel a little bit more comfortable.

AMT: And can I just clarify, there are a lot of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, what's the proportion of Saudi citizens to the foreign workers who are there?

KAREN YOUNG: Well, this is a subject of debate. Officially, it's about a third. But many people think the numbers are much larger. I mean, if you look at basically the workforce, it's probably more like two thirds of the workforce is foreign. In some industries, of course, it's much higher. In the construction industry, it's nine out of ten labourers are foreign. So it's very widespread, and there's also a lot of replication and inefficiencies. The way that people are invited into the kingdom as foreign labourers is often based on visas that the government will issue to a company and say, oh, you can hire 700 workers for this project, but 500 of them must be of x nationality. So the labour market and the rules regulating labour are structured around really national identities, rather than in job skills or the needs of a particular company or project.

AMT: And what new image is Saudi Arabia trying to create for itself internally and abroad with this latest announcement?

KAREN YOUNG: Well, you know, Saudi Arabia has a lot of challenges in projecting its identity and its ability and willingness to change to the outside. It seems to just sort of stumble every time. And the Vision 2030 is getting mixed reactions, I think, from a lot of people watching markets. They're thinking, well, this is a Herculean task, it's near impossible. But then other people are reacting and saying, well, finally, this is an attempt at change, it's very important. So they're kind of doomed if they do, doomed if they don't, right? Which is which is troubling. But this is an important shift. I think more important for domestic audiences than for the rest of the world. This is really the first time that a Saudi leader has gone on television and said very publicly, we want to have a conversation between state and society. This is a conversation between the rulers and the ruled, and that's a very novel in Saudi Arabia.

AMT: And so given that sort of, that now is in train, we just heard our last guest talking about the social implications of that. What are you going to watch for as this plan rolls out, if indeed it can roll out the way this one gentleman is saying it will?

KAREN YOUNG: Yeah I think as the Deputy Crown Prince has said himself, I mean, the enemy is bureaucracy. There are a lot of vested interests in Saudi Arabia: inside the government, inside the way that contractors to the government work. And they're not going to be very happy with the shift in the way that they have generated revenue. This is potentially a great upheaval of ways of doing business and ways of governing, and so that's going to make some people and institutions, I think, very uncomfortable. I think what we'll be looking for is the ability for change to happen, and sort of cutting through red tape, and making policy changes. And these things will not necessarily generate results quickly. Every country in the in the West has had experiments with trying to create jobs, and it's nearly always a disappointment. It's very difficult to create jobs, especially on this scale. So it's something that will require some patience, and I don't know how the country and the kind of what I would call vested interests inside of the bureaucracy will go along with it. And that includes the 15,000 other members of the ruling family.

AMT: And there's also talk of really boosting military production as a way to make money. What effect could that have on the region?

KAREN YOUNG: I don't know about military production, but they certainly are buying a lot of weapons. So that continues to be a state priority, even with reduced fiscal resources. One of the proposals in the 2030 plan is the idea to privatize many of the military assets and facilities. That would be very interesting. But Saudi Arabia is right now projecting its military strength. It has a more interventionist and engaged foreign policy inside the Middle East. And I don't expect that to diminish.

AMT: Okay, well, Karen Young, thanks for your thoughts on all of this.

KAREN YOUNG: Thank you.

AMT: That is Karen Young; she's a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. And we reached her in Washington, DC. Let us know what you think about this as Saudi announces it wants to wean itself off oil and change its economy, and the implications of that. You can e-mail us from the site, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Just click on the contact link. Tweet, we are @thecurrentcbc. Find us on Facebook. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Documentary reveals secret remote island camps where Australia sends asylum seekers

Guest: Eva Orner

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you’re listening to The Current.

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It is the policy and practice of the Australian government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters. The message is simple. If you come to Australia illegally by boat, there is no way you will ever make Australia home.

AMT: Well, it doesn't get much clearer than that. But exactly what happens to the people who try has become much less clear. Since 2001, it has been Australian policy to intercept refugee boats. You just heard Commander Angus Campbell of the Australian army warning would-be asylum seekers in an online video. But no journalist has ever been allowed to visit the two detention centres where those intercepted refugees are taken. Both camps are far from Australia, one in Papua New Guinea, the other end Nauru, a small impoverished Pacific island republic. Now, in the news today Papua New Guinea says it's going to close its Manus Island Detention Camp after its top court ruled that what's going on there is illegal. But right now the camp is there and once refugees arrive there they're held for 400 to 500 in legal limbo, unable to process a refugee claim for Australia - out of sight, out of mind. Now a new documentary made with secretly recorded video is offering an unprecedented look into the reality of life inside those camps. Chasing Asylum has its world premiere tomorrow at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival, and its director Eva Orner is with me from New York City. Hello.

EVA ORNER: Hi. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Who are the people seeking asylum in Australia aboard the ships?

EVA ORNER: Well, historically, it's been Hazaras from Afghanistan, people from Lebanon, people from Iran, people from Iraq, Syrians, and also some North African countries as well, and Sri Lankans.

AMT: And why is the Australian government so intent on keeping such ships from landing in Australia?

EVA ORNER: That’s the big question. You know, these various Australian governments over the last 15 years have run these terror campaigns, stopping the boats. You know, ‘stop the boats’ is part of our vernacular at the minute. I think there's this fear that if we let people in, we will be overrun. There is a fear of invasion. I think we have to be really honest and agree that we are a pretty racist country and that most of the people that are coming now or trying to come now are Muslim, are brown, are undesirables. And what I'm saying is going to upset a lot of people, but it's completely true. I think it's fear-based. I think it's a panic-based. And successive governments over the last 15 years have used this tactic to win elections.

AMT: And how far away are these detention centres from the mainland?

EVA ORNER: Gosh. They are far. I think Nauru is about a five-hour flight from Darwin, which is sort of the most northern point of Australia. It's a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And Papua New Guinea is a fair way North of Australia. Both are impoverished. Both have no infrastructure to accommodate refugees and asylum seekers. Both have violence, massive unemployment, and absolutely no future life possibilities for people seeking asylum.

AMT: So the people that we see in your film, actually, they were intercepted in the boats, taken ashore long enough to be put on a plane and flown away, essentially, by the government to these detention centres.

EVA ORNER: Yeah. What happens is the boats are usually intercepted at Christmas Island where people are processed. And now no one comes to mainland Australia. Everyone goes to Nauru or Manus Island. The current government and the previous government have pretty much stopped the boats, which is what they are very proud of, by these incredibly harsh measures where people are put in indefinite detention in what are essentially hell hole camps, where people are, in fact, dying ,slowly going mad, being sexually abused, children are being abused. It's horrific. And their only options are to either take resettlement on Nauru, which gives them no future possibilities. That hasn't yet happened in Papua New Guinea. There are a lot of people waiting for resettlement there, but it hasn't happened and there are no prospects for them there. Or they can agree to return to the places they have fled through the IOM, the International Organization of Migration, who will then take them home and a lot of people have done that because it's too futile for them to stay.

AMT: Okay. What kind of deal did the Australian government strike to allow those detention centres to even operate on those islands?

EVA ORNER: They simply bribe poor island nations with billions of dollars. We spend 1.2 billion dollars a year currently keeping about 2,000 people in these camps, which is extraordinary because they live in tents in subhuman conditions. It's not costing that much money. The security companies running them and the governments are taking massive amounts of bribe money.

AMT: I mentioned that there has not been access to these centres. You were not able to go, were you?

EVA ORNER: Hell no. [laughs] No. If you apply to have a visa to Nauru-- And honestly, people who are listening, Google Nauru and you’ll see that it is Alcatraz. It’s the tiny little island in the middle of nowhere that you can drive around in 20 minutes. And there's nothing on it. It's been mined to just oblivion. If you apply to a visa in Nauru, it costs 7,000 Australian dollars to apply. So, it’s the most expensive visa in the world. And 99.9 of people are rejected and you don't get your money back. And that is to deter people from coming. The only people who can go there are employees of the Australian government who will work in the camps.

AMT: What can you tell me about the people who helped you get the footage to tell this story?

EVA ORNER: Not much. [laughs] I mean, look, the biggest to me-- There are two parts of the film that I'm deeply proud of and also grateful for and that is, there are extraordinary whistle-blowers who have come out in the film to talk to me. It feels like there is a change happening in Australia whereby the little bit of information that's coming out showing women and children being abused, men being abused, this horrific situation, I think people are starting to realise it's actually not okay. A small number of whistle-blowers are now coming out and talking and I was really lucky to get some people who have never spoken before, who were very detailed in what they talked about and who, I think, gave out new information about what's going on in the camps. And I was also able to access some footage in the camps.

AMT: How are people even recruited to work there?

EVA ORNER: So when the camps reopened a few years ago it was done very, very quickly. It was a new regime and it was done very, very quickly and it was as ridiculous as ads on Facebook. The Salvation Army had the first contract there looking after people and providing support and they hired a bunch of kids with absolutely no experience and some of those people are in my film and they talk about being managers at McDonald's or somebody worked in a factory packing boxes and when they arrived they were confronted with very damaged terrified men and women in horrific circumstances, not understanding where they were or why or how long they had been there. And these people were completely ill-equipped to deal with it. Everyone that’s worked there has said the problem is there's nothing you can do to help people. You can listen to them, but when they say, will I ever get out of here? I mean, you can't say anything except to just keep hoping, because it's all so hopeless.

AMT: Well, you talk to one young woman who was working there and I was really struck by what she said about her first few days when she got to the island of Nauru. Let's listen to her.

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One of my most vivid memories was a sign being on the wall that said staff would have to be trained how to use a Hoffman knife. When I asked what a Hoffman knife was, it was the knife used to cut people down when they are found hanging. Quite quickly I started to realize that I had sent myself to a place which I never would have gone.

AMT: So this is somebody who realizes that she's in over her head.

EVA ORNER: Yeah, and she's just a young girl and she had no qualifications to be in this situation. And she's been very outspoken. She worked there quite a few years ago and she's come out and talked about this a lot. And one thing I will say about all the whistle-blowers, whether they are young women or older men, they're all traumatized. Some of them have been out of the camps for a couple of years and when they talk they still cry. Martin, who was the older a guy. He was a prison guard who worked for the security company on Manus. He's still very deeply affected by it and he broke down when I interviewed him. There's a lot of damage that's been done to a lot of people. I mean, obviously, the asylum seekers and refugees have been completely ruined and destroyed and I fear that they won’t ever recover from their time in detention. But I think a lot of the workers that have worked there have some pretty serious PTSD and some issues.

AMT: Some of those whistle-blowers gathered some incredible footage. Can you describe some of the conditions in which these refugees were being held?

EVA ORNER: Yeah. I mean, they're still there. They're still being held. On Nauru they live in multi-tents. They have, sort of, cardboard flooring. On Manus, there's a lot of malaria, there's lot of disease and sickness. There’s mud everywhere. People live cramped together in small spaces. In Manus Island there was an old World War Two hut with a tin roof and there were like 50 double bunks in there just full of single men with a couple of toilets that were overflowing. Apparently, the food is very sub-standard and often has things like maggots in it. And just to remind everyone, this is still costing the Australian taxpayer 1.2 billion dollars a year for this.

AMT: How difficult was it to get that footage?

EVA ORNER: The Australian government operates a very strict secrecy policy about the camps. No journalists are allowed in, no filmmakers, no cameras. There has been minimal leaked footage that has come out of the camps over the last 15 years. And I can say that in my film I have an enormous amount of new footage that nobody has ever seen before. Obviously, I didn't film it because I'm not allowed to go to Manus or Nauru, and I can just say that I'm incredibly grateful that for the people that provided it to me.

AMT: But, again, it was very difficult then, is what you're telling me. If they had been caught, what would have happened?

EVA ORNER: Well, that's the interesting thing. What would happen if they’d been caught? Boy, they’d be sent to a deserted island for the rest of their lives? Well, that's already happened to them. So, I actually don't know what more could happen to them. I don't think it's worth testing to see and I think that's the issue that we all need to look at, because I question Australia’s status as a democratic country with these policies. We send people to camps. We break our commitment to the refugee convention. We don't allow journalists to visit them. We say the reason for that is because the camps fall under the jurisdiction of the Nauru and Papua New Guinea governments, but we clearly pay for what is happening there. And I think the fact that we're not allowed to see it or talk about it or film it means that we're not a complete democratic country and I think that's what we really need to look at.

AMT: Well, I want to play another scene from your documentary and I'll warn our listeners, it's very graphic. This is the same worker we heard from earlier. This time she's describing how some of the refugees cope with their trauma and despair. And again, it's explicit.

SOUNDCLIP

On Nauru, I was seeing daily self-harm, up to four a day. There was no hope to give them. I saw men cut their stomach open with glass. One man took a fluorescent light tube and beat himself across the head and stab himself. Men suffocating themselves. Men stitching their lips. One man stitched his eye lid. Swallowing RID, swallowing washing powder, swallowing razor blades. People trying to hang themselves with rope, fan cords, knitting wool. They are incredibly traumatized from where they're coming from, what they are seeking asylum from, and they are being re-traumatized by their current situation.

AMT: It's horrific what she describes.

EVA ORNER: Yeah. It's happening every day. Actually, this is a really interesting aside. This happened last week – the Nauruan government has made it a criminal offense to attempt suicide in the camps. And a man who tried to self-harm is now being tried as a criminal act with a jail sentence, because he tried to kill himself. They're trying to stop people from self-harming.

AMT: I was just going to ask you if they had any support services in detention and you’ve just answered my question.

EVA ORNER: Well, the big problem is that the Save the Children contract ended last year and now the security company runs the place, so I don't think there's very much happening in terms of support services and social workers anymore. There might be a few kicking around and I believe there are, particularly for people who have been resettled, but it's very, very grim. And apparently, in the last year people have deteriorated very severely and most people are taking a lot of medication and self-harming, you know, talking to themselves. It's very, very, very dark at the minute. And there are people that have been locked away there for over 1,000 days.

AMT: And you just mentioned children and Save the Children. What's life like for a child in those camps?

EVA ORNER: I think that's actually one of the sections that’s the hardest in the film. I think, you know, one of our intents was just to slowly build the horror and you sort of get halfway through the film and it's like, you think this is bad. Guess what? We have children here as well. And Australia is the only country in the world to detain children indefinitely, which is… quite an honour. And I think that we have some pretty extraordinary footage of children playing in these camps with absolutely nothing. And we have some very strong stories about how awful it is. I think when you put a child in that kind of situation, in confinement, it stays with them for the rest of their lives and it has a pretty big effect on them. And so there are children there that are self-harming. There are children there that are acting in a way that suggests they have witnessed or been sexually abused. A lot of the parents can't take care of their children because they're completely depressed or they've quietly lost their mind, so the children are really suffering. That's one of the things that I think the Australian public do get upset about when they hear about the children.

AMT: Well, and you have a very heart-breaking scene. You've got a volunteer with Save the Children who describes what happened when they handed out some toys to some of the children. Let's listen to that.

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The kids line up after school. They give them a bag and they rip up the bag. And one of the kids, she was Sri Lankan, she grabbed this toy and it was a soft toy. And, you know, after months and months and months, she grabbed a soft toy in her hands and she didn't know what to do with it. She just, like, rubbed all over her neck and face and she was screaming with joy. And we, me and Save the Children, we were just behind the counter and we burst into tears. We could not believe it. After one year of being in a detention centre she finally grabbed a soft toy and she could hold it and it was hers. And then you just feel, like, what the hell? Why are we keeping kids in this condition?

AMT: So those kids, they have no toys. Like, do they get any special care?

EVA ORNER: No. Nothing. I mean, you can see in the footage they run around in the dirt. They play with sticks. They play with chairs. Apparently, the children are quite often quite destructive which is a sign that they're depressed or they have some serious mental illness brewing and a lot of them a very listless. It’s very grim.

AMT: And even beyond the children, you find some women have been sexually assaulted by the locals.

EVA ORNER: Yeah. That's, I mean, there's a very big problem in Nauru. And Nauru is a very tiny island nation of 10,000 people. If you inject into that society, like, 1,000 people, a lot of them are women and children. You know, there have been riots in the camps. There has been a lot of allegations of sexual abuse and Nauruan police force and legal system is not equipped to deal with it. It's very slow and nothing seems to happen, but there are numerous allegations of rape and sexual assault of asylum seeker and refugee women on Nauru, and children.

AMT: What you are telling us about this place is very unsettling, very disturbing. Did you try speaking to the government about the conditions of the camps?

EVA ORNER: Yeah. One of my favourite parts of the film is in the last frame, which is a card which says the following politicians declined to be interviewed for this film, and it's every single prime minister since John Howard in 2001 and it’s our last two immigration ministers. I would suggest that is fairly - I don't know - indicative of the secrecy of the policies and the fact that they won’t talk to journalists. And, again, my querying our status as a democracy when we spend taxpayers' money on things that we can’t access or see and that there's no accountability for.

AMT: It's interesting. You do use footage of them in television news or speaking in parliament and they continually-- more than one official says this is what the people want, essentially. I'm paraphrasing, but they're saying we're doing this because this is what Australians want us to do.

EVA ORNER: Yeah. And that's partly why I made the film because I feel like-- Like with all countries, you know, 30 percent of people probably are quite conservative and think we don't want to let immigrants and refugees into the country. I think about 30 percent of people are like me and think we could be doing better; we could open our doors - not to everyone. No one's saying let everyone in, but we don’t have to be 67th in the world in our refugee intake. We could be a top 20, let's say. No one's no one's going crazy. And then I think there are 30 percent of the population that are a bit clueless or confused or don't know the facts or aren't interested. And I feel like perhaps if you can show them what it is like, it might inform them and help them make a decision. And I'm trying not to be forceful with this film. I'm trying not to be didactic. I'm trying to invite everyone to see the film, including politicians, because most politicians have not been to Manus or Nauru and don't know what they're doing. And I feel like anyone who has a child or a family would see this film and has to, in some way, feel some sympathy and feel that there is a degree to what we are doing that is wrong. And also I feel really strongly about being a signatory to the refugee convention. You opened the interview with one of our military personnel saying it is illegal to come to Australia by boat, and it's not. And this is something that drives me insane. It's part of the vernacular in Australia. Our journalists use it all the time. A good journalist sees it all the time. There is no such thing as an illegal refugee or an illegal asylum seeker if you are a signatory to the UN refugee convention. People who are being persecuted have a right to come to Australia by boat and seek asylum.

AMT: And so what is the plan for those who are still in those camps?

EVA ORNER: There's been a lot of weird things going on. Just after I started making the film, I think it was about October in 2014, we did the Cambodia deal, which the Australia government is still weirdly proud of in talking about as a success. This is where it all gets really surreal and quite astonishing. Where a country as wealthy and free as Australia will pay Cambodia an initial 40 million dollars, that's four-zero, and then a subsequent 15, one-five, million dollars to take refugees from Manus and Nauru. The caveat was the Cambodian government insisted that people had to volunteer. And it's been almost probably two years, a year and a half, and I think five people have left Nauru to go to Cambodia. And I think three of them have left, because the conditions there are so terrible. They're locked away. We went to Cambodia and filmed there. Cambodia has no history of resettling refugees. It's incredibly poor, has incredibly high unemployment, is incredibly corrupt. Culturally, they don't fit in there. There are a handful of refugees in Cambodia and they're all pretty miserable and live below the poverty line. Now, that's been a complete flop, although the Australian government won't concede that and since then, over the last few months, there was a wild rumour that we were trying to pay the Philippines 150 million dollars to take everyone off Manus and Nauru and that fell through. And then there was another rumour a few months later that we were dealing with one of the –stans, like Kazakhstan, and trying to bribe them to take our refugees and asylum seekers from Manus and Nauru. And the problem is if they shut the camps offshore tomorrow and bring everyone to Australia, and I'm really honest about this, the boats will start coming again. There’s the highest amount of refugees and displaced people in the world since the end World War Two at the minute. You know, the world has changed. It's a terrible situation and people are fleeing. I don't have a problem with people coming by boat to Australia. If we uphold the convention, process people properly, determine if they receive refugee status or not and qualify, and then resettle them. We can't get the camps going.

AMT: Why are you choosing to give your film its world premiere in Canada?

EVA ORNER: I think Hot Docs is a fantastic film festival. And I think that Australia and Canada are kind of the same country in so many ways. You know, we're both large and largely empty, we have a low population, we’re both wealthy countries, both are a little isolated in our own ways, and I think that your current government has showed us how you can turn something around. I'm a huge Trudeau fan. I think what he's doing with refugees and Syrians and everything else is extraordinary. And I think that you've come out of a period that was very similar to what Australia is stuck in now. I think we need to look at Canada and I think we need some new leadership that is young and fresh and innovative and not frightened. I thought it would be an interesting place to premiere the film. And the timing was right.

AMT: And then you will show it in Australia next. What are your concerns about doing that?

EVA ORNER: Without going into too much detail, there’s a new border force protection act that came out last July and in it is a particularly heinous whistle-blower clause. And it states that anyone who works for the Australian government that speaks out negatively about the camps is committing a criminal act and the penalty is two years in prison. And that's again why I challenge our status as a democracy. The fact that this legislation has been passed and is active is extraordinary to me. I think the clause was put in to deter people and it's not working. But, you know, it definitely puts people in precarious situations. Look, as far as I'm aware we haven't done anything illegal in the film. The act is new and will be tested. And, yeah, we premiere in Australia on the 5th of May and then I'm going on a tour of the country for six weeks. So we’re just doing a whole series of high profile screenings.

AMT: Okay, well, Eva Orner, thank you for your work.

EVA ORNER: Thank you.

AMT: Eva Orner is the director of Chasing Asylum. The documentary has its world premiere at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto tomorrow night. And Eva Orner joined us from New York City. Let us know what you think of what she says. You can reach us through the website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. If you're just joining us, you can download the podcast from the site, listen right online or download the radio app. Cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can also tweet us. We're @thecurrentCBC. Stay with us we're talking about digital technology next - how to use technology to stop technology. I'm an Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How 'calm technology' pulls attention from online temptation

Guests: Fred Stutzman, Tristan Harris, Peter Reiner

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: mellow guitar]

Camp Grounded is a summer camp for adults. We're going to unplug, get away, be kids again. No digital technologies, no networking, no work talk and four days of just endless fun. With the advent of Twitter and Facebook, and all these other social sites, each one of us has become a personal brand and we're all our own like a private corporation and so we become defined by what we do.

AMT: Well, if you have ever considered going on a digital detox, there is a camp for that and perhaps that comes as no surprise. We are increasingly glued to our smartphone screens even if they can leave us feeling like unhappy campers. Linda Stone left her job as a high tech executive to study what she calls continuous partial attention. She says our divided attention contributes to rising stress levels. She does understand why it can be so hard to look away from our screens.

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LINDA STONE: We feel busy and valued and needed and like we're making a dent in the universe because there are all these demands on us. So, we feel useful and as if we've got a place; as if we'd be missed if we weren't an active node on the network, so it makes us feel like we're an active part of something; like we're included.

AMT: When it comes to the problem of scattered attention and rising screentime stress, taking a digital detox isn't going to be a practical solution for many. So today we're asking whether technology can come to the rescue to save us from technology because there is a new generation of technology pioneers working to put us back in control of our own time and attention. Fred Stutzman is the CEO of Freedom, that is an app designed to keep its users off the internet. He joins us from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, hello.

FRED STUTZMAN: Thanks for having me.

AMT: So, people essentially will pay you to block them from their own technology which they're also paying for?

FRED STUTZMAN: [laughs] That’s right. It sounds silly but it is the truth. People will pay to block themselves off of the things that distract them so that they can focus and get their work done. It's something that they value.

AMT: What do they do? They block themselves off for a pre-determined length of time?

FRED STUTZMAN: That's right, yes. We make products that work across desktop, tablets, phones, that allow them to voluntarily say this is the time that I want to be offline or away from the apps that distract me and you know, you can do it either by setting a period of time or a schedule so you can do it every morning, something like that.

AMT: And so no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, nothing sort of popping up?

FRED STUTZMAN: Exactly. It's reducing the interruptions but also reducing the temptation to be pulled in those directions.

AMT: Who uses the Freedom app?

FRED STUTZMAN: It's mostly people who understand the value of their time, so it's professionals, it's writers, it's creative, it's people who need to focus to get their work done. A lot of remote workers, people who work from home, people who may not have the environmental reinforcements to keep them on task, they're the big users of Freedom.

AMT: Now, you also teach at a university. Do your students need the Freedom app or are they able to handle distractions of digital technology better than people who might not have grown up with it?

FRED STUTZMAN: Oh it's a huge issue. I mean, when all of our lives are mediated online in one way or another, it's this constant draw. So absolutely, students use this kind of technology. We really grew as a student technology and so I think it's something that schools are now starting to think about and address. As we look at the way our business has shifted over the past couple years, we get a lot more calls from schools and the way they're thinking about it is different as well. A couple of years ago it would be you know, let's put a big firewall at the school that keeps kids off of all these technologies and I think they're realizing that that's not the way we act in reality. Kids should be given some degree of a digital literacy around when are the right and wrong times to use these technologies. We're hearing from schools, can you give us tools that will enable the students to develop literacies around how you segment your time; how do you have your offline and online time?

AMT: What, in your own experience, led you to develop the idea of an app that blocks certain technologies?

FRED STUTZMAN: I was studying social media, Spending a lot of time on social media and needed to get my dissertation done, so I ended up using Freedom pretty extensively and really saw that the quality of my work improved. When you don't have all these things competing for your attention, it's just a very different way of working and one that I think we've almost forgotten. When you're able to enter that mode of single focus of mono-tasking, it's just this very powerful state for people.

AMT: How serious are people's problems with attention, or focus, or managing their time then if it's necessary?

FRED STUTZMAN: When you go to work on your computer or you pick up your tablet to get some things done, I kind of liken it to trying to get work done on your television. So there are all these technologies that are co-located inside the device that are designed to distract you. I mean that's the reason Facebook, Twitter, they are great services, but they want your attention so they're competing for your attention and it's up to us, basically pure self-regulation, to find a way and strategies to deal with that. I think it's a huge problem. I think it's one that is if we resort to pure willpower, it's quite challenging and so there's a real interesting area for where technology can come in and solve that problem, so that's where we are.

AMT: At the same time, is an app like yours complicit in feeding the idea that users cannot disconnect from technology in any other way through their own willpower?

FRED STUTZMAN: I think our app harnesses that will power. You know, that’s a great question, it’s one that I wrestle with. What we see in the data, is that when people use an enabling technology like Freedom or any other app out there, it's working with them. It's not replacing will power. There still is some will power and getting it set up and deciding you want to use it. It's basically translating that intention into action.

AMT: Okay, Fred Stutzman, thanks for talking to me today.

FRED STUTZMAN: My pleasure.

AMT: Fred Stutzman is the CEO of Freedom which is an app that lets users block themselves from accessing the internet. He joins us from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Well, apps such as Freedom may help us manage our time online today, but my next guest hopes that future technologies will have that built in. Tristan Harris spent the last three years as a product philosopher at Google. He left in December to take on the full time role as co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign. Tristan Harris joins us from San Francisco, hello.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Hi, thank you for having me.

AMT: From a big picture level, what are you trying to change about tech design?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, we live in a unique time in history where a handful of people working at three tech companies, I would say Apple, Google, and Facebook, go to work every morning and the choices that they make dictate what a billion people see when they wake up in the morning and it kind of programs their mind to think about their life, their obligations, their attention, in a very particular way. So there's this massive asymmetry where a small number of people in California, trained mostly in engineering or design, are basically making decisions about how to steer the thoughts and behaviours of a billion people, actually multiple billion people, and what is the ethical or moral responsibility they have to be incredibly thoughtful about how they're doing that because they can't not do it? So then, the question becomes how do you consciously, carefully do that?

AMT: Okay, that's interesting. We were looking at it from that side so how would you describe our relationship with technology and social media at this point?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, I completely agree with Fred. I mean, I think that the whole system is pretty broken right now. The reason, just to amplify something that he was saying, is that there is this attention economy where everyone has to escalate their persuasive tactics in order to get more of people's attention. To get you to use it means tapping into the psychological triggers which kind of activate you to come back, spend some time, invest and then get hooked so that they can bring you back the next time and that results in this increasingly persuasive internet. If you imagine, there's this door between you and this internet app, Economy Ecosystem, and behind that door there's this almost invisible new physical force which is how persuasive that environment is, how persuasive is social media, how persuasive is the internet at getting you to keep reading, scrolling, clicking, watching the next thing? Over time, the persuasive force behind that door is only going to go up. And as persuasion goes up, agency, or the ability to self-direct our thoughts and our behavior, goes down. Luckily, there is this situation where a handful of companies, really Apple and Google, who make the two dominant smartphone platforms, mediate our relationship to that force behind that door and they can do more to help us navigate within that environment so that we have more agency.

AMT: Let's go back to the getting hooked there. How much work goes into getting users hooked?

TRISTAN HARRIS: I actually studied at a lab at Stanford called the persuasive technology lab which was part of a whole cohort of young engineering students from Stanford who were all taught, essentially, how to you know, train people in these techniques of building, engaging successful products. And you know, in my class were the founders of Instagram and early executives at Facebook, and no one had any evil intention, but there are whole conferences and loads of books where you can learn the art of kind of tapping into people's psychology.

AMT: Okay, so in order to fight some of that, give us a concrete example of the type of feature you'd like to see incorporated into something like instant messaging?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Sure. Well, so right now we kind of have this all or nothing choice with our phone. What if we could have choice while we're using the screen with things like Freedom and other great tools that would let you be connected, but not get interrupted. So let's say you could, while working on a document, say I want to be focused for one hour so that if anyone messages me, the message will be held until I go unfocused, and that will be fully communicated to them. So, imagine that you open up a chat window and you say I want to send Tristan a message, hey when are you done with your interview? When you open up the chat message, you'll see before you even hit send that Tristan is focused for the next hour and this message will be delivered after he goes unfocused. And if it's really important, you can escalate it with a conscious choice with this by hitting this button or something like that. That way, you can still get the thought off your mind in the moment when you have that need, but you're not accidentally or mindlessly interrupting people by default, you can only consciously interrupt people by default.

AMT: So, you've raised actually another point here, and that is not only do we get distracted by messages coming in or something, but when we send something, when we want to connect with someone, we expect them to connect back with us instantaneously.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Absolutely, and we're all kind of miscalibrated about expectations because when we expect a response that quickly, that leaves us to also feel intense social obligation when we receive a message and don't respond. If you look at that as kind of psychological vulnerability, that's like a button that you can push in someone's brain, right? It's called actually social reciprocity. And you can imagine how if a company wanted to they could manipulate that instinct.

AMT: I want to pick up on all of this. We spoke with Jacob Bank, one of your former Google colleagues, who is a product manager at Google Apps. He's working on a project called Goals in Google Calendar which is aimed at helping users more easily schedule personal life priorities like fitness, times with friends, or even me time. Listen to him describe their design process.

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We have a responsibility to help people follow through on these bigger objectives rather than just helping them get going even more quickly or send emails more quickly. If Goals works effectively, people are interacting with the calendar in a very light way and what they're really doing is accomplishing the real world thing that is likely outside of the digital world that they said they want to accomplish.

AMT: Tristan Harris, what advantages do you see for tech companies in moving toward the goals you're advocating?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, just like Jacob is saying, I think this will become a new area of consumer demand just like organic food became something that people solely demanded more of and realized they didn't want the regular food. I think we're at the start of something like that for technology. And what Jacob is talking about is really, you know, calendars that help you make life choices as opposed to making technology choices or app choices that. That alignment with life, with Freedom, with the way that we want to live our lives, just the idea that every technology company and app that is trying to truly help you make the life choices that you want to make, as opposed to making the app choices that you want to make to get as much screen time as possible. That has to be something that consumers value and demand and they will want to choose the things that are truly helping them do that. So, I think we're at the start of hopefully on a much longer road where that's the direction of the tech industry.

AMT: So, if the goal is to allow us to do things we really want to do in real life, why don't we just leave our smartphones at home and go for a walk?

TRISTAN HARRIS: I think people should absolutely do that, too. It's just that we live in this reality where your smartphone is kind of like an exoskeleton for your mind, and it's one that we're increasingly, increasingly dependent on. The number one way that we connect with other people now is with our smartphone, even with just a phone call. So, like it or not, this thing is with us all the time. Unlike in situations where other prosthetics where you have the FDA certify what it means for it to truly be safe to be strapped on all the time, we don't have some accountability loop like that for technology where these things are safe to strap on, to use, to have on you and have it truly be supportive of the life that you want to live.

AMT: You want tech designers to change their goals, their aims, their business model as part of what you're doing. Talk to me a little bit about that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: So long as the core business model of the internet is advertising, specifically engagement based advertising, that if I can get eyeballs staring at rectangles for long periods of space and time, that's how I make money. That's the business model of the internet and that becomes a problem.

AMT: So how does Time Well Spent, your project, how do you try and fight that? How do you try to change that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: Well, I think that we need supplemental sources of revenue or other options, almost like the organic food option, which might cost a little bit more money, but whose incentives are more deeply aligned. It's deepening the alignment between what's good for farmers and what's good for people and there might be a slightly higher cost for that, but if you could imagine, would you pay even ten dollars a month for a version of Facebook that was completely on your team to help you spend your time well? That's kind of what we're trying to do with Time Well Spent, which is there should be a whole class of organizations, including something like Freedom, what Fred's doing, where the software that is really designed and aligned to help people truly live their lives, can be rewarded for that. And it's marked out and understood by consumers so that they know what they're paying for. They're paying for a deeper alignment between what they want for their life and what the company wants.

AMT: Okay, well thank you for talking to me today. Interesting.

TRISTAN HARRIS: Absolutely. Thank you.

AMT: Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign. He joined us from San Francisco. When it comes to the way we live with our devices it is not solely wearable inventions such as Google glass that can make us seem like cyborgs. The smartphone has become such a ubiquitous accessory that my next guest says we are all essentially proto-cyborgs today. But again, he does say there's reason to be optimistic. The Google glass, as you might say, is half full. As long as we can assure that our devices are actually working for us and not the other way around. Peter Reiner is a professor at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia and he joins us from Vancouver, hello.

PETER REINER: Good morning.

AMT: In what sense are we already cyborgs?

PETER REINER: Well, the notion of a cyborg is really just a marriage of biology and technology and we have so intimately integrated our smartphones and, actually the entire universe of devices on which we interact on a day to day basis, that they have become part of what we call our extended mind. If you were at dinner yesterday evening with a group of friends and people started talking about some movies and let's say the movie Amelie came up and people were talking about how wonderful it was, and then somebody says well, what was the name of that actress and nobody at the table is a movie buff and so nobody remembers, how likely do you think it is that the very next words out of somebody's mouth would be, well I'll just Google that? And what's so remarkable about that little story is how unremarkable it is; that it has become a seamless part of the way that we navigate the world today; that we rely on these information appliances that are always at our fingertips to extend our minds in ways that really never happened before.

AMT: So when you say that they can be used, smartphones and digital technologies are our best chance of becoming smarter, are you talking about that? Or do you go beyond that?

PETER REINER: I am talking about exactly that. When I say that, what I'm pointing to is the universal desire for people to be smarter, everybody wants to know more, to be smarter, to be cognitively enhanced, really where our brains are already working very, very effectively and we may be bumping up against the hard realities of neurobiology. Rather than trying to make our brains intrinsically work more, what may be the better strategy is to use these tools that we have with us all the time to enhance our cognitive abilities by offloading tasks that they do better than we do and freeing up our brains to do the things that our brains do better than they do. Fortunately, there are still some of those.

AMT: So if you look at the ways we use digital technology today, are we actually headed toward improving our lives or is it the opposite?

PETER REINER: Well, we're doing both at the same time and it's hard to know on balance which direction it's going. We do have certainly some metrics. Recently there was a paper that came out from the Federal Reserve, of all places, which looks at the economy and what they noticed was that the productivity of workers was rising for quite a number of years and with the introduction of computers, it continued to rise until social media showed up on the scene, and it has been flat. Since social media became so popular, they attribute it directly to the use of social media by people and its effect on their working environment and its effect on their attention span. We need a real solution because it's affecting us in important ways.

AMT: You say it's affecting our autonomy.

PETER REINER: So, I do suggest that there is a real threat to autonomy and autonomy is one of the wonderful values that we have fought hard for through the enlightenment, it’s an important value, it's the ability to decide for yourself, by yourself to navigate the world as you wish. But, the persuasiveness of these technologies is really quite remarkable and it's a bit of a worry again, when we have so much power within a few companies. There are a few recent studies that have highlighted this. Robert Epstein last year published a paper that showed that just by altering, and they played with this artificially, but altering the ranking of Google searches so that candidates for elections—so the searches showed up either favourable or unfavourable, results for the candidates for elections. They could sway undecided voter’s choices by 20 percent and they would never have noticed it. The previous year, Facebook published a very controversial experiment where they manipulated the news feed of just 680,000 of their users by a little bit, and they could modify their emotional content, their emotional state by the content of that news feed and the users of course, never noticed.

AMT: You're describing something out of a science fiction movie where they all make us go vote for the wrong guy or something but, along with that kind of manipulation you're also suggesting that we get distracted, that we get pulled over to things where we lose that agency; that the very thing that is supposed to actually enhance our ability to be an autonomous and give us more options, kind of closes down.

PETER REINER: There's a plus and minus to all of these technologies and to everything that we interact with and the objective is really to try to find a way to alter the balance so that we maximize the benefits and minimize the deficits, if you will, of interacting with these technologies. What we think we really need to do is to have consumers and those of us who are watching the space very carefully pound the table hard to demand that these companies move the technology in a way that helps us live our lives in a more productive, but also a more satisfying way. One way that we could think about that is by having something akin to a Good Housekeeping seal of approval that could be awarded to companies or software products so that you could see that, oh they have done something to help me, and then you might be more likely to use that particular technology that another one that doesn't have that seal of approval. That way, we incentivize everybody appropriately as opposed to trying to ask Facebook to route its business model, I don't think that's realistic.

AMT: But we are still, as you say then, cyborgs. How do we get our autonomy back?

PETER REINER: It's a real dilemma that we have. I think it's the major ethical dilemma that I see in terms of the way that we're interacting with our technologies. I guess the only way that I know of is by having people like me pound the table in favour of more user autonomy and less corporate autonomy.

AMT: It's really important to hear your thinking on this, Peter Reiner. Thank you.

PETER REINER: Thank you.

AMT: Peter Reiner is a professor at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of BC. He joined us from Vancouver. Now, over to you. What do you think needs to change to make our relationship with technology a healthy one? Are we already there, or do we just need to turn off and tune out quick? Grab a device and tell me. Send us an email through the web site cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. You can find us on Facebook or on Twitter. We are @thecurrentcbc. Or you could turn off all the technology, your choice. I am Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening.

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Apr. 27, 2016 Full Episode Transcript

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