June 24, 2025 • 49 mins
We’re sharing a preview of a new audiobook, Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth, which celebrates the wit and wisdom of the legendary science fiction author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Twenty-five years after his death, Adams’ books continue to be read by new generations and his creations along with his ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything being “42”, have seeped deep into public consciousness.
Written and narrated by Arvind Ethan David, Adams’ former protégé, this one-of-a-kind audiobook includes rare archival material from the Adams Estate, interviews with Adams’ personal friends like Stephen Fry and Ian Charles Stewart, and reenactments of his work. The preview you’re about to hear explores the mind of a man who foresaw the technological age in all its wonder and terror
Get Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth now at Audible, Spotify, Pushkin, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello there, listeners. My name is r vind Ethan David.
I'm an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work
has won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any
of that, I started my career working for Douglas Adams,
and I'm dropping into your feed to day to share
a preview of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams
(00:41):
The Ends of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy.
Adams was more than a science fiction or comedy writer.
He was someone with deep insights into our world. He
foresaw the dangers of our current age, from social media
to chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even
(01:03):
had some good ideas about how we might survive these
dangerous times. In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive
journey through Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from
his personal archive, original readings of his work, and interviews
with those who knew and loved him best, from Stephen
(01:24):
Frye and David Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists.
I do hope you enjoy this excerpt, and if you do,
you can find Douglas Adams the ends of the Earth
at pushkin dot FM, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or
wherever else good audiobooks are found.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Chapter three, everything is connected the Internet we didn't get The.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Computer scientist Danny Hillis came up with a brilliant definition
of technology, which is technology is stuff that doesn't work yet. Now,
the interesting thing is everything we've was at some point technology.
I mean, a chair was technology before we'd figured it out.
Now we know what a chair is, but before we did, yeah,
(02:17):
people trying to figure out, well, how many legs should
it have, how high should it be? And until we
got it read, they used to crash. Now, of course
we know everything you need to know about a share,
so we no longer think of chairs as technology.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
We just use them.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Now.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It's very odd that we still tend to think of
bathroom taps as technology, and we keep on reinventing them
and reinventing them. Nowadays, particularly in the hotel, you can
hardly walk into a washroom without You've got to figure
it out all over again. Now, how do I open it?
I am I responsible for turning it on? Do I
do it with my hands? Do I just look at it,
(02:51):
Do I use my elbows? And then you think, now,
who's responsible for.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Turning it off? Do I just walk away?
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Or you know, we can't leave the damn things alone
because we're so relentlessly, ceaselessly inventive, so we keep on
inventing stuff maybe that doesn't need to be real, and
I would think it's probably time to call a moratorium
on bathroom.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Taps, chairs and bathroom taps aside. Douglas was obsessed with
all types of technology, but the specific type of technology
that obsessed Douglas above all else was computing, and specifically
what happens when you start to connect computers together on
a network.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Now, many years ago, I invented a thing called the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I never meant to be
a predictive science fiction writer in the mode of say
Arthur C.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Clark.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
My reason for inventing it was purely one of narrative necessity,
which is that I had lots of extra bits of
story that I didn't know what to do with.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I didn't know anything at.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
All about technology in those days, and I didn't think
twice about any of the issues, so I just made
it a bit like things I was already familiar with.
It was a bit like a pocket calculator, a bit
like a TV remote. It had a little window at
the top and lots and lots of little buttons on
the front.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as it manifests itself
in the five novels that bear its name, is an anarchic,
attitude filled user generated publication. Today we would call it
an app Wikipedia on Acid with aggressive social media functionality.
But when Douglas Adams first described it in nineteen seventy nine,
(04:34):
neither the iPad, nor the Internet, nor Wikipedia nor social
media had been invented. One of the strangest things about
the blurring between fiction and real life in Douglas's career
was not that he predicted technologies that later came to pass.
Many science fiction writers, as Douglas pointed out himself, from
(04:57):
Arthur C. Clark to William Gibson, have done that. Where
Douglas is unusual is that, twenty years after writing a
book about The Guide, he founded a production company, the
Digital Village, with a team that included top technologists and
Internet pioneers, and then he set about trying to actually
(05:18):
build a digital guide to the world in real life.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. To understand
how deep and old Douglas's love for technology in general
and network computing in particular ran, and the strange role
he ended up playing in the history of the Internet.
(05:39):
We need to start at the very beginning and who
was at the very beginning of Douglas's love affair with
computers Stephen Fry.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Of course, we started talking about computers, and you have
to remember that computers then meant isolated objects on a desk.
There was no networking. There was no Internet. There was
I mean, if there were sort of vague versions of
it within the universities. There was no way you could
get onto the net from home. And we both, I
(06:13):
think understood that that was the future of computing.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And we both were.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
Aware of something that became very important in our lives
that Apple computers, who were big in the seventies, they
really kickstarted the whole home computing craze. They were bringing
out a new and rather unusual sort of computer. We
met then, I guess in eighty three, maybe it was
mid eighty three, something like that, and we were aware
(06:40):
that in January eighty four, Apple were bringing out a
new computer which they were going to call the Macintosh,
and I was able to tell him which he didn't
know that it was called the Macintosh. Nothing to do
with raincoats, but because the Macintosh is is a kind
of apple. It's like a Golden Delicious or a Grennie
(07:01):
Smith or Coxes Pippin. But there is the Macintosh Apple
very popular in America. Hence you know, so it's an anyway,
if you get bugged down in all these ridiculous memories,
that would mean nothing to anybody else. But we were,
and this is the story I like to tell, and
he told it too, So we were the first two
people in Britain possibly Europe to buy an Apple Macintosh.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It is worth mentioning in passing that for some years
Stephen and Douglas would argue about who was actually first
in line at the Max store that day.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Whomever it was.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Douglas's love for computers predated the Macintosh. Here he is
describing love at first sight.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
But I remember the first time I ever saw a computer.
It was in Lasquez, in the top and core road
of fond Memory, and it was a common door.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Pet.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
I have you remember that it was the very very
early one, which is like a sort of pyramid with
a little sort of screen, a big and I sat
and stared at it, and I was absolutely fascinated by it.
And I was trying to figure out any reason, any
(08:20):
possible reason, why this could have any use to me,
and I just couldn't see any And I was thinking
as hard as I could, but I couldn't see any
way in which a computer could be useful to me
because I was a writer and I just didn't have
that much stuff to add up. And that was because
(08:41):
I'd got the wrong idea of what a computer was.
I thought it was a kind of super adding machine,
but everybody thought it was a kind of super adding machine.
That was the model we had in our mind of
what a computer was, a super adding machine. And so
we developed it as an adding machine with a long
(09:03):
feature list. And after a while we begin to think, well,
we're now getting very good at adding up and manipulating
these numbers.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Is there anything else we can do with it?
Speaker 4 (09:14):
I mean, supposing we made these numbers stand for something else,
like we made it stand for the letters of the alphabet,
for ASCI code, And we suddenly think, my god, we
have had such limited imagination.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
We have failed to see the.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
Really exciting possibilities of the machine. How short sighted we've been.
It isn't an adding machine, it's a typewriter. So we
developed it as a typewriter with a long feature list.
And then after a while we get on a roll
and we think, well, what else can we make these
numbers stand for. We can make them stand for the
elements of a graphic display, and we come up with
(09:57):
yet another paradigm shift. We think, my god, how short
sighted of us to think that it was just an
adding machine or a typewriter. It's something much more exciting
than any of these. It's a television with a typewriter
sat in front of it. And then with the invention
of the worldwide where we go to get another paradigm shift,
and we think, my god, it isn't any of these.
(10:17):
It isn't any of these. It isn't just a typewriter,
it isn't just an adding machine, It isn't a television.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
It's a brochure.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
In less than three minutes, almost as a throwaway gag,
Douglas sketches out a twenty year intellectual history of personal
computing from adding machine to typewriter, to television to brochure.
Douglas skewers how at every stage we have had a
dramatically limited understanding of how computers were truly transformational, particularly
(10:50):
when combined with the power of networked connectivity. The specificity
and power of Douglas's vision of what the Internet was
and what it could be were breath taking Lee ahead
of his time. Here he is in two thousand and
one speaking to the collection of mobile phone and network
(11:12):
technologists and executives.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Imagine if every piece of information we ever generated about
the world that passed through a computer, whether it's a
restaurant typing up its menu for the evening, whether it's
a shop maintaining its stock list, whether it's a car
noticing what speed it's going, how much petrol it's got left,
and where the nearest service stations are, what prices they're
(11:36):
charging for a petrol are, Or whether it's someone measuring
the wingspan of an African swallow or writing down where
and when their grandmother was born, or whether it's someone
taking a digital photograph from the top of the Great Pyramid,
or just some flower that's bloomed late or early this year,
or the settings in your thermostat and when it turned
(11:56):
on and off, or if every time you took your
child's temperature, the network remembered. Imagine all of that gradually
creating a vast shared software model of the world. Just
imagine it. The one thing I did get right when
(12:17):
I came up with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
was that it would know where you were and come
up with information appropriately. And that, of course, is the
thing that makes the crucial difference to everything in that
list above. If every piece of information knew the when
of itself and the ware of itself, so that the
(12:39):
virtual world we created fitted over the real world like
an invisible glove, and these devices, these devices that we
currently think of as telephones or PDAs, would be the
devices that made that invisible world visible to.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Us today in twenty twenty five, when we all walk
about with geolocated supercomputers in our pockets, what Bliss is
describing seems simply an accurate description of the world in
which we now live. Back in two thousand and one,
it was insane science fiction except for the companies who
(13:22):
were trying to build it. And one of those companies
was Douglas's own Digital Village, where he had assembled an
enormously talented group of people to try and make, as
he described it, the Earth edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. Here's Robbie stamp.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
I'd written, unbidden a business plan called Cable City, which
was a recognition that to take advantage of new cable
and satellite opportunities, you needed to create an entirely new
cost base for programming. And I was telling Douglass about it,
and it had morphed by then into something.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
Called the Digital Village.
Speaker 6 (14:03):
The Marshall mclune quote influenced that Digital Village. And I
was sitting there with Douglas, you know, several of our
meetings in in his house, and he said, oh, that
sounds interesting. I'd like to be your partner. How much
would it cost me to invest? So I plucked a
figure out of the air and he said, I'm in,
and that was it. We were then fifty to fifty
partners in this wonderful one of the best adventures of
(14:26):
my working life, called the Digital Village.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So Robbie and Douglas launched this company, the Digital Village,
and they recruit almost at once an amazing group of
people and they take the moonshot. They're going to build
the Hitchhiker's Guide. Here's Richard Harris, who served as chief
Technology Officer of the Digital Village.
Speaker 7 (14:48):
Remember this is the day before the term social network
had been actually coined. You had tripod in MySpace and
all of the CompuServe forums at the time, but very
much precursors of social networks.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
And of course the.
Speaker 7 (15:02):
Hitchhiker's Guide itself was meant to be an opinionated counterpoint
to the Encyclopedia Galactica asimore construct, but we didn't have
an Encyclopedia Galactica at the time. If we were doing
it now, we would be building an opinionated counterpoint at Wikipedia,
and I would love the challenge of doing that, but
(15:22):
we didn't. So we had to come up with a
content driven network of people that created its content, that
were self policing and created trust between people. And what
we were all about was delivering people to each other
via content and helping them collaboratively build content, which is
(15:42):
actually something I think we succeeded on very well with
H two G two.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Now there were a lot of people cashing in on
the first dot com boom of the late nineties. Lots
of people trying to build social networks and Internet sites,
but note the specificity of Douglas's vision. As described by Harris, we.
Speaker 7 (16:07):
Were never in the business of doing a Facebook and
simply delivering eyeballs to advertisers. That's the fundamental contradiction in
most social networks is they're not about supporting people, they're
not about building community. They're about selling that community to
paying advertisers. And I think that's a fundamentally flawed model.
(16:28):
You see systems that can see what's happening and adapt
to them in real time. And you need to give
people not just what they knew to ask for, but
what they needed to know but didn't know to ask for.
And that was, if you like, a fundamental strap line
for our development of the real Hitchhiger's guide is, if
(16:49):
you're giving people what they ask for, you're just a
search engine. You may be a sophisticated search engine, you
may be a constrained, community driven search engine, but you're
still a search engine. But you need to be building
an understanding of people sufficient to let them find the
stuff that they didn't know what to ask for. Part
of our ch angles were actually okay, how do we
(17:10):
build a knowledge framework that profiles people for their own benefit,
not for advertisers benefit, and helps put them in touch
with who and what they needed to know.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
So it's people to.
Speaker 7 (17:20):
People, people to content, people on content place. Putting all
of those together.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Now, you might suspect that there is an element of
hindsight at work here in Richard's description. But I have
the advantage of actually having been in the room when
H two G two dot com was being planned and built,
and I can attest that this thoughtfulness about the dangers
(17:47):
of what social media could become, and the importance of editors,
fact checkers, and community self regulation were built into its
early design. Those insights came not only from the official
technologists and scientists at the company, but often intuitively from
Douglas himself. Here's Bobby Stamp.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Again, everything is connected. I think that deep sense at
his core. I think so much of what he explores
creatively through almost all of his work is that idea
everything is connected and everything is perspectible. And I think
he saw in the Internet an emergent technology which was
(18:32):
going to sort of in a way make if I
can use this make flesh that interconnectedness of things. Here
were all here were millions and millions and millions of
nodes which were going to be connecting in new new ways,
some of which we could maybe predict and many we couldn't.
And I think he found that emergent property intellectually hugely exciting,
(18:53):
because I think it was an enormous river flowing into
his creativity, which was maybe one of the most important
well springs in my mind, was that natural fascination in
perspective and in connective And I think that the Internet
sal was there.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
He just saw it.
Speaker 6 (19:13):
Very very very early on as this massive playground where
so much was going to be possible that hadn't been
possible going through traditional gatekeepers. But I think Douglas, when
I look back to those early conversations, was phenomenally prescient
about an awful lot of the ways in which the
Internet duly has evolved. I think maybe some of the
(19:37):
wild and nastier aspects or the more difficult aspects of
what we've learned about social media and the Internet. He
kind of died before we'd really seen a lot of that.
And I think before you know, the Internet found its
business model, which was turning human beings into financial derivative
products who were sliced, diced, and sold and re sold
(19:59):
and sold in these massive advertising trading markets. So I
think he was there in the early optimistic, more wide
eyed days of what was going to be possible. But
I think it was that freedom and that recognition of
the interconnectedness of everything that thrilled him.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
This idea, the idea that everything is connected, is one
that Douglas road to logical but absurd extremes in his
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency thinks.
Speaker 8 (20:29):
The term holistic refers to my conviction that what we
are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all
things that I do not concern myself with such petty
things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff, and
inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as
being detectable in the pattern web of the whole. The
connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle
and complex than we are rough and ready understanding of
(20:52):
the physical world might naturally suppose.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Dirk Gently is a detective with a sort of superpower.
He has a semi psychic ability to sense the deep
interconnections between all things to its, which people, which events,
which locations are relevant to his current case, and his methods,
(21:17):
whilst unconventional, are normally successful or semi successful, he solves
cases with questionable efficiency. The great irony of Dirk Gently
as a character is that this hero with a gift
for sensing connections is himself profoundly bad at making human connections,
(21:41):
and he spends most of his life alone and lonely.
Without wanting to post mortem psychoanalyze Douglas Adams, it is
perhaps worth asking why he was so excited to become
part of the Digital Village and to run a production company.
Here's Ian Charles Stewart, co founder of Wyatt Magazine and
(22:05):
another of Douglas's partners at the Digital Village.
Speaker 9 (22:09):
But the main reason we got together wasn't because there
was a single driven purpose. It was because he had
writer's block, and the challenge was how to create a
team around him that allowed creativity to re emerge for
him to be able to continue telling stories in a
different way. And so the idea was to create a
platform which he could use to tell stories in indifferent media,
(22:31):
in new media. The first, of course, was the computer
game Starship Titanic, and we created a team around that,
and then the second was thinking about the film, and
the notion was that if we gave him, if we
took him away from the typewriter and paper and put
him in front of new tools with other people, that
that might become something which he could get his teeth
(22:52):
into and have fun with. And it turned out to
be the case.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Sophie Aston was Douglas's assistant at the Digital Village. Sophie
and I first met when we were both in our
early twenties and excited to be around the great Douglas Adams.
Here she is recollecting what it was like to have
Douglas in an office. He was.
Speaker 10 (23:15):
Such a you know, a social being, a social animal.
That actually what he was really enjoying in those last
few years was working in an office environment with lots
of interesting, young, creative, brilliant people on Starship Titanic on
HTG two. That was what gave That's what fed him,
you know, the excitement. He was in the office a
lot of the time. He probably didn't need to be,
(23:37):
but he really enjoyed spending time in our company.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I think what's crucial in this story is to realize that,
unlike the leaders of a lot of other Internet companies,
Douglas Adams wasn't just a technologist. He was both a
technologist and a world class creative, and he was also
someone deeply interested in human connection. That is to say,
(24:01):
what really interested him was how networked technology could be
life enhancing to humans and to our relationships. Here he
is in the year two thousand, giving another keynote address,
this time to a group of mobile phone executives. He
imagines a world of virtual reality and online dating. Note
(24:23):
that he uses the phrase soft world to denote what
we would probably call the digital or virtual world today.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
In the real world, if you want to know what
the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower looks like,
you have to go there. In the soft world, you
can ask your guide to show you what it looks
like from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Maybe it can show you the view through a.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
Webcam there instantly, or maybe it can construct a virtual
reality view for you in real time based on everything
it knows about everything that can currently be seen from
the top of the Eiffel Tower. So the first thing
you'd see is a lot of virtual graffiti, some of
it quite naughty of being French, and you just sort
of wave it away. And as you look down at
(25:08):
your virtual vie you ask it. How many of the
cars you can see from your current advantage point, for instance,
are British?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
For a moment you think it's not working.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
Then you say, oh, okay, okay, so how many of
them are Perjo's And the.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
View lights up with thousands of moving dots? Okay?
Speaker 4 (25:25):
How many of the cars you can currently see have
some Bach playing on the incast areas?
Speaker 3 (25:31):
A few dozen?
Speaker 4 (25:32):
Oh, when there's one playing your favorite recording of the
Shubler preludes?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Do they have their flag up? Yes?
Speaker 4 (25:38):
She'll talk to you, but only because the only thing
you asked her about was what she was listening to.
Anything else in her flag would have been down for
you. You chat for a bit about the music and quickly
discover a tremendous rapport.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
What about having dinner together?
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Okay, but she has a gluten problem which restricts where
she can eat, and.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
You like turbot.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
So a couple of restaurants light up in your view.
One of them looks great for a romantic tryst. Lots
of alcoves and dim lighting. But some of the people
who have eaten there tonight have left notes around the
place saying left around in hyperspared cyberpa noticing the saying
that they're obviously understaffed in the kitchen tonight and the
food has been coming out cold or reheated the other place.
Get raves her about the food, but it's a bit
(26:18):
bright and noisy. You decide that good food is the
thing to go for. Then you remember, damn, you're not
actually in Paris, you're a new deli and got a
bit carried away. That's all right, it says your your friend,
I'm actually in Albuquerque. I'm a music squatter. What does
that mean, Well, she just monitors the network for anybody
who's looking for someone who's listening to that recording. The
(26:38):
real occupant of the car had is flagged down and
wasn't talking to anybody. So she just intercepted your query
and really quite enjoy talking to you. And now she's
going out to dinner locally. Thanks bye, So you track
which restaurant is going to and send a margarita to
her table to say thanks. But she's annoyed that you
tracked her down. And turns the connection off. Oh well,
you go back to your day job. Erecting advertising hoardings
(27:00):
on Mars soft Mars, that is, which has recently been
added to the soft Solar system.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
It is archetypal. Douglas adams to imagine that the highest
calling of the Internet would be to enable a failed
romantic tryst between two lonely bark enthusiasts in Paris. But
if he foresaw internet romance, Douglas also predicted catfishing and
even more serious problems that are free for all information
(27:31):
eraror would usher into our world. Here there's an extract
from an article that Douglas wrote in nineteen ninety nine
about the issues of online trust, read once again by
Samuel Barnett.
Speaker 8 (27:45):
The Internet is so new we still don't really understand
what it is. We mistake it for a type of
publishing or broadcasting because that's what we're used to. So
people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or
that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily
trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to
(28:05):
apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on
the telephone. Of course, you can't trust what people tell
you on the web any more than you can trust
what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants.
Working out the social politics of who you can trust
and why is quite literally what a very large part
(28:26):
of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason,
we turn off this natural skepticism when we see things
in any medium which require a lot of work or
resources to work in, or in which we can't easily
answer back, like newspapers, television, or granite hence carved in stone.
What should concern us is not that we can't take
(28:48):
what we read on the Internet on trust. Of course
you can't, it's just people talking, but that we ever
got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read
in the newspapers or saw on the TV, a mistake
that no one who has met an actual journalist would
ever make. One of the most important things you learn
from the Internet is that there is no them out there.
(29:12):
It's just an awful lot of us.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Those of us who remember the early days of social
media in the heady two thousands remember it as a
happy place. Twitter was this endless tea party where celebrities
were your friends, and there was an ongoing kind intellectual
collaborative conversation. As Douglas says, there was no them, just
(29:39):
an awful lot of the best of us. Early Twitter
perhaps gave a glimpse of the sort of social media
that Douglas Adams wanted to build the Guide's vision of
the Internet. We didn't get that, of course. Instead we've
ended up with an Internet in which profit reaping algorithms
(30:02):
prioritized clickbait. That is to say, they prioritized division, anger
and fear. Instead of getting a place where minds can meet,
we are being driven to our separate echo chambers and
increasingly our separate social networks. We are seeing increasing evidence
(30:23):
that social media is a mental health threat, particularly for
the young, and a profound threat to social cohesion on
the national level. None of this was the plan. Where
we have ended up is a sorry, dark shadow of
what we had all hoped for at the dawn of
(30:45):
the Internet. What would Douglas make of all this? We
can't know the answer, of course, but perhaps as a
proxy we could ask the people who worked alongside him
in those early glory days, the people who strived alongside
him trying to build the kind of Internet he wanted
to see. Here's Richard Harris.
Speaker 7 (31:07):
Most social networks, they're not about supporting people, they're not
about building community. They're about selling that community to paying advertisers.
And I think that's a fundamentally flawed model, as we're
seeing in extremists with what's happened to Twitter now and
to a large extent, what's happening with Facebook.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Here's whyed co founder Ian Charles Stewart with a slightly
more nuanced view.
Speaker 9 (31:34):
First of all, it's easy to beat social media up
these days because everybody does it, and everybody complains about it,
and everybody uses it an excuse for everything It is. Nonetheless,
the way a whole bunch of new people have generated
careers for themselves, have been able to get access to
communities that would never have found otherwise. The whole notion
of long tail communities is real because of social media.
If you cared about something but lived in rural New
(31:54):
Zealand and the South Island and had no one else
who cared about what you care about, on the Internet,
you can find them, and social media allows you to
do that. So we shouldn't forget the good bits as
we complain about the bad bits.
Speaker 8 (32:04):
But yes, I.
Speaker 9 (32:04):
Think we have at this current stage of development, and
it's true for all technologies. We have people who are
comfortable and feel like they're riding the wave, and then
we have those people that feel like every time they
try to put their head above what a they're crushed
by the wave. Those people tend to feel disenfranchised, They
tend to feel angry, and therefore you end up with
(32:25):
Twitter commentaries and trolls. Same, it's true on your YouTube, tait. Same,
it's true on all media. And I think it's not
easy to carry everybody along at the same pace when
the world is being so rapidly changed in so many
different ways. Social media is just one part of that.
I think it's, if anything, it's a microcosm of what's
happening in society. More broadly, I do think it points
(32:47):
to governance challenges. The question as to whether it's the
nasty corporates or it's the misleading governments that are most
to blame. I think is an open one. The veneer
of respectability that's assigned to governments because we theoretically vote
for them, I don't think is all that. It's me
(33:09):
only have to look at voting in Venezuela, France, Austria,
or Heavens help us the US to question that veneer
of respectability. So I don't blame CEOs of big companies,
nor blame necessarily heads of government. I think it's acietal thing.
We just have to manage our way through. And I
(33:31):
think I don't mind, as a member of that society
where that help comes from or where their guidance comes from.
And I think sometimes the humor and wit of someone
like Douglas is helpful in helping guide people through it.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
James Goss, the novelist and my old school friend, in
nineteen ninety six, built the first website for a theater
show in the UK. Five years later, James for the
BBC produced the first webcast of a memorial service in
internet history. The memorial service in question well sadly and
(34:04):
inevitably that of Douglas Adams. My point is, James Goss,
like Douglas, is an early adopter of technology.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I really think Douglas would have been amazing on social media,
whilst also being the first person to point out that
pouring all of your heart and soul and details of
your entire life out there is a very stupid thing
to do, and also none of it has any meaning.
You know, he would have been the first person to
diagnose this.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
And here's Stephen Fry. Stephen, at one point in the
early two thousands had the biggest Twitter following in the world.
He has since withdrawn from all social media.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
How do I put it?
Speaker 5 (34:45):
I won't say who's fortunate in dying. I mean his
mind when he died had really been unpolluted by what
happened to the Internet and by the invention of social media,
and then what happened to that, And he would of
course have been angry and disappointed and upset as we
all were. And he predicted, yes, you could say he
(35:08):
predicted the IPAAN. You could say he predicted all kinds
of ways that you could interface with technology.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
But he didn't.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
Predict, in a strange way, the most important and terrible
fact of technology is that it was still in the
hands of these gibbering apes that are human beings, and
that they would despoil it, and that it wouldn't improve them.
They would inchitify, to use curried doctor Ov's wonderful word,
(35:36):
the incitification of the Internet, you know. And so he
didn't live to see the incitification. When he died, it
was still a place of tremendous optimism, and the barriers
were being broken down, and frontiers and disputes and disagreements
of long standing were melting away and always going to
be solved by the glory. And what he didn't predict
(35:59):
was that far from making humans nicer, it seems to
have made as nasty.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
I mean he started with a view of the lump
and bureaucracy in the shape of vogons, for example, and
the vagueness and the hopeless kind of unreliability of scientists
and others. And there's no real malevolence there of the
kind that every day despoils our culture with with lieson and.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Un quick footnote. My editor has requested that I explain
Cory doctor Rowe's concept of the enthitification of the Internet.
I think it's one of those words that actually explains
itself rather well. N shittification, the end shitification off the
(36:51):
Internet moving on. Whilst Douglas didn't live to see it happen,
I actually suspect that, as an endless warrior, Douglas did
fear that the technology he loved might in the wrong
hands and used with the wrong motivations, have terrible consequences
and would likely, as Stephen Fry puts it, despoil our
(37:14):
culture with lies and unpleasantness. Exhibit one in this argument
is mostly harmless. The fifth and final Hitchhiker's Book, it's
a uniquely bleak book in his cannon, the darkest by
far of the series, ending with the unambiguous death of
(37:35):
all of the much loved characters Arthur Ford, Trillion, Zeyphod
and the rest. What is interesting, though, in this context,
is how and why they die. The Guide itself, as
we've established, is a pretty good proxy for the Internet,
(37:55):
a user generated source of information. The Guide is a
cross between Wikipedia and a social media platform. Even in
the first Hitchhiker Book, Douglas hints at some of the
problems of a crowd old sourced repository of opinion masquerading
as fact.
Speaker 8 (38:15):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion
to all those who are keen to make sense of
life in an infinitely complex and confusing universe. For though
it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters,
it does at least make the reassuring claim that where
it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In
cases of major discrepancy, it's always reality that's got it wrong.
(38:39):
This was the gist of the notice. It said, the
Guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
And that's in the first book in nineteen seventy nine.
By the time we get to Mostly Harmless in nineteen
ninety two, the Guide has been taken over by a
ruthless corporation Infinitum Enterprises, who plan to use it exclusively
for profit and to eliminate all competition. The real life
(39:09):
parallels here scarcely need pointing out. Infinidom uses sophisticated surveillance,
data collection and an autonomous AI to track and manipulate
its users. It defiantly asserts its authority over real life.
The Guide is definitive, reality is definitely inaccurate. For example,
(39:34):
when the Earth stubbornly insists on existing despite the Guide
entry on it categorically stating that it had been demolished,
the Guide sentient AI goes about an elaborate scheme to
ensure that reality conform to its description. To do this,
it has to destroy not only the earth, but all
(39:56):
earths in all realities, once and forever. In the final
sentences of the book, Arthur Dent realizes what is about
to happen. That he, his friends, his daughter, and everyone
he has ever loved are about to be destroyed forever.
Speaker 8 (40:19):
Things began slowly to reassemble themselves in Arthur's mind. He
wondered what he should do, but he only wanted it idly.
Around him, people were beginning to rush and shout a lot.
But it was suddenly very clear to him that there
was nothing to be done, not now or ever. Through
(40:42):
the new strangeness of noise and light, he could just
make out the shape of Ford Prefect, sitting back and
laughing wildly. A tremendous feeling of peace came over him.
He knew that at last, for once and forever, it
was now all finally.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Over.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Hearing that today from the perspective of a society which
has had its reality terribly distorted by the entitification of
social media, it's impossible not to see it as a very,
very bleak satire on a world that had not yet
been born when it was written. Douglas always regretted that
(41:31):
his final Hitchhiker book was so bleak, and he planned
to go back to the series one day and write
a happier ending. Sadly, he never got round to doing that,
in the same way that he didn't get to stick
around and help guide the evolution of social media. So
let's give Douglas the last word in this chapter as
(41:55):
he looks to the future, to the guide to the Internet,
the Internet that we didn't get, but the Internet that
the inventor of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had
hoped to build.
Speaker 4 (42:08):
This is an idea I've been pursuing for a while,
and since it grew out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
I called it H two G two.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
And started it out as a community website, a community
that is of voluntary researchers starting to build the very
guide that they would then be able to use, a
collaboratively built guide. It's in its infancy that it has
already built up a hugely enthusiastic group of researchers pouring
stuff into it before we could even get a couple
(42:38):
of steps along the way of building the kind of
infrastructure we needed to make the thing start to self
organize and self propagate. Guess what, Like every other website
on the planet, we ran out of resources or money
as we call it. I hope that one day we
can begin to form the basis of something that brings
my original vision of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
(42:59):
It's a mobile, personal, collaborative guide to real life.
Speaker 11 (43:05):
AI Grock is modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
which is one of my favorite books. It's a book
on philosophy disguised as a book on humor. Actually that
forms the basis of my philosphy, which is that we
don't know the meaning of life. But the more we
can expand the scope of scale of consciousness, digital and biological,
(43:27):
the more we're able to understand what questions to ask
about the answer that is the universe. So I have
a philosophy of curiosity.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
But I'm afraid I lied. We can't give Douglas the
last word because it turns out that someone else has
come along with their own vision of what an Internet
based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would look like.
There is no question that Elon Musk is a major
(43:56):
figure in this moment of global history. He has done
more to speed the transition to electric cars than anyone alive,
and through SpaceX, has pushed the boundaries of space exploration
further than ever before. If we actually get to Hitchhike
the Galaxy in our lifetimes, it will largely be because
(44:18):
of Elon Musk. And yet his reinvention of Twitter as
an organ of right wing politics, his championing and partnership
with Donald Trump, and his reverse takeover and defenestration of
the American government all give one to put it as
neutrallly as possible. Pause now. On the one hand, it
(44:43):
is hardly surprising that a tech bro like Elon is
a fan of Hitchhiker, but his admiration goes beyond the casual.
Elon Musk sent a plaque reading don't Panic into Space,
strapped onto his Tesla roadster. As he's just told us,
he based his AI engine on the Guide, and he
(45:06):
plans to name one of his Mars settlements chips the
Heart of Gold. Even more than any of that, Though,
Elon talks about Douglas the same way I talk about
Douglas as a profound thinker whose contributions go beyond the
realms of comedy. So I find myself puzzling about what
(45:29):
exactly Elon sees in Douglas Adams. Is Elon seeing the
same thing I see. Here are some other points of
view from other Douglas friends and fans, starting with James Goss.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
If Douglas was alive today, he'd have taken great joy
in blocking Elon on Twitter. That would have been the
thunderclap that just resounds around the world, and it would
have happened like three years before the rest of us
got there.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Emma Westcoot is an Associate professor of Game design at OCAD,
Canada's largest art and design university. She's as thoughtful a
person on gaming, social media, and interactivity as you will
have meat, and she started her career working with Douglas
at the Digital Village.
Speaker 12 (46:15):
And yet the sort of tech Bros And Silicon Valley
have taken it is a to do list, and without
actually having the reflexivity to sort of see that it
may have been a critique or a warning. So I
think that's interesting. I think that when Elon Musk sent
(46:37):
don't panic up into space or whatever he did, I
or heard Douglas sort of shift in his grave sort
of thing.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Max Landis, the screenwriter and comic book author, is as
big a Douglas fan as anyone alive. We collaborated on
the gently Netflix series. Max is himself a big and
sometimes controversial character with a pretty healthy ego, So I
wondered what he would make of elon sharing our love
(47:05):
for Douglas.
Speaker 13 (47:07):
Elon, what a fascinating evolution of a public figure like?
What a transformation? An unself conscious transformation into a villain?
And I think certain people are cushioned, both by their
neurological makeup and their parenting and the four hundred billion
(47:35):
dollars behind them from having to having to look at
the world in a realistic way. And I think Douglas
appeals to people who want to think they know a
little better because Douglas writes like he knows a little better.
He writes like he kind of gets it a little
more than you do. However, a lot of times, what
people miss and when you talk about Musk, what I
(47:56):
think someone like Musk misses is that ultimately Hitchhiker's Guide
one anyway is fucking about Arthur. You're really locked in
in his experience in that.
Speaker 14 (48:08):
Book, it's about a normal guy who is a victim
of systems and institutions. And if you are someone like
Elon Musk, who exists at the highest spectrum of human power,
he does he can have anything he wants.
Speaker 13 (48:23):
I think you want to believe you deserve that position,
You have to believe you know better. So I think,
does that make sense? It's almost like it's almost like
in his head he turns Douglas Adams into an Rand.
The problem, I mean, the problem with Elon, if we're honest,
is he's a Zepod, but he thinks he's a Ford. Yeah,
it's real, He's he's you know when you meet a Ford,
(48:46):
So like it, and it's not Elon ze Fod. He
would have another head. His kid is named like X
twenty three.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Like I.
Speaker 13 (48:54):
He would do whatever it took.
Speaker 15 (48:56):
And I believe, I believe if you showed Trump the
machine that shows you your size in the universe, that
you are her machine, he would have exactly the same
reaction as ad.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
It zoomed in on me.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
The image of Elon Musk and Donald Trump sitting in
the total perspective vortex is perhaps the best way to
give Douglas. The last word in this chapter
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello there, listeners. My name is r vind Ethan David.
I'm an author, a playwright, and a screenwriter whose work
has won Grammy Antonia wards. But more important than any
of that, I started my career working for Douglas Adams,
and I'm dropping into your feed to day to share
a preview of my new audiobook about him, Douglas Adams
(00:41):
The Ends of the Earth, a celebration of his intellectual legacy.
Adams was more than a science fiction or comedy writer.
He was someone with deep insights into our world. He
foresaw the dangers of our current age, from social media
to chaotic politics, with hilarious clarity, and maybe he even
(01:03):
had some good ideas about how we might survive these
dangerous times. In this audiobook, you'll go on an immersive
journey through Adams's mind. We've never before heard recordings from
his personal archive, original readings of his work, and interviews
with those who knew and loved him best, from Stephen
(01:24):
Frye and David Bidel to leading astrophysicists, conservationists, and political scientists.
I do hope you enjoy this excerpt, and if you do,
you can find Douglas Adams the ends of the Earth
at pushkin dot FM, slash audiobooks on Audible, Spotify, or
wherever else good audiobooks are found.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Chapter three, everything is connected the Internet we didn't get The.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
Computer scientist Danny Hillis came up with a brilliant definition
of technology, which is technology is stuff that doesn't work yet. Now,
the interesting thing is everything we've was at some point technology.
I mean, a chair was technology before we'd figured it out.
Now we know what a chair is, but before we did, yeah,
(02:17):
people trying to figure out, well, how many legs should
it have, how high should it be? And until we
got it read, they used to crash. Now, of course
we know everything you need to know about a share,
so we no longer think of chairs as technology.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
We just use them.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Now.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
It's very odd that we still tend to think of
bathroom taps as technology, and we keep on reinventing them
and reinventing them. Nowadays, particularly in the hotel, you can
hardly walk into a washroom without You've got to figure
it out all over again. Now, how do I open it?
I am I responsible for turning it on? Do I
do it with my hands? Do I just look at it,
(02:51):
Do I use my elbows? And then you think, now,
who's responsible for.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Turning it off? Do I just walk away?
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Or you know, we can't leave the damn things alone
because we're so relentlessly, ceaselessly inventive, so we keep on
inventing stuff maybe that doesn't need to be real, and
I would think it's probably time to call a moratorium
on bathroom.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Taps, chairs and bathroom taps aside. Douglas was obsessed with
all types of technology, but the specific type of technology
that obsessed Douglas above all else was computing, and specifically
what happens when you start to connect computers together on
a network.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Now, many years ago, I invented a thing called the
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I never meant to be
a predictive science fiction writer in the mode of say
Arthur C.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Clark.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
My reason for inventing it was purely one of narrative necessity,
which is that I had lots of extra bits of
story that I didn't know what to do with.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
I didn't know anything at.
Speaker 4 (03:54):
All about technology in those days, and I didn't think
twice about any of the issues, so I just made
it a bit like things I was already familiar with.
It was a bit like a pocket calculator, a bit
like a TV remote. It had a little window at
the top and lots and lots of little buttons on
the front.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as it manifests itself
in the five novels that bear its name, is an anarchic,
attitude filled user generated publication. Today we would call it
an app Wikipedia on Acid with aggressive social media functionality.
But when Douglas Adams first described it in nineteen seventy nine,
(04:34):
neither the iPad, nor the Internet, nor Wikipedia nor social
media had been invented. One of the strangest things about
the blurring between fiction and real life in Douglas's career
was not that he predicted technologies that later came to pass.
Many science fiction writers, as Douglas pointed out himself, from
(04:57):
Arthur C. Clark to William Gibson, have done that. Where
Douglas is unusual is that, twenty years after writing a
book about The Guide, he founded a production company, the
Digital Village, with a team that included top technologists and
Internet pioneers, and then he set about trying to actually
(05:18):
build a digital guide to the world in real life.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. To understand
how deep and old Douglas's love for technology in general
and network computing in particular ran, and the strange role
he ended up playing in the history of the Internet.
(05:39):
We need to start at the very beginning and who
was at the very beginning of Douglas's love affair with
computers Stephen Fry.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Of course, we started talking about computers, and you have
to remember that computers then meant isolated objects on a desk.
There was no networking. There was no Internet. There was
I mean, if there were sort of vague versions of
it within the universities. There was no way you could
get onto the net from home. And we both, I
(06:13):
think understood that that was the future of computing.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
And we both were.
Speaker 5 (06:18):
Aware of something that became very important in our lives
that Apple computers, who were big in the seventies, they
really kickstarted the whole home computing craze. They were bringing
out a new and rather unusual sort of computer. We
met then, I guess in eighty three, maybe it was
mid eighty three, something like that, and we were aware
(06:40):
that in January eighty four, Apple were bringing out a
new computer which they were going to call the Macintosh,
and I was able to tell him which he didn't
know that it was called the Macintosh. Nothing to do
with raincoats, but because the Macintosh is is a kind
of apple. It's like a Golden Delicious or a Grennie
(07:01):
Smith or Coxes Pippin. But there is the Macintosh Apple
very popular in America. Hence you know, so it's an anyway,
if you get bugged down in all these ridiculous memories,
that would mean nothing to anybody else. But we were,
and this is the story I like to tell, and
he told it too, So we were the first two
people in Britain possibly Europe to buy an Apple Macintosh.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It is worth mentioning in passing that for some years
Stephen and Douglas would argue about who was actually first
in line at the Max store that day.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Whomever it was.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Douglas's love for computers predated the Macintosh. Here he is
describing love at first sight.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
But I remember the first time I ever saw a computer.
It was in Lasquez, in the top and core road
of fond Memory, and it was a common door.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
Pet.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
I have you remember that it was the very very
early one, which is like a sort of pyramid with
a little sort of screen, a big and I sat
and stared at it, and I was absolutely fascinated by it.
And I was trying to figure out any reason, any
(08:20):
possible reason, why this could have any use to me,
and I just couldn't see any And I was thinking
as hard as I could, but I couldn't see any
way in which a computer could be useful to me
because I was a writer and I just didn't have
that much stuff to add up. And that was because
(08:41):
I'd got the wrong idea of what a computer was.
I thought it was a kind of super adding machine,
but everybody thought it was a kind of super adding machine.
That was the model we had in our mind of
what a computer was, a super adding machine. And so
we developed it as an adding machine with a long
(09:03):
feature list. And after a while we begin to think, well,
we're now getting very good at adding up and manipulating
these numbers.
Speaker 3 (09:12):
Is there anything else we can do with it?
Speaker 4 (09:14):
I mean, supposing we made these numbers stand for something else,
like we made it stand for the letters of the alphabet,
for ASCI code, And we suddenly think, my god, we
have had such limited imagination.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
We have failed to see the.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
Really exciting possibilities of the machine. How short sighted we've been.
It isn't an adding machine, it's a typewriter. So we
developed it as a typewriter with a long feature list.
And then after a while we get on a roll
and we think, well, what else can we make these
numbers stand for. We can make them stand for the
elements of a graphic display, and we come up with
(09:57):
yet another paradigm shift. We think, my god, how short
sighted of us to think that it was just an
adding machine or a typewriter. It's something much more exciting
than any of these. It's a television with a typewriter
sat in front of it. And then with the invention
of the worldwide where we go to get another paradigm shift,
and we think, my god, it isn't any of these.
(10:17):
It isn't any of these. It isn't just a typewriter,
it isn't just an adding machine, It isn't a television.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
It's a brochure.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
In less than three minutes, almost as a throwaway gag,
Douglas sketches out a twenty year intellectual history of personal
computing from adding machine to typewriter, to television to brochure.
Douglas skewers how at every stage we have had a
dramatically limited understanding of how computers were truly transformational, particularly
(10:50):
when combined with the power of networked connectivity. The specificity
and power of Douglas's vision of what the Internet was
and what it could be were breath taking Lee ahead
of his time. Here he is in two thousand and
one speaking to the collection of mobile phone and network
(11:12):
technologists and executives.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
Imagine if every piece of information we ever generated about
the world that passed through a computer, whether it's a
restaurant typing up its menu for the evening, whether it's
a shop maintaining its stock list, whether it's a car
noticing what speed it's going, how much petrol it's got left,
and where the nearest service stations are, what prices they're
(11:36):
charging for a petrol are, Or whether it's someone measuring
the wingspan of an African swallow or writing down where
and when their grandmother was born, or whether it's someone
taking a digital photograph from the top of the Great Pyramid,
or just some flower that's bloomed late or early this year,
or the settings in your thermostat and when it turned
(11:56):
on and off, or if every time you took your
child's temperature, the network remembered. Imagine all of that gradually
creating a vast shared software model of the world. Just
imagine it. The one thing I did get right when
(12:17):
I came up with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
was that it would know where you were and come
up with information appropriately. And that, of course, is the
thing that makes the crucial difference to everything in that
list above. If every piece of information knew the when
of itself and the ware of itself, so that the
(12:39):
virtual world we created fitted over the real world like
an invisible glove, and these devices, these devices that we
currently think of as telephones or PDAs, would be the
devices that made that invisible world visible to.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Us today in twenty twenty five, when we all walk
about with geolocated supercomputers in our pockets, what Bliss is
describing seems simply an accurate description of the world in
which we now live. Back in two thousand and one,
it was insane science fiction except for the companies who
(13:22):
were trying to build it. And one of those companies
was Douglas's own Digital Village, where he had assembled an
enormously talented group of people to try and make, as
he described it, the Earth edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. Here's Robbie stamp.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
I'd written, unbidden a business plan called Cable City, which
was a recognition that to take advantage of new cable
and satellite opportunities, you needed to create an entirely new
cost base for programming. And I was telling Douglass about it,
and it had morphed by then into something.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
Called the Digital Village.
Speaker 6 (14:03):
The Marshall mclune quote influenced that Digital Village. And I
was sitting there with Douglas, you know, several of our
meetings in in his house, and he said, oh, that
sounds interesting. I'd like to be your partner. How much
would it cost me to invest? So I plucked a
figure out of the air and he said, I'm in,
and that was it. We were then fifty to fifty
partners in this wonderful one of the best adventures of
(14:26):
my working life, called the Digital Village.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So Robbie and Douglas launched this company, the Digital Village,
and they recruit almost at once an amazing group of
people and they take the moonshot. They're going to build
the Hitchhiker's Guide. Here's Richard Harris, who served as chief
Technology Officer of the Digital Village.
Speaker 7 (14:48):
Remember this is the day before the term social network
had been actually coined. You had tripod in MySpace and
all of the CompuServe forums at the time, but very
much precursors of social networks.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
And of course the.
Speaker 7 (15:02):
Hitchhiker's Guide itself was meant to be an opinionated counterpoint
to the Encyclopedia Galactica asimore construct, but we didn't have
an Encyclopedia Galactica at the time. If we were doing
it now, we would be building an opinionated counterpoint at Wikipedia,
and I would love the challenge of doing that, but
(15:22):
we didn't. So we had to come up with a
content driven network of people that created its content, that
were self policing and created trust between people. And what
we were all about was delivering people to each other
via content and helping them collaboratively build content, which is
(15:42):
actually something I think we succeeded on very well with
H two G two.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Now there were a lot of people cashing in on
the first dot com boom of the late nineties. Lots
of people trying to build social networks and Internet sites,
but note the specificity of Douglas's vision. As described by Harris, we.
Speaker 7 (16:07):
Were never in the business of doing a Facebook and
simply delivering eyeballs to advertisers. That's the fundamental contradiction in
most social networks is they're not about supporting people, they're
not about building community. They're about selling that community to
paying advertisers. And I think that's a fundamentally flawed model.
(16:28):
You see systems that can see what's happening and adapt
to them in real time. And you need to give
people not just what they knew to ask for, but
what they needed to know but didn't know to ask for.
And that was, if you like, a fundamental strap line
for our development of the real Hitchhiger's guide is, if
(16:49):
you're giving people what they ask for, you're just a
search engine. You may be a sophisticated search engine, you
may be a constrained, community driven search engine, but you're
still a search engine. But you need to be building
an understanding of people sufficient to let them find the
stuff that they didn't know what to ask for. Part
of our ch angles were actually okay, how do we
(17:10):
build a knowledge framework that profiles people for their own benefit,
not for advertisers benefit, and helps put them in touch
with who and what they needed to know.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
So it's people to.
Speaker 7 (17:20):
People, people to content, people on content place. Putting all
of those together.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Now, you might suspect that there is an element of
hindsight at work here in Richard's description. But I have
the advantage of actually having been in the room when
H two G two dot com was being planned and built,
and I can attest that this thoughtfulness about the dangers
(17:47):
of what social media could become, and the importance of editors,
fact checkers, and community self regulation were built into its
early design. Those insights came not only from the official
technologists and scientists at the company, but often intuitively from
Douglas himself. Here's Bobby Stamp.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Again, everything is connected. I think that deep sense at
his core. I think so much of what he explores
creatively through almost all of his work is that idea
everything is connected and everything is perspectible. And I think
he saw in the Internet an emergent technology which was
(18:32):
going to sort of in a way make if I
can use this make flesh that interconnectedness of things. Here
were all here were millions and millions and millions of
nodes which were going to be connecting in new new ways,
some of which we could maybe predict and many we couldn't.
And I think he found that emergent property intellectually hugely exciting,
(18:53):
because I think it was an enormous river flowing into
his creativity, which was maybe one of the most important
well springs in my mind, was that natural fascination in
perspective and in connective And I think that the Internet
sal was there.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
He just saw it.
Speaker 6 (19:13):
Very very very early on as this massive playground where
so much was going to be possible that hadn't been
possible going through traditional gatekeepers. But I think Douglas, when
I look back to those early conversations, was phenomenally prescient
about an awful lot of the ways in which the
Internet duly has evolved. I think maybe some of the
(19:37):
wild and nastier aspects or the more difficult aspects of
what we've learned about social media and the Internet. He
kind of died before we'd really seen a lot of that.
And I think before you know, the Internet found its
business model, which was turning human beings into financial derivative
products who were sliced, diced, and sold and re sold
(19:59):
and sold in these massive advertising trading markets. So I
think he was there in the early optimistic, more wide
eyed days of what was going to be possible. But
I think it was that freedom and that recognition of
the interconnectedness of everything that thrilled him.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
This idea, the idea that everything is connected, is one
that Douglas road to logical but absurd extremes in his
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency thinks.
Speaker 8 (20:29):
The term holistic refers to my conviction that what we
are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all
things that I do not concern myself with such petty
things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff, and
inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as
being detectable in the pattern web of the whole. The
connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle
and complex than we are rough and ready understanding of
(20:52):
the physical world might naturally suppose.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Dirk Gently is a detective with a sort of superpower.
He has a semi psychic ability to sense the deep
interconnections between all things to its, which people, which events,
which locations are relevant to his current case, and his methods,
(21:17):
whilst unconventional, are normally successful or semi successful, he solves
cases with questionable efficiency. The great irony of Dirk Gently
as a character is that this hero with a gift
for sensing connections is himself profoundly bad at making human connections,
(21:41):
and he spends most of his life alone and lonely.
Without wanting to post mortem psychoanalyze Douglas Adams, it is
perhaps worth asking why he was so excited to become
part of the Digital Village and to run a production company.
Here's Ian Charles Stewart, co founder of Wyatt Magazine and
(22:05):
another of Douglas's partners at the Digital Village.
Speaker 9 (22:09):
But the main reason we got together wasn't because there
was a single driven purpose. It was because he had
writer's block, and the challenge was how to create a
team around him that allowed creativity to re emerge for
him to be able to continue telling stories in a
different way. And so the idea was to create a
platform which he could use to tell stories in indifferent media,
(22:31):
in new media. The first, of course, was the computer
game Starship Titanic, and we created a team around that,
and then the second was thinking about the film, and
the notion was that if we gave him, if we
took him away from the typewriter and paper and put
him in front of new tools with other people, that
that might become something which he could get his teeth
(22:52):
into and have fun with. And it turned out to
be the case.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Sophie Aston was Douglas's assistant at the Digital Village. Sophie
and I first met when we were both in our
early twenties and excited to be around the great Douglas Adams.
Here she is recollecting what it was like to have
Douglas in an office. He was.
Speaker 10 (23:15):
Such a you know, a social being, a social animal.
That actually what he was really enjoying in those last
few years was working in an office environment with lots
of interesting, young, creative, brilliant people on Starship Titanic on
HTG two. That was what gave That's what fed him,
you know, the excitement. He was in the office a
lot of the time. He probably didn't need to be,
(23:37):
but he really enjoyed spending time in our company.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I think what's crucial in this story is to realize that,
unlike the leaders of a lot of other Internet companies,
Douglas Adams wasn't just a technologist. He was both a
technologist and a world class creative, and he was also
someone deeply interested in human connection. That is to say,
(24:01):
what really interested him was how networked technology could be
life enhancing to humans and to our relationships. Here he
is in the year two thousand, giving another keynote address,
this time to a group of mobile phone executives. He
imagines a world of virtual reality and online dating. Note
(24:23):
that he uses the phrase soft world to denote what
we would probably call the digital or virtual world today.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
In the real world, if you want to know what
the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower looks like,
you have to go there. In the soft world, you
can ask your guide to show you what it looks
like from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Maybe it can show you the view through a.
Speaker 4 (24:47):
Webcam there instantly, or maybe it can construct a virtual
reality view for you in real time based on everything
it knows about everything that can currently be seen from
the top of the Eiffel Tower. So the first thing
you'd see is a lot of virtual graffiti, some of
it quite naughty of being French, and you just sort
of wave it away. And as you look down at
(25:08):
your virtual vie you ask it. How many of the
cars you can see from your current advantage point, for instance,
are British?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
For a moment you think it's not working.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
Then you say, oh, okay, okay, so how many of
them are Perjo's And the.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
View lights up with thousands of moving dots? Okay?
Speaker 4 (25:25):
How many of the cars you can currently see have
some Bach playing on the incast areas?
Speaker 3 (25:31):
A few dozen?
Speaker 4 (25:32):
Oh, when there's one playing your favorite recording of the
Shubler preludes?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Do they have their flag up? Yes?
Speaker 4 (25:38):
She'll talk to you, but only because the only thing
you asked her about was what she was listening to.
Anything else in her flag would have been down for
you. You chat for a bit about the music and quickly
discover a tremendous rapport.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
What about having dinner together?
Speaker 4 (25:50):
Okay, but she has a gluten problem which restricts where
she can eat, and.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
You like turbot.
Speaker 4 (25:56):
So a couple of restaurants light up in your view.
One of them looks great for a romantic tryst. Lots
of alcoves and dim lighting. But some of the people
who have eaten there tonight have left notes around the
place saying left around in hyperspared cyberpa noticing the saying
that they're obviously understaffed in the kitchen tonight and the
food has been coming out cold or reheated the other place.
Get raves her about the food, but it's a bit
(26:18):
bright and noisy. You decide that good food is the
thing to go for. Then you remember, damn, you're not
actually in Paris, you're a new deli and got a
bit carried away. That's all right, it says your your friend,
I'm actually in Albuquerque. I'm a music squatter. What does
that mean, Well, she just monitors the network for anybody
who's looking for someone who's listening to that recording. The
(26:38):
real occupant of the car had is flagged down and
wasn't talking to anybody. So she just intercepted your query
and really quite enjoy talking to you. And now she's
going out to dinner locally. Thanks bye, So you track
which restaurant is going to and send a margarita to
her table to say thanks. But she's annoyed that you
tracked her down. And turns the connection off. Oh well,
you go back to your day job. Erecting advertising hoardings
(27:00):
on Mars soft Mars, that is, which has recently been
added to the soft Solar system.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
It is archetypal. Douglas adams to imagine that the highest
calling of the Internet would be to enable a failed
romantic tryst between two lonely bark enthusiasts in Paris. But
if he foresaw internet romance, Douglas also predicted catfishing and
even more serious problems that are free for all information
(27:31):
eraror would usher into our world. Here there's an extract
from an article that Douglas wrote in nineteen ninety nine
about the issues of online trust, read once again by
Samuel Barnett.
Speaker 8 (27:45):
The Internet is so new we still don't really understand
what it is. We mistake it for a type of
publishing or broadcasting because that's what we're used to. So
people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or
that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily
trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to
(28:05):
apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on
the telephone. Of course, you can't trust what people tell
you on the web any more than you can trust
what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants.
Working out the social politics of who you can trust
and why is quite literally what a very large part
(28:26):
of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason,
we turn off this natural skepticism when we see things
in any medium which require a lot of work or
resources to work in, or in which we can't easily
answer back, like newspapers, television, or granite hence carved in stone.
What should concern us is not that we can't take
(28:48):
what we read on the Internet on trust. Of course
you can't, it's just people talking, but that we ever
got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read
in the newspapers or saw on the TV, a mistake
that no one who has met an actual journalist would
ever make. One of the most important things you learn
from the Internet is that there is no them out there.
(29:12):
It's just an awful lot of us.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Those of us who remember the early days of social
media in the heady two thousands remember it as a
happy place. Twitter was this endless tea party where celebrities
were your friends, and there was an ongoing kind intellectual
collaborative conversation. As Douglas says, there was no them, just
(29:39):
an awful lot of the best of us. Early Twitter
perhaps gave a glimpse of the sort of social media
that Douglas Adams wanted to build the Guide's vision of
the Internet. We didn't get that, of course. Instead we've
ended up with an Internet in which profit reaping algorithms
(30:02):
prioritized clickbait. That is to say, they prioritized division, anger
and fear. Instead of getting a place where minds can meet,
we are being driven to our separate echo chambers and
increasingly our separate social networks. We are seeing increasing evidence
(30:23):
that social media is a mental health threat, particularly for
the young, and a profound threat to social cohesion on
the national level. None of this was the plan. Where
we have ended up is a sorry, dark shadow of
what we had all hoped for at the dawn of
(30:45):
the Internet. What would Douglas make of all this? We
can't know the answer, of course, but perhaps as a
proxy we could ask the people who worked alongside him
in those early glory days, the people who strived alongside
him trying to build the kind of Internet he wanted
to see. Here's Richard Harris.
Speaker 7 (31:07):
Most social networks, they're not about supporting people, they're not
about building community. They're about selling that community to paying advertisers.
And I think that's a fundamentally flawed model, as we're
seeing in extremists with what's happened to Twitter now and
to a large extent, what's happening with Facebook.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Here's whyed co founder Ian Charles Stewart with a slightly
more nuanced view.
Speaker 9 (31:34):
First of all, it's easy to beat social media up
these days because everybody does it, and everybody complains about it,
and everybody uses it an excuse for everything It is. Nonetheless,
the way a whole bunch of new people have generated
careers for themselves, have been able to get access to
communities that would never have found otherwise. The whole notion
of long tail communities is real because of social media.
If you cared about something but lived in rural New
(31:54):
Zealand and the South Island and had no one else
who cared about what you care about, on the Internet,
you can find them, and social media allows you to
do that. So we shouldn't forget the good bits as
we complain about the bad bits.
Speaker 8 (32:04):
But yes, I.
Speaker 9 (32:04):
Think we have at this current stage of development, and
it's true for all technologies. We have people who are
comfortable and feel like they're riding the wave, and then
we have those people that feel like every time they
try to put their head above what a they're crushed
by the wave. Those people tend to feel disenfranchised, They
tend to feel angry, and therefore you end up with
(32:25):
Twitter commentaries and trolls. Same, it's true on your YouTube, tait. Same,
it's true on all media. And I think it's not
easy to carry everybody along at the same pace when
the world is being so rapidly changed in so many
different ways. Social media is just one part of that.
I think it's, if anything, it's a microcosm of what's
happening in society. More broadly, I do think it points
(32:47):
to governance challenges. The question as to whether it's the
nasty corporates or it's the misleading governments that are most
to blame. I think is an open one. The veneer
of respectability that's assigned to governments because we theoretically vote
for them, I don't think is all that. It's me
(33:09):
only have to look at voting in Venezuela, France, Austria,
or Heavens help us the US to question that veneer
of respectability. So I don't blame CEOs of big companies,
nor blame necessarily heads of government. I think it's acietal thing.
We just have to manage our way through. And I
(33:31):
think I don't mind, as a member of that society
where that help comes from or where their guidance comes from.
And I think sometimes the humor and wit of someone
like Douglas is helpful in helping guide people through it.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
James Goss, the novelist and my old school friend, in
nineteen ninety six, built the first website for a theater
show in the UK. Five years later, James for the
BBC produced the first webcast of a memorial service in
internet history. The memorial service in question well sadly and
(34:04):
inevitably that of Douglas Adams. My point is, James Goss,
like Douglas, is an early adopter of technology.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
I really think Douglas would have been amazing on social media,
whilst also being the first person to point out that
pouring all of your heart and soul and details of
your entire life out there is a very stupid thing
to do, and also none of it has any meaning.
You know, he would have been the first person to
diagnose this.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
And here's Stephen Fry. Stephen, at one point in the
early two thousands had the biggest Twitter following in the world.
He has since withdrawn from all social media.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
How do I put it?
Speaker 5 (34:45):
I won't say who's fortunate in dying. I mean his
mind when he died had really been unpolluted by what
happened to the Internet and by the invention of social media,
and then what happened to that, And he would of
course have been angry and disappointed and upset as we
all were. And he predicted, yes, you could say he
(35:08):
predicted the IPAAN. You could say he predicted all kinds
of ways that you could interface with technology.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
But he didn't.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
Predict, in a strange way, the most important and terrible
fact of technology is that it was still in the
hands of these gibbering apes that are human beings, and
that they would despoil it, and that it wouldn't improve them.
They would inchitify, to use curried doctor Ov's wonderful word,
(35:36):
the incitification of the Internet, you know. And so he
didn't live to see the incitification. When he died, it
was still a place of tremendous optimism, and the barriers
were being broken down, and frontiers and disputes and disagreements
of long standing were melting away and always going to
be solved by the glory. And what he didn't predict
(35:59):
was that far from making humans nicer, it seems to
have made as nasty.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
I mean he started with a view of the lump
and bureaucracy in the shape of vogons, for example, and
the vagueness and the hopeless kind of unreliability of scientists
and others. And there's no real malevolence there of the
kind that every day despoils our culture with with lieson and.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Un quick footnote. My editor has requested that I explain
Cory doctor Rowe's concept of the enthitification of the Internet.
I think it's one of those words that actually explains
itself rather well. N shittification, the end shitification off the
(36:51):
Internet moving on. Whilst Douglas didn't live to see it happen,
I actually suspect that, as an endless warrior, Douglas did
fear that the technology he loved might in the wrong
hands and used with the wrong motivations, have terrible consequences
and would likely, as Stephen Fry puts it, despoil our
(37:14):
culture with lies and unpleasantness. Exhibit one in this argument
is mostly harmless. The fifth and final Hitchhiker's Book, it's
a uniquely bleak book in his cannon, the darkest by
far of the series, ending with the unambiguous death of
(37:35):
all of the much loved characters Arthur Ford, Trillion, Zeyphod
and the rest. What is interesting, though, in this context,
is how and why they die. The Guide itself, as
we've established, is a pretty good proxy for the Internet,
(37:55):
a user generated source of information. The Guide is a
cross between Wikipedia and a social media platform. Even in
the first Hitchhiker Book, Douglas hints at some of the
problems of a crowd old sourced repository of opinion masquerading
as fact.
Speaker 8 (38:15):
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion
to all those who are keen to make sense of
life in an infinitely complex and confusing universe. For though
it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters,
it does at least make the reassuring claim that where
it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In
cases of major discrepancy, it's always reality that's got it wrong.
(38:39):
This was the gist of the notice. It said, the
Guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
And that's in the first book in nineteen seventy nine.
By the time we get to Mostly Harmless in nineteen
ninety two, the Guide has been taken over by a
ruthless corporation Infinitum Enterprises, who plan to use it exclusively
for profit and to eliminate all competition. The real life
(39:09):
parallels here scarcely need pointing out. Infinidom uses sophisticated surveillance,
data collection and an autonomous AI to track and manipulate
its users. It defiantly asserts its authority over real life.
The Guide is definitive, reality is definitely inaccurate. For example,
(39:34):
when the Earth stubbornly insists on existing despite the Guide
entry on it categorically stating that it had been demolished,
the Guide sentient AI goes about an elaborate scheme to
ensure that reality conform to its description. To do this,
it has to destroy not only the earth, but all
(39:56):
earths in all realities, once and forever. In the final
sentences of the book, Arthur Dent realizes what is about
to happen. That he, his friends, his daughter, and everyone
he has ever loved are about to be destroyed forever.
Speaker 8 (40:19):
Things began slowly to reassemble themselves in Arthur's mind. He
wondered what he should do, but he only wanted it idly.
Around him, people were beginning to rush and shout a lot.
But it was suddenly very clear to him that there
was nothing to be done, not now or ever. Through
(40:42):
the new strangeness of noise and light, he could just
make out the shape of Ford Prefect, sitting back and
laughing wildly. A tremendous feeling of peace came over him.
He knew that at last, for once and forever, it
was now all finally.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
Over.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Hearing that today from the perspective of a society which
has had its reality terribly distorted by the entitification of
social media, it's impossible not to see it as a very,
very bleak satire on a world that had not yet
been born when it was written. Douglas always regretted that
(41:31):
his final Hitchhiker book was so bleak, and he planned
to go back to the series one day and write
a happier ending. Sadly, he never got round to doing that,
in the same way that he didn't get to stick
around and help guide the evolution of social media. So
let's give Douglas the last word in this chapter as
(41:55):
he looks to the future, to the guide to the Internet,
the Internet that we didn't get, but the Internet that
the inventor of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had
hoped to build.
Speaker 4 (42:08):
This is an idea I've been pursuing for a while,
and since it grew out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
I called it H two G two.
Speaker 4 (42:16):
And started it out as a community website, a community
that is of voluntary researchers starting to build the very
guide that they would then be able to use, a
collaboratively built guide. It's in its infancy that it has
already built up a hugely enthusiastic group of researchers pouring
stuff into it before we could even get a couple
(42:38):
of steps along the way of building the kind of
infrastructure we needed to make the thing start to self
organize and self propagate. Guess what, Like every other website
on the planet, we ran out of resources or money
as we call it. I hope that one day we
can begin to form the basis of something that brings
my original vision of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
(42:59):
It's a mobile, personal, collaborative guide to real life.
Speaker 11 (43:05):
AI Grock is modeled after The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
which is one of my favorite books. It's a book
on philosophy disguised as a book on humor. Actually that
forms the basis of my philosphy, which is that we
don't know the meaning of life. But the more we
can expand the scope of scale of consciousness, digital and biological,
(43:27):
the more we're able to understand what questions to ask
about the answer that is the universe. So I have
a philosophy of curiosity.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
But I'm afraid I lied. We can't give Douglas the
last word because it turns out that someone else has
come along with their own vision of what an Internet
based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would look like.
There is no question that Elon Musk is a major
(43:56):
figure in this moment of global history. He has done
more to speed the transition to electric cars than anyone alive,
and through SpaceX, has pushed the boundaries of space exploration
further than ever before. If we actually get to Hitchhike
the Galaxy in our lifetimes, it will largely be because
(44:18):
of Elon Musk. And yet his reinvention of Twitter as
an organ of right wing politics, his championing and partnership
with Donald Trump, and his reverse takeover and defenestration of
the American government all give one to put it as
neutrallly as possible. Pause now. On the one hand, it
(44:43):
is hardly surprising that a tech bro like Elon is
a fan of Hitchhiker, but his admiration goes beyond the casual.
Elon Musk sent a plaque reading don't Panic into Space,
strapped onto his Tesla roadster. As he's just told us,
he based his AI engine on the Guide, and he
(45:06):
plans to name one of his Mars settlements chips the
Heart of Gold. Even more than any of that, Though,
Elon talks about Douglas the same way I talk about
Douglas as a profound thinker whose contributions go beyond the
realms of comedy. So I find myself puzzling about what
(45:29):
exactly Elon sees in Douglas Adams. Is Elon seeing the
same thing I see. Here are some other points of
view from other Douglas friends and fans, starting with James Goss.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
If Douglas was alive today, he'd have taken great joy
in blocking Elon on Twitter. That would have been the
thunderclap that just resounds around the world, and it would
have happened like three years before the rest of us
got there.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Emma Westcoot is an Associate professor of Game design at OCAD,
Canada's largest art and design university. She's as thoughtful a
person on gaming, social media, and interactivity as you will
have meat, and she started her career working with Douglas
at the Digital Village.
Speaker 12 (46:15):
And yet the sort of tech Bros And Silicon Valley
have taken it is a to do list, and without
actually having the reflexivity to sort of see that it
may have been a critique or a warning. So I
think that's interesting. I think that when Elon Musk sent
(46:37):
don't panic up into space or whatever he did, I
or heard Douglas sort of shift in his grave sort
of thing.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Max Landis, the screenwriter and comic book author, is as
big a Douglas fan as anyone alive. We collaborated on
the gently Netflix series. Max is himself a big and
sometimes controversial character with a pretty healthy ego, So I
wondered what he would make of elon sharing our love
(47:05):
for Douglas.
Speaker 13 (47:07):
Elon, what a fascinating evolution of a public figure like?
What a transformation? An unself conscious transformation into a villain?
And I think certain people are cushioned, both by their
neurological makeup and their parenting and the four hundred billion
(47:35):
dollars behind them from having to having to look at
the world in a realistic way. And I think Douglas
appeals to people who want to think they know a
little better because Douglas writes like he knows a little better.
He writes like he kind of gets it a little
more than you do. However, a lot of times, what
people miss and when you talk about Musk, what I
(47:56):
think someone like Musk misses is that ultimately Hitchhiker's Guide
one anyway is fucking about Arthur. You're really locked in
in his experience in that.
Speaker 14 (48:08):
Book, it's about a normal guy who is a victim
of systems and institutions. And if you are someone like
Elon Musk, who exists at the highest spectrum of human power,
he does he can have anything he wants.
Speaker 13 (48:23):
I think you want to believe you deserve that position,
You have to believe you know better. So I think,
does that make sense? It's almost like it's almost like
in his head he turns Douglas Adams into an Rand.
The problem, I mean, the problem with Elon, if we're honest,
is he's a Zepod, but he thinks he's a Ford. Yeah,
it's real, He's he's you know when you meet a Ford,
(48:46):
So like it, and it's not Elon ze Fod. He
would have another head. His kid is named like X
twenty three.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
Like I.
Speaker 13 (48:54):
He would do whatever it took.
Speaker 15 (48:56):
And I believe, I believe if you showed Trump the
machine that shows you your size in the universe, that
you are her machine, he would have exactly the same
reaction as ad.
Speaker 3 (49:09):
It zoomed in on me.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
The image of Elon Musk and Donald Trump sitting in
the total perspective vortex is perhaps the best way to
give Douglas. The last word in this chapter
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