Hello everyone and welcome to Amanpour & Company.

Here's what's coming up.

If women don't work, everything collapses.

We are going to show them that we can stop this society.

50 years ago, Iceland's women went on strike.

It's now the most gender equal country on earth.

A new documentary, "The Day Iceland Stood Still," tells that historic story.

And I speak to their president, Hatla Thomas Dóttir, and the film's director, Pamela Hogan.

They have cited that story as the catalyst for change.

Reporting from an ancient land, the former CNN Cairo Bureau Chief, Gayle Young, on her memoir and her work exposing female genital mutilation in 1990s Egypt.

Also ahead, tech activist Corey Doctorow talks to Hari Sreenivasan about his latest book on the decline of the internet and how to reform it.

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Thank you.

Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

And today we focus on the amazing strides women have made over the past half century and the continuing struggle for the right to full equality.

According to the World Economic Forum, we're still 123 years away from that.

Women still earn 20% less than men on average, and recent UN reports show rollbacks in reproductive and legal rights.

So it's critical to remember the moments when history was made.

On this day, 50 years ago, 90% of the women in Iceland went on strike.

They stopped working in their jobs and at home to demonstrate the irreplaceable role of women in society.

They refused to be invisible, and their women's day off changed Iceland forever.

It's now the subject of a new documentary called "The Day Iceland Stood Still."

- Almost all the women in Iceland are on strike today.

It's National Women's Day there, and the women are refusing to work in even their own homes.

If women don't work, everything collapses.

We are going to show them that we can stop this society.

The man thought it was ridiculous.

Oh, you are so silly.

Goodbye.

The beds were not made, dishes not washed, the telephone system went dead, theaters did not open, most of the schools were closed.

Well, it didn't come to blows, but we got very harsh words, mostly from men.

They were thought to be destroying the role of the housewife and putting society on its head.

It's like a revolution, you know.

I saw the flags coming up.

(imitates flapping) And it was beautiful.

- And 50 years later to the day, I speak to the film's director, Pamela Hogan, and the president of Iceland, Hatla Thomas Dóttir.

Welcome to both of you to our program.

This is an amazing film, Pamela Hogan, and Hatla Thomas Dóttir, I want to ask you as president of Iceland, what do you make of this incredible documentary showing, I mean, you're only the second female president of your country, and yet it happened.

- Yeah, I love this film so much, and I've been showing it and having conversations about it in multiple places around the world, and I have yet to meet a person who isn't moved by the solidarity, courage, and joy that Icelandic women showed 50 years ago and pretty much built the pathway for the rest of us to enjoy being a leading country when it comes to closing the gender gap today.

It was incredible how well this film documents that courageous journey.

- And just quickly, you were seven years old when the actual day off, so to speak, happened October 24th, 50 years ago.

What do you remember from that day?

I remember it vividly because it was my mom's birthday.

And this day they were not baking and cleaning, she and her sisters, as on every other day.

And they were on a strike and they were having fun while doing it.

And pretty much nothing worked in Iceland that day.

And it really made me think that when women are not at work, very few things work out well, at least.

And when I asked my mom and her sisters why they were on a strike, they told me very plainly that they wanted to show that they matter.

And I think that was maybe the beginning of me thinking that one day I might want to matter too.

And I think throughout decades of doing different things, I've learned that that's ultimately what most of us want to do, to matter, to be seen, valued and heard in a world that should allow all of us to contribute.

- Yeah, that's really beautifully said.

Pamela, what struck, I mean, what made you get involved?

How did you even decide to do a film about this date that, I mean, not everybody knows about?

- Yeah, you know, there's a famous saying, "There's nothing new in the world "except the history that you do not know."

And when I was in Iceland on a family trip 10 years ago, and I read this tiny little blurb in the back of "The Lonely Planet Guide" about this incredible day, like literally Christian, my head exploded.

And I just thought, why don't I know this story?

And why don't we all know this story?

And when I realized that no one had yet made a film about it, and I started talking, calling some of the women, just doing a little bit of research, I just thought these women are incredible.

And not only are they courageous, and did they do something that started really a revolution in their country, but they're also funny.

They're humorous, and they used humor to open people's ears to their message.

And I thought that that was not only kind of fascinating and smart, but I realized it would be fun to make the film with them.

- Well, it really was, and watching it, it was so uplifting, because generally, when you often see movements, they can be much sadder, much more dour, you know, violent.

I mean, there's so much that goes into so many liberation movements, and this one seemed very different.

And as you say, humor and determination and ordinary women were heard.

So let me just play one of the clips that you have sent us.

And this is, as you said, Madam President, you wanted to be something and somebody in your country.

And this is about two of those women who tell us what they wanted to be.

- I was asked, "What are you going to do when you grow up?"

And I said, "I want to be a captain of a ship."

They said very sweetly to me, "No, dearest, you cannot, "because you are a girl."

From the time I was 12, I said that I wanted to be a lawyer.

Everybody said, "Oh no, you will be married before you're 18."

(thunder rumbling) (laughing) - I mean, it is extraordinary.

Now, of course, you know, Madam President, that the first lady who wanted to be a ship captain ended up becoming the first female president of Iceland.

And the second one was the first woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

So reflect on that, and that scene is beautiful, is the animation and the real voices.

Yeah, Madan Vigdís was not only the first female president in Iceland, but the first female to be democratically elected as president.

And I remember equally vividly five years after the women's strike when she was elected, I felt as an 11-year-old girl that anything was possible.

Just like the collective leadership of women in 1975 changed my life, her leadership really impacted the lives of all of us who were lucky enough to grow up under her leadership.

And I often point out that it's important to be first to break down these barriers, and we've had many first women leaders across Icelandic society.

But I also think it's important when we elect a woman again for some of these positions, whether it's bishop, which now we have a second woman serving there, or president, where we have a second woman serving, and prime minister as well.

So we have, because then we start to normalize women's leadership and gender-balanced leadership, and it's not just the exception and then we go back to the norm.

It starts to become a new norm that women lead, and I think we've reached that level of closing the gender gap in Iceland, and I'm very proud of that fact, proud of my country to continue to courageously show what is possible in a world where not everybody sees the value and worth of Closing the gender gap.

Yeah, and I mean it's no small feat Iceland is really in the vanguard of of that not just in the in the world But even in the developed world in certainly certainly in Europe certainly compared to the United States.

It's pretty extraordinary what you've achieved Pamela Some of the stories almost seem incredible I mean they're not because they're there but the fact that women were really expected just to cook and clean and stay in the house and not really talk and not Certainly fulfill their dreams and ambitions.

It was quite amazing.

It was just completely normalized What do you think about Iceland or do you think it's?

everywhere that that this was what what women could could expect and we're talking only 50 years ago where they were just cooking and cleaning isn't it incredible that it's that it's only 50 years ago also women's names if they were married the name couldn't be on the doorbell and their name couldn't be in the phone book and jobs were advertised for men or for women and of course the women's jobs were paid less and were lower levels.

So I think that's one of the reasons we felt it was so important to capture these women's memories now because I think in generations to come no one would believe that life was like that for a woman.

And I think also one of the secrets of the women's drive to really make the day off something big was they were the women's movement in the 1970s and Iceland was feeling a little bit behind Scandinavia and maybe the United States.

So they really wanted to do something big to make a statement and I'd say they succeeded.

So let's just put that absolutely you're right.

The United States ranks 43rd now on the gender equality or parity index.

Iceland is considered the best country for gender equality.

So it zoomed from sort of a standstill right ahead of the pack.

But, Madam President, the whole idea of the day, the 24th of October, was going to be a general strike by women.

You were going to basically stop working all the parts of industry that you had menial jobs and were paid less for the jobs you were doing than the men were.

But then it turned into a day off because certain members of the female community didn't like the idea of a strike.

Tell me about that.

It's funny.

It broke down traditional political lines.

>> Yeah, it's very interesting that some of the perhaps more radical women wanted to call it more what you might say, conservative women were more comfortable with calling it a day off.

And women somehow found a way before social media, before the Internet, to organize a strike or a day off and find a bridge between those words so everybody could participate.

of women participated and did no work that day.

And I think it's quite an achievement at a time where we didn't have the tools that we have today to mobilize.

But what I was more impressed with already at the age of seven and still am today is exactly what you mentioned, that they did it with such solidarity, even if they had to call it different names.

They did it with such courage and such joy.

This was really a fun day.

They were singing and chanting and making signs, and it was a fun day.

And we have repeated it several times since, and we'll do so now on October 24th as well.

And from what I can tell, women from all walks of life are going to stand in solidarity, and many men as well, because increasingly, I think, in Iceland, we realise that closing the gender gap is for all of us.

It's brought us economic progress, it's brought us social progress, it's brought us to the top of many more lists than closing the gender gap, including highest GDP per capita, one of the highest, and high wellbeing and happiness scores, and it really has delivered great progress to our country to focus on closing the gender gap.

- And I'm actually gonna play the clip that we have from that day.

It's described as battle cry because they, you know, the women on stage sing a certain song that is the mission.

But also it is interesting, you say, they were sprinkled throughout some male allies, but let's just play this.

- This song was a battle cry.

(singing in foreign language) - Go, go, go girls.

Here's my hand.

(SINGING IN SWEDISH) So I'm asking people to think new thoughts about men and women.

Every movement has a battle song, because it unites the souls.

And I think we were just crying singing this lullaby.

[ Singing in German ] -So, what you remember, Madam President, at age 7, I mean, exists in black and white.

I was going to say in blazing technicolor, but in amazing black and white.

So I want to ask you, Pamela, when you were talking about that day and you did interview some men, some of the husbands, some of the -- for instance, the editors-in-chief of the main newspaper who came to an agreement with their female employees about how to actually help them while also trying to get them not to take that day off.

Tell me about that.

>> I was really pleased, Christiane, that Sturmer agreed to the interview because, in a way, he could have come off looking like the bad guy because all the women who were the typesetters -- all the typesetters were women, and what that meant was if they went on strike, they didn't set the type, that paper's not going to go out the next day.

And so he was very strategic, and he managed to negotiate, and he says it was a very tough negotiation, but he convinced the women to come back at midnight and set the paper so that it could go out the next day.

And in the end, they really did cover every single page of that paper is all about the strike.

I think in the end, the women who wanted to just not get the paper were kind of happy that they had done that.

But I was really impressed that he was willing to sort of talk about his moment in that negotiation.

I did say to him, "Stermer, the progressive newspapers were covering the women's movement.

It was a news story.

Why wasn't yours?"

And he rose up in his chair and said, "Pam, it was the Cold War."

So there was that.

>> Cold War, women's rights, I don't know.

Madam President, it is interesting because Pamela also talks about not just the daughters but the sons and how, you know, all the kids were, like, watching their mothers do this thing and seemed to be, you know, galvanized by it.

There's one incredible scene when one of the women basically tells her husband, "Here, you take the kids.

You look after them.

They're boys and girls.

And you cook them dinner.

And the husband managed to fry and burn boiled hot dogs.

Anyway, that's for another story.

But what do you think this meant for boys in Iceland?

Because now all we hear about is boys around the world feeling alienated by the progress women have made, even though women still are not paid parity by any means and are still not as recruited for certain jobs as men are?

Well, first, I just want to point out that hot dogs sold out in Iceland that day because apparently that was the only meal that many men could cook at the time.

But joking aside, I think it meant a lot for both girls and boys who experienced this.

And I know that men of my generation in particular remember this day vividly and have been great allies.

And we would not be this far in closing the gender gap in Iceland if it wasn't also in the interest of men to do so.

But in Iceland as elsewhere, we haven't fully closed the gender gap.

We still have to work on gender-based violence.

That's still a problem here, as elsewhere.

We still have to lift the floor of the gap that we have, particularly for caring jobs, teaching jobs, caring for the elderly, caring for children.

I think there's still a lot of work for us to do, even in Iceland that is supposedly best.

We're the only country that has over 90 percent score on the World Economic Forum's metric.

But I think if we want to do that, and I think that's maybe a response to the status of boys and men in today's world, we need to understand that closing the gender gap isn't a woman's issue.

It's really about economic and social progress.

It's really about building a more sustainable and a peaceful world.

So I think the next phase, and I hope the next phase for us in Iceland, will be about bringing boys and men to the table even more actively, because some of the things that changed the situation in Iceland have to do with affordable child care, which benefits both mothers and fathers, equal paternity leave, and steps like that.

Because you can't close the gender gap without closing also the work-in-the-home gap.

You can't close the leadership gap if it's going to be more beneficial for you to choose a male leader than a female leader, because the female leader will go away to paternity leave, but the man won't.

And it's still a fact in the world we live today that over 90 percent of all positions, be it head of states or CEOs or chairmen of boards, they're still men.

So even if women have made great progress, and in Iceland we certainly have, we have not closed the gender gap anywhere in the world, and we are very far from a gender balance in leadership the world over.

And I'm absolutely certain that the key to getting there-and this is something our first democratically female president, Madame Vigtis, often said, it will be because women decide to show up in leadership and work in allyship with men to really bring about a more sustainable and peaceful world, honestly.

I think that's where the golden key to that kind of a world lies, because women care about the state of the world, about the world that next generation of children and grandchildren inherit.

So I think it's going to make a big difference when more people look to close the gender gap with even greater fearlessness than we see today.

Well, it's an amazing film.

I really encourage everybody to see it.

Halla Tómasdóttir, president of Iceland and Pamela Hogan, director of The Day Iceland Stood Still.

Thank you both very much indeed for being with us.

- Thank you, Christiane.

- Thank you so much.

- Now, while we celebrate the incredible success of Iceland in its work towards gender equality, we remember also that in many places around the world, the pace of change is excruciatingly slow.

In Afghanistan, for instance, women's rights are going backwards under draconian Taliban rule.

Plus in other patriarchal religious societies, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, harmful practices like female genital mutilation continue.

It affects millions of girls every year, half of them before their fifth birthday.

My next guest, Gail Young, was my former colleague, CNN correspondent and Cairo bureau chief, where she exposed that brutal practice.

And I recently spoke with her about the groundbreaking work and her new memoir, "Update, "Reporting from an Ancient Land."

Gail Young, welcome to the program.

And we know each other for a long time, used to be a CNN producer and correspondent, and we crossed paths a lot, especially during the '90s.

This memoir, though, is not just about your time at CNN, but also it's kind of unusual, as you say.

It's about what an ancient Syrian queen, she features a lot.

- Yes, it is an unusual memoir.

It is a memoir, it is about my adventures, as you said, in Egypt in the 1990s when I was sort of unexpectedly became a CNN correspondent and bureau chief in Cairo.

But I was also always fascinated with Roman history.

And on my first assignment in Syria, I became aware of this ancient Syrian queen Zenobia.

And I realized over the years that our paths kept sort of overlapping because we would encounter sort of similar things at the same age at that time.

You know wars and rebellions and sieges and disasters and also things like I don't know recalcitrant camels and warm beer but 17 centuries apart.

So in the book I kind of use her experiences in life to be a benchmark for how things changed and how things were so much the same and also in my own life to examine things like ambition, misogyny, motherhood, all of the things I was experiencing at that time in that place.

Wow, I mean that is pretty amazing.

but it's also really interesting.

Yeah, it's the adventures of two women, 17 centuries apart.

17 centuries apart, it's amazing.

You know, I remember you especially with your camera woman, Mary Rogers.

You guys made a formidable team in the mid-90s in Egypt and it was about FGM, female genital mutilation.

Which, and let's just go back 17 centuries, which has been existing in Egypt for a long, long time.

Tell me first where you found, I mean, it goes back to the pharaohs.

- Oh, it does.

They have found mummies of females, you know, from that era, and they were circumcised.

And there's even some speculation, mostly mine, that Zenobia herself may have been circumcised, which would explain her disinterest in sex, which was very widely commented on during her lifetime.

So what led you to this story?

And then we're going to play it.

It's quite hard to watch and to listen to even 30 years later.

And we're going to play it.

What led you to do that story?

Remind me.

Well, I had a tutor and she would come to my house.

An Arabic tutor.

And we would speak Arabic and one weekend she was all excited because her little sister was going to be circumcised.

And I was shocked.

I had no idea that that happened in Egypt.

I'd never heard anybody mention it.

But when I started to do some investigating, it was a lot of girls, all of them practically, 97% by some reports at that time.

And yet no one ever seemed to talk about it or understand it as an issue.

So we found a number of families who were willing to invite us for the ceremony because in their mind, it was a wonderful thing to do.

They loved their children.

They weren't trying to hurt their daughters.

They thought they were helping them because they believed that female circumcision was needed because otherwise girls would get too excited, you know, if they did chores or wore underwear that was too tight or whatever and that they would be susceptible to men who would take advantage of them.

And so for them it was a happy occasion, it was a rite of passage.

So we went to a home and there I'm going to play the report so don't give it all away.

I won't give it all away.

But what happened was not what we were expecting.

Negla is 10 years old.

She's excited to be the center of attention, fearful of what might happen next.

This morning she'll be circumcised.

Hag Omar is known in Arabic as a hygienic barber.

He circumcises thousands of girls each year, as did his father before him.

He doesn't bother to wash his hands or the child.

A ripped sheet makes a crude bandage around her waist.

The family celebrates.

The operation will be quick, without anesthetic.

Shame on you, chides the barber.

It's finished.

Soon you can get up and go play.

Officially, the Egyptian government condemns female genital mutilation, but it turns a blind eye to the practice.

Studies show 80 to 90 percent of lower-income girls are circumcised, usually in unhygienic operations that can lead to infection and severe blood loss.

"Daddy, daddy!"

screams Negla.

"There is a sin upon all of you."

Negla's family fears that without circumcision she'll become sexually promiscuous.

It's not known why Egyptians traditionally circumcise their daughters.

The family believes it's part of Islam, but religious scholars disagree.

It's almost unheard of in other Islamic countries.

I want you to know, Daddy, that I didn't want to be circumcised and you did it to me.

Don't be a brat, your grandmother calls.

It's over, says her father.

Be brave, Negla.

Be brave.

Honestly, it was shocking then and it's shocking now.

Obviously, we've blurred out some of the pictures, which did not happen in its first airing.

It's not a religious practice, neither Muslim nor Christian, but as you said, it's cultural.

And what shocked you most about it?

Because you were invited in and you thought it was going to be some kind of celebration.

I don't know what you expected.

I don't know what we expected either, you know.

But what was shocking to me was her reaction, this little girl, because in Egypt at that time, children in public, you'd never saw them, you know, cursing their parents or having a temper tantrum.

The fact that she screamed at her parents, this is a shame upon you, a sin in Islam.

And that she didn't want it, and that they forced it on her.

I think that was the most powerful point of that story.

And not only for the world, but for Egyptians themselves.

Well, I wonder whether you remember the reaction.

Just because we aired it.

Then we had a program.

Ted Turner had wanted to focus on Egypt because a UN conference was happening and he was very keen on the UN.

We did a program every night and we played.

I anchored it and played that piece.

Exactly.

This was a huge conference, a United Nations conference filled with heads of state and academics and very important guests and Egypt had wanted to shine.

And once that story aired, it was, you know, it's hard to say something went viral before the internet, but it blew up and everyone was talking about it.

We were both of us interviewed by international press about that story.

And then the next day you did that thing you do with an interview with president Mubarak, where you held him accountable and he stumbled.

I'm going to actually play just a little clip of it because I hadn't planned on it.

I didn't know.

I was just going to do president Mubarak as the host of this conference and as an important Middle East leader, but I had to focus on this.

Here's a little bit of it.

You saw that we did a report on the term female circumcision in this country, which is not illegal.

Do you think you're going to... Why don't you outlaw it?

Really, I think that this appeared in our country.

Maybe still in some village in Upper Egypt, but this appeared nearly.

If I was to tell you that it appears a lot.

I was shocked when I saw it yesterday.

Well, do you think your government can outlaw that?

It needs to explain to the people.

Because if we cannot issue a law, they will not obey it because we will never catch them and never punish them.

So interesting.

Shocked, which I believe, but also mindful of the conservative nature of much of the population, we can't issue a law, we'll never catch them.

So what then happened?

I mean, to be fair, they were about to kick us out of the country.

- You know, we got a lot of criticism for that story, both of us.

CNN in general for showing the girl's face, for not asking her opinion, et cetera, et cetera.

But others said this is a pivotal moment because this story will jolt them into action.

And you know, today, so many reports from the World Bank, journalists, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, award-winning book, you know, they have cited that story as the catalyst for change.

And not long after that interview, Mubarak, they did order that it would not be performed in public health facilities and that they would start an education campaign.

And here we are 30 years later, and the number of girls circumcised in Egypt has dropped dramatically.

Studies showed it was at 97% before or when we did the stories, and that now some surveys have suggested that only 15% of urban girls are now circumcised.

Egypt itself puts that number for all girls more around 30th percentile.

But the point is, it is going down.

It has been made illegal.

- So this is important because obviously, President Mubarak fell during the Arab Spring.

He's no longer alive.

His successor, President Sisi, has actually outlawed it now.

What Mubarak didn't do, Sisi has done.

- He has outlawed it.

He's created, they've created a tip line where you can call in if you suspect somebody is going to do it to their daughter.

And he, Sisi himself has said that it is a priority for him.

And studies, or surveys now say that only about 13% of young women who will be mothers, they call them future mothers, say that they will do it or would like to do it.

And that may even be less because now that it's outlawed, you know, they are, you know, very -- >> Cautious.

>> Yeah, cautious about breaking laws.

It's dropped dramatically since that catalyst moment of that story.

And I think it's on its way to being eradicated.

>> I mean, it's really important.

And it is actually an example of sometimes journalism, even inadvertently, you did not know what would happen after that.

You probably might have thought that it would create a bit of a firestorm.

But it's led to something good.

So just to end up, how do you assess in your memoir and in your thoughts the results of your journalism, the results of your journey through the Middle East, through Egypt specifically?

Well, I saw the '90s as sort of a magical time in CNN, because it was a beast that needed 24-hour coverage before going live was that easy, right?

So I did a lot of human interest stories when I was at CNN, and, um, you know, it's... I believe those stories to this day are still very important, because they are snapshots of life that sometimes get overlooked because there's so much breaking news.

And, you know, so I do feel... There's a couple of other stories I had done over the years that did lead to some changes or some recognition for people.

Like what kind of things?

Oh, there was a magician in India who was trying to recreate the great rope trick because he thought he would get a prize that had been offered in the 1900s, early 1900s.

But he was recognized by the government afterwards.

Or a child that we did a story on when Hillary Clinton was coming to visit that ended up being adopted by an American family.

So, you know, I feel really good about my work.

I was never quite, you know, we did wars and things like and coverage and news coverage and I was so privileged to be able to work with you.

And, you know, and you taught me a lot and can I please tell this story?

Tell?

I don't know the story.

Remember we were in Algeria and it was so dangerous.

Oh God, it was so scary.

And the moment we walked out of the... During the Islamic feast, you know, takeover there.

Yeah, we walked out of the airport and people were spitting at us and calling us names.

And the crew I brought from Egypt wouldn't go out of the hotel.

So I found another crew.

We went out.

We were on the streets.

And as we were shooting some B-roll for your story and looking at people, these guys came up behind us and one of them says, "I want to kill you" in English.

And I'm like, "Okay, nope.

I'm good.

We're going to get in the car and go back to the hotel."

And you spun the cameraman around, grabbed the microphone, and put it up to this man, and you said, "Why?

Why do you want to kill me?"

Really?

Yeah.

And the thing was, you weren't aggressive.

You weren't trying to shame him.

You weren't challenging him.

It was like you really wanted to know, why did he want to kill us?

Why?

And, you know, he was so taken aback, but then he started talking and a small group came around and the whole mood changed.

And, you know, I love that idea that as journalists, we can use our, you know, natural curiosity and our ability to just try to understand and ask that why?

- You know, that's so important.

Thank you for reminding me, just because that is the fundamentals of what we should be doing.

Going and asking why and how, and not predetermining who we like, who we don't like, just asking everybody.

In a respectful way and in a genuine desire to know what they're thinking.

Gail Young, thank you for reminding me and thank you for being such a good colleague.

We had a heck of an adventure together, particularly in Egypt.

I'm glad to be able to tell that story again.

Thank you.

Congrats on your memoir.

And just to note, FGM was in fact officially banned in Egypt under President Mubarak.

During his time in office though, President Sisi has signed a law to strengthen the penalty for those committing it.

Next to the online world, which can be infuriating, isolating and downright dangerous with the rise of AI generated ads, pop-ups and reams of information, author Cory Doctorow says, "The internet is getting worse fast."

And he's joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his latest book, "Examining What's Gone Wrong and How We Can Fix It."

- Christiane, thanks.

Cory Doctorow, you've got a new book out called "Ens***tification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."

This is now a word that has been in kind of common slang for a couple of years.

Some dictionaries are picking up on it too.

First for our audience, what does it mean?

- Yeah, well, thank you.

For most of my adult life now, I've worked for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation that does digital rights work.

I've spent most of my life coming up with different metaphors and similes and framing devices for this.

And (indistinct) is the latest one and it's done really well.

It's a way of talking about how platforms go bad, but also about why platforms go bad.

So it describes this pattern of platform decay.

First platforms are good to their end users.

They find a way to lock those end users in.

And once it's hard for them to leave, they make things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers who also get lured into the platform.

Once they're locked in, the platform withdraws all of the value from those sellers as well.

And eventually it's just a pile of sh*t. Eventually the platform is fully decayed, end stage notification.

But the more interesting thing is the questions it raises and the answers it proposes for why it's happening now.

So, you know, walk us through examples that people would be familiar with.

I mean, you spend quite a bit of time on Facebook, and you know, there's about 3 billion people on the planet that know what that it's like.

So kind of walk us through how this process has played itself out on something we're familiar with.

Yeah, you know, Facebook started with a very attractive proposition.

They went to people who were using MySpace, which was the big social media platform of the day.

And they said, we will never ever spy on you.

And so people piled into the platform, they identified the people who matter to them, they got a feed consisting solely of the things they asked to see.

They also locked themselves in, they locked themselves in through something economists call the collective action problem, which you may know as the problem of getting the six people in your group chat to agree on what board game you're going to play this week and what movie you're going to see only when it's a couple 100 people on Facebook.

And you know, some of you are there because that's where the people with your rare disease they're hanging out or where you meet with the people who live in the country you left behind or how you find your customers or your audience or just plan the Little League carpool.

It can be really hard to go.

And so once Facebook knows that you can't leave anymore, they start phase two of ens***tification, making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

So they go to you know, the advertisers and they say, Hey, do you remember when we told these suckers that we weren't going to spy on them?

Obviously, that's a lie.

We spy on them with every hour that God sends.

We have these incredibly detailed non consensual dossiers on them.

And if you give us remarkably small sums of money, we will target ads to them with incredible fidelity.

They go to the publishers and they say, You remember when we told these people we were only going to show them things they asked to see?

Obviously, that's a lie to we will cram stuff into people's eyeballs who never asked to see it.

All you need to do is put excerpts from your own website on Facebook with a link back to your own website so people can click on it and we'll just show it to people who never asked to see it.

So they get locked into they become dependent on us.

We know a lot about monopoly and kind of our daily lives.

We think a lot about what happens when there's just a few sellers, but it's actually just as bad when there's just a few buyers.

So you get this monopsony lock in right where Facebook has control over its sellers and it makes things worse for them.

We see ad prices going through the roof.

We see ad targeting fidelity going through the floor.

We see ad fraud exploding.

Publishers had to put more and more of their content on Facebook, you had to put so much that there was no reason to visit your website.

And of course, no one was gonna because if you put a link to your own website on Facebook, they wouldn't show it to anyone, because maybe that link was a malicious link.

And so we end up with this kind of deadlock where we are holding each other hostage, the businesses are held hostage by us, the amount of content in our feed that we want to see has dwindled to a kind of undetectable homeopathic residue, and the void has been filled with things that people are being ripped off to show us.

And in that equilibrium, where all the value has been taken by Mark Zuckerberg and his shareholders and executives, we are all one hair's breadth away from leaving.

So I wonder, one of the things that people are going to hear you describe this and say, why doesn't the market just fix this?

Isn't there a better mousetrap somewhere else?

Won't just people walk with their feet?

Yeah, so we used to have mechanisms that punished companies for being bad to us.

And one of them was competition.

And so there was a time when people were exodusing from Facebook at speed and running to a new startup called Instagram.

You may recall that Facebook then bought Instagram for a billion dollars at a time when it only had 12 employees.

And what's really interesting about that is that as little as we were enforcing antitrust law in those days, there was one thing that we still said was illegal.

And that was to buy a company in order to reduce competition.

And Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an email to his CFO where he defended buying Instagram, even though it only had 12 employees for a billion dollars.

And he said people prefer Instagram to Facebook, they leave Facebook, they they don't come back.

If we buy Instagram, we can recapture those users.

That's as much of a confession of guilt as you could ask for.

And yet the Obama DOJ waved that merger through just like all of the GW Bush and Clinton DOJs.

Everyone since Reagan has waved through pretty much every merger, except for extraordinary years under Biden, we haven't had a new privacy law since 1988.

The last privacy law America got at a Congress for consumers is the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988.

It's a law that makes it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals.

That's the only technological threat you can expect to be protected against since the 1980s, since Die Hard was in theaters.

So Facebook can spy on you in all these ghastly ways and do bad things to you.

All of the mechanisms that used to punish companies for being bad to you, new technology and interoperability, strong workforce who cared about users, competition, regulation, all of those things were systematically dismantled.

And when you take away the forces that punish people for harming you to help themselves, well, you should expect that the people who are in a position to harm you to help themselves are going to go ahead and do it.

You write about how the erosion of our antitrust frameworks and laws has created this kind of techno feudalism.

Describe what that is and who benefits.

This is a term I got from my friend and colleague Yiannis Varoufakis, who used to be the finance minister of Greece.

And Yiannis wrote this book, Techno Feudalism, where he tries to draw an important distinction between profits and rents.

So profits are money that you get for making something that people like.

Rents is money that you get for owning something that people need to make things.

And so rents, you know, it's passive income.

It's owning a factor of production.

If you're Amazon and you own the platform, then everyone who wants to sell to the American public has to pay you 45 to 51 cents out of every dollar they bring in in rents.

About 90% of affluent households in America have prime.

They've paid for shipping a year in advance.

There's no reason to shop anywhere else.

And indeed, if they find what they're looking for on Amazon, they don't shop anywhere else.

And so if you want to sell anything to Americans, you have to be on Amazon, you have to give Amazon 51 cents out of every dollar you bring in.

Apple and Google bring in 30 cents out of every dollar that we spend in an app.

So if you're supporting a performer on Patreon, or if you are donating to a news agency, or if you're buying music or ebooks or audiobooks or movies, 30 cents out of every dollar is being captured by these tech platforms.

51 cents out of every dollar is being captured by Google and Meta.

And so that's money that publishers and advertisers don't get to keep.

So these rents are the characteristic of feudalism, right?

The difference between feudalism and capitalism, the thing that changed to turn feudalism into capitalism, was the transformation of an economy based on rents to an economy based on profits.

Now, both of these have their problems, neither of them are particularly great for workers.

But capitalism was much more productive than feudalism.

I want to give you an opportunity to examine like the business model that sort of Uber has ushered in, because there's so many other companies that are Uberifying whatever their vertical or whatever their market niche is.

I mean, because we talked about Facebook, we talked about Google, and it seems like slightly a different type of business, but it kind of follows the rules that you lay out in this book of how these platforms decay.

Yeah, so you know, Google lost $31 billion over 13 years, mostly Saudi royal money.

They got it from a venture capital fund called SoftBank that's run by Masayoshi's son.

That's the same people who gave us WeWork and they gave us, well now they're backing OpenAI.

So the Saudis subsidize 40 cents, 41 cents out of every dollar of all of our taxi rides for more than a decade.

All the other cab companies go under.

We have a lost decade in transit.

And as a result, when Uber starts to raise prices, and they more than doubled them now, and when they start to cut wages, and they've more than half them now, we're often without any other alternatives, they're able to make a lot of money from this, they're redeeming those discounts they offered in the early days.

Uber has really digital, high tech ways of changing the wages and prices that they pay and offer.

So this is something called algorithmic wage discrimination, comes from a legal scholar called Vina Dubal.

What Uber does is periodically offers drivers a slightly low ball offer, a little less per mile, a little less per minute.

When the driver takes that, if they take the bait, then the offer goes down again, a little while later, and it goes down again a little while after that.

The idea here is to sort of in the in the manner of boiling frog, to get that driver to abandon all the things that used to let them be picky about which Uber rides they would take.

And as a result, you have the steady erosion of these wages.

Now that's something that's spread to other fields, where you have contractors, Google, or rather Uber, misclassifies its employees as contractors and can get away with paying them different wages for the same for the same work.

That's also true in fields like nursing, where hospitals preferentially hire nurses as contractors, not as staff.

It's how they do union avoidance.

And it used to be that if you were hiring a contract nurse for the day, you do it with a staffing agency, and that would be someone local.

These days, there's four giant apps, each of which bills itself as Uber for nursing.

And because we haven't had a new privacy law since 1988, these apps before they offer nurses a shift can go to a data broker and find out how much credit card debt the nurse has.

And the more credit card debt that nurse is carrying, the lower the wage they are offered, they are imputing financial desperation, and, and charging them a premium as a result.

So this uberization is spreading to other labor markets and it is connected to a lack of competition, a lack of regulation, the unique characteristics of digital and the fact that IP law stops nurses from twiddling back from changing the way this stuff works.

If you're a nurse or an Uber driver, or someone else is being paid with an app, you could in the absence of the IP laws that stop you from buying an app that intervenes, you could get an app that says things like, okay, all the nurses in this town are going to refuse shifts below a certain wage, or all the drivers in this town are going to refuse rides below a certain wage.

And they can calculate in an instant, how much you're being paid by the mile and by the minute, which is something that can be really hard to do.

If you're a person, you've got 10 seconds to decide whether you're going to take a ride.

There are so many ways that people could push back with technology.

They've all been taken off the table.

And so what we have is infinite flexibility and technology to exploit and harm you and zero flexibility and technology to defend yourself from exploitation and harm.

So let's pivot a bit to kind of what is your vision of a future look like of a good internet?

What are the kinds of interventions that we would need to do to build that?

I mean, because I think a lot of times the onus gets thrust back upon us.

Oh, well, you know, if you just vote with your dollars, if you just change your behavior, whatever.

Well, as you describe, look, a lot of times we don't really have that much of a choice.

But on the policy front, are there things that we can do to try to regain some of this control?

I believe in systemic changes.

And you asked about which policies would make a difference.

Well, you know, privacy law, which sure go a long way.

There are lots of different people who are angry about the privacy situation in America.

And if we could get them all to start pulling in the same direction, boy, could we ever make a difference, right?

And the answer to this is a federal privacy law with a private right of action.

And we are long overdue for it.

That would be a very big one.

And I think it's a relatively easy lift.

The other stuff's a little harder.

One thing that I go into some detail on in the book is how to think about a policy that is administrable, right?

So we can imagine lots of things we don't want companies to do, but figuring out whether they're following those rules is really hard.

If we say, okay, we have to stop people from harassing people and allowing hate speech.

Well, you have to agree on what hate speech is, you have to investigate something that someone has called hate speech and see whether it is hate speech, you have to decide whether the company did what it could to stop it.

This is like a multi year process for something that happens 100 times a minute on a platform like Facebook.

And so it's just not a great answer.

Meanwhile, if you ask yourself, why do people on Facebook who are bombarded with hate speech and harassment stay on Facebook?

Well, the answer is that they don't want to leave their friends, right?

And so those people stay.

So why don't we make it easier for them to leave?

You know, Mark Zuckerberg gave you a scraper that would let you leave MySpace but still see the messages for you on MySpace.

We could reverse engineer apps to do that.

We could use scrapers to do it.

And we could also mandate, you know, through policy that firms do it.

So we could make it so that if you left Twitter or Facebook and went to Blue Sky or Mastodon, that you could see the things people were posting for you on the platform you used to belong to, and they could see the things that you posted in reply.

And that would mean that if the company didn't treat you well, you could leave.

That is how you vote with your feet and vote with your wallet.

But in order to do it, we need policy that makes it possible.

As to how you get involved in policy.

Well, I mentioned a few times that I work for this digital rights nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And these are grassroots groups that work on everything from abortion privacy and limiting the use of digital tools in ICE raids, to limiting facial recognition, to demanding that public procurements be of tools and software that can be independently repaired and audited.

And there's a lot of room to do work even under this federal administration at the state and local level.

Yeah.

You know, I did want to ask, look, a company like Uber or Google, they'll hear what you have to say maybe and they say, look, this is the free market.

We have built a product that's successful enough that people with their own power have chosen the costs and the benefits and they're coming to us and they're doing business with us because we provide them a service that's worth it.

What's wrong with that?

Well, I think if that were the case, it would be great, but that's not the case.

I mean, if you want to choose someone else's app store for the iPhone, you have to commit a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

If these guys want to be creatures of the free market, then they should stop using state intervention to prevent new market entry and to prevent end users from getting a better deal from installing privacy blockers in their apps and so on.

You know, the rules against reverse engineering have been enormously beneficial to these companies that make proprietary platforms like our cell phones.

You know, if you're a web user, chances are you've installed an ad blocker.

51% of web users has installed an ad blocker.

It's the biggest consumer boycott in human history.

No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app because to reverse engineer the proprietary platform that the app comes along is a felony under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, and it carries a sentence of a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.

And so if they want to be creatures of the free market, well then, let them give up the power to invoke the state to prevent people from deciding how their own property works.

I'm not the world's biggest advocate for markets as the best way to organize everything, but the one thing that people who believe in markets should believe in is that private property is sacrosanct.

And when you buy your phone, the fact that it would make Tim Cook sad if you use someone else's store is his problem, not your problem.

The book is called "An Indication Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."

Author Cory Doctorow, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Hari.

It was a real pleasure to be on.

And finally, a heavy metal drummer, a motorcycle enthusiast, and now the first female Prime Minister of Japan.

Staunch Conservative Sanae Takeuchi was elected this week, following an unconventional path to power.

The Iron Maiden fan is being called Japan's Iron Lady, a reference to Britain's first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

It is a landmark moment indeed.

And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's coming up on the show every night, sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

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