28/11/2017 Newsnight

16 years after this 17-year-old

private died from gunshot

wounds at Deepcut barracks,

there's to be a fresh inquest

into what really happened.

It sometimes seems as though

the authorities want everyone

to move along and think

about something else -

his parents tell us

about why they never gave up

looking for answers.

I saw my son on a slab

and he's 17 years old.

I promised him then that

I would find out the truth.

I don't think we have

found the truth yet.

And I still owe him that promise.

We'll ask a leading human rights

lawyer whether parents should have

to fight so hard to get

the investigations they need?

Also tonight, you might

have known your phone

was addictive, but did you know

it is properly addictive...

and deliberately so.

It's part of my body now.

It is always with me.

I don't know.

I don't want to say

it is an addiction,

but I just need my phone!

It is not sensational

to say our brains are being hacked,

because that is pretty much

what is happening.

And Stella McCartney tells us why

the fashion industry needs

to be more sustainable.

This can be fashionable, this can be

sexy, this can be young.

Hello.

We start tonight with

the speculation this evening

of a settlement in the fraught talks

over Britain's Brexit divorce bill.

We might have an answer

to the fifty billion euro question -

how much do we pay to leave.

And the answer seems to be a number

near to fifty billion euros.

The papers are full

of somewhat varying figures

as to what Britain is agreeing too -

but that's the order of magnitude.

Certainly, the general

pattern of these talks,

that we say no and then we say yes,

while they say very little appears

to have repeated itself again.

But our political editor Nick Watt

has been around Westminster finding

out how this is all going down,

and he's with me now.

Can we put a figure on it? We can

confirm that the UK has agreed to

the EU framework for settling that

financial divorce bill with EU when

we leave. Stage one came in the

Prime Minister's speech in Florence

when she said that the UK would

agree to cover it share of the EU

budget up to the end of 2020. The

final stage has come just now, which

is that the UK has agreed that it

will meet its liabilities racked up

as a member of the European Union.

Where you go from there is a matter

of dispute. The sources I have been

talking to say that they are not

putting a number on the table. The

Financial Times and the Daily

Telegraph which broke this story,

the Daily Telegraph is talking about

a figure of up to 55 billion euros

and the Financial Times is talking

about 100 million euros but think it

could be mass such down to half of

that. The UK Government do not want

the figure at the table at the next

summit. They never want a figure on

the table. What they want to be able

to do is offset that against our net

payment and pay these liabilities as

they are due in perhaps as long as

decades to come. They have an ally

in me shall buy. His view is that

methodology is more important than a

number.

The papers are going on it.

Financial Times here. The Times.

There is the Daily Telegraph. The

Guardian. What does this tell us

about Theresa May and her whole

approach to these negotiations?

Theresa May once a dealer at the end

of this process. The idea is to have

it by October next year and then you

can finalise it in Parliament. She

feels very strongly that you have

got to move on to the second stage,

the final trade talks and the

transition talks. You have to do

that at the summit next month and to

do that you have got to come to some

sort of agreement in the next week.

There are some senior Remain Tories

who say that the Prime Minister is

talking a tough game. And then she

is quietly sort of doing this deal

in Brussels. I think what ministers

would say is we are making progress,

we made this big movement, but on

the money there will still be a line

by line and analysis and crucially,

they are not there yet on two big

issues. One is the role of the

European Court of Justice in the

future relationship with EU citizens

of this country and also the Irish

border.

Theresa May has gone to the

Middle East. She will not be

answering questions about it

tomorrow.

It will be Damian Green

standing in for the Prime Minister

at Prime Minister's Questions. There

is a report going on into whether he

behaved appropriately with a young

woman journalist who he had a drink

with an questions about alleged

pornography on his computer. The

interesting thing is, he is a

passionate Remainer who is

delivering Brexit bar when he was

asked about it and how he would vote

in another referendum, he said he

would vote to Remain.

It is only a small Surrey

village near Camberley,

but the name Deepcut has sadly

become synonymous with a series

of deaths at the Barracks there.

Four young trainees died by gunshot

wounds over a number of years

in the late '90s and early 2000s.

The strange but similar

circumstances made the families

deeply sceptical of initial

suggestions of death by suicide.

After perseverance by those

families, subsequent reviews exposed

a culture of bullying and harassment

at the barracks, and found fault

in the army's treatment of trainees.

Questions were raised about

the investigations into the deaths.

And today - one family successfully

won a high court action to obtain

a fresh inquest into the death

of their son.

Private Geoff Gray was only 17

when he died, 16 years ago.

Should it really have taken so long

for the relatives to get

His parents spoke to us today.

I saw my son on a slab

and he was 17 years old.

I promised him then I'd

find out the truth.

I don't think we've

found the truth yet.

And I still owe him that promise.

Private Geoff Gray died

in 2001 at the Deepcut

army barracks in Surrey.

He was found shot twice

in the head with a rifle.

The Army ruled that his

death was a suicide.

The week before he died he had

phoned us and he told us that

somebody had taken their life

in the barracks.

I think he had taken some

tablets and he had died.

And he said, that's

a coward's way out.

And I thought, you know,

he's talking about suicide

being the coward's way out.

So I don't think he did.

It's not in his nature.

In 2002 an inquest returned an open

verdict and today the High Court

ordered that it was necessary

or desirable in the interests

of justice for a fresh

inquest to be held.

Private Gray's family believe

the truth of his death

at the Deepcut Barracks has not

yet been uncovered.

Looking at the fact

that he was shot twice in the head.

You always have to look at the fact

that he may have been murdered.

Once you've put one bullet in,

your body will drop.

You know, to be really graphic

about this, the back

of your head disappears.

So your body will drop.

The rifle will rise.

You can't do it twice.

Private Gray's death at Deepcut

sadly was not unique.

Private Sean Benton died

of gunshot wounds in 1995.

A fresh inquest into his case

will be heard next year.

Private Cheryl James

was found to have shot

herself in the same year.

There was a fresh inquest

into her case last June.

And Private James Collinson

was found dead with a single

gunshot wound in 2002.

The Army came to my door and said

your son has killed himself.

Families have been fighting

for years to learn the truth

about the Deepcut deaths.

A heavy burden to add

to their bereavement.

We don't have a choice,

there is no choice in that.

You have to carry on.

I have another son at home.

I have to carry on for his sake.

Life goes on living.

It's sort of, we do this

and then we have to carry

on with family life as well.

You know.

And keep on going.

And just try to get the truth

of what actually happened to Geoff.

It is also difficult to get

the expertise required to question

the police and Ministry of Defence.

Bereaved families in inquests should

have legal aid whenever

the state are represented.

So for instance if you go

into an inquest now and the police

are there, the Ministry of Defence

are there, the Fire Services

are there, the NHS are there

for instance, they will be quite

properly represented

by taxpayers money.

Now if that is the case,

why should believed families sit

in court and simply faced that bank

of lawyers against them

with not a single lawyer

being funded for them.

It is outrageous.

The families though will press

on in the hope that one day,

hopefully soon, they get a more

convincing set of answers.

Geoff signed up

to serve his country.

He died when he was 17 years old.

His country should serve him now

and we should find the truth.

Let us look at some of the general

issues raised by the difficulties

parents have in getting inquests.

Joining me now from Salford

is Pete Weatherby QC -

a specialist in public inquiries

and inquests - including

Hillsborough, Grenfell

and a whole raft of others.

Good evening. We have had a string

of cases going back it decades,

blood contamination, Hillsborough,

Orgreave, cases were families of

those involved, in some ghastly

tragedy, seal it justice has not

been done or questions have been

left unanswered.

Do you see

commonalities? Absolutely. These

families have got to go through the

whole process yet again to try and

get at the truth, not just one

family, it is not a coincidence,

three of them as you just reported.

You mentioned blood contamination, I

could add to that the Birmingham pub

bombings, the new inquests 45 years

on. In my view there are two common

problems, the first is a duty, the

candour that needs to be a duty, a

legal duty of candour. What is a

common part of all of these cases

and apparently the Deepcut ones as

well is that there is new evidence

coming forward. Why is that coming

forward so long afterwards? What

went wrong with the original

investigations? The original

enquiries? It appears given all of

these historic cases, take the blood

contamination case, go back to the

early 1980s, when the evidence seems

to show that the Department of

Health knew that the blood was

contaminated yet was still supplying

people unknowingly who then went on

to die from either hepatitis or HIV.

In these cases there is a culture of

denial as there would be in any

authority when they are

investigated.

There shouldn't be.

There is a culture of denial,

institutional defensiveness where

they reach for the denial first. If

you look at Grenfell, bringing us

right up to date, immediately after

the fire and you had the council

saying that they have done nothing

wrong, the emergency response, some

of the contractor is issuing

condolences, but at the end of them

they were saying, by the way, we did

nothing wrong either and people are

making the denials before they have

even looked at their own behaviour.

The other feature of course is that

we heard it in the peace there,

everybody is very well legally

represented apart from the families

of the victims.

Exactly. In any of

these disasters or tragedies, that

is exactly right. The Army, the

police, the local authorities, the

NHS, whatever it is, all entirely

properly fully represented, but the

victims are not. If you look at the

Birmingham pub bombings, the

families after 45 years, were

spending most of their time trying

to get funding so that they could go

to the inquests of their loved ones.

It

is there a point that sometimes it

is right to say it is time to close

this issue, we are not going to have

an enquiry? May be families are

clinging onto unrealistic hopes of

what might emerge or maybe the

authorities genuinely know that

there is nothing to be said. Is

there ever a defence of Saint, it is

time up?

I would look at it from the

other end of the telescope, there

should be an enquiry very quickly

and it should be done properly and

you can do that if there is a legal

duty of candour, which makes a

public authority or the public

facing private entity in these days

of privatisation, if there is a

legal duty on them to be proactive

in coming out with the truth and

owning up to their own shortcomings.

Only up to the grand shortcomings.

This is the proposed law, the

Hillsborough law. And has quite a

bit of cross-party support.

It has

had its first reading, it has strong

support and will go back soon I hope

to the House of Commons and it

requires candour. So hopefully we

will not have these repeat inquests

15 years on. But people proactively

will have to tell the truth and it

will put the -- put victims on a

level playing field in terms of

representation. Linking public

funding to victims in disasters and

unnatural death situations.

Thank

you very much.

Something is going badly wrong

with the way we use clothes,

according to major study

being launched this evening.

In the last 15 years,

across the world, the average number

of times a garment is worn before it

ceases to be used has gone down

by more than a third.

In China, clothes are

worn 70% fewer times

than they were in 2002.

At one level, this just tells us

that as we get richer,

we like to have more new things.

And fashionable ones at that.

But the report suggests this

could potentially take us

to environmentally catastrophic

outcomes.

Here's the dilemma.

Fashion is an industry that's grown

in appeal over the decades.

But by its nature, it

promotes obsolescence.

Fashion today implies out

of fashion tomorrow.

Who wants to wear that?

The result is what today's

report calls the "take,

make, dispose" model.

The clothing industry takes

non-renewable resources,

makes clothes and textiles

with them, that

are then disposed of.

That disposal reflects

massive under recycling.

And disposal itself costs tens

of millions in Britain alone.

The fact is, we've become

rather good at this model.

Going into clothing production

is a way of taking a poor country

towards middle-income status.

And clothes for consumers are

extraordinarily cheap as a result.

This is the graphic

in the report that says it all.

As the world becomes richer,

the number of garments

being produced has doubled.

But the number of times each garment

is worn has plummeted.

The solutions the report

suggests include radically

improving recycling,

making durability more

attractive, and even promoting

more clothing rentals.

What the report does not suggest

is simply taxing clothes to make

them more expensive.

That would hurt the poor.

And being able to choose clothes

and to use them as a form

of self-expression almost defines

what it is to be a modern consumer

in an affluent society.

Now the report was produced

by the Ellen McArthur Foundation, -

she was the round the world

yachtswoman who now promotes

the idea that the economy

should be circular, -

with goods recycled round and round,

not flowing straight into landfill.

Contributors to the report included

McKinsey the consultants,

and many clothing businesses,

including Stella McCartney's.

Well, just before the official

launch earlier this evening,

I went to the Fashion Gallery

at the Victoria and Albert museum,

to talk to Ellen McArthur

and Stella McCartney herself.

First I asked Ellen if we should

blame the waste of textile materials

on the very nature of fashion.

I think the disposable nature of

fashion is one of the challenges of

the other challenge is to try to

make that fashion that changes by

definition fits within a system and

that is what the report is about,

building a broader system within

which the design, the materials

used, when they come out of the far

end as fast fashion that material

can be something that is technical

or if by -- is biodegradable.

If we

did this right and we will more

eco-friendly in the way we dress,

you might end up out of the job

because you design one piece of

clothing and instead of us changing

it we would wear it for 20 years and

not need as many new clothes.

I do

not worry about that. My business

model is based on sustainability and

I have a successful business. This

report looks at working together at

all levels of the industry and

creating new business from it and

looking at essentially the waist and

finding a way of reusing rate and

making it exciting, not looking at

it as a problem all the time but an

opportunity.

It is a $500 billion US

dollar opportunity if we can get

this right and will cover that

material. $100 billion is not

recycled every year and that is

value to the industry.

Can you

persuade people that durability is

attractive.

If we are burning one

truckload of clothing every second

using it as landfill, there is

nothing attractive about that. We

all live on the planet together and

we have to survive it. It is not a

quick fix, but I think today we are

bringing awareness to it and a

different approach.

It is rarely

seen here but some companies have 5

million subscribers to have access

to whatever clothing they want. When

they get a new piece of clothing,

the old one goes back. It is

effectively rental but the clothing

goes back into the system. Now if it

has durability that will go out to

someone else. When you build a

system when clothing goes back they

know what it is made from.

It is

also a new way to look at the

fashion industry, all industries

must review their impact on the

planet now. It applies to every

industry.

It should apply to

everything.

It applies to everything

and there are exciting alternatives.

It has a second life. My clothes are

on their and you can swap and barter

clothing.

I'm a bit sceptical about

the rental model with clothes, I

like my own clothes.

It is a modern

approach because to have a future we

need to have this conversation for

our children. We will have to have

these conversations.

What would be

your advice to an average consumer

who likes to spend money on clothes

and dress well and who sees dressing

as a form of self-expression, as

part of their identity and the way

they behave. What could they change

right now.

Right now the consumer in

this country cannot be circular with

fashion decisions, that is hard to

do because the industry is not

circular. With this report we are

trying to get the industry to look

at this vision and have a high level

of ambition. And collaborate as

never before.

And incentivise

people. It does not have to be

punishment, it can be sexy and

young. I get excited about the

opportunities. As a fashion designer

and businesswoman that is why I'm

here today, I'm interested in the

new.

What you did not put in the

report is the possibility of taxes

because people will tell you what

they've got because they pay more.

It is a valid point but just taxing

clothing will not solve the problem.

Clothing now is designed in a linear

way, we burn or landfill a

significant amount.

People need to

look at the opportunities

financially and there is massive

opportunity to make money on every

level. There's so much waste, get

recycling incentives in place but

people would get money for recycling

their clothes properly.

We're about

to enter I suspect a frenzied

speculation about what Meghan Markle

is going to wear at her wedding when

she marries Prince Harry. Is it

healthy that we are so obsessed with

the dress.

As animals on this planet

we are obsessed with strange things.

It is OK, some people are obsessed,

some people do not even know who

you're talking about. It is all

relative. I think the main thing is

just to bring a new awareness into

the conversation.

It would make a

big -- a big statement, the dress.

I'm happy to provide some

eco-options!

And now Viewsnight.

And this week we are hearing two

very different opinions

of the Trump presidency.

On Thursday, we'll be hearing

from a critic of the President,

but tonight it's a chance

for Drew Liquerman,

from Republicans Overseas UK,

to make the case for the defence.

There is a difference

between liking something,

and being addicted to it -

I like water and drink it

several times a day,

but I'm not a water junkie.

However in some cases

there is a fine line

between merely wanting something,

and yearning for it to fill

an acquired chemical need.

And here's the thing: our attachment

to smartphone technology appears

to be more in the latter category -

it is actually addictive.

You may recognise the problem,

but in fact it is not

accidentally addictive,

it is designed to be so.

Because the online world is funded

mainly through advertising,

those working in it,

need to both grab and keep our

attention to survive and thrive.

Now understanding how

technology addiction works,

may make you more resilient

in resisting it.

Our technology editor David Grossman

has been finding out more -

and meeting one former Google

executive who believes what is known

as "the attention economy" poses

a threat to democracy itself.

For many of us, reaching

for our phones has become automatic.

As unthinking as blinking.

Sometimes I'll just unlock my phone

and I'll lock it again

and I won't even know

what I've looked at.

All of a sudden I might just go

on my phone and I will think,

I don't even need to go

on my phone right now.

If I'm crossing the road I can get

distracted by my phone

and realise oh wait,

there's a car there!

It's as if we're driven by a power

beyond our conscious actions.

It's not sensational

to say our brains are being hacked.

Because that's pretty

much what is happening.

Balliol College Oxford was built

to withstand the distractions

of the pre-smartphone age.

The heavy wooden doors and

castellated quad are fortifications

against attention hijack.

James Williams is a former Google

executive who became concerned that

Silicon Valley's central mission

is to interrupt our

every waking thought.

He resigned and now

studies at Balliol.

The way we are monetising most

of the information in the world

is by distracting people,

keeping them from doing

what they want to do,

rather than helping them do

what they want to do.

Now, I don't know anybody,

I've never met anybody at least,

who wants to spend all day

on Facebook or wants to keep

clicking articles all day.

If there are people like that,

I'd love to meet them, because I'd

love to understand their mind

and their priorities.

But you know when you think

about the goals that people

have for themselves,

they tend to be things like,

you know the things that

when we are on our deathbed

we will regret not having done.

Like, you know, I want to take

that trip with my family

or I want to learn how to play piano

or, you know, spend

more time with friends.

These are the real human goals that

people have and these are the goals

in my mind that technology ought

to be helping us pursue.

If they don't do that then I don't

know what technology is for.

Most technology companies

have another goal.

Welcome to the attention economy.

Because the internet is funded

largely by advertising,

companies need us glued

to their apps, or they

don't make money.

Today we're going to

set a new mission...

Although Facebook founder

Mark Zuckerberg maintains that his

company's mission is, quote...

To bring the world closer together.

..A couple of weeks ago

Facebook's first president

expressed a very different,

even sinister, objective.

How do we consume as much

of your time and conscious

attention as possible?

And that means that we need to sort

of give you a little dopamine hit

every once in awhile.

Because someone liked or commented

on the photo or post or whatever.

And that's going to get

you to contribute more content.

And that's going to get you,

you know, more likes and comments.

It's a social validation

feedback group that, I mean,

is exactly the kind of thing that

a hacker like myself would come up

with because you are exploiting

a vulnerability in human psychology.

You can see these results

in places like this.

These students at Bournemouth

University have grown

up with smartphones.

They can't imagine

being without them.

The relationship I have

with my phone is quite intense

because I use it like,

all the time.

I think it is part of my body now.

It is always with me.

I feel like if I don't

have my phone with me,

and everybody's like,

talking about memes, for example,

I wouldn't understand the joke

or what everybody's laughing

at because I wasn't on my phone.

So how does technology

hack its way into our brains?

According to psychologists, it taps

into our neural reward system.

We are driven by natural rewards

and these kinds of natural rewards

are very basic rewards.

Food, water, sex.

These are the sorts of things

that are making us happy

on an everyday basis.

But with technology,

some of these needs are almost

being replaced by the kinds

of social notifications

we may have received,

by the smartphone technology

that we are using.

So, you know, these

are technological rewards that can

be given to us that can

trick our brain into having those

rewarding moments and to receiving

most technological rewards that can

make us happy eventually.

This is the fundament

of our being, though,

those motivations you describe,

that's the fundamental operating

system of our minds, isn't it?

Yes.

Tapping into our reward system

is just the start of the way

technology is engineered

to hold our attention.

In the '50s the psychologist

B F Skinner discovered that pigeons

could be made more obsessed

with earning rewards if you made

those rewards unpredictable.

Now that produces in a rat

or a pigeon or a monkey and in a man

a very high rate of activity.

And if you build up,

you can get enormous amounts

of behaviour out of these organisms

for very little pay.

You don't need to give them very

much to induce a lot of that.

Now that is the heart

of all gambling devices.

Bingo!

Number three...

The way apps get you to pull down

to refresh the screen

is based on Skinner's work.

It's just like a fruit machine.

You pull, it whirrs,

and you get a variable reward.

Sometimes nothing, sometimes

you hit the jackpot.

There is a whole industry

of consultants, of writers,

who are basically helping people

who are designers draw

on this big catalogue

of cognable vulnerabilities.

And exploit them for

the purposes of giving us hope.

Keeping us using these products.

Another of these vulnerabilities

is our brain's in-built

aversion to loss.

For example, Snapchat shows

what it calls streaks.

How many days a message

chain has gone unbroken.

Facebook is now testing

a similar feature.

It's all designed to

compel you to message.

And it works.

It's like a fire emoji

and then it will be like oh,

you have been on a streak for three

days and then you want

to sort of like compete,

like with other people.

Oh, how many streaks do you have?

And you feel like you have to reply.

When it goes low, like you're about

to lose the streak, it tells you.

So then you feel the need,

even if you weren't going to message

them anyway, or send any pictures,

you feel the need to.

Smartphones also exploit our brain's

in-built drive to finish things.

If you remove the cue that

we've reached the end,

well, we just keep going.

A food psychologist discovered that

when a soup bowl was fitted

with a hidden tube that kept it

topped up, people would drink

pints and pints of soup

in an effort to finish the bowl.

That's why the Twitter

and Facebook feeds never end.

We never get a cue to stop.

And it's why video sites

like YouTube and Netflix will start

the next video even before the one

you're watching has finished.

Before I've been on my phone

watching YouTube videos back to back

for like, two hours.

When you do actually sit down

and try and calculate the hours,

you realise how much time has been

wasted on things that you could have

been doing that were productive.

Really?

You feel like you're...

So why don't you stop?

I don't know.

I don't want to say

it's an addiction,

but I just need my phone!

Another very powerful way

that we are manipulated

is in what we watch.

The scientists of the attention

economy know that our brains

are drawn to stories that prompt

strong emotions, like outrage.

Balanced discussions may appeal

to our conscious intellects,

but not the subconscious urges that

will keep us clicking and scrolling.

So that is what we are served,

a diet of outrage.

And it doesn't matter of the stories

are fake or real, they all serve

to grab our attention.

Even reputable news

organisations are having

to adapt their coverage to compete.

In the 30s a former student

of Balliol College, Aldous Huxley,

predicted a world where manipulation

and destruction combined to create

a happy, docile populace

incapable of self-government.

One way of looking at this is that

you know, the attention economy

is a kind of denial of service

attack against the human will.

And that has big implications

in our own lives because there

are things we want to do today,

this week, this year.

It has big political

implications because, you know,

the will of the people is the basis

of the authority of democracy.

And if that's being undermined,

our political systems,

the possibility of democracy is very

straightforwardly being undermined.

The distraction and manipulation

of the attention economy is only

going to get more refined and more

compelling, and less noticeable.

For example, Facebook and other big

tech firms are investing

heavily in virtual reality.

So unless we are prepared to change

the way we pay for the online world,

we could literally lose

ourselves in technology.

David Grossman there. It could be

the biggest problem of our time.

I'm joined by Tristan Harris.

He is co-founded the movement "time

well spent" to spark an important

conversation about the kind

of future we want from

the technology industry

and was a design ethicist

and product philosopher

at Google until 2016,

where he studied how technology

influences a billion users'

attention, well-being and behaviour.

He was described by the Atlantic

Magazine "as the closest thing

Silicon valley has to a conscience".

Good evening. I am interested in how

much of a problem we should really

think this is. You likened it to the

slot machines but this isn't going

to bankrupt you or kill you in the

way that some other drugs do. I

wonder whether addiction is quite

the right way to look at it.

It is

much bigger than addiction, I would

call it an existential threat to the

human race and the reason is because

there are 2 billion people who use a

smartphone every day, 2 billion

people use Facebook, that is more

than a number of followers of

Christianity, these tech companies

have more influence over our daily

thoughts and some religions given

that we check our phones 150 times a

day. The total surface area of how

much technology is steering 2

billion people and their thoughts is

enormous, even when you are not

looking at your phone, it is

implementing or creating the kind of

thought you're thinking about now.

The challenge is as James said and

we were allies at Google in trying

to raise this conversation, is that

these companies goals are

fundamentally misaligned with our

goals and the goals of democracy.

That is why it is an existential

threat.

It is not an existential

threat, you need to find the harm it

is doing. Yes, we are wasting quite

a lot of time, yes we are sometimes

misdirected to rubbish when we would

have better things to do with our

lives, but talking about existential

threats, you need to say what actual

harm it is doing to all those people

who choose to use their phones in

this way.

I would ask in the 150

times a day will recheck, what is

going on in that moment right before

we check. Is it because we are

sitting there and we a conscious

choice and that is not what is

happening, what is happening is that

we are building up anxieties and as

it builds, it causes us to self

interrupt. We actually interrupt

ourselves about every 40 seconds.

We

are complicit in this process, we

can, smoking addicts will tell you

it is very difficult to stop smoking

and lock the cigarettes in a

cupboard but if you're fed up with

your phone and you want some

uninterrupted time, you put the

phone away or you turn it off. It is

not that difficult. The reason we

don't is because we like getting

stuff on the phone and it connects

us and we get a reward from it,

don't we?

We get enormous benefits

from these technology companies, I

think the challenges is that their

goals are not aligned with ours. The

one you mentioned, you have 100

million teenagers, a vulnerable

population and you are basically

saying, for each one of your

friends, it shows the number of days

in a row you have sent messages back

and forth, it is like putting them

on treadmills and time their legs

together, they both have to keep

running otherwise they lose their

streak. It is like we have hijacked

what 100 million teenagers view as

the currency of friendship, the way

kids know if they are friends is if

they keep that streak up. That is

where we are developmentally harming

an entire generation of children.

That is one of the clearest examples

where it is not just addiction...

A

lot of parents would say, I would

stop my child doing that. What do

you do? Are you an addict? Do you

feel you have controlled the

destruction of your phone?

No. I

haven't and I think one of the

things that we said when we talk to

all these experts in provision

technology is that even if you know

how these techniques work, it still

works on you. You're sitting inside

of this suit, all of these instincts

that are getting close, if you wake

up in the morning and you see photos

of your friends missing out, you're

missing out on what they were doing

last night, that will pull on any

human being, you can be the director

of the CIA and that will affect you.

We are all human. This is about

whether or not the goals of

technologies align with that.

Thank

you.

That's all we've got

time for this evening.

But before we go, we bring you news

of an exciting new film

with a soundtrack by the composer

Michael Nyman.

It's called Washing Machine -

The Movie, and it consists

of sixty-six minutes of a particular

brand of washing machine

going through its forty

degree wash cycle -

accompanied by a specially composed

minimalist soundtrack by Mr Nyman.

The movie will premiere

in Leicester Square next month -

but we've managed to get

you a sneak peak.

Good night.

PIANO PLAYS.