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(suspenseful music) - 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 they can stop the business 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, Halla Tomasdottir and the film's director Pamela Hogan.
Then.
- 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 1990 Egypt.
Also ahead, tech activist Cory Doctorow talks to Hari Sreenivasan about his latest book on the decline of the internet and how to reform it.
(suspenseful music) (suspenseful music continues) - [Announcer] "Amanpour & Company" is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Attwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment to Fight Antisemitism, the Family Foundation of Layla and Mickey Straus, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, the Peter G. Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Monique Schoen Warshaw, Koo and Patricia Yuen committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
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 October 24th, 1975, 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.
- [Speaker] 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 got it got very hard at work, mostly for 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?
It was a (indistinct) coming, and it was beautiful.
- And to mark that 50th anniversary, I spoke to the film's director Pamela Hogan and the president of Iceland, Halla Tomasdottir.
Welcome to both of you to our program.
This is an amazing film, Pamela Hogan and Halla Tomasdottir.
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 the 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 to say, you were seven years old when the actual day off, so to speak, happened, October 24th of 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 pretty 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 Christiane, 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, you know, just doing a little bit of research, I just thought, "These women are incredible."
And not only are they, you know, 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, no dearest, you cannot, because you are a girl."
(melancholy soft music) (seagulls calling) - 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 are 18."
(eerie music) (sheet rustling) (laughs) - I mean, it is extraordinary.
And 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, Madam Vigdis 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 that 11-year-old girl that anything was possible.
And her leadership, just like the collective leadership of women in 1975, changed my life.
Her leadership really impacted the life 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 with now we have a second woman serving there, or president where we have a second woman serving, and prime minister as well.
So, 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 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 is no small feat.
Iceland is really in the vanguard of that, not just in the world, but even in the developed world, 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 is everywhere, that this was what women could expect?
And we're going only 50 years ago where they were just cooking and cleaning.
- Isn't it incredible 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 in 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, but 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 payed less for the jobs you were doing than the men were.
But then, it turned into a day off because certain, you know, 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 a strike and some of the 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.
And 90% 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 will 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 realize 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 higher 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 see, they were sprinkled throughout some male allies.
But let's just see this.
- The song was a battle cry.
- Afram Stelpur means "Go on, girls."
- Go, go, go, girls.
Here's my hand.
(women singing in foreign language) - So, I'm asking people to think new thoughts about many things.
- Every movement has their battle song because it unites the soul.
- And I think we were just crying, singing the tune.
(women singing in foreign language) - So, what you remember, Madam President, at age seven, I mean, exists in black and white; I was gonna say in blazing technicolor, but in amazing black and white.
So, I wanna 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 gonna go out for next day.
And so, he was very strategic, and he managed to negotiate.
And then, he says it was a very tough negotiation, but he convinced the women to come back at midnight and set the paper, so they 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.
So, you know, I think, in the end, the women who wanted to just not get the paper at were kind of happy that they had done that.
But I was really impressed that he, you know, was willing to sort of talk about his moment in that negotiation.
I did say to him, "Sturmer, you know, the progressive newspapers were covering the women's movement.
Like, 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.
(laughs) 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 'em," they're boys and girls, "and you cook them, you know, 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.
- Hmm.
Well, first, I just wanna 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 waiting 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% score on the World's 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 childcare 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 gonna be more beneficial for you to choose a male leader than a female leader because the female leader will go away to a paternity leave, but the the man won't.
And it's still a fact in the world we live today that over 90% of all positions, be it head of states or CEOs, or chairmans 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 graph 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 Madam Vigdis 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 gonna make a big difference when more people look to close the gender gap with a even greater fearlessness than we see today.
- Yeah, well, it's an amazing film.
I really encourage everybody to see it.
Halla Tomasdottir, 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 rules.
Plus, in other patriarchal religious societies, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, harmful practices like female gentle mutilation continue.
It affects millions of girls every year, half of them before their fifth birthday.
My next guest, Gayle 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".
Gayle 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's about my adventures, as you said, in Egypt, in the 1990s, when I 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, 'cause 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 used 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.
It's a great device, 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 film.
- 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.
- Wow.
So, what led you to this story?
And then, we're gonna play it.
It's quite hard to watch and to listen to, even, you know, 30 years later, and we're gonna play it.
- Wow.
- What led you to do that story?
Remind me.
- Well, I had a tutor, and she would come to my house.
- [Christiane] An Arabic tutor.
- M-hm.
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.
It was, you know, 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 was- - I'm gonna say the report, so don't give it all away.
- No, I won't give it all away, but what happened was not what we were expecting.
- [Gayle] 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.
(tool whirring) The operation will be quick, without anesthetic.
(child screaming) "Shame on you," (indistinct) the barber.
"It's finished, so you can get up and go play."
Officially, the Egyptian government condemns female genital mutilation, but it turns a blind eye to the practice.
(child speaking foreign language) - Studies show 80 to 90% 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 circumcised 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," she says.
"Don't be a brat," her grandmother called.
"It's over," says her father.
"Be brave, Negla.
Be brave."
- Honestly, it was shocking then, and it's shocking now.
Obviously, we blurred out some of the pictures, which did not happen in this 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 gonna 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, 'cause in Egypt at that time, children in public, you 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, you know, 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.
You know, head Turner had wanted to focus on Egypt because the 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 gonna 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.
It may be 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 we cannot issue any law; they will not obey, because we never catch them or 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 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 for 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 story.
And that, now, some surveys have suggested that only 15% of urban girls are now circumcised, each of 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 failed 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 Sisi himself has said that it is a priority for him.
And studies or surveys 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, very... - Cautious.
- Yeah, cautious about breaking laws.
- Yeah.
- It's dropped dramatically since that catalyst moment of that story, and I think, you know, it's on its way to being eradicated completely.
- 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 met, can I please tell this story?
- Hell, I don't remember the story.
- Remember we were in Algeria, and it was so dangerous.
- Oh, god, it was so scary.
- And the moment we walked out- - During the Islamic feast, you know, takeover there.
- Yeah, and 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're 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 gonna 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 wanna kill her?"
- 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 wanna 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, you know, that, yeah.
- In a respectful way, and, you know, and in a genuine desire to know what they're thinking.
- To know.
Gayle Young, thank you for reminding me, and thank you for being such a good colleague.
- Thank you.
- We had a heck of an adventure (indistinct) in Egypt.
- We did.
We did.
- 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 permitting it.
Next, to the online world, which can be infuriating, isolating, and downright dangerous.
With the rise of AI-generated ads, popups, 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.
Cor Doctorow, you've got a new book out called "(censored): 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 years.
Some dictionaries are picking up on it too.
First, for our audience, what does it mean?
- 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 window and framing devices for this.
And (censored) 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 (censored) right?
Eventually the platform is fully decayed, end stage (censored).
But the more interesting thing is the questions it raises and the answers it proposes for why it's happening now.
- So, you know, kind of 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 to 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 mattered to them.
They got a feed consisting solely of the things they asked to see, but they also locked themselves in.
They locked themselves in through something economists called the collective action problem, which you may know is a problem of getting the six people in your group chat to agree on what board game you're gonna play this week, or what movie you're gonna see, only when it's a couple of hundred people on Facebook.
And, you know, some of you are there because that's where the people with your rare disease are 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 car approval.
It can be really hard to go.
And so, once Facebook knows that you can't leave anymore, they start phase two of (censored), 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 gonna 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 gonna show them things they asked to see.
Obviously that's a lie too.
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 in too.
They become dependent on us.
We know a lot about monopoly.
In 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 wanna 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.
- You know, so I wonder, look, one of the things that people are gonna hear you describe this and say, "Why doesn't the market just fix this?"
Right?
Isn't there a better mousetrap somewhere else?
Won't just people walk with their feet?
- Yeah, so, you know, we used to have mechanisms that punished companies for being bad to us, and one of them was competition, right?
And so, you know, 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 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 waived that merger through, just like all of the G.W.
Bush and Clinton DOJs, everyone since Reagan has waived through pretty much every merger except for four extraordinary years under Biden.
We haven't had a new privacy law since 1988.
The last privacy law America got out of 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 gonna go ahead and do it.
- You're right about how the erosion of our antitrust frameworks and laws has created this kind of techno feudalism.
Describe what that is and who benefits.
- Yeah, this is a term I got from my friend and colleague, Yanis Varoufakis, who used to be the finance minister of Greece.
And Yanis 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.
Rent 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 pre-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 wanna 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 are 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, they're 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 wanna 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 your book of how these platforms decay.
- Yeah, so, you know, and 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 Son.
That's the same people who gave us WeWork, and they gave us, well, now they're backing OpenAI.
So, the Saudis subsidized 41 cents 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 halved 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 Veena Dubal.
And what Uber does is periodically offers drivers a slightly low-ball offer, a little less per mile, a little less per minute.
And 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 manner of boiling a 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 mis-classifies its employees as contractors and can get away with paying them different wages 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're imputing financial desperation, and charging them a premium as a result.
So, this Uberization is spreading to other labor markets, and it's 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 who's 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 gonna refuse shifts below a certain wage," or "All the drivers in this town are gonna refuse rides below a certain wage."
And it 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 gonna 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 in technology to exploit and harm you, and zero flexibility in technology to defend yourself from exploitation and harm.
- And 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, 'cause 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 described, 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 would 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 a hundred 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 wanna leave their friends, right?
And so, those people say, "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 in 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 Bluesky 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 wanna 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 "(censored): Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do about It."
Author Cory Doctorow, thanks so much for joining us.
- Oh, 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 Takaichi 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.
(suspenseful music) (suspenseful music continues)