Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, welcome to Radio 3's free-thinking at Sage Gateshead. Let me start by offering a free-thinking guarantee. If you like what you're about to hear, I have absolutely no idea whether you'll like

what's on tomorrow in this slot. None at all.

Our cultural lives, however, now buzz with promises that work the other way. Sometimes they're

very sensible. If you buy a DVD of On the Buses, you won't be shocked to find Amazon nudging

you in the direction of Mutiny on the buses. Unlike the Amazon customer who bought

a box of communion wafers and was offered sexual lubricant. Or the customer who bought a British

Army Commando knife and was offered a box set of Dexter Series 2. But maybe the ridiculous ones are better. Maybe the seemingly sensible one is the problem,

because let's face it, it is possible for a person to spend too much of their time watching

Reg Varnie films. So how much has digital technology and digital commerce changed our

cultural lives.

It's certainly given us new ways of discovering the neglected, the marginalised and the archival.

On iTunes and Spotify, the artists of the past compete vigorously with those of the present.

But is there some great shift happening, pushing us towards a future in which everything is available

and nobody pays at the point of use for music or art or books? Or do new ways of doing things

conform to older patterns? Well, I'd like to recommend four people who could help us

explore those questions. They're the novelist and games writer Naomi Alderman, the journalist, blogger and veteran

of the magazine business David Hepworth, Serena Kaczynski, digital editor of prospect, and the poet

Kai Miller, winner of this year's Forward Prize.

Now, I want to start with a bit of autobiography. I'm wondering how your cultural and media lives have changed in the last decade. Your habits, perhaps, if I can put it like that. Serena?

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