Russia's Red Web - Older Entrepreneurs
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 'Red Web': The Internet in Russia is a totalitarian tool but is also a device by which totalitarianism can be resisted. Laurie Taylor talks to Andrei Soldatov, a Moscow based journalist and co-author of a book which explores the Russian government's battle with the future of the Internet. Drawing on numerous interviews with officials in the Ministry of Communications, as well as the web activists who resist the Kremlin, he exposes a huge online surveillance state. What hope is there for ordinary digital citizens? They're joined by Natalia Rulyova, a Lecturer in Russian at the University of Birmingham.
Also, older entrepreneurs. Oliver Mallett, Lecturer in Management at the University of Durham, discusses the obstacles faced by late entrants to enterprise culture.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much, |
| 0:06.2 | much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Hello. Well, there we were having a pint in the Station Hotel Sidcup in early summer when Tom |
| 0:18.6 | suddenly became obsessed with his bag of salted peanuts. |
| 0:23.0 | Do you know the weight of the nuts in this pack he asked me? |
| 0:26.0 | It's less than one ounce, |
| 0:28.0 | and they cost us a shilling. |
| 0:30.0 | Now imagine what peanuts would cost in bulk. |
| 0:34.0 | Where are we going with this? I asked. |
| 0:36.0 | And then Tom unrolled his scheme. |
| 0:39.0 | Look, here's the maker's name on the packet, Whiteside and Company, |
| 0:42.0 | so we go to White Side and we buy |
| 0:43.5 | sale, I don't know, 10 pounds of peanuts at wholesale prices and then we repacket them. |
| 0:47.4 | But who do we sell them to? This is the genius bit, Lorry. We hire a pushcart. We visit up with a paraffing-fueled hot plate and then we go around the avenues of Sidcup in the evening, |
| 0:57.6 | knocking on the doors and asking if people would like a shilling bag of warm peanuts. They'd be able to smell the delicious flavor from their doorways. It can't go wrong. |
| 1:05.1 | And that's how Fireside foods came into being. And we could have made a fortune, |
| 1:09.9 | been honoured by Mrs Thatcher, welcomed into the Dragon's Den, given seats in the Lords, if only that year's summer hadn't been the hottest for over two decades, a climate that could not possibly have been less conducive to the consumption of hot |
| 1:24.1 | paraffin-flavored peanuts. Well I thought of the fall of fireside foods as I was |
| 1:29.0 | reading a new study on the problems of setting up as an entrepreneur. |
| 1:32.1 | Problems which in this study were compounded by the fact that the would be |
| 1:35.2 | entrepreneurs were in their mid-50s when they decided to go it alone. |
| 1:39.8 | Well the study published in the journal Work Employment and Society is titled Making |
| 1:43.5 | Sense of Self Employment in Late Career, understanding the identity work of |
... |
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