Hello, my name is David Runtzeman and this is a special live edition of Talking Politics

coming from the Bristol Festival of Economics. We are going to be talking about the impact

of digital technology on how we work, on how our economies are organised but also crucially

on democracy.

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We have a great panel to discuss this, the authors of two of the best recent books on

these broad themes, Rana Farouha, whose book is called Don't Be Evil, the case against

Big Tech, Karl Frey, whose book is called The Technology Trap and also we are joined by

Diane Coil, Professor of Public Policy at Cambridge, but also the director of the Bristol

Festival of Economics. We are going to come on to some specific questions about some of

the things that politicians have been saying both in this country and the United States

about what we could do about the power of Big Tech and also some of the basic questions

about infrastructure. We will get on to Labour's pitch to Nationalised Broadband. We will

probably come to that at the end. We want to start with some broad themes and Rana if

we could start with you and you and Karl both write about this in your books. So the

politics of the last few years have been pretty fractious, very polarised, everyone is aware

that there is a rising tide of what is usually called populism and it is blamed on the whole

on globalisation and when people look for the deeper cause they tend to focus on trade

and the effects of trade. But there is a rival story to go with that. If you look at the

...