Hello, my name is David Ronson and this is Talking Politics.

I'm delighted to say we're joined today by John Norton, who is our guide to all things

technological and political as well, and also James Williams. And I'm going to get James

to introduce himself in a minute, but I'll give you a little background as to why James

is here and he's going to be appearing on this podcast more than once. James is the winner

of the inaugural nine dots prize, which was a prize that offered $100,000. He's going

to have to let me say that and he's won $100,000. For the best answer to a question, and the

question was, are digital technologies making politics impossible? Full disclosure, I was

one of the judges, so I didn't just see James's entry, I saw lots and lots of entries and

there were hundreds and hundreds. To enter the prize, you had to write a 3,000 word essay,

which was kind of your mini answer to the question, and then the winner gets the money and has

to write a book. So James will be in Cambridge at points over the next year writing the

book and we're going to check in with him about the book, how it's going and how some of

his thinking in answer this question has changed. The other thing worth knowing about

the prize is it was completely anonymous, so we had no idea who'd won until we'd awarded

it and then we discovered that it was James. So all of the entries which we read were

anonymous, some of them were poetry, some of them were fiction, most of them were nonfiction,

but they were all sorts of kinds of answers to questions, it was really interesting. But

we were kind of excited because he could have been anyone, could have been famous, could

have been anything, to discover that James is currently a PhD student just finishing his

PhD at the internet institute in Oxford. But before that, for 10 years, he worked at Google.

So before we get on to the answer to the question, are digital technologies making politics

...