The Spectator Podcast: Tech vs Trump

On this week’s episode, we discuss Trump versus technology, the ‘new normal’ with Calamity May, and whether jargon is polluting the English language.

First up, in this week’s magazine cover piece, Niall Ferguson writes on the battle between networks and hierarchies for supremacy in a digital world. The biggest fight is between the American President and the social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, who still exist in the unregulated frontier of the Wild Wild World Wide Web. Niall joined Freddy Gray, host of the Spectator’s Americano podcast, to discuss. As Niall writes:

“It may be too big a stretch to claim that Russian Facebook ads swung the election in Trump’s favour. But it seems plausible that his campaign’s use of social media, particularly Facebook, gave it a vital edge that compensated for its financial disadvantage relative to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. On that, if on nothing else, I suspect Steve Bannon and Clinton would agree.