Everything Is Fake
Jamie Bartlett explores why fakery is increasingly rewarded rather than punished in modern life, and why many people seem unbothered by it.
Episodes
1. We Are as Gods
For years something strange has been happening online, but most of us have no idea what’s really going on. Ethnic conflict in Myanmar. A chemistry professor is killed in Ethiopia. A teenager dies in her bedroom in London. A mob storms the Capitol in Washington DC.And that’s the moment that catches Jamie Bartlett’s eye. A few days after the riot, on January 9th 2021, the outgoing leader of the Unit
2. Blitzscaling
From the rubble of the dot com crash, an ambitious young Harvard student with a passion for hacking and love of Roman emperors, sets up an exciting new website. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is an instant hit on college campuses. Soon it attracts the attention of Silicon Valley’s most successful - but controversial - venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. The company starts to scale up. But there’s one pro
3. Are You Not Engaged?
The tech pioneers were right: all this connectivity and sharing is creating a new age of freedom and democracy. A global consciousness. Arab Spring, Barack Obama – both fuelled by social media - make the possibilities feel limitless.But, just as the dream to connect everyone is being realised - at the height of technological optimism - everything starts to fall apart.Producer: Caitlin Smith
Soun
4. Flood the Zone
2016 is a big election year. But something is going very wrong online. Journalists in America and the Philippines start to notice something strange going on online. In Manila, Maria Ressa - the editor of online news site, Rappler - discovers a sock puppet network of social media accounts, all pushing for the election of a strong leader. Someone like Rodrigo Duterte. Maria is suspicious. She makes
5. The Vortex
One of the strange things about our new media universe, is how innocuous decisions taken in Silicon Valley - turning a dial, or adding a few lines of code to increase engagement - can change your life. In 2016, Instagram introduced a new way of looking at content: the non-chronological feed. Now, instead of seeing what your friends were posting in the order they were posting it, an algorithm broug
6. Arbiters of Truth
In 2018, the CEOs of our most popular social media companies are standing at a crossroad. After political outcry over Russian interference in the 2016 election and fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, tech leaders have a decision to make. They need to come up with ways of making their platforms safer. One route is a radical overhaul of the entire business model. The other is the biggest d
7. Rest of World
Jamie Bartlett travels to Minnesota to meet Abrham Meareg Amare. The young academic is seeking asylum in the States following the murder of his father in Ethiopia in 2021. In December 2022, Abrham became the lead complainant in a $2 billion lawsuit against Meta. Abrham believes that company is partly responsible for the death of his dad - a renowned chemistry professor - who was slandered and doxx
8. I Sung of Chaos
On 30th September 2022 a coroner in London finds that Molly Russell "...died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content." The finding is a global first. Social media is ruled to have contributed to the death of a child. In San Francisco, around the same time, a strange story is unfolding inside Twitter HQ. Ever since Donald Trump's account
Trailer
Have you noticed that more and more of the world feels, well, fake?Online there's a daily avalanche of dubious advice and information - about health, money, success, happiness - much of it delivered with total confidence and little regard for evidence.There's the fabricated reviews, inflated metrics and synthetic content.Influencers present themselves as authorities. The 'fake it till you make it'
1. Fake it. Make it. Podcast it.
Jamie Bartlett is not Steven Bartlett. People mix them up more than you might think - but there is an important difference: Steven Bartlett is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet, and Jamie is not.So what does Steven have that Jamie doesn't? And what does the answer tell us about the world we now live in?In this first episode, Jamie digs into the origin stories of the UK's podcast
2. Kayfabe Country
In episode two, Jamie ventures into the strange world of 1980s WWF wrestling - where performers and fans share an unspoken agreement to treat the whole spectacle as real. A shared illusion where everyone knows it's fake, but plays along because it feels true. It sounds like harmless fun. And for a while, it was. But Jamie soon wonders: what happens when an idea like that escapes the ring and chang
3. My Truth, Your Truth, and Anything But the Truth
In 1987, the same year Hulk Hogan body-slammed Andre the Giant, something else happened that would change America's relationship with the truth forever - a Washington regulator abolished the law that required broadcasters to present both sides of an argument.What followed was Morton Downey Jr, a furious chain-smoking provocateur who discovered that outrage was more compelling than accuracy. And Op
4. The Lance Armstrong Defence
In the early 2000s, a young man in New Jersey was writing thousands of fake university essays for paying students. Around the same time, financial analysts in New York were rating toxic debt as safe. And in Silicon Valley, a new business philosophy was taking hold: fake it till you make it.Jamie Bartlett asks how so many people, in so many different worlds, arrived at the same conclusion at the sa
5. Doctor’s Orders
Jamie sits down with Dr Aseem Malhotra, the cardiologist who reaches millions through alternative media with his claims about Covid vaccines - and who is, he says, nervous about talking to the BBC. Jamie goes through his arguments carefully, with an open mind. But the harder question isn't whether Malhotra is right or wrong. It's what it means that so many people trust him more than they trust the
6. F For Fake
Jamie and his AI companion Jimmy Botlett become increasingly difficult to tell apart as they bring you the final chapter of this story - featuring Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, who now wishes he'd thought harder about the consequences. Plus we hear claims that an engineer is building something rather frightening at one of the big AI companies. But what's true, what's fake, and what does an
Trailer
It all started with a crazy idea to realise a hippie dream of building a “global consciousness”. The plan was to build a connected world, where everyone could access everyone and everything all the time; to overthrow the old gatekeepers and set information free.But social media didn’t turn out that way. Instead of setting information free – a new digital elite conquered the world and turned themse
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