This year, The Digital Human celebrates its 10 year anniversary. During that time, we have explored all corners of the digital realm, and told hundreds of stories that have revealed how we as humans have been shaped by the technological world we have created, and what we may become in the future. Some of those stories have always stayed with us, because they have generated more questions - questions that we’ve always wanted to have answered, and in this series, we finally will. In one of our all...
May 23, 2022•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores who owns the function of the devices we use, and why we need the right to repair and hack the things we consume.
Mar 28, 2022•29 min
Aleks Krotoski asks why we're always yearning for next technological solution to our problems? What is it that has driven us to the current, seemingly relentless cycle of innovation. It’s not all explained by consumerism, there appears to be a deeper motivation - as if we’re already half living in an imagined future of ever greater technological possibilities. Is this how we’re evolving, instead of adapting to the world like other species, we’re adapting the world to suit us? Producer: Peter McM...
Mar 21, 2022•29 min
Alexander Lukashenko has proudly called himself 'Europe's last dictator'. He has held power in Belarus since 1994, and has been known to repress opposition with brutal efficiency. In 2020 he was re-elected for his 6th Presidential term in an election US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned was "not free or fair". This resulted in mass protests in the country, which was met with brutal crackdowns - the UN reported multiple violations of human rights, including reports of 450 documented cases of ...
Mar 14, 2022•29 min
A special kind of wisdom is transmitted from generation to generation - proverbial knowledge with no basis in fact, but still intuitive: chicken soup cures a cold; live, love, laugh; turn a coin in your pocket in the moonlight to secure a fortune. Proverbs have always helped to answer life’s important questions, and in some cases, this kind of wisdom can save a community from disaster. In the past, traditional knowledge was held by a matriarch or a wise man. When they died, that wisdom went with...
Mar 07, 2022•29 min
Offline, we as individuals present different sides of ourselves in different situations. We behave very differently with friends, employers, parents, lovers and strangers. But as Social Media Giants like Facebook and Twitter became ubiquitous, suddenly all those different facets of our lives and personalities were compressed into a single space - this has become known as Context Collapse. Aleks Krotoski explores how Context Collapse came to be, the impact it has had on our behaviour and well bei...
Feb 28, 2022•29 min
Aleks Krotoski asks where did all those groups and individuals deplatformed after the Jan 6th riots go and what have they been doing in the year since? With Donald Trumps 'Truth Social' platform about to launch it's hoped all his supporters will flock to this new gathering place. But who have they become in a year without his tweets and facebook posts to galvanise them? Many flocked to encypted messaging services like Telegram or self proclaimed 'pro free speech' platforms like Gettr and Gab. Th...
Feb 21, 2022•30 min
Aleks Krotoski asks if how we use technology has affected our attitudes to ephemerality and the transience of things. Producer: Peter McManus
Nov 15, 2021•29 min
There are many ways in which the taint of prejudice, outdated ways of thinking and plain old human error can enter our artificial intelligence systems. The weakest link is always where the sticky handprints of humans are most visible. To train AIs, systems need two things: computer vision, to precisely identify images, and machine learning algorithms. But they also need a person to label images over and over and over again, so when the AI perceives that image, they learn what it is. In this epis...
Nov 08, 2021•29 min
We've all had experiences of our attention wandering, usually at those moments when we most need to concentrate. But, in our productivity-driven society, are we placing too much emphasis on paying attention and failing to recognise the benefits of more unstructured thought processes? After all, focus comes at a cost. With numerous demands on our attention, it's all too easy to experience burnout. Unfocus can recharge our batteries and allow us to be creative by making connections and connecting ...
Nov 01, 2021•29 min
If you want to send a message without any chance of it being intercepted then end-to-end encryption services are the way to do it. Governments and intelligence agencies can’t even intercept these messages, without compromising the phone they’re sent or received on, because the tech companies themselves don’t even have access. In the pursuit of protecting people’s privacy, in the wrong hands these messaging apps can be dangerous. Aleks discovers how the Taliban used WhatsApp to help them sweep th...
Oct 25, 2021•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the relationships between social media content creators and their audience, asking how does it get complicated when money starts to change hands. These are often described as para-social relationships. Ones were the audience knows a lot about the content creator and they know next to nothing about the viewers. This can lead to misunderstandings and even behaviours that border on coercive control. How can this new breed of celebrity navigate this world when what their subs...
Oct 18, 2021•29 min
We all cheat at least a little bit, some of us in family games of monopoly, others on their taxes. Aleks asks if the digital era has made that easier; with less apparent consequence and therefore more tempting? If that's the case where does that lead us. Why, for example, would people hack the language learning app Duolingo to achieve an entirely meaningless high score, just to beat those of their fellow learners? And if you use the fitness app Strava to compete with others who cycle the same ro...
Oct 11, 2021•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores what it's like to be 'villain of the day' on social media. It seems every day an individual rightly or wrongly becomes the object of the online world's condemnation. What's that like and what motivates people to pile on? Are the criticisms always made in good faith or is there something more complex going on with what the critics are trying to signal. Producer: Peter McManus
Jun 28, 2021•29 min
Dr Charu Smita, a media researcher in Delhi explains how as the social contract between middle class Indians and the Government, to provide medical assistance, crumbled, people realised they'd need to mobilise to help save lives. Anirudh Deshmukh is a musician from Mumbai and when the second wave of Covid hit India and he saw the urgent tweets and posts from people searching for oxygen and hospital beds for loved ones he decided to do something about it. Using a combination of social media, What...
Jun 21, 2021•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the impact of Sci-hub on science and the Open Access Movement.
Jun 14, 2021•29 min
Aleks Krotoski talks to the children of those lost to QAnon conspiracies. Many have sought support and advice in online forums where they exchange stories of estrangement and bereavement unable to prevent their parent falling further down the rabbit of outlandish plots, twisted ideas and political extremism. For many experts QAnon behaves like an authoritarian cult demanding total obedience to its ideas and anyone who can’t be converted are to be shunned. In an ironic twist on the classic cult n...
Jun 07, 2021•28 min
Most banks, airlines even the military use legacy software because to replace it costs millions. Instead, as companies grow or change, old software is merged with new software. Aleks hears about ‘technical debt’, when software engineers who create original software code leave or move on, taking their expertise with them. Without proper knowledge of the old code, maintaining legacy software can become problematic and leave a company or organisation vulnerable to technical bugs. The damage brought...
May 31, 2021•29 min
Illustration by Seonaid MacKay The history of early cinema, radio, and television has suffered from a mass loss of material. Lon Chaney’s vampiric grin and Betty Balfour’s joyful dances were melted down for the silver. Canisters full of voices from radio’s early days cast aside. Doctor Who and Dad’s Army fans still scour basements and attics in the hope of finding episodes lost decades ago. When a new technology creates a new artform, we seem to make the same mistake - not seeing the value, and ...
May 25, 2021•30 min
In 2006 the creators of the alternate reality game, Perplex City set a puzzle challenge called Billion to One. With only one photograph and a first name players were tasked with using the internet to find out who the man was in the photo. Despite thousands of people looking for Satoshi he stayed hidden for 14 years until eventually, just before New Year in 2021 Tom Lucas in Germany used reverse image search and in under five minutes discovered who he was, where he lived, worked and how to contac...
Mar 29, 2021•29 min
Dreams have fascinated people since the dawn of humanity, seen as prophetic, used by the ancient Greeks to diagnose illness before physical symptoms appeared, and inspiring some of the world’s greatest inventions and works of art. But dreams have a darker side. Often we meet our internalised anxieties in our sleeping subconscious. During the Pandemic there was a surge of people reporting having more dreams, especially vivid, nightmarish visions - facing down swarms of insects, swept away by titl...
Mar 22, 2021•29 min
As we hunker down for the last period of lockdown novelty has never felt more absent from our lives. Aleks Krotoski explores its importance and asks if the digital world can actually provide it. Producer Peter McManus
Mar 15, 2021•30 min
Every time we seek treasure and eventually find, we get a hit of endorphins that tickles the happy parts of our brains. There are tales of extraordinary discoveries; King Tut’s tomb, The Mona Lisa, Viking gold. Incredible things that took ingenuity and dedication to uncover. Wouldn't it be remarkable to strike it lucky and find real treasure buried for hundreds or even thousands of years? Every rabbit hole we go down, every mystery we try to solve scratches that itch. It might be offline, or on....
Mar 08, 2021•29 min
In the early days of the internet, trolls were nothing to fear. Comedians, tricksters, harmless pranksters ready to waste a little time or pounce on a typo. Some people enjoyed a bit of provocation to spark some spirited debate. You had flamers and griefers, but in general communities were good at booting out malicious actors, while leaving the trickers to their fun. But in 2021, things are very different. In the past, a random troll post on 4Chan would quickly sink into obscurity. Now, one prov...
Mar 01, 2021•29 min
Aleks Krotoski explores the power of toys and play in shaping our technological future. Apple's Tim Cook has said he began working on the smartwatch aged 5 after seeing the cartoon character Dick Tracy's wristwatch two way radio. So how much of our technological present has been prescribed by future visions of the past? Clearly many innovators imagination’s get fired up by childhood experiences but do they end up pursuing technologies that don’t actually solve the problems we’re facing? Or worse...
Feb 22, 2021•29 min
Since March this year - 2020 - venues have been black. Performers and live audiences are separated by COVID-19. Had it lasted a week, maybe two, things might not have changed. But as with the rest of our lives, technology has had to step in to give a lifeline to those who make their living from live performance. Aleks asks whether streaming online commodifies and commercialises artists and cultural scenes by turning what they do into just more online content? Or will streaming, together with lim...
Nov 16, 2020•29 min
The monsters we create have always given us insight into what we're scared of in the world around us. Whether that's zombies igniting fears around racial tensions in the United States of the nineteen sixties or Dracula articulating a fear of the other and of immigration at the end of nineteenth century. Aleks Krotoski asks what those monsters born in tech tell us about our fears today. Producer: Peter McManus
Nov 09, 2020•30 min
In Maori culture, images and objects or treasures can come to embody a person. However when the Maori were first confronted with portrait photography they initially responded by hiding from the camera, fearful that their 'mauri', or life force, would be lost. Professor Deidre Brown explains though how the Maori began to see the new medium as an effective method of embodying the 'wairua', or everlasting spirit, of a person. Robin Finn was very close to her mother, they spoke to each other several...
Nov 02, 2020•29 min
There's a perception that it’s always daytime on the internet. What that misses is that it’s not always the case for us when we go there. We gravitate to different parts of the digital world during the night. We slow down without the bombardment of emails updates and notifications. We become explorers of soundscapes on meditation apps, we listen to soft, soothing mumblings on podcasts lulling us to sleep. For those digital night owls, it’s an Alice like experience falling through a labyrinth of ...
Oct 26, 2020•29 min
If there’s one thing that makes the world go ‘round, it’s trust - trust in institutions, trust in science, trust in the economy, trust in each other. Trust is what protects our vulnerability; it’s behind the unspoken social contracts that keep us safe. Without trust, we’re done. And since the beginning of our love-hate relationship with the Web, we’ve been wondering: is computer-mediated communication eroding trust? Or, does it make trust stronger? Or, are we more likely to misplace it more now ...
Oct 19, 2020•29 min
