Marianna in Conspiracyland (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Women of Web3, with Lauren Ingram | Apple Podcasts
Gateway: Cocaine, Murder & Dirty Money in Europe (Project Brazen) `
The Archers (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Marianna Spring, the BBC’s excellent disinformation and social media correspondent, is out meeting the over-internetted again. The dedicated Spring covers online mistruths, those who peddle them and those who believe them. So in Disaster Trolls she talked to people convinced that the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing were in fact actors. In Death By Conspiracy, she tackled anti-vax campaigners, and described how a man died of Covid because he believed what they said.
This time round, for her new Radio 4 series Marianna in Conspiracyland, Spring considers whether online conspiracy theories could end in violence. She focuses on the UK, though she mentions the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots in the US, and also talks to a German reporter who was attacked by a mob. Mostly, she trains her attention on a free newspaper called the Light. It prints at least 100,000 copies a month, and has 18,000 followers on its Telegram account.
Spring starts off in Totnes, Devon, home to happy hippies, crystal-strokers and other alternative lifestylers concerned about climate change and big pharma. The Light is widely distributed here and draws readers in through its libertarian, anti-vaccine stance. So far, so familiar. Unfortunately, once you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid/ swallowed the red pill/ seen or, indeed, read the Light, it offers up some far less palatable opinions. Such as the idea that people should be tried for “crimes against humanity” over the pandemic. “A lot of people would like to see justice,” says one of the paper’s readers. He’s referring to an idea usually called Nuremberg 2.0, after the Nuremberg trials. Nuremberg 2.0 insists that anyone involved in the rollout of the Covid vaccine should be investigated. “And if they’re found guilty, they face the punishment,” he says. Spring asks him if that punishment should be hanging. “Yes,” says this seemingly reasonable man.
As ever, Spring remains calm when the battier proponents of conspiracy theories articulate their views. Sometimes, though, those who push extreme ideas don’t like to own up to them. Darren Nesbitt, editor of the Light, mealy-mouths about “free speech” and “people making up their own minds”, while offering the hard stuff – extreme rightwing views from horrible organisations such as Patriotic Alternative and Alpha Men Assemble – on the Light’s Telegram. Nesbitt is nice to Spring when she interviews him, calling her “a smart, bright journalist full of energy”. Later, on Facebook, he publishes a poem that describes her as “shilling for cash”.
I applaud Spring’s careful, reasonable reporting in this fascinating series, which features a good cross section of believers and sceptics and ends with Spring, lightly, wondering about her own safety. I wonder about it, too.
Another woman working hard to explain the ways of the internet is Lauren Ingram. She has a podcast, Women of Web3, which seeks to illuminate the metaverse to women (or anyone) who aren’t quite sure about crypto, NFTs, Chat GPT or anything else about Web3, sometimes known as the Internet of Things. It’s a good show: Ingram knows her stuff and is a relaxed, warm interviewer. Unfortunately, despite the podcast’s best efforts, some of the content is pitched too high for simpletons such as me.
I listened to the debut episode of the new series, with Alice Delahunt, head of new fashion company SYKY (pronounced Psych-ee). It has raised more than $10m in investment, but I remained unclear about what it does. Delahunt said a lot about “opening up the space”, but I wanted a few more specifics. Will SYKY’s future fashion mean that if I buy a pair of trainers from its real-life shop, I’ll get an online avatar that’s also wearing my nice new shoes? And where will my online me exist? In Meta? Because I don’t fancy that particular brave new world at all… Anyway, for those who are more business-minded and, possibly, more online than me, this is a lovely show and I recommend it.
Let’s get back to the physical. Here’s a tale of cocaine-smuggling overlords – not in the US, but much closer to home. In Gateway: Cocaine, Murder & Dirty Money in Europe, journalist Mitchell Prothero gives us a rip-snorting (sorry) tale of bad men doing bad things. “Europe is now the world’s biggest market for cocaine,” he says, explaining that the drug comes in via Antwerp and Rotterdam. “It’s like Miami in the 80s, but with even more drugs and much shittier weather.”
There are bombs under cars, shootings on main streets, fake passports, prison breakouts, the lot. Intensive reporting has been done off air, so that the listener gets a cracking true-crime yarn that barrels along, with characters such as the Belly and Scarface mixing with people you’ve heard of, such as Tyson Fury and Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi, who was assassinated in the Netherlands on the orders of the Iranian government. (Weirdly, this overlaps with Paul Caruana Galizia’s recent podcast series on Iranian assassinations in the UK, Londongrad: Iran’s Hit Squads.) As ever with such tales, it’s both exciting and queasy-making. I await the Netflix series.
Speaking of baddies, on Friday Rob Titchener returned to The Archers. If you’re not au fait with his rottenness, you’ll have to scroll back several years to when he was married to Helen and smoothly subjected her to months of coercive control. She ended up trying to kill him – but, as is the way of super villains, he didn’t die. Now he’s back. What will happen? Helen is a very different woman, it must be said, and Ambridge a different place. Maybe Titchener will get his long overdue comeuppance.
