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After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit londonreviewbookshop.co forward slash events. Hi, everyone. I am Victoria Turk, Features Editor at Wired UK, and I'm delighted to be talking tonight to Jeanette Winterson. Her new book, 12 Bytes, is out today, and we're going to be talking about that, about technology, where it came from, where it's headed, how it fits in with our lives. If you've got questions, please do put them in the Q&A function and we'll get through as many of those as possible at the end of the chat with Jeanette. Do keep them coming throughout and we'll get through as many as we can. Jeanette.

Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. You are my dream interviewer for this and I just want everybody out there to know that I am so happy to be here with

you tonight. Oh well thank you, I'm honoured. The pleasure's all mine. Maybe you'd like to start just by giving us a bit of background to the book. What inspired it? What's it about? I

realised I was completely ignorant and that's not a feeling I like, it's not a place I want to be. And I thought, all right, the world's changing. It's not just about computing. It is computing technology, but technology itself is accelerating so fast. I'm not a digital native, obviously, because I'm far too old for that. And I thought, I don't want to be just muddling around in this space, this space that is the future. I want to understand it. If possible, I want to be part of the conversation. Maybe I can even influence it. It was really obvious to me that it shouldn't be a place where you had only tech nerds, maths graduates, computing scientists and physicists in on the conversation, because it was going to affect all our lives, everybody. And that would mean perhaps something that was more egalitarian, that was more democratic, where people had a voice rather than no voice. And naturally, I was concerned, as we all are, the fact that government power is waning at a time when the power of big tech, which is unaccountable, not elected, but extremely powerful, is on the rise. And I know Google wants to take over the planet. And I thought, well, is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Maybe it isn't. Maybe also our ideas of how we manage society in the macro should change. Why do we think that we have elected representatives? Maybe it's better if people really who understand how the future should look should be in charge of it, the people with all the money and all the tech. And I thought, no, no, that's not right. So it was really about getting involved for me and learning as much as I could. And so reading as much as I could. For me, that's always the way in. And trying to focus on the big picture. How do we get here? What about religion? What about art? What about philosophy? What about literature? Because we don't live in separate silos of existence, do we? We live joined up or we live not at all. And the idea of the kind of nerd looking at the computer screen day and night is not real life in so much as there still is a thing called real life, which is bigger than a computer screen. It may not always be, but it is at the moment. So I thought, all right, I need to go back into what I know, study it from there, and I also need to go into what I don't know. And I had some questions to ask myself. I thought, where are all the women? Because it cannot be that women have such strange particular female brains that they're not interested in all this stuff. So that rang some alarm bells. And a story that we follow in the book, how women got out of tech, because they did. It wasn't that they never went in, it was that they were actually shoved out of it. So I wanted to tell that story. And I wanted to ask also, well, okay, AI is a tool now. Everything that human beings have done is a tool. What happens if it's not a tool anymore? What happens if it sits beside us as an alternative life form? And where does this start? I thought it really starts with the Industrial Revolution, which mattered to me because I was born in Manchester where the Industrial Revolution began. And I thought, OK, Homo sapiens, been on the planet 300,000 years. That's not very long. But the Industrial Revolution, 250 years old. You know, my house in London is as old as that. This is such a little short sliver of Homo sapiens time. And then the computing revolution, which really only kicks off after World War Two, you know, with all the innovations necessary at Bletchley Park. And this massive shift that's been happening, which seems to me to be an evolutionary shift on the grander scale, which will affect everything. So it was all of that. And I thought, even if you don't understand it, you must try. And it will be like trying to learn a new language. It will be like trying to master a new discipline. And I think we shouldn't sit out there passively waiting for things to come to us. We should go out and find the things that interest us. And then we have a little bit of control over it. You know, I mean, your own background, we were talking earlier because you said you were good at science and you were good at the humanities and languages and you went into languages and then you came back into science and tech. And it's exactly that that interests me, the rounded picture, the bigger picture, the overall picture, not just it isn't a little a little tech book. It just is not that. And it's not the history of Google or Amazon or anything like that of Wi-Fi. It's to try and look at us, humanity. You know, we've developed this. So what happens now? Great.