Natalia: This will be interesting because we probably have different thoughts on this because we have different ways of interacting with the online space.

Richard: I won't do the long story about my childhood but basically my first friends I found online and now most of my friendships are maintained online. I feel that connected to many people across the globe, people that I really love and trust. It works because we have that closeness and I think there's a set of behaviors and skills involved in how to actually maintain those relationships across distributed geography and how to use the right tools for the job. I think probably most people don't have the skills to communicate well online. Also if you look at technology in the wider sense, I think the technology that we see at scale has been vastly damaging. Facebook is the biggest example - we have more than a billion people participating on a platform that is mobilizing as much money and talent and power as possible for the purpose of manipulating people. It is successful at that to the tune of billions of dollars a year and now they are affecting voting choices. The way that Facebook works is to just play on your needs for meaning and connection and that’s extremely damaging. They got a bunch of scientists and a bunch of engineers and psychologists together with some designers to work out how to do that. Also there's only so far I can get into the technology conversation before I'm in the capitalism conversation. You know when it comes to belonging, so-called social media are actually anti-social. I have friends in Barcelona who thanks to Air BnB live in the suburbs where 70% of the houses are rented and random people are turning up every week. All the local industry is gone because its all tourists - you can’t buy things like clothes baskets. This is the result of technology in the service of capital. So while there are kinds of technology that are really liberating and empowering, they are based on a different set of values which are about the common good and about enabling people and connecting them. It’s not those that most people are interacting on - they're there in the capitalist playground. I'm a technologist, I've got a technology company and a lot of my friends technologists and they're doing really cool stuff. It’s about the ownership, incentives and what their analysis of how power works and how you shift it. That's what makes the difference.

Natalia: I think you learn the skills of how to be online with others and it is a skill it needs to be learned. Technology in a way is a tool and you choose how to use it. But online platforms are currently wired in a way that they're actually using us. I think that's a tricky space to navigate and that's where we need to be self-aware and think about how are we using it. What am I doing? How am I? What is it for? Why do I need it? It's different, it’s a different track of conversation. I think that digital tools definitely help me maintain my connections and maintain my sense of knowing the others. Even if it's just a little simple text that I send to my friends when I'm overseas. I travel a lot so just being able to coordinate and have a Skype call or whatever and just checking how they're doing or being able to say hey I'm here and I'm thinking about you. That's very useful. But still I feel that the connections are build face to face I don't know if I can build a strong relationship with someone that I only see online once in a while. Or that I only chat to and I don't I don't even know what their full body looks like. I don't know what what the feeling of that hug is. I'm a bit more soft in that sense.

Richard: I want to add another little point which is that in my experience of the web over the last few years there has been the collapse of meaning and the collective conversation. Just like reading articles or going on Facebook sometimes it’s hard to for us to understand each other and I just feel a kind of outrage and anxiety and disorientation because of that. I'm really into podcasts all of a sudden. I think that form of dialogue that long form especially I'm really into ones that are like unedited unproduced just like a conversation between two people. It goes on for an hour or an hour and 20 and you actually get to hear some of that human being you get into some context basically the journey that you wouldn't have otherwise gone on. And that dialogue form has quite different properties from the written form. I'm finding so much more since orientation and meaning and connection through that form than I am through all the stuff that I'm reading online.

Natalia: That's one of the things I think is a skill you need to use when you're online - escalating the bandwidth when you need to. So if you're having a conflict with someone you don't just keep on sending ranty messages, you say hey do you want to jump on a call and actually see each other faces and be able to interact in a better way.

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