5. Tech

What Really Happened in the Nineties? - A podcast by BBC Radio 4

Here we are in 2022 navigating cancel culture, Brexit, identity politics, war in Europe.

How did we get here? Did we miss something? Robert Carlyle, who played the wildcard Begbie in the '90s hit Trainspotting, is here to show us that we did. That the world we live in was shaped by the forgotten decade: the 1990s.

From Hong Kong to Moscow, Cool Britannia to No Frills flights, we travel back in time to key moments in the '90s that reverberate today in unexpected ways.

Episode 5: Tech

Robert Carlyle uncovers a conflict in the 90s that we may not have been aware of – the crypto-wars between the so-called cypherpunks and the United States government. The fight was over online privacy and it was won by a computer programme called Phil Zimmermann, who faced four years in jail for releasing software called Pretty Good Privacy. As Jamie Bartlett, the author of The Missing Cryptoqueen explains, if it wasn’t for Phil, we wouldn’t be able to communicate securely online today.

Producer: Stephen Hughes Sound Designer/Composer: Phil Channell Consultant: Jamie Bartlett