Cool Girl Paradox: Olga Koch interview

Olga Koch has something of a mantra (and despite what you may have heard, it's not Rosamund Pike's 'cool girl' monologue from Gone Girl). "You can't shame me if I'm not ashamed," underpins her attitude towards sex, love and, of course, publically soiling herself. It's a relatively recent addition to her psychological arsenal, adopted in the aftermath of the breakup that eclipsed her 29th birthday, but it's been present in the pop culture she absorbed from a young age. Little Olga was drawn to the Samantha Joneses of the world, the Nessas and the Stifler's moms, because they were openly sexually active, and felt no shame in it: "it was so appealing to see a woman that was just so completely unselfconscious."

Just Friends is a thesis on this 'hoe culture', as Koch dubs it. "The thing that defines hoe culture isn't what you want. It's the fact that you're not self conscious about it." She points to the rock goddesses that dominated her youth (Courtney Love, Gwen Stefani, Alanis Morissette), who seemed to have attained the elusive 'cool girl' status. Sonically and visually these women are hard-nosed and rebellious, but lyrically they're actually incredibly vulnerable – and conventional.

When Morissette sang about being unable to get over a breakup ('Would she go down on you in a [movie] theater?') or when Love admitted in an interview that the first time she laid eyes on Kurt Cobain she wanted to have his babies, they're "saying all the forbidden things that cool girls aren't allowed to say." They're saying things that, had you texted them to someone you were seeing, would have you branded clingy (the worst descriptor you could possibly receive in high school; "the cool girl kiss of death") but because they're saying them to rock music and their hair is dyed, nobody notices. 

With a background in computer science, Koch's a bit of an anomaly in standup circles. The most traditionally comedic thing about her is her Oxford education, and even that was a masters in the Social Science of the Internet. The best project she's ever worked on, she says, was the podcast Human Error, which combined the two. Koch made 20 episodes of Human Error last year with friend and part-time internet message board moderator (and co-host of the Ten Thousand Posts and Trashfuture podcasts) Hussein Kesvani. He was a technology journalist, she was a vaguely tech-adjacent comedian – can I make it any more obvious?

The show's mission statement is to examine and explain the unintended consequences of humankind's adventures in technology – because while Koch and Kesvani are both clearly technology lovers, that doesn't mean they should be blind to problems the industry poses. "Having been in the tech world, and worked for two tech corporations and then done academia, it's like both of these fields benefit from creating really convoluted terms and ideas and keeping them as opaque as possible, because if they're not opaque people won't spend money on them. And so me and Hussein [...] will explain it to you because it's actually very stupid."

In episode four, Who Owns Your Face?, they hear from Matthias Marx, a security researcher who successfully lodged a GDPR complaint against facial recognition giant Clearview AI. He complained that Clearview were using his biometric data without his consent, and eventually forced them to remove his face from their digital library. Koch asks him what's to stop Clearview from simply reuploading it. The answer: nothing. The company is not exploiting some sort of legal loophole, they're just operating in an area nobody has yet cared enough about to regulate. You can't help but wonder if he's still out there checking for its re-emergence – it's been two years, more than enough time for the company to pick up where they left off.

And yet with everything she's seen of the tech world Koch still finds reasons not to be pessimistic. Whenever she sees a headline proclaiming TikTok as the One True Social Medium, she remembers that just three years ago we were having the same conversation about Instagram – you were dead if you weren't on it – and Facebook before that. "The dot com boom happened, Lehman Brothers fucking got dismantled [...] You've been saying 'this is it' about every corporation since the beginning of time". Hope springs eternal – and for Olga Koch it springs from remembering the infrequency with which she now checks Facebook.

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Olga Koch: Just Friends, The Stand Comedy Club, Glasgow, 13 Oct and touring the UK and Ireland
Listen to Human Error wherever you get your podcasts
Follow Olga on Twitter @rocknrolga, and on Instagram @kolga300