More like this: To be Seen and not Watched w/ Tawana Petty

In her forthcoming book, End Times Fascism, Klein and co-author Astra Taylor take stock of the history of fascism and the collective power that has been brought to bear to fight it. This time is different. Tech titans accumulated tremendous power and wealth, and are firmly on the side of the fascists. And our information environment is flooded and disoriented. While that might portend a dark outcome, Klein has a different diagnosis. Fascist powers seem angrier and more aggressive than ever; but Klein thinks this is a sign that we are winning.

Further reading & resources:

• The Rise of End Times Fascism by Astra Taylor & Naomi Klein
• On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
• More about Naomi & Astra’s upcoming book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.
• In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing by Kathryn Jezzer-Morton, The Cut, Jan 2026
• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis
• Walter Benjamin’s Concept of History
• UN expert says world has given Israel ‘licence to torture Palestinians’ — Al Jazeera quoting Francesca Albanese, March 2026
• How The 'Free Helicopter Rides' Meme Went Viral — The Progressive Magazine, September 2023
• Safe or Just Surveilled?: Tawana Petty on the Fight Against Facial Recognition Surveillance — Logic(s) Magazine 2020

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

More like this: Fantasy Factory: AI Supervillains w/ Anat Shenker-Osorio

Valerie Veatch is the director of Ghost in the Machine, a new film that explores the depths of the Silicon Valley fantasies around AI, and platforms all the people that challenge these fantasies. With this film, Valerie is working to change the culture of AI: it is not inevitable, in many way it’s not even possible, and therefore we have a right to refuse to engage with it. Valerie discusses why she made the film, what she learned, and what impact she’s hoping it will have.

Ghost in the Machine will be available for rentals and screenings beginning March 27, via Kinema! Pre-sales are now available at open now (go to Kinema and slelect the "Watch" tab). Proceeds will go towards the production of the film. The film will also be available on PBS in fall 2026.

Further reading & resources:

• Trailer for Ghost in the Machine
• Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan
• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots by Emily Bender et al
• The TESCREAL Bundle by Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres
• Kinema — where you can watch Ghost in the Machine

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

And now Julia Angwin is suing them.

More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI & Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

In this episode Julia (and her lawyer Peter) discuss what happened with Grammarly, why she’s suing, and how neither of them can believe that this tool made it through their legal team and into the public realm.

Please email info@prf-law.com for more info, or if you would like your name to be searched in the list of experts that Grammarly used for their tool.

Further reading & resources:

• Julia’s op ed in the New York Times
• Pre-order Julia’s new book On Courage: How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
• Check out The Markup, founded by Julia
• Grammarly pulls AI author-impersonation tool after backlash — BBC 12th March 2026
• Shishir Mehrotra’s (CEO of Grammarly) apology on LinkedIn
• Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive — Wired 4th March 2026
• Grammarly is using our identities without permission — The Verge 6th March 2026
• Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it — Casey Newton, Platformer 9th March 2026
• Details of the case, from PRF Law, Julia’s representative firm

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

More like this: The Stories we Tell Ourselves About AI

This week in our second episode leading to the AI Doc, we are joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive campaign strategist who hosts the Words To Win By podcast. Anat tries to focus on the positives: if you don’t think people should join the AI party, throw a better party. She gives us some quick lessons on messaging: how to paint tech CEOs as actual villains, how to flip the script and convince AI men that actually, it’s okay to die — and how to avoid what Anat refers to as ‘Mar-a-lago face’

Further reading & resources:

• Listen to Anat’s podcast Words to Win by
• Pre-Suasion and Influence by Robert Cialdini
• Messaging This Moment — a critical handbook for progressive comms 

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

More like this: AI Safety’s Spiral of Urgency w/ Shazeda Ahmed

Or better yet, recommend that they buy More Everything Forever, Adam Becker’s latest book exploring all the fantasies and promises of coming out of Silicon Valley. This episode is the first in our Fantasy Factory series, where we explore how and why tech evangelists manufacture consent about AI’s boom, doom, and inevitability.

The futures that AI men want for us — e.g. a disembodied immortal life in AI utopia — are all scientifically impossible. Even the worse mass-extinction event on Earth would be more pleasant than trying to live on Mars. Yes, space is very cold, but it doesn’t mean we should put data centres out there! Adam explains where these narratives are coming from, who they benefit, and why they exist outside the laws of physics.

Further reading & resources:

• More about Adam Becker
• Buy More Everything Forever
• For All Mankind (TV series)
• Our video on the Iran war

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

More like this: Worker Power & Big Tech Boss Men w/ David Seligman

This week’s episode is a recording of our livestream from Monday: a litigator, regulator, and activist share their work and perspectives on coordinating bottom-up fights against Big Tech power, worker suppression, and unfair consumer practices. Speakers are:

• David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice and Democratic candidate for Colorado Attorney General
• Alvaro Bedoya, former Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and founding director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center
• Elliott “El’Bo” Awatt, Driver Organizer with Colorado Independent Drivers United

Further reading & resources:

• Alvaro Bedoya on how he became a populist
• Drivers for Lyft and Uber are building a national movement — Colorado Newsline 2024
• Uber Claims Transparency Law Complicates Rides and Takes Away Driver Perks – but Does It? — Westword, February 2025
• An AMA on Reddit with David Seligman

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

More like this: Last week’s episode with Meredith Whittaker, Audrey Tang, Abeba Birhane, and Usha Ramanathan

This week we’ll hear from Naomi Klein, who will discuss how ‘AI for Climate’ is very much not a thing; Nikhil Dey who shares all the ways powerful actors cosplay at having ‘accountability’; Timnit Gebru who explains that ‘frugal AI’ is something being made novel by the hype & scale of big tech business models; and finally Chinasa Okolo who will help us better understand the complexities of ‘multilateralism’.

Further reading & resources:

• More on Nikhil Dey — social activist and a founding member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)
• More on Timnit Gebru — founder of the DAIR institute
• More on Naomi Klein — author and professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia
• More on Chinasa Okolo — founder of Technecultura, a research institute focussing on AI governance for global majority countries
• The Guardian’s profile on Nikhil — June 2013
• More about MKSS involvement in the Campaign for the Right to Information in India
• The Screen New Deal — by Naomi Klein, The Intercept, 2020
• More on the cancellation of the Northern Gateway Pipeline
• Ghana NLP
• Watch this week’s interviews in full on Youtube
• RSVP to **The People's Policy: Holding Big Tech Accountable [Livestreamed Conversation + Q&A]** — happening on March 2nd 5:30pm MT

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More like this: AI In Gaza: Live from Mexico City

Surprise, surprise: the DoD feels that they should able to use AI models however they want, as long as its lawful — but… was this lawful? They are now threatening to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk. What does this all mean?

For this short, Alix was joined by Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Centre for Justice, to help us understand why the US defence department and an AI company are arguing about how best to us AI models for dehumanising and unjust military purposes.

Further reading & resources:

• Pentagon's use of Claude during Maduro raid sparks Anthropic feud — Axios, Feb 13
• Anthropic on shaky ground with Pentagon amid feud after Maduro raid — The Hill, Feb 19
• US used Anthropic's Claude during the Venezuela raid, WSJ reports — Reuters, Feb 16
• Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid — WSJ, Feb 15
• Amos’s Bluesky thread sharing more thoughts on the story

Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@themaybe.org

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More like this: Lingo Bingo at the India AI Summit w/ Karen Hao, Joan Kinyua, Chenai Chair, and Rafael Grohmann

With us this week to discuss co-opted terms is Meredith Whittaker on how ‘open source’ cannot meaninfully be applied to AI systems; Audrey Tang on ‘democratisation’, something which is both helped and harmed by AI; Abeba Birhane on everyone’s favourite slogan ‘AI for Good’; and Usha Ramanathan to discuss ‘AI and development’ in the context of the Aadhaar project in India.

Further reading & resources:

• More on Usha Ramanathan — legal researcher and human rights activist
• More on Abeba Birhane — principle investigator at the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin
• More on Meredith Whittaker — President of Signal
• More on Audrey Tang — Taiwan’s first Digital Minister
• Distributional AGI Safety — by Nenad Tomašev et al
• Watch this week’s interviews in full on Youtube

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More like this: The Vaporstate: All Hail Scale at the AI India Summit

We’ve partnered with the AI Now Institute and Aapti Institute to conduct twelve interviews based around the biggest and baddest terms we feel have been co-opted by global summits such as this one. This week we have Karen Hao discussing what it means to be ‘data rich’; Rafael Grohmann on the word ‘sovereignty’ and how it has a hundred definitions; Joan Kinyua on ‘human capital’, a key part of any AI development supply chain; and Chenai Chair, who will discuss ‘linguistic diversity’ — what it is, and what it isn’t.

These are just the best parts of the interviews — if you want to go deep and see each of these interviews in full, head to our Youtube channel now.

Further reading & resources:

• More about Rafael Grohmann — Assistant Professor of Media Studies with focus on Critical Platform and Data Studies at the University of Toronto
• More about Karen Hao — investigative journalist and author of Empire of AI
• More about Chenai Chair — director of the Masakhane African Languages Hub
• More about Joan Kinyua — president of the Data Labellers Association
• More on the Due Diligence Act
• More about the amendment to the Business Laws Act 2024
• What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? — Stephane Couture and Sophie Toupin
• Buy The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Joana Varon, and Clara Juliano
• Watch this week’s interviews in full on Youtube (link to playlist of interviews)

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More like this: Paris Post-Mortem (live)

For our final instalment of The Vaporstate, Alix is joined by Astha Kapoor and Amba Kak to reflect on the series, and discuss the upcoming AI Action Summit in India. This is the first time this summit is being hosted by a global majority country — will this create new opportunities for civil society to have a say, or is this just yet another chance for tech companies to whisper magic AI spells into the ear of government?

The end of The Vaporstate series marks the beginning of another series, made in partnership with AI Now and Aapti Institute: in the run up to the AI Summit, we want to rethink the terms that have been co-opted by government and industry. Terms like ‘sovereignty’, ‘AI for good’, and ‘human capital’. We interviewed twelve experts who unpack how these terms are framed in global summits like this one — watch this space for conversations with Naomi Klein, Meredith Whitaker, and Karen Hao, to name a few.

Further reading & resources:

• Mark Carney’s speech at Davos January 2026
• Watch the first batch of interviews discussing co-opted terms used in and around the upcoming summit

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More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

In our third installment of The Vaporstate, we are joined by two journalists from Lighthouse Reports, who tell all about their investigation into the questionable relationship between Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the Tony Blair Institute, and the current Labour government. What is the Tony Blair Institute and why did Ellison give them millions of dollars? What does any of this have to do with national IDs and NHS data? And if you’re a government official somewhere around the world, and TBI comes knocking to sell you an AI future what you should do…?

Further reading & resources:

• Britain must treat tech giants like nation states — The Times, 2024
• Backlight — Lighthouse’s monthly podcast
• Blair and the Billionaire — Lighthouse Reports 2025
• Inside The Tony Blair Institute — Lighthouse journalists Peter Geoghegan and May Bulman are interviewed by The New Statesman
• Do you have a story that you think is missing from public discourse? Here’s how to get in touch with Lighthouse
• Questions Alix proposed for the Sundance panel — as mentioned in the intro.

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More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

For episode two of The Vaporstate, Alix is joined by Rafael Zanatta and Luã Cruz. Rafa walks us through the incredible story of how his mom’s digital ID was stolen and a clever bank teller stopped someone from halfway across the country from stealing her savings. Luã ****shares the geopolitical battles that prevented a Meta takeover of Brazilian peer-to-peer payment and the roll out of a frictionless financial transaction system called PIX.

Further reading & resources:

• Brazil Has The World’s Most Accessed Citizen Services Platform — Forbes, March 2024
• More about Data Privacy Brazil
• The Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu — New York Times, 2018
• Works by South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han
• Lula pushing back against Trump’s tariffs — AP, September 2025
• More about The Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection

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More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake

Joining Alix for part one of The Vaporstate is Mila Samdub, Astha Kapoor, and Usha Ramanathan. Together they discuss the conception of Aadhaar, India’s key piece of digital public infrastructure, and how it morphed from a simple digital ID to something that unifies payments, phone plans, and biometrics.

Further reading & resources:

• More about Usha Ramanathan — legendary lawyer and activist who has been pushing back on the Aadhaar programme for over a decade
• More about Astha Kapoor — co-founder of the Aapti Institute
• More about Mila Samdub — designer, writer, and CyberBRICS Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, FGV Rio
• Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology — by Abeba Birhane et al, Nature Journal
• Aadhaar 2.0 workshop
• Walmart Takes Ownership of PhonePe from Flipkart — The Times of India, 2022
• Walmart invests $200 million in Indian mobile payments giant PhonePe — TechCrunch, 2023
• Google launches India mobile payments app Tez — BBC, 2017
• Identity Verification Standards in Welfare Programs: Experimental Evidence from India — Karthik Muralidharan et al, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021
• Aadhaar: Costs of Digital Red Tape — Reetika Khera & Amod Moharil, Economic & Political Weekly, 2024
• Overload, Creep, Excess – An Internet from India — Nafis Hasan et al, Institute of Network Cultures, 2022
• Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12 Digit Revolution — Shankkar Aiyar, Westland, 2017

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The Vaporstate is a deep exploration of digital public infrastructure: we will hear from the journalists, civil society groups, and lawyers from around the world who are watching these projects develop, and how this digital scaffolding shapes our lives.

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More like this: Straight to Video: From Rodney King to Sora w/ Sam Gregory

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it produce something totally new, or just mash together stereotypical aesthetics from Picasso’s work, and 16th century Japan? Can generative AI really create anything new if it can only draw from existing imagery?

Further reading:

• What I Read About AI in 2025 — by Eryk Salvaggio
• Visit Eryk’s Website
• Cybernetic Forests — Eryk’s newsletter on tech and culture

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More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised reverse centaur’ is…

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Enshittifcation now from Verso Books!
• Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
• On The Media series on Enshittification
• Pluralistic — Daily Links and essays by Cory Doctorow
• Conservatism Considered as a Movement of Bitter Rubes — Cory on why conservatism creates a friendly environment for scams
• How I Got Scammed — Cory on his personal experiences of being scammed
• All of Cory’s books
• All (Antitrust) Politics Are Local — the entry to Pluralistic that Cory wrote on the day of recording

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More like this: The Human in the Loop: The AI Supply Chain

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Alix and David talk about legal devices such as forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression — and the cases that David’s team are bringing to fight these practices

Further reading & resources

• Seligman for Attorney General Colorado
• Towards Justice California drivers lawsuit
• Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banal State of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel
• Prohibiting Surveillance Prices and Wages by Towards Justice
• Gill VS Uber — class action led by Towards Justice

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More like this: Net 0++ AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

AI companies are flagrantly obstructive when it comes to sharing information about their infrastructure — this makes reporting on the climate injustices of AI really hard. Karen shares the tactics that these companies use, and the challenges that she has faced in her investigative reporting.

Further reading:

• Buy Empire of AI by Karen Hao
• Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI by Karen Hao
• AI is Taking Water from the Desert by Karen Hao

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More like this: Dogwhistles: Networked Transphobia Online

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child safety isn’t a new concept, and the way our politics focuses on the spectacle isn’t new either.

To help us unpack this is Kate Sim, who has over a decade of experience in sexual violence prevention and response and is currently the Director of the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program at the University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab. We discuss the growth of ‘child safety’ regulation around the world, and how it often conflates multiple topics: age-gating adult content, explicit attempts to harm children, national security, and even ‘family values’.

Further reading & resources:

• On COSPRs forthcoming paper on the CSAM detection ecosystem. Here is a fact sheet with ecosystem map based on it: https://bit.ly/cospr-collateral
• On CSAM bottleneck problem: https://doi.org/10.25740/pr592kc5483
• IBCK episode on the Anxious Generation: https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/47a8aa95c83be96b044dcb3f4e43d158
• Child psychology expert Candace Odgers debunking Jonathan Haidt’s claims in real-time here: https://tyde.virginia.edu/event/haidt-odgers/)
• A primer on client-side scanning and CSAM from Mitali Thakor: https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/701yvdbh/release/2
• On effective CSA prevention and scalability: https://www.prevention.global/resources/read-full-scalability-report

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This week Alix is joined by two members of The Maybe team: Prathm Juneja and Georgia Iacovou. We discuss our favourite episodes from the year while making it clear we love all episodes equally. And also this is not your standard clip show. We ask ourselves what we learned, why it was important to us, and what we are hungry for in 2026.

Featured episodes:

• Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake
• Nodestar: Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser
• Regulating Privacy in an AI Era w/ Carly Kind
• To be Seen and Not Watched w/ Tawana Petty
• The Taiwan Bottleneck w/ Brian Chen
• Gotcha! How MLMs Ate the Economy w/ Bridget Read
• Also mentioned in this episode: AI in Gaza Live from Mexico City

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Head to our feed for more conversations from MozFest with Abeba Birhane, Audrey Tang, and Luisa Franco Machado.

Further reading & resources:

• Read The Onion, America’s finest news source, if you don’t already…
• The Onion to buy Infowars

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Further reading & resources:

• 6-Pack of Care — a research project by Audrey Tang and Caroline Green as part of the Institute for Ethics in AI
• More about Kami — the Japanese local spirits Audrey mentions throughout the conversation
• The Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI

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Further reading & resources:

• Learn more about Equilabs
• Follow Luisa on Instagram — sorry, email is too ‘analog’
• Check out her Linktree

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Further reading & resources:

• Abeba’s blog post on the UN censoring her talk on AI
• More about Abeba
• More about The AI Accountability Lab

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

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More like this: FAccT 2025 episodes one and two

This is an extra special episode packed full of conversations and on-site impressions of the biggest Mozfest we’ve had in years. This year Alix moderated three panels, ran an AMA, and even hosted a game show — and somehow also had time to record all of this, for your pleasure.

Included in this episode is:

• A preview of Exposing and Reshaping the Global Footprint of Data Centers, with independent journalist Pablo Jiménez Arandia, Tessa Pang (impact editor for Lighthouse Reports), and Paz Peña (Mozilla Fellow, and founder of the Latin American Institute of Terraforming.)
• A conversation with Hana Memon, developer at Gen Z for Change
• A conversation with creative technologist Malik Afegbua, on his project The Elder Series
• Nabiha Syed and Helen Turvey will also reflect on how this Mozfest went, and what they hope to see for the future of the festival in the coming years

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

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More like this: Independent Researchers in a Platform Era w/ Brandi Guerkink

Building knowledge is more important than ever in times like these. This week, we have three guests. Megan Price from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) shares how statistics and data science can be used to get justice. Janet Haven and Charlton McIlwan from Data & Society explore the role that research institutions can offer to bridge research knowledge and policy prescription.

Further reading & resources:

• HRDAG’s involvement in the trial of José Efraín Ríon Montt
• A profile of Guatemala and timeline of its conflict — BBC (last updated in 2024)
• To Protect and Serve? — a study on predictive policing by William Isaac and Kristian Lum
• An article about the above study — The Appeal
• HRDAG’s stand against tyranny
• More on Understanding AI — Data & Society’s event series with the New York Public Library
• About Janet Haven, Executive Director of Data & Society
• About Charlton McIlwan, board president of Data & Society
• Bias in Computer Systems by Helen Nissenbaum
• Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies
• If you want to hear more about the history of D&S, the full conversation is up on Youtube (add link when we have).

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More like this: Nodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask

So much of tech research happens within the tech industry itself, because it requires data access, funding, and compute. But what the tech industry has in resources, it lacks in independence, scruples, and a public interest imperative. Alix is joined by Brandi Guerkink from The Coalition of Independent Tech Research to discuss her work at a time where platforms have never been so opaque, and funding has never been so sparse

Further Reading & Resources:

• More about Brandi and The Coalition
• Understanding Engagement with U.S. (Mis)Information News Sources on Facebook by Laura Edelson & Dan McCoy
• More on Laura Edelson
• More on Dan McCoy
• Jim Jordan bringing in Nigel Farage from the UK to legitimise his attacks on EU tech regulations — Politico
• Ted Cruz on preventing jawboning & government censorship of social media — Bloomberg
• Judge dismisses ‘vapid’ Elon Musk lawsuit against group that cataloged racist content on X — The Guardian
• See the CCDH’s blog post on getting the case thrown out
• Platforms are blocking independent researchers from investigating deepfakes by Ariella Steinhorn

Disclosure: This guest is a PR client of our consultancy team. As always, the conversation reflects our genuine interest in their work and ideas.

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More like this: Algorithmically Cutting Benefits w/ Kevin De Liban

Luckily people like Soizic Pénicaud are working to prevent the modern welfare state from becoming a web of punishment of the most marginalised. Soizic has worked on algorithmic transparency both in and outside of a government context, and this week will share her journey from working on incrementally improving these systems (boring, ineffective, hard) — to escaping the slow pace of government and looking at the bigger picture of algorithmic governance, and how it can build better public benefit in France (fun, transformative, and a good challenge).

Soizic is working to shift political debates about opaque decision-making algorithms to focus on what they’re really about: the marginalised communities who’s lives are most effected by these systems.

Further reading & resources:

• The Observatory of Public Algorithms and their Inventory
• The ongoing court case against the French welfare agency's risk-scoring algorithm
• More about Soizic
• More on the Transparency of Public Algorithms roadmap from Etalab — the task force Soizic was part of
• La Quadrature du Net
• France’s Digital Inquisition — co-authored by Soizic in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports, 2023
• AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament ‘false starts’ — The Guardian Jan 2025
• Learning from Cancelled Systems by Data Justice Lab
• The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment — by Nari Johnson et al, featured in FAccT 2024

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More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI and Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

We talked to a global expert and leading voice on this issue for the past 20 years, Sam Gregory to get his take. We started way back in 1992 when Rodney King was assaulted by 4 police officers in Los Angeles. Police brutality was (and is) commonplace, but something different happened in this case. Someone used a camcorder and caught it on video. It changed our understanding about the role video could play in accountability. And in the past 30 years, we’ve gone from seeking video as evidence and advocacy, to AI slop threatening to seismically reshape our shared realities.

Now apps like Sora provide impersonation-as-entertainment. How did we get here?

Further reading & resources:

• More on the riots following Rodney King’s murder — NPR
• More about Sam and Witness
• ObscuraCam — a privacy-preserving camera app from WITNESS and The Guardian Project
• C2PA: the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity
• Deepfakes Rapid Response Force by WITNESS

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Post Production by Sarah Myles

More like this: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes

This week Alix is joined by Nic Dawes, who until very recently ran the non-profit newsroom The City. In this conversation we explore journalism’s new found toxic relationship with AI and big tech: can journalists meaningfully use AI in their work? If a model summarises a few documents, does that add a new layer of efficiency, or inadvertently oversimplify? And what can we learn from big tech positioning itself as a helpful friend to journalism during the Search era?

Beyond the just accurate relaying of facts, journalistic organisations also represent an entire backlog of valuable training data for AI companies. If you don’t have the same resources as the NYT, suing for copyright infringement isn’t an option — so what then? Nic says we have to break out of the false binary of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them!’

Further reading & resources:

• Judge allows ‘New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI to go forward — NPR
• Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society — Reuters Institute
• An example of The City’s investigative reporting: private equity firms buying up property in the Bronx — 2022
• The Intimacy Dividend — Shuwei Fang
• Sam Altman on Twitter announcing that they’ve improved ChatGPT to be mindful of the mental health effects — “We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but…”

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More like this: Defying Datafication w/ Abeba Birhane

Alix sat down with Nabiha Syed to chat through her first year as the new leader of Mozilla Foundation. How does she think about strategy in this moment? What role does she want the foundation to play? And crucially, how is she stewarding a community of human-centered technology builders in a time of hyper-scale and unchecked speculation?

As Nabiha says, “restraint is a design principle too”.

Plug: We’ll be at MozFest this year broadcasting live and connecting with all kinds of folks. If you’re feeling the FOMO, be on the look out for episodes we produce about our time there.

Further reading & resources:

• Watch this episode on YouTube
• Imaginative Intelligences — a programme of artist assemblies run by Mozilla Foundation
• Nothing Personal — a new counterculture editorial platform from the Mozilla Foundation
• More about Mozfest
• Nabiha on the Computer Says Maybe live show at the 2025 AI Action Summit
• Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in the era of Trump and AI — The Register
• Nabiha on why she joined MF as executive director — MF Blog

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More like this: The Collective Intelligence Project w/ Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew

Why are individuals are confiding in chatbots over qualified human therapists? Stevie Chancellor explains why an LLM can’t replace a therapeutic relationship — but often there’s just no other choice. Turns out the chatbots designed specifically for therapy are even worse than general models like ChatGPT; Stevie shares her ideas on how LLMs could potentially be used — safely — for therapeutic support. This is really helpful primer on how to evaluate chatbots for specific, human-replacing tasks.

Further reading & resources:

• Stevie’s paper on whether replacing therapists with LLMs is even possible (it’s not)
• See the research on Github
• People are Losing Their Loved Ones to AI-Fuelled Spiritual Fantasies — Rolling Stone (May 2025)
• Silicon Valley VC Geoff Lewis becomes convinced that ChatGPT is telling him government secrets from the future
• Loneliness considered a public health epidemic according to the APA
• FTC orders online therapy company BetterHelp to pay damages of $7.8m
• Delta plans to use AI in ticket pricing draws fire from US lawmakers — Reuters July 2025

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More like this: Chasing Away Sidewalk Labs w/ Bianca Wylie

When Hilary Ronen was on the board of supervisors for San Francisco, she had to make lots of decisions about technology. She felt unprepared. Now she sees local policymakers on the frontlines of a battle of resources and governance in an AI era, and is working to upskill them to make better decisions for their constituents. No degree in computer science required.

Further reading & resources:

• Local Leadership in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and the Tech Oligarchy by Hillary Ronen
• More on Hillary’s work as a Supervisor for SF
• Hillary Ronen on progressives, messaging, hard choices, and justice — interview in 48Hills from January 2025
• More about Local Progress
• Confronting Preemption — a short briefing by Local Progress
• What Happens When State and Local Laws Conflict — article on state-level preemption by State Court Report

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More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick

This is our final episode of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology both amplifies and obscures them. For this final instalment we have Cory Doctorow on to chat about his new book Enshittification.

Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised reverse centaur’ is…

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Enshittifcation now from Verso Books!
• Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
• On The Media series on Enshittification
• Pluralistic — Daily Links and essays by Cory Doctorow
• Conservatism Considered as a Movement of Bitter Rubes — Cory on why conservatism creates a friendly environment for scams
• How I Got Scammed — Cory on his personal experiences of being scammed
• All of Cory’s books
• All (Antitrust) Politics Are Local — the entry to Pluralistic that Cory wrote on the day of recording

More like this: Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays

This is part three of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. This week Lana Swartz and Alice Marwick join Alix to discuss their primer on how generative AI is automating fraud.

We dig into the very human, very dark world of the scam industry, where the scammers are often being exploited in highly sophisticated human trafficking operations — and are now using generative AI to scale up and speed up.

We talk about how you probably aren’t going to get a deepfake call from a family member to demand a ransom, but the threats are still evolving in ways that are scary and until now largely unregulated. And as ever even though the problems are made worse by technology, we explore the limitations of technology and laws to stem the tide.

Further reading & resources:

• Read the primer here!
• More about Lana Swartz
• More about Alice Marwick
• New Money by Lana Swartz
• Scam: Inside Southeast Asia's Cybercrime Compounds by Mark Bo, Ivan Franceschini, and Ling Li
• Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people
• Al Jazeera True Crime Report on scamming farms in South East Asia
• Scam Empire project by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

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More like this: AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy

It was just climate week in NYC and we did a live show on data centers with four amazing guests from around the US…

Thank you to the Luminate Foundation for sponsoring this live show and for all of our NY-based friends, and network from around the world that made it to Brooklyn for a magical evening. You can also watch the live recording on Youtube.

• KeShaun Pearson (Memphis Community Against Pollution) will break down how Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer is polluting the air of historically Black neighborhoods in Memphis, and how organizers are fighting back against yet another chapter of corporate extraction in their communities.
• KD Minor (Alliance for Affordable Energy) will demystify the energy impacts of data centers in Louisiana and share organizing strategies to mobilize community opposition to Big Tech and Big Oil infrastructure.
• Marisol (No Desert Data Center) will talk about their grassroots coalition’s recent win in Tucson to stop Amazon’s Project Blue data center proposal, which threatened the city’s scarce water supply, and how they’re organizing for future protections.
• Amba Kak (AI Now Institute) will talk us through the bigger picture: what’s behind Big Tech’s AI data center expansion, who stands to benefit from this boom, and what we sacrifice in return.

Further reading & resources:

• Amazon Web Services is company behind Tucson’s Project Blue, according to 2023 county memo — from Luminaria
• Tuscon to create new policies around NDAs following the councils regret around not knowing more about Project Blue — from Luminaria
• How Marana, also in the Tuscon area, employed an ordinance to regulate water usage after learning about data center interest in the area.
• xAI has requested an additional 150MGW of power for Colossus in Memphis, bring it to a total of 300MGW
• Time reports on increase in nitrogen dioxide pollution around Memphis due to xAI turbines
• Keshaun and Justin Pearson on Democracy Now discussing xAI’s human rights violations
• Meta’s Mega Data Center Could Strain Louisiana’s Grid — and Entergy Isn’t Prepared — report by the Alliance for Affordable Energy
• 'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community — 404 Media

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More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now

Alix sat down with Sarah Myers-West to go through the particulars of this deal, and other similar deals that are propping up AI’s industry of vapour. This is not your traditional bubble that’s about to burst — there is no bubble, it’s just that The New Normal is to pour debt into an industry that cannot promise any returns…

Further reading & resources:

• More on the Nvidia OpenAI deal — CNBC
• Analysts refer to deal as ‘vendor financing’ — Insider Monkey
• Spending on AI is at Epic Levels. Will it Ever Pay Off? — WSJ
• OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle spending $500bn on data centre expansion in Abilene — Reuters
• How Larry Ellison used the AI boom and the Tony Blair Institute to bolster his wealth
• Oracle funding Open AI data centers with heaps of debt and will have to borrow at least $25bn a year — The Register

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More like this: Worker Power & Big Tech Bossmen w/ David Seligman

This is part two of Gotcha! Our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is super-charging them. This week Bridget Read came to Alix with a very exciting business opportunity. Bridget authored Little Bosses Everywhere — a book on the history of MLM.

We explore how door-to-door sales in the mid 20th century US took on the business model of a ponzi scheme, and transformed the sweaty salesman into an entrepreneurial recruiter with a downline.

MLM originators were part of a coordinated plan to challenge the new deal in lieu of radical free enterprise, where the only thing holding you back is yourself, and the economy consists solely of consumers selling to each other in a market of speculation. The secret is, no one is selling a product — they’re selling a way of life.

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Bridget’s book: Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
• Family Values by Melinda Cooper
• The Missing Crypto Queen: a podcast by BBC Sounds, about a large scale crypto scam, where there wasn’t even any crypto
• LuLaRoe — the pyramid scheme that tricked American mums into selling cheap clothes to their friends and family with the promise of financial independence.
• My Experience of Being in a Pyramid Scheme (Amway) — a personal account by Darren Mudd on LinkedIn
• Watch our recent live show at NYC Climate Week

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More like this: Making Myths to Make Money w/ AI Now

This is Gotcha! A four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. We start with Mark Hays from Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), and get into one of the biggest tech-fuelled financial scams out there: cryptocurrencies.

Like many things that require mass-buy in, crypto started with an ideology (libertarianism, people hating on Wall Street post 2008). But where does that leave us now? What has crypto morphed into since then, and how does it deceive both consumers and regulators into thinking it’s something that it’s not?

Further reading & resources:

• Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
• Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington
• The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia
• Learn more about Americans for Financial Reform
• Check out Web3 Is Going Great by Molly White
• Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas — an excellent survey of all the tactics and rug-pulls during the height of the NFT boom
• The Missing Crypto Queen: a podcast by BBC Sounds, about a large scale crypto scam, where there wasn’t even any crypto

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In the series we look at:

1. Crypto: Mark Hays on how a thing touting financial freedom ended up being a kind of fin-cult, rife with scamming
2. Multi-Level Marketing : Bridget Read on the history of the biggest and most successful type of scam that still plagues us today
3. Generative AI: Data & Society’s primer on how generative AI is juicing the scam industrial complex
4. Enshittification: Cory Doctorow on his upcoming book, and how the process of Enchittification represents user-hostile practices that scam people into paying more, and ecosystem lock-in

More like this: **The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio**

In our final instalment (for now!) of Nodestar, Andrew Trask shares his vision for a world where we can assembly understanding from data everywhere. But not in a way that requires corporate control of our world.

If broadcasting is the act of talking to multiple people at once — what about broad listening? Where you listen to multiple sources of information, and actually learn something, without trampling over the control that individuals have over who sees what, when.

Andrew says that broad listening is difficult to achieve because of three huge problems: information overload, privacy, and veracity — and we are outsourcing these problems to central authorities, who abuse their power in deciding how to relay information to the public. What is Andrew doing at OpenMined to remedy this? Building protocols that decentralise access to training data for model development, obviously.

Further Reading & Resources

• The Computer as a Communication Device by JCR Licklider and Robert W Taylor, 1968
• World Brain by HG Wells
• Learn more about OpenMined
• We’re gonna be streaming LIVE at Climate Week — subscribe to our Youtube

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More like this: How to (actually) Keep Kids Safe Online w/ Kate Sim

This is part two of Nodestar, our three-part series on decentralisation. Blacksky is a community built using the AT Protocol by Rudy Fraser. Rudy built this both out of a creative drive to make something new using protocol thinking, and out of frustration over a lack of safe community spaces for black folks where they could be themselves, and not have to experience anti-black racism or misogynoir as a price of entry.

Rudy and Alix discuss curation as moderation, the future of community stewardship, freeing ourselves from centralised content decision-making, how technology might connect with mutual aid, and the beauty of what he refers to as ‘dotted-line communities’.

Further reading:

• Blacksky Algorithms
• Blacksky the app — if you want an alternative to Bluesky
• More about Rudy Fraser
• Open Collective — a fiscal host for communities and non-profits
• Paper Tree — community food bank
• The Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities by Nathan Schneider
• Flashes — a 3rd party Bluesky app for viewing photos
• The Tyranny of Struturelessness by Joreen

Rudy is a technologist, community organizer, and founder of Blacksky Algorithms, where he builds decentralized social media infrastructure that prioritizes community-driven safety, data ownership, and interoperability. As a Fellow at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, he advances research and development on technology that empowers marginalized communities, particularly Black users

More like this: Big Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx

This is part one of Nodestar, a three-part series on decentralisation: how the internet started as a wild west of decentralised exploration, got centralised into the hands of a small number of companies, and how the pendulum has begun it’s swing in the other direction.

In this episode Mike Masnick gives us a history of the early internet — starting with what was called the Eternal September, when millions of AOL users flooded the scene, creating a messy, unpredictable, exciting ecosystem of open protocols and terrible UIs.

Further reading & resources:

• Protocols, Not Platforms by Mike Masnick
• List of apps being built on AT Protocol
• Graze — a service to help you make custom feed with ads on AT proto
• Otherwise Objectionable — an eight part podcast series on the history of section 230
• Techdirt podcast
• CTRL-ALT-SPEECH podast

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More like this: Net0++: Data Centre Sprawl

Local government rejected the data center. But Starmer’s administration overruled them. They want to force the development of a water-guzzling, energy draining data center on a local community who has said no. And all of this is on the green belt. The lawsuit filed this week might put a stop to those plans.

Alix sat down Ollie Hayes from Global Action Plan and Martha Dark from Foxglove to discuss the legal challenge filed this week. Why now? Aren’t the UK aiming for Net 0? And how does this relate to the UK government’s wider approach to AI?

Further reading & resources:

• Read the Guardian article about the suit
• Read the Telegraph piece about the suit
• Donate to the campaign
• Data Centre Finder on Global Action Plan

Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@themaybe.org

More like this: Big Dirty Data Centres with Boxi Wu and Jenna Ruddock

This week, Paris Marx (host of Tech Won’t Save Us) joined Alix to chat about his recent work on hyperscale data centres, and his upcoming book on the subject

We discuss everything from the US shooting itself in the foot with it’s lack of meaningful industrial policy and how decades of lackluster political vision from governments created a vacuum that has now been filled with Silicon Valley's garbage ideas. And of course, how the US’s outsourcing of manufacturing to China has catalysed China’s domestic technological progress.

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Road To Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx
• Data Vampires — limited series on data centres by Tech Won’t Save Us
• Apple in China by Patrick McGee

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More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake

Cori Crider is a fearless litigator turned market-shaping advocate. She started litigating during many years at leading human rights organisation Reprieve, and then moved on to co-founding Foxglove so she could sue big tech. Now she’s set her sights on market concentration.

Cori’s analysis concludes with a hopeful message: we are not stuck in place with eight dudes running the show. In fact, we’ve been here before. The computer age never would have happened the way it did if thousands of patents weren’t liberated from Bell Labs in 1956. How can we use similar tactics to dethrone monopolies and think about how Europe and other large jurisdictions can decouple themselves from silicon valley infrastructure?

Further reading & resources:

• Antitrust Policy for the Conservative by Mark Meader of the FTC
• The Open Markets Institute
• The Future of Tech Institute

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Do you have an idea for the show? Email pod@themaybe.org

More like this: Part One of our FAccT roundup: Materiality and Militarisation.

Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her!

In part two we look into how AI is used to misrepresent people through things like image generation, and even care labour. These are conversations about AI misrepresenting hidden identities, care work becoming data work, how pride and identity is tied to labour — and how labour organisers are building solidarity and movement around this.

Who features in this episode:

• Priya Goswami brought a multimedia exhibition to FAccT: Digital Bharat. This explores the invisibilised care work and manual labour by women in India, and how their day-to-day has become mediated by digital public infrastructures.
• Kimi Wenzel organised Invisible by Design? Generative AI and Mirrors of Misrepresentation, which invited users to confront generated images of themselves and discuss issues of representation within these systems.
• Alex Hanna and Clarissa Redwine ran the AI Workers Inquiry, which brought people together to share in how AI has transformed their work, identify common ground, and potentially begin building resistance.

Further reading & resources:

• Circuit Breakers — tech worker conference organised by Clarissa Redwine
• Kimi Wenzel’s research
• Buy The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily Bender

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In this short Nic shares his perspective on how post-apartheid white communities have dealt with apartheid’s end. And how Musk is basically seeking out an information environment that can recreate the apartheid information system: Grok is just an extension of a media ecosystem designed to soothe guilt and stoke resentment.

Computer Says Maybe Shorts cover recent news with an expert in our network. If there is a news story you want us to cover, please email pod@themaybe.org

Nic is Executive Director at THE CITY, a news outlet serving the people of New York through independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, deepens democratic participation, and helps make sense of the greatest city in the world. He has led news and human rights organizations on three continents, and was previously Deputy Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Chief Content Officer of Hindustan Times in Delhi, and Editor-in-Chief of South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper.

In part one we explore the depth of AI’s hidden material impacts, including its use in military applications and to aid genocide. One of our interviewees talked about why they spoke up at the town hall — questioning why FAccT, the biggest AI ethics conference there is, accepts sponsorship from those same military contractors.

Who we interviewed for Part One:

• Charis Papaevangelou who co-organised a CRAFT session called The Hidden Costs of Digital Sovereignty. Greece is trying to position itself as a central digital hub by building data centres and participating in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ — but what does this actually mean for the people and infrastructure of Greece?
• Georgia Panagiotidou ran a session on The Tools and Tactics for Supporting Agency in AI Environmental Action — offering some ideas on how the community can get together and meaningfully resist extractive practices.
• David Widder discussed his workshop on Silicon Valley and The Pentagon, and his research on the recent history of the DoD funding academic papers — is it ever worth taking military money, even for basic research?
• Tania Duarte offered something very different: a demonstration of two workshops she runs for marginalised groups, to better explain the true materiality of AI, and build knowledge that gives people more agency over the dominant narratives and framings in the industry.

Further reading & resources:

• Recording of Charis’s CRAFT session: The Hidden Cost of Digital Sovereignty
• Cloud hiding undersea: Cables & Data Centers in the Mediterranean crossroads by Theodora Kostaka
• Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment and Why ‘open’ AI systems are actually closed and why this matters by David Widder
• The video that David quoted the Carnegie Mellon professor from — David was paraphrasing in the episode!
• We and AI & Better Images of AI
• More on Georgia Panagiotidou’s work and resources from her session

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This report isn’t a boring survey of what AI Now have been doing this year; it’s a comprehensive view of the state of AI, and the concentrated powers that prop it up. What are the latest AI-shaped solutions that the hype guys are trying to convince us are real? And how can we reclaim a positive agenda for innovation — and unstick ourselves from a path towards pseudo religious AGI.

Further reading & resources:

• Read the AI Now 2025 Landscape Report: Artificial Power

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*Amba Kak has spent the last fifteen years designing and advocating for technology policy in the public interest, across government, industry, and civil society roles – and in many parts of the world. Amba brings this experience to her current role co-directing AI Now, a New York-based research institute where she leads on advancing diagnosis and actionable policy to tackle concerns with artificial intelligence and concentrated power. She has served as Senior Advisor on AI to the Federal Trade Commission and was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024.*

*Sarah Myers-West has spent the last fifteen years interrogating the role of technology companies and their emergence as powerful political actors on the front lines of international governance. Sarah brings this depth of expertise to policymaking in her current role co-directing AI Now, with a focus on addressing the market incentives and infrastructures that shape tech’s role in society at large and ensuring it serves the interests of the public. Her forthcoming book, Tracing Code (University of California Press) draws on years of historical and social science research to examine the origins of data capitalism and commercial surveillance.*

Further reading & resources:

• Scratch — a high level programming language aimed at kids
• Hedy — the programming language that Felienne designed
• Join in and help out with Hedy!
• GenderMag by Margaret Burnett — how to ensure more gender inclusiveness in your software
• Elm — an easy and kind browser-based programming language
• A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans & Ari Schlesinger
• A Framework for the Localization of Programming Languages by Felienne Hermans & Alaaeddin Swidan

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Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, a gradual and multi-lingual programming language designed for teaching. She is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain“, a book that helps programmers understand how their brain works and how to use it more effectively. In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research. She also has a weekly column on BNR, a Dutch radio station.

And how do we combat the amazing hero-god narratives of Silicon Valley without reinforcing them?

Alix went to storytelling festival ZEG Fest in Tbilisi to chat with three amazing storytellers about that challenge:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It: who discusses how to use humour and satire to keep things simple — and that stories are not ‘made up’, but rather a way to relay a series of facts and concepts that are complex and difficult to process.
• Chris Wylie, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: on how the promise of superintelligence and transhumanism is basically like a religious prophecy. His new show Captured explores the stories that tech elites are telling us about our utopian AI future.
• Adam Pincus, producer of The Laundromat and Leave no Trace: shares his frustrations with the perceived inevitability of AI in his day to day, and also tells us more about his podcast series ‘What Could Go Wrong?’ in which he explores writing a Contagion sequel with director Scott Burns.

Further reading & resources:

• Captured: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover — limited podcast series featuring Chris Wylie
• **‘Contagion’ Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns Asks AI to Write a Sequel to Pandemic Film in Audible Original Series ‘What Could Go Wrong?’** — Variety article
• What Could Go Wrong? — limited podcast series by Scott Burns

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Shocking: these narratives stem from large tech companies, and this represents what Marietje Schaake refers to as a Tech Coup — which is the title of her book (which you should buy!).

The Tech Coup refers to the inability of democratic policymakers to provide oversight, regulation, and even visibility into the structural systems that big tech is building, managing, and selling. Marietje and Alix discuss what happens when you have a system of states whose knowledge and confidence have been gutted over decades — hindering them from providing good services, and understanding how to meaningfully regulate the tech space.

Further Reading & Resources:

• Buy The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake

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Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of **The Tech Coup.**

Last week Alix hosted a live show in Mexico City right after REAL ML. Four panellists discussed a huge important topic, which has been wrongfully deemed as taboo by other conferences: the use of AI and other technologies to support the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

Here’s a preview of what the four speakers shared:

• Karen Palacio AKA kardaver gave us an overview of Operation Condor — a program of psychological warfare that ran in the late 20th century in South America to suppress activist voices.
• Marwa Fatafta explains how these methods are still used today against Palestinians; there are coordinated surveillance projects that make Palestinian citizens feel they are living in a panopticon, and the granular data storage and processing is facilitated by AWS, Google, and Azure.
• Matt Mahmoudi goes on to describe how these surveillance projects have crystallised into sophisticated CCTV and facial recognition networks through which Palestinians are continuously dehumanised via face-scanning and arbitrary checks that restrict movements.
• Wanda Muñez discusses how fully autonomous weapons obviously violate human rights in all kinds of ways — but ‘AI ethics’ frameworks never make any considerations for machines that make life or death decisions.

Further reading & resources:

• The Biometric State by Keith Breckenridge — where the phrase ‘automated apartheid’ was conceived
• COGWAR Report by Karen Palacio, AKA Kardaver

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Wanda Muñez is an international consultant with twenty years of experience in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs and policies on human rights, gender equality, inclusion and the rights of people with disabilities. Wanda has worked for international NGOs and UN organizations in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. She became involved in the field of artificial intelligence in 2017, initially through the analysis of its intersection with International Humanitarian Law in the issues of autonomous weapons systems; and later focusing on the intersection between human rights and AI. In 2020, she was nominated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico as an independent expert at the Global Alliance on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), where she contributed to various publications and panels, and led the design of the research “Towards true gender equality and diversity in AI” that is currently being implemented. In 2020, Wanda Muñoz was recognized by the Nobel Women's Initiative as "a peacebuilder working for peace, justice and equality" and by UNLIREC as one of Latin America's "forces of change, working for humanitarian disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control. Wanda also just recently won DEI Champion of Year Award from Women in AI.

Karen Palacio, aka kardaver, is an interdisciplinary digital artist, industrial programmer specialized in AI, and data scientist from Córdoba, Argentina. She researches and creates through iterative loops of implementation and reflection, aiming to understand what it means to articulate artistic-technological discourses from the Global South. Her performances, installations, and audiovisual works engage critically and rootedly with the depths of computation, the histories of computing and archives, freedom of knowledge, feminisms, and the pursuit of technological sovereignty. She develops and works with Free Software in her processes, resemanticizing technologies she knows from her background as an industrial programmer.

Dr Matt Mahmoudi is Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and a Researcher/Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights at Amnesty International. Matt’s work has looked at AI-driven surveillance from the NYPD’s surveillance machine to Automated Apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory. Matt is author of Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Controls (University of California Press, February 2025), and co-editor of Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence (Haymarket, 2024) together with Mizue Aizeki and Coline Schupfer.

Marwa Fatafta leads Access Now’s policy and advocacy work on digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Her work spans a number of issues at the nexus of human rights and technology including content governance and platform accountability, online censorship, digital surveillance, and transnational repression. She has written extensively on the digital occupation in Palestine and focuses on the role of new technologies in armed conflicts and humanitarian contexts and their impact on historically marginalized and oppressed communities. Marwa is a Policy Analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, an advisory board member of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and an advisory committee member for Bread&Net. Marwa was a Fulbright scholar in the US and holds an MA in International Relations from Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She holds a second MA in Development and Governance from the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Adele shares her experiences of using social media from age ten, and growing up only ever feeling ‘understood’ by her followers. And now, the constant ‘how can I make content out of this??’ mindset has followed her into adult life.

Adele has been severely effected by online harms through the loss of her sister, and is working to use her lived experiences in her campaigning and advocacy work. The answer for Adele has never been to go full Luddite and reject social media — rather she wants to make online spaces safer for everyone.

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Adele’s book: Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World
• The Facebook Eye by Nathan Jurgeson — 2012 article from The Atlantic
• Smartphone Free Childhood
• Ripple — a suicide prevention browser extension

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Adele Zeynep Walton is a British Turkish journalist, online safety campaigner and the author of Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World. She is a campaigner with Bereaved Families for Online Safety, youth ambassador for People Vs Big Tech, and a founding member of the EU youth movement Ctrl + Alt + Reclaim.She is the founder of Logging Off Club, a community which brings people together offline at phone free events to reconnect with themselves and others across the UK. As a Gen Z who grew up on social media, Adele regularly speaks about digital wellbeing, social connection and rebuilding empathy in a polarised world.Adele has written for The Guardian, The Independent, the i, Dazed, i-D, VICE, Metro, Refinery 29, The Big Issue, Jacobin, Open Democracy, gal-dem, Computer Weekly and more. Her articles have been translated into Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian, Swedish, Turkish and Spanish, and she has been interviewed on Times Radio, LBC Radio, Sky News, BBC Radio Scotland and Channel 4 News and more. Between 2023-2024 Adele was DAZED's first ever political book columnist, where she has interviewed authors including Naomi Klein, Emma Dabiri, Vicky Spratt and more.

We had journalist Billy Perrigo on to chat what’s what with World. Is Sam Altman just providing a solution to a problem that he himself caused with OpenAI? Do we really need human verification, or is this just a way to side-step the AI content watermarking issue?

Further reading & resources:

• The Orb Will See You Now by Billy Perrigo
• The ethical implications of AI agents by DeepMind

Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.com

Perrigo is a correspondent at TIME, based in the London bureau. He covers the tech industry, focusing on the companies reshaping our world in strange and unexpected ways. His investigation ‘Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop’ was a finalist for the 2022 Orwell Prize.

Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew from the Collective Intelligence Project share CIP’s work using AI systems to explore more consultative democratic governance, how to reframe the social and relational of knowledge, to pull our thinking out of the individual frame and into collective and communal applications.

In Zarinah’s words, they are interested in what happens “between brains, not within brains”. A ‘community chat bot’ might sound cringe but Divya and Zarinah are doing work to make these valuable and useful, rather than addictive and sycophantic. If you’re skeptical of the utility of engaging in these toxic corporate towers of AI at all, this is an episode for you.

Further reading & resources

• Why We Need an Amistics for AI by Brain Boyd
• Collective constitutional AI project with CIP and Anthropic
• Global Dialogues launch announcement
• I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered by Joseph Cox from 404 Media
• Worker Power & Big Tech Bossmen w/ David Seligman
• The Orb Will See You Now by Billy Perrigo
• The Intimacy Dividend by Shuwei Fang

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Divya Siddarth is the executive director and co-founder of CIP. Previously, she has been a political economist and social technologist in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO, the AI and Democracy lead at the U.K.’s AI Safety Institute, and held positions at the Ethics in AI Institute at Oxford, the Ostrom Workshop, and the Harvard Safra Center. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Computational Decision Analysis in 2018.

Zarinah is Research Director at the Collective Intelligence Project, where they work on transforming public input into impactful change in the AI ecosystem. Previously a neuroscientist, Zarinah now focuses on the science of collectivity and emerging related technologies. Zarinah is faculty at the London College of Political Technology where they teach on Future Crafting. In their spare time, some might argue, they run too many non-profits.

In short, the report includes five case studies on data centre development across the globe. We were focused on understanding how companies approach policymakers, what information is made available to communities, how decisions are made to develop data centers, and when communities decide to resist their development, and what the outcomes have been.

The ONE big similarity across all case studies is that information about data centre development was consistently hard to find: accessing information about environmental impacts, urban planning, and even the identity of the companies proposing these projects, has been almost impossible to uncover.

We end the report with some recommendations for how to increase transparency and crack open democratic consultation of communities on the front lines of this behemoth tech infrastructure.

Further reading:

• Read the report here!
• A short More Perfect Union doc about living 400 yards from a data center
• Data Center Dynamics
• xAI's Memphis Neighbors Push for Facts and Fairness from Tech Policy Press
• If you have any thoughts or feedback about the report, please email research@themaybe.org

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get invites for community calls around data centre resistance.**

*Chris Cameron has been a scientist and researcher for over a decade and has been working in environmental justice policy since 2021. Her interest in investigating human rights violations related to environmental injustices has led to her current research into strategic litigation support for communities experiencing harm from data centers. Chris’s previous work has centered around co-designing projects with communities related to environmental rights advocacy and digital storytelling. She also hosts a radio show called Sound Ecology, a space for climate-oriented artists to share their sonic investigations as toolkits for the climate collapse. Contact Chris at cameroncscoop@gmail.com to speak more about data center litigation strategies and the intersection of technology and environmental justice.*

*Prathm Juneja is the Research Strategist at The Maybe and a PhD Candidate in Social Data Science at the University of Oxford, where his research examines, from a technical and ethical perspective, AI & Elections. He works at the intersection of AI, research, industry, and politics, spending most of his time advising governments, civil society organizations, and companies on civic tech and tech policy.*

Julie McCarthy and her team at NatureFinance have just released a report about the nature-related impacts of data center development globally. There are some pretty dire statistics in there: 55% of data centers are developed in areas that are already at risk of drought. So why do they get built there?

Julie also shares the longer arc of her career, which began in extractive industry transparency, and included time leading the Open Government Partnership, and the Economic Justice Program at Open Society Foundations. She brings all of that experience together for an insightful conversation about what iss happening with tech infrastructure expansion and what we should do about it.

Further reading & resources:

• Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics
• NatureFinance website
• Navigating AI’s Thirst in a Water-Scarce World — by NatureFinance
• Elon Musk building an xAI data centre in 19 days — report by Time Magazine
• OSF’s Economic Justice Programme
• The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato

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Julie is NatureFinance’s CEO.  She was founding co-director of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Economic Justice Program, a $100 million per annum global grantmaking and impact investment program focused on issues of fiscal justice, workers’ rights, and corporate power.  Previous roles include serving as the founding director of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), and as a Franklin Fellow and peacebuilding adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, focused on Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy co-founded the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), serving as its deputy director until 2009. She is a Brookings non-resident fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, and an Aspen Civil Society Fellow. Julie lives with her three children in Warwick, NY.

Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.com

Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of **The Tech Coup.**

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We brought back genomics professor Jenny Reardon to discuss the crushing void that was 23andMe’s business model — and that many companies like it have failed before.

This is a Computer Says Maybe Short, where we bring in an expert to give their take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@saysmaybe.com

Further reading & resources:

• The Postgenomic Condition by Jenny Reardon
• Power Over Precision — Jenny’s first episode with us

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Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices.  She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press) and, most recently, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press)

We get into it with law professor Julia Powles, who shares her research and perspective on the accelerating prospect of drone delivery companies taking over the skies. What? Yeah we had the same reaction. In the future a drone could deliver your morning coffee to you in minutes, neighbors be damned. As ever, tech bros are solving the serious problems, with obvious consequences of clogged skies, loud drone traffic overhead, and every coffee shop repurposed as a ghost kitchen.

What happens when companies get investment to build a product that no one asked for, but burdens everyone? How do you ‘zone’ the vastness of the skies? What are the environmental and public health impacts of yet more just-in-time delivery of things no one needs? And what are the tactics that companies use — e.g. characterising all consumers as insatiable addicts for convenience — to sell their paradigm-shifting technologies?

We want to do a third episode for Terra Nullius series on the sea. If you have anyone to recommend (perhaps yourself!) who knows anything about the world of subsea cables please email pod@saysmaybe.com

Further reading & resources:

• When it Comes to Delivery Drones, the Government is Selling us a Pipe Dream — from The Conversation
• Resisting technological inevitability: Google Wing’s delivery drones and the fight for our skies — by Anna Zenz and Julia Powles

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This week we’re starting with outer space, speaking with an expert in space law, Heather Allansdottir. But why should we care about space when the planet we are standing on is falling to shreds?

Currently, outer space belongs to no one. We have an Outer Space Treaty which was developed during the Cold War. But the treaty isn’t durable enough for a second generation of space exploration which includes private actors, not just nation states. Powerful companies, countries and individuals are in a desperate scramble to make it theirs. According Heather, we have about a two-year window to enshrine outer space as a commons, otherwise it will fall to chaos actors and tech billionaires.

In our next Terra Nullius episode, we’ll be talking about governing the skies and the companies that think you want drone-delivered coffee to your backyard.

Further reading & resources:

• Astrodottir — Heather’s space law consultancy

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Dr Heather Allansdottir is an academic of international law, focused on space law. She is the founder and director of the space sustainability consultancy Astrodottir, and the co-author of the forthcoming book New Perspectives in Outer Space Law (Springer 2025). She is deputy director of LLB at Birkbeck University's Faculty of Law and a former Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge.

To help us unpack this is Kate Sim, who has over a decade of experience in sexual violence prevention and response and is currently the Director of the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program at the University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab. We discuss the growth of ‘child safety’ regulation around the world, and how it often conflates multiple topics: age-gating adult content, explicit attempts to harm children, national security, and even ‘family values’.

Further reading & resources:

• On COSPRs forthcoming paper on the CSAM detection ecosystem. Here is a fact sheet with ecosystem map based on it: https://bit.ly/cospr-collateral
• On CSAM bottleneck problem: https://doi.org/10.25740/pr592kc5483
• IBCK episode on the Anxious Generation: https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/47a8aa95c83be96b044dcb3f4e43d158
• Child psychology expert Candace Odgers debunking Jonathan Haidt’s claims in real-time here: https://tyde.virginia.edu/event/haidt-odgers/)
• A primer on client-side scanning and CSAM from Mitali Thakor: https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/701yvdbh/release/2
• On effective CSA prevention and scalability: https://www.prevention.global/resources/read-full-scalability-report

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Dr. Kate Sim is the Director of the COSPR Program. She has over 14 years of experience in sexual violence prevention and response, having worked across community organizing, frontline support, government, academia, and industry in the US, UK, and South Korea. Her current research interests are: Big Tech accountability, sexual violence, and children’s liberation. Most recently, she worked at Google where she shaped product policy on a range of children's safety issues, including non-consensual intimate imagery, financial sextortion, grooming, and help-seeking journeys for people impacted by harmful sexual behaviors. Kate holds a PhD and MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Harvard University.

We talk about legal devices like forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression. And we dig into the existential issue of tech companies asserting more and more control over markets and people without taking any responsibility for the dominating role they play.

Further reading & resources

• Towards Justice California drivers suit
• Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banal State of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel
• Prohibiting Surveillance Prices and Wages by Towards Justice
• Gill VS Uber — class action led by Towards Justice

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• Martha Dark from Foxglove gave us the history and implications of the NHS/Palantir partnership of horror
• Matt Mahmoudi outlined the UK’s push to amp up facial recognition surveillance and to outlaw protests (seems good)
• Seyi Akiwowo shared a retrospective of the development of the Online Safety Act — the UK’s online speech regulation meant to protect kids
• Tanya O’Carroll did a victory lap, sharing details of her case against Facebook’s intrusive ad-targeting business model

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In this episode we explore India’s work over the last 20 years to build ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI. They went YOLO on a digital ID system in a country of 1 billion people — with very mixed results. Did this ‘public infrastructure’ lead to a locally-owned marketplaces? Nope! Has the fact that their PM is a Hindu nationalist limited India’s ability to tout this work on the global stage? Also nope! It’s actually allowed the government to techwash its authoritarianism.

Lots to unpack here, and fortunately, we’re joined by Divij Joshi, a researcher focused on the political economy of ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI, to explore India’s attempts at digital ID and government-as-a-platform.

Further reading & resources:

• Government as a Platform by Tim O’Reilly
• The Global DPI Agenda
• Recovering the ‘Public’ in India’s Digital Public Infrastructure Strategy by IT for Change
• Aadhaar’s mixing of public risk and private profit by Aria Thaker
• Interrogating India’s quest for data sovereignty by Divij Joshi

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Divij is a Research Fellow at ODI Global and a Doctoral Researcher at UCL, where his research and advocacy focuses on understanding the political economy and governance of emerging technologies to articulate a vision for a fair and just information society. His thesis examines how the emergence of 'Digital Public Infrastructures', as platform and data-based information systems are shaping notions of economic development and political subjectivity in India and globally.

This week Alix speaks with Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, who recently authored Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work. They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labour are being devalued by AI — especially (shocking) traditionally feminised work, such as caregiving.

Further reading:

• Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work by Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu
• Blood in the Machine by Brain Merchant

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*Aiha Nguyen is the Program Director for the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society where she guides research and engagement. She brings a practitioner's perspective to this role having worked for over a decade in community and worker advocacy and organizing. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor, technology, and urban studies. She is author of The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance and co-author of ‘At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers’, and ‘Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype and Value at Work’.*

*Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher on the Labor Futures team at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she investigates the impacts of digital surveillance, AI, and algorithmic power within the workplace. As an ethnographer, her past work has led her to explore the role of worker data and its commodification, the intersections of care labor and digital platforms, automation within service industries, and generative AI in creative industries. She is also a 2024-2025 Fellow at the Siegel Family Endowment.*

Alix and Carly will discuss how privacy regs bump up against current trends in AI, how to incentivise compliance, and the limits of Australian privacy laws.

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Carly Kind commenced as Australia’s Privacy Commissioner in February 2024 for a 5-year term. As Privacy Commissioner, she regulates the handling of personal information by entities covered by the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and seeks to influence the development of legislation and advance privacy protections for Australians. Ms Kind joined from the UK-based Ada Lovelace Institute, where she was the inaugural director. As a human rights lawyer and leading authority on the intersection of technology policy and human rights, she has advised industry, government and non-profit organisations on digital rights, artificial intelligence, privacy and data protection, and corporate accountability in the technology sphere.

• Shivani Dave is a journalist and commentator who uses social media for their career and income. They share their experiences with receiving hate online, and having to balance posting against hits to their mental health
• Alice Hunsberger is a trust & safety professional who’s worked at all levels of content moderation. She explains the technical complexities and limitations of moderating online spaces
• Jenni Olson is head of social media safety at GLAAD, and discusses the lack of transparency and care around platform content policies, allowing hateful dog whistles to proliferate
• Dr Emily Cousens, a professor at Northeastern, who provides important context on the history of trans misogyny in the UK

Further reading & resources:

• A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson
• Debunking the Cass Review by Gideon MK
• GLAAD Social Media Safety Program
• Meta’s Anti-LGBT Makeover by Jenni Olson
• Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria by Maintenance Phase: parts ONE and TWO
• T&S Insider by Alice Hunsberger

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*SHIVANI DAVE (they/them) is a political commentator and journalist whose work focuses on human rights, science and technology. SHIV is one of the organisers of the London Dyke March,  a regular collaborator with organisations; ACT UP LONDON, Queer Night Pride, local TRA, London Trans+ Pride and other more formal structures (THT, AKT, Trans+ History Week, LGBT+ History Month, NHS, THE PEOPLE ). They have written for outlets including The Guardian, BBC News, and Metro. They have appeared on Good Morning Britain, Sky News, and Jeremy Vine on 5 among others. SHIV is driven by a passion for sharing the stories of marginalised and oppressed people around the world.*

*Alice Goguen Hunsberger is a Trust & Safety leader with 20+ years of experience in content moderation, CX, and building safer online communities. She heads Trust & Safety at Musubi Labs, an AI company specializing in T&S services. Alice got her start in 2002, running a community forum and developing its first moderation guidelines. She later led T&S and CX at OkCupid, helped guide Grindr through its IPO as VP of CX & T&S, and drove ethical outsourcing strategies as VP of T&S at PartnerHero.*

*Jenni Olson (she/her/TBD) is Senior Director of the Social Media Safety Program at national LGBTQ media advocacy organization, GLAAD. A prominent voice in the field of tech accountability, Jenni leads GLAAD’s work to hold tech companies and social media platforms accountable, and to secure safe online spaces for LGBTQ people. The GLAAD Social Media Safety Program researches, monitors, and reports on a variety of issues facing LGBTQ social media users. GLAAD’s annual Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) report evaluates the major social media platforms on LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression. Olson has worked in LGBTQ media and tech for decades and is best known as co-founder of PlanetOut.com, the first major LGBTQ community website, created by a small team of tech pioneers in 1996.*

*Dr Emily Cousens (They/Them) is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Northeastern University, London and the UK lead for the Digital Transgender Archive. They are the author of Trans feminist epistemologies in the US Second Wave, published by Palgrave in 2023, and their expertise are in transfeminist philosophy and history.*

Venture capital wasn’t always how it is today. But now it’s a driver of inequality, political and economic instability, and insufferable personalities. How did we get here and what might come next?

In this conversation Catherine outlines her views on our current political moment and the role of VC in it. We’ve all got feelings about VCs, but in her book and in this conversation she forensically picks apart how it works, why it doesn’t really work, and why that’s a problem for all of us.

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Catherine’s book
• TechEquity Collaborative

Catherine Bracy is the Founder and CEO of TechEquity, an organization doing research and advocacy on issues at the intersection of tech and economic equity to ensure the tech industry’s products and practices create opportunity instead of inequality. She is also the author of the forthcoming book, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (Dutton: March, 2025).

Jenny describes genomics as the industrialisation of genetics; it’s not just about understanding the genetic properties of humans, but mapping out every last inch of their genetic information so that it’s machine readable and scalable and — does this remind you of anything yet?

There are a disturbing amount of correlations between AI and genomics: that they have roots in military applications; as fields they have been pumped up with money and compute; and that there are, of course, huge conceptual overlaps with race science.

Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices.  She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press) and, most recently, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press)

Luckily, this is a podcast for nerds like you. Alix was joined this week by Brian Chen from Data & Society, who systematically explains the process of advanced chip manufacture, how its thoroughly entangled in US economic policy, and how Taiwan’s place as the main artery for chips is the product of deep colonial infrastructures.

Brian J. Chen is the policy director of Data & Society, leading the organization’s work to shape tech policy. With a background in movement lawyering and legislative and regulatory advocacy, he has worked extensively on issues of economic justice, political economy, and tech governance.

Previously, Brian led campaigns to strengthen the labor and employment rights of digital platform workers and other workers in precarious industries. Before that, he led programs to promote democratic accountability in policing, including community oversight over the adoption and use of police technologies.

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In this episode Shazeda Ahmed goes deep on the field of AI Safety, explaining that it is a community that is propped up by its own spiral of reproduced urgency; and that so much of it is rooted in American anti-China sentiment. Read: the fear that the big scary authoritarian country will build AGI before the US does, and destroy us all.

Further reading & resources:

• Emotional Entanglement — Article 19
• Bodily Harms by Xiaowei Wang and Shazeda Ahmed for Access Now
• Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety — First Monday
• Made in China journal
• Pause AI

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Shazeda Ahmed is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Shazeda completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in 2022, and was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She has been a research fellow at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute, and NYU's AI Now Institute.

Shazeda’s research investigates relationships between the state, the firm, and society in the US-China geopolitical rivalry over AI, with implications for information technology policy and human rights. Her work draws from science and technology studies, ranging from her dissertation on the state-firm co-production of China’s social credit system, to her research on the epistemic culture of the emerging field of AI safety.

ICYMI: this is a recording from the live show that we did in Paris, right after the AI Action Summit. Alix sat down to have a candid conversation about the summit, and pontificate on what people might have meant when they kept saying ‘public interest AI’ over and over. She was joined by four of the best women in AI politics:

• Astha Kapoor, Co-Founder for the Aapti Institute
• Amba Kak, Executive Director of the AI Now Institute
• Abeba Birhane, Founder & Principal Investigator of the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab (AIAL)
• Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of Mozilla

If audio is not enough for you, go ahead and watch the show on YouTube

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*Astha Kapoor is the Co-founder of Aapti Institute, a Bangalore based research firm that works on the intersection of technology and society. She has 15 years of public policy and strategy consulting experience, with a focus on use of technology for welfare. Astha works on participative governance of data, and digital public infrastructure. She’s a member of World Economic Forum Global Future Council on data equity (2023-24), visiting fellow at the Ostrom Workshop (Indiana University). She was also a member of the Think20 taskforce on digital public infrastructure during India and Brazil's G20 presidency and is currently on the board of Global Partnership for Sustainable Data.*

*Amba Kak has spent the last fifteen years designing and advocating for technology policy in the public interest, across government, industry, and civil society roles – and in many parts of the world. Amba brings this experience to her current role co-directing AI Now, a New York-based research institute where she leads on advancing diagnosis and actionable policy to tackle concerns with artificial intelligence and concentrated power. She has served as Senior Advisor on AI to the Federal Trade Commission and was recognized as one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024.*

*Dr. Abeba Birhane founded and leads the TCD AI Accountability Lab (AIAL). Dr Birhane is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on AI accountability, with a particular focus on audits of AI models and training datasets – work for which she was featured in Wired UK and TIME on the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI list in 2023. Dr. Birhane also served on the United Nations Secretary-General’s AI Advisory Body and currently serves at the AI Advisory Council in Ireland.*

*Nabiha Syed is the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, the global nonprofit that does everything from championing trustworthy AI to advocating for a more open, equitable internet. Prior to joining Mozilla, she was CEO of The Markup, an award-winning journalism non-profit that challenges technology to serve the public good. Before launching The Markup in 2020, Nabiha spent a decade as an acclaimed media lawyer focused on the intersection of frontier technology and newsgathering, including advising on publication issues with the Snowden revelations and the Steele Dossier, access litigation around police disciplinary records, and privacy and free speech issues globally. In 2023, Naibha was awarded the NAACP/Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award for her work.*

We are streaming next week’s podcast LIVE from Paris on YouTube — register here🎙️

On Tuesday, February 11th, at 6:30pm Paris time / 12:30pm EST, we’ll be recording our first-ever LIVE podcast episode. After two days at the French AI Action Summit, Alix will sit down with four of the best women in AI politics to break down the power and politics of the Summit. It’s our Paris Post-Mortem — and we’re live-streaming the whole conversation.

We’ll hear from:

• Astha Kapoor, Co-Founder for the Aapti Institute
• Amba Kak, Executive Director of the AI Now Institute
• Abeba Birhane, Founder & Principal Investigator of the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab (AIAL)
• Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of Mozilla

This is our first-ever live-streamed podcast, and we’d love a great community turnout. Join the stream on Tuesday and share it with anyone else who wants the hot of the press review of what happens in Paris.

And, today’s episode is abundant with treats to prime you for the summit: Alix checks in with Martin Tisne who is the special envoy to the Public Interest AI track to ask him about how he feels about the upcoming summit, and what he hopes it will achieve.

We also hear from Michelle Thorne, of Green Web Foundation about a joint statement on the environmental impacts of AI she’s hoping can focus the energy of the summit towards planetary limits and decarbonisation of AI. Learn about why and how she put this together and how she’s hoping to start reasonable conversations about how AI is a complete and utter energy vampire.

Then we have Dr. Abeba Birhane — who will also be at our live show next week — to share her experiences launching the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College in Dublin. Abeba’s work pushes to actually research AI systems before we make claims about them. In a world of industry marketing spin, Abeba is a voice of reason. As a cognitive scientist who studies people she also cautions against the impossible and tantalising idea that we can somehow datafy human complexity.

Further Reading & Resources:

• **AI auditing: The Broken Bus on the Road to AI Accountability** by Abeba Birhane, Ryan Steed, Victor Ojewale, Briana Vecchione, Inioluwa Deborah Raji
• AI Accountability Lab
• Press release outlining the Lab’s launch last year — Trinity College
• The Artificial Intelligence Action Summit
• Within Bounds: Limiting AI’s Environmental Impact — led by Michelle Thorne from the Green Web Foundation
• Our Youtube Channel

Dr Abeba Birhane founded and leads the TCD AI Accountability Lab (AIAL). Dr Birhane is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on AI accountability, with a particular focus on audits of AI models and training datasets – work for which she was featured in Wired UK and TIME on the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI list in 2023. Dr. Birhane also served on the United Nations Secretary-General’s AI Advisory Body and currently serves at the AI Advisory Council in Ireland.

Martin Tisné is Thematic Envoy to the AI Action Summit, in charge of all deliverables related to Public Interest AI. He also leads the AI Collaborative, an initiative of The Omidyar Group created to help regulate artificial intelligence based on democratic values and principles and ensure the public has a voice in that regulation. He founded the Open Government Partnership (OGP) alongside the Obama White House and helped OGP grow to a 70+ country initiative. He also initiated the International Open Data Charter, the G7 Open Data Charter, and the G20’s commitment to open data principles.

Michelle Thorne (@thornet) is working towards a fossil-free internet as the Director of Strategy at the Green Web Foundation. She’s a co-initiator of the Green Screen Coalition for digital rights and climate justice and a visiting professor at Northumbria University. Michelle publishes Branch, an online magazine written by and for people who dream about a sustainable internet, which received the Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanities in 2021.

The pair share what it was like running a DEI consultancy in the months and years following the murder of George Floyd — when DEI was suddenly on the agenda for a lot organisations. The performative and ineffective methods that DEI is famous for (endless canape receptions!) has also given the inevitable backlash easy pickings for mockery and vilification.

The news is happening so fast, but these DEI episodes can hopefully help listeners better understand the backlash, not just to DEI, but to any attempts to correct systemic inequity in society.

Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!

Further reading & resources:

• Fearless Futures
• DEI Disrupted: The Blueprint for DEI Worth Doing
• Combahee River Collective

Rubie Eílis Clarke (she/her) is Senior Director of Consultancy, Fearless Futures. Rubie is of Jewish and Irish heritage and is based in her home town of London. As Senior Director of Consultancy at Fearless Futures, Rubie supports ambitious organisations to diagnose inequity in their ecosystems and design, implement and evaluate innovative anti-oppression solutions. Her expertise lies in critical social theory and research, policy analysis and organisational change strategy. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Goldsmiths University, London and a M.A. in Global Political Economy from the University of Sussex, with a focus on social and economic policy, Race critical theory, decoloniality and intersectional feminism. Rubie is also an expert facilitator who is skilled at leaning into nuance, complexity and discomfort with curiosity and compassion. She is passionate about facilitating collaborative learning journeys that build deep understanding of the root causes of oppression and unlock innovative and meaningful ways to disrupt and divest in service, ultimately, of collective liberation.

Hanna Naima Mccloskey (she/her) is Founder and CEO, Fearless Futures. Hanna is Algerian British and the Founder & CEO of Fearless Futures. Before founding Fearless Futures she worked for the UN, NGOs and the Royal Bank of Scotland, across communications, research and finance roles; and has lived, studied and worked in Israel-Palestine, Italy, USA, Sudan, Syria and the UK. She has a BA in English from the University of Cambridge and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a specialism in Conflict Management. Hanna is passionate, compassionate and challenging as an educator and combines this with rigour and creativity in consultancy. She brings nuanced and complex ideas in incisive and engaging ways to all she supports, always with a commitment for equitable transformation. Hanna is also a qualified ABM bodyfeeding peer supporter, committed to enabling all parents to meet their body feeding goals.

In this two-parter Alix is joined by Hanna McCloskey and Rubie Clarke from Fearless Futures. In this episode they share what DEI is and crucially, what it isn’t.

Listen to understand why unconscious bias training is a waste of time, and what meaningful anti-oppression work actually looks like — especially when attempting to embed these principles into digital products that are deployed globally.

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Further reading & resources:

• Fearless Futures
• DEI Disrupted: The Blueprint for DEI Worth Doing
• Combahee River Collective

Rubie Eílis Clarke (she/her) is Senior Director of Consultancy, Fearless Futures. Rubie is of Jewish and Irish heritage and is based in her home town of London. As Senior Director of Consultancy at Fearless Futures, Rubie supports ambitious organisations to diagnose inequity in their ecosystems and design, implement and evaluate innovative anti-oppression solutions. Her expertise lies in critical social theory and research, policy analysis and organisational change strategy. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Goldsmiths University, London and a M.A. in Global Political Economy from the University of Sussex, with a focus on social and economic policy, Race critical theory, decoloniality and intersectional feminism. Rubie is also an expert facilitator who is skilled at leaning into nuance, complexity and discomfort with curiosity and compassion. She is passionate about facilitating collaborative learning journeys that build deep understanding of the root causes of oppression and unlock innovative and meaningful ways to disrupt and divest in service, ultimately, of collective liberation.

Hanna Naima Mccloskey (she/her) is Founder and CEO, Fearless Futures. Hanna is Algerian British and the Founder & CEO of Fearless Futures. Before founding Fearless Futures she worked for the UN, NGOs and the Royal Bank of Scotland, across communications, research and finance roles; and has lived, studied and worked in Israel-Palestine, Italy, USA, Sudan, Syria and the UK. She has a BA in English from the University of Cambridge and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a specialism in Conflict Management. Hanna is passionate, compassionate and challenging as an educator and combines this with rigour and creativity in consultancy. She brings nuanced and complex ideas in incisive and engaging ways to all she supports, always with a commitment for equitable transformation. Hanna is also a qualified ABM bodyfeeding peer supporter, committed to enabling all parents to meet their body feeding goals.

We hear from Rubie and Hanna in the first half of the episode — and they will be back with us over the next couple of weeks for a two-parter on DEI! The rest of the episode will feature Alex Kotran discussing the future of Education.

What does the term ‘AI literacy’ invoke for you? A proficiency in AI tooling? For Alex Kotran, founder of The AI Education Project, it’s about preparing students to enter a rapidly changing workforce. It’s not about just learning how to use AI, but understanding how to build durable skills around it, and get on a career path that won’t disappear in five years.

Alex has some great perspectives on how AI tools will significantly narrow career paths for young people. This is an urgent issue that spans beyond basic AI literacy. It's about preparing students for a workforce that might look very different in five years to what it does today, and thinking holistically about how issues of tech procurement and efficiency intersect with times of economic downturn, such as a recession.

Further Reading:

• The AI Education Project
• The AIEDU’s AI Readiness Framework

Alex Kotran, CEO of The AI Education Project (aiEDU), has nearly a decade of AI expertise and more than a decade of political experience, as a community organizer. He founded aiEDU in 2019 after he discovered that the Akron Public Schools, where his mom has taught for 30+ years, did not offer courses in AI use.

Previously, as Director of AI Ethics at H5, Alex partnered with NYU Law School and the National Judicial College to create a judicial training program that is now used around the world. He also established H5's first CSR function, incubating nonprofits like The Future Society, a leading AI governance institute.