Computer Says Maybe

Almost everyone studying kids’ safety online agrees that a blanket social media ban won't work. And nearly every government moving on the issue is passing one anyway. This week, a researcher and a policy lawyer dig into why - and what could actually work instead.

More like this:When Kids Can’t Consent: The Case Against Tech in the Classroom w/ Andrew Liddell

This is the final episode in our back-to-school series on tech and kids. Pamela Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, spends the first half of the conversation dismantling the myths that are driving most kids-online safety policies: that teens are victims with no agency, that we're all "addicted" in the same way, and that “bad kids” are seeking risk rather than connection. Her research suggests that safety isn't the absence of risk; it's having the agency and support to navigate it. She also explains why age verification often strips that agency from kids and parents alike, without making anyone safer.

Cory Crider, executive director of the Future of Tech Institute, picks up where Pam leaves off. She walks us through Europe's Kids Act, the political pressure that is pushing Brussels to act, and why she'd rather fix toxic feed design than wall kids off from platforms that remain exactly the same underneath. She also gets into how easily an age-check system built for social media could creep into every corner of the internet if nobody's watching.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

No tech that your kid uses in the classroom was designed for their benefit. Not the tablet, not the "learning app," not the AI chatbot helping with homework. It was designed to benefit the company that made it — and your kid's data, attention, privacy, and, most importantly, safety, are the price.

More like this:Meet the Mom Winning Against AI in Schools w/ Ifeoma Ozoma

This week, Andrew Liddell, co-founder of the EdTech Law Center, walks us through exactly how EdTech works, why it made its way into schools with so little oversight, who it actually serves, and the cases his firm has fought against the companies putting these devices into classrooms.

His firm has gone after student-data pipelines it flagged as hackable — and later watched get hacked — laws like FERPA and COPPA being twisted into loopholes that bypass parental consent entirely, and school-issued AI tools pulling kids into the same crises we’ve watched play out among adults.

What ties it together, Liddell says, is a business model that was never built with kids in mind, and a legal system that’s still trying to catch up.

Andrew’s looking for parents in California who are concerned about their kids’ usage of AI chatbots. If that’s you, get in touch here: https://chatgptlitigation.com/

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

Over the last decade, tech workers have staged walkouts, signed open letters by the tens of thousands, and built more than a dozen new unions across the industry. And yet, over that same decade, tech companies have ramped up carbon emissions, raced to militarize AI, signed contracts with the Trump administration, rolled back protections for marginalized users, and, in some ways, engineered their platforms to be protest-proof.

In Against Tech Oligarchy, authors JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine ask the question: did tech workers ever actually learn how to fight?

More like this:Meet the Mom Winning Against AI in Schools w/ Ifeoma Ozoma

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are both former tech workers who spent years organizing from the inside. This week, they join Alix to map the last decade of tech labor organizing: the walkout era of 2018, when public pressure and shame campaigns actually worked; the pivot toward formal unionization after Kickstarter's breakthrough; and the sharp turn after 2022, when rising interest rates gave bosses cover to stop pretending they cared what workers thought.

They get into why revenue-based leverage barely applies to an industry that runs on perceived valuation, why AI researchers and rank-and-file engineers may need very different organizing strategies, and the line that anchors the whole conversation: you can spend years organizing for power, and the moment you actually have it, realize you have no idea how to use it.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

Imagine dropping your kid off at school, assuming they’ll spend the day being taught by… teachers, of course. But then you find out that part of their day is actually spent talking and reading out loud to a cute, cartoonish AI avatar named Amira. And while they’re reading, Amira is recording their voice, without ever receiving consent from the parent or child.

In New Mexico, this very technology is being mandated in classrooms across the state. But when one parent, with a reputation for speaking out and getting laws changed, discovered what was happening, she was ready to fight for the kids in her school district and beyond.

More like this: https://www.themaybe.org/podcast/the-digital-delusion-w-dr-jared-cooney-horvath

That parent is Ifeoma Ozoma. After Pinterest pushed her out for raising concerns about pay discrimination and health misinformation, she moved to Santa Fe, where a new fight found her.

We get into how one mom with a DIY website got fifteen school districts to opt out in six weeks flat, what digging into public records revealed about how deep this actually goes, and how she’s working to get the whole thing banned outright.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout.

A screen is built to do one thing well: split your attention across as many things as possible, as fast as possible. A developing brain needs the opposite— sustained, undivided focus— to learn anything at all. Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath doesn't think ed-tech is failing kids by accident. He thinks it's failing them because the two things it's built to do are the same two things guaranteed to keep them from learning.

More like this: You Seem Lonely. Have a Robot w/ Stevie Chancellor

In this episode, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a former classroom teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist and author of the new book The Digital Delusion, walks Alix through why so much of what makes a screen effective is exactly what makes it useless for learning: it invites multitasking when the brain needs focus, it rewards speed when comprehension requires slowing down, and it replaces face-to-face attention with something that looks like connection but doesn't function like it. Dr. Horvath takes us back over a deacde ago to trace how we got here, where a tool to fail students by design continues to become more embedded into the classroom.

Further reading & resources:

Buy The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath through The Maybe on Bookshop.org! Every purchases supports the author and independent bookstores across the country.

Want to join the authors we interview for exclusive Q&As? Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

You've likely heard of the National Sexual Assault Hotline. What you might not know is that it's operated by RAINN, an organization that has become one of the more unlikely players in tech policy. Since the pandemic, RAINN has seen a sharp rise in calls from young people. As more time is spent online, more opportunities for online sexual abuse follow.

More like this:How Anduril Tried to Kill Democracy in Ohio (& How Farmers Fought Back)

Stefan Turkheimer, RAINN’s VP of Public Policy, joins Alix to talk about how the crisis line led him to fight the ways tech platforms enable abuse at scale. Nearly 500,000 people contact RAINN's hotline every year, and a majority now call about tech-enabled assault: deepfakes, non-consensual intimate images, and coerced CSAM. RAINN didn't set out to become a tech accountability organization. But Stefan didn't just want to treat the symptoms. He wanted to change the root of the problem.

From a Facebook algorithm connecting predators to kids, to a bill Elon Musk killed and Melania Trump revived, to the current fight over Grok generating nudes, Alix and Stefan map the wins, the losses, and the laws still standing in the way of real accountability.

This conversation lands the same week Meta agreed to pay $18 billion to settle claims from dozens of states that it knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to addict kids. While it comes with tangible changes, daily time limits, nighttime blocks, age checks, it's also a clear example of what Stefan and Alix discuss in this episode. This settlement, and the safety standards that come with it, were hammered out behind closed doors with no public weigh in. Why is that still how we decide what safety looks like for millions of kids?

Content note: this episode discusses sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and non-consensual offenses.

Further reading & resources:

To learn more, support, or get support about the National Sexual Assault Hotline, visit RAINN.org. 

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

In Madison Township, Ohio, families have farmed the same land for generations. Then a commercial real estate company started buying up their neighbors' fields under the code name "Project Thor." They wouldn't find out until later that the buyer was Anduril, a venture-backed weapons company chasing a slice of the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget. Now, those farming families’ cattle and cornfields are being bulldozed to make way for a drone and cruise missile factory.

More like this:The Colossus Crossroads: Fighting for the Future of Memphis w/ KeShaun Pearson

In this episode, Taylor Barnes, a field reporter with Inkstick Media, takes us to Madison Township, where a fight over zoning has become a fight over who actually gets a say: communities that have a vote, or corporations that have a check. She walks us through the nearly billion dollars in tax breaks Anduril is set to receive, the lobbyist-drafted state law that stripped residents of their right to vote on the project, and what happens when the people with the least power over a decision are the ones who have to live with it.

Further reading & resources:

This fight isn't over. The farmers leading it are up against Anduril's legal team, largely on their own. If you're a lawyer - especially with experience in zoning or local democratic rights - and want to help, get in touch. We'll make the introduction.

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

We’re taking a short summer break and will be back on your feed in a couple of weeks. But we've got news before we go.

Catch up on our most recent series: Computer Says Kill & REAL Resistance

We're cooking up something new: a pilot membership community, launching this fall. Alix shares a little sneak peek at what we're building, and why we think its time to create a place where people can go deeper, find co-conspirators, and figure out what to do next.

It's still early, and because we’re building this for you, we want to make sure it’s shaped by you.

We want to hear from you:

We’d love your thoughts in a quick survey here. You can also send us a note directly to pod@themaybe.org.

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

In Memphis, companies don't come in to invest in the city. They come in to extract from its people and its land, no matter how high the human cost. That's exactly what xAI did when they decided to build one of the largest data centers in South Memphis, regardless of what it meant for the wellbeing of the people already living there.

More like this: The Collective Fight for Our Humanity - REAL Resistance

In this episode, KeShaun Pearson, Executive Director of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP), connects this fight to a much longer history of disinvestment and oppression in South Memphis— one that existed long before xAI showed up and shaped what it actually means to become a "sacrifice zone." But KeShaun also knows that when you're fighting to take something down, you have to build something better in its place. He shares his vision for what co-governance could look like between communities, cities, and corporations, and what it would take for a company that says it's here to give something back to actually mean it.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

In 2013, taxi drivers were beginning to notice something unusual: unmarked, black cars were cutting them off in taxi lines and picking up their passengers. Little did these drivers know that those black cars were the start of Uber — and it wasn’t just going to destroy the taxi industry, but wage labor as we knew it.

More like this:REAL Resistance — Against Automated Governments

In this episode, Alix Dunn sits down with Veena Dubal, one of the leading experts on gig labor and Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. Veena shares with us her firsthand account of the Uberization of everything from the beginning to now. She breaks down how this seemingly-innocuous ride sharing app would lead to algorithmic wage fixing around the world and the gamblification of workers’ lives.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

Anna Bacciarelli and Shazeda Ahmed know more than anyone that there are only a handful of tech companies asserting dominance around the world by talking in high-level abstractions about what the future looks like. At REAL ML, they want to change that.

More like this:REAL Resistance: Who's Behind Big Brother?

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this final conversation, Real ML executive director Anna Bacciarelli and researcher Shazeda Ahmed discuss what it takes to knit together a global community that is working to resist the material harms of big tech: the powers that be want to keep any discussion about the future of AI as vague as possible — which is why the experts that attend Real ML workshops take the time to get specific about the issues.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

Mariel Garcia-Montes and Crofton Black share their stories and investigations that uncover the backdoor deals that allow the surveillance industry to thrive under the guise of ‘security’. If you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we spy, right?

More like this:REAL Resistance: The Global Fight Against Technocolonialism

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this conversation, two guests from the network take us on a guided tour of the global underground surveillance tech market:

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Fernanda Rodrigues, Angela Chukunzira, and Kauna Love Malgwi make it clear that colonial powers have never gone away. The people and technology powering them have just changed, and one of them is AI…

More Like This: REAL Resistance: Against Automated Governments

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this conversation, four guests from the network discuss how the business of AI continues legacies of colonialism in Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya:

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

Maria Pilar Llorens, Divij Joshi, Gabriel Geiger, and Purity Mukami reveal how digitised welfare is not welfare — it’s just efficiency theatre.

More like this:REAL Resistance: The AI Information Warp

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this conversation, three guests from the network explore the rapid digitisation of public and judicial services around the world:

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

Klaudia Jaźwińska, Aliya Bhatia, and Yanick Kemayou come together to answer: What happens when a small collection of AI companies start colonising the truth?

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

This is REAL Resistance, a collection of conversations produced in collaboration with Real ML, featuring the experts and advocates who make up Real ML’s global network.

In this conversation, three guests from the network share all the ways in which AI is shaping our relationship with news, language, and learning:

As Yancik says in this episode, “openness without governance is extraction with extra steps”.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

How do we stand up against the human rights violations that exist in the gruesome relationship between the business of AI and war?

More like this:Computer Says Kill: The AI Safety Circus w/ Heidy Khlaaf

In our final installment of Computer Says Kill, Matt Mahmoudi returns, this time with Marwa Fatafta, to share the why and how of their recent joint statement on AI in warfare. The calls on AI companies to stop selling their products for use in military contexts, and for governments to cease buying them. The asks are simple while the execution is complex: what is the historical context of this fight and how long will it take to achieve some level of justice?

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

The AI industry loves to talk about safety, but their version of safety is putting us at risk.

More like this:The Palestine Laboratory w/ Antony Loewenstein

For our second to last series episode of Computer Says Kill, we’re joined by Heidy Khlaaf, a global expert in designing safe critical systems for high-risk infrastructures such as energy grids, nuclear power plants, and weaponry. Heidy outlines how the AI industry is working to redefine and shrink this essential, established field of expertise. By parading around sham “safety benchmarks”, this circus of an industry is marketing statistics that literally amount nothing at best, and proof that today’s LLMs aren’t safe at all, at worst. We explore the centuries of precedent and practice established in the safety field and examine how today’s AI safety “experts” are eroding this work to rush the incorporation of shoddy tech into the lucrative nooks and crannies of our militaries, economies, and physical infrastructure.

Further reading & resources:

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

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

Israel has a long history of making new technological weapons of war and exporting them to the world. They have used Palestine as a testing ground to show how new tools can enable mass killing. And they are banking that demand for their products might protect them on the world stage.

More like this:Anthropic is NOT the Good Guy w/ Maddy Batt

In part seven of Computer Says Kill, author of The Palestine Laboratory Antony Loewenstein explains that for Israel, precision warfare is just performative. Israel has the means to kill with precision, but this is at odds with the logics of genocide. Antony will take us through the history of Israel’s dealings with authoritarian states, and Israel and American states do not need to take state control of a their domestic tech industries because they are already so ideologically aligned with their regimes.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

The Israeli military is using data, surveillance, and AI to kill noncombatants in Southern Lebanon.

More like this:Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi

This week, we're kind of taking a break from our Computer Says Kill series to play a interview from our YouTube channel that is extremely relevant to the conversations we've been having about AI and militarization. Alix sat down with Nabih Bulos, the Middle East Bureau Chief at the LA Times, to discuss his recent reporting on Israel’s complex system of surveillance-driven targeting where, as he writes, even data from a phone can become a death sentence.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

Anthropic’s AI systems have been used in illegal American invasions in Iran and Venezuela. They have partnered with Musk in the disastrous Memphis Colossus facility. And yet! News coverage, some civil society, and a lot of normies act like Anthropic is one of the good guys. They aren’t!

More like this:The Toxic Love Triangle of Big Tech, Big War & Big Science w/ David Gray Widder

For part six of Computer Says Kill, we are joined by legal fellow Maddy Batt, who filed an amicus brief in the courtroom battle between Anthropic and the US Department of War. We talk about what we know from the lawsuit, what we know about how AI is being used in illegal invasions, and what might be possible for corporate accountability.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money.

More like this:Computer Says Kill: The Blank Check to Beat China w/ Lis Siegel

For part five of Computer Says Kill, researcher David Widder describes the powerful trifecta that is academia, Big Tech, and the US military: all of them need each other to survive, but who is benefiting the most? Half of Carnegie Mellon’s research funding comes from the DoW or the DHS — and David will explain how it’s being used to both prop up war apparatus, and serve as an on-ramp to Big Tech platforms.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

The US is in a race to ‘beat China’ at AI. Or is it? What if I told you that powerful actors in the US have built the story of an all-or-nothing race to get what they want?

More like this:Computer Says Kill: A License for Unlimited War w/ Amos Toh

In part four of Computer Says Kill we are joined by Lis Siegel who shares the history. We start with a document produced by China in 2017, and arrive at today when the Chinese bogeyman is being used to drive money, political influence and supply chain control to a few US tech giants. Listen in for some insight into how we got here.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

RightsCon has just been cancelled by the Zambian government with no word to the organizers, five days before it was set to begin.

RightsCon is the biggest annual global gathering of the digital rights community. Every year thousands of people come together to figure out how to make the internet safer and freer for everyone. When they can't connect, we all lose.

Alix shares a few theories about why Zambia pulled the plug (geopolitics, trade deals, and "values"). She also talks through her views on what it could mean that safe global spaces for this work are collapsing, and why you should care even if you've never heard of RightsCon.

If you were planning on attending RightsCon we're so sorry. If you're in Zambian civil society fighting for space to engage on these issues, please know there is a global community that has your back.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

Military spending on AI is a triple black box: How is AI being used in the military? Who is winning these contracts and what are they worth? And what is the military’s end-game here?

More like this:How a Calculator Company Reshaped Modern Warfare w/ Jeff Stern

Amos Toh will help us answer these questions in part three of Computer Says Kill. We will cover how military spending has changed over the last couple of decades: there has been a clear shift from the straightforward buying up of jets, to the over-reliance on licensed software. Amos also shares what hasn’t changed, which is: yes, the government still spend a hell of a lot of money on military tech.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

Precision weapons are meant to make warfare more exact. But what happens when the executive branch uses precision as an excuse to make more war and target with less and less accountability for accuracy?

More like this:Computer Says Kill: Collapsing the Chain w/ with Matt Mahmoudi

In part two of Computer Says Kill, Jeff Stern shares how a calculator company transformed modern warfare by making more precise weapons. After the Second World War, the US military wanted to be able to wage more war and target with more accuracy. At first it was about saving American troops. Over time it became a permission structure for more executive control over lethal force.

What does this history tell us about the role of precision and accountability in war?

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

How does a country wage war using LLMs? Oh and WHY?

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

In Computer Says Kill Ep #1 we are joined by Matt Mahmoudi. The US Department of War is leaning heavily on AI technologies to attack Iran. Matt explains how the use of LLMs to identify ‘legitimate targets’ is collapsing the chain of decisions that lead to lethal force. We discuss what this means at a time when fascist governments are eager to demonstrate their strength on the global stage. From Israel field-testing AI weapons in Gaza, to the US using AI tools in horrifying new ways to perpetuate ever worse war crimes, we start to connect the dots between the technology, the people powering it, and the human costs.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

This is Computer Says Kill, a new series on series focused on tracing the people, decisions, and systems that have recklessly ushered AI into the business of war.

What we’re watching play out— from AI military chatbots to tech companies in bed with authoritarian governments— isn’t a new story. It's the latest chapter in a much older relationship between technology, military power, institutional systems, and capital— one that has always moved faster than accountability, and always found a way to make the next thing feel inevitable. We're not convinced this is inevitable. But we think it’s time to understand to understand exactly how we got here.

The first episode in the series launches Friday, April 17th.

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

What better way than movies to help us process the world. Brian Merchant shares how our collective anxieties turn into cultural products.

More like this:One Filmmaker’s Fight Against AI w/ Valerie Veatch

Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, joins us this week to discuss his favorite unsettling, horror and thriller picks that bring our fears about AI and tech to life on screen.

Alix and Brian talk Terminator, Pluribus, and how even comedies about technology have a spectre of violence that helps us understand everything form labour exploitation to alienation to machine autonomy. All of this contributes to the role that film plays in helping us make sense of societal and technological change.

Click here to vote for us for the Webbys!

Further reading & resources:

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

Naomi Klein has spent her career studying political movements — and she thinks progressives are doing better than we think. Because the fascists are scared.

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:

**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!**

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

The way artists make art matters. And some artists, like filmmaker Valerie Veatch, are exploring what role AI has in the craft of filmmaking.

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 Machinewill be available for rentals and screenings beginning March 27, viaKinema! Pre-sales are now available at open now (go toKinemaand 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:

**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!**

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

Grammarly launched a feature that no one wanted and now they’re getting sued. They used the names of writers, journalists, and editors to pretend that AI versions of those people were making writing suggestions via the application. None of these ‘expert reviewers’ had any idea. Grammarly pissed off the wrong journalist.

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 emailinfo@prf-law.comfor 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:

**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!**

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

The left has a messaging problem. Silicon Valley elites are literally making up impossible fantasies and their narratives are winning out. Why?

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:

**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!**

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

Next time someone tells you that we can build data centres in space, show them this podcast episode — because it is literally impossible.

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:

**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!**

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

How does an oppressed workforce organise against Big Tech employers with even bigger lobbying muscle?

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:

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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

This is the last of our series AI Lingo Bingo Series! We dig into four more co-opted concepts with four more all stars.

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:

**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!**

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Anthropic’s Claude was used in the military operation to kidnap president Maduro earlier this year. Why? Unclear. Was this legal? Absolutely not.

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:

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 emailpod@themaybe.org

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

It’s our second week of playing AI lingo bingo. The summit in India is underway and the air is thick with vague terms that fail to describe the big problems.

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:

**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!**

Pre Production byGeorgia Iacovou| Post Production bySarah Myles

The AI Impact Summit in India is just a couple of days away and we are ready to drown in vague terms that kinda describe AI, and definitely obscure power. Let’s talk about how to reframe those terms…

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:

**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!**

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

In The Vaporstate, we have traveled to Brazil, India, and the UK. But what does this look like as a global movement of nations and companies evangelising technology as the key to solving all problems, everywhere?

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:

**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!**

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou 

What does US tech billionaire Larry Ellison get when he gives the Tony Blair Institute hundreds of millions of dollars?

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:

**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!**

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou 

What happens when the very way you prove who you are is stolen by someone else? And what happens when a country stands up to Meta and builds their own.

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:

**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!**

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Our first exploration of The Vaporstate takes us to India, home of Aadhaar: a mammoth digitisation project that charts a path from technical solution for public service delivery, through mission creep and popular opposition, to a knotty but inescapable part of Indian existence today.

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:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

This is The Vaporstate, a new series on the worldwide government bonanza of enthusiastic digitisation: Digital IDs, digital payment systems, massive data exchange platforms. What are the every-day impacts of these digitisation projects, and why now?

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.

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Infinite AI slop means we are moving away from our the age of information into what Eryk Salvaggio calls ‘the age of noise’.

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:

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification

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:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Litigator David Seligman describes how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US.

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

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Reporting on the tech industry proves a huge challenge due to how opaque it all is — Empire of AI author Karen Hao talks us through her investigative methods in a conversation from November 2024.

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:

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

A replay of our conversation with Kate Sim, on the state of child safety online.

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:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Before we break for the year we wanted to reflect on what the podcast brought us in 2025, and what we want to see for 2026

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:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

The Onion CEO Ben Collins has successfully turned political satire into a sustainable business. He explains why humorous messaging is important to understand times like these — and why he’s dead serious about buying Infowars.

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

Further reading & resources:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Audrey Tang has some big ideas on how we can use collective needs to shape AI systems — and avoid a future where human life is seen as an obstacle to paper clip production. She also shares what might be the first actual good use-case for AI agents…

Further reading & resources:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

You can’t build a digital rights movement if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. Luisa says that we’re in a crisis of imagination, and that participation — the non-performative kind — is one big way out of this.

Further reading & resources:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Earlier this year Abeba Birhane was asked to give a keynote at the AI for Good Summit for the UN — and at the eleventh hour they attempted to censor any mention of genocide in Palestine, and their Big Tech sponsors. She was invited to give her full uncensored talk at Mozfest.

Further reading & resources:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Mozilla Festival 2025. Barcelona. Three days in a bonanza of interesting people, ideas, and technology politics. These were our highlights!

More like this: FAccT 2025 episodesoneandtwo

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:

**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!**

Post Production bySarah Myles| Pre Production byGeorgia Iacovou

Everything is happening so fast. And a lot of it’s bad. What can research and science organizations do when issues are complex, fast-moving, and super important?

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:

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles| Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Imagine doing tech research… but from outside the tech industry? What an idea…

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:

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

**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!**

Governments around the world are using predictive systems to manage engagement with even the most vulnerable. Results are mixed.

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:

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

Seeing is believing. Right? But what happens when we lose trust in the reproductive media put in front of us?

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:

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!

Post Production by Sarah Myles

What happens when AI models try to fill the gaping hole in the media landscape where journalists should be?

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:

**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!**

Mozilla Foundation wants to chart a new path in the AI era. But what is its role now and how can it help reshape the impacts and opportunities of technology for… everyone?

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:

**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!**

Loneliness and mental health illnesses are rising in the US, while access to care dwindles — so a lot of people are turning to chatbots. Do chatbots work for therapy?

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:

**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!**

What’s it like working as a local representative when you live next door to Silicon Valley?

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:

**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!**

Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification 

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:

Thought we were at peak scam? Well, ScamGPT just entered the chat.

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:

**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!**

This just in with data centers: Energy grids are strained, water is scarce, utility costs are through the roof — ah well, let them eat compute, I guess!

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 alsowatch the live recording on Youtube.

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

OpenAI just secured a bizarre financial deal with Nvidia — but the math is not mathing. Is the AI sector an actual market, or a series of high-profile announcements of circular relationships between a tiny number of companies?

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:

**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!**

Multi-level marketing schemes have built an empire by enticing people with promises of self-realisation and economic freedom. The cost is simple: exploit and be exploited.

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:

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!

Hey you! Do you want some free internet money? If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is!

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:

**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!**

Gotcha! is a four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them — running through to October 10.

In the series we look at:

Crypto: Mark Hays on how a thing touting financial freedom ended up being a kind of fin-cult, rife with scammingMulti-Level Marketing : Bridget Read on the history of the biggest and most successful type of scam that still plagues us todayGenerative AI: Data & Society’s primer on how generative AI is juicing the scam industrial complexEnshittification: 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

What if you could listen to multiple people at once, and actually understand them?

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

**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!**

Social media isn’t really social anymore. But that might be changing. Rudy Fraser over at Blacksky Algorithms has built something new. He has built the infrastructure to provide a safe online space for the black community, and in the process challenges the ideas of hierarchical, centralised networks. His work — even outside the very cool development of Blacksky — is an amazing, concrete example of how the abstract ambitions of decentralisation can provide real value for people, and sets us up for a new kind of tech politics.

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:

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

How did the internet become three companies in a trenchcoat? It wasn’t always that way! It used to be fun, and weird, and full of opportunity. To set the scene for the series, we spoke to a stalwart advocate of decentratilsation, Mike Masnick.

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:

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

Foxglove and Global Action Plan have just sued the UK government over their YOLO hyperscale data center plans.

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:

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 emailpod@themaybe.org

What’s the deal with Silicon Valley selling imagined futures and never delivering on them. What are the consequences of an industry all-in on AI? What if we thought more deeply than just ‘more compute’?

More like this:Big Dirty Data Centreswith 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:

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

How do we yank power out of tech oligarch hands without handing it over to someone else?

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:

**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!**

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

Did you miss FAccT? We interviewed some of our favourite session organisers!

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:

Further reading & resources:

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

In May, Grok couldn’t stop talking about white genocide. This injection of right-wing South African politics triggered a conversation with a Musk contemporary, Nic Dawes.

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 emailpod@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.

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 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:

Further reading & resources:

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

AI Now have just released their 2025 AI Landscape report — Artificial Power. Alix sat down with two of it’s authors, Amba Kak and Sarah Myers-West for a light unpacking of the themes within.

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:

**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!**

*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.*

Felienne Hermans calls herself an ‘involuntary ethnographer of computer science’. She studies the culture behind programming, and challenges the dominant idea that learning to program has to be painful. Alix and Felienne chat about the history of programming and how it went from multidisciplinary and inclusive, to masochistic and exclusive. They also dig into all the ways it excludes women and people who do not speak English.

Further reading & resources:

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

Felienne is the creator of theHedy 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 theDutch Prize for ICT research.She also has a weekly column on BNR, a Dutch radio station.

Smart people focused on technology politics issues get it. We trade high level helpful concepts like surveillance capitalism, automated inequality, and enshittification. And even as some of these ideas are making it more mainstream, normies aren’t getting the message. We need stories for that. But how? How do we take the technical jargon and high-level concepts that dominate tech narratives and instead create stories that are personal, relatable, and powerful?

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:

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

There has been an intentional and systematic narrative push that tells governments they are not good enough to provide their own public infrastructure or regulate tech companies that provide it for them.

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:

**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!**

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.**

This episode contains some descriptions of torture methods, automated human targeting by machines, and psychological warfare throughout

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:

Further reading & resources:

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

Wanda Muñezis 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 wonDEI Champion of YearAward fromWomen 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 Mahmoudiis 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 Fataftaleads 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 Walton’s new book *Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World* is out NOW — for this week’s episode Alix sat down with her to discuss the book, and what pushed her to write it.

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:

**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!**

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.

Sam Altman is doing another big infrastructure push with World (previously Worldcoin) — the universal human verification system.

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:

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 emailpod@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.

Most of the time we interview people who say No to AI. In this interview, Georgia and Alix talk to two people who look at AI and ask How and For What. And lots of other questions too.

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

**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!**

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.

We’re excited to finally share our report on data center expansion and resistance around the world. It’s been a labor of love, but also showcases the amazing work of many organisations, activists, and journalists around the world that are working to create space for meaningful consultation about hugely consequential decisions. Download it here.

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:

**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.*

Last year, Elon Musk’s xAI built a data centre in Memphis in 19 days — and the local government only found out about it on the 20th day. How?

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:

**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!**

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.

This is another Computer Says Maybe short, this time with Marietje Schaake (author of The Tech Coup), to discuss OpenAI’s recent announcement: they want to partner with governments all around the world to build ‘democratic AI rails’ — sounds bad!

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 emailpod@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.**

**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!**

Personalised genotyping company 23andMe just went bankrupt — what’s gonna happen to all that genetic data?

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 emailpod@saysmaybe.com

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

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 ofRace 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)

This is our second Terra Nullius episode. As a reminder this means ‘Nobody’s Land’ — an infamous legal fiction from the age of Empire. In this episode we ask: who owns the skies?

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:

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

This is our first in a series called Terra Nullius. Huh? It’s Latin for ‘Nobody’s Land’. We will be exploring how rules are made for contested territory. If a land belongs to no one, does that mean it’s just up for grabs?

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:

**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!**

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.

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:

**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!**

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.

This week Alix interviewed David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice, to tell us more about how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US. He makes a compelling case for the urgent need to re-orient our thinking about political power and organise against it.

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

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

Last week Alix was in London to talk UK politics and broligarchy with four amazing guests:

**Subscribe to our newsletter for up-to-the-month opportunities to get involved!**

Amidst the scrambling of geopolitics, there is increasing conversation and momentum for the concept of tech sovereignty. It basically means that countries should build their own technology rather than rely on Silicon Valley. India Stack! Euro Stack! Everyone wants a stack.

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:

**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!**

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.

Two years ago, we were told that ‘prompt engineer’ would be a real job — well, it’s not. Is generative AI actually going to replace and transform human labour, or is this just another shallow marketing narrative?

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:

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

*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.*

This week Alix is speaking with her long-time friend and collaborator Carly Kind, who is now the privacy commissioner of Australia. Here’s something you may be embarrassed to ask: what does a privacy commissioner even do? We got you…

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.

**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!**

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.

This week producer Georgia joins Alix to discuss something huge that we’ve yet to go deep on: the prevalence of trans misogyny online. This episode is jam-packed with four amazing guests to guide us through this rough terrain:

Further reading & resources:

**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!**

*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.*