This week we’re kicking off a series about AI & the environment. We’re starting with Holly Alpine, who just recently left Microsoft after starting and growing an internal sustainability programme over a decade.

Holly’s goal was pretty simple: she wanted Microsoft to honour the sustainability commitments that they had set for themselves. The internal support she had fostered for sustainability initiatives did not match up with Microsoft’s actions — they continued to work with fossil fuel companies even though doing so was at odds with their plans to achieve net 0.

Listen to learn about what it’s like approaching this kind of huge systemic challenge with good faith, and trying to make change happen from the inside.

Holly Alpine is a dedicated leader in sustainability and environmental advocacy, having spent over a decade at Microsoft pioneering and leading multiple global initiatives. As the founder and head of Microsoft's Community Environmental Sustainability program, Holly directed substantial investments into community-based, nature-driven solutions, impacting over 45 global communities in Microsoft’s global datacenter footprint, with measurable improvements to ecosystem health, social equity, and human well-being.

Currently, Holly continues her environmental leadership as a Board member of both American Forests and Zero Waste Washington, while staying active in outdoor sports as a plant-based athlete who enjoys rock climbing, mountain biking, ski mountaineering, and running mountain ultramarathons.

Further Reading:

Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI

Our tech has a climate problem: How we solve it

In 2017 Google’s urban planning arm Sidewalk Labs came into Toronto and said “we’re going to turn this into a smart city”.

Our guest Bianca Wylie was one of the people who stood up and said “okay but… who asked for this?”

This is a story about how a large tech firm came into a community with big promises, and then left with its tail between its legs. In the episode Alix and Bianca discuss the complexities of government procurement of tech, and how attractive corporate solutions look when you’re so riddled with austerity.

Bianca Wylie is a writer with a dual background in technology and public engagement.  She is a partner at Digital Public and a co-founder of Tech Reset Canada. She worked for several years in the tech sector in operations, infrastructure, corporate training, and product management. Then, as a professional facilitator, she spent several years co-designing, delivering and supporting public consultation processes for various governments and government agencies. She founded the Open Data Institute Toronto in 2014 and co-founded Civic Tech Toronto in 2015.

Further Reading:

A Counterpublic Analysis of Sidewalk Toronto

Bianca Wylie on Medium

In Toronto, Google’s Attempt to Privatize Government Fails—For Now

In part 2 of Exhibit X, Alix interviewed Frances Haugen, who In 2021 blew the whistle on Meta; they were sitting on the knowledge that their products were harmful to kids, and yet — shocker — they continued to make design decisions that would keep kids engaged.

Mark Zuckerberg worked hard on his image (it’s a hydrofoil, not a surfboard!), while Instagram was being used for human trafficking — the lack of care and accountability here absolutely melts the mind.

What conversations did Frances’s whistleblowing start?

Was whistleblowing an effective mechanism for accountability in this case?

Do we have to add age verification to social media sites or break end-to-end encryption to keep children safe online?

*Frances Haugen is a data scientist & engineer. In 2021 she disclosed 22,000 internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and the Securities & Exchanges Commission which demonstrated Meta’s knowledge of their products harms.*

Your hosts this week are Alix Dunn and Prathm Juneja

Here is something you’re probably tired of hearing: Big Tech is responsible for a bottomless brunch of societal harms. And they are not being held accountable. Right now it feels as though we hear constantly about laws, regulation, courts. But none of it is effective in litigating against Big Tech.

In our latest podcast series Exhibit X, we’re looking at how the tides might finally be turning. Legal accountability could be around the corner, but only if a few things happen first.

To start, we look back to 1964. When Big Tobacco was winning the ‘try your best to profit from harm’ race. Research showed cigarettes were addictive and also caused cancer — and yet the industry evaded accountability for decades.

In this episode we ask questions like:

• Why wasn’t a report in 1964 showing cigarettes are addictive and cause cancer enough to transform the industry?
• What can we learn about corporate capture of research on tobacco?
• How did academia and experts shape the outcomes of court cases?

Prathm Juneja was Alix’s co-host for this episode. He is a PhD Candidate in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute Working at the intersection of academia, industry, and government on technology, innovation, and policy.

Further reading

• C-SPAN: Tobacco Settlement
•  The Cigarette Papers - Full Online Version
• The Truth Tobacco Industry Documents
•  Big Tobacco and the Historians
•  Tobacco Litigation Documents
•  A Tobacco Whistle-Blower's Life Is Transformed
• Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics
•  Tobacco Industry Research Committee
• Experts Debating Tobacco Addiction

In the Exhibit X series Alix and Prathm sink their fingernails into the tangled universe of litigation and Big Tech; how have the courts held Big Tech firms accountable for their various harms over the years? Is whistleblowing an effective mechanism for informing new regulations? What about a social media platform’s first amendment rights? So much to cover, so many episodes coming your way!

In part four of our FAccT deep dive, Alix joins Marta Ziosi and Dasha Pruss to discuss their paper “Evidence of What, for Whom? The Socially Contested Role of Algorithmic Bias in a Predictive Policing Tool”.

In their paper they discuss how an erosion of public trust can lead to ‘any idea will do’ decisions, and often these lean on technology, such as predictive policing systems. One such tool is the Shot Spotter, a piece of audio surveillance tech designed to detect gunfire — a contentious system which has been sold both as a tool for police to surveil civilians, and as a tool for civilians to keep tabs on police. Can it really be both?

Marta Ziosi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, where her research focuses on standards for frontier AI. She has worked for institutions such as DG CNECT at the European Commission, the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University, The Montreal International Center of Expertise in Artificial Intelligence (CEIMIA) and The Future Society. Previously, Marta was a Ph.D. student and researcher on Algorithmic Bias and AI Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is also the founder of AI for People, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to put technology at the service of people.  Marta holds a BSc in Mathematics and Philosophy from University College Maastricht. She also holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy and an executive degree in Chinese Language and Culture for Business from the London School of Economics.

Dasha Pruss is a 2023-2024 fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and an Embedded EthiCS postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. In fall 2024 she will be an assistant professor of philosophy and computer science at George Mason University. She received her PhD in History & Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in May 2023, and holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Utah. She has also co-organized with Against Carceral Tech, an activist group working to ban facial recognition and predictive policing in the city of Pittsburgh.

This episode is hosted by Alix Dunn. Our guests are   Marta Ziosi and Dasha Prussi

Further Reading

•  Evidence of What, for Whom? The Socially Contested Role of Algorithmic Bias in a Predictive Policing Tool
•  Refusing and Reusing Data by Catherine D’Ignazio

In this episode, we speak with Lara Groves and Jacob Metcalf  at the seventh annual FAccT conference in Rio de Janeiro.

In part four of our FAccT deep dive, Alix joins Lara Groves and Jacob Metcalf  to discuss their paper “ Auditing Work: Exploring the New York City algorithmic bias audit regime”.

Lara Groves is a Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute. Her most recent project explored the role of third-party auditing regimes in AI governance. Lara has previously led research on the role of public participation in commercial AI labs, and on algorithmic impact assessments. Her research interests include practical and participatory approaches to algorithmic accountability and innovative policy solutions to challenges of governance.

Before joining Ada, Lara worked as a tech and internet policy consultant, and has experience in research, public affairs and campaigns for think-tanks, political parties and advocacy groups. Lara has an MSc in Democracy from UCL.

Jacob Metcalf, PhD, is a researcher at Data & Society, where he leads the AI on the Ground Initiative, and works on an NSF-funded multisite project, Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research (PERVADE). For this project, he studies how data ethics practices are emerging in environments that have not previously grappled with research ethics, such as industry, IRBs, and civil society organizations. His recent work has focused on the new organizational roles that have developed around AI ethics in tech companies.

Jake’s consulting firm, Ethical Resolve, provides a range of ethics services, helping clients to make well-informed, consistent, actionable, and timely business decisions that reflect their values. He also serves as the Ethics Subgroup Chair for the IEEE P7000 Standard.

This episode is hosted by Alix Dunn. Our guests are Lara Groves and Jacob Metcalf.

Further Reading

• Lara Groves (Ada Lovelace Institute, UK), Jacob Metcalf (Data & Society Research Institute, USA), Alayna Kennedy (Independent researcher, USA), Briana Vecchione (Data & Society Research Institute, USA) and Andrew Strait (Ada Lovelace Institute, UK)- Auditing Work: Exploring the New York City algorithmic bias audit regime

In this episode, we speak with Nari Johnson and Sanika Moharana at this year’s FAccT conference in Rio de Janeiro.

In part two of our FAccT deep dive, Alix joins Nari Johnson and Sanika Moharana to discuss their paper “The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment”.

Nari Johnson is a third-year PhD student in Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, where she is advised by Hoda Heidari. She graduated from Harvard in 2021 with a BA and MS in Computer Science, where she previously worked with Finale Doshi-Velez.

Sanika Moharana is a second-year PhD student in Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. As an advocate for human-centered design and research, Sanika practices iterative ideation and prototyping for multimodal interactions and interfaces across intelligent systems, connected smart devices, IOT’s, AI experiences, and emerging technologies .

Further Reading

•  The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment

In part 1 of our FAccT conference deep dive, Alix Dunn sits down with co-host Andrew Strait from the Ada Lovelace Institute to talk about the history of FAccT and some of the papers being presented at this year’s event.

The Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference, or FAccT is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community of scholars and exploring how socio-technical systems could be built in a way that is compatible with a fair society. The seventh annual FAccT conference was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from Monday, June 3rd through Thursday, June 6th 2024 with over five hundred people in attendance.

This episode is hosted by Alix Dunn and our Co-Host is Andrew Strait

Further Reading:

• Robert Gorwa (WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany) and Michael Veale (University College London, UK)- Moderating Model Marketplaces: Platform Governance Puzzles for AI Intermediaries
• Marta Ziosi (University of Oxford, UK) and Dasha Pruss (Harvard University, USA)- Evidence of What, for Whom? The Socially Contested Role of Algorithmic Bias in a Predictive Policing Tool
• Michael Madaio (Google Research, USA), Shivani Kapania (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Rida Qadri (Google Research, USA), Ding Wang (Google Research, USA), Andrew Zaldivar (Google Research, USA), Remi Denton (Google Research, USA) and Lauren Wilcox (eBay, USA)- Learning about Responsible AI On-The-Job: Learning Pathways, Orientations, and Aspirations
• David Gray Widder (Digital Life Initiative, Cornell Tech, USA)-  Epistemic Power in AI Ethics Labor: Legitimizing Located Complaints
• Lara Groves (Ada Lovelace Institute, UK), Jacob Metcalf (Data & Society Research Institute, USA), Alayna Kennedy (Independent researcher, USA), Briana Vecchione (Data & Society Research Institute, USA) and Andrew Strait (Ada Lovelace Institute, UK)- Auditing Work: Exploring the New York City algorithmic bias audit regime
• Nari Johnson (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Sanika Moharana (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Christina Harrington (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Nazanin Andalibi (University of Michigan, USA), Hoda Heidari (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) and Motahhare Eslami (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)- The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Kate Sim, one of the core organisers of the Google Worker Sit-In Against Project Nimbus.

Dr. Kate Sim was recently fired, alongside almost 50 other employees, from Google after helping organize a sit-in protesting Project Nimbus, a joint contract between Google and Amazon to provide technology to the Israeli government and military. In this episode, Alix and Dr. Sim discuss technology-enabled violence, Dr. Sim's work in trust and safety, and Google's cancelled project Maven. They also talk about Dr. Sim's journey into protesting Project Nimbus, the many other voices fighting against the contract, and how Big Tech often obfuscates its responsibility in perpetuating violence. In the end, we arrive at a common lesson: solidarity is our main hope for change.

This episode is hosted by Alix Dunn and our guest is Dr. Kate Sim.

Further Reading

• No Tech For Apartheid
• What is Project Nimbus, and why are Google workers protesting Israel deal?
• Israeli Weapons Firms Required to Buy Cloud Services From Google and Amazon
• The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
• 3 Years After the Project Maven Uproar, Google Cozies to the Pentagon
• How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex
• Google Fired Us for Protesting Its Complicity in the War on Gaza. But We Won’t Be Silenced.
• Computer Says Maybe Newsletter - Protesting Project Nimbus

In this episode, we talk about the kinds of jobs that are being created as AI systems grow, how those jobs are evolving, what the labour conditions of those jobs are like and, who is benefitting from these systems.  

This episode is hosted by Alix Dunn and guests include James (Mojez) Oyange, Yoel Roth, Catherine Bracy and Cori Crider.

If you have feedback about the episode or a pet subject that you might want to join forces to develop into an episode, please reach out. You can email team@saysmaybe.com or share an audio note here: speakpipe.com/saysmaybe.

Further Reading

News Articles

•  Former TikTok Moderator Threatens Lawsuit in Kenya | TIME
•  Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop | TIME
•  Back to court: Kenya Facebook content moderators settlement talks collapse - Foxglove
• OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour: Exclusive | TIME

Other Links

• Sarah Roberts: Behind the Screen
• TechEquity website
• Foxglove website
• Whistleblower Support Organization - The Signals Network
• Trust & Safety Professional Association (tspa.org)Trust & Safety Professional Association (tspa.org)
• Integrity Institute

In this episode, we walk through how misinformation and disinformation has been used in past elections to impact outcomes, where we think AI might make a material difference in how elections play out this year, and where we think responsibility lies for the situation we’re in.

This episode is hosted by Alix Dunn and Prathm Juneja, and guests include Sam Gregory, Josh Lawson, and Claire Wardle.

If you have feedback about the episode or a pet subject that you might want to join forces to develop into an episode, please reach out. You can email team@saysmaybe.com or share an audio note here: speakpipe.com/saysmaybe

--

Further Reading

Academic Articles

•  KOSA isn’t designed to help kids, by danah boyd
•  Techno-legal Solutionism: Regulating Children’s Online Safety in the United States
• A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms
•  How to Prepare for the Deluge of Generative AI on Social Media
• Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
• Negative Downstream Effects of Alarmist Disinformation Discourse: Evidence from the United States | Political Behavior

News Articles

•  Voter Suppression Has Gone Digital
•  Big Tech rolls back misinformation measures ahead of 2024
• Big Tech Backslide: How Social-Media Rollbacks Endanger Democracy Ahead of the 2024 Elections
•  Murthy v. Missouri (Formerly Missouri v. Biden)
•  FCC votes to outlaw scam robocalls that use AI-generated voices

Other Links

•  How OpenAI is approaching 2024 worldwide elections
•  OII | How Data and Artificial Intelligence are Actually Transforming American Elections

What if we could have a public library for compute? But is… more compute really what we want right now?

This week Alix interviewed Teri Olle from the Economic Security Project, a co-sponsor of the California AI safety bill (SB 1047). The bill has been making the rounds in the news because it would force AI companies to do safety checks on their models before releasing them to the public — which is seen as uh, ‘controversial’, to those in the innovation space.

But Teri had a hand in a lesser known part of the bill: the construction of CalCompute, a state owned public cloud cluster for resource-intensive AI development. This would mean public access to the compute power needed to train state of the art AI models — finally giving researchers and plucky start ups access to something otherwise locked inside a corporate walled garden.

Teri Olle is the California Campaign Director for Economic Security Project Action. Beginning her career as an attorney, Teri soon moved into policy and issue advocacy, working on state and local efforts to ban toxic chemicals and pesticides, decrease food insecurity and hunger, increase gender representation in politics. She is a founding member of a political action committee dedicated to inserting parent voice into local politics and served as the president of the board of Emerge California. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two daughters.

Applications for our second cohort of Media Mastery for New AI Protagonists are now open! Join this 5-week program to level up your media impact alongside a dynamic community of emerging experts in AI politics and power—at no cost to you. In this episode, we chat with Daniel Stone, a participant from our first cohort, about his work. Apply by Sunday, September 29th!

The adoption of new technologies is driven by stories. A story is a shortcut to understanding something complex. Narratives can lock us into a set of options that are…terrible. The kicker is that narratives are hard to detect and even harder to influence.

But how reliable are our narrators? And how can we use story as strategy?

The good news is that experts are working to unravel the narratives around AI. All so that folks with public interest in mind can change the game.

This week Alix sat down with three researchers looking at three AI narrative questions. She spoke to Hanna Barakat about how the New York Times reports on AI; John Tanner, who scraped and analysed huge amounts of YouTube videos to find narrative patterns; and Daniel Stone, who studied and deconstructed metaphors that power collective understanding about AI.

In this ep we ask:

• What are the stories we tell ourselves about AI? And why do we let industry pick them?
• How do these narratives change what is politically possible?
• What can public interest organisations and advocates do to change the narrative game?

Hanna Barakat is a research analyst for Computer Says Maybe, working at the intersection of emerging technologies and complex systems design. She graduated from Brown University in 2022 with honors in International Development Studies and a focus in Digital Media Studies.

Jonathan Tanner founded Rootcause after more than fifteen years working in senior communications roles for high-profile politicians, CEOs, philanthropists and public thinkers across the world. In this time he has worked across more than a dozen countries running diverse teams whilst writing keynote speeches, securing front page headlines, delivering world-first social media moments and helping to secure meaningful changes to public policy.

Daniel Stone is currently undertaking research with Cambridge University’s Centre for Future Intelligence and is the Executive Director of Diffusion.Au. He is a Policy Fellow with the Chifley Research Centre and a Policy Associate at the Centre for Responsible Technology Australia.

There are oceans of research papers digging into the various harms of online platforms. Researchers are asking urgent questions such as how hate speech and misinformation has an effect on our information environment, and our democracy.

But how does this research find it’s way to the media, policymakers, advocacy groups, or even tech companies themselves?

To help us answer this, Alix is joined this week by Issie Lapowsky, who recently authored Bridging The Divide: Translating Research on Digital Media into Policy and Practice — a report about how research reaches these four groups, and what they do with it. This episode also features John Sands from Knight Foundation, who commissioned this report.

Further reading:

• Bridging The Divide by Issie Lapowsky
• Knight Foundation

Issie Lapowsky is a journalist covering the intersection between tech, politics and national affairs. She has been published in WIRED, Protocol, The New York Times, and Fast Company.

John Sands is Senior Director of Media and Democracy at Knight Foundation. Since joining Knight Foundation in 2019, he has led more than $100 million in grant making to support independent scholarship and policy research on information and technology in the context of our democracy.

Last week, CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov landed in France and was immediately detained. The details of his arrest are still emerging; he is being charged for being complicit in illegal activities happening on the platform, including the spread of CSAM.

Durov’s lawyer has referred to these charges as “absurd” — because the head of a social media company cannot be held responsible for criminal activity on the platform. That might be true in the US but does that hold up in France?

This week Alix is joined by Mallory Knodel to talk us through what happened:

• What are the implications of France making this move, and why now?
• How has Telegram positioned themselves as the most safe and secure messaging platform when they don’t even use the same encryption standards as WhatsApp?
• How Telegram has managed to get away with being uncooperative with various governments — or have they?

Mallory Knodel is The Center for Democracy & Technology’s Chief Technology Officer. She is also a co-chair of the Human Rights and Protocol Considerations research group of the Internet Research Task Force and a chairing advisor on cybersecurity and AI to the Freedom Online Coalition.

That’s the END of Exhibit X folks; if you’ve been following along, congratulations on choosing to become smarter. If not that’s okay, consider this episode a delicious teaser for the series.

In this episode Alix and Prathm engage their large wet brains and pull out the meatiest insights and learnings from the last five episodes. This series has been a delightful intellectual expedition into big tech litigation, knowledge creation, and online speech — if you’re a nerd for any of those things, it would be irresponsible for you to ignore this.

Thank you for listening; we hope to do more deep explorations like this in the future!

What makes an expert witness? How does a socio-technical researcher become one? Now that we’re the end of this miniseries, we might finally be ready to answer these questions…

In the fifth instalment of Exhibit X, civic tech acrobat Elizabeth Eagen shares her pithy insights on how researchers of emerging technologies are starting to interface with litigators and regulators.

The questions we explore this week:

• When do the expertise of social scientists become ‘good’ enough to stand up in court — and who gets to decide that?
• How can the traditionally glacial system of courts and legislators keep pace with the shifting whims of technology companies?
• Litigators want social scientists to get on the stand and say ‘X caused Y’ without a shadow of a doubt — but what social scientist would do that?

Elizabeth Eagen is Deputy Director of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University, which works with communities to study the effects of technology on society and test ideas for changing digital spaces to better serve the public interest. She was a 2022-23 Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, and serves as a board member at a number of nonprofit technology organizations.

Imagine: something horrible has happened and the only evidence you have is a video posted online. Can you submit it into evidence in court? Well, it’s complicated.

In part 4 of our Exhibit X series, Alix sat down with Dr. Alexa Koenig to discuss her work with the International Criminal Court. Dr. Koenig and many colleagues are supporting the court to grapple with online evidence and tackling challenges that courts face when they adapt to our digital world.

We answer questions like:

• How does the ICC work with social media companies to acquire evidence?
• How has generative AI and synthetic media impacted evidence in courts?
• When can we expect to see social scientists as expert witnesses in court?

Alexa Koenig, PhD, JD, is Co-Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center , Director of HRC’s Investigations Program, and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches classes that focus on the intersection of emerging technologies and human rights. She also co-teaches a class on open source investigative reporting at Berkeley Journalism. Alexa co-founded the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, which trains students and professionals to use social media and other digital open source content to strengthen human rights research, reporting, and accountability.

Often it feels as though the cases and lawsuits brought against big tech firms are continuously piling up, but there never seems to be any resulting justice or resolution. There are many good reasons for this, two of which are section 230 and the first amendment.

Big Tech companies will routinely invoke 230 and the first amendment to get cases against them thrown out before they can go to trial. In part 3 of Exhibit X, Meetali Jain explains how litigators have been playing 4D chess to get the courts to hold these companies accountable.

In this episode we ask…

• What is section 230 and how to platforms use it to their benefit?
• How can we take the design decisions of a corporation out of the free speech bucket so that they can be held responsible for their actions?
• How can we start developing more levers from transparency, beyond lawsuits and whistleblowing?

Meetali Jain is a human rights lawyer, who founded the Tech Justice Law Project in 2023. The Project works with a collective of legal experts, policy advocates, digital rights organizations, and technologists to ensure that legal and policy frameworks are fit for the digital age, and that online spaces are safer and more accountable.

This episode was hosted by Alix Dunn and Prathm Juneja

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:

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

**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!**

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:

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

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

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:

• Buy The Tech Coup by Marietje Schaake

**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:

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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!

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

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

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

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

Adele 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:

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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 email pod@saysmaybe.com

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

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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 email pod@saysmaybe.com

Further reading & resources:

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

**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 of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press) and, most recently, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press)

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:

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

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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 Centres with Boxi Wu and Jenna Ruddock

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

**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 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:

• Astrodottir — Heather’s space law consultancy

**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:

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

**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

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

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

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

**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:

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

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

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:

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

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!

*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.

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

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:

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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

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

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

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

This week Alix interviewed Catherine Bracy on her book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalising the Economy. Support Catherine’s work and buy it NOW.

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

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

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Catherine’s book
• TechEquity Collaborative

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

Alix’s conversation this week is with Jenny Reardon, who shares with us the history of genomics — and the absolutely mind-melting parallels it has with the trajectory of the AI industry.

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

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

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

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:

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

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

Do you ever wonder how semiconductors (AKA chips) get made? Or why most of them are made in Taiwan? Or what this means for geopolitics?

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

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

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

**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!**

Are you tired of hearing the phrase ‘AI Safety’ and rolling your eyes? Do you also sometimes think… okay but what is technically wrong with advocating for ‘safer’ AI systems? Do you also wish we could have more nuanced conversations about China and AI?

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

Further reading & resources:

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

**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!**

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

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

Kapow! We just did our first ever LIVE SHOW. We barely had time to let the mics cool down before a bunch of you requested to have the recording on our pod feed so here we are.

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

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

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

**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!**

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

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

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

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

The Paris AI Action Summit is just around the corner! If you’re not going to be there, and you wish you were — we got you.

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

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

We’ll hear from:

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading & Resources:

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

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

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

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

This week Alix continues her conversation with Hanna McCloskey and Rubie Clarke from Fearless Futures and we take a whistle-stop tour of the past 5 years. We start in 2020 with the disingenuous but huge embrace of DEI work by tech companies, to 2025 when those same companies are part of massive movements actively campaigning against it.

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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

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

DEI is a nebulous field — if you’re not in it, it can be hard to know which tactics and methods are reasonable and effective… and which are a total waste of time. Or worse: which are actively harmful.

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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

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