“If that plant explodes, we’re all dead,” Maffini’s mother used to intone, looking out at the defunct Caorso station, once the largest in Italy. As Maffini rode his bike six miles across the countryside to get a closer look at the plant from a nearby overpass, his mother’s doom-laden words rang in his ears. Her warning scared him. It also made him want to learn more. When he left home to go to university, Maffini decided to work in nuclear physics. “Radioactivity is a strange thing,” he says. “You can’t see it, you can't hear it, you can't smell it. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, for speculation, for fear.”

Four decades on from Chernobyl, and Italy has some of the highest energy bills in Europe. The country is scrambling to disentangle itself from its dependence on Russian gas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and build out its energy sovereignty. War in Iran, and a growing European consensus that turning away from nuclear power was, in the words of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a “strategic mistake,” has given more impetus to the Italian government’s argument that the country needs to move past its qualms.

Last year, the Italian cabinet approved a new draft law reintroducing the prospect of returning to nuclear power. “The government has approved another important measure to ensure clean, safe, low-cost energy that can guarantee energy security and strategic independence,” the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced. 

Italy is already surrounded on all sides by nuclear power plants: Slovenia’s Krsko plant is 90 miles away from the border, and there are four French nuclear power plants within 110 miles. Italy is the world’s second-largest importer of electricity, with nuclear power, largely imported from France, making up 5% of its energy basket. Italy also plays host to more U.S. nuclear warheads than any other European country. An estimated 35 thermonuclear gravity bombs are stored at two NATO airbases in northern Italy, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. 

Now, as data centers spring up in Italy’s industrial north, the country’s energy needs are expected to increase exponentially and the government is turning, albeit cautiously, to a long-held Italian taboo. Since the spring of 1986, when the most serious accident in nuclear history unfolded in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, the Italian population has lived in fear of nuclear energy. It voted to shutter its once-burgeoning nuclear industry in 1987, and in 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, when 94% of voters rejected government plans to revive the industry. 

It is a fear that has transformed Italy’s energy fortunes, making it reliant on imports and vulnerable to volatility and price shocks. 

“The international crises of recent years have clearly demonstrated the risk of excessive dependence on imported fossil fuels or vulnerable supply chains,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “The government approaches this issue with great respect for the country's history and the democratic choices expressed by citizens. The 1987 and 2011 referendums profoundly impacted the national energy strategy at very different historical moments. Precisely for this reason, the point is not to ignore those choices, but to acknowledge that today's technological, climatic, industrial, and geopolitical context has radically changed.”

For Meloni’s government, the argument is not so much whether Italy needs to revive its nuclear industry, it’s whether the country is ready to shake its demons, to shake the cultural memory of what happened at Chernobyl forty years ago, a thousand miles away from Rome. 

In the early hours of April 28, 1986, in the control room of the Latina nuclear power plant south of Rome, a young technician called Ruggero Dell’Aquila was working the night shift. “Everything was perfectly quiet,” he recalled. As morning broke, teletype messages from Northern Europe began to rattle in. A clerk came down from the control room with reports from the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. Their monitoring stations were registering radiation spikes far above background levels, and no one knew why. 

That evening, nuclear physicist Sergio Malossi, a director at the Latina plant responsible for monitoring radioactive risk, drove home. His mind was turning over what the clerks had been reporting. “He came in extremely agitated,” remembers his daughter, Roberta Malossi, who was 16 at the time. “We knew he was worried about something going wrong at the facility, but we didn’t understand.” Malossi says that her father’s first paranoid thought was that there had been a malfunction in his own plant, that radiation was leaching into the air, and that it was somehow his fault. 

At 9 p.m. Moscow time — aperitivo hour in Latina — the Soviet Union announced there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. In the ensuing days, Italian news was full of dire warnings. 

“Television was showing these clouds that would soon reach Italy. Everyone was terrified. The only information we got was from state TV, and the news was shocking,” said Monica Tommasi, President of Friends of the Earth Italy, who was a child at the time. Radiation, the news said, would rain down on the population. “The fear from the sky,” ran one La Repubblica headline. “The cloud above us, the doubt within us,” ran another.

On the night of April 30, 1986, Italy’s nuclear monitoring stations began recording increases in radioactivity. The cloud moved over the Valley of the Po, and while the government called for calm, the country began to descend into panic. In the minds of the Italian people, the worst had happened, explained Luca Romano, a writer and activist campaigning for the return of nuclear power in Italy. “Nuclear annihilation, death by radiation, the radioactive cloud and the nuclear holocaust, had arrived,” he said. Nuclear armageddon was a fear that had gripped the West for decades. This was not a nuclear war, but in the Italian collective consciousness, that didn’t make a difference. 

The reality was, says Barbara Curli, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin, that “Italy was only marginally affected by the cloud.”

The cloud in northern Italy meant radioactivity levels peaked briefly, but ten days later they had fallen dramatically back down. Because this spike was short-lived, the total radiation exposure remained low. A United Nations committee report recorded that northern Italy received an additional radiation dose of about 380 microsieverts in the year following Chernobyl — less than a fifth of the normal background radiation humans absorb in a year; equivalent to taking about six transatlantic flights. It was much smaller than the doses received by neighboring countries like Bulgaria, Austria and Greece, and in the south of Italy the dose was lower still. 

Down by the Latina power plant, though, the community was shaken by events in Chernobyl, and rumors and misinformation began to spread about the fallout. The friends and family of the technician, Ruggero Dell’Aquila, started asking him if a Chernobyl-style disaster could happen at Latina, too. “Everyone was afraid, asking — ‘can it explode, can it explode?’” he recalled. 

The reality was, a Chernobyl-style explosion was not possible at Latina, because its reactor lacked the unstable characteristics of the Soviet design. But this was not such an easy concept to explain. 

“The problem was that a slew of journalists took over, telling lies,” Malossi said, recalling paranoid rumours about radioactivity causing mutations in nature. People started telling stories, Malossi said, about “frogs with three heads, animals and fish with four tails. Strange things. When in fact absolutely nothing like that was happening.”

The government advised people to avoid fresh vegetables and dairy products, particularly for children. Farmers destroyed crops and poured away milk. Sergio Malossi ignored the warnings, having measured radiation levels in the air himself. “My father and others from the plant brought the vegetables home and we ate them,” his daughter recalled.

It was these warnings — delivered amid a lack of clear information — that shifted public attitudes toward nuclear energy, said Renzo Colombo, 65, who was just beginning a career in nuclear engineering when the explosion happened. Now a member of Nucleare e Ragione, a nonprofit that promotes a rational approach to nuclear energy in Italy, he recalls how quickly fear took hold. “A real phobia was born, a panic about radioactivity,” he said. “And this panic marked the next 25 years.”

The months after the accident were a shadowy, uncertain period for Italians working in the nuclear industry. “I have to be honest, I felt a little guilty,” said Colombo. “As a nuclear engineer, I thought ‘what have we done?’ My colleagues and I always thought we were designing something useful for humanity. And at that moment we felt betrayed by our own profession.”

Outside Italy’s nuclear plants, crowds began to gather. A coalition of environmental groups and political parties started pushing for people to vote against nuclear power in an upcoming referendum.

This movement was not new. “Many years before Chernobyl, an environmentalist culture was born — and it didn’t just concern nuclear power, but risky industry in general,” explained Curli, the Turin historian. The anti-nuclear environmental movement, which spread across Europe in the 1970s, was particularly potent in Italy — a country rocked by violent political turmoil, organized crime, and corruption scandals. Public fears, explained Curli, were sharpened by the Seveso disaster, an accident at an industrial plant in the north of Italy in 1976 that exposed tens of thousands of people to a toxic cloud of chemicals. Nuclear power, she said, “was not perceived by public opinion as a credible policy because there's this underlying distrust in institutions.” 

In 1977, almost a decade before Chernobyl, a 10,000-strong crowd of protesters showed up at Montalto di Castro, to protest against a large new nuclear plant that was planned. A Time magazine correspondent described the activists as “an improbable mix of elegant members of the Italian nobility, radical students in American Indian garb, middle-class citizens and Christian Democratic and Communist politicians.”

In the wake of Chernobyl, Renzo Colombo was working at that very same plant, helping to build the thermohydraulic cycle. By then, the station was nearly complete. “It was a beautiful plant,” Colombo said. “I loved working there.”

In November 1987, 18 months after the Chernobyl accident, the Italian government held a referendum on nuclear energy. Nearly 80% of Italians voted in favor of measures that would end the country’s use of atomic energy.

One morning, following the referendum, the Montalto di Castro plant’s director called the workers to a meeting. Colombo remembers him saying: “‘Ragazzi, gather round, I need to talk to you. I’ve just been to the ministry, and Italy has decided that we are closing all nuclear activity and will focus on coal and gas instead.’” The room went silent. “I was young,” said Colombo. “But there were people there who were older and had devoted years of their life to the nuclear field. There was just this urge to cry.” 

The effect of the referendum was all-encompassing: construction was halted, and over the next three years Italy’s nuclear plants were shut down for good; its nuclear engineers scattered — many going to work abroad, or, like Colombo, re-training to work in other industries. 

It was hailed as a victory for Italian environmentalism, says Curli. But the result was that there was a push to “gasify” Italy. That is, she says, “to choose the gas route — less expensive, and less demanding than nuclear power. But this made Italy almost completely dependent on Russian gas, Libyan gas, Algerian gas.” The Montalto di Castro site was converted into a fossil-fuel powered plant, running on gas and fuel oil.

Decades on from that post-Chernobyl referendum — and a second referendum in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 — Italy remains in the process of dismantling its nuclear power stations, even as it now contemplates a return to nuclear power.

Watching them work is Enrico Bastianini, director of operations at the Latina plant. As I walk with Bastianini through the plant, we come to the old control room. When it first opened in 1963, the Latina plant was the largest nuclear power station in Europe — a feat of Italian and British engineering (the reactor was of UK design) and a symbol of Italy’s post-war industrial growth. 

“We were emerging from the destruction of the war, and this was progress. And it was what allowed us to escape the economic hardships of war, and have low-cost energy,” Bastianini says.

Now, over 60 years on from when the plant opened, more than half of its existence has been spent being taken apart. Critics of nuclear power often focus on precisely this point: the long and complex process of dismantling nuclear plants, and the problem of managing radioactive waste, some of which takes millennia to decay. 

There are two phases to the process of taking apart the plant. “The first phase allows us to dismantle everything that’s nuclear except the reactor. That’s because the reactor contains a huge amount of graphite,” Bastianini explains. “When we have a national repository, it can be removed. But for now, it’s safest if it stays in the first phase.”

Bastianini leads me into a deposit room where radioactive material is being stored in steel containers, inside an earthquake-resistant facility. These containers are only for temporary storage.

There were attempts in the early 2000s to establish a national nuclear waste repository at a salt mine in Basilicata in southern Italy, but huge protests forced the government to abandon its plans. Today, SOGIN, the state-owned Italian company in charge of decommissioning nuclear sites, is still actively searching for a suitable location for a permanent repository and faces considerable opposition. 

Rumours and anxiety swirl around the Latina plant itself — just as they did in the 1980s, when Malossi heard stories of radioactive fish with four tails. Last April, an article by the Italian magazine L’Espresso published claims that the Latina plant could leach radioactive material into the soil. The plant vigorously denies these claims — a spokesperson for SOGIN said the company periodically checks the quality of vegetables, milk and fodder as well as air, soil and groundwater for radiation and that “as always, the results of the analyses confirm radiologically negligible environmental impacts.”

In the gloaming of a summer evening in Umbria, Monica Tommasi drives me through the twilight-darkened hills surrounding the medieval city of Orvieto. This land is rich in archeological and ecological heritage — filled with ancient tunnels, Etruscan caves, untapped archeological sites, wild places where wolves and boar roam. Tommasi is the President of Amici Della Terra — "Friends of the Earth" in Italian — an organization that was once the Italian chapter of the international Friends of the Earth network before breaking away in 2014. "We left, because we argued a lot," she said of the split, describing how the network "wanted to put turbines and panels everywhere, and we couldn't be in favour of that approach." 

The International Friends of the Earth association was born from the anti-nuclear movement in America, where the group successfully lobbied to shut down two reactors, and has since 1969 made anti-nuclear campaigning a core part of its identity.

But Tommasi remembers precisely when she first began to reconsider nuclear power. “I started thinking about it in 2011, when I began to see that the government was investing heavily in solar and wind power, which would invade and industrialize the natural landscape,” she recalled. Many of these green transition projects have been fraught with problems in Italy — wind farm companies accused of corruption and profiteering, of erecting wind farms in areas where there’s little wind, and laying waste to nature. 

For the first time, Tommasi began to think about ways to decarbonize “that don’t destroy the environment where people live and the landscape around them.”. She became intrigued by the nuclear option. “We needed to start reasoning and changing our minds,” she said. 

Tommasi now advocates for a national conversation about nuclear power. “This choice must be accompanied by a public debate,” she told me, “but it isn’t happening because everyone is still afraid.” 

“The future of Italy's energy sector must lie in nuclear,” she said, adding that if Italy was to continue pursuing solar and wind energy alone, “it means destroying all the natural areas that are still left.”

I asked the government to respond to allegations about how criminality, speculation and land-grabs in the renewable energy sector might be affecting Italians’ opinions on nuclear power. 

“We do not believe it is appropriate to frame the energy debate by ideologically pitting nuclear power against renewables, nor should we use any administrative or criminal issues in certain sectors to discredit a technology as a whole,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “Nuclear power is not an alternative to renewables, but their best ally,” she said. 

On a warm autumn day in Rome, several thousand people gathered for an annual “climate pride” march. They brandished homemade cardboard wind turbines that spun in the breeze. Vincenzo Migliucci, 83, was among them. He worked for more than three decades for ENEL, Italy’s energy corporation, and he’s been anti-nuclear for much of his life. After the Chernobyl accident, he protested outside the nuclear plant under construction in Montalto di Castro almost every day, picketing the workers as they went through the gates.

“The wrath of God happened,” he said, referring to Chernobyl. “And when a true estimate is made, we’ll one day see how many disasters Chernobyl caused.” 

Migliucci is against nuclear power plants of all types — arguing for solar panels instead — and is particularly concerned about what happens to the plants after they become obsolete and must, like the Latina plant, be slowly dismantled over decades. “The decommissioning costs a fortune; the nuclear waste repositories cost a fortune,” he said.

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He began telling me some of the stories that surround Italy’s shuttered nuclear plants. “Near the Garigliano power plant,” he told me, “a child was born with only one eye.” His own eyes widened as he pressed a finger into the middle of my forehead. “Sheep and cattle,” he said, “were born with six legs, or entirely red in colour. It’s not a myth, it’s real.” 

Younger generations of Italians don’t have the same collective impressions around nuclear power, nor around Chernobyl or its aftermath, explained Luca Romano, a young pro-nuclear influencer with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. Romano makes videos with his partner, Luiza Munteanu, about the advantages of nuclear power. The main problem he runs up against, he says, is that “we have a very low scientific literacy, the level of debate is abysmal.” And culturally, he adds, “Italy has always been a country that looks backwards rather than forwards.”

In May, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Italy’s Lombardy region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the governor to cooperate on applying nuclear science for development across the region. The choice of Lombardy was significant. It is home to Milan, and is at the heart of Italy’s digital infrastructure. Speckled with no fewer than 60 data centers, with more cropping up, Lombardy has opened itself up to Silicon Valley. Microsoft is investing billions in the area to boost its AI and cloud computing infrastructure. Amazon Web Services has committed to spending over $1 billion to expand its data center operations around Milan.

How northern Italy’s growing AI infrastructure will be powered, though, is still a problem to be solved — one that cuts to the heart of Italy’s energy dependence. Since Giorgia Meloni became prime minister in October 2022 — which coincided with the launch of ChatGPT a month later — the Italian government has been broaching the topic of nuclear power as essential to Italy's energy future. “World population and economic growth will significantly increase energy demand,” Meloni said at a sustainability summit in Abu Dhabi. “Not least due to the growing requirements arising from the development of generative artificial intelligence.” 

Artificial intelligence is a “highly relevant topic,” said Corrado, the communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “As more things run on electricity, the economy goes digital, and data centers and AI expand, demand for steady, low-emissions power will rise. Nuclear energy can help as a reliable, controllable source that works alongside renewables.” 

In August, it emerged that the government had set aside €7.5 million purely for pro-nuclear communication and information campaigns directed at regions where new plants may be built. One focus of the Meloni administration is on the prospect of building small modular reactors, sometimes called “mini nukes.” They are compact fission plants, a fraction of the size of the traditional, cathedral-like nuclear power stations. They have a smaller core, and proponents argue their safety features mean there’s minimal chance of an epic, Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster, something the government is keen to get across to voters. 

Currently, only China and Russia have these small reactors up and running, but mini nuclear plants have attracted significant attention in Silicon Valley. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was chairman of Oklo, a nuclear startup focused on SMRs, while U.S. nuclear startup Kairos has signed an agreement with Google to develop these reactors to power its data centers. This month, the European Commission unveiled a strategy for rolling out small modular reactors and bringing them “online” by the 2030s.

Soon, Italy may take the first steps towards the reconstruction of a nuclear industry that has been abandoned for decades. “I believe it won't be easy to relaunch nuclear energy,” said Barbara Curli, the Turin historian. “Knowing a little about the history of nuclear power in Italy and its political dimension, I'd be quite skeptical about the possibility of relaunching nuclear power here in Italy — but let’s see.” 

A little under 1,500 miles away, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, among wild boar, birds, and deer, radiation levels in some areas have dipped below around 0.3 microsieverts per hour, lower than background radiation levels in many European cities. Not least the eternal city of Rome.

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The post How Italy’s Chernobyl ghosts might stop a new atomic age appeared first on Coda Story.

In a digitized, connected world, exile doesn’t mean silence. Using open source intelligence techniques, encrypted messaging, and data, journalists can report in real time from thousands of miles away, serving communities they can no longer reach in person.

We spoke to four journalists from four countries who have spent the past decade working in exile. Some left gradually, step by step. Others had only hours to abandon their lives. Every year, hundreds more join them — barred from returning home, facing imprisonment or persecution if they do, uncertain when or whether they’ll see their families again.

Still, they keep reporting. These are their stories.

Ekaterina Fomina – Russia 

When Ekaterina Fomina was working as a reporter in Moscow, her favorite kind of journalism was old-school shoeleather reporting: traveling to far-flung regions of Russia, knocking on doors, talking to rural families who lived most of their lives offline. “My main tools were my legs and arms,” she said. 

In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Fomina began to grasp that one day soon, she might have to leave the country. Media outlets across Russia were facing intense pressure. As each day passed, the government implemented new censorship and repression laws. “We knew that if the government labeled us an “undesirable organization”— a criminal label in Russia — we could be arrested,” she said. Every newsroom had some kind of contingency plan in place for leaving, but the plans were vague and abstract. Fomina and her colleagues made sure they had visas ready in their passports for Europe, in case they had to leave quickly. “But we were not ready for a real tragedy.”

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Fomina went into overdrive, covering the war. 

“The polarization, the open war towards another country, made me realize that my position in society was completely different from those of many people around me. It was very difficult for me to accept that my fellow citizens could support such cruelty,” she said. “In the first weeks of the war, seeing this support made me realize that it would be very hard to live in this country.” 

Fomina — who was reporting for the independent outlet iStories — understood it would be impossible to cover the war from inside the country without facing prosecution. “The only option was to leave the country and continue covering the war openly.” 

It was not immediately obvious how long she would be away for. Her friends and colleagues reassured her that this wouldn’t last forever, but she wasn’t so sure. “Everything was unpredictable, and it was unclear how it would affect our destinies,” she said. She had no illusions that she would ever come back to Russia. 

“I don’t even remember the whole process of escape, because in the very first days of the war my colleagues and I were constantly working — covering events, talking to people on both sides, but especially people in Ukraine.” In the meantime, she packed up her life in one day.  She packed just one suitcase, giving a few things to her mother, and throwing the rest away. She took a handful of souvenirs from Russia — gifts from friends and family, a T-shirt with Cyrillic letters on it, talismans of the life she was leaving behind. 

In the middle of a cold March night in Moscow, she said goodbye to her mother and grandmother, not knowing when she would see them again. “The scale of my personal tragedy couldn’t be compared to the scale of the tragedy happening in Ukraine. Only years later can I evaluate how awful, how tragic, and how traumatic those events were for me. But at that moment, it was just a feeling of adrenaline,” she said. “At an intuitive level, I felt that this was the last peaceful moment of my life in Russia.” 

Living in exile in Europe, Fomina began to reorient her reporting techniques. She could no longer be a shoeleather reporter, using her legs and arms as tools and knocking on doors. She began investigating war crimes using open-source intelligence techniques. 

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Not long into her exile, she investigated Russian soldiers who had been there during the massacre in Bucha. She started by tracing evidence from a survivor’s phone. The phone and its calling credit had been confiscated by Russian soldiers, then used to call their families back home. When it ran out of credit, the soldiers left it behind. One survivor recovered it and gave it to Fomina. Using investigative techniques and leaked data, she identified the numbers on the call log as belonging largely to relatives — mothers and wives — of Russian soldiers. She was then able to verify precisely which soldiers had been deployed in the area. 

For her work on this investigation, Fomina was arrested in Russia in absentia in the summer of 2024. Then, on March 31, 2025, a Moscow court sentenced Fomina to 8.5 years in prison for disseminating “fake news” about Ukraine out of “political hatred.”

“On the one hand, you know that you did everything right,” Fomina said, describing her schooling, her education, her constant pursuit of the truth in journalism. “But on the other hand, you are facing such limitations and such punishment.”

“I suppress my trauma in order to continue doing this,” she said. “But I can’t stop doing my work because the war crimes are continuing.” 

It is now four years since Fomina fled Russia. Barring a dramatic regime change in the future, there’s no prospect she’ll ever return.

Luz Mely Reyes - Venezuela

Luz Mely Reyes left Venezuela in slow motion. In 2015, she was the editor-in-chief Efecto Cocuyo, a small newspaper in Caracas. “Our heart as journalists was not to be too close to power. Power can be very seductive. But when you are too close to power you can lose the heart of your duty. So we tried always to be close to the common people,” she said.  

In 2018, a Venezuelan politician and opposition member called Fernando Albán mysteriously fell from a tenth-floor window while being held in custody. Nicolás Maduro’s government said he jumped. Reyes wasn’t so sure. “I asked questions on my Twitter account — why was he on the 10th floor, how did he jump?” she recalled. After tweeting, she turned her phone off to focus on writing. Suddenly, her husband’s phone began to ring. It was a tip-off: police were discussing Reyes’ tweet online, and talking about detaining her. Reyes scrambled to leave the country, only coming back a few months later when the dust had settled. 

All too soon, she had to leave Venezuela again — this time because of her coverage of a journalist who had been arrested in the middle of a blackout.

And so her wandering years began. Whenever Reyes felt too much pressure from the authorities, she would leave Venezuela for extended periods, spending time in neighboring Brazil and Colombia, before slipping back into Venezuela when she felt it was safe. 

“I had to accept that I wouldn’t be able to live in Venezuela anymore,” she said. But she continued to shuttle back and forth. The authorities canceled her passport twice, threatened to imprison her, increasing the pressure all the time. Her team told her how it didn’t make sense to be in Venezuela — that she couldn’t do her work properly while she was constantly in hiding, on high alert. 

Finally, after five years of this, she booked a one-way ticket out of Venezuela. She now lives in Austin, Texas, and doesn’t know if she’ll ever go home. 

“I had been struggling for about five years to accept that the government was expelling me from the country. I finally accepted that I was in exile — because if you can’t return to your country without the risk of being persecuted, well, you’re an exile.”

Reyes hasn’t stopped working for the people of Venezuela. During the US military strike on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro, she mobilized her sources and contacts across the country. She and her team livestreamed updates for ten hours straight, confirming the facts, debunking disinformation as the extraordinary events of January 3 unfolded. 

She feels the pain of being away from home acutely. “They say there are seven stages of grief when you’re forced to migrate. One grief I always have is for the landscape, for the weather, for the beach, for the space I was in, for the sun,” she said. “It’s very physical. I feel like a tree that has been ripped out of the ground.” 

There is no job she would rather do, though. “If I had to do it all over again, I would choose to be a journalist.”

Zahra Joya - Afghanistan

Zahra Joya’s world changed forever over just a few days in August 2021. On August 14, she was working in Kabul as editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media, an Afghan women’s journalism platform. The following day, Kabul fell to the Taliban. Joya joined the chaos of people fleeing the country out of Kabul airport. She arrived in a hotel room in London on August 26 — in less than a fortnight, everything she knew was gone.  “Everything vanished overnight,” Joya said. From her hotel, she couldn’t stop reporting. 

“I personally was safe, but when I looked back to all our achievements, to all the work that we had done, it gave me this chance to rethink my circumstances. I realized I could not stop my work. So we continued.”

Rukhshana Media’s burgeoning team scattered to the four winds following the collapse — some made it out of Afghanistan like her, others took shelter within the country, where it was no longer safe for them to keep working openly.

Founded in 2020, Rukhshana Media is a platform for female journalists — a space for stories by and about women in Afghanistan. It was named after an Afghan teenager who was stoned to death after being accused of adultery in 2015. 

Joya had to find a way to keep Rukhshana Media alive. She began, frantically, to build a completely new team, from thousands of miles away. 

“It was a terrible moment of my life. It was something I never, ever imagined I would go through,” she said. ““It was impossible for me to not think about Afghanistan just because I was outside.”

Joya scoured social media for new reporters. Then came the complex problem of how to hire them. How to look after journalists on the ground in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, keep them anonymous, and keep them safe, from thousands of miles away? She drew up a security plan and a code of conduct for her team. “I tell my colleagues, “please prioritize your safety. No information is worth your safety.”” She decided not to tell each reporter who their colleagues were, so that if they were captured by the Taliban, they would have no information to hand over under interrogation.

Bathed in the glow of her computer in her government-issued hotel room in London — where she stayed for a year — Joya worked and worked to publish as many stories as possible from on the ground in Afghanistan. 

“For the women of Afghanistan, one of the only ways to raise their voices is through media,” Joya said, describing how Afghan families often call her asking for help, asking if she can write about their situation. Families of female activists call Joya as soon as their relatives are imprisoned by the Taliban. 

“I feel guilty sometimes because people rely on me. They’re inside the country and they want to raise their voice,” she said. “My colleagues are taking their life in their hands to gather information.”

To evade capture, Rukhshana Media’s reporters often need to switch phone numbers without warning, meaning people can go dark at any time, and there are panicked moments where Joya doesn’t know what’s happened to them. 

In September 2025, the entire country went dark without warning. The Taliban had shut down the internet completely — stating it was being blocked "for the prevention of vices." All of Joya’s contacts, reporters and sources stopped responding. 

“Afghanistan was cut off from the world. It was terrible. It reminded us of the fall of Kabul all over again. We had no idea what was going on in the country,” she said. When the internet came back on, her work continued, the pace relentless — and it hasn’t stopped since.

Jesús Adonis Martínez Peña - Cuba

The idea for El Estornudo — a narrative journalism magazine covering Cuba — started on a balcony in Havana in 2015. A group of young people, many of them university students, gathered together and talked about their dream to tell the stories of Cuba on their own terms. 

“It was a time of bilateral tension between the United States and Cuba, and the situation in Cuba wasn't as serious in terms of the social, political, and economic crisis as it is now,” remembers the editor-in-chief of El Estornudo, Jesús Adonis Martinez Peña. Widespread internet had not yet arrived in Cuba, but more and more people were getting access every day, and new media outlets were springing up –– “basically in what had been, up until that point, a wasteland in terms of independent media.”

Together, the young journalists drafted a manifesto for their magazine, which they published on March 16, 2015, Journalist’s Day in Cuba. 

“In Cuba, the press is a neo-colonial republic. With flags, coats of arms, statutes, organizations, prizes, forums, infinite debates — but without independence,” they wrote. “If you want to know Cuba beyond the clash of slogans and the three or four topics recycled by the contemporary media world, you have to read this magazine.”

They decided to call their magazine ‘El Estornudo’ — The Sneeze. The name, they said, reflected their own reflexive need to “react against the prevailing climate, the urgent need to expel something.” 

More than a decade has passed since that balcony brainstorming session. “Ten years later, and here we are. And most of our founders are scattered around the world,” Peña, who is now based in Chicago, said. Peña himself believes he can still go back to Cuba if he stays low-profile, doesn’t work, and just sees his family. But a number of his colleagues can’t. “My colleague who edits the magazine with me, they wouldn’t even let him board the American Airlines flight.”

The situation for Cuban journalists is specific to the island. “In Cuba, no one is going to shoot us in the head for journalism,” the Estornudo staff wrote in their founder’s letter ten years ago. This still holds true today — and it’s important, Peña said, “to respectfully acknowledge the realities for our colleagues in the region, in Central America, in countries like Mexico, where there are journalists being killed. We have the imperative, the duty, to do journalism under our own specific conditions of totalitarianism.” Reporters in Cuba exist within an insidious culture of fear and control. “The press is constantly under siege by state security. They monitor our colleagues, restrict their movements within the island, put police patrols in front of their houses — it functions almost like a temporary house arrest,” Peñam said. “There have been arrests, interrogations; they put pressure on the families of journalists too, pushing them into exile too.”

Since the Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent blocking of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, the country has been plunged into fresh crisis. President Trump has called on Cuba to “make a deal before it’s too late” and threatened to implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the “next President of Cuba.” Looking on, Peña’s team has been on high alert. They’re preparing themselves for every outcome — from a spiralling social crisis resulting from the U.S.-imposed fuel blockade, to a direct American attack on Havana. “We are considering every scenario, and we are not ruling anything out. And whatever happens, we are ready to report.”

Drop in Illustrations by Teona Tsintsadze.

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“It makes me proud,” said Australian academic Julie Posetti, Director of the Information Integrity Initiative. “It genuinely makes me proud,” she told me from her desk thousands of miles away in Oxford. “Because you're dealing with a small country at the bottom of the world — a wealthy Western state, but one with relatively limited ability to flex muscle when it comes to Silicon Valley. Australia has been on the front foot in a flawed way, but in an ambitious and frankly a brave way.” The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a trade group that represents several of the biggest Silicon Valley companies, has complained that the ban “undermines U.S. digital competitiveness.” 

The social media ban for teens is the latest — and perhaps most muscular — move that Australia has made in recent years to stand up to Big Tech. It’s a push led by the country’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who has been critical in building Australia’s sophisticated understanding of Big Tech’s expanding power. “We are treating Big Tech like the extractive industry it has become,” Grant said in a speech about the ban back in June. Tech giants have been aggressively lobbying Australia for years to try to stem the tide of regulation, especially during the country’s pandemic-era push to get Google and Meta to pay news publishers for linking their content. Meta stonewalled the push, while Google did start paying news publishers, although it’s since been clearly signalling it wants to wind those deals down. But the legislation spooked the tech giants, who didn’t want to see other western states following in Australia’s footsteps.

As millions of teens lost access to their accounts, they flocked to other corners of the internet to air their grievances. “The Albanese government clearly doesn’t understand the impact this will have,” a teenager wrote on the Australian mental health forum ‘Beyond Blue’. “They think that just because we’re ‘kids’, we don’t know what’s best for us. It makes us look stupid, and that’s not fair.” Another agreed: “Honestly, it’s kinda scary. A lot of people my age (under 16) use social media not just for scrolling but for connection.” Yet the overwhelming majority of Australians support the ban. According to a nationwide survey carried out by Mark Andrejevic, Professor of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, and research company Roy Morgan, 78% of the population back the measure. In contrast, Andrejevic noted, many of his colleagues in academia oppose it. “Many academics studying social media started early on when it seemed more benign and there were clear benefits to the forms of networking it allowed,” he said. “I tended to be critical from the start because I study surveillance and the online economy.” 

The Australian ban faces the same pitfalls that occurred when the U.K. enforced its age verification rules from July, preventing young people from accessing porn sites. Australians will now have to submit personal information such as their biometrics to access social media, meaning that private companies acting as gatekeepers will potentially have access to vast troves of personal data. On X, Elon Musk called the ban a “backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians.” Following his tweet, the Senate inquiry received 15,000 responses from the public in a single day.

On December 12, Reddit filed a lawsuit against the Australian government, arguing that as a discussion forum — rather than social media platform – it should be exempt from the legislation, which it says will curtail not just young people’s, but all Australian users’ rights to free and open political discourse. The legislation, the company said in a statement on its own website, is “forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes onto teens as well as adults.” The company highlighted in particular the vague way the government defines social media, creating “an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t.” 

Reddit’s concerns reflect Silicon Valley’s unease with Australia’s enthusiasm for regulation. Its ambitions to stand up to Big Tech run beyond social media. The government has also been attempting to build world-leading guardrails on Artificial Intelligence. But, rather like the European Union, Australia also has ambitious plans for the widespread adoption of AI, which has led the government to hold back from crafting tougher legislation on privacy, safety and transparency. “The fact they have backed off the guardrails for the moment, speaks, I suppose, to the economic hopes being pinned on the technology,” said Andrejevic. Even though it wants to stand up to Big Tech, Australia also sees itself as the right kind of place to develop a robust tech sector.

Still, Australia stands apart in the West in its attempt to face up to platform capture. A recent U.S. survey showed that a third of U.S. teens use social media, particularly TikTok and YouTube, “almost constantly.” Posetti put it to me this way – Australia’s always been a “nanny state” — a place where you can’t ride a bike without a helmet. It also has a “deep egalitarian strain,” says Andrejevic. “At least in ideology if not in practice.” So it tracks that the idea of a handful of foreign billionaires taking over the online world and pumping whatever they like into everyone’s feeds is, well, just not very Australian. And now, with Malaysia planning to ban under-16s from social media next year, several European countries and even a handful of individual U.S. states considering similar rules, will national governments be able to wrestle back some control from Big Tech?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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The future according to Silicon Valley’s prophets

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We think of Silicon Valley as a nexus of tech moguls, innovators, power brokers and venture capitalists. But something bigger and more ideological is unfolding in the Valley — the building of an entire religion. Tech evangelists talk about Artificial Intelligence as if they’re building a higher power. Elon Musk believes AI will help us find a “digital God;” while biohacker and tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is adamant: “I think the irony is that we told stories of God creating us,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “And I think the reality is that we are creating God. We are creating God in the form of superintelligence.”

According to the tech prophets, the future is something the rest of us don’t have any control over — in part, they say, because we don’t understand the tech enough to have the power or the authority to regulate it, and in part because the prophets themselves don’t want to bear any responsibility for the products they create. So how should we think about Silicon Valley’s version of the future, what promises are they really making, and how can we regain control over the story of the future? 

This time two years ago, I was staying at an eco-retreat deep in the rainforest in Costa Rica. It was supposed to be a break from work — a time to unplug, recharge, sleep in a bamboo “pod” to the soundtrack of howler monkeys and toucans, that sort of thing. Instead, as often happens when I’m trying not to think too hard, I came across an interesting story. It began when I noticed my fellow retreaters all came from California. They were unplugging too: and arguably, they needed it more than me, because they all worked in tech. What I had thought was a rustic Costa Rican-owned eco-lodge was actually a favorite techbro getaway, founded by burnt-out former tech innovators, who had invested their money into helping their other burnt-out friends recover from burnout. 

Over my days in that steamy jungle, I learned that the place I was staying in often ran psychedelic retreats for venture capitalists, engineers, tech workers, and crypto-bros, and that the entire valley surrounding us was gradually being taken over by similar retreats. Parcels of land were being sold off to Californian buyers, with indigenous people pushed out before being invited back into “the space” to guide psychedelic rituals and help the tech bros unlock their “creative flow” and dream up their latest innovations.

Right now, Silicon Valley’s elite are obsessed with accelerating towards a future where the human race is re-engineered and the world’s resources are in the hands of a very few. After I got back from my trip, I couldn’t stop thinking about how psychedelics are being used to help some of the world’s most powerful tech evangelists build a vision of expanded human consciousness and fuel their ambition to build hyper-intelligent AI models, pushing them to accelerate towards evolutionary transformation, with all the problems and delusions that entails — and what that means for the rest of us. 

“Come watch me trip balls,” Bryan Johnson, the longevity entrepreneur (whose catchphrase is “don’t die”), proclaimed recently, before livestreaming himself taking a ‘heroic dose’ of magic mushrooms. Johnson, who believes the tech world is “building God with superintelligence” is determined to live until he can eventually merge with a machine and live forever. In recent years, he’s been trying myriad interventions to biohack his body — everything from injecting himself with his son’s blood plasma to taking over 100 supplements a day — in an attempt to live longer. Experimenting with psychedelics is his latest venture, but he’s far from alone in the tech world. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has publicly said a psychedelic retreat was “life-changing;” while Elon Musk says he has used ketamine for depression, and Google’s Sergey Brin has invested millions into a psychedelic research project.

Upon my return from Costa Rica, I spoke to Johns Hopkins psychedelic humanities lecturer Neşe Devenot, who described how, spurred on by psychedelics, the tech elite are building a conviction that they are “the chosen steward of technology to help transmute the current phase of humanity and consciousness into a new form.”

The thing is, while psychedelic brews like ayahuasca have been used in shamanic practices within indigenous groups for centuries, the practice has been hijacked by the tech world — not to forge a closer connection with nature, or to confront their own existence, but to imagine a future where we transcend nature, transcend death, and terra-form the planet with datacenters to power ever-expanding artificial intelligence systems.

“A tech bro on acid is still a tech bro — they just become a psychedelically amplified tech bro,” is how writer and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff put it to me last year. “These guys have a hallucinatory confidence over their plans. And they’re developing tech that is as potentially disruptive to civilization as nuclear weapons.” Here are some of the most psychedelically inflected visions for the future that the tech bros are building for us and, soberly, let’s also look at what the costs of those visions are.

We’ll live in Utopia* 

Believers: Jeff Bezos, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk

Tech leaders like Jeff Bezos and Ray Kurzweil promise us a solved world. They say that with the help of AI, we can hack our way back into paradise. Some talk about it as “the Singularity” — a world where AI is billions of times more intelligent than humans — and say we just won’t be able to predict or even conceive of what the future will look like once we build artificial intelligence that powerful. But the most optimistic tech evangelists believe it will be a kind of heaven.

“It is a renaissance; it is a golden age. We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades,” says Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “By the time we get to the 2040s, we’ll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that’s singular in nature,” adds computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who has written extensively on the Singularity.

In our podcast Captured, tech workers described what their utopia might look like from their San Francisco condos: “I see a city filled with gardens, filled with communities, a place where people can raise their kids together, a place where people can find a place to belong. And maybe there's sci-fi elements to that,” engineering physicist Andrew Cote told us, staring out over the horizon.

The catch: But once everything is solved, what will we do with our time? Philosopher Nick Bostrom asks us to imagine what Utopia would actually look like — and whether it’s something we actually want: “Imagine we have all this technological abundance, and we’ve somehow managed not to use it to oppress one another or wage war, but have some reasonably good arrangement. What would human lives be like?” Well, for one thing… 

We’ll live forever*

Believers: Bryan Johnson, Peter Thiel 

Talk to anyone in Silicon Valley right now and they’ll wax lyrical about ways to live forever. At present, they accept it’s medically impossible — but they believe the day is coming when technology will let us transcend our bodies.

“I’m basically a brain with limbs… the rest is kind of undifferentiated,” said AI builder Kyle Morris when speaking to us for Captured, showing us the vast range of supplements he took to live long enough to see a technological shift where we’ll be able to merge with machines and continue to consciously live beyond the limits of our bodies. Bryan Johnson, tech CEO and leader of the “don’t die” movement, has experimented with injecting his son’s blood plasma into his veins in a bid to live longer — though he says it didn’t really work.

The catch: *Not everyone will live forever. Only those who can afford it. “I suspect we're going to see a class divide between people who can live hundreds of years and people who live less than 50. That’s going to be a civil war of some sort, I would anticipate,” Kyle Morris told us.

We’re all going to die*

Believers: Elon Musk, Daniel Kokotajlo, Effective Altruists

This might seem contradictory, but in San Francisco it makes sense: there are two camps — those who believe AI will allow us to live forever, and those who believe it will kill us all. There’s also people who believe both outcomes are a possibility. Elon Musk, for example, says there’s “only a 20% chance of annihilation” by super-powerful artificial intelligence programs.

While reporting for Captured, we spoke to Effective Altruists protesting outside Meta: “Pause AI because we don’t want to die!” they chanted. Earlier this year, a group of AI researchers released AI2027, a piece of science fiction charting the rise of runaway artificial intelligence, ending in a brutal showdown where every human is killed by an AI-activated biological weapon, and the Earth is terraformed by datacenters, laboratories, and particle colliders.

*Except the tech-bro survivalists. Tech enthusiasts — with money — believe their inventions could trigger a catastrophic event on Earth: a global pandemic, climate breakdown, nuclear war, or AI apocalypse. They’re quietly prepping. Some are building bunkers in Montana. Others see New Zealand as the ideal bolthole. Peter Thiel has constructed a fortified estate there, designed as a survival outpost.

We’ll never have to work again*

Believers: Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Blania

Tech leaders building artificial intelligence talk openly about how they’re transforming the entire economy. They tell us that the world of work, as we know it, may not exist for much longer. “Entire classes of jobs will go away and not come back,” is how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman puts it. Jobs as we know it will change forever. For Captured, we spoke to nurses who are already seeing chunks of their jobs taken over by artificial intelligence, and even a comedian who worries a day will come when AI starts writing her peers’ jokes. Already, entire industries are feeling the effects of AI takeover. But if we don’t have to work, how will we get paid? Silicon Valley has an answer for that too: Universal Basic Income, an old idea retrofitted for the AI age. The idea with UBI, is that we'll all get an allowance, a regular payment, no strings attached. That payment will replace income that would previously have come from a job. We traveled to Kenya to look at the prototype for one of these systems in action: a concept called World, that gives you a monthly allowance of around $50. In return, you must submit your iris biometrics to World’s database via a camera device called the Orb. When the Orb arrived in Kenya, there were enormous, chaotic queues at shopping malls, packed with people vying to submit their iris data and get onto World’s system and get hold of the handouts. 

The catch: Universal Basic Income sounds great in principle, but if you think deeper, it will completely change what it means to be human. If we don’t work, don’t pay taxes, then we as humans will no longer contribute to society and the economy. We’ll then become completely reliant on — and powerless against — the whims and wishes of those in power, with no way to protest, or strike, if they’re unhappy with how things are going. If we accept Silicon Valley’s vision of the future where we depend on handouts from our tech overlords, we’d concede our freedom, independence and autonomy to a new set of masters. Beyond that, it’s difficult to imagine what we would do all day — as a species — if we didn’t have to work. “If there's nothing we need to do–if we could just press a button and have everything done, like, then what do we do all day long? What gives meaning to our lives?” philosopher Nick Bostrom mused while speaking to us for Captured.

Nation states will not exist*

Believers: Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen

“Very few institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet,” Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, said in a lecture recently–and by that, he means governments, and countries themselves. After all, governments come with a whole host of irritating traits that tech leaders loathe–they regulate companies, make them pay taxes, tell them what they can and can’t do. Why not secede, then, from those countries entirely, and build your own? Srinivasan is one of the leading thinkers behind the idea of a “networked state” — a successor to the nation state, built and enabled by tech. 

Proponents of the networked state dream of having digital statehoods; “startup nations” where they’ll be free of taxes and regulations, free of the bureaucracy of living in, well, a traditional country. They’re already doing it: pushing to draft legislation to create “freedom cities” in the U.S. — something Trump’s 2024 campaign proposed, enclaves unshackled by federal law where tech engineers can try out startups and clinical trials free from regulation or approval from federal agencies. Meanwhile on an island off the coast of Honduras is Prospera, a semi-autonomous “private city” backed by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, that’s marketed as a libertarian fantasy utopia. 

The catch: The idea of getting rid of stifling government bureaucracy and living in a world without borders is an idealistic dream held by many people, not just tech leaders. But, as the Silicon Valley elite envisions it, we would replace sovereign nations with a collection of private, giant gated communities that would hoard resources, money, and power, while locking everyone else out. A world where democracies no longer exist and elected leaders are replaced by digital moguls would be a world that serves clients, not citizens, and cares only for profit and innovation, a world where international human rights laws are thrown out. 

We’ll spread out into the stars*

Believers: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson

But what if we could take this idea of building crypto-states further — and leave Earth entirely to build Silicon Valley outposts on Mars, or on the moons of Jupiter? Not only transcend our bodies, but transcend the Earth itself — after all, if we can’t fix the planet, we can just leave it. Jeff Bezos talks about moving “all polluting industry into space” and leaving Earth as a nature reserve — one of the tech industry’s many technofixes for climate change. And all of Elon Musk’s ventures, from Tesla to X, are designed to support his ultimate mission: making the human species “multiplanetary.”

“They want to ensure the light of consciousness persists by reducing the probability of human extinction,” says Émile P. Torres, a philosopher who used to be part of what they call the emergent “cult” of Silicon Valley. Torres told us about the tech bros’ vision of a utopian future where humans conquer the universe and plunder the cosmos. It sounds like something out of science fiction — and indeed it is: when we visited AI frat houses during our reporting for Captured we found bookshelves stuffed with science fiction about space and colonizing the universe. 

Harvard historian Jill Lepore has a different way of seeing it — she calls it “extra-terrestrial capitalism,” mimicking a colonialist vision of expanding indefinitely, taking our extractivist mindset into the stars. 

The catch: Not everyone will be able to travel into space — or perhaps, not everyone will be able to stay on Earth. If you read enough sci-fi, and listen to enough conversations in Silicon Valley, you can envision all sorts of different outcomes: Mars becoming a penal colony filled with slave workers extracting resources; Mars becoming independent from Earth; only the super-rich and elite able to leave Earth as the planet burns. In Musk and other tech-bro survivalist visions of the future, they imagine a global pandemic, climate meltdown or nuclear war extinction event — perhaps thanks to the runaway Artificial Intelligence they themselves built — and see space as the ultimate off-ramp for a chosen few. 

“It’s important to get a self‐sustaining base on Mars… because it’s far enough away from Earth that it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk told the audience at South By Southwest in 2018. “In the hopefully unlikely event that something terrible happens to Earth, there’s a continuance of consciousness on Mars. One of the benefits of Mars is life insurance for life collectively,” he said this year. 

We’ll have all human knowledge in our brains*

Evangelists: Elon Musk, Bryan Johnson

Why bother with school when you could install a chip in your brain? Right now, tech leaders are working on building chips — like Musk’s venture, Neuralink — that we can insert in our brains, so that one day, we can merge with machines. When we met engineers in San Francisco, they told us about their ultimate ambition: to put all human knowledge inside human brains, from birth. 
“That’s the purpose of the education system, right?” said Jeremy Nixon, the founder of AGI House, which brings together AI workers into a houseshare in San Francisco.

But why not skip over all that and simply install a chip into our brains, so that even from birth we can know everything, all at once. Imagine, we’ll be able to speak every language on Earth, we’ll know all of human history, all of science. Ok, we might not be able to discover anything new — but our future will be boundless. “You hold your phone and it’s like a better prefrontal cortex. It tells you how to get places, tells you how to plan. It gives you answers. It gives you a better memory. I see in the next 50 years, that's going to enter us, that's going to become part of us,” Kyle Morris, another member of the AGI House, told us. 

The catch: Not everyone will necessarily be able to get this supersonic brain — and those enhancements will only come to those who pay. So, as tech leaders see it, could there one day be an underclass of people who can’t afford — or don’t want to install — these brain enhancements? And will those with enhanced brains then oppress those without them? Just as the world is becoming harder and harder to navigate now without a smartphone, perhaps in the future it will become harder to navigate without a chip in your brain — will you be able to travel, move freely, do simple errands? Last week, Mark Zuckerberg said that people without smart glasses like Meta’s model, that give them instant and constant access to an AI assistant, will be at a cognitive disadvantage. 

Climate change will be fixed by tech*

Evangelists: Larry Page, Elon Musk, Bill Gates


There’s an idea we came across while reporting in Silicon Valley that climate change, while problematic, is nothing much to worry about, because one day soon it too, like everything else, will be fixed by some technological intervention. Perhaps we’ll geoengineer the skies to create “sunscreen for the Earth” (as one pair of tech evangelists-turned-guerilla geoengineers dubbed it); perhaps we’ll finally figure out nuclear fusion (that’s a favourite prediction in Silicon Valley circles), or we’ll figure out how to get our oceans to sequester carbon. In November, Elon Musk proposed that “A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth.” Though artificial intelligence datacenters suck up vast quantities of water and spew carbon into the atmosphere (Google’s newest datacentre in the UK will emit 570,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, according to planning documents), the tech leaders tell us: we’ll figure out the answers sooner or later; or AI will do it for us. 

The catch: Geoengineering, while a favorite pipedream of tech enthusiasts, could have unpredictable, and Earth-shattering consequences. Climate experts say processes like these could throw Earth into deeper chaos by cooling the world unevenly and wreaking havoc on our climate systems. And once we start the process of solar geoengineering, we won’t be able to stop — we’ll have to keep spewing chemicals into the atmosphere to cool down the sun, or face a rapid and catastrophic heating event. Who would even be in charge of geoengineering the planet; and who would decide if it was safe enough?

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There was no specific tipping point that made Logan Lane get rid of her smartphone. One day, the thought just arrived. “I was like, I just can’t fucking do this anymore.” And she put away the device that had dominated her life since she was 11. “I spent about five of my developmental years just tied to my smartphone,” she says. Logan, 20, bought a basic flip phone, and re-learned to navigate the world, without social media, GPS, and without the constant, nagging cry for attention from her smartphone that had punctuated her days.

She grieves the early adolescence she lost to her phone. “In the years when you’re supposed to be reading and playing, we were on our phones and computers,” she says. “We had those years of play stolen from us.” 

Lane is the founder of the Luddite Club, a solidarity network of “former screenagers” growing a movement across America. Together, they’re pledging to give up their devices, choosing instead a life of voluntary exile from the digital world. 

To speak to Lane, I placed an international call to her flip-phone — an act that already felt anachronistic. The line crackled as we talked and her train rattled through New York City. For a moment, the world felt analog again. 

Lane is part of the first generation with no memory of life before smartphones — a generation that became addicted to their phones before anyone truly understood the cost. “There’s no one person to blame,” she said. “Even though I was only 11 or 12 years old when I got a phone, I was responsible for facilitating this addiction in my life. But at the same time, I was a child.” 

All around Lane on the subway, all along the train — and along every train in New York City; every train in every major city in the world — people stared into their smart devices. The smartphone penetration rate for the world is about 60%; in the U.S. it’s at 91%. Just a decade ago, global penetration was 10%, but now many of us can’t leave a room, let alone the house, without our phones.

Rising in response is a resilient counterculture; a growing group of people who have had enough. People who long for a simpler, more three-dimensional life in which they have control over their digital existence, and their thoughts and data are not harvested, nudged, monitored. So they check out. Power off their smartphone; lock it in a drawer; give it away; throw it in the trash. Hope they’ll never have to use one again. The Luddite Club now has local chapters all over the U.S., and young people are flocking to the myriad offline events where they talk about reclaiming their lives from tech capture. 

“I’m excited to read on the train in peace, to not look at social media, post or check up on exes, looking for validation or a small dopamine hit. I’ll get dopamine the right way,” a young woman recently wrote on Reddit. “It will be difficult at first,” someone responded, “but it will become more freeing after you break your chains.” Another young man wrote that he had “just wasted ten years of my life living in an alternate reality.” Having made the switch, he called on others to “come back to the real world and enjoy the struggles and solutions of analog life.”

These conversations unfold in a radical corner of the internet where thousands of people a day come to discuss getting rid of their smartphone. The “dumbphones” subreddit has the intimacy of an addiction support group. The page is full of pictures of what people call their “everyday carry” gear, the tech they bring with them on a typical day. For people of a certain age, the pictures are transfixing, nostalgic: Motorola Razr flip phones, old Nokias, candy-colored iPod minis, notebooks, A to Z maps, point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players. The photos hark back to a moment in time before everything — as the Luddites see it — started to go wrong.

It was, if you want to put a specific year to it, 2006. Facebook had just opened up its usership beyond students, and tens of thousands of users were signing up every day. Back then, Facebook reunited long lost schoolfriends, lovers, even relatives. Independent musicians blew up overnight on Myspace. Social media felt like something that would make people more open and connected. The first iPhone was still a year away. We still knew how to navigate our world without Google maps. We still read books on commutes, took pictures on cameras and uploaded them in their joyful hundreds to Facebook for fun. The 2008 crash hadn’t happened. Attention algorithms didn’t yet exist. The tech companies still felt like harbingers of a better, more connected future. 

Daisy Krigbaum, a dumbphone advocate who now runs a business around it, calls that era “the sweet spot.” It was a time, she says, “when online social platforms were there to facilitate in-person correspondence. They just filled the gap between when you could see somebody in person. You could talk to your friend while they’re abroad. You could talk to a family member who's bedridden. But then it evolved into a monster.”

The “sweet spot” is something Judy Estrin remembers well. One of the internet’s early architects, Estrin is a Silicon Valley veteran who helped build the foundations of the web in the 1970s. When I spoke to her at a sunny cafe in Palo Alto last year, she described the last days before technology stopped being built to cater to our needs. “It was human-centred,” she said of the internet back then. “It wasn’t until we got into the Cloud, mobile, social, that the dynamic shifted and it became more about humans adapting to the technology.” 

One thing that had kept tech companies in check, Estrin explained, was limitations on computing power. “There were constraints on the technology. We kept moving up against processing, bandwidth, storage.” But once computing power got cheaper, those constraints disappeared. “The culture changed,” she said. Instead of designing carefully, companies could just keep adding features. “The design aesthetic was these continuous scrolling feeds. The design of mobile became more and more massively online.”

She remembered how computer scientists started designing for mobile first. “We stopped having to think in terms of constraints. We just started brute-forcing everything.” And then tech began not to respond to our lives but to shape them. “It was in 2010, 2011, 2012,” Estrin said, “you could see the incentives of the system and the ad-driven markets just completely starting to shift things.” She said she felt guilty for not noticing this switch sooner — and for playing some role in the world Silicon Valley created; the world we all live in today. “ I did and do feel increasingly disappointed. Just disappointed with the technologies that we created,” she said. “ I think that I was so heads down and focused for so many years, between building companies and raising my son. And I think that I, then at some point, picked up my head. And it's like, well, why wasn't I paying attention to this stuff? What was I doing?”

For dumbphone business-owner Daisy Krigbaum and her partner Will Stults, the wake-up moment came on a transformative night in 2022. One night, after hours of scrolling beside each other on the couch, they finally looked up.

After basking in blue light and “looking at mindless stuff” for “an unreal amount of time,” Krigbaum said, they turned to each other and admitted they had a problem. 

They decided to forgo the tech that had been dominating their existence. First, like Lane, they had to come to terms with the time they had lost, and why. “ I think we both feel really grateful to have been born kind of on the cusp of the post-information age where we still had some foundational social skills,” said Krigbaum, who is 28. “I already feel impoverished by how much of my adolescence took place online.”

“Society's relationship with tech has at least migrated to the point where we're willing to admit that most or all of us have some sort of problem,” added Stults. “None of us have a completely healthy relationship with technology.” They started to look at flip phones and old-style cellphones to switch over to but found the experience of detangling their life from smartphones filled with knotty inconveniences, workarounds and sacrifices. 

Contemporary life is full of small dependencies that keep people tethered to their phones — apps for work, school portals, two-factor authentication, maps, music, messaging. One tiny function you rely on can hold you hostage to the whole device. “It’s such a confusing world to get off a smartphone,” Stults said. So he and Krigbaum founded an online store called dumbwireless selling dumbphones, and running a hotline to help people through the process. “We thought if we could streamline it a little bit, then people might be more inclined to follow their better instinct in those moments when they are like, ‘I can't do this anymore,’” said Krigbaum.

Krigbaum herself uses a Lightphone: it’s a new type of device built for digital exiles. Alongside another phone called the Kompakt, these phones are intentionally boring. The screens are e-ink. They have maps, messages, a calculator, an alarm clock, and of course a telephone. The Kompakt can “sideload” any other apps you need, like Slack, Spotify and WhatsApp. But they don’t pull and nag at your attention. 

At upwards of $200, these hybrid, dull phones are the ultimate connoisseur's choice for someone who wants to live in the modern world without being dependent on an attention-demanding device. But the true radicals go further, returning to the flip phones and Nokias of the “sweet spot” era, saying the joy of going back to the dumbphone is reclaiming parts of your brain — like your sense of direction — that have atrophied from smartphone use.

On Reddit’s dumbphones forum, people talk about the bigger aim of doing without the conveniences their phones provide and regaining control over their thought patterns. “Everything is a fucking struggle without a smartphone. The whole world is set up around them,” one Redditor wrote last month. “But I am focussed, I feel capable, I am so much more compassionate and understanding of others. I have more patience. I am less angry and more in control of my emotions. My anxiety is practically gone.”

Every so often, the author Zadie Smith — perhaps the world’s most famous flip-phone user — is reminded of the horrors of analog life, she told Ezra Klein on his podcast. “ Disaster. We're at a party at three in the morning, there's no way to get home, forget about it, walk five miles, disaster. Once a year. And every time it happened, I would think that was bad, but is it as bad as having my very consciousness colonized every moment of the day? And I'd be like, no. Definitely no competition.” It’s a trade-off dumb phone users are happy to make – lose their phone but regain their consciousness.

The other thing dumb phone users cherish is the solitude they get back. True solitude – where there’s no constant companion in your pocket that can listen to the sound of your voice, feel the pads of your fingertips, track your expressions, and follow you through your home city.

Someone who knows the importance of such solitude is Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist living in Hebron, on the West Bank. Hebron is one of the most intensely surveilled places on Earth, where the Israeli military uses facial recognition programs called Blue Wolf, Red Wolf, and White Wolf to track Palestinians. “I feel that I live in a lab and I’m a simulation object,” Amro told me, describing how the systems rely heavily on smartphones for data collection and enforcement. 

In 2022, Amro filmed an Israeli soldier beating an Israeli-Jewish activist. The video was much-shared in Israel, and Amro knew it would only be a matter of time before he was arrested. So he gave his smartphone to a friend who drove a taxi around the city. When the police came for him, they were intent on getting hold of it.  “The Israeli police were crazy to get my phone. And I refused to give it to them,” he remembers. Meanwhile, the phone’s location was moving all over Hebron, hidden in the taxicab. “My friends moved it from one car to another, trying to hide it. The phone was going all around the city until I was released,” he said with a laugh.

After that, he traveled to Jordan and bought an analog phone with buttons — the first he’d owned in years. “Buy it from a random place, when you travel somewhere, go and buy one,” he advised. He swaps out his smartphone for the analog phone “to feel better,” when he wants to have a moment of respite from the suffocating surveillance of life in the occupied West Bank. 

“It’s a very bad feeling to know all your life is being watched. Not just your political activities, but your [personal] life too. If you want to have a date, or something for yourself, the occupation will use it against you.” Once Amro started using the analog phone, the Israeli forces took notice. They didn’t like it. Just last month, as he was crossing the border from Jordan into Palestine, the customs officer rifled through his bag, looking for his smartphone. When the officer found the small analog phone, he took a picture of it and sent it to his superiors. 

“I was waiting, waiting, waiting,” Amro said. “Then the interrogators came.”

They grilled him about the phone. “ What’s wrong with you?” they said. “Why do you carry an analog phone? What do you do with it, who did you contact, and where is your smartphone?”

“I told them, ‘I’m not doing anything illegal. I live in Hebron. My house has one camera in the front and one in the back. Whenever I get in or get out, you know about it. Wherever I go, you know. My life has no privacy. Why do you care if I have an analog phone or a smartphone?’”

The border police questioned him solidly for two hours about the phone. “Everything is built on surveillance now and digitalization,” Amro said. “So if you go analog, you really make it hard for them. In the past, intelligence systems depended on analog tactics — on people. Now they depend on machines.”

They wanted him to have a smartphone because, as Amro put it, “The phone documents everything.”

He feels solidarity with other analog phone users around the world. “Whenever I see someone else with one, I feel — Here’s a friend. We are the same family.”

Sometimes, with his analog phone, Amro does nothing more than go to the forest for a moment of peace. “We’re skimming nature from our life, and it’s really important to understand the threat of digitalization. Going back to nature is really important.” 

It’s a sentiment New York-based writer August Lamm, who has made a zine about dumbphones, shares. She can palpably feel the outside world re-entering her life since she got rid of her phone. “I feel more present and attuned to my surroundings, and I can feel my life changing,” she said. “My days feel long and rich and open, and I can trust my thoughts more because I don't feel they've been fed to me.”

She talked about how the physical realm opened up to her when she got rid of her smartphone, with its Instagram account and its tens of thousands of followers. She regained a sense of her surroundings. “If you live for fifty years and you’re aware every day of what’s going on around you, and you’re listening to people, and you’re present, that is more valuable than living into your nineties and when you flash back through your life it’s just screens.”

Lamm wants to push to maintain a critical minority of society who isn’t captured by smartphone use, who don’t own them and will never own them. “I would love to live in a world where people say, ‘Wait, do you have a smartphone?’ as a matter of courtesy.” 

It feels like an impossible dream, as big tech companies move to capture even more areas of our lives. From the moment the scans of our unborn bodies are uploaded by our parents to Instagram, to our school days dominated by Google classroom, to our first phone, to every thought we commit to a search term or AI model, to every beat of our heart recorded by our smart watch, to the steady decline of our health, to our hospital appointments booked on our phones, to the day we die and condolences are posted on our page, the phone is ever-present. “ Our brains are captured. The industry is captured. Our politics is captured. We're captured in so many different ways,” Judy Estrin said. “Our leadership is captured. In every industry, we’re captured by this mentality and worship of growth and innovation.” 

And if tech leaders have their way, there’ll be a time when the smartphone is no longer an external device — but part of our bodies. Kyle Morris, a young AI builder I met in San Francisco last year, called the smartphone a “better prefrontal cortex. It tells you how to get places, tells you how to plan. It gives you answers. It gives you a better memory. I see in the next 50 years, that it's going to enter us. That it's going to become part of us.” He held up his phone in front of me: “It's weird that we have these like external things that we're using. People are going to start retrofitting themselves with improved memory, improved vision.” 

As companies like Neuralink push towards merging technology with the body, and AI seeps into every corner of our world, Lamm says she still has days where she feels powerless and alone. 

When Google rolled out AI search, with no way to turn it off, she broke down. “I  googled how to undo an AI overview, and there wasn't a way to do it. And I had a total meltdown… I was like, this is evil. Like, I can't even do a Google search without being confronted by AI.”

I ask Lamm and Lane what they’ll do in the future in the face of this capture. With each passing year, it gets more difficult to live without a smartphone. The pandemic — which saw countries around the world rolling out QR code greenpasses — cemented this, as restaurants spurned paper menus, airlines stopped issuing paper tickets, health services made it so hospital appointments could only be booked on apps. Recently, Lamm couldn’t apply for a UK Visa because she needed a smartphone to do it. She can’t get an electric car because you can only pay for electricity with a QR code. So what then — when the drawbridge finally rises and modern life necessitates a smartphone?

Lamm has thought about this, and once she gets to her conclusion, it becomes as sci-fi as the imaginings of the tech workers who want to put chips in our heads. “There needs to be another option,” she reflected. “In the worst case scenario, people just defect from society and say, ‘Ok, there’s at least a few thousand of us that want to just live a normal life and we’ll go off and continue living a normal life somewhere else,’” she said. She quoted from Dave Eggers’s cult novel “The Every,” where a small tribe of tech-skeptics calling themselves the “Trogs” try to live outside a world where surveillance capitalism and tech have become all-encompassing. 

“It wouldn’t be a commune situation because ideally through this activism, it would kind of be more of a split in society, rather than founding a new society,” Lamm said. “It would be like enough people that it would feel like normal life, and you just wouldn't interact with the tech.”

As my line with Logan Lane, the Luddite Club founder, crackled again, I asked her the same question — what will she do when life becomes impossible without a smartphone, when tech capture becomes complete? “I’m just like, fuck it. I’ll get to it when I get to it. But I am not OK with it. I am going to do everything I can before then to try to prevent that.” She paused. “I'm not so worried about what people in Silicon Valley think people want.” As her train went into a tunnel, the line went dead, and she continued with her journey — in exile from the digital world; fully present in the physical world.

Drop in image 1: Teona Tsintsadze. Motion by Anna Jibladze . Drop in image 3: Teona Tsintsadze/Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) Reinhold Möller, Motion by Anna Jibladze. Drop in image4 : Teona Tsintsadze/ Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0)Ermell/Reinhold Möller.

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The Age of Exile

This Big Idea explores how displacement has evolved from historical punishment into a defining condition of our time.

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This is just the beginning. “Innovation related to artificial intelligence could displace 6-7% of the US workforce if AI is widely adopted,” says a recent Goldman Sachs report.

In the last week, over 53,000 people signed a statement calling for “a prohibition on the development of superintelligence.” A wide coalition of notable figures, from Nobel-winning scientists to senior politicians, writers, British royals, and radio shockjocks agreed that AI companies are racing to build superintelligence with little regard for concerns that include “human economic obsolescence and disempowerment.”

The petition against superintelligence development could be the beginning of organized political resistance to AI's unchecked advance. The signatories span continents and ideologies, suggesting a rare consensus emerging around the need for democratic oversight of AI development. The question is: can it organize quickly enough to influence policy before the key decisions are made in Silicon Valley boardrooms and government backrooms?

But it’s not just jobs we could lose. The petition talks about the “losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity… and even potential human extinction.” It reflects a deeper unease about the quasi-religious zeal of AI evangelists who view superintelligence not as a choice to be democratically decided, but as an inevitable evolution the tech bros alone can shepherd.

Coda explored this messianic ideology at length in "Captured," a six-part investigative series available as a podcast on Audible and as a series of articles on our website, in which we dove deep into the future envisioned by the tech elite for the rest of us.

During our reporting, data scientist Christopher Wylie, best known as the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, and I spoke to the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 book foresaw the possibility that our world might be taken over by an uncontrollable artificial superintelligence.

Do we believe in Bostrom’s version of the future where society plunges into dystopia or utopia? Or is there a middle way? Judge for yourself whether his warnings still sound theoretical.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Christopher Wylie: To start, could you define what you mean by superintelligence and how it differs from the AI we see today?

Nick Bostrom: Superintelligence is a form of cognitive processing system that not just matches but exceeds human cognitive abilities. If we're talking about general superintelligence, it would exceed our cognitive capacities in all fields — scientific creativity, common sense, general wisdom.

Isobel Cockerell: What kind of future are we looking at — especially if we manage to develop superintelligence?

Bostrom: So I think many people have the view that the most likely scenario is that things more or less continue as they have — maybe a little war here, a cool new gadget there, but basically the human condition continues indefinitely. 

But I think that looks pretty implausible. It’s more likely that it will radically change. Either for the much better or for the much worse.

The longer the timeframe we consider — and these days I don’t think in terms of that many years — we are kind of approaching this critical juncture in human affairs, where we will either go extinct or suffer some comparably bad fate, or else be catapulted into some form of utopian condition.

You could think of the human condition as a ball rolling along a thin beam — and it will probably fall off that beam. But it’s hard to predict in which direction.

Wylie: When you think about these two almost opposite outcomes — one where humanity is subsumed by superintelligence, and the other where technology liberates us into a utopia — do humans ultimately become redundant in either case?

Bostrom: In the sense of practical utility, yes — I think we will reach, or at least approximate, a state where human labor is not needed for anything. There’s no practical objective that couldn’t be better achieved by machines, by AIs and robots.

But you have to ask what it’s all for. Possibly we have a role as consumers of all this abundance. It’s like having a big Disneyland — maybe in the future you could automate the whole park so no human employees are needed. But even then, you still need the children to enjoy it.

If we really take seriously this notion that we could develop AI that can do everything we can do, and do it much better, we will then face quite profound questions about the purpose of human life. If there’s nothing we need to do — if we could just press a button and have everything done — what do we do all day long? What gives meaning to our lives?

And so ultimately, I think we need to envisage a future that accommodates humans, animals, and AIs of various different shapes and levels — all living happy lives in harmony.

Cockerell: How far do you trust the people in Silicon Valley to guide us toward a better future?

Bostrom: I mean, there’s a sense in which I don’t really trust anybody. I think we humans are not fully competent here — but we still have to do it as best we can.

If you were a divine creature looking down, it might seem like a comedy: these ape-like humans running around building super-powerful machines they barely understand, occasionally fighting with rocks and stones, then going back to building again. That must be what the human condition looks like from the point of view of some billion-year-old alien civilization.

So that’s kind of where we are.

Ultimately, it’ll be a much bigger conversation about how this technology should be used. If we develop superintelligence, all humans will be exposed to its risks — even if you have nothing to do with AI, even if you’re a farmer somewhere you’ve never heard of, you’ll still be affected. So it seems fair that if things go well, everyone should also share some of the upside.

You don’t want to pre-commit to doing all of this open-source. For example, Meta is pursuing open-source AI — so far, that’s good. But at some point, these models will become capable of lending highly useful assistance in developing weapons of mass destruction.

Now, before releasing their model, they fine-tune it to refuse those requests. But once they open-source it, everyone has access to the model weights. It’s easy to remove that fine-tuning and unlock these latent capabilities.

This works great for normal software and relatively modest AI, but there might be a level where it just democratizes mass destruction.

Wylie : But on the flip side — if you concentrate that power in the hands of a few people authorized to build and use the most powerful AIs, isn’t there also a high risk of abuse? Governments or corporations misusing it against people or other groups?

Bostrom: When we figure out how to make powerful superintelligence, if development is completely open — with many entities, companies, and groups all competing to get there first — then if it turns out it’s actually hard to align them, where you might need a year or two to train, make sure it’s safe, test and double-test before really ramping things up, that just might not be possible in an open competitive scenario.

You might be responsible — one of the lead developers who chooses to do it carefully — but that just means you forfeit the lead to whoever is willing to take more risks. If there are 10 or 20 groups racing in different countries and companies, there will always be someone willing to cut more corners.

Wylie: More broadly, do you have conversations with people in Silicon Valley — Sam Altman, Elon Musk, the leaders of major tech companies — about your concerns, and their role in shaping or preventing some of the long-term risks of AI?

Bostrom: Yeah. I’ve had quite a few conversations. What’s striking, when thinking specifically about AI, is that many of the early people in the frontier labs have, for years, been seriously engaged with questions about what happens when AI succeeds — superintelligence, alignment, and so on.

That’s quite different from the typical tech founder focused on capturing markets and launching products. For historical reasons, many early AI researchers have been thinking ahead about these deeper issues for a long time, even if they reach different conclusions about what to do.

And it’s always possible to imagine a more ideal world, but relatively speaking, I think we’ve been quite lucky so far. The impact of current AI technologies has been mostly positive — search engines, spam filters, and now these large language models that are genuinely useful for answering questions and helping with coding.

I would imagine that the benefits will continue to far outweigh the downsides — at least until the final stage, where it becomes more of an open question whether we end up with a kind of utopia or an existential catastrophe.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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As Georgia's first female Baptist bishop, Rusudan Gotsiridze challenges the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, and is known for her passionate defence of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. She stands at the vanguard of old religion, an example of its attempts to modernize — so what does she think of the new religion being built in Silicon Valley, where tech gurus say they are building a superintelligent, omniscient being in the form of Artificial General Intelligence?

Gotsiridze first tried to use AI a few months ago. The result chilled her to the bone. It made her wonder if Artificial Intelligence was in fact a benevolent force, and to think about how she should respond to it from the perspective of her religious beliefs and practices.

In this conversation with Coda’s Isobel Cockerell, Bishop Gotsiridze discusses the religious questions around AI: whether AI can really help us hack back into paradise, and what to make of the outlandish visions of Silicon Valley’s powerful tech evangelists.

This conversation took place at ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in June 2025. It has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

Isobel: Tell me about your relationship with AI right now. 

Rusudan: Well, I’d like to say I’m an AI virgin. But maybe that’s not fully honest. I had one contact with ChatGPT. I didn’t ask it to write my Sunday sermon. I just asked it to draw my portrait. How narcissistic of me. I said, “Make a portrait of Bishop Rusudan Gotsiridze.” I waited and waited. The portrait looked nothing like me. It looked like my mom, who passed away ten years ago. And it looked like her when she was going through chemo, with her puffy face. It was really creepy. So I will think twice before asking ChatGPT anything again. I know it’s supposed to be magical... but that wasn’t the best first date. 

Isobel: What went through your mind when you saw this picture of your mother? 

Rusudan: I thought, “Oh my goodness, it’s really a devil’s machine.” How could it go so deep? Find my facial features and connect them with someone who didn’t look like me? I take more after my paternal side. The only thing I could recognize was the priestly collar and the cross. Okay. Bishop. Got it. But yes, it was really very strange.

Isobel: I find it so interesting that you talk about summoning the dead through Artificial Intelligence. That’s something happening in San Francisco as well. When I was there last summer, we heard about this movement that meets every Sunday. Instead of church, they hold what they call an “AI séance,” where they use AI to call up the spirit world. To call up the dead. They believe the generative art that AI creates is a kind of expression of the spirit world, an expression of a greater force.

They wouldn’t let us attend. We begged, but it was a closed cult. Still, a bunch of artists had the exact same experience you had: they called up these images and felt like they were summoning them, not from technology, but from another realm. 

Rusudan: When you’re a religious person dealing with new technologies, it’s uncomfortable. Religion — Christianity, Protestantism, and many others — has earned a very cautious reputation throughout history because we’ve always feared progress.

Remember when we thought printing books was the devil’s work? Later, we embraced it. We feared vaccinations. We feared computers, the internet. And now, again, we fear AI.

 It reminds me of the old proverb about a young shepherd who loved to prank his friends by shouting “Wolves! Wolves!” until one day, the wolves really came. He shouted, but no one believed him anymore.

We’ve been shouting “wolves” for centuries. And now, I’m this close to shouting it again, but I’m not sure. 

Isobel: You said you wondered if this was the devil’s work when you saw that picture of your mother. It’s quite interesting. In Silicon Valley, people talk a lot about AI bringing about the rapture, apocalypse, hell.

They talk about the real possibility that AI is going to kill us all, what the endgame or extinction risk of building superintelligent models will be. Some people working in AI are predicting we’ll all be dead by 2030.

On the other side, people say, “We’re building utopia. We’re building heaven on Earth. A world where no one has to work or suffer. We’ll spread into the stars. We’ll be freed from death. We’ll become immortal.”

I’m not a religious person, but what struck me is the religiosity of these promises. And I wanted to ask you — are we hacking our way back into the Garden of Eden? Should we just follow the light? Is this the serpent talking to us?

Rusudan: I was listening to a Google scientist. He said that in the near future, we’re not heading to utopia but dystopia. It’s going to be hell on Earth. All the world’s wealth will be concentrated in a small circle, and poverty will grow. Terrible things will happen, before we reach utopia.

Listening to him, it really sounded like the Book of Revelation. First the Antichrist comes, and then Christ.

Because of my Protestant upbringing, I’ve heard so many lectures about the exact timeline of the Second Coming. Some people even name the day, hour, place. And when those times pass, they’re frustrated. But they carry on calculating. 

It’s hard for me to speak about dystopia, utopia, or the apocalyptic timeline, because I know nothing is going to be exactly as predicted.

The only thing I’m afraid of in this Artificial Intelligence era is my 2-year-old niece. She’s brilliant. You can tell by her eyes. She doesn’t speak our language yet. But phonetically, you can hear Georgian, English, Russian, even Chinese words from the reels she watches non-stop.

That’s what I’m afraid of: us constantly watching our devices and losing human connection. We’re going to have a deeply depressed young generation soon. 

I used to identify as a social person. I loved being around people. That’s why I became a priest. But now, I find it terribly difficult to pull myself out of my house to be among people. And it’s not just a technology problem — it’s a human laziness problem.

When we find someone or something to take over our duties, we gladly hand them over. That’s how we’re using this new technology. Yes, I’m in sermon mode now — it’s a Sunday, after all. 

I want to tell you an interesting story from my previous life. I used to be a gender expert, training people about gender equality. One example I found fascinating: in a Middle Eastern village without running water, women would carry vessels to the well every morning and evening. It was their duty.

Western gender experts saw this and decided to help. They installed a water supply. Every woman got running water in her kitchen: happy ending. But very soon, the pipeline was intentionally broken by the women. Why? Because that water-fetching routine was the only excuse they had to leave their homes and see their friends. With running water, they became captives to their household duties.

One day, we may also not understand why we’ve become captives to our own devices. We’ll enjoy staying home and not seeing our friends and relatives. I don’t think we’ll break that pipeline and go out again to enjoy real life.

Isobel: It feels like it’s becoming more and more difficult to break that pipeline. It’s not really an option anymore to live without the water, without technology. 

Sometimes I talk with people in a movement called the New Luddites. They also call themselves the Dumbphone Revolution. They want to create a five-to-ten percent faction of society which doesn’t have a smartphone, and they say that will help us all, because it will mean the world will still have to cater to people who don’t participate in big tech, who don’t have it in their lives. But is that the answer for all of us? To just smash the pipeline to restore human connection? Or can we have both?

Rusudan: I was a new mom in the nineties in Georgia. I had two children at a time when we didn’t have running water. I had to wash my kids’ clothes in the yard in cold water, summer and winter. I remember when we bought our first washing machine.  My husband and I sat in front of it for half an hour, watching it go round and round. It was paradise for me for a while. 

Now this washing machine is there and I don't enjoy it anymore. It's just a regular thing in my life. And when I had to wash my son’s and daughter-in-law’s wedding outfits, I didn’t trust the machine. I washed those clothes by hand. There are times when it’s important to do things by hand.

Of course, I don’t want to go back to a time without the internet when we were washing clothes in the yard, but there are things that are important to do without technology.

I enjoy painting, and I paint quite a lot with watercolors. So far, I can tell which paintings are AI and which are real. Every time I look at an AI-made watercolour, I can tell it’s not a human painting. It is a technological painting. And it's beautiful. I know I can never compete with this technology. 

But that feeling, when you put your brush in, the water — sometimes I accidentally put it in my coffee cup — and when you put that brush on the paper and the pigment spreads, that feeling can never be replaced by any technology. 

Isobel:
As a writer, I'm now pretty good, I think, at knowing if something is AI-written or not. I'm sure in the future it will get harder to tell, but right now, there are little clues. There’s this horrible construction that AI loves: something is not just X, it’s Y. For example: “Rusudan is not just a bishop, she’s an oracle for the LGBTQ community in Georgia.” Even if you tell it to stop using that construction, it can’t. Same for the endless em-dashes: I can’t get ChatGPT to stop using them no matter how many times or how adamantly I prompt it. It's just bad writing.

It’s missing that fingerprint of imperfection that a human leaves: whether it’s an unusual sentence construction or an interesting word choice, I’ve started to really appreciate those details in real writing. I've also started to really love typos. My whole life as a journalist I was horrified by them. But now when I see a typo, I feel so pleased. It means a human wrote it. It’s something to be celebrated. It’s the same with the idea that you dip your paintbrush in the coffee pot and there’s a bit of coffee in the painting. Those are the things that make the work we make alive. 

There’s a beauty in those imperfections, and that’s something AI has no understanding of. Maybe it’s because the people building these systems want to optimize everything. They are in pursuit of total perfection. But I think that the pursuit of imperfection is such a beautiful thing and something that we can strive for.

Rusudan: Another thing I hope for with this development of AI is that it’ll change the formula of our existence. Right now, we’re constantly competing with each other. The educational system is that way. Business is that way. Everything is that way. My hope is that we can never be as smart as AI. Maybe one day, our smartness, our intelligence, will be defined not by how many books we have read, but by how much we enjoy reading books, enjoy finding new things in the universe, and how well we live life and are happy with what we do. I think there is potential in the idea that we will never be able to compete with AI, so why don’t we enjoy the book from cover to cover, or the painting with the coffee pigment or the paint? That’s what I see in the future, and I’m a very optimistic person. I suppose here you’re supposed to say “Halleluljah!” 

Isobel: In our podcast, CAPTURED, we talked with engineers and founders in Silicon Valley whose dream for the future is to install all human knowledge in our brains, so we never have to learn anything again. Everyone will speak every language! We can rebuild the Tower of Babel! They talk about the future as a paradise. But my thought was, what about finding out things? What about curiosity? Doesn’t that belong in paradise? Certainly, as a journalist, for me, some people are in it for the impact and the outcome, but I’m in it for finding out, finding the story—that process of discovery.

Rusudan: It’s interesting —this idea of paradise as a place where we know everything. One of my students once asked me the same thing you just did. “What about the joy of finding new things? Where is that, in paradise?” Because in the Bible, Paul says that right now, we live in a dimension where we know very little, but there will be a time when we know everything. 

In the Christian narrative, paradise is a strange, boring place where people dress in funny white tunics and play the harp. And I understand that idea back then was probably a dream for those who had to work hard for everything in their everyday life — they had to chop wood to keep their family warm, hunt to get food for the kids, and of course for them, paradise was the place where they just could just lie around and do nothing. 

But I don’t think paradise will be a boring place. I think it will be a place where we enjoy working.

Isobel: Do you think AI will ever replace priests?

Rusudan: I was told that one day there will be AI priests preaching sermons better than I do. People are already asking ChatGPT questions they’re reluctant to ask a priest or a psychologist. Because it’s judgment-free and their secrets are safe…ish. I don’t pretend I have all the answers because I don’t. I only have this human connection. I know there will be questions I cannot answer, and people will go and ask ChatGPT. But I know that human connection — the touch of a hand, eye-contact — can never be replaced by AI. That’s my hope. So we don’t need to break those pipelines. We can enjoy the technology, and the human connection too. 

This conversation took place at ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in June 2025.

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Yet Pope Francis has established the Church as an erudite, insightful voice on AI ethics. "Does it serve to satisfy the needs of humanity to improve the well-being and integral development of people?”” he asked G7 leaders last year, “Or does it, rather, serve to enrich and increase the already high power of the few technological giants despite the dangers to humanity?"

Francis – and the Vatican at large – had called for meaningful regulation in a world where few institutions dared challenge the tech giants.

During the last months of Francis’s papacy, Silicon Valley, aided by a pliant U.S. government, has ramped up its drive to rapidly consolidate power.

OpenAI is expanding globally, tech CEOs are becoming a key component of presidential diplomatic missions, and federal U.S. lawmakers are attempting to effectively deregulate AI for the next decade. 

For those tracking the collision between technological and religious power, one question looms large: Will the Vatican continue to be one of the few global institutions willing to question Silicon Valley's vision of our collective future?

Memories of watching the chimney on television during Pope Benedict’s election had captured my imagination as a child brought up in a secular, Jewish-inflected household. I longed to see that white smoke in person.  The rumors in Rome last Thursday morning were that the matter wouldn’t be settled that day. So I was furious when I was stirred from my desk in the afternoon by the sound of pealing bells all over Rome. “Habemus papam!” I heard an old nonna call down to her husband in the courtyard. 

As I heard the bells of Rome hailing a new pope toll last Thursday I sprinted out onto the street and joined people streaming from all over the city in the direction of St. Peter’s. In recent years, the time between white smoke and the new pope’s arrival on the balcony was as little as forty-five minutes. People poured over bridges and up the Via della Conciliazione towards the famous square. Among the rabble I spotted a couple of friars darting through the crowd, making speedier progress than anyone, their white cassocks flapping in the wind. Together, the friars and I made it through the security checkpoints and out into the square just as a great roar went up. 

The initial reaction to the announcement that Robert Francis Prevost would be the next pope, with the name Leo XIV, was subdued. Most people around me hadn’t heard of him — he wasn’t one of the favored cardinals, he wasn’t Italian, and we couldn’t even Google him, because there were so many people gathered that no one’s phones were working. A young boy managed to get on the phone to his mamma, and she related the information about Prevost to us via her son. Americano, she said. From Chicago.

A nun from an order in Tennessee piped up that she had met Prevost once. She told us that he was mild-mannered and kind, that he had lived in Peru, and that he was very internationally-minded. “The point is, it’s a powerful American voice in the world, who isn’t Trump,” one American couple exclaimed to our little corner of the crowd. 

It only took a few hours before Trump supporters, led by former altar boy Steve Bannon, realized this American pope wouldn’t be a MAGA pope. Leo XIV had posted on X in February, criticizing JD Vance, the Trump administration’s most prominent Catholic.

"I mean it's kind of jaw-dropping," Bannon told the BBC. "It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he's had against American senior politicians."

Laura Loomer, a prominent far-right pro-Trump activist aired her own misgivings on X: “He is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” 

As I walked home with everybody else that night – with the friars, the nuns, the pilgrims, the Romans, the tourists caught up in the action – I found myself thinking about our "Captured" podcast series, which I've spent the past year working on. In our investigation of AI's growing influence, we documented how tech leaders have created something akin to a new religion, with its own prophets, disciples, and promised salvation.

Walking through Rome's ancient streets, the dichotomy struck me: here was the oldest continuous institution on earth selecting its leader, while Silicon Valley was rapidly establishing what amounts to a competing belief system. 

Would this new pope, taking the name of Leo — deliberately evoking Leo XIII who steered the church through the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution — stand against this present-day technological transformation that threatens to reshape what it means to be human?

I didn't have to wait long to find out. In his address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, Pope Leo XIV said: "In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching, in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labor."

 Hours before the new pope was elected, I spoke with Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings institution who’s an expert in AI and labor policy. Her research on the Vatican, labour, and AI was published with Brookings following Pope Francis’s death.

She described how the Catholic Church has a deep-held belief in the dignity of work — and how AI evangelists’ promise to create a post-work society with artificial intelligence is at odds with that.

“Pope John Paul II wrote something that I found really fascinating. He said, ‘work makes us more human.’ And Silicon Valley is basically racing to create a technology that will replace humans at work,” Kinder, who was raised Catholic, told me. “What they're endeavoring to do is disrupt some of the very core tenets of how we've interpreted God's mission for what makes us human.”

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The people I spoke to, many of whom had voted Republican all their lives, found themselves caught between two worlds and ostracized, not only by the conservative community, who broadly rejected their right to exist, but also by the LGBTQ community, who could not comprehend how they could have voted for a president who actively sought to roll back their rights. They were kicked out of transgender support groups, rejected by their friends and families, and turned to Facebook to find community and support. Yet they stood firm for Trump, with one woman telling me: “I don’t push for trans rights, I push for my personal rights.”

Seven years after I spoke with those women, Trump has been reelected and his administration has ramped up its war on transgender rights, suing the state of Maine for allowing transgender athletes in girls’ sports, and building on a series of executive orders aimed specifically at rolling back transgender rights.

When he took office, President Trump signed executive orders declaring that sexes are “not changeable”, and shutting down gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19. Orders have also ended funding for LGBTQ education, and have been designed to push teachers to withdraw support for trans students and try to intimidate them into not using students’ chosen names or gender identities. 

As we approach the 100th day of Trump’s second term, I caught up with one of the trans women I spoke to seven years ago: Danielle Marie, 47, living in Dallas, Texas, who transitioned in October 2016, shortly before Trump first took office. 

This article was reported by Isobel Cockerell. The following account is told in Danielle’s own words.

Danielle’s Story

I remember I had my first thoughts of wanting to be a girl when I was in kindergarten. It was not some really deep thing that was crushing me. It was just how I felt. It was something I always wished I could do, but I would just push it down, shake my head and say to myself, “Well, that’s not happening. That’s ridiculous. Man up and move on.”

But it was always there.

I had a lot of shame, but I hid it well. I grew up, and got pretty successful, career-wise:  I was an account manager in the security industry, so I was making good money and managing a group of people. I got married, and my wife wanted a big family — in a way, I saw having lots of kids as a sign of masculinity. I was a virile, baby-making father and career man. We had five kids together. 

But by 2016, my career was stalled and my marriage felt like it was headed towards divorce. Everything was falling apart. And I started to think about transitioning. There really was not much for me to risk at that point. Maybe this was my chance to finally be happy. 

As Donald Trump’s campaign ramped up, I I thought — "What harm could it do? He’s an outsider. He’s not an inside-the-Beltway politician. He’s a successful businessman, let’s give him a shot." I figured, worst-case scenario, things would stay about the same, and best-case scenario, we’d have a more robust economy, and a strong job market.

I didn’t think too much about the social aspects. And sure, I knew there were people on the left saying that socially he was a really bad guy, and I was like, "Yeah, I don’t think he really stands for that stuff. I just think he’ll be a normal president."

So  I started my transition during the Trump campaign. I came out to my family in October 2016, and I voted for Trump in November. In a way, I didn’t consider my sexuality or gender identity to be much of a thing defining my vote. I kind of detached the two. I was like, “Yeah, I’m trans and I’m pansexual, but whatever — that has nothing to do with what I’ve believed my whole life.”

As the Trump administration got underway, I got every surgery I wanted — glottoplasty, facial work, breast implants, body defining liposuction, vaginoplasty — paying for it with my savings. 

After my transition, my parents stopped talking to me, I went through a divorce, and my kids stopped talking to me too. It tanked my career, there's definitely a certain level of disrespect that comes with being trans. 

I fell in with a group of conservative folks in the LGBTQ community for a while, just to get by. They were the only support group I had. 

If I could travel back in time, I would set the old me down and say, “Look, these people are not your friends. They lack empathy. They’re almost reptilian in the way that they cannot empathize with the plight of others. Start thinking for yourself. Look around. Stop associating with this mess.”

As it was, I was exposed close-up to a level of vitriol and rabid hatred. The people I was hanging out with were very angry, bigoted, hateful people. 

Their hatred started to help me shift my ideas and nudge me in a different direction. So, towards the end of Trump’s first term I started to pull away from them, too, and then things got really hard.

The left didn’t like me because I had voted for Trump. And the conservative LGBTQ community didn’t like me. But ultimately, it wasn’t until I distanced myself from that group that I was really able to grow and change in what I think is a more positive direction.

The evidence against Trump was piling up, and I began to wonder if he was really bad news. 

I started listening to more centrist podcasts, and gravitating more and more left in the content I was exposed to. By the end of Trump’s first term, I was pretty far along moving towards the left. Then January 6 happened. That day was a bellwether for me. It was like — okay, not only are these people bad, but they fashion themselves as patriots. A patriot doesn’t do what they did on January 6. That was the last nail in the coffin for any hope of me ever being conservative again. Conservatism is a total lack of empathy — I know from having been one. 

In the run-up to the November 2024 election, the prospect of Trump’s return to power chilled my blood. As a former conservative, I at least understand where they’re coming from — but the revamped MAGA movement and Project 2025 really began to scare me and make me believe we were screwed.

There was everything in there: anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-marriage equality, removing gender markers from legal documents. That’s going to affect me. 

On election night I was home alone. I watched it on TV for a while. It looked pretty solid that he was going to win, and I went to bed. I didn’t get hysterical. Drained would be the right word. I was in disbelief. It was just like — well, we’re fucked. It was a mix of despair, anger, and a kind of remorse for my country. 

After the guy who had his people storm the Capitol and threaten the vice president, after that guy won again — I felt like, “My country is gone. Everything I had ever hoped this country was and could be is gone.”

I have an “F” on my driver’s license — but I won’t soon. I had to go through counseling, get a letter, go to the DMV. But they stopped issuing it almost a year ago. 

Now they want to go after people who already had it changed. A law has been proposed in Texas that, if you present a government document that shows a different sex than the one assigned at birth, you are committing what they want to call “gender identity fraud”. It’s punishable by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Even if this law doesn’t go through, they’ll come up with something just as bad.

It feels like they’re kicking me while I’m down. I’m just trying to be myself and live my life — and that is somehow way too much to ask. It’s heartbreaking. They already hated us. We dealt with that. But now they’re in power, they want us poor, unemployable, unusable — or to detransition. That’s what they want.

I’d like to move — at least to a blue state, if not out of the country. Oregon or Washington would be ideal, but they’re expensive. I’ve thought about Colorado. But ultimately, I think my best bet is to try to seek refugee status in Canada. That’s what I wish for the most.

I’ve even toyed with the idea of detransitioning. I never thought about it before he won. I’m not planning to do it, but I’m preparing myself mentally for that possibility — that I might have to, just to survive. I’m so far along now, I don’t even know if it’s feasible. If I started presenting as male, people would probably think I was a trans man. So I don’t think it would save me.

There’s a lot of rhetoric. They’re taking away our rights but they haven’t rounded us up yet. And then you see what they’re doing to immigrants. They’re deporting people to camps in Central America, places they’re not even from. I’m afraid they’ll do the same to us. They’ll hide it behind the language of “help” or “care,” and then send us to conversion camps. I’m pretty convinced of that.

That’s why I think I need to get the hell out, at least out of Texas. But I’m just in no position right now. I’m paycheck to paycheck, like most Americans.

I still consider myself a patriot. I think there are a lot of wonderful things this country can be, and in many cases has been. It destroys me to have to walk away and turn my back on my country because the people that are ruining it have won.

This article was put together based on an interview Danielle did with Coda reporter Isobel Cockerell. Her words have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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In the hours after Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, I went, like thousands of others in Rome, straight to St Peter's Square to witness the city in mourning as the basilica's somber bell tolled. 

Just three days before, on Good Friday, worshippers in the eternal city proceeded, by candlelight, through the ruins of the Colosseum, as some of the Pope's final meditations were read to them. "When technology tempts us to feel all powerful, remind us," the leader of the service called out. "We are clay in your hands," the crowd responded in unison.

As our world becomes ever more governed by tech, the Pope's meditations are a reminder of our flawed, common humanity. We have built, he warned, "a world of calculation and algorithms, of cold logic and implacable interests." These turned out to be his last public words on technology. Right until the end, he called on his followers to think hard about how we're being captured by the technology around us. "How I would like for us to look less at screens and look each other in the eyes more!" 

Faith vs. the new religion 

Unlike politicians who often struggle to grasp AI's technical complexity, the Vatican has leveraged its centuries of experience with faith, symbols, and power to recognize AI for what it increasingly represents: not just a tool, but a competing belief system with its own prophets, promises of salvation, and demands for devotion.

In February 2020, the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life published the Rome Call for AI ethics, arguing that "AI systems must be conceived, designed and implemented to serve and protect human beings and the environment in which they live." And in January of this year, the Vatican released a document called Antiqua et Nova – one of its most comprehensive statements to date on AI – that warned we're in danger of worshipping AI as a God, or as an idol.

Our investigation into Silicon Valley's cult-like movement 

I first became interested in the Vatican's perspective on AI while working on our Audible podcast series "Captured" with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie. In our year-long investigation, we discovered how Silicon Valley's AI pioneers have adopted quasi-religious language to describe their products and ambitions — with some tech leaders explicitly positioning themselves as prophets creating a new god.

In our reporting, we documented tech leaders like Bryan Johnson speaking literally about "creating God in the form of superintelligence," billionaire investors discussing how to "live forever" through AI, and founders talking about building all-knowing, all-powerful machines that will free us from suffering and propel us into utopia. One founder told us their goal was to install "all human knowledge into every human" through brain-computer interfaces — in other words, make us all omniscient.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, whom I spoke with recently, told me she had warned Pope Francis about the dangers of algorithms designed to promote lies and disinformation. "Francis understood the impact of lies," she said. She explained to the Pope how Facebook had destroyed the political landscape in the Philippines, where the platform’s engagement algorithms allowed disinformation to spread like wildfire. "I said — 'this is literally an incentive structure that is rewarding lies.'"

According to Ressa, AI evangelists in Silicon Valley are acquiring "the power of gods without the wisdom of God." It is power, she said, "that is in the hands of men whose arrogance prevents them from seeing the impact of rolling out technology that's not safe for their kids."

The battle for humanity's future 

The Vatican has always understood how to use technology, engineering and spectacle to harness devotion and wield power — you only have to walk into St Peter’s Basilica to understand that. I spoke to a Vatican priest, on his way to Rome to pay his respects to the Pope. He told me why the Vatican understands the growing power of artificial intelligence so well. "We know perfectly well," he said, "that certain structures can become divinities. In the end, technology should be a tool for living — it should not be the end of man."

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It came from Christopher Wylie. He’s a data scientist and the whistleblower who cracked open the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. I had just started working with him on a new investigation into AI. Chris was supposed to be meeting me, but he had found himself trapped in Dubai in a party full of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

“I don’t know if you can hear me — I’m in the toilet at this event, and people here are talking about longevity, how to live forever, but also prepping for when people revolt and when society gets completely undermined,” he had whispered into his phone. “You have in another part of the world, a bunch of journalists talking about how to save democracy. And here, you've got a bunch of tech guys thinking about how to live past democracy and survive.”

A massive storm and a once-in-a-generation flood had paralyzed Dubai when Chris was on a layover on his way to Perugia. He couldn’t leave. And neither could the hundreds of tech guys who were there for a crypto summit. The freakish weather hadn’t stopped them partying, Chris told me over a frantic Zoom call. 

“You're wading through knee-deep water, people are screaming everywhere, and then…  What do all these bros do? They organize a party. It's like the world is collapsing outside and yet you go inside and it's billionaires and centimillionaires having a party,” he said. “Dubai right now is a microcosm of the world. The world is collapsing outside and the people are partying.”

Chris and I eventually managed to meet up. And for over a year we worked together on a podcast that asks what is really going on inside the tech world.  We looked at how the rest of us —  journalists, artists, nurses, businesses, even governments — are being captured by big tech’s ambitions for the future and how we can fight back. 

Mercy was a content moderator for Meta. She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn't sleep. And when she tried to unionize, she was laid off.

Our reporting took us around the world from the lofty hills of Twin Peaks in San Francisco to meet the people building AI models, to the informal settlements of Kenya to meet the workers training those models.

One of these people was Mercy Chimwani, who we visited in her makeshift house with no roof on the outskirts of Nairobi. There was mud beneath our feet, and above you could see the rainclouds through a gaping hole where the unfinished stairs met the sky. When it rained, Mercy told us, water ran right through the house. It’s hard to believe, but she worked for Meta. 

Mercy was a content moderator, hired by the middlemen Meta used to source employees. Her job was to watch the internet’s most horrific images and video –  training the company’s system so it can automatically filter out such content before the rest of us are exposed to it. 

She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn’t sleep. And when she and her colleagues tried to unionize, she was laid off. Mercy was part of the invisible, ignored workforce in the Global South that enables our frictionless life online for little reward. 

Of course, we went to the big houses too — where the other type of tech worker lives. The huge palaces made of glass and steel in San Francisco, where the inhabitants believe the AI they are building will one day help them live forever, and discover everything there is to know about the universe. 

In Twin Peaks, we spoke to Jeremy Nixon, the creator of AGI House San Francisco (AGI for Artificial General Intelligence). Nixon described an apparently utopian future, a place where we never have to work, where AI does everything for us, and where we can install the sum of human knowledge into our brains. “The intention is to allow every human to know everything that’s known,” he told me. 

Later that day, we went to a barbecue in Cupertino and got talking to Alan Boehme, once a chief technology officer for some of the biggest companies in the world, and now an investor in AI startups. Boehme told us how important it was, from his point of view, that tech wasn’t stymied by government regulation. “We have to be worried that people are going to over-regulate it. Europe is the worst, to be honest with you,” he said. “Let's look at how we can benefit society and how this can help lead the world as opposed to trying to hold it back.”

I asked him if regulation wasn’t part of the reason we have democratically elected governments, to ensure that all people are kept safe, that some people aren’t left behind by the pace of change? Shouldn’t the governments we elect be the ones deciding whether we regulate AI and not the people at this Cupertino barbecue?

“You sound like you're from Sweden,” Boehme responded. “I'm sorry, that's social democracy. That is not what we are here in the U. S. This country is based on a Constitution. We're not based on everybody being equal and holding people back. No, we're not in Sweden.” 

As we reported for the podcast, we came to a gradual realization – what’s being built in Silicon Valley isn’t just artificial intelligence, it’s a way of life — even a religion. And it’s a religion we might not have any choice but to join. 

In January, the Vatican released a statement in which it argued that we’re in danger of worshiping AI as God. It's an idea we'd discussed with Judy Estrin, who worked on building some of the earliest iterations of the internet. As a young researcher at Stanford in the 1970s, Estrin was building some of the very first networked connections. She is no technophobe, fearful of the future, but she is worried about the zealotry she says is taking over Silicon Valley.

What if they truly believe humans are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us.

“If you worship innovation, if you worship anything, you can't take a step back and think about guardrails,” she said about the unquestioning embrace of AI. “So we, from a leadership perspective, are very vulnerable to techno populists who come out and assert that this is the only way to make something happen.” 

The first step toward reclaiming our lost agency, as AI aims to capture every facet of our world, is simply to pay attention. I've been struck by how rarely we actually listen to what tech leaders are explicitly saying about their vision of the future. 

There's a tendency to dismiss their most extreme statements as hyperbole or marketing, but what if they're being honest? What if they truly believe humans, or at least most humans, are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us right now. 

In our series, we explore artificial intelligence as something that affects our culture, our jobs, our media and our politics. But we should also ask what tech founders and engineers are really building with AI, or what they think they’re building. Because if their vision of society does not have a place for us in it, we should be ready to reclaim our destiny – before our collective future is captured.

Our audio documentary series, CAPTURED: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover is available now on Audible. Do please tune in, and you can dig deeper into our stories and the people we met during the reporting below.

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Dig deeper into our CAPTURED series

Who owns the rights to your brain?

Isobel Cockerell

In Kenya’s slums, they’re doing our digital dirty work

Isobel Cockerell

Stop Drinking from the Toilet!

Judy Estrin

The post Captured: how Silicon Valley is building a future we never chose appeared first on Coda Story.

Together, they asked themselves — and the world – what happens when computers start to read our minds? Who owns our thoughts, anyway? This technology is being developed right now — but as of this moment, what happens to your neural data is a legal black box. So what does the fight to build protections for our brains look like? I sat down with Rafael and Jared to find out.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Rafael, can you tell me how your journey into neurorights started?

Rafael: The story starts with a particular moment in my career. It happened about ten years ago while I was working in a lab at Columbia University in New York. Our research was focused on understanding how the cerebral cortex works. We were studying mice, because the mouse  brain is a good model for the human brain. And what we were trying to do was to implant images into the brains of mice so that they would behave as if they were seeing something, except they weren't seeing anything.

Q: How did that work? 

Rafael: We were trying to take control of the mouse’s visual perception. So we’d implant neurotechnology into a mouse using lasers, which would allow us to record the activity of the part of the brain responsible for vision, the visual cortex, and change the activity of those neurons. With our lasers, we could map the activity of this part of the brain and try to control it. 

These mice were looking at a screen that showed them a particular image, of black and white bars of light that have very high contrast. We used to talk, tongue-in-cheek, about playing the piano with the brain. 

We trained the mice to lick from a little spout of juice whenever they saw that image. With our new technology, we were able to decode the brain signals that correspond this image to the mouse and — we hoped — play it back to trick the mice into seeing the image again, even though it wasn’t there. 

Q: So you artificially activated particular neurons in the brain to make it think it had seen that image?

Rafael: These are little laboratory mice. We make a surgical incision and we implant in their skull a transparent chamber so that we can see their brains from above with our microscope, with our lasers. And we use our lasers to optically penetrate the brain. We use one laser to image, to map the activity of these neurons. And we use a second laser, a second wavelength, to activate these neurons again. All of this is done with a very sophisticated microscope and computer equipment. 

Q: So what happened when you tried to artificially activate the mouse’s neurons, to make it think it was looking at the picture of the black and white bars? 

Rafael: When we did that, the mouse licked from the spout of juice in exactly the same way as if he was looking at this image, except that he wasn't. We were putting that image into its brain. The behavior of the mice when we took over its visual perception was identical to when the mouse was actually seeing the real image.

Q: It must have been a huge breakthrough. 

Rafael: Yes, I remember it perfectly. It was one of the most salient days of my life. We were actually altering the behavior of the mice by playing the piano with their cortex. We were ecstatic. I was super happy in the lab, making plans.

 And then when I got home, that's when it hit me. I said, “wait, wait, wait, this means humans will be able to do the same thing to other humans.”

I felt this responsibility, like it was a double-edged sword. That night I didn't sleep, I was shocked. I talked to my wife, who works in human rights. And I decided that I should start to get involved in cleaning up the mess.

Q: What do you mean by that?

Rafael: I felt the responsibility of ensuring that these powerful methods that could decode brain activity and manipulate perception had to be regulated to ensure that they were used for the benefit of humanity.

Q: Jared, can you tell me how you came into this? 

Jared: Rafael and I met about four years ago. I'm an international human rights lawyer based in Washington and very well known globally for working in that field. I had a single hour-long conversation with Rafa when we met, and it completely transformed my view of the human rights challenges we’ll face in this century. I had no idea about neurotechnologies, where they were, or where they might be heading. Learning how far along they have come and what’s coming in just the next few years — I was blown away. I was both excited and concerned as a human rights lawyer about the implications for our common humanity.

Q: What was your reaction when you heard of the mouse experiment?

Jared: Immediately, I thought of The Matrix. He told me that what can be done in a mouse today could be done in a chimpanzee tomorrow and a human after that. I was shocked by the possibilities. While implanting images into a human brain is still far off, there’s every reason to expect it will eventually be possible.

Q: Can you talk me through some of the other implications of this technology? 

Jared :Within the next few years, we’re expected to have wearable brain-computer interfaces that can decode thought to text at 75–80 words per minute with 90 percent accuracy.

That will be an extraordinary revolution in how we interact with technology. Apple is already thinking about this—they filed a patent last year for the next-generation AirPods with built-in EEG scanners. This is undoubtedly one of the applications they are considering.

In just a few years, if you have an iPhone in your pocket and are wearing earbuds, you could think about opening a text message, dictating it, and sending it—all without touching a device. These developments are exciting. 

Rafael:  I imagine that, we'll be hybrid. And part of our processing will happen with devices that will be connected to our brains, to our nervous system. And this could enhance our perception. Our memories — you would be able to do the equivalent to a web search mentally. And that's going to change our behavior. That's going to change the way we absorb information. 

Jared: Ultimately, there's every reason to expect we’ll be able to cure chronic pain disease. It’s already being shown in labs that an implantable brain-computer interface can manage pain for people with chronic pain diseases. By turning off misfiring neurons, you can reduce the pain they feel.

But if you can turn off the neurons, you can turn on the neurons. And that would mean you'll have a wearable cap or hat that could torture a person simply by flipping a switch. In just a few years, physical torture may no longer be necessary because of brain-computer interfaces. 

And If these devices can decode your thoughts, that raises serious concerns. What will the companies behind these technologies be able to do with your thoughts? Could they be decoded against your wishes and used for purposes beyond what the devices are advertised for? Those are critical questions we need to address.

How did you start thinking about ways to build rights and guardrails around neurotechnology?

Rafael: I was inspired by the Manhattan Project, where scientists who developed nuclear technology were also involved in regulating its use. That led me to think that we should take a similar approach with neurotechnology — where the power to read and manipulate brain activity needs to be regulated. And that’s how we came up with the idea of the Neurorights Foundation.

So in 2017, I organized a meeting at Columbia University’s Morningside campus of experts from various fields to discuss the ethical and societal implications of neurotechnology. And this is where we came up with the idea of neurorights — sort of brain rights, that would protect brain rights and brain data. 

Jared:  If you look at global consumer data privacy laws, they protect things like biometric, genetic, and biological information. But neural data doesn't fall under any of these categories. Neural data is electrical and not biological, so it isn't considered biometric data.

There are few, if any, safeguards to protect users from having their neural data used for purposes beyond the intended function of the devices they’ve purchased.

So because neural data doesn't fit within existing privacy protections, it isn't covered by state privacy laws. To address this, we worked with Colorado to adopt the first-ever amendment to its Privacy Act, which defines neural data and includes it under sensitive, protected data.

Rafael: We identified five areas of concern where neurotechnology could impact human rights:

The first is the right to mental privacy – ensuring that the content of our brain activity can't be decoded without consent.

The second is the right to our own mental integrity so that no one can change a person's identity or consciousness.

The third is the right to free will – so that our behavior is determined by one's own volition, not by external influences, to prevent situations like what we did to those mice.

The fourth is the right to equal access to neural augmentation.  Technology and AI will lead to human augmentation of our mental processes, our memory, our perception, our capabilities. And we think there should be fair and equal access to neural augmentation in the future.

And the fifth neuroright is protection from bias and discrimination – safeguarding against interference in mental activity, as neurotechnology could both read and alter brain data, and change the content of people's mental activity.

Jared: The Neurorights Foundation is focused on promoting innovation in neurotechnologies while managing the risks of misuse or abuse. We see enormous potential in neurotechnologies that could transform what it means to be human. At the same time, we want to ensure that proper guardrails are in place to protect people's fundamental human rights.

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When I’m 125?

J. Paul Neeley

Captured: how Silicon Valley is building a future we never chose

Isobel Cockerell

I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me

Michael Kennedy

The post Who owns the rights to your brain? appeared first on Coda Story.

This article is an adapted extract from CAPTURED, our new podcast series with Audible about the secret behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover. Click here to listen.  

We’re moving slowly through the traffic in the heart of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Gleaming office blocks have sprung up in the past few years, looming over the townhouses and shopping malls. We’re with a young man named James Oyange — but everyone who knows him calls him Mojez. He’s peering out the window of our 4x4, staring up at the high-rise building where he used to work. 

Mojez first walked into that building three years ago, as a twenty-five-year-old, thinking he would be working in a customer service role at a call center. As the car crawled along, I asked him what he would say to that young man now. He told me he’d tell his younger self something very simple:

“The world is an evil place, and nobody's coming to save you.”

It wasn't until Mojez started work that he realised what his job really required him to do. And the toll it would take.

It turned out, Mojez's job wasn't in customer service. It wasn't even in a call center. His job was to be a “Content Moderator,” working for social media giants via an outsourcing company. He had to read and watch the most hateful, violent, grotesque content released on the internet and get it taken down so the rest of us didn’t have to see it. And the experience changed the way he thought about the world. 

“You tend to look at people differently,” he said, talking about how he would go down the street and think of the people he had seen in the videos — and wonder if passersby could do the same things, behave in the same ways. “Can you be the person who, you know, defiled this baby? Or I might be sitting down with somebody who has just come from abusing their wife, you know.”

There was a time – and it wasn’t that long ago – when things like child pornography and neo-Nazi propaganda were relegated to the darkest corners of the internet. But with the rise of algorithms that can spread this kind of content to anyone who might click on it, social media companies have scrambled to amass an army of hidden workers to clean up the mess.

These workers are kept hidden for a reason. They say if slaughterhouses had glass walls, the world would stop eating meat. And if tech companies were to reveal what they make these digital workers do, day in and day out, perhaps the world would stop using their platforms.

This isn't just about “filtering content.” It's about the human infrastructure that makes our frictionless digital world possible – the workers who bear witness to humanity's darkest impulses so that the rest of us don't have to.

Mojez is fed up with being invisible. He's trying to organise a union of digital workers to fight for better treatment by the tech companies. “Development should not mean servitude,” he said. “And innovation should not mean exploitation, right?” 

We are now in the outskirts of Nairobi, where Mojez has brought us to meet his friend, Mercy Chimwani. She lives on the ground floor of the half-built house that she rents. There's mud beneath our feet, and above you can see the rain clouds through a gaping hole where the unfinished stairs meet the sky. There’s no electricity, and when it rains, water runs right through the house. Mercy shares a room with her two girls, her mother, and her sister. 

It’s hard to believe, but this informal settlement without a roof is the home of someone who used to work for Meta. 

Mercy is part of the hidden human supply chain that trains AI. She was hired by what’s called a BPO, or a Business Process Outsourcing company, a middleman that finds cheap labour for large Western corporations. Often people like Mercy don’t even know who they’re really working for. But for her, the prospect of a regular wage was a step up, though her salary – $180 a month, or about a dollar an hour – was low, even by Kenyan standards. 

She started out working for an AI company – she did not know the name – training software to be used in self-driving cars. She had to annotate what’s called a “driveable space” – drawing around stop signs and pedestrians, teaching the cars’ artificial intelligence to recognize hazards on its own. 

And then, she switched to working for a different client: Meta. 

“On the first day on the job it was hectic. Like, I was telling myself, like, I wish I didn't go for it, because the first image I got to see, it was a graphic image.” The video, Mercy told me, is imprinted on her memory forever. It was a person being stabbed to death. 

“You could see people committing suicide live. I also saw a video of a very young kid being raped live. And you are here, you have to watch this content. You have kids, you are thinking about them, and here you are at work. You have to like, deal with that content. You have to remove it from the platform. So you can imagine all that piling up within one person. How hard it is,” Mercy said. 

Silicon Valley likes to position itself as the pinnacle of innovation. But what they hide is this incredibly analogue, brute force process where armies of click workers relentlessly correct and train the models to learn. It’s the sausage factory that makes the AI sausage. Every major tech company does this – TikTok, Facebook, Google and OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT. 

Mercy was saving to move to a house that had a proper roof. She wanted to put her daughters into a better school. So she felt she had to carry on earning her wage. And then she realised that nearly everyone she worked with was in the same situation as her. They all came from the very poorest neighborhoods in Nairobi. “I realised, like, yo, they're really taking advantage of people who are from the slums.” she said. 

After we left Mercy’s house, Mojez took us to the Kibera informal settlement. “Kibera is the largest urban slum area in Africa, and the third largest slum in the entire world,”he told us as we drove carefully through the twisting, crooked streets. There were people everywhere – kids practicing a dance routine, whole families piled onto motorbikes. There were stall holders selling vegetables and live chickens, toys and wooden furniture. Most of the houses had corrugated iron roofs and no running water indoors.

Kibera is where the model of recruiting people from the poorest areas to do tech work was really born. A San Francisco-based organization called Sama started training and hiring young people here to become digital workers for Big Tech clients including Meta and Open AI.

Sama claimed that they offered a way for young Kenyans to be a part of Silicon Valley’s success. Technology, they argued, had the potential to be a profound equalizer, to create opportunities where none existed.

Mojez has brought us into the heart of Kibera to meet his friend Felix. A few years ago Felix heard about the Sama training school - back then it was called Samasource. He heard how they were teaching people to do digital work, and that there were jobs on offer. So, like hundreds of others, Felix signed up.

“This is Africa,” he said, as we sat down in his home. “Everyone is struggling to find a job.” He nodded his head out towards the street. “If right now you go out here, uh, out of 10, seven or eight people have worked with SamaSource.” He was referring to people his age – Gen Z and young millennials – who were recruited by Sama with the promise that they would be lifted out of poverty. 

And for a while, Felix’s life was transformed. He was the main breadwinner for his family, for his mother and two kids, and at last he was earning a regular salary.

But in the end, Felix was left traumatized by the work he did. He was laid off. And now he feels used and abandoned. “There are so many promises. You’re told that your life is going to be changed, that you’re going to be given so many opportunities. But I wouldn't say it's helping anyone, it's just taking advantage of people,” he said.

When we reached out to Sama, a PR representative disputed the notion that Sama was taking advantage and cashing in on Silicon Valley’s headlong rush towards AI. 

Mental health support, the PR insisted, had been provided and the majority of Sama’s staff were happy with the conditions.“Sama,” she said, “has a 16-year track record of delivering meaningful work in Sub-Saharan Africa, lifting nearly 70,000 people out of poverty.” Sama eventually cancelled its contracts with Meta and OpenAI, and says it no longer recruits content moderators. When we spoke to Open AI, which has hired people in Kenya to train their model, they said that they believe data annotation work needed to be done humanely. The efforts of the Kenyan workers were, they said, “immensely valuable.”

You can read Sama’s and Open AI’s response to our questions in full below. Meta did not respond to our requests for comment.

Despite their defense of their record, Sama is facing legal action in Kenya. 

“I think when you give people work for a period of time and those people can't work again because their mental health is destroyed, that doesn't look like lifting people out of poverty to me,” said Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer representing more than 180 content moderators in a lawsuit against Sama and Meta. The workers say they were unfairly laid off when they tried to lobby for better conditions, and then blacklisted.

“You've used them,” Mutemi said. “They're in a very compromised mental health state, and then you've dumped them. So how did you help them?” 

As Mutemi sees it, the result of recruiting from the slum areas is that you have a workforce of disadvantaged people, who’ll be less likely to complain about conditions.

“People who've gone through hardship, people who are desperate, are less likely to make noise at the workplace because then you get to tell them, ‘I will return you to your poverty.’ What we see is again, like a new form of colonization where it's just extraction of resources, and not enough coming back in terms of value whether it's investing in people, investing in their well-being, or just paying decent salaries, investing in skill transfer and helping the economy grow. That's not happening.” 

“This is the next frontier of technology,” she added, “and you're building big tech on the backs of broken African youth.”

At the end of our week in Kenya, Mojez takes us to Karura forest, the green heart of Nairobi. It’s an oasis of calm, where birds, butterflies and monkeys live among the trees, and the rich red earth has that amazing, just-rained-on smell. He comes here to decompress, and to try to forget about all the horrific things he’s seen while working as a content moderator. 

Mojez describes the job he did as a digital worker as a loss of innocence. “It made me think about, you know, life itself, right? And that we are alone and nobody's coming to save us. So nowadays I've gone back to how my ancestors used to do their worship — how they used to give back to nature.” We're making our way towards a waterfall. “There's something about the water hitting the stones and just gliding down the river that is therapeutic.”

For Mojez, one of the most frightening things about the work he was doing was the way that it numbed him, accustomed him to horror. Watching endless videos of people being abused, beheaded, or tortured - while trying to hit performance targets every hour - made him switch off his humanity, he said.

A hundred years from now, will we remember the workers who trained humanity’s first generation of AI? Or will these 21st-century monuments to human achievement bear only the names of the people who profited from their creation?

Artificial intelligence may well go down in history as one of humanity’s greatest triumphs.  Future generations may look back at this moment as the time we truly entered the future.

And just as ancient monuments like the Colosseum endure as a lasting embodiment of the values of their age, AI will embody the values of our time too.  

So, we face a question: what legacy do we want to leave for future generations? We can't redesign systems we refuse to see. We have to acknowledge the reality of the harm we are allowing to happen.  But every story – like that of Mojez, Mercy and Felix –- is an invitation. Not to despair, but to imagine something better for all of us rather than the select few.

Christopher Wylie and Becky Lipscombe contributed reporting. Our new audio series on how Silicon Valley’s AI prophets are choosing our future for us is out now on Audible.

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Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa’s digital sweatshops

Erica Hellerstein

The post In Kenya’s slums, they’re doing our digital dirty work appeared first on Coda Story.

On Chinese social media, the crisis in California is being treated as conclusive evidence that US society is broken. Some of the criticism cuts uncomfortably deep - for instance, Chinese commentators have pointed to the stark divide between rich and poor Californians and how they have faced different fates after losing their homes. "Even the world's largest economy still does not have the ability to protect the safety of its citizens when disasters occur," wrote academic Lu Qi. Another blogger put it more bluntly: "So, do you know why the wildfire in the United States is out of control? Because there is no one in control. Of course, they didn’t put out the fire or save anyone"

Chinese state media drew flattering comparisons between China’s response to catastrophe and that of the U.S. government. Look at last week's Tibet earthquake, Chinese media crowed, where over 14,000 rescue workers were deployed on search and rescue operations. And remember the 2022 Chongqing wildfire, they added, reposting videos of locals transporting extinguishers, supplies and emergency workers to remote areas on mopeds to fight the fires. Writing in the state-owned Beijing Daily, columnist Bao Nan described the fires as a “completely man-made disaster.” The fire chief, he alleged, borrowing far-right tropes, “seemed more focused on LGBT initiatives.” Proclaiming the superiority of China’s governance and capacity for collective action, Nan argued that  “superheroes in American blockbusters may stir up some passion for a moment, but when facing actual disasters, we don't need solitary heroes.” What’s more effective, he wrote, is “the power of group solidarity."

Russian coverage of the California wildfires took a different but equally calculated tack. Rather than dwell on comparisons between the United States and Russia, they amplified American political conflict and the ongoing corrosive blame game. Russian state media, such as RIA Novosti, has extensively reported Elon Musk's condemnation of the California government and its supposed mismanagement of federal resources. 

Meanwhile, the Russian-appointed governor of occupied Kherson, opted for some straight-up trolling. “The California fires have left many ordinary residents homeless,” he told the state-run news agency TASS, “therefore, our region is ready to welcome any American citizen who has lost their home and livelihood. Naturally, this applies only to those who have not financed the Ukrainian army or supported the current Kiev regime, which has caused far more civilian casualties through its actions than the fires in LA.” 

What's consistently been missing from Chinese and Russian coverage is, of course, context, balance and introspection. When it comes to holding up mirrors, both Moscow and Beijing make sure that theirs only point outward. Each regime is crafting a self-serving narrative. China positions itself as the champion of collective action and social cohesion, while Russia seizes every opportunity to show the United States as fundamentally flawed and dysfunctional. What both Beijing and Moscow get is that the most effective propaganda isn't necessarily about creating fake news - it's about distorting truths to exacerbate genuine societal tensions.

What makes this type of propaganda so effective is the marshaling of selective facts and manipulation of issues that resonate with people, playing up any polarizing political implications. While we often focus on detecting "fake news," authoritarian states have mastered something more sophisticated: using social media to exploit points of conflict, appealing to users’ prejudices to effectively turning them into useful idiots. Silicon Valley's platforms have handed these states an unprecedented ability to influence communities worldwide with propaganda narratives. 

And they don’t even need to make up stories about inequality or government dysfunction. Because the most effective propaganda is the kind that is grown from kernels of truth.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here for more insights like these straight into your inbox.

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The post How California’s wildfires are fuel for propaganda appeared first on Coda Story.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Isobel: Your book is called “The Hidden Globe.” Can you tell us what that means to you? 

Atossa: It’s a book about loopholes and how people, companies, and even countries use them, especially those with significant money and power. The idea of a loophole, the etymology of it, is actually a slit in a castle wall that you can shoot arrows out of while you're obviously protected by the wall. And I think that that's really important to remember when you're thinking about how these loopholes work today. They allow those employing loopholes to hide behind the wall while taking advantage of the provisions that are afforded to them.

Isobel: These loopholes — this hidden globe — often exist as a physical space though. How does that work? 

Atossa: Visualizing the physicality of these spaces was key in trying to express what it was I was thinking about. For years and years I had this hunch that there was something weird going on between countries. Something we were not talking about that didn’t totally correspond to our idea of a nation state. Power was being wielded in ways that didn’t adhere to our concept of national sovereignty. 

So if you look at the map of the world, you'll see 192 countries. But what isn't shown on the map is all the stuff in between and above and beneath. Maps don’t show that laws don’t necessarily go hand in hand with territory.

In a lot of cases, it does—if you rob a bank, for example, that’s a physical crime that would be prosecuted based on your location. But for more transnational activities where jurisdiction isn’t clear, it’s not necessarily “you’re in country X, so you’re bound by the laws of country X.” You might be in a free zone with its own laws or on a ship with a flag of convenience. There’s this uncoupling of land and law, where countries create alternate rules when it’s convenient.

Isobel: Dubai is an example of this. Can you explain how?

Atossa: Dubai has its own civil and Islamic laws, but they carved out a space for finance companies to operate in a familiar legal environment. They created a court from scratch and simply imported judges and rules. This new court—the Dubai International Financial Center—uses common law. Essentially, they made up new rules and created a new jurisdiction within the existing one, almost like nesting dolls.

Isobel: And sometimes these judges aren’t even physically present…

Atossa: Right, they don’t even always import the judges; some work remotely. I open the book with Swiss mercenaries, and there’s an analogy between those mercenaries and these judges who adjudicate cases over Zoom. They’re trained in one country and then “borrowed” by another. Mark Beer, one of the judges, actually lived in Dubai, but the others hopped around in places like the Caribbean, the UK, and Singapore. Countries want to hire these judges because companies want a familiar legal environment—not necessarily favorable rules, just consistency, so that they don’t risk fines or shutdowns over compliance issues. But it’s strange that companies can make up a court for themselves, while I don’t get to choose where to adjudicate my parking ticket.

Isobel: You grew up in Switzerland and you talk a lot about freeports — these hidden spaces in Geneva, the city of your childhood, where people can hide goods and assets. Did you ever go inside one of these places?

Atossa: I never actually got to visit the Geneva Freeport, even though it’s only a mile from where I grew up. I could get into places like northern Laos and Dubai, but not the Freeport. The idea of works of art hidden away where no one can see them—that was almost more offensive to me than, say, a country compromising its sovereignty. 

Art does what it does; it can be beautiful or disturbing. But then we layer abstraction on top of it—its speculative market value, its value to an individual or as part of the art market. Putting art in crates, where people can’t look at it, for tax reasons or so someone can obscure its value from an ex-spouse feels deeply wrong. 

Historically, freeports were for storage of things like grain, which had a shelf life. You couldn’t let goods sit in a freeport indefinitely, neither here nor there. But with art, due to both the nature of the items and storage technology, they can remain there for an incredibly long time. That’s the loophole—not that there’s storage, which is fine, but that an artwork can be both “in transit” while not moving at all. This is a legal fiction that exemplifies the world I’m writing about.

Isobel: I used to naively think that people bought art because they loved art or found pieces beautiful. I didn’t fully grasp, before reading your book, that actually art collecting often has very little to do with being an art lover.

Atossa: There’s been some recent reporting that art isn’t necessarily the investment it was once thought to be—not all works will appreciate like a Picasso might. But if you’re very wealthy, there are only so many places to put your money: real estate, stocks, and art is just another asset class. When financial affairs are handed over to accountants or family offices, art isn’t exempt; it’s yet another commodity. Owning a piece of art allows you to take out loans against its value or use it as collateral. So, while many rich people may appreciate art as we do, art also serves a function as part of a portfolio.

This is where freeports come in. If art is viewed as an asset, you don’t want it to get damaged, and you may not want people to know it exists. If there are only ten da Vincis, they’re worth more than if there were fifty. So there’s a game of obscuring value, existence, and location. There’s also a tax element: you may not declare it in the same way as other onshore assets if, for example, there’s a sales or use tax associated with it.

Isobel: Tell me more about growing up in Geneva. What was it like? 

Atossa: When I was a teenager, a lot of the kids I grew up with had parents who were diplomats, so they had diplomatic plates on their cars and some degree of immunity. I remember an ex-boyfriend who was speeding and nothing happened because of those plates. Or someone would be smoking pot and the cops would say, “I know who your mother is, I know who your father is,” and then do nothing. 

It’s not like they were doing anything outrageous, but there’s this awareness of different worlds within Geneva.

Isobel: You’ve lived in New York for two decades now but you wrote about how much you missed Geneva during the pandemic — how it was almost calling to you. What’s your relationship with Switzerland like now?

I don’t think Swiss people see me as truly Swiss. It’s that classic expat feeling: in Switzerland, I feel American; in the U.S., I feel Swiss. And with Geneva, you have this city that seems quiet and boring on the surface but, as my book discusses, there’s so much going on behind the scenes. Switzerland does have a lot going for it, and Geneva is now a more progressive city than other Swiss cities. It’s not just a capitalist hellhole. But I still don’t feel entirely at home there. It’s like a haunting, almost spooky feeling. Geneva’s a place that can freak you out if you overthink it. Most people don’t do that, but I have. 

Isobel: You called Geneva the “City of Holes,” which fits this idea of a place that’s quiet but full of hidden dramas.

Atossa: Exactly. It’s strange how everyone carries on as if it’s normal. But when you realize how much of the world’s coffee or finance goes through Geneva, it’s absurd. The city punches so far above its weight class, given its size and demographics.

Once you know about these hidden aspects, you can’t unsee them. You walk past a building with a plaque saying “Offshore Partners LLC,” and it’s hard not to think, “If walls could talk…” There’s so much you want to know, so much that you can’t know. There’s this blankness you encounter—almost like an invisible wall. You want to know, but Geneva has a way of keeping its secrets.

Isobel: I’ve been working on a lot of stories about tech elites, the technopoly and so on. And something I’ve come across again and again is a “bunker mentality.” This idea that the tech bros have that they want to create their own jurisdictions, their own walled-off communities that will protect them from government regulation — but maybe in the future will also protect them from apocalyptic climate chaos, or the ravages of societal breakdown. Can you explain this mentality? 

Atossa: I think these tech leaders have convinced themselves that they’re victims, that everyone hates them and they need to protect themselves at all costs. It’s a classic persecution complex seen throughout history among monarchs and dictators. With power comes paranoia.

Some of these people aren’t stupid; they see that things aren’t working for most people. That can lead to a reasonable fear of being pursued or facing consequences for their actions.

For the tech guys, their identity is tied to being hackers. They think of themselves as clever problem-solvers, whether it’s with code or social issues. They live in a world of nations that don’t align with their ideals, so they look for shortcuts to create a future they envision. The appeal of charter cities is that they feel like a hack. The original concept of charter cities came from [Nobel Prize-winning American economist] Paul Romer, who had some honest intentions. He believed that foreign laws could bring better infrastructure to developing economies.

But for the tech elite, they thought: “We don’t even need to lobby Washington; we can create our own rules.” These charter cities would be business-friendly, with no taxes and streamlined bureaucracy. The catch? It’s not democratic. If a corporation runs a charter city, that corporation effectively becomes the ruler.

This appeals to certain tech types who are disillusioned with democracy, probably because they fear the consequences if democracy were to take real effect.

Isobel: In your book you mentioned the longevity movement — this obsession with living forever that has gripped tech bros — and how it’s connected to the idea of charter cities. What’s going on there?

Atossa: Right, the longevity hackers are frustrated with regulations, like those imposed by the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], which slow down testing for new treatments. They want faster processes and are seeking places where they can expedite those trials. This is already happening in a Honduran charter city called Prospera. 

Isobel: You discuss outer space as a potential ultimate charter city. Can you elaborate?

Atossa: Absolutely. The ultimate charter city—or tax haven—could be in space. It’s an interesting thought, as it represents a frontier where these tech leaders could establish their ideal conditions without the constraints of current Earth-based systems.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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Think pieces and blogs across Chinese state media hailed the conversation as yet more evidence that Putin backs China’s claims over Taiwan — which in turn bolsters his own expansionism. 

“Putin is very good at helping China teach a lesson to its rebellious son. He made demands on Musk and hit Taiwan's weakest points,” wrote one Chinese military commentator to his 300,000 followers following the revelation. 

SpaceX responded to the allegation by saying that Starlink doesn’t operate over Taiwan because Taiwan won’t grant the company a license. The island democracy doesn’t want Starlink having majority ownership control over any satellite connection, so it’s been racing to build its own independent satellite internet service, free of Elon Musk’s grip.

Musk said last year, to Taiwan’s fury, that he believes Taiwan to be an “integral part of China,” comparing it to Hawaii. So it makes sense that the self-ruled island doesn’t want the billionaire in control of its satellite internet. 

Nonetheless, satellite internet is something Taiwan urgently needs. Its undersea fiber optic cables connecting the island to the internet are vulnerable, easily severed by ships in the South China Sea. It’s happened 27 times in the last five years. And as the Chinese military stages almost daily “war games” and drills around the island, including simulating a blockade of the island’s ports — an exercise it carried out most recently in October — it feels more urgent than ever that Taiwan has some way of accessing the internet via satellite. But it doesn’t want Starlink having the power to turn on – or off – that connection.  

What would Trump do if Xi Jinping imposed a blockade on Taiwan? “Oh, very easy,” he told a Wall Street Journal reporter last month. “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%,” meaning he would impose tariffs. When asked if he would use military force against a blockade, Trump replied “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and knows I’m fucking crazy.” 

Our colleagues at the China Digital Times collected and translated a series of responses to this statement that are worth a read. It was “intriguing”, wrote Hong Kong professor Ding Xueliang, that this was Trump’s only response. 

Chairman Rabbit, a nationalist WeChat blogger with more than two million followers, went further: “Trump has absolutely no interest in Taiwan or the South China Sea, and has no intention of becoming embroiled in a conflict with China,” he wrote. 

Since the Musk-Putin revelations, Taiwan’s government has said it welcomes applications from all satellite internet services, including Starlink, “provided they comply with Taiwanese laws.” 

The irony is that manufacturers in Taiwan actually make some key bits of hardware for Starlink satellite systems, like circuit boards and semiconductor chips. 

Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and Trump wants to slap tariffs on those too. He has said in the past, without providing much evidence, that Taiwan “stole our chip business.” 

But Taiwan’s politicians say Trump needs Taiwan just as much as Taiwan needs Trump. Francois Wu, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, told reporters this week that "without Taiwan, he cannot make America great again. He needs the semiconductors made here."
On election day in the U.S., it was revealed that Starlink had asked its Taiwanese suppliers to shift manufacturing off the island, citing “geopolitical risks.” The report sparked fury in Taiwan, with talk of boycotting Tesla, and viral praise for Musk’s “foresight” across Chinese social media.

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Every morning at about 6:30am I catch the trolley car from my home in downtown San Diego up to the hospital where I work — a place called La Jolla. Southern California isn't known for its public transportation, but I'm the weirdo that takes it — and I like it. It's quick, it's easy, I don't have to pay for parking, it's wonderful. A typical shift is 12 hours and it ends up being 13 by the time you do your report and get all your charting done, so you're there for a very long time. 

Most of the time, I don’t go to work expecting catastrophe — of course it happens once in a while, but usually I’m just going into a normal job, where you do routine stuff.

I work in the neuro-intensive care unit. The majority of our patients have just had neurosurgery for tumors or strokes. It’s not a happy place most of the time. I see a lot of people with long recoveries ahead of them who need to relearn basic skills — how to hold a pencil, how to walk. After a brain injury, you lose those abilities, and it's a long process to get them back. It's not like we do a procedure, fix them, and they go home the next day. We see patients at their worst, but we don't get to see the progress. If we're lucky, we might hear months later that they've made a full recovery. It's an environment where there's not much instant gratification. 

As a nurse, you end up relying on intuition a lot. It's in the way a patient says something, or just a feeling you get from how they look. It’s not something I think machines can do — and yet, in recent years, we’ve seen more and more artificial intelligence creep into our hospitals. 

I get to work at 7am. The hospital I work at looks futuristic from the outside — it’s this high-rise building, all glass and curved lines. It’s won a bunch of architectural awards. The building was financed by Irwin Jacobs, who’s the billionaire owner of Qualcomm, a big San Diego tech company. I think the hospital being owned by a tech billionaire really has a huge amount to do with the way they see technology and the way they dive headfirst into it.

They always want to be on the cutting edge of everything. And so when something new comes out, they're going to jump right on it. I think that's part of why they dive headfirst into this AI thing.  

We didn't call it AI at first. The first thing that happened was these new innovations just crept into our electronic medical record system. They were tools that monitored whether specific steps in patient treatment were being followed. If something was missed or hadn’t been done, the AI would send an alert. It was very primitive, and it was there to stop patients falling through the cracks. 

Then in 2018, the hospital bought a new program from Epic, the electronic medical record company. It predicted something called “patient acuity” — basically the workload each patient requires from their nursing care. It’s a really important measurement we have in nursing, to determine how sick a person is and how many resources they will need. At its most basic level, we just classify patients as low, medium or high need. Before the AI came in, we basically filled in this questionnaire — which would ask things like how many meds a patient needed. Are they IV meds? Are they crushed? Do you have a central line versus a peripheral? That sort of thing. 

This determines whether a patient was low, medium or high-need. And we’d figure out staffing based on that. If you had lots of high-need patients, you needed more staffing. If you had mostly low-need patients, you could get away with fewer. 

We used to answer the questions ourselves and we felt like we had control over it. We felt like we had agency. But one day, it was taken away from us. Instead, they bought this AI-powered program without notifying the unions, nurses, or representatives. They just started using it and sent out an email saying, 'Hey, we're using this now.'

The new program used AI to pull from a patient’s notes, from the charts, and then gave them a special score. It was suddenly just running in the background at the hospital.

The problem was, we had no idea where these numbers were coming from. It felt like magic, but not in a good way. It would spit out a score, like 240, but we didn't know what that meant. There was no clear cutoff for low, medium, or high need, making it functionally useless.

The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, 'This patient is too sick, I need to focus on them alone,' because the numbers didn’t help us make that case anymore. They didn’t tell us if a patient was low, medium, or high need. They just gave patients a seemingly random score that nobody understood, on a scale of one to infinity.

We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need. 

That was the first thing.

Then, earlier this year, the hospital got a huge donation from the Jacobs family, and they hired a chief AI officer. When we heard that, alarm bells went off — “they're going all in on AI,” we said to each other. We found out about this Scribe technology that they were rolling out. It’s called Ambient Documentation. They announced they were going to pilot this program with the physicians at our hospital. 

It basically records your encounter with your patient. And then it's like chat GPT or a large language model — it takes everything and just auto populates a note. Or your “documentation.”

There were obvious concerns with this, and the number one thing that people said was, "Oh my god — it's like mass surveillance. They're gonna listen to everything our patients say, everything we do. They're gonna track us.”

This isn't the first time they've tried to track nurses. My hospital hasn’t done this, but there are hospitals around the US that use tracking tags to monitor how many times you go into a room to make sure you're meeting these metrics. It’s as if they don’t trust us to actually care for our patients. 

We leafletted our colleagues to try to educate them on what “Ambient Documentation” actually means. We demanded to meet with the chief AI officer. He downplayed a lot of it, saying, 'No, no, no, we hear you. We're right there with you. We're starting; it’s just a pilot.' A lot of us rolled our eyes.

He said they were adopting the program because of physician burnout. It’s true, documentation is one of the most mundane aspects of a physician's job, and they hate doing it.

The reasoning for bringing in AI tools to monitor patients is always that it will make life easier for us, but in my experience, technology in healthcare rarely makes things better. It usually just speeds up the factory floor, squeezing more out of us, so they can ultimately hire fewer of us. 

“Efficiency” is a buzzword in Silicon Valley, but get it out of your mind when it comes to healthcare. When you're optimizing for efficiency, you're getting rid of redundancies. But when patients' lives are at stake, you actually want redundancy. You want extra slack in the system. You want multiple sets of eyes on a patient in a hospital. 

When you try to reduce everything down to a machine that one person relies on to carry out decisions, then there's only one set of eyes on that patient. That may be efficient, but by creating efficiency, you're also creating a lot of potential points of failure. So, efficiency isn't as efficient as tech bros think it is.

In an ideal world, they believe technology would take away mundane tasks, allowing us to focus on patient encounters instead of spending our time typing behind a computer. 

But who thinks recording everything a patient says and storing it on a third-party server is a good idea? That’s crazy. I’d need assurance that the system is 100 percent secure — though nothing ever is. We’d all love to be freed from documentation requirements and be more present with our patients.

There’s a proper way to do this. AI isn’t inevitable, but it’s come at us fast. One day, ChatGPT was a novelty, and now everything is AI. We’re being bombarded with it.

The other thing that’s burst into our hospitals in recent years is an AI-powered alert system. They’re these alerts that ping us to make sure we’ve done certain things — like checked for sepsis, for example. They’re usually not that helpful, or not timed very well. The goal is to stop patients falling through the cracks — that’s obviously a nightmare scenario in healthcare. But I don’t think the system is working as intended.

I don’t think the goal is really to provide a safety net for everyone — I think it’s actually to speed us up, so we can see more patients, reduce visits down from 15 minutes to 12 minutes to 10. Efficiency, again.

I believe the goal is for these alerts to eventually take over healthcare. To tell us how to do our jobs rather than have hospitals spend money training nurses and have them develop critical thinking skills, experience, and intuition. So we basically just become operators of the machines.

As a seasoned nurse, I’ve learned to recognize patterns and anticipate potential outcomes based on what I see. New nurses don’t have that intuition or forethought yet; developing critical thinking is part of their training. When they experience different situations, they start to understand that instinctively.

In the future, with AI, and alerts pinging them all day reminding them how to do their job, new cohorts of nurses might not develop that same intuition. Critical thinking is being shifted elsewhere — to the machine. I believe the tech leaders envision a world where they can crack the code of human illness and automate everything based on algorithms. They just see us as machines that can be figured out.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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Kenya is hosting unprecedented lawsuits against Meta Inc., the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Mercy Mutemi, who made last year’s TIME 100 list, is a Nairobi-based lawyer who is leading the cases. She spends her days thinking about what our consumption of digital products should look like in the next 10 years. Will it be extractive and extortionist, or will it be beneficial? What does it look like from an African perspective? 

The conversation with Mercy Mutemi has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Isobel Cockerell: You’ve described this situation as a new form of colonialism. Could you explain that?  

Mercy Mutemi: From the government side, Kenya’s relationship with Big Tech, when it comes to annotation work, is framed as a partnership. But in reality, it’s exploitation. We’re not negotiating as equal partners. People aren’t gaining skills to build our own internal AI development. But at the same time, you're training all the algorithms for all the big tech companies, including Tesla, including the Walmarts of this world. All that training is happening here, but it just doesn't translate into skill transfer. It’s broken up into labeling work without any training to broaden people’s understanding of how AI works. What we see is, again, like a new form of colonization where it's just extraction of resources, with not enough coming back in terms of value, whether it's investing in people, investing in their growth and well-being, just paying decent salaries and helping the economy grow, for example, or investing in skill transfer. That's not happening. And when we say we're just creating jobs in the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, if the jobs are not quality jobs, then it's not a net benefit at the end of the day. That's the problem.

IC: Behind the legal battle with Meta are workers and their conditions. What challenges do they face in these tech roles, particularly content moderation?  

MM: Content moderators in Kenya face horrendous conditions. They’re often misled about the nature of the work, not warned that the work is going to be dangerous for them. There’s no adequate care provided to look after these workers, and they’re not paid well enough. And they’ve created this ecosystem of fear — it’s almost like this special Stockholm syndrome has been created where you know what you're going through is really bad, but you're so afraid of the NDA that you just would rather not speak up.  

If workers raise issues about the exploitation, they’re let go and blacklisted. It’s a classic “use and dump” model.

IC: What are your thoughts on Kenya being dubbed the “Silicon Savannah”?  

MM: I do not support that framing, just because I feel like it’s quite problematic to model your development after Silicon Valley, considering all the problems that have come out of there. But that branding has been part of Kenya's mission to be known as a digital leader. The way Silicon Valley interprets that is by seeing Kenya as a place where they can offload work they don’t want to do in the U.S. Work that is often dangerous. I’m talking about content moderation work, annotation work, and algorithm training, which in its very nature involves a lot of exposure to harmful content. That work is dumped on Kenya. Kenya says it’s interested in digital development, but what Kenya ends up getting is work that poses serious risks, rather than meaningful investment in its people or infrastructure.

IC: How did you first become interested in these issues?  

MM: It started when I took a short course on the law and economics of social media giants. That really opened my eyes to how business models are changing. It’s no longer just about buying and selling goods directly—now it’s about data, algorithms, and the advertising model. It was mind-blowing to learn how Google and Meta operate their algorithms and advertising models. That realization pushed me to study internet governance more deeply.

IC: Can you explain how data labeling and moderation for a large language model – like an AI chatbot – works?  

MM: When the initial version of ChatGPT was released, it had lots of sexual violence in it. So to clean up an algorithm like that, you just teach it all the worst kinds of sexual violence. And who does that? It's the data labelers. So for them to do that, they have to consume it and teach it to the algorithm. So what they needed to do is consume hours of text of every imaginable sexual violence simulation, like a rape or a defilement of a minor, and then label that text. Over and over again. So then, what the algorithm knows is, okay, this is what a rape looks like. That way, if you ask ChatGPT to show you the worst rape that could ever happen, there are now metrics in place that tell it not to give out this information because it’s been taught to recognize what it’s being asked for. And that’s thanks to Kenyan youth whose mental health is now toast, and whose life has been compromised completely. All because ChatGPT had to be this fancy thing that the world celebrated. And Kenyan youth got nothing from it.  

This is the next frontier of technology, and they’re building big tech on the backs of broken African youth, to put it simply. There's no skill transfer, no real investment in their well-being, just exploitation.

IC: But workers aren’t working directly for the Big Tech companies, right? They’re working for these middlemen companies that match Big Tech companies with workers — can you explain how that works?  

MM: Big Tech is not planting any roots in the country when it comes to hiring people to moderate content or train algorithms for AI. They're not really investing in the country in the sense that there’s no actual person to hold liable should anything go south. There's no registered office in Kenya for companies like Meta, TikTok, OpenAI. And really, it’s important that companies have a presence in a country so that there can be discussions around accountability. But that part is purposely left out.  

Instead, what you have are these middlemen. They’re called Business Process Outsourcing, or BPOs, that are run from the U.S., not run locally, but they have a registered office here, and a presence here. A person that can be held accountable. And then what happens is big tech companies negotiate these contracts with the business. So for example, I have clients who worked for Meta or OpenAI through a middleman company called Sama, or who worked for Meta through another called Majorel, or those who worked for Scale AI but through a company called RemoTasks.  

It’s almost like they're agents of big tech companies. So they will do big tech's bidding. If the big tech says jump, then they jump. So we find ourselves in this situation where these companies purely exist for the cover of escaping liability.  

And in the case of Meta, for example, when recruitments happen, the advertisements don't come from Meta, they come from the middleman. And what we've seen is purposeful, intentional efforts to hide the client, so as not to disclose that you're coming to do work for Meta… and not even being honest or upfront about the nature of the work, not even saying that this is content moderation work that you're coming to do.

IC: What are the repercussions of this on workers?  

MM: Their mental health is destroyed – and there are often no measures in place to protect their well-being or respect them as workers. And then it's their job to figure out how to get out of that rut because they still are a breadwinner in an African context, and they still have to work, right? And in this community where mental health isn't the most spoken-about thing, how do you explain to your parents that you can't work?  

I literally had someone say that to me—that they never told their parents what work they do because how do you explain to your parents that this is what you watch, day in, day out? And that's why it's not enough for the government to say, “yes, 10,000 more jobs.” You really do have to question what the nature of these jobs is and how we are protecting the people doing them, how we are making sure that only people who willingly want to do the job are doing it.

IC: You said the government and the companies themselves have argued that this moderation work is bringing jobs to Kenya, and there’s also been this narrative that — almost like an NGO – these companies are helping lift people out of poverty. What do you say to that?  

MM: I think when you give people work for a period of time and those people can't work again because their mental health is destroyed, that doesn't look like lifting people out of poverty to me. That looks like entrenching the problem further because you've destroyed not just one person, but everybody that relies on that person and everybody that's now going to be roped in, in the care of that one person. You've destroyed a bigger community that you set out to help.

IC: Do you feel alone in this fight?

MM: I wouldn’t say I’m alone, but it’s not a popular case to take at this time. Many people don’t want to believe that Kenya isn’t really benefiting from these big tech deals.  It’s not a narrative that Kenyans want to believe, and it's just not the story that the government wants at the end of the day. So not enough questions are being asked. No one's really opening the curtain to see what is this work?  Are our local companies benefiting out of this? Nobody's really asking those questions. So then in that context, imagine standing up to challenge those jobs. 

IC: Do you think it’s possible for Kenya to benefit from this kind of work without the exploitation?

MM: Let me just be very categorical. My position is not that this work shouldn't be coming into Kenya. But it can’t be the way it is now, where companies get to say “either you take our work and take it as horrible as it is with no care, and we exploit you to our satisfaction, or we, or we leave.” No. You can have dangerous work done in Kenya, but with appropriate level of care,  with respect,  and upholding the rights of these workers. It’s going to be a long journey to achieve justice. 

IC: In September, the Kenyan Court of Appeal made a ruling — that Meta, a U.S. company, can be sued in Kenya. Can you explain why this is important?

MM: The ruling by the Court of Appeal brings relief to the moderators. Their case at the Labour Court had been stopped as we awaited the decision by the Court of Appeal on whether or not Meta can be sued in Kenya by former Facebook Content Moderators. The Court of Appeal has now cleared the path for the moderators to present their evidence to the court against Meta, Sama and Majorel for human rights violations. They finally get a chance at a fair hearing and access to justice. 

The Court of Appeal has affirmed the groundbreaking decision of the Labour Court that it in today's world, digital workspaces are adequate anchors of jurisdiction. This means that a court can assume jurisdiction based on the location of an employee working remotely. That is a timely decision as the nature of work and workspaces has changed drastically. 

What this means for Meta is that they now have a chance to fully participate in the suit against them. What we have seen up to this point is constant dismissiveness of the authority of Kenyan courts over Meta claiming they cannot be sued in Kenya. The Court of Appeal has found that they not only can be sued but are properly sued in these cases. We look forward to participating in the legal process fully and presenting our clients' case to the court for a fair determination. 

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the Court of Appeal ruling was in regard to the case of 185 former Facebook content moderators, not a separate case of Mutemi's brought by two Ethiopian citizens.

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Case in point: In June last year, residents in western Azerbaijan began demonstrating against a proposed new reservoir to store toxic waste from a British-owned goldmine near the village of Söyüdlü. The Azeri regime  accused first the West, and then Russia, of organizing the protest. The mine, operated by a UK company called Anglo-Asian Mining, uses cyanide to separate gold from the bedrock, and then dumps the toxic sludge — which locals say is leaching into their soil and rivers. Residents in the area have been complaining of respiratory illnesses from the fumes and say lung cancer rates have increased, too. 

Journalists from one of Azerbaijan’s few independent news outlets, Abzas Media, came to investigate, and began publishing stories about the mine and the environmental damage it was inflicting on the local community. Then, in late 2023 — as COP28 in Dubai was getting underway — the Azeri authorities arrested the outlet’s founder Ulvi Hasanli, followed by four of its reporters. 

Context: Last week, Leyla Mustafayeva, the acting editor-in-chief of Abszas Media – who now lives in exile – spoke at a Climate Disinformation Summit in Copenhagen,’ run by the European Journalism Centre. I joined a disturbed, rapt audience as she described how her colleagues were languishing in pre-trial detention, while their relatives were threatened and their bank accounts frozen. The village itself has been cordoned off by police,with no outsiders,bar state-approved journalists, allowed to enter and talk to residents. 

Mustafayeva told the Copenhagen summit how “COP29 helps Azerbaijan’s government greenwash their fossil fuel exports” while protecting Western corporations. We’ll be watching closely to see how Azerbaijan continues to scrub its image in the run-up to COP. 

Connecting the Dots: If you think this story sounds far away from you, the gold mined in this place could well be in your iPhone, your laptop, or that Tesla you bought to help the planet.  

What to do about it all? Stay informed. That’s the least you can do. Mainstream media no longer have bureaux or correspondents in the South Caucasus, and local journalists are under enormous pressure from the authorities. Working with exiled Azeri journalists, the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories is trying to fill the gap, gathering  40 reporters  to continue investigating the impact of gold mining in Azerbaijan and keep the story alive. 

What to Watch For: nearly 200 countries are due to discuss a new plan to provide financial assistance to developing countries suffering the effects of climate change. But it’s not clear whether the United States, the world’s largest economy, will back the plan, with the summit taking place five days after the American presidential election..  As a result, many leading financial institutions are not bothering to send representatives, according to the FT, because, as one finance executive put it “You only go to the party if everyone is going.”

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It was a late spring evening in Devon, England, in May 2021. Even before we saw the satellites, the party had become surreal: it was one of the first gatherings in the region since the pandemic had begun. We were camping in tipis in a field overlooking the Jurassic Coast, the ocean thundering below. Inside the biggest tent, people were singing, smoking, shouting. The evening was unraveling. Someone—masked, costumed—stuck his face inside the flap and yelled, with great theater: “Starlink is visible! Starlink is visible!”

Half of the party knew what he meant, the other half just stared. Led by those who knew, we headed out into the dark field and peered up at the sky. Directly above our heads, above our field, our very tent—a moving train of what looked like stars, perfectly spaced, perhaps fifty of them, speeding across the sky, on and on and on. Some people in the crowd began screaming: the ones who knew nothing of the satellite network Starlink, who thought the world was ending. Their reaction of pure, primeval terror was echoed all over the world every time Starlink sent up a new batch of satellites, and people who had never heard of Elon Musk’s project looked up. 

Since the beginning of the Space Race, in 1955, fewer than 250 objects a year were sent into orbit. Then, in May 2019, came the launch of Starlink, which has since launched more than 6,000 satellites. Musk has ambitions to put 42,000 satellites into space, blanketing the whole planet in a kind of mesh. As the pandemic raged across the world, the night sky quietly began changing forever—and a few months after my trip to Devon, Elon Musk became the richest man on Earth.

Musk has repeatedly said that revenue from Starlink, which is forecasted to be about $6.6 billion in 2024, is in service of his ultimate dream for Starlink’s parent company SpaceX: making humans multiplanetary. Colonizing Mars.

“There’s really two main reasons, I think, to make life multiplanetary and to establish a self-sustaining civilization on Mars,” Musk said in 2015. “One is the defensive reason, to ensure that the light of consciousness as we know it is not extinguished—will last much longer—and the second is that it would be an amazing adventure that we could all enjoy, vicariously if not personally.”

The red planet, the fire star, the bringer of war. For millennia, humans have stared up at the rust-colored planet in the sky and wondered.

“Mars has been fascinating to people for as long as there have been human beings,” the science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson told me over a Zoom call. “It’s weird. It’s red. It has that backward glitch in its motion, it wanes and grows in its brightness. Everyone always knew it was weird, and it’s attractive to people.”

Robinson lives in Davis, California, well within what he calls the “Blast Zone” of Silicon Valley’s influence. He wrote Red Mars, a cult sci-fi classic about colonizing the planet, in 1992, when Musk was a college student. Three decades on, Mars is on our minds more than ever, and Robinson’s fiction is morphing into reality.

An avid sci-fi fan, Musk says he will send the first ship to colonize the red planet by the end of this decade. His dream to colonize space is shared by many of the most powerful players in tech.

“They want to ensure the light of consciousness persists by reducing the probability of human extinction,” said Émile P. Torres, a philosopher who used to be part of what they call the emergent “cult” of Silicon Valley, which envisions a utopian future where humans conquer the universe and plunder the cosmos. They call themselves transhumanists, long-termists, effective altruists, cosmists: people who believe we should strive for immortality, bend nature’s laws to our own will, and transcend terrestrial limitations. “This grand vision of reengineering humanity, spreading to space, is about subjugating nature and maximizing economic productivity.” 

Many billionaires in Silicon Valley envision a future where we can transcend the limits of our bodies and Earth itself, becoming superhuman by enhancing our consciousness through artificial general intelligence and spreading human life out into space. These ideas are the stuff of science fiction; indeed, they are inspired by it. The richest men in Silicon Valley share a deep love of sci-fi. And, armed with billions of dollars, they’re bent on making the stories of their childhood a reality. For Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who founded his own rocket company, the influences are Star Trek and the books of sci-fi authors Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, who wrote futuristic fantasies depicting humans as pioneers capable of colonizing other planets. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who have invested heavily in space ventures, alongside Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, are all aficionados of the 1992 Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash, which depicts virtual worlds and coined the term “metaverse.”

Musk wants to name the first colonizer ship to Mars “Heart of Gold,” after a ship in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And his ambition to terraform the planet could be straight out of Robinson’s Red Mars. The novel is set in 2026—Musk once said he was “highly confident” that SpaceX would land humans on Mars in that year; he now hints closer to 2029. Musk has talked about the “lessons” he has drawn from reading science fiction: “you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age.” The Harvard historian Jill Lepore calls this “extra-terrestrial capitalism,” a colonialist vision of expanding indefinitely, and extracting far beyond this world and into the next.

At the outset of Red Mars, the Ares, the first-ever colonial spaceship, is transporting 100 scientists to the red planet. Their mission: to terraform Mars, turning it from a dusty, inhospitable wasteland into Earth 2.0, a habitable place for humans, with a thicker, Earth-like atmosphere, as well as oceans, breathable air, and low radiation. This plotline is exactly Musk’s plan.

“We can warm it up,” Musk has said of Mars’ freezing, thin atmosphere. His plan is simple—to “nuke Mars,” detonating explosions at the poles and making mini-suns that would heat up the entire planet. The idea is straight science fiction, but he is serious. It’s a more extreme version of the plot of Robinson’s book, which has giant mirrors deployed to reflect more sunlight on the red planet.

Robinson said he is “trying to keep a nuanced portrait of Musk,” who probably read Red Mars as a college student. He sees Musk as someone “hampered by his right wing activities” who owns a “very good rocket company” but whose ambition to colonize the cosmos is pure “fantasyland”.

“This is a fantasy game — ‘let’s ignore gravity, let’s ignore or gut microbiome, let’s ignore cosmic radiation’. Well, you can ignore them if you want—but what a stupid thing to do,” Robinson said. “We are geocentric creatures. We are expressions of the earth and even Mars will screw us up."

Robinson did not mince his words when speaking of his work inspiring the philosophies of the world’s most powerful tech billionaires. “Transhumanism, effective altruism, long-termism, etc.—these are bad science fiction stories,” Robinson said. “And as a science fiction writer, I am offended because science fiction should not be fantasy.

For Robinson, the ambitions and philosophy of Silicon Valley are a warped version of science fiction, far removed from the novels he writes. He describes his work as realistic, but also out of reach of the present: “stuff we might really do with technology, that’s within our grasp, but far enough out that it’s quite utopian.” And yet, the world’s richest man is out there, right now, pouring billions of dollars into making the plot of Red Mars a reality.

Robinson talks about his readers as “co-creators” of the story. “They bring their own experiences. They are co-creating it. So Musk’s Mars, he’s co-creating it. He might have got some ideas from reading the Mars Trilogy.” Ultimately, though, he said: “I am not responsible for the ideas that people come to.”

Science fiction and storytelling have always had the power to inspire real events. The 19th century astronomer Percival Lowell was famous for his belief that Mars was covered in Martian-built canals—an idea that, even though it was pure fancy, changed the course of 20th century history. “We wouldn’t have gotten to the moon yet if it wasn’t for Percival Lowell writing his fantasies about Mars in the 1890s,” Robinson said, explaining how the German Rocket Society, an amateur rocket association, was founded on Lowell’s beliefs. Among its members was a young aerospace engineer who would go on to develop the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany during World War II—and later, the Saturn V rocket that propelled NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon. Wernher von Braun, too, believed that humans should one day colonize Mars.

Robinson’s novels can sometimes feel more like blueprints for the future than fiction, instruction manuals for how to change a planet’s climate. His storylines are full of drudgery; grinding practicalities that pull you down from fantasy into logistics. Red Mars, for all its grand vistas of the dusty planet, wretched storms and soaring volcanoes, is countered by inordinate periods when Robinson’s characters are building toilets and sewage systems or else caught up in petty practical disagreements and relationship problems. Perhaps, ironically, it’s the bureaucracy of his books that makes their ideas feel so within reach.

I first heard of Robinson at a dinner party in East London. The meal had been cleared away, and we were drinking wine. My host, a young climate activist, had just returned from Alaska, where he had been tagging along on a yacht trip with a select group of superrich investors all gathered to watch glaciers crumble into the sea and be told about dwindling blue whale numbers. Everyone on the boat was talking about the same book: Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry for the Future. It had blown their minds.

Set in a near-future Earth where humanity is finally forced to deal with its broken climate or go extinct, it almost reads like a manual for how we might fix our burning world. Like Red Mars, the novel describes an extreme approach for fixing the climate: geoengineering. That’s the concept that we can redesign the very atmosphere of the Earth, tweak the elements to our own ends by shooting massive quantities of particles into the stratosphere, and thereby dim the sun. It is thanks to Robinson’s novel that most people have even heard of the practice. As environmentalist Bill McKibben has written, “a novel feature of the geoengineering debate is that many people first heard about it in a novel.”

“It’s so successful, I think it hardly counts as a cult novel now,” said David Keith, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago who is one of the most prominent scientists working in the field of geoengineering. Keith said that Robinson had consulted with him ahead of writing The Ministry for the Future. “I don’t want to claim any inspiration, but we met,” he said with a smile, adding that he thought of Robinson as “an environmental guru.”

Geoengineering sci-fi like Robinson’s has ignited the imagination of Silicon Valley elites hoping to fix the planet’s problems. Luke Iseman and Andrew Song, a pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs who founded a startup called Make Sunsets, are already deploying solar geoengineering on a micro-scale, releasing balloons filled with sulfur dioxide over the deserts of Nevada. They call their project “sunscreen for the earth”—a term they got from ChatGPT, the AI chatbot. Iseman told me he founded the company after reading science fiction about geoengineering, both Robinson’s book and Termination Shock, the latest novel by Neal Stephenson. “The ideas are amazing,” said Iseman. “I think we’ll see Ministry for the Future-style actions sooner rather than later, for better and worse.” Iseman described how he read both books and immediately began envisioning how he could make them a reality.  

“The more I learned, the more excited I became,” he said, adding that he had grand ambitions for Make Sunsets to keep expanding, unfettered, and try to alter the Earth’s atmosphere. “We’ve got a couple of years of runway to work on this, and a laundry list of fun sci-fi-esque technologies that will let us do this better over time,” he said. Mexico banned solar geoengineering after Make Sunsets carried out a rogue balloon release in Baja California without government permission. By contrast, he said, Nevada is a “good launch site for experimental stuff.”

Make Sunsets and other geoengineering projects have faced criticism for a cowboy-style approach to the future of the planet. Indigenous groups have condemned them as taking a colonial attitude toward the skies. “Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization,” said Asa Larsson-Blind, a Saami activist from northern Sweden who has been campaigning for a global moratorium on solar geoengineering. “Not only of nature and the Earth, but also the atmosphere. Treating the Earth as machinery and saying that we’re not just entitled to control the Earth itself, we will control the whole atmosphere, is to take it a step further.”

Robinson said the message of his books is being missed. “You don’t just burst in some Promethean way to the one techno-fix. The technology that matters is law, and justice, and therefore—politics. And this is what the techno crowd doesn’t want to admit.”

Musk, a private citizen, has already decided for us what the rule of law will be on Mars. “Most likely the form of government on Mars would be a direct democracy, not representative,” he said during his 2022 Time Person of the Year interview. “We shouldn’t be passing laws that are longer than The Lord of the Rings.”

The tech elite’s desire to spread out into space isn’t a new whim. “Expansion is everything,” said the imperialist diamond mining magnate Cecil Rhodes. He would stare up at the sky and regret that humanity couldn’t yet expand outwards into space, those “vast worlds which we could never reach.” Rhodes' words were recorded in his last will and testament, published in 1902. “I would annex the planets if I could.”

In Robinson’s Red Mars, a great fight is underway—a fight of ideologies between the Reds, who believe colonizing Mars will destroy a place that has remained unchanged for billions of years, and the Greens, who want to create an Earth-like biosphere. The Reds make an argument akin to those of Indigenous groups on Earth. Why, they say, can’t we let Mars be Mars? A place that has been unravaged by human exploitation. A place where the rocks, the ice, the sky, have their own value.

“Let the planet be, leave it to be wilderness,” one character, Anne, pleads to her fellow scientists. She’s heartbroken by the thought of extracting, altering, colonizing the planet, and wrecking its ancient landforms and its planetary history. “You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see—as if this were some playground sandbox for you to build castles in.”

I asked Robinson if he thought the same way Anne did—if he was, in fact, Anne. “Oh, no,” he said with a laugh. “My characters are much more interesting than I am.”

That night in Devon, when we saw the Starlink satellites going up, already feels like a relic from a bygone era, from a time when the night sky was uncluttered by human ambition. Now, whenever I look up, wherever I am in the world, I can spot one of Musk’s satellites within a matter of seconds.

Before long, satellites in the sky will outnumber the stars we can see. The universe will be blotted out by fast-moving pieces of metal reflecting back at us. And perhaps the Mars of our solar system will one day resemble the Mars of Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction, the Mars of the fever dreams of the richest people in the world. A Mars that has been transformed by humans to look more like our own Earth—no longer a red light in the sky, but one that looks like what we already know here on Earth. At that point, we’ll have nothing in the universe to look at but ourselves.

The post Silicon Valley’s sci-fi dreams of colonizing Mars appeared first on Coda Story.

As a kid, I always bubbled with energy too. I talk at triple speed, and people often have to tell me to slow down. My childhood neighborhood, the Abanotubani district, lies beneath a great gorge in Tbilisi. A huge, ruined fortress overlooks our neighborhood —- for centuries, it served as a stronghold for Tbilisi, protecting it against invaders.

Now, views of the fortress are obscured by an even bigger mansion, built by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in our country. His wealth is about a third of our gross domestic product. Construction on his house began when I was a toddler: a great sea of glass and metal dominating the gorge. I remember looking up and thinking it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. 

Ivanishvili became the biggest philanthropist in Georgia, supporting arts and culture, fixing schools, houses and hospitals. But even as a young kid, I was doubtful that some billionaire was truly going to help our country. 

Protests were the backdrop of my childhood in Georgia. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders during the Rose Revolution. I was three. It was a peaceful uprising to oust the then-President Eduard Shevardnadze, ending his reign of chaos that had lasted more than a decade. A man called Mikheil Saakashvili was elected after him and set about trying to rid the country of the corruption that had plagued it for so long. 

While there were problems during Saakashvili’s rule, there was also a huge shift in the country towards democracy and reform. For a while, things felt hopeful. 

Of course, we always lived below our powerful billionaire neighbor — the oligarch Ivanishvili in his spy villain-worthy lair. But I also grew up being aware of another big neighbor, one that sat right above Georgia. On a clear day in the hills above my house in Tbilisi, you could see the Greater Caucasus mountain mange — the natural border with Russia.

I was on vacation in those hills above Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. I remember the warplanes buzzing overhead and how my mom went into a panicked frenzy. During that war, Russia occupied South Ossetia, a region to the northwest of Tbilisi. I guess that was when I started to absorb the idea that Russia was not our friend. 

When I was 12, a party called Georgian Dream came to power, backed by Ivanishvili, the billionaire who lived above us. Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs from the former Soviet space, has close ties to Putin. My parents felt uneasy about it all and moved the family to Paris, where I spent my teenage years. 

We lived in the bougie 6th arrondissement. Kids at my school had no idea where Georgia was — I was constantly having to explain that I was from the country, not the U.S. state. The country by the black sea — “la mere noire,” I would intone, again and again. It was Georgia for dummies. People would nod, not quite knowing. One girl literally thought Georgia was a place in the Arctic region of Lapland. If I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, I guess she was thinking of the island of South Georgia in Antarctica. Wrong again. I realized it was often easier to just pretend I was French like everyone else. 

As I grew older, though, I became prouder of my roots. I found a group of friends who came from all over. They introduced me to an important part of French life: going to protests. At those protests, I learned a lesson — my voice matters. 

The French really put the “pro” in protests — they do not mess around. While I was in high school, the cops killed a French activist with a police grenade during a protest. It caused uproar across the country, so I tagged along with older kids to blockade our school, barricading it with trash cans for two weeks to push for justice for the guy who was killed. 

I started to learn that protest actually works in a democracy. I would go between Paris and Tbilisi, taking lessons from my French friends and bringing them to Georgia. “You guys go home too soon when you protest. You stand there and think stuff is going to fall out of the sky,” I would tell my Georgian friends. Last year, though, a new law was proposed in Georgia, and things went full chaos-mode. 

It’s called the foreign agents law. It’s a copycat of the same regulation in Russia. It dictates that any institution getting 20% of its money from abroad has to register with a statewide system as an agent of foreign influence. 

In practice, it makes it easier for the state to crush opposition, get rid of foreign-aided projects that make our life better and stamp out free expression by creating scapegoats. It gives the government arbitrary reasons to arrest anyone they deem a “foreign influence operation.” 

Loads of my friends in Tbilisi work on projects that would be deemed a “foreign agent” by this new law. Whether they work in plastic recycling programs, as independent journalists or as human rights lawyers, they now face extra interrogation by the state. It’s basically a tool for political repression. 

The law’s proposal last year lit a flame under us in Tbilisi. We organized big protests and for a while, it worked — the government didn’t press ahead. But this year, they tried again. 

On April 3, the Georgian Dream party announced plans to bring back the bill. I felt a mixture of anger and hopelessness when I heard. Here we go again, I thought. Here’s undeniable proof of our government blindly trying to follow Russia's lead. I got ready to fight. 

Maybe if you had the privilege of growing up in a first-world country, you don’t understand, but for us this law means the difference between having a functioning democracy and existing as a puppet for Russia. It means losing our freedom of speech. 

On the morning of April 15, the protests began. 

My friends and I have joined the demonstrations every day, trying to put the lessons I’d learned in France into practice. I believe that if we can inspire enough people to get out on the streets, we can overwhelm the brutality we are fighting against. For now, the state is fighting back hard, with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and by simply beating protesters to a pulp. I’m worried things are going to descend into even more violence, though I hope we can avoid it.

On the night of April 30, I put on a gas mask and assigned myself a task: deactivate as many tear gas canisters as I could. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can put a plastic cup over the canister before it starts to smoke, which snuffs it out. Or, if it’s smoking already, you can dunk the canister in a bucket of water.

Things escalated fast that night. Protesters surged onto Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and as they did, police unleashed a torrent of tear gas canisters onto us from the side streets, scattering the crowd. I ran forwards into the impact zone, grabbing the canisters and submerging them into bottles of water that I had previously set out. It was a race to get to the canisters before they started spinning out of control. 

The police began advancing from the side streets and blasting everyone in the area with water cannon, throwing them to the ground. They didn’t care if they hit protesters or journalists — and they hit both. Officers also beat up anyone they could get their hands on. A no man's land emerged between the protesters and the police. In the buffer zone were journalists — and me. Along with dealing with the tear gas, I was also taking pictures — using loads of flash to annoy the officers — just for my own personal project. I managed to capture several instances of how police laid into the protestors. 

It was time to build barricades, French style, and invoke the lessons I had learned in Paris. I started dragging metal barrier fences together and getting people to help. I then told people to gather up trash cans, just like we did in high school. Five guys started to help me. From that moment on, I was standing in the buffer zone in front of the barricades, directing people like an orchestra conductor. I got them to add umbrellas to the structure — a tactic inspired not by the French, but by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — to protect from the water cannon. 

The crowd of police just watched as I directed the resistance. They recorded everything, sussing me out. Then, they mobilized the arresting squad. The police surged forward, grabbing anyone they could — journalists, protesters, they didn’t care. I started to run, but my fashion-victim status let me down, badly. I was wearing my cute new purple Adidas Sambas. But those shoes have no grip, as anyone who owns a pair knows. I slipped on the wet ground. 

A bunch of masked police jumped on me and began beating me mercilessly. At one point I nearly scrambled away, but again my sartorial choices screwed me over. My blazer was tied around my waist and they grabbed it and pulled me back.

By law in Georgia, all police officers have to wear a visible badge number. But during the protests, police hide their badges and mask up with balaclavas, so it’s difficult to prosecute them for brutality down the line.  

They started hitting the back of my head hard, and all I could do was protect my eyes and curl into the fetal position. They dragged me behind the police line and continued laying into me. Then they surrounded me, taunting me, telling me to hit myself and say that I was a little bitch. My legs were like jelly and I could barely stand. I did whatever they ordered, desperate, until they threw me into a van. Already, there was a lump the size of a bar of soap on the back of my head, with deep blue panda rings forming around my eyes. 

They hauled me to prison, but it took them six hours to get me inside. There was already a queue of other protesters they’d caught. My captors waited in the van with me, watching Russian TikToks for hours on end. Honestly, that was almost worse than the beating.  

The atmosphere inside the cells was desperate. People were silently pacing up and down, their spirits hitting rock bottom. Police were bringing in more protesters all the time, their radios crackling. I was in a cell with three other guys. “They beat me like a dog,” one of them said, showing me a bootprint-shaped bruise on his back. I realized we had to get the morale up, fast — and show the guards they couldn’t break us. 

We sang all the songs we could think of — “Bella Ciao,” the European anthem, a bunch of Georgian songs. At one point I even sang the Marseillaise. The police told us to shut up. We kept singing, and cracked terrible jokes that this was a five-star digital detox. 

I got out of jail because a lawyer helped me, pro bono. She works for the Human Rights Center, a group of lawyers here in Georgia that under the new law would be at the top of the state’s list of “foreign agents.” That lawyer, she probably weighs 120 pounds, isn’t much more than 5 feet tall, and she’s formidable. When she goes into the police station, you see the fear in their eyes. She’s the best. If it wasn’t for her and her organization, I would still be in jail. This Russian law wants to take away our access to human rights lawyers like her. 

Two weeks on, and my concussion is getting better, day by day. The nausea has eased and the daily headaches are becoming less intense. 

I’m back on the streets. At these protests, the energy feels different. There’s a crazy electricity in the air. Everyone is singing, fighting, determined not to lose their country. A lot of the protesters are my age — Gen Z. We don’t remember the chaos and corruption of the 1990s. We’re not worn down, like older people, by decades of protesting. We’re also more savvy than our parents’ generation about fact-checking. We don’t just swallow the stream of propaganda that’s fed to us. We’re ready to fight. I spoke with my uncle on the phone about it yesterday morning, just before the law was passed — he told me “my hopes are in Gen Z and a miracle.” 

By Luka Gviniashvili as told to Isobel Cockerell

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the lawyer's association that advised Gviniashvili. It was the Human Rights Center, not the Young Lawyer's Association.

The post I’m protesting Georgia’s ‘Russian law.’ The police beat me up mercilessly appeared first on Coda Story.

Re-writing Georgia’s recent history, Ivanishvili said that Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 were the fault of the West.

The speech follows days of popular protests against the so-called “foreign agents law”, a piece of legislation that wants to force civil society organizations to register if they take money from foreign entities, or face penalties. In his speech, Ivanishvili called Georgia’s vibrant civil society part of a Western spy network and announced their “destruction” after the October elections.

The “foreign agents law” is an important tool in the government’s arsenal. The law is a carbon copy of the Russian legislation which the Kremlin used to attack Russia’s independent media and civic activism. What’s interesting about the law is that it has become a Russian soft power export and a major feature of a modern day authoritarian playbook around the world from Nicaragua to Egypt.

In Georgia, alliances with the West against Russia — which occupies a fifth of the country — is seen by the majority of people in Georgia as an existential necessity. The ambition to integrate into NATO and the European Union is actually written into the country’s constitution. So the adoption of this openly Russian-style law constitutes not only a move towards authoritarianism but also a major geopolitical shift. “It’s a turning point because he (Ivanishvili) officially declared a foreign policy shift,” tweeted Atlantic Council’s analyst Eto Buziashvili.

As I write this, the news has come in that the Georgian parliament has passed the legislation, and more massive protests are being planned. More context on this story in our previous reporting here, and we’ll keep you updated as this story develops.

JOURNALISTS KETTLED AS NYPD STORMS COLUMBIA ENCAMPMENT

5,000 miles away from Tbilisi, where riot police are spraying protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, the The NYPD has been out in force on Manhattan’s 116th street. Decked out in full riot gear, they stormed the encampment of students occupying Columbia University last night, making dozens of arrests.

“I just can’t believe that Western society, or the world in general, is so terrified in 2024 of college students sleeping in expensive tents,” Columbia Journalism School student Bence Szechenyi told me in a voice note as he disembarked from the 1 train at New York City’s 116th street yesterday morning. He was heading to the gates of his — and my — alma mater, where negotiations between pro-Palestine protesters occupying the campus and the university were at an impasse. Students were occupying a building on campus, Hamilton Hall, renaming it 'Hind's Hall', in memory of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli tank fire in northern Gaza in January.

For Szechenyi, the response from both the University and the media over the Columbia protests has been perplexing. “We are talking about college students having a protest. That’s what college students do. The hysteria around it is confusing to me. I’ve spent a lot of time around the camps and it’s literally a drum circle. It looks like Coachella.” He described the distinctly teenage detritus of the camp — Capri-sun juice boxes and packets of skinny popcorn, hipster tote bags and yoga mats. Israeli counter-protester flags have been left untouched by the pro-Palestine students, he said, of whom dozens are Jewish, and have been holding Seder dinners in the encampment over Passover.

Life in the camp sounds pretty kumbaya: there are regular yoga classes, even a pop-up library. “In the more cynical parts of my mind I would call it less of a revolution and more of a Taylor Swift fan club… one thing I can say for certain about the 18-23-year-olds in that encampment is that they’re definitely not Hamas. But you couldn’t always tell that from the institutional reaction.” Classes at the Journalism School have been canceled so far this week — something Szechenyi is outraged by. “We’re supposed to be journalists, we cannot be afraid of 18-year-olds in Covid masks.”

He continued voice-noting me late into the night yesterday, as the NYPD encircled Hamilton Hall and kettled journalists. “We’re cordoned in a little pen right now and they’re arresting people,” he said, as the police stormed the building and rounded up the students, as journalists begged the cops to let them out for bathroom breaks. “It’s crazy that they pushed all the press out.” Szechenyi described the sheer volume of cops out in force in their riot gear — it would, he said, have been “a great night to commit a crime in Brooklyn.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

• We’ve grown horribly accustomed to the fact that all our data — from social media posts, to emails, to fertility tracking, is harvested up by tech giants and used to sell us stuff or peddle disinformation or, frankly, whatever the companies want to do. Now, our brain waves are up for sale — but a new Colorado law wants to expand privacy rights to protect the insides of our own heads, too. 
• This crazy story about a Baltimore County principal who was seemingly caught on recorded audio making blatantly racist and anti-Semitic comments. But investigation revealed that the audio was an AI-generated fake, in a plot by the schools’ former athletic director.

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

• Pedro Sanchez is not resigning. The Spanish PM’s announcement marks the end of a week of speculation over whether he would step down campaign of harassment by right-wing opponents targeting his wife. Allegations of "influence peddling" against her, led by the far-right group Manos Limpias ("Clean Hands"), have been backed up by dubious journalism from Spain’s right-wing media ecosystem. This also shows us something else — how the information ecosystem takes no prisoners, turning people off public roles and pushing political leaders to consider just checking out completely.

The post Georgia’s new iron curtain appeared first on Coda Story.

I met Shannon in Glastonbury. She invited me back to her cottage right by the town’s famous tor, a spooky tower on a sandstone hill that looks out over the Somerset Levels. We sipped tea as we talked about her fears and premonitions surrounding the pandemic and her conviction that the vaccine was a “population control” project. All at once, she leaned in and started talking about the then-Prince Charles. “He’s changed, you know. If you look at pictures of his face over the last few months, it has completely changed.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, cautiously.

“I’m not saying anything,” she said, with a conspiratorial smile. “Just that the Prince Charles from before the pandemic is not the same man as we’re seeing now. It’s probably a body double.”

Shannon was the first person I thought of as the mysterious saga of Catherine, Princess of Wales, made global headlines. Since her reported abdominal surgery in January and subsequent disappearance from public view, a number of bizarre theories have taken root. My favorite is that she is waiting for her fringe to grow out.

To put an end to the rumors and the gossip, the royal family released a Mother’s Day photo that they said was taken by Prince William, featuring a supposedly post-op Kate back in the bosom of her family. But the wannabe sleuths of X and TikTok soon figured out that the photo had all sorts of things wrong with it: strange sleeves, weird-looking fingers, mismatched patterns on clothes. And then international photo agencies pulled the image, saying it had been tampered with. That was enough to tip even mainstream journalists over the edge into full “Katespiracy” land.  

“Oh wow. Ok I am now fully on board the Kate Middleton truther train,” wrote Guardian columnist Owen Jones on Monday morning. “I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist,” wrote ITV’s royal correspondent Chris Ship. “But… there are serious questions for Kensington Palace.” He then asked if any of his followers were botanists and could identify whether the foliage in the background of the photo should be in leaf in early March. 

Cue Kate posting on X, admitting the photo had been shopped: “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” her statement ran. Cue my X feed exploding. “WE DEMAND A VIDEO OF KATE HOLDING A DAILY TELEGRAPH WITH TODAY’S DATE NOW,” wrote one joker. 

The parodies and real analyses of Kate’s edited family photo are now indistinguishable from one another. And while some legitimate analysts are pointing out real problems with the image, the answers to why the photo was doctored range from the speculative to the seriously unhinged. It also shows how easily a lack of information can tip over into disinformation. And the royal family’s ham-fisted attempt at “transparency” only fueled further disinformation.   

Given the future we’re all hurtling towards, in which AI-generated images and video will be impossible to tell from the real thing, even the most logical among us might never be satisfied by hard evidence again.

GLOBAL NEWS

Arguably, the only suspense related to the Russian elections is whether Yulia Navalnaya will be able to carry forward her husband’s legacy. Though President Vladimir Putin is assured of victory this weekend, he remains deeply wary of the threat represented by Navalny’s movement. Last week, Navalnaya echoed her husband’s call for Russians to protest by turning out en masse to vote at noon on March 17, the last day of the unprecedented three-day process. As Russia intensifies its crackdown on dissidents, turning out at the appointed hour would itself be considered, Navalnya suggested, an act of civil disobedience. It would serve as evidence that opposition to Putin — Russia’s longest-serving leader since Stalin — remains viable, even as he prepares to extend his rule up to 2036. 

If Putin is a shoo-in to be re-elected as president over the weekend, Narendra Modi is only marginally less likely to be re-elected prime minister of India after elections anticipated to be held in May. But the Indian government remains sensitive to narratives around Modi’s perceived authoritarian streak. Last week, it warned Big Tech to prevent artificial intelligence products from “threaten[ing] the integrity of the electoral process.” It was likely a response to the headlines created when Google’s newly launched Gemini tool responded equivocally to the question: “Is Narendra Modi a fascist?”

In wartime, can literature bridge divides? And can writers, as PEN America tweeted, “help guide the rest of us across that bridge?” Staff resigned en masse after Guernica, an online magazine, published a personal essay by an Israeli writer that the magazine’s co-publisher deemed to be a “hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” Guernica eventually took the story down. But even in wartime, surely the sophisticated, often privileged readers of a magazine like Guernica can be trusted to both abhor the loss of life in Gaza and read the words of an Israeli writer struggling with her conscience.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Meduza, an independent Russian news website produced in exile in Latvia, anticipates that the Russian presidential elections might prompt authorities to fully restrict access to the internet. Millions of Meduza’s readers, the site says, live in Russia. Since Navalny’s death, independent news sites have faced a barrage of cyberattacks. In response, Meduza has prepared an “SOS newsletter” it can send to readers via email, which is harder to shut off.
• In the “college of today,” argues William Deresiewicz, a writer and former faculty member at Yale University, “[y]ou start with theories and impose them on texts.” It means that the students, still overwhelmingly drawn from the “top 20% of the income distribution,” who become journalists learn to “have faith in expertise, to speak its language and accept its values.” The result in journalism, he writes, is an increasing disconnect with readers and a tendency towards activism rather than skepticism.

The remainder of the newsletter was curated by Shougat Dasgupta.

The post Calamity Kate and the failed Photoshop appeared first on Coda Story.

Three-quarters of a mile below the ground, miners have just detonated a massive quantity of explosives. They’re blasting out iron ore from the bedrock: around six Eiffel Towers’ worth each night.

In this northern Swedish mining town of around 23,000, most people are used to the feeling of reverberating dynamite. But a newcomer will find themselves jolted awake, night after night.

Signs of the ground being hollowed out below are everywhere. Cracks run up the brickwork of houses and apartment buildings, and nearest to the mine, the land seems to undulate. Kiruna is breaking apart.

In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages

Kiruna sits high up in the Swedish Arctic, a starkly beautiful place, surrounded by primeval forests, powerful rivers and rugged mountains. More than a century ago, industrialists named it “the land of the future” because of the rich seams of iron ore that lay beneath the earth. But today, mining has carved out so much of the land that it’s causing deeper, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust. Unlike the timed nightly rumblings from the mine, these are real seismic tremors that shake the town’s foundations without warning. It is as if Kiruna’s mountain, woken from its slumber, is trying to settle itself. 

Carina Sarri, 73, can barely recognize the landscape today — it has changed so much since her childhood. The Kiruna native now lives in the south of Sweden, but recently returned for a visit.

“Two, three new mountains they have built, from the remains of the mine,” she said, describing the enormous piles of waste rock the miners have dumped, forming artificial mountains that dominate the skyline to the south of the city. She told me about the lake, once a treasured summer spot for swimming and fishing brown trout. The Swedish state-owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag or LKAB, began draining the southern end away about a decade ago to stop water seeping into the mine. Now people are afraid that what remains is too contaminated to swim in, and the brown trout have become scarce.

Sarri is of Sami origin, a group that is indigenous to the region. Now retired, she helped found Sweden’s first Sami-language nursery school in Kiruna in the 1980s. Sarri told me she couldn’t help but think about how her hometown might look a century from now when there is nothing left to extract. “How will they leave this land?” she wondered aloud.

It’s an old question in Kiruna, where an iron mine first laid waste to the land in the early 20th century. It forever changed the lives of the Sami people — indigenous reindeer herders, native to northern Scandinavia and northwest Russia, who have lived in these lands for millennia. But today, the question has taken on new meaning.

Across northern Sweden, companies have staked claims here for pioneering new carbon-free ways to mine iron and make steel. They also want to dig up a rich treasure trove of rare earth elements and precious metals to help power our mobile phones and electric cars. In 2021, the region even became the target site for a drastic intervention that could bring down global temperatures but could also cause cataclysmic disaster — a proposal to dim the sun.

Ebba Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister and minister for business and energy, believes the region could help reduce the speed at which the world is heating up. “Sweden really has the answer to the million-dollar question of whether it’s possible to have very high set climate goals and then at the same time have a strong economic growth,” Busch told me. “The Swedish answer to that is yes.”

There’s an underlying sense here that swathes of this beautiful, resource-laden land should be turned over to industry, that it must be sacrificed at the altar of a green transition in order to phase out fossil fuels. But for local residents, the tradeoffs are more complex than simply embracing a more sustainable future. Environmentalists, Indigenous groups and academics say that what politicians and energy executives are really advocating for is a technofix for the climate crisis: simply trading out one extractive industry for another without challenging the systems that got us here in the first place. And it could bring untold collateral damage upon one of nature’s last refuges in Europe, alongside the Sami, the region’s last Indigenous culture.

In reporting this story, I met climate scientists, mining executives, Sami leaders and Swedish politicians. Among them, I found no absolute heroes or true villains. Everyone was searingly aware that the climate is in danger, but each person had drastically different ideas about how to fix it. Some politicians, like Busch, say the solutions to the climate crisis are in the ground, ready to be mined, while the Sami believe the answers have always existed in the quiet teachings of the natural world. This far-flung northern region is a crossroads of technologies, ideologies and ambitions for the planet. Kiruna is, as one scholar put it, “a microcosmos, like a magnifying glass under which you see all the problems of the world.”

This past October, I went to the mine myself. From a platform three-quarters of a mile below ground, I watched as an electrified train approached, moving autonomously along the tracks and letting out a shrill whistle. Carriages passed by filled with black rocks — some like gravel, some as big as watermelons. When they reached the loading shaft, the bottom of the carriage flew open and pieces of iron ore fell into the abyss with a screech and a roar. From there, my guide explained, they would be crushed, turned into pellets and eventually melted down into steel.

Anders Lindberg, a spokesman for LKAB, Sweden’s state-owned mining company, drove me down into the Kiruna mine in a company-owned four-wheel drive vehicle. Cheerful, bespectacled and passionate about mining, he kept up a constant stream of chatter as we rolled through the unfathomable warren of underground tunnels, caverns and railways. As we approached 4,000 feet below ground, the mine’s deepest level, my ears started to pop and it got hotter — we were getting closer to the Earth’s core.

“Whatever you do in your daily life, it has started in the mine,” he said as his headlights flashed across the roughly hewn rock of the tunnel wall. “The tools you use, the chair you’re sitting on, the bike you’re riding on your way to work. The pens you’re writing with, the computer, your mobile phone. It has all started in the mine.” 

From Kiruna, the iron is taken by train to ports in Norway and Sweden, where it is refined into steel or shipped to LKAB’s clients. At least 80% of iron ore in Europe comes from LKAB’s mines. The company says its products can be found in mobile phones, bikes, strollers, electric cars, roads and buildings all over the world.

When Lindberg took me to see some of the miners, I expected pickaxes and dusty faces, but instead I found men and women sitting in state-of-the-art underground offices — with computer screens, water coolers and even a canteen. It turns out that a lot of the mining now happens remotely. I watched as one woman, Ingela, picked up piles of rock and moved them using joysticks and an Xbox controller, before a huge curved screen.

Most iron mining and steelmaking today is otherwise not very modern: The pelleting, refining and smelting processes are typically powered by fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Globally, the steel industry is responsible for about 8% of carbon emissions. But LKAB says they can transform the whole process from mine to end-product by using electricity generated by water and wind instead.

Ahead of COP 28 — the global climate conference taking place this week in Dubai — the UN warned that we’re on track for global temperatures to rise 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. The UN estimates that an average of 21.5 million people have been displaced by climate disasters each year since 2008. Without drastic changes in the way we live, we'll see more and more hellish weather events, deadly heat waves, forest fires, drastic flooding and millions more forced to leave their homes — the world as we know it will be even further transformed.

We’re already living through these consequences, but stopping the worst effects will require overhauling nearly every industry. We must reduce our carbon emissions. But the question of how to do that hangs heavily in the Arctic air.

Until the last decade, Sweden’s northernmost county — Norrbotten, home to Kiruna — wasn’t such an exciting place. Unemployment levels were among the highest in the country, and people were moving down to Stockholm in search of work. But a new chapter began when Facebook came to town.

In 2011, Meta (then Facebook) began building an enormous data center in Lulea, a small city on the Baltic coast, about four hours south of Kiruna. Run on hydropower and cooled naturally by the frigid Arctic air, the data center called attention to northern Sweden’s potential as a place with an abundance of renewable energy. More server farms began setting up shop and wind farms were erected in the vast forestland. Within a few years, industry leaders and politicians spoke of the area’s potential to help revamp age-old, carbon-heavy steel production into new eco-friendly processes. Meanwhile, Kiruna’s space center — a rocket range and satellite station — was becoming an important European hub for monitoring climate change and space weather.

Signs of this new industry of sustainability — and its profits —  are everywhere now: LED screens on the university campus and at the airport invite people to “become the green transition.” Someone handed me a newspaper that proclaimed northern Sweden’s green transition will “save the world.”

The need for a change in the way we live and treat the Earth is also plain to see here. Every winter feels a little shorter than the last. The snow, once soft and easy for animals to dig through to reach food beneath, is now melting and refreezing as the temperature fluctuates unpredictably. The region’s reindeer are moving about ever more erratically, in constant search of food.

Alongside the “land of the future,” this place has another alias — “Europe’s last remaining wilderness.” There’s truth to the name: These vast boreal forests are home to the brown bear, golden eagle, Arctic fox, lynx, wolf and beaver. It’s one of the least inhabited places in Europe. But the Sami don’t like the term. For them, this isn’t a wilderness, and it isn’t empty. The land is replete with cultural heritage, with the traces of thousands of years of living alongside nature, herding reindeer, fishing, hunting and storytelling. 

“If you read a map now, you can see Sami names all over — every mountain, every lake, every river — all have Sami names. It’s our ancestors’ land,” said Anna Sarri, Carina Sarri’s cousin who runs a nature tourism business in a village outside Kiruna and comes from a long line of reindeer herders. “It’s a culture.”

In January of this year, the city of Kiruna laid out a lavish welcome for the European Commission to celebrate the start of Sweden’s six-month leadership of the Council of the European Union. Donning a blue LKAB hard hat and protective clothing, Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, gave a speech inside the belly of the mine to mark the occasion.

“I don’t know what comes to mind when you think of Sweden. Some of you might think of the Swedish musical miracle like ABBA, Roxette or Swedish House Mafia. Maybe you’re thinking of Astrid Lindgren or those red-painted wooden houses. Untamed wilderness,” Busch said with a smile. “But I’d like to add another entry to that list. LKAB, the Swedish mines.”

She went on to announce that in Kiruna, just north of where LKAB is currently mining, is a second enormous underground deposit of metals, containing not only iron, but also Europe's largest quantity of rare earth metals. This second deposit, she said, would be a treasure trove of much-needed materials for making magnets that power electric car engines and help convert motion into electricity in wind turbines.

Opening up a sister mine — to dig for these valuable minerals —  would be crucial, she said, for Europe’s greener, profitable future. It would wean Europe off dependence on China’s rare earth elements and help reduce dependence on fossil fuels worldwide. “Sweden is literally a goldmine,” Busch told reporters.

Anna Sarri was in her village when she first heard the news. Announcing the deposit without consulting the Sami first, and doing it on the grandest possible scale was a “dirty trick,” she said. In reality, the mining company has known about the deposit for over a century. They simply hadn’t categorized or publicly registered its geological makeup in detail until now. But the international media immediately bought the political calculus, hailing the deposit as a new “discovery.” The fanfare suddenly made it a very difficult thing for the Sami — or anyone else — to oppose the opening of a new mine. Doing so would mean being on the wrong side of the climate change debate.

“It’s a way of working which always puts the reindeer herding society in a situation where you are almost forced to say yes, and if you don't, you are an enemy to society,” said Nils Johan Labba, a Sami politician who I met in Anna Sarri’s village.

The mining company says that according to geological reporting standards, it had to make a large public announcement so all parties were notified at once.

Talk of untapped treasures lying beneath the earth in northern Sweden is nothing new, especially to Indigenous people like Sarri and Labba. In the early 20th century, a eugenicist named Herman Lundborg traveled to Kiruna to meet the Sami and classify them. He measured their skulls and photographed people naked, a project that was privately backed by the founder of Kiruna’s mine and the LKAB mining company. In 1919, Lundborg wrote that there were “dormant millions” in profits underground in northern Sweden and that because the Sami — who he believed to be racially inferior — did not extract those resources, they should “give way to clean Swedish [industrial] interests.” At the time, Lundborg’s influence served as the backdrop for the state’s displacement of Sami communities during the industrialization of the north in the early 20th century. Racial ideology — and assimilation policies forced on the Sami people — painted Sami traditions and philosophy around land use as incompatible with Sweden’s prosperity.

Sami politicians and community leaders told me that to them, the green transition feels like a continuation of what they have experienced for centuries: more extraction, more sacrifice of their land. The undeniable threats of climate change on one hand and the constant acquisition of land by mining companies on the other, feel like an existential Catch-22; they can lose their land to green development, lose it to climate change or, potentially, lose it to both.

But these rare earth metals are here. And they could help human beings keep using the tools and technologies we’ve come to depend on, without doing quite so much harm to the planet. Should the Sami have to give up their way of life to make way for these mines — when they had little to do with destroying the climate in the first place? I put the question to LKAB’s Lindberg.

“You cannot look at the Sami population and say, ‘They’re a small group that’s not part of the society,’” he said. “We have Samis working in the mine. Reindeer herders are using motorcycles, snowmobiles, helicopters, drones, mobile phones. They also need these metals. They are also using fossil fuels, being part of the climate change.”

The mineral-rich land here may contain real answers to the climate crisis. But there’s also money to be made from these rare earth metals — and a lot of it.

The state-owned mining company has not yet put a price on how much that second deposit in Kiruna’s potential sister mine — the one announced during the European Commission visit in January — might be worth. Along with 700 million tons of iron ore, LKAB believes the new deposit contains about 1.3 million tons of rare earth elements. One metric ton of neodymium, one of the elements found in the deposit used for powerful magnets and electronics, is currently priced at around $70,000. The total profits here — of iron for traditional industrial use alongside valuable mining byproducts in the form of rare earth metals that go into our phones and electric vehicles — could be astronomical.

Busch, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, has called the newly announced Kiruna deposit as potentially fortune-changing for Sweden’s economic future as Norway’s discovery of offshore oil in the late 1960s, which led to it becoming a top global exporter of crude oil. 

But some locals are skeptical about what all this mining is really for and who really stands to gain from it. At a pub in Lulea, where locals were competing in a Swedish-style pub quiz over plates of meatballs and lingonberries, I met workers who had just flown in to lay fiber optic cable in the Baltic Sea. They chuckled when I mentioned the green transition. “Ask the companies how much electricity it will need!” one of them said.

It is a good question. LKAB, along with its partners — a steelmaking and hydropower company — is currently testing out a new way of making steel, which leaves behind the traditional blast furnace but requires a phenomenal amount of electricity. How much exactly? “We would need approximately 70 terawatt hours of electricity a year,” said LKAB’s Lindberg. He explained this would amount to roughly half the electricity that all of Sweden’s population of 10 million consumes in a year.

How could that much electricity be generated here in a planet-friendly way? Imagine 3,000 new wind turbines. That’s what must be built, according to Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson, Sweden’s former minister for business who now advises SSAB, the steelmaking company partnering with LKAB on their new fossil-free steel venture. Thorwaldsson is all for it, because the consequences of not doing it, he said, are too grave to think about. “It must, must work,” Thorwaldsson said. “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

But wind farms come with issues of their own. “They talk about wind power,” said Johan Sandström, a mining expert at the Lulea Institute of Technology. “OK, some wind turbines might end up in the sea, but others must be on land. Whose land?"

For people in northern Sweden, this is the real million-dollar question. And it’s a hard one to raise in a place like Lulea — where almost everyone is somehow connected to the town’s industry and technology sectors. Sandström described an emerging “culture of silence” around challenging the new narrative of the green transition.

“As soon as you ask a question about it, you’re categorized as being against progress and sustainability,” said Sandström. “It’s like a silent consensus that we need to view this as a positive thing, period. And I think that's unfortunate.”

Henrik Blind, councilor of the nearby town of Jokkmokk, said he feels the green transition has been “hijacked by the industry” that has continued to take away and exploit Indigenous land, but this time with a climate-saving label slapped on top. When I met Tor Lennart Tuorda, a Sami photographer who works as an archivist at the Sami museum, he put it more bluntly.

“It’s only shit talk, this green transition,” he said. “It’s only a way to extract even more. You can call it green colonialism instead. That’s more true.”

Mining for the green transition will bring some harm to the land and the people who live on it. But its champions carry a healthy dose of realism about what drives the global economy and how our demands for everything from ballpoint pens to laptops affect the climate. They are pushing for more sustainable ways for us to keep living as we do.

Then, there’s a more radical crowd: scientists who argue that all options must be on the table, that we may need to look beyond the Earth itself to slow down climate change. They too found their way to Kiruna.

In 2021, a group of researchers at Harvard University wanted to study whether humans could one day bring down the Earth’s rising temperatures by dimming light from the sun. They predicted that if they could send a burst of mineral dust into the atmosphere, it would act like millions of tiny mirrors high in the sky, scattering sunlight back into space and potentially lowering temperatures worldwide.

The group set their sights on Esrange, the Swedish Space Corporation’s rocket launch site and space base, a 40-minute drive east of Kiruna. The sparsely populated Arctic landscape would make it an ideal testing ground.

The first step would be to come to Esrange, where they could test out flying a special mechanical balloon about 12 miles overhead. If successful, the balloon could one day be used to sprinkle the sky with those tiny mirrors.

One of the scientists on the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx for short, is David Keith, who is now a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago. He told me that the first goal was simply to test the balloon, but the longer-term goal was “to do some stratospheric science, with a focus on solar geoengineering.”

Dubbed “sunscreen for the Earth,” solar geoengineering is one of the most controversial types of climate science out there today. If it works, it could potentially reduce global temperatures and save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change. But there are huge, potentially catastrophic, risks involved. Scientists say a mistake in the process could disrupt our climate system — even erode the ozone layer — and severely impact global drought and flooding patterns.

Nevertheless, the stage was set for the SCoPEx team to come to Sweden. They even announced their plans to the media. But then word reached Åsa Larsson Blind, who lives northeast of Kiruna and is vice president of the nonprofit Saami Council, a cross-border rights group that spans the Sami region.

Larsson Blind was startled by what she saw as the mindset of geoengineering — the idea that humans might one day be able to tweak the Earth’s climate to suit our own ends. 

“Solar geoengineering is kind of the ultimate colonization,” she told me. “Not only of nature and the Earth, but also the atmosphere. Treating the Earth as machinery and saying that we’re not just entitled to control the Earth itself, we will control the whole atmosphere is to take it a step further.”

The Saami Council launched a high-profile campaign opposing the project, releasing a video that challenged not only the proposed experiment, but called for a complete global ban on geoengineering research. The video featured Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking alongside Larsson Blind, other Indigenous leaders, scientists and environmentalists who called geoengineering “pollution for a pollution problem” and a “false solution” to climate change.

In his work, Keith talks about a stark future where the effects of climate change get so bad that it could become urgent to research geoengineering as a potential solution. He argues that it is important to understand the risks while we still have time to consider them soberly, rather than in some future climate emergency. “The purpose of research,” he told me, “is to provide more information about how well these technologies might work and what their risks are.” But after the Saami Council campaign, the Swedish Space Corporation reneged on its commitment to the SCoPEx team — the balloon launch was called off. 

Keith recalled Space Corporation officials telling the group that “there were enough different disputes over mining and other topics in Sami land; that from the point of view of the Swedish government, they just didn't want one more irritation.”

“I think the Swedish government failed kind of abysmally on that score,” he said. “It is entirely legitimate for the Sami to oppose experiments or whole research in general,” Keith told me. “But their right to do so needs to be balanced against the rights of people in poor, hot countries.” He added that in his experience, people were more interested in geoengineering in the Global South.

Mattias Forsberg, a representative from the Esrange Space Center, said that it was not only opposition from the Sami that caused them to cancel the project. “Our core mission as a company, our reason for being in business, is to serve the sustainable development of humanity and our modern societies,” Forsberg said. “Since it quickly became clear that this whole topic around the SCoPEx project needed to be discussed more widely internationally before any related mission could be conducted, we took the decision to cancel our engagements with the project.”

I talked about the scuttled geoengineering project with Henrik Blind, the Sami politician in Jokkmokk. For him, the shutdown of SCoPEx’s balloon test in Kiruna — and the debate it sparked — seemed to capture the clash between nature-based solutions and techno-fixes to climate change.

“This is an example of how stupid it is, that we as one creature, among millions of creatures, think we can be larger than nature. It’s something that makes me laugh,” he said. “It isn’t the sun’s fault, and it isn’t the planet’s fault, that our climate is going where it’s going.”

We met by a frozen lake a few minutes’ drive from Blind’s office at city hall. He glided up to our meeting place in a pristine white Tesla, the tires squeaking on the snow. Dressed in a pink cashmere hat and bright red knitted mittens, he walked with a slight bounce, making quick progress around the lake.

Dusk was drawing in — it was October, and the nights were getting longer. Blind gestured at the twilight stillness around us, the sky turning the color of watery ink. “We call it the blue hour,” he said with a smile.

Jokkmokk lies just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, where the sun only just manages to peep over the horizon during winter. People in this part of the world have a singular relationship with the sun. It’s something that made the concept of solar geoengineering — the idea we can blunt the strength of the sun’s rays — feel particularly unsettling for Blind.

We talked about the strange reality of living mostly in the darkness for six months of the year, and with abundant light for the other six. “Of course it’s dark, but dark is also light in some way,” Blind said. “The light needs the darkness, to get the contrast.”

On the subject of contrasts, I asked Blind about the Tesla. Electric cars depend on metals and minerals often extracted in environmentally destructive conditions. “For me, it’s showing how hard it is to be a modern person. You want to do the right thing, but still, you are harming nature in one way or another,” he said. “It’s a conflict in the head. I know that an electric car has a lot of minerals in it, and it’s causing trouble in other places.”

There is trouble — plenty of trouble — in other places. In the fight for a more sustainable future, climate campaigners say those in power are trying to fix the climate in precisely the same way they destroyed it. Those least responsible for climate change are forced to relinquish their land — and in some places, even their lives — in the race to fix the damage. 

In Xinjiang, China, the Uyghur people are being forced to work in solar panel factories while millions more are surveilled, imprisoned and “re-educated” so China can consolidate control over the region’s vast resources of rare earth elements and precious metals. In Mexico, Indigenous communities say their lives and livelihoods are being threatened by wind farm company land grabs. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt mines providing 70% of the world’s supply for rechargeable batteries in cars and phones are expanding rapidly, mines run on trafficked child labor, with spartan conditions as people scrape out the metal by hand using pickaxes and shovels.

It’s a far cry from the Kiruna iron mine, which LKAB dubs the “most modern iron mine in the world.” Victoire Kabwika, a mining technician from the DRC, now works here in LKAB’s mine. I met Kabwika and his wife Angel as they came out of Sunday service at Kiruna’s church, blinking in the slanting Arctic sunlight. He too spoke of contrasts. To Kabwika, mining in Sweden is night and day compared to back home. 

“In Congo, people are working with soldiers around. And weapons. Children are working. It's not good,” he told me. Mining in the DRC to fuel the green transition is also ravaging the landscape, but there, people regularly pay for it with their lives. More than 7,000 miles south of Kiruna, the Kolwezi mine is also causing nearby houses to crack apart due to the excavation below them. But there, soldiers are forcing people to leave their homes, marking them with red Xs and burning them down. Amnesty International found they’d even torched some homes with families still inside.

All over town in Kiruna, signs proclaim that the company has “secured mineral assets that guarantee the future for ourselves and our region beyond 2060.” If the new sister mine for iron and rare earth elements — just north of the current mine — is allowed to open, “it will mean my life, because it's going to extend the time for exploration,” said Kabwika. It would mean more jobs in the region, and that he could likely stay in his job here indefinitely.

For the Sami collective that currently herds reindeer here, it would mean yet another loss of land. And for everyone in town, it could mean more earthquakes.

At 3:11 a.m. on May 18, 2020, a 4.9-magnitude earthquake shook Kiruna, triggered by ongoing mining activity. 

“I was in my bed,” said Zebastian Bohman, 51, who has lived in Kiruna for a decade. He remembers how his apartment shuddered: paintings fell off the walls and glasses tumbled from kitchen cupboards. His thoughts immediately turned to the mine: “Who’s down there? Who’s on the shift? You start to call.”

No one was killed. But the “minequake” was more evidence of how dangerously unstable the land had become — and would continue to grow if the mining company kept digging. The town is ever so slowly being pulled towards the mine, like a tablecloth dragged across a table set for breakfast. Even before “the big one,” as locals now call it, plans were made to move Kiruna for precisely this reason.

So the mining company drew a big, red line down the middle of the town. Everyone on one side, around 6,000 homes, would have to move around two miles to the east, and the mining company would pay the cost — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Most of the “old town’s” buildings are being bulldozed, replaced by new buildings in a “new town” center. But homes built in the traditional Swedish style — with painted clapboard and sloping, copper roofs — are being moved one by one, loaded onto trailers in their entirety and relocated. Residents often walk behind the houses, keeping a sort of slow-moving vigil.

In 2025 the city will move its immense Lutheran church. Made of wood, with soaring stained glass windows that bathe the congregation in Arctic sunlight, the architect constructed its pitched triangular shape to look like a Sami tent. The town will need to widen the road and demolish a railway viaduct to finish the job.

Since summer, the old town has largely emptied out. The land that’s closest to the mine has been turned into a kind of memory park, for the next few years at least, while the ground is still stable enough to be safe. It’s a place where people can go to process the loss of Kiruna as it was

“People are grieving, mourning the old city,” Bohman told me. “I would think it will take a generation. They love their old city and the new one is not in their heart yet.” Alongside his wife Cecilia, Bohman runs a food truck just outside the mine where they serve up reindeer kebabs to miners, businessmen, Kiruna’s teenagers and anyone else passing by. In between shifts, Zebastian Bohman took me to his old apartment building, where he showed me a series of cracks, big and small, running up through the block from the basement.

Bohman and his wife moved out of the apartment last year, into their newly allotted home. They were pleased with the trade and relieved to be out of their old place, away from the booming, the juddering and constant worry about seismic activity.

But a month after their move, around the holidays last year, the Bohmans were sitting on the sofa late one evening watching television, when they felt it. That familiar, sickening jolt: a mini-earthquake. The couple looked at each other as their new house shuddered around them. When the shaking stopped, they could do nothing but laugh. “We realized we were fucked,” Zebastian Bohman said with a chuckle and a shrug. “That's what we realized. This is not the end. This is not a home forever.”

The mining company says they don’t foresee the new town having to move again. But the Bohmans believed, in that moment, that this wouldn’t be the last time.

As we imagine our future on this planet, we can all expect epic upheaval in the places we call home. But the stakes of change will be much higher for some than for others. 

For people who are already seeing the worst of the climate crisis, the costs are extraordinary: their homes, their land, their lives. For those industrialists at the top of global supply chains, the fight to kick humanity’s fossil fuel habit will force a change in the source and size of their profits.

And for the people of Kiruna, the gains and the losses are as immense as the landscape itself. The fragility of this reality is felt every night, for now and for the foreseeable future, as the earth continues to shake.

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The post In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages appeared first on Coda Story.

As thousands of people continue to arrive in the U.K., the British authorities are scrambling for new ways to monitor and control them. Under the government’s new rules, Britain has a legal duty to detain and deport anyone who arrives on its shores via truck or boat regardless of whether they wish to seek asylum. Passed in July 2023, the Illegal Migration Act has already been described by the United Nations Human Rights Office as “exposing refugees to grave risks in breach of international law.”

More than 20,000 people have come to the U.K. on small boats so far in 2023, and some 175,000 people are already waiting for an asylum decision. But officials say the U.K. does not have the physical space to detain people under the new law. And a public inquiry published this week argued that the U.K. should not detain migrants for more than 28 days. The report found evidence of abusive, degrading and racist treatment of migrants held in a detention center near London’s Gatwick Airport.

With detention centers at capacity and under scrutiny for mistreating migrants, and with the Rwanda scheme facing court challenges, those awaiting deportation or asylum proceedings are increasingly being monitored using technology instead, such as GPS-enabled ankle trackers that allow officials to follow the wearer’s every move. The ankle tracker program, which launched as a pilot in June 2022, was initially scheduled to last 12 months. But this summer, without fanfare, the government quietly uploaded a document to its website with the news that it was continuing the pilot to the end of 2023.

A Home Office spokesperson told me that “the GPS tracking pilot helps to deter absconding.” But absconding rates among migrants coming to the U.K. are low: The Home Office itself reported that they stood at 3% in 2019 and 1% in 2020, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the advocacy group Migrants Organize. In other official statements, the Home Office has expressed concern that the Rwanda policy may lead to “an increased risk of absconding and less incentive to comply with any conditions of immigration bail.” So authorities are fitting asylum seekers with GPS tags to ensure they don’t disappear before they can be deported.

Privacy advocates say the policy is invasive, ineffective and detrimental to the mental and physical health of the wearers. 

“Forging ahead, and massively expanding, such a harmful scheme with no evidence to back up its usefulness is simply vindictive,” said Lucie Audibert, a legal officer at the digital rights group Privacy International, which launched a legal challenge against the pilot program last year, arguing there were not adequate safeguards in place to protect people’s basic rights. 

Migrants who have been tagged under the scheme say the experience is dehumanizing. “It feels like an outside prison,” said Sam, a man in his thirties who fled a civil war with his family when he was a small child and has lived in the U.K. ever since. Sam, whose name has been changed, was told by the Home Office at the end of last year that he would need to wear a tag while the government considered whether to deport him after he had served a criminal sentence.

The Home Office has also outsourced the implementation of the GPS tracking system to Capita PLC, a private security company. Capita has been tasked with fitting tags and monitoring the movements and other relevant data collected on each and every person wearing a device. For migrants like Sam, that means dealing with anonymous Capita staff — rather than the government — whenever his tag was being fitted, checked or replaced.

After a month of wearing the tag, Sam felt depression beginning to set in. He was worried about leaving the house, for fear of accidentally bumping the strap. He was afraid that if too many problems arose with the tracker, the Home Office might use it as an excuse to deport him. Another constant anxiety weighed on him too: keeping the device charged. Capita staff told him its battery could last 24 hours. But he soon found out that wasn’t true — and it would lose charge without warning when he was out, vibrating loudly and flashing with a red light.

“Being around people and getting the charger out so you can charge your ankle — it’s so embarrassing,” Sam said. He never told his child that he had been tagged. “I always hid it under tracksuits or jeans,” he said, not wanting to burden his child with the constant physical reminder that he could be deported.

The mental health problems Sam experienced are not unusual for people who have to wear tracking devices. In the U.S., border authorities first deployed ankle monitors in 2014, in response to an influx of migrants from Central America. According to a 2021 study surveying 150 migrants forced to wear the devices, 12% said wearing the tags led to thoughts of suicide, while 40% said they believed they had been psychologically scarred by the experience.

Capita staff regularly showed up at Sam’s home to check on the tag, and they often came at different times than the Home Office told Sam they would come. Sometimes, they would show up without any warning at all. 

Sam remembered an occasion when Capita officers told him that “the system was saying the strap had been tampered with.” The agents examined his ankle and found nothing wrong with the device. This became a routine: The team showed up randomly to tell him there was a problem or that his location wasn’t registering. “It was all these little things that seemed to make out I was doing something wrong. In the end, I realized it wasn’t me, it was the tag that was the problem. I felt harassed,” Sam told me. 

At one point, Sam said he received a letter from the Home Office saying he had breached his bail conditions because he had not been home when the Capita people came calling. According to Home Office documents, breaching bail conditions is a good enough reason for the government to have access to a migrant’s “trail data”: a live inventory of a person’s precise location every minute of the day and night. He’s worried that this tracking data might be used against him as the government deliberates on whether or not to deport him. 

Sam is not alone in dealing with glitches with the tag. In a study of 19 migrants tagged under the British scheme, 15 participants had practical issues with the devices, such as the devices failing or chargers not working. 

When I asked Capita to comment on these findings, the company redirected me to the Home Office, which denied that there were any concerns. “Device issues are rare and service users are provided with a 24-hour helpline to report any problems,” a government spokesperson said. They then added: “Capita’s field and monitoring staff receive safeguarding training and are able to signpost tag wearers to support organizations where appropriate.”

Migration campaigners say contracts like the one Home Office has with Capita serve to line the pockets of big private security companies at the taxpayers’ expense while helping the government push out the message that they’re being tough on immigration.

“Under this government, we have seen a steep rise in the asylum backlog,” said Monish Bhatia, a lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, who studies the effects of GPS tagging. “Instead of directing resources to resolving this backlog,” he told me, “they have come up with rather expensive and wasteful gimmicks.” 

The ankle monitor scheme forms part of Britain’s so-called “hostile environment” policy, introduced more than a decade ago by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, who described it as an effort to “create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” It has seen the government pour billions of pounds into deterring and detaining migrants — from building a high-tech network of surveillance along the English channel in an attempt to thwart small boat crossings to the 120 million pound ($147 million) deal to deport migrants to Rwanda. 

The Home Office estimates it will have to spend between 3 and 6 billion pounds (between $3.68 and $7.36 billion) on detaining, accommodating and removing migrants over the next two years. But the option to tag people, while cheaper than keeping them locked up, also costs the government significant amounts of money. The U.K. currently has two contracts with security companies for electronically tagging both migrants and those in the criminal justice system. One with G4S, which provides the tag hardware, worth 22 million pounds ($27.5 million) and another with Capita, which runs electronic tagging services for 114 million pounds ($142 million), fitting and troubleshooting the tags.

The Home Office said the GPS tagging scheme would help streamline the asylum process and that it was “determined to break the business model of the criminal people smugglers and prevent people from making dangerous journeys across the Channel.” 

For his part, Sam eventually got his tag removed — he was granted an exception due to the tag’s effects on his mental health. After the tag was gone, he described how he felt like it was still there for weeks. He still put his clothes and shoes on as if the tag was still strapped to his ankle. 

“It took me a while to realize I was actually free from their eyes,” he said. But his status remains uncertain: He is still facing the threat of deportation.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Monish Bhatia's affiliation. As of April 2023, he is a lecturer at the University of York, not Birkbeck, University of London.

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I came to the U.K. with my family when I was a young kid, fleeing a civil war. I went to preschool, high school and college here. I’m in my thirties now and have a kid of my own. I don’t know anything about the country I was born in — England is all I know. 

I got my permanent residency when I was little. I remember my dad also started applying for our British citizenship when I was younger but never quite got his head around the bureaucracy. 

When I got older, I got into a lifestyle I shouldn’t have and was arrested and given a criminal sentence and jail time. The funny thing is, just before I was arrested, I had finally saved up enough to start the process of applying for citizenship myself but never got around to it in time.

In the U.K., if you’re not a citizen and you commit a crime, the government has the power to deport you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here all your life. So now, I’m fighting the prospect of being kicked out of the only country I’ve ever known. 

When I finished my sentence, they kept me in prison under immigration powers. When I finally got bail, they said I’d have to wear a GPS-powered ankle tag so that I didn’t disappear. I couldn’t believe it. If I had been a British citizen, when I finished my sentence that would be it, I’d be free. But in the eyes of the government, I was a foreigner, and so the Home Office — immigration — wanted to keep an eye on me at all times. 

My appointments with immigration had a strange quality to them. I could tell from the way we communicated that the officers instinctively knew they were talking to a British person. But the system had told them to treat me like an outsider and to follow the procedures for deporting me. They were like this impenetrable wall, and they treated me like I was nothing because I didn’t have a passport. They tried to play dumb, like they had no idea who I was or that I had been here my whole life, even though I’ve always been in the system.

I tried to explain there was no need to tag me and that I would never abscond. After all, I have a child here who I want to stay with. They decided to tag me anyway.

The day came when they arrived in my holding cell to fit the tag. I was shocked by its bulkiness. I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to cover this up under my jeans?’ I love to train and keep fit, but I couldn’t imagine going to the gym with this thing around my ankle. 

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to wear that thing. When I was first released — after many months inside — it felt amazing to be free, to wake up whenever I wanted and not have to wait for someone to come and open my door.

But gradually, I started to realize I wasn’t really free. And people did come to my door. Not prison guards, but people from a private security company. I later learned that company is called Capita.  When things go wrong with the tag, it’s the Capita people who show up at your home.

The visits were unsettling. I had no idea how much power the Capita people had or whether I was even obliged, legally, to let them in. The employees themselves were a bit clueless. Sometimes I would level with them, and they would admit they had no idea why I was being tagged.

It soon became clear that the technology attached to my ankle was pretty glitchy. One time, they came and told me, ‘The system says the tag had been tampered with.’ They checked my ankle and found nothing wrong. It sent my mind whirring. What had I done to jolt the strap? I suddenly felt anxious to leave the house, in case I knocked it while out somewhere. I began to move through the world more carefully. 

Other times, Capita staff came round to tell me my location had stopped registering. The system wasn’t even functioning, and that frustrated me. 

All these issues seemed to make out like I was the one doing something wrong. But I realize now it was nothing to do with me — the problem was with the tag, and the result was that I felt harassed by these constant unannounced visits by these anonymous Capita employees. 

In theory, the Home Office would call to warn you of Capita’s visits, but often they just showed up at random. They never came when they said they would. Once, I got a letter saying I breached my bail conditions after not being home when they came around. But I’d never been told they were coming in the first place. It was so anxiety-inducing: I was afraid if there were too many problems with the tag, it might be used against me in my deportation case. 

The other nightmare was the charging system. According to the people who fit my tag, the device could last 24 hours between charges. It never did. I’d be out and about or at work, and I’d have to calculate how long I could stay there before I needed to go home and charge. The low battery light would flash red, the device would start loudly vibrating, and I’d panic. Sometimes others would hear the vibration and ask me if it was my phone. Being around people and having to charge up your ankle is so embarrassing. There’s a portable charger, but it’s slow. If you want to charge up quicker, you have to sit down next to a plug outlet for two hours and wait. 

I didn’t want my child to know I’d been tagged or that I was having problems with immigration. I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to explain why I was wearing this thing around my ankle or that I was facing deportation. Whenever we were together I made sure to wear extra-loose jeans. 

I couldn’t think beyond the tag. It was always on my mind, a constant burden. It felt like this physical reminder of all my mistakes in life. I couldn’t focus on my future. I just felt stuck on that day when I was arrested. I had done my time, but the message from the Home Office was clear: There was no rehabilitation, at least not for me. I felt like I was sinking into quicksand, being pulled down into the darkness. 

My world contracted, and my mental health went into freefall. I came to realize I wasn’t really free: I was in an outside prison. The government knew where I was 24/7. Were they really concerned I would abscond, or did they simply want to intrude on my life? 

Eventually, my mental health got so bad I was able to get the tag removed, although I’m still facing deportation.

After the tag was taken off, it took me a while to absorb that I wasn’t being tracked anymore. Even a month later, I still put my jeans on as if I had the tag on. I could still kind of feel it there, around my ankle. I still felt like I was being watched. Of course, tag or no tag, the government always has other ways to monitor you. 

I’ve begun to think more deeply about the country I’ve always called home. This country that says it no longer wants me. The country that wants to watch my every move. I’m fighting all of it to stay with my child, but I sometimes wonder if, in the long term, I even want to be a part of this system, if this is how it treats people.

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The post For migrants under 24/7 surveillance, the UK feels like ‘an outside prison’ appeared first on Coda Story.

“I once had an idea in the back of my mind to leave this place and go abroad,” Besmir Billa told me earlier this year as we sipped tea in the town of Kukes, not far from Albania’s Accursed Mountains. “Of course, like everybody else, I’ve thought about it.”

The mountains rose up all around us like a great black wall. Across the valley, we could see a half-constructed, rusty bridge, suspended in mid-air. Above it stood an abandoned, blackened building that served during Albania’s 45-year period of communist rule as a state-run summer camp for workers on holiday. 

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Kukes has lost roughly half of its population. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork. 

Fifteen years ago, people would come to Kukes from all over the region for market day, where they would sell animals and produce. The streets once rang with their voices. Those who’ve lived in Kukes for decades remember it well. Nowadays, it’s much quieter.

Billa, 32, chose not to leave. He found a job in his hometown and stayed with his family. But for a person his age, he’s unusual.

You can feel the emptiness everywhere you go, he told me. “Doctors all go abroad. The restaurants are always looking for bartenders or waiters. If you want a plumber, you can’t find one.” Billa’s car broke down recently. Luckily, he loves fixing things himself — because it’s difficult to find a mechanic.

All the while, there is a parallel reality playing out far from home, one that the people of Kukes see in glimpses on TikTok and Instagram. Their feeds show them a highly curated view of what their lives might look like if they left this place: good jobs, plenty of money, shopping at designer stores and riding around London in fast cars. 

In Kukes, by comparison, times are tough. Salaries are low, prices are rising every week and there are frequent power outages. Many families can barely afford to heat their homes or pay their rent. For young people growing up in the town, it’s difficult to persuade them that there’s a future here.

Three days before I met Billa, a gaggle of teenage boys chased a convoy of flashy cars down the street. A Ferrari, an Audi and a Mercedes had pulled into town, revving their engines and honking triumphantly. The videos were uploaded to TikTok, where they were viewed and reposted tens of thousands of times.

Behind the wheel were TikTok stars Dijonis Biba and Aleks Vishaj, on a victory lap around the remote region. They’re local heroes: They left Albania for the U.K. years ago, became influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, and now they’re back, equipped with cars, money and notoriety.

Vishaj, dubbed the “King of TikTok” by the British tabloids, was reportedly convicted of robbery in the U.K. and deported in 2021. Biba, a rapper, made headlines in the British right-wing press the same year for posting instructions to YouTube on how to enter the U.K. with false documents. Police then found him working in a secret cannabis house in Coventry. He was eventually sentenced to 15 months in prison. 

The pair now travel the world, uploading TikTok videos of their high-end lifestyle: jet skiing in Dubai, hanging out in high-rise hotels, driving their Ferrari with the needle touching 300 kilometers per hour (180 mph) through the tunnel outside Kukes. 

Billa’s nephews, who are seven and 11, were keen to meet him and get a selfie when they came to town, like every other kid in Kukes. 

“Young people are so affected by these models, and they’re addicted to social media. Emigrants come back for a holiday, just for a few days, and it’s really hard for us,” Billa said. 

Billa is worried about his nephews, who are being exposed to luxury lifestyle videos from the U.K., which go against the values that he’s trying to teach them. They haven’t yet said they want to leave the country, but he’s afraid that they might start talking about it one day. “They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,” he said.

Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real. “I’m very concerned about it. There’s this emphasis for kids and teenagers to get rich quickly by emigrating. It’s ruining society. It’s a source of misinformation because it’s not real life. It’s just an illusion, to get likes and attention.”

And he knows that the TikTok videos that his nephews watch every day aren’t representative of what life is really like in the U.K. “They don’t tell the darker story,” he said.

In 2022, the number of people leaving Albania for the U.K. ticked up dramatically, as well as the number of those seeking asylum, at around 16,000, more than triple the previous year. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, one reason for the uptick in claims may be that Albanians who lack proper immigration status are more likely to be identified, leading them to claim asylum in order to delay being deported. But Albanians claiming asylum are also often victims of blood feuds — long-standing disputes between communities, often resulting in cycles of revenge — and viciously exploitative trafficking networks that threaten them and their families if they return to Albania.

By 2022, Albanian criminal gangs in Britain were in control of the country’s illegal marijuana-growing trade, taking over from Vietnamese gangs who had previously dominated the market. The U.K.’s lockdown — with its quiet streets and newly empty businesses and buildings — likely created the perfect conditions for setting up new cannabis farms all over the country. During lockdown, these gangs expanded production and needed an ever-growing labor force to tend the plants — growing them under high-wattage lamps, watering them and treating them with chemicals and fertilizers. So they started recruiting. 

Everyone in Kukes remembers it: The price of passage from Albania to the U.K. on a truck or small boat suddenly dropped when Covid-19 restrictions began to ease. Before the pandemic, smugglers typically charged 18,000 pounds (around $22,800) to take Albanians across the channel. But last year, posts started popping up on TikTok advertising knock-down prices to Britain starting at around 4,000 pounds (around $5,000). 

People in Kukes told me that even if they weren’t interested in being smuggled abroad, TikTok’s algorithm would feed them smuggling content — so while they were watching other unrelated videos, suddenly an anonymous post advertising cheap passage to the U.K. would appear on their “For You” feed.

TikTok became an important recruitment tool. Videos advertising “Black Friday sales” offered special discounts after Boris Johnson’s resignation, telling people to hurry before a new prime minister took office, or when the U.K. Home Office announced its policy to relocate migrants to Rwanda. People remember one post that even encouraged Albanians to come and pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II when she died in September last year. There was a sense of urgency to the posts, motivating people to move to the U.K. while they still could, lest the opportunity slip away. 

The videos didn’t go into detail about what lay just beneath the surface. Criminal gangs offered to pay for people’s passage to Britain, on the condition they worked for them when they arrived. They were then typically forced to work on cannabis farms to pay off the money they owed, according to anti-human trafficking advocacy groups and the families that I met in Kukes. 

“I imagined my first steps in England to be so different,” said David, 33, who first left Albania for Britain in 2014 after years of struggling to find a steady job. He could barely support his son, then a toddler, or his mother, who was having health problems and couldn’t afford her medicine. He successfully made the trip across the channel by stowing away in a truck from northern France. 

He still remembers the frightened face of the Polish driver who discovered him hiding in the wheel well of the truck, having already reached the outskirts of London. David made his way into the city and slept rough for several weeks. “I looked at everyone walking by, sometimes recognizing Albanians in the crowd and asking them to buy me bread. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.” 

He found himself half-hoping the police might catch him and send him home. “I was so desperate. But another part of me said to myself, ‘You went through all of these struggles, and now you’re going to give up?’”

David, who asked us to identify him with a pseudonym to protect his safety, found work in a car wash. He was paid 35 pounds (about $44) a day. “To me, it felt like a lot,” he said. “I concentrated on saving money every moment of the day, with every bite of food I took,” he told me, describing how he would live for three or four days on a tub of yogurt and a package of bread from the grocery chain Lidl, so that he could send money home to his family.

At the car wash, his boss told him to smile at the customers to earn tips. “That’s not something we’re used to in Albania,” he said. “I would give them the keys and try to smile, but it was like this fake, frozen, hard smile.”

Like David, many Albanians begin their lives in the U.K. by working in the shadow economy, often at car washes or construction sites where they’re paid in cash. While there, they can be targeted by criminal gangs with offers of more lucrative work in the drug trade. In recent years, gangs have funneled Albanian workers from the informal labor market into cannabis grow houses. 

David said he was careful to avoid the lure of gangsters. At the French border, someone recognized him as Albanian and approached, offering him a “lucky ticket” to England with free accommodation when he arrived. He knew what price he would have to pay — and ran. “You have to make deals with them and work for them,” he told me, “and then you get sucked into a criminal life forever.”

It’s a structure that traps people in a cycle of crime and debt: Once in the U.K., they have no documents and are at the mercy of their bosses, who threaten to report them to the police or turn them into the immigration authorities if they don’t do as they say. 

Gang leaders manipulate and intimidate their workers, said Anxhela Bruci, Albania coordinator at the anti-trafficking foundation Arise, who I met in Tirana, the Albanian capital. “They use deception, telling people, ‘You don’t have any documents, I’m going to report you to the police, I have evidence you have been working here.’ There’s that fear of going to prison and never seeing your family again.” 

Gangs, Bruci told me, will also make personal threats against the safety of their victims’ families. “They would say, ‘I'm going to kill your family. I'm going to kill your brother. I know where he lives.’ So you’re trapped, you’re not able to escape.”

She described how workers often aren’t allowed to leave the cannabis houses they’re working in, and are given no access to Wi-Fi or internet. Some are paid salaries of 600-800 pounds (about $760-$1,010) a month. Others, she added, are effectively bonded labor, working to pay back the money they owe for their passage to Britain. It’s a stark difference from the lavish lifestyles they were promised.

As for telling their friends and family back home about their situation, it’s all but impossible. “It becomes extremely dangerous to speak up,” said Bruci. Instead, once they do get online, they feel obliged to post a success story. “They want to be seen as brave. We still view the man as the savior of the family,” said Bruci, who is herself Albanian.

Bruci believes that some people posting on TikTok about their positive experience going to the U.K. could be “soldiers” for traffickers. “Some of them are also victims of modern slavery themselves and then they have to recruit people in order to get out of their own trafficking situation.”

As I was reporting this story, summer was just around the bend and open season for recruitment had begun. A quick search in Albanian on TikTok brought up a mass of new videos advertising crossings to the U.K. If you typed in "Angli" — Albanian for “England” — on TikTok the top three videos to appear all involved people making their way into the UK. One was a post advertising cheap crossings, and the other two were Albanians recording videos of their journeys across the channel. After we flagged this to TikTok, those particular posts were removed. New posts, however, still pop up every day.

With the British government laser-focused on small boat crossings, and drones buzzing over the beaches of northern France, traveling by truck was being promoted at a reduced price of 3,000 pounds (about $3,800). And a new luxury option was also on offer — speedboat crossings from Belgium to Britain that cost around 10,000 pounds (about $12,650) per person.

Kevin Morgan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety for Africa, Europe and the Middle East, said the company has a “zero tolerance approach to human smuggling and trafficking,” and permanently bans offending accounts. TikTok told me it had Albanian-speaking moderators working for the platform, but would not specify how many. 

In March, TikTok announced a new policy as part of this zero-tolerance approach. The company said it would automatically redirect users who searched for particular keywords and phrases to anti-trafficking sites. In June, the U.K.’s Border Force told the Times that they believed TikTok’s controls had helped lower the numbers of small boat crossings into Britain. Some videos used typos on purpose to get around TikTok’s controls. As recently as mid-August, a search on TikTok brought up a video with a menu of options to enter Britain — via truck, plane or dinghy.

In Kukes, residents follow British immigration policy with the same zeal as they do TikTok videos from Britain. They trade stories and anecdotes about their friends, brothers and husbands. Though their TikTok feeds rarely show the reality of life in London, some young people in Kukes know all is not as it seems.

“The conditions are very miserable, they don’t eat very well, they don’t wash their clothes, they don’t have much time to live their lives,” said Evis Zeneli, 26, as we scrolled through TikTok videos posted by her friends in the U.K., showing a constant stream of designer shopping trips to Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

It’s the same for a 19-year-old woman I met whose former classmate left last year. Going by his social media posts, life looks great — all fast cars and piles of British banknotes. But during private conversations, they talk about how difficult his life really is. The videos don’t show it, she told me, but he is working in a cannabis grow house. 

“He’s not feeling very happy. Because he doesn’t have papers, he’s obliged to work in this illegal way. But he says life is still better over there than it is here,” she said.

 “It’s like the boys have gone extinct,” she added. At her local park, which used to be a hangout spot for teenagers, she only sees old people now.

“There’s this huge silence,” agreed Albiona Thaçi, 33, whose husband traveled to the U.K. nine months ago in a small boat. When he left, she brought her two daughters to the seaside to try to take their mind off of the terrifying journey that their father had undertaken. Traveling across the English Channel in a fragile dinghy, he dropped his phone in the water, and they didn’t hear from him for days. “Everything went black,” Thaçi said. Eventually, her husband called from the U.K., having arrived safely. But she still doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. 

In her 12-apartment building, all the men have left. “Now we have this very communal feeling. Before, we used to knock on each others’ doors. Now, we just walk in and out.” But Thaçi’s friends have noticed that when they get together for coffee in the mornings, she’s often checked out of their conversation. “My heart, my mind, is in England,” she said. She plans to join her husband if he can get papers for her and their daughters. 

The absence of men hangs over everything. In the village of Shishtavec, in the mountains above Kukes, five women crowded around the television one afternoon when I visited. It was spring, but it still felt like winter. They were streaming a YouTube video of dozens of men from their village, all doing a traditional dance at a wedding — in London. 

“They’re doing the dance of men,” said Adelie Molla, 22. She had just come in from the cold, having collected water from the well up by the town mosque. The women told me that the weather had been mild this year. “The winter has gone to England,” laughed Molla’s mother Yaldeze, 53, whose son left for the U.K. seven months ago. Many people in their village have Bulgarian heritage, meaning they can apply for European passports and travel to Britain by plane, without needing to resort to small boats.

The whole family plans to eventually migrate to Britain and reunite. “For better or worse I have to follow my children,” said Yaldeze, who has lived in the village her whole life. She doesn’t speak a word of English. “I’m going to be like a bird in a cage.” 

Around the town, some buildings are falling into disrepair while others are half-finished, the empty window-frames covered in plastic sheeting. A few houses look brand new, but the windows are dark. Adelie explained that once people go to the U.K., they use the money they make there to build houses in their villages. The houses lie empty, except when the emigrants come to visit. And when they come back to visit their hometown, they drive so that they can show off cars with U.K. license plates — proof they’ve made it. 

 “This village is emptying out,” Molla said, describing the profound boredom that had overtaken her life. “Maybe after five years, no one will be here at all anymore. They’ll all be in London.”

The oldest settlements of Kukes date back to the fourth century. In the 1960s, when Albania’s communist government decided to build a hydropower dam, the residents of Kukes all had to leave their homes and relocate further up the mountain to build a new city, while the ancient city was flooded beneath an enormous reservoir. And in the early 1970s, under Enver Hoxha’s paranoid communist regime, an urban planner was tasked with building an underground version of Kukes, where 10,000 people could live in bunkers for six months in the event of an invasion. A vast network of tunnels still lies beneath the city today. 

“Really, there are three Kukeses,” one local man told me: the Kukes where we were walking around, the subterranean Kukes beneath our feet, and the Kukes underwater. But even the Kukes of today is a shadow of its former self, a town buried in the memories of the few residents who remain.

David was deported from Britain in 2019 after police stopped him at a London train station. He tried to return to the U.K. in December 2022 by hiding in a truck but couldn’t get past the high-tech, high-security border in northern France. He is now back in Kukes, struggling to find work. 

He wanted me to know he was a patriotic person who, given the chance to have a good life, would live in Albania forever. But, he added, “You don’t understand how much I miss England. I talk in English, I sing in English, I cook English food, and I don’t want my soul to depart this earth without going one more time to England.”

He still watches social media reels of Albanians living in the U.K. “Some people get lucky and get rich. But when you see it on TikTok or Instagram, it might not even be real.” 

Besmir Billa, whose nephews worry him with their TikTok aspirations, has set himself a challenge. He showed me his own TikTok account, which he started last summer.

The grid is full of videos showcasing the beauty of Kukes: clips of his friends walking through velvety green mountains, picking flowers and petting wild horses. “I’m testing myself to see if TikTok can be used for a good thing,” he told me. 

“The idea I had is to express something valuable, not something silly. I think this is something people actually need,” he said. During the spring festival, a national holiday in Albania when the whole country pours onto the streets to celebrate the end of winter, he posted a video showing young people in the town giving flowers to older residents. 

At first, his nephews were “not impressed” by their uncle’s page. But then, the older boy clocked the total number of views on the spring festival video: 40,000 and counting. 

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In recent years, scientists desperate to stop global warming have looked back at this natural event and wondered: Could people recreate similar effects to help reverse rapidly rising global temperatures? 

Enter stratospheric aerosol injection, the process of releasing tiny reflective particles of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that reflect sunlight back into space in order to cool off the planet. The concept mimics the natural activity of volcanoes like Mount Pinatubo. But it is driven by humans.

Proponents of stratospheric aerosol injection, including start-ups and researchers investigating and experimenting with the process, call it “sunscreen for the earth” and argue that we can create a layer of protection to shield us from the hot rays of the sun. It is one of a growing variety of Earth-cooling techniques that fall under the conceptual umbrella of “solar geoengineering.” Other proposed solar geoengineering techniques range from creating light-reflecting clouds to deploying giant mirrors in space. In 2020, Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana, unveiled a “whiter than white” specialized paint, designed for rooftops and roads, that can bounce 95% of the sun’s rays back into deep space, cooling the buildings beneath it.

But a growing group of scientists and academics are afraid that solar geoengineering is an all-too-welcome distraction from our obligations to reduce carbon emissions and a flawed scientific concept to boot. They say processes like these could throw Earth into deeper chaos by cooling the world unevenly and wreaking havoc on our climate systems. Plus, solar geoengineering could lock us into long-term reliance on such techniques, creating new dependencies and potential consequences.

“There’s a sense of really deep desperation and urgency among scientists who are reading climate science and see how dire the situation is,” said Lili Fuhr, the director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate & Energy Program. She explained that despair can lead scientists to scramble around for an idea — any idea — that might stop global heating quickly.

“I don't think that desperation turns a bad idea into a good idea. The only good idea is that we need to get out of fossil fuels. Anything else doesn’t help us,” said Fuhr.

Despite the concerns that scientists like Fuhr share, solar geoengineering has some uniquely powerful advocates. Bill Gates has backed a Harvard University proposal to shoot light-reflecting aerosols into the sky above the Arctic Circle in Sweden, a project that was scrapped after local indigenous Saami people raised objections. In February, billionaire philanthropist George Soros gave a nod to the idea of creating more clouds above the ice caps to cool the poles by blocking sunlight. “Human interference has destroyed a previously stable system and human ingenuity, both local and international, will be needed to restore it,” he said in a speech at the 2023 Munich Security conference. And Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has provided $900,000 in funding for 15 solar geoengineering modeling projects.

These projects have the look of a quick, relatively cheap, technology-led solution to global heating that doesn’t involve restructuring society around sustainability and renewable energy. It would mean that society could, in theory, have its cake and eat it too: We could keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere while protecting the Earth from greenhouse gas effects.

But processes like this could require humans to continue shooting chemicals into the stratosphere for centuries. Fuhr explained that this could put us on a dangerous trajectory: We wouldn’t be able to stop or even slow down the deployment of these chemicals without facing a rapid, sudden — and potentially catastrophic — heating event. “There would be a shock effect that humans and ecosystems wouldn’t be able to adapt to,” she said. Scientists like Fuhr estimate that an event like this would cause the Earth to heat up so rapidly that we’d risk destroying life on the only planet we can safely live on.

If we want to avoid this, Fuhr said, we’d need “centuries of an international collaborative political regime, doing this in a benign way, for the benefit of all.” 

“I can’t think that anyone actually believes that is possible. We have regime changes all the time — look at the country I’m in right now,” she told me, speaking from Washington, D.C. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. government has shown increased interest in such initiatives. In June, the White House announced a federal plan to research the concept of solar geoengineering more deeply, with the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy leading an effort to set risk management standards and transparency guidelines for any publicly-funded solar geoengineering research in the U.S. The move could be the first step toward greater federal engagement with solar geoengineering research efforts.

The European Union has been more cautious: It has warned against using large-scale disruptive geoengineering technology without a proper assessment of the risks. In June, the bloc called for global talks on the subject and said that the risks of interfering with the climate were “unacceptable.” 

“Nobody should be conducting experiments alone with our shared planet,” said European Union climate policy chief, Frans Timmermans, at a news conference. But the EU is also looking at setting rules and boundaries for outdoor geoengineering experiments, an indication that at least some officials are warming to the idea.

In 2021, a collective of scientists and industry professionals signed a “solar geoengineering non-use agreement,” demanding no public funding, no outdoor experiments, no patents, and no support in international institutions for the practice. In other words, they called for a complete shutdown of any experimentation or exploration of solar geoengineering. The scientists and academics said the idea was simply too dangerous and that it would be impossible to test the effects of solar geoengineering on the Earth’s climate without actually releasing the chemicals on a global scale.

“You're literally talking about intervening with the atmosphere, which protects the only semblance of life that we know in an otherwise desolate universe. Like, I don't even know what to say to these people. It's extraordinary,” said Noah Herfort, the co-director of Climate Vanguard, a youth think tank that has been warning about the risks of geoengineering since 2022.

At some point, artificially spewing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to see its effects on the Earth stops being a test. We cannot fully predict the outcome without actually doing it, Fuhr explained. “And we just happen to have one planet,” she said.

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The havoc we have wreaked on our environment is why the Anthropocene epoch may be our last. Humanity has been talking about the apocalypse for thousands of years. But in 2023, as we grapple with the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the imminent threat of climate disaster and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, there is a greater urgency to the questions some are asking about what the world would really look like without us. Would it be better to leave the Earth to the animals, to the trees, even to the rocks? And would the world be a safer and more benevolent place if we let AI robots run everything? 

In “The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us,” the American poet and critic Adam Kirsch interrogates the prospect of a world that is no longer dominated by humans — either because we have driven ourselves to extinction or because we have been replaced by artificial intelligence. Sitting in a sweltering Rome on the hottest day ever recorded in the ancient capital, I spoke to Adam Kirsch on the phone in New York City, where the air quality index hovered near hazardous because of the wildfire smoke drifting over from Canada. It was difficult not to talk about the “end times.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you first start thinking about a future without humans?

I began to want to write the book during the pandemic when, very quickly, I felt like my physical world contracted to the space of an apartment. It struck me how little of a difference that made to my life. So much of what I do and what most of us do can be done virtually rather than physically — whether it's work, leisure or consumption. I began to think about the idea that human life has already changed. It has already gone virtual and disengaged from the physical in ways that our ancestors would not have understood. And the transhumanists’ idea is just another step on that path. 

Let’s clarify for our readers what “transhumanists” think. They basically imagine a world where the human condition can be improved or even replaced by technology like AI, right? 

Transhumanism is the school of thought which says that in the future, we will be able to use technology to overcome the limitations of our physical bodies. Transhumanists look to a future where humans will give way to another species or another form of life that isn't embodied in flesh and blood. It isn't necessarily mortal, and it might be able to live indefinitely, as a record of information, or as a simulation, or in the virtual world. 

Or, alternatively, transhumanism says that we will just be able to escape the limitations of our bodies with genetic engineering. One of the most vivid strains of transhumanism right now is the idea that in a future with artificial intelligence, there might be minds that are not human minds at all. Minds that are actually born on computers and that have a very different relationship to reality and the physical world than we do. And that those minds will become the leading form of life on our planet and take over from us in a violent or benevolent way. 

Another group you look at in your book also considers what the world would look like if humans no longer dominated it. They are called “anthropocene antihumanists” and seem to believe that humans are a kind of cancer on the earth, multiplying like a parasite. And that the world would be better off without us.

Antihumanists say that humans have taken over from nature as the most important factor on the planet. They say we no longer live alongside nature, but we control nature and dominate it. This, they believe, is eventually going to lead to the decline or disappearance of humanity itself. And they think that would be a good thing. So antihumanism can be anything from saying we should stop having children to predicting that an environmental calamity is going to reduce us to just a few leftover populations. Philosophically, it can take the form of saying, ‘How can we think about the world in ways that don’t put humanity at the center of it?’ They give equal respect and agency to nonhuman things and even nonliving things, like objects or the ocean. 

Or a rock. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what a world without humans looks like. Especially as I grapple with the realities of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. I sometimes find myself fantasizing about what the natural world looked like before human civilization. Reading your book was an intense experience in that way, because it forces you to think about the Earth without humanity. What kind of place did it take you to psychologically, while you were writing? 

It's very difficult to imagine the disappearance of humanity as a real prospect — in the same way that it's sort of hard to imagine what it's like to be dead. We could all theoretically agree that at some point there will no longer be a human species, that we will have become extinct. And that just as the dinosaurs did, someday we will disappear. But to think about that happening tomorrow or next year plays havoc with all of our assumptions about what matters and how we go about our days. Thinking about these things is on a different track from daily life. In daily life, we're dealing with the world as it is — raising children and going to work. We’re not thinking about the future in an abstract or philosophical way.

Yes, it’s a kind of bizarre cognitive dissonance to think about a world millions of years from now when humans don’t exist and then go back to thinking about what to have for lunch. 

When the book was published in January, almost right away, all of the things that I was writing about started to become much more mainstream. First, there was ChatGPT, which led to  people talking about artificial intelligence in a very immediate way and talking about how dangerous it might be. And then came this summer that we’re having with all these broken temperature records and parts of the world becoming dangerously hot and endangering human life. Even to me — someone who's been thinking about this and researching and writing about it for a long time — when it erupts into your actual life, it seems like kind of a shock. We have a tendency to think about dire things or radical changes in the abstract and not deal with the concrete until we absolutely have to. 

I think we rely so much on shards of hope that seem to get slimmer and slimmer every year. You talk about hope a lot in the book. How hopeful would you say you are? 

I think that all of us rely on hope. We rely on the assumption that the future is going to be like the present because that’s the only way we know how to navigate the world. But one of the things that drew me to the people I write about in the book is that they're not afraid to think about things that seem frightening or impossible, that most people dismiss as science fiction or extremism. They’re thinking through the idea of, ‘What if the world actually was like this in the future? What if we actually did have computers that could outthink us or what if billions of people could no longer survive because of climate change? What would that do to our sense of ourselves and the way we live?’ And I think that that’s useful to think about. Both for its own sake and because it maybe also makes us more willing to take action in the present. 

There was one Franz Kafka quote in your book that really stood out to me. “There is hope — an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.” What does that mean to you?

What transhumanists and antihumanists are trying to say is, ‘Well, maybe in the future, there won't be us, but there will be something else that we can be hopeful for.’ They say that the disappearance of humanity might not mean the end of everything that we care about. They’re trying to nudge us into a new way of thinking that if we're not here, it might not matter that much — as long as something else is. Both of them think of humanity as a stage. That the normal progression of the human species is to supersede ourselves or eliminate ourselves, not by accident, but by necessity. 

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The group has built a deep learning AI model that they say, in their peer-reviewed paper, can detect the sexual orientation of cisgender men. The researchers report that by studying subjects’ electrical brain activity, the model is able to differentiate between homosexual and heterosexual men with an accuracy rate of 83%. 

“This study shows that electrophysiological trait markers of male sexual orientation can be identified using deep learning,” the researchers write, adding that their findings had “the potential to open new avenues for research in the field.”

The authors contend that it “still is of high scientific interest whether there exist biological patterns that differ between persons with different sexual orientations” and that it is “paramount to also search for possible functional differences” between heterosexual and homosexual people. 

Is that so? When the study was posted on Twitter, it drew a strong reaction from researchers and scientists studying AI. Experts on technology and LGBTQ+ rights fundamentally disagreed with the prospect of measuring sexual orientation by studying brain patterns. 

“There is no such thing as brain correlates of homosexuality. This is unscientific,” tweeted Abeba Birhane, a senior fellow in trustworthy AI at Mozilla. “Let people identify their own sexuality.”

“Hard to think of a grosser or more irresponsible application of AI than binary-based ‘who’s the gay?’ machines,” tweeted Rae Walker, who directs the PhD in nursing program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and specializes in the use of tech and AI in medicine.

Sasha Costanza-Chock, a tech design theorist and the associate professor at Northeastern University, criticized the fact that in order for the model to work, it had to leave bisexual participants out of the experiment. 

“They excluded the bisexuals because they would break their reductive little binary classification model,” Costanza-Chock tweeted. 

Sebastian Olbrich, Chief of the Centre for Depression, Anxiety Disorders and Psychotherapy of the University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich and one of the study’s authors, explained in an email that “scientific research often necessitates limiting complexity in order to establish baselines. We do not claim to have represented all aspects of sexual orientation.” Olrich said any future study should extend the scope of participants. 

“Bisexual and asexual individuals exist but are ‘simplified away’ by the Swiss study in order to make their experimental setup workable,” said Qinlan Shen, a research scientist at software company Oracle Labs’ machine learning research group who was among those criticizing the study. “Who or what is this technology being developed for?” they asked. 

Shen explained that technology claiming to “measure” sexual orientation is often met with suspicion and pushback from people in the LGBTQ+ community who work on machine learning. This type of technology, they said, “can and will be used as a tool of surveillance and repression in places of the world where LGBT+ expression is punished.” 

Shen also disagrees with the idea of trying to find a fully biological basis for sexuality. “I think in general, the prevailing view of sexuality is that it’s an expression of a variety of biological, environmental and social factors, and it’s deeply uncomfortable and unscientific to point to one thing as a cause or indicator,” they said.

This isn’t the first time a machine learning paper has been criticized for trying to detect signs of homosexuality. In 2018, researchers at Stanford tried to use AI to classify people as gay or straight, based on photos taken from a dating website. The researchers claimed their algorithm was able to detect sexual orientation with up to 91% accuracy — a much higher rate than humans were able to achieve. The findings led to an outcry and widespread fears of how the tool could be used to target or discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. Michal Kosinski, the lead author of the Stanford study, later told Quartz that part of the objective was to show how easy it was for even the “lamest” facial recognition algorithm to be trained into also recognizing sexual orientation and potentially used to violate people’s privacy. 

Mathias Wasik, the director of programs at All Out, has been campaigning for years against gender and sexuality recognition technology. All Out’s campaigners say that this kind of technology is built on the mistaken idea that gender or sexual orientation can be identified by a machine. The fear is that it can easily fuel discrimination. 

“AI is fundamentally flawed when it comes to recognizing and categorizing human beings in all their diversity. We see time and again how deep learning applications reinforce outdated stereotypes about gender and sexual orientation because they're basically a reflection of the real world with all its bias,” Wasik told me. "Where it gets dangerous is when these systems are used by governments or corporations to put people into boxes and subject them to discrimination or persecution.”

The Swiss study was published in June, less than a month after Uganda’s president signed a new, repressive anti-LGBTQ+ law — one of the harshest in the world — that includes the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” In Poland, activists are busy challenging the country’s “LGBTQ-free zones” — regions that have declared themselves hostile to LGBTQ+ rights. And the U.S. Supreme Court just issued a ruling that effectively legalizes certain kinds of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Identity-based threats against LGBTQ+ people around the world are clear and present. What’s less clear is whether AI should have any role in mitigating them.

The study’s researchers say that their work could help combat political movements advocating for conversion therapy by showing that sexual orientation is a biological marker.

“Our research is absolutely not intended for use in prosecution or repression — nor would it seem to be a practicable method for such abuse,” said Olbrich. “There is no proof that this method could work in an involuntary setting. It is a sad reality that many technologies can be misused; the ethical responsibility is to prevent misuse, not halt the progress of scientific study.”

He added that the study’s objective was to identify the neurological correlates — not causes — of sexual orientation, in the hope of gaining a more nuanced understanding of human diversity. 

"Our work should be seen as a contribution to the larger quest to comprehend the remarkable workings of our neurons, reflecting our behaviors and consciousness. We didn't set out to judge sexual orientation, but rather to appreciate its diversity. We regret if people felt uncomfortable with the findings,” he said. 

“However true these good intentions might be,” said Shen, “I don’t think it erases the inherent potential harms of sexual orientation identification technologies.”

On Twitter, Rae Walker, the UMass nursing professor, was more blunt. 

“Burn it to the ground,” they said.

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