1984 Today!

“This is something that you don’t fully comprehend until you face it.”

The small, historically important and culturally rich country of Georgia, nestled in the Caucasus between Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, has seen nonstop street protests for months, taking over the centre of the capital city, surrounding the nation’s parliament, and challenging the ruling party. Police violence and “shocking human rights violations” against the protestors, including the use of torture and shock troops, have only served to enflame public sentiment and increase support for the resistance.

The two most recent actions by the government that inspired such ongoing resistance were a cancellation delay of Georgia’s EU membership bid and the enactment of a ‘foreign agent’ law that classified as spies any organisation (even animal shelters) receiving more than 20% of their funds from overseas. More changes in law and policy have followed, including draconian limits on the rights to assemble and speak freely.

The issues run deeper still. As a former Soviet republic, Georgia has also struggled to define itself as separate from and outside the sphere of influence of Russia. Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia might well have been the first European war of the 21st century, and the muted response from the international community was a modern revival of “appeasement”. Russia’s willingness in that conflict to use violence to carve up another country’s territory also proved to be a grim harbinger of the current war in Ukraine.

Marika Mikiashvili is a lecturer at Alte University in Tbilisi and a member of the Droa Party, which belongs to the Coalition for Change, standing in opposition to the incumbent party, Georgian Dream. She provides a wealth of background and historical perspective to contextualise the independent and pro-European aspirations of the Georgian people, as well as sharing her own personal experience of living through a constitutional democracy’s sudden shift towards authoritarianism.

You can find Marika on X where her handle is @Mikiashvili_M.

Background image by George Khelashvili.

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The existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States was highly classified for over twenty years until the Senate’s Church Committee investigation in 1975. Prior to that, the long-running joke was that the initials NSA stood for ‘No Such Agency’.

Since 1975, the NSA has been at the centre of major scandals alleging violations of the Fourth Amendment and breaches of its ‘outward-facing’ role which is meant to limit its surveillance to non-US citizens and foreign countries.

The Bush administration’s ‘warrantless wiretapping’ programme was believed to be the most egregious example of intrusion until “the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history” in 2013, when Edward Snowden released documents and information to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald in a Hong Kong hotel room, bringing the sheer scope and depth of the NSA’s spying into the public domain.

Jeremy Duffy worked at the NSA for sixteen years, where he taught Operations Security and was an adjunct faculty member at the National Cryptologic School. He witnessed first-hand the behaviour of the agency when the scandals broke, and often protested against what he saw as the mistreatment of employees and rampant institutional dishonesty. Since leaving the NSA, Jeremy works as a consultant on workplace communication and organisational improvement.

He is the author of Are You Listening? Lessons in Waste, Abuse, and Mismanagement from the Agency That Doesn’t Listen, and blogs at thegeekprofessor.com, where you can join his mailing list to receive a free 44-page mini-book about his time at the NSA.

In our conversation, Jeremy describes the hostile environment at the NSA, discusses his experiences of the atmosphere during the scandals, and shares very handy information on what he calls LifeSec, which is the use of Operations Security measures in daily life, to keep your data safe.

Speaking with him was eye-opening, worrying, and fascinating. I hope you feel the same.

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AI has come for the world’s oldest profession!

Cybrothel in Berlin offers customers a range of human-free sexual experiences involving sex dolls, AI, and virtual reality.

“The world’s first AI brothel” is the brainchild of Austrian filmmaker Philipp Fussenegger, whose most recent film Teaches of Peaches premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Teddy Award for Best LGBTQ Documentary.

Philipp agreed to take a break from his skiing holiday to speak to me about how he got the idea, what it’s like catering to his clientele, and how far he thinks technology can go in augmenting or even replacing human-to-human sex and intimacy.

Our conversation takes in the queasy implications of realistic sex dolls, the narrow parameters of “beauty”, the complexity of human sexuality, and the challenges of broadening horizons while maintaining safe and healthy boundaries.

Also, Philipp is offering you the opportunity to name Cybrothel’s new male sex doll! Make sure you leave your suggestions in the comments on Substack, or send them to us via our website. Make sure you enter quick, because competition will be stiff!

Enjoy!

You can find Philipp’s film work on his website, and stream Teaches of Peaches on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video.

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Richard Sanderson was a director of the London Musicians Collective for ten years, helped set up the UK radio station Resonance FM, and founded the experimental music label Linear Obsessional through which he released over 150 albums as downloads, CDs, cassettes and vinyl, until its demise in 2022.

The label’s demise was precipitated by strong, negative, and abusive reactions Richard received to four of his social media posts sharing commentary on trans issues. The backlash drove him out of the experimental music scene to the point that he felt compelled to shut down his label.

In November 2024 he wrote an article about his experience, which is how I found out about his story.

Richard and I sat down together to discuss some of the experimental music he put out, how it felt to be subjected to abuse online, what being ‘on the left’ means these days, and more.

It was a great chat, and Richard even brought along his melodeon to play us out with an exclusive in-studio rendition of There Was An Old Woman Tossed Up In A Blanket, a lovely English folk tune.

I hope you enjoy it.

You can find Richard on Substack and X, and visit the remains of Linear Obsessional on Bandcamp.

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I’m suspicious of social media, and the effect a smartphone has on my attention in general.

Books like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, about how devices and social media are negatively affecting teenagers and children, make an argument that I’m primed to hear favourably.

When researchers and politicians talk about limiting the use of phones in schools, I find myself listening sympathetically.

The Australian government passed a new law in late November 2024 banning under-16s from social media, because of concerns over the effect platforms like TikTok and Instagram are having on young people.

Meta is being sued in more than 30 states for “fueling mental health problems among teens by making its Facebook and Instagram platforms addictive,” according to Reuters.

So I was surprised and interested to find two meta-analyses by Dr Christopher Ferguson, both published by the American Psychological Association this year, in which he claimed that “the current research literature is unable to provide strong evidence for a clinically relevant link between time spent on social media and mental health issues in youth.”

In fact, Chris found that “meta-analytic evidence for causal effects was statistically no different than zero.”

Chris says that researchers, authors, politicians, and activists have it all wrong. To him, the concerns over social media are part of a long history of moral panics obsessed with the corruption of youth, a thread of unfounded outrage that stretches from violent video games all the way back to Socrates.

Our conversation was a lot of fun. Chris walked me through his research and methods, with a special emphasis on how studies in the field could be better and more useful.

In the end, whichever side of the debate they land on, the people involved want to help young people and prevent unnecessary suffering, which, as a layman, makes me think they’re all ultimately on the same team.

You can read Chris’s Substack here and buy his novel here. He is also the author of the non-fiction books Catastrophe!: How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse, How Madness Shaped History: An Eccentric Array of Maniacal Rulers, Raving Narcissists, and Psychotic Visionaries, and Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.

Enjoy!

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Falak Enayat worked for the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Afghanistan until Kabul was seized by the Taliban in 2021.

Overnight, Falak became a hunted fugitive on a ‘red list’ of wanted persons, struggling to keep himself and his wife safe in a city suddenly dotted with military checkpoints, where even going outside in jeans was a suspicious act because of the insistence of the Taliban on traditional Afghan clothing.

In our conversation, he shares his personal account of how he and his wife stayed alive, made it out of their country as it fell (for a second time) into the hands of theocratic militants, and eventually found sanctuary in Canada and then the United States.

Falak’s story, and the good humour, resilience, and positivity that comes through in his telling of it, is an incredible and inspiring example of how we can choose to face the worst and rise above it.

His experience also highlights the often-overlooked fact that when a refugee reaches a safe country, their journey is far from over.

It’s a privilege to bring you his story. I hope you find it as touching and uplifting as I did.

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Nikhil Suresh made me laugh, think, and reconsider my thoughts on technology.

When I read his essay I Will F***ing Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, in which he announced that “the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne,” I knew I had found a deep thinker with a sharp wit and a way with words.

Nikhil is the founder of Hermit Tech, a consultancy that sets up world class data infrastructure, and he is also highly skeptical of the marketing bumf and hot air being blasted out of the collective orifices of the technology industry.

We had a fun and fascinating conversation about the rampant fraud and dishonesty in tech and AI in particular, the delusions and FOMO plaguing companies rushing into implementing useless technology, the ways that human vices and shortcomings are coded into the machines we create to help us, and the possibility of a better way forward.

It was enlightening and heartening to speak with someone who feels deeply the need to humanise the machine, rather than further mechanise the human.

I hope you enjoy our discussion.

You can read Nikhil’s writing at ludic.blog and find out more about Hermit Tech on their website.

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“It’s time to embrace the future. It’s time to get drunk on intelligence.”

Victor Miller ran for mayor of Cheyenne, the capital city of the state of Wyoming, on a platform of putting AI in charge of the city. He says ChatGPT is a “superior intelligence” to humans, and he believes that the advent of AI-led government could enable “a Cambrian explosion of political activity” that would give citizens more rather than less of a say in how they are governed.

Fortune reported on his attempt to change the political game:

If elected mayor, Victor Miller, 42, told voters he would govern Cheyenne, Wyoming, a town of just shy of 65,000 residents, via an AI chatbot modeled on OpenAI’s GPT-4. He named the chatbot, which he built himself, VIC, standing for Virtual Integrated Citizen; Miller himself pledged to serve as a “meat avatar” carrying out VIC’s duties. 

As part of his campaign, Victor wore a speaker around his neck that played VIC’s answers to questions from the public and the media.

He placed fourth in the election, with 3% of the vote, but took the result as a sign that the public is ready to try something new. Victor is now raising money for his Rational Governance Alliance, through which he intends to “introduc[e] Rationally Bound Delegates (RBDs) - public servants who use AI for all decision-making,” and “develop AI systems, train RBDs, and place them on ballots across the nation by 2026.”

Is this the beginning of a new, strange chapter in the story of American democracy, or a flight of fancy uncoupled from the practical realities and limitations of governance and technology?

In our conversation, Victor shares his discontent with the status quo of American politics, his hopes for the future, and his fears for a system and a nation that (in his opinion) is mired in corruption, malaise, and incompetence.

I hope you enjoy it.

You can find VIC on X as @AIForMayor.

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On Tuesday 5 November, the United States will end the ‘begging for votes’ phase of the election cycle and enter the ‘haggling over results’ phase.

The question of who the next President of the United States of America should be is a hot one worldwide, and not just for the citizens who get to cast a vote.

For a fresh perspective, I decided to head out and stick a microphone-shaped thermometer into London’s opinion-hole.

I was armed with two questions:

* Do you have an opinion about the upcoming US presidential election?

* If I tell you that I make a podcast about dystopian trends in society, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

I spoke with British, Australian, Mexican, and American people. The variety and depth of their views was fascinating.

I hope you enjoy this Election Special.

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William Henry Gates III, better known as Bill Gates, has been a major figure in technology, business, and politics for forty years. In that time he created what is arguably the world’s best-known computer operating system, ran one of the leading tech companies in the United States, gained a reputation for predatory monopolistic practices during Microsoft’s anti-trust case in the 1990s, and then was reborn (or reinvented) as the face of philanthropy, the fabulously wealthy nerd-done-good who decided to dedicate his life to giving away his money by supporting global initiatives in healthcare, education, and poverty reduction.

Tim Schwab, an investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C., disagrees with the carefully cultivated image of Bill Gates as a saintly technocratic thought leader selflessly divesting himself of his billions for the good of humankind.

In his book, The Bill Gates Problem, Tim argues that Bill Gates, through the Gates Foundation, has continued the same predatory monopolistic practices that made him infamous at Microsoft. Far from being, as Andrew Ross Sorkin called him, “the most consequential individual of our generation,” Tim proposes that Bill Gates is at the wellhead of a toxic blend of dark money, intellectual property capture, and political influence-gathering that causes real-world harm to the very people it claims to serve, undermines democracy, and provides the perfect case study of a billionaire exercising undue, unquestioned, and largely unacknowledged control over public affairs.

In our conversation, Tim shares insights he gathered while researching and conducting interviews for his book. He describes some of the ways that the Gates Foundation has affected news-gathering and the media, chilled academic inquiry, and stifled rather than driven innovation. He considers Gates to be a narcissistic power-broker who, through his own hubris, has mostly failed to provide the solutions at the core of his stated mission while ironically succeeding in becoming far wealthier than ever before, all while claiming the mantle of charity and the tax benefits that go with it.

For your reference, in our discussion we compare the 1998 video of Bill Gates’s deposition in the Microsoft anti-trust case to a 2014 interview of him by the Washington Post about his role in the Common Core educational reforms in the United States. Filmed sixteen years apart, they provide a way to compare the attitude, tone, and mannerisms of the corporate ‘cut-throat’ Bill Gates of Microsoft to the ‘civic-minded’ Bill Gates of the Giving Pledge years.

The Bill Gates Problem, published by Penguin, is available wherever books are sold.

You can find Tim Schwab at timschwab.substack.com or on X as @TimothyWSchwab.

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