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

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

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

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou | Post Production by Sarah Myles

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

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

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

More like this: Paris Post-Mortem (live)

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou 

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

More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou 

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

More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

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

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

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

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

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou