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

More like this: Big Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx

This is part one of Nodestar, a three-part series on decentralisation: how the internet started as a wild west of decentralised exploration, got centralised into the hands of a small number of companies, and how the pendulum has begun it’s swing in the other direction.

In this episode Mike Masnick gives us a history of the early internet — starting with what was called the Eternal September, when millions of AOL users flooded the scene, creating a messy, unpredictable, exciting ecosystem of open protocols and terrible UIs.

Further reading & resources:

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

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

More like this: Net0++: Data Centre Sprawl

Local government rejected the data center. But Starmer’s administration overruled them. They want to force the development of a water-guzzling, energy draining data center on a local community who has said no. And all of this is on the green belt. The lawsuit filed this week might put a stop to those plans.

Alix sat down Ollie Hayes from Global Action Plan and Martha Dark from Foxglove to discuss the legal challenge filed this week. Why now? Aren’t the UK aiming for Net 0? And how does this relate to the UK government’s wider approach to AI?

Further reading & resources:

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

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

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

More like this: Big Dirty Data Centres with Boxi Wu and Jenna Ruddock

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

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

Further reading & resources:

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

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

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

Cori Crider is a fearless litigator turned market-shaping advocate. She started litigating during many years at leading human rights organisation Reprieve, and then moved on to co-founding Foxglove so she could sue big tech. Now she’s set her sights on market concentration.

Cori’s analysis concludes with a hopeful message: we are not stuck in place with eight dudes running the show. In fact, we’ve been here before. The computer age never would have happened the way it did if thousands of patents weren’t liberated from Bell Labs in 1956. How can we use similar tactics to dethrone monopolies and think about how Europe and other large jurisdictions can decouple themselves from silicon valley infrastructure?

Further reading & resources:

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

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Do you have an idea for the show? Email [email protected]

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

More like this: Part One of our FAccT roundup: Materiality and Militarisation.

Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her!

In part two we look into how AI is used to misrepresent people through things like image generation, and even care labour. These are conversations about AI misrepresenting hidden identities, care work becoming data work, how pride and identity is tied to labour — and how labour organisers are building solidarity and movement around this.

Who features in this episode:

• Priya Goswami brought a multimedia exhibition to FAccT: Digital Bharat. This explores the invisibilised care work and manual labour by women in India, and how their day-to-day has become mediated by digital public infrastructures.
• Kimi Wenzel organised Invisible by Design? Generative AI and Mirrors of Misrepresentation, which invited users to confront generated images of themselves and discuss issues of representation within these systems.
• Alex Hanna and Clarissa Redwine ran the AI Workers Inquiry, which brought people together to share in how AI has transformed their work, identify common ground, and potentially begin building resistance.

Further reading & resources:

• Circuit Breakers — tech worker conference organised by Clarissa Redwine
• Kimi Wenzel’s research
• Buy The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily Bender

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

In this short Nic shares his perspective on how post-apartheid white communities have dealt with apartheid’s end. And how Musk is basically seeking out an information environment that can recreate the apartheid information system: Grok is just an extension of a media ecosystem designed to soothe guilt and stoke resentment.

Computer Says Maybe Shorts cover recent news with an expert in our network. If there is a news story you want us to cover, please email [email protected]

Nic is Executive Director at THE CITY, a news outlet serving the people of New York through independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, deepens democratic participation, and helps make sense of the greatest city in the world. He has led news and human rights organizations on three continents, and was previously Deputy Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Chief Content Officer of Hindustan Times in Delhi, and Editor-in-Chief of South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper.

Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her!

In part one we explore the depth of AI’s hidden material impacts, including its use in military applications and to aid genocide. One of our interviewees talked about why they spoke up at the town hall — questioning why FAccT, the biggest AI ethics conference there is, accepts sponsorship from those same military contractors.

Who we interviewed for Part One:

• Charis Papaevangelou who co-organised a CRAFT session called The Hidden Costs of Digital Sovereignty. Greece is trying to position itself as a central digital hub by building data centres and participating in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ — but what does this actually mean for the people and infrastructure of Greece?
• Georgia Panagiotidou ran a session on The Tools and Tactics for Supporting Agency in AI Environmental Action — offering some ideas on how the community can get together and meaningfully resist extractive practices.
• David Widder discussed his workshop on Silicon Valley and The Pentagon, and his research on the recent history of the DoD funding academic papers — is it ever worth taking military money, even for basic research?
• Tania Duarte offered something very different: a demonstration of two workshops she runs for marginalised groups, to better explain the true materiality of AI, and build knowledge that gives people more agency over the dominant narratives and framings in the industry.

Further reading & resources:

• Recording of Charis’s CRAFT session: The Hidden Cost of Digital Sovereignty
• Cloud hiding undersea: Cables & Data Centers in the Mediterranean crossroads by Theodora Kostaka
• Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment and Why ‘open’ AI systems are actually closed and why this matters by David Widder
• The video that David quoted the Carnegie Mellon professor from — David was paraphrasing in the episode!
• We and AI & Better Images of AI
• More on Georgia Panagiotidou’s work and resources from her session

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

This report isn’t a boring survey of what AI Now have been doing this year; it’s a comprehensive view of the state of AI, and the concentrated powers that prop it up. What are the latest AI-shaped solutions that the hype guys are trying to convince us are real? And how can we reclaim a positive agenda for innovation — and unstick ourselves from a path towards pseudo religious AGI.

Further reading & resources:

• Read the AI Now 2025 Landscape Report: Artificial Power

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

*Sarah Myers-West has spent the last fifteen years interrogating the role of technology companies and their emergence as powerful political actors on the front lines of international governance. Sarah brings this depth of expertise to policymaking in her current role co-directing AI Now, with a focus on addressing the market incentives and infrastructures that shape tech’s role in society at large and ensuring it serves the interests of the public. Her forthcoming book, Tracing Code (University of California Press) draws on years of historical and social science research to examine the origins of data capitalism and commercial surveillance.*

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

Further reading & resources:

• Scratch — a high level programming language aimed at kids
• Hedy — the programming language that Felienne designed
• Join in and help out with Hedy!
• GenderMag by Margaret Burnett — how to ensure more gender inclusiveness in your software
• Elm — an easy and kind browser-based programming language
• A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design by Felienne Hermans & Ari Schlesinger
• A Framework for the Localization of Programming Languages by Felienne Hermans & Alaaeddin Swidan

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Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, a gradual and multi-lingual programming language designed for teaching. She is the author of “The Programmer’s Brain“, a book that helps programmers understand how their brain works and how to use it more effectively. In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research. She also has a weekly column on BNR, a Dutch radio station.

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

And how do we combat the amazing hero-god narratives of Silicon Valley without reinforcing them?

Alix went to storytelling festival ZEG Fest in Tbilisi to chat with three amazing storytellers about that challenge:

• Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep and The Thick of It: who discusses how to use humour and satire to keep things simple — and that stories are not ‘made up’, but rather a way to relay a series of facts and concepts that are complex and difficult to process.
• Chris Wylie, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: on how the promise of superintelligence and transhumanism is basically like a religious prophecy. His new show Captured explores the stories that tech elites are telling us about our utopian AI future.
• Adam Pincus, producer of The Laundromat and Leave no Trace: shares his frustrations with the perceived inevitability of AI in his day to day, and also tells us more about his podcast series ‘What Could Go Wrong?’ in which he explores writing a Contagion sequel with director Scott Burns.

Further reading & resources:

• Captured: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover — limited podcast series featuring Chris Wylie
• **‘Contagion’ Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns Asks AI to Write a Sequel to Pandemic Film in Audible Original Series ‘What Could Go Wrong?’** — Variety article
• What Could Go Wrong? — limited podcast series by Scott Burns

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