Policy Prompt

Often compared to ocean shipping lanes, Earth’s orbital layers act as channels to almost 14,000 satellites moving at around 7 km/second. These orbital pathways are becoming increasingly congested as a rapidly growing number of commercial actors enter what was once a predominantly state-run domain. Can the 1967 Outer Space Treaty hold up against this space revolution? Can international structures quickly modernize and work together to ensure all players in the space race are committed to a safe and sustainable future?

Join hosts Vass Bednar and Paul Samson as they speak with guests Esther Brimmer and Jessica West about a comprehensive and collaborative approach to space governance. Esther is a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations, a former US assistant secretary of state and an expert in international institutions. Jessica is a CIGI senior fellow and a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, a Canadian peace and security research institute, where she focuses on technology, security and governance in outer space.

In-Show Clips:

• 00:29:04: Universal Studios: “New Moon. Reds Launch First Space Satellite” (Internet Archive, October 7, 1957)

Mentioned:

• UN Outer Space Treaty: https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html
• International Maritime Organization Polar Code:  
  imo.org/en/ourwork/safety/pages/polar-code.aspx 
• Geostationary orbit: 
  wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit 
• United Arab Emirates future space planning: 
  space.gov.ae/en/media-center/blogs/2/3/2020/uae-shaping-future-of-earth-observation-satellites-and-space-exploration 
• UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space: 
  https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/copuos/current.html
• Philippine National Statements during the 68th Session of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space: 
  philsa.gov.ph/news/philippine-national-statements-during-the-68th-session-of-the-united-nations-committee-on-the-peaceful-uses-of-outer-space-un-copuos/ 
• Canada’s statement to the First Committee of the 79th Session of the United Nations, Thematic Debate: Outer Space: 
  international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/peace_security-paix_securite/weapon-armes-control-documents/thematic-debat6.aspx?lang=eng 

Further Reading:

• Jessica West, CIGI senior fellow and senior researcher at Project Ploughshares. Find her CIGI bio and works here: cigionline.org/people/jessica-west/ 
• Esther Brimmer, James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance and former assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Find her Council on Foreign Relations bio and works here: cfr.org/expert/esther-brimmer

Credits:

Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our supervising producer is Tim Lewis, with technical production by Henry Daemen and Luke McKee. Show notes are prepared by Lynn Schellenberg, social media engagement by Isabel Neufeld, brand design and episode artwork by Abhilasha Dewan and Sami Chouhdary, with creative direction from Som Tsoi. 

Original music by Joshua Snethlage. 

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault. 

Be sure to follow us on social media. 

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @cigionline 

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt on all major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected]

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

For centuries, the power to create money was isolated to traditional issuers, who built trust over the ages. But now stablecoins are starting to pull at that monopoly, rising up in relevance as a massive innovation on infrastructure. Some jurisdictions are turning things upside down with digital asset adoption, while others are holding back, with important geopolitical implications. 

On season two’s opener, hosts Vass Bednar and Paul Samson welcome Ali Abou Daya and Morva Rohani to discuss the emergence and transformative nature of crypto and stablecoins. Ali is the chief executive officer of Transactix Financial, a stablecoin company, and Morva is the executive director of the Canadian Web3 Council, an industry organization that advocates for responsible public policy. Together the four consider the digitalization of traditional finance, and the challenges surrounding establishing trust and who controls what.

Mentioned:

• Blockchain: see CIGI’s explainer video “What Is Blockchain?” (YouTube, January 4, 2018)
• “In God We Trust” printed on US currency: see www.congress.gov/committee-report/112th-congress/house-report/47/1 and David Mislin, “The complex history of ‘In God We Trust’” (The Conversation, February 2, 2018)
• “Satoshi” refers to Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious pseudonymous author of a 2008 white paper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”; see also Joshua Davis, “The Crypto-Currency” (The New Yorker, October 3, 2011)
• “Bitcoin maxis”: Tonya M. Evan defines this term and others in the digital asset lexicon: “The Bitcoin, Not Crypto, Debate: Why Words Matter” (Forbes, August 21, 2024)
• For more on El Salvador’s experience with bitcoin, see “Bitcoin: El Salvador makes cryptocurrency legal tender” (BBC, June 9, 2021), “World’s first Bitcoin nation scales back crypto dream” (BBC, December 18, 2024) and Robyn Wilson’s “The Salvadoran beach town that became a Bitcoin testbed” (BBC, July 1, 2025)
• Nigeria’s central bank digital currency, the eNaira: www.firstbanknigeria.com/personal/ways-to-bank/e-naira/
• Tether setting up physical HQ in El Salvador: Federico Maccioni, “Crypto firm Tether and its founders finalizing move to El Salvador” (Reuters, January 13, 2025)
• For comparison of transaction costs by analyst Eric Yeung, see his April 20, 2025 X post: “The Final Showdown Between China and the U.S.: The Battlefield Shifts from Military Hegemony to Global Currency Warfare.” Yeung is a Hong Kong–based precious metals and investment expert who posts daily analysis on X.
• The GENIUS Act (in full: Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act) became public law in July 2025 to provide for the regulation of payment stablecoins in the United States: www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1582/text
• “MiCA and the European Union”: see Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation
• Daniel Day-Lewis played Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, a 2007 film based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!
• “The milkshake example”: a reference to Harvard Business School professor “Clay Christensen’s milkshake marketing,” which considers why we “hire” a product

Further Reading: 

• Ali Abou Daya’s bio: www.linkedin.com/in/aliaboudaya/
• About Transactix Financial: www.transactix.ca/about
• Morva Rohani’s bio: www.linkedin.com/in/morvarohani/
• About the Canadian Web3 Council: https://web3canada.ca/about/
• For more analysis on the evolving role of digital assets, including central bank digital currencies, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized assets, within the broader context of the global financial system, see CIGI’s project Digital Assets in a Deglobalized World

Credits:

Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our supervising producer is Tim Lewis, with technical production by Henry Daemen and Luke McKee. Show notes are prepared by Lynn Schellenberg, social media engagement by Isabel Neufeld, brand design and episode artwork by Abhilasha Dewan and Sami Chouhdary, with creative direction from Som Tsoi. 

Original music by Joshua Snethlage. 

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault. 

Be sure to follow us on social media. 

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @cigionline

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt on all major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected]. 

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

In episode 16, hosts Vass and Paul talk to Marc Levinson — economist, historian and author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, published in 2016, and the follow-up, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (both Princeton University Press). 

Marc brings to life a topic freighted with importance but often out of mind: how an innovation involving the shipping container, 200 years in the making, transformed economic geography and the transport of cargo around the globe. The three discuss, as well, the current challenges in figuring out the value of international trade that is unpackaged and, so far, not well accounted for — exchange in services, ideas and intangibles, of increasing significance in the global economy.

Mentioned:

• The giant container ship Ever Given: “In pictures: Container ship blocking the Suez Canal finally on the move” (BBC, March 29, 2021)
• “Gambler” Malcolm McLean, featured in the PBS series They Made America: www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/mclean_hi.html
• The BBC’s “The Box” project: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/business/2008/the_box/default.stm

Further Reading: 

• Marc Levinson’s bio: www.marclevinson.net/?page_id=10
• Marc Levinson’s website: www.marclevinson.net/
• Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, 2nd edition (Princeton University Press, 2016)
• Marc Levinson, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt
   

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

How do you discover music? College radio, word of mouth, serendipity — or your very own AI DJ? In 2006, Spotify’s founders discovered music as “a traffic source” for an advertising model, and have since transformed the music industry. But what are their goals or values when it comes to music and culture beyond the pursuit of profit, and what does it mean for musicians and music lovers? And why aren’t policy makers more concerned about this mega platform?

In this episode of Policy Prompt, hosts Vass and Paul welcome Liz Pelly, music and media critic, and the author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria, 2025). Together they chat about how we’ve consumed our music over the years, and how it’s been fed to us, from the “stimulus progression” of Muzak’s elevator tunes to the “mood-driven logic” of Spotify’s algorithmic curation.

In-Show Clips:

• 00:12:57: AFP News Agency, “Sweden’s Pirate Party aims for kingmaker spot” (YouTube, March 26, 2010)
• 00:18:34: CNBC Television: “Spotify is the platform for artists who want to break globally, says Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney” (YouTube, November 12, 2024)

Mentioned:

• Muzak’s archives and the concept of “stimulus progression”: see https://muzakarchives.com/ and https://muzakarchives.com/stimulus-progression/
• Big Shiny Tariffs (public playlist): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/56kKurRKQmJnhJgvq9pSV5
• Big Shiny Tunes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Shiny_Tunes
• Canada’s Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11): www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/modernization-broadcasting-act.html
• Songza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza
• Rhapsody/Napster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster_(streaming_service)
• “Pirate Bay”/Piratbyrån: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyr%C3%A5n
• Living Wage for Musicians Act of 2024: www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7763
• Federal Music Project: www.wnyc.org/series/works-progress-administration/about
• The Musicians’ Union: a trade union representing more than 36,000 musicians across the United Kingdom working in all sectors of the music business and supporter of the Musicians’ Census
• Public Knowledge’s Streaming in the Dark project: see their video explainer and the 2024 paper by Meredith Filak Rose, “Streaming in the Dark: Competitive Dysfunction Within the Music Streaming Ecosystem” (Berkeley Journal of Entertainment and Sports Law 13 (1): 23–66)
• “Edmonton Public Library’s first digital public space, created to celebrate Edmonton’s local music scene and its history”: see https://capitalcityrecords.ca/ and https://capitalcityrecords.ca/albums

Further Reading: 

• Liz Pelly’s bio: https://lizpelly.info/
• Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (Atria, 2025)

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

What does innovation actually mean, and how should we be thinking about it?

In this episode, Vass and Paul welcome Joel Blit, an expert in innovation and innovation policy. Joel is a senior fellow at CIGI, and an associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, where he chairs the Council for Innovation Policy and Strategy. They discuss the mix of art and science that comprises innovation, the tensions surrounding it, and the different approaches — inside and outside the academy — that Canada and other jurisdictions are experimenting with to best generate and capture commercial and societal benefits from emerging technologies, in particular artificial intelligence. 

In-Show Clips:

• 00:06:26: TVO Today, “Evaluating Performance-based Funding” (YouTube, October 3, 2019)
• 00:46:40: BBC News, “How could AI affect jobs globally and worsen inequality?” (YouTube, January 15, 2024)

Mentioned:

• “Sigma 2” in education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

Further Reading: 

• Joel Blit’s bio: https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/jblit

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt
   

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

AI is going to affect us all and everyone has opinions about it. But what does the data say?

In this episode of Policy Prompt, Vass and Paul welcome Nestor Maslej from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, where he is the research manager of the AI Index and the Global AI Vibrancy Tool. In developing tools that track the advancement of AI, Nestor hopes to make the AI space more accessible to policy makers, business leaders and the lay public. Nestor discusses the excitement and fears surrounding this fast-moving technology and the importance of quantitative data in AI myth busting. “At the Index, we really feel that to make good decisions about this tech, whether you are in a boardroom, in a Parliament, or simply sitting in your living room, you need to have access to data and you have to actually understand what is going on with this technology.”

In-Show Clips:

• 00:10:55: CNBC, “How China’s New AI Model DeepSeek Is Threatening U.S. Dominance” (YouTube, January 24, 2025)
• 00:30:11: Yahoo Finance, “What is the CHIPS act? The semiconductor bill with bipartisan support (and criticism)” (YouTube, July 20, 2022)
• 00:41:07: The AI Navigator, “What is Jevons Paradox and how could it apply to AI?” (YouTube, May 2, 2024)

Mentioned:

• The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI: https://hai.stanford.edu/about
• The Stanford AI Index: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index
• The Stanford Global AI Vibrancy Tool: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/global-vibrancy-tool
• Jevons paradox: Greg Rosalsky, “Why the AI world is suddenly obsessed with a 160-year-old economics paradox” (NPR, February 4, 2025)

Further Reading:

• Nestor Maslej’s bio: https://profiles.stanford.edu/nestor-maslej
• Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Vanessa Parli, Anka Reuel, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah * Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald and Jack Clark, Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024 (Stanford, CA: Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, April 2024)

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

In episode 12, artist and thinker Amanda Wasielewski joins hosts Vass and Paul to discuss the crossover and interplay between digital and capital-A art.

Amanda, an associate senior lecturer of digital humanities and associate professor (docent) of art history in the Department of Archives, Libraries, and Museums at Uppsala University in Sweden, has exhibited her artwork internationally and recently published the monograph Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023) and co-edited Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era, with Anna Näslund (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Amanda brings her art historian perspective to questions of data politics, including categorization, authentication, nuances lost in automation, the need to be able to see data sets, and both the fears and artistic potential surrounding generative technologies.

In-Show Clips:

• 00:08:12: Rakutentech, “Computer Vision — The Now & The Future — Rakuten Technology Conference 2019” (YouTube, December 25, 2019)
• 00:11:14: SamDoesArts, “Why Artists are Fed Up with AI Art” (YouTube, December 24, 2022)
• 00:22:48: Watchseenart, “Is Damien Hirst Sloppy or Suspicious?” (YouTube Short, March 21, 2024)
• 00:49:56: The IT Crowd, “Series 2 — Episode 3: Piracy warning” (YouTube, March 18, 2009), parody of the original 2004 Motion Picture Association ad “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” posted by HelloImAPizza (YouTube, October 3, 2022)
• 01:00:42: The Wall Street Journal, “OpenAI’s Sora Made Me Crazy AI Videos — Then the CTO Answered (Most of) My Questions” (YouTube, March 13, 2024)
  

Mentioned:

• Artist Jack Bishop: https://jackbishop.ca/
• More about the Group of Seven: www.gallery.ca/whats-on/exhibitions-and-galleries/experience-the-group-of-seven-at-the-gallery
• On controversy surrounding dating of works by Damien Hirst: “Dating Discrepancy in Damien Hirst’s Formaldehyde Work Rocks Art World” by Rebecca Schiffman, Art & Object, March 25, 2024
• On “the famous case, which is still unresolved, of the painting of Christ…said to be of Da Vinci, but then said not to be”: “Salvator Mundi, Saudi Arabia and the saga of the missing masterpiece” by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, August 24, 2024
• On “this famous paper…which proposed a technique called StyleGAN, which was replicated on the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com”: “Analyzing and Improving the Image Qualityof StyleGAN” by Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, Miika Aittala, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen and Timo Aila, preprint, arXiv, March 23, 2020
• Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, ImageNet Roulette project: https://paglen.studio/2020/04/29/imagenet-roulette/
  

Further Reading: 

• Amanda Wasielewski’s website: www.amandawasielewski.com/
• Amanda Wasielewski, Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero Books, 2018)
• Amanda Wasielewski, Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023)
• “Next book out this fall”: Since this episode was recorded, Amanda Wasielewski and Anna Naslund’s co-edited book Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era has been released, published by University of Chicago Press in November 2024
  

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt
  

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

Warren Buffett once said he would rather trust his money to monkeys throwing darts than financial advisers. So how do the monkeys’ chances of hitting the target stack up against those of, say, pollsters, Magic 8 Balls or star charts? Maybe the monkeys have practised.

Meet Robert de Neufville, who is super at forecasting: someone whose predictions have proved far more accurate than regular forecasting and regularly outperform intelligence analysts’. Robert holds degrees in government and political science from Harvard and Berkeley, co-hosts the NonProphets: (Super)forecasting Podcast and has extensive experience in analyzing existential risk. Robert and hosts Vass and Paul discuss everything from Buffett’s monkeys and Moneyball to the importance of parking your biases, knowing what to research and the difference between hype and meaningful signal, to the value of expertise, new things to worry about and the need to stay skeptical.

Mentioned:

• NonProphets (Super)forecasting Podcast by superforecasters Atief Heermance, Robert de Neufville and Scott Eastman: https://nonprophetspod.wordpress.com/
• For more on Elaine Rich and the Good Judgment Project, see Alix Spiegel on Morning Edition, “So You Think You’re Smarter Than A CIA Agent” (NPR, April 2, 2014)
• Philip E. Tetlock, one of the founders of Good Judgment, author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, 2nd ed. (Princeton University Press, 2017)
• Scholar Barbara Mellers: see, for example, “Human and Algorithmic Predictions in Geopolitical Forecasting: Quantifying Uncertainty in Hard-to-Quantify Domains” by Mellers, John P. McCoy, Louise Lu and Philip E. Tetlock, 2024, Perspectives on Psychological Science 19 (5), https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231185339
• Swedish Defence Research Agency’s crowd forecasting site Glimt: https://glimt.nu/glimt/en/welcome.html
• Brier score: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score

Further Reading: 

• Robert de Neufville’s bio: https://goodjudgment.com/about/our-team/superforecaster-profiles/robert-de-neufville/
• Robert de Neufville’s Telling the Future Substack: https://tellingthefuture.substack.com/about
• For more on IARPA (Intelligence Advance Research Projects Activity) and the massive supercasting tournament it launched in 2011, see: https://goodjudgment.com/common-questions-good-judgment-superforecasters/

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

Join hosts Vass and Paul for their fascinating conversation with Michael Richardson, associate professor of media and culture at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, about the ideas in his book Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024). Michael explores the ethical and political implications of witnessing in an age of profound instability, and how our ways of making knowledge and experiencing the world are being mediated in fundamental ways by nonhuman systems — from the embodiment of history, trauma and change in animals and natural landscapes, to the “immediately computational” witnessing by technologies such as surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:

• Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte: https://seas.umich.edu/research/faculty/kyle-whyte
• Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, editors, A World of Many Worlds (Duke University Press, 2018)
• Future of Life Institute: “Slaughterbots are here” (https://autonomousweapons.org/)
• “The infamous COMPAS [Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions] sentencing software”: see “Code is law: how COMPAS affects the way the judiciary handles the risk of recidivism,” by Christoph Engel, Lorenz Linhardt and Marcel Schubert, Artificial Intelligence and Law, February 2004, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-024-09389-8
• Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society: www.admscentre.org.au/

In-Show Clips:

• 7:17: NDPVIDEO: “Jack Layton on reckless economic policies” (YouTube, December 3, 2009)
• 14:57: Center for Puerto Rican Studies: “Bridging the Divides: Apocalypse and Indigenizing Futures” featuring Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Kyle Powys Whyte (YouTube, February 1, 2024)
• 18:48: ABC News In-depth: “One year on, ABC News looks back at how Australia’s Black Summer bushfire crisis unfolded” (YouTube, January 1, 2021)
• 21:58: Overthink Podcast, “Thinking with the pluriverse: a conversation with Mario Blaser” (YouTube, October 24, 2023)
• 49:22: The Wall Street Journal: “Valkyrie: This Autonomous AI Drone Could Be the Military’s Next Weapon” (YouTube, October 7, 2023)
• 51:12: Future of Life Institute: “Slaughterbots — if human: kill()” (YouTube, November 30, 2021)
• 1:02:20: Testimony of witness Rebecca Wexler, Assistant Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law, US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterorism hearing “AI in Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions” (January 24, 2024)
• 1:03:14: WITNESS: “WITNESS’ Sam Gregory testifies in US House hearing on how we can inclusively prepare for deepfakes” (YouTube, November 8, 2023)

Further Reading: 

• Michael Richardson, Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024)
• Michael Richardson, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature (Bloomsbury, 2016)
• Michael Richardson, “Algorithmic Trauma,” in The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth, Michael Richardson and Carolyn Pedwell (Duke University Press, 2023)

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

Be sure to follow us on social media.

• X: @_policyprompt
• IG: @_policyprompt

Listen to new episodes of Policy Prompt biweekly on major podcast platforms. Questions, comments or suggestions? Reach out to CIGI’s Policy Prompt team at [email protected].

CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

Copyright has become a tool for privatizing everything — the opposite of what it was designed to do when it was invented in the eighteenth century to protect published works. In their book Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Penguin Random House, 2024), Princeton professors David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu provide a lively account of that turnaround, to the point where “the bulk of American culture is in copyright prison,” the world’s largest companies earn their revenue from intellectual property, and creative rights to everything from wallpaper, computer code, choreography, a “vibe” or a banana costume can be disputed, claimed and monetized. Join Vass and Paul for this engaging tag team with David and Alexandre as they discuss both historical and contemporary examples of the power of copyright and where we might be headed with new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence.

Mentioned:

• Statute of Anne of 1710: www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html
• Landmark copyright case, Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. 499 US 340 (1991)
• Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17): www.copyright.gov/title17/
• “Fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create”: Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin Random House, 2005, chapter 12)
• TRIPS Agreement: www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel2_e.htm
• Berne Convention of 1886: www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/
• Copyright Act (RSC 1985, c C-42): https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-42/Index.html

Further Reading: 

• David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Penguin Random House, 2024)
• Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (Penguin Random House, 2005)
• Katy Waldman, “Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?” (The New Yorker, January 6, 2025)
• CBC Arts, “Court tosses out another Da Vinci Code plagiarism case” (CBC, November 13, 2006)
• Associated Press: “Media Talk; Dustin Hoffman Loses Appeals Court Case” (The New York Times, July 9, 2001)
• Racheal Muldoon and Mark Bailey: “Getty v Stability AI: A ‘tantalising glance’ of what’s to come for AI firms and creators” (Charles Russell Speechlys, January 16, 2025)
• Kari Paul, “Court of a-peel: nasty split over banana costume leads to legal monkey business” (The Guardian, August 1, 2019)

Show Notes:

• More on copyright history, current questions around legislation, and rights of publicity: BBC Arts & Ideas podcast, “Dickens, Disney and copyright” (with guests David Bellos, Katie McGettigan and Hayleigh Bosher; December 21, 2023)
• On Creative Commons movement and Wikipedia: Creative Commons, “Celebrating 20 Years of CC Licenses — Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig” (YouTube, April 6, 2022)

Credits:
Policy Prompt is produced by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson. Our technical producers are Tim Lewis and Melanie DeBonte. Fact-checking and background research provided by Reanne Cayenne. Marketing by Kahlan Thomson. Brand design by Abhilasha Dewan and creative direction by Som Tsoi.

Original music by Joshua Snethlage.

Sound mix and mastering by François Goudreault.

Special thanks to creative consultant Ken Ogasawara.

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