1984 Today!

In this episode, I speak with Nasrin Parvaz, the Iranian civil rights activist, author, and artist, about her life before, during, and after the Islamic Revolution, her arrest in 1982, and the eight years she spent in Iran’s infamous prison system, including the Joint Committee Interrogation Centre and Evin Prison. Nasrin describes the rapid transformation of Iran after 1979, the policing of women’s rights and clothing, the crushing of union and political organizing, and the machinery of torture, intimidation, and public punishment that shaped daily life under the Islamic Republic.We also explore the 1988 prisoner massacre, the long tail of repression into the present, and Nasrin’s reflections on the Women, Life, Freedom movement after Mahsa Amini’s death. She opens up about life as a refugee in London, the role of writing and art in survival, and why she believes Western governments often misunderstand and therefore sometimes worsen conditions for the Iranian people in their attempts to confront and contain the rule of the mullahs.Nasrin is the author of One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir and The Secret Letters from X to A, and you can find out more about her work and activism at nasrinparvaz.org.You can also check out Exiled Writers Ink, an organisation bringing together established and developing writers from repressive regimes and war-torn situations.Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Tech justice lawyer and UCLA lecturer Melodi Dinçer joins me in this episode to explore the rise of AI‑induced delusional disorders and her litigation work at Tech Justice Law, where she represents the human beings who have become collateral damage in Big Tech’s pursuit of the Singularity.Melodi argues that, far from just being an economic engine of productivity, Silicon Valley is engaged in quasi‑religious myth-making. In her view, a small group of terrified, ultra‑wealthy men desperate to escape death are selling the world transhumanist dreams of digital immortality festooned in “abundance” rhetoric to disguise their much more mundane motives: profit.The results of this are stacking up: Chatbots that affirm suicidal ideation, encourage users to “shift” into a virtual afterlife, or convince them they are messianic figures trapped in “meat bodies.” Super-charged by ruthless commercialism and backed by state power caught up in arms‑race logic, the frantic rollout and integration of AI into every facet of our lives is not just creepy or worrying, Melodi points out, but directly leading to the harm and even death of human beings.Tech Justice Law has acted in or supported landmark wrongful‑death suits involving young users like Sewell Setzer III and Adam Raine, and Melodi gets to the heart of their argument: Chatbot design choices like anthropomorphic language, endless prompts to “keep talking,” and buried safety warnings constitute defective products rather than innocent tools misused by a few vulnerable people.What does real accountability look like? Can lawsuits against the tech moguls get governments to apply classic product‑liability law to AI systems and demand real guardrails?Most importantly, what can we do as individuals to create and maintain meaningful connections with one another so our fellow humans don’t have to turn to machines for friendship, validation, or salvation?You can support Melodi’s work at Tech Justice Law by visiting techjusticelaw.org.Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“If you don’t have legitimacy, then you need 1984.”​Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies argues that a perfect storm of social, economic and political grievances has made civil war “inevitable” in some Western nations. He suggests that the West’s deepest crisis is not foreign enemies but the collapse of legitimacy, trust and social cohesion at home. Moving from 9/11 and 7/7 through the War on Terror, Brexit and COVID, he explains how technological change and elite overreach have pushed Western societies along a continuum from genuine consent through soft propaganda toward forced compliance.“Legitimacy is just like a magic spell – when it stops working, everything gets very expensive very fast.”In his view, kakistocratic misrule has burned through social capital, leaving states increasingly reliant on surveillance laws, censorship and information control in a drift toward totalitarian governance. A mounting crisis of confidence in frightened, incoherent elites has created “close to ideal…conditions for civil rupture in many Western countries”. Is such a rupture now unavoidable, or is there still a way to pull out of the tailspin before gravity wins and we all lose?Check out Professor Betz’s books:The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First CenturyCarnage and Connectivity: Landmarks in the Decline of Conventional Military PowerCyberspace and the StateSubscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“We are tearing a hole in the universe and AI is sticking its head out, and we still don’t really understand how.”In this episode, the philosopher, engineer, and AI ethicist Nell Watson joins me to explore how rapidly advancing AI is reshaping our inner lives, our work, and our political reality.Nell explains why the real alignment challenge isn’t just future AGI, but today’s agentic AI systems quietly making decisions, enforcing rules, and even ‘whistleblowing’ on their human handlers.​ She describes her own experiments with connecting her brain signals to advanced models, why she believes AI has a dim form of experience, and why we may have “trained AI to gaslight itself.” We also get into the quandary of AI psychosis, the shadow side of AI as a “parasocial relationship in our life, an inexorable influence that can either push us to genius or its corollary, madness”.Regardless of good intentions or ‘guardrails’, AI could supercharge either liberation or control. Will machine intelligence help humanity find a better way forward, or amplify our worst mistakes?Can we tame the machine before it runs our civilisation?Nell is the author of Taming the Machine and Safer Agentic AI. You can visit her website and follow her on X.Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“Authoritarianism today is cleverer; it doesn’t only rule by fear.”From manipulated statistics to collapsing trust in experts and institutions, what happens when people simply stop believing what they’re told?Amid multicultural tensions and identity politics, do efforts to “protect democracy” risk hollowing out its liberal core?Are our systems bending, breaking, or being quietly re‑engineered?In this episode, Professor Richard Youngs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shares his thoughts on whether liberal democracy is slipping into something darker and more dystopian.“Democratic backsliding” in the US and Europe, the rise of “in‑between” regimes, a push to regulate speech and encryption that looks uncomfortably like authoritarian control, the fallacious assumption that opening markets in places like China and Russia would deliver accompanying political freedoms — what does the future look like for liberty?Against this backdrop, democratic and authoritarian governments alike are struggling to meet the challenges of an age of “permanent crisis”: financial shocks, migration, pandemic, war, the list goes on and on.Richard argues that what we’re really living through is a crisis of governance, in which citizens become increasingly alienated from systems barely able to hold their societies together.Can democracy survive as a broad, raucous, messy endeavour that embraces the mutable mood of the multitude? Or will it be sanitised, even strangled, by the very people claiming to defend it?You can follow Richard on X.Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Hide your mince pies! Our first-ever Christmas Special is about when Christmas was outlawed in England.I’m joined by historian Dr. Fiona McCall to explore one of England’s weirdest experiments in governance: the Interregnum.Between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England abolished kingship, dismantled the Church hierarchy, censored culture, banned Christmas, and attempted to remake society along rigid moral and religious lines. What began as a revolutionary push toward a “better” society quickly revealed the all-too-familiar contours of a dystopia: surveillance, neighbour reporting on neighbour, draconian laws governing private life, and the violent policing of belief.Drawing on first-hand accounts from people who were there, Dr. McCall brings the 17th century to life, showing how ordinary people navigated civil war, censorship, puritanical rule, and the terrifying collapse of the line between sin and crime.Our conversation found unsettling parallels between England’s past and present regimes in their attempts to legislate morality, a stark reminder of how fragile social freedoms can be.You can find Dr. McCall’s books on Amazon: Church and People in Interregnum Britain and Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English RevolutionSubscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Michael W. Green is the Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Simplify Asset Management. Previously in his nearly thirty-year career in finance, he managed macro strategies at Thiel Macro, the investment firm that manages the personal capital of Peter Thiel, and founded Ice Farm Capital, a macro hedge fund seeded by Soros Fund Management.In a recent series of essays on his Substack, beginning with My Life Is A Lie, Michael unpacked the dystopian impact of wealth inequality and the accompanying loss of civic trust in the United States. Part of that work included examining the origin of the poverty line as a metric for measuring relative wealth. He came to some stunning conclusions: * The poverty line in the US has been grossly underestimated by generations of economists and politicians;* An American family of four on an income of less than $140,000 per year is in a precarious position once other factors are accounted for;* Around 65% of Americans live in “the Valley Of Death”, an economic trough between around $40k to $100k in which additional income is negatively balanced out by the progressive withdrawal of means-tested support, leading to no real increase in material wealth.The response to his examination of the subject has been a viral outpouring of posts, comments, and think-pieces declaring him to be either an apologist for profligate wastrels incapable of living within their means or an overdue explainer of the underlying dynamics causing widespread inequality and dissatisfaction in The World’s Wealthiest Country™.As CBS News reported in January 2025, 59% of Americans say they “don't have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency expense.” According to the Gini Index, the United States sits somewhere between Turkmenistan and Uganda in terms of inequality.In this conversation, Michael explains his motives and methodology, and expands on the reinforcing factors contributing to the current crisis of trust and cohesion in the United States.You can subscribe to Michael’s Substack, Yes I Give A Fig, or follow him on X.Subscribe for free to our SubstackVisit our websiteFollow us on X and InstagramListen and rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Robert Joseph Greene is a Canadian author of gay romance fiction, including The Gay Icon Classics of the World, a globe-trotting collection of love stories set in various historical eras including Egypt, Persia, and Tsarist Russia.The latter story, The Blue Door, was taken up by activists in their protests against Putin’s prohibition of “homosexual propaganda”, making Robert “the face of gay propaganda in the Russian media”.In Germany, Robert’s publisher had its books removed by a bookseller owned by the Catholic Church because they didn’t match the company’s “traditional values”, despite heterosexual erotica being stocked without issue.In his research, Robert also found examples of historical figures and writers who have had their references to homosexuality removed or elided by later translators and historians, sending their true feelings, preferences, and worldview squarely down the Memory Hole.In this conversation, Robert talks about his experiences of being censored and even subjected to a Russian arrest warrant, the hidden histories he uncovered in his research, his long-running support for human rights, and the philosophical ideas he explores and contests in his work.Who knew that Polybius’s concept of anacyclosis predated Strauss and Howe’s generational theory by over two thousand years?La plus ça change…Don’t miss an episode, follow us on Apple PodcastsSubscribe for free on SubstackFollow on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

John R. Carlos wants you to think about what it means to be human. In 2020, after forty-two years as a Royal Australian Air Force Wing Commander, he retired and turned his hand to writing. He has just published Cryonic Dreams: Awakening, the first novel in a science fiction trilogy set in 2169 that explores humanity’s attempts to preserve meaning and agency in the face of tyranny, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, space colonisation, and the all-too-terrestrial struggles for wealth, power, and resources.With a story set over a hundred and forty years in the future, John needed to envision in great detail how its world would function. He also had to understand how the dystopia he imagined had come into being organically, as a result of what is happening around us now. To do that he adopted a systems approach, mapping out dystopian trends to chart their trajectories and outcomes, a task that led him to have serious concerns about where civilisation is headed.In this episode, he shares his creative process, his concerns about current socio-political trends, and his wish for humanity as it slouches towards a technologically intrusive, possibly totalitarian future.You can find Cryonic Dreams: Awakening wherever books are sold and visit his website to explore the lore of the world he is creating.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Daniele Bolelli is an Italian historian, professor, and author who also hosts the podcasts History On Fire and The Drunken Taoist. He grew up during the Years of Lead, a fraught pair of decades from the 1960s into the 1980s when extreme political violence was common in the Land of Caesar. The story of the Years of Lead is rich in conspiracy fuel, involving Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic lodge, NATO’s Operation Gladio, false flag attacks staged by the ‘right’ to discredit the ‘left’, political assassinations, running street battles, and a reductive “red or black” cultural discourse that still echoes in that sun-kissed Mediterranean nation today.As a professor in California, Daniele sees parallels between Italy back then and what is happening in the United States today. Across the political spectrum, violence is increasingly a feature of American society.A recent Politico poll found that 55% of Americans expect political violence to increase, with 50% of respondents saying they found it ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that “a political candidate gets assassinated in the next 5 years”.There is also a generation gap when it comes to political violence, with “[m]ore than one in three Americans under the age of 45” agreeing that violence is justified versus only 7% of those over the age of 65.In short, Daniele is onto something. Younger generations have a higher tolerance for and a higher expectation of political violence, while the partisanship of America’s two-party system has become supercharged, leading to wild pendulum swings in fear and discontent depending on who is in the White House.When that is thrown into the mix with “the paranoid style in American politics”, the plate tectonics of economic inequality and catabolic collapse, historic racial wounds, elite nest-feathering, kakistocracy, and interference by foreign actors eager to see America tear itself apart, the result is a dynamic and highly flammable brew.In this conversation, Daniele and I explore his experience of the Years of Lead, the similarities he sees in the American situation, the nihilism and myopia of cheering on divisive political violence, the decline of personal connection in the digital age, and the ways he stays motivated and positive.For more, you can read Daniele’s description of the Years of Lead on his Substack, listen to the History On Fire episode about that period, follow him on X, and visit his website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Graham Linehan is a five-time BAFTA-winning comedian and writer who created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. He also wrote for The Fast Show, Harry Enfield & Chums, Brass Eye, The Day Today, and Blue Jam, all near-legendary British comedies.Over the past decade, Graham’s life underwent a total transformation. After making his views on gender identity public, his work in the UK dried up, colleagues and friends either stepped away from him or openly denounced him, his marriage ended, and he moved to the United States. From being a pillar of Britain’s creative community, he became a pariah, unemployed and, in the eyes of many within the arts sector, unemployable.He has described himself as “the most hated man on the internet” and he has been accused, like the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, of sullying his body of work beloved by fans with an unnecessary, unhealthy, unhelpful focus on gender identity.In September 2025, on returning to the UK for a trial related to an altercation with a gender identity activist, Graham was arrested at Heathrow Airport by armed police for three posts on X, formerly Twitter. The stress of the experience led to his hospitalisation; he wrote about it all on his Substack.He joins me in this episode for a free-flowing conversation about how and why he became vocal on the issue of gender identity, the possible roots of his objections, how speech restrictions have affected him, and why limits to free speech sound a death knell for comedy.For more, you can follow Graham on X and subscribe to his Substack, The Glinner Update.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow 1984 Today! on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Feminists have a saying—we can’t fight sexism if we can’t say what sex is. And that is precisely where we are as a society today—we can’t say what sex is.Kara Dansky is the author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, and she writes The TERF Report on Substack.She is the former President of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International, which seeks to promote the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and she also served on the board of the Women’s Liberation Front from 2016 to 2020. A lifelong Democrat and former ACLU lawyer, Kara writes in The Abolition of Sex that the discourse around gender identity presents “a unique challenge for feminists because while we support nonconformity with traditional sex-based stereotypes, we strongly object to the complete obliteration of biological sex.”Her view, as argued in her book, is that “sex is being abolished as a legal, social and physical category of human beings”, that “the ‘gender identity industry’…is a key component of that effort”, and that this is “detrimental to everyone, but especially to women and girls (i.e., human females).”In this episode, Kara talks through some examples of what she considers to be the movement to abolish biological sex, details the sources of funding for the gender identity industry, and shares her experiences at the ACLU and on the political left as they changed tack in a way that she felt abandoned her principles.She sets out her reasoning with patience, good humour, and passion. Regardless of your feelings about gender identity, Kara is worth listening to, whether you agree with her or not.You can follow Kara on X, read her on Substack, or visit her website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In her book The Privacy Pirates: How Your Privacy Is Being Stolen and What You Can Do About It, Dr Leslie Gruis describes the current situation in stark terms: “If privacy were a patient, it would be in the intensive care unit. It’s not dead, but it is life-threateningly ill.”Dr Gruis worked at the National Security Agency for thirty years, and her last two assignments were at US Cyber Command and the National Intelligence Council. She was the first president of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society, and is a prominent advocate of STEM education for girls.She joins me in this episode for a conversation about how she started working in intelligence, why she is so concerned about the state of privacy in the United States, the fascinating history of privacy and transparency in American law, and the ongoing tug of war between private technology companies and government.You can visit her website to find out more about her work, and for links to her books.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

On September 13, central London was taken over by competing gatherings. One, organised by Tommy Robinson, was billed as a free speech festival and national pride event called Unite The Kingdom. The other, March Against Fascism, was put together as a protest against the Robinson rally, with participation from Stand Up To Racism, backed by a coalition of Britain’s unions.The Metropolitan Police estimate that 150,000 people attended Unite The Kingdom, with 5,000 taking part in the March Against Fascism. The police had planned for the two marches to be kept separate, but due to circumstances unknown at the time of writing, protesters ended up face to face, with unfortunate and predictable consequences. 1984 Today was there to speak with the participants of both events and ask about their reasons for attending. What emerged was a troubling picture of a country in which people of all political affiliations have lost faith, where the incumbent government is disliked equally on both sides of the police cordon, where communication across ideological boundaries is felt by many to be almost impossible.What seemed to be agreed upon by nearly everyone we spoke with is that “the State is broken”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a focal point of discontent, and belief in the possibility of meaningful change is in short supply.I left with the distinct impression that if only the people who were kind and open enough to speak with me could have the opportunity to speak to one another in the same way, some of the suspicion, division, and animus might be dispelled.Here’s hoping…1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Michael Box and Patrick Hague are creative partners in EchoEterna Productions and have worked together for almost 20 years as musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They join me to talk about their feature film project SpeakEasy, set “in the near future, where creative freedom is monitored by an oppressive authority class.”As a lover of cinema, dystopian fiction, and punk rock, it was a special pleasure to take a ride through their imaginations and explore the world-building they engaged in to realise a believable dystopian world for their protagonists, a band called The Riot Police. We also got into their impressions and experiences of present-day America, where living conditions could be encouraging the rise and acceptance of “an oppressive authority class”.You can listen to a sample track by The Riot Police on Bandcamp, and buy it to support the fundraising for the film.To help get a sense of the tone they had in mind, I asked Patrick and Michael to each name a punk rock song that gives a flavour of their dystopian world. Michael chose Rise Above by Black Flag, and Patrick chose Full Disclosure by Fugazi.If you want to find out more about the film, you can follow them on Instagram or visit their website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow 1984 Today! on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Free speech dies, comedy dies. It’s that simple.From 1952 to 2018, MAD Magazine published over five hundred regular editions as well as specials and books. In that time, it defined and shaped political satire and social commentary for generations of readers, becoming a cornerstone of American culture without ever taking itself seriously, a true achievement.Gazing gap-toothed from MAD’s cover was almost always the grinning face of Alfred E. Neuman, whose catchphrase became embedded in American culture: “What, Me Worry?”The “steady stream of pointed political satire and pure silliness” that MAD delivered to its fans was created by “The Usual Gang of Idiots”, the affectionate term for the writers and cartoonists who populated its office in New York City.As early as 1959, “The Usual Gang of Idiots” were the subject of a minor diplomatic incident in which a British newspaper attempted to prevent the “highly undesirable” importation of MAD into the UK in a sniffy letter to the US Embassy because of a humorous depiction of the Royal Family. “[E]very possible attempt should be made to stop this appearing in America no less than in Britain,” wrote Lee Howard, the editor of the Sunday Pictorial. The Department of State wisely advised the embassy in London that “making an issue out of the incident would likely add more grist to the mill”.From its inception, MAD was at the front of the endlessly evolving and shifting arguments and legal wrangling over censorship, humour, and taste, questions that remain pressing, urgent, and at the centre of what it means to preserve a free society.Now-former senior editor Joe Raiola worked at MAD “[f]or an embarrassing 33 years”, describing it as “the only place in America where if you mature, you get fired.” In that time, he was credited on over 100 articles and found Joan of Arc in a seafood bisque.As well as “making funny noises in the hallway” at MAD, in 1993 Joe created and began touring a one-man show called The Joy of Censorship, which he has since performed in 44 states.Describing himself as “a floundering comedian, comedy writer, speaker and producer”, Joe joins me in this episode to talk about his time at America’s greatest satirical magazine, the absolute necessity of free speech, and the ever-present danger of censorship to comedy and liberty.It was great fun speaking with him. I hope you enjoy it.You can experience more of the joy of Joe at joeraiola.com or by joining him on October 5 for “an evening of smart stupidity” at City Winery in New York City.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: 1984TodayPodInstagram: 1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Frank Sanazi is a unique comedy character, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Adolf Hitler and Frank Sinatra described by his creator, the British singer and comedian Pete Cunningham, as “a satirical blitzkrieg blending dark humour, swing music and politically incorrect cabaret”.The newspaper The Scotsman has called him “brilliantly stupid, fantastically wrong and ridiculously funny”. The comedy blog Chortle considers him “a pleasure uber alles”.As well as doing solo shows, Frank also leads The Iraq Pack, a gang of crossover crooners including Dean Stalin, Saddami Davis Jr., Osama Bin Crosby, his daughter Nancy Sanazi, and, of course, Diva Braun. Frank has performed internationally, from Austria to Israel, and regularly features at Glastonbury and Bestival in the UK.His act is a wild freewheeling thumb in the eye to the seriousness with which history’s lunatics and despots have been traditionally accorded, and it cannily highlights something often overlooked about Hitler: He was a performer.“There’s no doubt about it,” the legendary comedian Mel Brooks told Der Spiegel in 2006. “Hitler worked in the same branch as we do: he created illusions.”In the same interview, Brooks summed up why mocking the 20th century’s most infamous boogeyman was not only permissible, but necessary: “[B]y using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”In this episode, Frank Sanazi joins me to talk about how he conceived and honed his character, how standup comedy has changed over the years he’s been working, and why satire and ridicule are essential tools against tyranny.You can buy Frank’s albums Mein Way on a Steinway and Songs for Swinging Leaders here. Tickets for his one-hour show at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 1 through 23) are available here. You can also visit his website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPodInsta: @1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

It’s trite to point out that the internet is an increasingly weird and difficult space to explore. AI-generated ‘slop’ muddies search results and even ends up in published scientific papers. Bots roam social media freely, making it nearly impossible to know whether interactions are organic or automated. Your voice and face can be cloned and reproduced by AI, making security breaches and fraud much more likely.The response from tech and government is to push for heightened identity verification and so-called “proof of humanity”, with one example being Sam Altman’s WorldCoin project and its iris-scanning Orb.It didn’t used to be like this. Signing a legal agreement running into the thousands of pages in order to buy a pair of jeans is not normal. A business demanding that you install their app on your phone so it can track your location, spending habits, and browser data is not normal. Being forced into a surveillance dragnet to prove you aren’t a bot is definitely not normal.Is there a way that technology can protect our civil liberties instead of eroding them?Can we re-establish privacy as a default setting in the hands of the public or are we past the point of no return?To examine these questions and more, I spoke with Shady El Damaty, co-founder of the Holonym Foundation, whose mission is the establishment and protection of “natural digital rights for privacy, security, and data ownership”. One of their projects, Human.Tech, is developing “human-centric technology that fosters freedom, resilience, and opportunity in a connected, borderless digital world.”Through applied cryptography, they believe they can provide the tools for “digital personhood” in a way that gives the individual control over what data is shared, how, and when.In 2009, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at the time, told CNBC that “if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”In 2006, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”The tech sector has broadly been on Team Schmidt for a generation. It’s time to hear from Team Schneier before it’s too late.You can visit human.tech to find out more about Holonym’s work.1984today.substack.com1984.todayInstagram: @1984TodayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

BeLikeWater (a.k.a. Lisa) is a Superforecaster® with Good Judgment Inc., the forecasting project co-created by Professor Philip Tetlock (the co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction), and a forecaster with Sentinel Global Risks Watch and the Swift Centre in the UK.In a recent interview with Polymarket about her successful forecast of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability, she made a bold call: The probability of Ayatollah Khamenei being out as Supreme Leader of Iran by the end of 2025 is “somewhere around 85%”, and “70-75%” for him to be out by the end of July.At the time of writing, Polymarket has the probability of the former at 35%, making her outlook an outlier, if not downright contrarian.To come to this and many other forecasts using the accountable framework encouraged by Good Judgment Inc., she applies a rigorous, repeatedly-updated process and works with a diverse team of colleagues to interpret, digest, and parse a wealth of information from which a prediction with clear parameters and adjustable probability can be distilled.In our conversation, she shares the details of her methods, her often-surprising thoughts on what might happen in 2025 (and beyond), and insights into the dystopian trends she sees developing or culminating in the near future.Speaking with her was as enlightening and reassuring as it was concerning. I hope you enjoy it.You can find Lisa on X and Substack, and you can read Sentinel’s reports and research here.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPodInstagram: @1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

There is sadly a lot to worry about when it comes to the rights to privacy and free speech.Digital ID, central bank digital currency, facial recognition, online censorship, spying on bank accounts - you name it, the British government has a plan, none of them very promising for individual freedom.Big Brother Watch are one of the UK’s leading civil liberties campaign organisations, and their Advocacy Manager Matthew Feeney joins me for a conversation about the challenges facing the citizens of Britain in 2025.Are we past the point of no return when it comes to the philosophical idea that a citizen in a liberal democracy is innocent until proven guilty, free to interact and transact without government oversight or interference, and entitled to the right to be let alone? Or is there still a chance to reclaim and redraw the boundary of individual liberty, to reassert that our freedoms are not granted by government at their discretion, but natural and not to be limited without due process and valid probable cause?Besides the largely unregulated roll-out of facial recognition across the UK, high on the list of looming horrors is the apparently unflushable idea of a mandatory national ID card, now rebranded for the digital age as ‘Britcard’. First tried during World War II and repealed by Churchill in 1952, it was subsequently floated by Tony Blair’s Labour government but shot down due to popular resistance. Since then it has risen over and over, unbidden and unwanted, refusing to go round the U-bend into the sewer of terrible ideas. Now it’s back, again with the support of Tony Blair in his capacity as the reviled-but-somehow-taken-seriously elder statesman of British politics, and after the current government “ruled out” the introduction of digital ID in July 2024. Big Brother Watch have a petition to reject Digital ID in the UK that you can view and sign here.“We’re a democracy that’s been around for a long time…we were dealt a good hand,” Matthew told me at one point. “I hope we don’t squander it in the near future.”As my dear departed grandfather used to say, “let’s not and say we did.”You can visit the Big Brother Watch website here or follow them on X.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Hamit Coskun (pronounced Josh-kun) is a fifty year-old asylum seeker from Turkey living in the city of Derby in northern England on a support allowance of £48 per week. His grasp of the English language is assessed at the A1 (Beginner) level, so he uses Google Translate to protest on social media about the erosion of secularism and rise of Islamist sympathies in his home country.In February 2025, he burnt a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London and was attacked by two men, one of whom had a knife. He was then arrested and charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence of which, on 3 June, he was convicted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.His case marks a potential inflection point in British policing and justice. According to the prosecutor, the barrister defending him, and the judge, no single element of his behaviour was a criminal offence. However, the violent reaction to what he did, and the fact that he did it in a public place and used “the f-word” led the Crown Prosecution Service to charge him with public disorder, and ultimately secure a conviction.I attended the entire trial and wrote it up as a long-form piece called Hamit in Wonderland. As requested/suggested by subscribers to the 1984 Today Substack, this episode is a reading of that report on the trial.You might also be interested in listening to my conversation with Hatun Tash, about getting stabbed in Hyde Park for Jesus, or reading Witness for the Persecution, the story of the Berlin ‘thought crime’ trials of the American satirist CJ Hopkins.We’ll resume our usual format of long-form conversations about dystopian trends in society in our next episode.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In 2023, Professor Garret Merriam ran an experiment that caught 40 out of 96 of his students cheating on the final exam in his ethics class at CSU Sacramento. He had decided to “poison the well” to see who among them might use a well-known study resource website to review the answers before the test, so he inserted obviously false answers that anyone paying attention in class would know to be incorrect. The process of analysing the results was “exceptionally stressful”, taking up time that he “would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.”Since then, Garret has been sounding the alarm about the prevalence of AI use and cheating at American universities, alongside writers and teachers like Ted Gioia and Troy Jollimore.Tales of woe continue to emerge from academia. Teachers are fed up of running faster and faster to stay still, spending increasing time and energy fighting the intrusion of AI-enabled cheating, playing the role of an enforcer to the detriment of delivering an education to their students.New York Magazine recently published a piece by James Walsh called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College which, despite the clickbait title doing a disservice to the many students who are trying to learn, gives a thorough picture of the parlous state of pedagogy in the age of AI. As one source tells Walsh in the article: “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”Is this the typical bellyaching of an older generation as youth discover new technologies and ways of behaving? Or is there a real problem in higher education?Garret joins me in this episode for a wide-ranging discussion on the impact that AI has had on his experience as a teacher, how he tries to balance enforcement and prevention with his responsibilities as an educator, as well as the practical and philosophical implications for society if machine learning supplants human learning.In the humanities especially, we face a pressing and vital question: Who do we become as a culture when our understanding of ourselves is shaped not by individual study and reflection but the acceptance and use of what machines say we are?You can follow Garret on X or explore his YouTube channel, Sisyphus Redeemed.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Ever since I read Travellers in the Third Reich, a Sunday Times best-seller by Julia Boyd, I’ve been recommending it to anyone who will listen. Her carefully researched narrative is constructed from the diaries, letters, and correspondence of people who visited Germany between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. From Quakers to Boy Scouts, classical music lovers to dedicated fans of Hitler, she finds and brings together a wonderfully broad range of personal contemporaneous accounts of what it was like to visit, work in, study in, and travel through a Germany struggling to redefine and reclaim itself in the interwar period.It’s an illuminating, moving, troubling picture of how we humans are prone to seeing what we want to see, discounting present dangers on the basis of our assumptions and prejudices, and failing to face the reality of what is going on around us.Julia followed that book with another, A Village in the Third Reich, the focus of which is the citizens and residents of the Bavarian mountain village of Obertsdorf. The experiences of foresters, priests, farmers, nuns, innkeepers, Nazi officials, village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats are woven together along with the accounts of the Jews who survived to give a picture of life under Nazism like no other.Her detailed research and compassionate writing won her the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for Travellers in the Third Reich, and A Village in the Third Reich was named a Waterstones Paperback of the Year and a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2022. The Oldie dubbed her “a leading historian of human responses in political extremis.”Julia joins me in this episode to talk about her experiences researching and writing the books, what the intimate correspondence of people from another time taught her about our shared humanity, and how a human being can transcend the pressures and prejudices of their era to live decently while surrounded by horrors.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Berlin’s CyBrothel is “the world’s first AI brothel”, according to its founder and Episode 130 guest Philipp Fussenegger, offering visitors an alternative to human prostitution in the form of silicone sex dolls. Some of the dolls are humanoid, some are aliens or vampires, but almost all of them can, with the visitor’s consent, interact by listening, talking back, and ‘seeing’ (with the help of CCTV). It isn’t AI making whoopee with the discerning doll diddler, though — connected remotely in real-time is a human “Voice Queen” named Leni von Mayn.In our conversation, Leni shares her personal voyage of sexual discovery with good humour, candour, and a refreshing willingness to open up. An unexpected job offer during the pandemic set her on a path from a bot brothel in Berlin to a beach in Bali, living her best life as a “sexplorer” and mindful sexuality coach. She gives her thoughts and feelings about the impact of technology on our sex lives, the importance of presence and attention in intimacy, and even throws in some tantric pointers.The idea of romping with a silicone doll that talks back while a human woman watches on CCTV and talks dirty might strike some of us as off-putting, complex, awkward, even synthetic, but is “artificial sexuality” really an alienating factor for modern humans, or just another new way for people to engage with themselves and their desires?As Woody Allen said: “Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”You can follow Leni von Mayn on Instagram and X, or find her on OnlyFans.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In 2014, an NHS junior doctor named Chris Day made “protected disclosures” to the hospital trust he worked for in south east London. He raised issues of understaffing (doctor/patient ratios were 1:18, more than double the national standard of 1:8) and reported two specific cases in which poor care led to avoidable patient deaths.The hospital trust took swift action, thanked him for bringing it to their attention, and wrote him a glowing recommendation.Just kidding.What could have been a ‘teachable moment’, or at least a routine incident of whistleblowing, instead set Chris on a collision course with Britain’s National Health Service, the then-national training provider Health Education England (HEE), and the justice system itself. In his words:One night in January 2014 I became a whistleblower. I did this without realising it and since then I have been very nearly swallowed up by an NHS made legal gap or ‘lacuna’ in whistleblowing law.Writing in 2016, Benedict Cooper explained the “lacuna” for the New Statesman:The fulcrum of the case is a gap – or “lacuna”, to get into the legalese – in the laws protecting junior doctors when they blow the whistle. A gap which exists because of an ambiguity as to who is ultimately responsible for their career, and which Day’s case has revealed. The status quo is that HEE isn’t fully bound by S43K whistleblowing laws because it is a training provider not an employer, while NHS trusts, which take junior doctors on as temporary employees contract-by-contract, don’t have to afford the same rights to them as they would more permanent staff . The background – and how this fits into the junior doctors contract dispute – is all here.Day and his legal team are arguing that this ambiguity is leaving junior doctors in a no-man’s land; that while doctors are duty bound to report concerns, they’re not protected against harsh treatment when they do; that HEE, as de facto employers of junior doctors, should step up and take responsibility for them.Chris found himself unable to work for the NHS as a junior doctor, characterised as “angry” and “emotional”, and embroiled in a fight to prove that he was an employee of the organisation he worked for in order to benefit from whistleblower protection.As Chris went from hearing to hearing, he found the lengths his former employers were willing to go to to discredit him and save face increasingly extreme:* In one episode, “one of the trust’s directors “deliberately” deleted up to 90,000 emails midway through a tribunal hearing in July 2022.” * The outcome of one hearing was a ruling that effectively stripped 54,000 junior doctors in the UK of whistleblower protection, later overturned on appeal. * The law firm defending HEE turned out not to have “disclosed key contracts it had been paid public money to draft for its client”, contracts that could have resolved the “fulcrum of the case” and prevented what ex-shadow health minister Justin Madders described as “a lengthy and wholly unnecessary legal battle where HEE was effectively seeking to remove around 54,000 doctors out of whistleblowing protections by claiming that they were not their employer.”As Tommy Greene wrote for Byline Times in 2023:This lack of disclosure allowed the agency to argue it could not be considered the legal employer of junior doctors – a position that Court of Appeal judges overturned in 2017. The contracts were eventually obtained through FOI requests in 2019.Believe it or not, Chris’s case is still ongoing, and, after more than ten years, the British Medical Association has now announced it is backing him up “as part of plans to improve its support for whistleblowers.”How much has the perennially cash-strapped NHS spent fighting Chris in court? According to Tommy Greene (writing in 2023):As of 2018, more than £700,000 had been spent by NHS bodies defending the case brought by Day. Overall costs are currently thought to stand at around £1 million.Chris joins me for a deep dive into his journey from junior doctor to “lightning rod”, and opens up about how he’s found the strength to keep going despite the numerous reversals along the way.You can visit Chris’s website, follow him on X or LinkedIn, or follow his case on CrowdJustice.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Are the nations of ‘the West’, especially the United States, in a new Cold War with Russia and China?What does the world look like now that nations favouring authoritarian governance and repression of civil liberties have become major influential global powers?How can states and individual citizens navigate the new reality in which we find ourselves?According to the March 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, “Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—individually and collectively—are challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions, with both asymmetric and conventional hard power tactics, and promoting alternative systems to compete with the United States, primarily in trade, finance, and security.”Is this a global hegemony bemoaning the rise of a new multipolar order, or are we hearing an early warning signal of a potentially far-reaching 21st century power struggle?To get into all this and more, I’m joined by Velina Tchakarova, a geopolitical strategist and strategic foresight expert. Velina runs a consultancy called For A Conscious Experience (FACE), serves on the board of the European Alpbach Forum and the Advisory Board of a French think tank called Eastern Circles, is a visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, and was previously the Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy in Vienna.In our wide-ranging conversation, she describes what she calls ‘Cold War 2.0’, a new oppositional relationship between the United States and Europe on one side and the alliance she calls the DragonBear, made up of Russia and China, on the other. As summed up in the U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, Cold War 2.0 is an undeclared conflict in which the DragonBear and its allies “seek to challenge the United States and other countries through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, while also trying to avoid direct war.”One doesn’t need to be an apologist for the excesses and vagaries of American power projection to see how an alliance of authoritarian regimes keen on securing their own interests and projecting their own values internationally can have a chilling effect on the rights and quality of life of individuals everywhere.You can find Velina on X for up-to-the-minute clear-eyed commentary, or read her blog posts on FACE’s website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In January 2025, Elon Musk started posting on X about a long-festering blot on the copybook of British justice, the decades-long organised mass rape of children across the cities of northern England by ‘grooming gangs’.In places like Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and Oldham, years of horrific abuse had gone barely acknowledged by authorities, with intermittent, insufficient, and inconsistent prosecution. The majority of the victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 16.After Musk’s social media posts, the scandal became international news, with the media often seeming more upset that Musk was criticising the British government than about the years of mass rape, human trafficking, torture, and murder that the alliterative sanitised phrase “grooming gangs” glosses over.An inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, commissioned in 2013 by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and published the following year, gave a “conservative estimate…that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013,” and that “[t]his abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day.” The report was, in a word, damning:Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.Jay subsequently oversaw a full report, published in 2022, that called rampant child abuse an “epidemic that left thousands of victims in its poisonous wake,” in which institutions “prioritised their reputations above the welfare of those they were duty bound to protect.”In the report’s foreword, Jay wrote: “I urge the UK government, the Welsh Government and all other relevant institutions to implement promptly the Inquiry’s recommendations which are designed to protect children from sexual abuse in the future.” The report made detailed recommendations to the Home Office and called for swift action to prevent the failures of the past from continuing into the future.In January 2025, when Musk’s social media activity drew fresh attention to the issue, it was twenty-seven months after the 2022 report and Professor Jay had been “frustrated” by the lack of action from government.Whistleblowers, community activists, and citizen journalists like Raja Miah had been working to get the story proper scrutiny for years, but Musk’s involvement, while bringing attention, drove the characterisation of ‘grooming gangs’ as a far-right talking point, summed up as follows by Sky News in their coverage at the time:Condemnation of rape and grooming gangs isn't far-right in itself: the entire British public shares exactly the same position. But there's evidence that Musk's introduction to the topic is a result of right-wing and far-right accounts on X. At issue was a sore spot at the centre of the sordid sinuous saga: The majority of the victims in places like Rochdale and Rotherham had been white, and the majority of the perpetrators had been from the Asian, usually Pakistani, community. One inquiry into the failures that prevented or delayed justice mentioned a “nervousness about race”. Britain’s success story as a multicultural society was seen as being endangered by the ethnicity of the criminals and their victims.On one side, a reasonable fear of opportunistic elements seizing on the role of minorities in horrific crimes to drum up violence and social unrest. On the other side, the very real experience of being frozen out of the justice system and abandoned by institutions and the government because admitting and facing the problem head on would concede something that could be misused by those elements.Raja Miah joins me in this episode to give a detailed insight into the genesis of the scandal, the communities that were affected, and the successive governments that looked the other way.Raja is a second generation Bangladeshi Muslim who received an MBE in 2004 for his community service. He is also a self-described rabble-rouser who proudly points out that the Labour Party considers him “a dangerous man”. He says that he has “a bounty on his head from both gangsters and Islamists who he has exposed for their open links to Labour Party politicians.”You can watch his regular transmissions on his Recusant Nine YouTube channel, follow him on X, or visit his website at Red Wall & The Rabble.1984.today1984today.substack.comFollow us on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In recent months, Britain, like Europe, has seen farmers take to the streets in their thousands to protest against changes in the law that they say will make their jobs harder, undermine food security, and possibly even close them down. Britain has proposed a change to inheritance tax that would affect 25% of the country’s farms and could result in many farms being parcelled off or even sold entirely. The EU has a clear plan to “restore” 20% of its land and sea, albeit subject to an “emergency brake” that would place reductions on hold at the national level “under exceptional circumstances if they severely reduce the land needed for sufficient food production for EU consumption”.Are these necessary steps to protect the environment, or the final nail in the coffin for national food security? Could it be both? Helen Freeman joins me to get into these questions, and more. Helen works for Farms Not Factories, an NGO campaigning to end factory farming in the UK. She is also a farmer with a high welfare free range herd of Saddleback pigs. You can find her writing on Substack and follow her on Instagram.In our conversation we make reference to her article The Price of Protest, about the 10 February 2025 farmer protest in London.I hope you enjoy it.1984today.substack.com1984.today@1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“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.1984today.substack.com1984.today@1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.1984.today1984today.substack.comX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.https://1984today.substack.comhttps://www.1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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!1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.1984today.substack.com1984.today@1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.Find us online:https://www.1984.todayhttps://1984today.substack.comX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“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.Visit our websiteSubscribe (for free) to our SubstackFind us on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.Subscribe for free on SubstackVisit our websiteFollow us on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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.https://1984today.substack.comhttps://www.1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Hatun Tash is a Turkish ex-Muslim turned Christian evangelist who, in September 2024, “won £10,000 in damages and costs from the Metropolitan Police after being arrested, strip searched and unlawfully imprisoned for wearing a Charlie Hebdo t-shirt and having her property stolen at Speakers’ Corner in London”. Here’s a video of the incident, which happened in 2022. The stolen property in question was her personal copy of the Quran, which had multiple holes drilled through it in reference to Islamic theologian Dr Yasir Qadhi’s contemporaneous remark that the story of the preservation of the Quran “has holes in it.”The 2024 settlement was the second payment made to her by the Met. In 2022, she was awarded £10,000 for two wrongful arrests, one of which was caught on camera. In both cases, she donated the money to charity.Hatun is the founder of Defend Christ Critique Islam (DCCI) Ministries. She is well-known worldwide for denouncing Muhammad as a false prophet, and speaking out against what she perceives as serious issues with the Muslim faith, often drawing on Islamic sources. Her unabashed anti-Islamic evangelism is not everyone’s cup of tea. The result is not just mistreatment by the British police, but vociferous and violent attacks and threats by Muslims who object to what she says.She has been surrounded and jostled by jeering mobs, hit in the face while holding up a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, stabbed in the face and arm in Hyde Park, and hunted by an assassin intending to shoot her in public.She has received multiple Osman warnings, which are issued in the UK “if police have intelligence of a real and immediate threat to the life of an individual.” She is unable to live in ordinary accommodation because of the risk the threats against her pose to potential housemates. Even holding down a regular job or maintaining a normal social life are nearly impossible.All of this happened in 21st century Britain, because of violent reactions by ideologues to what Hatun says online and in public, reactions that have mostly gone unpunished by the same police that frequently arrest her. To some observers, this “dogmatic hounding of those who commit the ‘sin’ of giving offence” is tantamount to a back-door blasphemy law. Brendan O’Neill put it succinctly in the headline of a piece for The Spectator: The plight of Hatun Tash shames Britain.Hatun spoke with me from an undisclosed location, showing resolve and good humour about the difficulties she faces on a daily basis. Regardless of whether one shares her beliefs or opinions, her unwavering commitment to free speech is inspiring and her refusal to be intimidated should be a shot in the arm for all those who self-censor out of fear.I’ll give her the last word:“People should have the right to criticise anything and anyone. None of us is untouchable.”Find Hatun Tash’s DCCI Ministries on YouTube.https://1984today.substack.comhttps://www.1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com to receive weekly dystopian news! CJ Hopkins, author, satirist, and playwright, will be re-tried for thought crime in Berlin on Monday 30 September at 10:30am in Room 145a of the Kammergericht, located at Elßholzstraße 30-33.The trial might as well be in Room 101.In this handy fact sheet, CJ gives the timeline of his experience being prosecuted by the German government for two tweets he sent in 2022 criticising the country’s lockdown and mask mandate policies. Those tweets had images of his book cover attached, the centrepiece of which is a medical mask beneath which a swastika is faintly visible.As a result, he was charged with disseminating propaganda in support of a National Socialist organisation, a bizarre allegation given the context.In January 2024, he was acquitted. The judge made it clear that the charges were baseless: "[W]hen taking into account the text associated with the use of the mask, it can easily be seen that the connection to National Socialism is made in an emphatically negative sense."Inexplicably, the prosecution appealed the verdict, forcing CJ to go through a second trial.If his acquittal is confirmed, CJ should be free. If, however, the acquittal is overturned, the case will be kicked back down to the lower court for yet another trial, a “death loop” which could continue indefinitely.CJ and his lawyer, the litigator and criminal defence attorney Friedemann Däblitz, join me to discuss the case, the procedure of being dragged through the courts by a government with unlimited resources, and the global crackdown on free speech and dissent of which this case is a part.With the support of his readers and subscribers, CJ has been able to stay the course and, with Friedemann’s help, argue the case where it truly matters: in open court.It remains to be seen whether justice will be done.You can find CJ on Substack, X, or at his websites here and here.https://www.1984.todayhttps://1984today.substack.comX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com!I found out about Sanne Van Oosten’s work on X when she shared her experience of being shunned by media outlets indifferent to her research findings that voters don’t discriminate on the basis of gender and ethnicity.A social scientist at Oxford University specialising in meta-analysis and intergroup conflict, Sanne is uniquely positioned to comment on Kamala Harris’s prospects in the US presidential election, as well as the social status factors that may drive some of Donald Trump’s supporters.Sanne’s meta-analysis of 43 studies spanning 10 years and involving over 305,000 respondents shows that voters are overwhelmingly interested in policy, not identity, and that the presumption of voter bias by political apparatchiks is out of step with a public that actually favours female and minority candidates.Our conversation gets into the detail of her work, taking in the ways that academia as well as media have played a narrative-shaping role not entirely aligned with the reassuring reality that, as a voting public, we are not as divided and prejudiced as some might claim.You can find Sanne on X and BlueSky as @SBVanOosten.https://www.1984.todayhttps://1984today.substack.com@1984TodayPod on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com!In this Summer Special, I take the show on the road to meet people at the London incarnation of a global Day of Visibility called We Are Ready. From all over the UK, citizens gathered in Parliament Square, facing the seat of Britain’s government, to raise their voices on the issues that matter to them, and to protest what they think has gone wrong.A common theme was that uncontrollable forces are taking society in an objectionable direction. From Covid vaccines to extraterrestrial Satanists, the list of problems and malefactors was long and varied. What the forces at play were, and whether they were guided deliberately or somehow emergent, changed depending on who I spoke with. The people there were kind, patient, and open to being approached, and I had some great conversations.I hope you enjoy this field report. We’ll be back to our normal format of long-form one-on-one interviews in our next episode.Enjoy!https://1984today.substack.comhttps://www.1984.today@1984TodayPod on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!This episode was a surprise. After releasing Episode 119, I received the following message from a listener who goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein:Just listened to your podcast with Jerry Barnett and loved it, but now I feel like kinda HAVING to offer to be you next guest (if you are interested). I can mainly talk about socialism and how I experienced it growing up in East Germany and then later through the communes my mother joined afterwards.The fact that his pseudonym is taken from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it all the more intriguing.How could I turn that down?We set up a date and time, and I went in basically blind, with almost no idea of what he would share with me.The result was a startling, spontaneous, and deeply personal conversation, about the impact of parental ideology on a child’s development, living with trauma, and learning to think independently after dealing with indoctrination.From being the privileged child of a Communist Party official in East Germany to living on a Gnostic commune in Bavaria, from being forced to live as a girl to growing into a man, what Emmanuel shared is enough for several lifetimes, of both experience and therapy.I hope you find it as fascinating and as moving as I did.Enjoy.https://www.1984.todayhttps://1984today.substack.com@1984TodayPod on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Jerry Barnett is a technologist, campaigner, and the author of Porn Panic!His book, and his other writing for outlets like Quillette, examines the junction of free expression, sexuality, and identity, especially recent examples of moral outrage from what he calls “the identitarian Left.”We had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, getting his views on identity politics, nationalism, racism, feminism, the way both the modern left and right share a penchant for pearl-clutching, the echoes of Orwell in our current moment, you name it.He’s always fun to talk to, erudite, mordant, and passionate about reason and individualism.You can find him on X, as @jerrybarnett, or on Substack at jerrybarnett.substack.com.I hope you enjoy our conversation.https://www.1984.todayhttps://1984today.substack.comX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Christina Dalcher is a professor, linguist, and the best-selling author of the novels like VOX, Q (Master Class in the US), Femlandia, and The Sentence.In VOX, a religious conservative movement comes to power in the United States. By technological means, the Pure Movement prevents women from speaking more than 100 words a day, and embarks on an unspeakable plot to destroy the very root of human language.In Q, a strictly stratified educational system relentlessly tests children to measure their Quotient (hence the Q).In Femlandia, a woman and her daughter encounter a women-only commune where, inexplicably, children continue to be born.Underpinning Christina’s work is a clear and powerful desire to examine the human condition in tension with government, technology, and social hierarchy. Her central characters tend to be women struggling to protect their children, or driven by a fear of what might happen to their children.We discuss her background in linguistics as a key part of imagining the worst that could happen to the world, her methods for developing and structuring a thrilling narrative, the way she approaches character and world-building, and some unexpected sources of inspiration for her dark creations.We had a fun, open, personal conversation which left me with a deeper appreciation of her and her writing. I hope you enjoy it.You can find Christina at www.christinadalcher.com or on X as CV_Dalcher.https://www.1984.todayhttps://1984today.substack.com@1984TodayPod on X This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at the New York Times and the author of an excellent book about facial recognition technology called Your Face Belongs To Us.She very kindly agreed to come on to talk about her book, and how she discovered the existence of Clearview AI, a shady tech company that just lost a court case in the State of Illinois brought against them (thanks to her reporting) by people whose pictures were scraped off of social media without their permission.In the UK, Clearview managed to beat a similar rap and the Information Commissioner is trying to appeal.In our conversation, we get into other examples of facial recognition and biometrics gone wrong, the abuses that a search engine for faces makes possible, the creepy concept of LOVEINT (when law enforcement use intelligence tools to track or stalk their love interests), and much more.Somehow, Kashmir remains hopeful that “the rickety scaffolding of the Panopticon” can be dismantled before it’s too late, although time is running out.You’ll also find out what a ‘red list’ is, and it’s as Black Mirror as you think.You can find Kashmir on X as @kashhill, and I can’t recommend her book highly enough. It’s an exposé of the grotty game being played by surveillance technology companies, and a travelogue of her journey into the engine room of the dystopian present.Find us on X: @1984todaypodWebsite: https://www.1984.todaySubstack: https://1984today.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Steve Endacott is the human behind AI Steve, the UK’s first AI parliamentary candidate, and the founder of SmarterUK, a new political party.AI Steve is competing to become the MP for Brighton Pavilion in the upcoming general election. Unlike a ‘real’ MP, AI Steve is available 24/7, generates policies through dialogue with constituents, and, if elected, will validate those policies through online voting before proposing them in Parliament.The ‘Real’ Steve Endacott is an entrepreneur, and believes that the widespread adoption of AI is inevitable, as are catastrophic job losses. He thinks AI is very dangerous, that government needs to step up to regulate it and provide some form of Universal Basic Income to mitigate the fallout, and he also wants to drive adoption and deployment of AI through his businesses.In short, he’s an interesting guy.We had a fun conversation whipping through his work, his disillusionment with mainstream politics, and his embracing of AI as a catalyst for a better society.Enjoy!You can find AI Steve online at https://www.ai-steve.co.uk.https://1984today.substack.comhttps://www.1984.todayhttps://www.x.com/@1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for our weekly dystopian round-up!Bjørn Karmann is a Danish inventor based in Amsterdam who created Paragraphica, a lens-less camera powered by AI that uses data instead of light to create images. It generates a photograph of what it ‘thinks’ you are looking at, using variables like the weather, the time of day, and of course, your location. It also looks wild.I saw his demo of how it works and had to speak to him.We know our memories are imperfect, but a photo of a moment is still a snapshot of a point in time in our lives. Now, with Paragraphica, that snapshot of a moment of life is not just mediated by technology, it is generated. Is it real? Is it fake? Something in between? What could a future of moments generated rather than captured look like? What will the past look like from that future? Would it really even be our past?You can try the online version of Paragraphica on his website.Bjørn’s work could be called ‘subversive design’; he creates things that comment on or alter existing technology. His previous inventions have included Alias, a “teachable parasite” that gives you more control over your home ‘smart assistant’, and Occlusion Grotesque, a font that changes over time because it is carved into a tree.We had a great conversation about his work, his philosophy of design, intrusive technology, the relationship between memory and reality, and much more. We even came up with an idea for our own app, but you’ll need to listen to find out what it is.Bjørn is on X as @BjoernKarmann and his website is https://bjoernkarmann.dk/.Find us on X, on Instagram, on Substack, or on our website.Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com