Litigator David Seligman describes how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US.
More like this: The Human in the Loop: The AI Supply Chain
We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!
Alix and David talk about legal devices such as forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression — and the cases that David’s team are bringing to fight these practices
Further reading & resources
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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou
Reporting on the tech industry proves a huge challenge due to how opaque it all is — Empire of AI author Karen Hao talks us through her investigative methods in a conversation from November 2024.
More like this: Net 0++ AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy
We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!
AI companies are flagrantly obstructive when it comes to sharing information about their infrastructure — this makes reporting on the climate injustices of AI really hard. Karen shares the tactics that these companies use, and the challenges that she has faced in her investigative reporting.
Further reading:
Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou
A replay of our conversation with Kate Sim, on the state of child safety online.
More like this: Dogwhistles: Networked Transphobia Online
We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!
Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child safety isn’t a new concept, and the way our politics focuses on the spectacle isn’t new either.
To help us unpack this is Kate Sim, who has over a decade of experience in sexual violence prevention and response and is currently the Director of the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program at the University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab. We discuss the growth of ‘child safety’ regulation around the world, and how it often conflates multiple topics: age-gating adult content, explicit attempts to harm children, national security, and even ‘family values’.
Further reading & resources:
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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou
Before we break for the year we wanted to reflect on what the podcast brought us in 2025, and what we want to see for 2026
This week Alix is joined by two members of The Maybe team: Prathm Juneja and Georgia Iacovou. We discuss our favourite episodes from the year while making it clear we love all episodes equally. And also this is not your standard clip show. We ask ourselves what we learned, why it was important to us, and what we are hungry for in 2026.
Featured episodes:
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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou
The Onion CEO Ben Collins has successfully turned political satire into a sustainable business. He explains why humorous messaging is important to understand times like these — and why he’s dead serious about buying Infowars.
Head to our feed for more conversations from MozFest with Abeba Birhane, Audrey Tang, and Luisa Franco Machado.
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Audrey Tang has some big ideas on how we can use collective needs to shape AI systems — and avoid a future where human life is seen as an obstacle to paper clip production. She also shares what might be the first actual good use-case for AI agents…
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You can’t build a digital rights movement if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. Luisa says that we’re in a crisis of imagination, and that participation — the non-performative kind — is one big way out of this.
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Earlier this year Abeba Birhane was asked to give a keynote at the AI for Good Summit for the UN — and at the eleventh hour they attempted to censor any mention of genocide in Palestine, and their Big Tech sponsors. She was invited to give her full uncensored talk at Mozfest.
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Mozilla Festival 2025. Barcelona. Three days in a bonanza of interesting people, ideas, and technology politics. These were our highlights!
More like this: FAccT 2025 episodes one and two
This is an extra special episode packed full of conversations and on-site impressions of the biggest Mozfest we’ve had in years. This year Alix moderated three panels, ran an AMA, and even hosted a game show — and somehow also had time to record all of this, for your pleasure.
Included in this episode is:
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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou
Everything is happening so fast. And a lot of it’s bad. What can research and science organizations do when issues are complex, fast-moving, and super important?
More like this: Independent Researchers in a Platform Era w/ Brandi Guerkink
Building knowledge is more important than ever in times like these. This week, we have three guests. Megan Price from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) shares how statistics and data science can be used to get justice. Janet Haven and Charlton McIlwan from Data & Society explore the role that research institutions can offer to bridge research knowledge and policy prescription.
Further reading & resources:
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Imagine doing tech research… but from outside the tech industry? What an idea…
More like this: Nodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask
So much of tech research happens within the tech industry itself, because it requires data access, funding, and compute. But what the tech industry has in resources, it lacks in independence, scruples, and a public interest imperative. Alix is joined by Brandi Guerkink from The Coalition of Independent Tech Research to discuss her work at a time where platforms have never been so opaque, and funding has never been so sparse
Further Reading & Resources:
Disclosure: This guest is a PR client of our consultancy team. As always, the conversation reflects our genuine interest in their work and ideas.
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Governments around the world are using predictive systems to manage engagement with even the most vulnerable. Results are mixed.
More like this: Algorithmically Cutting Benefits w/ Kevin De Liban
Luckily people like Soizic Pénicaud are working to prevent the modern welfare state from becoming a web of punishment of the most marginalised. Soizic has worked on algorithmic transparency both in and outside of a government context, and this week will share her journey from working on incrementally improving these systems (boring, ineffective, hard) — to escaping the slow pace of government and looking at the bigger picture of algorithmic governance, and how it can build better public benefit in France (fun, transformative, and a good challenge).
Soizic is working to shift political debates about opaque decision-making algorithms to focus on what they’re really about: the marginalised communities who’s lives are most effected by these systems.
Further reading & resources:
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Seeing is believing. Right? But what happens when we lose trust in the reproductive media put in front of us?
More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI and Journalism w/ Nic Dawes
We talked to a global expert and leading voice on this issue for the past 20 years, Sam Gregory to get his take. We started way back in 1992 when Rodney King was assaulted by 4 police officers in Los Angeles. Police brutality was (and is) commonplace, but something different happened in this case. Someone used a camcorder and caught it on video. It changed our understanding about the role video could play in accountability. And in the past 30 years, we’ve gone from seeking video as evidence and advocacy, to AI slop threatening to seismically reshape our shared realities.
Now apps like Sora provide impersonation-as-entertainment. How did we get here?
Further reading & resources:
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Post Production by Sarah Myles
What happens when AI models try to fill the gaping hole in the media landscape where journalists should be?
More like this: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes
This week Alix is joined by Nic Dawes, who until very recently ran the non-profit newsroom The City. In this conversation we explore journalism’s new found toxic relationship with AI and big tech: can journalists meaningfully use AI in their work? If a model summarises a few documents, does that add a new layer of efficiency, or inadvertently oversimplify? And what can we learn from big tech positioning itself as a helpful friend to journalism during the Search era?
Beyond the just accurate relaying of facts, journalistic organisations also represent an entire backlog of valuable training data for AI companies. If you don’t have the same resources as the NYT, suing for copyright infringement isn’t an option — so what then? Nic says we have to break out of the false binary of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them!’
Further reading & resources:
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Mozilla Foundation wants to chart a new path in the AI era. But what is its role now and how can it help reshape the impacts and opportunities of technology for… everyone?
More like this: Defying Datafication w/ Abeba Birhane
Alix sat down with Nabiha Syed to chat through her first year as the new leader of Mozilla Foundation. How does she think about strategy in this moment? What role does she want the foundation to play? And crucially, how is she stewarding a community of human-centered technology builders in a time of hyper-scale and unchecked speculation?
As Nabiha says, “restraint is a design principle too”.
Plug: We’ll be at MozFest this year broadcasting live and connecting with all kinds of folks. If you’re feeling the FOMO, be on the look out for episodes we produce about our time there.
Further reading & resources:
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Loneliness and mental health illnesses are rising in the US, while access to care dwindles — so a lot of people are turning to chatbots. Do chatbots work for therapy?
More like this: The Collective Intelligence Project w/ Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew
Why are individuals are confiding in chatbots over qualified human therapists? Stevie Chancellor explains why an LLM can’t replace a therapeutic relationship — but often there’s just no other choice. Turns out the chatbots designed specifically for therapy are even worse than general models like ChatGPT; Stevie shares her ideas on how LLMs could potentially be used — safely — for therapeutic support. This is really helpful primer on how to evaluate chatbots for specific, human-replacing tasks.
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What’s it like working as a local representative when you live next door to Silicon Valley?
More like this: Chasing Away Sidewalk Labs w/ Bianca Wylie
When Hilary Ronen was on the board of supervisors for San Francisco, she had to make lots of decisions about technology. She felt unprepared. Now she sees local policymakers on the frontlines of a battle of resources and governance in an AI era, and is working to upskill them to make better decisions for their constituents. No degree in computer science required.
Further reading & resources:
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Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification
More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick
This is our final episode of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology both amplifies and obscures them. For this final instalment we have Cory Doctorow on to chat about his new book Enshittification.
Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised reverse centaur’ is…
Further reading & resources:
Thought we were at peak scam? Well, ScamGPT just entered the chat.
More like this: Gotcha! The Crypto Grift w/ Mark Hays
This is part three of Gotcha! — our series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them. This week Lana Swartz and Alice Marwick join Alix to discuss their primer on how generative AI is automating fraud.
We dig into the very human, very dark world of the scam industry, where the scammers are often being exploited in highly sophisticated human trafficking operations — and are now using generative AI to scale up and speed up.
We talk about how you probably aren’t going to get a deepfake call from a family member to demand a ransom, but the threats are still evolving in ways that are scary and until now largely unregulated. And as ever even though the problems are made worse by technology, we explore the limitations of technology and laws to stem the tide.
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This just in with data centers: Energy grids are strained, water is scarce, utility costs are through the roof — ah well, let them eat compute, I guess!
More like this: AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy
It was just climate week in NYC and we did a live show on data centers with four amazing guests from around the US…
Thank you to the Luminate Foundation for sponsoring this live show and for all of our NY-based friends, and network from around the world that made it to Brooklyn for a magical evening. You can also watch the live recording on Youtube.
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