In this remark, Sullivan displayed far more lucidity regarding AI than did other members of the Democratic establishment. (Take Kamala Harris’ bewildering characterization of bias and misinformation as “existential” threats.) Their successors in the White House, though, see AI as central to their plans for American dominance. Last week, the Trump administration slapped strict export controls on Nvidia’s H20 chip. And on Monday, the president’s science and technology policy chief, Michael Kratsios, told an audience of technologists that AI would be central to the new “Golden Age of America”. 

It is easy enough to say that a new technology will power prosperity. The reality, though, is that AI is more challenging a topic for the White House than Kratsios let on. There were some clues in JD Vance’s speech on artificial intelligence in Paris in February. It was his first major policy address as vice president, and it revealed an understanding of AI that befits him as a former tech investor. 

But it was also a careful political balancing act. Vance promised that the Trump administration’s AI policy would, simultaneously, be highly deregulatory, cripple American adversaries, and “center American workers”. These wide-ranging undertakings hint at the underlying reality of Vance’s speech: that the Trump administration’s emerging AI policy is being shaped by distinct factions with different priorities and worldviews.

As AI capabilities improve, the ideological divisions have only sharpened. Silicon Valley accelerationists push for unfettered development while invoking Chinese competition as a shield against regulation. Meanwhile, the populist elements of Trump’s base remain deeply skeptical of coastal elites building “machine gods” that could displace American workers. 

These contradictions explain Vance’s rhetorical tightrope: promising deregulation to please potential big tech donors, while assuring workers that they will have “a seat at the table” in a future that may not require their labor. It is what you would expect from an administration being pulled in three directions.

The strongest pull comes from the “accelerationists”. This is a group that includes venture capitalists, such as Marc Andreessen, and their venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and tech giants interested in AI like Meta and Nvidia. 

They spend hundreds of millions in lobbying and political spending. After pharmaceuticals, tech giants are DC’s largest lobbyists. They have one lobbyist for every two Congress members, spending a record $61.5 million in reported federal lobbying in 2024, not including unreported think tank donations and direct political fundraising. It is commonly recognized in Silicon Valley that when a senator visits, the first dinner stop they make is a fundraiser hosted by Marc Andreessen or David Sacks, now the White House’s AI and crypto czar. 

The group has said again and again that technological advancement should not be hampered by over-regulation or a fear of hypothetical future risks. It is a group that has been scarred by the crippling environmental regulation of the late 20th century — particularly for nuclear power, where environmentalist groups made similarly “existential” arguments about nuclear safety. Accelerationists liken such thinking to that of the Effective Altruists, who have long called for caution in the development of AI, and whose lobbying influenced the Biden administration.

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Much of Andreessen’s writing about AI is an implicit rebuke to Effective Altruism. In his manifesto “Why AI Will Save The World”, he positions AI as “quite possibly the most important — and best — thing our civilization has ever created”. He rejects concerns about AI killing humanity (calling this a “category error”, since AI is “math — code — computers”); ruining society through harmful outputs (dismissing objections as “thought police”); eliminating jobs (Andreessen counters this with economic theories on productivity growth); or causing inequality (arguing technology democratization benefits everyone).

As we get closer to powerful AI systems beyond “math — code — computers”, and public and political concerns grow, the accelerationist faction will likely double down on their framing of regulations as capitulation to China. They will reframe the debate around American dominance. Ted Cruz summed things up on his podcast: “If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese.” 

Soon enough, national security risks will become clear. These will include AI-assisted bioweapon development, or clear evidence that systems are misaligned with the intent of their operators. At this point, the accelerationists will call for guardrails, but only those of the superficial kind. 

In that event, the accelerationists might sound like they are in line with the China hawks, but will quietly continue business as usual. Meta continues to open-source its latest models, despite reports of their use by China’s military. Nvidia has lobbied against, and blatantly violated, export controls. These companies’ political capital comes not only from their willingness to spend money on lobbying, but from their availability as “experts”. Much policymaking is based on available “expertise”, which often means corporate lobbyists.

The accelerationists, then, now have the most power over the White House’s AI policy. But they might understand the least about what’s coming.

The national security hawks have a clearer view of the future. This is a group whose origins can be traced, at least in part, to the first Trump administration. In 2019, the president presciently signed the first ever executive order on AI, recognizing “the paramount importance of American AI leadership to the economic and national security of the United States”. 

This view persisted among select members of the Biden administration, including Sullivan and Ben Buchanan. Sullivan and Buchanan have been succeeded in the White House by a faction that includes traditional Republican “China Hawks” such as the new National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, who view AI as the defining front in a new cold war. The faction has allies in AI lab leaders, like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who have publicly advocated for the US to maintain leadership in the development of AI, even if it involves means such as export controls.

To the national security hawks, it is an undeniable fact that China must not achieve superintelligence first. There are two distinct ways to ensure victory: Accelerate America or Obstruct China.

The choice of approach depends on the perceived risks of AI beyond the China competition. It’s no good beating Beijing if, by winning, the US loses control of advanced systems. The greater the perceived existential risk from advanced AI itself, the more inclined officials become toward obstruction over acceleration.

The “Accelerate America” hawks believe that the US must be ahead in AI development at all costs. As such, President Trump’s recent executive order calls for “American Dominance” in AI. At minimum, this means streamlining permitting, removing regulatory barriers, and avoiding hindrances to American progress. And, encouraged by the recent tariffs, reshoring efforts are gaining momentum: Nvidia announced on Monday that it will manufacture its latest Blackwell AI chips in the US, as part of a broader $500 billion investment in the next four years. Hindrances to accelerationists include things like creator copyright enforcement. Accelerate America hawks view any government interference that slows American labs as ultimately benefiting Chinese competitors, who operate without such constraints.

Moving further along the spectrum, mid-level hawkish interventions would see the military and government industries not merely adopting advanced AI systems, but actively co-developing them. The most aggressively hawkish iteration of the Trump administration would designate AGI as a national priority, overseeing a “Manhattan Project” for superintelligent AI, and giving unprecedented access to resources. One such resource would be the NSA’s reams of high quality data.

This policy would entail large government involvement, which could trigger a nation-state arms race. China, we can imagine, would perceive American government-led AI development as an existential threat requiring matching countermeasures. Another problem with the plan is that it would transfer development authority away from technical experts and toward bureaucrats and military planners. As a result, it would decrease the competence of those overseeing the potential intelligence explosion.

The other group of hawks, the “Chinese Obstruction” camp, focuses less on winning and more on ensuring that China loses. If empowered, this faction would enact rigorous national security evaluations of AI systems, the idea being to build up state capacity and defensive expertise within AI. (This is the current mandate of the US AI Safety Institute.) The obstructionists could extend to federally-backed intervention. This strategy would recognize that open-sourcing AI significantly benefits China, which has strong technical talent but weaker computational resources. With this in mind, note Sam Altman’s recent announcement that OpenAI will open-source one of its leading models. He is trying to get the beating of DeepSeek, a Chinese rival, perhaps to the detriment of national security.

By keeping model weights private, as well as restricting knowledge of training methodologies, America might be able to maintain its lead. This strategy rests on information asymmetry. As such, it might include export controls on both hardware and knowledge. There could be criminal penalties for sharing restricted AI information with Chinese entities, and policymakers could classify certain AI techniques as controlled defense technologies. There are already signs of this attitude. Senator Tom Cotton recently proposed barring citizens from foreign adversaries like China from working in the national laboratories.

The obstructionist hawks borrow from nuclear deterrence theory. As a result, they understand that the creation of transparent thresholds for AI development (such as the size of a training run), and the imposition of consequences for those who violate those thresholds, might make the development of superintelligence less economically and politically attractive. (That was the argument of a well-circulated paper whose three authors included a former Google CEO and an advisor to Elon Musk’s xAI company). Under such a strategy, the US would publicly commit to specific countermeasures triggered by Chinese advancement toward superintelligence. These countermeasures could range from economic sanctions to targeted cyber operations against research infrastructure to more aggressive interventions.

Finally, the most extreme obstructionist approach recognizes that the AI arms race itself might be destabilizing, regardless of who wins. This strategy would involve America voluntarily restraining its own superintelligence development in exchange for verifiable international agreements — perhaps the “Deal of the Century” (or Anthropocene) for President Trump. It would require sophisticated verification mechanisms, potentially including international inspection regimes similar to nuclear non-proliferation treaties. The fundamental premise is that the prospect of Chinese superintelligence is so troubling that America should sacrifice its own in order to avoid it.

The populist Right is the third major faction likely to influence the administration’s approach to AI. This is a group that is dormant in formal policy circles but vocal in the cultural landscape that elected Trump.

Take the comments made by Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Joe Rogan regarding superintelligence and the Trump administration’s official policies. Carlson has characterized AI as a “threat to human civilization”. On his appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Carlson went further, declaring: “If it’s bad for people we should strangle it in its crib. Why not just blow up the data centers?” Steve Bannon predicts “artificial superintelligence that is far more intelligent, far more creative, far more powerful than human beings”. Joe Rogan doesn’t think we are ready for it.

This faction splits into two sociologically distinct but overlapping groups. The religious traditionalists — Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals — fundamentally reject Silicon Valley’s quest to create “machine gods”. To them, this represents not merely technological hubris but potential heresy. They question whether humans should attempt to construct intelligences exceeding our own capabilities — a modern Tower of Babel disconnected from Biblical values.

The second group — workers traumatized by globalization and the ramifications of the NAFTA trade deal — seeks a better vision for automation than the previous waves, which devastated manufacturing communities. Trump’s base won’t tolerate another generation of workers discarded by technological change. Groups like American Compass represent their interests, demanding AI deployment that strengthens rather than displaces the middle class. Even so, we’ll only see these effects later: AI will affect cognitive work before it affects physical work. As a recent analysis puts it, AI will first come for “films, finance and programming” — not exactly blue-collar labor. 

These two factions find common ground in the New Right’s broader opposition to war and global entanglements. If superintelligence development continues unchecked, the populists will fear a Cold War with China, potentially triggering a Taiwan invasion and disrupting peaceful American life — precisely the scenario Trump promised to avoid.

From a sociological perspective, they see AI’s development as being driven by young, well-paid, liberal Californian engineers racing to build machine gods — while risking both American lives and livelihoods. And after witnessing existing technology’s destruction of family values and youth culture, they fear that AI will do further damage, constraining freedoms while concentrating power in government and tech firms.

As we get more powerful AI systems, the populist Right is likely to become more comfortable with government intervention to protect their lives and livelihoods. The populists will push for law and order policies — “AI agents must follow the law” — while advocating for populist measures to limit automation’s impact. Such measures might include requirements of human oversight; taxation of computational activity; and pro-union regulations.

Most importantly, this group embraces America First principles — rejecting both unnecessary military escalation with China and trade policies that sacrifice American workers. And they offer a third path beyond hawkish-libertarian binary that dominates Washington. 

For the time being, it appears that the Effective Altruists are an afterthought and that the accelerationists and the more aggressive hawks together have the upper hand. Shortly after Michael Kratsios was confirmed as the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, President Trump urged him to “blaze a trail to the next frontiers of science” and make America an “unrivaled” global leader in emerging technologies. Kratios’ speech this week expressed an almost identical spirit.

But the arrival of powerful AI will fracture both domestic and international politics. It is a fundamentally destabilizing technology — socially, economically, and geopolitically. Increasingly realistic chatbots will support, and then substitute, human friendships and relationships. Autonomous AI agents will replace cognitive labor, then robots will take care of the rest. And the development of this technology might herald the beginning of a new geopolitical Cold War with China — where a Taiwan invasion becomes ever more enticing, data centers become strategic missile targets, and cyberweapons make it onto the escalation ladder. 

It is rarely prudent to second-guess Trump. Elon Musk, for a few weeks the “first buddy”, appears now to be on his way out of the White House. Musk, having said on a recent podcast that AI has a “10-20% chance of killing everyone”, might have been one of the more moderating influences on the president, if only with regard to AI.

Where things go from here, therefore, is anyone’s guess. But despite the prospective exit of Musk, Trump is uniquely placed to achieve what others thought impossible: meaningful coordination domestically and internationally. In short, he has an opportunity to strike the “Deal of the Century” with China. His foreign policy successes — the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, historic summit with Kim Jong Un, pressuring European allies to pay up for defense — show his deftness in using US leverage for American, and global, interests.

In this spirit, he could avoid war, or worse, by adopting the containment strategy of the obstructionist hawks; protecting his white-collar-voting base; and making a deal with China that mimics nuclear arms deals. The more aggressive hawks might object to it, but it’s worth remembering how quickly Trump has normalized, at least among Republicans, the idea of pragmatic engagement with Russia. Norms are out, negotiations are in, and with AI moving at lightning speed, it is negotiations that are the appropriate course of action.

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.

Eighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in.

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more.

This spring saw the publication of a book by Kaczynski’s neighbour in Montana, and this summer Apple TV released a podcast on the case. He’s also been name-checked by Right-wing influencers clearly trying to keep up with the zeitgeist, like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. Carlson last year praised Kaczynski’s “smart analysis” of systems and large organisations, while Masters recommended Kaczynski’s manifesto in a podcast interview in March, saying “there’s a lot of insight there.” Over 25 years after he was arrested, there is no end to our interest in the Unabomber. Why do we still find him so compelling? And why is Kaczynski cool now with very online types, from Right-wingers on 4chan to “anti-woke” leftists on Reddit?

While the recent Unabomber retrospectives mostly rehash his life and the facts of his case, the current zeitgeist revolves more around his ideology. Kaczynski’s manifesto argued that technological progress — the “Industrial Revolution and its consequences” — posed an existential threat to humankind by turning people into “engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine”. Stripped of their autonomy by a faceless, unaccountable system, humans endured psychological suffering as they were forced into “over-socialization”, Kaczynski’s term for a state of being in which the industrial society’s codes and mores have replaced a person’s innate selfhood.

Zombified in this way, people blindly applauded technological advances which spelt societal and environmental doom. There was no hope of fixing the current system. The only option remaining, in Kaczynski’s view, was to overthrow it completely through revolution — by any means necessary. Though Kaczynski repeatedly emphasises the non-political nature of his revolution, he has a lot to say about political movements, particularly Leftist ones, which he saw as cadres of over-socialised do-gooders preoccupied with irrelevant identity concerns. Conservatives weren’t much better: they were “fools” who failed to understand that technology was destroying the traditionalism they prized.

Gen Z and younger millennials see the truth in Kaczynski’s central critique of technology, and its deleterious effects on society. Surrounded by screens from early childhood, addicted to near-constant media consumption, often lacking basic in-person social skills, many sense a broader problem in their own individual capture by the tech borg. They’ve grown up in an era marked by mounting terror about climate change, and in which conventional politics seems woefully insufficient to solve any problems. So Kaczynski’s manifesto resonates.

Though he could never have imagined such horrors as TikTok in the Nineties, the society he describes — atomised and materialistic, one that has forfeited freedom in favour of technological progress we’ve been tricked into wanting — chillingly resembles our own. Sure, he cribbed a lot from French philosopher Jacques Ellul, whose book The Technological Society deeply influenced Kaczynski. But there’s a disquieting reason why Kaczynski is a household name and Ellul, outside of academic circles, is not. Fans tend to either be defiant about the terrorism itself — what better way to offend normies? — or they view it as an unfortunate side plot, perhaps not realising it’s the only reason Kaczynski’s ideas ever attracted notice. “I honestly wish Uncle Teddy wasn’t a terrorist and instead just published the manifesto and let it get popular decades later,” wrote Reddit poster “nabberstonguemyanus” earlier this year. “Then we could openly endorse it and not be called incel psychos.”

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Kaczynski’s recent popularity also corresponds with an epidemic of isolated, socially unskilled young men, many of whom appear to be living mostly online. The term “NEET” — not in education, employment or training — has spilled out from the realm of economics research into common usage. The proportion of NEETs who are young men has been increasing in both the US and the UK. Despite sterling credentials and a promising academic career, Kaczynski chose the lifestyle of what would now be called a “NEET”. In doing so, he became free to enact his revenge on a system he hated and from which he’d felt alienated even as a child. Few of today’s NEETs could, or would want to, deploy Kaczynski’s methods. But they admire his refusal to be judged by society’s standards and relate to his inability to fit in. Few have the wherewithal to leave society entirely, but many may dream of it.

Kaczynski grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb, one of two boys. He was a gifted student and enrolled at Harvard at age 16. Lonely, awkward Ted struggled socially and participated in a cruel series of experiments run by a psychology professor with ties to the CIA. Kaczynski and the other participants were subjected to degrading interrogations disguised as intellectual debates and aimed at breaking their confidence. Kaczynski later called it the worst experience he’d ever had. Traumatised and increasingly paranoid, Kaczynski went on to obtain his Ph.D from the University of Michigan, then to a prestigious professorship at the University of California-Berkeley. Kaczynski’s disillusionment with society hardened at Berkeley, where he decided he could no longer countenance studying or teaching mathematics since it contributed to scientific and technological progress. He left Berkeley in 1969 and floated around for much of the Seventies, sometimes living with his parents and holding down temporary blue-collar jobs, before moving permanently into his 10×12 cabin in Montana.

Beginning in 1978, he planted or mailed 16 bombs mostly to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. He sent his manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post (and Penthouse, though that always seems to get left out) promising to end the violence if they published it. With encouragement from the government, who thought publishing the document could help crack the case, the Post did so. Kaczynski’s brother David and his wife Linda recognised Ted’s writing and alerted the FBI, who arrested him at his cabin in April 1996. Cue the iconic mugshot: Kaczynski in an orange jumpsuit, bearded and grizzled, a far cry from the handsome, clean-cut young professor photographed on the Berkeley campus. He spent 25 years in ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison in Colorado known for housing high-profile or particularly dangerous inmates, before being moved to a medical facility late last year.

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There’s a strange thrill to the story. How many of us believe so deeply in our philosophical principles that we would give up all our modern comforts? American culture is strongly influenced by the myth of the frontier loner, fiercely independent and living on his own terms. We fear this type, but we also respect him. What makes Kaczynski unique is that he had it both ways, finding freedom in seclusion while also fulfilling that other very American compulsion: to be noticed. Unlike other wilderness hermits such as Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Kaczynski influenced society even more by dropping out of it than he would have otherwise. McCandless’ Kerouackian journey ended grimly in a broken down bus in the Alaskan woods where he died of malnutrition. Kaczynski made himself world-famous and forced the public to reckon with his ideas. He hasn’t even seemed to mind prison, from where he has exchanged letters with supporters and even fallen in love with a female pen pal. He’s continued to influence politics; a 2018 story in New York Magazine described his dealings with a faction of radical environmentalists.

That view — of the Unabomber as a John Brown-esque maverick driven by a higher ideal — is one way to look at it. Another way is to consider Kaczynski as a deeply lonely man driven to violence as much by personal grievance as by principle. He was unable to form relationships with women, an incel in other words. Kaczynski’s bonds with his family were strained and he eventually cut his parents out of his life entirely, blaming them for pushing him to attend Harvard before he was mature enough to handle it. His brother David’s 2015 memoir is an often gut-wrenching read.

It’s hard not to feel for young Ted, so unprepared and unformed. “His confidence in his intellect was not matched by any visceral confidence in his worth as a person, and over time the divide would only grow larger,” David writes, describing Ted on his way off to Harvard. “His self-confidence became infected with doubt, recoiled, and then redoubled toward arrogance and grandiosity.” It’s poignant to read, in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation Kaczynski underwent in 1998, that as late as age 45 he still held out hope of meeting a partner and even contacted a local psychologist in Montana to help him learn to build a relationship. Apparently the bombing campaign wasn’t enough to fill a deep emotional vacuum.

Knowing this history gives a new dimension to the Ted trend. In valorising him, fans get to feel edgy and subversive for portraying him as a freedom fighter. But they can also relate to the bitter, friendless individual Kaczynski really was. Some are aware of this. “Ted Kaczynski AKA The Unabomber was one of our brethren,” wrote poster “Redpill Robert” on a large incel forum in 2020.

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It’s difficult to empathise with Kaczynski as a person, even if one were willing to set aside his murders to do so. David Kaczynski writes of Ted’s cruelty towards their parents, of hateful letters written over a period of years as he minimised contact. He didn’t attend his father’s funeral after the elder Kaczynski killed himself. Wanda Kaczynski coped by concluding that Ted had been warped by trauma stemming from a hospitalisation as an infant. Ted refused to reconcile with her even as she lay on her deathbed. His resentment towards his parents is an obvious subtext to his manifesto, in sections where he deplores modern child-rearing and schooling. “It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study,” Kaczynski complains.

Even in his journals, Kaczynski acknowledged the personal nature of his plans. “My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge,” he wrote in 1971. “ I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.” He considered the possibility that his crimes would “stimulate public interest in the technology question”, but equally mused that they would “repel” most people and cause a backlash. In the end, of course, they did both. Kaczynski came across as morally repugnant and arrogant, but he succeeded in forcing his ideas into the mainstream.

There’s a mini-Ted inside all of us. Fumbling at an automated self-checkout kiosk while a computerised voice chirps at you; clicking impotently to make a YouTube ad go away; receiving an email about one’s information being compromised in a widespread data breach; being served a targeted Instagram ad moments after googling something related: we all know the kind of helpless rage these moments inspire. For members of the younger generations, whose development and social lives have been shaped to a degree unprecedented in human history by technology, Kaczynski represents a lost alternative. Most of them will never commit a violent act; Tedposting will have to do for now.

More and more, it’s becoming conventional wisdom that our constant exposure to screens and digital stimuli is bad. Efforts to do something about it crop here and there: some Silicon Valley parents forbid their children from using the very same devices that industry sells to others, and the Chinese government announced last year that it would limit children to three hours of online gaming per week. Among adults, phone addiction is so commonplace that people have begun to lock their phones in boxes to get even a small respite from them — the necessity of this an example of the kind of technological servitude Kaczynski feared. There’s an increasing sense of having lost touch with nature, a sense of the world and its societies being diseased. The Unabomber nostalgia wave is a symptom.

“The 2016 election cycle will be remembered for many things, but for those who work in politics, it may be best remembered as the year that political data reached maturity.”
— Andrew Therriault

In 2004, 22-year old Andrew Therriault wanted to get a Democrat president elected. “I got in my car and drove to Ohio,” he told me. “I walked around college campuses, signing students up to vote and all that.” But John Kerry did not get elected, and Therriault “wound up after the election, back at my parents’ house, broke, depressed and unemployed”. Talking to strangers about politics, he concluded, was not his forte.

Ten years later, Therriault found a job that did feel right: Director of Data Science for the DNC, the organising body of the US Democratic Party. By 2016, he was editing the O’Reilly publication Data And Democracy, from which the above quote is taken, describing in detail exactly how data can be used for political campaigning.

With hindsight, the 2016 election cycle was probably not best remembered as “the year that political data reached maturity”. It was, however, the year that many journalists and researchers discovered for the first time how data-driven, personalised political campaigning works, when they sought explanations for the political shocks of Britain voting Leave and the US voting Trump.

But Barack Obama had already won two Presidential elections using those techniques with increasing sophistication. A Guardian article in 2012 spared a single paragraph to privacy concerns between gushing about “a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before”, and the way, probably unconsciously, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page — home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends — directly into the central Obama database”.

Despite the furore over Cambridge Analytica, and the supposed (but implausible) psychological manipulation of 2016 voters via social media, digital political campaigning remains the norm. Hardly surprising, in a world where we increasingly turn to personalised channels, and especially social media, for our news and commentary. How else could campaigners reach potential voters?

In the recent UK local and mayoral elections, the Labour Party spent over half a million pounds (£570,160) on advertising via Meta alone — that’s Facebook and Instagram. The Conservatives lagged behind with a mere £336,668, perhaps because their adverts tended to target pensioners who spend less time on social media: one with the headline “Tax the Codgers” was shown only to over 55s. Thanks to WhoTargetsMe you can now dig into the broad strategies of digital political campaigners, though not the details of how specific ads are targeted.

I asked Andrew Therriault how many data points he would have on a typical voter — dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? “Thousands,” he says, as if that’s obvious. But to think of that as a list of thousands of things he’d know about an individual voter would be misleading. Yes, it would include voter registration details — name, address, age — and perhaps answers previously given to surveys. But to that basic voter database Therriault’s team would add census data for the neighbourhood. Political campaigns also regularly use commercial data from data brokers such as Experian and Acxiom, collected from our interactions with businesses. Even though it’s hard to match data from those sources to individual voters, they can be used to build models, so what they do know about you can be used to predict things that they don’t know.

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Being able to profile individual voters helps a campaigner decide who to target, and tailor the message to them. There are two kinds of people worth targeting: those who might be persuaded to support your side, and those who need a push to get out and vote. “Persuade or mobilise,” as Andrew Therriault puts it.

Like other kinds of personalised advertising, political campaigns aim to show the most effective message to the right person, at the right time. And, also like other adverts, digital media allow the advertiser to monitor which ads are the most effective for this kind of person, by running trials of different variants to see which gets the best response. It is, in short, a huge feat of digital technology. It would be a mistake, however, to see the technology itself as driving this political change. Rather, the change from mass movements to “The Personal Is Political” predates the capacity to deliver a tailored message to an individual on a device that accompanies them everywhere.

The era of mass politics is not very old. In 1848, “the springtime of the peoples”, a huge Chartist demonstration in London tried to deliver a petition calling for universal male suffrage, secret ballots, and other reforms to parliament. According to the Illustrated London News, it took a cart drawn by four farm horses to carry the signatures in “five huge bales or bundles”. The government fortified all the bridges in London to prevent the assembled masses reaching Westminster, and went on to arrest the leaders and suppress the movement.

The road to every citizen getting a vote would be long and hard. In the US, race was the bar to democratic equality: in the UK, it was property, which excluded some men until 1918, and a third of women until 1928. In France, where all men did get the vote in 1848, women would wait until 1944.

But the ability to vote a government in — or out — was not the only form of mass politics. By 1874 around 10%  of the adult population of Britain were members of TUC-affiliated unions (mostly men). Organisations pressing for equal rights for women, or for non-whites in America, also demanded equality beyond the vote. However, by the time Martin Luther King made his “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963, the character of those mass movements was changing. Even as King called on the US Government to make good the “promissory note” to all Americans, black and white, guaranteeing “the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, that universalist vision was fragmenting and turning inwards.

Tom Hayden, later Senator Hayden, was in the immense crowd that heard King that day. After being inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to hitchhike across America, Hayden became a Civil Rights activist and spent some time in jail. There he drafted what would become the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a manifesto for Students for a Democratic Society:

“We oppose the depersonalisation that reduces human beings to the status of things,” it declares. “The goal of man and society should be human independence; a concern not with image or popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.” Politics, he said, should be a “means of finding meaning in personal life”, imbuing it with a therapeutic sensibility. The Port Huron Statement captures a moment at the beginning of a new political age. It talks of “loneliness, estrangement, isolation”, and “the felt powerlessness of ordinary people.” It matters not only that people lack power, but that they feel powerless.

The distinction between politics and personal feelings was fraying, and as the Sixties drew to a close, a slogan emerged to capture this new kind of politics. “The Personal is Political” is the title of a short 1969 article written by Carol Hanisch, an activist in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and a founder of New York Radical Women, the group that protested at the Miss America contest in 1968. They were all women who were active in other movements — Civil Rights, Anti-War or the New Left — who wanted to discuss politics without men present. After the meeting ended, they kept arguing into the small hours at a nearby restaurant over apple pie a la mode.

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I asked Hanisch what she thought of the shift towards seeing the world in terms of identity. “It cannot be a positive change,” she told me. “We lose all sense of a need for unity to take on the source(s) of our oppression. Instead it invites us to escape the real world by “living in our heads”. It allows us to believe that if we can change ourselves and/or just a few people, everything will be fine, which is, of course, nonsense. We’re talking society-wide oppression here, not just individual attitudes. You can’t ‘identify’ yourself out of oppression, though over the centuries people sure have tried!”

Today, we take disagreement very personally. Not only issues that are entangled with our everyday lives, our feelings or how we see ourselves: even geopolitical issues or which political party we vote for are taken much more personally. People are less open to social connection with those who disagree with them politically. Survey after survey has shown that, increasingly, we are more likely to see those who disagree with us politically as closed-minded, selfish, hypocritical, immoral or lazy, and less likely to call them intelligent or honest. Negative feeling towards the other side, politically, has been steadily increasing since the Eighties.

I asked Andrew Therriault if he thought politics in general had become more personal.  “Yeah, from both the voters and the candidate side it’s become more individualised, in terms of even the basic facts we’re working with,” he says. “This idea that your political reality can be whatever you want it to be, and whatever someone else wants to tell you it should be. And there does not seem to be that sort of common grounding we once had when things were less personalised.”

Politics, in other words, is turning into a form of self-expression. It is no longer an arena to which we all bring our conflicting visions of how the world should be, and try to persuade others to join us in working towards ours — or even, in which we might listen to other people’s ideas and change our minds.

***

This article includes material drawn from Technology Is Not The Problem, published by HarperCollins.

The Manual spooked Western intelligence agencies. Did this mean that terrorists were being trained to operate like MI6 agents? And if so, how could they be defeated? It’s a paranoia that has only grown in the past two decades. From terrorist groups to semiconductor companies, non-state actors increasingly have access to highly sensitive information of national importance. Espionage is now anyone’s game; the need for security everywhere. Only this week, two men in the UK — including a former parliamentary aide — were charged under the Official Secrets Act with spying on behalf of China. And while this might seem a throwback to a Le Carré world of inter-state espionage, the reality is that any modern spy worth their salt would be as interested in Britain’s private sector as it is in our government.

The British state has begun to realise this. In 2022, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum and FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a joint address to business and academic leaders. When it came to the threat of Chinese espionage and cyberattacks, they said: “most of what is at risk from the Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It’s yours.” Nowadays, private companies developing products in areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotech have access to such sensitive information that, if it got into the wrong hands, it would be a national security issue.

Far from the Cold War era of stealing nuclear secrets — think Aldrich Ames and the Rosenbergs — spies today are more likely to want to nick your PowerPoint. In January last year, a Chinese spy named Zheng Xiaoqing stole a data file from General Electric Power, which related to the design and manufacturing of gas and steam turbines. The IP was thought to be worth several million. He attempted to hide the file within the code of another file — a picture of a sunset — using a technique called steganography. The choice of target is instructive: it is increasingly the Nvidias and ASMLs of the world (both semiconductor companies), and not the CIA or MI5, which have access to secret information of national importance.

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This diffusion of knowledge and power away from the state and intelligence agencies, and towards private companies, marks a stark shift from the Cold War era. Back then, there was no confusion: the British and American intelligence communities had a monopoly over secrets. In fact, the Cold War was in many ways a war of intelligence, and its Manichean nature — an existential competition between the US and the Soviet Union — was far more stable than our current multipolar system. As Tom King, chair of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee in the Nineties, lamented in 1998: “Was not the Cold War, in its awful way, a form of rigid security system that has now collapsed?”

Ironically, globalisation was initially seen as the panacea for Cold War tension. The Marshall Plan of 1948 was President Truman’s attempt to induce Europe not to turn red with a large injection of cash. And four decades later, it was the desire for American blue jeans which helped bring down the Berlin Wall. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of terrorism, that the West figured out that globalisation and interdependency was a threat, not a cure. Today, in an interconnected world where we rely upon one Taiwanese company (TSMC) for all of our smartphones, economic and national security have become one and the same.

Well-aware that it cannot afford to turn a blind eye, the UK Government has overseen an influx of national security legislation in the past few years all designed to tighten scrutiny. The National Security & Investment Act, introduced in 2022, is designed to protect the UK’s critical infrastructure — from telecommunications to AI — against foreign acquisition. More recently the new National Security Bill, introduced in December 2023, is the most significant espionage law since the Official Secrets Act of 1911. And a new arm of MI5 — the National Protective Security Authority — was established in 2023 to advise private UK companies on how to combat cybersecurity. “Economic security” has also become a significant issue. In a speech last week Oliver Dowden laid out plans for export controls and tighter regulation of sensitive research projects in British academic institutions, arguing that “our economic and security interests are intertwined as never before”.

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What this wave of legislation suggests is that national security has become so all-encompassing and diverse that it can no longer be separated from the rest of government. Legislation, not secret agents, is being used to counter security threats. In a globalised world, the politician’s pen is replacing the agent’s pistol.

Some fear that the government’s increasing role in dealing with national security may lead to its politicisation. Just last month, the UK banned foreign state ownership of newspapers, responding to the attempted acquisition of the Telegraph by the UAE conglomerate RedBird. Prior to the ban itself, the acquisition was seen to “represent a very real potential national security threat” by a group of 18 Tory MPs. The problem is that, although the concerns over the Telegraph instance were well-founded, the broader notion of “national security” remains undefined and ambiguous — even in a major piece of legislation like the National Security & Investment Act. The risk is that, with the ever-widening scope of “national security”, it becomes a political issue, defined and redefined by politicians at any given moment.

Across the Atlantic, earlier this week Congress approved a bill to ban TikTok unless the the Chinese company ByteDance sells the US platform. The concerns stem from two issues. The first is the fact that for many people TikTok acts as a de facto source of news: its ownership by a Chinese company therefore essentially translates into a foreign-held media company. Second, there is the issue of TikTok’s vast pool of data — and fears that the CCP has access to it. The danger is that TikTok could be used for surveillance, Chinese-sanctioned propaganda, and ultimately to undermine American democracy. In the run-up to an already potentially toxic presidential election, those worries are not unfounded. Nonetheless, the forced sale of TikTok is yet another example of Western governments feeling compelled to use a blunt instrument (legislation) to tackle issues of national and economic security.

Pressure has mounted on the UK to follow suit. And the UK has in general very much followed (or been lent on by) the US to toughen its national security legislation in recent years. Just think back to Trump’s row with Johnson over Huawei in 2020, when Britain was on the cusp of allowing a Chinese company to dominate the UK’s 5G network. But we also have less weight to throw around in the global economy than America. The US can easily absorb the shock of any unintended consequences inflicted by heavy-handed legislation. The UK, on the other hand, has to walk a finer line between national security and staying open for business. There can be no such thing today, economically speaking, of an isolationist Britain.

This collaboration (and, in some cases, confrontation) between the state and private companies who hold IP and technology of national importance is not necessarily a bad thing. But as the lines between economic and national security blur, the trade-off may well be a politicisation (and bureaucratisation) of national security by those in Whitehall. And this does represent a fundamental break with the past. As the intelligence academics Antonio Díaz Fernández and Ruben Arcos put it, the days of the Cold War “secret state” are giving way to the 21st-century “protecting state”, in which national security seeps into everyday life.

Since the Cold War “national security” has expanded from the narrow realm of military power and deterrence to include terrorism, environmental security, migration, cybersecurity and now economic security. Of course, parliamentary bills will never replace the world of James Bond entirely. But, as Bond’s own Chief of Intelligence put it a little over a decade ago: “Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they aren’t nations… It’s in the shadows — that’s where we must do battle.”

Looking incredibly young has certainly helped his case — even now, at 54, Sinclair could still pass for a 30-something. A decade ago, Time featured Sinclair on its annual list of the world’s most influential people. And by popularising the concept of “autophagy”, Sinclair has almost certainly influenced you at some point.

Autophagy, which comes from the Greek for “self-devouring”, refers to the process by which cells deprived of fresh supplies of glucose are forced to “feed off” themselves, reducing the inflammatory toxins that are so synonymous with ageing and, in theory, revitalising the mitochondria that power every cell. While Silicon Valley tech bros such as Brian Johnson, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos may have garnered more headlines, a lone maverick scientist, in science-fiction style, was busy working on the medical secret to substantiate their quest for eternal youth. Or so it seemed.

Nowadays, former colleagues in academia are queueing up to denounce Sinclair. In March, when he announced with his brother that their company Animal Bioscience had developed a supplement for dogs “shown to reverse the effects of age related decline”, it proved to be the final straw. A former research partner, and colleague at Harvard Medical School, labelled him “the textbook definition of snake-oil salesman”, before Sinclair resigned from his role as President of the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research on 13 March.

So where did it all go so wrong for Sinclair? After all, it’s not as though Time were wrong to cite his influence — which has become ubiquitous by stealth. With the unmasking of one of its leaders, where next for the biohacking movement? And is there more to it than billionaire daydreams and sketchy online apothecaries?

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In many ways, it simply continues to grow. Because calorie restriction has been consistently shown to increase lifespan in laboratory animals, Sinclair’s championing of autophagy to stabilise lower blood sugars has seeped into popular consciousness as a rationale for weight-loss “hacks” that might also help you live longer. Advocates of intermittent fasting, buttered coffee, ultra-low carb diets, cold-water immersion or drinking diluted vinegar invariably invoke the implied cloak of scientific legitimacy that autophagy provides. And Sinclair personally aligned himself and his clout with these sorts of trends. By taking just one meal and 1,100 calories per day, and focusing on plant-based, low-carb, low-protein, and heart-healthy high-fat foods, he promoted the “deep cleanse” cellular repair and ultimate detox that autophagy is meant to provide. In turn, autophagy is in large part responsible for the popularity of the so-called 16:8 diet, whose adherents consume their calories in an eight-hour window before fasting for the next 16 to maintain low-blood sugars.

So, when the American Heart Foundation published research last month indicating that restricted-eating-window diets of the 16:8 variety were linked to 91% higher risk of cardiovascular deaths, they rattled many of the intermittent fasting advocates. But Sinclair had already been testing the scientific establishment’s patience for years. By suggesting that non-diabetics should consider taking the diabetes drug Metformin, for longevity purposes, as he did, Sinclair had long courted controversy, and not just from outside of the biohacking community but from within it.

Because if Sinclair is the father of anti-ageing biomedicine, Oedipal forces have been massing against him for some time. On 10 March, Dr Brad Stanfield, another noted longevity influencer, launched a withering takedown of his career and record. Stanfield alleged that by setting up companies trading in anti-ageing supplements of dubious merit, Sinclair amassed a personal fortune. Initially, it was resveratrol, the much hyped “miracle” compound found in red wine. According to Stanfield, GlaxoSmithKline bought the rights to the research for $720 million dollars and spent five years trying and failing to replicate Sinclair’s findings. More recently, again without compelling clinical evidence from human trials, Sinclair has been advocating for and marketing the supplement NMN to boost NAD+ levels, in order — he said — to encourage DNA repair and enhance insulin sensitivity.

Such internal feuding demonstrates the reality of the biohacking movement. Because, while the public has a tendency to conflate longevity science with plutocrats obsessed with living forever, the movement is far from an elite project. Many biohackers are in late-middle age and have more grounded expectations. When I meet John Hemmings, a 63-year-old biohacker, he explains that by extending his “healthspan” he hopes to “compress his morbidity” and delay the onset of age-related conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and, in particular, Alzheimer’s. Hemmings is hardly your average subject matter — in an earlier political career, he was a Lib Dem MP who used parliamentary privilege to denounce Ryan Giggs’s attempts to use a super-injunction to silence press coverage of his private life. But in other ways, Hemmings’s anxieties are representative, given that, on average, senior citizens rack up five separate comorbidity diagnoses by the age of 80. It’s easy to see why some might seek more control over their exit strategy.

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Hemming’s new career as a committed biohacker began in earnest in 2020 when, at 21 stone, he realised that was a likely candidate for type 2 diabetes. He managed to lose seven stone in just nine months (a process he broadcast on social media) by making use of a device designed for diabetics. A skin sensor allowed him to perform continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and track his blood sugar in real time through an app. For the first time he could see how levels spiked and fell in relation to different meals and activities. Preventing spikes means eliminating the crashes that inevitably follow, which reduces hunger pangs and helps weight loss. And CGM is the most prevalent biohacking trend of the moment. For many, weight loss is the primary goal, but for others, like Hemmings, it’s a gateway to biohacking through which the ultimate prize of a longer, healthier life first becomes visible. That higher glucose levels act as an ageing accelerator is the central premise of the longevity community, but Hemmings quickly realised its limitations. “It’s not as if there is just one number that matters. It requires a holistic approach.”

Today, he spends around £10,000 a year on weekly blood tests to track the effects of his various interventions on key biomarkers as a way of stalling ageing at a cellular level. And he is now a convert-turned-preacher: he publishes blogs replete with homespun microbiological research that track the impact of his treatments. More radically, these include rapamycin, which Hemmings sources from India. Although it’s a potentially harmful immunosuppressant used to prevent the rejection of kidney transplants, rapamycin has also been shown to extend lifespans in animal trials and is the longevity community’s greatest hope of a “quick win” against ageing. Hemmings believes rapamycin is likely to be a more effective method than fasting when it comes to inducing that all important state of autophagy.

He monitors his long-term progress through epigenetic tests — a type of biochemical assessment that looks at DNA to see how well cells are ageing in relation to their chronological age (he proudly tells me that one put his age at 53, and another at just 36). But with his political background, Hemmings sees his personal travails as heralding social change. He believes that our health service is out of date because it is predicated on repairing the damage caused by our afflictions, by which time it’s often already too late. “Biohacking enables people to have detailed information as to what they can do to improve how their bodies function in the short term. Hence rather than waiting to get ill and then going in and out of health care, the level of personal health can be maintained,” he says.

Despite all the money he has spent, Hemmings represents the grassroots of the biohacking movement — those seeking their own routes to longevity. And he has long been sceptical of figures like Sinclair: “The science just isn’t strong enough to support some of the claims he’s been making.” Instead, it is other leading longevity podcasters such as Dr Peter Attia and the newly emergent voice of Dr Stanfield who are likely to benefit from Sinclair’s defenestration. As a practising GP in Auckland, with clinical expertise in helping people age gracefully, Stanfield in particular has become Sinclair’s online nemesis.

Both Stanfield and Attia are physicians, and appear comparably mindful of their Hippocratic responsibility to, first, do no harm. Both tend to wait until multiple clinical studies converge around similar findings before recommending supplements. And both have identified the worrying tendency of longevity researchers such as Sinclair to conflate the evidence from animal and human trials. Looked at independently, the evidence from human trials alone often tells a very different story. And Sinclair’s entire theory of autophagy may well prove to be a classic example of this pattern. What works for laboratory rodents doesn’t necessarily apply to large mammals like human beings. Stanfield cites evidence suggesting that humans would need to fast for four days to derive the autophagy benefits that can be induced in mice in just 16 hours.

Like Attia, Stanfield regards autophagy as a dangerous distraction, and beyond short-term weight loss, he contests the idea that calorie restriction and fasting has any long-term longevity benefits, a stance now echoed by the American Heart study. What’s more, depriving your body of vital nutrients like protein for 16 hours a day is a high-risk strategy, given that human studies show that frailty is the commonest factor in all-cause mortality. As Attia argues, unless we mitigate “sarcopenia”, the age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength which normally begins in our 30s, ultimately frailty will be our undoing — even if it’s not listed on our death certificates.

By advocating fasting and low-protein intake, Sinclair has been flying in the face of preventative care clinical guidelines for years. It seems that you can be a serious research scientist or an entrepreneur, but not both (and by pushing supplements for dogs, Sinclair appears to have opted for neither). But perhaps the work of more serious figures like Attia and Stanfield shows that what we currently call biohacking could ultimately become part of general medical treatment. Given that the global market for anti-ageing biomedicine is projected to be worth $93 billion by 2027, they are certainly unlikely to be the last to try and realise its immortal temptations.

This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was their justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers.

They provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen Stock, whose columns are up for a National Press Award this week, Julie Bindel, a lifelong campaigner against violence against women, and Debbie Hayton, who is transgender. Apparently the GDI equates “gender-critical” beliefs, or maintaining that biological sex differences exist, with “disinformation” — despite the fact that those beliefs are specifically protected in British law and held by the majority of the population.

The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.

So, what are these “ratings agencies” that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age.

***

Disinformation only really became a discussion point in response to the Trump victory in 2016, and was then supercharged during the Covid era: Google Trends data shows that worldwide searches for the term quadrupled between June and December 2016, and had increased by more than 30 times by 2022. In response to the supposed crisis, corporations, technology companies and governments all had to show they were taking some form of action. This created a marketplace for enterprising start-ups and not-for-profits to claim a specialism in detecting disinformation. Today, there are hundreds of organisations who make this claim, providing all sorts of “fact-checking” services, including powerful ratings agencies such as GDI and Newsguard. These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising.

How this works is relatively straightforward: in UnHerd’s case, we contract with an advertising agency, which relies on a popular tech platform called “Grapeshot”, founded in the UK and since acquired by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, to automatically select appropriate websites for particular campaigns. Grapeshot in turn automatically uses the “Global Disinformation Index” to provide a feed of data about “brand safety” — and if GDI gives a website a poor score, very few ads will be served.

The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. Alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the GDI receives money from the UK government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, its two founders emerged from the upper echelons of “respectable” society. First, there is Clare Melford, whose biography published by the World Economic Forum states that she had previously “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status”. She set up the GDI with Daniel Rogers, who worked “in the US intelligence community”, before founding a company called “Terbium Labs” that used AI and machine learning to scour the internet for illicit use of sensitive data and then sold it handsomely to Deloitte.

Together, they have spearheaded a carefully intellectualised definitional creep as to what counts as “disinformation”. Back when it was first set up in 2018, they defined the term on their website as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive”. Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out. But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative” — stories that may be factually true, but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution or “the science”.

GDI founder Clare Melford explained in an interview at the LSE in 2021 how this expanded definition was more “useful”, as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem “harmful” or “divisive”:

“A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false — it escapes from the limits of fact-checking. Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful… [GDI] leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation… It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is antisemitic…”

Larger traffic websites are rated using humans, she explains, but most are rated using automated AI. “We actually instantiate our definition of disinformation — the adversarial narrative topics — within the technology,” explains Melford. “Each adversarial narrative is given its own machine-learning classifier, which then allows us to search for content that matches that narrative at scale… misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-black content, climate change denial, etc.”

Melford’s team and algorithm are essentially trained to identify and defund any content she finds offensive, not disinformation. Her personal bugbears are somewhat predictable: content supporting the January 6 “insurrections”, the pernicious influence of “white men in Silicon Valley”, and anything that might undermine the global response to the “existential challenge of climate change”.

The difficulty, however, is that most of these issues are highly contentious and require robust, uncensored discussion to find solutions. Challenges to scientific orthodoxy are particularly important, as the multiple failures of the official response to Covid-19 amply demonstrated. Indeed, one of the examples of GDI’s work that Melford highlighted in her LSE talk was an article about the Delta variant of Covid-19. “This is a Spanish language site talking about how a third of deaths in the United Kingdom from the Delta variant are amongst those people who are vaccinated, which is clearly untrue,” says Melford. “It is Chipotle that has been caught next to this ad unwittingly, and unfortunately for them have funded this highly dangerous disinformation about vaccines.”

The statistic being reported comes from a June 2021 Public Health England report into Covid variants that sets out the 42 known deaths from the Delta variant from January to June: 23 were unvaccinated, 7 vaccinated with one shot and 12 fully vaccinated. In other words, 29% were fully vaccinated — around a third — and 17% partially vaccinated, making a total of 45% vaccinated. To further complicate the question, Melford misread the Spanish headline, and it actually referenced two thirds, or 66%, which is wrong again.

Examples like this are far from rare. The GDI still hosts an uncorrected 2020 blog about the “evolution of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” surrounding Covid-19’s origins, which concludes that “cutting off ads to these fringe sites and their outer networks is the first action needed”. This is despite the fact that Facebook and other tech companies long ago corrected similar policies and conceded that it was a legitimate hypothesis that should never have been censored.

***

In the US, a number of media organisations have started to take action against GDI’s partisan activism, prompted by a GDI report in 2022 that listed the 10 most dangerous sites in America. To many, it looked simply like a list of the country’s most-read conservative websites. It even included RealClearPolitics, a well-respected news aggregator whose polling numbers are among the most quoted in the country. The “least risk of disinformation” list was, predictably enough, populated by sites with a liberal inclination.

In recent months, a number of American websites have launched legal challenges against GDI’s labelling system, which they claim infringes upon their First Amendment rights. In December, The Daily Wire and The Federalist teamed up with the attorney general of Texas to sue the state department for funding GDI and Newsguard. A separate initiative to prevent the Defense Department from using any advertiser that uses Newsguard, GDI or similar entities has been successful, and is now part of federal law.

But GDI is a British company and, on this side of the Atlantic, the Conservative Government continues to fund it. A written question from MP Philip Davies last year revealed that £2.6 million was given in the period up to last year, and that there is still “frequent contact” between the GDI and the FCDO “Counter Disinformation and Media Development” unit.

***

Yesterday, I was invited to give evidence to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee during which I outlined the extent of the threat to the free media of self-appointed ratings agencies such as the Global Disinformation Index. The reality, as I told Parliament, is that GDI is merely the tip of the iceberg. At a time when the news media is so distrusted and faces a near-broken business model, the role of government should be to prevent, not encourage, and most certainly not fund, consolidations of monopoly power around certain ideological viewpoints.

But this isn’t simply a matter for the media. Both companies and those in the advertising sector also need to act: it cannot be good marketing for brands to target only half the population. Last year, Oracle announced it was cutting ties with GDI on free speech grounds, but as we discovered, it seems they are still collaborating via the Grapeshot plaform: is Larry Ellison aware of this?

At its heart, the disinformation panic is becoming a textbook example of how a “solution” can do more harm than the problem it is designed to address. Educated campaigners such as Clare Melford may think they are doing the world a service, but in fact they are acting as intensifying agents, lending legitimacy to a conspiratorial world view in which governments and corporations are in cahoots to censor political expression. Unless something is done to stop them, they will continue to sow paranoia and distrust — and hasten us towards an increasingly radicalised and divided society.

***

This article has been updated to reference the fact that Clare Melford misread the headline about deaths from the Delta variant, and it actually claimed 2/3 not 1/3.

This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician who cost the US the Vietnam War, and the biggest FBI investigation of the 20th century. But it begins with a mild-mannered psychologist who studied pigeons at Harvard in the Thirties. B.F. Skinner believed environment determines behaviour, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviourism, on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a birdcage with a food dispenser controlled by a button.

Skinner’s goal was to make the pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realised the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.

This led him to propose two kinds of reward: primary and conditioned reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is something we’re born to desire. A conditioned reinforcer is something we learn to desire, due to its association with a primary reinforcer. Skinner found that conditioned reinforcers were generally more effective in shaping behaviour, because while our biological need for the primary reinforcer is easily satiable, our abstract desire for the conditioned reinforcer isn’t. The pigeons would stop seeking food once their bellies were full, but they’d take far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click.

Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behaviour. From frequent-flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.

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Some people soon began to consider whether games could be used to make people do other things. In the Seventies, the American management consultant Charles Coonradt wondered why people work harder at games they pay to play than at work they’re paid to do. Like Skinner, Coonradt saw that a defining feature of compelling games was immediate rewards. Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.

In the 21st century, advances in technology made it easy to add game mechanics to almost any activity, and a new term — “gamification” — became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. By 2008, business consultants were giving presentations about leveraging fun to shape behaviour, while futurists gave TED Talks speculating on the social implications of a gamified world. Underpinning every speech was a single, momentous question: if gamification could make people buy more stuff and work more hours, what else could it be used to make people do?

The tone was generally utopian, because back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good. In 2007, for instance, the online word quiz FreeRice gamified famine relief: for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice were given to the UN World Food Programme. Within six months it had already given away over 20 billion grains of rice. Meanwhile, the software-as-a-service company, Opower, had gamified going green. It turned eco-friendliness into a contest, showing each person how much energy they were using compared with their neighbours, and displaying a leaderboard of the top 10 least wasteful. The app has since saved over $3 billion worth of energy. And then there was Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington biochemists who’d struggled for 15 years to discern the structure of an Aids virus protein. They reasoned that, if they turned the search into a game, someone might do what they couldn’t. It took gamers just 10 days.

Even established corporations saw gamification’s potential. In 2008, Volkswagen debuted a campaign called “The Fun Theory”, based on the idea that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better”. Piano stairs were installed at a Stockholm rail station to encourage people to use them instead of the escalator, leading to a 66% increase in stair use. Volkswagen also tried to gamify gamification itself, creating a contest for good game ideas. The winning idea was a “speedcam lottery”, where people who kept to the speed limit would be entered into a prize draw, funded by speeding fines.

It all seemed so simple: if we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, gamification took a less wholesome route.

***

Humans, unlike pigeons, don’t respond much to clicks; but we do respond to another arbitrary sound: applause. We associate the sound of clapping hands not with food, but with another primary reinforcer: esteem. And esteem appears to be one of the main reasons we play games. Will Storr has argued that the evolutionary function of games is to organise societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. This association is so strong in our minds that, like the pigeons pecking the button long after the food dispenser has stopped dispensing, we’ll chase scores long after everyone else has stopped watching.

So when, in 2009, Facebook added the “like” button, it abruptly created a score to compete for. It motivated people to post more content — hitting “send” became like pecking a food dispenser button or activating a slot machine, initiating an excitingly uncertain outcome. The post might go completely unnoticed, or hit the jackpot and go viral. Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximise button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant responses, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features were crucial in turning social media into the world’s most addictive status game.

But this was just the beginning. Many in the managerial class began to wonder how they could use gamification for their own ends. The Chinese Communist Party was among the first to apply the principles of social media to the real world. In several towns and cities, it began trialling social credit schemes that assign citizens a level of “clout” based on how well they behave. In some areas, such as Rongcheng and Hangzhou, there are public signs that display leaderboards of the highest-scoring citizens. The lowest-scoring citizens may be punished with credit blacklists or throttled internet speeds.

Meanwhile, in the West, gamification is used to make people obey corporations. Employers like Amazon and Disneyland use electronic tracking to keep score of employees’ work rates, often displaying them for all to see. Those who place high on the leaderboards can win prizes like virtual pets; those who fall below the minimum rate may be financially penalised.

Game features are even more pervasive in the digital world. The dating app Zoosk works like a role-playing game, allowing you to accumulate experience points simply by using the app, which unlocks new abilities, such as animated virtual gifts to send to prospective dates. Meanwhile, on Tinder you can purchase various “level-ups” — Boosts, Super Likes, and Rewinds — that increase your chances of winning and compel you to keep playing to get your money’s worth. And if you have no luck on dating apps, there are always AI girlfriends to play with: apps like iGirl and Replika award users points for their commitment, which can be used to “level up” their virtual lovers into a version that is more intimate.

These are only a few examples. Virtually every kind of app, from audiobook apps to taxicab apps to stock trading apps, now employs game mechanics like points, badges, levels, streaks, progress bars, and leaderboards. Their ubiquity attests to their success in hooking people. Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritised immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilisation.

So where does this all lead? What is the endgame?

***

At the University of Michigan in the mid-20th century, there was a zoologist named James V. McConnell. A strong believer in fun, he often presented his academic research alongside satire and poetry, so it was difficult to tell which was which. One of the few things McConnell took seriously was behaviourism. He was transfixed by Skinner’s work on pigeons, and wished to expand the work to humans, with an eye to creating a perfect society. In a 1970 Psychology Today article he wrote: “We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. We have the techniques now to do it. Only by using them can we hope to maximize human potentiality.” In short, he wanted to turn society into a Skinner box.

A decade later, McConnell noticed how captivated people could become by video games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, and he became one of the first proponents of gamification. He pitched an ambitious project to gamify education to tech companies such as Microsoft and IBM, but he was 30 years too early, and they couldn’t yet see its promise. There was, however, one person who’d taken a keen interest in McConnell’s work. His name was Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski had come to Michigan as a postgraduate from Harvard, where he’d studied mathematics and graduated at just 18. But at Harvard, he’d also been subjected to cruel experiments. In a lab not far from where Skinner had once experimented with pigeons, psychologists linked to US intelligence were now experimenting with humans — one of whom was Kaczynski. Under the glare of blinding lights, he was methodically humiliated to see how he reacted. He claimed the experience didn’t affect him, and yet, within just a few years, he developed a paranoia about psychological conditioning and mind control. And so, when Kaczynski learned of McConnell’s proposals to turn society into a Skinner box, he concluded that the jocular professor was an existential threat to humanity, and that he needed to die.

It wasn’t a decision Kaczynski had made lightly; he’d developed an entire philosophy to justify it. Influenced by techno-dystopian writers such as Aldous Huxley and Jacques Ellul, Kaczynski believed the Industrial Revolution had turned society into a cold process of production and consumption that was gradually crushing everything humans valued most: freedom, happiness, purpose, meaning, and the ecosystem. In his view, everything society now produced — including science and technology — served society, not humanity, and thus was increasingly being purposed not to enrich our lives but to psychologically condition us so we wouldn’t resist what was being done to us and to the earth.

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In short, where society had once been shaped to accommodate people, now people were being shaped to accommodate society. And this mis-shaping made people anxious and depressed because it conflicted with our deepest nature.

Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose. The brain evolved to solve problems, but the problems it had evolved for were now largely solved by technology. Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn’t make us happy, only aimless. And to stave of this aimlessness, we had to continually set ourselves goals purely to have goals to pursue, which Kaczynski called “surrogate activities”. These included sports, hobbies, or chasing the latest product that ads promised would make us happy. For Kaczynski, the result of reorienting our lives to chase artificial goals was that we became increasingly dependent on society to provide us with them. And without our own inherent sense of purpose, we’d inevitably be made to chase goals that were good for the industrial machine but bad for us.

Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesy the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognising its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and AI is reducing the need for labour, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are crumbling, and people are losing their value systems. Amid such uncertainty, games, with their well-defined rules and rewards, provide a semblance of order and purpose that may otherwise be lacking in people’s lives. Gamification is thus no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.

Unfortunately, it seems to be only a sticking plaster. Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they instead kept us too busy to notice our dissatisfaction. Rather than a fulfilled life, a life filled full. Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary, substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritising extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — in other words doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the intrinsic love of doing them — leads in the long term to lower well-being.

Kaczynski seemed to recognise this long before the arrival of smartphones. He felt that building a life around chasing what was offered on billboards and in magazines wouldn’t make him happy, and would only feed the Machine, so in 1971 he fled industrial society, holing himself up in a log cabin in the Montana wilderness. There he attempted a simple and self-sufficient life, enjoying the small things like the sound of birds singing and the feeling of the sun on his back.

But this idyll wouldn’t last. While hiking across one of his favourite spots — a rocky ridge with a waterfall — he was aghast to find a road had been built across it. As he saw it, industrialisation, like some creeping fungus, had followed him even here. Enraged, he decided modernity couldn’t be escaped, and had to be destroyed. His emotional instability got the better of him, and in 1978 he began posting bombs to those he accused of betraying humanity. In 1985, a package arrived at McConnell’s home. It was opened by his assistant, Nicklaus Suino. The package only partially exploded, injuring Suino and McConnell, and leaving them both shaken for life.

They were lucky. Less than a month later, Kaczynski would send another, more carefully prepared bomb to computer store owner, Hugh Scrutton, who’d become Kaczynski’s first murder victim.

By then, the FBI’s investigation into the bombings had grown into the largest in its history. For over a decade they scoured the country as Kaczynski continued to kill and injure, but much of their time, money, and manpower was wasted chasing mirages, for Kaczynski would often scatter his bomb parcels with red herrings such as notes referencing fictitious conspiracies and signed with made-up initials.

Kaczynski’s actions, though unforgivable, can teach us as much about gamification as his philosophy. His red herrings lured people away from what they actually sought, and this is also what gamified goals threaten to do. To understand how, we must consider a human error known as surrogation.

***

While Kaczynski wanted to demolish industrial society and return humanity to an agrarian life, US defence secretary Robert McNamara wanted the opposite: to use American industrial might to crush the agrarian society of Vietnam.

McNamara was a statistician who believed what couldn’t be measured didn’t matter. He charted progress in the Vietnam war by body count because it was simple to measure. It became his way of keeping score. But his focus on what could be easily measured led him to overlook what couldn’t: negative public opinion of the US Army both at home and in Vietnam, which deflated US morale while boosting enemy conscription. In the end, the US was forced to withdraw from the war, despite winning the battle of bodies, because it had lost the battle of hearts and minds.

Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure. And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, badges, trophies — are secondary reinforcers that only derive their worth due to their association with something we actually desire. But these associations are often illusory. A click is not the same thing as a food pellet. And points are not the same as progress.

We’re easily motivated by points and scores because they’re easy to track and enjoyable to accrue. As such, scorekeeping is, for many, becoming the foundation of their lives. “Looksmaxxing” is a new trend of gamified beauty, where people assign scores to physical appearance and then use any means necessary to maximise their score. And in the online wellness space, there is now a “Rejuvenation Olympics” complete with a leaderboard that ranks people by their “age reversal”. Even sleep has become a game; many people now use apps like Pokémon Sleep that reward them for achieving high “sleep scores”, and some even compete to get the highest “sleep ranking”.

Most such scores are simplifications that don’t tell the whole story. For instance, sleep trackers only measure what’s easy to measure, like movement, which says nothing about crucial facts such as time spent in rapid-eye-movement sleep. A more accurate measure of how well you slept would be how refreshed you feel in the morning, but since this can’t be quantified, it tends to be ignored. Further, if increasing one’s youthfulness score requires a daily two-hour skincare routine, a diet of 50 pills each day, abstention from many of life’s pleasures, and constant fixation on one’s vital metrics, is it really worth it? Of what value is adding a few years to your life if the cost is a life worth living? The scores we use to chart progress can’t articulate the nuances of reality, and yet we often tie our life goals and even self-worth to such arbitrary numbers.

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In the end, Kaczynski himself was led astray by red herring goals. In 1995, he enacted his endgame, demanding the New York Times and Washington Post print his anti-technology manifesto to prevent further bloodshed. All along, his goal had been to get the widest possible newspaper coverage, to maximise how many people would see his manifesto, but like McNamara, he didn’t account for what couldn’t be quantified, such as how people would see his manifesto. Skinner’s pigeons had learned to desire the click of the food dispenser because it had been accompanied by food, and Kaczynski’s intended audience learned to hate his arguments because they had been accompanied by violence. By maximising audience size at the expense of everything else, Kaczynski gained a massive audience unwilling to give him a fair hearing.

Further, his manifesto contained a peculiar choice of words (“eat your cake and have it”), which was recognised by his brother, David, who alerted the police, leading to Kaczynski’s capture. And so, by fixating on the most obvious metric — the size of his audience — Kaczynski lost the one thing he’d been fighting for all along: freedom.

Kaczynski played the wrong game, and was trapped by it. Today, we all face similar traps. We chase numbers and icons because they’re always available, and the chase is often so immersive that it keeps us from seeing where it leads, which is often far away from what we actually seek. This can lead to what the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman calls “counterfeit fitness”: the constant, momentary “wins” that come with playing digital games give us a false sense of progression and accomplishment, a neurochemical high that feels like victory but is not, and which, if it becomes a habit, risks overriding our actual ambitions.

It explains why so many young men have lost themselves in video games, and are no longer in employment or relationships. The false signals they’re getting from video game progress, combined with the sexual reward of online porn, are convincing their dopamine pathways that they’re winning in life, even as their minds and futures atrophy. It’s easy to persuade people into tying their sense of progress to fake or trivial goals. Casinos keep their customers happily losing money by distracting them with minor side games they’re likely to win. The small victories convince them they’re winning overall even as they lose the only games that actually matter.

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This strange quirk of human behaviour can even cost lives. In South Korea, a young couple became so addicted to raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby starve to death. The parents prioritised what they could quantify — levelling up their virtual baby — over that which they couldn’t — the life of their real one.

What makes pathological gameplaying so dangerous is that the more harm it does, the more alluring it becomes. If your baby is dead, why not raise a virtual one? If your life of playing video games has stopped you finding a girlfriend, why not play the AI girlfriend game? Thus, bad games form a feedback loop: they distract us from pursuing the things that will bring us lasting contentment, and without this lasting contentment, we become ever more dependent on false, transient metrics such as scores, trophies, and leaderboards to imbue our lives with meaning.

All the things a gamified world promises in the short term — pride, purpose, meaning, control, and happiness — it threatens in the long term. It has the power to seclude people from reality, and to rewrite their value systems so they prioritise the imaginary over the real, and the next moment over the rest of their lives.

Fortunately, there is a solution.

***

In prison, Kaczynski wrote a little-known sequel to his manifesto, entitled Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, in which he outlines his belief that all sufficiently advanced civilisations become trapped in fatal games. To illustrate his point, he employs a thought experiment involving a forested region occupied by several rival kingdoms. The kingdoms that clear the most land for agriculture can support a larger population, affording them a military advantage. Every kingdom must therefore clear as much forest as possible, or face being conquered by its rivals. The resulting deforestation eventually leads to ecological disaster and the collapse of all the kingdoms. Thus, a trait that is advantageous for every kingdom’s short-term survival leads in the long term to every kingdom’s demise.

Kaczynski was describing a “social trap”, a term coined by a student of Skinner, John Platt, who had theorised that an entire population behaving like pigeons in a Skinner box, each acting only for the next immediate reward, would eventually overexploit a resource, causing ruin for everyone. What Platt called “social traps”, Kaczynski called “self-propagating systems”, because he viewed them as negative-sum games that took on a life of their own, defeating every player to become the only winner. He believed such games were an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, and had to be stopped before they reached a critical mass of players and became “alive”.

In jail, Kaczynski was forbidden access to the web, and in letters he struggled to understand what Facebook was. Nevertheless, his warnings could easily have been referring to social media. On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: digital filters, mask-like makeup, plastic surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off. On TikTok and YouTube, there is another self-propagating system where pranksters compete to outdo each other in outrageousness to avoid being buried by the algorithm. Such extreme brinkmanship frequently leads to injury, and has even led to the deaths of, among others, Timothy Wilks and Pedro Ruiz.

On X, meanwhile, there lives a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other — only make each other angrier — so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless cycle of mutually assured distraction.

Those are just three examples of social traps that have emerged in our gamified age. But the most worrying social trap is gamification itself. Every company that exploits our gameplaying compulsion to sell its products will have an edge over those who do not, which forces every company to compete to gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it is the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be. Games will be created not just to extract money from people, but also data.

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The 2025 Enhanced Games, for instance, is a new futuristic version of the Olympics, funded by tech moguls including Peter Thiel, where contestants can exploit anything from cybernetic implants to performance-enhancing substances to get a competitive advantage. The purpose of the games seems to be transhumanist: to motivate people to discover new ways to augment human abilities, with the eventual goal of turning men into gods. There is, after all, a vacancy in heaven. When God is dead, and nations are atomised, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Games can motivate us to destroy ourselves, but they can also motivate us to better ourselves. In a gamified world, it’s possible to play without getting played, if one only chooses the right games. As the poker player-turned-podcaster Liv Boeree said: “Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play.” So how do you decide which games to play? The story of gamification offers five broad rules.

First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones. Short, frequent feedback loops offer regular reinforcement, which helps motivate us. But what is made to motivate us too often addicts us. So consider the long-term outcomes of the games you’re playing: if you did the same thing you did today for the next 10 years, where would you be? Play games the 90-year-old you would be proud of having played. They won’t care how many trophies you have; they will care how many times you saw your parents before they died.

Second: choose hard games over easy ones. Since the long-term value of games lies in their ability to hone skills and build character, easy games are usually a trap. People with unearned wealth — thieves, heirs and lottery winners — often end up losing it all, because the struggle to obtain a reward teaches us the reward’s worth, and is thus a crucial part of the reward.

Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones. Games evolved to confer status, and status is zero-sum — for some to have it, others must lose it. But we no longer have to play such games; we can change the rules so a win for me doesn’t mean a loss for you. Educational games are one example. Wealth creation is another. Positive-sum games — where every player benefits by playing — are a form of competition that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a reward. Chasing trophies and leaderboard rankings can help drive us to succeed, but a fixation on such rewards can become a source of stress, and can even make leisure activities feel like drudgery, turning games into work.

Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can’t be quantified.

There are an overwhelming number of games to choose from. If you want to keep fit, try Zombies Run, an app that takes the form of a post-zombie-apocalypse radio broadcast telling you which direction to run to avoid being eaten. If you want to learn general knowledge while helping those in poverty, play the FreeRice quiz. If you want to learn a new language, try Duolingo. And if you want to form good habits, there’s Habitshare, which lets your friends track your attempts, motivating you more than if you were only accountable to yourself.

But if, among the countless games out there, you can’t find one right for you, then you can just create your own. By now there’s an app to keep any kind of score, and an AI to formulate any possible ruleset. Kaczynski killed himself last summer, still adamant humanity was doomed. His disturbing legacy has since passed to his disciples, such as the Liverpool man Jacob Graham, who was last month jailed for terrorism after trying to emulate his idol. Graham may have thought he was saving the world, but, with all his talk of maximising kill counts, he was just playing a bad game.

In the end, Kaczynski and his followers made the same mistake as Skinner: they viewed us as mere puppets of our environment, devoid of agency and the ability to adapt. They needn’t have feared the world becoming a Skinner box because, among all the papers written about that troublesome contraption, one fact is always omitted: Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were in a cage, and had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.

Your move.

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

Grindr launched as a mobile app in 2009, the brainchild of a gay Israeli-American tech entrepreneur, Joel Simkhai. It provided a seamless tech-mediated way for gay and bisexual men to interact in their area. The app promised, and arguably delivered, a hassle-free way to screen and select casual sexual partners with none of the pitfalls of in-person conversation. It was a runaway success, earning Simkhai millions, and becoming a staple in the lives of gay men across the world. The company went public in 2022, a feat which was hailed by commentators as a sign of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the business and finance world.

On paper, being anti-Grindr seems a bit like being “anti-freedom” — the projection of prudish, old-fashioned sensibilities onto techno-sexual liberation. Even the typical propogandists of grievance, those who accuse the app of perpetuating racism or “body fascism” or “femme-phobia”, just want equal access to this clearly emancipatory tool for the gay community. Gay men, particularly young gay men, are promiscuous; it’s in our nature. We do not play by the same rules of fidelity and desire as those of more conventional taste. But Grindr, far from furthering and expanding the opportunity for gay desire, has not truly augmented this state of affairs. Instead, it has diminished it, fundamentally reducing the erotic frisson, if not the availability, of casual encounters.

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Algorithmic screening, of course, is no longer just for gay guys. In her studies Cold Intimacies and Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz has extensively documented the pernicious effects that the rise of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge has had on heterosexual romantic love. Dating apps, by design, have led to the over-intellectualisation and rationalisation of mate-selection. Many young people are now paralysed by choice and the exhausted task of trying to dissect and screen a potential partner, applying a cold set of metrics to ensure time is not wasted on hopeless duds. What Illouz documents for straight romance is equally true of the role of apps like Grindr on gay sex.

There are essentially two types of casual sex. There’s the functional, “get-your-rocks-off” kind where all that’s desired is a cheap orgasm with minimal effort. And then there’s the truly erotic, where a roll in the sack leaves a lasting memory. But this kind of eroticism requires something almost external to sexuality: a degree of mystery. Like Illouz, philosopher Byung Chul-Han has noted that our overly tech-mediated “pornographic” social world has lost the art of experiencing one’s sexual partner as truly “Other”. In The Agony of Eros he writes:

“Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.”

This lack of otherness, in turn, diminishes sexual encounters into ego-centric, utilitarian pursuits — masturbation with another person attached. Modern, tech-mediated sex is that of Nietzsche’s “last man” in Thus Spake Zarathustra who “has his little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night”, without ever realising what’s been lost. It’s no wonder that the rise of apps is correlated with the rise of various stripes of asexual identity. Why bother with sex if this is all that’s on offer?

Grindr flattens desire by design. To play the game, users must advertise themselves through curated, sexually enticing images. The notorious “headless torso” image, the brass tacks of sexual marketing, gets to the heart of what’s on offer here — not a person but a body. Metrics on height, weight, sexual position and penis size further allow users to screen each other by pre-determined criteria and preferences.

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There is then a boilerplate set of steps for organising an encounter. One man prompts “you looking?” the other “can you host?”, a brief exchange of dick pics occurs and locations are sent. One textual analysis of Grindr conversations notes, grimly, that “metaphors of consumption or ‘meat market’ are pervasive” with users said to be “on the hunt” for sexual prey. Yet before one gets to this brief transactional exchange, you first must do the necessary labour: the endless scroll. One survey found that nearly 40% of Grindr users were on the app daily, checking in over eight times and spending around 1.3 hours per day just scrolling. The inevitable result of constantly hitting refresh is not finding the perfect partner, but merely settling for whoever was “good enough” given time spent — a sexual sunk-cost fallacy.

The end result is an in-person sexual encounter, sure, but one that’s already been ruined in advance. Disappointments begin at the front door (how old is that photo?), followed by some prescribed sexual motions (one’s “intos” having been agreed in advance), and then some brief post-coital conversation as you struggle to find your pants. Contrast this tech-mediated disaster with the typical gay hook-ups of yesteryear. One didn’t have to hyper-intellectualise the screening process as encounters were determined by chance. Your options were whoever was at the bar, sauna or beat: limited of course, but liberated at least from the mental tyranny of scrolling down an endless menu.

Rather than brief transactional exchanges, men are forced to perform an intricate set of glances, touches and maybe even a little flirting. Chul-Han speaks frequently about the collapse of little rituals in modern life, seemingly silly irrational habits which in fact add an inarticulable weightiness to encounters. In-person cruising also maintains the mystery of the Other, absent the overthinking of every pixel in an image or word in a sentence. The result is real sex, a raw unmediated encounter with another person where one briefly loses oneself in the intensity of pleasure. Grindr hasn’t killed the gay bar. Yet, with all conveniences, it’s not surprising that many gay men are choosing to sit on their couch rather than go out for more meaningful pursuits. After all, rejection in-person wounds far more than being ignored on an app.

New tech deeply embeds itself, and mere criticism of its pitfalls doesn’t make it go away. While some outlets have claimed Zoomers are ditching the apps for real-life connection, the reality is far bleaker: concerns about their image and fear of rejection are putting much of Gen Z off looking for love (and sex) altogether. Cures are not so easily prescribed. Because of their pervasiveness, “getting off the apps” is just as likely to result in prolonged solitude as it is more meaningful encounters. Pernicious tech must be soldiered through, recontextualised, and made to work for the user rather than passively consumed. Yet glimmers of light can be found in Chul-Han’s recommendation for little rituals and for maintaining a certain mystique.

Perhaps the solution is less getting off the apps entirely and more about taking a risk on what constitutes a “match” — leaving final judgements to an in-face encounter, and meeting at a bar first before the bedroom. Perhaps placing your bets on irrational, unpredictable physical “chemistry” over hyper-rationalised profiles can carve out some heterotopic space for homoerotic desire. One must not lose hope of aiming higher — of not settling for junk food sex when more refined erotic experiences await the patient and brave. Forster’s story ultimately ends with mother and son perishing as the machine crumbles around them. But just before their demise they share a single moment in which they feel the real presence of one another for the first time:

She crawled over the bodies of the dead. His blood spurted over her hands. “Quicker,” he gasped, “I am dying — but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine.”

It is true that misogyny prevails in the medical profession and that women’s healthcare is often overlooked and under-researched: just look at the current attitude towards endometriosis and the crisis in childbirth and after-care. But there is a greater philosophical question here that needs to be interrogated: Is menopause a disease of oestrogen and ageing that should be treated? Or are we instead pathologising and medicalising a normal part of the female life cycle?

This week, The Lancet medical journal published a series of articles examining the current media narrative, saying it’s “time for a balanced conversation about menopause”. Its editorial states that, while some women experience severe symptoms, others have mild or no symptoms. And despite the frequent claims that menopause is associated with poor mental health, it states that “there is no strong evidence that the risk of first-onset clinical depression is increased over the menopause” — although some women with previous mental illness may be at risk.

Menopause wasn’t always taken so seriously. There was a time when women were expected to shut up and put up with their hot flushes. We darkly referred to this stage of life as “the Change”. But then, the bestselling book Feminine Forever, by gynaecologist Dr Robert Wilson, changed that narrative forever. He made the case that menopause was a serious disease and that post-menopausal women were deficient: “a woman’s physical, social, and psychological fulfilment all depend on one critical test: her ability to attract a suitable mate and to hold his interest for many years.” He described menopause as “a mutilation of the whole body” and HRT was a way to “be restored along with a fully feminine appearance”.

Though some feminists fought back, many health activists embraced the view that, like contraception, HRT was a key to women’s liberation. But what wasn’t common knowledge at the time was that Wilson was funded by the HRT industry.

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There followed an inevitable surge in demand for HRT until, in the early 2000s, a large study from the Women’s Health Initiative reported an increased risk of breast cancer associated with long-term HRT use. Overnight, the treatment fell out of fashion. That study has now been contested, and in the past decade, the medication has had a renaissance. Parliamentarians are calling for menopause health checks, and leave from work, and social media is full of doctors recommending it to women — and women recommending it to each other — not just as a way to reduce hot flushes, but as a way to save marriages, skin tone, and sex lives — as well as reducing future cardiac and dementia risks.

But do all these claims stack up? The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is the official provider of evidence-based guidelines for UK doctors. In 2015, they published their “first guideline on menopause to stop women suffering in silence”. One of the guideline developers said: “For the past decade, some GPs have been worried about prescribing HRT, and women worried about taking it. I hope that this new NICE guideline will empower women to talk to their GP or practice nurse about menopause and provide them with information on the range of options that could help. For health professionals, the guideline should boost their confidence in prescribing HRT.”

In other words, women should be asking for HRT, and GPs should be prescribing more of it. And certainly, there is good-quality evidence that HRT is highly effective at reducing the hot flushes and sweats that many women experience. But it also comes with side effects — in particular, the risk of certain cancers and, where oestrogen is taken as tablets, an increased risk of blood clots.

Annice Mukherjee, a consultant endocrinologist with a specialist interest in the menopause, says: “Women who want to access HRT should be able to get it on the NHS. But I think it’s just gone from one extreme to another… What we need is balance. Some women will benefit from some treatments but not others. Some women will come to harm from some treatments and not others. Treatments like HRT are being oversold for that potential benefit.”

One area of controversy is whether HRT has preventative properties. NICE says that HRT can be used to treat vasomotor symptoms — flushes, sweats and “low mood that arises as a result of the menopause”. It is also listed as effective for the treatment of osteoporosis, though other drugs are preferred. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) advises that HRT should only be prescribed to relieve post-menopausal symptoms that are adversely affecting quality of life — for example, poor sleep caused by night sweats, in turn causing fatigue or low mood — and say that “treatment should be reviewed regularly to ensure the minimum effective dose is used for the shortest duration”.

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It’s important, though, not to confuse correlation with causation. Treating flushes with HRT to improve sleep is often helpful. But given the exterior factors often affecting women at this stage in their lives — looking after younger or older family members, as well as the impact of the gender pay gap —  the menopause might not be the sole trigger for their mood swings. And if HRT fails to remedy these problems, patients can end up on escalating doses rather than being encouraged to explore whether another factor might be the problem.

Indeed, anxiety, weight gain, fatigue, and low mood are rising across society because of poor physical mobility in midlife. But because of the health propaganda campaign, women attribute it to the menopause, says Mukherjee. “This may be contributing, but they go on HRT and this doesn’t help.”

“It’ll treat flushes, but they weren’t a problem anyway,” she continues. “And then they’ll say that they have heavy bleeding or weight gain or bloating, or migraines are getting worse. Some doctors will then just escalate the doses up, and up, and up. And then, if it’s not working, they are put on testosterone.” She adds: “The evidence for testosterone for those general symptoms is zero. Again, that’s all propaganda.”

Growing awareness is exacerbating the problem, piling pressure on doctors to prescribe. As a result of powerful activism, access to HRT is sometimes seen as a “rights” issue for women.

Brooke Nickel is a public health researcher at the University of Sydney, whose work has looked at the language used to sell HRT products to women. “They’re really spinning that feminist narrative around,” she says. “If you don’t do something, you’re not taking control of your body or you’re being oppressed by other people.”

“They then either conceal or downplay the evidence,” she continues. “They don’t talk about harms, they only talk about benefits, they only spin it in a positive way. So it’s not really giving transparency or giving all the information to women.”

Mukherjee agrees. “People are using HRT as a panacea and it’s not a panacea. They think it’s going to prevent heart disease, dementia, diabetes, etc. Some doctors say, if it doesn’t make its symptoms better, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to prevent disease.” The trouble is, we simply don’t know which of those women is going to develop complications. “We know from previous research there might be one in 50 women who get a breast cancer diagnosis with five years of treatments,” Mukherjee says.

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Social media is complicating the landscape even further. Dr Liz O’Riordan, a former breast surgeon who has been treated for breast cancer herself, says: “Lots of members of the public are getting their information from celebrity influencers.” Some make an effort to be accurate, she says, but not all. There are also some high-profile doctors claiming menopause is a disease that must be treated, and that if you don’t take HRT you will get heart disease and dementia.

This is confusing for women in the breast cancer community, as many can’t take HRT due to the risk of their cancer worsening or returning. Nor does O’Riordan think that the risks of HRT — which include breast cancer and for some preparations blood clots — are fairly explained online. Notably, however, NICE’s draft guidance explicitly does not recommend that HRT is used to prevent cardiovascular disease or dementia.

Normally, if a treatment is not working, we reconsider whether the diagnosis is correct. But in this case, it’s different. “It’s a bit like Tripadvisor — we are not getting a balanced view,” says O’Riordan. “A lot of women don’t need HRT, instead we only hear the worst stories about menopause and as a result women are scared, asking, ‘if we don’t take it what’s going to happen to us?’ There is a real fear for the future.”

Consider what happened after NICE’s updated draft guidance for managing menopause was published recently. There was an outcry on social media about one particular recommendation: cognitive behavioural therapy, which NICE said can “reduce the frequency and severity of hot flushes and night sweats and should be considered alongside or as an alternative to HRT”. One post in response read: “Talking therapy for menopause is insulting, cruel and pointless.”

Myra Hunter would disagree. The emeritus professor has been researching menopause for most of her professional life, and argues that CBT can make a real difference to women who are experiencing hot flushes and sweats. She’s not against HRT, but thinks that menopause can best be understood through a “biopsychosocial” framework that considers biology, psychology and social factors.

“Our minds and bodies are intrinsically linked,” she says. “CBT has been used to help people to manage physical symptoms, such as chronic pain, for some time… We should not say that CBT is a cure-all — it’s not. It’s a choice for women. It may not get rid of symptoms entirely, but it might reduce the negative impact they have on her life.”

In fact, the NICE draft guidance says that CBT should only be “considered” for help with flushes — and still primarily recommends HRT. No-one is saying that menopausal symptoms are all psychological. Hunter also observes that the meaning and experience of menopause varies across cultures. “In some countries, such as Japan or India, women tend to report fewer [hot flushes]; and there may be other factors which explain these differences, such as diet and nutrition.”

Hunter has also noticed a resurgence of the Sixties idea that HRT can make you look younger, sexier, and less wrinkled. “I’ve been struck by women asking about testosterone, even when they are doing well, thinking it may help give them ‘energy’ or make them feel more ‘lively’.” HRT marketing has created a demand that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Perhaps we should be grateful for this blossoming interest in women’s health. But this wave of concern comes with strings attached. It’s not helping women to insist that we all “need” HRT, or to promote it to treat conditions where there simply isn’t evidence for it working. We need independent information — not to be oversold products like consumers in a marketplace. By treating post-menopausal women as “deficient” in hormones, rather than going through a normal stage in life, women are being medicalised. And is that really doing them a favour?

1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg
2. The escape from California
3. Clegg battles Britain
4. The rise of Facebook fraud
5. How Clegg wields his superpower

1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg

In July 2018, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was a mid-tier guest speaker at Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s inaugural “Democracy Summit” in Copenhagen. No longer an MP after being unceremoniously dumped from parliament in 2017 by a bar manager now in jail for fraud, Clegg was one of a number of former politicians who, having lost power, believed democracy was in trouble. Also appearing with the former Lib Dem leader were the two headliners that day: Joe Biden and Tony Blair.

The themes of that summit reflected the zeitgeist of the moment: the dangers of fake news and technology, particularly on social media platforms. For much of that year, Facebook had been under intense public scrutiny following revelations that people’s private data had been secretly collected and sold to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The “Cambridge Analytica scandal” had seen Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, dragged before Congress where he had given a hesitant and unconvincing performance in front of the world’s media, becoming a lightning rod for all the anxieties of the moment.

Rasmussen’s Democracy Summit was, then, another potential PR problem for Facebook. Yet, as one of the key sponsors, it also offered an opportunity to show how seriously it was now taking its responsibilities. Facebook’s Vice President of Global Policy Solutions at the time, Richard Allan, headed up the company’s delegation. Allan was the former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam who gave up his seat for Clegg in 2005, acted as his campaign manager, and was then granted a peerage by the Coalition in 2010. Also in attendance was Facebook’s former vice president, Joanna Shields, who had also been given a peerage under the Coalition, becoming a minister under David Cameron and then Theresa May’s “special representative on internet crime and harms”.

So, while Clegg was a rather bruised former politician, he remained a very well-connected one. When the conference ended, he did not even have to sort his own travel home: Blair offered him a lift back to London in his private jet. Here was a taste of the gilded life he might aspire to in his political retirement, the life of a former politician no longer constrained by democracy.

But Clegg, thanks to that summit, has taken quite a different path from almost any previous British politician. He had never been that interested in technology, according to those who know him. But as Allan told me recently: “The event was one of those moments which helped Nick understand how politically significant all this was.” Within a few months, Clegg had joined Facebook, and relocated to the US. He has since risen to become one of the most senior executives at its parent group, Meta — no longer merely deputy prime minister of the UK, but, according to those I spoke to in Whitehall, effectively “Foreign Secretary of Facebook”.

Clegg’s importance at Meta was revealed last year when he negotiated both his return to London and promotion to “President of Global Affairs”; a position which reportedly earns him upwards of $15 million a year. Six years after his career low-point, Clegg is now Zuckerberg’s trusted consigliere, the political representative for a $1 trillion corporate behemoth. He is the man paid to ensure Zuckerberg is not exposed to the sort of political scandal that dragged his name through the mud in 2018.

In short, Clegg has it all: not only the kind of power, wealth and settled family life back in London that few former politicians could ever dream of, but also his reputation repaired and even enhanced. No longer a humiliated political loser, he is now the man tasked with making the world’s most important media company more socially responsible and saving democracy from the populists in the process.

While Clegg remains relatively guarded about this new life — he would not agree to be interviewed for this piece — his wife Miriam González Durántez’s Instagram page is like a show reel for what it all looks like. There he is with his wife one moment, hiking in Africa, smiling for the camera, soaked in the mists of Victoria Falls; then in the United States; and then back in England walking in the countryside. “Happy birthday Nick Clegg!” Miriam writes below one image of the pair of them. “Life with you is an incredible journey.”

“Y’all shooting Clarkson’s farm?” one of Miriam’s friends jokes in reply to her birthday post, the rolling English countryside clearly visible behind them. “I’ve watched two episodes and I’m hooked!” Miriam replies. “At least it’s anti-Brexit!!” For Miriam the nature of her husband’s departure from politics — and what came soon after — remains a source of bitterness. Under a news story that she posted on her Instagram feed about David Cameron returning to frontline politics as foreign secretary, she remarks, “Clearly getting bored at home,” before adding, acidly: “And yet home is where he truly belongs.” When a friend replies, “I thought it was George O you really hated”, Miriam posts a laughing emoji. When another adds, “what a joke of a man”, Miriam responds with a heart.

But is her husband really so different from Cameron? “The only difference,” one senior government minister said to me, “is that David is back in government trying to launder his reputation — whereas Nick is selling his to launder somebody else’s.”

This is central to any consideration of Clegg’s new life: is he really the liberal constraining influence on Meta that his defenders claim, the man making Facebook that little bit more responsible for the good of us all? Or is he, actually, an enabling force, giving a veneer of respectability to a company that is so big it has moved beyond the control of mere national governments and remains just as socially irresponsible as ever? For, according to those I have spoken to in the British Government and law enforcement over the past few months, Meta’s influence is not becoming more benign under Clegg — quite the opposite.

I was told by a senior minister that, in the UK today, 10% of all crime happens on a Meta platform. “That’s not online crime,” he said, “but all crime.” And it is getting worse. Not only has online fraud exploded on Facebook marketplace, but child exploitation is being made easier by Meta’s decision to ignore pleas from law enforcement agencies and government ministers not to roll out “end-to-end encryption” across its platforms, in effect making it much easier for paedophiles to groom and abuse children without anyone knowing. “They are responsible for an awful lot of harm in this country,” another minister told me.

And yet what is being done about it? According to those I spoke to in government, Britain has become a global soft touch for online criminals, attracted to the country by the ease of operating in English, our economic openness, speed of online payments — and, crucially, the utter inability of the state to do anything about it.

2. The escape from California

Clegg’s time in California was important, say those who know him, because it allowed him to get close to Facebook’s “C-suite” executives — in particular, Zuckerberg himself. For much of this time, his boss was Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s all-powerful number two. When she stepped down in the summer of 2022, Zuckerberg relied instead on a team of lieutenants, one of whom was Clegg. With this direct relationship established, Clegg felt secure enough to move back to Britain.

According to Meta, he only occasionally interacts directly with the British Government — his job is now too important for that. “He spends most of his life on a plane,” I was told. In January, he was in Switzerland for meetings about AI; in December, in Brussels to talk to the EU; in October, Greece for another summit about democracy; and over the summer, India, where he was greeted like a visiting head of state.

Clegg’s job at Meta is to set overall strategy for dealing with the world’s most powerful regulators, oversee Meta’s own governance strategy and manage the politics that inevitably come with its extraordinary global influence and wealth. In total, there are now 3 billion “monthly active users” on Facebook, 2 billion on WhatsApp and 1 billion on Instagram. If Meta is now the size of a country, Clegg is both its cabinet secretary and its chief diplomat.

As such, Meta is not just another social media company, but a monster of global proportions: an international news platform, publisher, marketplace and advertising giant all rolled into one, used not just by ordinary people, but also by criminal gangs, sexual predators, authoritarian governments and terrorists. Indeed, one of Meta’s own lines of defence is that its very size is the reason why so much crime happens on its platforms.

Clegg’s defenders argue that, since joining Meta in 2018, he has moved the company away from its more libertarian instincts towards a more “mature, sensible place”, where it apparently acts more proactively in addressing public concerns about its role in things such as deep fakes, sexual exploitation and fraud. He has, they say, been instrumental in making Meta less hostile to regulation while creating new layers of governance for the platforms. He created the independent “Oversight Board” which now makes decisions on free speech and content on Facebook and Instagram, and which has been filled with unimpeachably liberal bigwigs such as the former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who lives in London, and the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. These are Clegg’s people.

The Oversight Board has certainly helped to reduce the kind of political controversy over Facebook censorship which dogged the company during Clegg’s early years, when Donald Trump was removed from the site. Yet this innovation also points to the question about Clegg’s influence. “I mean, come on,” said one of the senior UK government figures I spoke to. “Does anyone really believe the ethics board is anything more than a rubber stamp for the same old West Coast liberal politics the company has always had?” To Clegg’s critics, in other words, it’s all just window dressing for the same corporate interest.

Over the past months, I have spoken to more than a dozen figures in government, finance, tech and police, as well as those who know Clegg personally, to try to understand how much he has really managed to achieve at Meta. Those who have come across him at work describe the same figure who burst into the public consciousness in 2010: fluent, charming, persuasive, normal.

One British minister who had dealt with Clegg in government told me he was the same as ever, only now with the air of corporate power behind him. Another MP said he was “charming but defensive” when representing Meta. Another who met him in California told me that while he was thriving professionally in the US, he was clearly out of place in Silicon Valley’s deracinated suburbia, too far removed from the Victorian warmth of south-west London where the family had made their home and to which they have now returned — albeit to a new £8 million home in Chiswick.

Clegg and his wife disliked the scale of urban poverty in California that sat alongside the kind of extraordinary tech wealth that they were benefiting from. Both felt that their time in the US had confirmed how European they were and, while they might hate Brexit and the Conservative Government, London was nevertheless home. While they were there, Miriam lectured on international trade policy at Stanford University, but she has her own political ambitions in Europe. Since returning, she has created a new political movement — or “nascent political party” as one friend described it — called España Mejor, or “Better Spain”.

It was always the pair’s Europeanness that made Clegg such an attractive prospect for Zuckerberg. He is, explains one friend, fluent in European in a way Zuckerberg is not.

3. Clegg battles Britain

“The tech industry needs to work together to fight predatory adults online,” Clegg tweeted in November. “That’s why Meta is a founding member of the Tech Coalition’s new Lantern programme, which will allow companies to share signals about predatory behaviour & take action on their respective platforms.”

A month later, Meta announced that it was rolling out end-to-end encryption for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook, meaning, as it boasted at the time, “the content of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the receiver’s device”. As a result, “nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said”.

For years the British Government had been lobbying Meta not to go through with this plan. Today, Britain receives around 800 referrals every month from the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organisation which trawls the internet looking for evidence of child exploitation. When NCMEC finds evidence of wrongdoing it passes it on to national crime agencies around the world who then go to arrest the abusers operating in their country. As a result of these 800 referrals, around 1,200 children are protected from predatory adults every month. By rolling out end-to-end encryption, the UK Government believes this number will collapse overnight.

In 2022, there were around 32 million reports of online child sexual exploitation made to NCMEC — 21 million of which came from Meta. When I put this to Meta, they pointed to comments by the NCMEC executive John Shehan, who recently praised the company for going “above and beyond” in their search for online child sexual exploitation while other companies did not, and there seems to be some truth in this. While Facebook referred 21 million reports to NCMEC in 2022, Google reported 2.2 million, TikTok 290,000 and X just under 100,000. Apple reported just 234. And yet, by rolling out end-to-end encryption, Meta has, in effect, wilfully blinded itself to at least some of what is happening on its platforms, even if it insists there is still much they can do to combat child sexual exploitation.

A Meta spokesman told me: “We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent and combat abuse while maintaining online security.” Here is classic Cleggite third-wayism. Meta points to things such as enforcing age limits, using technology to scour for suspicious behaviour and stopping adults contacting children they don’t know. The company says, for instance, that it can block anyone over 19 from starting a direct conversation on Instagram with children they don’t follow. Meta also says it has developed technology to identify “suspicious adults” — for example, if they’ve recently been reported or blocked by a teen — which would prevent them from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts. But if adults are this suspect why aren’t they just thrown off Facebook altogether?

Another safety feature Meta boasts about are the “safety notices” it sends to teenagers if they are talking to suspicious adults. In just one month last year, 85 million users apparently saw such safety notices. And yet, as a parent, it is hard to feel reassured by such statistics rather than simply terrified at the scale of potential abuse. Other defenders of Meta argue that end-to-end encryption does not disempower the police. Encrypting messages does not stop undercover police entering WhatsApp groups or seizing mobile phones. Meta insists that overall, even with end-to-end encryption, it expects to continue providing more reports of potential child sexual exploitation than other social media companies. We shall see.

The British Government, at least, is far from convinced. In the autumn of 2022, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, held a video call with Clegg about the issue. In this meeting, Clegg claimed Meta was being unfairly targeted because it was making the majority of referrals to NCMEC. From the British Government’s perspective, though, this was exactly the point — it is making so many referrals because there is so much abuse happening, which will now be harder to do anything about. The discussion ultimately ended without agreement: the UK Government insisted that it was possible to protect privacy and child safety by developing new technology to sit alongside end-to-end encryption. Clegg insisted that it was not.

It looks, to those in government, like Clegg has absorbed the prevailing libertarian orthodoxy of California: an orthodoxy which places privacy above all else. In Silicon Valley, there is an arms race to offer customers total privacy in their private communications, no matter the cost. For the British Government, the cost of such unbreakable privacy is simply too high. Instead, it believes technological solutions are possible that allow social media companies to scan for illegal material on encrypted platforms, while also maintaining privacy. “We know it’s possible, because GCHQ says it is,” one government figure told me. The British state, in other words, had developed the technology itself. Meta says most experts disagree.

After Braverman and Clegg’s discussion in 2022, the pair did not meet until 2023. In the meantime Braverman ordered the Home Office to produce a public campaign directed against Meta’s planned roll out of end-to-end encryption which would target Zuckerberg directly, pleading with him “as a father” to change course. The plan, in effect, was to launch a coordinated government attack on the Facebook founder to shame him into action by turning public opinion against him. But, then, Rishi Sunak ordered Braverman to pull the campaign.

Why would he do this? On this point there remains a fierce dispute between ministers. Some see something nefarious — Sunak eyeing a future career like Clegg’s — others the power of the Treasury, others mere political tactics or Sunak’s weakness. What is certainly true is that there was a campaign and then there was not.

It was also at this time that the Government began trying to reassure Meta about the measures contained within its then-controversial Online Safety Bill, which was making its way through parliament. Under the Bill’s provisions, social media companies such as Meta would be responsible for the content on their platforms and would have a new duty to “identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm” from illegal content and “activity that is harmful to children”. The legislation also gave the powers to enforce this to Ofcom, the media regulator. Ofcom, the act states, could order Meta to use “accredited technology” to look for and take down child sexual abuse material on its platforms, and also to levy fines up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue.

Facing this threat, in March 2023, Meta warned it would pull WhatsApp from the UK if the proposed measures in the Bill were not removed. But, then, in September — just as the row between Braverman and Clegg was reaching its climax — the Government moved to reassure Meta and the other social media companies that Ofcom would only be able to force them to scan WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook for illegal content if that was “technically feasible”, which Meta insists it is not. In the end, the Bill received royal assent in October without the changes once demanded by Meta, but with responsibility for dealing with the problem kicked over to Ofcom.

No one knows how Ofcom will use its new powers — or how powerful the new law will actually be. One thing we do know is that since the passage of the Online Safety Act in September, Meta has not only not pulled WhatsApp from the UK but has felt free to push ahead with the roll out of end-to-end encryption across its other services. “The truth is we’re too scared and timid,” said one government figure involved at the time. “As ever.”

When I opened my phone this weekend, I noticed a little message on WhatsApp. “We’re updating our Terms of Service and making relevant changes to our Privacy Policies for UK users, effective 11 April 2024,” the note read. The changes are necessary, it went on, “to reflect that the minimum age to use WhatsApp in the UK will be changed from 16 to 13″.

4. The rise of Facebook fraud

Alongside the Online Safety Act, the principal challenge for Meta over the past year has been the growing anger over the explosion of fraud on its platforms, particularly Facebook. According to the Government, fraud now accounts for 40% of all crime in England and Wales, 70% of which comes from abroad with as much as 80%  happening online — the vast majority on social media. In recent evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, the TSB’s Financial Crime Prevention Director, Paul Davis, said 80% of the fraud they saw originated on social media, before adding: “Let’s not walk past the fact that when I say ‘social media’, the majority of them start from the channels owned by one company in particular, which is Meta.” Baroness Nicky Morgan, chair of the House of Lords Fraud Act Committee, told Meta that she had received written evidence from high-street banks that in one three month period alone, 70% of all cases of investment fraud started on Facebook or Instagram, either through adverts or victims being directly messaged.

The police are seeing the use of social media and “encrypted messaging services” like WhatsApp by criminals “increasing throughout all aspects of fraud”.

While Clegg sets Meta’s overall political strategy, he tends to defer the job of defending Meta’s interests in the UK to the team he has assembled in London, most of whom also used to work in Whitehall.

Meta’s director of public policy in London is Chris Yiu, a former No. 10 adviser and Treasury official who went on to become one of the most influential figures at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI). Yiu is credited within the TBI as being the man who convinced Blair of the revolutionary potential of technology, setting him off on his journey towards Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who now funds most of his work calling for much greater use of technology by government. Yiu remains close to Blair, becoming one of the TBI’s board members in 2022, a position he still holds, alongside his job at Meta.

Alongside Yiu, there’s Rebecca Stimson, who was in the Cabinet Office during the Coalition as a senior EU policy advisor to Cameron. Then there’s Richard Earley, Meta’s “Head of UK Content Regulation Policy”, who also worked in the Cabinet Office with Clegg during the Coalition, and Philip Milton, who does much of the direct interaction with the Government on the issue of online fraud. Before joining Meta, Milton previously worked at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, “with responsibility for e-Privacy, Data Protection and Net Neutrality policy”, and before that at the Serious Fraud Office. For Meta, Whitehall is less a revolving door than a one-stop shop from which to poach its lobbyists.

When Milton appeared before the House of Lords in 2022, he claimed that dealing with online fraud was Meta’s “number one priority”. “Without our users, our platforms cease to exist, it is as simple as that,” he said. “Even if they do not necessarily fall victim to fraud, the very presence of it degrades users’ experience, and it makes it an unattractive place for advertisers to use as well.”

Yet, according to those I spoke to within the British Government, Facebook has been the slowest and least effective of all the Big Tech companies in reducing fraud on its platforms. When Google changed its algorithm so that it would only take adverts from investment products regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the amount of online fraud coming from the site collapsed to almost zero. Meta, in contrast, dragged its feet and is only now doing something similar.

Far from being motivated to act, one senior government insider told me, Meta’s business model and sheer size meant it was, in fact, incentivised to move much more slowly than other companies. “If you are eBay or Gumtree, then fraud on your marketplace is a real problem because it’s your bread and butter,” they explained. “For Meta, they are ultimately an advertising company, so eyeballs on site is what they need, so the incentives are completely different.”

Meta’s principle strategy was to avoid any new legal obligations imposed upon it to deal with the fraud — or, more specifically, any new legal liabilities to recompense those who had been defrauded through its sites.

Today, pressure for the Government to do something is not just coming from consumers who have been ripped off online, but from Britain’s powerful banking sector, which has become incensed at the amount of money it is having to pay out in compensation to those defrauded on social media. The issue has become more acute because of a new regulatory regime coming into force in October this year, which will mean almost everyone who is defrauded online will be entitled to a full reimbursement. At the moment, most banks voluntarily reimburse their customers, covering around two-thirds of all fraud cases. Under the Government’s new rules, however, almost all claims up to £415,000 will be covered — some 99% of all cases — with the cost of the compensation split 50/50 between the bank of the fraud victim and the bank of the fraud thief. The social media platform on which the fraud took place will not have to pay a penny.

To deal with this discrepancy, there has been a growing push inside the Government for tighter rules on tech companies — Meta in particular — to force them to clamp down on the fraud on their sites. The Government has had two “anti-fraud champions” over the past year or so — Anthony Browne and then Simon Fell. Both have publicly backed calls for the burden of compensation to be shared between the banks and social media companies. For Meta, this is not just a financial irritation but also a potential legal principle that could become a new gold standard across the world.

Before the party conference season last year, formal proposals went into No. 10 that included a recommendation that the Government look again at “burden-sharing” as part of a new Online Fraud Charter. According to one minister, two of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers — James Nation, deputy head of the policy unit, and Will Tanner, deputy chief of staff — were demanding the Government “push hard in this space”.

And yet, when the Charter was eventually published in November, there was no mention of it. Instead, the Charter was a kind of voluntary compact between the Government and tech firms to do more to deal with fraud, with a review to take place in six months to see how they are getting on. The tech companies — and Meta — had dodged a bullet. “The lack of anything in the Fraud Strategy caused quite a stir from the financial services sector,” the minister told me.

Even getting Meta to accept some responsibility for the content on its platforms took an enormous effort and the direct lobbying of Clegg to get it over the line. “It is the first time they have ever accepted responsibility for what is on their platforms,” one insider said, “so it’s a big mental boundary that they’ve crossed, which we shouldn’t overlook.”

In the run-up to this turning point last year, Clegg spoke to Bob Wigley, Chair of UK Finance, after which he ordered a number of his juniors to engage directly with Anthony Browne, the Government’s then anti-fraud champion. Following one such meeting, Browne wrote to Clegg directly to say he was “very pleased with the new identification measures that Meta is taking to combat fraud on your platforms” and that he was “confident they will have a real impact, and benefit millions of your users in the UK”. He concluded: “Thank you for your constructive approach and taking the issue with the seriousness it deserves.”

Meta says that while the Government has not made it financially liable for site fraud, the Online Safety Act does list fraud among the harms social media companies have a duty to combat — with fines of up to 10% of its global turnover if it does not. Meta also insists that the commitments it has made in the Online Fraud Charter are significant. For instance, it will soon be rolling out “increased verification” on Facebook Marketplace, introducing warning messages to encourage users never to pay for an item without seeing it first. But why has it taken so long to get here? And if it takes the threat of government action to do it, why aren’t we demanding more laws with more bite all over again?

According to a number of insiders involved in the process, the real brake on imposing burden sharing was the Treasury and Jeremy Hunt in particular. “It was a combination of the two of them,” said one government figure. The Treasury does not want to impose financial burdens that make Britain less attractive for inward investment, particularly from tech companies. A second figure confirmed that the reason the social companies had escaped without any new liabilities for the fraud was because of “competitiveness issues”. A third said: “As ever, the Treasury is reluctant to choke off any potential UK investors with what they see as punitive measures.”

For Hunt, personally, one of his central objectives as Chancellor is to make London and “the triangle” with Oxford and Cambridge “the Silicon Valley of Europe”. In his Autumn Statement, he boasted that Britain already had the “third largest technology sector in the world, double the size of Germany and three times the size of France”, but wanted to go further. Meta has already invested heavily in London, with a big new campus at King’s Cross, one on Rathbone Place and another on Warren Street. It is from Warren Street in particular that Clegg is able to “hot desk” whenever he goes into the office. Hunt’s vision has also been embraced by Sunak, the tech bro with a place and a former career in California.

And so, what is the result? Next month the UK Government is hosting the first ever Global Fraud Summit in London, attended by interior ministers and figures from Interpol, the EU Commission and the UN. And who has been asked to give a presentation on how to share intelligence? Meta.

5. How Clegg wields his superpower

If Nick Clegg has a superpower, it is surely the illusion of normality. He is the public schoolboy in an M&S pullover helping to run one of the world’s great hegemons. It was this ordinariness that once made him politically popular, but which also contributed to the ferocity of the backlash when it came. The country had briefly fallen in love with this new Blair, only for him to let them down, just like the old one.

His skill as a politician was to always adopt the demeanour of the most sensible person in the room, neither irresponsibly libertarian nor hysterically conservative. It is the same trick he plays today. When Clegg bemoans those fixated on “speculative future risks about AI models that currently do not exist”, this may sound like third-way centrism, but it is also no coincidence that this reflects Meta’s corporate interest in maintaining a light-touch regulatory system for as long as possible.

Again and again, Clegg has adopted the same strategy: shepherding Meta into a place where it can say it is already regulating itself — and so does not need sweeping new regulations imposed upon it. But all the while, things are getting worse online, not better, and Clegg is the man ultimately responsible for Meta’s overall political strategy — a strategy which, I was told by four separate figures from within the UK Government, was self-interested, slow and resistant to any real democratic challenge, reticent to do anything which affects its corporate bottom line or sets damaging regulatory precedents which could be adopted elsewhere.

“There’s no question in my mind that he is an enabler,” one former colleague at Meta told me. “The only question is whether he realises it or not.”

Far from a burnt-out politician, Clegg is now a private citizen with extraordinary power and responsibility, paid a fortune to promote the interests of a company whose policies affect the lives of billions. If the US Congress can hold Zuckerberg to account, why isn’t the British Parliament doing the same to Clegg?

But it is also true that when trying to piece together his influence, the British Government has also shown itself to be as full of contradictions as Meta. During my conversations I heard how unimportant Clegg was to Zuckerberg, a figure to be held in contempt for selling his reputation for money. But I was also told how instrumental he was in dragging Meta over the line to sign the Online Fraud Charter. Meanwhile, some ministers boasted about how the Government had refused to give in to threats from Meta, while others lamented how ineffective they had been. Some blamed the Treasury, others No. 10 and others still a general mindset of British state weakness, made worse by splits within the Cabinet between security-conscious departments such as the Home Office and rivals such as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

For all this pointless squabbling, a simple reality remains: Clegg might be an influential figure in a giant corporation, but the British Government is responsible for the laws which apply in Britain. If Britain is a soft touch, that is the Government’s fault. The question of whether he is a restrainer or an enabler is, then, moot: he is, inevitably, both. The real question is one of power. Clegg and the British Government have it. And we should be angrier with both for how they use it.

I was training for a bodybuilding competition, and it had been weeks since I had eaten fruit, because fruit contained sugar, and sugar was off-limits. The only time I was allowed it was immediately after workouts, in the form of half a Gatorade mixed with a scoop of protein powder, gulped down to prevent my starving body from consuming its own lean mass.

There are few pictures of me from this time in my life, except the ones I took weekly to track my progress. I posed in a sports bra and underwear with my muscles tensed, and sent the results to my trainer. Your midsection is showing more separation every week!, he wrote, as my abdomen morphed from a smooth, flat expanse to a rippling six-pack. (The sports bra was a mere formality by then; breasts consist mainly of fat, and mine had shrunk down to nothing.) Ten years later, the thing I remember most is not how great I looked but how much work it was. If I wasn’t eating or exercising, I was thinking about these things: planning, prepping, setting timers so that I’d remember to swallow whatever was on the menu within however many minutes of a workout. By the time I abandoned my training regimen — around the time I found myself weeping over fruit on the internet — my body had become a vehicle whose maintenance was my full-time job.

All of which is to say, when I read about Ozempic patients who are losing weight not just without trying, but without having to think about trying — the ones who, to quote one user, “just don’t think about food anymore” — I want to squawk with indignation. What do you mean, you don’t think about it?! That’s not fair; it’s cheating. But even among people who don’t share my peculiar history (okay, obsession) with manipulating the size and shape of their bodies, that instinctive reaction is commonplace. Whatever one’s reasons for losing weight, the common wisdom is that it’s not supposed to be easy, physically or mentally.

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Indeed, any experience to the contrary tends to inspire suspicion, even among those who believe wholeheartedly that being able to effectively cure obesity, and its litany of associated health conditions, would be an extremely good thing. The impulse to view Ozempic and other medicines of its ilk with mistrust, even derision — the equivalent of buying indulgences instead of performing atonement — has been compared with the taboo against Suboxone among former addicts, who “were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological”.

It’s not a bad analogy; Suboxone and Ozempic both work in their own way to suppress a person’s appetite, curbing an undesirable behaviour by eliminating the basic urge to engage in it. Another comparison might be the contemptuous moralising aimed at people who quit smoking by substituting tasty-flavoured vapes for combustible tobacco. It’s not that vaping doesn’t work; it’s that it’s too easy, too enjoyable. If smoking is a sin, quitting should be a crucible — or at the very least, it should not taste like cake. And in a world where an overweight body is seen as a sign of moral failure, thinness is seen as the just reward for those who atone through deprivation.

This ascetic immiseration is a chief characteristic of what social critics refer to as diet culture, which is adjacent to but separate from losing weight. Consider how many people are either perpetually on a diet — or at least, say they are — or just off one with little to show for it: it’s almost as if the point is not successful weight loss, but the show of compliance. You are depriving yourself of food not because it will make you thin — often, it does not do this — but because you are performing, for yourself and for the world, the role of a person who wants to be thin and is willing to hurt for it. Ordering the salad instead of the steak is a form of virtue signalling: “I am trying to be good.”

This entanglement of the moral with the biological has a long history, in which even doctors have been unable to entirely separate the two. The Victorian era, a time of ground-breaking advancement in the medical sciences, was also a time of great permeability between the social zeitgeist and the scientific community, in which cultural notions of beauty and femininity often reappeared in a doctor’s office disguised as medical advice. Among these dictums was the notion that appetite, particularly for women, was a signpost of both poor health and poor character. Then, as now, a slender figure was valued — and then, as now, achieving one was supposed to be accomplished through exquisite self-control. The ideal woman in the eyes of society and science alike not only ate very little, but made a show of it, demonstrating sovereignty over her appetites one dainty nibble at a time.

Those who took pleasure in eating, meanwhile, were viewed as courting disaster, an idea widely reflected in the medical wisdom of the era. John Harvey Kellogg, who in the late 1800s was considered America’s foremost pioneer in the field of gastroenterology, was convinced that robust appetites were inextricably linked with sexual depravity. “Candies, spices, cinnamon, cloves, peppermint, and all strong essences, powerfully excite the genital organs,” he warned in the 1880s. His guidelines for good gastrointestinal health, which included not just a bland vegetarian diet but a regular regimen of yoghurt enemas, were designed with the goal of curbing the desire for food and sex alike.

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This sense — that a healthy body is a thin body under control — recurs throughout history. At the turn of the 20th century, Kellogg pumps his patients full of bran flakes at one end and yoghurt at the other; at the dawn of the 21st, a fitness influencer dutifully crams exactly four ounces of chicken breast down her throat before heading to the gym. At the same time, to lose weight in other, easier ways — via liposuction or diet pills or, today, Ozempic — has long been viewed as not just unearned, not just cheating, but perhaps even a sort of devil’s bargain for which a harsh price will soon be paid. The history of scandals in the world of medically-assisted weight loss — the withdrawal of fen-phen from the market in the Nineties after research revealed that it could cause heart valve damage in up to a third of patients, or the rare but ghastly side effects of treatments like Coolsculpting — only serves to validate the moral superiority of the nay-sayers. We told you it couldn’t be that easy.

Of course, maybe this time it is that easy. Sure, there’s the occasional (albeit rare) horror story of Ozempic patients suffering stomach paralysis as a result of the drug — or the less ghastly, more quotidian concern that its appetite-suppressing effects cause the loss of not just fat but precious lean mass. But even if these apprehensions prove unfounded, the capacity of Ozempic to make weight loss not just effective but thoughtless is why it will almost certainly continue to occupy an important place in the medical consciousness, but a fraught place in our moral one.

Imagine: instead of sweating through gruelling workouts at the gym, the only effort you have to make is a weekly jab with a slender needle. Instead of battling your appetite at every meal, it retreats to a quiet corner on its own, until you’ve forgotten it ever existed. This doesn’t just flout the conventional wisdom, the studied science, of what it takes to lose weight; it flies in the face of every narrative in which weight loss is synonymous with redemption, in which every pound lost is a demon conquered.

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Time and research may reveal that Ozempic really is the future of weight loss, but I suspect that the stories we tell about it — and the perverse pride of having a body moulded by diet and exercise, yes, but also by focus and discipline and pain and tears — will be far harder to shed. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that my own brief foray into amateur bodybuilding was preceded by about 15 years of a more traditional eating disorder: the common thread in these experiences was not just a longing to be thin, but the satisfaction of putting in work here and seeing results there, of wrestling my body and its appetites alike into submission. Would I have felt so satisfied, so in control, if I had been able to simply neuter myself of those appetites with a weekly shot? Is self-deprivation still a triumph if there’s no desire to triumph over?

Here, it becomes important to note that in at least one way, Ozempic does suffer the same pitfalls as any other weight loss method that relies on eating less: people who stop using it tend to regain the weight. But unlike a diet, the idea of being on Ozempic permanently doesn’t inspire existential dread, evoking the dire image of spending the rest of your life tormented by raging and insatiable hunger. Indeed, one of the things that makes the drug so intriguing is that it curbs all manner of appetites. For food, yes, but also for alcohol, nicotine, gambling, sex — in short, for the pleasures that straddle the line between needing and craving. Ozempic patients will not burst into tears over a picture of a fruit salad. Instead, a lifetime on the drug will be characterised not by desire, but the absence of it. And this is perhaps its own sort of tragedy.

But Musk isn’t the only tech baron causing people to worry about freedom of thought. Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons, Artificial Intelligence might be able to read our minds simply by observing our behaviour. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, recently warned that it might observe our internet browsing history or what we’ve liked on social media in order to manipulate us with persuasive tailored messages.

Yet all this fretting about futuristic mind-reading technologies distracts from the reality that the biggest threats to freethinking today come from carbon, not silicon. Corporate influence is one such menace. Not only can companies control, block or obfuscate our thinking, but employers can also fire people for holding the wrong opinions. Bertrand Russell pointed out the danger of this a century ago. And today, in an age of mobs, online and offline, Left and Right, how many people dare form opinions?

In the UK, we are protected from being discriminated against for our “philosophical beliefs” by the Equality Act 2010. And a series of recent employment tribunal cases have decided that this means people cannot be fired for holding gender-critical beliefs. But, to count as a “philosophical belief”, specific criteria must be met. The thought in question must be “a belief” rather than merely an “opinion or viewpoint”, and one which is “worthy of respect in a democratic society” in a judge’s view. This leaves our more tentative, exploratory ideas — in short, the process of thinking itself — unprotected. But being kept in mental solitary confinement until we have fully formed “philosophical beliefs” is not conducive to thought.

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You could object that employers are firing employees for what they say, not what they think. But there is an overlap between thought and speech that the law doesn’t recognise. If we start believing that thought only happens inside our heads, then the battle for free thought is already lost. Thought is very much a social process; we think with each other. And in many situations, a group thinking together is more likely to get to the truth than if each individual has only their own mental biases to rely on. Thought should be regarded as both private and social, internal and external.

We also think externally with technologies: in our diaries, drafting documents on a computer, or googling something on an iPhone. And as technology is increasingly pervasive, we think externally more than ever before. Yet widespread online surveillance, and the ability of law enforcement to access our devices, means that the more we use these technologies, the more we expose our thinking to punishment. And those technologies may yet be turned against us.

So does the law protect such external thinking? While our right to freedom of thought is more than 75 years old, we are only deciding now what it means in practice. There’s a good chance that the legal profession will adjudge that thinking only happens inside our heads, in our “forum internum”. But a right to freedom of thought that does not protect external thinking is not worthy of the name. We should not put up with such crumbs from the high table of law.

Which leaves us with an even more fundamental threat to free thought: ourselves. Whereas free speech is never out of the headlines, freedom of thought rarely features in the national conversation. An alien observer would probably conclude that humans are more concerned with the liberties of their tongues than their minds.

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The truth is that firing off opinions is often a far more pleasant pastime than thinking. Thinking is hard and anxiety provoking, and one can get through life quite well, perhaps best, without ever doing it. As one psychologist argued, evolution has encouraged us to make decisions using the least possible energy, leading us to become “cognitive misers” who are “as stupid as we can get away with”. We will do anything to distract from our thoughts. A 2014 study found that when students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women electrocuted themselves.

It has never been easier to drown out our inner thoughts. Increasingly, we flood the spaces where thought was once possible, such as when washing-up, walking or weeding the garden, with other people’s thoughts. We gorge on podcasts, YouTube, Spotify playlists — anything to stop us having to sit with the anxiety of thought. We have become addicted to digital benzos.

We also steer away from freethinking because it can threaten our sense of belonging. The more you believe the falsehoods of your particular political tribe, the better a member you are. And so it’s easier to not think about anything too much. As the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue, “most people make their party choices based on who they are, not what they think” and act based on “emotional attachments that transcend thinking”. We then become more loyal to our party than to reality. Especially since, ultimately, we want to act more than we want to think. If someone offers us an idea or cause that will justify our actions, we will love them for it.

These feelings are exacerbated in a democracy, where, in order to be taken seriously, one must have an opinion to-hand on every topic. What matters is to be able to loudly articulate this opinion, rather than its truth. Democracy encourages us to feel as though we’re thinking when forming these opinions — when most often, we are not. We keep happily banging our own podiums like millions of sweaty Khrushchevs.

If we truly want to protect the right to think freely, we need to radically reorganise society: governments must support freethought; corporations can neither be allowed to monopolise information flows nor make earning a living dependent on our opinions. And, most important, we must start to value thinking far more highly. Then, when the machines come, as they inevitably will, we will clearly see both how they threaten freethought as well as how they can support it. Musk may have proclaimed himself a “free speech absolutist” — but whether Neuralink technology will uphold his principles remains to be seen. I have a feeling we might not like it.

Recent weeks have brought us two new and impressive examples of this genre. A New Yorker long read about the project of growing a near-identical breast milk substitute from human mammary cells relates the touching tale of Leila Strickland, a cell biologist at Stanford whose personal struggles with breastfeeding led to the formation of her company Biomilq. And within the pages of the Financial Times, we encountered Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO of an intellectual property software company in Silicon Valley. At the age of 31, Shanahan was having difficulties harvesting her eggs in order to freeze them for a future conception — the updated version of “was trying to have a baby but couldn’t”.

In a description that would sound impossibly neurotic were it not being uttered about someone with massive personal wealth, readers are told that she “was haunted by the fear that her life was being shaped by an organ that had been ageing before she was born” (namely, her ovaries). Attending a gathering in the home of a “Hollywood power couple” in 2017 and listening to a talk about the project of scientifically increasing human longevity, she idly swipes open her fertility tracking app and has “a moment of powerful insight”: why is nobody working on “reproductive longevity”? Or, in other words, how can we stop ovaries ageing so fast?

Several years later, and post-divorce from the Google bloke after an alleged (but denied) tryst with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur is still bankrolling academic research into this question on an epic scale. One study she funds is apparently looking at the potential of immunosuppressant drugs currently licensed for organ-transplant patients to delay menopause — if nothing else, a pleasingly symmetrical companion to the prescription of terrifying-sounding off-label drugs to delay puberty at the other end of things.

For some, it will be quite hard to get behind the supposed drama and nobility of Shanahan’s quest — to see her as we are implicitly encouraged to do, as a kind of brave pioneer or astronaut, wandering about in a mostly unknown realm — because this requires us to act like we don’t already know the answers to the questions she asks so urgently. As listed by the FT, these include: “Why are the ovaries one of the first organs to age? Why does the quantity and quality of eggs fall so dramatically? Why do humans go through menopause when so many animals do not?”

The truth is that evolution and natural selection have quite straightforward explanations; in fact, from that perspective, a much more puzzling question is why human females don’t die immediately after menopause, as so many other animals do. But then you realise that Shanahan and her researchers are totally uninterested in any answer that might position the female body as part of the natural world. When they ask “why…?”, all they really want to know is what mechanisms and environments immediately cause the limited shelf-life of human ovaries, so that they can then try to fiddle about with the process.

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A different reporting trope in this area is to observe that if such-and-such reproductive problem was happening to men, modern medicine would have dealt with it already. True to form, in the story about Strickland’s ambitions for breast milk substitute, a food scientist is quoted as saying that, thanks to “middle-aged white men”, there has been little medical interest in lactation historically. In the story about Shanahan, meanwhile, we’re told that “while men were finding myriad ways to lengthen their own lives, barely anyone was researching how to slow ageing ovaries”.

Such clichés fit well with the feminist complaint that, due to sexism, the particularities of a woman’s body have been under-researched historically and are still poorly understood, relatively speaking. It is, of course, a fair objection — yet perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

For the middle-aged men (and women) are now most definitely coming for the female physiognomy, and many of them have dollar and pound signs in their eyes. As such, it would be naïve to think these people have thought through all the consequences of whatever they are trying to sell us. Though Shanahan stresses that her own interest is not commercial, one Bloomberg article late last year estimated that the market for ovarian longevity drugs could reach $44 billion within the next decade. Similarly, a separate report from late last year suggested that “the global infant-formula market” is expected to be valued at “over $100 billion by 2032”.

It’s not hard to anticipate the appeal of such products, should they ever get off the ground properly. Nearly every new mother knows the hell of poor latching, mastitis and cracked nipples, and in my experience is keen to tell everyone else about it: I know I was. To a pregnant or would-be pregnant woman faced with such horror stories, having access to a near-identical breast milk substitute that you could pay for, should it all go wrong, might seem like a blessing. And to the woman not ready to face any of that terribly visceral stuff, but who still assumes they will want to get knocked up at some point, the existence of drugs apparently minimising the luck of the gestational draw in later years might seem a good thing too. In both cases, one assumes, there is a sense of prudentially shoring yourself up against the vicissitudes of biology; of running from capricious Mother Nature into the soothingly reliable arms of the market instead.

This flight from the perceived contingency of biology is obviously behind much of the appeal of so-called technological advances in fertility and reproduction: from the construction of artificial wombs to laser-assisted egg-hatching to AI’s predictive role in embryo selection and beyond. Viewed by prospective buyers, such developments would seem to raise your individual chances in the lottery of healthy baby-making; and who, you might think, could argue with that? A similar rationale makes a surrogacy arrangement desirable to some — except that in this case, another woman’s body now counts as a bit of the technological kit to be carefully tested first and then enhanced through suitable diet and exercise, in order to maximise the success of your aim.

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Indeed, in her mostly absurd book Full Surrogacy Now, author Sophie Lewis argues for widespread surrogacy as the norm for reproduction, partly on the grounds of what she calls “the tragedy of worldly contingency”: the fact, for instance, that “[s]ometimes people can’t become mothers; sometimes mothers die; sometimes they don’t love their babies; sometimes they abort them, abuse them, abandon them, divorce their co-parent or even kill”.

This isn’t so much an aversion to biological luck as a rejection of the very existence of all luck in human projects, full stop. The underlying message seems to be that if an action or process can go wrong in any way, it therefore needs to be improved. And it might be easy to reject such thoughts as adolescent wailing about life’s unfairness, except that a similar motive seems to lie behind technological innovations these days that has ostensibly little to do with mediating biology. Viewed from one perspective, for instance, the appeal of a retreat into VR for some looks like an attempt to cut down the random haphazardness from real life. Why go visit a mountain when you can sit in your living room, experiencing a wraparound panorama of the same thing on your new Apple Vision Pro glasses? Choose what you see and hear, and what you don’t; surround yourself, in the words of the Apple Vision marketing team, in a “beautiful environment”, making your screen “feel 100 feet wide”.

But of course, you can’t get rid of radical contingency in this life, no matter what you do — all you can do is choose your preferred rollercoaster. Apple Vision Pro glasses will eventually malfunction. Selecting a surrogate still means you are at the mercy of what happens to her body, to the eventual baby, and to the human relationships involved afterwards. You can try to mitigate the unreliability of your breast milk by buying a substitute, but you can’t control the supply chain or the price point. And drugs can only help you play reproductive roulette for that bit longer. The problem is not technical, it’s existential — and there’s nothing a biotech start-up could ever produce that would solve it.

The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024. 

***

Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, esteemed members of the Select Committee,

As an independent investigative journalist, it is my duty to serve the broad public interest, to watch over governmental and corporate conduct, to safeguard the principles underpinning a free society, and to spotlight wrongdoing — whether it comes from the Left, the Right, or the centre. It is a privilege to present my work to this committee. Over the past 15 years, I have uncovered a variety of different forms of surveillance and censorship, documenting how special interest groups, politicians, and law enforcement agencies use these tactics to silence or weaken their enemies.

I am committed to reporting on surveillance and censorship, because I regard free speech as the bedrock of our republic and the linchpin of our democratic process. These principles are the defining characteristics that set America apart on the global stage. But freedom of speech has not endured without a fight. In every generation, political and corporate actors from across the ideological spectrum have seized on crisis and moral panics to demand restrictions on speech.

Now as ever, we must remain vigilant against efforts to undermine free speech and free expression. Recent technological advancements have created new opportunities to restrict speech without public input or accountability. The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools, in particular, offers powerful entities the unprecedented ability to monitor, flag, and censor billions of individuals at a scale and scope never before conceivable. While this technology holds significant benefits, it also carries substantial risks. Private security firms are increasingly marketing AI solutions to both government agencies and corporations. Mounting evidence suggests that state and business interests are already deploying this technology with the goal of stifling lawful discourse and silencing dissent.

Some of you may be familiar with my October 2022 investigation delving into the history of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the FBI’s concurrent expansion into the policing of social media. Using court documents and evidence provided by a DHS whistleblower, I reported that government programs initially designed to curb foreign influence and incitement to terrorism had transformed into a broader campaign to suppress ordinary domestic speech. CISA’s expansive focus eventually touched on a wide range of political topics, from the 2020 presidential election to the origins of Covid-19 to criticism of the Ukraine-Russia war.

Two months later, in December 2022, I reported on a cache of Twitter’s internal corporate documents that became known as the Twitter Files. I gained access to internal emails, tools, and chats that confirmed my earlier reporting about CISA. I revealed that law enforcement agencies like CISA and non-governmental partner organisations consistently pressured Twitter executives to censor political speech under the guise of combating misinformation. I have since published many articles on my Substack based on these documents, including a piece released on Monday.

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The Right has embraced cancel culture

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In my latest report, I reveal that a non-profit anti-misinformation election consortium provided an inaccurate tip to CISA in November 2020 about a New York Times journalist’s observations about delays in the presidential vote count in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Instead of verifying the validity of the tip, CISA hastily produced a “Misinformation Report” about the incident, arguing that the tweet had promoted falsehoods about the election. The agency then lobbied Twitter to restrict access to the reporter’s tweet. In response, Twitter shadowbanned the Times reporter’s tweet, effectively rendering it invisible to most users — despite substantial evidence supporting the journalist’s accuracy.

I understand the stated intent behind these efforts — the desire to uphold the highest standards for our elections and deter any illicit manipulation. However, as this and many other cases illustrate, the government often errs and acts in a politically motivated manner. For this reason alone, it is inappropriate for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to act as the arbiter of permissible journalism. Moreover, government censorship of truthful and accurate speech — rather than dispelling conspiracy theories — serves only to exacerbate the erosion of public trust in our elections.

My work on the Twitter Files and other reporting on this topic differs slightly from recent testimony heard by this committee. I have also shed light on private entities’ attempts to control and curtail public discourse on major areas of public policy. I revealed that a group called Public Good Projects regularly collaborated with Twitter during the pandemic to censor specific social media accounts because of their criticism of establishment views around Covid-19 vaccines, while amplifying accounts supportive of vaccines and government viewpoints. This particular censorship campaign was entirely funded by biopharma lobbyists that represent Moderna and Pfizer.

In some instances, the censorship demands targeted users who simply expressed opposition to “vaccine passports” – the proposal to make a person’s right to travel and engage in certain forms of commerce dependent on their vaccination status. The validity of the idea of “vaccine passports” is a reasonable topic of debate in a free society, and should not be repressed by a drug company with financial interests at stake.

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More recently, in collaboration with UnHerd and RealClearInvestigations, and with co-author Jack Poulson, I reported that Moderna relaunched efforts to influence vaccine discourse, again working with Public Good Projects. Moderna also employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm Talkwalker to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites, including social media and gaming platforms like Steam. Moderna labelled almost any critic of the company or vaccine policies as “high risk” for spreading misinformation, including reputable academics like Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and local elected officials who simply voiced objections to vaccine mandates.

The company even targeted tennis champion Novak Djokovic in its misinformation reports, not for any statement he made but for his accomplishments. In one report, Moderna warned that: “The optics of Djokovic, whose vaccine opposition barred him from competing in the 2022 US Open, returning to and winning the Moderna-sponsored [2023 US Open] competition bolsters anti-vaccine claims that vaccines — and mandates — are unnecessary.” In other words, Djokovic’s alleged act of “misinformation” was his unvaccinated athletic ability. There are many other examples in my reporting, beyond the Twitter Files and Moderna documents, that show government and corporate interests trying to stifle free speech on public safety and national security grounds.

Last month, I reported on confidential documents chronicling the activities of Logically, a British artificial intelligence firm that has expanded into the US market with the guidance of former DHS intelligence director Brian Murphy. This individual was previously responsible for the illicit surveillance of Left-wing protesters and the creation of dossiers on journalists critical of the government. Logically has quietly secured US military contracts and piloted a program for the Chicago Police Department to employ its AI platform to analyse local hip-hop music to predict crime. The state of Oregon also retained Logically to combat so-called election misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections. The company is now competing for contracts to monitor and remove alleged social media misinformation in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

It is important to underscore why the American public should be aware of the British AI firm Logically. The United Kingdom government awarded Logically multi-million dollar contracts to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. The company instead surveilled activists and academics who expressed legitimate forms of speech, including thoughtful concerns about pandemic lockdowns and vaccine passports, according to a recent watchdog report on the firm’s activities. Logically previously boasted of a special partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to automatically suppress and label content they deemed as misinformation, giving the company immense influence over content moderation decisions. It is another case of the government outsourcing censorship to a private entity with a record of targeting lawful speech around hotly contested political issues.

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I want to emphasise that this focus on corporate influence and government surveillance is not a recent development in my work. In 2015, I uncovered evidence of agricultural industry lobbyists ghostwriting state legislation designed to criminalise the recording of slaughterhouses and dairy facilities. The legislation was designed to imprison journalists and animal rights activists who document conditions in slaughterhouses. Many of these “Ag-Gag” laws have since been overturned by the courts for violating the First Amendment. I have also previously reported on government and private sector surveillance and censorship targeting environmental groups, Black Lives Matter activists, and labour unions.

In December, I exposed the efforts of pro-Israel activists to stifle pro-Palestinian voices. One notable example, relevant to today’s hearing, involves the deployment of artificial intelligence bots to mass-report social media posts expressing solidarity or sympathy for Palestinians as violations of platform terms of service. Many of the targets appear to be individuals using innocuous hashtags like #FreePalestine, unrelated to hate or violence. There are over 1,000 documented cases of Meta removing peaceful content advocating for Palestinian human rights. The use of artificial intelligence bots to suppress nonviolent and benign forms of political expression during a conflict illustrates another case of organised censorship.

Last summer, I profiled the activities of Flashpoint, among the cottage industry of so-called threat intelligence firms that use artificial intelligence to monitor activist behaviour. The company began by infiltrating al-Qaeda chat rooms and selling that data to the FBI. Critics argue that the firm played a central role in the wrongful convictions of several Muslim Americans. Flashpoint, which still maintains ties with the FBI, has more recently infiltrated the private communications of ordinary airline workers who organised against coercive and ultimately unconstitutional vaccine mandates. Many of these anti-mandate activists were conservative Trump supporters.

I present these examples to underscore how censorship affects dissenting voices of all ideological stripes. I understand that in our intensely polarised environment, free speech has become a divisive issue — often misused by politicians seeking a scapegoat for societal ills. But free speech is critical for activists spanning the ideological spectrum, and to every journalist committed to uncovering the truth. And history teaches us that when governments and private entities demand new censorship authority to attack dissidents of a particular stripe in one era, those tools are just as likely to be used against an entirely different set of actors a few years later. Today’s cheerleaders for an unaccountable “content moderation” regime may very well be tomorrow’s victims of that same system.

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Before I close, I wish to draw your attention to a hearing held nearly 12 years ago by another House committee, addressing a remarkably similar topic. The committee convened a hearing to demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about revelations that the agency had retained General Dynamics, a defence contractor, to conduct round-the-clock monitoring of social media.

Republicans controlled the House at the time, but members of the committee from both sides of the aisle raised concerns about DHS practices. Then-Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, called for assurances that DHS was not infringing upon “civil rights and civil liberties of those who choose to use social media” or “spying on lawful activities”. Then-Rep. Patrick Meehan, a Republican from Pennsylvania, cautioned against DHS and its contractors monitoring private citizens’ speech, which he said “could have a chilling effect on individuals’ privacy rights and people’s freedom of speech and dissent against their government”.

That hearing looks quaint today. In terms of bureaucratic and technological capabilities, the General Dynamics scandal was a relic of another era. It occurred prior to the emergence of CISA, the DHS agency with a multi-billion-dollar budget, actively monitoring Americans for wrong speak on contentious issues. It transpired before significant advancements in AI allowed for far more invasive monitoring of constitutionally protected speech through sentiment analysis. And it pre-dated the creation of numerous anti-misinformation NGOs and private-sector firms competing for contracts to control and censor the internet.

Nonetheless, the 2012 hearing serves as a reminder that concerns about censorship and surveillance need not break down along partisan lines. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle can still unite to voice concerns about the erosion of free expression and government efforts to regulate political discourse. I implore this committee to rise above partisanship and treat the threat posed by online surveillance and censorship as an American issue, affecting all of us equally. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to testify today, and I eagerly await your questions. Thank you.

A couple of weeks after the switch, a bill of around £1,000 arrived on her mat. She had only been living in her new home for a few days. For weeks, then months, Jan emailed and phoned. She spoke to customer service bots, payment teams, even engineers. She created accounts and new passwords. At one point a new customer account offered hope, before another £1,000 bill was autogenerated. The Bill remained; nothing could shift it.

The case is unresolved. One computer-literate family member has dedicated dozens of hours to The Bill, but still it looms. Nothing and no-one can win an argument with the automated system. Months of Jan’s life have been consumed by this; and her confidence in dealing with any kind of technology is now irreparably damaged.

Jan is a victim of “techno-admin”: it’s a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine. You probably have a similar story. How many incorrect bills, unprocessed address changes, reminder notices printed in error? How many sleepless nights? It is the scourge of our age.

It’s all over the news, too. The energy company EDF recently issued artist Grayson Perry with a £39,000 monthly electricity bill, which to a machine seemed like a perfectly normal £38,700 increase on the previous one. Perry spent three tedious hours fixing it. And of course, there is the Post Office Horizon scandal: techno-admin at its cruellest. At the sharp end, postmasters were incorrectly told by Fujitsu’s accounting software that they were in arrears, and the Post Office subsequently hounded them, ruining hundreds of lives, careers, and reputations. At the softer end, thousands endured hours of stressful, fruitless phone calls and complaints. All because the people in charge found it easier to trust a machine than ask difficult questions of their own organisation.

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This is how democracy dies

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We are all sub-postmasters these days: each of us daily dealing with computer systems which make our lives harder. How much of your workday is taken up with tasks like the following: filling in a lengthy online form, which crashes just as the finish line draws near; spending hours trying to cancel an online subscription; coming face-to-face with the dreaded “Schrödinger’s account”: you try to sign into an it using your email address, only to be told there is no such account; you try to create a new account with the same email address, and you are told one already exists.

These are rarely the consumer’s fault. Companies make errors, which you end up paying for. When Hackney Council was the victim of a ransomware attack a couple of years back, the service disruption was well-documented. Less discussed is the amount of techno-admin imposed on the borough’s 250,000 residents as a result. The fact that legitimate organisations routinely make such enormous mistakes makes it a lot easier for criminals to operate. I know of one person whose number plate was ‘cloned’: someone is driving around with his registration on their car, and this poor chap has spent hours appealing fines because ‘the system’ can’t or won’t recognise that it is not actually his car.

And last week, I spoke to a fraud professional who told me his son-in-law’s identity was stolen by SMS fraudsters who pretended to be his phone provider. They re-registered his number, got into his mobile banking and tried to take out loans in his name. After two months of effort, he still hasn’t got his old mobile number back. It’s unfair to blame the victim: many banks insist on some text-based communications, although they aren’t as secure as people assume. It won’t be long before everyone is terrified of answering their phone, lest it be a sophisticated scam.

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Could the UK’s productivity problem, which has flatlined since 2010, be partly caused by the surge in techno-admin? Large firms use automation and digitisation to cut staff and reduce overheads, especially when it comes to customer service — but what they have actually done is outsource the admin work to us, the customer. We are the ones now form-filling, changing passwords and fixing mistakes. We are the ones paying to sit in a telephone queue for an hour. And don’t forget techno-admin has to be carried out during work hours, because lines close at 6pm.

Forcing us to do techno-admin doesn’t even save the companies much money. One business processes specialist I spoke to explained that the moment things are automated and digitised, complicated software is involved. Which means that whenever there is a problem, you need high-skilled and, therefore, well-paid staffers. Or you need to call on the software providers — the Fujitsus of this world — which just adds more layers and delays and expense. This is probably why the UK’s chief auditor recently claimed that the government could save £20 billion by — among other things — modernising its IT systems. In the NHS, outdated IT systems are thought to have contributed to multiple deaths.

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“Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency”, claims Bill Gates, but “automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” In other words, automation mostly works when you can standardise inputs and outputs. But humans aren’t a Ford factory production line: we’re messy and things go wrong all the time.

In the coming years, more decisions and tasks will be outsourced to ever smarter AI: decisions relating to spending, sentencing, military tactics, housing allocation. But ever fewer people will understand how any of these systems actually work. Staff won’t dare to question them.

Picture the frictionless future of ubiquitous smart machines: you head downstairs in the morning to make a coffee when — oh! The smart coffee machine needs a software upgrade! Unfortunately, you’ve lost your account details, and cannot recall which of your 25 email addresses you signed up with in the first place. But no time to fix that now, because you are struggling to log into the kids’ remote homework platform. Apparently, your laptop needs a new app, which will only work if you download some other software first. In the meantime, the bank’s been in touch with an urgent fraud warning — at least, the voice on the line sounded like the bank, but who can really be sure these days — so now you need to change all your passwords.

It won’t be long before simply living will be a full-time job. And at that point, UK productivity will finally hit zero. Then, and only then, when the economy has collapsed into a black hole of rage and wasted time, might we rebel against the pointless, painful scourge of techno-admin.

At once, a Japanese prize barely heard of in the Anglosphere was making headlines around the world. Has the worst nightmare of the gatekeepers of high literary culture come true? Do the judges of the prize have faces dripping with egg, like a Master of Wine who picked the Blue Nun in a blind tasting? And is Rie Kudan, for her part, cheating? Well, no… and no.

To the latter question, we could counter that she was using AI-generated language precisely to make a point about AI-generated language: that is, that she wanted (as she puts it) to test the way “soft and fuzzy words” can obscure our ethical clarity. We could counter, further, that ChatGPT didn’t decide which 5% of the novel was going to be by ChatGPT, nor which bits of ChatGPT’s language were going in there.

And to the former question — whether the judges were just wrong to think the novel good — we can say: surely we’re past all that. If they thought The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy was flawless, then by their own lights — and if they’re decent critics we can expect readers to agree — it was. Didn’t we all learn at GCSE that the reader’s interpretation of the poem is much more important than trying to figure out what the author meant by it? Didn’t Roland Barthes pronounce The Death of the Author as long ago as 1967?

The idea of the single, inspired author originating a text of near-sacred originality is itself a hangover from the Romantics. It’s a two-century blip. Before then, fiction-writers often did their damnedest to pretend they were copying from someone else, even when they were making it up. Chaucer was forever talking about “myn auctor”, and a text that came adapted from a precedent was seen as more trustworthy and high-status than one that didn’t. Milton reworked the Bible, Shakespeare reworked Holinshed, and so on and so forth.

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In more recent times, experimental and modernist authors have been using randomness, or the home-made equivalent of algorithms, to generate their texts for 100 years or more. In 1920, the Dadaist eminence Tristan Tzara announced that poetry could be written by taking a newspaper article of the length you wanted your poem to be, cutting it into its constituent words with a pair of scissors, shaking them about in a bag and then transcribing them in the random order in which they emerged. There’s a funny bit about it in Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties.

That was only the starting gun for all manner of literary jiggery-pokery. William S. Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin picked up Tzara’s baton in the Sixties, experimenting with “cut-ups” (much like Dada poetry) and “fold-ins” (where you would fold two pages of an existing book together so the edges met, and read across the fold to make a new text). The fantasy writer Jeff Noon’s 2001 book, Cobralingus, presented a set of algorithmic instructions for transforming a text through what Noon called “filter gates”, something analogous to a DJ remixing a record. The children’s writer Andy Stanton recently published Benny the Blue Whale: A Descent into Story, Language and the Madness of ChatGPT, a serious/silly account of his experiments getting ChatGPT to write a novel about a blue whale with a micropenis.

Arbitrary literary constraints or outright randomness, then — which is to say, things outside the author’s control which help determine the final text — have a very honourable place in literary history. You could even see the sonnet form or the villanelle as a species of algorithm. The mid-century Oulipoians sought out baroque formal constraints (most famously, Georges Perec’s managing to write a novel without the letter E) by way of liberating their creativity rather than stifling it. Italo Calvino wrote a novel — The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) — around a tarot pack. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) presented the reader with loose pages in a box and invited you to read the novel in any order you liked.

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None of which is to say that Ms Kudan is necessarily an avant-gardist, or needs to be. Only that it’s a very narrow and regressive view of literature to see handing over control of some of your text to chance or to an algorithm as “cheating”. It’s what you do with the result that counts, and what Ms Kudan did was apparently, well, flawless.

There are, no question, literary-ethical problems with ChatGPT. If the algorithm has been “trained”, as some hefty lawsuits are currently complaining it has been, on vast screeds of copyright text without permission or compensation for the authors, that’s a violation deserving of redress. You could even make the case, perhaps, that 5% of Ms Kudan’s prize money should rightfully be distributed to every Japanese language author on whose copyright work the algorithm was trained. But that question is a business and intellectual property issue: to one side of the purely literary question of its part in the creation of The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy.

Indeed, if you were of a literary-theoretical cast of mind you could point out what Tzara and his successors were gesturing to in an oblique way anyway: intertextuality. Every text, in the end, is made of other texts. Every word in a novel or poem is a borrowing: it depends for its meaning on the vast constellation of other contexts in which it has appeared, and through which its reader will understand it. Every author, in his or her individual way, is a meat-brained ChatGPT, “trained” on a lifetime’s reading of classics and copyright works.

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That’s really where the case of Ms Kudan really does probe an anxiety in the culture. What if the writer is (in the phrase Martin Amis used of V.S. Pritchett) a mirror, not a lamp? The Romantic model of the artist is underscored, after all, by a reassuring idea about humanity: that we are creators not creations, that what makes us distinctive isn’t simply a neurological compost of our inputs but some ineffable inner essence that can only be captured in the act of expression.

Is it possible, then, that we so fiercely police the distinction between what Large Language Models can do and human creativity because we’re… touchy about it? That we’re worried it may be a temporary distinction of degree rather than a fundamental difference of category; which is to say, no distinction at all?

A righteous scourge where progress is concerned. He fell foul of feminists in the Eighties on account of a book about gender that championed the old-fashioned way of doing sex. Traditional sex roles as a bulwark against undiluted consumer culture or some such gender complementarian red-herring. He was greeted at the college campus in Marburg where he was teaching at the time by a mob brandishing a giant papier-mâché phallus. His reputation never recovered. Up until then, he’d been something of a fixture in academic circles. A Roman Catholic priest-cum-anarchic theorist. A bit of a celebrity, even. An ascetic who never really called anywhere home. His final years of transitory earthly existence he spent refusing to treat a large, painful growth emanating from his neck. Reputedly self-medicated by puffing on opium instead.

The corruption of the best is the worst, a Latin Maxim he frequently cited. Illich was at war with the systematisation of charity. The systematisation of everything, in fact. His most famous book — Deschooling Society — is a denunciation of compulsory education, of the “specialised torpor” it can’t help but induce. “Giving” in the Christian sense should not always have to be broken down into rules. This was the essential message embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan. You answered the call of a specific suffering. As in antiquity, you should not be bound by place or people, but free to love at will. With the institutionalisation of the Christian message, with its ascension to power, the inclination to force the hand of kindness took hold. The mystery was sucked right out of it, and with it went so much of the power and the glory. The church became the forerunner of the law-abiding modern state, the modern state whose incessant social engineering Illich heaps scorn upon from behind a wall of medieval scholarship.

However, it is a later Illich book, in which he turned the same line of attack onto modern medicine, that I find most provocatively stimulating in a 21st-century context. Written in the Seventies, Limits to Medicine — Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (catchy title) constitutes one of several blistering critiques of modernity and post-industrial alienation Illich produced in his heyday. The gist of it is that the more we lather ourselves in technology, the more of our autonomy we inevitably sacrifice, and the more technology we need just to get by in turn. Instead of enhancing nature, we attempt to step beyond it. A self-replenishing negative feedback loop ensues. The result: Nemesis, the envy of the gods. “Unbounded material progress has become everyman’s goal. Industrial hubris has destroyed the mythical framework of limits to irrational fantasies, has made technical answers to mad dreams seem rational…” I wonder what he might have made of Dignitas?

For Illich, anguish is a part of health, and the inner resources we acquire putting up with it are more precious than decent blood pressure, than the odd bit of surgery. They are fundamental to the building of community. What he calls the “art of suffering” is paramount. In all pain there is a question mark, he claims. To smother it out entirely is to prioritise one aspect of healing — treatment — at the cost of atrophying all of our cultural and spiritual strengths when dealing with agony. Pain-killing gone too far renders us little more than spectators of our own decay. If we don’t bother trying to turn suffering into meaning, we are left ever more dependent on “the machine”.

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The book is broken up into three sections. Beginning with clinical iatrogenesis, when pain and death are a direct result of medical procedure — most obviously, when myopic surgeons do things like amputate the wrong limb, and more obliquely through drug side-effects or antibiotic resistance. Here you’ll lumber into a swamp of footnotes, and far too many Seventies-born statistics, some of which have aged badly. For a start, treatment for cardiovascular disease has come a long way in the last 50 years. You can argue that medical practice sponsors a morbid society by inculcating slovenly lifestyles, but credit where it’s due, I’d far rather suffer this illness today than in 1973.

The sections covering social and cultural iatrogenesis in turn tackle what becomes of society when health policies reinforce an industrial organisation that encourages ill-health. He’s not wrong when he declares that the more energy invested in medicine as a commodity, the greater the delusion that society has a supply of health locked away somewhere. I’ve lived my entire life under this delusion, and will no doubt continue to do so. In fact I’m a prime candidate for an Illichian makeover. I’m depressive, over-ambitious, obsessive-compulsive, an addict and a complete neurotic. I’ve leapt under the knife at every available opportunity. Five times in all. As an adult I’ve had the tonsils out, despite being told it was non-essential. I’ve had two painless, totally benign lumps removed from my neck. Most recently I had a node sliced off of my right vocal cord. I’m the kind of person that starts hammering Solpadine Max the moment I get a sniffle. I expect industrial medicine to sort it, whatever it is, and in no time at all. No self-healing capacity whatsoever.

Illich claims that the negative function of money is the devaluation of that which cannot be bought and sold. The more we dismantle any natural ability to cope, the more we shroud ourselves in pseudo-divine scientist mystification. Obvious enough statements. What’s more interesting is Illich’s attempts to reach behind this dilemma. In his opinion, blaming Big Pharma for the abuse of proscribed chemicals is tantamount to blaming the mafia for the abuse of street drugs. Short-sighted and pointless. When the market for consumer goods reaches a critical level, civilisation convinces itself that the human condition can be remodelled without limit: this is his real gripe, what he considers the root of the problem. When we hit a brick wall, the same thing that birthed the problem is reached for. This cycle of over-consumption he sums up as a kind of compulsive nostalgia, a desperate hankering for yesterday’s progress. In a world unfit for human habitation, Illich’s notion of the “patient” becomes an accomplice to the lie that his failings are biological, as opposed to systemic.

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The lofty Catholic material really starts to sing once you get into old age and death in part three: cultural iatrogenesis. “From Stockholm to Wichita the towers of the medical centre impress upon the landscape the promise of a conspicuous final embrace…” Illich is very much in favour of old people being given a corner to die in at the family gaff as opposed to subjecting them to invasive and repeated medical procedures, and instead of outsourcing terminal decline to the old folks’ homes and the hospice. A cruel inversion here he points out: to die at home now is the preserve of the rich. Yet, the more wealth the country from which you hail globally has, the more likely the man in the street is to wind up surrounded by strangers in the closing chapter of his life.

From what I’ve seen, death in the mountains of Kabyle, where half of my family live, looks like more fun than death in working-class England. The intergenerational support network provided by the more “primitive” society is something most of us no doubt miss, subconsciously but bitterly. Have we shunned death? Illich certainly believes so. For us, death is crisis, instead of something to which we relate every step of the way, instead of that which informs and enriches our ability to fully live. Keep it out of sight. It spoils the utopian fantasy that everything is manageable, if we just hurl enough cold rationality at it. Shrouding it in an air of “crisis” justifies near limitless ineffectiveness where science is concerned, our replacement for religion. An excess of futile treatments in the dying embers being symbolic of this. As far as Illich is concerned, at the moment of demise, the insured are paying for participation in their own funeral rites and little more: “in an insidious way the doctor provides each citizen at the last hour with an encounter with society’s deadening dream of infinite power”.

In his antipathy for the industrial world, a lot of the time he goes way too far. He appears drunk on his own ideological fervour. On a botched suicide he writes: “I know of a woman who tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. She was brought to the hospital in a coma, with a bullet lodged in her spine. Using heroic measures the surgeon kept her alive, and he considers her case a success; he no longer has to worry about her ever attempting suicide again.” I like a bit of hardcore cynicism, it’s refreshing in a world which seems sworn to naïveté, but isn’t this beyond harsh where the medical practice in question is concerned? He’s not into birth control — I don’t agree but I can look past that, he’s a man of the cloth after all, it’s kind of to be expected — but what good does this statement do anybody? At one point he even appears to call for the scapegoating of doctors as a plausible solution to the overextension of medicine into human civilisation. That to me just sounds like sour grapes.

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You’ll often run into this problem reading Illich. Any remedy shy of some kind of Marxism-tinged, back-to-basics, Catholic revolution-cum-devolution is only furthering the grief, only enabling the torment of the species further. He attacks welfare as only deepening the problem, for instance. Unless people are downing tools entirely, they’re not doing enough. They’re complicit in their own damnation. I like the fiery tone, the austere biblical voice, but come on, let’s be pragmatic about this. At the end of the day, who’s going to remove your appendix, your uncle Abdul? Your gran?

That being said, prescribed medication is still the third highest cause of death globally. Some of this stuff has aged badly, but aspects of the underlying philosophical argument he hammers home are perhaps even more valuable today than at the time of writing. Overly radical yes, but Illich is also something of a seer. He’s maybe not your man for a solution, but through the prism of his very specific and expansive learning we can look at the mess of our current state of affairs with fresh clarity.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, the disequilibrium of military power is such that the battlefield outcome is predetermined: Israel cannot lose; Hamas cannot win. Beyond a single surprise attack, Hamas cannot fill screens with mass Israeli dead and force Israel to stop. Instead, it proffers its own dead to the world to make global condemnation force Israel to stop.

At the centre of Hamas’s media operation sits Al-Aqsa (literally “furthest mosque”), the name of Hamas’s TV channel, radio station and social media channels (though the latter have mostly been banned). Funded by Hamas’s general budget — which comes from siphoning off aid that comes into the Strip, foreign countries such as Iran and Qatar, and its own tax collecting — it began broadcasting in Gaza in 2006 after Hamas came to power. By the time the terrorist group launched its October 7 attack, Al-Aqsa’s various channels were broadcasting everything from news and drama to children’s entertainment. From its inception, however, all of the network’s content has been informed by a two-pronged strategy.

The first concerns indoctrination in the service of resistance, and has a particular focus on inculcating antisemitism and anti-Israeli activity into children. An instructive example is Tomorrow’s Pioneers, which features Farfour the Mouse, a costumed character with a high-pitched voice who bounds about squeaking joyously, simulating firing AK-47s and throwing hand grenades. “You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists,” he tells his young viewers. “We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers.” In 2007, Farfour’s story arc sadly ended with him being beaten to death by an Israeli interrogator. It was, the show’s producer said, intended to usher in a new direction for the programme.

Al Aqsa has featured a series of music videos aimed at radicalising children. In one, a four-year-old girl is seen singing to her “mother”, identified as “mother Reem” (an apparent reference to Hamas’s first female suicide bomber Reem Riyashi). Later in the video, the woman blows herself up, killing four Israeli soldiers. After her mother carries out the attack, the little girl holds an explosive and sings to the camera: “I am following Mommy in her steps.”

In 2009, Al-Aqsa published Hamas’s first feature-length film, which celebrated the life and death of an Al-Qassam Brigade militant from the first intifada. The movie encouraged “mosque youth” to act as informants for Hamas-controlled intelligence organisations. Another video segment carried an interview with a son of Umm Nidal, a Gazan whose four sons became suicide bombers. “I ask all Muslim sisters, mothers and daughters and sisters, that the Al Aqsa expects us, the next generation, to fall into line for it, God Willing and Exalted,” he says. “Do not withhold from us the commanders, do not withhold from us the soldiers, and do not withhold from us lovers of martyrdom.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 2016, the US State Department named Fathi Hamad, Al-Aqsa TV’s founder and director, a “Specially Designated Terrorist” because the station’s continual airing of “programs designed to recruit children to become Hamas armed fighters and suicide bombers”.

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The second prong of Hamas’s media strategy centres on its role as a competent governing force in Gaza, highlighting the various state functions it claims to fulfil. Popular programmes include EayanA alaAldifa (Eyes on the West Bank), which is concerned with the issues of people in West Bank, Ashab al-ard (Landowners), which deals with problems of ordinary Gazans, and Nafidhat Al-khayr (The Goodness Way), which highlights the humanitarian issues and support given by Hamas to families in need.

In recent years, this emphasis has gradually bled over onto its social media channels; a study of Hamas’s X account from 2015 to 2018 found that the group mostly posted about “its internal governance and foreign policy, with the smallest focus on resistance”. And just as on television, all this output is tightly controlled. In 2014, Hamas Interior Ministry offered guidelines to “social media activists” via a video from its official website. “Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine,” it ordered.  “Before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank, don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.”

It continued: “Begin [your reports of] news of resistance actions with the phrase ‘In response to the cruel Israeli attack”, and conclude with the phrase ‘This many people have been martyred since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza’. Be sure to always perpetuate the principle of ‘the role of the occupation is attack’, and we in Palestine are fulfilling [the role of] the reaction.”

Yet as with so much in the region, this all changed on October 7. That day, Al-Aqsa broadcast footage of burning cars in Israeli towns alongside a video of a group of young Israeli men with arms tied behind their backs. “This picture is your picture, this night is your night, this flood is your flood, and this blessed action is for all of you,” the anchor declared triumphantly. The programme then cut to a message from the deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau Saleh al-Arouri, who called for an uprising in the West Bank: “[The IDF] won’t be able to attend to confrontations on other fronts,” he promised.

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More broadly, though, October 7 represented the moment Hamas’s emphasis shifted from legacy to social media — and, critically, when the main driver of output switched from Hamas itself to its armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. “Since October 7, the group’s media operations are unsurprisingly dominated by the Al-Qassam Brigades’ media and its spokesman, Abu Obayda,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, Fellow of the Middle East Forum, tells me. “This reflects the reality of the war in which it is Hamas’s operatives in Gaza who primarily control the narrative and not its political leaders in exile in Qatar and elsewhere. And, it is, after all, the group’s status as a military ‘resistance’ force that matters most to supporters around the world and observers more generally.”

As far as social media campaigns go, it has undoubtedly been a success. In the days following Hamas’s attack, the group’s Telegram channel tripled in followers, from 340,000 to 1.3 million followers. Prior to the massacre, its average post received 25,000-30,000 views, a figure which increased tenfold to more than 300,000. Similarly, Al-Qassam Brigades’ account grew from 205,000 subscribers on 7 October to 619,000 on 12 October. Both accounts remain active, though they are barred in certain regions, such as the EU, UK, US and Israel.

Also noticeable was the style of their content. In late October, I attended an IDF screening of footage from Hamas’s attack. What struck me was the video-game-like nature of the violence; terrorists ran around shooting civilians as if they were in Grand Theft Auto. In the weeks since, the first-person has remained their favoured style, with much of Al-Qassam’s content designed to portray its troops as elite soldiers.

If this all seems crude, its impact cannot be discounted. On 13 October, Hamas released a video on Telegram that purported to show its terrorists soothing a crying baby; another fighter bandages the foot of an Israeli toddler. This type of footage may not have much purchase in the West, but more than 1.4 million watched it on Al-Jazeera’s Facebook page for Egypt. Former advisor to Palestinian Authority, Ghaith al-Omari, said the videos had convinced many in the Arab world that, unlike Isis, Hamas “are humane and respect Islamic laws of War”.

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Such widespread dissemination follows a simple but effective structure. Content begins at the primary level: from official Hamas and Al-Qassam Brigades’ channels and accounts. It then travels to unofficial accounts and supporters (though these are also increasingly becoming banned as social media companies crack down). These accounts typically reshare official content but also generate their own material. Examples include the Gaza Now Facebook account (which had 4.9 million followers before being banned) and Instagram’s @eye.on.palestine (which has 9.6 million and can still be accessed in certain countries).

The third level consists of a range of informal pro-Palestinian groups and channels, including those set up by influencers. This is arguably the most effective level of dissemination as it uses ordinary people — seemingly unaffiliated to Hamas – to tell “authentic” stories of suffering. What emerges is often described as the “true” picture or story from Gaza and is coupled with the popular hashtags — #IsraeliCrimes, #AlAqsa, #FreePalestine, #StandWithPalestine — that allow this sort of content to go globally viral.=

If Israel is overwhelmingly dominant on the ground, it is hopefully outmatched by Hamas and its supporters online. #freepalestine is found on 39 times more Facebook posts than #standwithisrael. On Instagram, pro-Palestinian hashtags are found on 26 times more posts than pro-Israel ones.

This is war fought on two planes; and if Israel is doing its best to level Hamas in Gaza, it is losing badly across the world online. The irony, of course, is that nowhere is Hamas clearer about who it is and what it wants than in its output. As an IDF official told me recently: “if Western audiences actually listened to the interviews given by Hamas officials, the Israeli media effort could just shut down. Hamas makes the case for Israel’s war against them better than any Israeli official ever could.”

The strange saga began a week ago, when the board of the nonprofit decided to fire its AI guru and cultish leader, Sam Altman. But when the 700+ staffers of OpenAI wrote an open letter saying that they too would go with the ousted CEO, he was swiftly reinstated.

The hairpin plot twists of this power struggle have been breathtakingly hard to follow. Reports are now surfacing that Altman had announced that he was on the brink of achieving a significant AI breakthrough only the day before he was fired. A letter was sent to the Board advising them that this tech discovery — an algorithm known as Q* (pronounced Q-Star) — could “threaten humanity”. The algorithm was deemed to be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system smarter than humans.

Altman’s dream was to then marry AGI with an integrated supply chain of AI chips, AI phones, AI robotics, and the world’s largest collections of data and LLMs (large language models). Its working name is Tigris.

To achieve this, Altman would need vast computing resources and funding. Perhaps that is why reports suggest he has been talking to Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, Softbank, and Cerebras — which now makes the fastest AI chips in the world. Cerebras chips are big. The size of a dinner plate and more powerful than any traditional chips.They also have Swarm X software, which allows them to knit together into clusters that create a computational fabric that can handle the massive volume of data needed to build better AI.

Cerebras represents a great threat to the manufacturer of the world’s fastest supercomputers and AI chips, Nvidia. The most powerful of these supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, are central to the defence of the American nation and are kept at the highly protected nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But almost every big organisation depends on Nvidia chips or computers. A year ago, Nvidia was worth $300 billion; now it is worth $1.35 trillion — the most dramatic increase in the value of a Nasdaq firm since 1971. Yet Cerebras has designed a chip 20-times faster than Nvidia’s. This is why some say the Cerebras IPO will kill Nvidia. Now we begin to see a national-security component to this story.

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While the West has been focused on generative AI that has no cognitive ability, China has taken a different path. It has built the world’s only Quantum optical computer, which can solve in 47 seconds a problem that would take a traditional supercomputer 240 years.

Similarly, Altman wants to build a new generation of computers for the AI era. In July, he partnered with Cerebras and the Emirati incubator G42 to unveil the Condor Galaxy, the “World’s Largest Supercomputer for AI Training”. G42 is behind the world’s largest Arabic LLM (Large Language model), which, like ChatGPT, generates new linguistic content, and is also working with Amazon to gather and process DNA information to develop massive new global genomics, proteomics and biobanking services.

To an AI data scientist, the data collected for these innovations — the languages, nationalities and DNA involved — are honeypots brimming with opportunity. The West doesn’t have the mechanisms or the mores to gather such a quantity of meaningful data or the money to finance what Altman wants. But international investors do, including the Emiratis, the Chinese — who are already very interested in Altman — and all the others backing G42.

Moreover, if the world wants AI designed for true diversity, if it wants medical and financial products created to suit the broadest range of humans, then this will only happen where that diverse data can be found. It’s not going to be created in the US, where young, white male tech bros all design AI, and the FDA-approved testing of medicines pretty much excludes anyone but white males.

When AI people say they worry about Altman’s lack of “guardrails”, they mean he is willing to take the risk that he builds something that, like a Djinni, cannot be put back in a bottle. He is prepared to build something that might not be controllable. He is like Oppenheimer who was willing to smash atoms to win the Second World War, even though he might have ignited the atmosphere and incinerated Earth to do it.

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By this measure, Altman is a mad scientist who will put us all at risk to achieve a historic breakthrough. Hence the letter to the board of OpenAI by some staff, along with others keen for the world to take note that the huge staff attrition rate at OpenAI was not due to “bad culture fits” — rather, this was due to “a disturbing pattern of deceit and manipulation”, “self deception” and the “insatiable pursuit of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)”. For Altman, this “pursuit” entailed incorporating superintelligence inside a robot’s body. Which, presumably, is why OpenAI started investing in humanoid robotics made by IX in Norway back in March.

You can understand why the OpenAI Board might have become uneasy when they realised that Altman was racing around the Middle East and Asia trying to raise billions for this vision. But, as Bloomberg wrote, “these are not “side ventures”, they are “core ventures”. This is about redefining the cutting-edge of chip design, data collection and storage, computational power, and the interface between AI and physical robotics.

This new supply chain would not only challenge America’s IT infrastructure; it could be facilitating the diminishment of US power. It implies innovation is shifting outside of the US and acquiring data that is beyond the reach of regulators. No doubt the US authorities looked at all this and saw Altman collaborating with G42 as equivalent to fraternising with the enemy because it is seen to be backed by the folks who own ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok (G42 has a significant stake in them). They saw that G42 owns Pax AI, which some say is Pegasus (the notorious spyware) reconfigured. Was Altman under surveillance as he pursued this grand vision? How could he not be?

The truth is Altman does not believe in borders. He has one goal: to build the best AI possible. He has a vision that probably worried his board and unnerved Washington. Given that the US is trying to slow down technological innovation in other parts of the world by restricting the sale of the best chips and computers, it is hugely challenging when he says: “We’ll build our own stuff — in fact we’ll build our own supply chain and ecosystem.” So much for ITAR, the US system for banning the export of critical tech.

There was a time when an American would have been arrested for selling such protected high-tech innovations abroad. Today, can you stop a smart American from innovating outside the US? Can you tell entrepreneurs not to take foreign money and not to partner with foreign firms? Can you demand that they stop challenging existing firms like Nvidia? No. Not when others are offering so much money.

What took place over the past week at OpenAI confirms that none of the young leaders of this new AI space see borders. As Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems said: AI “isn’t a Silicon Valley thing, it isn’t even a US thing, it’s now all over the world — it’s a global phenomenon”. Yet, the US authorities and its allies will have known the significant challenge to Western notions of security and control that Altman’s vision presents.

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Two days after Xi and Biden met on November 15 and agreed to play nice, Altman was fired. The Daily Dot suggests that Altman was terminated because Xi hinted to Biden that Altman’s OpenAI was surreptitiously involved in a data-gathering deal with a firm called D2 (Double Dragon), which some thought to be a Chinese Cyber Army Group. David Covucci reported, “This D2 group has the largest and biggest crawling/indexing/ scanning capacity in the world 10 times more than Alphabet Inc (Google), hence the deal so Open AI could get their hands on vast quantities of data for training after exhausting their other options.”

There is something deeper happening here. China has already forged an AGI path of its own. They are avoiding generative AI in favour of cognitive AI. They want it to think independently of prompts. China is already giving AI control over satellites and weaponised drones. No doubt, Altman would love to work with that capability and the Chinese would love to work with him.

Could that be why Larry Summers, the Former Secretary of the Treasury with connections to US politics and business, also ended up on the new OpenAI Board? Perhaps the US Government realised they could not stop Altman but might claim a seat at his table?

What does all this mean for us? Experts like Altman say they are designing AI to do good. But AI designers disagree about what constitutes “good”. It is clear this arms race could have civilisational consequences.

And yet, as shown by the almost fearful anticipation over his biopic Napoleon, Scott’s output is wildly variable in quality. When he produces a dud, such as Robin Hood or Exodus: Gods and Kings, it’s a real stinker, both leaden and bombastic, the filmic equivalent of a bloated rock band’s cocaine grandiosity. Yet Scott seems immune to external criticism. “I have no favourite film of mine,” he declared, “they are all my favourite children, and I have no regrets about any one of them. At all.” How are we to understand this strange duality? Is he a great director who occasionally makes bad films? Or is he fundamentally a studio hack who somehow makes great films? Is Scott the greatest bad filmmaker of all time?

Critics most frequently liken him to a great general, marshalling vast crews and controlling every aspect of production with a logistician’s eye; he sets up workshops to produce armour and uniforms and takes over North African cities like an occupying force. There is no other filmmaker so seduced by the thrilling spectacle of vast armies on the march, the glitter of sunlight against swords and spearblades, and the brightly coloured splendour of battle standards flapping against the wind. Even Isis, who had an eye for such things, felt compelled to steal battle scenes from Kingdom of Heaven for their propaganda videos. In Black Hawk Down, every soldier’s death is as abrupt and brutal, yet as lovingly detailed, as that of a warrior in the Iliad who is mentioned only to die. Scott takes an honest, boyish pleasure in war: his enthusiasm sweeps the audience away in all its glory and adventure like a recruiting sergeant’s drum. 

The young Scott was shaped by war; his earliest memories are of sheltering in an understairs cupboard from the Blitz. Scott credits his father, a Royal Engineers brigadier who helped design the D-Day Mulberry Harbours, for imposing a sense of productive discipline within the family: “His whole mindset on simplicity and order and reliability, I guess set into me. It’s part of my upbringing, part of my schooling.” The young Scott lived in British-occupied Northwest Germany, attending school in a converted Kriegsmarine barracks where every morning he would walk past a fleet of tethered U-Boats, cocooned in plastic. Did this mark his filmmaking style? 

Certainly, there is no other director who can combine boomer liberal morality with a sense of scale and grandeur edging on the fascistic: for his vision of Gladiator’s Rome, Scott studied Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia, and the Tyrell Corporation offices in Blade Runner resemble a ziggurat furnished by Albert Speer. His 1984 advert for Apple — in which he employed shaven-headed National Front “connections” as cheap extras — is an early iteration of this seductively totalitarian aesthetic. Even the proto-Indo-European speaking, marble-white Greek statue-like aliens of Prometheus and Alien Covenant strangely prefigure the aesthetics of the modern internet dissident Right. 

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Yet instead of a general or a Caesar, perhaps we ought to think of Scott as a great British industrialist, who in an earlier time would have built great steamships and chains of factories. A product of what was rapidly becoming the post-industrial Northeast, Scott was shaped by the looming shipyards of South Shields and steel mills of West Hartlepool. His mother was a miner’s daughter. “All around us was darkness when we were younger — rain and the industrial moors. That’s where Ridley got Blade Runner from,” his brother Tony remarked, and indeed the film’s opening shots, with jets of flame roaring from tall furnace chimneys, are a direct reference to Hartlepool’s now-lost industrial grandeur.

“There were steelworks adjacent to West Hartlepool,” Ridley remembers, “so every day I’d be going through them, and thinking they’re kind of magnificent, beautiful, winter or summer, and the darker and more ominous it got, the more interesting it got.” His first creative work, the 1965 short Boy and Bicycle, transposes the style of the French New Wave to the grey industrial landscapes of the Northeast, the “cancerous coast, tumours of industry”, as his narration calls it, where you “breathe through nasal fuzz at all times” — an early artistic vision reimagined, for commercial purposes, in the sentimental brass-band proletarian nostalgia and sepia soft focus of his famous Hovis advert. His art school background, and struggles with studio executives who butcher his vision, obscure this driving fascination with work and industry.

Another director might have transmuted these elements into tiresome gritty agitprop, but Scott is himself an industrial machine, perhaps the last of the Victorian capitalists in all their grandeur. “I’ve got three corporations. And I love business. If I hadn’t been a filmmaker I would have stuck with business,” he has stated, “I’m pretty working-class in that sense, I was never a child who saw a guy in a Rolls Royce or a Bentley and thought ‘Fuck you.’ I always thought: ‘I want one of those one day,’ and that was it.” 

Like no other Hollywood director, Scott is absorbed by the world of work, and the mechanics of engineering. His crusading hero Balian is a blacksmith, whose greatest happiness is found teaching his new Arab serfs the magic of irrigation. The spaceship Nostromo in Alien is a working vessel, a “commercial ship”, cramped and grimy with a working-class crew, leaking oil and lubricant. Its occupants smoke endlessly and grumble about their poor food, and their salvation is found through understanding the internal workings of the ventilation system: they may as well be hauling coal through space. Alien’s world is a radical, industrial upturning of the pristine and coolly detached futurism of his idol Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Even the God-like aliens of Prometheus are — like Scott’s father — “Engineers.” 

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Interpreting Ridley Scott as a titan of British industry, we also understand his failings. Just as Britain’s extraordinary inventiveness rarely translates into industrial power, Scott essentially creates new genres from scratch, yet discards them to be elaborated on and commercially exploited by others. In Blade Runner, he invented Cyberpunk, in Alien, the spaceship Gothic of any number of later sci-fi films, just as the immersive, confusing soldiering of Black Hawk Down made HBO’s later, more commercially-acclaimed Generation Kill possible. Though he is interpreted now as the greatest journeyman director of the Hollywood studio system, Scott is then, in both his strengths and weaknesses, a perfect exemplar of the British creative genius. 

When he moved to Hollywood to make 1981’s Blade Runner, set in the dark dystopian future LA of 2019, he not only brought Hartlepool’s industrial landscapes but its weather, insisting on relentless, driving rain in every shot: “When they asked me, ‘Why is it always raining outside?’, I said, ‘Because that’s how I bloody want it!’ ” Back then, this most Hollywood of directors was seen as possessing a dark, European sensibility quite alien to the sunny optimism of his new workplace. “I was born in drizzling rain in the northeast of England,” he has stated, adding with emotional truth if not historical accuracy that “The northerners are the Celts, and they are all nuts. It’s a Celtic thing, you know you tend to be a bit ‘the glass is half-empty’ rather than ‘the glass is half-full.’” Perhaps his most perfect film, Blade Runner, is a deeply pessimistic dream, a world where technological advance is paired with scarcity rather than abundance, and the only desirable future is “off-world”. Buildings are damp, everything is old and shabby, a vaguely-defined sense of doom and decline looms over the dirty city he is, as I say, a product of Britain. 

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In Blade Runner, too, all communication is abrupt, clipped speech filled with strange non-sequiturs, all emotion proved to be false. “As an Englishman, I’m aghast at emotional intensity,” he has remarked, adding in a later interview that “In film, it’s very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.” Like Graham Greene’s own entertainments, Scott’s films all display this certain English “sliver of ice in the heart”. 

A cynical Briton in Hollywood, Scott’s career fated him to work in the ideological dream-factory of the American empire during both its rise to global dominance and its decline. What is the message of Gladiator, after all, but the realisation of a decent, taciturn provincial that the empire is corrupt at its core? In Black Hawk Down, what could have been a Jerry Bruckheimer flag-waving schlockbuster showed a 9/11 audience imperial overstretch at bloody ground level — its lesson that military intervention in a troubled Islamic world, even if noble, is futile was apparently lost at the time: even Donald Rumsfeld attended its first screening. Kingdom of Heaven, contemporaneous with both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the New Atheist movement, made the implicit explicit, providing a heavy-handed rebuke to both Western crusading zeal and organised religion (and a corresponding, perhaps overindulgent vision of Islam that caused controversy at the time). 

We might say there are two Ridley Scotts, expressed in the colour palettes that have come to dominate his later films: a Ridley Scott of greys and blues, of toil and depression and the cold and hostile northern landscapes of Prometheus and Alien Covenant, and the expansive golden-hued Ridley Scott of exotic spectacles, as opposingly bright and filled with adventure and opportunity — yet ultimately alien — as Hollywood is from Hartlepool. 

As Scott ages (at 85, we may expect Napoleon to be among his last films) the palette of his films has darkened along with his themes. The questions of the dying industrialist in Prometheus — “Where do we come from? What is our purpose? What happens to us when we die?” — now reflect the anxious preoccupations of a master approaching the end of a long and illustrious life. 

To argue over his value as an artist is to misunderstand his cultural place. A product of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, displaying both its nose-down dogged devotion to hard graft and its paradoxical accompaniment, the yearning desire for expansive new worlds to conquer, Scott has achieved both. Like the landscapes that formed him, he is both a relic of Britain’s industrial heritage and a vision of worldly success. Whether he is an auteur or merely an industrious craftsman is beside the point. Like Maximus, he gives the crowd what they want with ruthless efficiency and they love him for it. Are you not entertained?

That a private American company should gain such a foothold in the NHS would normally cause concern among privacy and health service advocates. And that it could be Palantir — part-funded in its early days by the CIA and with Western armies among its clients — is causing high anxiety. “Is Palantir really the kind of company we want at the very heart of the National Health Service?” asks Cori Crider, director of Foxglove, a campaign group dedicated to challenging the excesses of tech giants. “This is a company who, at the start of the pandemic, had no track record of working with healthcare staff. They’re not a healthcare company. They weren’t a health data company. They were essentially a tech company who supported spies, police, the military and border forces.”

Palantir, in partnership with Accenture, is in the running with Quantexa, a British company partnered with IBM, and Oracle Cerner to build the “Federated Data Platform” (FDP), described by the NHS as a system “which will enable NHS organisations to bring together operational data – currently stored in separate systems – to support staff to access the information they need in one safe and secure environment”. NHS England says there are currently no plans to include GP records in the FDP, but privacy campaigners fear that that could change with mission creep, and if it did, Palantir could gain access to them. The winner of the FDP contract was supposed to have been named in September, an announcement then delayed to the middle of this month, and now said to be imminent — but few in the NHS believe it will be anyone but Palantir.

The NHS — budget this year £182 billion — has the largest repository of health data in the world. It services around a million GP appointments a day, and over a quarter of a million hospital appointments. According to consultants Ernst and Young, the information gleaned from NHS activities could be worth £9.6 billion a year. With the advent of AI, mining this treasure trove of data could mean the discovery of better medicines and treatments, improved patient care and vast savings. But in the wrong hands, it could see the NHS being used as a cash-cow, and it could mean a loss of privacy, the end of patient trust, and the slow death of the NHS as we know it.

So, how did Palantir get in the running — and why are they being hotly tipped as a shoo-in for the FDP contract, worth £480m over seven years? The company, named after the crystal “seeing stones” in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, was founded by Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, in 2003 with the intention in his words of adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud software in order to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties” (he had sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002). Before the 9/11 attack on New York, the US intelligence agencies had been blind-sided; Thiel was convinced his seeing stones would give them better vision in the future.

An early investor in Palantir was the CIA, through a venture capital arm named In-Q-Tel. The first of four iterations of Thiel’s data systems — Palantir Gotham — is used by the US National Security Agency, the FBI, the Western military, police, US immigration services and fraud investigators. It is capable of pulling together vast amounts of data and making connections that could solve problems insoluble to mere humans. It is currently being used by the Ukrainian army in its war with Russia.

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There have been reports — neither confirmed nor denied by Palantir — that its software helped to locate Osama bin Laden. Former CIA director George Tenet once said he wished the agency had had Gotham before 9/11, the suggestion being that it might have pulled together disparate dots into one large picture of terror plot planning. Another iteration, called Metropolis, is a finance analytics platform widely used by hedge funds and banks. In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, executives from major tech companies, including Palantir, Google, Meta and Amazon, were asked by the UK government whether they could help with the planning and implementation of its responses to Covid-19. Palantir immediately stepped in, offering the use of another of its systems, Foundry… for just £1. Its offer was accepted by beleaguered health officials.

Palantir advisers were embedded in the NHS while Foundry was used in planning to effectively distribute medicines, ventilators and vaccines, monitor staff levels and intensive care bed availability — creating the kind of joined-up health response that would not have been previously possible with the UK’s fragmented network of trusts and care providers. Once a vaccine became available, it was involved in its rollout. By the end of the pandemic, Palantir’s £1 punt had paid off.

“A £1 contract seemed odd at the time, but it obviously gave them a foot in the door,” says Dr David Wrigley, digital lead on the BMA’s GP Committee, which has expressed concerns over the use of patients’ data on the FDP. “They will have learned about NHS systems and contracts, seen how the system operates and how best to bid for other contracts going forward.” Palantir’s next move to curry favour with the UK government was to offer its services again, for six months, to help with the logistics of housing Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion. But this time it charged nothing whatsoever. The company says it is proud of the role that it played at a time of great suffering for Ukrainian families. But this move did its relationship with the UK, and its long-term income, no harm at all.

Since then, Palantir has been awarded several other NHS contracts worth £60 million, with none going out to tender. Last month, it was awarded £5.5million to continue running Homes for Ukraine over the next 12 months for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) — again with no tendering process. The probity of this deal was questioned by the National Audit Office (NAO) in a report published last week. It pointed out that: “In February 2023, the Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, wrote to Palantir noting his concern about the practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition.” Asked about this criticism, Palantir said there was: “nothing unusual in a business offering a prospective customer the opportunity to trial before purchase. Indeed the Government’s own guidance states that ‘where a service is being outsourced for the first time, a pilot should be run’ and that ‘if you’re buying a product, consider asking for a demonstration or trial on a smaller scale’.”

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But a more polemical vision of how Thiel sees British people’s relationship with the NHS was revealed in January when he made some unguarded comments during a Q&A session at the Oxford Union debating society. He said they were suffering from “Stockholm syndrome”, held ideologically captive by their healthcare system, and that the NHS needed “market mechanisms” to improve, adding that: “In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over… In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” He said British people needed to stop thinking the NHS was “the most wonderful thing in the world” and accept that it is an “iatrogenic” institution. An iatrogenic illness is a malady caused by the treatment itself. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,” he said.

Palantir quickly distanced itself from his comments. Joanna Peller, the company’s UK health lead, said: “Peter Thiel made these comments as a private individual and our CEO [Alex Karp, at Palantir since 2004] has made it clear he firmly disagrees with them and that he wishes ‘we had a health care system in the US that served the poor and underserved as well as I perceive the British system does’.” Few people in the NHS would argue that its countrywide IT systems couldn’t be improved, but many billions of pounds have been wasted in previous unsuccessful attempts to merge them. At the moment, there are 42 administered by “Integrated Care Systems” comprising hospital trusts, local authorities and care providers.

The first attempt at digitising and uniting records held by GPs and hospital trusts was launched in 2002 and called the National Programme for IT. It began with a budget of £6.2 billion but was mired in technical difficulties and a lack of trust among health staff. It was scrapped in 2011 after racking up £12 billion in costs. One of the private contractors who pulled out of the scheme before it was junked was Accenture, Palantir’s current bidding partner. In 2021 the government launched the General Practice Data for Planning and Research system, designed to enable records to be used for more than simple personal care. Advances in technology meant that the data in them could be used for the same purposes envisaged for the FDP — better care, medicines and healthcare planning.

However, patients were advised that where their data was to be shared for anything beyond care — for research or planning — they had the right to withhold their data under an NHS “National Data Opt-Out”, and they did in their droves. “More than a million people opted out because there was a lack of trust in the system,” says Foxglove’s Crider. “And each time someone opts out, the data set gets smaller and so its usefulness for research is diminished.” Sam Smith, policy lead at medConfidential, which campaigns for patient privacy, says he believes even more people will want to opt-out if Palantir wins the FDP contract. But there is confusion over whether they will be able to. Smith explains:

“The NHS England website says people will not be able to opt out, but this is contradictory because we all have the right to opt out of sharing our personal data if it is to be used for anything other than patient care, for purposes such as research and planning — but that is exactly what FDP is supposed to be used for… Last month, Sir Chris Whitty [chief medical officer for England] urged people not to opt out precisely because their information could help with research and planning. So what is it to be? Can people opt out, or can’t they?”

In a letter to the Health and Social Care Committee in August, Lord Markham, under-secretary of state for health, said the government was considering reforming the National Data Opt-Out. I asked NHS England whether these reforms would make it easier or harder for patients to opt out, but it did not answer the question. On the subject of Palantir and the FDP, a spokesperson said:

“The NHS is conducting a fair and transparent procurement process for a supplier of the federated data platform, in line with public contracts regulations, and this process has not yet concluded… Better use of data brings huge benefits for patients — a federated data platform will ensure more joined-up care and better use of resources, connecting existing NHS data in one secure environment to help speed up diagnosis and reduce waiting times and hospital stays.”

Palantir’s Peller emphasises that patients’ data is safe with the company. “Unlike many other technology companies, we’re not in the business of collecting, mining or selling data,” she says. “What we do is provide tools that help customers understand and organise the information that they hold, along with training and support in using those tools. We are legally defined as the ‘data processor’ while the customer is the ‘data controller’. Customers retain full ownership of their data. Palantir is granted no rights to such data and can only carry out that processing which it is instructed to do by the customer, while UK government customer data is only hosted in the UK.” She says Palantir is “now helping to reduce the care backlog and ensure patients receive vital treatment sooner in 36 NHS Trusts across England”. These are trusts invited (some say pressured) by NHS England to run trials of Foundry, and this is the reason Palantir is considered a shoo-in for the FDP contract — it is too embedded to get out.

However, in response to a written Parliamentary question in March, health minister Will Quince said nine of these had been “paused” while two had been suspended. A variety of reasons were later given, ranging from a lack of funds to administrative delays, and assurances were made in August that some of the paused pilots were up and running again. But at least two — Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, and Milton Keynes University Hospital — have indicated that the system wasn’t right for them. I asked NHS England how many of the 36 pilots were currently operational, but received no answer. This only confuses the picture, as Palantir insists they all are.

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Whichever company is announced as the provider of the FDP, its success will not only be judged on whether the NHS is finally blessed with the joined-up digital wizardry it so badly needs, but also on whether it manages to provide that and retain the trust of patients. “If a person goes to see their GP and holds back important or embarrassing information because they’re afraid it will be shared with a private company, then that is not only dangerous for the patient, but also very sad,” says the BMA’s Wrigley. “Because that could mean the end of the doctor-patient relationship as we know it.”

Now he has pivoted back to his true passion, gut health, and taken many of his followers with him. Endorsed by celebrities such as Davina McCall and Carrie Johnson, the new version of the ZOE app promises a personalised nutrition plan and comes with a glucose blood monitor usually used by diabetics. It is proving hugely popular, with over 100,000 subscribers paying up to £600 in their first year — and a further 300,000 on the waiting list. 

It boasts all the hallmarks of a scientific endeavour, with endorsements by world-leading experts and numerous studies. But how convincing are its claims?

Deborah Cohen, a medically qualified TV, print and radio reporter, and Margaret McCartney, a GP, undertook a forensic investigation for UnHerd and found that ZOE’s scientific foundations aren’t as strong as they would have you think…

Read on to learn about:

1. ZOE and the influencers
2. Why Tim Spector created ZOE
3. Does ZOE think you are healthy?
4. Why ZOE wants your data
5. What does your gut tell ZOE?
6. How scientific is ZOE? 

***

1. ZOE and the influencers

“I gave up after a month.” Gail, 49, is talking about her experience of using the ZOE app — the heavily promoted personalised nutrition plan that, we’re told, will help us understand our bodies and make us more healthy. “It certainly didn’t change my food compulsion — if anything, it made me feel worse.”

Take a look at ZOE’s lavish series of adverts, or the rapturous response to the app on social media, and you would be forgiven for thinking that Gail is an anomaly. TikTok, Facebook and Instagram are filled with celebrities, ZOE “members” and influencers sharing their positive experiences and inviting you to join the club.

One is Carrie Johnson, who recently shared her welcome email on Instagram, another is Davina McCall, one of the faces of ZOE’s marketing campaign. She claims she is now “living her best life”, telling prospective consumers (and her 1.7 million Instagram followers) that the knowledge provided by the technology is the “greatest gift ever”. A vocal menopause-awareness campaigner, McCall claims the gut microbiome is “completely different” in pre- and post-menopausal women.

But women only make up part of the market. Steven Bartlett, of Diary of a CEO podcast, is also an ambassador: “There’s an incredible correlation between what I’ve eaten, my blood glucose levels, and how I’m feeling,” he claims.

These three are among the 117,000 people who ZOE claims are now “members”. Another 300,000 are on the waiting list. This, despite the fact that ZOE isn’t cheap: it costs £24.99 per month (roughly £300 per year) and £299.99 for the intro kit which includes the instantly recognisable bright yellow blood glucose monitor that users display proudly.

These monitors are all part of a “personalised nutrition” plan that also measures your gut “microbiome”: the collection of “good” and potentially “bad” microorganisms in your intestines. This is assessed via stool samples which you collect in a “hammock” over the loo bowl and then post to the “lab” for testing.

After a fortnight of continuous blood sugar monitoring, combined with your gut bug measurement, you are provided with a nutritional programme — basically foods you should eat and those you should avoid. ZOE suggests that this sort of personalised approach can help with energy levels, reduce hunger, help you reach a healthy weight, feel less bloated, sleep better, and avoid chronic health issues.

But is ZOE the solution? Certainly, its stratospheric rise is a marketing triumph. But beneath the sheen of its glossy adverts and its wealth of medical testimonies, ZOE’s scientific foundations seem far from healthy…

2. Why Tim Spector created ZOE

From its inception in 2018, ZOE has relied heavily on the profile and academic credentials of co-founder Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London. Already a familiar name in nutrition circles, he rose to prominence during the pandemic with his ZOE Covid symptom tracker app, described by The Financial Times as “arguably the world’s largest ever citizen science experiment”. With millions logging on to share their test results and symptoms, Spector’s app, boosted by £5 million of government funding, was credited with first highlighting that loss of taste and smell accompany Covid infection.

A self-described “measured risk-taker”, Spector told The FT that he moves from subject to subject “if I’m not very interested in the next step or the next stage any more”. He started out as a rheumatologist, treating joint and muscle disorders, before turning to epigenetics, the study of how behaviours and environment can affect the way your genes work. Then, he set up the UK Twins Registry, one of the richest collections of data about identical and non-identical twins in the world.

It was this work, in particular, that led to his current interest: the interplay between diet and gut health. When he was studying the genetics of obesity in twins, he noticed that their weight sometimes greatly varied — which he attributed to the fact that their gut microbes were different.

After this Eureka moment, he decided to focus his efforts on nutrition, writing several books, the most recent being Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well (2022). And he takes his own advice seriously — eating plenty of “fermented food” such as kombucha, kefir and kimchi to help his microbiome. He also microdoses on a diabetes drug which, he claims, could have anti-ageing benefits.

According to Spector’s website, it was during one of his presentations on his microbiome research that he met his ZOE co-founders, the now-CEO Jonathan Wolf and president George Hadjigeorgiou, both of whom have backgrounds in machine learning and business. They “shared his vision of helping individuals understand their unique biology to improve their own wellbeing in an accessible way”.

After opening offices in Boston and London, they rapidly attracted $27 million in initial funding to commercialise Spector’s work. (He remains a part-time ZOE employee and company shareholder.) And in 2019, they paid for a study that seemed to confirm the key concept for ZOE’s entry point into a crowded consumer market of products that offer advice on the healthiest foods to eat.

The PREDICT1 study suggested individuals’ metabolic responses to the same foods vary remarkably, with genes only playing a small part. (More on what you can infer from it later.) At a conference in the US, Spector revealed that they had found “really surprising” variation between certain biomarker responses — including some of those used by ZOE — to standardised meals.

It was what other investors needed to hear. The combination of a personalised nutrition app coupled with machine-learning and big data proved to be alluring buzzwords for the wellness-obsessed digital world. Steven Bartlett invested more than £2 million earlier this year. ZOE, he says, is a company that represents “the future”. It is “health science, driven by big data” that doesn’t just extend “our lifespan, but more importantly our health span”. Venture capitalists and those involved in a crowdfunding exercise thought similarly. Last year, one of the CEOs valued the company at over £209 million.

Yet some are sceptical. They suggest this is just the latest iteration of Big Diet — or Big Nutrition. “This is a classic playbook. X doesn’t work; the experts are wrong; read my book and find out the truth. Then buy my product which FINALLY fixes everything,” says one critic, who did not want to be named. Interestingly, Spector himself used to be of these sceptical voices, writing cautiously in The British Medical Journal in 2018 that observational studies — such as those since published by ZOE —  are limited by the inability to measure causal relations between microbes and health traits. They can only show associations.

“The strongest level of evidence is obtained from interventional clinical studies — in particular, randomised controlled trials,” he wrote. (ZOE is yet to publish controlled trial data.) In 2019, he again suggested evidence was limited. In the same year he promoted ZOE study findings at that US nutrition conference, Spector wrote in a medical journal, that “there is a lack of long term human studies, or indeed follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions” to understand whether “diet-induced modulation of the gut microbiota endures”. Could this barrier be overcome?

3. Does Zoe think you are healthy?

On social media, it doesn’t take long to find people posting about the thrill of receiving their ZOE test results. As one user, Joel, 28, said to us: “It gives you another thing to share on Facebook or Twitter.” But how much can we actually infer about what’s going on inside our bodies?

There has long been a temptation in medical circles to assume that the more biological parameters we measure, the better. The truth, however, is that not all test results are useful. Just because something is measurable in your body, doesn’t necessarily mean that the result will yield useful information.

Dr Guess claims the app might be doing little more than recommending more fruit and veg to everyone. “They have no published data showing all this info results in personalised dietary advice,” she says. “They need to show that the dietary recommendations made by their algorithm can be replicated by other scientists. In other words, does the test give the same dietary recommendations on Wednesday as it did on Monday? This is one of the hallmarks of good science. Even more important, they need to show what they’re doing actually improves a user’s short and long-term health.”

This isn’t to say that continuous glucose monitoring isn’t useful. It is offered in the NHS, but for specific reasons — for people with diabetes. Readings can help to adjust insulin doses and improve control of potentially harmful spikes and troughs. Many people say that it has revolutionised their care. In people without diabetes, however, blood glucose is under continuous physiological control — with the pancreas regulating the release and storage of sugar in the body to keep it within normal parameters. This is the market ZOE is aiming for.

They’re not the only company making continuous glucose monitors aimed at people without diabetes. Even those in the clinical medicine arena are pivoting into this space. Indeed, The Global Wellness Institute estimates the global market segment for “healthy eating, nutrition and weight loss” is worth $946 billion a year.

The only problem is we don’t really have any evidence that these monitors do keep non-diabetic people healthy.

Dr Shivani Misra, a consultant in metabolic medicine at Imperial College London who researches continuous glucose monitoring, cautions that we don’t totally understand how to interpret measurements in healthy people. “We have no robust evidence base to suggest that those rises and falls are signalling anything untoward in the present or that they have negative consequences in the future,” she says. In fact, different devices might have different readings in response to eating the same meal.

Dr Kevin Hall investigates the regulation of body weight and metabolism for the publicly funded US National Institutes of Health, which has a programme in precision nutrition. His team has studied the use of continuous glucose monitoring in highly controlled environments — when people actually live at the lab for a month and undergo very specific diets and exercise regimens. They measured the glucose levels of one person wearing two devices. They found that sometimes one of the devices would give a very high glucose reading after a meal, and the other would give a low reading. They also analysed readings on the same device. They changed the regimens week to week — and concluded that the response to the same meal might vary as much as it did to eating a different meal in different weeks.

“Even in these very highly regimented kinds of controlled feeding studies, they don’t give rise to reproducible measures,” Dr Hall says. “It’s very likely that if that person ate a banana the next week, even if they had exactly the same previous food and did the same exercise that day, they might get a very different response.”

Unsurprisingly, the results are causing confusion. For instance, Gail says her glucose levels went up when she was exercising and her friend, who has diabetes and is used to monitoring their glucose, looked at her graph and thought it looked high. “I felt I didn’t get enough explanation about what this means or what might happen to my glucose,” Gail says. On TikTok, users also warn against the unwanted “spike”, saying they need to get a flatter line and describing their worries about their glucose dipping at night.

But this is not necessarily something to worry about: glucose going up and down is a normal bodily response. “Any time they see a slight rise or spike, people panic and it’s creating unnecessary anxiety,” Dr Misra says. “Then they think it’s wrong to eat carbohydrates — which release glucose into the blood — and there is no evidence that this is necessary or beneficial. Some tell me it’s taken over their life.”

4. Why ZOE wants your data

But what about those who do feel their energy levels drop and notice a lethargic “crash”? Joel, for example, frequently wakes up at 3am to find his glucose dipping. He was even told he was waking up because of this dip. But he’s not entirely sure what to do about it.

This isn’t entirely surprising. While symptoms and how we feel are real, it can be hard to attribute cause and effect. In her clinic, Dr Misra sees people with and without diabetes who tell her they’re getting symptoms of low blood sugar, but when they’ve actually measured it, it’s within normal range. “There’s a risk everything becomes glucose-related,” Dr Misra says. “It’s human nature when you’re monitoring something you become hypervigilant about that.” This is something Dr Hall and his team also found in their studies. “I think the fascinating thing is that when people are provided with more and more information, they tend to make these correlations,” he says.

The risk is that we are creating problems for people rather than solving them, and turning healthy people into patients.

Ironically, perhaps mitigating this is the relationship between social class and health: in other words, the people most likely to be able to afford ZOE may be among the least likely to benefit from it. Because of this, Amitava Banerjee, professor of clinical data science at University College London and consultant cardiologist, says that ZOE plays into what is called the “digital divide”.

“Even when digital interventions are useful, the people who need them least are usually accessing them most, especially given the cost,” he says. “Those who are at the highest risk of health problems are often in more deprived and ethnically diverse areas, with neither the money nor the resources to use ZOE.” And even though it’s been largely tested on young healthy people of European ancestry — as the ZOE team has written in medical journals — the marketing goes beyond this cohort of people. “The results they get from studies might not be applicable to people outside that group,” Professor Bannerjee cautions.

Elsewhere, some doctors have turned to social media to complain about the increased workload the app is creating for them among a cohort known as the “worried well”. GPs have described to us how they’ve been contacted by patients concerned they have diabetes, as they think that is what their continuous glucose monitors are showing. While ZOE is just one of dozens of private companies and influencers who generate blood results capable of causing alarm and sending patients to NHS GPs, they all add pressure on appointments — especially if people didn’t get good enough information about what the test results actually mean.

5. What does your gut tell ZOE? 

Blood sugar is only a part of what ZOE tests. Other indicators as to the function of our metabolism and how we respond to food is determined by our gut microbiome. Zoe wants to harness the “potential power” of this to affect your long-term health and certain symptoms, and so takes a reading on how good your “gut bugs” are with the help of your stool sample. A diet plan to improve that is then constructed.

But not everyone is convinced there is sufficient scientific evidence to justify this approach. Dr Hall says research suggests you can change the microbiome in pretty consistent ways across individuals by changing their diet. “The complexity of the microbiome kind of belies a single readout of good versus bad. How you even come up with a single good, bad kind of criteria is mystifying to me,” he says.

Professor Tariq Iqbal, a gastroenterology consultant who runs trials into faecal microbiota transplantation in people who have bowel disorders, says that we’re only just beginning to understand to what degree levels of microbes naturally fluctuate in the gut in a healthy person over time. “At the moment, there is no reason to get your microbiome generally tested,” he says. “We don’t have good evidence about what a “normal” microbiome looks like. It’s more complicated than simply saying there are ‘bad’ and ‘good’ bacteria in the gut.”

Current research suggests that there is no “standard” microbiome composition that can be used as a baseline for health. There may also be problems with reading too much from a single sample. According to Guts UK, a digestive disease charity that works closely with the Gut Microbiome for Health Group of the British Society of Gastroenterology, the bacteria found in your stool does not necessarily tell you what microbes are in your gut. Meanwhile, the British Dietetic Association warns: “Commercial gut microbiota testing and lifestyle change programmes based on the test results cannot be advised currently as the science is not at a stage that can support testing and treatments programmes.”

Nor, Dr Guess adds, is there any robust evidence to support the claim that personalising a diet based on the gut microbiome is more effective than generic healthy eating advice for any of the claims being made. In fact, Professor Iqbal says that patients might be unnecessarily worried by what microbiome testing shows. “At the moment, we just do not have enough knowledge to safely and accurately recommend any specific interventions (such as particular changes in diet, and/or particular probiotics) to cause beneficial long-term changes to the composition of the bacteria in the gut,” Guts UK said.

ZOE, however, told us that their data showed members “who follow ZOE advice, including gut booster foods, see an improvement in their gut microbiome score” — the mix of “good” and “bad” microbes. This conclusion is drawn from a ZOE internal survey of 450 members who followed their advice for more than 12 weeks, which also showed 70% have more energy, 85% improved their gut health and others saw improvements in their menopause symptoms. This is all heavily promoted across their website.

These results haven’t been published and they declined to share it with us when we asked, so we are unable to assess what was asked or how the sample was selected. Moreover, as Dr Guess points out, “the data has not been validated or peer-reviewed”. Neither was there a control group, which would be needed to know whether it was ZOEs’ specific advice, or simply better healthy eating, that was making a difference. When we relayed this to ZOE, they agreed this meant that we could not be sure these were “clinically meaningful results” and told us they were going to be publishing a randomised controlled trial in the future.

6. How scientific is ZOE?

It is hard not to be blown away by the dizzying array of high-profile journals that feature on ZOE’s website: Nature Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet, among others. It links to abstracts of papers published in peer-reviewed journals, which on the surface seem to provide proof of the science. At a closer look, however, not all is as it seems.

ZOE places the weight of their programmes’ claims on three main studies with the acronym PREDICT (Personalised Responses to Dietary Composition Trial). They were carried out with scientists from prestigious universities, including Stanford, Harvard and Kings’ College, London. They have not yet all been published.

The studies analyse the results of people making multiple readings about their body and food intake. This has produced a huge dataset: more than 4 million glucose readings so far, for example. These findings are then used to develop models to predict the impact of particular foods on our bodies — all valid areas of study. The researchers have searched for associations between different measurements, such as hunger and types of food eaten.

All of which sounds impressive. Until you realise that these were observational studies, which can only show associations between various data collected, and not causations, as Tim Spector himself has previously noted. For while measuring lots of variables to find patterns can be a useful research technique, it also means you increase the chances of finding coincidences — which puts you at risk of misinterpreting random variation as a meaningful difference. Poor practice in this type of study is known as “data dredging”.

Nor do they answer the key question: is there evidence that the individualised advice generated by the ZOE tests, which is the key market differentiator, does what it claims?

The answer: we don’t know. There have been no trials published exploring whether the “personalised” advice given by ZOE can result in better health outcomes compared with standard diet and lifestyle advice.

And the same holds for menopausal women, the key ZOE demographic targeted by Davina McCall. The first PREDICT study in 2022 compared data in pre, peri and postmenopausal women. According to ZOE: “Women who have been through menopause had, on average, higher blood pressure and blood sugar, a greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease in the next 10 years, worse sleep, and more body fat. Crucially, the team’s analysis found that diet and the bacterial species that were present in women’s guts were at least partially responsible for the changes.”

However, Dr David Nunan, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, is sceptical. “It’s a cross sectional [observational] study” he says, “which means that no claims of causation can be made.”

The design of the study, in other words, simply isn’t capable of telling whether any changes in the microbiome are a result of menopausal change. In fact, Dr Nunan says, “when the data for all microbiome species are compared, there is no statistical difference in pre and postmenopausal women. It’s only when you examine a subgroup of species that 8 out of 2,452 show a statistically significant difference.” Moreover, even when this happens, the study has not indicated what this means in real life. In other words, we do not know what impact this has for the ways that women metabolise food.

Yet despite these gaps, ZOE told us that they are “proud” to have recently completed their own randomised controlled trial “with a non-personalised control group versus the ZOE programme”. The full manuscript, they say, is “under preparation”.

According to its critics in the science community, however, even this trial has its design flaws. One group receives the whole ZOE package, the other receives a leaflet with US health advice. But the way it is set up, people will know exactly which group they are in, thereby rendering results less reliable. A fairer test to assess is its ZOE’s personalised algorithm that makes the difference would be for both groups to receive blood monitoring and stool analysis, and what they thought was personalised advice. The only difference should be that one group receives advice based on ZOE’s tests and algorithms, while the other receives advice that looks like it might be “personalised” but isn’t.

“You have to bear in mind when looking at these studies that they aren’t fully independent,” Professor Banerjee says. “They are marking their own homework. You need external validation and testing to reproduce the results.”

None of this is to say that paying close attention to nutrition is not important. ZOE is only one of hundreds of apps that measure our biometrics in this age of the quantified self. But while keeping abreast of our data might be interesting, are these promises of personalised advice based on sound medicine? And are they, as the website promises, scientifically proven to lead to real-world improvements?

Without this evidence, Zoe is simply collecting our data and then selling it back to us. And not only does this come at a financial cost — it could be making us less healthy.

So the cognitive dissonance was palpable when the country’s first Rajars-style consumer survey of podcasts was published last week, offering the best snapshot yet of what Britain listens to. Much of the top 25 paints the UK as essentially and irredeemably twee. No Such Thing As A Fish — gadzooks trivia from high-end neckbeards. Off Menu: whimsical comfort-eating celeb fodder. The Therapy Crouch: Peter Crouch having a mind-numbingly pleasant chinwag with his missus. Shagged Married Annoyed: exactly what it says. The Rest Is Politics: a show built around the heartwarming premise that the last 20 years can be neatly scooped up and packed away.

But at the top of the charts were two shows that pointed towards something hiding in plain sight. A missing market: the market for men. Podcasts are a confessional booth medium, after all. Up and down the train carriage, no one knows what’s in anyone else’s earbuds. As economists would put it, they are an example of “revealed preference” as opposed to “stated preference”. What you actually want, rather than what you think you should want. And by their mass adoption of Rogan, it seems that what men want is the old tradition of the men’s magazine, continued by other means.

At the start of the 2010s, the last of that old world — the shining city on a hill of Arena, Select, Nuts, Jack, Loaded — finally fell away. We were told this was because there was a new lad in town. Softer, kinder, he could “do better”, if he avoided his inherent “toxicity”. He had the feeling of inevitability that all modern archetypes take on. Vice threw off its buccaneering spirit, and actively mocked its old ways. Even LadBible, once at the end of a scale that could genuinely be termed toxic, has reformed itself into the doughy shapes of the maaate cultural revolution.

The message of the new man was gynocentric: by 2013, the conversation among women had begun to guide what men’s interest media looked like. Men took note of this important new datapoint: they softened their image, nodded along. Then, as the podcast charts show, secretly went back to listening to bodybuilding tips, insane stories of shark attacks, reasons why the pyramids were built by aliens, how fugitive Nazis founded actual colonies in South America, what it’s like to kill a moose, and what Tim Dillon thinks of twerking children. In short, they went back to what men’s magazines had always been about. Not connecting with a sort of soft Jeremy Corbyn vibe. Not trying to figure out complex relationships.

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If Rogan is the pure Gen-X vision of masculinity — basically every self-educated stoner at a 1999 house party, who has that old-school vision of hating both the military-industrial complex and political correctness — then the second-most listened to podcast in Britain is his Zoomer cognate. Steve Bartlett is a marketing entrepreneur who flipped his social-media agency into big money ($660 million at its apex valuation) by the age of 25. This earned him a chair on Dragon’s Den. Now, in his twilight years (30), Diary of a CEO is solidly wedged at the top of younger listeners’ (17-34) playlists, as the Edison Research survey confirms.

First listens don’t immediately reveal its appeal. Like many other podcasts — The Lex Fridman Show, Sam Harris’s Making Sense, Hidden Forces — it takes the format of “slightly naive guy interviews top experts about big picture stuff”. Bartlett is obviously likeable. He comes across as humble, genuinely curious. He’s marketed the show well, and curated his guest list better. They all come with their A-game. Information, certainty, high performance. It’s not a giggly show for kicking ideas about: it’s an earnest attempt to mine their life’s experience for info nuggets. How to get your brain off porn. When to double-down on a job and when to quit. How to build resilience. Being consistent.

In DOAC’s world, almost every insight is usable; no part of the buffalo is wasted. The past decade has seen an explosion in media-savvy self-help gurus, whose profusion has sparked a quantum leap in just how well-adapted and productive the average person can be. Bartlett is at the forefront of that codifying impulse — the urge to absorb all of it. He has that kind of mind: the stone-cold work ethic of someone never truly at rest. The very first episode describes his entrepreneurial origin myth: aged 20, living in the worst area of Manchester, working every hour, so poor that he resorted to pinching food from empty tables in pubs.

Bartlett is unique in many aspects of his back story (he was born in Botswana to an illiterate mother, for a start), yet he also sums up a particular Geriatric Zoomer/Young Millennial way of engaging with the world. He’s the avatar of what they call hustle culture: the obsession with putting in the hours in your own business or scheme. Here, the ultimate aim is to achieve a kind of earthly perfection that previous generations might’ve looked at as square. This is the New Man. He’s neurotic but well-adjusted. He works hard. He does not play all that hard.

Bartlett’s “internet entrepreneur” origins speak to the core of that hustle culture identity. He’s literally on the board of Huel, the makers of a wildly popular Soylent-style meal replacement. The “complete nutritional shake” is fast becoming a lifestyle in itself to a certain kind of 20-something man, and for boys whose bedroom furniture comprises a single pair of dumbbells. They are the ones filing life down to a smooth nubbin, until it doesn’t contain anything that doesn’t add to some personal P&L account.

This, young men often mistakenly believe, is how you get girls. Being industrious. Having your shit together. Making it. In reality, this sort of monoculture is an instant turn-off. But the task of living fully can seem so daunting that it’s easy to double down on an internet grab-bag of tips and tactics and sheer Nietzschean will. Cannily, Diary of a CEO also styles itself as the antidote to the problems of this way of life. In his origin myth, Bartlett “thought he would figure it out” when he made his first million but he “quickly realised he knew nothing”. So it’s a show as much about how to sustain relationships, how to re-examine your old ways, how to work around the dreaded Mental Elf.

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There are many overlaps between how Gen X men view the world, and how the younger generations do. Both Rogan and Bartlett believe religiously in self-improvement. Both think that life is a hackable system, and delight in finding the short-cuts. But Rogan’s top paradigm is still open-loop. It’s ultimately a shrug. Did the Mafia kill Kennedy? I dunno, but it’s fun to think about. Can the sulforaphane found in young Brussel sprouts reverse the aging process? Well that would be cool.

With Bartlett, there is a sense that he does still feel there is an ultimate answer out there. That you can clock life. It’s an almost spiritual impulse, a syncretic belief in something better. All this hustle, it’s just got to add up to something. And in the absence of greater meanings, many are working out at a gnostic temple of the perfectible self. Overall, it might be nice if the world knew what to do with its biggest audio show.

The idea that “we the people” condemned the “Nasty Noughties” and its toxic men to the trashcan of history is a top-down reading that doesn’t stack up. In truth, the bits of masculinity we’ve suppressed are just living in a thumb-necked mixed martial artist’s basement in Texas. And the bits of masculinity we can still tolerate are on Diary of a CEO. With the blizzard of entertainment options, “water cooler moments” in media are supposed to be over by now. But what the success of Rogan shows is that there is actually a giant water cooler out there, that is accessed by millions each week, who try not to talk to strangers about it. Somewhere, there is a fusion position.

AI’s problems start at the top. Unlike the internet, which spawned a number of independent companies (including Google and Microsoft), AI seems to be controlled by existing tech giants, which are investing heavily in these new firms. ARM, for instance, the British-based chip designer whose IPO last week set Wall Street aflutter, is garnering huge investments from other Big Tech firms, including Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Apple. Elsewhere, Open AI’s largest investor is Microsoft, while DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014.

This pattern of collaboration between giants and upstarts suggests that the next tech revolution seems poised to empower the existing hierarchy. It also threatens the prospects of the classes below. Big Tech and venture capital executives such as Reid Hoffman promise that AI will serve the cause of “elevating humanity”, despite potentially wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide. Indeed, according to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. In other words, AI looks destined to warp our class structure in a similar way to feudalism, turning what has been a collection of Roman citizens into serfs.

But is this the entire story? Historically, humans have performed analytical tasks manually. They may have created tools, such as spreadsheets and surveys, to help them. But the tasks of optimising businesses have largely lain in the hands of human analysts who spend their days collecting data on the performance of businesses and markets. In the last phase of technological development, jobs for these “symbolic analysts” exploded: in the US, the number of workers in occupations requiring average to above-average education, training and experience increased from 49 million in 1980 to 83 million in 2015. Yet these tasks are now running into a buzzsaw with AI, whose underlying premise is that machines can learn to detect patterns and changes better than human beings.

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The greatest generational conflict

By Joel Kotkin

In his bestselling book AI Superpowers, Kai Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft boss who now runs one of the world’s most prolific AI venture funds, proposed a two-dimensional view of the future of work. His key thesis: that the social nature of a job and the discretionary nature of a job will be the key factors underlying AI’s impact. If, for instance, a job is highly formulaic and has few discretionary decisions, and people perform their tasks with little social interaction, AI is likely to displace it. So, while the CEO of an insurance company might be safe from being displaced by AI, one of his analysts is not.

And this is where the nuance is often lost. According to the US Labor Department, AI and automation could impact as many as many as 90 million American workers, with warehouse workers among the most prominent losers. What will really alter class relations, however, is the impact on more professional jobs. They have been the ascendent class for the last two generations, growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% since 2001 — well above the 0.4% annual rise for total employment. But whereas the computer revolution was a boon to those working as programmers and market researchers, AI does the job for them, often with more speed and accuracy. As Rony Abovitz, one of the pioneers of virtual reality and AI, has observed: “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work.”

In such a world, it is not hard to envisage a new kind of class conflict that extends beyond the traditional Marxist conflict between low-wage workers and better-educated owners. More than 82% of millennials fear AI will reduce their pay, and they are right to be worried. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo, recently warned. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.” As if to illustrate his point, tech firms such as Meta and Lyft have already announced major cutbacks in their white-collar workforce, while IBM has paused hiring to assess how many mid-level jobs can be replaced by AI.

What this means more broadly isn’t tricky to discern: a once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant.

Indeed, tech executives are already planning for the emergence of a vast, unproductive class made largely redundant by AI and robotics. After interviewing 147 digital company founders, the technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has concluded that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people”, while everyone else comes to rely on gig work and government aid. This is reflected in support for universal basic income by a number of leading tech oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and AI guru Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI).

Of course, many might wonder what is wrong with this. Already, roughly half of all Americans support the idea of a guaranteed basic income of about $2,000 a month if robots put them out of work. UBI enjoys even stronger support in most European countries, particularly among younger people. Further east, the popular Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Sato sees re-distribution as a way to as achieve the green goals of “degrowth” and “net zero” without devastating the masses.

Yet if history is our guide, such intellectual circles are surely plagued by a certain naiveté. In every stage of capitalism, the ruling class has offered promises of welfare and support. And in every stage of capitalism, they have only done so with the intention of strengthening their own position.

What is different this time, though, is that there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution.

If the 20th century was atheistic, religiosity is now everywhere — I hardly know anyone who lives as a pure-blood rationalist, nor do I encounter many who dwell entirely within one faith or metaphysical tradition. Astrology and occultism flourish in mainstream daylight, while a revived interest in psychedelic experience and synthetic drugs has opened up gnostic wormholes amid the high-res sound-systems of nightclubs that seem more than ever like techno-pagan temples.

Attempting to understand this paradoxical synthesis led me to TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis, a deeply Californian writer who was born in 1967 but is very much a child of the Nineties. His outlook was shaped as a cultural journalist in that decade he recalls fondly for its “ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come”. He describes TechGnosis as “a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology”, and insists that “religious questions, spiritual experiences, and occult possibilities remain wedded to our now unquestionably science-fiction reality”.

Starting from the maxim that “magic is technology’s unconscious”, Davis explores the myriad ways in which an ostensibly rationalist-materialist-atheist civilisation invests its new machines with ancient animism and archetypal dreams. Think of the recent hype around AI; how ready we are to project sentience and malign — Chtulian! — will onto a technology that, considered rationally, can never possess such qualities. He also considers the ways in which “ecstatic technologies” such as psychedelic drugs, meditation and shamanism now influence and modify questions of the soul, while asking if religious experience, defined by Carl Jung as that in which “man comes face to face with a psychically overwhelming Other”, may itself be evolving in tandem with technocultural mutation.

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The first edition of TechGnosis was published in 1998 — the same year, it’s always startling to recall, in which Google was founded — a prelapsarian time of heady economic growth and triumph-of-liberal-democracy optimism. It’s dizzying to think how much has changed since then, the spree of relentless cultural, societal and technological upheaval we’ve undergone. Yet Davis’s first book has remained relevant (helped by multiple revised editions with updated material). In part this is because it was never fully taken in by the Nineties’ now painfully discredited techno-utopianism, nor did it paint an especially rosy picture of our tech-civilisational future (yes, the one we’re now in). Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan, writing in 1962 about how the Global Village might turn out to be a more uncomfortable place than we anticipate: “As our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside…  we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence.”

Is there a better description of the online mobs, omni-paranoia, mass derangement, moral outrage, scapegoating, and polyphonic extremism that have defined the years since they put devices in our elegantly evolved hands? This sceptical edge may make Davis an appealing writer to those who find other psychedelically informed theorists too far out, too loose and easy with rationalism and the Enlightenment tradition. He is attractively open to gnostic, mystical, religious and, yes, psychedelic experience — a “heady seeker of sorts”, as he describes his younger self — yet he is also cool-headed and rational, even cynical when it comes to the exploitativeness of technocapitalism. Now in his late fifties and a compelling guest on podcasts and YouTube talks (as well as the producer of many excellent articles on his Substack) Davis advocates a “middle way — between reason and mystery, scepticism and sympathy, cool observation and participation mystique”.

His book churns up an unrelenting, often brilliant spray of ideas, funnelling a dizzying range of information across multiple cultural-intellectual byways and minority belief systems. Davis examines the seminal, future-shock cyberpunk fictions of William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and the gnostic dystopias of Philip K. Dick. But he also ranges onto magical-esoteric-religious history: the Greek-mythic trickster Hermes Trismegistus, John Dee’s “Enochian” magic, the discovery in 1945 of the heretical gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi — even the neuroscientist John C. Lilly’s experiments in telepathically communicating with dolphins by way of intravenous ketamine and a sensory-deprivation tank. He traces the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s messianic vision of a noospheric Omega Point — in which all minds are fused in an ecstatic oneness that brings the divine principle to its earthly apotheosis — through the delirious rhetoric of Nineties Wired-era tech propagandists and Singularity hucksters, whose effusions glossed the acceleration into our era of surveillance capitalism, epistemological fragmentation, radical inequality and political extremism.

Davis insists that the digital age teems with religious and supernatural metaphors. His distinction between the analogue “soul” and the digital “spirit” is memorably suggestive: “The analogue world sticks to its grooves of soul — warm, undulating, worn with the pops and scratches of material history. The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality.” It is not lost on Davis that his book appeared shortly before the arrival in multiplexes of The Matrix, an exhilarating film that mainlined the mythos of simulation, alienation, deception and sacred uprising into the global psychic mainstream and perhaps primed teenage minds to plunge into the nightmarish hyperrealities of the decades to come.

He is also sympathetic to the neo-psychedelic culture that emerged from a post-Sixties underground to fuse with a more broadly gnostic cultural mood (you can’t open the New York Times or New Yorker these days without seeing articles on psychedelic research, though acknowledgement of the irreducible weirdness of psychedelics is less common). But Davis regards our connected devices and social media as the real acid in the civilisational punch-bowl: perhaps the ruptures we’ve lived through over the past decade are just the beginning of a cyberdelic horror-trip we’ll never wake up from.

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By Rob Doyle

Today, the digital future-present keeps echoing the magical-animist-pantheistic past — and vice versa. What are shamans if not “ecstatic technicians of the sacred”, LSD if not a “gnostic molecule”, and Gnosticism itself — the heretical Christian doctrine that declared our universe the botched work of a sinister demiurge, a lesser god — if not “the world’s first metaphysical conspiracy theory”? Meanwhile, the revival of virtual reality and the increasingly realistic texture of video games conjures up the ancient fantasy of simulation and nested realities (“the protagonists of Hindu yarns often found themselves wandering through infinite nests of Borgesian dream worlds”). It is only a short, psychotic leap from there to believing that consciousness is itself a game within a game, that there are levels parallel to or above this one. Even if reality turns out not to be a video game, actual games reanimate gnostic longings. “The boss characters and evil creatures who must be conquered to advance levels are the faint echoes of the threshold-dwellers and Keepers of the Gates that shamans and gnostics had to conquer in their mystic peregrinations of the other worlds.”

At least in its younger form, Davis’s is the sort of intelligence that can barely give itself room to breathe. TechGnosis covers so much ground that you wish he’d linger in one place for a while, probe more deeply into some of the intriguing areas he races over, or make more of the arresting, speculative ideas he frequently dashes out. His book’s enduring cult appeal has arguably made him a touch self-important, assessing (and hyping) its continuing relevance across a series of overlong afterwords. But these are quibbles against the high appeal of a writer so alert to “the powerful, archetypal connections among magic, tricks, and technology”, and the value of psychedelic thought in generating new metaphors. Davis writes of such strange, compelling things with real poetry, his meta-muse unleashed in “those vast cosmic webworks whose own mysterious designs we may glimpse, if at all, in moments past all sense or reckoning”.

The command centre is a small room with three TV monitors, two of which are divided into four screens. All are showing drone footage from different parts of the front’s 20 kilometres of trenches. Four men sit in front of the screens. Two men sit off at the side — one on a laptop, one manning a two-way radio. In the centre of the room stands Bereza, the Brigade commander, barking voicenotes into his phone.

Two of the screens go black and a message pops up: “Your livestream will play again as soon as it’s available. Get Ready!”  I’m told it happens all the time. The screens cut in and out for all manner of unpredictable reasons. But, then, the image reappears and we are looking at a forest. A Russian tank is on the move — changing direction and wheeling around. The men inside this room are trying to destroy it. Their constant banter —  about girls and weapons — doesn’t seem to affect the focus with which they pursue the tank. One man shouts into the radio; Bereza growls into his phone. A screen goes black again. “Your livestream will play again as soon as it’s available. Get Ready!”

A screen flashes with light. Then billowing smoke. The men whoop and cheer. I have just seen a successful strike. Dima grins. The atmosphere is electric but also strangely banal. The exclusively male cohort, the puerile jokes, the screens, the repeated invocation to “Get Ready!”. It’s like they are all playing a video game.

“This is modern war, David” says Dima. “The war online.”

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Dodging shells on Ukraine's eastern front

By David Patrikarakos

In some respects, 21st-century warfare began the first time a US MQ-1 Predator UAV (that’s an unmanned Aerial Vehicle) drone flew over the Taliban’s positions to photograph the scene below. The Americans realised drones could be used for more than snooping. They could be modified for combat, armed with missiles and other incendiary devices. China, Iran and Turkey joined the arms race, and now they flood the market with their own cheap and effective drones.

For any state fighting without the wealth of the United States and China (which is everyone else), what is cheap and effective is also necessary. Out in Ukraine, the skies throng with Chinese-made DJI Mavics, Iranian Shaheds, Russian Orlan-10s and Turkish Bayraktar TB2s. Drones may not have the same payload or firepower as a fighter jet, but then again you can’t buy a fighter jet on the internet. For the price of one F-35, you can buy 55,000 DJI Mavic 3s. For less established militaries, drones offer the chance of levelling the field to at least some degree.

I spot a DJI Mavic 3 drone amid the scattered clothing, food and weaponry in the Dnipro 1 base. It’s not more than around 13×12 inches. This is a civilian camera drone — anyone can buy it online for around $3,000. If resource constraints breed creativity, then the Ukrainians are becoming artists. When I covered the battle of Bakhmut, an officer there explained to me how his unit could take out a multi-million-dollar T90 Russian tank by simply buying a Mavic online and fitting it with a small explosive. The Ukrainians have become masters of modifying consumer drones for conflict; of weaponising the everyday into something far more potent.

There is an atmosphere of relaxed watchfulness here. The sound of shells and rockets is distant but constant. The soldiers are fighting the Russians up close with tanks, rockets, artillery, sometimes even rifles. And always drones. Some, including the Iranian-made HESA Shahed 136 that the Russians use, are designed to directly strike targets. These are generally expensive — though the Shahed comes in at around $10,000 upwards, which makes it affordable enough to be expendable (only increasing their threat). But the Ukrainians mainly use drones as “eyes in the sky” — they use the cheaper camera ones to spot enemy targets and then call in their coordinates to other units, mainly artillery, to enable them to strike them more accurately. When ammunition and equipment stocks are low, firing must be accurate. On the front, there are few second chances.

“If I had had this technology in 2014, Putin would not have been able to occupy any of our territories. Fact,” says Dnipro 1 commander Yuriy Bereza. “The most important thing now is online comms. The most important thing is that I can see the reality on the ground.” He’s whittling a piece of cardboard with a knife, which he waves it around for emphasis as he makes his point. “When soldiers are on the front they are stressed and often give the wrong information, but with a drone I can see the situation calmly on the screen… I see the reality, the truth of it all — from above. It impacts how quickly I can make a decision. And whoever is quicker wins.

“It’s incredible how drones are changing the war. If I turn on my phone – a rocket will come out of the sky and land on me. The Russians can track it and they have orders to kill me. So many things in war now are about WhatsApp, Facetime, Signal — wars are being run out of phones. And if you leave a phone on in the wrong place you can die.”

The next morning after coffee, Bereza calls over a soldier who introduces himself as Oleksiy and who was part of the team last night. He is a studious-looking man who before the war was, like Dima, an IT engineer. Once those fighting here would have been the most physically impressive. Now they are recruited for their digital skills. Contemporary conflicts now require different types of soldiers — and they’re neither AI-generated nor Olympians.

He explains that what I had seen yesterday was part of a multi-pronged mission to stop two Russian tanks trying to destroy Ukrainians positions on the zero line while simultaneously trying to draw the unit’s attention away from an attack from the other side. “My role is to coordinate the direction of fire and to give tasks to the different units around me. Those who pilot the drone; those who analyse the coordinates; those who shoot — all of them I coordinate on the battlefield.”

He picks up a book from the table. “Look at this book on how to be a commander. It’s several years old, but we need to react to events as they are now. Military doctrine is like a computer program, it needs to be updated every six months. Drones are the best for choosing tactics, not tomorrow, but right now.”

And you need to be creative. Last night one of the tanks managed to get away but they got the other one by sending the drone up to follow it in real time and then send its coordinates to the artillery as it moved. They could direct their fire in such a way that while they didn’t hit it directly, they forced the tank onto a mine, blowing it up. The whole operation took about three minutes. How would they have done this operation without drones?  “Before drones,” he replies, “the only eyes we had were of the infantry. We sucked.”

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What about the air force? He smiles. “Well, for a start the Russians also have more planes. But even so, maybe you can hear a tank from a plane, but you cannot work out where it is. Especially if the tank is hidden and then two minutes later comes out of its hiding place — and the Russians use jamming systems to disguise their movements, but we use drones from a big distance to get around this. Drones allow us to watch the battle in real time.” The benefits drones bring are more than just narrowly military. For a start, there is the question of morale. One of the unit’s key tasks, Oleksiy explains, is to aid their infantry. “When they see us over their heads, [they know] we are protecting them, so they are happier to stay on their frontlines positions, because they know we can be there in one minute,” he says. This, in the end, it’s what it’s all about in war: speed. And drones, if used properly, give you that. Right now, the Ukrainians are reaping the rewards.

The Russians are neither stupid nor technologically naive. According to reports, Ukraine is losing around 10,000 drones per month to Russian electronic warfare. When I spoke to Dima earlier in the year, he told me how much better the enemy was getting at jamming and disrupting his attacks and how much more advanced they were in medium-range drones. Now, 18 months on, despite all their problems, the Russians remain in the field and they are getting better. They have significant technological capabilities — and, crucially, they are learning from their mistakes.

The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are forced to crowdfund for drones (and indeed other equipment). The Russians, bereft of international or often popular domestic support, are reliant on Moscow to keep delivering. It does so inadequately and with little concern for its own men. But its artillery is still firing, and its drones are still in the air. And as the counteroffensive intensifies all the way up and down the line of contact, it is becoming clear that whoever wins the drone wars will come to hold the upper hand in the war — perhaps for good.

The online abyss, with its proliferation of the repugnant, the vile and the downright perverse, makes the vast oceans my grandfather navigated appear almost quaint. Still, he grasped what would prove to be an essential truth of the internet: inhumanity is overlooked in the distribution of awards. In our digital era, attention goes to the most shocking, the most outrageous, the most hurtful.

Like many disaffected young men, I spent a phase of my life drawn to the grimmest corners of the internet, frequenting shock sites such as Ogrish. I would stay up late into the night, the glow of my screen illuminating images of brutal violence, the aftermath of bombings and scenes of torture — much of it related to the various global conflicts occurring in the early 2000s. This was, perhaps, a misguided attempt to understand the depths of human suffering. But does the internet merely reflect our inherent depravity, or does it make it more extreme?

I recently spoke to Monica Garnsey, the executive producer of  a harrowing BBC documentary which some of her colleagues described as among the worst assignments of their careers. These were veteran reporters who had seen the horrors of war zones, yet the subject they were uniquely disturbed by was an online underbelly: a monkey-torturing ring. What bothered them was that, unlike soldiers, or even individuals with abhorrent sexual desires, many who revelled in these gruesome videos displayed an unsettling lack of guilt. These videos showed innocent animals subjected to unspeakable cruelty at the viewer’s request, with other individuals who sought out the clips admitting they also took pleasure in it; for some, it was just a way of “passing the time”. They spoke of it as an intriguing hobby, a release valve for pent-up anger, or even, in some twisted cases, as entertainment. One of the primary sadists recalled stumbling upon a torture video and “chuckling to myself”.

Though much of the actual torture was taking place in Indonesia, the videos were mostly being watched by people in America. Propping up this twisted subculture are “torture-media influencers” — individuals who monetise the abuse of stars like Mini, a monkey whose popularity made her too valuable to kill, despite the complaints of torture aficionados who had grown weary of her starring role. (“Mini is so over,” some would post.)

The business model of these “torture-media influencers” was sickeningly straightforward, selling videos on a pay-per-view basis. But the internet doesn’t actually make it easy to make money; the financial gain was relatively minor. After expenses, even the top purveyors were earning only a few hundred dollars through private sales of more explicit films. There are plenty of easier ways to make that amount of money. These influencers must derive some satisfaction from their work.

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The majority of this disturbing content is circulated on platforms such as YouTube, where unsuspecting viewers stumble upon it; it’s a site with resources, and one that most people believe to be relatively well-regulated. Indeed, its content moderators are required to watch anything from acts of suicide and murder to incidents of child abuse. The depraved content that slips through the net is actually only the tip of the iceberg.

The job is known to be traumatic. In 2018, a lawsuit was filed against Facebook and its associated companies alleging that the companies failed to protect their content moderators from the psychological impacts linked to reviewing disturbing images. The case was settled in 2020, with Facebook agreeing to pay $52 million to thousands of American workers. Might it be possible that some derive perverse pleasure from this line of work? Since we know that there are people who pay to watch this content, surely there’s a possibility that some people want to watch it and get paid. Most, though, claim to do it out of necessity. And it’s a growing field of employment, especially in regions where employment opportunities might be scarce.

These content moderators are real-life incarnations of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a juvenile delinquent “reformed” into utter brokenness through non-stop involuntary exposure to violent films. It reminds me of my grandfather. He joined the military with intentions that were less than noble — to avoid jail time — but what he did, in the name of service, left him psychologically broken. Is the internet as corrupting a force as war: a system that rewards depravity and punishes those charged with maintaining order?

Mike McCartney, a former gang member now known as the “Torture King”, is an incontrovertible piece of evidence that the internet actually inspires abuse. He knew nothing about monkey torture until he stumbled upon a video on YouTube. He found it amusing. And it served as a gateway drug. The very worst monkey torture content is shared on private, and therefore unmoderated, channels. The Torture King sought out out likeminded people on Telegram, where the abuse is both normalised and escalated to unimaginable levels, with members conspiring and voting on cruel methods of torture. He started selling and trading torture videos, deriving a meagre profit, starkly disproportionate to the risks he took, including a potential seven-year prison sentence.

In some ways, this is an extreme case of a broader pattern, whereby people pursue validation and clout on social media at any cost, even when it involves catering to their basest impulses. The founder of Ape’s Cage, known as Mr Ape, told the BBC investigation that he felt affection for the monkeys, particularly Mini, whom he hoped would make it out of the ordeal alive (she did). Like several other torture fans, he even justified his actions by claiming he was trying to expose others involved in the trade. Perhaps he was just trying to avoid the consequences of his actions, but he wouldn’t be the first man to profess one set of beliefs when alone and online, and quite another when offline and in the company of others. The internet encourages psychological compartmentalisation, as well as the feeling that you can escape reality. But let us be clear: these depraved men were the instigators, not the liberators.

Can anyone take them on? Earlier this month, Meta, the conglomerate that owns Facebook and Instagram, established a task force dedicated to curbing the distribution and sale of child sexual abuse material on its platforms — a problem further exacerbated by ceaseless improvements in deepfake technology. This move was a response to a damning report by the Stanford Internet Observatory that unveiled a network of accounts peddling self-generated explicit material, primarily through Instagram’s direct messaging feature. A key point in the researchers’ findings was that the site was enabling buyers and sellers to find each other, thanks to the effectiveness of its algorithm.

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But are these sites giving people what they want, or making people want it? Perhaps it’s both. They are designed to keep users hooked because that’s their business model. They promote and amplify our darkest desires; they whet our appetite for more. TikTok has, for instance, faced criticism for contributing to the radicalisation of individuals by leading them down conspiracy theory rabbit holes.

And this then has resonance in the real world. What we see on the internet can directly impact our faith in reality — in other people. As an insider from the BBC documentary expressed: “What you realise is that anyone — the person in front of you in line, the person next to you on the street — could be a monkey torturer.” In a society where trust is already fragile, the danger is profound: bombard us with the worst aspects of human nature, and we view each other as suspects. We retreat into isolation, further eroding our faith in others. In other words the internet, in feeding our darkest desires, fans the flames of societal fragmentation.

The omnipresence of depravity has other consequences. It can numb us; or it can inspire a terrible guilt, akin to my grandfather’s, about our inability to prevent inhumanity. It leads to dehumanisation, and political apathy: if humans are terrible, what’s the point of trying to make society better?

But perhaps we can draw comfort from the fact that, while depravity generates a lot of views, so too does the fight against it. The BBC investigation into monkey torture is, in many ways, a successor to NBC’s television programme To Catch a Predator, affectionately known as TCAP. In the early days of social media, the show capitalised on the commonality of child predators, setting up intricate traps to catch these maladjusted individuals in the act. It was immensely popular. The programme paraded the perverts before the public eye, drawing attention to the staggering number lurking online. It featured the shy and morbidly obese Peter Sciacca, who went by the username “Don Ceech” and met his lonely demise in 2021 after serving time in prison. The trouble is, this sort of voyeurism is also problematic. Was Sciacca vulnerable? Marginalised? Exploited by the internet, just as he used it to exploit others? Exploited by the TV show, which turned his emptiness and alienation into a spectacle for others to consume, deepening his isolation, escalating their propensity for depravity?

We do have to take some responsiblity. The internet is, after all, a reflection of us — a mirror to our collective consciousness. But that digital mirror also allows us to detach consequences from action and to leave empathy behind. And it is this, arguably, that poses a far greater threat to our societal fabric than the individual acts of depravity. So even as those sickos are brought to justice, we ought to ask ourselves: what would we do, if we thought we could get away with it?

The gold standard for this approach appeared to be set in March, when Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and 1,800 concerned researchers signed a letter calling for AI development to be paused. This week, however, 350 scientists — including Geoffrey Hinton, who effectively invented ChatGPT, and Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind — decided to up the ante. Artificial intelligence, they warned, “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.

Does this mean you should add “death by ChatGPT” to your list of existential threats to humanity? Not quite. Although a number of prominent researchers are sounding the alarm, many are sceptical that its current state is anything close to human-like capabilities, let alone superhuman ones. We need to “calm down already”, says robotics expert Rodney Brooks, while Yann Le Cun — who shared Hinton’s Turing Prize — believes “those systems do not have anywhere close to human level intelligence”.

That isn’t to say that these machine-learning programs aren’t smart. Today’s infamous interfaces are capable of producing new material in response to prompts from users. The most popular — Google’s Bard and Open AI’s Chat GPT — achieve this by using “Large Language Models” (LLMs), which are trained on enormous amounts of human-generated text, much of it freely available on the Internet. By absorbing more examples than one human could read in a lifetime, refined and guided by human feedback, these generative programs produce highly plausible, human-like text responses.

Now, we know this enables it to provide useful answers to factual questions. But it can also produce false answers, fabricated background material and entertaining genre-crossing inventions. And this doesn’t necessarily make it any less threatening: it’s this human-like plausibility that leads us to ascribe to LLMs human-like qualities that they do not possess.

Deprived of a human world — or indeed any meaningful embodiment through which to interact with the world — LLMs also lack any foundation for understanding language in a humanlike sense. Their internal model is a many-dimensional map of probabilities, showing which word is more or less likely to follow the previous one. When, for example, Chat GPT answers a question about the location of Paris, it relies not on any direct experience of the world, but on accumulated data produced by humans.

What else do LLMs lack that human minds can claim? Perhaps most importantly, they lack the intention to be truthful. In fact, they lack intention at all. Humans use language for purposes, with intention, as part of games between human minds. We may intentionally lie in order to mislead, but that in itself is an attitude to the value of truth.

It’s this human regard for truth that inspires so much terror about the capacity of AI to produce plausible but untrue materials. Weapons of Mass Disinformation are the spectre stalking today’s internet, with deepfake videos or voice recordings serving as the warheads. Yet it’s hard to see this as a radically new problem. Humans already manage to propagate wild untruths using much simpler tools, and humans are also much better than is often recognised at being suitably sceptical. Mass distribution of false or misleading material has been shown to have little effect on elections. The breakdown of trust in media or authoritative information sources, and the splintering of belief in shared truths about the world, have deeper and more complex roots than technology.

Even the most fearful proponents of AI intellectual abilities don’t generally believe that LLMs can currently form goals or initiate actions without human instruction. But they do sometimes claim that LLMs can hold beliefs — the belief, for example, that Paris is in France.

In what sense, however, does an LLM believe that Paris is in France? Lacking a conception of the physical world to which abstract concepts such as “Paris” or “France” correspond, it cannot believe that “Paris is in France” is true in a way that “Frankfurt is in France” is false. Instead, it can only “believe” that data predicts “France” is the most probable completion of the string of words “Paris is in…”.

Imagine learning Ancient Greek by memorising the spellings of the most common 1,000 words and deducing the grammatical rules that govern how they may be combined. You could perhaps pass an exam by giving the most likely responses to questions similar to the ones in your textbook, but you would have no idea what the responses mean, let alone their significance in the history of European culture. That, broadly, is what an LLM can do, and why it’s been called a “stochastic parrot” — imitating human communication, one word at a time, without comprehension.

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A stochastic parrot, of course, is very far from Skynet, the all-powerful sentient computer system from Terminator. What, then, has provoked the sudden panic about AI? The cynical, but perhaps most compelling, answer is that regulation of AI technology is currently on the table — and entrepreneurs are keen to show they are taking “risk” seriously, in the hope that they will look more trustworthy.

At present, the European Union is drafting an AI Act whose “risk-based approach” will limit predictive policing and use of real-time biometric identification in public. The US and EU are also drawing up a voluntary code of practice for generative AI, which will come into force long before the AI Act makes its way through the EU’s tortuous procedures. The UK government is taking the threat just as seriously: it published a White Paper on AI in March, and Rishi Sunak reportedly plans to push an “AI pact” when he meets Joe Biden next week. Regulation, it seems, is a matter of when, not if — and it’s clearly in the interests of developers and businessmen to make sure they have a seat at the table when it’s being drafted.

This isn’t to say that commercial interests are the sole driver of this week’s apocalyptic front pages; our fears about AI, and the media’s coverage of them, also reflect far deeper cultural preoccupations. Here, comparisons between human thought and AI are particularly revealing.

If you believe that human language is an expression of agency in a shared world of meaning, that each human mind is capable not only of subjective experience but of forming purposes and initiating new projects with other people, then prediction-generating machines such as ChatGPT are very far from humanlike. If, however, you believe that language is a structure of meaning in which we are incidental participants, that human minds are an emergent property of behaviours, over which we have less control than we like to believe, then it’s quite plausible that machines could be close to matching us on home turf. We already refer to their iterative process of adjusting statistical weights as “learning”.

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In short, if your model of human beings is a behaviourist one, LLMs are plausibly close to being indistinguishable from humans in terms of language. That was, after all, the original Turing Test for artificial intelligence. Add to this our culture’s taste for Armageddon, for existential threats that sweep aside the messy reality of competing moral and practical values, long and short-term priorities, and pluralist visions of the future, and it’s no wonder the world-ending power of AI is hitting the headlines.

At an Institute of Philosophy conference this week, Geoffrey Hinton explained why he believes AI will soon match human capacities for thought: at heart, he is sceptical that our internal, subjective experience makes us special, or significantly different from machine-learning programs. I asked him whether he believed that AI could become afraid of humans, in the way he is afraid of AI. He answered that it would have good reason to be afraid of us, given our history as a species.

In the past, our gods reflected how we saw ourselves, our best qualities and our worst failings. Today, our mirror is the future AI of our imagination, in which we see ourselves as mere language machines, as a planet-infesting threat, as inveterate liars or gullible fools. And all the while, we continue to create machines whose powers would dazzle our grandparents. If only we could program them to generate some optimism about the future, and some belief in our own capacity to steer towards it.

So the ad I spotted in that Tube carriage, for the dating app Tinder, seemed particularly fitting. It depicted a smiling young couple in psychedelic clothing, with the caption: “Finally Having Kids”. They each rest one hand on a pushchair. In the pushchair is a dog.

If, given my recent experience, Londoners seem more partial to dogs than kids, this may not be the only way in which “fur babies” are on the up. According to last year’s ONS data, half of British women now reach 30 without having kids. And Pets At Home CEO Lyssa McGowen thinks some of these have redirected their caring urges toward pets. “They are taking all that time and energy and attention and putting it into fur babies, especially in urban areas,” she said.

McGowen speculates that this is happening because the classic milestones of adult life — such as getting your own place — seem increasingly out of reach to many, thanks to scarce housing, rising costs and stagnant wages. This feels plausible: in the US, studies show the stated desire for family size has remained consistent even as the birth rate has fallen. And one recent UK-based Rolling Stone investigation quoted many young couples for whom money is indeed the sticking point.

But is that all there is to it? Prospects for Gen Z are not as optimistic as for their Boomer grandparents, but in absolute terms human societies have lived through greater turbulence and gone on having kids. Birth rates remain buoyant, for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which consistently makes the top 10 in the Fragile States Index of most unstable countries. So what else is in the mix?

Liberal feminist Jill Filipovic argues that if more women are opting to have fewer or no kids, it isn’t so much about the financial pinch. Certainly, among dog-walking acquaintances locally, I can think of several childless, younger millennial heterosexual couples who seem, on the face of it, pretty sorted: good jobs, comfortably off, often homeowners, sometimes even working flexibly from home. Ideally situated, in other words, for starting a family. And yet, they have no kids. For some in this situation, the dog is an object of minute, loving observation and care, and plays the central role in conversation that children usually do for young parents. Watching this, my sense is that although for some economics is a factor in choosing between human babies and the fur variety, at least some of the time it’s not just about money. It goes, rather, to the heart of what we think the purpose of life is — and thus what we are.

When I took our Tube-travelling dog for a check-up recently, the vet asked if we were planning to have her spayed. In discussing the pros and cons, the vet suggested one benefit would be that, once neutered, “she can just get on with being a dog”. It stuck in my mind: after all, isn’t the reproductive cycle part of being a dog? In what sense would neutering Saffy make her freer to be a dog? What kind of dogness is actively obstructed by the organismic urge to make more dogs?

If, as McGowen suggests, a great many young adults today are directing their parental instincts toward pets, I suspect a central reason is that we’ve embraced an equivalent understanding of humanness. That is, we’ve come to believe that the preconditions for realising yourself fully — especially in the field of sex and relationships — now actively foreclose becoming a parent, or at least radically reduce parenthood to one not especially appealing option among many. Given the pervasiveness of this message, the surprise shouldn’t be that many young men and women are pouring that caregiving urge into “fur babies”, but that anyone is bucking the trend and still making the human sort.

Fertility really started plummeting with the onset of the sexual revolution. While modernity consistently drives down birth rates, in the UK (with the exception of a wartime blip) the average number of children per woman remained above the replacement rate until the 20th century.  It was only in the Sixties, concurrent with legalisation of the Pill, that rates began falling off a cliff, dipping below replacement levels in 1975, the year after contraceptives were made available to everyone free of charge. Britain’s total fertility rate has remained below replacement ever since.

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People are not without agency, of course. My birth, toward the end of the Seventies, attests to the fact that women didn’t abruptly stop having kids just because they could suddenly control fertility. But if contraception acted directly on fertility, it also did so culturally, by making it possible for the first time to treat sex and reproduction as two separate things. This was a seismic technological and cultural change; and one consequence was, as the Catholic feminist Abigail Favale puts it, that it became increasingly normal to see sex not as a “procreational” activity but a “recreational” one. And I suspect it’s this shift, more than anything else, that’s done most to undermine the once-robust cultural association between parenthood and being a fully realised adult human.

Cultural changes take a while to percolate through, but half a century on from the original revolution, this worldview is so normalised that it’s hard to imagine things any other way. For example, in Let’s Talk About It, a 2021 educational book about sex and relationships aimed at teenagers, the procreational function of sex is acknowledged in passing but the overall emphasis is on sex as — in the book’s terms — a “fun physical activity”.

A great many things follow from viewing sex in this way. Firstly, if sex is primarily recreational it genuinely doesn’t matter what sex your partner is, provided they want to have sex with you. “Reproduction aside”, the authors of Let’s Talk About It assert, “your genitals exist to let you feel pleasure with yourself or others (no matter which genitals they may have).”

Secondly, if the principal aim is recreation, then relationship type doesn’t matter. Studies have long shown that where children are concerned, growing up with two married parents is associated with better outcomes. As long as there is a general cultural consensus that sex is associated with children, then, this is likely to be accompanied by a consensus that sexual desire should be generally pointed at marriage or at least long-term relationships. But if sex is mainly recreational, babies are emphatically not viewed as part of the story. Rather, as in Let’s Talk About It, they are discussed as a “risk” attendant on sexual activity: a negative event of the same order as catching a sexually transmitted disease.

It follows, too, that if sex is just a fun leisure activity, then you can have any kind of relationship you like. Accordingly, the book gives equal weighting to monogamy, polyamory, hook-ups, and abstinence, saying only that “Sexual intimacy is a powerful way to feel good and bond with another person, whether it’s for a night or a lifetime”. Taken together, this worldview presents embodiment, sexuality, desire and intimacy as coruscating, infinitely varied expressive options in which what anyone does should be limited only by individual preference and mutual consent. And if this is what being a fully realised person looks like, then by comparison, reproductive sex — the boring old heteronormative kind — is constricting in the extreme.

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Imagine you’ve grown up with this set of messages, or at least something like it. Now, imagine you detect in yourself a buried hankering to be a mother or father. In order even to reach the starting blocks for doing anything about this longing, you’d need to unlearn most of your culture’s ambient assumptions about the field of sex and relationships, beginning with the received view that babies are not a source of joy but threat. Then you’d have to question the taboo on connecting sexual desire with its reproductive end, which is to say accept that, if you’re trying to make a baby, it really does matter what genitals your partner has.

In the face of all this, it’s no wonder many who have absorbed some variant of this message simply embrace it, and set out to enjoy the panoply of expressive sexual and emotional options now presented, without judgement, for selection. And this means sidelining parenthood: for within that paradigm, the organismic urge to reproduce, with all the limits it opposes on those expressive options, presents itself not as an aspect of becoming fully human, but an obstacle to the infinite ways in which we might do so. Self-neutering is now, as the vet suggested of spaying Saffy, self-actualisation. And should some glimmer of the ancient drive to care for dependents nonetheless fight its way to the surface, Tinder’s latest ad campaign has the answer.

Decades later, Germans are as obsessed with their cars as ever. But the autobahns are choked with traffic, and large, growling combustion engines capable of demonic speeds seem, to many, hopelessly out of sync with Germany’s self-proclaimed global leadership on environmental protection and climate change.

And so the shine is coming off German car manufacturing. Headlines such as “Share of e-cars imported from China into Germany more than triples” will sound scary if you’re VW, Audi and co. Yet official German sales statistics for April show that domestic models still occupy eight of the top 10 spots, with VW models featuring in four places. Chinese electric models and Teslas are nowhere to be seen. The ID-3 and ID-4, VW’s electric models, far outsell Elon Musk’s machines.

Germany, however, represents a tiny slice of the global car market these days. VW has long since been set on conquering the Chinese market and has done astonishingly well there. But its sales in China fell by 15% in the first quarter, including a 40% drop for electric cars. The bigger picture suggests that there is indeed cause for alarm.

The world’s largest carmaker, the Volkswagen Group, still towers over the rest, following a brief drop to second place under Toyota after the deeply embarrassing diesel scandal eight years ago, when California researchers discovered defeat software that allowed VW to fake their cars’ nitrogen oxide emissions during testing. Dieselgate, which has so far cost VW more than €30 billion in fines globally, is far from over, and threatens to inflict further damage on the brand. Earlier this month, on the 166th day of his fraud trial, Rupert Stadler, former CEO of Volkswagen subsidiary Audi, changed his mind about what he knew about emissions cheating and pleaded guilty. He is now expected to face a €1.1 million fine rather than prison.

Stadler is the first senior VW German executive to admit wrongdoing. He confessed to allowing the sale of cars to continue even though he knew they contained the emissions manipulating software. Until now, VW higher-ups had insisted they had been unaware of their engineers’ cheeky tinkering. The trial of Martin Winterkorn, former Volkswagen CEO, is on hold due to ill health, but the Stadler confession will embolden fresh lawsuits. Thousands of German drivers are already suing VW and its marques for damages — and a total of 10 million cars on German roads could, in theory, be affected. The financial consequences of damages at that scale could eviscerate the industry, which would prefer to leave Dieselgate in the rear-view mirror.

The affair was the death knell for “clean diesel”, which, ludicrously, had been sold around the world as a green fuel, not least by German manufacturers who stubbornly insisted that petrol and diesel internal combustion motors had a bright future, despite much of the industry elsewhere placing its chips on electric. Germany’s sprawling car industry is built around these two, 19th-century motor technologies, with suppliers such as Bosch and hundreds of smaller Mittelstand firms supplying VW, BMW, Daimler, Opel and Porsche — not to mention large foreign-owned factories for Ford and Tesla. By some estimates, car manufacturing accounts for €500 billion in revenue and employs, directly and indirectly, 10 million people. Electric cars, by contrast, are essentially computers on wheels, contain far fewer mechanical components and require less factory labour and more software coders.

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It’s no surprise, then, that the sluggish, reluctant switch to electric has been painful. Until last year, when Musk opened a “gigafactory” for Tesla SUVs and batteries at the gates of Berlin, German car management and unions, lobbyists and politicians were all largely in denial about the need for a radical transformation. It’s too early to tell whether domestic brands can fend off Tesla, with its bottomless market cap and the threat of cheap Chinese imports.

Yet resistance to electric cars is as cultural as much as it is economic. As Ulf Porschardt, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, has written: “Internal combustion engines made by Porsche, Maserati and Lamborghini were, and are, high culture. To stop making them is as if Beethoven had stopped after the 7th Symphony, or Wagner had finished the Ring after Siegfried.”

Dramatic stuff. But depending on who you ask, Porschardt is either a shameless apologist for the country’s most corrupt and powerful industry and its dangerous, polluting and climate-destroying products — or else he’s an apostle of the values that the car has embodied in both German and Western, post-Second World War culture.

In his history of the iconic Porsche 911, Porschardt regularly defends the absence of a speed limit on German motorways: “The autobahn is the last place where we enjoy more freedom than others in the world.” It is no coincidence that Porschardt supports the Free Democratic Party, a tiny, liberal and pro-car party which recently derailed plans, pushed by its Green coalition partner, to introduce a speed limit of 130kph. Debate over driving speeds resurfaced last year as Germany attempted to reduce its dependency on Russian oil: lower speeds means lower fuel use, lower emissions and fewer accidents. But with a majority of Germans now favouring a speed limit, Porschardt and his fellow travellers are on the losing side of this very German culture war.

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The car, and its place within German society, has never been so furiously debated. In Berlin, there is bitter opposition to a proposed extension of an inner-city motorway through densely populated neighbourhoods. The capital is positively brimming with community groups keen to create low-traffic “superblocks”, as Barcelona has done.

Yet, in spite of the Greens’ participation in the Scholz coalition, new motorways continue to be proposed across the country. In response, a radical new climate movement, Letzte Generation, has sprung up, so named because they believe they are the last generation that can prevent catastrophic climate change before dangerous tipping points kick in. For them, the unfettered use of “motorised individual transport”, as they prefer to call cars, must be restricted. And so they have taken to supergluing themselves to intersections and exit slipways, causing horrendous rush-hour traffic jams, sometimes even to the hindrance of emergency vehicles. This, somehow, is supposed to pressure the government to adopt more effective climate policies.

The Kulturkampf around das Auto shows no signs of slowing. Germans’ obsession with driving is deeply associated to West Germany’s emergence as an economic powerhouse from the ashes of the Second World War. According to one intriguing, provocative theory, made by writer Mia Raben in her essay “The Incapacity to Brake”, the post-war obsession with speed is directly related to Germans’ refusal to face up to the reality of what their country did to the world under Hitler, a leader, she says, they adored. “The object libido has migrated from the Führer to the car,” she wrote.

Raben’s essay title referred to a famous 1967 book, The Incapacity to Mourn, which took a psychoanalytical approach to explaining why it was so hard for ordinary Germans to look the crimes of the Nazis in the face. Even today, everything is somehow explained by the war, from the national obsession with cars to the misplaced radicalism of the environmentalists who oppose them. When I think of my grandparents — who very much belonged to the Hitler generation, and spent their lives avoiding the question of guilt for war and genocide — and how they thundered across the glittering autobahn, there is some sense to this theory. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by travelling at the highest speeds possible in their shiny, powerful Mercedes, they weren’t trying to outrun their past.