Computer Says Maybe

This is our first in a series called Terra Nullius. Huh? It’s Latin for ‘Nobody’s Land’. We will be exploring how rules are made for contested territory. If a land belongs to no one, does that mean it’s just up for grabs?This week we’re starting with outer space, speaking with an expert in space law, Heather Allansdottir. But why should we care about space when the planet we are standing on is falling to shreds?Currently, outer space belongs to no one. We have an Outer Space Treaty which was developed during the Cold War. But the treaty isn’t durable enough for a second generation of space exploration which includes private actors, not just nation states. Powerful companies, countries and individuals are in a desperate scramble to make it theirs. According Heather, we have about a two-year window to enshrine outer space as a commons, otherwise it will fall to chaos actors and tech billionaires.In our next Terra Nullius episode, we’ll be talking about governing the skies and the companies that think you want drone-delivered coffee to your backyard.Further reading & resources:Astrodottir — Heather’s space law consultancy**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Dr Heather Allansdottir is an academic of international law, focused on space law. She is the founder and director of the space sustainability consultancy Astrodottir, and the co-author of the forthcoming book New Perspectives in Outer Space Law (Springer 2025). She is deputy director of LLB at Birkbeck University's Faculty of Law and a former Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge.

Child safety is a fuzzy catch-all concept for our broader social anxieties that seems to be everywhere in our conversations about the internet. But child safety isn’t a new concept, and the way our politics focuses on the spectacle isn’t new either.To help us unpack this is Kate Sim, who has over a decade of experience in sexual violence prevention and response and is currently the Director of the Children’s Online Safety and Privacy Research (COSPR) program at the University of Western Australia’s Tech & Policy Lab. We discuss the growth of ‘child safety’ regulation around the world, and how it often conflates multiple topics: age-gating adult content, explicit attempts to harm children, national security, and even ‘family values’.Further reading & resources:On COSPRs forthcoming paper on the CSAM detection ecosystem. Here is a fact sheet with ecosystem map based on it: https://bit.ly/cospr-collateralOn CSAM bottleneck problem: https://doi.org/10.25740/pr592kc5483IBCK episode on the Anxious Generation: https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/47a8aa95c83be96b044dcb3f4e43d158Child psychology expert Candace Odgers debunking Jonathan Haidt’s claims in real-time here: https://tyde.virginia.edu/event/haidt-odgers/)A primer on client-side scanning and CSAM from Mitali Thakor: https://mit-serc.pubpub.org/pub/701yvdbh/release/2On effective CSA prevention and scalability: https://www.prevention.global/resources/read-full-scalability-report**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Dr. Kate Sim is the Director of the COSPR Program. She has over 14 years of experience in sexual violence prevention and response, having worked across community organizing, frontline support, government, academia, and industry in the US, UK, and South Korea. Her current research interests are: Big Tech accountability, sexual violence, and children’s liberation. Most recently, she worked at Google where she shaped product policy on a range of children's safety issues, including non-consensual intimate imagery, financial sextortion, grooming, and help-seeking journeys for people impacted by harmful sexual behaviors. Kate holds a PhD and MSc from the Oxford Internet Institute and a BA in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Harvard University.

This week Alix interviewed David Seligman, Executive Director of Towards Justice, to tell us more about how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US. He makes a compelling case for the urgent need to re-orient our thinking about political power and organise against it.We talk about legal devices like forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression. And we dig into the existential issue of tech companies asserting more and more control over markets and people without taking any responsibility for the dominating role they play.Further reading & resourcesTowards Justice California drivers suitEichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banal State of Evil by Hannah ArendtThe Dual State by Ernst FraenkelProhibiting Surveillance Prices and Wages by Towards JusticeGill VS Uber — class action led by Towards Justice**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Last week Alix was in London to talk UK politics and broligarchy with four amazing guests:Martha Dark from Foxglove gave us the history and implications of the NHS/Palantir partnership of horrorMatt Mahmoudi outlined the UK’s push to amp up facial recognition surveillance and to outlaw protests (seems good)Seyi Akiwowo shared a retrospective of the development of the Online Safety Act — the UK’s online speech regulation meant to protect kidsTanya O’Carroll did a victory lap, sharing details of her case against Facebook’s intrusive ad-targeting business model**Subscribe to our newsletter for up-to-the-month opportunities to get involved!**

Amidst the scrambling of geopolitics, there is increasing conversation and momentum for the concept of tech sovereignty. It basically means that countries should build their own technology rather than rely on Silicon Valley. India Stack! Euro Stack! Everyone wants a stack.In this episode we explore India’s work over the last 20 years to build ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI. They went YOLO on a digital ID system in a country of 1 billion people — with very mixed results. Did this ‘public infrastructure’ lead to a locally-owned marketplaces? Nope! Has the fact that their PM is a Hindu nationalist limited India’s ability to tout this work on the global stage? Also nope! It’s actually allowed the government to techwash its authoritarianism.Lots to unpack here, and fortunately, we’re joined by Divij Joshi, a researcher focused on the political economy of ‘digital public infrastructure’ or DPI, to explore India’s attempts at digital ID and government-as-a-platform.Further reading & resources:Government as a Platform by Tim O’ReillyThe Global DPI AgendaRecovering the ‘Public’ in India’s Digital Public Infrastructure Strategy by IT for ChangeAadhaar’s mixing of public risk and private profit by Aria ThakerInterrogating India’s quest for data sovereignty by Divij Joshi**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Divij is a Research Fellow at ODI Global and a Doctoral Researcher at UCL, where his research and advocacy focuses on understanding the political economy and governance of emerging technologies to articulate a vision for a fair and just information society. His thesis examines how the emergence of 'Digital Public Infrastructures', as platform and data-based information systems are shaping notions of economic development and political subjectivity in India and globally.

Two years ago, we were told that ‘prompt engineer’ would be a real job — well, it’s not. Is generative AI actually going to replace and transform human labour, or is this just another shallow marketing narrative?This week Alix speaks with Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra Mateescu, who recently authored Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work. They discuss how automation is now being used as a threat against workers, and how certain types of labour are being devalued by AI — especially (shocking) traditionally feminised work, such as caregiving.Further reading:Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work by Aiha Nguyen and Alexandra MateescuBlood in the Machine by Brain MerchantSubscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!*Aiha Nguyen is the Program Director for the Labor Futures Initiative at Data & Society where she guides research and engagement. She brings a practitioner's perspective to this role having worked for over a decade in community and worker advocacy and organizing. Her research interests lie at the intersection of labor, technology, and urban studies. She is author of The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance and co-author of ‘At the Digital Doorstep: How Customers Use Doorbell Cameras to Manage Delivery Workers’, and ‘Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype and Value at Work’.**Alexandra Mateescu is a researcher on the Labor Futures team at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she investigates the impacts of digital surveillance, AI, and algorithmic power within the workplace. As an ethnographer, her past work has led her to explore the role of worker data and its commodification, the intersections of care labor and digital platforms, automation within service industries, and generative AI in creative industries. She is also a 2024-2025 Fellow at the Siegel Family Endowment.*

This week Alix is speaking with her long-time friend and collaborator Carly Kind, who is now the privacy commissioner of Australia. Here’s something you may be embarrassed to ask: what does a privacy commissioner even do? We got you…Alix and Carly will discuss how privacy regs bump up against current trends in AI, how to incentivise compliance, and the limits of Australian privacy laws.**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**Carly Kind commenced as Australia’s Privacy Commissioner in February 2024 for a 5-year term. As Privacy Commissioner, she regulates the handling of personal information by entities covered by the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and seeks to influence the development of legislation and advance privacy protections for Australians. Ms Kind joined from the UK-based Ada Lovelace Institute, where she was the inaugural director. As a human rights lawyer and leading authority on the intersection of technology policy and human rights, she has advised industry, government and non-profit organisations on digital rights, artificial intelligence, privacy and data protection, and corporate accountability in the technology sphere.

This week producer Georgia joins Alix to discuss something huge that we’ve yet to go deep on: the prevalence of trans misogyny online. This episode is jam-packed with four amazing guests to guide us through this rough terrain:Shivani Dave is a journalist and commentator who uses social media for their career and income. They share their experiences with receiving hate online, and having to balance posting against hits to their mental healthAlice Hunsberger is a trust & safety professional who’s worked at all levels of content moderation. She explains the technical complexities and limitations of moderating online spacesJenni Olson is head of social media safety at GLAAD, and discusses the lack of transparency and care around platform content policies, allowing hateful dog whistles to proliferateDr Emily Cousens, a professor at Northeastern, who provides important context on the history of trans misogyny in the UKFurther reading & resources:A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-PetersonDebunking the Cass Review by Gideon MKGLAAD Social Media Safety ProgramMeta’s Anti-LGBT Makeover by Jenni OlsonRapid Onset Gender Dysphoria by Maintenance Phase: parts ONE and TWOT&S Insider by Alice Hunsberger**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!***SHIVANI DAVE (they/them) is a political commentator and journalist whose work focuses on human rights, science and technology. SHIV is one of the organisers of the London Dyke March,  a regular collaborator with organisations; ACT UP LONDON, Queer Night Pride, local TRA, London Trans+ Pride and other more formal structures (THT, AKT, Trans+ History Week, LGBT+ History Month, NHS, THE PEOPLE ). They have written for outlets including The Guardian, BBC News, and Metro. They have appeared on Good Morning Britain, Sky News, and Jeremy Vine on 5 among others. SHIV is driven by a passion for sharing the stories of marginalised and oppressed people around the world.**Alice Goguen Hunsberger is a Trust & Safety leader with 20+ years of experience in content moderation, CX, and building safer online communities. She heads Trust & Safety at Musubi Labs, an AI company specializing in T&S services. Alice got her start in 2002, running a community forum and developing its first moderation guidelines. She later led T&S and CX at OkCupid, helped guide Grindr through its IPO as VP of CX & T&S, and drove ethical outsourcing strategies as VP of T&S at PartnerHero.**Jenni Olson (she/her/TBD) is Senior Director of the Social Media Safety Program at national LGBTQ media advocacy organization, GLAAD. A prominent voice in the field of tech accountability, Jenni leads GLAAD’s work to hold tech companies and social media platforms accountable, and to secure safe online spaces for LGBTQ people. The GLAAD Social Media Safety Program researches, monitors, and reports on a variety of issues facing LGBTQ social media users. GLAAD’s annual Social Media Safety Index (SMSI) report evaluates the major social media platforms on LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression. Olson has worked in LGBTQ media and tech for decades and is best known as co-founder of PlanetOut.com, the first major LGBTQ community website, created by a small team of tech pioneers in 1996.**Dr Emily Cousens (They/Them) is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Northeastern University, London and the UK lead for the Digital Transgender Archive. They are the author of Trans feminist epistemologies in the US Second Wave, published by Palgrave in 2023, and their expertise are in transfeminist philosophy and history.*

This week Alix interviewed Catherine Bracy on her book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalising the Economy. Support Catherine’s work and buy it NOW.Venture capital wasn’t always how it is today. But now it’s a driver of inequality, political and economic instability, and insufferable personalities. How did we get here and what might come next?In this conversation Catherine outlines her views on our current political moment and the role of VC in it. We’ve all got feelings about VCs, but in her book and in this conversation she forensically picks apart how it works, why it doesn’t really work, and why that’s a problem for all of us.Further reading & resources:Buy Catherine’s bookTechEquity CollaborativeCatherine Bracy is the Founder and CEO of TechEquity, an organization doing research and advocacy on issues at the intersection of tech and economic equity to ensure the tech industry’s products and practices create opportunity instead of inequality. She is also the author of the forthcoming book, World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy (Dutton: March, 2025).

Alix’s conversation this week is with Jenny Reardon, who shares with us the history of genomics — and the absolutely mind-melting parallels it has with the trajectory of the AI industry.Jenny describes genomics as the industrialisation of genetics; it’s not just about understanding the genetic properties of humans, but mapping out every last inch of their genetic information so that it’s machine readable and scalable and — does this remind you of anything yet?There are a disturbing amount of correlations between AI and genomics: that they have roots in military applications; as fields they have been pumped up with money and compute; and that there are, of course, huge conceptual overlaps with race science.Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices.  She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press) and, most recently, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press)