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“Privacy is not about something to hide. Privacy is about controlling access to yourself.” Bruce Schneier has spent decades thinking about digital security and the hidden systems that shape modern life, and he pulls no punches in his assessment: Surveillance is the default condition of digital life because politicians lack the will to limit corporate power in a data economy that rewards the ongoing extraction of our information. We talk about why “nothing to hide” is a reductive way of thinking about privacy, why the real danger is the loss of control over our own lives, and how data collection has become so normal that most of us barely notice it anymore. Bruce argues that concentrating so much information and power in too few hands poses a serious threat to democracy and to the idea of free individuals living private lives. We also get into AI, proof of humanity, bot-filled public spaces, age verification, and how governments and companies justify ever more invasive systems in the name of safety, convenience, or efficiency. Bruce’s diagnosis is simple: this is not a technology problem, it’s a political problem, and it will stay broken until we fix it. You can visit Bruce’s website and subscribe to his Crypto-Gram newsletter. Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

“There is no belief in a democratic process in Iran right now.” In this episode, I speak with Fariba Nawa, the Afghan-American investigative journalist, podcaster, and chief editor of OnSpec Podcast, about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s global campaign to threaten, kidnap, and kill dissidents living abroad. Fariba shares how her own life as a refugee has informed her work, and discusses the process of making Lethal Dissent, her powerful nine-part podcast series on Iranian state repression and transnational intimidation. As we explore how identity, trust, and access shape what can be reported, Fariba explains her refusal to flatten global events into easy binaries and why, from Afghanistan to Turkey and Iran, the story is never as simple as just “good guys vs. bad guys”. She also opens up about her experiences of journalism under pressure and the toll of doing work that is both personally risky and politically urgent. Fariba’s reporting is a reminder that real beat journalism still matters, and that going wherever the story leads while trying to maintain objectivity isn’t only possible, it’s crucial. You can support Fariba’s work by visiting her website at faribanawa.com, buying her book Opium Nation, listening to Lethal Dissent here (or wherever you get your podcasts), and funding her next investigation. Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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