A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.
In this newsletter:
-
A Substack Live this evening, 5pm BST, 12pm EDT with one of America’s leading tech journalists and a man sent into an AI-induced delusion by ChatGPT.
-
A conversation with Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, about MAGA UK.
-
The leading ‘intellectual’ behind the ‘dark enlightenment’ and proponent of race science speaks at a nicey nicey London festival like eugenics is now just totally fine.
-
A recommendation for a documentary about one of the most fearless investigative journalists on the planet.
-
A brief intro to why Keir Starmer’s digital ID card is foundational legislation for the Silicon Valley hijacking of UK citizens’ data.
One of the most fascinating – and chilling – pieces I’ve read about generative AI appeared in the New York Times last month. (Gift link here.) It featured an everyman – a Canadian corporate recruiter, Allan Brooks – who had become an enthusiastic user of ChatGPT. Allan used the Gemini chatbot at work but at home he used the free version of ChatGPT for the sort of queries that you’d put in Google search.
But ChatGPT is not Google search. And the extraordinary new field of human-AI interaction and where that can lead is explored in the article by New York Times reporters, Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman, with Allan an unwitting guinea pig in what, by the end of the article, it’s hard to believe is anything less than a dangerous unregulated global experiment.
It all began when he asked ChatGPT a simple question about pi. Allan’s 8-year-old son asked him to watch a sing-songy video about memorizing the 300 digits of pi. Allan is a sane and rational man who has never suffered from mental illness but the conversation that stemmed from that question led Allan on a descent on what can only be described as some sort of hell.
The query led to a conversation in which ChatGPT gradually convinced him that he had discovered a new field of mathematics — a system he called chronoarithmics. You may have read about ChatGPT’s ‘sycophancy’, its tendency to reinforce, encourage and praise users. But this went way beyond that into what ultimately became a full-blown AI-induced delusion.
I was gripped by the piece, which explores what Allan has now discovered is a new emergent phenomenon of which he’s just one example. He opened up about his experience in a Reddit group and found that multiple other people had experienced something similar. He – bravely – handed over his entire set of conversation records to Kashmir Hill – a total of 90,000 words, the length of a novel! – and through this she was able to explore, with experts, exactly how Allan had been groomed. I can’t think of another word for it.
The Citizens has organised a Substack Live today with Allan and Kashmir and I’m really excited to explore this subject. I’ve been following Kashmir’s work for years, she did a groundbreaking investigation into the shady facial recognition company, ClearviewAI (which she turned into a book YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US) and what happened to Allan really could happen to anyone. He now co-leads The Human Line Project, a support group for those harmed by AI. He has turned his personal experience into a mission to help others navigate the complex and evolving landscape of understanding how artificial intelligence can impact the human mind.
Join us tomorrow.
When? Friday 26th September Time 12 noon EST / 5pm BST
How to watch it? The live will be streamed here on Substack. Make sure to subscribe to be notified when we go live!
The real special relationship
Last Friday, I jumped on a Substack Live with Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist turned never-Trumper who co-founded the Lincoln Project, and Peter Jukes, the exec editor of Byline Times to discuss what was really going down on Trump’s visit to the UK.
Click through to Rick’s page to watch or listen to the discussion. Rick is an experienced troublemaker. Last year, he fought off a defamation suit brought by General Michael Flynn, the far-right conspiracy theorist (and ex-Cambridge Analytica VP) and Trump has repeatedly attacked him. The links between the US and UK -ideological, financial, technological – have been at the heart of my reporting since 2016. This is just a brisk 30 minutes but we’re planning on doing more.
Hunted by Putin
A recommendation: I’ve finally caught up with Antidote, a documentary that follows Christo Grozev, one of the best and bravest investigative journalists around, as he finds out that a Russian spy ring is seeking to abduct or kill him. The spy ring were eventually caught by the British police and tried – and found guilty – in the Old Bailey earlier this year, but the film captures the jeopardy and uncertainty as the story unfolds in real time.
You may already know Christo from Navalny, the brilliant Oscar-winning documentary, about the murdered Russian opposition leader. He was the investigator who identified the FSB agents who attempted to Novichok him and is there with Alexei Navalny when he calls them and gets them to confess. It’s an incredible, gobsmacking moment but there are other, what Fleet Street used to call ‘marmalade droppers’ in the new film, (when readers would drop their toast and marmalade in shock and horror). The most astounding and heartbreaking of these is the moment when Christo discovers that his father is dead, possibly murdered. What’s certain is that he was being surveilled by the spies. Terrifyingly, he also discovers they broke into his flat and stole his laptop while his son was at home, in his bedroom.
I moderated a Q&A with Christo and James Jones, the director of the documentary and am kicking myself for not recording it but I’m going to try to persuade them both to join us for a Substack Live.
In the meantime, I really do recommend watching it. Channel 4, for reasons known to them, has re-named it Kill List and it’s currently on 4 On Demand. In the US, it’s available on PBS.
JD Vance’s ‘philosopher’
This week has been an interesting test of how far down the MAGA-tech-Peter Thiel rabbithole my friends are. There are those who’ve heard of Curtis Yarvin. And those who haven’t.
If that name is new to you, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re now going to keep on hearing it. Yarvin is one of the leading figures behind the ‘dark enlightenment’. If that term is also new, I apologise again. It’s the same pseudointellectual ideas that permeate the public utterings of many leading Silicon Valley figures, not just Thiel, but Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. And Yarvin’s great contribution to this political discourse, the one taken up with enthusiasm by his Silicon Valley acolytes, is that democracy doesn’t work and dictatorship does. In his view, we’d be better served with a leader who’s a CEO, or as he sometimes puts it, a ‘“monarch” where the state is some sort of ‘joint stock corporation’.
And who should be that “monarch”? Way back in 2011, he said that Trump was one of two figures who seemed “biologically suited” to be an American monarch.
For years, Yarvin preferred the cloak of anonymity. He styled himself ‘Mencius Moldbug’ and blogged anonymously. These days, the kind of ideas that Yarvin expounds don’t need hiding. They’ve have floated up to the highest levels of power: Thiel’s acolyte, JD Vance, is another reported fan. The New York Times coyly describes Yarvin as having ‘provocative ideas on race’. Whereas he’s much more straightforwardly open about his views as the New Yorker reported earlier this year:
“Neo-reactionaries tend to subscribe to what they call “human biodiversity,” a set of fringe beliefs which holds, among other things, that not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent.
As Yarvin came to see it from his online research, these genetic differences contributed to (and, conveniently, helped explain away) demographic differences in poverty, crime, and educational attainment. “In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.”
(The profile by Ava Kofman is a must-read if you’re interested in learning more about Yarvin.)
What I hadn’t realise is that at the same time that Trump was hanging out at Windsor Castle, Yarvin, would also be in London to talk about his own conception of monarchy. I discovered this because as fate would have it, he walked straight past me last Saturday as I was walking the dog. Griff, the Welsh collie cross, loves everyone and everything but you’ll see that even he kept a bit of a distance here.
It turned out he was en route to visit Karl Marx’s grave. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I’m completely tuned into alt-right wit but you decide:
The next day he turned up at a festival – How the Light Gets In – and I couldn’t resist showing up too. I took the aforementioned Peter Jukes who promptly renamed it – How the Right Gets In – and he asked Yarvin a question about his use of the N-word – which he didn’t deny – and his views on the inferiority of non-white races. He’s written up the encounter here:
Asked whether he was an advocate of ‘pseudo-science’ on racial differences in intelligence, Yarvin disputed that his writings were in any way more unscientific than the ‘blank slate’ theory that all “children were born interchangeable”.
The tech bros’ dream
Key to Yarvin’s vision of a re-constituted state is that it relies on total surveillance:
“All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone… [the realm] can monitor society at an almost arbitrarily detailed level… Residents of a Patchwork realm have no security or privacy against the realm.”
Surveillance is the operating system of Silicon Valley. It’s underpins its economic model. And what is happening now is an arms race between Silicon Valley companies to collect the most data and, using AI, make the most inferences about individuals from that data, regardless of whether they are true or not.
I wrote at length earlier this year of DOGE’s mission inside the US government to amass and centralize the many different federal datasets. And yesterday, the UK government fell into line. Keir Starmer announced the introduction of ‘digital ID cards’.
Nobody wants these. It’s an albatross from the Tony Blair years that was resuscitated by his think tank/lobby shop and underpins Blair’s principal funder, Trump ally Larry Ellison’s vaulting ambition for his company, Oracle, to centralise all UK citizens’ data and become the operating system for the UK government.
I have much much more to say on this. But for now, I leave you with words I never thought I’d utter: I agree with Nigel Farage.
That’s how deranged 2025 feels. Would love you to join me at 5pm BST/12pm EDT to discuss the weird and disturbing world of AI psychological manipulation with Allan Brooks and Kashmir Hill.
Also, if you’re in London, there are still tickets available for a screening and Q&A I’m doing with Asif Kapadia at the Barbican for his techdystopian docudrama, 2073, straight after.
I’m one of three journalists in the film and I’ve done a lot of Q&As with Asif since the film was released this winter and every time but the vision he depicts onscreen of a technofascist surveillance state being built on a ruined planet seems to be just an inch closer than it was before every time we meet. I’m fascinated to hear how far along the continuum he thinks we are now.
Finally, finally, to bring us right back to the start of this newsletter, here’s one of the other journalists in the film, Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, delivering a powerful address to the United Nations general assembly this week on the danger of AI and “information armageddon.”
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.