1984 Today!

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Christina Dalcher is a professor, linguist, and the best-selling author of the novels like VOX, Q (Master Class in the US), Femlandia, and The Sentence.In VOX, a religious conservative movement comes to power in the United States. By technological means, the Pure Movement prevents women from speaking mo

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at the New York Times and the author of an excellent book about facial recognition technology called Your Face Belongs To Us.She very kindly agreed to come on to talk about her book, and how she discovered the existence of Clearview AI, a shady tech company that just lost

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Steve Endacott is the human behind AI Steve, the UK’s first AI parliamentary candidate, and the founder of SmarterUK, a new political party.AI Steve is competing to become the MP for Brighton Pavilion in the upcoming general election. Unlike a ‘real’ MP, AI Steve is available 24/7, generates polic

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for our weekly dystopian round-up!Bjørn Karmann is a Danish inventor based in Amsterdam who created Paragraphica, a lens-less camera powered by AI that uses data instead of light to create images. It generates a photograph of what it ‘thinks’ you are looking at, using variables like the weather, the time of day, and of course, your

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Crisis! Anxiety! Liberty!Dr Ashley Frawley joins me for a conversation about what she calls “the tendency to communicate social problems as emotional problems,” and how that degrades the power and autonomy of the individual while ignoring complex structural social issues.Ashley is a sociologist at t

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com to get our weekly dystopian newsletter!Communists! Assassination! Romance!Carol Cohn is an exceptional man with an incredible story. Born in Romania during World War Two, he survived the deportation of the country’s Jews, returned and grew up under the Communists, escaped to the West, and became a journalist married to the girl of his

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more!Live facial recognition! “Legal but harmful” speech! Spycoin!In this episode, I’m joined by Mark Johnson, the Advocacy Manager for Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties campaign group dedicated to reclaiming privacy, defending freedoms, and rolling back the surveillance state. You can find them

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and special updates!De-ageing in dogs! Genetic scanning in dating apps! The Singularity!All this and much more came up in this fascinating conversation with Professor George Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Professor Church is a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologi

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for dystopian news, transcripts, and more!In this episode, I sit down in the studio with Andy Agathangelou, the founder of the Transparency Task Force, “a certified social enterprise for people who have been shortchanged by the financial sector.” Andy is also the Chair of the Secretariat Committee to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Perso

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and transcripts.I’m joined in this episode by Emily Finley, author of The Ideology of Democratism. Emily is a senior fellow from the Albertus Magnus Institute and an instructor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.In her book, Emily argues that political leaders in many democratic countries differ from