Growing up in a leftist household, I looked at this change in diet as a way in which companies and neoliberal governments were erasing parts of our cultural identity and social cohesion, so I became obsessed with reading the brand names, places of origin, and lists of ingredients of food in the supermarket.

One thing I started noticing in my teens, and has worsened over time, is the limited variety of options. Don’t get me wrong, long supermarket corridors are colorful and filled with over 50 kinds each of bread, cereals, canned soups, chocolate, peanut butter, cookies, ice cream, potato chips, dog food, cheese analogs, frozen meals, and infant formula, but producers are usually no more than three, and ingredients often include things I wouldn’t be able to place in nature. 

From those ingredients that sound natural, there’s one that troubles me and is present in all the food items mentioned above: palm oil, a main product from the plant called Elais guineensis Jacq.

Beyond the Package

Oil palm derived ingredients are found in food under many names: vegetable oil, vegetable fat, palmate, palmitate, palm stearine, or stearate acid. In cleaning products, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate, glyceryl, cetyl palmitate, stearic acid, or palmitoyl are often derived from it too.

Healthwise, oil palm derived products aren’t bad, and are used to create nice textures in many items. Even more, palm oil is usually recognized as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. 

So you might wonder, why does this ingredient make you so angry? Are you simply an angry woman? Well, sure, and the world really needs more of us, but I’d also say we have to take all magical ingredients with a pinch of doubt.

That’s why I decided to dig deeper. Beyond my gut feeling or political instinct, I wanted to understand who actually stands to gain from this ingredient taking over our supermarket shelves, and at what cost. Was it improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers? Was it driving local development, or merely feeding a system of industrial agriculture that thrives on cheap land, cheap labor, and even cheaper ecosystems? Those questions led me to look beyond the pretty packaging and start piecing together a bigger, messier picture that connected oil palms to deforestation and land grabbing.

Around 2018, in the spirit of making something powerful out of my anger towards the industrialization of agriculture and food production, and understanding the full chain of actors benefiting from this, I joined a group of people investigating oil palm in Mexico, on the ground and from space, using satellite imagery.

Hidden Costs

Around the world, oil palm’s high productivity and versatility have led to its rapid and consistent increase in demand and production. Plantations are productive for several decades, so they can be understood as long periods of steady, year-long income by farmers. However, this crop is also associated with high rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and significant social, environmental and health impacts to smallholder farmers due to the intensive use of agrochemicals and polluting oil extraction processes. 

In addition, if you’re growing oil palm and at some point decide not to do it anymore, removing the plants is quite expensive – a 2012 study on Malaysian plantations estimated the cost of removing a hectare of oil palm at RM 34,500 (over USD 10,000 at that time).

Furthermore, when we talk about biofuels we usually forget to say that soil is not a renewable resource and, for this purpose, oil palm would most likely be produced as a monocrop in an industrialized way, a practice that does not regenerate the soil.

Initiatives like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) have been trying to regulate production and reduce these impacts, but many organizations have questioned their efficacy and standards.

In Mexico, the first attempts to establish oil palm plantations began in the 1950s, but production and demand only took off in the late 1990s, when the government classified it as a strategic crop–a crop that’s highly competitive in the market and/or important for food security–and a series of policies were designed to promote its cultivation and commerce at the federal or state levels. 

In 2017, the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER) published the National Agricultural Plan for the Period of 2017 to 2030, where they included the recommended market strategies to increase production and satisfy domestic needs, and maps indicating which regions were agro-ecologically suitable for each of the 38 strategic crops. 

In the case of oil palm, the suitability map indicated that 14.2 million hectares of the national territory were suitable for oil palm cultivation, an area almost the size of Nepal.

Unequal Maps

The SADER’s suitability maps were based on maps from other institutions, like the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SAGARPA), the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP), and the Institute for Productive Reconversion and Tropical Agriculture (IRPAT). Such maps are typically publicly available at very low resolutions and use different mixes of data climatic and topographic data (obtained from meteorological stations), edaphic characteristics (obtained from local studies), and cultivation areas (obtained from satellite data).

Observations of the Earth from satellite data, aka remote sensing data, have been used for the identification and analysis of crops of strategic importance, with the purpose of estimating their yields, preventing risks associated with climate change, and identifying socio-environmental impacts. At the moment, commercial satellites can return imagery with a resolution of around 30 cm per pixel every few hours, and software for satellite imagery management, like EarthExplorer or Google Earth have been accessible since the early 2000s, but high-resolution data is typically very costly and affordable only to large institutions and governments. 

Although subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options are more affordable, publicly available data–more likely to be accessible to smallholder farmers–is usually provided at lower resolution, typically 5-500 m per pixel, updated from daily to every few weeks. Also, feature identification and classification can be done manually by humans or with data-driven algorithms to cover larger areas, but results should always be verified against on-the-ground data to avoid confusion between crops and ecosystems. 

For example, distinguishing primary forest from oil palm data plantations is not a simple task. Manual methodologies are typically highly accurate, but unsustainable for large studies, which might explain why SADER gathered data from multiple institutions using different methodologies.

In any case, when agricultural policies rely heavily on remote sensing data, many issues on the ground are obscured, like the full breadth of environmental impacts of a crop’s cultivation, or the desired futures of those working the land. Even more, the lack of, or unequal access to, high-resolution data, raises questions about the adequacy and power imbalances promoted by those policies.

Follow the Data

In 2019, trying to understand the impacts of SADER’s recommendation of turning such a large amount of land into oil palm cropland, we decided to dig deeper into this topic. Afterall, we were city people and maybe farmers were very happy with their job prospects, or using palm oil derived products was the least impactful thing on the environment.

We contacted people involved in oil palm production, like the women farmer organizations “Agua y Vida, Mujeres, Derechos y Ambiente” and “Casa de la Mujer Ixim Antsetic”, and people in academia and the government, and we started looking at all publicly available information about oil palm production in Mexico. Despite abundant governmental data and scientific literature, it was hard to say who was benefiting the most out of oil palm production in the country. 

We didn’t find any publicly available interactive map of oil palm plantations at the national level, which we thought crucial for smallholder farmers and other non-governmental policy-makers to contribute to the design of agricultural policies. 

So we decided to create it.

It took us two years of gathering and analyzing publicly available data on oil palm’s socio-environmental impacts, production and cropland from 2014 to 2019. We followed a semi-automatic remote sensing analysis methodology running Python scripts over publicly available Google Earth satellite images to create our publicly available high-resolution oil palm plantations map, and a report explaining our findings. 

Considering the potential of these mappings, we decided to call ourselves the Observatorio Agroindustrial en México, or OBSAM with the aim of expanding this study to all the strategic crops in the country. 

Our map showed the distribution and expansion of oil palm at the national level. The data had the potential for identifying spatial relationships with transportation and other infrastructure projects, other agricultural programs, or the coverage of governmental sustainable rural development programs.

Expansion and Deforestation

We identified 62,057 hectares (ha) of oil palm plantations, usually close to transportation infrastructure and areas of scrubland, rainfed agriculture, pastureland and secondary vegetation. 

From these, 4,022ha were inside natural protected areas, mainly in the Palenque National Park, and the Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve (EBR) both in the Southern state of Chiapas–researchers, civil society actors, farmers, and media, had long reported this and asked for controlling the crop’s expansion in these areas, but no official response had been given to these concerns. 

In addition, oil palm plantations were found in five terrestrial and seven hydrological regions of importance for biodiversity conservation, as defined by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO). Finally, comparisons against official data for forest cover from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for 2017 and 2018, identified a link between oil palm and deforestation in more than 5,400 ha of forests and jungle.

Our literature review also showed that there were indeed multiple opinions about oil palm’s benefits and impacts around the world, depending usually on the level of access to technology and subsidies, labor force, land ownership, social organizing, and decision-making power of those who grow it. 

In Mexico, technological requirements for its cultivation have led to the replacement of itinerant traditional agricultural methods, like roza-tumba-quema –an itinerary agricultural technique practiced in tropical regions for around 10,000 years where land is cleared (roza-tumba), burnt (quema) and then let to rest for a prolonged period of time, recently modernised to roza-tumba-pica (clear-burn-add organic matter) to prevent wildfires. 

In addition, hard labor requirements have pushed women to do less specialized and lower income jobs, and the lack of a local market has led to economic dependency on gathering and extraction centers, which are not always easily accessible and typically private. 

Even more, around half of oil palm production in the country was carried out by smallholder farmers in communal land, or ejidos, of less than 50 ha, which often exposed them to other impacts observed around the world: land concentration, foreignization and grabbing.

In 2018, the estimated revenue per hectare of oil palm was around MXN 38 (less than USD 2), but production was relatively profitable in places like southern Chiapas, where smallholder farmers are typically landowners and have created cooperatives and organizations that help them access governmental financial incentives.

Food Insecurity

So what kind of information, governmental policies and mechanisms would benefit smallholder oil palm producers, improve production, and limit social and environmental impacts?

Turns out that this was not a revolutionary question, and around the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was also trying to understand this. In 2022, FAO found that around 37% of the world’s land was dedicated to agriculture and over 80% of farms around the world were under two hectares (20,000m2) in size. Such smallholder farmers produced around 35% of the entire world’s food, despite occupying only around 12% of all agricultural land. 

The FAO highlighted the need for detailed data–Earth observations included– that helped understand regional differences in agricultural practices and production, so that policy-makers could design agricultural plans that aligned to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). These goals have the stated aim of bringing “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” by promoting sustainable production, improving the productivity and livelihood of smallholder farmers, addressing inequalities, and guaranteeing food security worldwide. 

The FAO’s data means that 35% of food was being grown in around 4.5% of the world’s land by 2022. Although this might sound like our dreams of food security are easy to achieve, we have to be careful with our steps ahead because there’s a limit to how much of the world’s land is suitable for agriculture. Developing some suitable land might carry severe social and environmental impacts, and not all current agricultural land will remain productive in the future due to climate change and impactful land use.

Elusive Answers

As our findings proved the importance of carrying out the independent monitoring of this crop’s expansion, we decided to continue gathering and analyzing data to verify some impacts reported by multiple independent organizations. This way, in 2023, OBSAM published a second mapping with data from 2016 to 2022 and created a publicly available visualizing tool.

Our improved methodology detected 7,559 ha inside natural protected areas, mainly in the EBR and the Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve in Veracruz, something that had already been reported by peasant organizations but not evidenced in existing mappings. 

This time, to address the lack of verification in situ, the mapping was compared against publicly available data for the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, prepared by the General Coordination of Corridors and Biological Resources (CGCRB) and oil palm producers in the municipalities of Benemérito de las Américas and Marqués de Comillas, showing a large number of errors in the CGCRB archive. Comparisons against official data on forest cover now showed oil palm driven deforestation in 7,317 ha.

OBSAM is now expecting to release a third mapping with data until 2023, to enable the comparison between the three different mappings and identify new, growing and abandoned plantations, which would allow us to understand the paths of deforestation and land use changes. 

We’ve also gathered infrastructure maps and contacted people investigating the corporate side of oil palm commercialization, so we hope to get closer to understanding its relationship with important infrastructure projects and which policies are benefiting which actors the most.

However, many questions remained unsolved and to analyze all strategic crops and offer alternatives to oil palm production we would need to develop closer ties with people in communities located in the vicinity of oil palm plantations, to understand agricultural practices and challenges, develop participatory mapping tools for verification of satellite analysis and identify other datasets to capture what is meaningful and desirable by people on the ground. 

It is still unclear which existing agricultural practices and policies are benefiting smallholder farmers the most, but supermarkets continue to have more and more products containing palm oil derived products, so somebody must be making big profits and we would prefer it if it was them.

*If you want to support our work, or if you’re doing something similar and you want to share your struggles with someone in the same boat, full access to OBSAM mappings is granted under request. We are a group of people addressing data-access inequalities, and supporting smallholder farmers, academic research, and non-commercial enterprises. You can think of this as positive action in land observations and policy-making.

The post Deforestation, Data Gaps, and Small Farmers: Mapping the True Costs of Mexico’s Palm Oil appeared first on Untold.

Then he told the room what SpaceX is actually for: “We want to make Star Trek real. We want to make Starfleet Academy real.” 

This was not an aside. It was a mission statement, delivered to the people who sign US defense checks. He went on to describe a future of “big spaceships” exploring alien civilizations. “That is the goal!” he said. “And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!”

The speech was revealing – not for what it promised, but for what it concealed. It was the clearest example yet of a pattern that has been building for decades: Silicon Valley’s tech elite borrowing the ideas, images, and authority of science fiction while throwing out everything that made those stories politically meaningful. 

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, in their recent book Muskism, argue that the right question is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?” – treating him not as an individual but as the representative of a whole worldview, just as we speak of “Fordism”. That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary, and inevitable. This is not to say that Science Fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense.

No example makes this clearer than Musk’s own words. Because Star Trek, the franchise he claims to be bringing to life, stands for almost everything he and SpaceX are not.

In Gene Roddenberry’s vision, the future is not built by billionaires or defense contractors. The United Federation of Planets has abolished money. Humanity has left capitalism, nationalism, and militarism behind. The Enterprise does not explore space for profit or military advantage; it explores for knowledge, diplomacy, and shared understanding. Starfleet is not an army; it is a peacekeeping and science organization. This is not background detail. It is the whole point of Star Trek.

Strategic Looting

What Musk is doing – what Silicon Valley has perfected – is what I call “strategic looting.” They take the look and feel of science fiction while throwing out its politics. They want the Enterprise, but with defense contracts. They want the warp drive, but not the equal society that made it possible. They want the adventure, but not the social change that gave it meaning.

Musk is not alone in this. It is how the whole tech industry operates. These companies have learned that science fiction’s hopeful imagery can be put to work while its warnings are quietly ignored.

Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after the all-seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – objects used by those hungry for power. Tolkien wrote them as instruments of corruption; Thiel turned them into a brand for a company whose main early investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and whose business is selling mass surveillance to governments and militaries. The goal, as Slobodian and Tarnoff show, was never to escape the state but to vassalize it: to make the government’s exercise of power dependent on purchasing services from a private monopoly. The look is borrowed. The warning is thrown away. The contract is signed.

A Manifesto for Silicon Valley

The depth of this project has now been made explicit. In April 2026, Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on X – a condensed version of CEO Alex Karp and head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, which racked up 35 million views in days. 

The document calls for reinstating the military draft, declares that Silicon Valley owes a “moral debt” to the United States, argues that the “engineering elite” must build AI weapons rather than “obsession-driven apps,” and dismisses non-Western cultures as “middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” 

As I argue at length in a recent article in Science as Culture, the book is not really philosophy. It is a sales pitch. Establish that Silicon Valley owes a debt to the American state. Call out Google, Amazon, and Meta as companies that wasted that debt building social media. Present Palantir as the one company that actually paid up. The conclusion follows: Palantir is not just a tech firm – it is the rightful heir to state power. 

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat put it plainly: 

“Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration and police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space; they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.” 

The Tolkien name provides the mythology. The manifesto provides the politics. The defense contracts provide the money.

In each case, the pattern is the same: take the technology, the imagery, the sense that the future is inevitable. Throw out the warnings, the criticism, the politics that gave those stories their meaning. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) invented the word “cyberspace” and imagined it as a corporate battleground where human beings are just another resource to be mined – that vision becomes a product demo. Foundation’s galactic civilization becomes a justification for private space colonies. And now, Star Trek’s dream of humanity working together becomes a pitch to generals.

Materialized Science Fiction

The setting of Musk’s speech matters. He was not at a fan convention or a tech conference. He was speaking to the people who run the US military and decide where its money goes. When he said Space Force should make people think of Star Trek, he was not talking about exploration. He was pitching a military vision wrapped in the language of a show millions of people love.

This is “materialized science fiction”: the process by which science fiction stories are turned into real projects, with their original meaning stripped out and replaced with something that serves those already in power. These tech billionaires do not misread their source material by accident. They understand it well enough to know exactly which parts to keep and which to discard. The distortion is deliberate.

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism offers the most rigorous account yet of what this political project looks like in practice. By 2025, they show, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States – a position that made the Pentagon and NASA “deeply reliant on Musk,” making SpaceX the de facto gatekeeper for government access to low Earth orbit. They call the endpoint of this logic “sovereignty-as-a-service”: “the logic of the modern internet platform, scaled up to the level of the nation state”. 

The wager of Muskism, they write, is that “sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial — defined by access to bandwidth, compute, launch cadence, and orbital real estate as much as by borders and bureaucracies”. What is sold as independence through technology is, in practice, entry into Musk’s walled garden – to which he holds the master key. 

Their analysis is indispensable. But my argument here goes one step further. For Slobodian and Tarnoff, science fiction functions primarily as what they call “financial fabulism” – “science fiction in the mouth of the right entrepreneur could conjure capital from thin air”. That is true as far as it goes. The argument here is that Science Fiction does not only conjure capital at the pitch stage; it continues to accompany and amplify the accumulation strategies as they unfold – part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions remain thinkable, certain power grabs feel like common sense, and certain futures get built while others get closed off. 

Muskism names the symptom. Materialized science fiction explains one of the mechanisms by which it reproduces itself. 

A Tool for Grabbing Power

In a recent essay, Slobodian and Tarnoff push the argument further: where Fordism offered mass consumption and post-Fordism offered financialized aspiration, Muskism offers something qualitatively different. Not a social contract but what they call a “fan contract” – loyalty rewarded with amplified reach and a share of the attention economy, combined with the threat of expulsion for those marked as outside the walls. If Fordism and post-Fordism were, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism, they argue, is oriented toward social war.

What connects Thiel’s surveillance business, Zuckerberg’s digital world, Andreessen’s push against regulation, and Musk’s military space programme is not just a love of science fiction. It is a shared political goal: replacing democratic control with tech industry control, and using borrowed science fiction prestige to make that look acceptable. In their hands, science fiction stops being a literature of hope and becomes a tool for grabbing power.

Star Trek’s Federation was not built by tech billionaires or defense contractors. It came from humanity choosing, together, to cooperate rather than compete, to share rather than exploit. That choice came after humanity nearly destroyed itself. The Enterprise does not fly to escape Earth’s problems. It flies because those problems have already been solved.

Musk’s version turns this inside out. His spaceships are not a reward for fixing things here. They are a way to avoid fixing them. Why tackle climate change when you can go to Mars? Why fight inequality when you can promise abundance in space? Why repair democracy when you can build a private kingdom on another planet? 

A Guest List for the Few

As Slobodian and Tarnoff observe, Mars functions in Muskism as a “failover mechanism” for the civilizational collapse Musk learned to expect from science fiction – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens with the destruction of Earth; Asimov’s Foundation begins with the collapse of a galactic empire. 

As the Argentine novelist Michel Nieva argues, the appeal of Mars to Musk is not solving the problems of capitalism but relocating its logic to a new address. And as The Atlantic has reported, the question of who boards the Starship is not rhetorical – it runs directly through Musk’s pronatalist politics, his amplification of eugenicist accounts, and his dismantling of USAID while children died in South Sudan. 

Slobodian and Tarnoff go further: Musk is an indicator species for a broader Silicon Valley vision of a post-human future in which humans merge with machines, are gradually supplanted by AI, and the colonization of space is carried out not by people but by “cyborgified” organisms that are only distantly human. The guest list for the Starship, it turns out, may not include humanity at all. 

There is an additional irony here. The historian Jill Lepore has shown that Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC in 1977 with an explicit target in mind: the mega-rich and their privately owned rockets, settling colonies on other planets because no world was ever quite good enough. The typewriter Adams used had a sticker on it. It read: “END APARTHEID.” Musk grew up in Pretoria listening to the same BBC broadcast, claims the book as a formative influence, and is now building exactly what Adams was satirising. 

The science fiction story gives cover for walking away from the present. It also, it turns out, comes with a guest list.

From Utopia to Pitch Deck

When the world’s richest man stands before military leaders and says he wants to make Star Trek real, he is not being a fan. He is doing politics – winning contracts, shaping policy, building support for a vision that has very little to do with Roddenberry and everything to do with power. The audience was not the public. It was the people who control the defense budget.

Musk used Star Trek’s imagery because it carries weight: it makes privatized space exploration sound like a shared human adventure rather than a billionaire’s project. It makes working with the military sound like boldly going where no one has gone before. The same logic governed DOGE. To explain his approach to dismantling the federal bureaucracy, Musk cited Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: in the film, Captain Kirk wins an unwinnable training simulation by reprogramming it. “The only way to achieve success,” Musk said, “is to reprogram the matrix such that success is one of the possible outcomes. That’s what we’re doing”. The same logic runs across the whole industry.

The irony is that Star Trek saw this coming. The Ferengi – a species that puts profit above everything – were written as a warning, not a model. The Borg – a collective that strips away individual freedom – were the opposite of everything the Federation stands for. Corporate-run worlds were shown as places to be feared.

None of this means pretending Star Trek had no flaws. Critics, most notably the media scholar Daniel Bernardi, have rightly pointed out that the Federation’s vision of universal values often looked like American values in disguise – that its “we come in peace” approach echoed the language of the very colonialism it claimed to have left behind, and that alien cultures were usually judged against a human, Western standard. 

That criticism is fair. But even a flawed utopia contains more political imagination than a defense contractor’s pitch deck. The question is not whether Star Trek was perfect. It is what gets lost – and what gets used as a weapon – when even its imperfect values are stripped away.

This is what materialized science fiction looks like from the inside: not the utopia the stories promised, but the infrastructure of a political project that has no use for utopia. And yet here we are: a tech elite pitching Star Trek to defense contractors while running companies that harvest data like a natural resource, treat workers as replaceable, and fight every attempt at oversight. They have cut these stories open, taken the parts that suit them, and thrown away everything else.

Until the politics catch up with the aesthetics, what we are getting is not science fiction made real. It is a small group of very powerful people using science fiction’s authority to close off the futures it once imagined – billionaires in borrowed costumes, acting out the adventure while gutting the story that made it worth telling.

The post Billionaires in Borrowed Costumes: How Silicon Valley Loots Science Fiction to Justify Its Power Grab appeared first on Untold.

OK.

‘No creativity, please, no wordart, or graphics, don’t stand out, unreadable.’ 

OK.

‘Don’t clutter your CV with photos, tables, columns, headers, or footers, unreadable.’ 

OK.

How many of these little nuggets have you read or heard about when the topic of résumés comes up? I heard them all and many, many more – from ‘experts’ and fellow job seekers alike. Everyone wants that edge, but not too edgy. Clarity, but using a specific format. Showcasing you, but … there’s always a but.

While researching this topic, I had my résumé open the whole time to see if it stood the test. It never did. I’d rephrase and rewrite sections according to what I read. Only to revert back or make new changes. Each article gives hope of the ‘perfect formula’ to pass the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and get the attention of the human on the other side.

But here’s where it gets interesting – there’s no unified ATS that all companies use. No. Each company uses a different system, with its own unique algorithms. And you, dear applicant,  need to figure out which ATS the company uses so you can tailor your résumé to pass it.

How about that for a plot twist.

ATS in Action

The way ATS works is simple: it reads résumés by electronically analyzing (parsing) the relevant information, like name, education, and experience, then sorts them for the recruiter in a searchable format. 

One of its common features is keyword search – the system looks for specific words already mentioned in the job description, e.g. a specific number of years’ experience, certain skills, or a location. It also tracks candidates through the whole process, from application to interview results, and saves their information even if they were not selected, for future opportunities.

Beyond screening, it also handles job postings, interview scheduling, compliance reporting, and candidate notifications – managing the entire hiring workflow from start to finish. The system is built to handle large numbers of résumés, which is why it’s widely used to streamline the hiring process and free up time and resources.

A Timeline

The hiring process was not as sophisticated as it is now. Companies sent job postings to newspapers, you read the ad and sent your résumé by post or in person, recruiters waded through the lot and chose the most suitable candidates and invited them – by mail or by phone – for an interview. 

Too slow. Something had to be done to speed things up. Enter ATS. 

In the 1970s, it was just basic data entry with limited reporting capabilities. The 1980s saw added features like résumé parsing for faster sorting and analysis. The drawback was that it was expensive and difficult to use, which made it only implemented by large enterprises.

With the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, job postings and applications moved online. The system saw more advanced algorithms like candidate evaluation and ranking.

From the 2010s onwards, the Cloud enabled smaller companies to use ATS due to scalable and flexible subscription payments. The system’s analytics and reporting capabilities became more advanced, tracking criteria like cost per hire and time to fill. As mobile technology evolved, more and more candidates began using their mobile devices and social media accounts to apply.

When it comes to integrating AI, ATS is no exception – many providers have already built it into their products. There are even predictions that the future might even bring virtual reality and augmented reality technologies that could change the interview process completely.

ATS as a Business

The business of ATS software is booming. 

A 2025 report shows that the global ATS market was worth $2.5 billion in 2024 – a 12.3% jump from 2023. The top ten vendors alone controlled over 50% of that market, led by iCIMS at 10%, followed by Oracle, Workday, and Greenhouse Software. Annual growth among the top vendors was sharp: in one year, Workday grew 15.3% and Greenhouse 13.2%.

Reading the profiles of these leading vendors, one thing is very clear – AI is the star of their products. iCIMS has expanded its AI footprint with conversational tools and assessment features, even piloting autonomous AI Agents to handle sourcing and interview tasks. 

Oracle integrates generative AI into its Recruiting Cloud, using embedded co-pilots for job description optimization and candidate ranking. Workday is building a multi-agent ecosystem through its Illuminate system. Greenhouse is evolving into an agent-oriented platform, enabling third-party conversational AI to autonomously screen and schedule interviews.

Together, these plans paint a picture of ATS companies positioning AI as the backbone of the entire hiring process – shifting routine tasks to automation, with more on the way.

A 2026 report by 360 Research Reports puts the market at nearly $5 billion and is projected to reach $13 billion by 2035. As of 2025, 94% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS, and 78% of large enterprises have one built into their hiring process. Small and medium businesses are not far behind – 62% have adopted cloud-based platforms. AI-powered screening tools grew 46% year-over-year, and demand for mobile-friendly and analytics-driven systems has grown 59% since 2022. In the new analysis, Workday now holds 14% of global market share, while Oracle holds 12%.

Two things stood out in the 360 report key findings: a ‘56% rise in AI-driven candidate scoring and predictive analytics tools’, and ‘47% of new product launches focusing on AI, machine learning, and mobile optimization.’

What this means is that the AI-powered ATS train didn’t just leave the station, it’s almost at its destination. The demand for it is growing faster than you can say ‘bias.’ Companies implementing it will not look back now, even with four out of ten – according to the same report – saying they struggle with integrating and migrating data from older HR systems. 

AI in hiring is here to stay.

Built on Broken Data

The study by Douglas Guilbeault and colleagues reveals how generative AI like ChatGPT perpetuates gender and age bias in hiring. When prompted to create over 34,500 résumés for 54 jobs using typical male or female names, ChatGPT portrayed women as younger and with less work experience than men.

When asked to evaluate the same résumés, the AI ranked older men highest in quality, putting older women and younger applicants at a disadvantage – the same groups that already face discrimination in the real world. This happens because the model draws from internet data filled with stereotypes (e.g., men are better at ‘fixing things’ and therefore suited for roles like construction) – amplifying societal biases rather than reflecting objective reality.

Guilbeault observes that AI companies are aware of the problem. But their fix is to add filters to block the most obviously biased outputs. He argues that this barely scratches the surface – it misses subtler biases like the age and gender gaps the study found. Real progress means tackling bias at the core of how these models are built, not patching after the fact. Until then, his advice is simple: be cautious. These tools can make you believe the issue of bias is resolved when it’s really not.

Another study tested several LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta by having them score over 360,000 randomized résumés with different gender and racial identities. Compared with equally qualified White men, most models gave higher scores to female candidates (both Black and White) but lower scores to Black male candidates. These differences translate into real hiring impacts: women would have a higher chance of being selected, while Black men faced reduced odds.

Together, the two studies show that AI bias in hiring cannot be solved with patchwork fixes. It shows up in how résumés are generated, how they’re scored, and whose careers pay the price. With these inherent biases baked into the data, why do we expect AI-powered ATS to be fair in résumé screening?

Gaming the System

Writing a résumé should be an easy task – you put in the basic information an employer needs to consider you for a job, right? Wrong. It’s more than that, much more. I thought I knew a thing or two – I’ve had one for years. But after a career break, getting back into the job market, writing my résumé was anything but easy.

There is so much advice out there on how to write one, so I won’t repeat it here. What I want to focus on is something most of that advice misses – it’s not the usual suspects. Many websites advertise ATS-friendly templates complete with checker and scorer services, and if it doesn’t meet the minimum score, you need to rewrite it. Fine, I can live with that. What I’m not fine with is having to look for which ATS the company is using to tailor my résumé according to its algorithms.

For a simple experiment, I tried a LinkedIn job search, clicked on the ‘Apply’ button – not ‘Easy Apply’ – and it took me to the original website for the job. The platform the job was sourced from uses iCIMS. It was easy to see, I found it at the bottom of the page: ‘Powered by iCIMS.’ It’s also in the URL: ‘nameofplatform.icims.com/jobs/’

‘What do I do with that info?’
Easy, you google ‘how to optimize résumés for iCIMS’, which will give you many articles that try to explain how that specific system works. For example, it prefers simple fonts – Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman – and verbatim keywords from the job posting. This doesn’t just work for iCIMS, but for Workday, Oracle, and others. And if you can’t find the ATS yourself, Jobscan – for a fee – can do that with simple steps and give you optimization tips as well.

Is that something you needed to know? Absolutely, yes.
Will it make job searching easier for you? A resounding no.

Being a minimalist, I thought since my résumé has the basics, what more would an employer need? But I was mistaken. It’s the ATS I need to get past to reach the actual human. I hope you think of this new information as intel, not extra work.

But sometimes job candidates take it too far. 

I recently read about how Amazon is banning job seekers from using AI tools during interviews. Given the volume of candidates it receives, the company issued a set of guidelines to its internal recruiters to create ‘a fair and transparent recruitment process.’ Unless explicitly permitted, applicants may be disqualified if they used AI tools during the interview.

The problem became so widespread that Amazon shared tips on common signs the applicant is using an AI tool. Sometimes candidates sound as if they are reading instead of speaking naturally, even correcting themselves when they misread a word. Their eyes may follow text or drift away rather than focusing on the conversation. They might give confident answers that don’t directly address the question, or appear distracted and confused when reacting to AI‑generated outputs that don’t make sense.

And honestly? That’s only fair. You already have a foot in the door – showing your true self and answering naturally is the right way to go.

That said, and as a fellow traveler down the same road, I completely understand. Each step – learning about the job, tailoring your résumé, waiting for a response, and finally getting the ‘we invite you for an interview’ email – all that takes its toll, and you want the edge, any edge to ace that interview.

But if you’re considering using AI at that specific stage, think about it. What if it’s just a chat to tell you about the company and field your questions? What if it’s a work test? Who’ll be doing the actual work if not you? 

What if the company uses a platform like HireVue? Instead of a standard interview, candidates complete short game-based tasks designed to measure things like pattern recognition, working memory, and problem-solving. You could be tasked with performing actual job scenarios to test whether you can do the work, not just talk about it. What then?

The Human Cost

When hiring systems shut out qualified people, the economic consequences go far beyond the individual. Historically marginalized communities, including women and people with ethnic backgrounds, end up missing out on jobs – meaning fewer chances to grow in a career, build stability, or move toward long‑term security. 

Over time, this kind of exclusion widens existing wealth gaps and keeps certain groups stuck in cycles of underemployment and limited opportunity. And because well‑paid jobs often come with benefits like health insurance and retirement plans, being pushed out of those deepens inequalities even further.

Disclaimer: The following might be sensitive for some. If you find that it resonates with you to the point of disrupting your daily life, please, seek professional help.

Taking the consequences a step inward to what it does to the person on the receiving end – a psychological phenomenon called ‘job rejection fatigue.’ It’s the ‘emotional and mental exhaustion that builds up from receiving repeated job rejections over time.’ This doesn’t happen from one email – it’s the compound effect of several disappointments. It affects not just your confidence but also your health and social relations. 

But how does it compare to the stress that naturally comes from job searching? The simple answer: they’re two different beasts. When you’re looking for a job, you’re evaluating everything – from the role itself, to how many applicants, to your fit, to the company, etc. The uncertainty of the process causes stress. Job rejection fatigue is very specific to those rejection emails. Every single one piles it on till you reach a point when you fear opening the email to read the verdict.

The common advice you hear in this situation is ‘don’t take it personally.’ It doesn’t work and here’s why. The phenomenon is deeply connected to evolution: when the early human was rejected from the tribe/group/clan, it meant potential death. Those who took it ‘seriously’ survived, and you’re their descendant. So, it’s only an instinctive response – feeling the weight of it the way you do.

Here are the common signs to watch out for:

Emotional Symptoms: decreased motivation to apply, anxiety before opening emails, doubting your qualifications or career choices.

Behavioural Changes: reduced application quality, delaying search tasks, avoiding networking events, or withdrawing from social gatherings.

Physical Symptoms: changes in sleep patterns or in appetite, increased headaches, muscle tension, or fatigue even after getting rest.

If ignored, it might affect your life in the long run:

Relationship Strain: feeling irritable, withdrawn, volatile, or negative about your prospects can affect the people in your circle.

Career Stagnation: ‘settling’ for a role that doesn’t align with your qualifications or goals, and accepting terms without negotiating for salary or benefits.

Long-Term Confidence Issues: continued anxiety even after landing a job, imposter syndrome – doubting your abilities even when you’ve clearly earned your place – not pursuing better opportunities, nor building connections that might lead to better prospects.

If caught early, job rejection fatigue is manageable, here’s how:

Start with your mindset: think of every ‘no’ not as a judgment on who you are, but as a sign that it was the wrong fit. 

Change your tactics: instead of exhausting yourself with many applications, focus on a few thoughtful ones. This way you stay connected to your intentions and goals. 

Practice mindfulness: have small rituals to process disappointment – take a walk or do breathing exercises, just set aside some time for your body to recover. 

Take stock of how far you’ve come: be it skills, clarity, or resilience – you haven’t been standing still. It’s just a dry spell not a failure.

You need to always remind yourself that there’s more to you than a job seeker – you have your routines, your people, your hobbies, the parts of your life that shine despite someone else’s decision. Through all of it, give yourself grace; so much of hiring is outside your control, and the effort you’re making is already evidence of what you’re made of.

Fighting Back

One of the most famous cases is Derek Mobley v. Workday, Inc. 

In 2023, Mobley sued Workday alleging its AI tools discriminated against him based on race, age, and disability. The case was first dismissed because Workday was classified as an employment agency, but was later accepted in 2024 after a federal judge ruled that the company had a role in the decision‑making process by using workforce data from its customers’ companies to train its AI without accounting for the bias already present in that data.

In May 2025, a California district judge certified the case as a collective action suit – meaning anyone affected by the platform’s AI decisions could join. By July 2025, the case expanded to include individuals affected by HiredScore, an AI tool used by Workday customers to score, sort, rank, and screen applicants. The court also ordered the company to produce a list of their customers.

A more recent case was filed in California by job applicants Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik against Eightfold – an AI-hiring platform – in January 2026. The platform works by assessing applicants and predicting whether they’d be a ‘good fit’ for a job based on résumé and job listing data.

According to the lawsuit, Eightfold builds profiles on job seekers that go beyond listing their qualifications. They assign personality labels, such as ‘team player’, rank the quality of their education, and predict where their career is headed. It’s accused of doing so by collecting this data without the applicants’ knowledge, consent, or the chance to correct any mistakes.

Kistler and Bhaumik use an already existing law – the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). They argue that Eightfold’s profiles function just like credit reports: sensitive data, collected and used to make decisions about people’s futures. FCRA makes sure that sensitive information collected by credit bureaus and similar agencies is only shared with people who have a legitimate reason to see it. It also requires companies to investigate disputes and to tell consumers if a credit, insurance, or job decision goes against them because of what’s in their report.

At the time of writing, a ruling hasn’t been issued for either case.

For many, lawsuits are a last resort – who wants the stress, the hassle, and the cost of a long litigation process? But sometimes it’s the only way to get any justice at all. 

If successful, those involved could get some closure. More importantly, job hiring platforms would be pushed to put their house in order – auditing their tools and cleaning up biased training data before it hurts someone’s future. 

‘…, There’s a Way’

In 2021, Dr. Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, developed a bias test – the Conditional Demographic Disparity (CDD). It’s designed to reveal when one group is rejected more often than it is accepted.

Here’s what it would look like in hiring: we have equal numbers of men and women applying for the same job. Now think of their applications falling into two piles – the rejected pile and the hired pile. If women keep landing in the rejected pile more than the hired pile, while the opposite happens to men, something is clearly wrong. That imbalance is what the test flags as demographic disparity. The group losing out is marked as ‘disfavored,’ while the group benefiting is marked as ‘favored.’ The data simply speaks for itself.

A strong example of how effective this test can be comes from a 2024 audit in the Netherlands. Investigators found that the Education Executive Agency (DUO) was unfairly flagging students with non‑European migration backgrounds for extra checks, leading to indirect discrimination. The issue was serious enough that it was sent to the Dutch Parliament, and the minister for Education, Culture and Science issued a formal apology once the findings were published.

Wachter’s CDD has already proven it works. The real question is why it hasn’t been widely adopted – it’s in companies’ best interest to fill positions with suitable candidates the first time around, without waiting for a lawsuit to force the issue.

Another solution comes from a study where participants were given AI-generated résumés with White, Asian, Black, or Latino-sounding names or other indicators of race, and asked to recommend who should be invited for an interview.

The results show that when people made hiring choices alongside AI recommendations, they often mirrored the system’s biases. With fair suggestions, participants chose fairly – but when the AI displayed moderate bias, people followed it almost completely. Even under severe bias, they still followed the AI’s lead about 90% of the time.

The researchers concluded that human decision-makers tend to trust AI guidance unless the bias is very obvious, and propose a solution: the implicit association test – a psychological tool used to reveal hidden or subconscious biases people may not realize they have. According to the study, biased decisions dropped by 13% after taking it. They recommended adding such training alongside educating recruiters about AI’s limits as a way to reduce hiring bias.

There are also recommendations for companies to better streamline hiring without compromising transparency or efficiency. The frustration of job seekers who spend six to twelve months looking might make some turn to litigation, which could be incentive enough for hiring teams to take staff training for better practices more seriously.

Companies should optimize their tools for fairness and not just efficiency by reevaluating historical data the AIs are trained on – it might be perpetuating bias. The assessment and predictive tools meant to test the applicant’s ‘cultural fit’ with a prospective employer might discriminate against certain demographic groups.

With the EU AI Act and California’s SB 53 (Transparency in Frontier AI Act) treating the use of AI in hiring as a ‘high‑risk’ activity, companies must now exercise stricter oversight throughout the process and meet compliance requirements – otherwise they risk facing severe legal consequences.

The bottom line for companies: audit current screening processes, check whether AI is independently making decisions, and ensure each step is fair and job-related. The goal is a system that catches and mitigates inevitable human mistakes – perfect hiring doesn’t exist.

When I read about these methods and recommendations for the first time, I put myself in the shoes of employers and thought implementing them might be difficult, expensive, or time-consuming. But then again, do companies really thrive on never-ending hiring rounds, turning away the best person for the job, negative reviews, or liability lawsuits? 

If not … 

Your move.

What’s ahead

Some problems just don’t have an easy fix – AI-powered ATS is shaping up to be one of them. The signs are there, the effects are becoming more visible every day, and the consequences are easy to predict. ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’ It’s the will that is missing.

In some cultures including my own, work is not just about having an income – it’s tied to the self-respect and social standing that come from an honest day’s work. Being unemployed and actively looking should not be an extra burden on top of the demand of making ends meet. It cannot turn into a game of charades: I’ll pretend to apply to a human, a human will pretend to hire, and AI is right in the middle making all the decisions.

How about making life easier for everyone by dropping all pretenses. No one is buying it anymore. All those webinars, podcasts, articles, and advice might be helpful if the system were open and its decisions understood. Not knowing why you were rejected is frustrating enough. Getting a rejection email that lists possible reasons and you pick which one applies – that’s not transparency, that’s busywork.

Looking for an edge in the job market should come from your qualifications, potential, talents, skills, and experience, not from fixing a résumé with the right fonts and keywords so an AI can read it – that’s not building a career, that’s choosing wallpaper.

Let it stop with us. 

Make the next person sending out applications feel that they’ll be evaluated for their achievements. That the process is fair and the decisions explainable. That the barriers are not invisible. That the system actually works.

The post Applicant Tracking Systems: The AI That Broke Hiring appeared first on Untold.

This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.

LGBTQ+ individuals in Egypt face daily incidents of online violence, including threats, harassment, defamation, and blackmail. Much of this abuse comes from conservative and religious segments of society and often spills over into offline risks—or begins offline and later escalates online. 

The boundaries between digital and physical harm are increasingly blurred.

A few years ago, Noha Abeer, a pansexual Egyptian in her late twenties, became a target of online violence because of her identity and sexuality. The digital attacks soon translated into offline threats that put her life at risk.

“Yes, I was subjected to harassment, defamation, and online threats,” Noha recalls. “Between December 2021 and January 2022, people used photos and personal information from my account after I filed a harassment case against a driver,” she adds.

Targeting Nonconformist Persons in Egypt

When Noha filed the complaint, she refused to disclose her personal address and information to the prosecutor in front of the accused. The prosecutor insisted. Shortly afterward, anti-LGBTQI+ groups launched a defamation campaign against her, denying her right to exist in both digital and public spaces.

Those who are nonconformist or who simply do not obey the traditional gender divisions and social attitudes always face restrictions on their freedom, as they threaten the conservative social ethics, this applies especially to members of the LGBTQI+ community. For many like Noha, harassment flows seamlessly between online and offline spheres.

“I went to the cybercrime unit,” Noha recalls, “and the treatment was terrible. After a lot of persistence, a report was filed, but nothing happened. I couldn’t follow up because I couldn’t leave the house due to the defamation campaign in my neighborhood.”

She adds, “I was subjected to hundreds of instances of online harassment in the form of text messages and hateful, threatening comments. Sometimes I shared these messages and other times I just ignored them.” 

Noha had rejected advice about staying safe online, such as restricting messaging and commenting to friends only, not posting personal photos, and blocking abusers. She explains that she considers that all these steps are equivalent to asking, “What was the girl doing to be harassed?” or “Why did she go to that place?”, comments that blame the victim and do not solve or address the real problem.

Days before writing this article, Noha was subjected to a new smear campaign because of her opinion on a recent harassment incident that sparked public outrage in Egypt. A young woman was harassed on a public bus, and according to MadaMasr, “She said in a video she published on her social media accounts she faced three incidents of verbal harassment and assault on the road she takes to work, all by the same stranger.” 

Noha’s views were met with a hate campaign against her, with attackers sharing what they considered inappropriate photos of her taken from her personal account, including photos of her supporting LGBTQI+ people.

Noha is currently living outside Egypt, and it’s difficult for her to pursue or file reports against the ongoing abusive comments and threats she receives.

“The process of reporting harassment and online blackmail against women could be made easier and the state could allow for electronic reporting,” she explains.

LGBTQI+ Rights Rejected

In a report published in January 2025, a group of women’s rights organizations and initiatives submitted a joint submission on the status of women’s and girls’ rights in Egypt for the period 2019-2024.

The report revealed the situation of the LGBTQI+ community, from trapping and harassment to digital targeting and targeting in the public sphere, to the poor quality of medical services provided to them. According to the report, “transgender women are 50% more likely to receive harsher sentences than gay men.” Judges in ‘debauchery’ cases usually issue defendants with a single sentence for all charges.”

In January 2025, 137 countries submitted more than 370 recommendations to Egypt to improve its human rights situation. According to its response, the government decided to support 264 of the recommendations in full (77%), partially supported 16 (5%), and “noted” 62 (18%).

Some of the recommendations made to Egypt regarding improving the conditions of the LGBTQ community included Chile, Spain, Canada, and Iceland raising the issue of prosecuting and criminalizing individuals based on their sexual orientation or actual or perceived gender identity and the need for Egypt to commit to stopping forced anal examinations and amending the debauchery article used to criminalize consensual sexual conduct between adults.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) released a report in July 2025 a day before the final report of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Egypt’s human rights record, criticizing the Egyptian government’s response and commenting on the recommendations received during the review held last January.

According to EIPR: 

“This time, the Egyptian government decided not to respond to any recommendations with an overt rejection, as it had done in the three previous reviews, instead using the term ‘noted’ to refer to all the recommendations it did not accept and is therefore not committed to implementing. The government rejected any allegations of restrictions on civil society activities, any form of arbitrary detention, or requirements that limit the right to peaceful assembly or demonstration or freedom of traditional or digital media or that Egyptian laws are used to punish individuals for their sexual orientation.”

Why All These Waves of Hatred?

Mohamed Zarea, a researcher at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), believes that the recent wave of anger is not new to the LGBTQI+ community; “they suffer from hatred and discrimination from society and through media outlets indirectly controlled by security agencies.” 

“I would say that this wave of hatred has been escalating since 2014, when the community faced unprecedented arrest campaigns,” Zarea adds, “my explanation for this is related to the closure of freedom spaces that opened up after the 2011 revolution, including spaces specifically for the LGBTQI+ community and within the framework of the state’s control over the concept of morality.”

Zarea doesn’t believe that Islamist movements are solely responsible for this: “I don’t deny their hatred of the LGBTQI+ community, but they are not the only ones responsible; the state also has a very conservative regime.”

Zarea explains that Egypt has signed numerous human rights agreements, but it has not adhered to any of them. It consistently places a reservation, namely, “the stipulation of non-conflict with Islamic law”, in all the agreements it has signed (such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, CEDAW, and others). 

However, according to him, when it comes to LGBTQI+ rights, Egypt does not merely place reservations; it actively undermines any recognition of their rights. This is evident in its role within the Human Rights Council when opposing any resolution related to LGBTQI+ rights. “For example, in 2016, Egypt expressed its concern regarding the adoption of the deeply flawed draft law L.2. Rev.1, which aims to establish new rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people”, Zarea explains. 

“Egypt emphasised that the Council does not have the legislative authority to create new rights. Egypt will not recognise or cooperate with the independent expert established pursuant to L.2. Rev.1,” he adds. 

Zarea explains that Egypt consistently forms alliances to support opposing resolutions aimed at protecting the family as the fundamental unit of society. This is clearly demonstrated in its recommendations to countries that grant freedom to LGBTQ+ individuals through the UPR mechanism. 

Zarea confirms that Egypt consistently submits recommendations with almost identical wording: “Strengthen policies to support the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society.” This recommendation was submitted by Egypt during the fourth (current) cycle of the UPR to countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland, and France.

This official broader pattern reflects a deeper and structural cause for the hostility faced by LGBTQI+ people like Noha in Egypt. These are not only shaped by social attitudes but also by a wider political and legal environment that leaves little room for protection. In such a context, harassment does not remain confined to one space. Hate speech, smear campaigns, and threats often move easily between social media and everyday life and the judicial system. For many LGBTQI+ people in Egypt, the result is a continuous cycle in which online and offline violence reinforce each other rather than exist separately.

The post Online and Offline Violence are Two Sides of the Same Coin for LGBTQI+ in Egypt appeared first on Untold.

Imagine this: you’re sitting at home watching the news. An employee in a major beverage company is coming out of the courthouse in an ongoing, much publicized legal battle with her employers. All she did was inform government officials of a specific component that has been added to a recent product without proper tests. After going through the proper channels and filing a complaint at the company, she was told that it would be investigated, but nothing happened. 

She took action. Because someone had to.

The company argues that she signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prevents any employee from divulging trade secrets. Her lawyers counter that when it comes to public health, NDAs are not legally (nor ethically) binding. 

You have been following this case from the start, and you’re waiting for the court-ordered independent lab results to settle the matter. 

Now, ask yourself this: which part of that scenario did you care about most? You’d only be human if the first thing that came to mind was personal interest. When it is a health-related topic, everyone’s first priority is – and should be –  their own. The second thing might be a coin-toss between how the court would penalize the company if wrongdoing was proven, and how government officials would try to revise laws on food additives.

Coming last would be the employee who reported it. Why? Because we all assume she’ll be fine.  She actually did the right thing and her actions will save lives. If the courts rule in her favor, she’ll be lauded as a heroine. She presented evidence: lab results, testimonies, and her own eyewitness account. What more is there to think about?

She’ll be fine.

And you’d be right to think that way. In the United States, whistleblowers in the food industry are protected under the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The company can’t retaliate against her in any way for whistleblowing: by dismissal, demotion, or transfer. Should that happen, she’d be within her legal right to file a complaint, win it, and likely be compensated and reinstated back to her position.

Let’s use the same scenario but shift the industry; this time it’s an AI company. Here, the story takes a different arc. 

The common theme among AI whistleblowers differs from that of the food and beverage industry. In the absence of clear laws and reporting channels, the decision to speak out against AI industry giants is often weighed against livelihood, personal and professional reputation, and, in one case, life itself.

Stories from the AI Trenches

Sounding the alarm takes not just evidence, but courage and a firm moral belief that you’re doing the right thing: telling the truth. 

Meet a few brave individuals who faced hard obstacles to let the world know what goes on behind closed lab doors.

Leopold Aschenbrenner: Former OpenAI safety researcher, fired from his position for allegedly sharing documents externally. He warned of “egregiously insufficient” security against foreign threats, citing OpenAI’s failure to adequately protect critical algorithmic information and model weights. He became an advocate, urging a shift away from fast, unsafe deployment towards robust safety measures.

Suchir Balaji: Former researcher at OpenAI and perhaps the most tragic story on this list. He resigned in August 2024 after stating the company’s use of copyrighted material violated U.S. law and posed commercial harm to creators. He was set to testify in intellectual property lawsuits against OpenAI; but was tragically found dead by suicide on November 26, 2024. 

Timnit Gebru: Co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, dismissed in 2020 after writing a research paper that exposed how current AI training methods could deepen biases against minorities and marginalized communities. Her dismissal gained widespread coverage, exposing corporate retaliation, prompting her to found the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

Louis Hunt: Former CFO and VP of Business Development at Liquid AI. He resigned from his position and publicly challenged the claim that AI models don’t replicate copyrighted works. He  presented evidence of generated outputs that were exact copies of texts from The New York Times, Stephen King’s books, and Harvard Business Publishing articles.

Margaret Mitchell: Founder and co-lead of Google AI ethics unit who was fired in 2021 for alleged misconduct. She testified in the September 2024 Senate hearing on AI oversight, stressing the need for clear instructions to employees navigating NDAs, and accessible whistleblowing channels to provide support to those who wish to come forward with their concerns.

William Saunders: Ex-OpenAI technical staff member who testified at the September 2024 Senate hearing. He advised on: 1) establishing a list of government contacts who understood the reported issues and could act on them, and 2) identifying legal protections insiders need when flagging actions that don’t break laws, but put public safety at risk.

Helen Toner: Former OpenAI board member on the nonprofit arm, who testified at the September 2024 Senate hearing. She highlighted how vagueness in current AI whistleblower laws discourages people from coming forward, specifically those with complaints about AI development that often don’t fit existing legal categories designed for traditional industries.

Anonymous and Named Whistleblowers: Group of eleven-thirteen current and former employees at leading AI companies who in June 2024 wrote an open letter “Right to Warn” calling for principles to create a safe environment for employees to voice their concerns on potential risks. In July 2024, they filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requesting an investigation into how NDAs restrict scrutiny of safety behaviors (e.g., the rushed testing of GPT-4o). 

This list is not exhaustive, many more names can be mentioned, including, David Evan Harris, Jacob Hilton, Geoffrey Hinton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Ramana Kumar, Jan Leike, Neel Nanda, Carroll Wainwright, and Daniel Ziegler, among others. 

Why Blow the Whistle

Merriam-Webster defines a whistleblower as “an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or by other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency,” followed by the following note: “A whistleblower is commonly protected legally from retaliation.” 

If we analyze the stories above based on that definition, we see events unfolding in two stages. Stage One: the employee notices wrongdoing and first reports it internally. When the response from the company dismisses the complaint or addresses it inadequately, the employee either reports their concerns to the government/the media or publishes their findings as independent research.

The complaints themselves span a wide range, from ethical and governance concerns to more technical issues of alignment and safety. In addition, the alarms raised aren’t about one company’s specific attitude towards AI training, testing, and deployment; they bring to light an industry-wide, systemic pattern of behavior that if left unchecked could lead to non-reversable consequences.

For an insider to have that first-hand experience and courage to go through the steps to prevent such dangers, their actions should be celebrated as a reflection of moral integrity, not cause for retaliation. This brings us to the second part of the definition where the key term is “commonly protected”. Commonly means usually/often and that is an apt description in the case of AI whistleblowers. 

Stage Two is where we fail them, because there is simply no protection. The stories show that all of them lost their jobs, either by dismissal (with or without stated reasons) or through resignation (as a form of protest). They became industry pariahs just for speaking up, and some couldn’t find employment immediately after their stories broke out. 

If you’re an employee in an AI frontier company and read about the consequences faced by those who actually wanted to help, would you risk your career/livelihood, your industry standing, and your future to report AI risks? 

Nuclear Whistleblowing as a Model

In recent years, AI research has seen a surge in academic papers, books, interviews, and podcasts that wrestle with growing safety concerns. These works highlight AI’s dual-use and emphasize its black box nature – the opaque decision-making processes that continue to baffle even the scientists building these systems. 

In response, many AI governance and ethics experts compare the risks posed by advanced AI systems to those of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) materials and agents in their severity and potential for catastrophic and even existential harm.

Therefore, as a model for the AI industry, I turn to the nuclear field. Its whistleblower laws and regulatory frameworks have long maintained vigilant oversight over both plant operations and worker safety.

The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 (ERA) established the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which regulates civilian (not military) nuclear facilities and materials. The Act was substantially strengthened in 1992 through the Comprehensive National Energy Policy Act, which added significant whistleblower protections including Section 211.

The key provisions in this amendment include the following:

1. It defines the protected activities for which employees cannot face discrimination. 
2. It establishes a clear complaint and investigation process for whistleblowers who face retaliation. 
3. It requires that these protections be posted permanently in the workplace for constant employee access
4. It directs the NRC or the Department of Energy (DOE) to conduct swift investigations into whistleblower allegations of substantial safety hazards.

Here are examples of how this works in practice:

In May 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that Enercon Services Inc. wrongfully fired a senior engineer at Wolf Creek Generating Station for reporting safety violations. The engineer’s employment had been terminated in January 2012 after pointing out that soil coverage for buried safety pipes didn’t meet federal requirements. He was also asked to write a report justifying inadequate backfill material, but he refused.

OSHA ordered the company to reinstate the engineer with back pay, benefits, and compensatory damages. Enercon appealed, claiming the termination was for legitimate business reasons, but investigators found the engineer’s concerns were valid and that the field errors weren’t his fault.

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a comprehensive review of DOE whistleblower protections and found that while the legal framework exists, enforcement and implementation needed strengthening. The report’s six recommendations, which were mostly accepted, demonstrate that Nuclear whistleblower protections are actively monitored, regularly evaluated, and continuously improved to address gaps, and ensure the law’s promise is realized.

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Murray v. UBS Securities that whistleblowers under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) don’t need to prove their employer intended to retaliate. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals had required plaintiffs to prove employer’s intent, but the Supreme Court vacated that decision. It held that if an employer treats someone worse (by firing, demoting, or changing their working conditions) because of whistleblowing (a protected activity), that constitutes a violation. The employer’s motivation is irrelevant.

This ruling is significant because the Supreme Court noted that the Energy Reorganization Act protections already worked this way. Under ERA, whistleblowers only need to show their protected activity was a factor in the adverse action. Then the employer must prove by clear and convincing evidence they would have taken the same action anyway. The Murray decision reinforced what nuclear whistleblowers already have: strong legal protections that shift the burden away from those who speak out.

The established path for Nuclear whistleblowers could serve as a blueprint for their AI colleagues, who operate in a similarly high-risk domain.

The Push for AI Whistleblower Protection: A Timeline

We now have a question: if AI risks are widely acknowledged as severe, from systemic bias to existential threat, why does the law still fail to protect those who report these risks? The answer is quite simple: existing legal frameworks typically require evidence of fraud or illegality – thresholds that may not encompass AI safety concerns. This leaves insiders vulnerable as they attempt to alert the public and policymakers. 

The following timeline traces key events from 2024 to 2025 that have shaped the need for whistleblower protection. 

In May 2024, news of OpenAI’s restrictive NDAs became known. Following public criticism, CEO Sam Altman admitted he was unaware of their extent and expressed embarrassment. He confirmed the company’s revisions of these agreements to remove provisions that threatened to deprive departing employees of their vested equity. This acknowledgment came after reports that OpenAI’s NDAs prohibited ex-employees from criticizing the company or disclosing safety concerns, sparking broader scrutiny of AI industry practices.

In June, thirteen current and former AI employees wrote an open letter “Right to Warn” urging frontier AI companies to promote an environment of safety-first in AI development and deployment. They stressed the current practice of forcing new hires to sign an NDA, the terms of which demand that they cannot voice concerns or disparage the company, even after leaving.

Moreover, they raised the point of widespread retaliation against whistleblowers, which adds to the growing concern that AI companies fear losing funding and investments more than protecting humanity from a technology that could possibly destroy it. By not allowing criticism, the companies silence well-meaning experts who could steer innovation in the right direction.

On July 1, the same group filed a formal complaint to SEC’s chairman Gary Gensler and to Senator Chuck Grassley’s office. In it, they provided evidence that OpenAI’s NDAs were restrictive to any protected disclosures of concerns related to AI safety, and asked the chairman to conduct an investigation into whether that practice broke SEC rules.

On July 31, OpenAI sent a letter to senators outlining robust safety measures, including dedicating 20% of computing resources to safety efforts like red-teaming and risk evaluations. The letter also affirmed support for whistleblower protections by introducing anonymous reporting options, for example: the Integrity Line.

On August 1, Sen. Grassley sent a letter to Sam Altman demanding answers about OpenAI’s restrictive NDAs with a deadline of August 15. The questions included:

1. Whether OpenAI changed the restrictive language of their NDAs, and provide proof of it.
2. The number of employees who requested to contact federal authorities, including all the relevant details.
3. The number of SEC investigations into OpenAI, including basis and outcome.

Sen. Grassley’s aim was to identify the purpose of the NDAs: whether it is for protecting trade secrets, or preventing employees from voicing their concerns.

On September 17, Sen. Blumenthal chaired a hearing by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. He and several senators heard testimonies from, and directed questions to, expert witnesses on current AI regulations from an insider’s perspective. The hearing covered topics relevant to AI safety implementation and whistleblower protection.

At the start of 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14179 in January titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” which revoked Biden’s AI safety order (EO 14110 of 2023). The new EO mandated the creation of an AI action plan within 180 days, and explicitly set the policy of maintaining U.S. “AI dominance” by removing regulatory barriers to innovation. This shift in policy marked a decisive turn towards deregulation, one that positioned acceleration as a national priority.

In May, Sen. Grassley and bipartisan cosponsors introduced the “AI Whistleblower Protection Act” (S. 1792) in response to mounting concerns about retaliation against AI employees who raise safety issues. The bill would prohibit retaliation against both employees and independent contractors who report AI security vulnerabilities or safety violations. As of October 2025, the bill has yet to advance beyond the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Following the executive order mandate, the White House released the AI Action Plan in July. It advances the deregulatory vision by explicitly prioritizing speed and innovation, while dismantling what it calls “onerous regulation” and “bureaucratic red tape.” By eliminating safety requirements, the plan effectively grants the private sector carte blanche to accelerate AI deployment with minimal oversight.

In October, California passed SB-53 “Transparency in Frontier AI Act”, the first U.S. state law establishing frontier AI transparency and whistleblower protections. Among other provisions, SB-53 introduces direct whistleblower protections for covered employees tasked with assessing or managing critical safety risks:

• It mandates that large AI developers establish anonymous reporting channels.
• Employees are shielded from retaliation when using these channels or when reporting externally to state or federal authorities.
• Protection applies when the whistleblower reasonably believes their employer’s actions pose a substantial threat to public health or safety; especially in cases involving catastrophic risk.

These provisions mark a shift from viewing whistleblowers as disruptors to recognizing them as vital protectors of public interest.

From corporate controversies to whistleblower advocacy and legislative breakthroughs, the road to stronger safeguards has been anything but easy, especially when the drive for rapid deployment outweighs the call for scrutiny. Yet through the combined efforts of courageous individuals and responsive institutions, robust protections are finally within reach.

Line of Defense

In her testimony at the September 17 2024 Senate hearing, Dr Mitchell compared AI training to baking:

“With Data as essentially ingredients, training is cooking, and the model is the output … we’re missing an approach where we have recipes, a deep understanding of what the pieces are that result in this output.”

In a landscape where the builders themselves don’t fully grasp the systems they create, insider disclosures may be the only path to effective regulation.

As the race to develop and deploy AI accelerates, safety and alignment concerns take a back seat at frontier companies. Governance frameworks are racing to catch up by creating laws and policies to protect public welfare, but the gap between innovation and governance remains wide. We need whistleblowers now more than ever. 

But how can we rely on insiders to shield us from high-stakes AI failures when they lack industry-wide protections and remain vulnerable to retaliation? Whistleblowers are our primary line of defense in this field. But shields need protection too. Without enforceable legal guarantees, we’re asking people to make sacrifices they shouldn’t have to.

Where is the justice in that?

The post Whistleblowing as a Shield: Protecting the Voices That Keep AI Safe  appeared first on Untold.

This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor.

Years before Jan (preferred pronoun he), a 33 year-old Egyptian non-binary, came out or even knew about the LGBTIQ+ community, he would search online for people like him. He often found himself deceived by strangers on social media – people pretending to be LGBTIQ+,  or men posing as women. 

Like many queer Egyptians, he was searching for connection in a digital landscape designed to expose him.

A few years ago Jan adopted a new name for safety, deleted all his old social media accounts and rebuilt his online presence from scratch. The fear of being tracked — by security forces, anti-LGBTIQ groups, or far-right actors — shaped every decision he made online. On an earlier account, he happened to encounter members of the community who guided him through basic digital protection practices. For the first time, he felt a degree of safety.

Homosexuality in Egypt: a dangerous secret

According to a report by Transat, , transgender and gender non-binary people in Egypt live under a repressive system that perpetuates violence, discrimination, and stigma in various areas of life. This includes the private sphere, where domestic violence and deprivation of family support are prevalent, as well as the public sphere, where discrimination in education and the labor market persists. It also includes systematic legal and societal harassment that exposes LGBTIQ+ individuals to direct targeting through the state’s repressive laws and practices.

Egypt criminalises same-sex relations, according to the Law on the Combating of Prostitution (No. 10 1961), and in recent years, also on cybercrime laws such as the Law on Anti-Cybercrimes and Information Technology Crimes in  Egypt’s economic courts.

According to the Transat report, there is an increase in cases where online morality laws are applied: 

“The Egyptian media is a key partner in adopting and disseminating hate speech and incitement against women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community in particular. It consistently participates in stigmatizing LGBTQ+ individuals by perpetuating the stereotypes that have been nurtured about them over decades in artistic productions and media programs”.

The telecommunication law has been under the Economic Courts since they were created in 2008, and the cybercrime law was added to the Economic Courts by decree in 2019. With this addition, the Economic Courts began exercising influence over public life by reinforcing digital surveillance and by policing digital morality.

For Jan, digital safety became urgent. Other LGBTIQ+ individuals stepped in early on, teaching him how to protect himself online. This was guidance he needed because, by his own admission, he was once too bold and dismissive of the dangers. Today, his greatest concern is keeping his identity from his family, as they respect him so much and though he’s religious.

“I was harassed online by both women and men, within and outside LGBTQ+ circles. This harassment was not always direct or explicit perhaps, meaning if the conversation escalated, I would stop it, but it still happens” Jan recalls.

In a disappointed tone, he recounts a time when he was shamed by his closest friend, who was also part of the LGBTIQ+ community. During an argument between them, she threatened to go to his house and out him with his mother.

These threats reflect the broader precarity facing LGBTIQ+ Egyptians: vulnerabilities compounded by policing, stigma, and the absence of legal protections.

How to protect LGBTQ+ persons online?

In 2022, an organized anti-LGBTIQ+ campaign known as Fetrah emerged across social media, especially on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram. The name, which translates from Arabic as “human instinct,” was adopted by religious and far-right networks. Using the slogan “Fetrah is an idea,” the campaign launched coordinated posts and Twitter threads in Arabic urging users to promote its core message: that only two genders exist and that homosexuality is deviant and contrary to human nature. 

M.A, a researcher and gender activist who preferred to keep his real name hidden, believes that the Fetrah campaign promotes the outdated idea that homosexuality is an illness or a perversion. This is a great injustice to the LGBTIQ+ community, which is fighting for its rights. “The Fetrah campaign uses religion to fuel hatred and discrimination and legitimize violence against the queer community”, the researcher adds. 

For Jan, the violence and threats he experienced online led him to isolate. “I practically have no friends”, he says. “I stopped trying to make friends or form relationships online.” After closing his social media accounts he is even isolated from the LGBTIQ+ community which is increasingly under attack online — a choice many queer Egyptians feel increasingly forced to make. 

“The LGBTIQ+ community isn’t an isolated island from larger society; it’s a reflection of it to varying degrees”, M.A. explains. “I have seen somewhat similar experiences, some people withdrew, not always out of fear, but sometimes to protect their mental well-being. Others persevered and confronted the situation regardless of the consequences,” he adds.

“When people like Jan are threatened, they certainly won’t go to the police for protection”, M.A. explains. This is why the queer community must be a more compassionate place, or at least more aware of the dangers of male-dominated and patriarchal actions like harassment. 

“The presence of violations within the community necessitates that all entities, individuals, and activists re-evaluate themselves, not justify their actions”, M.A says. “They must work on building a genuine culture of accountability that protects people instead of silencing them or causing them to withdraw,” he adds. 

Though Jan cannot represent the experience of the entire LGBTIQ+ community in Egypt, he reflects a vital part of it, as he and many others have faced—and continue to face—digital challenges and risks that limit their access to safe online spaces. 

While social media offers visibility and connection, it also exposes the vulnerables to digital violence, blackmail, and state surveillance. These threats force many of LGBTIQ+ individuals to navigate the internet with fear and caution, restricting free expression and access to support. Understanding these struggles is essential to recognizing both the power and dangers of online spaces on queer groups in Egypt.

The post For LGBTQ+ People in Egypt, the Internet is Both a Lifeline and a Trap appeared first on Untold.

The mass mobilizations challenged autocratic structures, thereby disrupting or attempting to disrupt hegemonic state-society relations and catalyzing a shift towards participatory contestation and demands for democratic reform. 

The new context of heightened socio-political volatility was exploited by regime elites and non-state actors, particularly fascist and fundamentalist factions, to proliferate discourses based on othering, social conservatism and ultra-nationalism often reinforced through securitization regimes, the proliferation of digital surveillance, and restrictive legislation. 

What emerges is a form of digital fascism: the algorithmic extension of state power that invisibly shapes public discourse, weaponizes data and not only silences dissent but also “preemptively works to erase the very possibility of rebellion”.

Social media, Hate Speech and Anti-Black Violence in Tunisia 

Anti-rights ideologies in the SWANA region, including anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, are interconnected with far-right currents in the global north, as seen for example in the alignment between Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. This ideological synergy is reinforced through formal political cooperation: Meloni’s visits to Tunis and EU-led negotiations on “enhanced cooperation on migration management” illustrate how European powers leverage Tunisia’s economic and political vulnerabilities to outsource border control. 

In practice, these anti-rights ideologies are not merely rhetorical: they translate into concrete state-sanctioned repression. While Meloni has mobilized fears of demographic change and the influx of ‘illegal’ immigration to consolidate power in Italy, President Kaïs Saied has adapted parallel narratives to target Black African migrants within Tunisia. 

Saied’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric, including his February 2023 speech describing “hordes of irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa” as part of a criminal plan to alter Tunisia’s demographics, triggered widespread anti-Black violence, with mobs attacking migrants and asylum seekers and police complicit in arbitrary arrests and deportations. Social media amplified these narratives, providing platforms for hate speech and conspiratorial ideologies, particularly those propagated by groups like the Tunisian Nationalist Party. The combination of state-sanctioned incitement, online amplification, and impunity for perpetrators has created an environment where egregious anti-Black violence is normalized.

One of the most critical issues fueling technoviolence is the inadequacy of content moderation systems, especially those relying heavily on automation. In the region, the linguistic complexity of dialects such as the Maghrebi Arabic dialects confounds these systems. Internal Facebook surveys reveal that only 6% of hate speech in the SWANA region was detected by Instagram’s automated moderation. Such a failure could be explained, as per the findings of Mona Elswah’s 2024 report Moderating Maghrebi Arabic Content on Social Media, by the lack of diversity in natural language processing teams that develop automated content moderation systems at social media companies, combined with insufficient training datasets for Maghrebi Arabic dialects and the recruitment of non-native annotators.

Livestreaming Death in Sudan

In the meantime, Meta has become even less safe. In early 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a series of policy changes including the “simplification” of content policies, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, ending its third-party fact-checking program, and relaxing its filtering algorithms. While these changes were framed as promoting free expression, Amnesty International echoed the warnings of various human rights experts who have raised concerns about Meta’s role in fuelling mass violence and genocide in fragile and conflict-affected societies. Researchers have highlighted that these rollbacks could be particularly dangerous in fragile democracies and conflict contexts, where the absence of fact-checking and robust moderation allows political actors, state-backed influencers, and coordinated campaigns to exploit social media for harassment, racialized violence, and disinformation.

A recent investigation by Sudanese independent platform Beam Reports revealed how the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan are using TikTok to glorify atrocities during the genocide in Darfur. Following the takeover of Al-Fashir, RSF fighters committed widespread massacres and civilian-targeted violence have occurred, with fighters like the notorious commander “Abu Lulu” openly boasting on TikTok Live about killing thousands. These livestreams, often featuring RSF uniforms and direct claims of violence, attract thousands of viewers who send virtual gifts and comments praising the attacks. Clips are then reshared across TikTok, Facebook, X (Twitter), and Telegram. 

TikTok’s platform and algorithms have played a central role in amplifying these atrocities. Despite earlier warnings from Sudalytica in May 2025 about monetized hate speech and propaganda networks, the company has mostly failed to remove accounts or moderate content in Sudan. According to Beam Reports co-founder Raghd Orsud, while TikTok has banned RSF commander Abu Lulu’s account following the report, the broader harm persists, as months of atrocity-glorifying and hate content spread unchecked. Orsud clarifies how a single takedown is insufficient and calls for systemic action: “TikTok must deploy moderation teams fluent in Sudanese Arabic, establish a crisis-response channel for Sudan, preserve and securely archive violating content for accountability while preventing further spread, and proactively block re-uploads”.

The Complicity of Big Tech in Palestine 

In Palestine, researchers and digital rights advocates have documented a longstanding pattern of systemic censorship and bias on Meta platforms, which disproportionately removes Palestinian content while under-moderating hate speech and dehumanizing rhetoric targeting Palestinians, as 7amleh and Sada Social reported. This includes the deletion of posts documenting war crimes, photos of victims, and even content flagged simply for including Palestinian symbols, while similar content from Israeli sources often remains untouched. As documented by Palestinian organizations 7amleh and Sada Social, and highlighted in the 2021 Business for Responsibility (BSR) report and subsequent advocacy by the Stop Silencing Palestine coalition, these practices are embedded within the company’s algorithms and policies, reinforced by high compliance with Israeli government takedown requests. 

A more recent report by 7amleh criticizes Meta for failing to adequately protect Palestinians from incitement and hate speech in Hebrew. It highlights that Meta’s policies are biased and have contributed to enabling harmful discourse during Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. The report also points out Meta’s disregard for the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, which explicitly called for preventing and punishing “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”.

Social media platforms’ role is embedded in the “Empire stack”, where Big Tech operates in tandem with state power, extending digital forms of domination. This alliance merges with the interests of the military-industrial complex, and in the SWANA region, technologies are not only tested on marginalized populations but also generate enormous profit, as these tools are then marketed and exported to governments and security agencies around the world. 

The region has been both a laboratory and a lucrative marketplace for powerful corporations, profiting from the global circulation of surveillance systems, predictive policing tools, and AI-enabled warfare technologies, a dynamic that has fueled the accelerating AI arms race, where innovations tested in the region are deployed worldwide in both military and civilian contexts.

Silicon Valley has been actively enabling Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestinians by recruiting Unit 8200 veterans, investing in Israeli surveillance and AI-driven military technologies, and integrating these tools into global cloud and cybersecurity infrastructure. Grassroots worker-led advocacy initiatives such as No Tech for Apartheid and NoAzure for Apartheid have emerged to challenge the complicity of Big Tech in apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide particularly in Palestine, calling on companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to end all ties to the Israeli military.

In August 2025, an investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealed that Israel’s Unit 8200 was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud to collect and analyze vast amounts of Palestinian phone communications in Gaza and the West Bank. Following the report and protests by human rights organizations and the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, Microsoft announced on September 25 that it had suspended certain subscriptions and access to its cloud and AI services for the military unit while reviewing the allegations. 

While Microsoft’s decision to disable specific Israeli military subscriptions and services in response to the Guardian’s reporting was welcomed by human rights NGOs as a positive step, it remains insufficient. The organizations have called on Microsoft to conduct a comprehensive review of all its business relationships with Israeli government and military bodies, suspend or terminate any products or services contributing to human rights abuses, increase transparency about its due diligence and the scope of its review, and rigorously apply its AI and acceptable use policies to ensure it does not become complicit in mass surveillance, targeting of civilians, or other violations of international law. 

However, efforts to hold Big Tech accountable remain limited, as documents published in October 2025 revealed that when Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government in 2021 (Project Nimbus), they agreed to extraordinary terms, including a secret “winking mechanism”, intended to circumvent legal obligations in other countries while ensuring uninterrupted access for Israeli government and security agencies. Another recent example comes from internal Meta documents shared by whistleblowers, which show that the company repeatedly downplayed and buried research demonstrating the harmful effects of its platforms further highlighting the depth of Big Tech complicity in human rights abuses and the limitations of accountability and tech justice efforts.

In the words of Nadine Moawad, in a region like SWANA, “tech policy problems are compounded with a litany of daily struggles, most devastating of these being occupation, war, conflict, and displacement which affects, we sometimes forget, two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population. People Like Us are often, sadly, irrelevant to or tokenized in global policy”.

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In April 2025, Microsoft’s President, Brad Smith, pledged to challenge “any government” that requested his company to suspend its services in specific countries, alluding to threats from the Trump administration within its trade war. However, Smith’s promises were put to the test just one month later. In May, the President of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, and a number of his colleagues discovered that Microsoft had blocked their access to email accounts hosted on its servers. This blockade was implemented in compliance with Trump’s decision to place Karim Khan and all ICC staff on a sanctions list managed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the US Department of the Treasury.

The United States has long weaponized the OFAC sanctions list to isolate individuals and companies from the global financial system and global internet services. This is done by leveraging the influence and dominance of US-based companies over critical internet infrastructure, including hosting services, data centers, and undersea cables. However, this list expanded after October 7th, as the Trump administration actively targeted institutions and individuals working to document the genocide and prosecute the crimes of the Zionist occupation.

Just as Microsoft froze the email accounts of ICC staff in compliance with OFAC sanctions, other US-based big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta also froze the online accounts of numerous Palestinian institutions after the US administration listed them on the OFAC list— accused of supporting Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In 2024 alone, the number of individuals and entities designated by OFAC as “Specially Designated Nationals” increased by 25% compared to 2023. Even the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, was not spared from this list after publishing her report “From an Occupation Economy to an Economy of Genocide,” under the pretext of her relations with the International Criminal Court.

As the internet has become increasingly central to strategic and sensitive national infrastructures worldwide, economists and academics have been sounding the alarm for years about the implications of concentrating the ownership of the network’s infrastructure in the hands of a small number of private US-based companies, governed by US laws. But the allure of easy access to hosting and cloud-computing services, coupled with their low cost, meant that these warnings found little resonance among most governments—until Edward Snowden’s 2014 leaks provided evidence of extensive surveillance programs employed by the U.S. government, leveraging its influence over the network through the fact that US companies owned most of the sensitive infrastructure that powers the Internet. At that point, government discourse in Europe, Asia, and Latin America intensified, calling for the importance of gaining independence and asserting national sovereignty over sensitive layers of the Internet infrastructure.

Following the extensive sanctions imposed by the United States on Russia during its war with Ukraine, and the trade war waged by the Trump administration against countries worldwide to tip the scales in the United States’ trade balance favor, official calls for achieving digital “sovereignty” or “independence” reached their peak, encompassing a diverse spectrum of voices. On the left of these calls are human rights and academic institutions advocating for reclaiming infrastructure ownership from private companies by building “public infrastructure” managed by civil institutions. On the right are national governments calling for the imposition of their digital “sovereignty” to kill multiple birds with one stone: developing their economies and extending their control over their populations’ communications and data.

In this article, I attempt to map the landscape of cloud-computing infrastructure—the most central set of services on the Internet—and to trace the discourse of digital “sovereignty” or “independence,” which has grown steadily in recent years. Despite the way major tech companies portray the Internet as a “cloud” where data floats weightlessly, this cloud is in fact embodied in most physical forms of data centers and servers, most of which are owned by a very small number of companies. Contrary to the immateriality implied by the word “cloud,” this data is bound to those servers and data centers, which ultimately fall under the interests of the states and corporations that manage them. I also seek to identify the available spaces that rights-based organizations can turn to start their journey to “digital independence”.

The Hosting and Cloud-Computing Ecosystem

To imagine the ecosystem of companies that control the web and services hosting infrastructure, we can take as an example the chain of requirements for an organization to establish its online presence—such as creating a website, running email services, and setting up cloud storage.

To create a website, an organization must first rent a domain name from an Internet domain-name registrar, then obtain space to host its webpages, an email service, and possibly storage space for its databases and internal files. It may also choose to create pages on social-media platforms, where most online audiences are concentrated today.

Up until the mid-2000s, all these needs could be met through small companies—most based in the United States, with some in Europe—none of which controlled a dominant share of the market. Costs were reasonable in the industrialized North, though relatively high in the rest of the world. But over the years, the market for the requirements of a cyber presence changed significantly, with new patterns of comprehensive services emerging under what came to be known as cloud services.

These services became increasingly concentrated and monopolized by major corporations. For example, by the end of 2024, two US-based companies—GoDaddy and Namecheap—together owned as registrars one-third of the global domain-name market, which had reached 360 million registered domains. Meanwhile, the six largest US companies in this sector collectively held nearly half of all domain names registered worldwide.

The most famous of these domains were those that started with the internet itself, such as .com and .org, referenced as gLTDs (General Top-Level Domains) were then managed by a private US-based company called Network Solutions under a special contract with the U.S. government, until the non-for-profit organization, ICANN was established in 1998. The responsibility of managing domain names moved to ICANN, and the domain names sector consisting of registries and registrars was privatized and transformed into a profitable market.

This sector has undergone changes between 2019 to 2023, as an increase in domain-name registrations has been observed in Asian and African countries, especially country level top-level domains (cLTDs) such as .cn for China, .in for India, and .za for South Africa, alongside a decline in the growth of .com domains.  One of the drivers of this growth is the enactment of laws and strategies by governments in those countries that encourage local domain markets, the localization of hosting services and data centers on their territory, and the encouragement of local private and public sectors to register domains that end with country codes.

As a result of U.S. sanctions, many human rights organizations around the world lost control of their domain names, especially those ending with .org, .net, .com, which they had previously rented from registrars located in the United States. However, while some registrars claim that they are bound to legally comply with US law, NamesCheap arbitrarily revoked the domain name of the website genocide.live owned by Zionism.observer on January 5, 2026 as the website held a digital memorial honoring the victims of Gaza resulting in the removal of 16,000 videos documenting war crimes. According to NamesCheap CEO, violent content of the website violated their terms of service.

After registering a domain name, an organization needs to provide hosting storage for its website, its files, its email, and its archives. In the early expansion of the internet, companies and institutions used to set up and manage their own servers for hosting purposes. Today, just as U.S. companies dominate the domain names market, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively control about 62% of the cloud computing market.

As for countries under sanctions, they were pioneers in building local cloud-computing hosting infrastructure, such as China, where Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent lead the domestic Chinese cloud market (with shares of 33%, 18%, and 10%, respectively). In recent years, Alibaba’s share of the global cloud market has grown to 4%, due to its provision of regional hosting and domain services across Asia.

Just as with domain names, US cloud-computing companies froze the accounts of individuals, organizations, and countries placed on the OFAC list. Sanctioned organizations are forced to turn to cloud-computing providers outside the United States to continue their operations, and many of them lost access to even backups of their websites and databases. Meanwhile, some organizations proactively secured domain names and cloud storage from companies outside the U.S in anticipation of the risk of being placed on sanctions list.

It is important to note that using a non-U.S. service provider whether a domain registrar or a cloud service computing does not inherently shield an entity from OFAC sanctions enforcement. Many registrars outside of the US source their domains through wholesale agreements with U.S.-based registrars, and their agreements could contain clauses that prohibit from servicing parties designated by OFAC. As for cloud computing providers outside of the US, if they have offices or infrastructure located in the US, they are obliged to abide by the sanctions list.  For example, the Canadian-American company Tucows decided to comply with a request from the organization “Lawyers for Israel UK” to suspend the account of the Palestinian institution “Addameer,” due to the company’s offices and servers being in the United States.

If providers don’t have any presence in the US, the matter is governed by the provider terms of service with regards to conditions of removing content or suspending services.Some service providers may also decide to freeze their clients’ accounts without a court order if they believe, based on their personal assessment, that they are hosting content that may support terrorism or incite hatred. On the other hand, some service providers in Europe are fighting legal battles in local courts against decisions to remove content or suspend services on charges such as terrorism or anti-Semitism, as the Icelandic company “1984” is doing by refusing to remove the website “The Mapping Project” after being sued by a Zionist organization.

A Growing Global Debate

The Snowden leaks marked a turning point in the trust of international and local human rights institutions and governments alike in the internet infrastructure controlled by the United States. Official reactions on these leaks where security-centered where the concentration of ownership allowed governments to spy on one another. One of the most prominent reactions was the announcement by then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff of the construction of a submarine data cable between Brazil and Portugal that bypasses the United States. Named EllaLink and completed in 2021, the cable was intended to secure the data and communications of the Brazilian state and its citizens after it was revealed that Dilma was among the heads of state subjected to US espionage according to the leaks. For its part, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, which forced global companies to implement controls for using and processing European citizens’ data outside European borders, requiring legal permission.

These secret espionage programs, and the ability of the United States’ government to cut off entire populations from the internet’s ecosystem through sanctions, have driven many countries in Asia and Europe, including those friendly to the US, to enact policies and launch projects to build hosting infrastructure seeking greater sovereignty over their communications and their citizens’ data. Some countries developed laws that compel international cloud computing providers to host their citizens’ data in local data centers subject to the countries’ legal jurisdiction, as in the case of Vietnam and Singapore, or through agreements with foreign companies to build a national cloud, as in the case of Malaysia. these policies did not always mean independence from the US-based companies providing these services, as much as they aimed to generate jobs locally, as in the case of Malaysia.

In Europe, although “digital sovereignty” was at the center of discussions in the European Parliament of the European strategy for data in 2020, the Union became alert of the danger of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google controlling 70% of the cloud computing market within the continent. This awareness grew after Trump signed an executive order at the beginning of 2025, clarifying the by laws of the CLOUD Act passed in 2018, which allows US executive agencies to access – via a court order – data centers located outside the United States if they are owned by US-based companies. This contradicts the controls the European Union established via the GDPR for foreign companies processing European data hosted in their centers. As a result, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon rushed to develop internal policies guaranteeing the “sovereignty” of the host countries over their national data stored in their data centers. Microsoft executives later admitted to the French Parliament that the company could not guarantee France’s – or by extension, any EU country’s – sovereignty over its national data or its citizens’ data stored in the company’s data centers in France if the US government requested access via a court order. In Britain, over 50% of tech company leaders expressed in mid of this year a desire to work with local service providers rather than those in the United States.

Today, serious discussions are emerging in the European Union about adopting digital sovereignty strategies not only to protect its citizens’ data but also to catch up in the artificial intelligence race between the United States and China. In addition to the “Europe Digital Strategy” policy, which gives preference to European service providers in government tenders, calls has escalated to “liberating Europe from the digital siege” or urging the development of a plan to control all layers of the infrastructure, starting from the nationalisation of “semiconductor chips” manufacturing to building local data centers and hosting infrastructure.

Towards a Public Cloud Computing Infrastructure?

In the endeavor to dismantle the concentration of ownership over sensitive infrastructure, some human rights institutions and internet governance organizations are raising concerns about granting greater “sovereignty” and influence to local governments over citizens’ data, communications, and websites. This is particularly worrisome in countries that impose high levels of internet and media censorship and run unaccountable surveillance programs on their citizens’ data. Within a group called the “Democratic and Ecological Alliance for Digital Sovereignty,” a number of institutions, academics, lawyers, and rights advocates proposed a roadmap to “reclaim the concept of digital sovereignty.” The roadmap aims to expand the concept of “sovereignty” beyond state control,  which has historically served the economic and political interests of the ruling class and provided a framework for governments to evade accountability and transparency in governance.

The roadmap’s starting point is to redefine the cloud infrastructure that enables cloud computing as “public, state-ledcloud composed of public data centres interconnected through public infrastructure” that serves the public interest of diverse peoples and communities and distributes its economic returns the wider society. According to this roadmap, digital independence will also be achieved by building public infrastructure and platforms such as “public search engine or a public e-commerce market place”, governed by civil society institutions or international bodies (following the model of telecommunications network governance and global postal services). It also involves investing in open research that provides solutions for building public knowledge online for the benefit of society, rather than serving the profit motives of a handful of companies, and establishing restrictions and accountability mechanisms to dismantle government surveillance tools over their citizens’ data.”

Global movements are also emerging, targeting human rights organizations and small businesses to propose alternatives to the solutions and services of major tech companies. This year, the “Rise Against Big Tech” campaign was launched, calling to move away from big tech tools that have contributed to increasing climate change risks, data militarization, and police empowerment. It also advocates for promoting hosting service providers whose values align with cooperation, transparency, and equality.  In addition, some organizations are offering guidance to reduce independence on Google through reverting to self-hosting open-source tools on their own servers, such as daily communication tools (as alternatives to Slack or WhatsApp), storage administration tools, productivity software suites (as alternatives for Google Workplace), or self-hosted VPNs. Some initiatives also propose an “alternative” to social media companies, based on a decentralized hosting structure where social networks communicate directly with each other in a federation called the Fediverse.

Achieving complete independence from US service providers may be a privilege most human rights organizations cannot afford, especially in the Arab region. However, at the same time, reliance on service providers in the United States, especially for organizations documenting war crimes, or working on holding the Israeli occupation accountable, has become a digital existential risk . Therefore, there is no better political moment than the current one to engage in serious discussions within these human rights institutions, on what does it require to begin moving towards “digital independence” using open-source and self-managed tools.

But if there is one practical thing human rights institutions can start with, it is to move their domain, hosting, and email service outside of the United States with providers with terms of services that protect their right to exist online. Between complete dependence on US service providers and complete independence, there are spaces that can be explored to achieve a measure of gradual independence, until the day comes when initiatives emerge that offer infrastructure governed by an international body.

**Tech activist Ahmad Gharbieh reviewed this article and contributed to developing some of its ideas.

The post “Sovereignty” on the Cloud: Is the World Moving Toward Digital Independence from the United States? appeared first on Untold.

On the technological side, search engines are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, the World Wide Web by social media apps, while cryptocurrencies keep rising.

The title of the book was inspired by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s work investigating the extractivist, destructive and world-threatening character of contemporary global capitalism. In this context, Lovink maintains that digital platforms and their owners (X, Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber, just to mention a few) have reached a (predictable) point at which their logic of treating the world as “an immense reservoir” is ultimately translated directly into political violence. 

We can see this in different forms: when data collection is used to control borders or target civilians, the trivialisation of violence to normalise it and disturb dissent, and deletion to destroy voices and entire communities.

Enrico De Angelis: The book starts with a consideration: we have already lost the battle to change the techno-social aspects that you described in such detail in your previous work. You say there are no imaginative follow-ups on the horizon, no paradigm shift in sight: “The Universe ignores us”. And yet, while Franco Berardi (who is also included in this dossier) calls for a radical withdrawal to enable the emergence of a new horizon, you propose another approach. Also radical, but you say it is the moment to fight back. What should we do? Wait for the moment to leave the platforms ‘en masse’? Or, as you propose at the end of the book, are there other, smaller steps that can be implemented immediately, even by non-tech-savvy people?

Geert Lovink:  The exodus of social media platforms will have to happen together, as Team Human, for a reason, in an urgent setting. Sadly, this will only be done during a period of shock. Addiction and attachment are real. So far there are no effective strategies for the literally billions of users to voluntarily abandon Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Google. Ever since 2011, when we started our Unlike Us campaign, where we emphasised the unity of social media critique and alternatives, we have known that the individual guilt trip is going nowhere. Nudging is nonsense. We came to the conclusion that platform/app dependency can be overcome with the ‘tools’ approach. Tools that we use and then put aside. There will be an end to the techno-misery: “We want to see the sunshine after the rain.”

Attempts to reduce excessive smartphone time through awareness campaigns, offline weekends, and blocker apps that help you focus did not make a noticeable difference. The consumer behaviour approach is simply the wrong one. The addiction aspect cannot be ignored, but the medical ‘detox’ angle simply doesn’t work in this context. The desire for social connection in a time of loneliness, the growing travel time within urban sprawls, and the coordination issues of meeting others should not be ignored. Do we need Meta and Google for that? We don’t. Getting your phone out in the elevator is a habit. Uncooling the phone will be a task of the generation after Gen Z.

All the above has been known for years—that’s the sad part of this topic. Regression and stagnation are real. As we are still stuck on the platform, we need to be brave to question the exit strategies on offer so far. 

I am confident that Gen Z will be able to revolt—not just to demand a return to access to social media, as was the case in Tibet and other places where authoritarian regimes, in a desperate attempt to remain in power, limited access to certain apps or even cut off the internet as a whole. But their demand was to get the apps back. They could not live without them. We need to leave our sorrow and open radical vibe labs and experiment. Just try stuff. Besides Signal, DuckDuckGo, cryptpad.fr, and more, get inspired by the Facebook Museum of the Utrecht media arts organisation SETUP, a temporary booth installed in the hall of Utrecht Central Station. Or think of Francesca Bria’s Eurostack initiative that showcases the complexity of interrelated levels of tech, from apps to datacentres, when we demand ‘tech sovereignty’. Let’s add more to this list.

EDA: You write that platform brutality is worse than any other media representation of violence because it is remote, invisible, and indirect.

GL: So far, average users do not notice data extraction. We need to learn from the violence debate over the past decades and apply it to the internet field. The start here is the realisation that the ‘free’ and innocent phase, in which we signed a social contract with Silicon Valley, exchanging free access to apps and online services in exchange for our data, is over. A violent turn has happened over the past five years. 

The question is to what extent we will ‘feel’ the abstract and structural violence that is unleashed. This goes beyond the complaints over annoying ads. Many users, primarily young people, are suffering from mental health issues related to 24/7 use of social media. At what point will this damage have a real and physical impact? 

We witness loneliness, depression, apathy and indifference and the rise of right-wing politics, especially among young people, but often this is still perceived as happening elsewhere, to others. Economic uncertainty, mental breakdown and cognitive poverty are such that it is perceived as cool to be conservative (as a virtual mask or psychic armour). 

Platform brutality is the case when all this is no longer happening to others, and real consequences are no longer information that you swipe away.

What happens when structural violence excludes you, but you cannot find out, or do not even notice? You’re out. No carrier. What’s wrong with this app store? Information is made invisible, just for you. You have no access, but have no idea why, or for how long. You do not get a home loan, visa, job, fellowship or discount. It can be discrimination or just an inconvenience. Or getting worse tomorrow, with an impact only much later. 

Randomness is often part of the tech exclusion logic. Search and you will not find; prompt and you will be offered the wrong information—all presented with the best of customer service intentions and impeccable UX design. I have pointed at the sliding scale of violence, from the creation of a profile, the categorisation of one’s identity, nationality, race, face, fingerprints and iris, genes, to the creation of confined groups, the selection and isolation of them, ultimately to the point of expulsion, removal, extradition or even extermination. 

The inflation of the term ‘genocide’ doesn’t help here, as it is solely focused on that very last part, not on the sliding scale we’re all already part of. Social media databases are the most incredible self-created data repositories of one’s preferences, opinions, and social network ever created—and are immediately at the disposal of authoritarian forces, assisted by the Californian Big Brother. 

Take this example that passed by recently: As 404 Media reports, Google has chosen a side in Trump’s mass deportation effort. “Google is hosting an app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials.”

EDA: From the perspective of social and political movements from the global south, the issue with the platforms can be even more problematic. Let’s take the example of Gaza. On the one hand, as you also remind us, platforms have become directly entangled with the exercise of violence, including their role in deleting content and spreading fake news and bias. At the same time, since mainstream media coverage was also extremely biased, dissent was mainly circulated on those platforms (“TikTok is the problem”). Or, to quote you: “Can event-driven social movements afford to leave behind Big Tech, knowing they own the heads and minds of millennials and Gen Z?” How to respond to this urgency, to the paradox we are all facing? 

GL: Let’s not be moralistic and judge others from a distance. I have and will advocate for decentralised alternatives, but shy away from any suggestion on how people in hardship should communicate. You mention ‘content moderation,’ the infamous US ‘freedom of speech,’ and the censorship by Meta and Google, but the underlying problem there is the tech’s linking of content to IDs. There cannot be dissident content without an encrypted, anonymous delivery mechanism. We need to communicate more and leave less online. A tech renaissance of store-forward? The sky is the limit.

Throughout history, people have given their lives to deliver messages. Please read Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images despite All about four photographs from Auschwitz. As a teenager, my mother smuggled resistance newspapers on her bike in Nazi-occupied Breda. That defined my upbringing. The lesson taught was to fight registration, ID cards and centralised databases (see the chapter on this in Sad by Design). 

The question I have to ask myself is how my generation of what some call ‘internet pioneers’ was allowed to move from pseudonyms and anonymous users to Web 2.0 profiles and rigid ‘real names’ policies (with Google as ‘identity provider’). This is a collective sin, or defeat, if you like. It compromised the word ‘privacy’ for good, which is a travesty on the internet. All this is bad, but it affects people in crisis and war zones the most. What’s evident is the power of the message, regardless of all the petabytes that are collected to be used against us. There’s never an indifference against the signs of life that matter.

EDA: You dedicate the longest chapter to dreams. You say we cannot dream anymore because of social media overstimulation, which crowds our brains and deprives us of the time to ‘digest’ dreams. But dreaming, as you remind us, is crucial when it comes to creating new imaginaries and, therefore, to planning for political change. You launched the “dreamful computing” project, which explicitly tackles this issue. Can you explain what you mean by this expression and how it can be translated into specific practices?

GL: ‘Access to dreams’ is going to be vital for any substantive change. This will be a new era for the interpretation of dreams, that is, no doubt, post-Freudian. However, there is a dark, technological side to this renaissance: the capture and manipulation possibilities that future digital neuroscience will provide. 

To me, the corporate move to enter dreams is summarised in this awful, boring image: their ability to advertise in our dreams. The more material my Sydney friend Ned Rossiter and I collect, the clearer it becomes to us that the dream space will be one of the next Big Tech battlefields. It will be interesting to push the current psychedelic research further – and democratise that field, as it has to be taken back from the pharmaceutical establishment, time and again. 

I follow Erik Davis here, in this context. It is also important to stress the potential of (collective) dreaming that goes beyond the necessary reproduction of the imaginary labour force, and all we have to process during our busy, noisy days. How do you see we can Reclaim the Dream? This is a sincere, open question, as we’re into this not that long. The psychedelic winter was a long one, with generations destroyed by destructive neo-liberal investments into the (online) Self. As Yasha Levine puts it on his Substack in media terms: “The parasocial technology took over from where television left off and pushed society even more radically into an atomised configuration”.

We need to move away from the narcissistic preoccupation, embodied by King Trump. The psycho-political situation even worsens as we enter the phase of techno-fascism, aka techno-feudalism, if you look at it from a political economy perspective. The mental health situation deteriorates so fast that many start to act together. Common tools with real-life gatherings are the answer to this planned isolation. Our dream computing project is part of that movement. “I am dreamin’ man, yes, that’s my problem. I’ll always be a dreaming man, and I don’t have to understand, I know it’s alright.” Neil Young sings while I write this. The helpless state of this dreamin’ man will soon be a thing of the past—that’s for sure.

EDA: At the Institute for Network Cultures you dedicate a lot of attention to tactical media, which for many can appear as almost an obsolete term. How can tactical media be relevant today, in the face of all the techno-social aspects and the invasiveness of the platforms that you describe?

GL: I am not emotionally attached to any term. I believe in the speculative potential of the concepts we design to make a difference, to become machines, to cause long-lasting techno-social effects. When we use the term tactical media today, we do so to strengthen collaborations among hackers, designers, artists, and researchers in social movements. The tactical media approach reminds us to be open to migrating ‘Killroy was here’ aesthetics that wander from one medium to the next, from one locality to the next. This is so powerful today because, most of all, we are stuck on platforms that narrow our visual language, close down dialogue and discussion, and are utterly impossible as mobilisation tools. 

I admit that the guerrilla mode of tactical media makes it hard for resistance to scale up. The tactical media approach believes in the power of sparks, memes, stickers on traffic light poles: subversive signs that give strength to make it through the day. They are known today as copium, which is the opening essay of Platform Brutality. The more depressed a situation, the more powerful humour and irony can become. The more we experiment with the reversal of signs and concepts, the better. Come together and set up spaces. The emphasis should be less on aesthetics and more on tactical forms of organisation outside of platforms. This could be irritating about fluid, non-committing tactics in a time when sustainable self-organisation is needed most.

The post Capitalism, War, and the Violence of Digital Platforms: A Conversation with Geert Lovink appeared first on Untold.

In this conversation, Ozoma discusses her work, the current political situation in the US, how to bring change in the tech industry, and her sources of inspiration. 

Enrico De Angelis: You mentioned in your conversation with Tammarian Rogers that today it would be even more difficult to speak out loud for people who want to denounce cases of discrimination, harassment, or problematic behaviours in the tech industry in the US. Can you elaborate on that, and tell us about the general atmosphere today in your country? 

Ifeoma Ozoma: The reason why I said that is because of what we’ve seen already in the US with our federal government, the State Department, and the White House, taking very targeted retaliatory measures against even green card holders, threatening citizens with the revocation of their passports. So none of the retaliation from the government is hypothetical anymore. We’re seeing it happen all the time. And we’re only hearing about the cases with people who have access to media. 

There are so many more cases that I’m sure we haven’t heard about and we may never hear about because they’re people who are less resourced, which is exactly what authoritarian regimes do: They go after the people who have the least ability to fight back or have their stories told. 

And then, on the tech company side, both anecdotally and in the data, we’re seeing tens of thousands and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of people laid off. I have no doubt that many of those folks who are being laid off are people who have spoken up at some point, and they’re just added to the numbers of folks who are let go as part of a reduction in force. 

And so, especially in a society with zero social safety net, when your job is tied to your health insurance, tied to your ability to live, your ability to pay your rent or your mortgage and to provide for your family, what we’re seeing are not theoretical risks for people speaking up. They’re real immediate and long term risks for people. And so I think just overall, it’s so much harder for people to speak up. 

EDA: The situation is getting worse despite some substantial legal improvements you also advocated for (in 2022, in California the “Silenced no More Act”, a law that places restrictions to confidentiality provisions in work agreements, was approved). How do you explain these developments? Is it the general political atmosphere, or rather other factors more related to the tech industry? 

IO: It’s all of it. The law that I worked on was at the state level. We still don’t have federal protections that actually cover people to the same extent that the law in California and in Washington and a number of other states do. So, in the event that you’re working for a company, and you happen to be in one of those states, you have some legal protections. But of course, they hire people all over the country and all over the world. So unless you are in a jurisdiction where you are covered, you are totally left on your own. 

Moreover, the few measures that we used to have in the United States, like the “Equal Employment Opportunity Act” (EEOC), the Commission and other federal agencies that are supposed to deal with labor issues are now much weaker, as many of their lawyers have been fired by this administration. 

The people in charge are not folks who are aligned with workers anymore. And so you have a much worse case even if your situation is heard or taken up. If you file at the federal level now, you’re just as likely to have them make a ruling in favor of your employer. 

And I think from our perspective as advocates, we have to be understanding of that and careful not to ask people to martyr themselves. 

EDA: During the last two years, the role of tech companies in wars, as we have seen particularly in Gaza, has come to the surface as never before. Is there a direct connection between your work in terms of protection of workers’ rights in tech companies and this aspect in particular? In other words, does protecting the rights of tech workers in the US have an impact on tech companies’ complicity with human rights violations abroad? 

IO: It’s absolutely connected because those who are working in the kinds of positions that I used to work in, in these tech companies, are the most privileged folks in the tech worker ecosystem. And so if companies are successful in silencing their ‘white collar’ workers in the United States who have the most means, the most money, and the most access to lawyers,  then what of the folks who are doing labeling in East Africa and in Southern Europe and in Southeast Asia? 

And what of the folks even further down the chain who are in mines and basically in slave labor conditions in Congo and in other areas? So it’s all very, very connected to me. If you’re able to silence people in your offices on issues that are already settled in law, then you’re making sure that no one is able to speak up about what they’re seeing when they’re being told to program things for drones that will end up killing people in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Sudan, and wherever else, because all of it is connected. 

EDA: You mentioned the importance of adopting pragmatic approaches in order to bring change and avoid what you call the typical analysis/paralysis many activists suffer from. In the context of the US, you say you were inspired by the strategies of the environmental movement, like exerting pressures on shareholders in order to force companies to change their behaviours. You stressed also that we should accept that we live in a capitalist society and recognise its power balances, and act accordingly. Do you think this type of approach is effective also when it comes  to addressing the relationships between tech giants and weapons industries? I ask this especially since you said that in your case the leverage was money (as shareholders have to pay  lawsuits for example) and not racism or gender discrimination. In other words: what if that economic leverage doesn’t exist? Or, as you mentioned, when the wider political atmosphere is particularly hostile, as it is today? 

IO: I think it depends on where you are, but certainly in the United States, in Germany, in the UK, you’re not going to be very successful when the government is also supportive of arming folks who are carrying out genocide. And so if you don’t even have leverage with your own government, then you’re not going to have the kind of leverage you need with shareholders. 

You certainly aren’t going to have leverage inside the companies with the individuals who are making money off by arming attackers in a genocide and arming those like the Israeli government, like the Russian government, like the UAE that is operating in Sudan. 

Yeah, it’s all really terrible and so I think part of why there has to be global engagement and global connections between activists is that even though we’re not able to do much in the US, our folks who are in Ireland and able to put pressure on a government that actually agrees that genocide is wrong is then able to leverage pressure. Because many of these companies have international headquarters in Dublin. All of it is connected and so we have to be working together to figure out where there’s the ability and where’s the political space to put pressure on the companies, even if it’s not directly from the US, directly from the UK, directly from Germany. 

EDA: You said that one of the lessons we should learn in Europe while observing the US is that things can indeed get worse from one day to another. But trends are quite clear. Things are already getting worse here too: far right parties are winning or at least gaining consensus; freedom of speech is being repressed, and welfare eroded. In this context, how would you think your practical approach should be adapted? 

IO: The answer is always the same: to diversify the approach. And I think it also means working with different types of activists. So I think in the advocacy space, we’re so good at siloing ourselves. Like: ‘oh, I’m the group that works on human rights’, ‘I’m the group that works on immigration issues’, ‘I’m the environmental advocate’, when all of these things are connected. 

And so folks need to be working together. If a labor action is able to get things moving in France, then that’s the type of action you need to do. If environmental issues are more salient in Germany, then you can use different parts of the activism ecosystem to target the same companies and to target the government in different ways. 

You know It’s so interesting that World War II was not that long ago. So in theory, it shouldn’t be curious to people that fascism can take over in Europe in general, country by country and very quickly. History is not that separated from us and yet two generations past people completely forget what happened in their own countries, even if some of the people who witnessed those events are still alive. 

And so for me it is really infuriating that we can be so close to it and people can still act like, oh, there’s no way that it could happen here. 

EDA: During the conversation with Tammarrian Rogers, I really liked when you said that change in tech companies doesn’t pass only through those who are strictly “tech workers” but also other worker figures, with smaller wages and rights. So here are two separated questions: where are we in terms of organising across different types of workers in the tech industry? And, second: across different countries?

IO: I think the companies understand exactly how important it is, and that’s the reason why they’ve worked so hard to silo groups. So that, even in one company, you may literally not be able to reach out to and communicate or engage with folks who are doing work for the same company because they’re using countless different contracting agencies. 

The primary mechanism that they’ve used was to ensure that their engineers aren’t able to be in communication with even the data labelers who are ensuring that they’re able to feed all of this information into a large language model. So it is incredibly important that folks working on the coding of these systems understand that their work would be impossible without the people making cents a day, cents an hour in Kenya and in Bangladesh and in other places to label the information. 

But the companies have ensured that there isn’t the ability to directly communicate. And that’s where I think journalists actually have a huge role to play because they’re the ones who help to tell these stories. Like Time Magazine did a huge series on the Kenyan data labelers who have been doing both content moderation for companies like Meta and then the ones who are now doing a lot of the labeling for Large Language Models (LLMs). 

And the same for folks in Venezuela and in South America who are doing a lot of the labeling for these systems and looking at really horrific content because the companies know that no one would be willing to do it in Western Europe or in the United States, and certainly not at the pay that they’re able to exploit people with in these other countries. 

EDA: Are there no more traditional initiatives from below, like labor unions? 

IO: Not organizing, unfortunately, but I do know that there are a number of organizations like Tech Equity in the United States and others who have been doing reports. And they actually worked with a large labor union in the United States to do a report on how people in this chain of work are being exploited. 

But it’s next to impossible to do old school organizing because they’re not even at the same company. So the way that the companies have set up this work is you may work for OpenAI, but the people doing the data labeling are at 10 different contracted agencies so that the company can state legally that they never actually hired these people. They were just hiring the work through a contract with X, Y, Z agency. 

EDA: I want to finish the interview asking you about sci-fi writer Octavia Butler. In 2020 you founded a consulting firm, Earthseed, whose name is inspired by a political-religious movement in the novel “Parable of the Sower”. What place does she have in your work? 

IO: When you read Octavia Butler, it looks like she knew it all. I mean, if I believed in time traveling, she is surely an example of someone who has time traveled because she knew exactly what would happen and how it would happen. And that’s why her work moved me so much. But the core tenant of Earthseed in the books is that God is ‘change’. If anything is true, it is that things will change and we have our own role to play in changing things. 

And so that really is what I have believed in, that like so many of us can feel overwhelmed by the fact that so many horrible things are happening all of the time and what power do we have as individuals to change it. And what I really took away from her writing and what I try to live with day to day is that I can’t change absolutely everything but I can change small things that I have the ability to touch. 

So in my case, I have a background in political science and public policy and I know how laws are made. That is one thing that I can do. Can I change Hollywood? No. I have no experience in that. Can I go and change who becomes the president? I don’t have billions of dollars, so I don’t have the ability to buy the next president, unlike someone else. 

But where I can, in my own small space with my own expertise and my own networks, make changes, that is what I’m committed to. 

We all need to step up because I feel a lot of the power of authoritarians is in making people feel powerless. That there’s absolutely nothing that individuals have the ability to do, so they might as well just go along with what is happening to them and around them. 

The post Breaking the Code of Silence: Workers Rights and Systemic Change in Tech – A Conversation with Ifeoma Ozoma appeared first on Untold.