Panopticon :3 feat. Cory Doctorow

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE — Episode: "Panopticon :3" feat. Cory Doctorow

Date: February 10, 2026
Guests: Cory Doctorow
Hosts: Hussain Alkhateeb, Nate, Riley, and others

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Overview

This episode presents an incisive, witty exploration of the intersection of technological ambition, political decay, and dystopian business practices, featuring guest Cory Doctorow. The hosts dissect everything from NEOM-inspired urban planning grifts, Labour Party power plays, Amazon's surveillance capitalism, and Elon Musk’s latest empire-building PR stunts—unpacking how tech hype, monopoly consolidation, and political malaise are shaping today’s (and tomorrow’s) world.

The conversation moves fluidly from satirical urban design in the UK, through Labour party intrigue and the enduring banality of “Epsteinism”, to Amazon’s Ring surveillance campaigns and Musk’s consolidations around X, XAI, and Starlink—culminating in a detailed critique of the geopolitical implications of tech platform monopolies. The tone is irreverent, analytical, sometimes exasperated, and always deeply skeptical of “solutions” proposed by the elite for problems of their own making.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. NEOM, "The Loop", and Satirical Urbanism

(00:16–08:11)

• News Item: Architect Chris Williamson proposes a "Loop"—a massive high-speed rail connecting nine UK and Irish cities, explicitly “inspired by NEOM.”
• Hosts’ Reaction: The crew lampoons the architecture world's obsession with grand visualizations and the fantasy logic of Neom-style projects (“Like Lord of the Rings, it keeps ending and then there's another ending.” – Hussain, 00:16).
• NEOM’s Real Output: Williamson’s work on NEOM amounted only to visualizations, not actual public infrastructure. (Cory: “The idea of building anything, let alone public infrastructure in the UK is kind of a joke anyway…” – 02:54)
• SimCity/Infinite Money Analogy: “Saudi Arabia is the closest that anyone can come to playing SimCity with the infinite money cheat.” (Riley, 03:20)
• Satirical British Snowpiercer: Imagining Britain’s own endless, useless train line (“…train is the only dry land and everything is wet…” – Riley, 03:42)

2. Labour Party Drama & Epsteinism, “Managing Decline”

(08:11–25:43)

• Epstein File Fallout: Morgan McSweeney’s ouster sparks discussion on Labour’s internal rot and ties to unsavory powerbrokers. (“It is…amusing to think…it's so a group of friends…with a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's…could have a go at doing what he did…” – Hussain, 08:06)
• Labour's Gen X Stasis: Panel critiques the party’s out-of-date Blairism and penchant for endless briefings and backbiting.
• “Epsteinism” Concept: Riley and Hussain suggest Starmerism (and various centrist ideologies) are forms of Epsteinism, i.e., “managing decline for profit” by well-connected insiders. (“Starmerism and Trumpism are just Epsteinism...the amount of Obama high-level…all over the island…” – Hussain, 21:09)
• Labour’s Self-Inflicted Limitation: Characterized as draining their own “candidate pool” by fixating on internal purges over true political strategy.

3. Amazon Ring, Surveillance & AI Hype

(25:49–40:44)

• Amazon’s Palantir: Hosts share Brian Merchant’s reporting on Amazon as a core infrastructure supplier for U.S. security agencies (“Amazon is providing the technical architecture to the Federal Security State, ICE, NSA, Pentagon…” – Hussain, 26:52)
• Ring AI “Search Party” for Dogs: The new feature is parodied mercilessly for its dystopian PR (“…all the ring cameras in the neighborhood being activated—the white flight panopticon, basically.” – Riley, 30:23)
• Verhoeven Parody / AI Weirdness: The ad’s uncanny, AI-generated feel is highlighted as both sinister and absurd.
• Data Sharing & Encryption Skepticism: Cory’s CES encounter reveals Ring managers often cannot explain where user data goes or if it’s genuinely encrypted. (“I was like…where does the ring data go?...tell me about your ring data. Is…do you make it available to law enforcement?” – Cory, 28:14)
• Imperial Boomerang: Comparisons are drawn to South African gated community surveillance, returning to UK/US suburbia.

4. Elon Musk: Shell Games, "Everything Apps," Space Data Centers

(41:26–56:14)

• Data Centers in Space: Hosts dissect how “data centers in space” are another manifestation of Silicon Valley’s science fiction-fueled wishful thinking, using sci-fi concepts (Dyson Spheres, Kardashev scale) to justify dubious investments.
  • “The only thing you do if you want to have the heat leave a vessel is you surround it with vacuum. We call that a thermos.” (Nate, 43:47)
• X, XAI, and SpaceX Mergers:
  • The move to bind Musk’s companies together is seen not as strategic but as a panicked improvisation:
  • “He just has his shells and the shells have money and he has to keep moving all the money around between the different shells.” (Hussain, 50:12)
• “Running Across Alligators” Analogy: Musk is famed for barely staying ahead of disaster by constantly moving liabilities (“He is the all-time master of running across a river on the back of alligators without losing a leg.” – Nate, 51:07)
• Starlink & Infrastructure Monopoly: Musk’s control of satellite internet is dissected as a slow-motion monopoly in communications, especially critical in war zones or remote areas.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• NEOM Satire:
  “Should we be as ambitious about our future as they were in Saudi Arabia? …Should we be that ambitious? I know we’re an oil-producing country, but not that much.” – Hussain (04:06)
• Ring Surveillance:
  “When there's an alert, you push the button and every camera will look for this person...We're going to identify them.” – Riley (31:55)
• Epsteinism:
  “Starmerism and Trumpism are just Epsteinism. It's the same ideology…profit from managed decline.” – Hussain (21:09)
• Space Data Center Scepticism:
  “Famously, the thing that you do if you want to have the heat leave a vessel is you surround it with vacuum. We call that a thermos.” – Nate (43:47)
• Musk’s Tactics:
  “He is the all time master of running across a river on the back of alligators without losing a leg.” – Nate (51:07)
• On State Resistance:
  “If they're sending the gendarme for you because you're a pervert, like that...That should really make you have a look at yourself.” – Cory Doctorow (65:31)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• NEOM/“The Loop” Parody: 00:16–08:11
• UK Labour, Epsteinism, Political Decay: 08:11–25:43
• Amazon Ring Surveillance/AI Dystopia: 25:49–40:44
• 2000 Dotcom Ads/Marketing Excess: 39:10–41:12
• Elon Musk’s Shell Games, Data Centers in Space: 41:26–53:55
• Tech Monopolies, Geopolitics, EU/France vs. Musk: 55:08–66:14
• Legal and Policy Dragnet Closing on X/Twitter: 68:46–73:28
• Closing Satire and Banter: 74:46–End

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Geopolitics & Tech Sovereignty

(56:14–66:14)

• State Resistance: French authorities raid X offices due to platform’s failures to moderate abusive content and illegal AI-generated images. Symbolic break from passive European deference to U.S. tech dominance.
• Cory's Policy Proposal: Instead of just suing, EU states should legalize jailbreaking Twitter/X—allowing creation of alternate clients that skip advertising/slop content, breaking U.S. platform ad monopolies at the root.
• Broader Trend: Discussion of crumbling trust in U.S. as a neutral provider of core infrastructure, and the dangers of “abdicating” sovereignty over essential comms and cloud infrastructure.

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Conclusion & Tone

The episode ends on a characteristically darkly comic note, underscoring both the “psychic trauma” of technological/ political dystopia and the podcast’s mission to at least make it all bitterly funny. Episode ranges from detailed policy critique to wild satire (“if you want to get to Glasgow from Leeds...actually go to Ireland and come back”—Riley, 04:41).

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For Listeners New & Old

• This episode offers deep dives into current events, tech skepticism, and British institutional fatigue, all layered with dry wit and anger at the status quo.
• Cory Doctorow delivers insider policy insight on tech infrastructure, surveillance, and political power, while the hosts puncture the hype cycles and hollow ambitions of “innovation” capitalism, always returning to the implications for ordinary people.

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Want more?

• Bonus: They also recorded an episode on the (lamentable) Melania movie for subscribers; consider for even more psychic damage.
• For additional detail: See timestamps above and refer to the quotables for highlights.

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Transcript

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

All right, look, I'm aware that this is neom epilogue part like 1 million. But this is like Lord of the Rings. I can't stop. It keeps ending and then there's another ending. And. And I need to emphasize to all of you, this is tf. It's the free episode. And we got Cory Doctorow in studio today.

[Nate]

Hello.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I need to emphasize to all of you, all of you listening, that this is from an article in Dizzeen dated February 6th of this year is the Royal Institute of British Architects president Chris Williamson Different. Chris Williamson has proposed linking nine northern cities in Britain and Ireland with a structure he calls the Loop, a raised high speed railway informed by Neom.

[Riley]

So they're going to build the circle? Having built the line.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, the line.

[Nate]

The cube. The circle.

[Riley]

The Circle is going to be like a nice little ribbon around the Irish Sea. Famously great weather all the time.

[Nate]

It's a square with an infinite number of corners.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Really, how do you say our ambitious project that we're proposing as a sort of a thought experiment is inspired by Neom? If you want it to be anything.

[Nate]

Well, it's a bit like. And we're going to have it in the Metaverse.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

God says. Described by Williamson as a manifesto to inspire and provoke, the Loop would connect the English cities of Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bangor, Dublin and Belfast. And like, yes, I know that like, when architects do these things, right, they're trying to make a statement. But if your statement is we were inspired by Neom, what is your statement other than please can another government give us infinite millions?

[Nate]

Well, a bit like when a well meaning elderly relative knows that you're really into say, Dungeons and Dragons and shows up with a bunch of miniatures for a different game and says, you know, or like, like the horse piece from Monopoly and says, I saw you playing with these and I thought you'd like them.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Of course, when I was reading this, I was like, okay, what?

[Corey Doctorow]

What?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Why? Why have you done this? And then it was like, oh, okay. Williamson's firm worked on Neom. They are out of fucking clients. They have law. They've lost a big one.

[Nate]

No, no, they're Leverag.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

He says, maybe I've been too influenced by the scale, vision and ambition of Neom's the Line in Saudi Arabia. Having worked on the high speed stations running alongside the 170 kilometer long city for the last few years. What is he living in the Metaverse? What the fuck are you talking about? There never was a city. You never worked on high speed rail. All you did was make fucking visualizations.

[Corey Doctorow]

That's probably what he means though, because it's just like, look, you know, let's just like sort of be real here. Like, the idea of building anything, let alone like public infrastructure in the UK is kind of a joke anyway, right? But like, one thing you can do is be like, well, I had a great time in Saudi Arabia not doing anything except for like making visualizations of which I could sort of make the train go as fast as I wanted. And I would like to do that in Britain because I'm going to be not having a job in Saudi Arabia pretty soon.

[Riley]

I also like the idea too that Saudi Arabia is the closest that anyone can come to playing SimCity with the infinite money cheat. And so now he's just like, well, I've got this idea I've wanted since I was a kid. What if you made a train run in a circle, but huge and so why not? You know, why not?

[Nate]

You think he's doing mmt?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I think maybe he's doing British Snowpiercer. Yeah, I think British Pierce.

[Riley]

British Snowpiercer is basically the train is the only dry land and everything is wet. Just like you have to find a way to survive.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

British Snowpiercer doesn't. Sorry, spoilers for Snowpiercer. British Snowpiercer doesn't disguise the fact that the children are working to replace the parts of the train that keep Britain. But they also did defund the guards with the bullets.

[Nate]

I don't know, this monorail is more of a Scotland idea, so.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

But we in Britain should be as ambitious about our future as they were in Saudi Arabia. It is like, should we, should we be, should we be that ambitious? I know we're an oil producing country, but not that much. At present. The government seems to expect each city to compete for the same investment funding, but we need to encourage connectivity and collaboration. And yes, that's true, but I just go back to why would you be like, you know what's amazing? That statue of Ozymandias that's towering above the desert, that wonderful, complete statue of Ozymandias, two vast and trunked legs of stone.

[Riley]

It kind of also implies, it's like you would presume that it's going to be in either direction if this were a thing that was realistic. But then it's like that would seem to imply a lot of people would have to go way out of their way to get to where they're going, because it would still be faster than network rail somehow. And it's like I'd like to get to Gladys Glasgow from Leeds, I guess so. I don't know. The train is sold out in the way I want to go. So I've got to actually go to Ireland and come back. It's like when British Airways, if your flight gets canceled and they automatically book you and it's like, oh, you're going to go to Diego Garcia first and then you're going to fly back to Heathrow. It's like I realized you were just trying to get to Manchester, but it'll work eventually.

[Nate]

It's going to be like this Circle Line. You're just going to. You're going to think you can go all the way around, but you have to get off at Edgware Road every fucking time.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, we've actually. Look, here's the bad news. We've routed you to Tristan da Cunha. Good news, they are really looking to stop inbreeding there. So you are going to be very popular.

[Riley]

This guy basically was so happy to not get fit inside a suitcase in Saudi Arabia that he just basically had like a duckling imprinting experience as soon as he got back to the UK and he was dealing with the inter terminal train at Heathrow and he's like, I've got such a great idea. Absolutely. Like this, this is, this is human future right here. All right, we found a way to make, finally Ireland will be connected in a way that's meaningful.

[Nate]

Although that loop only does go one way. It just goes clockwise.

[Riley]

That is true.

[Nate]

So you would have to stay on all the way back to London around.

[Riley]

Maybe that's how he's going to achieve those efficiencies he's talking about. You only can go in one direction.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Look, I'm sorry I fired in here with huge energy. It's just when I read and I was like, there's a lot of news going on here. We've got someone as a guest who's expert on like tech policy and so on. But I was like, no, I must address this because I need to contemplate the mind that says, I would like to put NEOM on my public CV please, as a sort of example of what we can accomplish. I guess we could accomplish a lot of what they accomplished in Britain. We just have to dig a big trench. That would be, I guess, kill a bunch of people. That would be it.

[Nate]

Chief engineer on the Tacoma Washington Bridge.

[Riley]

Yeah, I feel like this is basically the logical endpoint of the kid who had the infinite money sheet in SimCity, whereas the people making the renderings were a different kind of kid with a computer who were at the same time making what you might describe as erotic spheres and cylinders in 3D studio max. And so it's like in either direction, you wind up doing something you'll eventually regret. But in this case, it's like people, I guess, are obligated to talk about it in the news like it's serious, much like Neom. So.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

And you know what? We all know that we were cursed by that old woman for not carrying water for her from the well. And now we have to talk about it. Also.

[Riley]

I cannot wait to eat crow on this. I can't wait to ride on the world's worst, I don't know, centripetal force thing. Sort of reverse centrifuge, I guess. I don't know. I'm gonna. I'm gonna experience a lot of Irish weather. You know what I'll be. I'm trying to think of those like, sort of like public shame tours where people like, I was wrong about a thing and they have to go like vlog from it or whatever. And so that's just gon. I'm going to live on the British. The British Circle train like it is Snowpiercer.

[Nate]

It'll be cheaper than rent.

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

What you're going to have to do, because it's going to go if it goes high enough speed and is constantly turning. Also, if it never at any point goes straight and is constantly turning. I don't know. I haven't seen the detailed designs. Then you'll be helpfully separated into all of your particles by weight. You've always wanted to be organized by weight.

[Riley]

Exactly. I'm seeking that level of efficiency in my life.

[Nate]

You have to wear a compression suit to prevent bruising on one side.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

We actually have a lot to talk about today. But it's like, no, there's a. Someone is dumb about Neom. I have a duty.

[Nate]

I mean, have you considered that maybe he ate too much Tylenol and became very interested in trains?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

God damn it. All right, rfk. Anyway, look, we got Corey in the house today. And what that means is I've been wanting to talk about some new Elon developments that have to do with the ownership of technological infrastructure and all of this. But we had to do our traditional 10 minute sacrifice to Neom. And also I have a little bit of news I want to get into. First news item. The first, and this is a little bit UK politics, but Morgan McSweeney is out. I can't believe it. I can't believe that the, the revelation of the Epstein files in the United States has caused what seems to be political consequences in every country other. Every English speaking country other than the United States, or at least mainly here and Westminster insiders are now talking amongst themselves about when Starmer will fall. And it is, you know, somewhat amusing to think like, okay, I guess this is what it was all for. It was so a group of friends who are linked together by a common association with a friend of Jeffrey Epstein's at 1 or 2 degrees of Remove could have a go at doing what he did in the 90s, but under a totally different set of political and economic circumstances and without a charismatic figurehead. So I guess this was predictable.

[Riley]

Well, also sort of like everyone has seen the photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Manelson apparently shopping for belts together. Like that's just old hat at this point. It's been all over the Internet, everyone knew about this and it was just sort of like when it was brought up it was either that's rude or like, oh, you don't understand real politics, you child. It's like, well, at some point this is probably going to look bad. Every single one of you is going to have to pretend to be shocked at a thing that everyone knew. And it's like, I guess in a way with McSweeney, I'm glad because beyond the fact that I guess I should feel bad for whatever local council he goes to go bankrupt next. But the degree to which everything about McSweeney seemed to be. I'm here to own the left. I'm here to make sure everyone who was excited by labor under Corbyn dies. And the fact that he's also kind of got caught up in this thing he's implicated means at least there's going to be some degree of, well, whoever it is that they're paying to investigate, every left wing journalist in Britain is going to be out of a paycheck. And that makes me happy. They probably had to, they had to do a deep dive on us. They're probably like, they seem to have some link between Swedish guys who are Italian. I'm really, I'm really confused and it's.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Like I think they're on the Saudi's payroll. They talk about Neom an awful lot.

[Riley]

There's not a lot. I don't know how many cast members there are. There's so many voices and so, yeah, like, you know what I mean?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Can we check if that South Africans working here legally.

[Riley]

So yeah, at the end of the day, like Fuck to Peter Mandelson, fuck to Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmer. And it's just like, because also, like I said before, none of this is a grand revelation. This was all known mostly publicly, and surely the details were known within the sort of Westminster not noticing circle.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Well, you know what?

[Riley]

You know what?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

We can find out about this all on. Check this out. I'm pitching. Okay, Gary Lineker, if you're listening, I have a podcast pitch for you. Both Morgan McSweeney and Dominic Cummings are available. You could call it, you could call it the power behind the throne. You could call it behind number 10. And then they could talk about all of the batshit, completely left field nonsense ideas they had about running the country. And then like 60,000 of like, slightly more right wing dads than listen to the Alistair Campbell, Rory Stewart 1. The rest is politics. Then they can go fill the O2 arena. Come on.

[Nate]

Svengali's Corner.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Svengali's Corner. Perfect. See? Okay, Gary Lineker, give me half a million pounds.

[Riley]

I mean, like, but the thing is, is that to me, I don't necessarily know if there's going to be any actual lesson learned here, but the thing that always struck me with these guys was that, like, the degree to which Mandelson and McSweeney and all the labor. Right, like, what is it? Labor first are so tied in with the kind of like, the people who are convinced that militant tendency still exists and it's infecting the labor for, like, they're, they haven't updated their conception of, like, who would have supported Corbyn and left wing politics and labor and since the early 80s, even if, like, they're literally younger than me, it's like you have to get jumped into being an old Gen Xer to be in the Labor Party. Like, you have to, you have to watch only Fools and Horses. You have to watch Citizen Smith. You have to care about that shit. And like, I just, it boggles my mind. And it's like, that is. That's one side. The other side is like, instead of the sugar tax, what if we just put botulism in sugar drinks? Like, that'll solve the problem. Like it's a psychotic. It's like the politics of taking, like, the mosquito speaker that, like, annoys teens with a loud noise to like, a much, much higher degree. And it's like, that's only ideas they've got.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Okay, I have a. I want to build on one question here, which is I've now been gnawing at me. Since you said it, Nate, how would you get jumped into being Gen X? Would you get the shit beaten out of you with Douglas Copeland books?

[Nate]

I am the sole Gen Xer on this call and I feel both seen and attacked. I mean, I think you have to be tied up with an old Violent Femmes cassette and then beaten with a. With a Douglas Copeland book.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Absolutely.

[Riley]

I feel as though like there's a specific kind of weird, like, like right wing by default British Gen Xer who is like, I don't understand what it is, but the tone, the cant of the people that wind up being in the circle, even if they're born in the 90s or later, they all basically have to adopt this mode of Blairism. And it's sort of like people who probably were starting their political careers or either right during that era, right after. And it's just so odd because it never updates. They literally are like, oh, when Corbyn was Labor leader, like, oh, we have the secret trot hunting mission. It's.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Although I'll say it updated one time. It updated exactly one time. And that was between 2003 and 5, when all of those guys needed to harden around support for the Iraq war. And so they all became totally Harry's Place ified. They all became agro, more aggro than an American liberal.

[Riley]

It's also very funny because, like the thing that they like glomming onto this idea, like the perfect labor leader and the perfect labor policy is Neil Kinnick. It's like, right, that would have been like glomming on to Joe Biden before he actually became president, when all he was famous for was constantly not getting the Democratic nomination. It's like Neil Kinnick famously lost all the time. And it's just like, it's such a strange, like American Gen Xers, North American Gen Xers. I feel as though, like not quite as implicated, even if in the US at least, like, statistically speaking, they're pretty right wing in Britain. It's just this odd. I don't know, Riley, you've perceived it too.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

They're more condescending about it. And I mean also like, yeah, being like basing everything around Kinnick and the people that evolved from him is quite a bit like, as you say, being like, yeah, but Biden is so good at giving tax breaks to cred card companies and he shows up almost every, almost half the time. But like the various labor insiders that are now all over the lobby just because they'll only ever brief against the powerful when the Powerful. Have one hit point left, right? And they're all briefing. Okay, well, Starmer's done. And they say, oh, actually, the writing's been on the wall for a long time. You just didn't ask me about it and I just hid it from you. Again, no one's saying, hey, why is the. Why didn't anyone talk about that? And one again, unnamed labor insider says, oh, it was done when a U turn on welfare cuts last year. And fine, sure. That's. That's what all this was in service of. Right. He was going to show purpose and resolve. And the purpose was largely to 80% continue the work of Rishi Sunak. And the thing is, like, that actually does take resolve because. But it's.

[Nate]

It's wildly unpopular.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, it takes resolve to be that hated.

[Nate]

Right.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

You know, you. You have to, like, get up every single day and do things that, that the. You're a small group of powerful people, like, but that you have to hear every single day that you are failing, that you can't fix anything, that you're basically. You're a sacrificial king, essentially.

[Nate]

You know, you describe this, and I'm hearing the voice of an anthropologist I used to date in my head talking about how it's not until there is a secret is in the open that everyone can acknowledge that they know it and that everyone feels this way and that there's this kind of tipping point. I mean, I do think that what you're describing is an actual phenomenon. It may in fact be that they all secretly thought he was cooked for 10 months. And it wasn't until it was okay to say it that they all said, oh, you think he's cooked too?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I just think it would be so cool.

[Riley]

Cool.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Okay, I'm going to propose a kind of job, right? That would be. It'd be great if we had someone whose job is to go and find that out and then maybe write it down and then get that out to people.

[Nate]

I think if you had a parliamentary fess hole, they could just. Each of them just in the fess hole, they could write it and they could see what other people think.

[Corey Doctorow]

This is the thing they do. They do. Because there's like. But the fesshole is like, what, like various WhatsApp groups, right? And this is it, because it's like, listeners of the show will know, but I have, like, parliamentary insiders as a result of, like, some certain connections that I will not say, but are fairly obvious. And the point is that everyone knew from the start that this guy was completely cooked, right? But also everyone, even who did not. You didn't need to have these inside connections in order to sort of realize that, right? It was very obvious from the start. And so one of the very. One of the most frustrating things that has sort of been the case for the past couple of years has been the fact that everyone sort of knows what's going to happen. Everyone knows the circumstances in which Keir Starmer took power. Everyone knows sort of how we got to where we got to. But as with everything to do with British media, it's like you don't really get permission to say the thing until certain people who are deemed to be important by the nature of where they sit in Westminster palace, for the most part, acknowledges the thing that you reach, like, the conclusion you reached, like, years ago, right? And if you bring it up, they'll yell at you or they'll block you or they'll sort of, like, say that you're stupid and they'll dismiss you. And again, like, so much of it is incredibly condescending. And I also say this as someone who used to work in various newsrooms where in theory, if you work in the same room as them, you're like, oh, I have a right to say what I think is fairly obvious only to be told to go fuck yourself and that you're stupid and that you don't know anything and you don't get the lobby pass, you don't get the discount on the cheap food or whatever. And so what the fuck do you know? And this has been incredibly frustrating for the Starmer administration because so much of the Starmer government, rather, because so. So much of the incompetence and so much of the kind of conclusion, the thing that we've reached to now has been sort of so evident for so long because none of them were particularly good, right? I think there is this sort of sense that this was going to be the second act of, or the third act of New labor, rather. And by which I mean that there was this idea that, oh, you have these kind of competent operators inside who are not necessarily the adults in the room, but they know how to sort of do political strategy, right? If the property problem with the Tories was that they were too busy sort of backbiting each other and they were too busy stabbing each other in the back, then the Labour Party would do the same thing, but they'd be smarter and more cunning about it. But the thing is, all these people were fucking idiots, right? And they were idiots right from the start. And at Least with the Tory parties, there was at least some sense of an ideological line. Even if that was sort of fragmented and thwarted by the post Brexit consensus, there was at least some degree of ideological coherence, which was just not the case over here. What you have were political opportunists whose kind of only purpose was to sort of get rid of a faction within their own party. They achieved it successfully. And the story afterwards. And again, I want to just make this final point, which is that the thing that actually still isn't being acknowledged, which I think is probably the most important part of the story, is the eradication of the left of the party and the disingenuous ways in which that happened and has continued to happen and is still very much in place right now. Because to do that, you then have to sort of acknowledge that things such as, I don't know, the kind of formal definition of. Of anti Semitism was kind of completely politically charged and also used for very directly political purposes. And the best kind of way that you can frame that is that they threw a religious minority, they threw a religious group under the bus in order to sort of achieve this tactuous political. Do you know? Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense?

[Nate]

Yeah, I mean, someday everyone will have always been against this.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I don't think they will be against.

[Corey Doctorow]

It because the fists of finger, like the British, they're so fucking arrogant that they won't be like, no, actually, Keir Starmer will get knocked. Keir Sama and his whole fucking political project will kind of collapse and they'll come onto like Sunday morning tv, like a couple of weeks afterwards and say that actually everything they did was completely right and that they have no regrets about it. They will not regret it because the truth is they lack humility. They kind of feel driven entirely by ego. They are driven entirely by resentment. There is no semblance in that faction of the Parsi, or indeed the Parsi as a whole, that there is any appetite for self reflection or humility.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Well, that would be toxic to what they're really supposed to do, which is, is maintain one half of the ratchet. And the thing is, like I'm now on the previous bonus episode, I referred to Starmerism as identical to Epsteinism, right? Where it is the continuing project of Epsteinism, where Epsteinism is where you manage decline. And we talked about one of his emails to Steve Bannon saying it's better if things are in decline, because actually, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, excuse me. Message to Peter Thiel. That's like, you know, when things are in decline you can profit from it. This is pretty good.

[Nate]

It's easier than finding bargains, than to buy the collapse.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

And you know, if you can think of political projects of managed decline that are taken on in different faces by connected associates of Jeffrey Epstein, you can see that Starmerism and Trumpism are just Epsteinism. It's the same ideology, just two different halves of it. And you know, it's a loosely connected group of wealthy insiders, many of whom are perverts, can profit from it. So Starmerism was Epsteinism. So is Clintonism, Blairism, Obama ism, Trumpism, like the amount of Obama high level Obama policymaking insights who were also all over the island. Mandelson was on the island. Fucking Trump himself was on the island.

[Riley]

Well also, I mean like the degree to which Obama, like a lot of Obama's campaign people wound up helping Theresa May, like basically working for the Tory party in Britain. Like it did definitely make this notion of that there's like, there's a certain kind of elite consensus. And I mean it also implies that if Starmerism is Epsteinism that like, are there going to be weird emails if there's ever kind of Starmer leaks where he's like, I, I see what you're doing, Varg Fickerness. I think you've got some great ideas for Britain. Like what kind of rabbit hole holes is he going down? I think it's worth remembering too. It's like Starmer was elected for the first time to represent Holborn in st Pancras in 2015. He was in 2015 because he was in the Shadow Cabinet. He famously resigned after the Brexit vote. He basically, his role was to be the people's vote person to kind of spite Corbyn in 2019. You remember the labor conference, he added the line about there's going to be basically a second referendum. There's so much where it's felt like he's always been kind of there to be a sort of foil or a spoiler. Then it's like, well no, now you have to actually be in charge. And it's like you'd think that from becoming labor leader in what was April 2020 until becoming Prime Minister in 2024, there might have been some degree of like you do have to kind of have some notion of what you're going to do. And it's like, I guess the best way I can describe Starmers and from my perspective is it's like deeply unpopular. 2005 Blair, who still won the election is like, fuck you. I'm gonna do whatever I want. It's like, but you can't kind of do that. I mean, my opinion, after 14 years of decline where people are like, we hate the Tories so much that we're actually gonna throw out the default country. It's like, because things have gotten so bad and you're like, actually, they were all really good.

[Nate]

Yeah.

[Riley]

You're not gonna. You're not. It's not gonna win people. It's certainly not gonna give you, I don't know, political mandate.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

He's reheated Blair from 2005, which is again, just like, peter, stop, get off your computer and come help me. I don't care who you're emailing. But also like, who will be the inheritor of Epsteinism in the uk? Because fucking Streeting has no. He has no friends. Al Cairns, he's in the Arctic. Nobody knows who he is.

[Riley]

I love the idea, like, you have to have a basic level of friends to get invited to be a Je Epstein's inner circle. So West Reading desperately wants to, but could never. Because he's like, no, he's just too off putting something like basically the fucking dark art circle of perverts. Like, that guy is just too weird.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

But also when I'm talking about Epsteinism, right, It's like what Peter Mandelson was doing every time he was invited to basically be in charge of the Labour Party was advance kind of the same ideological agenda. And that's the left half of Epsteinism, which is this is as progressive as it's allowed to get. Get right before it gets. It gets broken and then handed off to the people who are going to make the actual political changes that push things further to the right. That's what Streeting is the candidate for. I think it's actually. I am going to start calling these people the Epsteinist political movement. That Streeting is the Epsteinist candidate. In that sense, it doesn't matter if you didn't know him. That's the politics he's continuing. That's the politics he represents. And so. So, you know, this is. What are they going to do? They don't have one because the guy they chose to be their continuity candidate, they forgot to pick a guy who's like, at least, as you say, Nate, minimally likable.

[Nate]

Yeah.

[Riley]

I mean, the man. It's so funny because they're like, oh, he looks like a politician. He looks like a politician. And also your dad, does he remember in 2019. They're like, Starmer's got such great hair. He looks like a World War II RAF pilot. And then you hear him talk and he's just like, bollocks.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Like, he's Sean Kerry.

[Nate]

He's British. Sean Kerry.

[Riley]

Yeah. That's a great comparison.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, we need British hair.

[Riley]

But like, all things considered, John Gary.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

At least did something.

[Riley]

Keir Sarma just kind of appeared out of somewhere. You're just like, you'll, you'll do, you'll do, you'll do for us to fucking throw a spader in the cockshat.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, I want to move on to one. So a little, a little, a little more. A little more news, but fuck. To the Labor Party. Good luck picking from your very narrow puddle. You know what it is? You forced too many people to drink from the puddle and now you do not have a deep enough pool.

[Nate]

You drain the puddle.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

You drain the puddle, you fucking idiots. You're supposed to not drink from it. That's where you get your people, by not drinking from the fucking puddle.

[Riley]

Yeah, exactly. The next people to do Oxford PPE can't spawn in the puddle if you train entirely.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So this is what I want to talk about as well. And I'm almost slightly annoyed because I had this bookmark to talk with you about before they had a fucking super bowl ad and everyone got mad at them. This is of course the newest invention from Ring, AKA Amazon Surveillance Solutions. I want to quote from friend of the show and frequent guest Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine blog before we get into it. This is his article about the relationship between Amazon and ice. Basically, the point is there's more than one Palantir in the us it's just one. Also sells books and it's worth knowing about books and also does all of the digital infrastructure for a huge amount of the services that you consume and is basically impossible to boycott. This is the selection of a larger article about Bezos flattering and appeasing Trump, including Bezos gutting the Washington Post. Again, it seems like maybe allowing this kind of ideological vertical integration as a throwback to Hearst was maybe not the greatest idea. But let's let me read what Brian has to say. Amazon is providing the technical architecture to the Federal Security State, ice, nsa, Pentagon and many others that is actively enabling the state to surveil residents of the United States and to conduct its ongoing campaigns of violence, including of American citizens marked as domestic terrorists, which includes an ever expanding group of people like Renee Good who are community organizers, protesters and legal observers. Tom Honan Trump's border czar has even called for the creation of databases of anyone opposing or interfering with DHS actions. So with that in mind, what if you got that? But there was also an AI generated video about people finding lost dogs. So have you, have you all seen the super bowl ad?

[Nate]

Yeah, well, and I, I saw them demo this at CES with Ed Zitron as well. So Ed and I walked the floor at CES and we walked down out of the hotel and into the lobby and into the conference area and there was a special Amazon room that they had marked out for themselves. And there was a barker out front coming like going, hey guys, I see your press badges come on in here. So we walk in, we're kind of meowing.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

How come there's this red liquid coming out of sluice at the bottom?

[Nate]

And you know, we're wandering around and, and we see the ring flagpole which is like, it's like a, an extendable mast on a trailer. That's like a 20 foot mast with a kind of ring studded sphere at the top.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

It's always fucking spheres. I swear to God.

[Nate]

It's a totally cool multi pure per shape. So, so we're looking at it and this guy comes up and I almost felt bad for him because he was like, I am the product manager for Sphere. Do you. Or for, for Sphere, for Ring. Do you have any questions? And like I was like, I, I wasn't gonna bug you, but. But since you asked, where does the ring data go? Like, tell me about your ring data. Is, is do you make it available to law enforcement? Do you require war warrant? And he said, well, why are you asking about that? And I said, well, you know, I wrote about ring based on coverage from Jason Kebler and Joseph Cox and the, the four. Four people back when they were motherboard about the fact that ring was giving cops data from your doorbell even if you asked them not to and claiming otherwise. And also they were organizing cop street teams to market ring cameras where they give you like 10 free Ring cameras.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

To the like Abercrombie.

[Nate]

Yeah, like they would go to like the East Bumblefuck Police department and give them 10 free ring cameras and say have a community meeting and give away 10 of these and then everyone will get them and talk about the neighborhood safety and so on. And, and Amazon called me up, Amazon's PR people called me up and shouted at me about writing about this because it was a filthy lie and not true. And then later on had to admit that they were Doing it. So tell me about your ring flag pole. What's happening with your ring flag pole data? And he was like, well, I, I, I'm not sure. And I'm like, well, so is it end to end?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

That really fills you with this video you're taking of me that presumably has a bunch of AI built into it, what's happening with it?

[Nate]

And he was like. I was like, is it end to end encrypted? And he was like, it definitely is. And I'm like, so you can't access it without me? And he said, well, yeah, I can't. I, I mean, they told me that, that I wasn't allowed to. And I'm like, well, no, I'm not asking whether, like, as a matter of policy, you, the project manager manager, are allowed to look at the video for ring cameras. I'm asking whether Amazon has the keys. And he's like, I don't think we do. And I said, but look at the Lost Pets demo over there. How are you doing the Lost Pets if you can't decrypt the video? And he's like, well, you're asking me a lot of technical questions that I don't think I.

[Riley]

Hold on, hold on.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I don't think I believe this. Are you saying a project manager didn't understand the technical details of what he was in charge of and who was.

[Nate]

Sent out to grab people wearing press badges at CES and say, gentlemen, do you have any questions?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

It's just like, hey, do you have any questions? The questions I prepared to, to, to answer are, how many dogs have you reunited with the roses?

[Nate]

Why? Why are you so awesome?

[Riley]

I have to admit that I hadn't watched this until you put it in the show notes. And I mean, it feels like a really, really, like, hey, we got Paul Verhoeven to direct, like, a parody super bowl commercial about this thing because, like, the, the sequence of, like, put out an alert and then all of a sudden it has the animation of all the ring cameras in the neighborhood being activated to become like, you, you know, like the white flight Panopticon, basically.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Like, it's horrifying.

[Riley]

And I look at it like, also the AI is like, obviously the video quality has improved a bit, but it's still so uncanny when you watch it. Like, is that actually.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Because I got the impression it's totally AI really? I'll tell you how you can always.

[Nate]

Tell the dogs have got six paws.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Well, in this case, it's that AI shots tend to have the same kind of camera movement. When they're focused on a steady object, like the back of someone's head, they will be slowly zooming in. And it's. It's cuts of. It's what it is. It's almost like Wes Anderson like symmetry, but like randomly generated from garbage, not like the vision of a annoying guy. And then that's followed by a slow zoom in. And it will always be the same thing. And if you watch the Ring commercial for the commercial of Ring for Dogs, which we'll explain a little bit more of it moment, and you start looking for those AI hallmarks that are on every single AI video, then you will. You start seeing them everywhere. Just start with that one. You'll start seeing it everywhere. It is rife in this. This is an AI generated ad. I don't think they hired more than one actor to be.

[Riley]

When I saw it, the first thing that crossed my mind because it did feel uncanny in the sort of AI sort of like realistic video. But something's wrong with it. It was like, yeah. When there's an alert, you push the button and every camera will look for this person who fell backwards holding a huge rock on a glass bridge. We're gon. Who did it. We're going to identify them.

[Nate]

Well, do you. Do you remember, like, 10 years ago there was a kind of. There was this moment where DNA stuff was everywhere in Britain. So you had cops doing genetics.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, it's called dogging.

[Nate]

Yeah.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Why?

[Nate]

Cut that out.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Right, okay, fine. Go cut it out.

[Nate]

So, like, you had co. You had cops doing genetic testing and gathering, like, cheek swabbing everyone they pulled over. You had like 23andMe doing COD eugenics and telling everyone they were 18% Viking. You had what's his name from Watson and Crick running around and telling everyone that they had the wrong size skull. And then to kind of deal with the backlash, they were like, we've got a killer app for DNA that no one's going to disagree with. We're going to dust the dog shit on the council estates and we're going to go after the antisocial prick that doesn't pick up after their dog. Because we will have DNA profiles of all the dogs. We'll get the epithelial cells from the inside of their. Their large intestines as they shit out the poop. And we will use that to dust for dogs.

[Riley]

God damn.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Damn it. That is so fucking fun.

[Nate]

And that's what this is. It's like we have the CCTV backlash. CCTV backlash. We found a cuddly thing to do with it. It's finding lost pets.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

And I mean, I think, I think it was Nate, you said it was a very Verhoeven idea, which is this like schlocky image of like again, not real dogs being you reunited with, not real children. Just a kind of endless pastiche of something that's supposed to make you feel vaguely good in order to create the kind of. Kind of ice can see everything that your house sees.

[Riley]

Also like the kind. The weird like heads up display sort of like green, you know, like green LED sort of thing looking where like the box that identifies the dog named Milo that's missing looks like it's like what he's like a fucking Apache helicopter.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Target acquired.

[Riley]

Like we're this bastard dog for good. Like this. It's just so uncanny. Like I, I genuinely, I saw this and I'm like, this feels like a really on the nose parody. This feels like the, the. What is it like the. The Sons of Khan. God, what is it? Like that Azerbaijan legend logistics guys who make those fake AI videos about like we're gonna power the world with shrimp oil or whatever. And it's like they can't. They. They buy the thing like when they have AI figures like AI 3D, I guess, models based on actors. So it's like Timothy Chalamet is like leading this fucking. Like he's in charge of a mining rig for some reason. Like it genuinely felt like, like it was done as a parody. I cannot believe this is real, but it is.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So I'll read some of the press release. Ring has expanded search party for dogs, an AI powered community feature that enables your outdoor ring camera to help re unite lost dogs with their families to anyone in the US who needs help finding their lost pup. Since launch search party has helped bring home more than one dog a day. And now this feature is available to non ring camera owners via the Ring app for the first time. So yeah, still come into our walled prison garden, of course. And you know, hey, it's a community responsibility by the way, so we can help each other out. Not by ever leaving our houses or coming into contact with each other, but just by allowing data to be sucked up into like AWS's, you know, cop database.

[Riley]

Essentially.

[Nate]

Ring has been doing this since the earliest days. So rings launch marketing included a kind of next door style service where they would just tell you police blotter data from your neighborhood and adjacent neighborhoods and maybe the next neighborhood over. In very sensational terms, you know, man, man whose pigment is darker than you would Think belongs in this neighborhood. Seen looking at parcel three blocks away. And they encourage people who were not ring owners to get the updates as a way of knowing about the crime in your neighborhood.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I'm remind of. So we, we spoke with a, a South African journalist a couple years ago and one of the things she talked about was that this is a long standing service in like gated communities in South Africa. It's just, it feels a little bit imperial boomerang y in this case, but goes on before search party. The best you could hope was to drive up and down the neighborhood shouting your dog's name in the hopes of finding them. Now pet owners can mobilize the whole community. Community and communities are empowered to help to find lost pets more effectively than ever before. That's why we believe it's so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in Neighbors. Which makes sense if you think about it for a second, but then you remember, wait a minute, a dog that is owned by a family will have a caller. The caller will have a name, Often the caller will have a phone number.

[Nate]

Often the caller will have a fucking airtag.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah. And so the idea that this is some, because if you, if, let's say if you, if you're to tell the family, oh, the dog was kind of spotted, someone still has to go get it. Like someone still has to go get it. So if it's wandering around a suburb in the time it takes before it gets, I don't know, eaten by a coyote or something, depending on where it is, or a mountain lion, if it's in la, that wind or hit by a car, that window of time, you're not really benefiting that much from the ring cameras because again, in all of their AI generated promotional material, someone is still bringing the dog back to the family. They're not really moving the needle on the thing that they're claiming to be able to do.

[Nate]

It does make Lassie movies a lot shorter because once Lassie gets to Timmy in the well, everyone knows what's up.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, Timmy also has an air tag.

[Riley]

Well, I mean, I think about it. Yeah. Like you were saying, I mean it still depends on someone sort of receiving the, the, the dog Amber alert on their phone from the ring camera saying like, go out and get this person's dog. It's like, I mean, I'm sorry but like I, I, I haven't lived in America in a very long time, but I did grow up in America. The part of me is like most people are going to get like no.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Off or I'll shoot it.

[Riley]

Well also it's like why would you go, you go get the dog that you're on everyone's ring cameras. Like vicious dog thief captured when you were just trying to be a good.

[Nate]

Samaritan, you know, missing rottweiler named killer spotted on your back.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Oh my God. Imagine this. To be fair, this service would actually be useful in Britain because it would just tell you when like 30 XL bullies all with the same grandparents.

[Riley]

What if you rolled this out? If you rolled this out in Britain, it would have nothing to do with dogs. It would be like we will find this fucking bin thief and we will end his life. Like everyone will activate it all the time when their bins got moved without their permission. Like you can just force it to think that a wheelie bin is a dog and then you know, you've got the entire, the entire rose activated.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So anyway, look, this is probably one of the more horrifying of a very horrifying set of super bowl commercials including things like Coinbase and so on and so on.

[Nate]

It's a good timing for a Coinbase ad actually. It's very pets.com@the super bowl to have a Coinbase ad. Like the week, you know crypto is going to zero to. You know, it really is the super bowl tech purse.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

And I mean honestly, you know what if you are Brian Armstrong and this is the time to raise your head above the parapet to celebrate the $3 million that you got in 2014 from. Hold on, let Jeffrey Epstein just because of.

[Riley]

I remember this Corey. But I wonder Riley, do we have time to do a really quick potted history of that because pets and the super bowl in what was it, 2000 or 2001?

[Nate]

Yeah, we got it was just before the crash.

[Riley]

Yeah, yeah. So I, I, I vaguely familiar but it was in high school. So that was like the first dot com boom and like when the like the really ridiculous no due diligence on initial public offerings and like it all fell apart.

[Nate]

Yeah, yeah, they bought out the Super Bowl. The, the dot coms that were all dust in like months bought out the super bowl and beat each other up to crazy amounts. I mean the thing that we forget about the first dotcom bubble was how much of that money went into marketing and how, how many marketing vehicles there were. It wasn't just buying like Facebook targeted ads. Like you had magazines like the industry standard that were 300 pages long and 200 pages were clay coat 4 spot color full page ads or double spreads. Right. Like it was full employment for printers. It was, it was amazing.

[Riley]

So funny you say that because my brother is a little older than me and he had a subscription to Wired around that time. And I remember what you were saying, yeah, like mega high budget glossy ads the whole way through. But it was all for, I don't know, like, I can't even remember the names of these businesses. I mean like Obviously Yahoo and Pets.com, but like there were so many others that just. Yeah, like our, our.

[Nate]

I had a startup then and our venture capitalist funded a company called Cab Candy that was going to fill taxi trunks with candy. And then you could, you could, you could call a cab and get candy at the same time.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

My God, this is so stupid. Is that drug dealing? Is that just euphemism for drug dealing?

[Nate]

Well, it's, I mean it's basically, it's basically Door Dash.

[Riley]

Right.

[Nate]

But just for Candy and Justin. Cat.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Sorry, sorry. This is, there's this startup. Was it founded by someone who was bigged?

[Riley]

I just, I, I love the idea.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Did someone get bigged and start a company Doordash Delivery?

[Riley]

Like obviously there's a certain specificity. You get what you want. That's very different and a lot less sorted than like a cat pulls up, yo, you want a handful of candy crafts?

[Nate]

It's stoner food, right? It's just stoner food.

[Corey Doctorow]

It's also a great startup if like, you know, if you're a non. I was trying to like think of a joke for it, but actually it's.

[Riley]

Like that's the first that comes to mind. But I guess back in those days we're like, no.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Hey kid, do you want some candy?

[Nate]

Free candy. White fan.com.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Jesus Christ. What a, what a. What an economy. Honestly. Hey, it's always been fun in the economy, it seems. Let's, let's talk about our Elon items before we, before we pass pack it in. This is our main, our main segment that we've got to. 44, 45 minutes. We're so good at this.

[Nate]

Not much to say about Elon.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So yeah, he seems, he seems like a normal businessman. Let me just open up the last 15 years of new. Oh my goodness. So look, here's the thing. I am, I'm not going to say I'm tired of talking about data centers in space, but I have noticed that data centers in space is joining a pin that spies on you and everyone around you in order to like tell you what your appointment is are as the thing that everyone in AI seems to be Coming up with, it's a sort of. I don't understand, I mean, I kind of understand why they're all coming up with data centers in space because they need to solve the huge negative externalities that data centers cause. They need to deal with the fact that land and power are expensive. They need to imagine a world in which all of this is free. And so the data center in space lets them do that. Just like the spy pen, like the humanoid pin pin or the friend or whatever other thing. The nipple torturer. Yeah, the nipple torturer allows you to imagine that AI will be as ubiquitous as just computing. Like, these are all things that let an executive imagine what they want to imagine. It's just. I wish they would have some different ideas, but there's been this sort of cornucopia announcement from Elon where He declared that SpaceX will be purchasing Xai, where Xai has already purchased X, the Every Everything app. Did X the Everything app become the Everything app? Or is it still just bad Twitter? Did it become the Everything app?

[Nate]

I, I, well, I use it for nearly everything. I mean, if I could shit into it and fuck it and eat out of it, I'd never leave the house.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

If you could buy groceries with it.

[Riley]

Everything app could pull up to the spot with a trunk full of candy and I could just reach into it and grab a handful.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

To be fair, if you, if you post right, X, the Everything app is a great way to get someone to do that.

[Riley]

I mean, I will admit that, because I no longer am a regular X.com user. I missed the data centers in space thing. So I've got some questions, when you get into it, about the practicalities of this.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Oh, I'm sure it's. Can you conduct heat in an airless environment?

[Nate]

Well, famously, the thing that you do if you want to have the heat leave a vessel is you surround it with vacuum. We call that a thermos. And it's the thing that you use to make sure that your hot things cool off very quickly.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Nice. You know what? But hey, works for gazpacho, which I assume started hot.

[Nate]

I mean, I mean, you start with piping hot tomato soup, you put it in the thermos.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Delicious gazpacho.

[Riley]

So does it really come down to the fact that they just are like, well, there's, you can get better access. Like, you can have constant solar power in space and it's cold in space and they haven't thought about the, you know, the negative pressure, zero pressure, zero gravity thing.

[Nate]

Well, it's not that it's not that zero pressure, zero gravity. It's the lifting a lot of shit out of the gravity well. They're like, maybe someday we'll figure out a way to turn regolith into stuff, which is a thing no one knows how to do. And then we'll just turn moon dust into solar panels. But until then, every gram costs infinity. Yes. And we've got to get infinity grams of solar panels up into space. And then we have the thing that is like 300 degrees Celsius on one side and very cold on the other side, and we have no way to circulate that temperature within it because it's full of vacuum. And. And that's just like, for starters. Oh, and also, all of the data has to traverse reverse. The only electromagnetic spectrum that we have, which has other users also.

[Riley]

I was thinking to myself, I'm like, all right, data centers typically have fiber trunk stuff. That's kind of the way that they get lots of data. And I'm no genius, but I have run ethernet cables before, and I feel like running an ethernet cable to space would be pretty challenging. Running fiber lines would.

[Nate]

In Ukraine and Russia, they're like flying drones on miles of fiber optic to prevent radio jamming. You just keep that going longer, and then you've got a space elevator.

[Corey Doctorow]

What if you just like. Well, what if you just plugged one extension cord after it?

[Nate]

Just don't ever get the double extension cord with the mail plugs on either end. That's very dangerous.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So, like, the other thing is just even going back to the basics of it, would you generate more power for data centers by having them in space than it would cost to lift everything up into space, including keeping the solar panels maintained and changing out the graphics cards when they burn out?

[Nate]

It depends. Do we have free energy in this universe? Anti gravity device. What if there's a local localized gravity storm that you could take advantage of? I mean, highly localized.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I think, you know what we should put. You know, we'll do like the. Like Elon does in every IPO he does, and just be like, maybe a wizard will fix it. Maybe a gravity storm will happen. Perhaps. You know what? Perhaps somewhere there's like a Zephram Cochrane, and then we're just gonna get warp technology.

[Nate]

Well, the total addressable market is all the photons emanating from the sun.

[Riley]

Perfect. I love this idea, too, that it's like, I don't know, maybe there's a certain magic amount of ketamine. You take that when you watch the first 10 minutes of Gravity, you're like, that looks awes. Awesome. I want to be in that all the time.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

That looks sweet. Do you get to hang out with Sandra Bullock? Cool.

[Nate]

In space underwear?

[Riley]

Yeah.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So this, is this slightly out of order, but that's all right. Say, while launching AI satellites from Earth is the immediate focus, Starship's capabilities will also enable operations on other worlds. Thanks to advancements like in space propellant transfer, Starship will be capable of landing massive amounts of cargo on the moon, thereby establishing a permanent presence for scientific and menu manufacturing factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space. And it's just he that an announcement that contains the words factories on the moon was used to justify an ongoing one and a half trillion dollar valuation for SpaceX. That really all of this is about making the horribly awful finances of XAI disappear.

[Nate]

I forget, did you guys have Adam Becker on?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

We have, yes. It was delightful.

[Nate]

Did he do his riff about even if you detonated every nuclear warhead on Earth, it would still be infin. More habitable than Mars? Yes, because it would have oxygen and water. Like the fantasy about. I mean I. Look, I think we should do science on other planets, but the fantasy about establishing colonies on other planets as a backup for the planet Earth is so bananas.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

I mean, I know, I know that this is a very pat observation, but I would, I would love to just stop this one up before we start taking on that other.

[Riley]

But also like once again, I not exactly an expert on this, but I seem to recall beyond the solar radiation, there's just the total lack of oxygen and water. There's also the kind of difference in gravity that would just be detrimental to human beings relatively quickly. And you're like, well no, you need to spend four years in space and then go live on a planet that also sucks. And it's like I feel as though there's so many things that you'd want to have solved before we're going to have a path to profitability for building a factory on the moon. Genuinely, this, this stuff and I don't know how credulous you have to be and maybe you could say, okay, well it was convincing when Felonius grew said it. So Elon Musk kind of looks like him. So at the end of the day, maybe he's got a good idea. But I keep looking. Doesn't it take with the times that spacecraft have gotten to the moon, certainly with astronauts in the 60s and 70s, doesn't it take multiple days like A week to get to the moon from Earth. It doesn't take a really long time.

[Nate]

I think it depends on the relative orbits. There's a very good book about this, A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Warner Smith, about the sort of biology and physics and practicalities of setting up colonies elsewhere. One of the things they point out is that this fantasy of moving the industrial stuff that people don't like off Earth is Jeff Bezos's fantasy. He wants to put us all in giant ring habitats and then turn the Earth into a wildlife preserve. And so to do that, he's destroying as much of the wildlife as he can so that he can get into space and stop destroying wildlife.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

God, it's all burning the village to save the village.

[Riley]

Yes. If Lando Calrissian had gone bald, he'd be this evil.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So this is from earlier in the press release because I want to talk a little bit about the acquisition of Xai. SpaceX has acquired Xai to form the most ambitious vertically integrated innovation engine on and off Earth with AI rockets, space based Internet, direct to mobile device communications, and the world's foremost real time information free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book.

[Nate]

AI.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

AI writing. That's AI writing. AI generated this.

[Nate]

Every rocket ship needs its own social network.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, obviously. Clearly every rocket ship needs its own, like, snarky chatbot that will like regenerate an image of you wearing dental floss.

[Nate]

One giant leap for man, One micro bikini for mankind.

[Riley]

One giant leap for man. That's a tremendous question and I really appreciate that you asked it.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Fuck you, Neil, you suck. It also makes it look like the way this press release is worded, it makes it look like binding these companies was always the plan. Because this is always what Elon does, right? He stumbles into like crisis after crisis that he improvises his way through solving and then turns around and says, ta da, right? Look at what I did. I bought this social network on purpose. And well then he sort of was forced to buy it. And the thing is, right, I don't think people remember that he was buffaloed into buying Twitter by a court. He didn't have an intention, right, to roll a social network up into an AI company, up into a space launch launch company. He just has his shells and the shells have money and he has to keep moving all the money around between the different shells. Like he's did this before with SolarCity and Tesla.

[Nate]

He is the all time master of running across a river on the back of alligators without Losing a leg. I mean you get to do that until you can't anymore. You get one, you got one.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

You have to hop.

[Nate]

The second one generally happens pretty quickly after the first.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

But he received a huge amount of funding for third parties to buy Twitter. And for a while, I mean we used to joke on this show that it looked like we might get the J.P. morgan and Saudi public investment fund present microblogging platform. But then a few other things happen. Most importantly what happened is Elon started XAI because there was all the AI furor slash grok. XAI bought X which was again a way to take a bunch of people who wanted to invest in like the based AI company and use that money to pay back the people that loaned him money to buy Twitter. It's not a Ponzi scheme or a shell game. If one company buys the other, it's a shell company. Yeah, it's a shell company game. Game. Quite. So you didn't lose money on X because someone wanting to cash in an A on the AI hype bailed you out via xai. But now XAI is losing money faster than X ever, ever fucking did because they keep on building diesel powered data centers.

[Nate]

Their mistake is they plug the GPUs in. As Ed Zetron has pointed out, the fastest way to lose money on a GPU is to plug it in.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, just plug one in, play, play a game on it. Just you don't need the thousands. And according to a report from the information, XAI has told investors investors that the first nine months of 2025 it burned through nearly $10 million. $10 billion. Excuse me. And so because SpaceX is scheduled to IPO later this year, possibly at one and a half trillion, LOL. You could partly you could like use some of that AI hype, partly some of that grand unified theory of Elon Musk to invest in all of it all at once. But ultimately you would use that IPO to make Xai's losses vanish.

[Nate]

So did Saudi Aramco ever manage its trillion dollar ipo? I forget where that ended. Did they have it?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

They, they had an ipo, but it wasn't for everything as I recall.

[Nate]

So here's an interesting thing about Musk going public again. He hates running public companies.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Oh yeah, right.

[Nate]

Because he's subject to disclosure and he's subject to all kinds of things that he doesn't like very much and also shareholder votes and things that just drive him crazy. That's why he took Twitter private. Again, he is very much in the mold of the Cokes. Right. Charles Koch used to give these talks where he'd be like, anyone running a public company is cocked in soy because you have to do what the investors, you have to tell them what you're doing and you can't pursue your unitary vision and think long term and so on. And I think Musk imbibed it. It's quite amazing to see him voluntarily saying, okay, well what I really want to do is take all my pet projects as well as the one. The Tesla thing, and I want to make them all one big public entity and then make myself accountable to an SEC that barring prohibition on elections in 2028 will almost certainly be under Democratic control. Know.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, I mean it is strange and I suppose indicates that he is making the best of a limited set of options, I would guess.

[Nate]

Yeah, yeah. He's running across the river on the backs of alligators and not losing a.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Leg, you know, and so he is throwing out all of these buzzwords like Kardashev Level 2 and, and, and things like this. And he's like, well, all this is Kardashev. A Kardashev 2 level, level civilization that can harness the sun's full power with a Dyson Sphere. That kind of shit. He's been playing Dyson Sphere project.

[Riley]

I, I will admit that I. This went over my head and I wasn't sure. Was this like him trying to. To cop some sort of like anthropology jargon or is this more like I stole a thing from Robert Heinlein?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Sci fi. Oh, of course, it's test gr. It's just Sci Fi Test Real.

[Nate]

Literally the total address on Margaret is all the photons leaving the sun.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, that is what he means. That's what he means.

[Nate]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

The other thing I wanted to bring up before we move on to let's say his some recent brushes with the law in countries that still have some rule of law. Sorry, I just lived out the most I ever did. But you know what? Fuck it. I don't care if a country is going to fuck with Elon Musk. I will wear the fucking pussy hat. I will walk my dog to the Wooferendum. I don't care.

[Riley]

Yes, exactly.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Gonna fuck with Elon Musk. Good.

[Riley]

Exactly.

[Nate]

Would you vote for Mayor Pete?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Oh, he has to promise the way he's gonna fuck with Elon Musk first. Yeah, he has to be really specific.

[Riley]

This podcast cast are now all dedicated shooters. We will absolutely ride or die for Emmanuel Macron somehow, because they raided X Everything Apps offices in Paris Which, I mean, you know what, like I said, whatever. But it is still funny that something has gotten in his way that like a government did something.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Before we get to that, I wanted to talk about one other thing, which is what is SpaceX doing other than just replacing NASA as a publicly owned SpaceX program? SpaceX is trying to make Elon Musk a core player in communications infrastructure via Starlink. And the thing is, SpaceX is probably the most competently run of Musk's companies. And this is also referencing Jason Keibler, second Jason Keibler mention in the show. So update your spreadsheet at home, take a drink, do whatever you need to do. But SpaceX is the most competently run of Musk companies because it's not partisan, political, at least not on the surface. It often flies under the radar. And so Musk is building a monopoly in certain types of communications. War zone, drones, ships, planes, frequently rural areas, places where you. Because even in the uk, right, there are rural. There are some deep rural areas or bay parts, like the Scottish Highlands, like isolated communities where something like BT can say, we don't feel like maintaining the unprofitable lines to these areas anymore. We're going to have a deal with Starlink where, you know, you're still going to get your statutorily required Internet, but it's going to be provided via this third party. The British state does this all the time.

[Nate]

Doug Ford did it across the Ontario.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah. With lots of stuff. So basically he is monopolizing this thing that's only going to become more important and so merging other things with it. Merging like the content business with the distribution business. It's. It's weird that there is kind of a strategy there. It's just clearly one that he stumbled on and it's not the one that he wants you to think about.

[Nate]

I have to say it could not be worse timed though, because this is the moment in which everyone in the world is saying, oh shit, we can't rely on America to be a neutral technology platform.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

And that's where we get to the next section, which I know Nate really wants to talk about, which is, you know what? The French, they fucking. They did the thing. They were the first mover in. Hey, what if we just started arresting the Elon Musk people?

[Riley]

Look, all right, mea culpa. I'm sorry. Emmanuel Macron, a few years ago when I said that you were Jupiterian in the sense of going to Jupiter to get more stupider, I was wrong. This is actually cool. I appreciate, appreciate that you Guys did this because at the end of the day, like, being serious for a moment, like, some of the things going on with like the abuse imagery on. On Twitter, like, it's horrifying and it's like the response seems to be, you know, basically deal with it and. Or like, ha, isn't this funny? Wow, we never saw this coming. And it's like, I just. I don't know, I. Beyond the. All of the kind of manifold shady business practices Riley that you've. You've described, and just in general, like, the ways in which you would think that someone would not have been given this much leeway, there's an extent to which it's like, I don't know, like, if this is flat out fucking illegal in most European countries to do the stuff that X will do on demand or Grok will do on demand. So, like, good, I'm glad. Fuck with them. Like, clearly America's not going to.

[Nate]

I applaud your sentiment, but I'm skeptical of it as like a kind of political move. I think that if you look at what a company run by someone who's a lot more normal but like, like Apple has done in response to the European Union, like the European Union made a very minor demand of Apple. They said, you have to open up App Store. And Apple's first answer was, right, we will do that. We allow third party app stores on our platform under the following terms. Every app store will have to be licensed by us. Every app they sell will have to be licensed by us. We will charge junk fees in excess of the 30% fee that we currently charge. If we detect that your phone is outside the European Union for more than 21 days, we'll delete all of your apps and data. Also, if we delist an app Store, a thing we can do at any time, at our discretion, with no appeal, we will delete all your apps and data. And then the European Union said, that does not comply with the statute. And they're like, okay, we're just going to stop sending selling phones in Europe. And then everybody laughed and then they said, okay, we are going to sell phones in Europe. We're going to file like 16 pretextual appeals in Ireland, a place where we will never lose a court case. And we'll drag this out for 10 years like Meta did and Google did with the GDPR. So I do think that France has a move here, but it's not suing Elon Musk, although it'd be very funny to arrest him when he came to France. If he ever came to France. I, I think for, you know, contempt, because he'll never show up and then they'll get the contempt order and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I, I think what they could do, Article 6 of the Copyright Director from 2001, makes it illegal to jailbreak a phone, makes it illegal to jailbreak an app. They could just say, we are withdrawing your ability to use our courts to shut down European firms that compete with you. And then someone could make an alt client for Twitter that blocks all the slop and blocks all the ads and lets you use Blue sky or Mastodon and read the tweets that matter to you. So you could kind of go from one to the other. You know, it is the Most fucking Prodigy CompuServe ass thing in the world. The world that you have to be on the same network as someone to send them a message. It's just, it's just like, you know, 1992 called and they want their networking paradigm back. And, and that would directly deprive him of ad revenue. It would directly deprive him of users. It would make user migration a lot easier. It would really kick them in the dongle. And if they want to, with them, really with them, make it legal to jailbreak Teslas, which is much funnier than just like, you know, giving the finger to people in, in cyber trucks. Make it so they go to a mechanic, get like all the software upgrades, all the dlc, all the subscriptions for free, and all that money stays in France. And that would really deeply fuck with them. And this does not require them to compel Elon Musk to do anything. This only involves them doing things that are firmly within their sphere of control.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

It's almost like there's two sides to this. There's the it is right and proper to impede Elon Musk in anything specifically. But also there is this much larger thing, and I think this is something that, again, European, that non American specifically countries are realizing. A lot of Europeans who just thought, oh, well, we can just rely on Oracle and AWS and all this stuff. We'll rely on the people who do the ring camera. We'll rely on those people to supply all of our tech, our technical infrastructure, not just applications and phones and consumer products, but things like databases, things like backend, things like routers, tractor, firmware.

[Nate]

Yeah. Remember when those Russians stole those tractors and sent them to Chechnya and John Deer brick them? Well, that's great until you realize that, like, in the same way that Trump ordered Microsoft to shut down the ICC and the Brazilian court, when they pissed him off, he could order John Deere to shut all the tractors off in your country. You know, I do think that this is like the moment where it's all happening and it's because of something November said, which I think is the smartest thing anyone said about this geopolitical situation, which is Trump is playing a card game rigged in his favor and he flips the table over because he resents having to play it. And as a result, the kind of polite write fiction that you could trust American infrastructure because if they used it parochially, they would, they would do it in like a deniable and measured way and not in this like kind of gross, you know, hair on fire, everybody gets freaked out way. That's over, right? And it's been, you know, it's been, it wasn't Trump that invented this, right? Like you had the Snowden revelations convincing everyone in the world, hey, maybe we shouldn't have our fiber ends terminate on either the Atlantic or Pacific coast and then be bridged through America where the NSA is spying on everything. You had the weaponization of dollar clearing under, under Obama and under Biden as well as under Trump. You have the Argentine vulture capitalist taking the Argentine national assets from New York under the order of a New York court. Now you have everyone going like, do we still use swift? Do we still use the dollar? Ethiopia has revalued its currency and renminbi, or revalued its debt in renminbi. And so you have all these countries all over the world saying like, we just don't trust America as a neutral platform anymore. They weaponize their infrastructure for geopolitical ends. And you know, like Trump has just made this extremely urgent and I think has brought about the beginning of the end of the era where people trust it and it's in it that we can do it. It's hard with fiber, right? Because the problem with fiber is you have this order N squared problem where if you want to connect 200 countries with direct point to point fiber loops, you need 22,000 fiber loops, right? It's hard with currency because you need like deep liquid markets to do pairwise transactions between 200 currencies. It's kind of easy with it. You just need like a project on a git server that does Office360 like.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Git's own by Microsoft.

[Nate]

No, no, GitHub is owned by Microsoft. Git is just like a standard defined open source piece of software where we all just like work on it the same way that we just have, like, a single international practice of structural engineering that figures out the load stresses on ceiling joists. You'll have a single software engineering discipline that figures out what makes a good piece of office software that's secure and runs or firmware for a tractor or whatever.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

And. And it's so easy. All it would take is number 10 Downing street, just saying, we're just not going to use Twitter anymore. We're just going to get. We're going to get off of Facebook. We're going to.

[Riley]

We're going to Mastodon.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, we're going to Mastodon.

[Riley]

It's for the Labor Party.

[Nate]

You're thinking too small. What they should say is, we're going to legalize jailbreaking Twitter. What I mean is, we're going to go to Mastodon.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

It's easy enough. You could do that literally right now. You don't have to even make a call. You can just do that. Just. You need a phone. That's it.

[Corey Doctorow]

I mean, the real radical thing maybe should do is kind of be like, we're, like, we're exiting Twister and we're going to. We're going to actually reinstall the Matt Hancock app, and that's where we're going to have official government.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Hey, it's British. It's British.

[Riley]

It's going to go to different direction. They're going to. They're going to, like, you know the way that Silicon Valley companies are constantly more or less poaching British software developers over, like, they're going to do this in reverse. They're going to get MySpace Tom out of retirement. He's going to create new MySpace for Britain, and that's going to be the.

[Corey Doctorow]

Social network, I mean, and it'll be rebranded as MySpace. Space Captain Tom.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, that's right. The thing is, one of the reasons that suddenly there is, I think, a willingness on the part of European countries to take direct action against a favored American technology firm actually is because the need to protect children is a strong driver of political action.

[Nate]

Yeah.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

It's not an abstract demand, and it's almost like Elon Musk could have had everything.

[Corey Doctorow]

All I want to say is that, like, for the French, of all people, to sort of, like, go after perverts really, like, really should just make you think about, like, if they're sending the gendarme for you because you're a pervert, like that.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Come on.

[Corey Doctorow]

That should really make you, like, have a. Have a. Have a fic.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

You know, have a little look at yourself. But, yeah, it's like he could have had everything. He could have maintained his total dominance over the main political communication system that most countries are still hardwired into. But he just had to be oppositionally defiant that when they were like, hey, you should probably put some guardrails on your, on your AI to make it not violate like the 1:1 law that we really actually do care about, he was like, no legacy media lies. And now like it seems as though there is. Again, I'm not, I don't like to do too much prediction, but it seems as though he is encountering meaningful political resistance where once there was not that much. Whoops.

[Riley]

Whoops indeed. I guess to me, like to be, to be more serious for once, I suppose I think it's just that like at the end of it, Twitter obviously became something very different. But in general with social media like most people who use it tend to share stuff from their lives and that's kind of what's encouraged. And I think that like even outside of the politics of sort of like the demystification, the de legendifying of Elon Musk being revealed as just a complete idiot versus all of the PR hype of world's smartest man that you'd see everywhere a couple years ago, I think that the average person, regardless of how plugged into it they are, can understand and it's not meant to be maybe patronizing or talk down to people, but if you see friends sharing photos of your kids, you may have shared photos of your kids. I don't because I'm a very young kid and by this point, by the time I became a parent, it was already obvious that like these shit was getting weird. The idea that like at any time a photo that you share can be turned around to sexualize your kid and to humiliate, to humiliate with the intention of humiliating, bullying, frightening you or them can be done. And basically just by typing in a prompt like that's, that's horrifying. And it's like I feel as though people will look at that and regardless of whether or not they still think Elon Musk is, you know, basically like actual Ozymandias, they would just like, that's, that's disgusting. That's, that's atrocious. And so it's like, I guess to me like I will fully admit that I don't fall follow the bit by bit of this. I am kind of surprised that it's taken that long. And I share your sentiment, Hussain, that I can't believe it's The French who did it first. But I think even French people, regardless of the weird culture in France, is, well, this person is an artistic genius, so therefore all that other stuff doesn't count.

[Nate]

Yeah, you should have got Polanski to speak.

[Riley]

Yeah, exactly. Right. Still, it's just like, I think anyone can understand this. It's atrocious and it's indefensible. And the fact that the response has been the same kind of, from what as I've perceived it, the response has been like the kind of denying it. I mean, like, oh, it's a woke Libs or whatever. It's like, I don't know, man, we can see the pictures. It's disgusting. And so, I don't know, it's kind of like Milo Yiannopoulos syndrome in a way. Maybe this sounds like a ridiculous comparison, but what was the thing that really broke the camel's. The straw that broke the camel's back with him was him trying to be arch about child sex abuse, where it's like, sorry, you're not at a comedy gig in the United Kingdom. Okay? In America, some people are kind of fucking weirded out by this shit.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

It's like. It's like the one line. Yeah, it's the one line and they can't stop crossing it.

[Riley]

Stop fucking crossing it. And.

[Nate]

Yeah, well, I mean, there is something about billionaires that is about like the. I refuse to allow anyone to tell me to do anything. Like, I will. I. Rather than being told what to do in even the smallest and most petty and meaningless way, I will move heaven and earth. And that is kind of the billionaire ideology.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Speaking of on billionaires, I just want to go through because I have a couple of the highlights of some of the legal actions that are being taken against Musk and actually everything at Blazer Glory, soon to be a subsidiary of SpaceX. By the way, did he plan that? Because if you're the UK or France or whatever and Musk is trying to take over your communications infrastructure by like saying, hey, I provide all your rural Internet now because I can basically make the economics of it work. All you need to have is me having a background backdoor into everything. When SpaceX completes buying X, then you're going to have a criminal charge against one department of the company where the other one is providing all of your rural Internet. That, to me, doesn't make a huge amount of sense.

[Nate]

Do you remember when he was like, I'm going to call the website X and Peter Thiel said, it sounds like a porn site? We're not going to call PayPal X.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

He got his wish.

[Nate]

I'm going to have a couple and I'm going to oust you as CEO. Like, this is a guy who cannot learn his lesson or has always secretly wanted to run a porn site.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

So I want to focus on a few countries, but there are many taking action. So Indonesia, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, India, numerous US states, that's just to name a few. Brazil have actually long been before the French. They've long been the Chads. And the war against Musk's empire at X specifically, if you recall, like they just fully shut it down for a little while a couple of years ago, leading for Elon Musk to kind of sort of call for the murder of the judge that was involved. They're declaring that X AI is the co author of any material produced by Grok, meaning that the traditional way social media is governed, which is, oh, I'm just the neutral platform. All this stuff isn't really me. This is just people coming up and yelling things. It's like, no, you're. Now, if it's. If the chatbot's involved, you're an author. Which means that suddenly, according to Brazil, Elon Musk's company is co authoring a lot of illegal material in Europe. So uk, France and Spain. The other one I focus on, the UK is taking a privacy route of by the ico. So they're saying, well, you must have used a lot of personal information to build Grok and therefore generate all these obscene images. But also a safety route by the Online Safety act, which is like, hey, did you take precautions to stop this from happening? Elon Musk has bragged, no, we have not taken precautions because that's soy and cucked and woke. There is a criminal investigation in France that we've discussed in great deal earlier. That's actually for a few things. It's been going on for about a year. That was partly for algorithmic manipulation and Holocaust denial.

[Nate]

Mecca Hitler.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah, because the Mecca Hitler stuff, Grok was denying the Holocaust for a bit. And then the creation of non consensual sexual images and child sexual assault material. Stuff that like massively upped the political priority. And the most funny thing about this is that they're also calling for Linda Yakarino to come and testify. Who remembers Linda Yaccarino? It feels like it's from a fucking decade ago.

[Nate]

She's not CEO, right?

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

No, she's gone. Yeah, she's gone.

[Riley]

Some.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Some call her the most consequential CEO in history. The EU and Spain is considering banning the platform entirely and the Sanchez government is actually the most vocal and cognizant of the fact that it is actively dangerous to remain on US domiciled tech platforms in general. So he's the one who's Spain's furthest along on this. And then the EU as a whole, sorry, this is a lot of information. The EU as a whole is fining them 120 million euros broken into several things. One of them is for deceptive blue checkmark designs, which is actually funny because the Republican Party, which like the Republican Party's official communications account went through page by page and tried to do like a McDonald's getting sued for hot coffee thing, which again, the real thing that they should have been sued for by the way, they were using that. We'll talk about that in more detail later. But that was a justified lawsuit. But they were like, oh, they said this is a deceptive blue check because people will think that Mario Brothers is real. That's ridiculous. Look at this nanny sadism. And it's like, no, it's because people will think that's the official account for Mario Brothers. Anyway, so part of the trademark case.

[Nate]

Is a no brainer actually the consumer protection one on blue checks.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

The other one is, yep, blocking research or data access and then non compliant advertising. They haven't touched the child abuse material because that's kind of weirdly, that's actually more properly the preserve of national governments than the EU commission, generally speaking. So this is, that's. And that's just a few places Canada's doing shit as well. Like there are a lot of big markets are seem to have. Just like with Starmer, it's a little bit than all at once. And this could very easily all fizzle out, right? Like they could hold Elon in contempt. And he's just like, I didn't want to go to France anyway. It's all gay. It's gay there and not in the cool way. And then, you know, Linda Yaccarino comes and embarrasses herself in front of the Elysee palace. And that's kind of funny, but it goes nowhere. That's a distinct possibility. But it also seems more possible than it was three weeks ago that there is coordinated action against one of kind of the most at least annoying American tech companies of all of those.

[Nate]

The one that I worry about is the Brazilian intermediary liability stuff because the one thing we know from like recent Internet policy history is that when you say intermediaries are liable for user conduct, large intermediaries just say, okay, we're. We're going to eliminate wholesale swaths of user conduct, primarily user conduct involved with people who are already marginalized. So think about Sesta Fosta, where we said, okay, you mustn't traffic human beings for sex on our platforms, which is a thing that I think all of us would agree is a thing no one should do on platforms, and immediately said, great, all consensual sex workers ban.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah.

[Nate]

And then all the smaller platforms that catered to sex workers couldn't get insurance, couldn't get data, couldn't get server hosting, and they all disappeared. And so I really think intermediary liability is a bit of a monkey's paw. And, you know, the. The airing on the side of caution is just the strategy every platform takes when you create intermediary liability regimes. And largest large ones, like intermediary liability regimes, like, like Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg keeps saying, let's get rid of section 230, which is the American intermediary liability rule, because he can afford the compliance. And he's like, it would be very much better for me.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

No one else will ever. I'll never get Tommed.

[Nate]

I'll never. And I'm never going to have to buy another Instagram because there won't be one.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Right.

[Nate]

I'll just. You'll just have to build things on top of meta platforms.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Well, how about this? Can we rank as a. As. As a group, and all our listeners think we can agree, number one strategy, keep issuing arrest warrants for Elon Musk and Linda Yakarino.

[Nate]

Just keep.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Just every. Every country, summon them to court on the same day so they can't possibly attend all of them. And then suddenly he's one. He has a contestant contempt charge around the world. Even in fucking Greenland, the island with.

[Nate]

Only penguins on it that Trump put tariffs on.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Yeah. Oh, he's. He's got to get to Tristan Dunya somehow. Second Tristan Dunya mentioned in the episode fill in your bingo card. Take a drink. Anyway, I think that's all we have time for today. But I want to say, Corey, thank you very much for coming out.

[Nate]

Oh, I. You know, you guys are some of my favorite podcasters. Although don't tell anyone, but I. I like no gods, no mayor so much now. It's like listening to Trash Future, except afterwards, I don't feel bad about global politics. I just laugh when. With my parasocial buddies and then.

[Corey Doctorow]

And then.

[Nate]

And then think about an oaf.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

That's right. Well, I know you're going to be in Britain a little bit more. So perhaps Corey and no gods, no mayor soon. Stay tuned and thank you of course to our lovely co host and producer stepping in for another great episode. And for you the listener listening, don't forget there is a bonus episode every week. You get it for £4 50 this week we know what it is because we record recorded it already. It's, it's we, it's it's we watched the Melania movie. I'm so sorry. I feel bad about having watched it.

[Riley]

All we ever do is just acquire psychic damage in order to entertain you the listener.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Oh if you were in the theater while I was watching the Melania movie you would have heard me taking like damage over time. You would have heard me suffering like poison damage like in small amounts for like an hour and a bit. Anyway thank you very much everybody and we will see you on the boat.

[Riley]

Bonus.

[Hussain Alkhateeb]

Bye bye bye.