Computer Says Maybe

Latest Episodes:

Gotcha! Sep 18, 2025

Show notes

Gotcha! is a four-part series on scams, how they work, and how technology is supercharging them — running through to October 10.

In the series we look at:

Crypto: Mark Hays on how a thing touting financial freedom ended up being a kind of fin-cult, rife with scamming
Multi-Level Marketing : Bridget Read on the history of the biggest and most successful type of scam that still plagues us today
Generative AI: Data & Society’s primer on how generative AI is juicing the scam industrial complex
Enshittification: Cory Doctorow on his upcoming book, and how the process of Enchittification represents user-hostile practices that scam people into paying more, and ecosystem lock-in

Nodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask Sep 12, 2025

Show notes

What if you could listen to multiple people at once, and actually understand them?

More like this: **The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio**

In our final instalment (for now!) of Nodestar, Andrew Trask shares his vision for a world where we can assembly understanding from data everywhere. But not in a way that requires corporate control of our world.

If broadcasting is the act of talking to multiple people at once — what about broad listening? Where you listen to multiple sources of information, and actually learn something, without trampling over the control that individuals have over who sees what, when.

Andrew says that broad listening is difficult to achieve because of three huge problems: information overload, privacy, and veracity — and we are outsourcing these problems to central authorities, who abuse their power in deciding how to relay information to the public. What is Andrew doing at OpenMined to remedy this? Building protocols that decentralise access to training data for model development, obviously.

Further Reading & Resources

The Computer as a Communication Device by JCR Licklider and Robert W Taylor, 1968
World Brain by HG Wells
Learn more about OpenMined
We’re gonna be streaming LIVE at Climate Week — subscribe to our Youtube

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Nodestar: Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser Sep 05, 2025

Show notes

Social media isn’t really social anymore. But that might be changing. Rudy Fraser over at Blacksky Algorithms has built something new. He has built the infrastructure to provide a safe online space for the black community, and in the process challenges the ideas of hierarchical, centralised networks. His work — even outside the very cool development of Blacksky — is an amazing, concrete example of how the abstract ambitions of decentralisation can provide real value for people, and sets us up for a new kind of tech politics.

More like this: How to (actually) Keep Kids Safe Online w/ Kate Sim

This is part two of Nodestar, our three-part series on decentralisation. Blacksky is a community built using the AT Protocol by Rudy Fraser. Rudy built this both out of a creative drive to make something new using protocol thinking, and out of frustration over a lack of safe community spaces for black folks where they could be themselves, and not have to experience anti-black racism or misogynoir as a price of entry.

Rudy and Alix discuss curation as moderation, the future of community stewardship, freeing ourselves from centralised content decision-making, how technology might connect with mutual aid, and the beauty of what he refers to as ‘dotted-line communities’.

Further reading:

Blacksky Algorithms
Blacksky the app — if you want an alternative to Bluesky
More about Rudy Fraser
Open Collective — a fiscal host for communities and non-profits
Paper Tree — community food bank
The Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities by Nathan Schneider
Flashes — a 3rd party Bluesky app for viewing photos
The Tyranny of Struturelessness by Joreen

Rudy is a technologist, community organizer, and founder of Blacksky Algorithms, where he builds decentralized social media infrastructure that prioritizes community-driven safety, data ownership, and interoperability. As a Fellow at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, he advances research and development on technology that empowers marginalized communities, particularly Black users

Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick Aug 29, 2025

Show notes

How did the internet become three companies in a trenchcoat? It wasn’t always that way! It used to be fun, and weird, and full of opportunity. To set the scene for the series, we spoke to a stalwart advocate of decentratilsation, Mike Masnick.

More like this: Big Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx

This is part one of Nodestar, a three-part series on decentralisation: how the internet started as a wild west of decentralised exploration, got centralised into the hands of a small number of companies, and how the pendulum has begun it’s swing in the other direction.

In this episode Mike Masnick gives us a history of the early internet — starting with what was called the Eternal September, when millions of AOL users flooded the scene, creating a messy, unpredictable, exciting ecosystem of open protocols and terrible UIs.

Further reading & resources:

Protocols, Not Platforms by Mike Masnick
List of apps being built on AT Protocol
Graze — a service to help you make custom feed with ads on AT proto
Otherwise Objectionable — an eight part podcast series on the history of section 230
Techdirt podcast
CTRL-ALT-SPEECH podast

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Short: UK Groups Sue To Block Data Center Expansion Aug 22, 2025

Show notes

Foxglove and Global Action Plan have just sued the UK government over their YOLO hyperscale data center plans.

More like this: Net0++: Data Centre Sprawl

Local government rejected the data center. But Starmer’s administration overruled them. They want to force the development of a water-guzzling, energy draining data center on a local community who has said no. And all of this is on the green belt. The lawsuit filed this week might put a stop to those plans.

Alix sat down Ollie Hayes from Global Action Plan and Martha Dark from Foxglove to discuss the legal challenge filed this week. Why now? Aren’t the UK aiming for Net 0? And how does this relate to the UK government’s wider approach to AI?

Further reading & resources:

Read the Guardian article about the suit
Read the Telegraph piece about the suit
Donate to the campaign
Data Centre Finder on Global Action Plan

Computer Says Maybe Shorts bring in experts to give their ten-minute take on recent news. If there’s ever a news story you think we should bring in expertise on for the show, please email pod@themaybe.org

Big Tech’s Bogus Vision for the Future w/ Paris Marx Aug 22, 2025

Show notes

What’s the deal with Silicon Valley selling imagined futures and never delivering on them. What are the consequences of an industry all-in on AI? What if we thought more deeply than just ‘more compute’?

More like this: Big Dirty Data Centres with Boxi Wu and Jenna Ruddock

This week, Paris Marx (host of Tech Won’t Save Us) joined Alix to chat about his recent work on hyperscale data centres, and his upcoming book on the subject

We discuss everything from the US shooting itself in the foot with it’s lack of meaningful industrial policy and how decades of lackluster political vision from governments created a vacuum that has now been filled with Silicon Valley's garbage ideas. And of course, how the US’s outsourcing of manufacturing to China has catalysed China’s domestic technological progress.

Further reading & resources:

Buy Road To Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx
Data Vampires — limited series on data centres by Tech Won’t Save Us
Apple in China by Patrick McGee

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Consciously Uncoupling from Silicon Valley w/ Cori Crider Aug 15, 2025

Show notes

How do we yank power out of tech oligarch hands without handing it over to someone else?

More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake

Cori Crider is a fearless litigator turned market-shaping advocate. She started litigating during many years at leading human rights organisation Reprieve, and then moved on to co-founding Foxglove so she could sue big tech. Now she’s set her sights on market concentration.

Cori’s analysis concludes with a hopeful message: we are not stuck in place with eight dudes running the show. In fact, we’ve been here before. The computer age never would have happened the way it did if thousands of patents weren’t liberated from Bell Labs in 1956. How can we use similar tactics to dethrone monopolies and think about how Europe and other large jurisdictions can decouple themselves from silicon valley infrastructure?

Further reading & resources:

Antitrust Policy for the Conservative by Mark Meader of the FTC
The Open Markets Institute
The Future of Tech Institute

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Do you have an idea for the show? Email pod@themaybe.org

After the FAccT: Labour and Misrepresentation Jul 25, 2025

Show notes

Did you miss FAccT? We interviewed some of our favourite session organisers!

More like this: Part One of our FAccT roundup: Materiality and Militarisation.

Georgia, Soizic, and Hanna from The Maybe team just went to FAccT. Georgia and Soizic interviewed a bunch of amazing researchers, practitioners, and artists to give you a taste of what the conference was like if you didn’t get to go. Alix missed it too — you’ll learn along with her!

In part two we look into how AI is used to misrepresent people through things like image generation, and even care labour. These are conversations about AI misrepresenting hidden identities, care work becoming data work, how pride and identity is tied to labour — and how labour organisers are building solidarity and movement around this.

Who features in this episode:

Priya Goswami brought a multimedia exhibition to FAccT: Digital Bharat. This explores the invisibilised care work and manual labour by women in India, and how their day-to-day has become mediated by digital public infrastructures.
Kimi Wenzel organised Invisible by Design? Generative AI and Mirrors of Misrepresentation, which invited users to confront generated images of themselves and discuss issues of representation within these systems.
Alex Hanna and Clarissa Redwine ran the AI Workers Inquiry, which brought people together to share in how AI has transformed their work, identify common ground, and potentially begin building resistance.

Further reading & resources:

Circuit Breakers — tech worker conference organised by Clarissa Redwine
Kimi Wenzel’s research
Buy The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily Bender

**Subscribe to our newsletter to get more stuff than just a podcast — we run events and do other work that you will definitely be interested in!**

Short: Musk: Reanimating Apartheid w/ Nic Dawes Jul 23, 2025

Show notes

In May, Grok couldn’t stop talking about white genocide. This injection of right-wing South African politics triggered a conversation with a Musk contemporary, Nic Dawes.

In this short Nic shares his perspective on how post-apartheid white communities have dealt with apartheid’s end. And how Musk is basically seeking out an information environment that can recreate the apartheid information system: Grok is just an extension of a media ecosystem designed to soothe guilt and stoke resentment.

Computer Says Maybe Shorts cover recent news with an expert in our network. If there is a news story you want us to cover, please email pod@themaybe.org

Nic is Executive Director at THE CITY, a news outlet serving the people of New York through independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, deepens democratic participation, and helps make sense of the greatest city in the world. He has led news and human rights organizations on three continents, and was previously Deputy Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Chief Content Officer of Hindustan Times in Delhi, and Editor-in-Chief of South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper.

After the FAccT: Materiality and Militarisation Jul 18, 2025

Show notes

In part one we explore the depth of AI’s hidden material impacts, including its use in military applications and to aid genocide. One of our interviewees talked about why they spoke up at the town hall — questioning why FAccT, the biggest AI ethics conference there is, accepts sponsorship from those same military contractors.

Who we interviewed for Part One:

Charis Papaevangelou who co-organised a CRAFT session called The Hidden Costs of Digital Sovereignty. Greece is trying to position itself as a central digital hub by building data centres and participating in the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ — but what does this actually mean for the people and infrastructure of Greece?
Georgia Panagiotidou ran a session on The Tools and Tactics for Supporting Agency in AI Environmental Action — offering some ideas on how the community can get together and meaningfully resist extractive practices.
David Widder discussed his workshop on Silicon Valley and The Pentagon, and his research on the recent history of the DoD funding academic papers — is it ever worth taking military money, even for basic research?
Tania Duarte offered something very different: a demonstration of two workshops she runs for marginalised groups, to better explain the true materiality of AI, and build knowledge that gives people more agency over the dominant narratives and framings in the industry.

Further reading & resources: