To walk into the lion’s den once might be considered foolhardy. To do so again after being mauled by the lion? It’s what … ill-advised? Reckless? Suicidal? Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world’s leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day.
And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I’d learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving “broligarchy” – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics.
But as I wrote several drafts in the week leading up to last week’s talk in Vancouver, Canada, I had what felt like a slow-motion anxiety attack. One insistent question throbbed like toothache: why? Why, after everything that had happened last time, was I putting myself through it all over again?
In 2019, my first Ted Talk, entitled “Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy”, sent a shock wave across the conference, then the internet and then my life. I ended up facing a defamation suit over 19 words contained in it, that ate up my time, energy and, as time went on, my sanity.
And now here we are. In the first weeks of the second Trump presidency, with Elon Musk ripping up the US government. The power of the tech titans – the subject I’ve been investigating and reporting and talking about for the past nine years – is now finally front and centre. But now it all feels too late. My warning then – that democracy may not survive technology – was not heeded.
I’d be speaking, again, directly to Silicon Valley, to the men – because it is men – who are building the latest most powerful technology yet – AI – the runaway train that is coming for all our lives. Men who, crucially, are now marching in step with Donald Trump, the head of what is increasingly looking like a rogue state.
And what could I say? How could I address the collapse of the postwar international order and the role that technology is playing in it in the 10 to 12 minutes I’d been allotted? It was absurd. Most Ted Talks are written and learned months in advance, but I was a late addition to the lineup and the day before I was due to depart I didn’t even have a finished script.
Things reached a head on a Zoom meeting with the two lead curators and the head of Ted, a British media entrepreneur and philanthropist, Chris Anderson, who gently tore apart my latest draft, based on a viral column I’d written for the Observer: How to Survive the Broligarchy, 20 lessons for the post-truth world, a cross between a manifesto and a handbook about what techno-authoritarianism is going to mean for us all.
Did I really need a slide of Musk doing what looked like a Nazi salute, asked Anderson, given that Musk had denied it and it would alienate part of the audience from the off. Last time around, Anderson pointed out, I’d managed to take the audience with me as I laid out the story.
Last time around, I told him, it felt like the situation was redeemable. In 2019, I thought that “the gods of Silicon Valley”, as I’d described them, could be persuaded to take measures to prevent the harms of their platforms. “But that ship has now sailed.” In 2019, people in Silicon Valley could claim ignorance. Now, the leaders of Silicon Valley companies have made a clear and unmistakable choice.
Anderson’s counter was that people who work at these companies, and who would be in the room, “are still the best chance of effecting change”. It was actually bracing to hear his pushback, but when he suggested that perhaps I remove a line about the lawsuit I became tearful.
The line was about the importance of defending facts, and for me it was what lay at the heart of the entire case. “It’s just really profound for me,” I said. “It’s what it was all about.”
“Look,” he said at the end of the call. “We invited you. It’s up to you to choose what you want to say.” The weight, the freedom, the responsibility of that lay on me as I fiddled endlessly with my copy on the long flight across the Atlantic.
* * *
Two days later I stood on the Ted stage and gave the opening talk of the conference. It began with an unexpected cheer when I put up a slide that read: “It’s a coup”. We can’t fight it if we can’t see it, I said, and we can’t see it if we can’t name it. I wasn’t expecting the spontaneous response. It hadn’t even seemed controversial to me. (All week, in the days after the talk, people told me what a “release” it had been to have someone say the words out loud. “It hit me somewhere beneath my solar plexus,” a fellow speaker said. “I can’t explain how powerful it was to have someone say that, especially here.”)
But as I went on, I became aware of another current in the room. I could feel a wave of hostility coming from one small section of the audience. I’d had cheers and whoops but I could also see folded arms, hostile stares. Later, I would meet one of them, a close friend of Musk’s whose husband sat on the board of his companies.
“In 2019 I called out the gods of Silicon Valley. Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk,” I said in my closing statement. “I was wrong. You are not gods. You are men and you are careless … You are collaborators. You are complicit in a regime of fear and cruelty.”
Walking off stage, I gave a loud involuntary sigh that’s audible on the film of the talk. I tried. I tried in 2019, and I’ve tried again now. It’s my best effort to communicate why we face such profound risk. And that’s the emotion that’s visible, audible, all the way through the talk. It’s why I put myself back out there.
Because what happened to me is now coming for so many other people. Not just weaponised lawsuits against other journalists and online campaigns of harassment and abuse – though that is coming – but the everyday surveillance and data harvesting to which we are all subjected. In the new political landscapes, that carries new risks. I’ve been on the sharp end of that. I know how it feels. Terrifying. But it’s also the business model of Silicon Valley, and it’s why, as individuals, we must take steps to protect ourselves.
What I can’t stress enough is how much worse the situation is now, six years on.
Most of us – and I include myself here – have no idea how fast this technology is accelerating and how much power we are voluntarily giving up, how exposed and vulnerable we are.
* * *
I’m now back home. I did a follow-up interview with Anderson in which he called the talk “an absolute blockbuster”. And it now has a life outside the conference; it’s landed on YouTube where it’s gainedalmost 1m views in less than a week.
American friends and total strangers have sent me heartfelt notes. And two MPs, one Labour, one Conservative, and two members of the House of Lords have sent me messages about a specific reference I made to the UK government’s proposed bill that is seeking to tear up our 300-year-old copyright laws to make it easier for AI companies to use artists’ intellectual property for training their models. It’s called the data use and access bill and it’s currently working its way through the Commons despite protests from thousands of people across the entire UK creative industries, including the likes of Elton John and Paul McCartney.
But none of that was a given. I almost didn’t go through with it. I’d been unnerved by a back and forth with Tamsin Allen, a UK libel lawyer, hours before my talk. Ultimately, there was risk attached to me saying even the most seemingly innocuously factual things about the case, because it was me, because it was Ted, because the one lesson I’ve learned the hardest way is that when someone wants to attack you, they will find a way.
“Watch her talk from five years ago,” reads one of the thousands of comments on YouTube. “She was much more animated, much more upbeat and bright. Now she looks and sounds completely terrified, dejected, exhausted and heartbroken.”
The internet we’ve created, captured by big corporations and built on data tracking, was not inevitable. Nor is what’s coming next. And it’s why I wanted to write this piece. Because as hopeless as things are, there’s no inevitability to what comes next. It’s why I’m so appalled at the naivety of the British government, which, at the very moment that it should be seeking to strengthen UK national sovereignty against US tech power, is doing the exact opposite. This is not a partisan issue. David Davis, the Conservative MP, leaves me a voice note telling me that he views “the proposed changes in copyright law somewhere between theft and intellectual slavery”. It is, he says, an inversion of property law.
The big difference between Ted of six years ago and Ted in 2025 is AI. It dominates almost every conversation. The scale and pace of advancement in the technology is mind-blowing in the true sense of the word. AI’s domination of Ted is just a snapshot of its domination of every coming aspect of our lives.
It’s going to blast away whole industries, concentrate even greater power in an even smaller group of men, deplete the planet’s resources even further, and it’s in the hands of reckless, careless people who seem to have no understanding of society. To them, it’s just a race; a winner-takes-all competition. All while the world still looks much the same – same streets, same houses, same politicians talking on the same TVs. It’s why it’s so hard to get your head around it.
In my talk I made a point of criticising Sam Altman, another Ted speaker and the chief executive of OpenAI, the company that rocked the world when it unveiled ChatGPT in 2022. And at the end of last week, Anderson interviewed him live on stage and put my words directly to him: “In our opening session, Carole Cadwalladr showed ChatGPT give a Ted Talk in the style of Carole Cadwalladr and, sure enough, it gave a talk that wasn’t quite as good as the talk she gave, but it was pretty impressive. And she said, ‘OK, it’s great, but I did not consent to this.’”
Should OpenAI be using work of people who haven’t consented, he asked. Shouldn’t they be paid?
Altman simply avoided the question. “So right now if you use our image generation thing if you say I want something in the style of a living artist, it won’t do that,” he said, referring to the new image generation tool and conveniently evading the fact that it does exactly that for writers and journalists.
Instead, he talked about “the creative spirit of humanity” that AI would now “democratise”. New tools that would allow “new people to make better art, better novels, better content that we all enjoy”.
The point I’d made in my talk is that this entire AI gold rush is theft. So much of the training set for this entire industry is coming from us: our work, our words, our labour. Not just writers, but anyone who’s ever written anything online, as well as photographers, film-makers, musicians. It’s not innovation, it’s theft. But in talk after talk at the conference, this inconvenient truth was glossed over.
Afterwards, backstage, I ran into Altman himself. His security guard hovered. “I don’t want to intrude,” I said. “No, I’m happy to answer questions,” he said. But the foundational question of taking other people’s work without permission is something he just can’t answer.
“What’s the difference between me reading your work?” he asked. It’s all free to read. What’s the difference? You’re outputting to potentially millions of people for commercial gain for no recompense, I said. It’s fair use, he countered. It’s really not, I said. You’ve ingested the entire body of my work. It’s so easy to establish that.
And he was gone. Back to the controls of the tank that is soon to roll over all of us.
* * *
It wasn’t just the AI dominance that had changed Ted. My talk was the only one that addressed the current political moment, and among the 1,700 people there, it dominated conversation after conversation. A Ted fellow, a next-gen rising star, told me that some of her cohort in the US on visas or green cards had cancelled their trips, worried that they might be detained at the border when returning home. A Canadian editor for the Globe and Mail told me they were now sending reporters to the US with burner phones and wiped laptops. A historian at a non-profit specialising in black history told me of cancelled grants.
Even Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and popular science author who has documented what he sees as the upwards path of human progress, was uncharacteristically downbeat. The attacks on universities, including his own, had left him shaken.
Meeting Pinker at the conference was another personal landmark. I first went to Ted 20 years ago as a guest of his. I watched Jimmy Wales give a talk on the online encyclopedia that anyone could write and anyone could edit and thought: “Well, that’ll never catch on”, and then he demo-ed Wikipedia and it blew my mind.
I wrote up the event for the Observer, and it was the spark that led to me writing about these topics in a 20-year career with the paper. In 2011 and 2012 we put on our own Ted event, TEDxObserver, which I co-curated with the Observer’s former editor, John Mulholland. Ted and the Observer have been entwined in my understanding of this world, from excited tech-utopian to where we are now, witnessing Silicon Valley’s merger with an axis of autocracy across the world.
These vast data-harvesting tech monopolies that control our online world were never inevitable. And there is another way. We can go back to the future, to the democratic, inspiring, non-corporatised web that Wales proved was possible.
We are not powerless. There are things we can do collectively. I learned that when 30,000 Observer readers rose up to support me in my legal case. Last week’s talk is dedicated to them, because without them I don’t know where I’d be now. But together, we were able to hold power to account. And in the darkness that’s falling, I believe that rebuilding our information system – together – is the first step to getting out of this mess. This is my last signoff for the Observer. It’s been a ride. Thanks for reading.
Carole Cadwalladr can now be found at broligarchy.substack.com
