1984 Today!

Berlin’s CyBrothel is “the world’s first AI brothel”, according to its founder and Episode 130 guest Philipp Fussenegger , offering visitors an alternative to human prostitution in the form of silicone sex dolls. Some of the dolls are humanoid, some are aliens or vampires, but almost all of them can, with the visitor’s consent, interact by listening, talking back, and ‘seeing’ (with the help of CC...

In 2014, an NHS junior doctor named Chris Day made “protected disclosures” to the hospital trust he worked for in south east London. He raised issues of understaffing (doctor/patient ratios were 1:18, more than double the national standard of 1:8) and reported two specific cases in which poor care led to avoidable patient deaths. The hospital trust took swift action, thanked him for bringing it to...

Are the nations of ‘the West’, especially the United States, in a new Cold War with Russia and China? What does the world look like now that nations favouring authoritarian governance and repression of civil liberties have become major influential global powers? How can states and individual citizens navigate the new reality in which we find ourselves? According to the March 2025 Annual Threat Ass...

In January 2025, Elon Musk started posting on X about a long-festering blot on the copybook of British justice, the decades-long organised mass rape of children across the cities of northern England by ‘grooming gangs’. In places like Rotherham , Telford , Rochdale , and Oldham , years of horrific abuse had gone barely acknowledged by authorities, with intermittent, insufficient, and inconsistent...

In recent months, Britain, like Europe, has seen farmers take to the streets in their thousands to protest against changes in the law that they say will make their jobs harder, undermine food security, and possibly even close them down. Britain has proposed a change to inheritance tax that would affect 25% of the country’s farms and could result in many farms being parcelled off or even sold entir...

“This is something that you don’t fully comprehend until you face it.” The small, historically important and culturally rich country of Georgia, nestled in the Caucasus between Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, has seen nonstop street protests for months, taking over the centre of the capital city, surrounding the nation’s parliament, and challenging the ruling party. Police violence and “s...

The existence of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States was highly classified for over twenty years until the Senate’s Church Committee investigation in 1975 . Prior to that, the long-running joke was that the initials NSA stood for ‘No Such Agency’. Since 1975, the NSA has been at the centre of major scandals alleging violations of the Fourth Amendment and breaches of its ‘outwar...

AI has come for the world’s oldest profession! Cybrothel in Berlin offers customers a range of human-free sexual experiences involving sex dolls, AI, and virtual reality. “The world’s first AI brothel” is the brainchild of Austrian filmmaker Philipp Fussenegger, whose most recent film Teaches of Peaches premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Teddy Award for Best L...

Richard Sanderson was a director of the London Musicians Collective for ten years, helped set up the UK radio station Resonance FM, and founded the experimental music label Linear Obsessional through which he released over 150 albums as downloads, CDs, cassettes and vinyl, until its demise in 2022. The label’s demise was precipitated by strong, negative, and abusive reactions Richard received to f...

I’m suspicious of social media, and the effect a smartphone has on my attention in general. Books like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, about how devices and social media are negatively affecting teenagers and children, make an argument that I’m primed to hear favourably. When researchers and politicians talk about limiting the use of phones in schools, I find myself listening sympathetic...

Falak Enayat worked for the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Afghanistan until Kabul was seized by the Taliban in 2021. Overnight, Falak became a hunted fugitive on a ‘red list’ of wanted persons, struggling to keep himself and his wife safe in a city suddenly dotted with military checkpoints, where even going outside in jeans was a suspicious act because of the insistence of the Taliban on...

Nikhil Suresh made me laugh, think, and reconsider my thoughts on technology. When I read his essay I Will F***ing Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again , in which he announced that “the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne,” I knew I had found a deep thinker with a sharp wit and a way with words. Nikhil is...

“It’s time to embrace the future. It’s time to get drunk on intelligence.” Victor Miller ran for mayor of Cheyenne , the capital city of the state of Wyoming, on a platform of putting AI in charge of the city. He says ChatGPT is a “superior intelligence” to humans, and he believes that the advent of AI-led government could enable “a Cambrian explosion of political activity” that would give citizen...

On Tuesday 5 November, the United States will end the ‘begging for votes’ phase of the election cycle and enter the ‘haggling over results’ phase. The question of who the next President of the United States of America should be is a hot one worldwide, and not just for the citizens who get to cast a vote. For a fresh perspective, I decided to head out and stick a microphone-shaped thermometer into...

William Henry Gates III, better known as Bill Gates, has been a major figure in technology, business, and politics for forty years. In that time he created what is arguably the world’s best-known computer operating system, ran one of the leading tech companies in the United States, gained a reputation for predatory monopolistic practices during Microsoft’s anti-trust case in the 1990s, and then wa...

Hatun Tash is a Turkish ex-Muslim turned Christian evangelist who, in September 2024, “won £10,000 in damages and costs from the Metropolitan Police after being arrested, strip searched and unlawfully imprisoned for wearing a Charlie Hebdo t-shirt and having her property stolen at Speakers’ Corner in London”. Here’s a video of the incident, which happened in 2022. The stolen property in question w...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com to receive weekly dystopian news! CJ Hopkins, author, satirist, and playwright, will be re-tried for thought crime in Berlin on Monday 30 September at 10:30am in Room 145a of the Kammergericht, located at Elßholzstraße 30-33. The trial might as well be in Room 101. In this handy fact sheet , CJ gives the timeline of his experience being prosecuted by th...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com! I found out about Sanne Van Oosten’s work on X when she shared her experience of being shunned by media outlets indifferent to her research findings that voters don’t discriminate on the basis of gender and ethnicity. A social scientist at Oxford University specialising in meta-analysis and intergroup conflict, Sanne is uniquely positioned to comment o...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com! In this Summer Special, I take the show on the road to meet people at the London incarnation of a global Day of Visibility called We Are Ready. From all over the UK, citizens gathered in Parliament Square, facing the seat of Britain’s government, to raise their voices on the issues that matter to them, and to protest what they think has gone wrong. A c...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more! This episode was a surprise. After releasing Episode 119, I received the following message from a listener who goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein: Just listened to your podcast with Jerry Barnett and loved it, but now I feel like kinda HAVING to offer to be you next guest (if you are interested). I can mainly talk ab...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more! Jerry Barnett is a technologist, campaigner, and the author of Porn Panic! His book, and his other writing for outlets like Quillette , examines the junction of free expression, sexuality, and identity, especially recent examples of moral outrage from what he calls “the identitarian Left.” We had a fascinating and wid...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more! Christina Dalcher is a professor, linguist, and the best-selling author of the novels like VOX, Q (Master Class in the US), Femlandia, and The Sentence. In VOX, a religious conservative movement comes to power in the United States. By technological means, the Pure Movement prevents women from speaking more than 100 wo...

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

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

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