1984 Today!

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more! Crisis! Anxiety! Liberty! Dr Ashley Frawley joins me for a conversation about what she calls “the tendency to communicate social problems as emotional problems,” and how that degrades the power and autonomy of the individual while ignoring complex structural social issues. Ashley is a sociologist at the University of...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com to get our weekly dystopian newsletter! Communists! Assassination! Romance! Carol Cohn is an exceptional man with an incredible story. Born in Romania during World War Two, he survived the deportation of the country’s Jews, returned and grew up under the Communists, escaped to the West, and became a journalist married to the girl of his dreams. In this...

Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and more! Live facial recognition! “Legal but harmful” speech! Spycoin! In this episode, I’m joined by Mark Johnson, the Advocacy Manager for Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties campaign group dedicated to reclaiming privacy, defending freedoms, and rolling back the surveillance state. You can find them at BigBrotherWatch.o...

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and special updates! De-ageing in dogs! Genetic scanning in dating apps! The Singularity! All this and much more came up in this fascinating conversation with Professor George Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Professor Church is a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired...

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for dystopian news, transcripts, and more! In this episode, I sit down in the studio with Andy Agathangelou, the founder of the Transparency Task Force, “a certified social enterprise for people who have been shortchanged by the financial sector.” Andy is also the Chair of the Secretariat Committee to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Personal Banking and Fai...

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for weekly dystopian news and transcripts. I’m joined in this episode by Emily Finley, author of The Ideology of Democratism . Emily is a senior fellow from the Albertus Magnus Institute and an instructor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. In her book, Emily argues that political leaders in many democratic countries differ from their citizens in...

Subscribe at 1984today.substack.com for updates, transcripts, and more! All eyes on Argentina in this episode, as I’m joined by Beatriz Busaniche, an Argentinian activist and academic focused on free culture and human rights in the digital environment. Beatriz is the co-founder of the Argentine chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, a member of Creative Commons Argentina, and the President of the Fu...

Sergei Loznitsa is an award-winning director of feature films and documentaries, a Ukrainian born in the Soviet Union, and a compassionate interrogator of the human condition. His 2018 film Donbass, “a darkly satirical omnibus of scathing vignettes” about life in Eastern Ukraine, won him Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. His description of the film connect...

Allow me to introduce This Is How We Do It, our new occasional sidebar exploring love in the age of dystopia. Aleksandr , a tech-savvy young man from Russia, used AI to automate his Tinder profile, but what started as a wild experiment in modern dating turned into a love story for the digital age. Aleksandr and his fiancée Karina join me for a chat about their courtship and relationship, a fascina...

Substack has been in the news recently, due to accusations of and/or objections to extreme/racist/Nazi writers who have newsletters on the platform, and the refusal of Substack’s management to remove or throttle the content in question to the satisfaction of critics. If we tried to pinpoint when exactly the presence of that content became a foreground issue, it would most likely be the publication...

Can AI imagine itself? Is an organic life possible in a machine world? Do you want a computer chip in your brain? Tim Boucher is the author of the AI Lore books, over 100 illustrated volumes of conspiracy-tinged dystopian fiction set in a future where AI has taken control of the planet. Before that he was a content moderator at a major social media platform, an experience that “left him with sympt...

Can Substack survive mainstream media pearl-clutching? Do we dare to dream of utopia? Was the Virgin Mary really a virgin? These are just some of the questions I get into with the fascinating and contagiously positive Elle Griffin in this wide-ranging conversation. Elle is the author of The Elysian , an exploration of utopian ideas through fiction and non-fiction that goes out to over 11,000 subsc...

Charged! Convicted! Sentenced! Then tried? In this episode, I speak with CJ Hopkins, an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist who lives in Berlin. CJ’s plays have been produced and have toured at theatres and festivals in London, New York, Edinburgh, Sydney, Toronto, Los Angeles, Atlanta, the Netherlands, and his political satire and commentary have been published by  Consent...

Entrapment! Terrorism! Nazis! It’s time for our second episode! Our guest is Ken Silva, an investigative journalist focused on data privacy and, more recently, the FBI’s role in right-wing extremism. Ken and I discuss his work on the Fed Files, his investigative series at Headline USA based on documents he got access to through a source who…well, listen to our conversation, he explains it better t...

Thank you all for being the very first subscribers to our shared podcast journey. Speaking of sharing… This episode features the author, journalist, and podcaster Dorian Lynskey. His excellent book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is worth reading and is available from all reputable booksellers (and disreputable ones as well, I’m sure). He and I talk about...