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This week, my head felt so full. We’re working on the next edition of Cracks magazine, and my colleague Priya immersed herself in the world of network states, and I went down a few rabbit holes as well. Online communities that seek sovereignty is the short description. Inspired by the state of Israel and often classed as tech-fascist is a longer one. As a digital nomad myself, I puzzled my way through manifestos, essays, investigative pieces, and commentary until my brain overheated.

Some of it, I’m using in this week’s newsletter, has become quite… long, which brings me to the poll of this week.

If your answer isn’t mentioned, hit reply and send me an email. I’m reflecting on how to continue with this newsletter in 2027. Your feedback is most important!

Sanne

DEEP DIVE

How to keep your head cool around AI: the machine god narrative is harmful

It’s not hard to get an overheated brain when following the news: the rise of the far right, the problems of the manosphere, accelerating climate change, technology-advanced warfare, militarism spread through the police force, suppressing surveillance policies, and god-like AI controlling and perhaps extinguishing us all very soon. Or isn’t it all that alarming?

The midterm elections in the United States last week gave somewhat of a breather:

• Is Trump’s MAGA, with its white supremacist ideology, no longer that powerful?
• Elon Musk spent at least $445 million in a gambit to help Republicans keep control of Congress, AP writes: “an amount roughly equivalent to someone on a $100,000 annual salary saving every penny for 4,400 years.” And he lost.
• Lastly, it was, as El País English writes: A midterms of firsts: Records set for women, Black people, gay people, Muslims, Latinos and Indigenous people. Maybe “diversity” is not death after all?!

Did the “blue tsunami”, as some populist newspapers described it, wash away the idea that most people want less democracy and more platform capitalism? Or were US voters' motives more mundane, looking at the rising cost of living and gas prices? (Tip: have a look at Dear Data’s If One Group Voted Map).

According to NBC exit polls, almost a full quarter of voters surveyed counted “AI data centers” as “crucial” to their vote. Maybe the reality is that if politics moves too far from daily worries, the self-correcting, democratic mechanism works, and people take their power back?

The data centre is perhaps a good example. It is the epitome of all crises combined, and it follows a colonial pattern:

• It grabs land. Data centres are built where land is cheap and resistance is expected to be low.
• It extracts. The centres need energy and water.
• It separates us from nature. The low-frequency hum is a disruptive industrial noise that annoys people living close to the centres. It’s a small detail with a big meaning: humans are detached from the land, as owners instead of tenders of the land.
• It hides labour. The server halls don’t show the workers in countries like Kenya, India, and the Philippines who are labelling data for a dollar an hour.

Artificial intelligence scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru is surprised that everything tech billionaires say is taken as gospel by many journalists. She strongly criticizes the mainstream media for acting as a megaphone for tech companies rather than practicing independent journalism. Gebru was fired from Google in 2020 after writing a paper on the risks of large language models, including structural bias against women and people belonging to ethnic minorities.

She co-founded Black in AI (a community for Black AI researchers) and later founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) to investigate artificial intelligence from an independent, community-oriented perspective, with an eye for the impact on vulnerable and Black communities.

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In the Uncanny Valley by WIRED podcast episode Is AI’s Existential Threat Real?, Gebru explains the difficulty of debunking false narratives that have been spread by media before they get to interviewing the actual expert (like she is). She says that tech futurists sell you a story in which the future happens to us, as if we can’t stop it.

The newest buzzword is “recursive intelligence”: AI improving itself in a loop where humans are no longer needed. Gebru’s Institute DAIR shows through the Data Workers Inquiry that data workers in the Global Majority are actually the ones making AI look “superintelligent”. The “machine god”- narrative is not just a distraction, according to Gebru: “It’s harmful.”

Artificial intelligence is placed in such an exceptional field nowadays, as if it’s beyond our (regulatory) control. She concludes with a lesson for all of us:

​The AI Resist List is a good starting point; it shows initiatives creating alternative tech futures “that don’t kill the environment, that don’t exploit labour, or steal data and instead are actively helping their communities and these ideologies are spreading,” as Gebru explains.

Gaza at the center

When Jared Kushner presented the plan for “New Gaza” at the beginning of this year, it included building data centers on the ruins of Gaza genocide, as independent media platform Truthout reported. No cultural sites, nor restoring any parts of Gaza that retain Palestinian heritage or life. It follows the same colonial logic as mentioned above, where an industrial zone shows progress, and Palestinians are “pushed behind walls and gates” (like data workers in Global Majority countries), as Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa described on X.

susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa Jared Kushner presented these slides today showing imperial plans for Gaza. The so-called "board of peace" is composed of and controlled by zionists. Not one single Palestinian is on the board. This is a plan to erase Gaza's indigenous character, turn what remains of her 1:53 PM • Jan 22, 2026 3441 Retweets 6392 Likes Read 364 replies

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In Palestine, many of the current crises seem to come together. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese is continuously analyzing it along those lines, calling it in the UNAPOLOGETIC podcast “the Israelisation of society”. After the presenter mentions the decline of Western values, she says:

TIP: I’m currently reading Albanese’s book When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine, and it shows how much she had to unlearn as a European to now speak so eloquently and precisely as she does on a global stage today. And the essay by Arundhati Roy for Equator magazine is more dystopian but worth a read.

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What does this mean for storytelling, for journalism, for strategic communication?

Remember my overheated brain? The network state rabbit hole eventually also led to recognizing the colonial logic as described above. How can we escape it, though? Start by communicating about it. My literary impulse purchase this week explained why:

• Keep your head cool. Don’t buy into the one-sided AI narratives and tech-billionaires framing. Even if that’s what the media is mostly reporting about! When something is depicted as simple and black-and-white, know that it can’t be the whole story.
• Look for the voices at the margins. Timnit Gebru is a good start but not the only one. Look for researchers and practitioners rooted in Black Lives Matter, decolonial and Indigenous movements, and in the Global Majority. They often bring lived experience, have seen consequences first, and are listened to last.
• Follow the money in “independent” - labels. Gebru points out how so-called independent institutions might be funded by the tech industry itself. Look at about-pages, read about the people behind initiatives, do proper due diligence.
• Go local before you go global. Many of the current narratives generalize and paint the AI consequences with the same brush. AI is a container concept in the first place.
• Keep unlearning. We’re all colonized in our minds. People like Albanese can be an inspiration for continuously unlearning and ethical language use. Make it part of your practice: question your assumptions, notice who is missing from your communication.
• Communicate with ethics. Trust is everything. News hypes and alarmism might create clickbait; it will not make your audience listen.
• Make space for the future you want. Act instead of react. It’s so easy to get distracted!

Leading for Transformation is back!

What does it mean to be a narrative leader in 2027? How can you take the lead in helping people to understand the world? Stories are more important than ever, but by whom, where, and how do they get told?

For leaders in journalism, (strategic) communication, and content creation. We start on 14 January.

See you next week!

Sanne

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