In early April, I found myself in the breathtaking Chiesa di San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, Italy talking about men who are on a mission to achieve immortality.

As sunlight filtered through glass onto worn stone walls, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie recounted a dinner with a Silicon Valley mogul who believes drinking his son's blood will help him live forever.

"We've got it wrong," Bryan Johnson told Chris. "God didn't create us. We're going to create God and then we're going to merge with him."

This wasn't hyperbole. It's the worldview taking root among tech elites who have the power, wealth, and unbounded ambition to shape our collective future.

Working on “Captured: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley's AI Takeover” podcast, which we presented in that church in Perugia, we realized we weren't just investigating technology – we were documenting a fundamentalist movement with all the trappings of prophecy, salvation, and eternal life. And yet, talking about it from the stage to my colleagues in Perugia, I felt, for a second at least, like a conspiracy theorist. Discussing blood-drinking tech moguls and godlike ambitions in a journalism conference felt jarring, even inappropriate. I felt, instinctively, that not everyone was willing to hear what our reporting had uncovered. The truth is, these ideas aren’t fringe at all – they are the root of the new power structures shaping our reality.

“Stop being so polite,” Chris Wylie urged the audience, challenging journalists to confront the cultish drive for transcendence, the quasi-religious fervor animating tech’s most powerful figures. 

We've ignored this story, in part at least, because the journalism industry had chosen to be “friends” with Big Tech, accepting platform funding, entering into “partnerships,” and treating tech companies as potential saviors instead of recognizing the fundamental incompatibility between their business models and the requirements of a healthy information ecosystem, which is as essential to journalism as air is to humanity.

In effect, journalism has been complicit in its own capture. That complicity has blunted our ability to fulfil journalism's most basic societal function: holding power to account.

As tech billionaires have emerged as some of the most powerful actors on the global stage, our industry—so eager to believe in their promises—has struggled to confront them with the same rigor and independence we once reserved for governments, oligarchs, or other corporate powers.

This tension surfaced most clearly during a panel at the festival when I challenged Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of “The Guardian” and current Meta Oversight Board member, about resigning in light of Meta's abandonment of fact-checking. His response echoed our previous exchanges: board membership, he maintains, allows him to influence individual cases despite the troubling broader direction.

This defense exposes the fundamental trap of institutional capture. Meta has systematically recruited respected journalists, human rights defenders, and academics to well-paid positions on its Oversight Board, lending it a veneer of credibility. When board members like Rusbridger justify their participation through "minor victories," they ignore how their presence legitimizes a business model fundamentally incompatible with the public interest.

What once felt like slow erosion now feels like a landslide, accelerated by broligarchs who claim to champion free speech while their algorithms amplify authoritarians.

Imagine a climate activist serving on an Exxon-established climate change oversight board, tasked with reviewing a handful of complaints while Exxon continues to pour billions into fossil fuel expansion and climate denial. 

Meta's oversight board provides cover for a platform whose design and priorities fundamentally undermine our shared reality. The "public square" - a space for listening and conversation that the internet once promised to nurture but is now helping to destroy - isn't merely a metaphor, it's the essential infrastructure of justice and open society.

Trump's renewed attacks on the press, the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. funding for independent media around the world, platform complicity in spreading disinformation, and the normalization of hostility toward journalists have stripped away any illusions about where we stand. What once felt like slow erosion now feels like a landslide, accelerated by broligarchs who claim to champion free speech while their algorithms amplify authoritarians.

The Luxury of Neutrality

If there is one upside to the dire state of the world, it’s that the fog has lifted. In Perugia, the new sense of clarity was palpable. Unlike last year, when so many drifted into resignation, the mood this time was one of resolve. The stakes were higher, the threats more visible, and everywhere I looked, people were not just lamenting what had been lost – they were plotting and preparing to defend what matters most.

One unintended casualty of this new clarity is the old concept of journalistic objectivity. For decades, objectivity was held up as the gold standard of our profession – a shield against accusations of bias. But as attacks on the media intensify and the very act of journalism becomes increasingly criminalized and demonized around the world, it’s clear that objectivity was always a luxury, available only to a privileged few. For many who have long worked under threat – neutrality was never an option. Now, as the ground shifts beneath all of us, their experience and strategies for survival have become essential lessons for the entire field.

That was the spirit animating our “Am I Black Enough?” panel in Perugia, which brought together three extraordinary Black American media leaders, with me as moderator.

“I come out of the Black media tradition whose origins were in activism,” said Sara Lomax, co-founder of URL Media and head of WURD, Philadelphia’s oldest Black talk radio station. She reminded us that the first Black newspaper in America was founded in 1827 - decades before emancipation - to advocate for the humanity of people who were still legally considered property.

Karen McMullen, festival director of Urbanworld, spoke to the exhaustion and perseverance that define the Black American experience: “We would like to think that we could rest on the successes that our parents and ancestors have made towards equality, but we can’t. So we’re exhausted but we will prevail.”

And as veteran journalist and head of the Maynard Institute Martin Reynolds put it, “Black struggle is a struggle to help all. What’s good for us tends to be good for all. We want fair housing, we want education, we want to be treated with respect.”

Near the end of our session, an audience member challenged my role as a white moderator on a panel about Black experiences. This moment crystallized how the boundaries we draw around our identities can both protect and divide us. It also highlighted exactly why we had organized the panel in the first place: to remind us that the tools of survival and resistance forged by those long excluded from "objectivity" are now essential for everyone facing the erosion of old certainties.

The Power of Protected Spaces

If there’s one lesson from those who have always lived on the frontlines and who never had the luxury of neutrality – it’s that survival depends on carving out spaces where your story, your truth, and your community can endure, even when the world outside is hostile.

That idea crystallized for me one night in Perugia, when during a dinner with colleagues battered by layoffs, lawsuits, and threats far graver than those I face, someone suggested we play a game: “What gives you hope?” When it was my turn, I found myself talking about finding hope in spaces where freedom lives on. Spaces that can always be found, no matter how dire the circumstances. 

I mentioned my parents, dissidents in the Soviet Union, for whom the kitchen was a sanctuary for forbidden conversations. And Georgia, my homeland – a place that has preserved its identity through centuries of invasion because its people fought, time and again, for the right to write their own story. Even now, as protesters fill the streets to defend the same values my parents once whispered about in the kitchen, their resilience is a reminder that survival depends on protecting the spaces where you can say who you are.

But there’s a catch: to protect the spaces where you can say who you are, you first have to know what you stand for – and who stands with you. Is it the tech bros who dream of living forever, conquering Mars, and who rush to turn their backs on diversity and equity at the first opportunity? Or is it those who have stood by the values of human dignity and justice, who have fought for the right to be heard and to belong, even when the world tried to silence them? 

As we went around the table, each of us sharing what gave us hope, one of our dinner companions, a Turkish lawyer, offered a metaphor in response to my point about the need to protect spaces. “In climate science,” she said, “they talk about protected areas – patches of land set aside so that life can survive when the ecosystem around it collapses. They don’t stop the storms, but they give something vital a chance to endure, adapt, and, when the time is right, regenerate.”

That's what we need now: protected areas for uncomfortable truths and complexity. Not just newsrooms, but dinner tables, group chats, classrooms, gatherings that foster unlikely alliances - anywhere we can still speak honestly, listen deeply, and dare to imagine.

More storms will come. More authoritarians will rise. Populist strongmen and broligarchs will keep fragmenting our shared reality.

But if history has taught us anything – from Soviet kitchens to Black newspapers founded in the shadow of slavery - it’s that carefully guarded spaces where stories and collective memory are kept alive have always been the seedbeds of change.

When we nurture these sanctuaries of complex truth against all odds, we aren't just surviving. We're quietly cultivating the future we wish to see.

And in times like these, that's not just hope - it's a blueprint for renewal.

The post The capture of journalism and the illusion of objectivity appeared first on Coda Story.

In April last year I was in Perugia, at the annual international journalism festival. I was sitting in a panel session about whether AI marked the end of journalism, when a voice note popped up on my Signal. 

It came from Christopher Wylie. He’s a data scientist and the whistleblower who cracked open the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. I had just started working with him on a new investigation into AI. Chris was supposed to be meeting me, but he had found himself trapped in Dubai in a party full of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

“I don’t know if you can hear me — I’m in the toilet at this event, and people here are talking about longevity, how to live forever, but also prepping for when people revolt and when society gets completely undermined,” he had whispered into his phone. “You have in another part of the world, a bunch of journalists talking about how to save democracy. And here, you've got a bunch of tech guys thinking about how to live past democracy and survive.”

A massive storm and a once-in-a-generation flood had paralyzed Dubai when Chris was on a layover on his way to Perugia. He couldn’t leave. And neither could the hundreds of tech guys who were there for a crypto summit. The freakish weather hadn’t stopped them partying, Chris told me over a frantic Zoom call. 

“You're wading through knee-deep water, people are screaming everywhere, and then…  What do all these bros do? They organize a party. It's like the world is collapsing outside and yet you go inside and it's billionaires and centimillionaires having a party,” he said. “Dubai right now is a microcosm of the world. The world is collapsing outside and the people are partying.”

Chris and I eventually managed to meet up. And for over a year we worked together on a podcast that asks what is really going on inside the tech world.  We looked at how the rest of us —  journalists, artists, nurses, businesses, even governments — are being captured by big tech’s ambitions for the future and how we can fight back. 

Mercy was a content moderator for Meta. She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn't sleep. And when she tried to unionize, she was laid off.

Our reporting took us around the world from the lofty hills of Twin Peaks in San Francisco to meet the people building AI models, to the informal settlements of Kenya to meet the workers training those models.

One of these people was Mercy Chimwani, who we visited in her makeshift house with no roof on the outskirts of Nairobi. There was mud beneath our feet, and above you could see the rainclouds through a gaping hole where the unfinished stairs met the sky. When it rained, Mercy told us, water ran right through the house. It’s hard to believe, but she worked for Meta. 

Mercy was a content moderator, hired by the middlemen Meta used to source employees. Her job was to watch the internet’s most horrific images and video –  training the company’s system so it can automatically filter out such content before the rest of us are exposed to it. 

She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn’t sleep. And when she and her colleagues tried to unionize, she was laid off. Mercy was part of the invisible, ignored workforce in the Global South that enables our frictionless life online for little reward. 

Of course, we went to the big houses too — where the other type of tech worker lives. The huge palaces made of glass and steel in San Francisco, where the inhabitants believe the AI they are building will one day help them live forever, and discover everything there is to know about the universe. 

In Twin Peaks, we spoke to Jeremy Nixon, the creator of AGI House San Francisco (AGI for Artificial General Intelligence). Nixon described an apparently utopian future, a place where we never have to work, where AI does everything for us, and where we can install the sum of human knowledge into our brains. “The intention is to allow every human to know everything that’s known,” he told me. 

Later that day, we went to a barbecue in Cupertino and got talking to Alan Boehme, once a chief technology officer for some of the biggest companies in the world, and now an investor in AI startups. Boehme told us how important it was, from his point of view, that tech wasn’t stymied by government regulation. “We have to be worried that people are going to over-regulate it. Europe is the worst, to be honest with you,” he said. “Let's look at how we can benefit society and how this can help lead the world as opposed to trying to hold it back.”

I asked him if regulation wasn’t part of the reason we have democratically elected governments, to ensure that all people are kept safe, that some people aren’t left behind by the pace of change? Shouldn’t the governments we elect be the ones deciding whether we regulate AI and not the people at this Cupertino barbecue?

“You sound like you're from Sweden,” Boehme responded. “I'm sorry, that's social democracy. That is not what we are here in the U. S. This country is based on a Constitution. We're not based on everybody being equal and holding people back. No, we're not in Sweden.” 

As we reported for the podcast, we came to a gradual realization – what’s being built in Silicon Valley isn’t just artificial intelligence, it’s a way of life — even a religion. And it’s a religion we might not have any choice but to join. 

In January, the Vatican released a statement in which it argued that we’re in danger of worshiping AI as God. It's an idea we'd discussed with Judy Estrin, who worked on building some of the earliest iterations of the internet. As a young researcher at Stanford in the 1970s, Estrin was building some of the very first networked connections. She is no technophobe, fearful of the future, but she is worried about the zealotry she says is taking over Silicon Valley.

What if they truly believe humans are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us.

“If you worship innovation, if you worship anything, you can't take a step back and think about guardrails,” she said about the unquestioning embrace of AI. “So we, from a leadership perspective, are very vulnerable to techno populists who come out and assert that this is the only way to make something happen.” 

The first step toward reclaiming our lost agency, as AI aims to capture every facet of our world, is simply to pay attention. I've been struck by how rarely we actually listen to what tech leaders are explicitly saying about their vision of the future. 

There's a tendency to dismiss their most extreme statements as hyperbole or marketing, but what if they're being honest? What if they truly believe humans, or at least most humans, are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us right now. 

In our series, we explore artificial intelligence as something that affects our culture, our jobs, our media and our politics. But we should also ask what tech founders and engineers are really building with AI, or what they think they’re building. Because if their vision of society does not have a place for us in it, we should be ready to reclaim our destiny – before our collective future is captured.

Our audio documentary series, CAPTURED: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover is available now on Audible. Do please tune in, and you can dig deeper into our stories and the people we met during the reporting below.

The post Captured: how Silicon Valley is building a future we never chose appeared first on Coda Story.