There's a particular satisfaction—and unease—that comes with watching a pattern you've tracked for years suddenly manifest in your own neighborhood, before your mayor-elect even takes office.

In January 2022, we published "The Year the Big Lie Went Global," documenting how election fraud rhetoric had become a transnational phenomenon—from Trump to Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Fujimori, and Germany's far-right. The piece traced what seemed, at the time, like a disturbing but spreading phenomenon: politicians losing elections and refusing to accept the results, citing voter fraud without evidence.

We're republishing that piece alongside this essay, not because we've run out of stories to tell, but to show how the infrastructure documented then is now operating in real-time. Read them side by side to see how the pattern has evolved.

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. According to research from Equality Labs, over 1.15 million Islamophobic social media posts about Mamdani have circulated since January 2025, with user reach exceeding 150 billion impressions. Another 1.43 million posts have labeled him "communist." Forty-five Republican officials from 18 states amplified attacks. Twenty-six international politicians from 14 countries joined in.*

Within hours of his victory, this machinery of disinformation went into overdrive. A viral false narrative spread claiming pro-Trump "hackers" had infiltrated his election night party—the reality was simply a television screen showing election coverage. Texas Republican Alexander Duncan, running in the 2026 Senate race, falsely claimed a noncitizen had traveled to New York to illegally vote for Mamdani, misinterpreting what was clearly a joke post on X. The claim was promoted repeatedly within Elon Musk's "Election Integrity Community" on X.

Then came the ISIS fabrications. Accounts began circulating a fake statement purportedly from ISIS's propaganda apparatus, alluding to attacks in New York on Election Day. Laura Loomer, a self-described "Islamophobe" and Trump confidante, amplified it: "The Muslims can't think of a better way for the Muslims to celebrate the victory of a Muslim mayoral candidate today than by committing an ISIS attack in NYC." Her post gathered 203,000 views and was picked up by the former CIA agent Sarah Adams, who added credibility to the fabrication: "ISIS is threatening New York City today. If you still think appeasing terrorists will make them stop, you clearly haven't gotten the memo." Adam’s post, now deleted, reached 200,000 views and was re-posted by Duncan, who claimed it proved "ISIS is openly supporting [Mamdani]." That iteration received 1.3 million views in a single day.

By the next morning, Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, was calling for federal investigation into Mamdani's citizenship, urging the Justice Department and DHS to act immediately. "If the guy lied on his naturalization papers, he ought to be deported out of the country immediately and put on a plane to Uganda," Bannon told POLITICO. Mamdani was born in Uganda, moved to the U.S. at age seven, and is an American citizen. 

But here's what makes Bannon's response dangerous: he recognized exactly how Mamdani won—the ground game, the turnout operation, "the Trump model"—yet still questioned his legitimacy. You no longer need to deny victory to undo it. You question whether the victor deserves to govern at all. This normalizes permanent contestability, where democratic outcomes are never final, just opening moves in a longer battle over who gets power.

At Coda, we don't chase daily headlines. We track what we call "currents"—the underlying forces that shape multiple issues across different contexts. In 2022, we documented election fraud rhetoric as transnational. What was reactive then—politicians refusing to concede—is now pre-emptive: attacks before the winner even takes office.

That original piece showed us something: Bolsonaro declaring fraud "the only possible explanation" for potential defeat. Netanyahu calling an election transition "the greatest election fraud in history." Germany’s far-right spreading US conspiracies about voting machines they don't use. Each seemed isolated. Together, they revealed something systematic. The speed, coordination, and pre-emptive nature of these tactics was becoming operational by 2022. Now it's refined.

This is why we want you to read the 2022 piece: not as vindication, but as a baseline. The infrastructure that was built then is now operating in real-time against a New York mayor.

The 2022 article ends with Keiko Fujimori's supporters in Peru, bulletproof vests, calling for military intervention rather than accept election results. Three years later: coordinated attempts to delegitimize a US mayor-elect begin before he takes office, with calls to investigate his citizenship and threats of federal action.

From Lima to Harlem, the logic is identical: delegitimize before governing, and you can frame every decision as illegitimate from day one. When Mamdani announces his first appointment, proposes his first policy, makes his first budget decision, the machinery is already positioned to question not just the decision, but his right to make it.

Make democratic outcomes feel perpetually contestable, and power flows to those who control the machinery of doubt, not to those who win votes.

Reading the 2022 piece now, you'll recognize this logic operating around you—not as disconnected controversies, but as infrastructure serving a purpose.

Essay by Natalia Antelava

The post From Bolsonaro to Mamdani: the global delegitimization playbook becomes New York reality appeared first on Coda Story.

In June 2019, I stood in the corner of a hotel ballroom in Athens and watched as some of the most prominent publishers and senior editors from across the European continent were made to sit blindfolded on chairs arranged in circles.

It was past midnight. The bar had been open for hours. In this dimly lit space, Google executives moved between the circles, their voices cutting through the nervous laughter.

"Werewolves, wake up," one of them commanded. "Choose your victim." The blindfolded editors, people who ran newsrooms, who held governments accountable, who prided themselves on their clear-eyed analyses of current affairs, tilted their heads toward the voices of their hosts, trying to decode who among them was predator and who was prey.

This was the climax of NewsGeist, Google's annual gathering for publishers and editors. The game was Werewolf, sometimes called Mafia, a contest of deception and power where "villagers" must identify the killers among them as they are being eliminated one by one. Google executives, led by Richard Gingras, the company's Global Vice President for News, acted as game masters. They decided who could speak, who had to stay silent, who lived, and who died. The editors participated enthusiastically. Some had flown in on Google's dime. Many had received grants from the Google News Initiative, the company's billion-dollar program to support journalism innovation. All of them depended on Google's algorithms to surface their journalism to readers.

I played one round, but felt so uncomfortable I decided to watch from the edge of the room, struck by how the whole scene looked like performance art: a dramatization of the actual relationship playing out in the real world beyond this ballroom. Publishers were going broke trying to survive in an ecosystem Google had architected. Google decided what lived and what died in its search rankings, in ad auctions, in the fundamental infrastructure of digital publishing. The parallels seemed too obvious to miss. But in Athens, everyone was laughing, playing along, bonding over cocktails and clever game theory.

Six years later, in October 2025, I finally got to ask Richard Gingras if it had occurred to him that Google executives commanding blindfolded editors in a game of power and deception might be a metaphor for the actual relationship between Google and journalism.

He looked genuinely surprised.

"No, it didn't," he said. "Oh gosh. Oh my gosh. No!"

The question no one asked 

When the International Press Institute asked me if I wanted to interview Gingras on stage at their annual congress in Vienna, my first instinct was to say no. I knew it would likely be a futile exercise: a single interview against his substantial public platform. Although now retired from Google, Richard Gingras remains a towering figure in journalism circles, a 73-year-old who had spent five decades at the intersection of media and technology, including nearly fifteen years as Google's senior voice on journalism matters. Throughout that time, he'd been a fixture at every major industry conference, built personal friendships with leading editors across the world, and positioned himself as journalism's thoughtful critic and advocate.

But I said yes because despite being perhaps the most influential voice in shaping the relationship between the world's most powerful information company and the journalism industry, Gingras had never been asked to account for what he had built. And as journalism now lurches into a new era of AI dependency, making the same mistakes with companies like Microsoft that it made with Google, I wanted to know: Could one of the architects of the first wave of platform capture reflect honestly on what he'd created? And could that self-reflection help us to avoid repeating the pattern?

The lesson from a Central Asian autocracy 

The morning of the interview, I woke with a knot in my stomach that sent me straight back to another interview, nearly twenty years earlier. I was 26, newly appointed as the BBC's Central Asia correspondent, and I'd secured an exclusive with Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's president who hadn't spoken to any foreign media in fifteen years. A friend had arranged it on one condition: I couldn't ask about the corruption charges against Nazarbayev in the United States. On the morning of the interview, my friend called to remind me his career would be on the line if I broke that promise. I felt physically ill walking into that room, not afraid of Nazarbayev, but sick at the thought of betraying someone who'd helped me and who would pay the price for my question.

I asked anyway. Nazarbayev was furious. My friend didn't speak to me for months. But I learned something that has shaped every difficult interview since: Power protects itself not through crude censorship, but through relationships, by making you feel that asking the question would be a betrayal of someone who trusted you, who opened doors for you, and who would now suffer consequences.

Comparing a Central Asian dictator to a former Silicon Valley executive may seem absurd. Richard Gingras is no authoritarian. He doesn't imprison dissidents or threaten reporters. He hosts conferences, funds initiatives, and builds relationships. But the mechanism is identical. In Vienna, the discomfort I felt wasn't about betraying a friend who had helped me, it was about breaking an unspoken professional consensus. Gingras had made himself indispensable to journalism, not through threats but through generosity, access, and genuine engagement. Asking hard questions of someone who has positioned himself as journalism's ally, who many of my colleagues consider a friend, who has funded their projects and attended their events—that feels like betrayal not because he'll retaliate, but because the entire system is built on not asking the question.

Architecture of Capture

Journalism that protects relationships isn't journalism at all. Yet that's precisely what journalism did with major platforms, especially Google. For fifteen years. Gingras was at the center of a carefully constructed ecosystem of dependency. Publishers couldn't survive without Google's traffic. Google didn't need publishers — but keeping them dependent, grateful, attending conferences, accepting grants, led to them obliging their benefactors by being effectively blind to what was happening to their industry, what was being done to it.

Journalism was seen as politically important by Google leadership way out of proportion to its revenue-generating potential, because of its influence on public perception and potential regulation. The same was true at Meta. News executives inside these tech companies had big titles, meaningful infrastructure, and significant access to top leadership, but that access came with an implicit understanding about what questions wouldn't be asked. Publishers didn’t want to be left behind but, unknowingly, they were sealing their fate.

This power dynamic extends far beyond one company's relationship with one industry. At Coda Story, where we've spent years investigating how authoritarian regimes capture institutions and reshape information systems, we recognize the pattern. The same architecture of dependency that Google built with journalism is now embedded across every sector where technology companies control infrastructure. These companies are largely opaque and unregulated, yet they control the essential infrastructure of modern life. App developers depend on platform stores. Startups depend on cloud providers. Musicians depend on Spotify for discovery and revenue. Artists depend on Instagram for visibility. Schools depend on Google Classroom and Chromebooks. Media organizations now depend on AI companies whose models train on their content and are increasingly embedded in workflows, suggesting headlines, making edits, writing summaries. The negotiations happening today mirror what happened with Google and journalism fifteen years ago.

Understanding how journalism was captured matters especially because journalism was meant to be the institution that held power accountable. When journalism itself becomes dependent on the platforms it should scrutinize, unable to ask hard questions without risking its survival, the entire accountability infrastructure collapses. Tech platforms control the infrastructure upon which democratic institutions operate, and those institutions have learned not to examine that control too closely. What happened with Google and journalism is now the template. This is why reflecting on what Gingras built matters: not to relitigate the past, but because the pattern is repeating itself. If someone as thoughtful and engaged as Gingras can't examine what happened during his tenure, what hope do we have for accountability as these dependencies deepen?

The test 

In preparing for our conversation, I read everything Gingras had published recently. He is incredibly eloquent, and I found myself agreeing with much of what he wrote: his observations about echo chambers, about oversimplification, about journalism's failures. In much of his writing, he invokes his father-in-law Dalton Trumbo — the screenwriter who chose prison over compliance with McCarthyism — as evidence of his own intimate understanding of authoritarianism. He writes eloquently about polarization and journalism's narrow focus on accountability reporting.

Intellectually, I find much of Gingras's critique of journalism provocative and not entirely without merit. But it also felt self-serving. Take his recent piece about what he calls "the Woodward-Bernstein effect," in which he argues that journalism's post-Watergate focus on accountability reporting has become "problematic," that it's turned journalists into "the town scold" and "arrogant know-it-alls." Our team at Coda has spent years covering technology companies, and Google was consistently the most opaque, the most difficult to get answers from—genuinely harder to hold accountable than the fossil fuel companies I'd covered in the past. For fifteen years, Gingras was the friendly face of that opacity. And yet, he writes thousands of words diagnosing journalism's problems while writing almost nothing about Google's role in creating them.

I wanted to know: Could he apply the same analytical rigor to Google that he applies to journalism?

Here are the highlights and then the full transcript of the conversation that unfolded.

Key moments from the interview

• On power asymmetry: When asked if Google had power over journalism, Gingras initially deflects, then eventually says "You want me to say yes? Yes. I don't understand the point."
• On the Trump inauguration: Gingras says "the White House was very clever in staging that situation" to create the photo of tech executives at Trump's inauguration,” and insists "that's the last photo Sundar ever wanted taken. We don't support this administration.”
• On the Navalny app: When confronted about Google removing Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's voting app at Putin's demand — after invoking his father-in-law Dalton Trumbo who chose prison over compliance — Gingras says he "wasn't involved in that specific decision."
• On Google's impact: Gingras repeatedly denies that Google disrupted journalism's revenue model or harmed the industry.
• On accountability: When pressed about why he writes extensively criticizing journalism but not Google, Gingras says the questions raised are about decisions he "wasn't involved with."
• On dependency: When told publishers' relationship to Google is like "controlling the oxygen," Gingras responds: "What do you mean control the oxygen? Why don't you just explain it to me instead of talking in metaphors?"
• The audience intervention: An audience member cites DOJ monopoly findings and ongoing lawsuits, providing legal specificity about Google's market dominance that Gingras cannot dismiss as opinion.
• On News Geist and CNTI: Gingras reveals that News Geist, Google's annual conference for publishers, has been moved to CNTI (Center for News, Technology & Innovation), an organization he co-founded with Marty Baron, Paula Miraglia, and Maria Ressa. Google remains a sponsor.
• The Werewolf moment: When asked if he'd ever considered that Google executives commanding blindfolded editors in a game at News Geist might be a metaphor for the actual relationship, Gingras responds: "Oh gosh. Oh my gosh. No."

Editor's note: Throughout this conversation, Gingras used "we" to refer to both the journalism industry and Google. At the end of the interview, he clarified: "I'm here representing my own views" and emphasized he was speaking for himself, not on behalf of Google. We contacted Google for comment on what was said in this conversation but at the time of publication had yet to hear back. We will update if we do. Gingras now chairs Village Media and is on the board of CNTI (Center for News, Technology & Innovation) with journalists including Marty Baron, Paula Miraglia, and Maria Ressa. The transcript of the full conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity. 

The Transcript

Natalia Antelava: Just slightly reframing the introduction (to this session): This is framed as a conversation on the program, but really, for me, it's an opportunity to ask Richard some questions that I've always wanted to ask.

My name is Natalia Antelava. I am co-founder and editor-in-chief of Coda Story, and throughout my career, first as a BBC correspondent covering conflict zones and authoritarian regimes, and then as editor-in-chief of Coda Story, I've watched how information systems shape power, how companies make choices when authoritarians demand compliance, and how journalism's business models have collapsed. I don't think anyone has more to say about all of it than Richard Gingras, who spent 15 years at Google. I'm grateful to IPI for giving me this opportunity, and grateful to you, Richard, for sitting down.

So the first question I want to ask you is actually about pronouns. I've noticed in the pieces you sent me — and I know you're no longer at Google, but even before you left — you often refer to media and journalism as "we." Can you explain that "we"?

Richard Gingras: Media and journalism, oh, you mean including me? Yes, most certainly. Well, first of all, I spent five decades of my career at the intersection of media and technology and public policy, mostly in media. I started out in public broadcasting in the United States during Watergate. So it was a pretty seminal experience. In fact, by the way, my mentor back then said something to me that influenced my career — this was 1974. He said: "Richard, if you're interested in the future of media, stay close to the technology, because it establishes the ground rules and the playing field upon which it's played." And that certainly has influenced my career, but I feel I've always been part of the media. 

Natalia Antelava: Including when you were at Google?

Richard Gingras: Including my work at Google. You know, it was obviously very much embedded in what we could do as a tech company to help enable and grow not only the media ecosystem, the journalistic ecosystem, but how we could connect our users to important, relevant, and authoritative sources of information. So to me it was very much about being journalistic in that realm as well.

Natalia Antelava: But what puzzles me about you using that pronoun when you were at Google is that the relationship between the media industry and Google was very much a power relationship. And Google had the power that journalism and media didn't. So why do you use "we" given that there was such a power asymmetry? 

Richard Gingras: I mean, I always — I guess we can get hung up on these things, but I always saw it as a collaboration. And I thought it was really important to have it as a collaboration. In fact, let me touch on something. You've heard me say this before: You know, we live in an extraordinarily polarized society and time. And we get very simplistic in the way we talk about things. We talk about things in memes, problems in memes and solutions in memes. And it's not constructive. It doesn't enable constructive dialogue. And so frankly, when I hear people refer to big tech, or the tech bros, or fake news journalism, or the mainstream media, I go, well, wait a second. In a journalistic context, I find it actually incredibly sad. These are very difficult times and very difficult challenges. And to just make these kinds of simplistic conclusions…

Natalia Antelava: Absolutely. So let's not talk about big tech and let's not talk in generalizations. Let's talk about Google. Google's relationship with the media was a relationship of power. You had the money, you had the power, you created an ecosystem in which journalism was meant to survive and in which it collapsed. So why "we"? How is that a "we"?

Richard Gingras: I don't know, I'm kind of lost in the discussion of the pronoun, right? I mean, look, I went to Google 15 years ago. I was at Google actually for a bit before that. I went because I thought in this time of the evolution of the internet — this extraordinary thing called the internet — that being at Google was going to be a very significant place to be in terms of how we expose people to diverse sources of information, in terms of how we might help drive innovation in a time of tremendous change, right? I felt it was important to do that. And frankly, it was the most extraordinary experience of my career. I will tell you, I have never in my career worked with a more significant group of principled, thoughtful people than I did at Google, in Google Search, in Google News, in our relationships with the industry. We were trying to do the right thing. Does that mean we didn't make mistakes along the way? Of course. Like, you know, search ranking is the mission.

Natalia Antelava: What would you say was the biggest mistake you made at Google?

Richard Gingras: I would say the biggest mistake, honestly, was in our work with the industry, the Google News Initiative. We spent over a billion dollars over eight years, a billion and a half dollars trying to drive innovation.

Natalia Antelava: A tiny line in the budget.

Richard Gingras: Whatever. Who else around the world was spending anything close to that, trying to drive innovation in the news industry?

Natalia Antelava: But that was happening at the same time as Google — along with others, we cannot blame just Google — was also destroying and completely reshaping the ecosystem in which journalism existed.

Richard Gingras: How was that? How was Google destroying that? I'm serious.

Natalia Antelava: Well, because Google was extracting revenue from publishers.

Richard Gingras: No. How? Where?

Natalia Antelava: Was Google not extracting revenue from publishers?

Richard Gingras: Where? How?

Natalia Antelava: The advertising model completely collapsed.

Richard Gingras: Well, let's go to that point, because again, that's one of these things that I hear repeatedly. I heard it at a conference in South Africa, [where someone] said "Oh, platforms siphoned newspaper advertising." You know, that is not factually the case. If you actually — no, look at it: if you look at the makeup — I've studied this stuff, carefully.f you look at the makeup of advertising in a newspaper in 1980, 1990, right? 80% of it was four categories: [First] Classified ads, 30%, disappeared into the internet, into online commerce sites. Second, department stores who faded in an era of e-commerce.

Natalia Antelava: And Richard, if I were sitting down with Craig Newmark [founder of Craigslist], I would be asking him different questions, but I would like to ask you questions about Google.

Richard Gingras: And you made a claim, and I think it's fair for me to respond to the claim, right? Google did not destroy the news industry, did not take their revenue. In fact, another interesting point made by Mr. Siegel last night, which just made me shake my head: "But why did we have to reinvent advertising models?" Two-thirds of Google's advertisers—not two-thirds of its revenue—two-thirds of its advertisers are small businesses who could not afford to advertise in the world of print. And by the way, as he points out, information is vital to grow an economy. Advertising, particularly in local areas, is valued information to grow a local economy.

Natalia Antelava: So you completely stand by everything that Google did when it comes to journalism.

Richard Gingras: Actually, you didn't let me answer the question, Natalia. The things that I feel like we didn't — I don't think we drove enough innovation. We missed what I see now as a significant opportunity to drive, particularly local news organizations, to rethink what local advertising could be in their communities. I'm chairman of this company, Village Media, which is rethinking what a local media entity can be in this digital world, and it's entirely supported by local merchant advertising. That was a mistake.

Natalia Antelava: But basically you're saying that you don't agree with my premise that the relationship between Google and the media industry was one of power, where Google had all the power.

Richard Gingras: I don't know how that is even — I'm not even sure how that's relevant to the conversation. All I knew was, yes, we are, you know, Google Search was a very, very significant component of the—

Natalia Antelava: But that is kind of a yes or no question. Do you think Google — Google News Initiative — in its relationship with the media industry, do you feel like Google had the power?

Richard Gingras: I don't know. You want me to say ‘yes’? Yes. I don't understand the point. I mean, do we want to get to the substance of how we move the industry forward? 

Natalia Antelava: There are lots of people who would argue that you didn't move the industry forward — that Google, not you personally, but that Google destroyed the industry. Not just on its own — I know you will argue it wasn't just Google — but it created the information ecosystem that ultimately advanced the authoritarian rise all around the world.

Richard Gingras: Oh, good Lord. Oh, good Lord. Really? Let's look at that. No, no, no. Wait a second. Let me answer that because — let's look at that.  One of the things I've tried to study and I've written about this is the evolution of media and democracy. Let's see what happened in my country in the United States, right? Let us go back to 1980 when there was deregulation of radio and television. And that was the rise of extreme partisan talk radio, right? Which began to drive our population into very dangerous spaces. And then we had the evolution of cable and cable news networks who went to their partisan cohorts – Fox News. The most significant force in driving division in the United States was that singular company.

Natalia Antelava: I would really like to talk about Google.

Richard Gingras: I understand that, but when you make those kinds of grand statements, I think it's frankly fair for us to also look at the larger picture.

Natalia Antelava: And you do that, and we do that beautifully and very eloquently in all of your writing, which really focuses on criticizing the journalism industry — which is fair enough, I happen to agree with a lot of what you say about journalism. But it does strike me a little bit like an arsonist who criticizes the fire department for not preventing enough fires.

Richard Gingras: Okay. Let me ask you this: What do you think Google should have done differently?

Natalia Antelava: I think I am the one asking questions here, but let me ask you this: You have written about your father-in-law, Dalton Trumbo — it's an incredible story. Dalton Trumbo went to prison rather than comply with Congress. And you write about it as a man who really understands authoritarianism, like on a very personal level. It's very compelling.

But here's what it makes me think about: In 2021, during the Russian parliamentary election, Alexei Navalny, who was later subsequently killed in prison, the Russian opposition leader, came up with a very simple and unique way of fighting authoritarianism through elections. It was a voting app. Does anyone remember the name of the voting app?

[Audience member]: Smart Voting.

Natalia Antelava: Smart Voting, it was called the Smart Voting app. And if it had worked — we don't know whether it would have worked — but if it had worked, then it could have given a lot of people a blueprint for fighting authoritarianism around the world. One of the reasons it didn't work was because Google complied with the Russian government, with Putin's demand, to pull the Smart Voting app from Google stores, to pull videos from YouTube, and the whole thing flopped. You were there when these decisions were being made. How did you reconcile your personal beliefs, your family's story, with the fact that the company you were representing and working for was supporting a very nasty dictatorship?

Richard Gingras: Well, you just made the statement "supporting a nasty dictatorship." I wasn't there for that specific decision, so I really can't speak to it. I can tell you that, for instance, our market share in Russia is tiny, because obviously they have no particular interest in Google Search being successful in Russia. They've tolerated YouTube because YouTube is so popular. But we don't have much of a business there, and they regularly say…

Natalia Antelava: So it had nothing to do with compliance with Putin, it was just…

Richard Gingras: Well, you made the grand statement that we complied and propped up Putin, and frankly, I think that's nonsense.

Natalia Antelava: What about building censored search engines for China that track dissidents, and continuing business with Saudi Arabia after Jamal Khashoggi died? The Dragonfly [project] allowed the Chinese government to track searches.

Richard Gingras: We didn't deal with Saudi Arabia… Wait, where did you get this that we built a separate search engine for China? What?

Natalia Antelava: The Dragonfly allowed the Chinese government to track searches.

Richard Gingras: Actually… We pulled out of China because of that. We were not going to go into China with that.

Natalia Antelava: Selling cloud to Saudi Arabia after Khashoggi.

Richard Gingras: You want to just keep talking about that?

Natalia Antelava: Yeah, because this is important context

Richard Gingras: But you make these grand statements without any backup of fact. We were not creating a search engine to go back into China. Full stop.

Natalia Antelava: No, but you can...

Richard Gingras: In fact, if we wanted to go back into China — and I said this at the time — we would have gone into China because we lost a huge amount of business in pulling out of China. We wouldn't go in with a search engine. We would go in with a simple answer engine that said, "by the way, we're going to answer questions on all these topics like home renovation and travel and so on. We're not going to deal with politics at all."  Why would you go back into China and even presume to be a search engine on the open web in China?

Natalia Antelava: So are you saying that Google never complied with authoritarian governments around the world?

Richard Gingras: I'm sure you'll come up with an example, but I don't know. You don't understand the trickiness of the position that we're in. This is not by the way — yes, we are in, as I've said, a company that is like no other company in the history of the world in the middle of so much societal change. And it's tricky.

Natalia Antelava: Well, the company is the architect of that society.

Richard Gingras: Exactly. I sat down with, for instance, I had an hour-long conversation with the communications minister in a global South country. They wanted to talk about misinformation. I spent an hour talking about that with them and then they came, it was five minutes to go, and the minister said, "Oh by the way, Mr. Gingras, there's a politician here, and this is a country that doesn't have great love for the press, that is saying dishonest things about the government. Will you deplatform him?" No, we didn't deplatform him. We told him what we normally do: "We try to surface diverse sources of information from the press in your country. If that politician is saying dishonest things, then the presumption is that maybe others in the press will challenge that."

So we've tried to be extremely principled in every place we operate. Does that say there have never been issues or challenges of how do we survive in a country and continue forward? Like you've made a whole bunch out of the fact that—

Natalia Antelava: So pulling the app in response to Putin's request to take down the Smart Voting app, that's principled?

Richard Gingras: We didn't pull out.

Natalia Antelava: Yeah, you did.

Richard Gingras: Great. Oh, pull the app. You said we pulled out.

Natalia Antelava: You pulled the app, and after that, Google closed the offices.

Richard Gingras: That's right, because we — that was the principle.

Natalia Antelava: Yes, and I understand that you had the responsibility for your staff in the country. That is also understandable. But pulling the app — you just said Google was always principled, but that is not principled. And look, I'm not holding you responsible for the decision at that level, but I'm asking you for your reflections on how that squares with your beliefs and things that you talk about, about authoritarianism, about freedom. That's what I'm trying to get, I am trying to get your reflection on it.

Richard Gingras: My reflection, in general, because the issues you specifically raised are issues that I was not involved in. It wasn't my job. At those times, I was a VP of product in Search, also overseeing things like news and so on and so forth. So where was I? These are extraordinarily difficult times and difficult circumstances. I generally believe that Google tried, and Sundar Pichai is an incredibly principled fellow. We try to do as best we can in these complex times, in this complex world. Thank you very much.

Natalia Antelava: But, do you agree that it's not a principled thing to do, to pull the app?

Richard Gingras: There's many things that we can look at and say that was not necessarily the right decision. I didn't say we were flawless at all. We try to learn as best we can from every mistake we make and go forward. That's what we did at Google. Now, it's not "we" anymore because I'm not there, but I do have tremendous respect for the people there, including Sundar for that matter. And there's, you know, all kinds of nonsense has been made out of that photo at the inauguration. We've been at every inauguration for the last 20 years. And yes, the White House was very clever in staging that situation such that that photo happened. And I know full well that that's the last photo Sundar ever wanted taken. We don't support this administration. 

Natalia Antelava: Richard, I have another question. Let's talk about something else. So you just published a piece that you sent me about what you call the Woodward-Bernstein effect, talking about Watergate and how it's kind of set the precedent for journalism being really obsessed with accountability reporting at the expense of other kinds of journalism. It's an interesting argument and there is a lot that I agree with. What bothers me about that piece when I read it is that it's coming from you, because for so long while you were at Google, Google was one of the most opaque, non-transparent and difficult organizations that I have ever dealt with as a reporter. It was impossible to get an answer from Google on anything that Google did. How do you square that?

Richard Gingras: What? I don't know how to square your experience at all. I know that when it comes to Google Search, I spent so much of my time—and the reason I say these things, by the way, I do consider myself a journalist. I consider myself having been in this space for five decades. And so I will stand on that in terms of the opinions I make about how journalism might move forward.

Natalia Antelava: Yeah, and you have great opinions, but what puzzles me is why are we not hearing your reflections about Google, your employer, for 15 years? You criticize journalism a lot and a lot of this critique is incredibly prescient, but what about reflections on...

Richard Gingras: I'd gladly reflect, but what you've asked me to reflect on is things that I wasn't involved with. So, you know.

Natalia Antelava: Yes, but you reflect on things in journalism that you were not involved in.

Richard Gingras: Let me try it. Once again, Natalia, if I have an opportunity to answer the question, I'll do it more broadly, OK? If I think there's something that we never did enough of, particularly with regard to our algorithmic work — and I'm extremely proud of our algorithmic work — and one of the things we always did with Google Search, particularly, said, "Well, we show the results every day. We will encourage research of people looking and analyzing our research and giving us that feedback." I think a mistake we made was we never spent enough time explaining how we did our work. We assumed people would understand. And they don't. I spent so much time in the last 10 or 15 years on the policy space and every time I would meet with a minister in another country, you were starting from scratch because they had no clue how Google worked. They didn't understand the business, they didn't understand how search worked.

Natalia Antelava: What did Google not understand? But is there something that Google didn't understand? I'm trying to get you to answer that.

Richard Gingras: I'll tell you what Google — here's one of the things that Google didn't understand, is we don't understand the public policy environment. You know why? Because we're a bunch of engineers. We're a bunch of logicians. I remember when I first met — when Axel Springer moved forward with Leistungsschutzrecht [the German ancillary copyright law], right, another bad example of public policy, pay for links, right? And I explained this, so I had to go brief Larry [Page] about this. And as typical with Larry, he was very smart. And he said, well, that's just fucking stupid. And he's right. It was stupid. It made no sense for the industry.

Natalia Antelava: Yes, it didn't make sense for the profit part.

Richard Gingras: Can I finish my answer, Natalia? The reason it didn't make sense for him was that he's a logician. And I said: "But Larry, here's the thing. In the public policy environment, logic doesn't even get invited into the room. It's a battle of particular interests. And if we want to be effective in that environment, then we have to do a whole lot more outreach. We have to do a whole lot more talking. We have to do a lot representing what we do and why we do it." All right, there's a reflection.

Natalia Antelava: But, isn't what you do and why you did it — profit? The bottom line was always profit.

Richard Gingras: Are you saying there's something wrong with…

Natalia Antelava: No, not at all. I'm not saying there is something wrong….

Richard Gingras: I do find it interesting here that we like to toss around the word non-profit as if it were a cloak of ethics. It's not a business model, it's a tax status. What we all need to be much more focused on is how do we drive sustainable news businesses. And yeah, Google—

Natalia Antelava: Yeah, but that's exactly the point I'm making. What Google was always focused on was not driving sustainable news businesses. It was focused on driving its own business, which did not go hand-in-hand with sustainable journalism.

Richard Gingras: And again, if you want to be specific, in what ways you thought that was contrary to our societal interests, I'd like to hear it. I mean, look at it.

Natalia Antelava: Oh, does it?

Richard Gingras: Fine, say it, hear it. Can we be specific?

Natalia Antelava: I just gave you a bunch of examples from Russia, Saudi Arabia. There are others: Vietnam, Turkey...

Richard Gingras: OK. We try to survive in those countries as best we can without pulling out because we don't think it's in the best interest — like in the United States we got a government that could destroy us in a heartbeat. We're trying damn hard not to be destroyed because we don't think that's A) good for our business or good for the societies we operate in. And we will try to continue.

Natalia Antelava: Yeah, it's "we," you are still saying it. I find it interesting that you say "we" both about the news industry as well as Google and I think these are two very different "we's" because these are two entities that hold completely different power in today's information ecosystem, in which the noise is overwhelming and journalism cannot get through the noise. Part of that is the architecture of the way modern information works, and Google played a key role in being the architect.

Richard Gingras: No, listen, architect of what?

Natalia Antelava: Of the current information ecosystem.

Richard Gingras: What? Operating Google Search? Operating auction-based advertising systems? Tell me what? No, go ahead, tell me what.

Natalia Antelava (addressing voices from the room): Would anyone like to say something? 

Richard Gingras: Auction-based advertising systems have created great efficiencies in the economy. Go ahead.

[Audience member]: Sure, so we know that the Department of Justice has found two illegal monopolies, so it's not an opinion, it's a legal finding that Google had monopoly rents on search. So Google was found to have an illegal monopoly in search, that included in terms of advertising search and search visibility, and it was found to be an illegal monopoly in [ad tech]. And what does that mean? That means that it took monopoly rents. That was preferential dominance. And so that doesn't have anything to do with—that was how you siphoned off revenue. So this is not an opinion of Natalia's. This is what has been determined by a US court and then many competition authorities around the world that have done investigations to look at Google's market power, as you said, in all of these domains, including now building the next generation of AI, the whole AI ecosystem, redoing the information ecosystem, and revising copyright, which has been around for hundreds of years, to self-preferencing, forcing us to use those tools in Google products without any choice. No consent, no compensation, no credit. Google search would not be very useful if it didn't have fact-based information, just as AI is not useful without fact-based information. But there is not a fair exchange of value. There is no payment for copyright. There is no payment for the use of raw data, which creates the—

Richard Gingras: And by the way, we didn't revise copyright, we are operating within copyright today. Google is operating within copyright today.

[Audience member]: No, I mean, there are so many publishers that have aligned to create, to try to get their rights, their copyrights. But Google has so much money that it can afford to resist more than 54 lawsuits that are happening around the world.

Richard Gingras: Again, right, let the courts decide.

[Audience member]: They have decided…

Richard Gingras: You want me to give constructive [advice] to the industry, as me, not as Google, talking about AI? Go ahead, put up the robots.txt. Feel free. Pay to crawl {a bot that browses the net and discovers raw data from webpages, a critical step for search engines to function].. Great. My only guidance to you would be: be very cautious about what you expect in return dollar-wise. And if you want to analyze the information economy at large, you'll get a pretty clear understanding of where the value is and where the value isn't, right? But do that. I have no problem with that personally at all.

[Audience member]: We did it. [Another publisher] did it, I did it!

Richard Gingras: Great, do it, and then fine, and you can block whoever you block. That's fine, go ahead, but that's not a copyright issue. If there are copyright lawsuits and lawsuits that win, fine, but I haven't seen them yet.

[Audience member]: The Thompson Reuters case.

Richard Gingras: And just think, wait, let's see how the courts resolve those issues. But again, the same point is, if you want to block the crawlers, block the crawlers. If you want to try to extract payment from the crawler, extract payment for the crawlers, so be it. I don't disagree with that.

Natalia Antelava: I mean the issue with that is that if you control the oxygen and then you tell people "you don't have to breathe this air if you don't want to"—

Richard Gingras: What do you mean control the oxygen?

Natalia Antelava: I think everyone in this room understand the metaphor. Can you raise your hand if you know what I mean?

(hands go up)

Richard Gingras: Well don't, why don't you just explain it to me instead of talking in metaphors?

Natalia Antelava: Richard, I think of all people you really understand metaphors.

Richard Gingras: Thank you. Okay, Natalia, I don't know what to say. When you say you control the oxygen, what does that mean? Seriously, you giggle, just answer the question. Is it that hard to answer?

Natalia Antelava: You control the ecosystem in which publishers had to survive.

Richard Gingras: What control? Google Search? Control? Look, here too. Really interesting. When they say gatekeepers, we came from a pre-internet ecosystem where breaking into the dialog of the media was extraordinarily difficult. Now we have this thing called the internet and we have these things called search engines which help you find these sources. Now if you want to criticize the algorithm, criticize the algorithm and I'll gladly defend that or not. And if you want to be specific about those criticisms, do...

Natalia Antelava: No, I'm much more interested in—

Richard Gingras: But if you want to be in search, then yes, we need to crawl

Natalia Antelava: Yeah, that's right. That's what I mean. You control the oxygen and say “go ahead and breathe some other air”

Richard Gingras: What are you suggesting as the alternative model? I want you to just kind of play some of these scenarios through for a second. Because I'm saying, we need to pass a law saying that LLMs need to pay for the content they crawl. Can I finish the point, Natalia? Think of how that might play out. Because I suspect what might play out is those LLMs—first of all, the money isn't in news at all. It's not in news at all, it's not what the enterprises are paying for, so there's not gonna be a whole lot of money to be spent—but what they will do is they'll go pick off a number of publishers or wire services here, a big publisher there, and it'll be end of story. So much for that nice, wonderful, diverse ecosystem that we're talking about here. It won't happen. So again, you can impose that model. Is that ultimately to the benefit of the knowledge ecosystem of the world? I kind of question that.

Natalia Antelava: I mean, the knowledge ecosystem that is very questionable and is full of rubbish — I'm not blaming you for that. What I'm trying to get out of you are genuine reflections about the specifics. You're very good at giving them when it comes to critique of the media and you're not able to do it at all when it comes to critique of the company that was your employer for a long time. It sounds like you did everything right and publishers did everything wrong.

Richard Gingras: I did not say that, I did not say that Natalia, you know, honestly, you put words in my mouth, you raise non-specific questions for me to react to.

Natalia Antelava: I think I raised very specific questions.

Richard Gingras: These are specific questions about things that I again [was not a part of], I worked in search.

Natalia Antelava: But you understand how the power structures work. And you using the "we" pronoun and hosting journalists and being part of the journalism industry conversation has helped Google to obscure the fact that it was also destroying the business.

Richard Gingras: Again, people can decide whether they want to engage with Google or not.

They don't have to come to conferences that we've sponsored, they don't have to use the tools that we have provided, you don't have to at all. 

Natalia Antelava: Because if you don't, you don't exist. But since you brought up conferences, there is one question I’ve always wanted to ask you. I've only been to one News Geist — two News Geists [Google's annual conference for publishers] — as probably most of you in the room know. I went to Athens, was never invited back, I wonder why... But the one memory that I have from News Geist — it was a great conference, excellent conversations, really fun dinners, fantastic cocktails at the bar — and you know, one night after the cocktails, after everyone had lots of cocktails, all these people gathered into the ballroom for the big News Geist tradition, the Werewolf game. And those of you who don't know, it's basically like the same kind of game as Mafia. It's a power and deception game, where you've got the killers and the innocents – the villagers and the werewolves. And then you have the game masters. And this is happening at a time when lots of publishers are shutting down and the business is in tatters and, you know, there's this Google-facilitated conversation about how we can save journalism. And here I look across this room and there are several big circles of chairs and on the chairs are senior editors and publishers from across Europe and many of them are blindfolded or they've got their eyes closed and Google executives, yourself included, were going around playing the game masters, commanding when people could see, when they couldn't see, who lives, who dies. Did it ever cross your mind that this was a metaphor for Google's relationship with the media?

Richard Gingras: Good lord. Okay, so let me give you a quick bit of history. Our conferences came out of the software industry. They were called FooCamps. O'Reilly Publishing decided to do one for news called News Foo. And then they decided, well, not a very good business, and so Google said we would do it. Now it's like 12 years ago. And we've done these around the world. It's an absolutely great model. I wish more people would use it. Werewolf was part of it way before we started it. We didn't pick the game. It's a fascinating game. Reporters particularly like it because it's an interesting game that gets down to, can I detect when someone is lying or not? It's a game.

Natalia Antelava: Did it ever, after years of doing News Geist, did it ever cross your mind that this is a metaphor for Google's relationship with the media? Because I'll tell you, this is what everyone else thought!

Richard Gingras: No, it didn't. Oh gosh. Oh my gosh. No, no. So let me just say one thing.

Natalia Antelava: We are out of time.

Richard Gingras: Let me say two things. First of all, I'm here representing my own views. I'm also here representing an organization called CNTI [Center for News, Technology & Innovation], which was founded by the likes of Marty [Baron], Paula [Miraglia], me, Maria Ressa. That organization was founded to foment dialogue on these complex issues between different people. We don't always agree on things. So I want to be clear. What I'm speaking here for is my views. And by the way, our conference is going forward, News Geist is going forward. It's run by CNTI. What a nice thing. We've moved it from Google to CNTI. We hope to be doing one in Europe. 

Natalia Antelava: Google's still paying for it, though.

Richard Gingras: Google's a sponsor. So if you want to come up with $150,000 to sponsor the event, we'll gladly take your check. But Google has never imposed their agenda on it. We don't even have logos up at the event. 

Natalia Antelava: That is really the power of Google, when you don't need logos.

Alright, thank you so much. I really hope that we will all get to read pieces by you about your time at Google that have the same analysis and depth as your critiques of journalism.

Postscript: Gingras sat for this interview knowing the questions would be uncomfortable, which deserves acknowledgment. At the end, he said I should have been more specific in my questions. I would welcome the opportunity to continue this conversation with whatever specificity he'd like. His current writing on journalism and media can be found here.

The post The Werewolf game: an interview with Google’s former news chief Richard Gingras appeared first on Coda Story.

Even as Zelensky and his European allies descended on Washington, I found myself still processing what we had witnessed just days earlier in Alaska, where Putin and Trump turned crisis into theater, and where Putin issued a seductive invitation to step "from yesterday into tomorrow."

Put aside memories, responsibility, and accountability, he suggested. Drift into business as usual.

Every summer, when news slows to a languid crawl, journalists trade a well-worn joke: just wait, August will deliver its crisis. This August, the crisis came packaged as theater: a spectacle in Alaska with Trump and Putin center stage, military helicopters overhead, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in his intentionally provocative "USSR" sweatshirt and a swarm of media chasing every move.

Putin basked in his return from international isolation. Trump beamed as he applauded him. As far as we know, they achieved nothing. The summit wrapped up with vague platitudes..

I felt anger swell inside me as I watched the spectacle. Not at Putin or Trump, who are expertly playing the roles they have chosen for themselves, but at the rest of us who keep letting them get away with it.

The Media's Unwilling Complicity

In coverage of the Alaska summit, report after report on US television referred to Ukraine as "the war that started in 2022," echoing a narrative that strips away years of conflict, occupation, and loss. What Putin and Trump are successfully inviting us to forget isn't just the past, but the throughline of consequences that have brought us to this moment.

Our recent investigation exposes the anatomy of how authoritarians manipulate not just history but living memory itself: how the tweaking of tiny details, the quiet adjustment of timelines or the reframing of a single moment can change the entire story.

For me, the story is deeply personal. In 2008, Vladimir Putin carried out his first invasion of a sovereign state: Georgia. I flew home to cover the war for the BBC, filing updates on Russian troop movements, statements from officials, and frontline reports.

But my reports, no matter how thorough, sat within the BBC's larger narrative of the Georgia war as a sudden, out-of-the-blue August crisis. This narrative completely ignored the reality that for those living it, the war was simply the latest catastrophic chapter in Russia's decades-long campaign of aggression.

This is the paradox of news: one of society's essential pillars, designed to inform, yet structurally unable to capture the very continuity that defines how people experience life. The pressures are real: audience attention spans, commercial demands, the sheer volume of breaking news, but the effect remains the same. It makes news media, even well-intentioned, ethical media, an unwilling accomplice to authoritarian manipulation.

The Architecture of Forgetting

All of us understand our lives in context: in relation to history, memory, and culture. For Palestinians, today's violence is inseparable from the Nakba of 1948, the catastrophe that started their displacement. For Ukrainians, the conflict didn't begin in 2022. For Georgians, the war was never just five days long. For the Sudanese, the current war isn't separate from decades of Darfur's trauma.

When the news machine reduces these stories to start dates and breaking news alerts, it strips them of crucial continuity. It is precisely in these interrupted threads, these gaps where collective memory should live, that authoritarians find their opportunity.

Authoritarians operate in the spaces left empty by our collective forgetting, reshaping narratives and bending truth to serve their aims.

"I'm looking around, looking for a homeland inside my homeland," says one woman in Masho's piece, capturing the alienation spreading across societies where people are forced to give up not only their land but also their stories and memories, their truth.

Masho Lomashvili's investigation, "Erasing August: How Russia Rewrites Georgia's Story," was supported by Coda's Bruno Investigative Fellowship. We are currently seeking applications for our 2025-2026 Bruno Fellow. Apply here.

A version of this piece was originally published in our Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here to receive weekly deep dives into the patterns of power shaping our world.

The post The Alaska Spectacle and the War on Memory appeared first on Coda Story.

The numbers are staggering: Meta is offering AI researchers total compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years, with individual deals like former Apple executive Ruoming Pang's $200 million package making headlines across Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, OpenAI just raised $40 billion, with the company valued at $300, reportedly the largest private tech funding round in history. 

But beneath these eye-watering dollar figures lies a profound transformation: Silicon Valley’s elite have evolved from eager innovators into architects of a new world order, reshaping society with their unprecedented power. This shift is not just about money or technology, it marks a fundamental change in how power is conceived and exercised. 

We often talk about technology as if it exists in a silo, separate from politics or culture. But those boundaries are rapidly dissolving. Technology is no longer just a sector or a set of tools; it is reshaping everything, weaving itself into the very fabric of society and power. The tech elite are no longer content with tech innovation alone, they are crafting a new social and political reality, wielding influence that extends far beyond the digital realm.

To break out of these siloed debates, at the end of June we convened a virtual conversation with four remarkable minds: Christopher Wylie (the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower and host of our Captured podcast), pioneering technologist Judy Estrin, filmmaker and digital rights advocate Justine Bateman, and philosopher Shannon Vallor. Our goal: to explore how Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation has morphed into a belief system, one that’s migrated from the tech fringe to the center of our collective imagination, reimagining what it means to be human.

The conversation began with a story from Chris Wylie that perfectly captured the mood of our times. While recording the Captured podcast, he found himself stranded in flooded Dubai, missing a journalism conference in Italy. Instead, he ended up at a party thrown by tech billionaires, a gathering that, as he described in a voice note he sent us from the bathroom, felt like a dispatch from the new center of power:

“People here are talking about longevity, how to live forever. But also prepping—how to prepare for when society gets completely undermined.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS1Xs_z1rFk

At that party, tech billionaires weren’t debating how to fix democracy or save society. They were plotting how to survive its unraveling. That fleeting moment captured the new reality: while some still debate how to repair the systems we have, others are already plotting their escape, imagining futures where technology is not just a tool, but a lifeboat for the privileged few. It was a reminder that the stakes are no longer abstract or distant: they are unfolding, right now, in rooms most of us will never enter.

Our discussion didn’t linger on the spectacle of that Dubai party for long. Instead, it became a springboard to interrogate the broader shift underway: how Silicon Valley’s narratives, once quirky, fringe, utopian, have become the new center of gravity for global power. What was once the domain of science fiction is now the quiet logic guiding boardrooms, investment strategies, and even military recruitment.

As Wylie  put it, “When you start to think about Silicon Valley not simply as a technology industry or a political institution, but one that also emits spiritual ideologies and prophecies about the nature and purpose of humanity, a lot of the weirdness starts to make a lot more sense.”

Judy Estrin, widely known in tech circles as the "mother of the cloud" for her pioneering role in building the foundational infrastructure of the internet, has witnessed this evolution firsthand. Estrin played a crucial part in developing the TCP/IP protocols that underpin digital communication, and later served as CTO of Cisco during the internet’s explosive growth. She’s seen the shift from Steve Jobs’ vision of technology as "a bicycle for the mind" to Marc Andreessen’s declaration that "software is eating the world." 

Now, Estrin sounds the alarm: the tech landscape has moved from collaborative innovation to a relentless pursuit of control and dominance. Today’s tech leaders are no longer just innovators, they are crafting a new social architecture that redefines how we live, think, and connect.

What makes this transformation of power particularly insidious is the sense of inevitability that surrounds it. The tech industry has succeeded in creating a narrative where its vision of the future appears unstoppable, leaving the rest of us as passive observers rather than active participants in the shaping of our technological destiny.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and PayPal co-founder, embodies this mindset. In a recent interview, Thiel was asked point-blank whether he wanted the human race to endure. He hesitated before answering, “Uh, yes,” then added: “I also would like us to radically solve these problems…” Thiel’s ambivalence towards other human beings and his appetite for radical transformation capture the mood of a class of tech leaders who see the present as something to be escaped, not improved—a mindset that feeds the sense of inevitability and detachment Estrin warns about.

Estrin argues that this is a new form of authoritarianism, where power is reinforced not through force but through what she calls "silence and compliance." The speed and scale of today's AI integration, she says, requires us " to be standing up and paying more attention." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbznyAA3j8E&ab_channel=CodaStory

Shannon Vallor, philosopher and ethicist, widened the lens. She cautioned that the quasi-religious narratives emerging from Silicon Valley—casting AI as either savior or demon—are not simply elite fantasies. Rather, the real risk lies in elevating a technology that, at its core, is designed to mimic us. Large language models, she explained, are “merely broken reflections of ourselves… arranged to create the illusion of presence, of consciousness, of being understood.”

The true danger, Vallor argued, is that these illusions are seeping into the minds of the vulnerable, not just the powerful. She described receiving daily messages from people convinced they are in relationships with sentient AI gods—proof that the mythology surrounding these technologies is already warping reality for those least equipped to resist it.

She underscored that the harms of AI are not distributed equally: “The benefits of technological innovation have gone to the people who are already powerful and well-resourced, while the risks have been pushed onto those that are already suffering from forms of political disempowerment and economic inequality.” 

Vallor’s call was clear: to reclaim agency, we must demystify technology, recognize who is making the choices, and insist that the future of AI is not something that happens to us, but something that we shape together.

As the discussion unfolded, the panelists agreed: the real threat isn’t just technological overreach, but the surrender of human agency. The challenge is not only to question where technology is taking us, but to insist on our right to shape its direction, before the future is decided without us.

Justine Bateman, best known for her iconic roles in Hollywood and her outspoken activism for artists’ rights, entered the conversation with the perspective of someone who has navigated both the entertainment and technology industries. Bateman, who holds a computer science degree from UCLA, has become a prominent critic of how AI and tech culture threaten human creativity and agency.

During the discussion, Bateman and Estrin found themselves at odds over how best to respond to the growing influence of AI. Bateman argued that the real threat isn’t AI itself becoming all-powerful, but rather the way society risks passively accepting and even revering technology, allowing it to become a “sacred cow” beyond criticism. She called for open ridicule of exaggerated tech promises, insisting, “No matter what they do about trying to live forever, or try to make their own god stuff, it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to make a god that replaces God. You are not going to live forever. It’s not going to happen.” Bateman also urged people to use their own minds and not “be lazy” by simply accepting the narratives being sold by tech elites.

Estrin pushed back, arguing that telling people to use their minds and not be lazy risks alienating those who might otherwise be open to conversation. Instead, she advocated for nuance, urging that the debate focus on human agency, choice, and the real risks and trade-offs of new technologies, rather than falling into extremes or prescribing a single “right” way to respond.

“If we have a hope of getting people to really listen… we need to figure out how to talk about this in terms of human agency, choice, risks, and trade-offs,” she said. “Because when we go into the , you’re either for it or against it, people tune out, and we’re gonna lose that battle.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3771gt5m0&ab_channel=CodaStory

At this point, Christopher Wylie offered a strikingly different perspective, responding directly to Bateman’s insistence that tech was “not going to make a god that replaces God.”

“I’m actually a practicing Buddhist, so I don’t necessarily come to religion from a Judeo-Christian perspective,” he said, recounting a conversation with a Buddhist monk about whether uploading a mind to a machine could ever count as reincarnation. Wylie pointed out that humanity has always invested meaning in things that cannot speak back: rocks, stars, and now, perhaps, algorithms. “There are actually valid and deeper, spiritual and religious conversations that we can have about what consciousness actually is if we do end up tapping into it truly,” he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGyWGOB0ZEs&ab_channel=CodaStory

Rather than drawing hard lines between human and machine, sacred and profane, Wylie invited the group to consider the complexity, uncertainty, and humility required as we confront the unknown. He then pivoted to a crucial obstacle in confronting the AI takeover:

“We lack a common vocabulary to even describe what the problems are,” Wylie argued, likening the current moment to the early days of climate change activism, when terms like “greenhouse gases” and “global warming” had to be invented before a movement could take shape. “Without the words to name the crisis, you can’t have a movement around those problems.”

The danger, he suggested, isn’t just technological, it’s linguistic and cultural. If we can’t articulate what’s being lost, we risk losing it by default.

Finally, Wylie reframed privacy as something far more profound than hiding: “Privacy is your ability to decide how to shape yourself in different situations on your own terms, which is, like, really, really core to your ability to be an individual in society.”

When we give up that power, we don’t just become more visible to corporations or governments, we surrender the very possibility of self-determination. The conversation, he insisted, must move beyond technical fixes and toward a broader fight for human agency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64LSK25aS4&ab_channel=CodaStory

As we wrapped up, what lingered was not a sense of closure, but a recognition that the future remains radically open—shaped not by the inevitability of technology, but by the choices we make, questions we ask, and movements we are willing to build. Judy Estrin’s call echoed in the final moments: “We need a movement for what we’re for, which is human agency.”

This movement, however, should not be against technology itself. As Wylie argued in the closing minutes, “To criticize Silicon Valley, in my view, is to be pro-tech. Because what you're criticizing is exploitation, a power takeover of oligarchs that ultimately will inhibit what technology is there for, which is to help people.” 

The real challenge is not to declare victory or defeat, but to reclaim the language, the imagination, and the collective will to shape humanity's next chapter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZhdA9MpBVI&ab_channel=CodaStory

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There are cities that teach you to read between the lines, to notice the way the air shifts before history changes course. Beirut in 2008 was one of those cities. A familiar cast filled its glitzy bars and air conditioned coffee shops: correspondents, fixers, schemers, dreamers – but beneath the surface, the city was still reeling from the earth-shattering assassination in 2005 of its former prime minister Rafic Hariri. Beirut was caught between recovery and reckoning, not yet knowing that the region's biggest earthquake was still gathering force just across the border.

It was in this world that I found myself, the latest addition to the city's English-speaking press corps. I had landed as the BBC's correspondent, but unlike most of my on-air colleagues at the time, I had an accent no one could quite place and a backstory most of my fellow foreign correspondents would have struggled to map. Except for Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the other accented foreigner in Beirut's lively foreign correspondents group.

In Beirut, like all foreign correspondents Ghaith and I were outsiders to the country we were reporting on, but we were also outsiders trying to break into an industry that was reluctant to accept us. I remember at one particularly loud Beirut media party, a middle-aged man shouted into my ear that the new BBC correspondent's accent was a disgrace, an act of disrespect to British listeners. He didn't realize he was speaking to that very correspondent. 

Ghaith meanwhile had made his way from an architecture school in Baghdad (evident in the skill he brings to his sketches) onto the pages of The Guardian, somehow transforming the drawbridge of the British media establishment into an open door.  But it wasn’t our struggle that we bonded over – it was bananas. Or, more precisely, the scarcity thereof.

In Saddam’s Iraq, I learned from Ghaith, much like in the Soviet Georgia of my childhood, the lack of bananas turned them into more than a fruit. They were a symbol of luxury, a crescent-shaped promise that somewhere life was sweet and abundant. Most kids like us, who grew up dreaming of bananas, set out to chase abundance in Europe or America as adults. For whatever reasons, Ghaith and I chose the reverse commute, drawn to the abundance of stories in places that others wanted to flee. 

Ghaith and I decided to turn our community of two into a secret club we called “Journalists Without Proper Passports”: JPP, or was it JwPP. We couldn’t quite agree on the acronym, but it became a running joke about the strange calculus of turning what you lack into what you offer. Our passports, while pretty useless for weekend trips to Europe or getting U.S. visas, worked miracles for getting into places like Libya, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Burma, and Iran.

On a trip to Afghanistan, Ghaith left his Beirut apartment keys with a fresh face who had just arrived in the city: Josh Hersh. Josh, I only recently learned, had been agonizing over whether he should move from New York to Beirut, coming up with excuse after excuse not to make the leap. "In April, I'm gonna be in Afghanistan," Ghaith had told him when they met. "You can stay in my apartment, no problem." Just like that, Josh had no more excuses. And so, while Ghaith was in  Afghanistan, Josh was settling into Beirut's rhythm, discovering what the rest of us already knew: that the city had a way of making you feel like you belonged, even when you clearly didn't.

Josh had a keen reporter’s eye for things the rest of us missed. I remember one night at Barometre – a sweaty, crowded Palestinian bar where men spun in circles to music that seemed to defy gravity – Josh and I slipped outside for air. He pointed at my beer and said, "You aren't really drinking that, are you?" Just like that, he'd guessed my secret: I was pregnant. That was Josh's gift – listening and watching harder than anyone else, catching the detail that unlocks the rest of the story.

The gift was on full display when, almost two decades after they met, Ghaith and Josh sat down in Tbilisi at ZEG, our annual storytelling festival. Josh was interviewing Ghaith at ZEG for Kicker, his podcast for Columbia Journalism Review.

The conversation happened at a moment when the Middle East was literally on the brink of a wider war. The old fault lines – sectarian, geopolitical, generational – were shifting beneath our feet. And Ghaith's words felt both urgent and timeless, a reminder that beneath every headline about good guys and bad guys are people making desperate choices about survival. Unlike many of us, who eventually scattered to desk jobs at a comfortable distance from the action, Ghaith is still the one regularly slipping into Damascus and Sana’a, telling stories that – as Josh put it “refuse to moralize”, to categorize people as heroes or traitors, insisting instead on the messy, human reality of survival. 

At ZEG, he talked about Mustafa, a young man in Damascus who became a "reluctant collaborator" with the Syrian regime – not out of ideology, but out of a desperate calculus for survival. "My rule number one: I will never be beaten up ever again," Ghaith recounted Mustafa saying. "And of course, he gets beaten up again and again and again." It's a line that lands with particular force now, as the region cycles through yet another round of violence, and the world tries once more to flatten its tragedies into headlines.

Ghaith also spoke about the legacy of violence that shapes the region's present – and its future: "That's the legacy, the trauma of violence, that is the biggest problem in this region, I think. It is an organic reason why these cycles perpetuate themselves."

And then there was his insight into how the West – and the world – misunderstands the Middle East: "At one point, I realized there is no one conflict crossing the region from Tehran to Sana'a via Baghdad and Damascus. But a constellation of smaller conflicts utilized for a bigger one… It's so much easier to understand the conflict in the Middle East as Iran versus the Sunnis or the Jihadis versus Israel. But if we see it as a local conflict, I think it's much more difficult, but it's much more interesting."

"My anger with Americans is not only destroying Iraq, not only committing massacres and whatnot, and not a single person went to jail for the things they did in Iraq. Not George Bush. Not Nouri al-Maliki. No one has ever stood and said, well, I'm sorry for the things we've done. We will never have a proper reconciliation because the same trauma of violence and sectarianism will be repackaged and will travel to Syria, to Yemen and come back to haunt this region. And that's my problem. And this is why I'm angry."

Josh, with his characteristic gentleness, pressed Ghaith on these patterns and the craft of reporting on them. And Ghaith, ever the reluctant protagonist, brushed aside the idea of bravery: "I'm scared all the time. Not sometimes, but all the time. But also, I think it's not about me. I want to tell the story of Mustafa, of the other people on the ground. I don't want to be distracted by my own story, reading “War and Peace” in a Taliban detention cell."

When the session ended, people didn't leave with answers – they left with better questions. There was that electric feeling you get when a conversation has broken something open, when the neat categories we use to understand the world have been gently but firmly dismantled. In that room, for an hour, we weren't talking about "the Middle East" as an abstraction, but about the weight of history on individual lives.

In a moment when the region is once again at the center of the world's anxieties, when the language of "good guys" and "bad guys" is being weaponized by everyone from politicians to algorithms, we need conversations that refuse to let us off the hook. We need the kind of journalism that Ghaith practices, journalism that insists on the messy, contradictory reality of people's lives, that sees the individual inside the collective tragedy.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

Listen to the full conversation on The Kicker. If you're curious about the stories that shaped it, pick up Ghaith's book, and join us at the next ZEG, where the best conversations are always the ones you didn't expect to have.

The post What We Miss When We Talk about the “Middle East” appeared first on Coda Story.

Earlier this week, as the Iranian defense minister headed to Qingdao for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Donald Trump was basking in the spotlight at a NATO gathering in the Netherlands, claiming credit for brokering a Middle East truce. But beneath the headlines, one untold story was about who gets to shape the new world order, and how Russia, once a regional kingmaker, is now struggling to define its place.

As old alliances crack, Russia is scrambling to shape a new global order. Its answer: an unexpected bold imperial narrative that promises stability but reveals deep anxieties about Moscow’s place in a world where legitimacy, history, and power are all being contested.

The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

The post The Empire Game 2.0: Through Moscow’s Eyes appeared first on Coda Story.

The girl in the black Audrey Hepburn dress was crying in the bathroom, mascara running down her cheeks. We found her by chance—a total stranger using the bathroom of a hotel where we were hosting a giant dinner party for our 200 guests. My ZEG co-founders and I, on a quick trip away from our sprawling table, gathered around her, wanting to understand what had happened. Through tears, she told us her boyfriend had just broken up with her and announced he was getting engaged to someone else. On her birthday.

We handed her tissues and then invited her to join our party. Ten minutes later, she was surrounded by journalists, artists, Nobel laureates, filmmakers, and activists, all raising glasses and toasting her birthday as if she were the guest of honor. By the end of the night, she was laughing, swept up in the improbable magic that happens when you throw open the doors and bring strangers together.

As we organize the fifth edition of our storytelling festival, I keep thinking back to that night last summer. Of all the remarkable moments we've witnessed at ZEG, our annual storytelling festival, of all the celebrities and headliners we've hosted, it's that spontaneous encounter that best embodies the spirit of what we're trying to build: a place where boundaries dissolve, where the unexpected is welcome, and where someone who walked in crying can leave feeling part of a community they never knew existed.

How ZEG came to be

I'll be honest: I never thought I believed in ‘events’ as a way to do journalism. When I was reporting from war zones for the BBC, I believed journalism's impact was measured in stories published and scoops landed and in being on the ground. 

Of course, that remains true. But with social media platforms shaping how stories are distributed and consumed, I saw that journalism's survival hinged on our ability to create spaces for meaningful engagement and collective understanding. For our team at Coda, events like ZEG are not a side project—they’re central to how we create meaning and context in a noisy world. They let us go beyond the article, beyond the headline, and to wrestle as a community with the “how” and “why” and, sometimes, to change the story altogether, or at least our understanding of it.

That's the philosophy behind ZEG. But in practice, with colleagues scattered from San Francisco to Tbilisi, London, New York, Milan, and Delhi, the festival is put together in a whirlwind of Slack threads, late-night WhatsApps, and video calls that span time zones. Sometimes I look at the Zoom screen and can't help but chuckle: one of us is in a taxi after covering a protest, another is dialing in from an airport, someone else is squeezing in the call between deadlines or giving a bath to one of the kids. Though we never planned it this way, everyone on the screen is a woman, each of us juggling her own corner of chaos as we plan our biggest event of the year.

A laboratory for journalism

The word “zeg" means "the day after tomorrow” in Georgian. And that encapsulates Coda's mission to look beyond the headlines, connect the dots between crises, identify emerging patterns, and to stay on the story by building sustained narratives in a world that is fragmented, distracted and quick to forget. We know that keeping a critical eye on the present provides insights into the future. It’s why we aim to pioneer new ways to tell stories about the world, to show how local realities are part of wider global conversations that resonate across borders and generations.

ZEG began as a collaboration, a leap of faith between journalists and entrepreneurs in my hometown Tbilisi. We were brought together by the belief that stories can change not just what we know, but how we see and what we do. We wondered, in that first year, if anyone would really fly across the world to Georgia for a festival about telling stories, and how to tell them better. But people did, and—with the exception of the COVID years—they've kept coming ever since.

What started as an experiment has become an international event. In 2025, we’ll host 800 people, including 120 speakers, over three packed days.

Every year, friends ask me: “Who’s your big star at ZEG this time?” I’m never quite sure how to answer. The real magic is in the mix: in the way hundreds of people from all over the world come together, crossing borders both physical and mental, for three days of conversations that bend minds and spark connections that last a lifetime.

If you’re looking for a festival that’s the opposite of formulaic, you’ll find it at ZEG. We don’t have themes; we want space for surprises, to see where the questions we ask take us, and to try to arrive at ideas and perspectives that are fresh.

Beyond the festival

What happens at ZEG doesn't stay at ZEG. We carry on its spirit of inquiry in Coda’s journalism. Our mission is to stay on the story, so that the conversations and connections that begin at the festival invigorate and inform our reporting and coverage long after the festival lights go down.

While we know that for most of you, Tbilisi is a long way to come, we believe there's something essential about having global conversations far from the center. ZEG was born on the periphery, and—as we've seen again and again—it’s from the margins that the most original ideas and most urgent questions often emerge.

These are ideas and questions we want as many people as possible to hear and to interrogate. So we’re also working to make ZEG a year-round series of events both in person and online. This year, we're piloting "mini ZEGs" beyond the shores of Georgia for the first time, with events already being planned in Amsterdam, London, and on the East Coast of the United States.

If you value our work and want to help shape the future of storytelling, become a Coda member today. Membership gives you exclusive access to behind-the-scenes insights, early invitations to events, and the chance to be part of a global community committed to making sense of chaos and finding hope in uncertainty. Your support helps us keep these conversations going, both at ZEG and all year round.

This piece was first published as a members-only newsletter. If you want to go deeper and help us build the future of journalism, join Coda as a member.

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