<![CDATA[(margin*notes) ^squared]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LTqP!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff31d92c7-c290-4de8-a2d8-2e20e14e8237_800x800.png(margin*notes) ^squaredhttps://www.margin-notes-squared.comSubstackFri, 10 Jul 2026 10:11:42 GMT<![CDATA[Resources^ from the Rest of Us (08.07.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-080726https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-080726Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:45:50 GMT

Hey everyone! Resources^ from the Rest of US posts highlight some of the things I’m reading — including expert opinions from folks in my region, investigations and reports. I also include things that impact us and our communities.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (06.07.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-060726https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-060726Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:01:15 GMTYou asked, I listened! Events added since the last edition are marked 🆕 and in red font so you can jump straight to what’s new this week. In case you missed last week’s listing, items new last week are marked today by ⏮️ 🆕.

Today’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through May 2027 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note by using this button:

(margin*notes) ^squared is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Training Opportunities

Fellowship Opportunities

Calendar

July 2026

August 2026

The rest of this calendar covers events through May 2027 on AI governance, platform accountability, digital rights, human trafficking, inclusion, media freedom and related topics — with a particular eye on civil society, researchers, and advocates working in the Global South — and with a note on who's actually behind each one. Several have registration deadlines in the coming weeks. Paid subscribers see all of it.

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]]><![CDATA[Food Deserts. Or Just Deserts?]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/food-deserts-or-just-desertshttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/food-deserts-or-just-desertsSat, 04 Jul 2026 09:44:01 GMT

Near my house I often encounter an elderly lady who runs a fruit stand. A pretty grueling job for an older woman, I can imagine. But she’s always all smiles and makes the most delicious coconut smoothies for me — not too sweet and with plenty of coconut meat. The perfect boost on a hot day, which is every day. I pay her using a QR code to transfer money to her. To keep her records, she takes a snapshot of my payment confirmation with her mobile phone. It’s pretty old and beat up; the screen is scratched and almost impossible to see clearly when there’s a glare, made more difficult by the fact that I’m certain she needs eyeglasses but likely can’t afford them. I inevitably have to sort it out. We smile and chat a little; then I’m on my way.

One hundred and fifty-two million Southeast Asians are fully analogue. That’s roughly 22% of the population of the region who have yet to come online with their own devices. For those who’ve marginally joined the ranks of the global connecterati, many are mobile-first — they went straight to mobile devices, skipped the fax machines, desktops and laptops, and found the world in the palm of their hand. Social media, messaging apps, e-commerce, information search, and now generative AI. All in that tiny little device. Just like the lady who makes my coconut smoothie.

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“Mobile first” is a curious term.

It’s a concept popularised by global development organisations like the World Bank and UNDP and cultivated by global tech companies targeting emerging markets. Their comms teams aimed to signal some sort of endearing story around structural advantage — a leapfrogging — that has erroneously painted places like Asia as benefiting from technology’s graces in ways that the old world can only admire.

The trouble is, that story papers over a great deal. People in Myanmar were so mobile-first they even skipped the open internet and went straight to the curated world Facebook gave away through Free Basics and a stripped-down version of the app called Facebook Flex. For Myanmar, mobile-first was Facebook-first. And that was deadly, as we all now know.

Which Asia?

So when I read articles — and there is no shortage of them — applauding an undifferentiated ‘Asia’ for moving beyond adopting innovations developed elsewhere, breathlessly cataloguing the region’s tech prowess and export ambitions, I gotta ask: which Asia are they talking about?

Certainly not the mobile-first citizens I’ve encountered in villages and towns across the region. Certainly not the lady making coconut smoothies.

They mean corporate Asia — the large multinationals and family conglomerates headquartered in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Cyberjaya, and Singapore, where capital speaks and “innovates” on the back of supply chains that often rely on invisible digital labour: the content moderators, data labelers, workers whose efforts train the very models now being celebrated.

They are talking about certain groups of people in the region, not everyone. This matters a great deal because the story we construct — the extremes we tend to smooth out into averages and whole numbers — about who benefits from technology, and how that happens, and how widespread that is, shapes the policies we make and the investments we prioritise.

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A Geography of Absence

We’ve all heard about the real and potential harms embedded in AI systems. The risks of bias and discrimination in AI-enabled hiring, credit, healthcare, education and much else. This is all true.

But I want to talk about something I think is a bit more fundamental: the AI tool itself as a site of inequality. As an impediment to what philosophers call the good life — what makes a human life truly worth living.

I’m not talking about what AI does to you. I’m talking about who can afford AI for themselves.

I’m not a neo-Luddite. I use these tools. I’ve found Claude and ChatGPT genuinely useful for navigating spreadsheet coding, finding information that would have been nearly impossible to locate through standard search queries quickly and identifying common ground across long and complex documents. All things I can imagine being invaluable for anything from peace negotiations to closing difficult deals to even putting together funding applications for an NGO. I’m a voracious reader, and even I have to admit these tools have augmented what I can do and how fast I can do it.

Yet, I’m concerned about who gets to use them safely and well, and who doesn’t. Because when you use them safely, you advance and seize opportunities. When you can’t, you don’t.

Think of it like eating. A balanced diet of fresh vegetables alongside whatever processed foods you happen to enjoy is perfectly sustainable. Everything in moderation. But what happens when your options are restricted, or worse, restricted by forces entirely beyond your control? When you are structurally prevented? That’s what we call a food desert: a geography of absence, where entire communities simply don’t have access to affordable fresh produce and healthy food options. Not because of their choices. Because of their circumstances. Where I live, this might manifest as someone who can only afford cheap instant noodles for dinner most days or relies on cheap (but salty and oily) prepared foods.

Recently, after a yummy dinner of Japanese food, a friend spent some time telling me all about Claude’s Cowork capabilities and how useful he’d found them in his accounting and compliance work. I dove in, being the spreadsheet nerd that I am, and found that these tools could save me hours I could put towards more reading, more rest, more work. How absolutely amazing is that?

In fact, it really is absolutely amazing if you have the money to pay 3,000 Baht a month for a premium subscription. It really is absolutely amazing if you have the bandwidth for image generation and the hardware to make everything run smoothly, like an external monitor and laptop where you can run peripheral applications. But what happens when you don’t have the bandwidth? When the bank account doesn’t stretch that far (or you don’t have a credit card)? When your only device is a 15x7cm screen and your fingers?

You start to find yourself on the wrong side of the AI divide. And that has material consequences — for your success, your productivity and your ability to realise your own human flourishing.

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Meet Maya and Siti.

Both are ambitious young women with STEM degrees from solid universities — not top tier, but good enough, and earned through real effort. They both are keen on frontier technology and its risks, but neither have practical experience outside work they did in their undergrad labs. Both have just found out about a prestigious international fellowship that would most certainly help them jumpstart their early careers. The research essay is due in three days.

Maya works from a quiet apartment, just above a fashionable and well-stocked supermarket. At her desk by the window the city spreads out below her. She has a laptop connected to an extended monitor, a fast and reliable internet connection with quality wifi throughout her house, a cloud storage subscription and paid access to both ChatGPT and Claude. She opens the fellowship brief on one screen and a blank document on the other. She talks through her ideas with Claude, refines them, asks it to surface related literature. She finds a quote that looks useful and immediately cross-checks it: opens a third tab, searches the original source, verifies the citation, checks the context through key word searches in the PDF programme. She catches one that’s subtly incorrect and one that is just very wrong, made up in fact. She fixes them. She iterates. Three days later, she submits a tightly argued, well-sourced essay as an elegant PDF file that is as much her original ideas as it is enhanced by the tools she used. She is very happy and rings up her friends to grab a nice dinner to celebrate.

Siti lives at home with her family, in a traditional wood structure close enough to the neighbours that she can hear them arguing through the thin walls. Her parents are working — at a content moderation facility as contractors, as it happens — and she is the primary caregiver for her younger siblings for much of the day. She has a phone: a recent, affordable Chinese model with a small screen. DeepSeek came installed. She has a few tokens left for image generation in another tool. There’s no wifi at her home, but usually the 5G signal works on her phone, but only in specific locations in the house, none of which are particularly comfortable or quiet. She can use the shared community connectivity down the street, but it’s always crowded and loud with children looking for somewhere to play.

She reads the fellowship brief on her phone. She starts drafting but its slow going, typing with her fingers. She asks DeepSeek for help structuring her argument; it produces something reasonable. She tries to verify a reference it has given her — but switching between the draft and a browser tab and back again on a small screen, interrupted by a sibling who needs something, is genuinely difficult. She gives up after a few attempts, mostly out of frustration because she realises she doesn’t have enough time to do all this on her small device. Besides, it’s just small details that no one would really dig too deeply into. The shortcut is not laziness. It’s the rational response to her constraints. She submits something. It’s not her best work. It may not make the cut. She starts to feel depressed and sad.

Here’s the thing: Siti didn’t fail because she was less talented, or less prepared, or less motivated, or less literate with AI-enabled tools. She failed — or at least competed at a structural disadvantage — because the conditions that make responsible AI use possible were not available to her. Safe use of these tools requires the ability to verify, cross-check and interrogate. That is greatly facilitated when you have multiple screens, a stable connection, and uninterrupted time. It is severely hindered when you are working on a small phone in a crowded house with spotty 5G, trying to flip between tabs with big fingers and a caregiving interruption every twenty minutes.

The device shapes the behaviour. The circumstances determine the outcome.

In the short run, this is about competition. You cannot compete with other people or organisations that can fast-track proposals with AI-powered precision. You cannot compete with those who can move at speeds that were simply not humanly possible two years ago. You cannot compete if you are spending hours troubleshooting a spreadsheet while someone across town asks their premium model to fix it in two minutes. These are not minor inefficiencies.

In the long run, they compound and accumulate the harm of exclusion. And it is not simply a question of wealth; it is geographic and infrastructural. The gap between Bangkok and rural Isaan, between Jakarta and Papua, is seen in who has access to premium AI tools and enabling devices, and who gets left on the margins to try as hard as they can just to keep up, but always seemingly falling short.

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A Moral Lighthouse

I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy lately — not as an escape from these problems, but as a way of grappling with them more honestly. I’ve come to believe that the solutions we need are not simply technical, and not only political. They are importantly philosophical, in the sense that the moral lighthouse matters more than it first appears — and much more than when I first wrote about it here.

Martha Nussbaum’s work on political love and political emotions has given me a language for why justice requires more than rules — it requires the cultivation of certain kinds of feeling, certain orientations toward the lives of others. John Rawls and Amartya Sen, in different ways, have deepened my thinking about what just outcomes actually require — not just formal equality of opportunity, but genuine attention to the conditions that make flourishing possible. And from liberation theology — from Gustavo Gutiérrez and, now, from Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas — comes the concept I find most compelling of all: the preferential option for the poor and most vulnerable. Not charity or pity. But rather a structural commitment to centring the lives of those most at risk in every decision we make.

These perspectives don’t solve the AI divide. But they cast it in an important new light that matters. They force us to ask not “how do we manage the transition?” but “what does justice look like for Siti? What does her flourishing require?”

We don’t yet fully think of AI as a public good. But we should. We once didn’t think of electricity, running water, or roads that way either. Societies made deliberate decisions that these things were too fundamental to leave entirely to the market. Investment went everywhere, including where it cost more.

The analogy isn’t perfect. But it speaks directly to the absence of preferential options for the vulnerable in our current AI moment — and to the gap between the rhetoric of universal benefit and the reality of structurally unequal access.

And the looming and under-appreciated crisis of the AI-augmented versus the non-augmented, and what that means for the future of humanity.

Just Deserts

“Just deserts.” The philosophical idea that people receive what they have earned — that hard work and good choices produce deserved rewards, and that those who fall behind have, in some meaningful sense, done so by their own actions. It is a seductive story. It is also, more often than not, a story the comfortable tell themselves.

Siti is not receiving her just deserts. She is receiving a food desert — a landscape of restricted options, artificially constrained by forces she did not choose and cannot easily change. The same is true of the 152 million Southeast Asians still fully offline. The same is true of the coconut smoothie lady with the scratched phone and the need for glasses she cannot afford.

We will not get everyone an extended monitor and a view of the city. But we can, as a society, make a decision: that AI augmentation does not become the new mechanism of sorting, the new logic of just deserts for those whom the proper tools needed to compete remained inaccessible.

We can decide that the benefits of this extraordinary technological moment do not trickle down in the same ways that economic benefits have always failed to trickle down.

The divide between the AI-augmented and the non-augmented will become one of the defining fault lines of our world — determined not by talent or effort, but by the access and enabling devices.

For that, we need Nussbaum’s political love, Rawls’ and Sen’s theories of justice, and Leo XIV’s preferential option for the most vulnerable. We need a moral lighthouse. Not to feel better about ourselves. But to find our way — and to build the digital world where the good life is possible for all of us.

The coconut smoothie lady is real — she’s there every morning, squinting at a scratched screen, doing what she has to do.

Siti is fictional, a product of my imagination. But millions of people like her across the region are not. We don’t have to ask whether they deserve better, because we all know that they do. They aren’t waiting for the world to notice them, to see their lived experience.

But, we most certainly need to build a digital future that does.

]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (29.06.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-290626https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-290626Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:38:20 GMTYou asked, I listened! Events added since the last edition are marked 🆕 and in red font so you can jump straight to what’s new this week. In case you missed last week’s listing, items new last week are marked today by ⏮️ 🆕.

Today’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through May 2027 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note by using this button:

(margin*notes) ^squared is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Training Opportunities

Fellowship Opportunities

Calendar

June 2026

July 2026

August 2026

  • 01-05 August 2026 | Kyoto, Japan | Kyoto University Summer Program on Governance Innovation, organised by Kyoto University Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law and Policy (KILAP)

  • 🆕 03-05 August 2026 | Iloilo City, Philippines | AI Fest PH 2026, organised by West Visayas State University, Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry Iloilo, Regional Association of State Universities and Colleges, DOST VI, UMWAD Consortium, Innovate Iloilo, DevCon, AAP, Sync (*)

The rest of this calendar covers events through May 2027 on AI governance, platform accountability, digital rights, human trafficking, inclusion and media freedom — with a particular eye on civil society, researchers, and advocates working in the Global South — and with a note on who's actually behind each one. Several have registration deadlines in the coming weeks. Paid subscribers see all of it.

Read more

]]><![CDATA[Cracking the Silicon Bloc (Part 2)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/cracking-the-silicon-bloc-part-2https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/cracking-the-silicon-bloc-part-2Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:03:29 GMT

Last week, in Part 1 of this series, I attempted to reconstruct not the sainted version of John Paul II but the political-tactical one:

  • how he built a moral vocabulary the authoritarian Polish state could not suppress without suppressing Catholicism itself;

  • how the Church served as critical infrastructure when the Solidarność trade union and the pro-democracy movement it spawned;

  • how he helped make a Polish labour dispute into a global moral cause; and how “Don’t be afraid” was not a spiritual reassurance but a political diagnosis — the regime runs on your fear, stop supplying it.

Underneath all of it was the Holy Alliance: the CIA, the fax machines, the mismarked shipping containers through Gdańsk, and Reagan’s America absorbing the geopolitical risk that the Vatican could not.

The argument I ended on was quite simple: moral authority alone does not move geopolitical mountains. It moves them when it is organised, resourced and connected to actors willing to absorb risk on behalf of a shared interest.

In other words it requires moral authority, organisational infrastructure and coalition partners.

JPII aligned and strengthened all three.

Leo XIV has the first. Will he leverage the second and is it possible for him to build the third?

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How to Run a JPII Playbook for the AI Age

This week I am exploring what it would actually look like to run the JPII playbook in a world where a dominant power to be cracked is not Soviet, but Silicon, where Washington is closer to the problem than to the solution and where the coalition has to be assembled laterally, across the global majority, the middle powers, and the communities that platform capitalism has been treating as extraction zones rather than citizen-stakeholders.

But first, the question of how to run a JPII playbook for the AI Age itself needs sharpening. When I asked last week “who Leo’s Reagan might be”, I am really asking something more complex: where can the equivalent of all three elements be found today — the moral vocabulary, the legal and institutional legitimacy, and the geopolitical coalition — when the usual democratic superpower is part of the problem rather than part of the solution?

The answer, I want to argue, is that while the Pope has great leverage over the first two elements, no single actor can drive the third. The coalition has to be assembled from different sources, laterally, across actors who may have rarely acted in concert previously.

This is, in a historical sense, a Bandung moment for AI governance: a coalition of the non-aligned, asserting that the terms of a new technological order should not be set unilaterally by those who stand to profit most and generate power from them.

The central question this raises is how Leo’s moral authority, absent a super empowered ally, can be converted into the kind of durable institutional and societal pressure that influences the policies on how AI is governed.

That is where the moral and political overlap. Where we go next.

Moral Foundation of Political Action

JPII’s rhetorical genius at the UN was to ground human rights in human dignity rather than purely Catholic catechism and theology — making his argument universally claimable and simultaneously undercutting any state’s pretension to grant or revoke rights by political decree. Leo XIV is attempting something structurally similar with AI, but the terrain is more challenging.

In last month’s Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV argues that “[i]n the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it” (n. 9).

This is not a technophobic position, as he says that AI is not “a force antagonistic to humanity” nor “inherently evil.” The target is more exact: a “technocratic paradigm” that makes efficiency and profit the only measures of value, and in doing so reduces the human person to a resource. One of Leo’s central demands — that AI be “disarmed” — means freeing it from the logic of military competition, monopolistic control and cognitive arms races. “To disarm,” Leo writes, “means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.”

What makes this vocabulary powerful beyond Catholic audiences is the same universalist move JPII made: a claim grounded in the shared moral inheritance of humanity rather than any single tradition. It is not a sectarian question to ask how AI concentrates power or distributes it, whether it serves the many or extracts from them. It is in fact the central political question of our time, and Leo XIV has stated it with clarity.

His further insistence that “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few“ is a direct challenge to the governance claims of Silicon Valley — that the industry can self-regulate. Leo XIV’s answer is that legitimate moral authority requires democratic accountability, broad participation, a preferential option for the most vulnerable; not corporate fiat.

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Strategic Layer

The JPII precedent is instructive precisely because it was not purely aspirational: it strategically bolstered a specific social base, provided infrastructure and drew together a coalition that could absorb geopolitical risk. In other words, the moral vocabulary was the public face of a strategic machine that was the product of great effort by diverse collaborators to build.

To make real his guidance in the Encyclical, Leo must move beyond just the role of providing moral leadership to also mobilising the Church’s vast human, physical and financial resources and capacities to support a broad coalition as it translates the encyclical’s guidance into political and social action.

It’s now worth noting briefly one crucial difference between JPII’s moment and Leo XIV’s that cuts in his favour. The global civil society infrastructure that existed in the 1970s and 1980s — Amnesty International, the Helsinki monitoring networks, the international labour movement — was sophisticated for its time but operating with limited reach, slow communications and fragile funding. What exists today is orders of magnitude larger, faster and more connected. The organisations working on algorithmic accountability, data sovereignty, digital rights, AI governance and technocolonialism number in the thousands. The researchers, advocates, lawyers and community organisers who have spent years building the intellectual and institutional infrastructure for a just digital future are not waiting to be invented — they are already there, already making versions of Leo XIV’s argument in secular, technical and post-colonial vocabularies, already embedded in the communities most exposed to AI’s extractive logic. It is like having many, many Solidarność to lean on.

Unlike Solidarność JPII’s time, these are dispersed. They share the diagnosis but not always the strategy. They speak different languages — legal, technical, theological, political — and operate in different rooms. What the JPII moment had, and what Leo XIV’s moment currently lacks, is connective tissue: an institution capable of convening across those divides, lending moral authority to arguments that already have analytical rigour and holding the coalition together when the pressure to fragment is greatest.

That is precisely what the Church — at its best — is positioned to provide. Not as the leader of the coalition, but as its convener. Not as the source of the argument, but as an institution that makes the argument harder to ignore.

What follows attempts to sketch what that translation layer might actually look like. Because a coalition of the global majority and middle powers only becomes meaningful when it is made with levels of specificity.

Thanks for reading (margin*notes) ^squared! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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An Emerging Playbook for Leo XIV

The comparison with John Paul II and Solidarność only holds if it is made honestly: JPII didn’t win through eloquence alone. He won because eloquence was backed by organisation, and organisation was backed by resources, and resources were backed by a powerful coalition that shared his strategic interest in the outcome.

What follows is an attempt to sketch what might make up Leo’s organisational layer — the specific, concrete actions and investments that would help make the moral vocabulary stick. All of them require the Church to spend political and financial capital – and to be visible.

Fund Local Knowledge Ecosystems.

The governance principles in Magnifica Humanitas will remain aspirational unless they are grounded in locally produced evidence about what AI actually does to people in the places it is deployed – how else to have preferential options for the most vulnerable if the knowledge comes from the North’s most privileged?

The research infrastructure that currently shapes AI governance — the think tanks, labs, and policy centres whose outputs become the reference points for regulation, standards, and international frameworks — is overwhelmingly concentrated in Northern institutions. This is a structural distortion that systematically excludes the lived realities, political economies, social values and governance contexts of the societies most exposed to AI’s extractive mechanisms. Local wisdom, practitioner knowledge and community experience are not supplements to the governing frameworks — they are the epistemic raw material without which those frameworks will continue to be built on false premises.

The Vatican has the institutional relationships, the convening authority and the moral credibility to make the resourcing of Southern knowledge production a governance priority — funding research centres and fellowships for non-sectarian, locally grounded research and insisting that the expert rooms where AI governance is designed include architects, not only observers, from the regions that bear the costs. This connects directly to emerging regional efforts — in Asia, Africa, and Latin America — to build homegrown intellectual ecosystems capable of producing decision-ready, context-specific AI governance knowledge at the pace and scale that the policy moment demands.

Leo XIV’s encyclical already names the problem and resourcing the knowledge infrastructure to solve it is the institutional follow-through.

“Visit the DRC.”

John Paul II’s 1979 Poland visit was not a diplomatic event — it was a pastoral one, and the distinction mattered enormously. He did not go to meet the government. He went to be with the people, in their parishes and town squares; the regime had no script for what happened next. Leo XIV has an equivalent moment available to him: a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo — to the mining communities of the Kivus, where coltan and cobalt are extracted under conditions that make AI infrastructure possible and human dignity theoretical.

Sister Professor Léocadie Lushombo, who spoke at the Magnifica Humanitas launch, reflected on workers who say “we work in our graves.” A papal visit shaped around that reality, drawing the direct line between the device in your pocket and the body in the mine, would be an act of moral witness with global reach. It would also be politically unignorable in a way that encyclicals alone are not.

But this is also urgent: “Visit the DRC” is just shorthand for a geography of harm that runs much wider. Some ideas where Pope Leo XIV could visit:

  • Indigenous farming communities of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina’s lithium triangle, where aquifers that have sustained life for generations are being drawn down to supply the batteries that power AI hardware.

  • Content moderators in Nairobi or Manila — the ghost workers who spend their days labelling data and reviewing violent content under non-disclosure agreements and with minimal labour protections, so that AI systems function smoothly for users who will never know their names.

  • Farmers whose access to credit, insurance and market prices is now mediated by algorithmic systems they cannot see, contest or appeal.

  • Communities in the American Southwest or the Netherlands where municipal water supplies are under measurable pressure from the cooling demands of hyperscale data centres — a reminder that this is not a developing-world problem neatly contained elsewhere, but a systematic one that lands on someone, somewhere, every time a model runs.

The pastoral visit is not a communications strategy. It is the oldest tool in the Church’s repertoire for making an abstraction — suffering, human dignity, justice — impossible to ignore.

Weaponise the vocabulary.

John Paul II gave Solidarność more than solidarity — he gave them a moral language that was simultaneously Christian and universally legible, one that could be spoken at the UN as readily as in a Polish church. Leo XIV has already done the equivalent linguistic work as we’ve covered. But vocabulary only becomes power when it is carried by advocates into the rooms where decisions are made.

The Vatican should embrace a deliberate strategy for seeding this language — through Vatican delegations at ITU and UNESCO meetings, through briefings to receptive parliamentarians around the world and through formal partnerships with civil society organisations that can translate Leo’s concepts into legislative and regulatory text.

JPII’s language didn’t spread by itself. It spread because Solidarność printed it, taught it and refused to let the regime replace it with its own.

Leverage the infrastructure.

The Church’s material footprint could be one of the most under-appreciated geopolitical assets in the world: people, schools, hospitals, parishes and social action in virtually every country where tech companies are currently extracting data, expanding platform reach or deploying AI systems with minimal local accountability. In Poland, this infrastructure — the parish networks, the Catholic publishing houses, the underground circulation of samizdat — was what made John Paul’s moral vocabulary organisationally real and vibrant.

The 21st century equivalent is not underground printing; it is digital literacy, data rights advocacy and community organising against the technocolonial — at every level from the parish to the parliament. A Catholic school in Jakarta teaching students about data rights feeds into a national civil society coalition pressing for a citizen-centred AI regulation. A diocesan network in Brazil aggregating local experiences connects to regional bodies bringing evidence to ASEAN or African Union AI governance processes. A Vatican delegation tables those positions at the ITU or UNGA alongside middle power governments and secular advocacy organisations that share the diagnosis but lack the institutional reach. No single actor can do all of this. The Church can become a connective tissue to link them.

This infrastructure exists. Encouraging, supporting and even financing it to materially influence AI governance would be the most concrete thing Leo XIV could do to turn the encyclical into ground-level reality.

Use the Holy See’s UN standing.

The Vatican’s permanent observer status at the United Nations is structurally unique: it confers the ability to speak, convene and engage in diplomatic negotiations in ways that no NGO, think tank or civil society coalition can replicate. The Holy See currently has diplomatic relations with over 180 states — more than most countries — and a track record of effective multilateral engagement on issues from landmines to climate.

This standing is chronically underused on frontier technology governance.

Leo XIV could deploy it with genuine strategic intent. Some of the most consequential conversations in AI governance right now are not yet about treaties — they are about the standards, risk taxonomies, audit frameworks and technical benchmarks being developed in multilateral bodies like ITU and ISO (and within national bodies of the United States, such as NIST) that will eventually harden into de facto global rules.

Whoever shapes those technical foundations shapes everything that follows. The Holy See could use its convening authority and diplomatic relationships to ensure that middle voices and expertise from middle powers (especially among the global majority) are at those tables as architects rather than recipients. This can help ensure that the values embedded in Magnifica Humanitas are present in the rooms where the technical language is being written, before that language becomes binding on everyone. This is nearly an insurmountable challenge for an NGO. The Holy See can do this.

It must spend the political capital.

Centre the Global South as protagonists.

The risk in every well-intentioned Northern institution’s engagement with the Global South is the same: advocacy on behalf of, rather than power shared with.

Leo XIV’s decision to have Léocadie Lushombo speak at the Magnifica Humanitas launch as a peer intellectual contributor alongside cardinals and AI researchers was a signal. Signals need institutional follow-through.

The Vatican is already convening on AI governance and drawing stakeholders from around the global majority (for example, in my region, last year the Office of Social Communications of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences convened in Hong Kong to address the pastoral impact of AI).

These moments seem to largely escape mainstream attention. That is the problem. Convenings that are reported only in specialist Catholic publications and niche technology policy journals are not doing the political work that Leo XIV’s encyclical demands.

But more importantly, the signal sent by having Léocadie Lushombo on the stage at the Magnifica Humanitas launch needs to become the operating principle rather than the exception: Global South advocates, researchers and policymakers designed into the process from the outset as architects — setting the agenda, framing the questions and owning the outputs. And the outputs of those convenings must be visible, cited and consequential in the rooms where AI governance is being decided.

This is the difference between consultation and co-production. It is also the difference between a Church that comments on history and one that participates in it. The most credible challenge to Silicon Valley’s governance claims is not a European regulatory framework or a papal encyclical read in Rome. It is a Global South majority asserting, alongside one of the most universally recognised moral institutions in the world, that the terms of AI governance must be set by those who bear its costs — and being seen to do so.

Strengthen the interfaith flank.

John Paul II operated in a predominantly Catholic country against a communist state. Leo XIV is operating in a global arena where the Church’s credibility is amplified, not diminished, by coalition. Major faith communities all have substantial theological resources for critiquing the reduction of persons to data — and together they represent the majority of the Global South’s population.

The groundwork already exists. In July 2024, representatives of world religions expanded the Rome Call for AI Ethics (originally launched in 2020) in Hiroshima — a remarkable interfaith convergence (drawing from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Bahá’í, among others) that received less broad-based attention than it deserved.

Leo XIV’s task is not to necessarily convene something new from scratch but to elevate what already exists: making the Rome Call a moral reference point for international AI governance discussions, giving it the institutional weight of the full Vatican diplomatic apparatus and ensuring it is present in the technical standard-setting bodies where the real rules are being written.

The Holy See has the convening power. These are the moments to use it without hesitation.

Engage the tech companies — conditionally.

Chris Olah’s presence at the Magnifica Humanitas launch was not accidental. There is a faction within the AI safety and AI ethics community that genuinely wants external moral accountability and recognises the Church could provide it. Leo should pursue that track selectively and publicly — not as validation of the industry’s self-governance claims, but as conditional engagement with specific, auditable asks.

JPII never refused to talk to communist officials; he just made clear what he was asking for and held the line. The equivalent here is engagement with clear designs on ensuring technology serves citizens first and foremost – which includes transparency requirements, labor protections, data sovereignty commitments and much else as preconditions rather than aspirations.

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The Coalition Question

Who plays the role of the Polish Pope’s coalition partner in this AI story? The honest answer is: no single person or state. The JPII model depended on a super empowered democracy willing to absorb geopolitical risk on behalf of a shared strategic interest. That singly powerful coalition partner does not exist for Leo XIV, and waiting for one would be a category error — the Silicon bloc has no Cold War adversary whose defeat requires a pope.

The coalition Leo needs is structurally different: not a superpower patron but a network.

The Vatican may be one of the very few institutions that cuts across all of them — present in every jurisdiction, trusted across ideological lines and holding a moral vocabulary that none of them can generate independently. The coalition Leo needs isn’t a super empowered democratic state — it’s a super empowered distributed network of policymakers, civil society organisations, academics and advocates who are already making versions of this argument in different vocabularies, waiting for connective tissue.

So what does the operational layer of this coalition actually look like?

In the 1980s, the U.S. provided Solidarność with the material infrastructure of resistance: fax machines, printing equipment, communications technology and the funding to keep an underground information network alive against a state that controlled every official channel. The U.S. government funded fax machines because the terrain of contest was access to information — the regime controlled every official channel, and simply getting uncensored truth to people was an act of resistance. That battle has largely been won.

The terrain of contest now is epistemic authority: whose knowledge counts as credible evidence in the rooms where AI governance is decided, whose risk frameworks become the baseline and whose experts shape the standards before they harden into frameworks that exclude everyone else.

The equivalent of the fax machines today looks like:

  • Funded research and investments in knowledge infrastructure across the global majority that feeds directly into regional regulatory processes — producing locally grounded evidence at the pace and scale the policy moment demands

  • A shared legal monitoring network that tracks how AI systems deployed in Global South markets actually behave — the algorithmic credit denials, the biometric surveillance contracts, the data extraction terms buried in platform agreements — and surfaces that evidence in forms that legislators and UN agencies can use

  • Translation capacity: people who can take the vocabulary of Magnifica Humanitas and render it into the specific legal and political languages of the ITU, the WTO, the African Union’s data governance frameworks and ASEAN’s digital economy agreements

  • Convening infrastructure — the ability to get the right people in the same room, repeatedly, outside the conference circuit that Northern institutions already dominate

None of this is glamorous, but all of it is necessary. And the Church has the institutional relationships, the geographic reach and the moral credibility to help resource and convene it.

Coda

Return to the question. John Paul II did not crack the Soviet bloc because the Church was powerful. By the metrics of hard power — armies, budgets, nuclear arsenals — the Church had none of what mattered. He cracked it because he was right at the right moment, and because he gave people the tools to act on what they already knew but had been told to doubt.

The moral argument didn’t create the resistance. It unlocked it.

That distinction matters enormously for how we assess Leo XIV’s prospects, because the same conditions are present. The people living under the extractive logic of platform capitalism — in the mines, the content moderation farms, the communities losing their water to data centres, the lives of people experiencing AI-enabled discrimination — do not need to be told that something is wrong. They already know. Now is the time for the Church to proactively share the vocabulary, the organisation and the institutional backing to act on it.

What makes this moment genuinely different from JPII’s intervention in geopolitics is that the network already exists, distributed around the world. While John Paul II had to bolster Solidarność from within a surveillance state, against active suppression, over years of patient organisational work, Leo XIV does not face that problem. The researchers building homegrown AI governance knowledge ecosystems in Asia and Africa, the advocates carrying the language of digital sovereignty into UN meetings, the scholars working on what legitimate global governance actually requires — these are not waiting to be recruited. They are already there, already making versions of this argument, with growing sophistication and urgency. What they lack is not conviction. It is connective tissue.

That is the specific gap the Church is positioned to fill and that, today, perhaps no other institution can fill in quite the same way. Not the EU, whose regulatory authority stops at its borders. Not the UN, whose processes move at glacial pace. Not the civil society coalitions, whose legitimacy is real but whose reach is bounded. The Church is present everywhere the harm is occurring, trusted by populations that neither Brussels nor Washington can easily reach, and holding a moral vocabulary that has — once before in living memory — proven capable of changing the terms of a geopolitical contest that appeared settled.

The JPII story is not a template. The Cold War is over, the adversary is different and the terrain of contest has shifted from the shipyards of Gdańsk to the data centres, mine shafts, content moderation farms and legislative chambers where the rules of AI are being written right now, without most of the world in the room.

But the underlying logic holds: moral authority, organisational infrastructure and a coalition willing to act in concert can move things that pure power cannot.

The question for Leo XIV — the genuinely hard one — is whether the Church will follow through with the concrete, possibly uncomfortable, geopolitically risky work that the argument demands. Whether it will spend the political capital, visit the difficult places, fund the knowledge infrastructure, weaponise the vocabulary and show up not as a moral commentator on history but as a participant in it.

That coalition does not yet have a name. It is being assembled, piece by piece, in exactly the places this article has tried to describe — in the Kivus and the lithium triangle, in the fellowship programmes and policy institutes of the Global South, in the UN corridors where middle powers are looking for a common language, and in the Vatican itself, where an American pope who grew up in Chicago is asking what the Church owes the world it claims to serve.

In this way, Pope Leo XIV might yet do to the Silicon bloc what John Paul II did to the Soviet one.

]]><![CDATA[Resources^ from the Rest of Us (24.06.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-240626https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-240626Wed, 24 Jun 2026 11:31:29 GMT

Hey everyone! Resources^ from the Rest of US posts highlight some of the things I’m reading — including expert opinions from folks in my region, investigations and reports. I also include things that impact us and our communities. When I come across research or fellowship opportunities, I’ll tag those at the bottom.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (22.06.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-220626https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-220626Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:03:37 GMTYou asked, I listened! Events added since the last edition are marked 🆕 so you can jump straight to what’s new this week. In case you missed last week’s listing, items new last week are marked today by ⏮️ 🆕.

Today’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through March 2027 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note.

(margin*notes) ^squared is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Training Opportunities

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Calendar

June 2026

July 2026

The rest of this calendar covers events through March 2027 on AI governance, platform accountability, digital rights, anti-trafficking, inclusion and media freedom — with a particular eye on civil society, researchers, and advocates working in the Global South — and with a note on who's actually behind each one. Several have deadlines in the coming weeks. Paid subscribers see all of it.

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]]><![CDATA[Cracking the Silicon Bloc (Part 1)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/cracking-the-silicon-bloc-part-1https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/cracking-the-silicon-bloc-part-1Fri, 19 Jun 2026 11:03:35 GMT

I poured through the Pope’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and last week I published my thoughts on that: Pope Leo XIV’s Guide to Disarming Technocolonialism. In that article, I suggested that the Global South may have just gained their most substantive ally in the struggle for just, equitable and human-centred AI governance, and I ended that piece with this:

“John Paul II inspired Solidarność — giving ordinary people the courage to demand basic human rights under communist oppression, creating cracks in the Soviet bloc. I think Leo XIV is doing something analogous: inspiring a different kind of solidarity movement, giving it the moral vocabulary to demand digital rights and human agency under extractive capitalism, creating cracks in the Silicon bloc.”

That analogy deserves to be taken seriously — which I quickly realised meant interrogating it a bit.

This is the first of a 2-part series that tries to do exactly that:

  • Part 1, today, examines what John Paul II did: not the saintly version, but the political-tactical one — how he built vocabulary, infrastructure and coalition into a force that an adversary could not suppress.

  • Part 2, next week, dives into the harder question: given that Leo XIV has no Reagan, no Cold War and no Solidarność waiting in the wings, what could it actually look like to run a similarly inspired playbook today?

What can history teach us?

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Political Equations

Magnifica Humanitas is a document about power — specifically technocolonialism, and the Church as an unlikely but structurally significant ally for the Global South in AI governance. In last week’s piece I shared a personal memory: thirteen-year-old me on a Detroit street in 1987, waving a Vatican flag as Pope John Paul II rolled slowly past in his popemobile. I didn’t realise it then, but JPII was at the height of his political-moral authority, having inspired Solidarność, the Polish trade union, and having helped crack the authoritarianism of the Soviet bloc.

I wondered, can Pope Leo do something similar for technocolonialism, to crack the Silicon Bloc?

While last week’s piece was about the moral and philosophical argument, this week I want to examine the political one — because JPII’s power didn’t come from moral authority alone, and Leo XIV’s won’t either.

Context matters. You see, JPII’s moral authority aligned with the geopolitical interests of the most influential democracy of the time, Reagan’s America. As a political economist, the question that interests me is not what JPII said per se, but how he made it stick. What coalition formed, encouraged and strengthened by that moral authority, to give it tangible political and policy force? And the answer, it turns out, involves fax machines, the CIA, structure and a great deal of unglamorous organisational work.

As a political economist, the question that interests me is not what JPII said per se, but how he made it stick. What coalition formed around that moral authority to give it tangible political and policy force?

Carl Bernstein’s landmark 1992 investigative report in Time magazine documented what he called a Holy Alliance between America’s then President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, the Vatican’s Head of State. They and agencies under their control coordinated specifically to sustain and strengthen the Solidarność labour union and what became a pro-democracy movement against the authoritarian Polish communist regime.

Reagan’s National Security Adviser described it as “one of the great secret alliances of all time.” A U.S. official quoted by Bernstein was characteristically blunt: “Like all great and lucky leaders, the Pope and the President exploited the forces of history to their own ends.” The CIA provided material support — printing equipment, fax machines, communications technology — channelled into Poland through Church networks. The Vatican provided the moral cover, the physical and organisational infrastructure, and the popular legitimacy that is difficult to simply manufacture.

Leo XIV’s challenge today is genuinely inverted. JPII’s adversary was a foreign power (the Polish communist regime, and by extension, the Soviet Union) operating from outside the Western democratic system. Leo XIV’s adversary is a creature of domestic American capitalism operating from inside it — making the dominant superpower not an ally to be recruited but part of the problem to be navigated. JPII could move toward Washington; Leo XIV cannot. Further, JPII had the world’s democratic superpower patron absorbing geopolitical risk on his behalf. Leo XIV has no equivalent — and the U.S. government is compromised by its unhealthy relationship with the Silicon bloc. So the coalition has to be built differently.

A full accounting of the Silicon bloc would also reckon with China — its state-backed AI champions, its export of surveillance infrastructure and its own form of techno-authoritarianism. That is a serious topic deserving its own treatment, and I’ll leave that to others for now. This piece focuses on the democratic half of the bloc, where the JPII comparison is most direct and where Leo XIV’s institutional leverage is greatest.

Today, there is no Reagan waiting to show up at the Vatican to talk strategy.

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Saint and Strategist

It’s tempting to focus purely on John Paul II’s moral authority in cracking the Soviet bloc, but that would deliberately paper over important complexities and present an overly lionised version of him. That wouldn’t serve well the purpose of learning from history to serve the needs of humanity today.

So let’s spend some time thinking about the political-tactical version of JPII’s efforts, specifically how he:

  • Gave people a shared vocabulary that was harder to suppress than political language;

  • Used the Church’s physical infrastructure strategically; made Solidarność internationally legible; and crucially,

  • Told people their fear was the regime’s most powerful weapon. “Don’t be afraid” was a political act, not just a spiritual one.

The vocabulary

John Paul II was less than eight months into his Papacy when he made his first pilgrimage to Poland, his motherland, and delivered a homily to hundreds of thousands of people at a mass held at Warsaw’s Victory Square (now Piłsudski Square).

When he spoke of “dignity and rights,” the communist authorities faced an impossible problem: suppressing Catholic moral language would mean suppressing Catholicism itself. But JPII was doing something tactical. He spoke directly into the language of the Helsinki Accords, signed just four years earlier in 1975, in which the Soviets had formally committed to respecting human rights and fundamental freedoms. By nuancing that secular framework with his own moral arguments, he effectively weaponised the regime’s own signature against it. Challenging him meant challenging not only a document the Soviets had publicly endorsed, but even closer to home, also challenging Catholicism straight on.

His early homilies never pointedly called for political revolution, but his language was revolutionary. He ended that sermon at Victory Square, for example, with these words: “Niech zstąpi Duch Twój! Niech zstąpi Duch Twój! I odnowi oblicze ziemi. Tej Ziemi!” (English: “Let your Spirit descend. Let your Spirit descend. And renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.”)

Note how in the Polish, ziemia was used for both “earth” and “land”. It was clear that he was calling for the renewal of Polish land, of Poland itself. In a regime that claimed to speak for the Polish people, a Polish Pope returning home drawing an estimated ten million people — roughly one in three Poles — to his Masses and public appearances across the country, the psychological effect was irreversible: city after city, the regime watched enormous crowds assemble peacefully outside its control, which was itself the demonstration.

But moral authority and legal cover alone don’t crack a the Soviet bloc. That required Reagan’s America absorbing the geopolitical risk that neither the Church nor Helsinki could provide alone. And as history shows, the regime first cracked down, then negotiated, then yielded to the forces of solidarity, in every sense of the word.

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The infrastructure

General Jaruzelski declared martial law on 13 December 1981 and had more than 3,000 Solidarność leaders and members arrested overnight, with thousands more detained in the days and weeks that followed. Solidarność went underground. But the Church was there waiting.

Church basements became meeting rooms. Priests became couriers, moving messages between cells. Rectories became safe houses for leaders in hiding. American-funded printing presses, fax machines, transmitters and computers moved clandestinely into Poland through Church channels, often packed in mismarked shipping containers unloaded by sympathetic dockworkers in Gdańsk. Catholic clergy, laypersons across and the budding human rights community across Western Europe kept the flow of information and resources uninterrupted.

The network extended well beyond Poland’s borders through sympathetic clergy and the Vatican’s own diplomatic apparatus across Europe, according to subsequent historical accounts of the period. Polish émigré communities, often organised through parish networks, kept the pressure on Western governments and media. The Vatican’s own diplomatic apparatus worked the corridors of international institutions. It was an international operation, held together not by a command structure but by a shared institutional identity, emotional and political commitment to the rights of human beings, that crossed borders the Cold War had otherwise sealed.

In Poland, the communist state’s fatal weakness was that it could never control the one institution that commanded deeper loyalty than the Party. The Silicon bloc has an equivalent blind spot: its infrastructure extracts from communities it does not inhabit, monetises relationships it did not build and governs the digital lives of populations whose trust it has never earned. The Church, by contrast, has been in those communities for generations — not as a platform but as a presence, which is not nothing. Which is, in fact, incredibly powerful.

This is the structural advantage Leo XIV still has today.

International legibility

Before John Paul II, Solidarność was simply a trade union engaged in troublesome labour disputes on behalf of Polish dockworkers. After him, it was a global moral cause.

In his October 1979 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, JPII framed human rights in universal terms that resonated far beyond purely Catholic catechism. He enumerated rights spanning civil, political, economic, social and cultural dimensions, insisting they must be held together as an indivisible whole, and drew a direct causal line between rights violations and war: “the spirit of war springs up and grows to maturity where the inalienable rights of man are violated.” Grounding his argument in plain moral language in a vocabulary that spoke across faith traditions and required no fluency in theology to understand, he issued a universal challenge to any system — of any ideological character — that reduced the human person to a single dimension or subordinated rights to political interests.

Western labor movements — including the AFL-CIO — channelled support to Solidarność partly because the Pope had given it moral legitimacy that transcended Cold War politics. When he traveled again to Poland in 1983, at the height of martial law repression, the global media followed him. The regime could arrest union organisers. It could not arrest a story being watched by the world. John Paul II made the struggle of Solidarność legible to audiences everywhere who might otherwise have seen it as an internal Soviet-bloc affair.

This didn't happen in a vacuum. The 1970s and 1980s saw a remarkable flowering of global civil society around human rights — Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, the Helsinki Accords of 1975 had (in)advertently legitimised human rights monitoring behind the Iron Curtain (and the creation of Helsinki Watch, now Human Rights Watch, in 1978) and a generation of activists, lawyers and journalists had built the infrastructure of international human rights accountability that gave Solidarność's struggle a prepped global audience. JPII didn't create that environment. He stepped into it at precisely the right moment — and gave it a moral vocabulary and an organisational base that civil society alone could not have provided.

In that 1979 UN speech, JPII certainly had hot wars in mind — the Soviet tanks that had rolled into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 were living memory, and the threat of military escalation was the ever-present backdrop to everything Solidarność did. The causal chain from rights violations to war was, for his audience, not abstract at all.

Leo XIV faces a different threat landscape. The conflicts that matter now rarely involve formal declarations of war: they are fought in submarine cables and server farms, in export controls on semiconductors and in the race to dominate frontier AI development before the other side does. Washington and Beijing are locked in what many are calling a new cold war — but one whose terrain is algorithmic, whose weapons are models and chips, and whose casualties are often the communities in the Global South caught between two technology superpowers neither of whom asked for their consent. He faces a Silicon bloc whose power doesn’t require an army because it is already inside the infrastructure.

Making that conflict internationally legible — and making the human cost of it morally unavoidable — is Leo XIV’s equivalent task.

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“Don’t be afraid”

The regime’s deepest weapon was not tanks — it was the belief that resistance was futile and that you were alone. JPII demolished both these notions in a single visit. When he returned to Poland for the second time in 1983 at the height of martial law and again drew millions to see him, the psychological effect was clear. People who had lived under the atomising pressure of a surveillance state suddenly discovered they were not a minority. They were the majority, and they had always been.

“Don’t be afraid” was not a reassurance, but rather a diagnosis: the regime runs on your fear. Just stop supplying it.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash famously summarised the chain reaction of the Pope’s 1979 pilgrimage to Poland with this: “Without the Pope, no Solidarity. Without Solidarity, no Gorbachev. Without Gorbachev, no fall of Communism.”

The chain reaction Garton Ash describes took a decade to run through. It required vocabulary, infrastructure, international legibility and the courage to name fear as the regime’s primary weapon. None of it was inevitable. All of it was built.

The project for Leo XIV is whether an analogous chain is possible in the digital age — and what it would look like to start building it. The Silicon bloc does not rule by tanks or surveillance checkpoints. It wields power by convenience, dependency and the smooth normalisation of constant extraction. Its strongest weapon is not repression but resignation: the belief that the architecture of digital life is simply how things are, that the concentration of AI power in a handful of companies is a fact of nature rather than a political choice, and that there is no majority waiting to discover itself.

“Don’t be afraid” was JPII’s diagnosis for Poland. Leo XIV’s equivalent — buried in Magnifica Humanitas — may be this: the terms of the digital order are not written in stone. The trajectory of technology is not inevitable. The policies that will bend that trajectory toward human welfare, flourishing and the good life are being written now. And the people who bear the costs of that order are more numerous than those who profit from it. They always have been.

The trajectory of technology is not inevitable.

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What JPII Built

The Garton Ash chain — no Pope, no Solidarity, no Gorbachev, no fall of Communism — risks making it all sound inevitable in retrospect. But it wasn’t.

What John Paul II did was neither miraculous nor accidental. It was a coalition: moral vocabulary that couldn’t be suppressed without suppressing religion itself; physical infrastructure the state could not colonise; international legibility that turned a Polish labour dispute into a cause for freedom that resonated internationally; and a psychological intervention that named fear as the regime’s primary weapon and invited people to stop supplying it. Underneath all of it was the unglamorous machinery of the Holy Alliance — the fax machines, the shipping containers, the émigré networks, the CIA. And the emerging human rights community bolstered by Helsinki.

The analogy with Leo XIV is not perfect — no historical analogy ever is. But I believe the structural logic holds: moral authority alone does not move geopolitical mountains. It moves them when it is organised, resourced and connected to actors willing to absorb risk on behalf of a shared interest.

JPII had all three: the moral authority, the organisational infrastructure, and a coalition partner willing to absorb geopolitical risk on behalf of a shared interest. Leo XIV has the first. Whether he develops the second and builds the third is the question this series explores.

Next week, Part 2 turns to the harder problem. Leo XIV has no Reagan and no Cold War adversary whose defeat serves a superpower's interests. Unlike JPII, he does have a vast global civil society already working on AI governance, digital rights and technocolonialism — in many ways more sophisticated and numerous than anything that existed in 1980s Poland or indeed more broadly internationally. What he doesn't yet have is a Solidarność: a single focal point capable of turning dispersed advocacy into a mass movement with the moral clarity and political force to make the powerful genuinely uncomfortable. The adversary is not a foreign tyranny but a creature of American capitalism — embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life and more influential in Washington than the Vatican is.

As we’ll see, this new playbook has to be written from the coalition upward. What that looks like — in what form Leo’s Reagan might appear, what the fax machines of AI governance are, and where the network that needs to exist is — is where we go next.

Part 2 published next week.

]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (16.06.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-090626-11ahttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-090626-11aTue, 16 Jun 2026 11:03:44 GMT

You asked, I listened! Events added since the last edition are marked 🆕 so you can jump straight to what's new this week. In case you missed last week’s listing, items new last week are marked today by ⏮️ 🆕.

Today’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through March 2027 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note.

(margin*notes) ^squared is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Training Opportunities

Fellowship Opportunities

Calendar

June 2026
July 2026

The rest of this calendar covers events through March 2027 on AI governance, platform accountability, digital rights, anti-trafficking, and media freedom — with a particular eye on civil society, researchers, and advocates working in the Global South — and with a note on who's actually behind each one. Several have deadlines in the coming weeks. Paid subscribers see all of it.

Read more

]]><![CDATA[Pope Leo XIV's Guide to Disarming Technocolonialism]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/pope-leo-xivs-guide-to-disarminghttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/pope-leo-xivs-guide-to-disarmingSun, 14 Jun 2026 07:21:58 GMT

(margin*notes) ^squared is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Detroit, 1987

Thirteen year old me held a yellow and white Vatican City flag somewhere in the metro Detroit area, probably Hamtramck, the Polish enclave surrounded by the City of Detroit (now home to the most delightful hybrid Polish-West Asian food, though back then decidedly Polish through and through). The Polish Pope was coming to Detroit, and there was no way that this Polish family wouldn’t be there for him, waving the papal banner. I remember this distinctly because it was the first time I encountered a square rather than rectangular flag (how odd, I thought, but it subsequently ignited a lifelong obsession with flags – the most interesting one, of course, is Nepal).

Then I saw him.

Pope John Paul II (né Karol Józef Wojtyła) in his Popemobile. In the flesh. (There have maybe been only three times in my life when I’d been in the presence of such human awe and when to this day I still get goose bumps thinking about the experiences: John Paul II, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.) John Paul was at the height of his moral-political authority, having inspired 1980s Solidarność (Solidarity) labour movement, giving Polish workers the courage to demand basic human rights under communist oppression, creating cracks in the Soviet bloc. (So powerful an influence was John Paul II that Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarność union members hung large portraits of the Pope at the entrance gates to the Lenin Shipyards in Gdańsk, where the union was born.) This is one of those childhood memories that doesn’t seem to mean much at the time, until it suddenly does.

The Detroit News, 20 September 1987

Nearly 40 years later, I have a new life in Asia and there is a new Pope – Leo XIV, an American, the flipside of my identity – who issues an encyclical on artificial intelligence that reads in many places like post-colonial scholarship. Something that I’ve been rather passionate about in these pages. John Paul II electrified the Gdańsk shipyard workers and indeed an entire nation. Thirteen year old me would have never thought another Pope would chart a similar path — this time to confront not communist oppression, but a new kind of colonialism altogether.

This isn’t an article about faith. It is one about power and technocolonialism.

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Magnificent Humanity

Magnifica Humanitas is, above all, a document about power — though most mainstream coverage treated it as a document about ethics. It is also the most significant statement on the governance of frontier technology that any faith institution, anywhere in the world, has yet produced. And it is considerably more radical than it first appears.

What makes it remarkable isn’t the theology. It’s what the theology is actually saying. And, perhaps, who was in the room when it was brought to life.

The encyclical was presented at the Vatican’s Aula del Sinodo (Synod Hall) — quite literally the heart of Church governance — with Chris Olah, Anthropic’s Canadian co-founder and current Head of AI Interpretability as a speaker. Olah was raised evangelical and has been an atheist since the age of fifteen. He is also a Thiel Fellow — yes, that Thiel. His presence correctly raised eyebrows.

This was not a quirky invitation. The Vatican’s intelligence and diplomatic apparatus is sophisticated; Pope Leo would have been fully briefed on Olah and Anthropic before any decision to associate at such a level was made. A Pope who has shown no reluctance to sharply criticize Donald Trump or Israel’s violence doesn’t stumble into optics by accident. The Undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education at the Holy See, Antonio Spadaro called it the “venerable tradition of papal diplomacy – engagement with the uncomfortable interlocutor.”

Anthropic, for its part, would have had its lawyers, communications leads, and policy teams working through every angle of having a co-founder on that stage. So: was this the Vatican playing big tech, or big tech playing the Vatican? I genuinely don’t know — and I suspect many Really Smart People will (excuse the pun) pontificate at length on the question.

What I can say is this: Olah’s own remarks at the launch were not self-serving. He called for something his industry has systematically resisted — external accountability from voices that can’t be bought:

“We need more of the world — religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will — to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

But that’s only half of the opening story.

Pope Leo also invited a Congolese nun, Sr. Léocadie Lushombo, a theology professor at Santa Clara’s Jesuit School of Theology, to speak in the Aula del Sinodo as well. Her message was direct: “AI can very easily be colonial.”

"[Artificial intelligence] will make those cultures even more vulnerable to colonial extractivism. For this reason, I emphasize Pope Leo's claim that 'Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information.' (MH178) Yes, AI can very easily be colonial." — Sr. Léocadie Lushombo, 25 May 2026, Commentary at the Vatican’s Aula del Sinodo

The Pope chose an atheist Thiel Fellow from a frontier AI lab AND an African woman theologian. Olah’s remarks were either a genuine reckoning or an extraordinarily well-crafted piece of reputational management. Possibly both. The optics of the most self-described “safety-conscious” frontier AI lab standing alongside the Pope while continuing to accelerate development (its Mythos and Claude Fable 5 models have both been suspended following substantial security concerns – Fable 5 just within the past days) is its own story — one I’ll leave to others to chase.

What matters for the argument I want to make here is simpler: the tension between that presence and the anti-colonial nature of the document is real, and it isn’t resolved by Olah’s eloquence. That juxtaposition of the frontier AI lab founder and the African theologian isn’t incidental. It maps onto the fault line the encyclical itself is trying to name.

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An Invisible Thread

There’s a critical thread that the mainstream press either missed (because they weren’t looking for it?) or intentionally bypassed (because deference to the powerful American tech world?) or simply muted (because coloniality / neocoloniality / technocoloniality feels itchy?).

The thread I’m concerned about here isn’t primarily about AI ethics, but rather about POWER — specifically, who has it, how it replicates new colonial structures and, importantly, what a different arrangement should look like. An arrangement based upon governing principles centred on the human person and our human agency – articulated in the church’s own social doctrine. This thread has a name in our current vernacular: technocolonialism, and it should be used. To be clear: the word “colonial” appears explicitly in Leo’s text multiple times.

These seven noble principles — dignity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice — are core aspects of Catholic Social Doctrine (which we’ll address below). They are not theological abstractions but instead represent a systematic challenge to the logic of extractive tech capitalism and technocolonialism more broadly – and ultimately the evolution of neocolonialism in all its digital forms.

These principles challenge who controls the data infrastructure, who holds the compute, who employs the researchers, whose knowledge underpins governance. Antonio Spadaro was very direct on this:

“This pope’s connection with Leo XIII runs deeper than a name: just as the first Leo confronted Americanism in 1899 with Testem benevolentiae, so this Leo faces a new Americanism—far more powerful—that sacralizes power and success, divinizes efficiency, and regards any limitation as a defect to be corrected, exactly what transhumanism promises on the technological plane.”

(Commonweal, 27 May 2026, “Pope Leo and the ‘Babel Syndrome’: Magnifica humanitas challenges Silicon Valley’s Promethean pretensions”)

All eyes on America.

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Seven Principles for the AI Age

I’ll be honest: reading Magnifica Humanitas I had to keep stopping to exhale. Paragraph after paragraph, I found myself holding my breath and thinking; this is the argument. This is what I’ve been committed to and writing about for years, and here it is, in a papal encyclical.

As I read, I kept getting this feeling of encountering a familiar argument in an unfamiliar language. The concerns at the heart of (margin*notes)^squared — technocolonialism, data sovereignty, the Global South’s structural exclusion from substantive and equitable and sustained participation in AI governance, the way power concentration in a handful of American companies replicates older extractive logics — are, it turns out, the concerns at the heart of Catholic Social Doctrine, too.

I’ve been writing about these things in the secular vocabulary of post-colonial critique and international political economy. The Church has been writing about them in the vocabulary of theology — a language I sort of grew up with, but one that can feel opaque, even off-putting, to secular readers who might otherwise find themselves nodding along. What Leo XIV’s encyclical makes clear is that we have been circling the same argument.

And the question I want to sit with for a bit in this section is: what does it mean that the most systematic and institutionally powerful articulation of these principles right now is coming from the Vatican?

“Leo is not so much providing hard-and-fast conclusions regarding specific programs of robust regulation and safeguards as he is raising salient questions regarding the values that should inform our collective responses to the introduction of new technologies that radically change the shape of our world.”

- Thomas J. Massaro, in “A.I. and the human person: A theologian on ‘Magnifica Humanitas’

The seven principles are worth spending time with — not as a theological checklist, but as a political argument. Because translating them in action – as recognised by Kim Daniels – “is the work of democratic life.” I want to take them in three groups.

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Who owns what

I’m starting here, because this is where the encyclical is at its most radical, and where the mainstream coverage was most conspicuously toothless.

After establishing that goods “universally intended for everyone” have historically included land, labour and natural resources (n. 67), Leo XIV extends this principle — slipped into a single sentence — to “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.”

Read that again, in full, slowly:

“Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods.” (n. 67)

That may be the most radical sentence in the entire encyclical.

This is the universal destination of goods — one of the oldest and foundational principles in Catholic social teaching — applied directly to the infrastructure of 21st century American capitalism. This is the closest any major global institution has come to articulating a digital commons doctrine: the argument that the algorithms shaping our lives, the platforms mediating our relationships and the data extracted from our behaviour are not simply private property. They belong, in principle, to all of humanity.

The post-colonial parallel is exact. The common heritage of mankind doctrine in international law — the principle, fought for through the 1970s NIEO debates, that resources extracted from post-colonial states cannot simply be owned and priced by Northern corporations — was the intellectual foundation of the Global South’s long struggle to reshape the international economic order.

That argument lost unfortunately, in no small measure to the Reagan/Thatcher shift toward neoliberal economic orthodoxy. But here is the Roman Catholic Church, in 2026, applying the same logic to AI infrastructure. Hot diggity.

Who decides

Subsidiarity — the principle that decisions belong at the most local level capable of making them — reads as a direct indictment of how AI governance currently works, where “companies and platforms…define conditions for access, rules of visibility, forms of interaction, and even economic opportunities” (n. 71). The message here is clear that digital processes must not be “imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner, but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation” (n. 71).

Paired with solidarity, the text insists that decisions about algorithms and platforms must account for “all peoples and future generations” (n. 76), not only immediate beneficiaries. This sounds much like the Seventh Generation Principle, a core philosophical framework of the nations of the Haudenosaunee people of North America where decisionmakers must consider how their actions impact their descendants yet to be born, seven generations after you. Taken together, the discussion in the encyclical on subsidiarity and solidarity constitute a structural critique of the current governance architecture of frontier technology: designed by a handful of (mostly) American companies, regulated inadequately by governments and deployed globally without meaningful input from the communities most exposed to its consequences.

For anyone who has spent time following the Global South’s largely unsuccessful struggle for voice in international economic governance — from UNCTAD to the WTO to the climate negotiations — this argument is instantly recognisable. Different vocabulary. Same demand.

Who pays the price

The third cluster may be the most concrete — and the most damning.

The preferential option for the poor, social justice, and human dignity together constitute what I’d call the encyclical’s supply chain argument. The Pope names the hidden labour chains of AI production — data labelling, model training, content moderation — and insists “[i]t is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden” (n. 173). Sister Lushombo, at the Vatican launch, made it visceral: quoting a worker from the DRC mining minerals to keep the world’s data centres running without interruption: “we are working in our own graves.” Pope Leo is explicit about where social justice must begin: with “the poor, migrants, refugees, internally displaced persons, victims of violence and people living in urban or existential peripheries” (n. 78).

It begins with those on the margins.

The preferential option for the poor, social justice, and human dignity together constitute what I’d call the encyclical’s supply chain argument.

And then there is the part I kept coming back to. It names what may be the most insidious Silicon Valley ideology of this moment: the belief that “every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective” (n. 51). This is optimisation logic applied to human beings — the same logic that, as I've argued before, is quietly eroding our capacity for empathy.

It is also, unmistakably, colonial logic. The same logic that justified extraction from people deemed less productive, less rational, less developed, less us. Pope Leo calls it out by name.

Three clusters. One argument: the principles that Catholic Social Doctrine has been embracing for 135 years since Rerum Novarum’s response to industrial extraction map, with uncomfortable precision, onto the critique of AI that the post-colonial governance community has been making in entirely secular terms. They arrived at the same place by different roads.

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Disarming Technocolonialism

Paragraph 110 contains what may be the encyclical’s most politically charged sentence:

“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern...freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life” (n. 110).

In my reading, this is not an ethics statement, but rather a sovereignty claim.

The assumption Pope Leo is targeting — that whoever has the power to create the technology gets to set the rules for everyone who lives under it — is the foundational logic of technocolonialism. It is the 21st century version of the argument that superior firepower, superior organisation, superior technology and even the egoistic and racially charged sense of superior intelligence justified colonial rule. The logic has simply migrated: from gunboats to server farms, from territorial extraction to data extraction, from governing bodies to governing algorithms, and from claiming to know what was best for the colonised to claiming to know what is best for the connected. The people who built the systems get to set the rules. Everyone else adapts.

The encyclical names this as an assumption to be discredited — not managed, not regulated around the edges, but fundamentally challenged. Disarming AI, in this reading, means disarming the ideological infrastructure that makes technocolonialism feel inevitable.

Which brings me to one of the encyclical’s final arguments, and the words I scribbled in the margins of paragraph 238: not inevitable. The encyclical argues that technological evolution “does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility” (n. 238).

This is a direct rebuttal of the most powerful rhetorical weapon in the technocolonialist arsenal — determinism. The idea that AI development has its own logic, its own momentum, that disruption is simply what happens and the only question is how quickly you adapt.

That is not benevolent. It serves those who benefit from the current trajectory. And it forecloses the political imagination of everyone else.

Disarming AI begins with refusing that assumption. Which is, as it happens, where this newsletter has always started.

AI Disarmament’s Unlikely Ally

Other religious voices have spoken on artificial intelligence and frontier tech. The Dalai Lama, the World Council of Churches and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation have all issued statements or charters on AI. None carries the structural weight of what the Catholic Church can bring: a single binding doctrinal voice speaking to more than 1.4 billion Catholics across every country the tech companies are extracting data from; diplomatic standing at the UN and in international negotiations; schools, hospitals, and parishes embedded in the communities on the frontlines of AI’s consequences. The Holy See doesn’t just speak. It has institutional presence on the ground where it matters most.

And then there is the Sister Lushombo signal. Pope Leo didn’t choose a European cardinal or a Silicon Valley ethicist to stand beside him at the launch. He chose a Congolese nun who said plainly: “AI can very easily be colonial.” That choice was not incidental. It is an announcement about whose perspective the Roman Catholic Church intends to centre.

I am aware of the counterargument — and it deserves its place in this discussion. The Church has a long history of positioning itself alongside power while claiming to speak for higher principles. The Church that accommodated Latin American dictatorships is also the Church that produced liberation theology — Gustavo Gutiérrez, Óscar Romero, the base communities (comunidades eclesiales de base). The same institution that silenced those voices also, eventually, canonised one of them. Its own Pope found it necessary to issue a formal apology in this very encyclical for the Church's historical role in the enslavement of Africans (n. 176).

It does not have an unblemished record as a Global South ally. But it has a tradition — contested, suppressed and now perhaps resurging — of exactly the argument Leo XIV is making. The presence of an Anthropic co-founder at the launch is, as I said earlier, a tension that doesn’t resolve itself (but perhaps we can, for the moment, just assume that he was in fact the uncomfortable interlocutor).

But here is what I know for certain: the document exists. The language is on the record and now form part of the authoritative teaching of the Vicar of Christ, with Catholics required to give them "religious submission of the intellect and will" and to “take care to avoid those things which do not agree with it.” Universal destination of goods now includes algorithms. Disarming AI now means dismantling the assumption that whoever builds the technology gets to govern it. Institutions — including this one — can be held to their own stated principles. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, a form of leverage.

The question for you, readers of this newsletter, — NGO leaders, policymakers, scholars, and advocates working on exactly these issues — is straightforward: are you willing to see this framework as a moral lighthouse and translate it to action?

The post-colonial AI governance community has too frequently dismissed religious institutions as irrelevant or compromised or just out of touch. That may be a strategic error when one of those institutions has just produced the most explicit challenge to tech monopoly power that any major global body has issued.

As Spadaro concluded: “Like every great encyclical, it opens more roads than it closes, and some of its most audacious intuitions – the universal destination of data, the disarmament of AI, the new digital slaveries, the technological fast – await the testing ground of history.”

Will the Church act on its own framework? That’s not ultimately the Pope’s decision. It belongs to the 1.4 billion people in those parishes, schools, and hospitals and in governments and international organisations — and to the advocates willing to show up and make the argument alongside them.

Detroit, 1987 : Thailand, 2026

I was thirteen years old, unsure why I was waving a Vatican flag on a Detroit street as the popemobile rolled past. But John Paul II inspired Solidarność — giving ordinary people the courage to demand basic human rights under communist oppression, creating cracks in the Soviet bloc. I think Leo XIV is doing something analogous: inspiring a different kind of solidarity movement, giving it the moral vocabulary to demand digital rights and human agency under extractive capitalism, creating cracks in the Silicon bloc.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was waving that flag for back then. I think I do now.

A special thank you to Kim Daniels at Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Thought & Public Life for generously sharing resources I used to help me understand Magnifica Humanitas.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (09.06.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-090626https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-090626Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:01:58 GMT

You asked, I listened! Events added since the last edition are marked 🆕 so you can jump straight to what's new.

Today’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through March 2027 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note.

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Training Opportunities

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Calendar 2026

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]]><![CDATA[Rawls, Bandung 2.ai and the AI Governance We Need]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/rawls-bandung-2ai-and-the-ai-governancehttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/rawls-bandung-2ai-and-the-ai-governanceFri, 05 Jun 2026 15:03:56 GMTA brief housekeeping note: I took a short break in May to spend time with visiting family. It was a welcome recharge, but I'm now back to regular posting and keeping an eye on AI governance, policy, and research events, news and insights across the region.

I recently finished The Monarchy of Fear, a book by philosopher Martha Nussbaum. It’s been on my bookshelf for years, ever since I shelved my PhD aspirations. I picked it up earlier this week and I read it in two days flat. In the book, she explores how fear, envy and resentment shape our political lives. These emotions do not merely influence us as individuals, but they also influence nations. Fear can distort judgment, narrow our moral imagination and push societies toward competition when cooperation would better serve the common good.

As I read her book, I found myself naturally drifting towards what I work on mostly these days: governance of artificial intelligence and frontier technology.

When I stop and think about it, much of the contemporary discussions about AI are often driven by fear. Fear of falling behind. Fear of losing economic advantage. Fear that another country will develop more powerful systems first. Nowhere is this more visible than in the growing competition between the United States and China.

The dominant narrative is simple: AI is a race. The goal is to win.

Yet, I think this narrative is leading us in the wrong direction. If artificial intelligence is truly a transformative technology (it is), perhaps even a civilisation-shaping one (it very well might be), then we should pause and ask a more fundamental question: What would a just system of AI governance look like?

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To answer that question, I find myself returning to the work of another philosopher, John Rawls, and his momentous book A Theory of Justice where he ambitiously pursues “justice as fairness.” Rawls proposed a famous thought experiment known as the veil of ignorance. It goes like this: Imagine that you are designing the basic rules of society. You must choose the institutions that will govern everyone. However, there is one condition. You do not know who you will be once the system is in place.

“Let us review briefly the nature of the original position… To begin with, the veil of ignorance excludes all knowledge of likelihoods. The parties have no basis for determining the probable nature of their society, or their place in it. Thus they have no basis for probability calculations. They must also take into account the fact that their choice of principles should seem reasonable to others, in particular their descendants, whose rights will be deeply affected by it. These considerations are strengthened by the fact that the parties know very little about the possible states of society. Not only are they unable to conjecture the likelihoods of the various possible circumstances, they cannot say much about what the possible circumstances are, much less enumerate them and foresee the outcome of each alternative available.” (p. 134-5)

A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls

This means: You do not know whether you will be rich or poor. You do not know your race, gender, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or social status. You do not know whether you will belong to the powerful or the marginalised. You don’t know what your vocation will be. Because of the very fact that you could end up anywhere in society, Rawls argued that rational people would choose rules that are fair to everyone.

This thought experiment has traditionally been applied within individual societies. I’m not a philosopher, but I think the rise of artificial intelligence invites us to think on a global scale and to draw from as many tools we have available to us as possible. This is one.

IMAGINE

Imagine for a moment that world leaders had to negotiate the future of AI from behind a veil of ignorance. They can guess that AI will generate enormous wealth or that it may alter the balance of power between nations. They can even guess that it could transform labor markets, political systems, cultures and military capabilities.

What they do not know with certainty is where they will stand once these transformations unfold. They do not know whether they will represent the dominant AI power or a technologically dependent (or subordinate) state. They do not know whether they will belong to a wealthy society that controls frontier models or a “poorer” society that relies on technologies developed elsewhere and provided as a gift. Perhaps most importantly, they do not know whether they will shape the future of AI or merely live under systems designed by others.

I wonder, what principles of governance would they choose?

I suspect the rhetoric we are hearing today would be rather different. I also suspect that they would choose something quite different from the narratives currently being pushed by (mostly, but not uniquely) private actors. They’d surely take pro-social AI not only seriously, but as the basis for deliberations on what kind of AI humanity actually wants, and how our governance efforts can bring it about.

Most importantly, they would likely reject a world in which a handful of generally homogenous actors are able to unilaterally determine the technological future for the diversity of humanity.

This is where another historical event becomes relevant.

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Bandung

In 1955, leaders of post-colonial nations from across Asia and Africa gathered in Bandung, Indonesia. They came together in the aftermath of a long history of colonialism to assert a simple but powerful idea: The peoples of the world should have a voice in shaping the systems under which they live.

Leaders of India, Burma, Ghana, Egypt, and more came together in Soekarno’s Indonesia. They were neither Soviet stooges nor American pawns. They saw themselves as architects of a new world in which they could breathe freely and act independently. They came together to chart a middle way: rooted in justice, equity, and sovereignty.

“[W]e are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears… How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness… Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.”

Indonesia’s President Soekarno, opening speech to the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia,1955

The Bandung Conference is often understood as just a moment in post-colonial history, the precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It certainly was that. Yet its deeper significance extends beyond that context (one that I’ve written about in these pages before).

At its core, Bandung was a challenge to concentrated power. At the time this was the power enjoyed by former colonial empires. It demanded that those who are affected by political and economic systems should have a say in their construction – and when they are unjust, those systems must be changed.

This, I think remains quite relevant today.

The risk posed by AI is not simply that one country might become more powerful than another. The much more significant risk is that we create new forms of domination. Colonialism was one form of domination. It concentrated power in distant capitals while extracting resources and wealth and brain power from elsewhere. It drew those from the margins like a magent to the periphery, compelling them to conform and ultimately serve the empires that dominated them.

The AI age may produce different mechanisms of domination, but some of the underlying dynamics are quite familiar. A small number of firms and states may control the compute infrastructure upon which others depend. A narrow set of languages and cultural perspectives may shape systems used by billions of people. Data generated around the world may be transformed into value that flows primarily to those who already possess economic and technological power. And the bright thinkers from the margins migrate to the imperial center, if only to find compensation and recognition for their knowledge and insights.

AI recreating colonialism exactly as it existed in centuries past is not the challenge we face today. Instead, our challenge is that AI could create new forms of dependence, exclusion and hierarchy if we fail to govern it wisely – and that means justly.

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Historical Memory Behind the Veil

Rawls’ veil of ignorance asks us to imagine a future position we cannot yet know. We are to design institutions without knowing whether we will emerge among the winners or the losers. We do not know whether we will be powerful or vulnerable, wealthy or poor, dominant or dependent. Because we lack that knowledge, we are encouraged to choose principles that are fair to everyone.

Yet there is an intriguing possibility that arises when this idea is taken globally, in our age of artificial intelligence.

For many of the world’s wealthiest countries, the possibility of not coming out on top remains largely hypothetical in their minds. Their modern histories have been shaped by economic strength, geopolitical influence, military might and technological endowment. While there have certainly been setbacks and periods of decline, many of these societies have relatively little recent experience living under systems designed and controlled by others.

Much of the Global South has a different historical memory.

For billions of people across Asia, the Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the experience of colonialism was precisely the experience of living within institutions designed by distant powers. Political authority, economic rules and political structures were often imposed rather than negotiated. Decisions were made elsewhere while the benefits that frequently flowed outward created costs that were borne locally.

It is not my intention to romanticise this history or confer some kind of moral superiority. But in this experience, I think it may offer something equally valuable to humanity.

Perspective.

Rawls asks us to imagine what it would be like to occupy a less powerful position within society. Colonial history reminds much of the world what that experience actually felt like. Rawls’ veil of ignorance is a philosophical exercise in uncertainty. For many societies, the experience of asymmetrical power relations is not an abstraction but part of historical memory.

This is non-trivial because the central challenge of AI governance has never been simply technological, but political: Who will design the rules? Who will control the infrastructure? Who will benefit from the generated wealth? Who will bear the risks when things go wrong? Whose environment will be damaged? Whose culture will be crowded out?

Pause and reflect for a moment:

These questions sound remarkably different when asked from the perspective of those who have historically exercised power and those who have historically lived under it.

What seems to have emerged around us is this assumption, almost taken for granted, that leadership in AI governance should come primarily from those at the technological frontier. There is some logic to this. The countries developing the most advanced systems have invested substantially in developing the expertise that the world needs. They are closest to it. Their knowledge is useful.

But technical expertise per se is not the only form of knowledge that matters. There is also knowledge that emerges from lived experience.

Societies and communities that have lived through colonialism, dependency and exclusion often possess a heightened sensitivity to how power operates. They understand what it means to have rules imposed rather than negotiated. How economic dependency can become political dependency. How systems that appear equitable can produce profoundly unequal outcomes. And they know how powerful the margins can be through collective action.

This is where the spirit of Bandung becomes especially relevant and where Bandung 2.ai gains lift.

Remember, Bandung was not merely a gathering of newly independent states. It was a demand that those who live under global systems should have a meaningful role in shaping them. Those in Bandung in 1955 insisted that legitimacy requires voice. Active participation.

Seen in this light, Bandung 2.ai is not a call for the Global South to replace one set of dominant powers with another. It is a call to ensure that the perspectives of the historically governed are present equitably and substantively at the table as humanity designs the institutions and frameworks that will govern an artificial intelligence meant to serve the needs of all people everywhere.

I think the connection to Rawls is much deeper than it appears at first blush.

The veil of ignorance asks us to imagine that we may not emerge among the winners of history. The experience of colonialism reminds much of the world that this possibility is not merely theoretical. Perhaps this is why the countries and peoples shaped by that history have a uniquely important contribution to make. Not because they possess all the answers or because they are immune from pursuing their own interests. But because they carry historical knowledge about what happens when power becomes concentrated and abused, and when those subject to its consequences are excluded from its design. This isn’t a moral authority, it’s an epistemic contribution to humanity.

If artificial intelligence is to serve humanity as a whole, then the future cannot be negotiated solely by those who expect to dominate it. It must also be shaped by those who understand what it means to live with the consequences of decisions made elsewhere and projected onto them.

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The Case for Bandung 2.ai

This is why I believe the spirit of Bandung remains very important today. Not because the world should divide itself into old categories of North and South. And certainly not because every contemporary inequality is identical to colonialism.

Rather, I believe it is important because Bandung reminds us to ask whose presence – bodies, minds, expertise, experience, wisdom, culture – are missing from the room.

I’m suggesting here that when combined with Rawls’ veil of ignorance, the spirit of Bandung – through a Bandung 2.ai – offers something pretty powerful. Rawls asks us to imagine that we do not know whether we will be among the powerful or the powerless. Bandung reminds us what the world looks like from the perspective of those who have historically lacked power. Together, they encourage a form of political humility that is often absent from contemporary discussions of AI.

This perspective also challenges the assumptions behind great power competition.

The United States often approaches AI governance from the position of a current (democratic, and therefore legitimate) leader. Some say China increasingly does the same. Both may seek advantage and influence. And both certainly may seek to shape the rules of the emerging technological order.

Yet neither can know with certainty where it will stand in ten, twenty, fifty, or one hundred years.

History is filled with powers that assumed their dominance would last indefinitely. Few of them were correct. A genuinely just framework for AI governance would require nations to design institutions they would be willing to live under even if they themselves eventually became weaker. It would require leaders to ask not what rules benefit them today, but what rules they would consider fair if circumstances changed tomorrow.

That of course is a difficult question. But, frankly speaking, it is really a necessary one.

Artificial intelligence may become one of the most consequential technologies humanity has ever created. Its benefits could be extraordinary. But let’s not forget that its risks could be equally profound.

It is imperative that the institutions and frameworks we build today to govern frontier technologies must be firmly built upon equity that serves humanity, with shared responsibility and shared benefits. This is what will create a just future for all.

As Nussbaum reminds us, fear encourages us to race ahead with distorted judgement, a narrow moral imagination and unrelenting competition. Rawls encourages us to practice humility and the spirit of Bandung encourages us to practice solidarity. It may be that humanity needs all three lessons as we work to govern artificial intelligence in ways that are equitable and in service of human flourishing.

A parting thought…

Imagine entering negotiations over the future of AI without knowing whether you would be American or Chinese, powerful or weak, rich or poor, technologically dominant or dependent.

What rules would you choose for humanity then?

That may be the most important question facing AI governance today.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (02.06.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-020626https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-020626Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:54:12 GMTA brief housekeeping note: I took a short break in May to spend time with visiting family. It was a welcome recharge, but I'm now back to regular posting and keeping an eye on AI governance, policy, and research events, news and insights across the region.

Today’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through all of 2026 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note.

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]]><![CDATA[The Unbearable Lightness of Flippancy]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/the-unbearable-lightness-of-flippancyhttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/the-unbearable-lightness-of-flippancyFri, 01 May 2026 16:25:59 GMT

There’s something particularly jarring about how casually big tech executives now talk about superintelligence, as if they’re hawking some fashionable new deconstructed mango sticky rice or something. Mark Zuckerberg’s July 2025 “personal superintelligence” manifesto has certainly trickled down his chain of command, including – dangerously – to those whose job is to shape the thinking of regulators, elected officials and regulatory agencies. They’re using touchy feely narratives to pitch their latest product while diminishing the risks. Sound familiar?

The possibility that superintelligence could pose an existential risk to humanity has for too long been dismissed as speculative philosophy or the neo-Luddite anxieties of fringe technophobes. Increasingly, however, more and more Very Serious People are treating the issue with the seriousness it deserves, warning that policymakers need to pay urgent attention to the profound risks that superintelligence — whether ostensibly a “good” or “bad” superAI — may introduce into human society.

But now, companies like Meta — among the most powerful behavioural influence and advertising enterprises ever created — are transforming the pursuit of “personal superintelligence” into a formal corporate mission. Packaged in the language of freedom, empowerment and personal choice, it is being sold as the next inevitable chapter in Inevitable Technological Progress, rather than as a profound civilisational gamble that may warrant democratic scrutiny and restraint.

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Danger Will Robinson! Danger!

Companies like Meta are not just exploring the idea, but aggressively declaring their intention to build it and – more strikingly – to place it into the hands of absolutely everyone. That’s good people, bad people, irresponsible people and evil people. All with a personal superintelligence.

Nothing at all could go wrong, right?

“What, exactly, will AIs want? The answer is complicated. Not complicated in the sense that we can tell you but it’ll take a while; complicated in the sense that it’s chaotic and unpredictable. But one that is predictable is that AI companies won’t get what they trained for. They’ll get AIs that want weird and surprising stuff instead.”

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (p. 58)

Executives post in their Linkedin updates about how they are thrilled to be bringing this capability to every human on the planet. The tone is confident, nonchalant, as if this were simply the next platform shift rather than something qualitatively different – something with existential risks associated with it.

Nick Bostrom, one of the foundational thinkers in the field of AI existential risk, defines superintelligence as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” That is not merely a better chatbot or more capable search engine; or about chess or language. It implies systems that surpass human beings not only technically, but strategically, socially and scientifically, with extraordinary powers of persuasion and social reasoning.

The casualness with which some executives now speak about distributing such capability widely is therefore difficult to reconcile with the magnitude of what is actually being proposed. The awesome power that superintelligence promises also brings awesome risk. How can we take companies seriously when they so flippantly consider superintelligence as just the next generation of more powerful AI assistants or new product layer or next cool thing to pick up at your favourite electronics shop, when the academic literature treats it as something qualitatively different and potentially uncontrollable?

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I also find myself wondering how deeply many of the people promoting this vision have actually wrestled with its implications.

Do they genuinely understand the scale of what they are advocating for, or has the language of inevitability and progress simply become internalised corporate doctrine, where questioning the mission is both culturally discouraged and financially disincentivised? At what point does skepticism become professionally inconvenient inside organisations where the personal incentives — financial, cultural, and reputational — all reward optimism and forward momentum? In environments like these, pushing back against accelerating progress can quickly begin to look like heresy. And, perhaps more importantly, a threat to compensation packages and appreciating stock portfolios. And a job.

These are, after all, the same companies that helped produce many of the pathologies of social media, spent time and treasure selling the public (and governments) on the hollow promise of the Metaverse and are now asking us to trust that they will navigate superintelligence responsibly. That is a remarkable amount of faith to ask of the public, particularly given the track record.

The time has come to see skepticism not as cynicism, but as a civic obligation. And that skepticism must come not only from those outside these companies, but from those within them as well.

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Alignment and Other Small Existential Problems

Lately, I’ve been considering the existential risks associated with superintelligence and what that may mean for policymakers around the world – especially those on the receiving end of unconstrained Northern technologies. Two of the leading voices on this include Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. The warning they raise in their new book is chilling. And should force every policymaker to take what big tech tries to sell them with a hefty bit of skepticism.

What stands out most to me are not just the arguments people like Yudkowsky and Soares make, but how completely their arguments diverge from the framing we’re getting from companies like Meta. In Meta’s telling, superintelligence sits at the end of some continuous, inevitable arc — computers to internet to mobile to AI, and onward. In Yudkowsky and Soares’ telling, it represents a discontinuity: a threshold we do not understand, and one we may not get to cross twice. That gap is a serious issue because it reflects fundamentally different assumptions about how the world works once systems become more capable than we humans are.

At the center of this story is the alignment problem, which is often described in industry circles (especially among those getting rich off the tech) as a difficult but ultimately solvable engineering challenge. Given enough time, enough talent and enough iteration, their thinking goes, we will figure out how to make these systems behave in accordance with human values – to only do what we want them to do. They don’t even countenance the possibility of errors possibly fatal to humanity.

The problem is that this perspective is overly optimistic in a way that matters a lot. As Yudkowsky and Soares argued in their recent book, we do not currently know how to specify goals for an always growing superintelligent system in a way that reliably produces outcomes we actually want, especially under conditions we cannot fully anticipate.

That uncertainty would be concerning on its own, but it becomes more so when paired with the idea of wide deployment. Meta’s language around “putting superintelligence in everyone’s hands” borrows from the well-worn narrative of democratising technology, a narrative that has historically been associated with real gains in access and empowerment. But the analogy does not hold. Technologies we’ve democratised in the past can be recalled, regulated or incrementally improved after deployment; a superintelligent system that is constantly growing and evolving, if misaligned, may not afford us those same opportunities.

No rollback. No reboot. No second try.

Yudkowsky and Soares make the point even more bluntly:

“Most everyone who’s building AIs, however, seems to be operating as if the alignment problem doesn’t exist — as if the preferences that AIs wind up with will be exactly what they train into them.”

Their argument is unsettling precisely because it shifts the focus away from cartoonishly evil executives and toward something potentially much more dangerous: unconstrained institutional overconfidence in systems that may ultimately exceed human understanding and control.

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The Irresponsible Business of Acceleration

What makes this even more troubling is that the push toward superintelligence is absolutely not happening in a context of careful deliberation. Rather, it’s happening within an American capitalist market structure that rewards speed (and profit) above almost everything else. If one company slows down to resolve safety concerns, another can move ahead and capture the upside (and the profit). If one leadership team expresses doubt, another can step in with confidence and attract the capital, the talent and the narrative advantage. The result is a set of incentives that powerfully pushes all actors toward moving faster than they otherwise might. And definitely faster than they should.

This is not a side effect. These are not public-interest incentives. It is the American capitalist system working as designed.

And it raises uncomfortable questions about whether those incentives are compatible with the level of caution a technology that even its builders do not fully understand requires. It is one thing to move quickly in markets where failures are recoverable or localised, even when they produce profound harm, as Facebook’s role in Myanmar tragically demonstrated. It is another thing altogether to accelerate aggressively in a domain where the downside, however uncertain, could be systemic, irreversible and civilisational in scale.

The more serious the potential consequences, the less reassuring it is to hear language like Meta’s that suggests urgency in itself is somehow a virtuous aspect of their mission.

There is also, unavoidably, a question of credibility. The same company now positioning itself as the trusted steward of superintelligence is still grappling with the downstream effects of social media — systems that were, at least in principle, far simpler to understand and control. Issues like polarisation, misinformation and engagement-driven design were not some freak outcomes; they emerged from the core dynamics of the platforms themselves. Of course, that history does not disqualify companies like Meta from working on advanced AI, but it does colour and deeply complicate the case for trusting them to get something far more consequential right on the first, and perhaps only, attempt.

This is not some abstract concern, but rather one based squarely on a track record of breaking things, people and institutions.

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The Power Problem

Which leads to a deeper issue I’ve been thinking about: even if we assume that superintelligence can eventually be built safely, we still have to contend with the concentration of power it implies. Systems of that capability would not be neutral, equitable tools; they would shape economies, influence political systems, erode cultures and alter the structures of our decision-making itself. In that context, it is reasonable to ask whether we are comfortable with a world in which a small number of executives — billionaires like Zuckerberg and Musk and Bezos who have serious credibility problems — hold disproportionate influence and power over how such systems are designed and deployed, and for whose interests.

Those who flippantly pitch a superintelligence for everyone would like us to believe that it is purely a technical problem. But it is not. It is a power problem. A governance problem, too. Much worse, it is deeply concerning that these Very Serious Issues are currently being shaped more through corporate ambition than through inclusive, meaningful public debate.

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The Politics of “Personal Superintelligence”

This ideological dimension becomes especially visible in Zuckerberg’s attempt to distinguish Meta’s vision of “personal superintelligence” from what he characterises as competing approaches within the industry. In his manifesto, he writes:

“This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.”

The language here is striking. Not merely because it caricatures alternative approaches to AI governance, but because it casually asserts a very specific ideology while presenting it as common sense. Zuckerberg frames the future as a binary choice between individual aspiration and dependency, between entrepreneurial freedom and passive social decline. In this narrative, any model that places collective coordination, redistribution or public stewardship at the centre of technological transformation is implicitly reduced to a future of stagnation and people “living on the dole.”

This is Silicon Valley libertarianism masquerading as technological inevitability.

More importantly, this narrative narrows the range of futures we are ostensibly allowed to imagine. Questions about labour displacement, economic restructuring, public ownership, social safety nets and democratic oversight are transformed into cultural signals of weakness rather than legitimate political questions worthy of serious debate. The effect is subtle but powerful: it positions Meta’s preferred model of technologically accelerated individualism as not merely one possible future among many, but as the morally superior one.

But who exactly decided that?

Why should a small group of unelected billionaires and corporate executives get to define the ideological terms through which the rest of humanity is expected to understand superintelligence and its consequences?

To be very clear, these are not simply technical questions. They are political, economic and civilisational ones. Yet increasingly, the discourse around these debates are emerging not from democratic institutions or meaningful public deliberation, but from corporate manifestos written by executives with enormous financial interests in accelerating the technology as quickly as possible.

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We Need Humility

What I find the most irksome, however, is the tone in these kinds of narratives. When the potential downside of a technology includes the possibility — however contested — of existential risk, the language surrounding it should reflect a corresponding level of seriousness and humility. And yet much of what we see in public messaging is aspirational, confident and notably light (and usually absent) on expressions of uncertainty (never mind the humility). Because of their power and wealth, how companies like Meta communicate on this shapes how the broader conversation unfolds and what kinds of concerns are treated as reasonable.

You don’t have to accept the most extreme conclusions of Very Serious People like Yudkowsky and Soares to feel that something is really off here. You only have to grant that the downside risk might be larger than what we are used to dealing with, and that our current institutional and market incentives may not be well-suited to managing it.

From there, the question becomes harder to avoid.

Not whether we can build superintelligence, but whether racing to do so — under these conditions, with these incentives and led by these private actors — is a risk we actually understand.

And, more importantly, is it actually one we should be taking.

]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (20.04.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-200426https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-200426Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:56:05 GMTToday’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through all of 2026 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note.

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]]><![CDATA[My Analog Songkran ]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/my-analog-songkranhttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/my-analog-songkranFri, 17 Apr 2026 11:03:54 GMT

Please forgive the brief pause in (margin*notes)^squared — I’ve been in Indonesia, spending the past two weeks training senior officials working on the country’s AI regulations and frameworks. It was one of those stretches where real-world work fully takes over (in the best way). I shared a few thoughts just before heading to Jakarta, and I’ll link here to what the Ministry of Communication and Digital (Komdigi) had to say for those curious.

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Smack! I got hit right in the center of my chest, even before I saw it coming – by a stream of icy cold water!

That’s how Songkran works. No warning. No optimisation. No algorithm deciding whether you’re the right target.

Just life — happening to you.

I had just come back from Indonesia, where I’d been helping train senior officials working on the country’s AI regulations. A week spent thinking about systems that will increasingly shape how millions of people live, work, make decisions and thrive (or not).

And then I landed back home in Thailand and walked straight into Songkran celebrations. Where none of that mattered.

I’ve lost count, but I’ve certainly had more than a couple dozen Songkrans in my life. Over the years, I’ve watched it grow and morph, drawing in foreigners from all over the world, with cities and neighbourhoods turning into giant, joyful battlegrounds of water fights, music and laughter.

If you’ve never experienced it, Songkran is cultural heritage worth your time. Step outside, and you’re a target. Even policemen aren’t spared. Staying dry simply isn’t an option. You’re part of the community and you’re part of Songkran.

But also don’t forget that Songkran is more than just joy-filled chaos.

According to UNESCO, where Songkran was inscribed as intangible cultural heritage in 2023, it marks the sun’s transition into Aries and the traditional Thai New Year. (Similar water splashing can be found in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, too.) It’s a time for family, for paying respect to elders and ancestors, for cleansing and renewal. Water, in this context, is symbolic: of reverence, good fortune and washing away misfortune.

Washing away misfortune. I Iike that a lot. And what I love most about Songkran is what happens in the streets (and, yes, sometimes even indoors, too).

Phones get sealed away in plastic bags. People grab water guns and little buckets, throw on old slippers, and head out into the heat. And then something remarkable takes place.

Everyone mixes.

Rich and poor. Buddhist and Muslim. Thai and foreign. Every shade of life in between.

You scream as cold water hits your back. You laugh with strangers. You flirt with someone you may never see again. You dance badly in the street. You lock eyes for just a second too long.

You connect.

And it’s totally offline.

No feeds. No recommendations. No invisible system nudging you toward the “best” experience, the “right” people, the “optimal” moment.

Just chaos and choice.

And something else that I absolutely love: serendipity.

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More than a decade ago, a friend of mine (an impossibly tall Australian) met the love of his life in the middle of a water fight on Silom Soi 4. No app. No algorithm. Just a moment that wasn’t programmed to happen, but just did.

I have my own memories, too.

Flirting with boys who caught my eye. Plenty of rejection. But also the occasional smile back, a wink, a fleeting conversation before being swept away again by the crowd. Meeting friends, losing them in the crowds, finding new ones. Stopping to let ladies put talcum on my face. Cooling off in the April heat. A beer here or there (and here again!). And, inevitably, a trail of broken slippers left behind in the pools of talcum tainted water.

None of it planned. None of it optimised. Zero role or influence from billionaire tech bros.

If we aren’t careful, that kind of life becomes harder to access.

AI will never replace Songkran. But the thing is, it doesn’t have to in order to weaken our humanity and our agency.

It just has to surreptitiously reshape how we experience the world. Who we meet. Where we go. What we notice. What we experience.

A synthetic life isn’t one where robots take over, but rather where nothing unexpected happens anymore. Where the robots pull the strings; and we dance to their designs.

Where you don’t meet the Australian guy in a water fight.

Where no one catches your eye across the street because an app already decided who you should like.

Where your choices feel like your own, but have been gently pre-curated.

Where serendipity has been optimised out.

And with it, something really human disappears.

The uncertainty. The butterflies. The awkward pauses. The hesitant touch of a hand or shoulder. The risk of rejection. The possibility of something real. The joy that comes from playing with water, often with complete strangers.

As I write this, I’m watching a couple walking along the beach. Too close to be just friends, not quite close enough to be something more. They walk slowly, partly in the water, as if they don’t want the moment to end.

They stop at a small beach restaurant. A spontaneous decision, it seems. A date? A trial run? Old friends reconnecting? I have no way of knowing.

What I do know is this: I haven’t seen a single phone between them. Their attention is on each other. And on where they are — this beach, this sunset, this moment.

As the sun sets on Songkran 2026, I find myself feeling grateful.

For the friends I played water with.

For the drinks we shared while making up stories about the people around us.

For the randomness of where we ended up, and who we met along the way.

For the fact that none of it was mediated.

My Songkran was analog. The way I want my humanity to be.

Unscripted. Unoptimised. Crazy and uncertain. Mine.

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]]><![CDATA[This Is Not Training]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/this-is-not-traininghttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/this-is-not-trainingFri, 27 Mar 2026 04:09:39 GMT

Next week I’m heading to a neighbouring Southeast Asian capital with a few colleagues to train senior government officials on policymaking related to frontier AI risks. These are not theoretical conversations — the folks who will be in the room are actively shaping the architecture of decisions that will determine whether AI serves their society and communities, or undermines them.

I’m excited. But as I fight a bout of jetlag from a recent trip and stare up at the ceiling at night, I’ve also been thinking a lot about that word: training.

For most of my previous career in international development, “training” — or what we often called “capacity building” — carried an assumption that I don’t so much believe in any longer. In part due to a formative incident that happened to me. It was uncomfortable, but I’m so grateful for it.

Years ago, early in my career, I was working in Jakarta after the terrorist bombing of the Australian Embassy in 2004, helping mobilise support for victims. We had secured funding for trauma counseling, but instead of going directly to a local Indonesian organisation with deep expertise, the funds were routed through a large international NGO under the familiar banner of “capacity building.” After one meeting, an irate director of that local organisation pulled me aside on the street in front of the bombed out embassy and said something I’ve never forgotten: “Don’t ever tell me you are capacitating me. You know nothing about trauma counseling. That international NGO knows nothing about trauma counseling. Who is capacitating whom here?” (I wrote about that experience in this piece.)

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At the time I was utterly embarrassed. But her voice has never left my head. Even until today. In hindsight I feel like I can now finally and fully grasp her words.

Similarly, even in the governance realm in which I usually worked, the assumption was simple: that some countries lacked the knowledge, skills or institutional sophistication to govern effectively. And that others — usually from the West — were there to help fill that gap.

In hindsight, it’s difficult to separate that posture from its colonial roots.

I don’t say this lightly. I come from that world. I spent years working on strengthening governance, institutions, human rights and inclusive societies. Training was always central to that work. And to be fair, not everyone approached it this way or with an explicit post-colonial mindset — I personally leaned more heavily into radical participatory approaches, trying to surface lived experience and local knowledge, even when it wasn’t “efficient”. But I also paid expensive Western consultants to parachute in and do their thing.

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But even so, it took me years to fully grasp what was missing. I suspect that the problem was never simply a lack of capacity. Rather, it was (and is) about an asymmetry of power. And the confidence to confront it.

So as I prepare for this work next week, I find myself rejecting the idea that what we are doing is “capacity building” in the traditional sense. This is not about filling a deficit. This is not about transferring knowledge from North to South (nor should it). And it is certainly not about “capacitating” an underdeveloped bureaucracy.

Countries in this region are not necessarily lacking in capacity. All are located across the middle-income strata with large and often young populations, and a clear sense of the future they want.

The fact that senior government officials are choosing to engage in this kind of training is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of strength. I think of it as a deliberate act of preparation.

An effort to understand a rapidly evolving technology not because they are behind, but because they refuse to be outmatched. Because they have already seen what happens when technology outpaces governance (viz social media).

They have lived through the social, political, and human consequences of (foreign) social media platforms that arrived without accountability — platforms that reshaped public discourse, harmed children, enabled exploitation, extracted wealth and concentrated power far beyond their borders.

They have experienced what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that power — to be subject to decisions made in boardrooms thousands of miles away. Or to be on calls with aggressive executives from big tech companies demanding they make certain choices. (I know, I’ve been on those calls.)

This time, they are choosing something different.

They are choosing to learn. To understand and to engage. And to build the confidence and vision needed to exercise agency over technologies that will shape their societies for decades to come.

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I’ve written elsewhere about what I think of as a kind of “Bandung 2.0” moment — or perhaps more fittingly, Bandung 2.ai – Bandung in the age of AI. In 1955, Indonesia hosted the Bandung Conference, where newly independent nations came together to reject colonial domination and assert their right to determine their own political and economic futures.

What I see now is not a repetition, but an evolution of that same impulse. Then, the struggle was against territorial and political control. Today, it is against technological and infrastructural dependence. But the underlying principle is the same: a refusal to have one’s future shaped elsewhere. In that sense, efforts like this — to understand, govern, and ultimately shape AI — can be seen as part of a longer arc of asserting sovereignty, dignity and control over one’s own destiny.

So that, to me, is what this work is really about.

Not capacity building. Not training. But agency building.

Because if we are honest, the country where most big tech originates — the United States — has done the opposite. The American government has outsourced their expertise to private AI labs, to corporate-backed research centers, to industry associations whose incentives are aligned with profit, market share and power. They have allowed themselves to be guided — and often captured — by the very actors they are meant to regulate.

What I see increasingly across Asia is a different posture, one that ensures governance derives from what benefits citizens as human beings, not consumers. There is a willingness to engage seriously with the technology, to understand its risks and possibilities, and to shape it in ways that serve their people best.

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As part of this work, our organisation, born here in Asia, are building the architecture of a sovereign knowledge ecosystem in Asia — one that centres regional expertise, lived experience and local histories in the governance of frontier technologies.

This is important to me because the global majority does not need to rely solely on frameworks, theories and models developed elsewhere. They can – and should – adopt and adapt them where it makes sense. And chart a new path where it makes sense, grounded in their own realities on the ground, in their communities and within their institutions. They can draw on their own experiences of harm, resilience and adaptation and force products and systems and “innovations” to conform to the future their people want.

In other words, knowledge creation drawn locally can help them shape their own visions of what technology should do — and who it should serve.

There is a long history behind this. Moments where countries came together to assert a different path, resist alignment with dominant powers and imagine alternative futures.

That spirit feels relevant to me again.

This is of particular importance because what is at stake with AI is not just innovation, but power. Who shapes it. Who benefits from it. And who bears its costs.

In that sense, this work is not about catching up. But rather, it is about refusing to be governed by technologies — and by companies — that do not answer to their people. It is about ensuring that the trajectory of these systems can be bent toward human flourishing, not just shareholder value.

So no — this is not training or capacity building. It is confidence building. It is coalition building. It is about strengthening the ability of policymakers to act with confidence, independence and purpose in the face of immense external pressure.

There is a new frontier in AI governance, and it might not come exclusively from where the technology is built.

It may in fact come from where the stakes are most deeply felt — and where the will and determination to shape it is strongest.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (25.03.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-250326https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-250326Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:58:02 GMTToday’s Events^ dispatch contains curated posts — currently through all of 2026 — to keep you updated on knowledge shaping moments outside the mainstream Northern discourse. Please feel free to submit any upcoming events — seminars, conferences, webinars, workshops, trainings, etc — that you feel are relevant by dropping me a note.

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]]><![CDATA[I Kissed a Boy and I Liked It]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/i-kissed-a-boy-and-i-liked-ithttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/i-kissed-a-boy-and-i-liked-itSun, 08 Mar 2026 22:07:16 GMT

A first kiss is both exciting and hesitating at the same time. It can feel perfect. Or it can feel awkward. Uncertain. Risky even, because we don’t know the outcome. We don’t know if the other person feels what we feel, whether they will lean in too, or pull away; whether what feels electric to us will also feel electric to them. That uncertainty is not incidental to intimacy, affection and connection. It’s what makes it so core to our human experience.

Years ago I was on a work trip to Singapore and arranged to catch up with someone II’d met many years before when I was a very young new arrival in Jakarta. The now-defunct Nearby Friends feature on Facebook indicated he was in Singapore too, and after years of distance I thought it might be nice to catch up.

We agreed to meet up for dinner at Dempsey Hill but I nearly cancelled, tired from a long day of shopping and walking around the city. We hadn’t seen each other in years and what if we have nothing in common and it just becomes a waste of my time anyway? But I kept the appointment. When I showed up he was already there, seated in a still pretty empty restaurant. I immediately felt very unexpected butterflies in my stomach. More than five hours later, we were the last ones in the restaurant. We were so connected in conversation that time was lost. I finally had to excuse myself to use the washroom. But as I was washing my hands, he suddenly appeared next to me. I looked into his eyes. We both leaned in.

It was that moment so familiar from films and yet so disorienting when it happens in real life: drifting slightly closer, trying to read another face, trying to determine whether the risk is worth taking. Is this safe? Is this foolish? Is this mutual? Then leaning in.

When we finally kissed, I felt electricity run through me. It was joy and fear and excitement and hesitation all rolled up into one.

I felt seen.

Of course it wasn’t love — not yet. Perhaps it was passion, or just the deep connection. Or perhaps simply the force of finally crossing a threshold that had felt unreachable for too long. But whatever it was, it was human. Entirely, unmistakably human.

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For boys who like boys and for others across the queer community, such connection rarely develops under fairytale conditions. My electric kiss that night didn’t happen at the dining table. Or outside on the street. For us, the world often inserts itself into personal moments whether invited or not. There are the stares that do not communicate solidarity but warning. The remarks not whispered quietly enough to miss. The reminders, repeated over years, that who you are is suspect, excessive and lesser.

I’ve been called a faggot. I’ve been told I’ll burn in hell. I’ve been passed over for jobs and not so subtle whispers behind my back. I have heard, more than once, that people like me are why the world is broken. That accumulates and shapes how you move through public space, how quickly you trust, how cautiously you disclose, how often you prepare yourself for rejection before anything has even begun. How much you emotionally armour up.

You learn to build walls before bridges.

Yet there is another side to that emotional armouring. The frustrating work of trusting, risking, misreading, recovering and trying again is also how many of us build resilience. We learn how to survive rejection without letting it define us; how to remain open without becoming naïve; how to move toward another person despite knowing the possibility of unwanted outcomes is real.

That is why the real life kiss matters so much. It’s courage in action. Vulnerability overcoming fear. It is, in a way, an act of living both my truth and my possibility.

I found that same feeling again just this morning while reading Love in the Big City 대도시의 사랑법 a novel by the Korean Sang Young Park — longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and later adapted into a K-drama. Park beautifully captures the awkward architecture of a first connection. A real encounter is rarely smooth. It can come with sensory overload — the heat of another body suddenly sitting close to you in a café, the awareness of someone’s breath, the strange intensity of noticing details you did not expect to notice. It comes with silence, confusion, assumptions and missteps. In this novel, the guy who suddenly comes and sits down to start talking with Young, the main character, leans in and says something possibly strange — “You have a pretty way of talking” — and immediately Young’s mind clamors for meaning. Is it flirtation? Mockery? A compliment? A misunderstanding? His mind races ahead because this other human is being so unpredictable. So human.

I think that unpredictability matters a lot. It is these moments of serendipity, awkwardness and chance that make us so utterly human. Some would say these moments are inefficient and need to be optimised away – through digital engineering of a bot. But an AI companion cannot genuinely reproduce that human instability because it is always oriented toward responsiveness, affirmation and keeping the interaction going.

It may simulate surprise, but it does not risk misunderstanding “You have a pretty way of talking” in the way another person does, because beneath the exchange there is no independent nervousness, no awkward silence, no goosebumps, no interior self trying and sometimes failing to make itself understood.

“Was this how the lovers of Pompeii felt when the magma covered them? I was deluged by something very hot, and the world seemed to stop turning. Spinoza had distinguished forty-eight different kinds of emotion. Which one was I feeling right then? Desire, joy, awe, or confusion? And what did the man on the other side of the table feel for me? A mix of disdain and curiosity, or something similar to what I felt for him?”

– Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City 대도시의 사랑법

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When a Boyfriend Becomes a Product

Fast forward to today. I open Instagram and Facebook and find another kind of intimacy being pushed onto me — programmable, frictionless and for sale. And all fake.

Again and again, I am served advertisements for AI companion bots. Male bodies appear on screen: smooth skin, narrow waists, sculpted abs, carefully lit faces, always young, always symmetrical, always available. The language is direct and unambiguous: create your perfect boyfriend. Design him how you want. Choose his personality. Choose his style. In some advertisements, the voices are affectionate, suggestive, unmistakably erotic. The targeting is equally unmistakable: these are products marketed to people like me. Boys who like boys.

They promise intimate connection without uncertainty, affection without risk and attention without the possibility of being hurt. And they are targeting me because surveillance advertising and AI inference have determined something deeply personal about me. And, oh yes, I’m angry about that.

Ads from Luvea and Botify AI suddenly started appearing incessantly. There are others too, and they arrive through the surveillance advertising systems of Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta Platforms. (Yup, the same Meta that last year blew up its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes including the LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group that I co-led in APAC when I previously worked for Facebook.)

Ad for Luvea AI explaining its addictive nature, appearing on and amplified by Instagram (owned by Meta Platforms)

Let me be clear: I am not angry because AI exists. I am angry because artificial intimacy is now being sold directly into communities whose loneliness has already been shaped by stigma, fear and exclusion. Sold. For. A. Profit.

And guess what, as curious as I am given my work on AI governance, I have not clicked a single one of those advertisements.

Not because I don’t want to understand what they are offering and how they onboard you to their product, but because I already understand how these platforms work. Curiosity itself becomes a signal. A pause, a click, a moment of attention — all of it becomes data. Surveillance capitalism does not merely record what we choose; it infers who we are through what we hesitate over, what we linger on, what we return to. If I click once, I know the system will learn something from that curiosity and likely feed me more. It will follow me everywhere I go on the internet.

Everywhere.

So even before a single interaction with one of these products, the ad has altered my behaviour. It has introduced hesitation into my own digital life.

That’s nontrivial because the very systems now promising intimacy are introduced through infrastructures that already watch us, analyse us, follow us and target us. Making money off our vulnerabilities.

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Of course, not every conversational AI system or companion bot belongs in the same category. There is a meaningful difference between therapeutic conversational systems and commercial erotic companion products. There is, in fact, a serious conversation here about the pro-person, pro-potential role such technology can play: helping someone rehearse a difficult disclosure, navigate loneliness without judgment, access regulated and meaningful mental-health support or build confidence before a difficult human conversation.

Yes, there are situations where conversational AI may genuinely help queer people. Research suggests that members of the LGBTQ+ community remain significantly more likely to experience depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal thoughts than heterosexual populations, often because of discrimination, stigma and identity-related social, religious and community pressures. Some tools have already been explored for identifying suicide risk, helping queer youth in underserved areas access support, facilitating HIV-status disclosure to partners and building role-play scenarios to train counsellors working with queer communities.

This isn’t insignificant. For a closeted teenager in a hostile household, an HIV+ young man struggling to disclose his status or a queer person isolated in a place where speaking openly remains dangerous (even punishable by death), conversational systems may offer a first space of reflection or rehearsal.

Support and Substitution are Not the Same Thing

A tool that helps someone practise difficult disclosure is fundamentally different from a commercial product that invites someone to construct a flawless synthetic boyfriend whose body, tone, responsiveness, kinks and emotional availability are endlessly adjustable.

The question we should be asking is simple: when does a conversational tool become support, and when does it become substitution?

Again, this is nontrivial. These fake boyfriends hurt us.

They damage us not simply because they are artificial, but because they arrive inside communities already carrying specific wounds. They offer frictionless fantasy precisely where real intimacy is uncertain, fragile, giddy and expectant. These systems can hurt us precisely because they are designed to satisfy without requiring reciprocity, vulnerability or mutual care.

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Dating apps already changed queer life profoundly. Grindr and Tinder reshaped how many people meet, desire, reject, negotiate and connect. But dating apps still involve another human being. They involve unpredictability, awkwardness, misunderstanding, mutual interest, disappointment, negotiation, even deception. They involve another consciousness with its own needs and limits.

Dating apps promised to help us find one another. Companion bots promise something else entirely: a relationship in which the other person can never disappoint you because there is no other person there at all.

Companion bots remove that mutuality.

They promise a relationship in which the other side never resists, never disagrees unless programmed to, never withholds affection, never arrives carrying their own emotional reality.

A first kiss matters because another person may or may not kiss you back.

A synthetic boyfriend is designed so that you never have to experience that uncertainty or rejection. For vulnerable communities, fake boyfriends that reliably provide attention and affirmation can too easily create dependency, erode our agency and crowd out the difficult but necessary experiences through which real intimacy, trust and connection becomes possible.

These fake boyfriends also intensify beauty anxieties that many gay men already know too well. The bodies used in these advertisements rarely reflect us. They communicate an ideal: smooth skin, youth, muscular definition, narrow waists, controlled masculinity, highly curated desirability.

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For decades, gay men have already navigated an ecosystem where body comparison can be relentless. For some, particularly HIV+ men already carrying stigma, shame or fear of disclosure, these systems may deepen rather than relieve feelings of inadequacy.

Every time one of these advertisements appears, I feel something immediate: lacking. I do not have six-pack abs like the bodies presented. I do not have the skin, the hair, the polished perfection being sold back to me. I think about my own body, my own weight, my own age, my own partner, and a subtle but real comparison begins.

This is not harmless.

We have seen versions of this before. Decades ago, debates around women’s magazines intensified as unrealistic portrayals of beauty contributed to body-image crises among girls and young women. The death of the American Karen Carpenter in 1983 forced anorexia nervosa into public debate when the private consequences of beauty pressure became impossible to ignore. Similar moments have occurred in Asia. In Japan, the suicide of teenage idol Yukiko Okada in 1986 shocked the country and triggered a wave of copycat suicides later called “Yukko Syndrome.” And in the fashion world, the death of South Korean model Daul Kim in 2009 sparked global conversations about the psychological toll of beauty standards and the relentless pressures of the modelling industry.

Do we intend to wait again until visible damage becomes undeniable?

Queer communities have often been early adopters — and sometimes early casualties — of new connection and intimacy technologies, from location-based dating apps that exposed users to surveillance and entrapment to algorithmic systems that now infer sexuality from digital behaviour. Why are we once again becoming the place where these systems are deployed and scaled before we fully understand how they may reshape vulnerability, attachment and harm?

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Accountability for Synthetic Affection

We do not yet fully understand how repeated attachment to programmable intimacy shapes already vulnerable communities — and that uncertainty itself should concern everyone.

But uncertainty does not justify passivity.

It justifies precaution, especially because this is not only about companion bot companies. As I see it, responsibility sits in at least three places.

  • First, companies building commercial intimate companion systems should not be allowed to deploy products designed around emotional attachment without stronger psychological safeguards and independent review. And queer communities must be part of the accountability mechanisms.

  • Second, platforms like Meta should never be amplifying these products through advertising systems that infer vulnerability, sexuality and emotional susceptibility from behavioural traces. They should never be able to profit from our vulnerabilities.

  • Third, regulators should no longer pretend these are ordinary consumer apps.

At minimum, four areas now require attention.

  • Advertising restrictions: companion intimacy systems should not be targeted through inferred sexuality or behavioural profiling.

  • Product classification: synthetic intimacy systems should be treated differently from ordinary entertainment apps because they explicitly simulate attachment – and their ads bluntly state they are designed to be addictive (see inset above).

  • Independent review: systems designed for emotional dependency should undergo mental-health and psychological assessment before broad release, with the substantive participation of experts from the queer community.

  • Transparency obligations: companies must disclose how emotional retention, conversational dependency and personalised attachment mechanisms are designed.

Companion bots may indeed become part of social life. Some already call them inevitable.

A colleague recently told me exactly that. As he conducted research on young people’s thoughts about companion bots (which included me, obviously for the older demographic and which created the spark for this article), he told me that many young people are saying that the technology is “just inevitable”.

I pushed back.

They are not inevitable in any moral sense and not in any practical sense either. They are choices — designed, funded, distributed and normalised through companies and institutions that remain fully capable of setting limits.

Companion bots cannot feel desire. They cannot experience fear, courage, shame, orgasm, longing, heartbreak, tenderness or that trembling uncertainty of moving closer to another person and not knowing what happens next.

They cannot feel butterflies in the stomach. They do not even have a stomach.

That bit is really important because those fragile, awkward, uncertain experiences are not defects in human intimacy. They are what make intimacy human. They are what make us human.

We deserve more than technologies that monetise loneliness while pretending to heal it. And queer communities, in particular, deserve far better than becoming once again the place where addictive emotional technologies are tested first and governed later.

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What No Algorithm Can Return

That first kiss in Singapore.

Not because I am romanticising (okay, maybe just a little!), and not because every first kiss becomes something lasting, but because I still remember what moved through me in that moment: uncertainty, courage, hesitation, electricity. I remember not knowing what would happen next. I remember the brief silence before leaning closer. I remember how human it felt to risk something and discover that another person was willing to meet me there.

That feeling matters because so much of queer life already teaches us to expect rejection before connection, silence before recognition, distance before trust. When real connection does arrive — awkwardly, imperfectly, unexpectedly — it does something profound. It reminds us that being vulnerable with another person is not weakness but part of becoming fully human.

I want young queer people today, and those growing up tomorrow, to experience that too.

I want a young man to feel that sudden electricity when he reaches for his crush’s hand, knee or neck, and doesn’t know whether or not he will return that gesture. I want a young woman to feel that same trembling uncertainty when desire and trust begin to overlap. I want trans people, queer people, all those still trying to understand themselves in a world that often asks them to shrink, to know that intimacy is not something to be programmed in advance.

Remember, the uncertainty we all experience is not the flaw. It’s the point. That fragile space between fear and connection is where humanity lives. Where we live.

I for one don’t want that humanity — that awkwardness, that courage, that possibility of being surprised by another person’s embrace — to be diminished, outsourced or commodified by systems that promise affection without risk and companionship without reciprocity.

Human intimacy does not only give pleasure and joy; it teaches courage, patience, and emotional endurance.

Some regulated artificial intelligence systems may have a place in helping people navigate loneliness, disclosure, fear or isolation. But they must never become an excuse for accepting a thinner version of human life.

Young queer people deserve more than synthetic affection calibrated for engagement and profit.

They deserve the possibility of love, desire, rejection, courage, touch, laughter, heartbreak and all the imperfect human experiences that no algorithm can genuinely return.

They deserve that first electric moment, too. And the next one, and the next one.

We all do.

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]]><![CDATA[1984 — From Both Sides]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/1984-from-both-sideshttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/1984-from-both-sidesMon, 02 Mar 2026 13:27:48 GMT

Last Sunday I watched the 2026 Winter Olympics closing ceremony on TV with athletes from all over the world, flags mingling together and the sense that we the people of the world are way more than what divides us.

With my dose of Olympic joy, I still wasn’t tired after the ceremony ended, so I watched The Greatest Night in Pop, a documentary about the making of We Are the World — the single co-written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson that brought together pop’s then biggest American stars to raise funds for African famine relief. The film meticulously recounts how, long before mobile phones, social media and instant messaging, the logistical hurdles that had to be overcome for a remarkable cast of artists to come together in one room, setting their egos aside, to pursue something larger than themselves.

It made me think about these two very different manifestations of “togetherness,” separated by four decades yet bound by the same instinct: that there’s so much we can accomplish, and overcome, when we just come together as one. As I reflected on the two programmes I just watched, memories surfaced of the very first Olympics I remember as a kid: the 1984 Winter Games.

It was then, when I was ten years old, when the world opened to me.

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Sarajevo

It was the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in then Yugoslavia (a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement as it were). I remember watching with my sister from our living room. I recall she loved the figure skating; I was oddly interested in luge, bobsled and slalom. But I mostly loved the human interest stories that were pulled together. I remember realising, perhaps for the first time, how very big the world really is. How different people really are. Different languages, different flags, different faces — and yet, for those two weeks, they gathered peacefully under one idea.

Higher. Faster. Stronger. Together — this word would only be formally added decades later but was already implied.

I grew that winter. The Games weren’t just sport. They were proof that the world, in all its diversity, could converge in joy, laughter and life. Ten year old me never saw the differences as division. At that age, I hadn’t yet grasped the fact that a different kind of competition could also mean war, empire and power.

Looking back, I think Sarajevo is what set me on the path to becoming a global citizen — finding home wherever I landed, finding that belonging was not determined by one nationality or identity. I guess I could say that 1984 was a bit of a threshold year. Less than six years later I’d leave on a Sabena Airlines flight – off to discover the world.

The year 1984 saw the planning start for gathering the biggest names in pop to record We Are the World. For a moment, culture and capitalism were bending toward compassion.

At the same time, across the Atlantic, Poland’s Solidarity Movement – Solidarność – continued its improbable resistance — workers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens standing up to authoritarian control of narrative, resources and power. As a Polish family, we paid attention. Solidarity was not abstract. It was truth pushing back against machinery.

1984 was, in many ways, a year of many different facets of courage.

But it was also a year of shadows. There was another side to 1984. A dark side.

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AIDS, Bhopal

The virus that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS was identified in 1984, but that did not prevent years of stigma and political neglect – and the deaths of tens of millions of people. Marginalised communities were left to suffer while conservative leaders hesitated. Silence became policy. It got bad. Really bad. So, in 1987 ACT UP was formed: Silence = death they yelled. Indeed, they were not silent.

In December, as Richie and Jackson were putting the final touches on We are the World, toxic gas leaked from a pesticide plant in India, killing thousands in what became known as the Bhopal disaster. It remains one of the worst industrial catastrophes in history — a case study in regulatory failure, corporate negligence and the human cost of technological systems operating without accountability.

1984 showed two sides of itself at once:

Cooperation and indifference.
Solidarity and impunity.
Shared humanity and disposable lives.

I did not yet understand this duality when I watched the Olympic flame burn in Sarajevo that year. But I would.

Less than a decade later, Yugoslavia fractured. I remember watching the evening news — this time old enough to comprehend what war meant. The same city that had symbolised unity became synonymous with siege. And death.

Years later, in my twenties, I read As Long as Sarajevo Exists by Kemal Kurspahić, the story of the newspaper Oslobodjenje that continued publishing during the siege, missing only a single day despite constant bombardments. That spirit of defiance — of insisting on truth and continuity under fire — inspired me. In hindsight, I see now that the editors and journalists of Oslobodjenje knew that the integrity of information was worth risking their lives for.

This all carried me into humanitarian work and international development. And they carry me now into AI governance.

And then there is the other 1984. The fictional one.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, the year stands for surveillance without accountability, language manipulated to obscure truth, permanent war used to consolidate power and technology deployed not to liberate but to control. “Big Brother” is not merely a tyrant; he is an information system. Reality itself becomes administratively managed.

When Orwell wrote the novel in 1949, 1984 was a warning — a date projected into the future as a cautionary horizon. Yet when the real 1984 arrived, it did not look like Oceania. It looked like Sarajevo’s Olympic flame. It looked like musicians crowding around a microphone to sing for strangers. It looked like workers in Poland insisting that truth still mattered.

And yet, the dystopian strand was there too.

Governments slow to acknowledge a deadly virus because it impacted the other. Corporations shielded from the consequences of industrial catastrophe. Star wars (not the movie). Political narratives hardening around fear and exclusion, especially in the United States where conservative, white evangelicalism began to grow deeper roots with Reagan’s landslide re-election that same year. .

Orwell’s genius was not in predicting the exact technologies of the future. His was in identifying a pattern: when power converges with information control, when fear becomes governance strategy and when truth is invented to serve authority, our institutions erode from within.

The novel’s enduring relevance is not about telescreens. It is about asymmetry — who sees and who is seen; who decides and who is decided for. That asymmetry seems to be increasingly the fault line of our current age of frontier technologies.

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Twenty Twenty-Six

Today’s frontier systems do not resemble Orwell’s crude surveillance screens. They are far more subtle, far more capable, far more integrated into daily life. They curate and mediate information flows, predict and nudge behavior, optimise targeting — commercial and military alike. They are shaping us and our societies.

If the actual Bhopal of 1984 represented technology and capitalism without guardrails, Orwell’s fictional 1984 represented governance without accountability. AI sits at the intersection of both risks.

Today, frontier AI systems are being deployed at extraordinary speed. America explicitly seeks global dominance in AI. Corporations race to scale and cash-in with a new digital military-industrial complex that’s thriving from Washington to Tel Aviv, to Paris and Berlin, and to Beijing and London. Military applications proliferate. American diplomats are instructed to lobby against data protection laws abroad in the name of American competitiveness and dominance.

Underneath all this are the deeper questions of how to effectively address the risks of frontier technologies and prevent disasters from happening.

In 1984, industrial technology without adequate oversight led to Bhopal. Political indifference deepened the AIDS crisis. Power consolidated narrative control.

And yet that same year, artists collaborated across differences. Workers demanded dignity. Athletes embodied peaceful rivalry.

Technology and ‘innovation’ amplifies who we are. AI is our generation’s amplifier.

Are we building it in the spirit of the Olympics?

In the shadow of Bhopal?

Or in the imagination of Orwell?

The Olympic spirit assumes shared rules, referees and fairness. It assumes that even fierce competition operates within guardrails designed to protect human dignity. Bhopal represents the opposite: systems optimised for efficiency and profit without sufficient oversight, harms externalised and responsibility diffused.

In the AI domain, the stakes are even higher. These systems shape knowledge, labour markets, military targeting, financial flows and democratic discourse. They are our infrastructure.

If governed wisely, they could expand access to education, accelerate medical discovery, strengthen climate resilience and planetary health, and support more equitable growth.

If governed poorly or only by the most powerful, they risk deepening inequality, entrenching surveillance, accelerating autonomous warfare and enabling a new form of technocolonial extraction.

Some argue that this is simply the logic of geopolitics — that we are moving from Pax Americana toward something more fractured, more competitive, more unilateral. Toward a Bellum Technologicum. Perhaps. But this is precisely why governance matters. The question is not whether technology will shape power. It always does. The question is whether power will be constrained by shared norms.

This is where I find cautious hope.

1955 and the Spirit of Bandung

In 1955, leaders from Asia and Africa gathered at the Bandung Conference to articulate a non-aligned vision in a bipolar world. They sought autonomy, cooperation and dignity outside superpower rivalry.

Today, we need a similar spirit among middle powers — countries and coalitions willing to insist that AI governance be multilateral, rights-respecting and inclusive. Not anti-innovation. Not anti-growth. But pro-dignity. Governed by shared norms and rules.

A new spirit of Bandung for a pro-social digital age.

If AI governance becomes merely an extension of national power projection — a tool of digital unilateralism — then we risk repeating the darker side of 1984: systems built first, safeguards considered later.

When I think back to ten-year-old me watching the Sarajevo Winter Games, what I remember most is not the medals. It was the realisation that the world was larger than my immediate surroundings — and that difference did not preclude connection. Indeed, it inspired wonder and curiosity and joy.

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