<![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.comSubstackMon, 25 May 2026 22:14:14 GMT<![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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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (27.02.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-270226https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-270226Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:52:19 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[The Fiery Horse and the Future of Frontier Tech]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/the-fiery-horse-and-the-future-ofhttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/the-fiery-horse-and-the-future-ofTue, 17 Feb 2026 15:02:00 GMT

Today marks the first day of the Lunar New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Fiery Horse. As we enter this new cycle, I wish everyone great joy and prosperity. May this year bring big happiness and boundless joy to you, your families and your communities.

As I understand it, in the Chinese zodiac tradition the Horse symbolises movement, independence and forward momentum. Fire is associated with the heart, especially with sovereignty and virtue. At its finest, Fire represents dynamism, spontaneity and illumination. Out of balance, it becomes restlessness, recklessness and destruction.

And as we kick-off this new Year, I’m reflecting on how the Fiery Horse might inspire us in the tech governance space, particularly as we confront the governance of frontier technologies, mitigating their negative externalities and heading off the worst inclinations driving superintelligence.

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Just work with me here. :-)

The evolution of frontier technologies that we are all experiencing, especially the accelerating push toward artificial general intelligence and superintelligence, is being driven largely from the Global North, and predominantly from the United States. The values embedded in this technological acceleration are neither broadly representative nor are they universally shared. And as we know from recent American history, few guardrails are in place and few are seen on the American horizon.

For decades, the world was told by tech evangelists in Silicon Valley that rapid technological innovation would bring us closer together, democratise opportunity, and deliver widespread prosperity. Instead, many societies now grapple with the externalities: misinformation that corrodes democratic institutions and destroys trust, surveillance capitalism that erodes privacy and autonomy, labour exploitation embedded in digital supply chains and public institutions and civil society forced to shoulder the cost of mitigating harms created elsewhere. All while those companies internalise the profits and power.

The promise of technological inevitability has too often masked this asymmetry.

Perhaps the Fiery Horse offers us a different way to think about this moment and this momentum. Maybe this new year gives us time to pause and shift gears.

Independence

The Horse is fiercely independent, moving under its own power.

For policymakers across the Global South, independence in technology governance means refusing to accept that regulatory actions (or inactions, as the case may be), business models and technological priorities should be imported wholesale from the North.

Independence means asserting that our societies have the authority and the intellectual capacity to define what responsible technology looks like in our own contexts. And importantly how we want that tech to be shaped by our societies, our values and our principals, rather than the other way around.

Independence requires shaping our own narratives and resisting the rhetoric of inevitability — the idea that we are in an unavoidable “AGI race,” that speed is paramount, that scale is the defining need.

Independence means we can openly and assertively ask: who decided that artificial general intelligence is humanity’s highest technological priority?

Forward Momentum

The Fiery Horse doesn’t sit still. It moves.

But remember, intentional movement is not the same as constant acceleration for its own sake.

Forward momentum in technology governance means advancing policy that reflects the values, cultures and needs of our societies, even when these conflict with the profit motives or libertarian impulses embedded in much of the current technology stack.

For too long, innovation has been largely framed as profit-seeking disruption (remember the “move fast and break things”?). What if we reframe it as civilisational stewardship?

If we do that, forward momentum might actually look like:

  • Building public-interest digital infrastructure.

  • Investing in domestic research ecosystems.

  • Prioritising AI justice and AI dignity — not only AI safety.

  • Aligning technological development with social cohesion, planetary health and human flourishing.

The Fiery Horse challenges us to seek innovation guided by meaningful purpose.

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Sovereignty

Fire is associated with the Heart, and subsequently with sovereignty.

There may be no more urgent conversation for governments across the Global South and among middle powers than how to exert sovereignty over the foreign technologies that are reshaping their countries and societies.

The current digital order is characterised by structural asymmetries:

  • Infrastructure dependence on foreign cloud providers, chip manufacturers, and platforms.

  • Data extraction from populations without equitable value return.

  • Regulatory asymmetry, where harms are felt locally but governance power is concentrated elsewhere.

  • Narrative dominance, particularly the framing of a global “race” toward ever more powerful AI systems, where hesitation is characterised as proof of backwardness.

You see the picture: snowballing digital colonialism. The idea of sovereignty in this reality means asserting agency, not isolationism.

Sovereignty also means developing local knowledge ecosystems where we can build regulatory expertise that is rooted and constantly informed by lived experience. We can embed cultural wisdom and historical insight into the way technology is governed.

As an intellectual anchor, Asia has deep traditions of relational thinking, balance, social harmony and moral responsibility. These are not relics of old imperial histories. They are resources for the current generations.

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Virtue

Fire, when balanced, illuminates. But when unbalanced, it burns and hurts.

I’ve seen how the race toward artificial general intelligence is often framed as an engineering challenge or a competitive sprint. But it is fundamentally a moral question. If technology governance lacks virtue, then any amount of dynamism becomes nothing but recklessness.

Virtue in this context means having a moral lighthouse and remembering that technology exists to serve human societies, never the other way around. The same sense of virtue forces us to consider some key questions:

  • Does this system enhance human dignity?

  • Does it strengthen communities?

  • Does it support the good life?

  • Or does it primarily concentrate power and profit?

Virtue requires courage. The courage to slow down when necessary, to regulate, to invest in public capacity rather than outsource responsibility. The courage that bolsters virtue helps us reject narratives that equate restraint with weakness.

A Year to Reset

So as I’ve been thinking about this, maybe the Year of the Fiery Horse really does offer us a symbolic invitation.

Independence — to define our own priorities.
Forward momentum — to move with purpose.
Sovereignty — to reclaim agency.
Virtue — to illuminate the path ahead with our moral lighthouse.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (02.02.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-020226https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-020226Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:03:23 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.

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

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]]><![CDATA[Disorientation: AI and the Climate Crisis]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/disorientation-ai-and-the-climatehttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/disorientation-ai-and-the-climateFri, 30 Jan 2026 14:37:52 GMTUnbounded: 2 Minutes Edgewise delivers sharp, fast takes on current events, fresh revelations, and just cool things. Provocative or hopeful or fiery — it will always be brief, always grounded, and always unbounded.

Speaking at the Prince Mahidol Awards Conference in Bangkok this week, I reflected on artificial intelligence and climate disinformation, as a package. In short, we are facing twin emergencies. One is climate change — visible and urgent. The other is a crisis of truth — harder to see but just as dangerous.

And the tools we hoped would help — artificial intelligence, ‘democratised’ social media platforms, communications technologies — are now, paradoxically, accelerating confusion. We all too often focus on “misinformation” as some fixable effluent of technological innovation — which sits quite well with big tech because it doesn’t get at their destructive business models.

The truth is, America’s tech business models, incentivised by profiteering, create a danger that is not simply misinformation, but better understood as DISORIENTATION: people just don’t know what to trust or where to look.

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AI as an accelerant

Most people think of AI as ChatGPT, but its been ever present in our lives well before that was launched publicly. AI is the invisible scaffolding behind YouTube recommendations, Facebook timelines, and TikTok virality. The same technology that makes Spotify feel uncanny in its music picks is also used to do the same with climate disinformation — with scale, speed, and eerie precision.

Generative AI makes disinformation cheap, easy and hard, all at the same time:

  • Cheap to create convincing climate denial or delay narratives.

  • Easy to tailor content to specific audiences — whether it’s doubt about renewables or exaggerating the costs of transition.

  • Hard to distinguish between credible and manipulated content.

We’re already consuming fake protest footage, synthetic climate “experts,” and polished content that mimics real journalism. Sometimes it’s quite obvious and sometimes not so much.

And that’s the point: it chips away at what we trust and how we know.

This information disorientation stems from a deteriorating information ecosystem that creates confusion. When everything feels uncertain, nothing can mobilise us.

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Our information ecosystem is fragmenting — just when we need it most

We live in a fractured attention economy where truth competes with engagement, and AI-generated and enabled noise drowns out real reporting and journalism. One study showed that more than 1 in 5 videos recommended to new YouTube users are low-quality or misleading AI slop. Imagine being 17, trying to understand climate change, and ending up with AI-generated propaganda before you’ve even approached peer-reviewed science.

Implication: synthetic content dominates discovery before public interest journalism ever surfaces.

Stop treating AI and climate as separate issues

Right now, fossil fuel interests can use AI tools to scale greenwashing. Language models can be groomed to produce friendly narratives that delay climate action. And unregulated agents could eventually flood feeds with misleading content — 24/7, no fatigue and no oversight.

Governance conversations focus (rightly) on bias, fairness, and privacy. But climate integrity and public trust need to be part of that conversation too.

It’s not just the lying

AI can help with the climate crisis — smarter grids, better modeling — if it’s deployed within a just, accountable framework. But techno-optimism is no substitute for democratic governance.

And the real threat isn’t just that AI might lie to us. It’s that it may crowd out our capacity to know, to act, and to trust — just when we need all three the most.

So, maybe we shouldn’t silo these issues.

Climate integrity and information integrity must be considered in tandem. In a world of engineered confusion, safeguarding trust is not just a policy task, but a climate — and existential — imperative.

We can’t afford to remain disoriented any longer.

What do YOU think?

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]]><![CDATA[The Age of Bespoke Genocide]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/the-age-of-bespoke-genocidehttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/the-age-of-bespoke-genocideMon, 26 Jan 2026 17:10:18 GMT

In 2004, before Facebook — and definitely before we thought about newsfeeds and bespoke content curated specifically for our individual consumption — I travelled to Cambodia. The trip was with Indonesian peacebuilding colleagues, part of a study tour to understand how communities were rebuilding their lives and relationships after the Khmer Rouge genocide.

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We ate meals with survivors and perpetrators alike. Sometimes both sat at the same table — children of victims across from those who had been part of the regime that murdered their parents. To be honest, it was pretty jarring, but also a humbling experience. It was hard not to notice how their road to peace was paved not only with a common recognition of what happened, but with the complicated, sometimes terrifying act of remembering that together.

One of those meals I can’t ever forget. It took place in Pailin, near the Thai border, once the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. I recall that the drive was long and difficult, because what passed for roads were still dirt, deeply rutted by the rainy season, with each pothole seemingly deeper than the last. At one point I had to sit on the floor of the van because I needed to feel grounded after being thrown all over the place. People on motorcycles and bicycles, sitting in trucks and buses, snaked around us, making their way slowly through the bumpy, muddy chaos, too.

In hindsight, that road was a bit of a metaphor for life in post-genocide Cambodia. When the rains ended and the road dried, things smoothed out. Just as, in the aftermath of atrocity, facts began to settle. The horror of what had happened in Cambodia emerged — slowly, then with undeniable force. Truth, once uncovered, wasn’t contested. And accountability — however delayed or imperfect — followed.

Dinner with a Genocidaire

That night in Pailin, we had dinner with Khieu Samphan, one of the Khmer Rouge’s most senior leaders. He had been the regime’s head of state, collaborating closely with Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary. He was one of the architects of the Cambodian genocide.

He welcomed us into his sitting room, protested his innocence, and spoke of misunderstood intentions. He was defensive and shared with us a signed copy of a book that was written to exonerate him. I imagine the experience was not unlike sitting across from Adolf Eichmann — a murderer who never accepted his guilt.

At dinner, he changed dramatically. After realising that we were both fluent French speakers, our conversation quickly turned to descriptive stories of youth spent at university salons and cafés in France. His memories came alive very vividly. But there was a space he never crossed in French; he never spoke of the genocide.

Gaza

That was twenty years ago. Today, the world witnesses another genocide — this time in Gaza, among Palestinians. And unlike Cambodia, the facts and the truth don’t seem destined to emerge intact.

People are risking their lives to document in real time the destruction of the physical, cultural, and human infrastructure that makes up Palestinians life. We see it. We hear it. The language used by some Israeli officials and religious leaders mirrors the genocidal: calls to erase, flatten, destroy. And yet, consensus on the basic facts remains elusive.

Why is that?

Part of this is the geopolitical shielding of a state by its superpower ally. But another part is something new, something more insidious: the erosion of a shared reality itself.

We no longer navigate the same road, see the same signposts, approach the same facts, even see the same reality. Each of us travels a bespoke path carved and curated by algorithms designed to optimise engagement (and profit), not understanding (and peace). Where there were once potholes (distortions, biases, errors) that could be easily filled in during the dry season, there are now sinkholes (no shared reality). Manufactured narratives, AI-generated images and videos, cherry-picked truths, weaponised doubt.

Facts no longer flow toward a common understanding, but rather, they fragment and splinter. Before long, bespoke facts harden into parallel worlds.

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The Age of Bespoke Genocide

I wonder if we have we entered into a new age of the bespoke genocide — defined not by the absence of evidence, but by the personalisation of doubt, where mass atrocity is endlessly reframed and contested by machine-augmented and amplified narratives. Where the Khmer Rouge genocide became a fixed point in global memory, Gaza risks becoming a contested simulation, constantly rewritten by those with the most powerful computational tools, crowding out truth and sowing doubt in its place.

Generative AI systems don’t just hallucinate, they absorb the lies, half-truths and synthetic facts of others – then remix and reinforce them. State and non-state actors alike actively engage in LLM grooming — flooding the information ecosystem with synthetic content, manufactured consensus, and hyper-partisan distortion designed to influence how AI models interpret reality. The result? Outputs that blur the line between evidence and ideology, often reinforcing the narratives of the powerful.

Importantly, different rhetorical weapons are deployed to shut down exactly the inquiry necessary to identify the abuse of technological tools and safeguard the integrity of our information ecosystem. The fear of being tagged as “anti-Semitic” becomes a tool of control — one that destroys careers, isolates individuals, and disincentivizes the kind of transparency, research and critical inquiry that preserves the facts for history.

Generative AI systems don’t invent this dynamic, but they are essential tools in amplifying and normalising it. They harden bespoke truths and deliver them to targeted “users” in a tone and aesthetic designed for maximum credibility to sow maximum doubt in the truth. Today we are seeing powerful state actors seeking to reshape the truth in order to prevent an historical reckoning, to retain power and dominance over others.

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The Power of Shared Reality

In Cambodia, once the truth emerged — first in drips and drabs, and then in a flood — the pictures and testimonies led us to something solid and reliable: a shared reality, upon which society could take stock, seek accountability, and pursue justice.

The shared reality and shared reckoning make recovery possible.

When facts can be manufactured, truth placed in doubt, and memory made questionable, accountability becomes pretty much impossible. The rhetorical weapons – labels used to silence – decrease our ability to preserve the facts of this history. The same frontier tech tools that could deepen our understanding of the world risk becoming the mechanisms through which the guilty wash their hands of their sins. And perhaps more importantly, deny the accountability and justice victims deserve and societies need to recover and rebuild lives.

The road to Pailin — rutted and broken by the monsoon, yet still repairable — could be navigated because everyone could agree on where the damage was and what it would take to fix it. In much the same way, the shared reality of the Cambodian genocide allowed for reconciliation and, however imperfect, justice.

This is exactly what we risk losing now in the age of bespoke genocide: a common understanding of what is broken, the crimes committed – a shared reality. In other words, we are losing the ability to face the same facts, grieve the same losses, and hold the guilty to account.

Information Disorientation

We need to name what we see and we are experiencing. This misuse of AI tools isn’t just a case of disinformation; it’s a case of disorientation, a strategy to erase atrocity and accountability even as it unfolds. We must acknowledge and understand exactly how AI tools can be exploited, abused and used intentionally to weaken information integrity, and insist on regulatory frameworks that hold developers and deployers accountable for the social harms their systems enable.

Khieu Samphan was eventually tried and rightfully convicted by a UN-backed tribunal. The narrative he attempted to shift in the book he gave me that day did not survive the reckoning.

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]]><![CDATA[Resources^ from the Rest of Us (22.01.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-220126https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-220126Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:30:00 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.

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

Investigations / Expert Op-Eds

  1. Jai Vipra | Towards AI sovereignty: The good, the bad, and the ugly of AI policy in India

  2. Matthew Kirschenbaum | Grok is an epistemic weapon

  3. Kyle Dane Ballagon | From soft law to hard rules: Pushing for binding AI governance in ASEAN

Blogs / Substacks

  1. BlueDot Impact | A playbook for field strategy

  2. Center for Humane Technology | The World That Game Theory Built

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News

  1. The Star | Grok controversy a case study in product liability

  2. Kompas | Grok Makin Banyak Diblokir di Asia Tenggara

  3. Sinar Harian | MCMC arah sekatan sementara AI Grok susulan pelanggaran kandungan

  4. Bangkok Biz News | จับตารัฐขยับเข็น “กฎหมาย AI” ไทย วางสมดุลนวัตกรรม–ความปลอดภัย (Keep an eye on the government’s moves to push through Thailand’s “AI Law”, balancing innovation and security)

  5. Tech in Asia | Indonesia prepares two presidential regulations on AI

  6. Việt Nam News | UN Under-Secretary-General, Hoa Lâm Group discuss human-centred AI healthcare

  7. Taipei Times | Group warns over use of Chinese-made AI

  8. South China Morning Post | As more nations block Grok for obscene content, calls for ASEAN-wide curbs mount

  9. Reuters | South Korea launches landmark laws to regulate AI, startups warn of compliance burdens

Reports

  1. DEMOS | Epistemic Security for Crisis Resilience

  2. Reuters Institute | Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026

  3. Aspen Digital | Mind the Gap: AI and the Future of news in Latin America

  4. Responsible AI Governance Network | The 2025 Responsible AI Governance Landscape

  5. Concordia.ai | State of AI Safety in China 2025

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

Government / UN / CSO Announcements

  1. Indonesia | Pernyataan resmi menteri komunikasi dan digital RI

  2. People’s Republic of China | 加强安全监管，促进人工智能健康发展——新修改的网络安全法本月起施行 (Strengthening security oversight and promoting the healthy development of artificial intelligence—the newly revised Cybersecurity Law takes effect this month)

]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (21.01.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-210126https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-210126Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:34:50 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.

(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 (Free and Fee-based)

Calendar 2026

January 2026
February 2026

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]]><![CDATA[Global AI Governance’s Venezuela Moment]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/global-ai-governances-venezuela-momenthttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/global-ai-governances-venezuela-momentFri, 16 Jan 2026 09:37:40 GMT

When Donald Trump toured a Ford F‑150 assembly plant in Michigan this week and, caught on video, mouthed “f*ck you” and gave the middle finger to a protesting autoworker, it was not just another signal of his inability to maintain decorum, accept criticism, or remain diplomatic. It was a very clear signal: the United States, once the “shining city on a hill,” no longer even pretends to uphold a baseline of democratic civility or respect. [1]

When I worked on governance and human rights in China nearly two decades ago, we often said that how a government treats its own citizens at home is the best predictor of how it will behave abroad. Today, the signal is unmistakable: we have a president giving his critics the middle finger and a “f*ck you,” masked ICE agents carrying out intimidation, and government agencies weaponised for political retribution.

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Just days before that domestic middle finger, he gave one to the world, too.

The American military mounted a military operation deep in Caracas, illegally kidnapping Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and taking him to the United States to stand trial. With no Congressional or UN Security Council mandate, this was an illegal, unilateral action that clearly violated national sovereignty, Maduro’s authoritarianism notwithstanding (though America has had plenty of authoritarian friends throughout history). Trump followed by posting on his own digital platform, Truth Social, that he planned to “run” Venezuela indefinitely even claiming himself the acting president and stealing the country’s oil, reinforcing a narrative of imperial prerogative over international norms.

These two moments — the obscene gesture at a domestic protester and the kidnapping of a foreign head of state — are connected. They are emblematic of a terrifying truth: the United States is rapidly discarding the very values that once underpinned its claims to global democratic leadership — democracy, rule of law, human rights, and international cooperation — and it no longer hesitates to flaunt that shift. It no longer hesitates to be brazen, even vulgar, while doing exactly what it wants, with little regard for who gets hurt at home or abroad.

We must then ask ourselves: if the US can so casually discard rules and norms in pursuit of oil, power and selfish hegemony, what reason do we have to believe it will uphold ethics, rights, and multilateral norms in the governance of artificial intelligence — especially as we approach the possibility of superintelligence?

The stakes are high.

Venezuela

America’s intervention in Venezuela represents perhaps the most controversial projection of overt American power in the Western Hemisphere since its 1989 invasion of Panama. The operation drew global condemnation — including from members of the United Nations Security Council — for violating the UN Charter and basic norms of sovereignty. Meanwhile, Trump’s public declarations about controlling Venezuela’s government and oil resources show a transactional view of power: might makes right.

The president’s Deputy Chief of Staff (and architect of much MAGA madness), Stephen Miller, made it crystal clear: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” He had previously stated emphatically that “[the United States] is a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

This is not the language of collaborative global governance, but rather the language of imperial prerogative.

The stakes are very high indeed.

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The World’s Greatest Democracy

For years, the United States portrayed itself — and was portrayed by its allies — as a leader in inclusive, democratic governance: from human rights to free markets, from civil society participation to international cooperation. But that narrative started unraveling fast and furious the moment Trump 2.0 got its hands on power.

In tech governance, that façade is already gone:

  • The U.S. has pulled back from multilateral forums where civil society plays a significant role in shaping tech norms – including the Freedom Online Coalition, Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, Global Forum on Cyber Expertise, International Development Law Organization, International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, UN Democracy Fund, and many more besides.

  • Funding for global civil society efforts — historically supported through mechanisms like USAID and the US Department of State’s Democracy, Human Rights and Labour bureau — has been eliminated, creating a vacuum where local and regional advocates once participated easily and robustly.

  • Domestic policies now weaken the ability of advocates and activists to engage internationally — for example, requirements that social media accounts be public under threat of visa consequences, a policy that undermines safety for many.

  • Private tech firms, meanwhile, enjoy a blank check to scale, extract data, and “innovate” with impunity, with little accountability to human rights or public oversight.

  • US disengagement from international consensus on climate and digital cooperation means fewer shared frameworks and more ad hoc power plays.

In this context, civil society — what I see as the backbone of both accountability and inspiration in tech governance — has been hollowed out, especially in the Global Majority. Six months ago I sounded this alarm in the Asia Times. I remain just as worried; if not more so.

A few days ago I caught up with an old friend who is a peace mediator with whom I worked on the Aceh Peace Process. He described the collapse of USAID support as akin to suddenly pulling oil out of the global energy mix. Yes, there are alternatives — wind, solar, hydro — but for now, the system still runs on oil. And when it vanishes, everything grinds to a halt. That’s what we’re seeing now with the global civil society ecosystem: once heavily reliant on American development assistance, many aid workers, governments, and advocacy groups are scrambling to adapt — and coming up short. Civil society organisations, especially those critical to shaping AI governance, are increasingly left without the lifeblood they need to function meaningfully.

Civil society was the energy source for meaningful public participation in tech, and now their ability to substantively, equitable and meaningfully participate is quickly being eroded by the United States.

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

Surveillance Capitalism Meets State Power

Meanwhile, the global narrative that America is righteous because “we’re not communist China” masks a truth that is much more relevant: American surveillance capitalism rivals the informational extraction of authoritarian states. Data harvested by US tech firms yields insights into behavior, relationships, vulnerabilities, and preferences on a planetary scale.

Because most of this extraction is done by private companies, many feel comfortable (or at least resigned) in the belief that the state does not control these systems. But nevermind, there’s a democracy holding them accountable. Right?

Wrong. And that distinction is already blurred. As America’s federal government entices the cozying up with firms like Palantir and others owned by tech bros, the capacity for the state to access, leverage, or coerce access to private data infrastructures is only growing. Big Tech is feeding off the protection the Trump regime is providing them. These are infrastructures of power, not neutrality. And they are not controlled by us.

If America is willing to discard norms to seize oil, why would it hesitate to repurpose these digital architectures, including hindering effective governance, in pursuit of selfish geopolitical advantage?

Meanwhile, Europe’s commitment to rules, norms, and regulatory frameworks once seemed like a reasonably sound bulwark against an unchecked American libertarian tech unilateralism. But as the continent weighs America’s lust for Greenland and tepid support for Ukraine against Russian authoritarianism (among much else), its ability to exercise power seems brittle at best.

Indeed, as Europe weakens its own AI regulatory frameworks under American tech and government pressure, are we witnessing the 21st century equivalent of Sudetenland appeasement? The EU seems to increasingly resemble a Maginot Line rather than a credible deterrent against American pressure on global AI governance — impressive in form, but strategically weak.

Bandung 2.ai: A New Way

Last week, I joined a private fireside chat (sans fireplace, obvi – it’s hot here!) with a Southeast Asian Foreign Minister. When asked how their country was navigating pressure from both the US and China, the Minister replied that we don’t have to turn right or left. We can chart our own path — among our friends. Then came the warning: Know who your real friends are. A powerful country like the United States will always do — and take — what it wants.

If the United States can only now be counted on to take what it wants, cannot be counted on to lead in ethical, accountable governance or even fully participate in the rules-based, cooperative international order that they themselves built after the Second World War — and if Europe’s rule‑based commitments are unreliable or lack coercive underpinning to deter unilateralism — then the world must consider a third way. A new way.

This is where a Bandung 2.ai moment — an idea I’ve coined and written about in these pages — becomes essential. A non‑aligned, Global South‑led project that:

  • Challenges the monopoly of Western knowledge systems

  • Resists the universalisation of Western ways of knowing

  • Champions human rights and collective agency

  • Builds sovereign knowledge ecosystems, the infrastructures that produce and validate knowledge on their own terms, instead of under the shadow of Silicon Valley or Washington

If knowledge is the most valuable commodity in the 21st century – from raw materials for AI models to how we understand informed consent to how we benefit from a research to policy interface – then epistemic sovereignty is essential to political sovereignty, human flourishing and people-centred technological future.

This is not rhetorical wordplay and I certainly don’t mean to be overly academicy. It names exactly what’s required for a sovereignty that includes freedom from technocolonialism. The only way to ensure advanced technologies benefit all people of the world.

I think it is the foundation for a new governance architecture that centers local realities, values, and priorities, rather than grafting Western perspectives, frames and explanatory narratives onto diverse societies.

A sovereign knowledge ecosystem means:

  • Investing in regional research hubs that define problems and metrics for themselves

  • Building data infrastructures that serve local publics, not global platforms

  • Incentivising pro-social technology and preventing monopolistic ownership of the technology stack

  • Creating transparent, participatory governance bodies that include civil society, academia, traditional knowledge holders, and pro‑social enterprises to process knowledge

  • Making space for different ways of thinking, knowing, and living to shape how AI is built and what it’s used for

This is not being naive. It is a highly pragmatic approach in a world where America has proven unpredictable, transactional, and self‑interested.

Some Practical Steps to Take Now

To operationalise this vision of sovereign knowledge ecosystems rooted in the global south, here are some initial efforts that can be undertaken by governments in our region as part of plans to harness the power of frontier technologies for their citizens:

  1. Fund and scale independent AI researchers, endow Asian think tanks, and invest in universities as integral to public digital transformation and AI readiness investments (it’s not all about the hardware or job training!).

  2. Channel government and philanthropic resources to civil society actors and technical and policy experts and recognise them as a core governance pillar, as partners and co-creators who bring crucial cultural, community, linguistic, moral, and technical expertise to the policy table.

  3. Build data trusts and sovereign repositories accountable to their communities, not corporate interests.

  4. Create crisis response mechanisms across global south governments, academies and civil societies to both determine what individual and collective harms need attention and serve as our own firefighters (and NGO I work for is doing just this!).

  5. Create cross‑regional alliances — Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous networks — to advance new thinking on the ethics, safety, and public benefit of frontier tech.

Venezuela was the Warning Shot

While at the same time America’s leader was admonishing Thai diplomats to respect the UN Charter and territorial integrity over its violent border clashes with neighbouring Cambodia, America consciously decided to eschew international law and kidnap a nation’s head of state. (Remember that warning that the US will take what it wants?)

If it can abduct a sovereign leader and lay claim to another nation’s resources without even the pretense of a legal rationale — only the blunt force of a 21st-century manifest destiny — then nothing is off the table when geopolitics collides with technology.

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]]><![CDATA[Events^ from the Rest of Us (14.01.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-140126https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/events-from-the-rest-of-us-140126Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:17:59 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.

Events indicated with an (*) indicate activities that seem to be funded in part or in whole by a private sector entity (or the convening organisation receives private sector funding) and you are encouraged to investigate further.

(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 (Free and Fee-based)

Calendar 2026

January 2026
February 2026
March 2026

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]]><![CDATA[Resources^ from the Rest of Us (12.01.26)]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-120126https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/resources-from-the-rest-of-us-120126Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:20:54 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.

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

Featured Resources 1:

| The Battle for Cognitive Liberty in the Age of Corporate AI

This is hands down the best piece I’ve read on the real harms we are facing from an AI ‘revolution’ driven by perverse market incentives, billionaire bros, and the system which the powerful have created to internalise the lucrative returns on manipulating our cognition while externalising all the harms.

There are so many great take-aways and pull out quotes from here that I can’t put them all in this post. But one that really stood out for me is this:

“𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘭𝘶𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭.”

And if you thought an American democracy could be counted on, think again:

“𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘱 𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘢’𝘴 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘴 𝘶𝘱 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦’𝘴 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴: 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘮, 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘐 𝘥𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘶𝘯𝘴𝘢𝘧𝘦.”

Investigations / Expert Op-Eds

  1. CNAS | The Export Control Loophole Fueling China’s Chip Production

  2. Paris Marx | Getting of US tech: a guide

  3. Belfer Center | Middle Powers: An Intellectual Framework

  4. Michael Geoffrey Asia | The Emotional Labor behind AI Intimacy

  5. East Asia Forum Editors | As the United States walks away, Asia can’t give up on the rules based economic order

  6. Joseph Stiglitz | America’s Age of Empire

  7. Daron Acemoglu | What Now for the “Rules-Based Order”?

  8. Jorge G. Castrañeda | Yankee Go Home, Again

  9. Courtney C. Radsch | The Battle for Cognitive Liberty in the Age of Corporate AI

Blogs / Substacks

  1. Center for Humane Technology and Josh Lash | China isn’t racing the U.S. toward the same AI future

  2. Derja | AI governance did not happen.

  3. Derja | Redefining Hope in AI (Part 1): A personal reckoning with responsibility

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News

  1. Fortune | Why Singapore is the only Southeast Asian country in Pax Silica, the U.S.’s new AI ‘inner circle’

  2. Reuters Special Report | Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue

  3. The Nation | Trump exit from 66 bodies raises global policy risk

  4. The Asia Business Daily | China Criticizes U.S. withdrawal from Multiple International Organisations: “We will uphold multilateralism”

  5. The Standard | ทรัมป์พาสหรัฐฯ ถอนตัว 66 องค์การระหว่างประเทศ กระทบโลกและไทยอย่างไร

  6. Xinhua | China affirms support for UN following U.S. withdrawal from 66 international organisations

  7. Global Times (China) | US pulling out of international bodies “is no longer news”: Chinese FM on US withdrawal from 66 international organisations

  8. AP | Malaysia and Indonesia become first to block Musk’s Grok over sexualised AI images

  9. AP | China to probe Meta’s acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Manus

  10. Asia News Network | Why South Korea is vying to be first to regulate AI

Reports

  1. 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media | The Impact of the Gaza Blockade and the Destruction of Telecommunications Infrastructure on the Digital Economy Amidst Genocide

  2. Centre for Democracy & Technology | Risky Business: Advanced AI Companies’ Race for Revenue

  3. Digital Good Network | Derya Ozkul, Marie Godin | Exclusion by Design: Digital Identification and the Hostile Environment for Migrants

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

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Government / UN / CSO Announcements

  1. United States | Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States

  2. People’s Republic of China | Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning’s Regular Press Conference on January 9, 2026

  3. Taiwan, Republic of China | MODA Strongly Condemns Cyber Violence and Urges All Sectors to Work Together in Protecting Digital Human Rights

  4. Taiwan, Republic of China | Legislative Yuan Passes Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Act in Third Reading, Laying Foundation for AI Innovation, Security Governance in Taiwan

  5. Observacom | Shadow Banning”: The Subtle and Covert Censorship of the Major Tech Platforms (in English, Spanish and Portuguese)

  6. 7amleh | 7amleh Calls on Linkedin not to Support Annexation Policies and Settlement Discourse

Company Announcements

  1. Meta | Human Rights Report 2024

Podcasts/Webinars

  1. Instagram | On Empathy (not the title but an IG video I saw that I think you’ll like)

  2. Reboot Democracy | Using AI to Support Public Deliberation: A Conversation with Audrey Tang

]]><![CDATA[Hear Me Roar: AI Governance from the Margins]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/hear-me-roar-ai-governance-from-thehttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/hear-me-roar-ai-governance-from-theSun, 04 Jan 2026 09:26:50 GMT

This first post of the new year is a perfect moment to take a big breath and reflect not just on what’s ahead in 2026, but how we keep showing up for the work of building better digital futures, for all people, everywhere.

I am so grateful to all of you who’ve joined me on this journey: sharing hopes, fears, ideas, and hard questions about the frontiers of technology. For many of us, it can feel like shouting from the sidelines. Structural power leaves many of us actually on the margins. But we shouldn’t think of this vantage point as a weakness because it really is where much of the most honest thinking can happen.

In fact, today’s piece was sparked by one of you reading this newsletter — an old friend from my democratic governance days — who asked in response to my year-end essay:

“Any thoughts on what those who feel unheard and unseen can do to contribute to the ethical AI governance effort?”

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

I read it and immediately knew that I had the topic for my next article. Her question isn’t just about AI or tech policy, but broadly about power, voice, and agency. It hints pretty clearly at the fatigue many of us feel in the face of sweeping changes that seem to happen to us, not with us, and certainly not always for our benefit.

It’s also a timely question. We are in a moment where the language of “responsible AI” and “AI for good” is everywhere — and yet meaningful participation in shaping these systems remains out of reach for most. So what can we do when we feel marginalised or disempowered? What does it mean to push back, even without institutional clout or insider access?

It can often feel like there’s no seat at the table for people from the margins. But even if we are denied the ability to bring our own chairs to that table, there are still ways to build pressure outside the room.

Here are some pathways you can consider for participating in the ethical governance of AI from the margins.

→ Normalise Uncomfortable Words

We live in an era dominated by surveillance capitalism — where our data is extracted, monetised, and used to optimise behaviour. Simply talking about this openly can be a radical act. Normalise naming it: surveillance capitalism. Push back when it’s hand-waved away as some cost of convenience, or no big deal, or overblown rhetoric from luddhites.

Call out technocolonialism — the imposition of extractive technologies on communities without consent or consultation. Whether it’s AI systems in the global south or predictive policing in over-surveilled communities, we need to shine a light on the pattern of power consolidation and disappearing voices and weakening agency. Don’t be shy. Say it.

Talk about the legacy of colonialism and how it plays out in the technology governance spaces today that are so dominated by Northern (primarily private) interests. Discuss the similarities between the Facebooks and Amazons and Googles of today and the British and Dutch East India Companies of the past. Because the impacts on us today are profound.

→ Create Friction

Big Tech wants a seamless, optimised life — but it’s often in the friction of life that we find serendipity, humanity, and challenge. Don’t let every analog moment get optimised out.

  • Choose the in-person meetup over the app.

  • Have slow conversations that meander instead of the quick text messages that lose much .

  • Make room for the unmeasurable.

These are small rebellions against empires of tech — but they add up and matter.

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→ Show Up Where Decisions Are Being Made and Priorities Discussed

Even without formal power, anyone can show up where it counts.

  • Zoning meetings: Data centers are exploding globally, often with enormous environmental impact and little local benefit. Say “no” — or at least, “not like this.” Ask tough questions, demand hard answers. And dig deeply to uncover the big tech firms behind some of these infra projects and their shell companies (because we know they sometimes hide so that light can’t shine on them).

  • Public comment periods: Governments often invite feedback on AI-related regulation. These are underused. Civil society groups sometimes publish templates that can help you weigh in. Step on the scale.

  • Town halls: Ask your legislator, city officials or other civil servants about AI use in public services, about campaign donations from tech interests, about their stance on algorithmic accountability, surveillance, and tech-enabled genocide. Be polite, but persistent.

→ Pressure the Powerful — Even as an Individual

  • Buy one share in a Big Tech company. It’s often enough to attend shareholder meetings, ask questions, and vote. A single voice — if informed and coordinated — can start something.

  • Ask hard questions at conferences, public talks, panels. Don’t accept the “I’ll have to look into that” or “we’ll circle back” brush-off from anyone. Make the discomfort visible and press on.

  • Write, speak, share — whether through op-eds, social posts, or holiday dinner conversations. Your lived experience is valid data and you should leverage it.

→ Build or Join Something Analog

Those who design or tolerate disempowerment often do so to make people feel isolated. But you’re not alone and it can be super empowering to connect with others:

  • Join tech accountability groups.

  • Help local advocacy organisations integrate digital justice into their work.

  • Start a community teach-in group, like a book club — but for demystifying AI, surveillance, and digital rights.

→ Dissect the Narrative

“AI for Good” often sounds wonderful — but you gotta ask: Good for whom?

These initiatives are frequently PR-driven, masking extractive incentives behind a veneer of benevolence. When you hear vague claims about “ethics panels” or “responsible AI,” dig deeper. Who benefits? Who gets harmed? Who profits from the behavioral insights extracted? Who makes money?

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→ Use The Law

In many countries, Freedom of Information laws allow you to ask how tech is used in public services — from welfare algorithms to policing tools. If you suspect harmful AI use, file a request (and some NGOs or journalists out there could help in this regard). You might uncover more than you expect.

→ Support What Can Bring the Future We Want

Not all tech is extractive. Civic tech and public interest AI efforts are building tools with democratic oversight, community governance, and user agency in mind.

  • Recommend these tools to your local government, libraries, or schools.

  • Share them widely. Visibility will help build legitimacy.

Parting Thoughts

These are some reasonably actionable things that we can take when we don’t individually possess power and influence. When we don’t all have institutional power or the luxury to get paid to attend conferences and seminars, let alone be featured speakers at them.

But when we come together, our actions take on exponential impact and the impact compounds. Like this math formula: (the*margins)^squared

Imagine if thousands of us interrogated Silicon Valley’s “AI for Good” initiatives with the same rigor they apply to their own market forecasts and policy narratives.

Imagine if we made it impossible for companies to wrap exploitative practices in feel-good narratives without facing substantive scrutiny.

At the end of the day, we can’t feel helpless — and we certainly can’t remain uninspired. That’s what private interests (and authoritarian actors) are counting on. They’d prefer for us to remain quiet, disconnected and confused. All the easier to accept their narratives.

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]]><![CDATA[Artificially Wrapped: My Year in Tech Governance]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/artificially-wrapped-my-year-in-techhttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/artificially-wrapped-my-year-in-techMon, 29 Dec 2025 06:31:17 GMT

Much has happened this year.

Fascism crept deeper into America, with impacts reverberating around the world, including the Global South. A US-China AI ‘war’. The world finally acknowledging the genocide unfolding in Gaza and paying attention to the tech driving it. A billionaire tech bro dismantled some of America’s most important soft power institutions — not by accident, but by design – and showed how private companies can dangerously co-mingle datasets never meant to be joined up. Closer to home, in Indonesia and Nepal, students poured into the streets, only to be violently silenced by governments still calling themselves democratic. Political dissidents are still surveilled and harassed online and off.

And through it all, I found myself pulled deeper into the governance of artificial intelligence and how to help leaders bend innovation in the direction of human flourishing. To think about the issues holistically and with people at the centre.

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

The Work

This year, I spoke at international forums, trained exiled journalists, partnered with government AI offices, and helped train parliamentarians from around the world. I read widely, argued often, and wrote regularly — including right here, on this newsletter, (margin*notes)^squared.

In all those engagements, I kept hearing the same things from policymakers:

  • They feel powerless in the face of Big Tech.

  • They fear being blamed if their country “falls behind” for pushing back.

  • They’re inundated with narratives — pushed hard by the private sector — about growth, progress, and inevitability.

In my conversations with policymakers across Southeast Asia — from Brunei Darussalam to Indonesia to Thailand — I heard the same refrain: they feel deeply unprepared, technically outmatched, and politically powerless in the face of Big Tech. They seem terrified to question the logic being sold to them. That if they question the Silicon Valley growth narrative, they might doom their countries to economic decline. That real, effective governance might mean “falling behind.”

But that’s not true. That’s a story sold by people with products to protect. Those are stories created by trillion-dollar companies armed with lawyers, lobbyists, and messaging experts.

At a regional AI forum, I sat on a civil society panel with four other Asian advocates. Afterward, I turned to them and said, “Isn’t this forum… awfully white?” They exhaled — relieved that someone said it out loud. We all laughed at the same moment; and then sighed at the same moment. Then of course laughed again at the persistent jinx. An ASEAN event with few ASEAN speakers, and closing remarks delivered by non-Asian organisations. It seemed to show where power still resides, where expertise is seen, and who still controls the discourse.

The Analog-ness of Being Human

In contrast to all that noise, I’ve also found myself drawn to different kinds of moments — analog ones.

I buy coconut smoothies regularly from an elderly lady running a fruit stall on the side of the road. Her hands sometimes shake as she prepares the drink, struggling with the frozen smoothie mix that just doesn’t seem to want to dislodge itself from the blender, even when turned upside down. We exchange small talk, smiles. We see each other. Not as profiles or QR codes, but as humans. It’s a simple moment, but it means something.

This year, I’ve moved away from screens more often. I’ve observed migrant workers and wondered about their stories – who might be happy and thriving, and who might feel exploitation and fear. I’ve thought about how tech tries to remove friction from our daily lives and interactions — but that same friction is where humanity lives.

I’ve sat alone in restaurants and just watched the room, devices tucked away in my bag. Waiting in line. Helping someone across the street. Being interrupted. Feeling awkward. All of these are moments where empathy grows.I don’t want a world where we innovate these things out of existence.

The Myth of “Governance”

A key take-away this year, in my view, is that we have a long, long way to go to ensure frontier tech is governed in the interests of citizens and human flourishing. One of the clearest things was that AI governance hasn’t really happened yet.

A fellow Substack writer, fellow ex-big tech, and new friend, Asma Derja, wrote this:

“If governance is defined as the capacity to impose real limits on power, then what we currently label as AI governance is, in practice, not governance at all. Governance should be evaluated by whether systems were actually constrained, delayed, altered, or made costly to deploy. By that standard, most institutional governance over the past year failed.”

I think Asma is right.

Too much of what passes for “governance” is little more than appeasement, or the lowest common denominator. Policymakers roll out the red carpet for tech executives who speak like oracles and act like saviors. But they’re not prophets — they’re salespeople. They are protecting markets, not people.

It’s especially dangerous when Global South governments are expected to adopt frameworks developed in Europe or the U.S. That’s more projecting power than advancing governance.

We need sovereign knowledge ecosystems. Not the borrowed blueprints passed down to us today. We need tools and norms grounded in our lived realities — in Jakarta, Manila, and Phnom Penh — not Brussels or Palo Alto or London.

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A Book That Shook

It wasn’t the infamous Bangkok earthquake of 2025, but rather a book that shook me up the most. One of the most formative reads this year was The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. It made me think about power — who has it, who uses it, and who suffers because of it. It got me thinking again about the 1955 Bandung Conference, and the need for a Global Majority with the power to drive innovation in ways best for us, not best for the North’s interactions with us.

It deepened my belief that tech governance today isn’t just a regulatory issue framed by 21st century challenges, but rather a decolonial one, deeply rooted in history and lived experience. It reminded me how urgently we need those sovereign knowledge ecosystems in the Global South — not wholesale, imported frameworks, but tools and norms rooted in our histories, languages, and lives – so that AI and frontier risk can be reimagined and effectively addressed from the margins in.

Unexpected Joys (and Laughs)

One of the most wonderful moments of the year came at the Paris Peace Forum. A woman from the French Foreign Ministry found me in the crowd. She had sought me out — just to say she reads (margin*notes)^squared. She taught me the term Filosofia de Boteco, which I then wrote about here. Later, the CEO of a philanthropic foundation told me the same. I was floored. I write this newsletter from the margins — so to feel seen and valued in that way means everything.

And then there were the funny moments. Like when I introduced myself on a call to a parliamentary expert joining our team and she said, “Michael! I know you. We sat next to each other during training in Kuala Lumpur.” It reminded me: the world is small. Paths cross. And we all need to pay a bit more attention.

For the Next Generation

As I write this, my niece and her friends are visiting me in Bangkok. They’re soon to be recent grads — new software engineers headed for Big Tech jobs in the U.S. My niece subscribes to this newsletter. But talking with them, I realised: they don’t yet fully understand the governance, justice, philosophical, ethical and rights issues surrounding the systems they’re about to build. Their education didn’t prepare them for that. And their employers likely won’t either.

It reminds me how much work we still have to do — and how essential this writing, teaching, and agitating really is. (So, to all you out there: Please write, teach and agitate! As the late US Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis said: Be Bold, Be Brave, Be Courageous, and… Find a way to get in the way.”)

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My Hopes for 2026

The policy hope: That Southeast Asian leaders stop repeating Silicon Valley talking points and start listening to the knowledge and experience of their own people — and investing in the ecosystems that support them.

The human hope: That we resist the temptation to surrender our empathy to efficiency. That we embrace the messiness of life — waiting, listening, being — so we can stay human.

Notes on Voice

One thing I’ve carried around this year — and honestly, for a while now — is writing from Southeast Asia as someone who’s white. I’ve lived most of my life in the Global South. These are my foods, my communities, my rhythms. I’ve grown up with technology and watched and participated in in its evolution from here. But I’m aware that some readers may struggle with that, draw conclusions.

What they don’t always see is the rest of my story: as a queer person, as someone who has known discrimination and violence, as someone who has worked among death and worked on peace, I’ve learned to look for empathy in the cracks. That’s where my writing comes from — a space of love, lived experience, and radical hope. And that will never cease.

Why I Write

I don’t write for the billionaires. I write for the person who thinks their voice is too small to matter.

Maybe they’re a policymaker in a ministry. A Parliamentarian newly elected. Maybe they’re an activist, a student, or a community leader. Or an academic or researcher. Or maybe they are you.

If you’ve ever felt unheard or unseen — I write this for you.

Because you matter and are important to our communities. And we deserve dignity, justice, and flourishing. We deserve tech that serves us.

With Gratitude

To everyone who reads this newsletter, thank you. For sharing, commenting, reflecting. For being here.

To especially, thank you for encouraging me to hit “publish” on my very first article of this substack. I still remember messaging you before I clicked, and how terrified I was. And now here we are. Thanks.

To and who are constantly inspiring me.

To all of you: thank you for reminding me that this work matters.

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]]><![CDATA[Reading As Resistance]]>https://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/reading-as-resistancehttps://www.margin-notes-squared.com/p/reading-as-resistanceWed, 24 Dec 2025 12:48:06 GMT

Each morning this year began usually the same way: just before the tropical sun quickly rose, I rolled out my yoga mat, breathed into the day, sent metta to loved ones (and not-so-loved ones) and then brewed my favourite Vietnamese coffee. Then, for an hour or two I’d read. Explored new ideas. Inquired about old questions. And often caught myself muttering sounds of surprise (‘Oh really?” “I’d no idea!” “How interesting”) and usually going down rabbit holes searching for more information online.

Books help me understand the world. I’ve got at least 2,500 of them at home. They give me ammunition to ask better questions. And often they are how I find the words and language for things I’ve long felt but never named. One book often leads to another. Or I get inspired from a reference in a podcast, a friend’s recommendation, or a footnote in an article.

Oh, and my books are tabbed to death with stickies to help me find intersting quotes and references!

This year was no different.

I set myself a goal of 100 books and ended the year at just over 70. It’s a slight miss, but I’ll blame that on travel and a few big projects and starting some new work with AI Safety Asia, an amazing NGO at the cutting edge of AI governance in my region. The book count doesn’t matter as much as what I gained from them: new ways of seeing the world around me. And on more than one occasion they inspired some of my writing here in (margin*notes)^squared.

Reading Toward Equity and Justice

My guiding principles in life are equity and justice. On these, I make zero compromises. So I often gravitate to books that interrogate systems of power: who holds and hoards it, who’s excluded from it, who’s damaged and hurt by it, and how we build something better.

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice helped me revisit some foundational ideas, while Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth brought great clarity to something I’ve believed in but couldn’t quite articulate: that massive wealth at the top is as corrosive to social systems as injustice at the bottom.

Like many, I’m deeply concerned with the rights and dignity of marginalised people and the genocide that we see in plain sight on our screens every day. So this year I read widely on Palestine and Israel, the Israel lobby, American foreign policy and even tuberculosis, through John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis, a stunning account of the world’s most persistent and unjustly ignored disease – and the bias, discrimination, shame and pain that follow it.

And I must say that Jacinda Ardern’s memoirs (“A Different Kind of Power”) is simply amazing. Yes, we REAlly can have a different kind of leadership, built on empathy and inclusion and justice and equity. She shows us that it is indeed possible in our world today. I had the joy of having a bilateral with Jacinda at the 2023 Paris Peace Forum and I’ll never forget that. We are better because of leaders like her.

Jakarta and the Margins

A special thanks to my new colleague Zar who recommended The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. I was stunned to learn that the word Jakarta — the city I called home for nearly a decade — has been in fact a euphemism across the Global South for U.S.-supported mass killings during the Cold War, especially in Latin America.

This book didn’t just change what I know; it changed how I understand place, memory, and geopolitical violence. It got me to dive deeper into the Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 1955 and the struggles non-aligned leaders faced – which I have written about here, too.

Mirca Madianou’s Technocolonialism gave me another key insight — and the vocabulary that I very much needed. Her articulation of how digital technologies reproduce colonial patterns in the Global South gave me a word I now use often: technocolonialism. I was honored to speak at one of her conferences earlier this year, and her thinking continues to shape mine around post-colonial experiences and neocoloniality in the governance of frontier technology.

Power, Privilege & Platforms

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People — which I read in a couple days — offered a devastating, inside look at the cost of ambition and idealism within tech. Sarah was initially my hiring manager at Facebook, though she left before I started. (And I swear there is a nameless reference to me in there — the human rights guy she wanted to hire in Bangkok!) Her reflections on greed, invincibility, and the slow corrosion of values inside massive platforms is essential reading for anyone building or participating in the digital world. Even if you walk away convinced of only half the stories, that should be enough to light a fire under you.

Unexpected Pairings with Big Insights

Some of the most powerful reading moments this year came from strange but timely book pairings. Reading The Color of Law right after Jesus and John Wayne deepened my understanding of how white Christian nationalism has shaped — and continues to distort — American politics. It helped me understand the performative cruelty, racism and toxic masculinity we see spreading like plague across the American political landscape. I didn’t plan to read them back to back (and still not sure how I came across them), but I’m so glad I did. You should, too.

Frédéric Martel’s In the Closet of the Vatican was long (600 pages or so — but packed full of information from hundreds of interviews he conducted with church officials around the world) and utterly fascinating. It revealed how gay men — seeking protection from the judgement of family and society — historically gravitated toward the Church, and then unintentionally setting up new layers of secrecy and political contradiction. The hypocrisy it exposes is staggering. And I read this all while simultaneously reading about liberation theology!

The Full List: My Favorite Reads of 2025

Im also sharing here an almost full list of the books that stayed with me this year (I’ll spare you from the ones that just weren’t worth it). You’ll find politics, memoir, global health, inequality, religion, and a touch of fiction and speculation. Let’s call it my literary Mix Tape. I hope you’ll find something that calls to you.

These books represent hundreds of hours of early-morning learning, questioning, reflecting, and connecting dots. I’m grateful for the ability to read, to write, and to explore ideas with all of you.

📬 If you’ve read any of these, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
📚 And if you’ve read something that challenged or changed you this year—please send it my way.

Here’s to more curiosity, more justice, and more beautiful mornings with coffee and books in 2026.

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

Tech and Tech Policy

  • Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful, by Mira Madianou

  • Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

  • Broken Code: The Fight to Expose Facebook’s Toxic Secrets, by Jeff Horowitz

  • Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass, by Nicol Turner Lee

  • The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back, by Hilke Schellmen

  • Machines of Tomorrow: How AI Will Shape Our World, From AI Origins to Super Intelligence and Post Humanity, by Pedro-Uria-Recio and Randy McGraw

  • The Digital Republic: Taking Back Control of Technology, by Jamie Susskind

  • The New Fire: War, Peace and Democracy in the Age of AI, by Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie

  • The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes

  • Viral Justice: How We Grow the World we Want, by Ruha Benjamin

  • The Information Animal: Human, Technology and the Competition for Reality, by Alicia Wanless

  • Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, by Jamie Susskind

  • Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking Our Digital Futures, by Neil Selwyn

  • Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control, by Stuart Russel

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Human Rights, Equality and Justice

  • Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, by Kenneth Roth

  • Equality: What It Means and Why it Matters, by Thomas Picketty and Michael Sandel

  • Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, by John Green

  • The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, by Vincent Bevin

  • Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, by Ingrid Robeyns

Espionage

  • The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerillas 1939-1945, by Max Hastings

Philosophy

  • The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, by Masahiro Mori

  • A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls

  • A Theology of Liberation, by Gustavo Gutiérrez

China

  • Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang

  • The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, by Mark L. Clifford

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United States

  • The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein

  • The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson

  • Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy, by David Rhode

  • Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy, Henry Farrel and Abraham Newman

  • Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Kristin Du Mez

  • Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, by Anna Merlan

Palestine, Israel

  • Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel, by Ilan Pappé

  • The Jew Who Rowed for Palestine: An Israeli-Palestinian’s Search for Identity, by Mark Gerban

  • The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearshimer and Stephen D. Walt

  • Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, by Jimmy Carter

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Democracy and Globalisation

  • Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, by Anne Applebuam

  • A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, by Russel Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum

  • The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalisation, by Peter Zeihan

  • The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz

  • The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf

  • The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law, by Jonathan Sumption

  • Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, by Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis

  • Growth: A Reckoning, by Daniel Susskind

Memoirs, Biography and History

  • A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir, by Jacinda Ardern

  • The First Global Village: How Portugal Changed the World, by Martin Page

  • Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021, by Angela Merkel

  • Salazar: The Dictator who Refused to Die, by Tom Gallagher

  • The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, by Marci Shore

  • A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution, by Raquel Varela

  • A People’s History of Malaysia: With Emphasis on the Development of Nationalism, by Syed Husin Ali

  • Intellectuals in Developing Societies, by Syed Hussein Alatas

  • Jakarta: A Biography of a City, by Herald van der Linde

  • In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocracy, by Frédéric Martel

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Literature

  • Babel: An Arcane History, by R.F. Kuang

  • It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

  • Girl at War, by Sara Nović

  • A Boy’s Own Story, by Edmund White

  • The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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