Carole here, tapping into my phone while en route to the Borris festival, a small but brilliant literary fest in the rolling Irish hills.
That’s a slightly pastoral intro to the theme of today’s newsletter, the unassailable power of the Silicon Valley tech giants and their creeping control over our lives.
Ireland is the low-tax European home for most Silicon Valley tech companies, and the inside account of how Facebook captured the Irish government and regulator was a highlight for me of Sarah Wynn-Williams’s rollicking book, Careless People.
It was published last year and blows the lid on her time working directly alongside Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
Anyway, you may have seen headlines earlier this week from the Hay festival where Wynn Williams sat mutely on stage as I was supposed to interview her. Awkward! She’d been silenced by Facebook’s legal team but came on stage anyway, unable to even smile, nod or shake her head.
I’m also delighted that we’re running a piece about a new doc that’s coming out, Ghost in the Machine, by director Valerie Veatch.
I met Valerie at Sundance where she was the plucky underdog with a handmade, low-budget, truly indie film, and I’ve been cheerleading for it since. It’s a much-needed corrective to the AI hype that floods our newsfeeds every single day and is not just misleading, but dangerous.
Valerie’s AI doc was up against a much bigger budget film – The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist – that had access to the likes of...
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