Carole Cadwalladr: TED Talk 5/7/25

Carole Cadwalladr TED Talk Transcript

Introducer: There’s no time much bigger than this one. Please will you welcome back to this third stage. Carol Cadwal.

Carole: I have been feeling a lot of panic and fear about this at all. and not just from the normal reasons for public speaking although that’s there too. But it’s also because, I want to say something meaningful, and I’ve been overwhelmed by the enormity of what is happening right now. And there’s a particular set of circumstances, which have also been feeding into my confusion and denial.

And that is because the last time that I stood on this stage, it led to a three year legal battle. culminated in London’s High Court, in which it felt like I was on trial for my life because I was. My career, my reputation, my finances, even my home was on the line. All because I came here to warn you that I didn’t think democracy was going to survive a technology that you’re building.

However, incredible it is. In fact, I was the person who almost didn’t survive, and pretty much everything I was warning about is now coming true. I can’t sugarcoat it.

It’s a bit of a head fuck. I have a lot of emotions about coming here, and Ted also, I suspect, is feeling them to. But what actually I finally realized yesterday is that the denial and the confusion that I’ve been feeling is maybe what you’re feeling too.

I felt powerless for a really long time. So if that’s what you’re feeling, I get it. But we have to act now.

My alarm system is ringing again. There are things that we can do. In my case, I survived, and you will, too, but it’s by learning to have I how to fight that.

This is my guide, and it has to start with naming it. It’s a coup, and then you probably don’t want to hear that, and especially here, but we can’t fight it if we can’t see it, and we can’t see it if we don’t name it. The Russian The Russian and American presidents ann are speaking the same words.

They are telling the same lies. We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start. Coups are like concrete, when they stop moving, they set.

It is already later than we think. This image, some of you in this room might know these people, I call it tech bros in hostage situations. It’s a message, it’s a message to you.

This is Putin’s playbook. He allows a business elite to make untold riches in exchange for absolute loyalty. Some people are calling this oligarchy, but it’s actually bigger than that.

These are global platforms. It’s brolligarchy. There is an alignment of interests that runs from through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy.

It’s the type of power that the world has never seen before. It’s always the data. It’s the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley.

You know, the first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber troops into the U.S Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence, it’s a hack. That data is now feeding AIs that are choosing who Tack and who to replace.

Sorry, eliminate four and Wte. When we broke the Cambridge Analytica story about the harvesting 87 million people’s Facebook data, people freaked out, rightly. This is chicken feed compared to that, but it is the blueprint.

It’s always the data. Which is why it’s so important you start thinking about your private life. The brigarchy doesn’t want you to have one.

This is the old headquarters of the East German secret Police. They had detailed files and almost one in three of their citizens. That is nothing compared to what Google has on every single one of us, and hundreds of other companies.

The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance. It harvests our data in order to seller stuff. We are already living inside the architecture of totalitarianism.

It may not have been deliberate, but we now have to start acting as if we live in the East Germany, and Instagram is the stars in. Politics is downstream from culture. So I actually learned this from one of somebody who I think of as one of the great philosophers of our age.

Steve Banner. He actually stole it from somebody else. Books, it’s not politicians who have the power.

He knows that. It’s why he’s a podc bro these days. But culture now is just what’s next on your phone.

And that’s AI, culture is AI now. And forget the killer robots. If you want to know what the first rate AI apocalypse is, we’re already living it.

It’s total information collapse. And if you take one thing only away from this talk, it’s politics is technology now. And that’s why everybody in this room, you can’t look away.

It’s why you’re COs have been taken captive and are paraded on TV like hostages. But you, you have a choice. So, Trump, he calls the press, the enemies of the people, and he probably doesn’t even know that he’s put in Stalin.

So, what happened to me is a playbook, and it’s now coming for all sorts of other people. It was actually a friend of this guy who came after me, Nigel Barard, to Brexit London. I’m not going to go super into the details.

But 2019, sorry, 19 Press Freedom Organizationations called The Lawsuit Against Me a Slap. That means it’s a strategic litigation against public participation. A really long winded way of saying it’s using the law as a weapon to shut people up, not just journalism, but other public people too, and it works.

I just wanted to tell you about one aspect of the litigation, which I found terrifying, and that was the data harvesting. There’s this quote, you may know, it’s Cardinal Richellet. If you give me six lines written, by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them in which will hang him.

In my pace, the first forensic searches of my phone and laptop yielded 40,000 pieces of data. It’s my messages, my emails, my voice memows, my personal life. The whole thing about this attack which came for me was really personal.

There’s the thing about this litigation isn’t only one part of the playbook. It was also this sort of massive online campaign of abuse. which is just day after day, after day, after day, because my most unforgivable crime was reporting while female. It was a digital witch burning.

And I believe that this man came after me personally, because I look not look at the Guardian and not Ted. It’s because I look like the weakest limp. But he was wrong.

And $30,000 people rose up to support me. They contributed almost a million pounds to a legal defense fund because they saw a bully trying to crush me, and they would not let it stand. And it always makes me emotional when I think about that.

I just heard somebody saying, the camera person, I don’t know where they are, contributed. This whole talk is actually my gratitude towards everybody who did that. But it’s also why I know about what we have to do next.

You know, Trump pursuing news organizations and every day they’re settling. These are big corporates, big corporate interests. Not everybody can stand up to power, but there are people who are doing it, and we can support them.

We have to have each other’s backs right now, because we are the cavalry now. U. So you know, this is really important to me, but I spoke to a UK libel lawyer for this talk. I want to say that there is an awful lot of facts set down in a high court judgment.

And we’re actually taking the case now to the European Court of Civil of human rights. We’re testing the UK on its laws around freedom of expression. So look after facts.

You’ll miss them when they’ve gone. This is wayback machine. Give them money.

They’re trying to preserve the Internet as it’s being deleted day by day. History’s our best chance of getting out of this. You know, you’ve probably know this phrase, Do you not obey in advance?

That’s Tim Snyder, who’s a historian of authoritarianism. We now are in technical authoritarianism. We have to learn how to digitally disobey.

That can be as simple as the drop down box. Don’t accept the cookies, don’t give your real name. Download the signal, the encrypted messaging app.

Don’t b Yemen, don’t add the addor of the Atlantic to your group chat. Ah, don’t you experiment on children. You know, social laws change.

We don’t send children down coal mines anymore. And in years to come, allowing your child to be data harvested from birth will be considered child abuse. You didn’t know, but now you do.

Privacy is power. And we have more of it than we think. I had this little epiphany yesterday in which I realized, actually at the moments when I felt most powerlessvers were the moments that I felt, I was actually most powerful.

It was because my journalism had impact. They want us to feel powerless. That’s the plan.

There is so much, though, that we can learn from people who’ve been through this before. Alexey Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, he always talked about a beautiful Russia of the future. He painted a vision.

There is a beautiful internet of the future, free from corporate capture and data tracking. We can build it. It is gonna take a movement, but we can learn from movements that have been before us.

This is just a little story about. This is my colleagues and I on strike in December, because my news organization, The Guardian, decided to sell our corner of it, the Observer, the Sunday title, and it was a battle really didn’t need it this time, and we didn’t actually win. But, you know, you can’t win every battle, but you definitely won’t win if you don’t fight. said, I’m I want to leave you with this.

This is chat GPT writing a TED talk in the style of Carol Cadwalladr. And is creepily plausible, but what it doesn’t know, because AI is actually as dumb as a rock, is that I returned to Sam Altman, who is coming here at Ted speaker, and say that this does not belong to you. Chat GPT has been trained on my IP, my labor, my personal data.

And I did not consent. You know, the guardian has effectively got rid of more than a 100 journalists. We actually leave the building next week.

Shortly afterwards, it signed a syndication deal with open AI. Or as I think of it, it married its rapist. But I do not consent.

And while we still have copyright yours in my country, government, UK government is trying to tear them up at the moment in order to suck up to Silicon Valley in Trump. But while we have them use them, because what is happening to my industry is happening to yours, too. And it’s more than theft.

It’s a violation. Data rights are human rights. In 2019, I came here and I called out the gods of Silicon Valley.

I was wrong. Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, you are not gods. You are men, and you are careless.

You think that by allying yourself with an autocrat, you will be protected. That’s not how history works. It’s not even how oligarchy works.

This is Mikard Kodikovsky. He was an oligarch until he was sent to Siberia to prison for 10 years after Putin tired of him. You are sucking up to a tyrant. who is trying to destroy the laws, who made your business as possible.

You are collaborators. You’re complicit in a regime of fear and cruelty. But the rest of us, we all here, we have a choice.

I chose to come back to Ted because I’m reclaiming my story. My words. We are not powerless.

The 30,000 people who supported me proved that we are not powerless. Because we know who we are, and we know what we stand for. And my question to Silicon Valley is, do you.

Thank you..