What does US tech billionaire Larry Ellison get when he gives the Tony Blair Institute hundreds of millions of dollars?

More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

In our third installment of The Vaporstate, we are joined by two journalists from Lighthouse Reports, who tell all about their investigation into the questionable relationship between Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the Tony Blair Institute, and the current Labour government. What is the Tony Blair Institute and why did Ellison give them millions of dollars? What does any of this have to do with national IDs and NHS data? And if you’re a government official somewhere around the world, and TBI comes knocking to sell you an AI future what you should do…?

Further reading & resources:

• Britain must treat tech giants like nation states — The Times, 2024
• Backlight — Lighthouse’s monthly podcast
• Blair and the Billionaire — Lighthouse Reports 2025
• Inside The Tony Blair Institute — Lighthouse journalists Peter Geoghegan and May Bulman are interviewed by The New Statesman
• Do you have a story that you think is missing from public discourse? Here’s how to get in touch with Lighthouse
• Questions Alix proposed for the Sundance panel — as mentioned in the intro.

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

What happens when the very way you prove who you are is stolen by someone else? And what happens when a country stands up to Meta and builds their own.

More like this: The Vaporstate: ID in India

For episode two of The Vaporstate, Alix is joined by Rafael Zanatta and Luã Cruz. Rafa walks us through the incredible story of how his mom’s digital ID was stolen and a clever bank teller stopped someone from halfway across the country from stealing her savings. Luã ****shares the geopolitical battles that prevented a Meta takeover of Brazilian peer-to-peer payment and the roll out of a frictionless financial transaction system called PIX.

Further reading & resources:

• Brazil Has The World’s Most Accessed Citizen Services Platform — Forbes, March 2024
• More about Data Privacy Brazil
• The Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu — New York Times, 2018
• Works by South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han
• Lula pushing back against Trump’s tariffs — AP, September 2025
• More about The Brazilian Institute for Consumer Protection

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Our first exploration of The Vaporstate takes us to India, home of Aadhaar: a mammoth digitisation project that charts a path from technical solution for public service delivery, through mission creep and popular opposition, to a knotty but inescapable part of Indian existence today.

More like this: Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake

Joining Alix for part one of The Vaporstate is Mila Samdub, Astha Kapoor, and Usha Ramanathan. Together they discuss the conception of Aadhaar, India’s key piece of digital public infrastructure, and how it morphed from a simple digital ID to something that unifies payments, phone plans, and biometrics.

Further reading & resources:

• More about Usha Ramanathan — legendary lawyer and activist who has been pushing back on the Aadhaar programme for over a decade
• More about Astha Kapoor — co-founder of the Aapti Institute
• More about Mila Samdub — designer, writer, and CyberBRICS Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society, FGV Rio
• Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology — by Abeba Birhane et al, Nature Journal
• Aadhaar 2.0 workshop
• Walmart Takes Ownership of PhonePe from Flipkart — The Times of India, 2022
• Walmart invests $200 million in Indian mobile payments giant PhonePe — TechCrunch, 2023
• Google launches India mobile payments app Tez — BBC, 2017
• Identity Verification Standards in Welfare Programs: Experimental Evidence from India — Karthik Muralidharan et al, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021
• Aadhaar: Costs of Digital Red Tape — Reetika Khera & Amod Moharil, Economic & Political Weekly, 2024
• Overload, Creep, Excess – An Internet from India — Nafis Hasan et al, Institute of Network Cultures, 2022
• Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12 Digit Revolution — Shankkar Aiyar, Westland, 2017

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou