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

This is The Vaporstate, a new series on the worldwide government bonanza of enthusiastic digitisation: Digital IDs, digital payment systems, massive data exchange platforms. What are the every-day impacts of these digitisation projects, and why now?

The Vaporstate is a deep exploration of digital public infrastructure: we will hear from the journalists, civil society groups, and lawyers from around the world who are watching these projects develop, and how this digital scaffolding shapes our lives.

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Infinite AI slop means we are moving away from our the age of information into what Eryk Salvaggio calls ‘the age of noise’.

More like this: Straight to Video: From Rodney King to Sora w/ Sam Gregory

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it produce something totally new, or just mash together stereotypical aesthetics from Picasso’s work, and 16th century Japan? Can generative AI really create anything new if it can only draw from existing imagery?

Further reading:

• What I Read About AI in 2025 — by Eryk Salvaggio
• Visit Eryk’s Website
• Cybernetic Forests — Eryk’s newsletter on tech and culture

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Welcome to the final boss of scams in the age of technology: Enshittification

More like this: Nodestar: The Eternal September w/ Mike Masnick

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Is platformisation essentially just an industrial level scam? We will deep-dive the enshittification playbook to understand how companies lock users into decaying platforms, and get away with it. Cory shares ideas on what we can do differently to turn tide. Listen to learn what a ‘chickenised reverse centaur’ is…

Further reading & resources:

• Buy Enshittifcation now from Verso Books!
• Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow
• On The Media series on Enshittification
• Pluralistic — Daily Links and essays by Cory Doctorow
• Conservatism Considered as a Movement of Bitter Rubes — Cory on why conservatism creates a friendly environment for scams
• How I Got Scammed — Cory on his personal experiences of being scammed
• All of Cory’s books
• All (Antitrust) Politics Are Local — the entry to Pluralistic that Cory wrote on the day of recording

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Litigator David Seligman describes how big tech companies act brazenly as legal bullies to extract wealth and power from the working class in the US.

More like this: The Human in the Loop: The AI Supply Chain

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

Alix and David talk about legal devices such as forced arbitration and monopolistic practices like algorithmic price fixing and wage suppression — and the cases that David’s team are bringing to fight these practices

Further reading & resources

• Seligman for Attorney General Colorado
• Towards Justice California drivers lawsuit
• Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banal State of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• The Dual State by Ernst Fraenkel
• Prohibiting Surveillance Prices and Wages by Towards Justice
• Gill VS Uber — class action led by Towards Justice

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Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou

Reporting on the tech industry proves a huge challenge due to how opaque it all is — Empire of AI author Karen Hao talks us through her investigative methods in a conversation from November 2024.

More like this: Net 0++ AI Thirst in a Water-Scarce World w/ Julie McCarthy

We’re replaying five deep conversations over the Christmas period for you to listen to on your travels and downtime — please enjoy!

AI companies are flagrantly obstructive when it comes to sharing information about their infrastructure — this makes reporting on the climate injustices of AI really hard. Karen shares the tactics that these companies use, and the challenges that she has faced in her investigative reporting.

Further reading:

• Buy Empire of AI by Karen Hao
• Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI by Karen Hao
• AI is Taking Water from the Desert by Karen Hao

Post Production by Sarah Myles | Pre Production by Georgia Iacovou