It has been a year since Aaron Bastani first met with AI investigative journalist Karen Hao, to discuss her book Empire of AI. A year is a long time, in the fastest growing sector on the planet. To bring us up to date, Aaron and Karen sat down again to discuss the major shifts in the empire – and their impacts on us all.

Billions of people now use, AI as it has become more integrated into our lives, from chatbots, Google searches, predictive text, and beyond. At the same time, there has been a groundswell of fear and even anger about the arrival of the most disruptive technology of the 21st century: its impact on jobs, its use of resources, and the reckless behaviour of its billionaire founders.

What have been the changes at the top of the major AI companies: OpenAI, Google, xAI and Anthropic? As Elon Musk approaches trillionaire status, how is he making this much money? What impact is the rollout of AI at such speed and scale having on the economy? What forms of resistance to this form of AI are emerging? And why are billionaires all choosing to build their bunkers in New Zealand?

The ACFM crew gather for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s foundational contribution to 20th century cultural and media theory.

Download the short text and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem consider The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1935.

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We are all subject to manipulation campaigns all the time: advertising, political campaigning, social media. You don’t know what’s true and you can’t stop watching slop.

And the technology is getting better all the time – there are now systems that predict what your brain state will be when you see a particular video on the internet.

We’re living in a jungle of manipulative media objects: sycophant chatbots, military disinformation, “flooding the zone with shit,” and conspiracy theories that either capture people and drag them into derangement or, sometimes, turn out to be true.

So where did these manipulative systems come from?

Trevor Paglen is one of the most important artists of our era. He took Richard Hames on a journey that weaves between art, technology, cognitive science, the history of CIA experiments, magic, military psy-ops and UFOs to explain why the world feels so confusing – and why that might have been the point all along.

Do Your Own Research is a show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible. The video version contains a map, which you can view in full here: https://novaramedia.com/category/video/do-your-own-research/

The far right holds power in the US, inflaming tension along racial lines. ICE agents terrorise the streets, while Black history is erased from school curricula. In the UK too, Nigel Farage’s far right party Reform is on the ascendancy, riding a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment that he himself helped to stoke.

Our guest on Downstream this week is Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate and legal scholar. Crenshaw is known for coining the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the ways different forms of discrimination combine or intersect, and is a leading figure within the field of Critical Race Theory. Born into segregation, her new memoir Backtalker (2026) tells her life story, tracking 60 turbulent years of American history in the process.

How have the forces of race, class and gender shaped Crenshaw’s own life? What is Critical Race Theory – the academic field Crenshaw founded – really about? Was Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign a failure because she was a weak candidate, or because she was a victim of the forces of misogynoir? And in these times of rising fascism, should progressives put their efforts into tackling inequality based on race, or class?

AI progress isn’t slowing down. The bubble doesn’t seem to be popping. And who in power actually cares about the environmental impacts anyway?

All that is to say: AI is here to stay. And what will be its fruits? Greater control of workers or even their brutal repression, some say.

So, is there a positive future for AI at all?

Garrison Lovely is the author of Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace You—and How to Stop It. And surprisingly, his answer is “yes”. He told Richard Hames about the dangers of AI, and how to get off the path to dystopia.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

A wealth tax on the very richest people in our society has never been more popular. Recent polling puts the plan at 90% approval, a figure almost unheard of for any policy proposal.

This week’s guest, Gabriel Zucman, is a French economist who has done the most comprehensive work on what such a tax could accomplish.

And he’s also a key inspiration for the UK’s leading wealth tax advocate – and friend of the show – Gary Stevenson.

It’s a dizzying set of allegations.

A trove of leaked voice notes and call recordings — published by the anonymous outlet Hondurasgate.ch and Spain’s Canal RED — allege that Israeli money helped secure US President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years in a US prison for trafficking some 400 tons of cocaine.

The recordings point to an alleged plot involving Trump, Netanyahu and Argentina’s President Javier Milei to return Hernández to power and destabilise the left-wing governments of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

But how do we know whether allegations on an unattributed website are true? And does it even matter if they are? David Adler, co-general coordinator of the Progressive International and an expert in Latin American politics, joins Richard Hames to dig into the story, explain its imperial backstory, and what it means to live in an age where claims arrive faster than we can verify them.

Do Your Own Research is a show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

Jem, Nadia and Keir apply their weird-left lens to the power and potential of shock. Starting with an investigation into economic shock therapy and the way that Trumpism models the concept of shock doctrine, they move onto modern art’s relationship with the shock of the new, from Dada and Eisenstein to gangsta rap and radio shock jocks.

Can you acclimatise yourself to shock either through repetition or training? Can shock be commodified? What other shocks are coming down the pipeline? These ideas and more with musical input from Kylie, Herbie Hancock and Stravinsky.

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