The AI industry is so unpopular that it has started paying for the support it can’t earn. So what does it take for people to turn that mistrust into power that the industry can’t just buy off?

More like this: Flock Shock: How Local Fights Over Surveillance Are Reshaping American Politics w/ Sarah Hamid & Anthony Ralphs

In this episode, Steven Renderos, Executive Director of MediaJustice, walks us through our current political climate as data centers become a kitchen table issue and AI PACs stealthily pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the midterms. Steven also argues that the biggest mistake we can make is accepting the inevitability argument, and shares how we can build something that holds up for the next fight and the fights to come.

Further reading & resources:

• BroBots vs the People Campaign — MediaJustice
• The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South — MediaJustice
• Media Capture: Who Controls the Story Controls the Future — MediaJustice
• While the Left Sleeps — Phil Agre, Wired, Aug 1995

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout.

You may have seen the viral clip of a man in a full Darth Vader costume protesting Flock at a San Diego City Council meeting. The man behind the mask was Anthony Ralphs, who spent months trying to get the city to reconsider its contract with the surveillance tech company. After repeatedly raising concerns with the council, he turned to political theater - and got national attention. His protest is part of a growing backlash against Flock, bringing people across the political spectrum together to challenge surveillance tech and demand more say in how it’s used.

In this episode, Anthony reflects on what it took to get people to listen. Then, Sarah Hamid from the Electronic Frontier Foundation breaks down how Flock’s data-sharing works and explains a strategy gaining traction in communities looking to get this technology out of their cities: bringing lawmakers and community organizers together before contracts are signed. Together, they unpack how backlash against Flock is turning frustration with surveillance tech into renewed political engagement.

Further reading and resources:

• The Man Behind the Anti-Flock Darth Vader Mask Wants to Know: 'When Will This End? — 404 Media
• Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters — 404 Media
• Street Level Surveillance: ALPRs** — Electronic Frontier Foundation
• EFF's Policy Position on ALPR Surveillance: Eliminate It and Reduce Its Harms — Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Cities terminate Flock contracts at record pace in August — Ars Technica

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology with a community of fellow co-conspirators. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

Tech companies keep telling us that the answer to solving climate change lies in AI. Meanwhile, the data centers required to power AI are keeping coal plants open longer, bringing in gas turbines, and driving plans for power stations bigger than anything we’ve built before.

More like this: The Colossus Crossroads: Fighting for the Future of Memphis w/ KeShaun Pearson

In this episode, Ketan Joshi, an independent climate analyst based in Oslo who tracks the climate impact of data centers and AI, explains how we got from facilities that drew the power of a suburb to facilities that consume as much electricity as Nigeria’s entire power grid.

A former wind industry advocate, Ketan breaks down how a company can claim to run on 100% renewable energy while still driving up fossil fuel use, why Big Tech stopped talking about offsets and started promising that AI itself will solve the climate crisis, and what you find when you read the footnotes of their sustainability reports.

He also argues that the real winners of the AI boom aren't even the tech companies... but fossil fuel companies like Chevron, who still come out ahead even if the bubble pops.

Further reading & resources:

• Ketan Joshi’s Big Tech Annual Emissions + Energy Data Reports
• The AI Climate Hoax Report — Ketan Joshi
• The real energy use of agentic AI — Zeke Hausfather
• Microsoft and Chevron plan one of the largest gas-powered data center projects in US — TechCrunch, June 2026

Join The Maybe Collective for our first event: How to Resist AI in Schools: Learnings on Local Action with recent podcast guest, Ifeoma Ozoma ​on Thursday, October 15th 12-1pm ET for a participatory conversation about turning activation into action. This event is free to register HERE.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout.

When a tech executive says AI will be doing your job next year, it sounds like a forecast. Dr. Carissa Véliz argues it's something else: a command, delivered in advance, that works only if enough of us obey it. If you believe the prediction, you buy the product, reorganize your company, and bet the economy on it, and the prediction comes true because you made it so. So who gets to make predictions that stick? And what would it take to stop treating them as news and start hearing them as orders?

More like this: AGI is Scientifically Impossible w/ Adam Becker

In this episode, Alix Dunn talks with Carissa Véliz, associate professor at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and author of Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, From Ancient Oracles to AI. Carissa explains why a prediction is a command disguised as a description, how powerful people use algorithms to fulfill their own forecasts, and why the alternative just might be being relying on preparation over prediction.

Further reading & resources:

Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, From Ancient Oracles to AI — Carissa Véliz

Beware the Power of Prediction — Carissa Véliz, TED Talk

The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt
The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” — Émile P. Torres, Current Affairs

Join The Maybe Collective to unpack this month's series on AI, elections, and who gets to shape the future with us. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

Almost everyone studying kids’ safety online agrees that a blanket social media ban won't work. And nearly every government moving on the issue is passing one anyway. This week, a researcher and a policy lawyer dig into why - and what could actually work instead.

More like this: When Kids Can’t Consent: The Case Against Tech in the Classroom w/ Andrew Liddell

This is the final episode in our back-to-school series on tech and kids. Pamela Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, spends the first half of the conversation dismantling the myths that are driving most kids-online safety policies: that teens are victims with no agency, that we're all "addicted" in the same way, and that “bad kids” are seeking risk rather than connection. Her research suggests that safety isn't the absence of risk; it's having the agency and support to navigate it. She also explains why age verification often strips that agency from kids and parents alike, without making anyone safer.

Cory Crider, executive director of the Future of Tech Institute, picks up where Pam leaves off. She walks us through Europe's Kids Act, the political pressure that is pushing Brussels to act, and why she'd rather fix toxic feed design than wall kids off from platforms that remain exactly the same underneath. She also gets into how easily an age-check system built for social media could creep into every corner of the internet if nobody's watching.

Further reading & resources:

• Promoting Adolescent Online Safety and Privacy through Human-Centered Computing [VIDEO] — Pam Wisniewski, University of Waterloo CrySP Speaker Series on Privacy
• EU KIDS Act to restrict social media platforms’ access to children in the EU — European Commission
• What is in the EU's planned KIDS Act? — Reuters
• Protection of persons under 18: Seven out of ten children, aged between 10 and 14, think that setting the digital age of majority at 15 is a good idea — Arcom

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

No tech that your kid uses in the classroom was designed for their benefit. Not the tablet, not the "learning app," not the AI chatbot helping with homework. It was designed to benefit the company that made it — and your kid's data, attention, privacy, and, most importantly, safety, are the price.

More like this: Meet the Mom Winning Against AI in Schools w/ Ifeoma Ozoma

This week, Andrew Liddell, co-founder of the EdTech Law Center, walks us through exactly how EdTech works, why it made its way into schools with so little oversight, who it actually serves, and the cases his firm has fought against the companies putting these devices into classrooms.

His firm has gone after student-data pipelines it flagged as hackable — and later watched get hacked — laws like FERPA and COPPA being twisted into loopholes that bypass parental consent entirely, and school-issued AI tools pulling kids into the same crises we’ve watched play out among adults.

What ties it together, Liddell says, is a business model that was never built with kids in mind, and a legal system that’s still trying to catch up.

Andrew’s looking for parents in California who are concerned about their kids’ usage of AI chatbots. If that’s you, get in touch here: https://chatgptlitigation.com/

Further reading & resources:

• EdTech Law Center
• Parents’ Consent at the Heart of Ed Tech Lawsuits — The 74
• Google's work in schools aims to create a 'pipeline of future users,' internal documents say — NBC News
• Children's Screen Time Action Network
• Mothers Against Media Addiction
• Phone Free Schools Movement
• Fair Play
• Schools Beyond Screens

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

Over the last decade, tech workers have staged walkouts, signed open letters by the tens of thousands, and built more than a dozen new unions across the industry. And yet, over that same decade, tech companies have ramped up carbon emissions, raced to militarize AI, signed contracts with the Trump administration, rolled back protections for marginalized users, and, in some ways, engineered their platforms to be protest-proof.

In Against Tech Oligarchy, authors JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine ask the question: did tech workers ever actually learn how to fight?

More like this: Meet the Mom Winning Against AI in Schools w/ Ifeoma Ozoma

JS Tan and Clarissa Redwine are both former tech workers who spent years organizing from the inside. This week, they join Alix to map the last decade of tech labor organizing: the walkout era of 2018, when public pressure and shame campaigns actually worked; the pivot toward formal unionization after Kickstarter's breakthrough; and the sharp turn after 2022, when rising interest rates gave bosses cover to stop pretending they cared what workers thought.

They get into why revenue-based leverage barely applies to an industry that runs on perceived valuation, why AI researchers and rank-and-file engineers may need very different organizing strategies, and the line that anchors the whole conversation: you can spend years organizing for power, and the moment you actually have it, realize you have no idea how to use it.

Further reading & resources:

• Buy the book: Against Tech Oligarchy — JS Tan & Clarissa Redwine
• How a Tech Worker Fought Back from Being Fired as a Union Organiser — Clarissa Redwine, Branch
• Why the Balance of Power in Tech is Shifting Towards Workers — Jane Lytvynenko, MIT Technology Review

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout

Imagine dropping your kid off at school, assuming they’ll spend the day being taught by… teachers, of course. But then you find out that part of their day is actually spent talking and reading out loud to a cute, cartoonish AI avatar named Amira. And while they’re reading, Amira is recording their voice, without ever receiving consent from the parent or child.

In New Mexico, this very technology is being mandated in classrooms across the state. But when one parent, with a reputation for speaking out and getting laws changed, discovered what was happening, she was ready to fight for the kids in her school district and beyond.

More like this: https://www.themaybe.org/podcast/the-digital-delusion-w-dr-jared-cooney-horvath

That parent is Ifeoma Ozoma. After Pinterest pushed her out for raising concerns about pay discrimination and health misinformation, she moved to Santa Fe, where a new fight found her.

We get into how one mom with a DIY website got fifteen school districts to opt out in six weeks flat, what digging into public records revealed about how deep this actually goes, and how she’s working to get the whole thing banned outright.

Further reading & resources:

• Amira Opt-Out SFPS
• Schools Beyond Screens
• New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools — The New York Times
• Get unvetted AI out of New Mexico schools — Ifeoma Ozoma

Join The Maybe Collective to explore the politics of technology through fresh ideas that you won't hear anywhere else. Sign up for monthly insights, access to exclusive digital events, and real ways to get more involved on issues you care about.

Computer Says Maybe is produced by Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout.