This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like: Carole Cadwalladr (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr’s talk titled “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like” at TED2025 on April 8, 2025.

Listen to the audio version here:

CAROLE CADWALLADR: I have been feeling a lot of panic and fear about this talk, and not just for the normal reasons of public speaking, although that’s fair 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 the technology that you’re building, however incredible it is.

In fact, I was the person who almost didn’t survive, and pretty much everything that I was warning about is now coming true. I can’t sugar-coat 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 too. 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.

The Time to Act Is Now

I’ve 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 how to fight back.

This is my guide, and it has to start with naming it. It’s a coup.

I know 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 and American presidents are now 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.

The Rise of Broligarchy

This image, some of you in this room might know these people. I call it “tech bros in hostage situations.” It’s a message to you. This is Putin’s playbook. He allows the 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 broligarchy.

There is an alignment of interests that runs through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy. It’s a 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 US 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 to sack and who to replace. Sorry, eliminate fraud and waste.

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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 that you start thinking about your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one.

Living Inside the Architecture of Totalitarianism

This is the old headquarters of the East German secret police. They kept detailed files on 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 sell us 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 East Germany and Instagram is the Stasi.

Politics is downstream from culture. I actually learned this from somebody who I think of as one of the great philosophers of our age, Steve Bannon. He actually stole it from somebody else. It’s not politicians who have the power. He knows that. It’s why he’s a podcast 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 great 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 your CEOs have been taken captive and are paraded on TV like hostages. But you, you have a choice.

When the Law Becomes a Weapon

So Trump, he calls the press the enemies of the people and he probably doesn’t even know that he’s quoting 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 Farage. He’s a Brexit funder.

I’m not going to go super into the details. But 19 press freedom organizations called the lawsuit against me a SLAPP. That means it’s a strategic litigation against public participation. A really long-winded way of saying it’s using law as a weapon to shut people up. Not just journalists 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. It’s Cardinal Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” In my case the first forensic searches of my phone and laptop yielded 40,000 pieces of data. My messages, my emails, my voice memos, my personal life.

A Digital Witch Burning

And the whole thing about the attack which came from me was really personal. Because the thing about this litigation is 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. Not Mr. Guardian and not TED. It was because I looked like the weakest link.

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But he was wrong. 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 was 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.

Having Each Other’s Backs

You know Trump is doing news organizations and every day they’re settling. These are big corporates with 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.

You know this is really important to me but I spoke to a UK libel lawyer before 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 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 Way Back Machine. Give them money. They’re trying to preserve the internet as it’s being deleted day by day. History is our best chance of getting out of this.

Digital Disobedience

You know you probably know this phrase, “do not obey in advance.” That’s Tim Snyder who’s a historian of authoritarianism. We now are in techno-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 Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Don’t bomb Yemen. Don’t add the editor of the Atlantic to your group chat. Don’t experiment on children.

You know social morals 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 the moments when I…

I felt most powerless 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. Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, he always talks 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 going to take a movement, but we can learn from movements that have been before us.

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This is my colleagues and I on strike in December because my news organisation, The Guardian, decided to sell our corner of it, The Observer, the Sunday title. And it was a battle we really didn’t need at 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.

AI and the Theft of Intellectual Property

So I want to leave you with this. This is ChatGPT writing a TED talk in the style of Carole Cadwalladr. And it is creepily plagiarized in the style of Sam Altman. But what it doesn’t know, because AI is actually as dumb as a rock, is that I am going to turn to Sam Altman, who is coming here, a TED speaker, and say that this does not belong to you. ChatGPT has been trained on my IP, my labour, my personal data. And I did not consent.

You know, The Guardian has effectively got rid of more than 100 journalists. We actually leave the building next week. And shortly afterwards, it signed a syndication deal with OpenAI. Or as I think of it, it married its rapist. But I do not consent. And while we still have copyright laws in my country, the UK government is trying to tear them up at the moment in order to suck up to Silicon Valley and 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. Data rights are human rights.

A Call to Silicon Valley

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 Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was an oligarch until he was sent to Siberia to prison for ten years after Putin tired of him. You are sucking up to a tyrant who is trying to destroy the laws who made your businesses possible. You are collaborators. You are 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.