ChatGPT v The Guardian

Take my hand and come with me down into information dystopia...

Happy New Year!

I wanted to do a quick update largely because Asif Kapadia’s 2073 is in cinemas across the UK today and tomorrow and it’s being screened with a Q&A that we did a few weeks ago at the end.

There’s a great new website for the film here. And you can find where it’s playing here. It’s streaming on Amazon and elsewhere from January 6 but it does make a difference seeing it on the big screen and although our future technoauthoritarian dystopia might not be the vibe that anyone of us want going into 2073, it’s arguably the one we’re going to get.

This is going to be such a pivotal year with a news agenda that will feel like being in a spin cycle of a washing machine. These days of relative quiet during the darkest days of the year (a friend referred to the period between Christmas and the New Year as the “perineum” the other day) feel like the calm before the storm, which they likely are.

One of the voices in the film is Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian, who’s an essential guides to this present moment. Her latest book, Autocracy Inc, lays out comprehensively but simply how networked autocracies and countries with autocratic features are with one another. These are political and financial technological alliances that link Russia to China to Venezuela to Iran.

Anne’s point is that the bad guys are helping each other out all the time in all sorts of ways. And we’re watching a new US-UK axis being built in real time between Farage and Musk. Wendy Siegelman, a brilliant open-source investigator who had a career in corporate finance before becoming a one-woman kleptocracy exposure machine and who has been a hugely valuable resource and ally helping with my investigations over the years, posted this week about a disturbing new company she’d found.

X.AI London Ltd was incorporated in the UK’s Companies House on December 12. And look who’s the person with significant control:

We don’t know what that company is for but if Musk did want to pour £100m into the next UK election, as it’s been reported, this is how he could do it.

Why Musk is so obsessed with Britain and Keir Starmer’s government is its own mystery. Anyone? A residue of his roots in South Africa and a desire to decolonise the coloniser? I’m reaching here…

At the end of Autocracy Inc, Anne Applebaum makes a case for why democracies have to take a leaf out of the bad guys’ playbook and find ways of working together with the first line of attack being against the entire offshore financial system that enables kleptocracies to steal, launder and shelter money. One of the small rays of hope and prompts to action,she cites is Alexei Navalny’s crowdfunded YouTube investigations into corruption:

This was investigative journalism but packaged and designed to move people—to explain to them the connection between the palaces built by distant rulers and themselves—and it worked. Some of the videos received hundreds of millions of views. Now imagine the same project, but backed by democratic governments, media, and activists around the world. Not just investigations, and not just prosecutions, but campaigns to publicize them and to connect them to ordinary people’s lives.

I’ve written before about the genius of these investigations, now led by the scarily brilliant Maria Pevchikh. And, they’re something I’ve thought about repeatedly over the years including when planning the podcast that I launched this week with the Citizens and Peter Jukes who founded Byline Times.

Last week, I explained its origin in a legal case against the UK government that’s winding its way through the European Court of Human Rights but the precipitating factor was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It took place a month after my High Court defamation trial, while I waiting for the verdict, and I was at my bleakest and maddest. Mad with anger and bewilderment at what had happened to me and why. And that documents and evidence spilled out in open court about the funder of the Brexit campaign’s relationship with the Russian government that went almost entirely unreported. And bleak because Britain was utterly complicit in what was happening on the ground in Ukraine.

In the heat of the moment, I had the idea of telling the story of Russian influence in the UK through a narrative podcast in a way that people might finally be able to get: through a real life John Le Carre story of spies and counterespionage. To be honest, it was one of my less genius plans, born out of my trauma and setting up myself up for a major time and energy sink. But crowdfunding it meant it couldn’t be one of my so-called bright ideas that I could quietly drop.

The whole project felt like a millstone until I teamed up with Ruth Abrahams, a freelance audio producer, and Peter and together with Sergei Cristo, its star, we turned it into a fun, creative project that hopefully comes across in the edit.

All of which to say, it’s so wildly unlikely that it would go to the top of the Apple charts on the day that we released it that I hope you don’t mind us taking the win and celebrating it.

Most narrative podcasts are expensive commercial productions by commercial studios. That’s why so many of them are based on cold crime cases of murdered women or are true crime-adjacent. Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring comes from a different place and made with a very different budget: this is a defining story of our time and one that we urgently need people to reckon with and understand.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who subscribed. Episodes dropping weekly on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, as they say. And if you’re able to contribute a few quid to the crowdfund, an even bigger thank you.

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Talking of podcasts…

This week’s update on the commercial podcast studio buying our beloved Observer is that they published their accounts one day before the end-of-year-deadline.

This is a true crime story. It’s the ongoing drama of how the Scott Trust, the private company that owns the Guardian, entered into a secret deal to divest itself of a core part of the news organisation to a small start-up podcast company and has pushed through with it in the face of protest and resistance from pretty much everyone including its own journalists, editor, six former editors, foreign correspondents, former journalists, 100+ celebs and cultural figures and on and on.

The deal is so dumb that even ChatGPT has its number.

I posted on BlueSky a simple breakdown of how Tortoise’s accounts showed it was another year of multi-million pound losses. The company lost £3.8m this year. It made out that this was some sort of financial success because it lost £4.2m the year before. And it also failed to point out that its revenue was also down. That’s a bit of a killer blow for a start-up where it’s either grow or die.

The Guardian put out a news story on this bylined by the mysterious “Guardian Staff”. That’s the same byline that’s being writing about the deal, including this story in which it must surely be in breach of its own editorial standards? (Seven Guardian management quotes vs one from the NUJ? Really??)

Anyway, this is how “Guardian staff” reported it:

And this is how the FT reported it. Can you spot the difference?

But then this is a deal so dumb that the only way to make it make sense is to believe that a £3.8m loss is some sort of whizzy reverse-logic start-up wizardry. Here on the other hand, is some independent analysis by an experienced business head:

V poor numbers for a start-up in its fifth year. Losses since launch now £20m. Revenues down in the year, and half a million spent on redundancies. Company boasts about reducing pre-exceptional losses by 35% - but it still had 150p of costs for every 100p of revenue, which is an appalling ratio. Had to raise £1.1m from shareholders in late-2023, presumably just to survive 2024. Interesting to note they launched a "Business Roundtable" network in late-2023, which looks to be the corporate shilling stuff that Carole was writing about. Suggests they had to admit they were missing their targets for regular readers by a mile.

Hard to see that the shareholders would have kept funding the business without the Observer deal. Evidence for that is the "going concern" statement. It suggests the fund-raising in 2024 -- ie, £2.7m from issuing more shares and convertible loan notes plus further equity (all to support Obs deal) -- was critical to the auditor agreeing that the company was sufficiently strong to continue in business for another 12 months. Relevant section says "on this basis" - ie, the basis of the fund-raising - the company can be viewed as a going concern. No wonder there was the rush to get the deal signed in December.

It may be that the Scott Trust has taken some of those convertible notes (they are essentially a loan that doesn't have to be repaid because it converts into shares at a later date).

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RIP Jimmy Carter

Back in 2011, I had the huge privilege of interviewing Jimmy Carter in his home in Plains, Georgia. I re-read my piece when I heard the news of his death and it brought back what an amazing man he was. I loved doing that interview, loved especially the way that Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, kept up a dialogue with each other throughout. He was genuinely curious in her answers and at one point insisted that she try to answer a question about him that I’d put to her.

Chris Stanford, the photographer who joined me on the trip this week, sent me his memories of it:

I remember the day very very well. It was a highlight for me. I grew up just an hour or so away in a small town in South Georgia so he was more than a President to us. He represented all that we could be.

And a couple of souvenirs:

Not my finest hair day but it underscores how privileged I’ve been to work at the Observer with the best editors around during a time in which this kind of journalism was possible. I was initially upbeat and enthused about the Tortoise deal precisely because the Guardian/Observer no longer supports this kind of journalism. The biggest takeaway from the interview was seeing the modesty of the Carters’ home and the community they lived in: it was extraordinary to see up close. To this day, I can clearly visualise the ancient Carnival Cruises travel mug the ex-President drank his coffee out of. These days, budget restrictions mean that interview would be done by Zoom.

Thank you for reading this far and if you’ve subscribed, a huge thank you for that. I set up this newsletter hastily and without much thought in a way that could easily fall into my “less brilliant ideas” bucket. But it’s turned out to be a really positive experiment and experience so far so thank you for coming along for the ride.

I’ve loudly defended the need for a robust, well-funded mainstream media for the last decade - it’s an argument I endlessly have with Peter Jukes, an alt media enthusiast and entrepreneur, including in the podcast - but I’m now coming to terms with accepting that it may not actually be up to the job.

It’s never been more needed. We’re entering the era of AI sludge that will further bury evidence-based news and journalism. But if the Guardian management and Scott Trust board are going to continue to pretend ignorance of something so blindingly obvious that even ChatGPT has a handle on it, there has to be another way.

Here’s to networks of mutual support to get us through the choppy waters of 2025 and finding other ways to tell the stories that matter. Do join in, in the comments below. And thank you, as ever.