9/11 revisited + UK’s sovereign AI chief joins US AI company

In this week’s issue

• The face of the UK’s ‘Sovereign AI’ strategy becoming a lobbyist for Anthropic exposes the revolving door between Whitehall and Silicon Valley.
• 25 years on from 9/11, the paranoid, fundamentalist spirit of 2001 is being resurrected by right-wing tech billionaires armed with the internet.
• Authoritarian governments across Latin America are weaponizing the US “War on Terror” framework to militarise their states, crush dissent, and persecute political opponents.
• The far-right AfD’s historic surge in Germany threatens the political stability of the entire nation.
• Why saving democracy requires radically reinventing political practice to match the iterative, bottom-up structures of the tech companies shaping the future.
• The Trump administration has engineered a murky 100-year deal to seize a fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves, marking a return to 20th-century “regime compliance” imperialism.
• Climate scientist Dr. Ella Gilbert warns against trusting “tech bro” promises of unproven geoengineering fixes.

Is the War on Terror finally over? Did it ever end?

Twenty five years after two commercial jets slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York, we continue to live in 9/11’s long shadow: a world of constant surveillance, secret courts, cross-border renditions, water-boarding, torture, autonomous drone warfare and the normalisation of foreign military interventions. Apparently anything is acceptable as long as it is conducted with the aim of “fighting terror”. 

This weekend, Americans will look back to mourn those who lost their lives in twin towers. But if 9/11 was a tragedy for America, it was a crisis that continues to extract a price in Afghanistan and much of the Middle East. What little global legitimacy the West had gained after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 was vapourised a decade later in 2001.

Today, US gunships are back in the Persian Gulf and US “precision weapons” continue to slam into schools and wedding parties,except the victims are now in Iran, rather than Iraq. The US continues to seek foreign oil, except this time they are looking south, and it is Venezuelans who must pay for the privilege of being ruled from Washington. 

This week we bring you a snapshot of the world after 9/11. Our founder Anthony Barnett revisits the moment the twin towers collapsed and how the moment that changed the world and informed openDemocracy’s future.

 You can also read Manuel Tufró’s reflection on how “the war on terror” perpetuates itself by constantly seeking new targets – something which is on the mind of Germany’s, Patrick Kaczmarczyk, whose insightful article analyses how the tumult of the 1990s laid the grounds for the country’s modern far-right.Meanwhile, writer and philosopher Georg Diez writes about the strange new world of “Frontier Politics”, where democracy and technology seem increasingly incompatible.

To witness Diez’s thesis in action, do read Tom Darling’s incisive view on how Matt Clifford, the man tasked with developing the UK’s sovereign AI strategy, has decided his talents are better spent lobbying the UK government on behalf of the US AI giant, Anthropic.

9/11 also marks 25 years since openDemocracy came into its one as one of the first daily online independent publications. That’s 25 years of nurturing new ideas, conducting impactful investigations, and publishing inconvenient truths. If you value our contributions over the past quarter century, consider becoming a regular donor. 

I don’t know what the world will look like in 2051, but I do hope we’ll still be fighting the good fight.

Have a great weekend

Aman

Weekly Poll

25 years after 9/11, what do you think is the biggest security threat?

Join us for an exclusive live recording of Changed My Mind, the podcast that explores the thinking behind serious shifts of opinion. This panel discussion will feature Rosemarie Mallet, the bishop of Croydon, Aman Sethi, the editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, Alison Goldsworthy, the CEO of The Depolarisation Project, and Laura Osborne, the managing director of WPI Economics. You can get a flavour of Changed My Mind by listening to the podcast or via this article.

Reader Comments

openDemocracy receives so many carefully considered messages about our work that it seems a shame to keep them to ourselves.

These comments are edited for clarity, accuracy and length, and are not a reflection of openDemocracy’s editorial position.

Do Gullis and his ilk take us for fools who will fail to spot the absence of declarations of interest? Whether in paid or voluntary positions, even pre-Nolan it has been second nature for most of us, surely, to declare even a potential interest, to desist from speaking or voting and to offer to leave the room.

That was the situation yesterday, is so today and will remain so for all our tomorrows.

Is it perhaps a case of projecting on to all of us their own self- interested view of the world, so making it for them inconceivable that anyone else would disapprove or find it otherwise than the norm?

Mal | Re: Ex-Tory MP-turned-Reform councillor landed lobbying job after defecting

This week in history

The Gdańsk Agreement and Solidarity • 31 August 1980

On 31 August 1980, the Polish government signed the Gdańsk Agreement with striking workers, recognising the right to form independent trade unions, marking the first such recognition in Soviet-bloc history. The Solidarity movement that emerged was at its peak a union of ten million people, more than a third of Poland’s adult population. Its example, its methods, and its ultimate partial defeat contain lessons we can all learn from.

What we’re reading

I brought the war with me, Lindsey Hilsum

I don’t believe in heroes but if I had one, it would be Lindsey Hilsum, whose brave journalism from the world’s wars is always unflinching, honest, and tells the human stories in conflict. In 2024 she published this beautiful anthology that brings together poetry and her own stories from the frontlines. The poems are not necessarily about war, but the emotions they evoke are reflected in the stories she tells from Syria, Iraq, Rwanda, Palestine, Afghanistan and other places of intense heat and suffering. Rather than take a chronological approach, Hilsum organises her poems and stories thematically – looking at love, courage, fighters. 

I wanted to share her book today, because this week marks the liberation of Izium, Ukraine, which was occupied for six months by Russian forces in 2022. Hilsum opens the book at a bombed out apartment building outside Izium which she visited straight after the liberation, and where I went a year later. When I read the poem she chose, James Fenton’s A German Requiem, it helped me express the horror and difficult emotions of how it felt to stand there: It is not the houses. It is the space between the houses./It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist. I read those opening pages, and I felt so grateful for her book.

Sian Norris, senior investigations reporter