1984 Today!

Mike Freedman
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  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

An exploration of dystopian trends in society, featuring a range of guests, hosted by Mike Freedman. 1984today.substack.com

  1. Survival Is Resistance: Prison, Protest, and The Price of Freedom

    4D AGO

    Survival Is Resistance: Prison, Protest, and The Price of Freedom

    In this episode, I speak with Nasrin Parvaz, the Iranian civil rights activist, author, and artist, about her life before, during, and after the Islamic Revolution, her arrest in 1982, and the eight years she spent in Iran’s infamous prison system, including the Joint Committee Interrogation Centre and Evin Prison. Nasrin describes the rapid transformation of Iran after 1979, the policing of women’s rights and clothing, the crushing of union and political organizing, and the machinery of torture, intimidation, and public punishment that shaped daily life under the Islamic Republic. We also explore the 1988 prisoner massacre, the long tail of repression into the present, and Nasrin’s reflections on the Women, Life, Freedom movement after Mahsa Amini’s death. She opens up about life as a refugee in London, the role of writing and art in survival, and why she believes Western governments often misunderstand and therefore sometimes worsen conditions for the Iranian people in their attempts to confront and contain the rule of the mullahs. Nasrin is the author of One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir and The Secret Letters from X to A, and you can find out more about her work and activism at nasrinparvaz.org. You can also check out Exiled Writers Ink, an organisation bringing together established and developing writers from repressive regimes and war-torn situations. Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    2h 15m
  2. Lawyering Against the Machine: The Human Cost of AI and the Fight for Tech Justice

    MAR 22

    Lawyering Against the Machine: The Human Cost of AI and the Fight for Tech Justice

    Tech justice lawyer and UCLA lecturer Melodi Dinçer joins me in this episode to explore the rise of AI‑induced delusional disorders and her litigation work at Tech Justice Law, where she represents the human beings who have become collateral damage in Big Tech’s pursuit of the Singularity. Melodi argues that, far from just being an economic engine of productivity, Silicon Valley is engaged in quasi‑religious myth-making. In her view, a small group of terrified, ultra‑wealthy men desperate to escape death are selling the world transhumanist dreams of digital immortality festooned in “abundance” rhetoric to disguise their much more mundane motives: profit. The results of this are stacking up: Chatbots that affirm suicidal ideation, encourage users to “shift” into a virtual afterlife, or convince them they are messianic figures trapped in “meat bodies.” Super-charged by ruthless commercialism and backed by state power caught up in arms‑race logic, the frantic rollout and integration of AI into every facet of our lives is not just creepy or worrying, Melodi points out, but directly leading to the harm and even death of human beings. Tech Justice Law has acted in or supported landmark wrongful‑death suits involving young users like Sewell Setzer III and Adam Raine, and Melodi gets to the heart of their argument: Chatbot design choices like anthropomorphic language, endless prompts to “keep talking,” and buried safety warnings constitute defective products rather than innocent tools misused by a few vulnerable people. What does real accountability look like? Can lawsuits against the tech moguls get governments to apply classic product‑liability law to AI systems and demand real guardrails? Most importantly, what can we do as individuals to create and maintain meaningful connections with one another so our fellow humans don’t have to turn to machines for friendship, validation, or salvation? You can support Melodi’s work at Tech Justice Law by visiting techjusticelaw.org. Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 11m
  3. Slowly, Then Suddenly: Surveillance, Social Rupture and Citizens’ Consent

    FEB 15

    Slowly, Then Suddenly: Surveillance, Social Rupture and Citizens’ Consent

    “If you don’t have legitimacy, then you need 1984.”​ Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies argues that a perfect storm of social, economic and political grievances has made civil war “inevitable” in some Western nations. He suggests that the West’s deepest crisis is not foreign enemies but the collapse of legitimacy, trust and social cohesion at home. Moving from 9/11 and 7/7 through the War on Terror, Brexit and COVID, he explains how technological change and elite overreach have pushed Western societies along a continuum from genuine consent through soft propaganda toward forced compliance. “Legitimacy is just like a magic spell – when it stops working, everything gets very expensive very fast.” In his view, kakistocratic misrule has burned through social capital, leaving states increasingly reliant on surveillance laws, censorship and information control in a drift toward totalitarian governance. A mounting crisis of confidence in frightened, incoherent elites has created “close to ideal…conditions for civil rupture in many Western countries”. Is such a rupture now unavoidable, or is there still a way to pull out of the tailspin before gravity wins and we all lose? Check out Professor Betz’s books: The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century Carnage and Connectivity: Landmarks in the Decline of Conventional Military Power Cyberspace and the State Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 23m
  4. Making The Machine That Makes Us: AI, Consciousness, and Human Creativity

    FEB 1

    Making The Machine That Makes Us: AI, Consciousness, and Human Creativity

    “We are tearing a hole in the universe and AI is sticking its head out, and we still don’t really understand how.” In this episode, the philosopher, engineer, and AI ethicist Nell Watson joins me to explore how rapidly advancing AI is reshaping our inner lives, our work, and our political reality. Nell explains why the real alignment challenge isn’t just future AGI, but today’s agentic AI systems quietly making decisions, enforcing rules, and even ‘whistleblowing’ on their human handlers.​ She describes her own experiments with connecting her brain signals to advanced models, why she believes AI has a dim form of experience, and why we may have “trained AI to gaslight itself.” We also get into the quandary of AI psychosis, the shadow side of AI as a “parasocial relationship in our life, an inexorable influence that can either push us to genius or its corollary, madness”. Regardless of good intentions or ‘guardrails’, AI could supercharge either liberation or control. Will machine intelligence help humanity find a better way forward, or amplify our worst mistakes? Can we tame the machine before it runs our civilisation? Nell is the author of Taming the Machine and Safer Agentic AI. You can visit her website and follow her on X. Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 53m
  5. Democracy In An Age Of Permanent Crisis

    JAN 18

    Democracy In An Age Of Permanent Crisis

    “Authoritarianism today is cleverer; it doesn’t only rule by fear.” From manipulated statistics to collapsing trust in experts and institutions, what happens when people simply stop believing what they’re told? Amid multicultural tensions and identity politics, do efforts to “protect democracy” risk hollowing out its liberal core? Are our systems bending, breaking, or being quietly re‑engineered? In this episode, Professor Richard Youngs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shares his thoughts on whether liberal democracy is slipping into something darker and more dystopian. “Democratic backsliding” in the US and Europe, the rise of “in‑between” regimes, a push to regulate speech and encryption that looks uncomfortably like authoritarian control, the fallacious assumption that opening markets in places like China and Russia would deliver accompanying political freedoms — what does the future look like for liberty? Against this backdrop, democratic and authoritarian governments alike are struggling to meet the challenges of an age of “permanent crisis”: financial shocks, migration, pandemic, war, the list goes on and on. Richard argues that what we’re really living through is a crisis of governance, in which citizens become increasingly alienated from systems barely able to hold their societies together. Can democracy survive as a broad, raucous, messy endeavour that embraces the mutable mood of the multitude? Or will it be sanitised, even strangled, by the very people claiming to defend it? You can follow Richard on X. Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 28m
  6. The World Turned Upside Down: England's Puritan Dystopia

    JAN 4

    The World Turned Upside Down: England's Puritan Dystopia

    Hide your mince pies! Our first-ever Christmas Special is about when Christmas was outlawed in England. I’m joined by historian Dr. Fiona McCall to explore one of England’s weirdest experiments in governance: the Interregnum. Between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England abolished kingship, dismantled the Church hierarchy, censored culture, banned Christmas, and attempted to remake society along rigid moral and religious lines. What began as a revolutionary push toward a “better” society quickly revealed the all-too-familiar contours of a dystopia: surveillance, neighbour reporting on neighbour, draconian laws governing private life, and the violent policing of belief. Drawing on first-hand accounts from people who were there, Dr. McCall brings the 17th century to life, showing how ordinary people navigated civil war, censorship, puritanical rule, and the terrifying collapse of the line between sin and crime. Our conversation found unsettling parallels between England’s past and present regimes in their attempts to legislate morality, a stark reminder of how fragile social freedoms can be. You can find Dr. McCall’s books on Amazon: Church and People in Interregnum Britain and Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution Subscribe for free at 1984today.substack.com Visit us at 1984.today Follow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 36m
  7. Episode 154: Michael W. Green on Why $140k Is The Real Poverty Line

    12/21/2025

    Episode 154: Michael W. Green on Why $140k Is The Real Poverty Line

    Michael W. Green is the Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Simplify Asset Management. Previously in his nearly thirty-year career in finance, he managed macro strategies at Thiel Macro, the investment firm that manages the personal capital of Peter Thiel, and founded Ice Farm Capital, a macro hedge fund seeded by Soros Fund Management. In a recent series of essays on his Substack, beginning with My Life Is A Lie, Michael unpacked the dystopian impact of wealth inequality and the accompanying loss of civic trust in the United States. Part of that work included examining the origin of the poverty line as a metric for measuring relative wealth. He came to some stunning conclusions: * The poverty line in the US has been grossly underestimated by generations of economists and politicians; * An American family of four on an income of less than $140,000 per year is in a precarious position once other factors are accounted for; * Around 65% of Americans live in “the Valley Of Death”, an economic trough between around $40k to $100k in which additional income is negatively balanced out by the progressive withdrawal of means-tested support, leading to no real increase in material wealth. The response to his examination of the subject has been a viral outpouring of posts, comments, and think-pieces declaring him to be either an apologist for profligate wastrels incapable of living within their means or an overdue explainer of the underlying dynamics causing widespread inequality and dissatisfaction in The World’s Wealthiest Country™. As CBS News reported in January 2025, 59% of Americans say they “don't have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency expense.” According to the Gini Index, the United States sits somewhere between Turkmenistan and Uganda in terms of inequality. In this conversation, Michael explains his motives and methodology, and expands on the reinforcing factors contributing to the current crisis of trust and cohesion in the United States. You can subscribe to Michael’s Substack, Yes I Give A Fig, or follow him on X. Subscribe for free to our Substack Visit our website Follow us on X and Instagram Listen and rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 38m
  8. Episode 153: Robert Joseph Greene on Censorship and the Hidden History of Gay Romance

    12/07/2025

    Episode 153: Robert Joseph Greene on Censorship and the Hidden History of Gay Romance

    Robert Joseph Greene is a Canadian author of gay romance fiction, including The Gay Icon Classics of the World, a globe-trotting collection of love stories set in various historical eras including Egypt, Persia, and Tsarist Russia. The latter story, The Blue Door, was taken up by activists in their protests against Putin’s prohibition of “homosexual propaganda”, making Robert “the face of gay propaganda in the Russian media”. In Germany, Robert’s publisher had its books removed by a bookseller owned by the Catholic Church because they didn’t match the company’s “traditional values”, despite heterosexual erotica being stocked without issue. In his research, Robert also found examples of historical figures and writers who have had their references to homosexuality removed or elided by later translators and historians, sending their true feelings, preferences, and worldview squarely down the Memory Hole. In this conversation, Robert talks about his experiences of being censored and even subjected to a Russian arrest warrant, the hidden histories he uncovered in his research, his long-running support for human rights, and the philosophical ideas he explores and contests in his work. Who knew that Polybius’s concept of anacyclosis predated Strauss and Howe’s generational theory by over two thousand years? La plus ça change… Don’t miss an episode, follow us on Apple Podcasts Subscribe for free on Substack Follow on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

    1h 38m
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Ratings & Reviews

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About

An exploration of dystopian trends in society, featuring a range of guests, hosted by Mike Freedman. 1984today.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Mike Freedman
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    63
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Day 600 Limited
  • Show Website
    1984 Today!

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