A ride from Tangier, the largest city in northern Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta takes less than two hours. The border crossing has its own, sleepier rhythm, quite different from the tourist-driven bustle of Tangier. In Ceuta, traders run their errands, Morocco-based expats make visa runs and Spanish people catch ferries to the mainland. On most days, the border crossing seems almost ordinary. The fences, though menacing and topped with razor wire, are less imposing up close and officers make small talk with the expats waiting to get their visas stamped. 

Then there are those days when the routine collapses and Ceuta becomes the center of Europe’s migration debate. 

The territory is a geographic and political paradox. Despite falling under Spain’s — and the European Union’s — jurisdiction, it sits on the northern edge of Africa, surrounded by Morocco and separated from the Spanish mainland by the Strait of Gibraltar. It is an entry point to Europe, yet not fully part of the Schengen zone, requiring additional immigration checks for travelers crossing to the mainland. 

When more than 60,000 people — mostly Moroccan men and teenagers — rushed into Ceuta (almost doubling the coastal city’s population), the images reverberated across Europe. There seemed to be no dramatic buildup to the incident, nor any obvious explanation why thousands of people chose that day to make their way to Spain. 

Europe’s far-right politicians seized the narrative, portraying the influx as an imminent invasion, warning that the men were on their way to “Calais” and “Germany.” Italy temporarily suspended the Schengen free movement regime with Spain, meaning travellers arriving by sea and air would now be subject to border checks. Spain threatened to take “proportional measures” in response and did so at midnight on August 8, when it imposed similar checks for visitors from Italy. 

The standoff between European governments — led by socialist Pedro Sánchez in Spain and conservative Giorgia Meloni in Italy — is not simply a test for European border security. Instead, what transpired in Ceuta poses bigger questions about the shifting nature of state sovereignty itself: How are we to understand borders, if they’re shaped by forces beyond the state’s reach? 

Borders are not just lines separating geographic entities. They are systems built on surveillance, diplomatic bargains and digital networks. Ceuta is the place where all three converge. Its borders, already protected by the sea, have been fortified with steel, outsourced through diplomacy and tested by coordinated rumors.

Steel

The crossings into the enclave are blocked by a multi-layered barrier of fences and wire. Morocco administers a fence separating it from the neutral area between the two countries. Two fences on the Spanish-controlled territory follow, creating an enclosure monitored by the Spanish Civil Guard. The physical infrastructure is reinforced with motion sensors, thermal and CCTV cameras, maritime communication systems and facial recognition technology. 

Even the sea has now been incorporated into the border system. Just three days after the Ceuta border chaos, Spanish authorities installed a 500-metre floating barrier and anchored naval buoys to create another monitored enclosure. 

The EU has funded most of the fortifications. The Border Violence Monitoring Network’s report says that since the construction of Ceuta’s border barrier in the 1990s, the EU has spent tens of millions of dollars to make the Spanish-Moroccan frontier more secure, technologically up-to-date and heavily surveilled. With the recent mass crossing, Spain will now receive additional emergency financial aid. 

Yet, the architecture of physical surveillance, built and re-built with European money for decades, cannot prevent the human cost of attempting to cross a border. In Ceuta alone, at least 100 people died according to local authorities. “The rationale behind increasing surveillance is that you'll be able to save lives and smash the [people trafficking] gangs, right?” asked Nathan Akehurst, who has written about Ceuta’s border for Jacobin. “Where was that in this case?” 

Diplomacy

Akehurst’s question touches upon the human-centered rationale for heavy border surveillance. But there is also a political one. It is not only Spain, as a EU member, that receives funds to manage migration. Morocco has received €427 million since 2015, for migration-related expenses, including technology and training. That’s part of Europe’s wider strategy of border externalization, a practice where Europe moves border control beyond its own territory. 

The practice has been around for decades, but went into overdrive after 2015, when approximately 1.3 million people, mostly from Syria, came to the continent seeking asylum. Many of them reached Europe through Turkey, prompting the EU to strike a deal with Ankara: €6 billion in funds, visa liberalization and EU-ascension negotiations in exchange for stricter border controls and curbing irregular arrivals to Greece. The EU also agreed to resettle within Europe one Syrian from Turkey for every Syrian returned to Turkey from Greece. But by 2020, when the EU failed to resettle Syrians, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared he would no longer prevent migrants from crossing Turkey en route to the EU. 

“Border externalization is basically paying other countries, but also subjecting them, through a carrot and stick approach, to performing functions that are usually performed by a state itself at their borders,” explained Josephine Solanki from the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based think tank. It leaves space for leaders like Erdoğan, Solanki added, to bargain for influence by turning migrants “into political leverage.”

The cost of outsourcing borders is not just material. It is measured in control that Europe cedes to the foreign governments it relies on for migration policy enforcement. 

In Ceuta, migrants claimed local authorities did not stop them from crossing the border. A young Moroccan man told the New York Times a day after the event: “They opened the border and let everyone go by.”

Border outsourcing agreements were made, among others, with authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where EU funds were used to detain migrants and quell domestic protests, rights organizations say. Alliances with “deeply unreliable and authoritarian actors” in the name of stability, said Nathan Akehurst, “is short-termist, insane and loses Europe any credibility it has left.” These alliances also allow Europe to “shift the blame to the Moroccans, the Eastern Libyans, the Turkish or whoever decides to take advantage of that moment.”

Rumors 

It is yet to be revealed who, if anyone, has taken advantage of the mass crossing into Ceuta. Local and international media have uncovered now-deleted posts that shared tips on routes and equipment for the journey. One of the main networks was called Hrig Sebta network — “Sebta” being the Arabic name of Ceuta and “hrig” being the Maghrebi term for undocumented migrants, literally referencing the burning of identity papers. 

In the wake of Ceuta, European ministers pledged to tackle online misinformation to avoid migration crises, but remained cautious when asked about thousands of posts reportedly linked to Russia. Other theories attributed the crossing to Morocco’s tensions with Spain over its closer ties with Algeria, or to Spain’s position on Palestine.

But those rumors, and what appears to be a weeks-long coordinated online campaign behind them, reveal something deeply human that fences can’t deter: movement that is spurred by hopes for a better life. 

“[The crossing] would have happened anyway at some point,“ Akehurst argues. “There would have been a crossing because all of the circumstances that generate that are already there before someone with a twitter account throws a match on the fire.”

Yet, let’s pause at the match. It’s not about someone with a social media profile creating chain messages. It is about the ecosystem that can jeopardize borders by creating information flows, turning rumors into perceived opportunities.

Moroccan newspaper TeleQuel already published a report about social media posts amplifying the next hrig — another attempted crossing into Ceuta — on August 15. 

When packaged to a hungry audience, rumors carry the currency of truth. They’ve driven migration long before social media was even conceptualized. Now those rumors speed through digital space owned and operated by private companies not prone to accountability and sitting well outside the reach of any single state.

And the EU has understood that for years. “It is necessary to structure the information space, as we have organized in the past the territorial space, the maritime space and the air space,” Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market of the EU said back in 2018. He warned about Big Tech companies treating digital space as a no-man’s-land that they would write rules for. 

The no man’s land between Morocco and Spain appears calmer now. But the turmoil of the crossing revealed a new, digital dimension to border governance. Information has always found a way to spread; digital platforms have given it new channels: ones which allow those behind the information to remain faceless, while the information itself passes from screen to screen. It reaches a boiling point, spills over from the digital space and then can be disappeared, even before anyone has had a moment to scroll back.

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The post The manufactured crisis of Ceuta appeared first on Coda Story.

We’re inching forwards through the thick smog that has cloaked Tbilisi for days. At first, I thought it was a kind of blueish, pink winter mist that makes the city feel like it’s in an ongoing sunset, until a friend who smokes told me they’d been having trouble breathing in it.

It’s Black Friday. A journey that should only take a few minutes is stretching past an hour and for the most part, Tsaro and I are sitting in silence, occasionally passing a phone between us to translate the few words we do speak. Both sides of the road are jammed. People are rushing for the deals at CarreFour, she sighs.  

This November day is also the 365th day of continuous protests in Georgia against a government Georgians believe is steering the country back into the Kremlin’s orbit after years of moving towards Europe. Dozens of Georgians are languishing in prison, often in pre-trial detention, for participating. The protests themselves don’t make news outside the country so much anymore. Unless, that is, there is some kind of significant development, like the discovery of toxic WWI-era chemicals used by police in water cannons, the same cannons I watched the police turn on young Georgians for hours last winter.

It was while covering one of these still ongoing nightly protests that I met Tsaro Oshakmashvili, a 62-year-old widow with wayward orange curls. And it was through deciding to remain after the October 2024 election, the one international observers say was marred by serious irregularities, that I found myself reflecting upon what authoritarianism can do to how we relate to one another and the duality of Tbilisi. Georgia now has more political prisoners than Russia per capita, and still regularly features as an upcoming destination amongst many UK newspapers. 

Since our meeting, Tsaro has become a public figure after her de-facto adoption of Archil Museliantsi, currently in jail for allegedly damaging property during the protests. Archil is a 30-year-old-law student who was orphaned at six months old. When the pair first met on Rustaveli Avenue, at the height of Georgia’s protests, he turned to Tsaro and told her he was ready to die for his country.

Just a few days after we met, Tsaro and I were accosted by police. I’d been taking photographs outside the gates of a Tbilisi prison. With some effort, she calmed them down and we walked away with my memory card wiped. We got back into her car and sat in silence. She then turned to me and, even though my knowledge of Georgian is small, I saw the glint in her eye and knew what she was saying; “You didn’t delete them all, did you?”

Archil is serving four years for allegedly setting fire to one of the new CCTV cameras used to identify protesters through facial recognition technology. The video used to sentence him doesn’t contain any trace of his face, though. Just a man in a balaclava and a burning piece of paper. His lawyers argued it wasn’t enough to identify him, but he was found guilty anyway. After receiving his verdict, Archil was told he could request a presidential pardon. His reply: “What President? Do we have one?” 

Tsaro now spends her days campaigning around the country in Archil’s name, encourages him to make use of his sentence by pursuing his law degree, and brings him supplies in Gldani Prison. The three books and the tracksuit bottoms on the backseat of the car are for him. 

When we finally arrive, I get out of the car and notice the huge sky and the quiet. Tsaro points towards an empty field with a mesh of electric poles running through it, the city a hazy silhouette in the distance. "That's Archil’s view," she says, and pauses for a moment. 

We go through security, stepping over a sleeping dog, and enter a room divided by large steel bars with an x-ray scanner running through. Archil’s things can go forward, but we cannot. As a non-blood relative, Tsaro has no visitation rights. So we watch on in silence as the items slowly travel through the scanner. It will be three more years until Tsaro and Archil can be in the same room again. It will also be the fourth time they’ve met. 

Later that night, a crowd gathers at Tbilisi State University. An explosion of flares and music signals for the protest to begin. Tsaro marches at the forefront behind a huge banner. She smiles and waves at the camera, her way of signaling to Archil that she's watching him.

I walk with the crowd, face hidden by sunglasses and a cap: enough to not be picked up by facial recognition, but hopefully not too much to violate recent laws that prohibit concealing your face.

Afterwards, I meet a group of friends who have gathered at a nearby bar. A man who is visiting from Argentina is wondering about whether to move to Tbilisi permanently, telling me what a fantastic place it seems to be. I tell him he should, then step into a sideroom, and watch on in silence as two men make use of the empty space to dance.

It’s strange to arrive in a place at such a high-stakes moment and only realize what that means as it happens. From the beginning, Georgia asked little of me and gave everything back in return, operating on such frictionlessness that meant I barely had to ask what it was that I was doing there. Perhaps the same reasons I first started to love it were the same reasons vacationing Russians had during the Soviet Union; myths of the eternal host and a perceived openness to strangers, though that "warm welcome" had started to wear thin. But this wasn’t something I initially stopped to ask myself — this question of Russia’s colonial relationship with Georgia, its occupation of Georgian land, and the influx in 2022 of tens of thousands of Russians fleeing mobilization and war with Ukraine.

Shortly after arriving, I found myself in a reality that held little regard for tomorrow; people of all nationalities — Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, European, and others — turning to the present moment as a form of coping. But although I sensed that people were escaping, avoiding, I was still doing the math on who was fleeing what, exactly. It would still be many more months until I learnt the difference between what it means to confront oneself versus one’s oppressor and what we owe to the places that receive us.

But the thing that provoked me to start wondering about such things wasn’t Georgia’s existential fight against Moscow. It was a relationship with somebody who was fleeing themselves.

A friend had suggested I come to Tbilisi, proposing that Georgia could make a good follow up to a story I had recently finished about Ukrainians starting a new life in the UK. I spent the first days in the company of international correspondents focused on the upcoming election and what it would mean for the country. Drink in hand; the conversation usually concluded with how much they loved it here and when they were flying out again. I listened, sheepishly, unable to venture an opinion and not clear about what a return to an authoritarian past would look like in practice.

As the days crept forward, I couldn't have said how long I would stay, but my neighbor never asked anyway. Iskra was my age. Her dog, Riri, liked to nap on my bed. Ours was the last of a remote cluster of homes with balconies fashioned from old scraps of wood and living room furniture arranged haphazardly on the street. It was one of the highest points in the city before it gave way to rugged mountainside. The only traffic that went by here was the funicular and the tourists who gawped out of its windows. 

Without saying too much, Iskra and I were getting to know each other, sitting on our shared patio with the city, a dark twinkling pit, below. Between us, a favorite topic was emerging; Georgia, its unpredictability, and a feeling of being at odds with the places we had left behind. Iskra was born in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and had moved to Amderma, Russia's northern coastline, where her mother had worked as a geologist. The war had made it clear to her that she would not be returning. I was still ambivalent about what it was I carried with me from my own homeland, what that counted for in Georgia, and the idea of returning. It was Iskra who first explained to me the origins of Georgia’s resentment towards the Russians that had moved here after the war. That I was learning it from a person who had spent most of their life in Russia might have felt more ironic, had she not said it with such conviction.

After February 2022, Tbilisi was flooded with people coming over Georgia’s northern border, their arrival enabled by the ease of remote work which muddied the water between dissidents, draft dodgers, those looking for an easier life, and plain wartime tourists.

In the early days, more than 10,000 people might have arrived in a single day, a rate that wouldn't go unnoticed in Tbilisi, a city with a population of 1.3 million. Some pursued anti-war activism, others opened bars catering, at times, to an exclusively Russian clientele. As rents jumped and Russian echoed through the streets, local resentment simmered.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, many Georgians recognized themselves in Ukraine. And now, with so many Russians in the city, could Putin use their presence to justify another special military operation and "liberate" Tbilisi, too? Or, would the Georgian government align itself so closely with the Kremlin that he wouldn’t have to?

Georgian Ministers debated what to do. Should they restrict entry, like they had in the Baltic states, or allow people in, fearing that turning them away would simply deliver them back to Putin's army. Meanwhile, locals took matters into their own hands, some venues insisting you could only enter if you recognized Russia as an occupier, requesting that people sign a physical declaration. But attempts to sort so-called "good Russians’" from "bad Russians" amplified hatred, with one venue who employed such policies undergoing cyber attacks from a far-right Russian group as a result. Eventually, some gave up and went home, tired of having to prove themselves the "good" kind, while Georgians endured a crushing gentrification from the very same country whose legacy they had been fighting since the Red Army invasion of 1921.

Arriving abruptly from the UK put me in an unusual position — naive enough to move between worlds without being in the firing line, and outside the divide enough that, in time, I would start to see the particularities of it clearly.

One evening, I was on my way out, looking for something to eat. Iskra was smoking on the patio.

“I’ll join you,” she said.

We descended into the city, the street lights casting a deep amber glow over its surface like dark honey, and arrived outside an Italian place. Amid the chatter, there was one man sitting alone, an untouched plate in front of him. Iskra knew him from somewhere, and the two of us slipped into the empty chairs beside him. 

After a few short words between the two, the man turned to ask me where I was from. When I told him London, his eyes widened “Oh, London? I love this culture,” proceeding to talk endlessly about the 2008 electronic music scene, naming bands I thought I had forgotten, reviving a curiosity I hadn’t felt in some time.   

“OK,” he announced, standing up as abruptly as our conversation began. “I will go to The Creek. I hope you will join me there for a drink.” And we did, entering through the double doors, passing the bar, to find him sitting in the courtyard beneath a fig tree. There we spent the remains of the evening listening to him talk about growing up in a remote Siberian town, the concentration of wealth in Russia, and the challenges of throwing parties in homes that can only fit 20 people. Iskra's eyes glazed over. Not mine.

Two nights later, I met Kostya again. From the beginning, I had questions. What was he really doing in Georgia? Did he leave Russia because he was against the war, or because he didn’t want to be sent to the front? Should he be actively helping Ukraine? What does he owe Georgia now that he is here? But I didn't ask them outright, waiting to see instead of hearing it and resonating with a person who, like me, was fueled by restlessness.

We spent the evening moving from place to place — first a wine bar, next a red-lit basement. He was unable to stay in the same spot for more than 45 minutes. Each time we took a seat somewhere new, he began talking with the same fervor as when we first met; telling me about his childhood pets, cleaning toilets throughout his military service, a brief employment stint doing social media for a local environmental ministry, before realizing “what it really was,” being cheated on by his childhood love, and cheating on all his loves since. Each of his stories is a portal into a parallel world, where words make sense, but the context they operate within does not.

It’s not until we’re sitting on the pavement outside an overspilling bar that I really start to notice him; his box shaped jaw, his eyes that stare upwards from the way he tilts his head forward when he speaks. His accent makes each syllable heavy, like a thud, when suddenly he asks if I want to go somewhere else. We do. And when I announce that I’m done for the evening, he walks me home, to the very top of the city, to a final and precarious footpath that weaves over the mountain side before landing outside mine. We hug, awkwardly. Kostya has already started to walk away when I realise how much I’ve enjoyed his company.

“Thanks for a great night,” I shout. 

“Pfff - thank me?” he replies, turning to address me and walking backwards as he does.   

The following few days run like a strange clockwork. We meet most evenings, at the same time, in one of a handful of places. This, I never questioned. Instead, I relished in feeling like I had found a side door into a place I was still figuring out – meeting people of multiple nationalities in a single night, unable to tell who lived here and who was passing through; though it didn't seem to matter, and no one thought to ask.

“Let’s go to Pith,” says Kostya.

His friend, Artur, a Russian guy of Chinese descent is standing behind the bar dressed, as he usually is, in an oversized checked shirt. The place is empty aside from the three of us and it’s gone closing time. 

“I would like to go to Thailand,” says Artur, drink in hand. 

“Pfff. Thailand? Really? Come on man,” replies Kostya.

“Yes - really. I’ve had enough of this city,” says Artur, slamming his glass on the table. “We’re fucking three hours away from Russia right now. In October, this place is going down. Georgian Dream is gonna get re-elected and Putin will use the country as his playground. I don’t want to be here when that happens.” 

“So, what do you want to go to Thailand for?” asks Kostya. 

“Bro, I’m Asian. I just want to go somewhere people aren’t gonna look at me twice, where I can start a business and live in peace. Plus, I can’t be dealing with the situation between China and Taiwan. I’ve just left a war. I don’t want to be anywhere near the firing line when China invades and the US starts sending over nukes. I want to be sitting on the beach smoking a huge, fucking joint.” 

A few days later, a friend learnt I was in Tbilisi and insisted I meet his friend. I went without Kostya and found myself sitting around a table in the company of Georgian women, many of whom had recently moved abroad, making idle chit-chat over a table of food. A woman to my side gave me a list of things I had to see and do, telling me how often people fell in love with her country and decided to move here permanently. I asked why she left and she went stiff; “it’s different if you’re from here.”  

Another woman turned to me; “So, tell me where you’re staying.”

When my attempts to explain to her were unsuccessful, she pulled out a map on her phone and handed it over. I looked at the screen. Half of Tbilisi was covered in red crosses.  

"Don’t worry," she told me, seeing my eyebrows furrow. “Those are just the businesses owned by Russians we avoid,” before telling me that I must get the same app myself.

I took a closer look. Half the places Kostya and I went were each marked with a red cross. I imagined myself trailing around that map, Kostya at my side, a red cross following us everywhere we go. 

After that night, the writing on the walls, that's become as staple as the buildings themselves, took on a new immediacy. 

“Fuck Russia.”

“Russia is a terrorist state.”

“Russian’s go home.”

“You’re not refugees.”

The city starts to slow as the weather gets hotter. So hot, that even the crickets give up their ceaseless chirping and the smell of trash cooking inside their bags waiting to be collected taints the air.

Iskra and I are sitting in the patio eating watermelon until she suggests heading to a party being held at a nearby dog shelter, the intention being for dogs to leave with new owners. As we approach the fence dividing our place from the sloped wasteland, we’re hit by a smell so rancid that it stops us in our tracks. We cover our mouths, struggling to catch our breath between the chokes and sputters.

“I can't,” Iskra says, shaking her head, her voice muffled. 

Then I glance up and see it: a black cockerel, lifeless, hanging from a tree, a shoestring knotted tightly around its pale foot. Its head tilts to one side, its wings splayed open, motionless in the breezeless air.

The two of us stand there, before Iskra whispers 

“It’s a curse.”

Soon after the black cockerel appears, Iskra moves out, opting for a house on the other side of town that she shares with a Georgian family. We continue to meet. One night, we’re sharing a meal, when she announces she’s leaving. I message Kostya who is at Pith.

As I walk across town, the night is indistinguishable from any other. The city's old stone buildings and cracked pavements are dimly lit by the same amber streetlights. The same hum of nightlife whirls in the background, as people move onto their second, or third, venue for the evening. But tonight, it feels muted, like a party winding down before ever really beginning. Clusters of people stand outside bars, their mouths moving, but faces vacant. 

I can’t tell if anything has really changed, or if I’m just imagining it. Earlier that day, a piece of legislation had come into effect. The Foreign Agents Bill meant any organization receiving more than 20% of its funding from overseas would have to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” It’s a clever, simple law, lifted from the Kremlin, giving the ruling party power to shut down media, evacuate NGOs, and silence activists. Violent protests to reverse the bill in March 2023 were successful, only for the bill to resurface. This time, the bill passed. This was not just a law. It was a signal that Georgia’s government was importing the Kremlin’s operating system. 

A few days later, Kostya is staring at me from across the table, hardly blinking as he smokes. I stare back, not really seeing him, half wondering if the past few weeks are just something I made up in my head. I’m leaving tomorrow. 

“You know, I really don’t know where I am going next, or what I am going to do. Sometimes I think I also want to go to Thailand,” says Kostya out of the silence. 

“I’ve been accused so many times of being some kind of bad guy here. The amount of times I’ve been made to say "Putin is a dickhead," just so that I can order a beer. I know what's happening in Russia is a lie, but still, I can’t just abandon it. I have to protect it.” 

“Why, though?” 

“Because,” he says. “I have nothing else.”

“They were cold winter days. I put on a coat, and went to the rallies, for the sake of the children” 

— Tsaro Oshakmashvili.

As Election Day, October 26, 2024, approached, Georgia’s State Security Services went on Facebook to warn of an impending Western coup, and a plot to assassinate the billionaire founder of Georgian Dream and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanshvili. A pro-Western elite was supposedly preparing to topple the government and drag Georgia into war with Russia. Outlets that spread Kremlin narratives picked up the story, adding one detail: only Russia — and Putin himself — could prevent such a coup from occurring. I had been back in the UK during the run-up to the elections, and when my flight touched down in the city of Kutaisi on the night Georgia went to the polls, I turned on my phone to find both Georgian Dream and the opposition coalition claiming victory. 

As we shuffled off the plane, a man asked where I was headed. I say Tbilisi and he asks if I wanted a ride with his friends: a motley crew of Georgian and Australian men, each dressed in a version of a navy puffer jacket. When it turned out there were no buses this time of night, I said yes.

I sat up front next to a man called Tornike. I had him pegged as 45 and Iwas shocked to learn he was actually my age. I ask who he voted for. 

“Please” he said in a low, nasally voice. “I didn’t bother.” 

“Why?” I ask. 

“It’s lose-lose either way. Politicians just want money. I’m 31. I’ve got - what? Forty, fifty, years left. I’d rather just enjoy my life.” 

I stepped out of their car and into the bitter wind on Rustaveli. Tbilisi was quiet. Somehow the lights felt more grey than amber. A lone car was driving up and down the broad central drag, blaring its horn, a Georgian flag billowing from its window. A group of men loitered on the empty street and cheered each time a car passed and then returned to standing in silence. 

The next day, I go for a walk. Everywhere I look, I see a city void of life, of people. I message friends.  The only person who wants to meet is Dato, a sparky 24-year-old I got to know over the summer. He picks me up in his car. We tear through the city.

“This government doesn’t give a fuck,” he says, barely breathing between his words. “There is no other way but to do another Maidan. But I really hope I’m wrong.” referring to the 92-day-long pro-European protests in Kyiv’s central square which led to the fall of the then government, the annexation of Crimea just weeks later, and the death of 103 protesters. 

In just over a month's time, Dato will be arrested as he leaves a friend’s house and, later, flee the country.

We go to meet his friend, a successful restaurant owner who tells me he’s ready to pack it all in and leave Georgia for good. It’s not about fighting, it’s about making an exit.

“Will you come back?” I ask him.  

“There will be nothing to come back to.”

Kostya, who’s hosting me, returns at 4 A.M. from a trip to Istanbul. He changes into his pajamas and gets into bed beside me. It’s now been 48 hours since the election result. Evidence of voter intimidation and ballot stuffing starts to mount. Increasingly, it appears the election was stolen. A demonstration organized by opposition leaders is being held outside parliament that evening. I ask Kostya if he’s coming, but he’s going to Pith to see friends. “For my welcome home party,” he says. 

That night, the news coverage shows men holding banners stating “Georgia is not Russia.” Young women embrace amid a riot of EU and Georgian flags; people clutch their hearts as the national anthem sounds. But when the opposition finally unveils their grand plan to fight, the mood changes. 

“Our plan,” they say, “is you.”

Later that evening, I sit on Kostya’s bed while he smokes on the balcony, the cold slipping in through the open door. The harsh overhead light glares above. I tell him about the deflated protest, the sense of hopelessness settling over the city, and the stories of young Georgians planning to leave the country for good.

“I’m sorry, but these people killed my empathy,” he says, stepping in from the balcony.  

I remind him why he came here in the first place, but Kostya waves off my concerns, insisting that life here could never compare to Russia, recounting the stories of people sentenced to years in prison for holding up blank protest placards, for reposting anti-war content online, for replacing price tags at a supermarket with messages to stop the war, or throwing plastic water bottles at police. As if a protest like tonight's would even get the chance to happen in Russia, he says. They'd arrest you the moment you gathered. The police would know before you even start. “Maybe now,” he says, “they will understand what it’s like to be us.”

I spend successive evenings attending protests, interviewing people and taking photographs. I pitch news outlets. One story I have is about members of the LGBT+ community fleeing the country. Only the month before, the Family Values Bill passed which prohibited all pride events and public displays of the rainbow flag, banned gender transition, adoption for same sex couples, and allowed censorship of films and books. The law is an almost direct copy of Russia’s anti-LGBT law. One man told me how he was stripped and beaten by police when they found LGBT content on his phone. Editors express only vague interest. In Tbilisi, history is accelerating. In the rest of the world, Georgia barely registers

I go out with Dato and his friends. All anyone can talk about is the election. “If we lose this, we lose our identity,” says Dato, standing to his feet in an impromptu speech. “Where are the Russians who fled here because of the war? If they came here because of Putin, why don’t they join us in the fight?”

I put the question directly to Kostya the next day, asking him if he thinks it's his duty to join. But, really, I just want him to admit what’s really at stake; that the stories he has been told are a lie, that the same stories are used to justify wars that he can escape, that protecting those stories isn’t really escaping at all, it’s remaining trapped in the same narratives that people on the streets outside are now fighting.

But the answers I want aren’t the answers I get. 

“My country?” he asks, indignantly. “What about Europe? They are the ones making problems here.”

How would I feel, he asks, if Russia started creating bases on the UK’s borders? Just as NATO is doing in Ukraine. It’s strategic, he says, the EU flags at Georgia’s airport, the funding, the way EU leaders ferry themselves in and out of the country and address crowds at opposition rallies, painting themselves as Georgia’s savior. Europe has created this situation, not Russia.

“Anyway, whatever. I just want to live my life. I’m OK with being here and them hating me.”

“But this is the crux of the hate.”

“Let them hate,” he says. “I’m tired of all the fucking hate.” 

When I return, he tells me not to speak, and that we should end it. I glance at the cigarette trembling in his hand and ask for ten minutes alone to pack my things.

The bleakest day yet comes on November 25, a month after the election and the day Georgian Dream members are sworn in. The city is cloaked in wet fog. The protesters’ plan is to block the legislators from entering parliament, but with hundreds of masked policemen forming a wall around the building there is little that can be done. Within minutes, the plastic grinning faces of parliamentarians are projected from live screens, signing their oaths of office. The crowd stands motionless in the rain, wet Georgian flags hung around their shoulders. 

Suddenly, people surge towards the iron fence erected around the building, pounding their fists against it. The desperate hammering brings relief. For a moment, it feels as though something, anything, might finally happen. But hours later, as I file photos from a cafe across the street, people are still banging on the fence, and Georgian Dream has long left the building.

On November 28, the news arrives that Georgian Dream will be suspending EU accession talks, suspending the only future that isn’t linked to Moscow. The response is immediate. Rustaveli floods with tens of thousands of people for a bitter standoff with the police who chase and beat individual protestors into the following morning. They begin to pick protesters off one by one while walking their dogs or collecting their children from school. Each evening, the crowd rejuvenates and the cycle repeats.

Somewhere in the crowd, Archil meets Tsaro for the first time. Together, they endure the cold, the tear gas, the water cannons, the indiscriminate arrests, the raids, the beatings by police. And despite having only just met, what they experience erases the distance between them. "We went through such terrible days… that, of course, there was no difference anymore,” Tsaro later told me. “This was my son. He was a son of the same Georgia.”

By the start of 2025, all major opposition leaders will be arrested; while attempts to legally ban all opposition remain underway today, effectively creating a one party rule. Obstructing the road is enforced with fines or detention, while obstructing the pavement becomes listed as a new offence. A man is charged for insulting the police online. Another is charged with throwing a water bottle at police and sentenced to two years. I think of Kostya's words, that Georgia will never be anything compared to Russia, and don’t feel so sure.

Where does Georgia go from here? Czech MEP Marketa Gregorova recently said Georgia was undeserving of its EU candidacy status and that, with Viktor Orbán gone, there would be no one left to oppose targeted sanctions against officials. Meanwhile, Russia has deepened ties with South Ossetia. Part of the new agreement grants Russian citizens the right to take up official positions in the occupied region. One month after declaring the new partnership, South Ossetia’s Prime Minister stepped down. His replacement; Marat Kambolov, a Kremlin-appointed Regional Administrator. In May, Georgian Dream launched a new unit for monitoring online “hate speech” against officials, with 60 cases already being filed. 

People still stand outside parliament as 118 prisoners of conscience serve out their sentences. Some who continue to protest ask where the younger generation have gone; others say it's the sheer scale of the crackdown and the extended power police have that keeps them away. Just a few weeks ago, a friend told me he was leaving. "Society here is broken," he said. Sitting on our shared terrace, I recently asked my neighbor, in his sixties, if he attended the protests back in 2024. He just laughed. “This is nothing new for Georgia.”

The other day, I passed Kostya in the street. It was the unmistakable sound of British English from the woman he was with that made me turn his way. Two years later, the irony is that perhaps he was right; the younger generation, the ones who haven’t left, say they do have a deeper understanding of what it is like to live beneath authoritarianism — the main difference being that it didn’t cost them their empathy.

When I visit Tsaro at home, she shows me pictures of Archil on her phone, cooing how cute he is, joking that he makes her own children jealous. But I also know that she feels the full weight of this moment from the times that I have seen her cry while reading his letters.

There was something else Tsaro said that day we were intercepted by police, something that surprised me more than her small hope that I’d somehow defied the police.

“You know, not all police are bad. Some are really good people,” she said, using my phone to translate. “I felt sorry for them. They told me we have families, too. If they don’t do something, they’ll be fired and unemployed. That’s why they are afraid.” Then, smiling once again, said she was looking forward to telling Archil the story later and that he would certainly find it very funny.

Tsaro has now spent many weekends campaigning across the country with the Mothers of Conscience, a collective of mothers whose children have been imprisoned for protest-related charges since 2024. One member, Marina Terishvili, whose son is serving two years, lost her other son on the 9th April 1989, the day Georgian demands for independence from Moscow were met with shovels, tanks, and toxic gas at the hands of the Soviet authorities. Many people’s names did not make it into the official tally of the dead that day. They died months after exposure to the gas.

The Mothers often deliver newspapers written by their children from behind bars. I've joined them on these newspaper runs, and recently took a copy with me to translate back home. In it, I found a note from Archil:

“Stand by a stranger, this is what gives me strength and motivation to fight, fight when I see how people care for each other, fight when I see how they support and stand by me, a stranger to them.”

The collective responsibility people take for others, standing by strangers, is something I still see in Tbilisi, even if that community is now confined to the patches of pavement where it is still legally permitted to protest, or to the contents of a package delivered behind bars, or to the sofa in Tsaro's living room, the one that Archil is planning to sleep on when he is released. Such acts of solidarity exist in a space authoritarianism cannot so easily reach: the space between people, another homeland. 

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After kilometers of flat, orange desert, the bus dives down through an increasingly lunar landscape as it reaches San Pedro de Atacama. Amidst the sea of red rocks, patchy vegetation and distant high plains known as altiplanos, a small sign appears on the side of the road. The entry marker has been tagged in graffiti. “Se vendió los salares.” “They sold the salt flats.” 

The town of San Pedro, located in the north of Chile not far from the borders with Argentina and Bolivia, then appears like an oasis. In this hub for international tourism, small buses packed with visitors make trips from the dusty, bustling center to explore the region’s various geysers, sand dunes and volcanoes. Night sky tourism ventures offer a unique look at the southern stars. But it is the vast white salt flats, formed between 100 and 10 million years ago, that people come from around the world to see. 

As tectonic plates slowly shifted, water flowing from the Andes mountains lost access to the sea and settled into a natural drainage area known as an endorheic basin. Here, water evaporated quickly, leaving a white crust of salt on top and below, a rich mélange of minerals – lithium, potassium, magnesium, and boron — encased in brine. The Salar de Atacama is one of the biggest salt flats in the world — and one of the most important.

On March 11, Jose Antonio Kast, Chile’s new president took office. Kast, a conservative ostentatiously close to Donald Trump, has long been a critic of Chile’s national lithium strategy. One of his first actions as president was to sign an exploratory deal with the United States to extract rare earths and essential mirals. Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper and second largest of lithium, is central to the Trump administration’s plans to reduce its reliance on China as a source of the rare earths and metals that are fundamental to modern industry, from semiconductors to electric vehicles to batteries to defense technology.

Even before Kast took office, he attended Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami, an ostensibly security-related alliance that is also an attempt led by the U.S. to curb China’s growing influence in Latin America. Under the previous Chilean government, China had become a dominant player in the national lithium industry, as it had in Argentina. With Javier Milei, a Trump ally, in office in Buenos Aires, having another ally ensconced in Santiago has been a significant boost to U.S. plans to reclaim its role as the overwhelming regional hegemon. It was intervention from Washington, for instance, that led to Chile abandoning a $500 million Chinese telecom deal to link the two countries via undersea fiber optic cables.

Amidst the geopolitical wrangling, though, is the question of who benefits from Chile’s national resources and what impact the relentless drive to extract those resources has on the country and its people.

Sonia Ramos Chocobar sweeps kibble from the small kitchen table of her home on the outskirts of San Pedro and shoos her five dogs and three cats into the yard. Chocobar has just returned home after several days in neighboring Calama – where she was attending the first-ever Salt Flats Conference – and the house is a mess. The climate activist has made time between her afternoon grocery shopping and an evening community gathering to meet with me. 

Chocobar, in her 70s, is a bit of a local legend. In 2009, she made national news when she and another environmental activist (Amelia Mamani, since deceased) silently walked from San Pedro to Santiago, a distance of 1,534 kilometers, to raise awareness about the environmental risks of geothermal exploration near a geyser known as El Tatio — sacred to the Lickanantay indigenous community she comes from. The “march of the grandmothers” was followed by other environmental actions. Most recently, Chocobar walked to Antofagasta, the gritty port town that exports much of the copper, lithium and other resources mined out of the vast expanses of land in what’s known as Chile’s Gran Norte (“Greater North”) region. 

This time her message was different: save the Atacama salt flats.

The broader area where the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia converge is often referred to as the world’s “lithium triangle.” This lost corner of South America is believed to hold 68% of the world’s lithium reserves — a key element in the production of the lithium-ion batteries that fuel not only electric vehicles, but, increasingly, data centers and other large “green” infrastructure projects. San Pedro, roughly in the middle of the triangle, is sitting on a modern gold mine — and a faultline for the future of renewable energy.  

The town of 2,500 full-time residents has long been at the center of a tug-of-war between different actors, all of whom claim sovereignty – dominion – over the salt flats surrounding it: the indigenous communities who have called this environment home for centuries, the Chilean state and the international markets salivating over the “white gold” extracted from it. Over the years, and through much negotiation on local, national and international levels, a sort of entente had been reached: the state owns the resource, private companies exploit it and some of the profits kick back to local communities. Lithium was even granted a special status under a dictatorship-era decree: a “strategic” mineral, only to be mined with the express agreement of the State. The election of Kast has already disrupted this tenuous equilibrium. The Chilean president has removed environmental protections from roughly 40 different types of natural resources — reopening the tap that has long fueled extractivism and inequality in Chile after four years of left-wing, protectionist policies. 

With counter space cleared and the tape recorder set, Chocobar begins to speak, choosing her words carefully and pausing regularly for emphasis. She sounds tired, but steely. “We are always in a constant effort to protect our water, our land,” she tells me. “We have the misfortune of the Pacific. And we have the misfortune that the Salar de Atacama is one of the greatest lithium sources in the world.”

It wasn’t always this way — in fact, the “resource curse” is relatively new, she explains. For a long time, the Atacama desert was viewed by most Chileans as a no man’s land. Growing up as a member of the Lickanantay indigenous community — also known as the Atacameño people — Chocobar learned how to coexist with the harsh environment, rather than to dominate it. How to extract groundwater, which plants to grow, when and where to shuffle crops. “If we are millenary people, it is because we have found many ways to survive here,” she says. “People think the desert is lifeless, but it’s the exact opposite.” 

Over her many years, Chocobar has seen these techniques slowly disappear: dried-up streams, dying flora and fauna, water rerouted from communities to corporations. The natural richness of the desert lands she calls home has been converted into a monocrop for export. The culprit? The world’s increasingly rapacious appetite for rare earths and metals.

Lithium demands huge amounts of water. To extract the resource through a process called brine evaporation, mineral-rich groundwater is pumped from beneath the salt flats at a rate of thousands of liters per second into vast open-air ponds. Then, the water is evaporated to reveal the lithium. 95% of this groundwater — which once belonged to the smattering of 18 indigenous communities that inhabit the region — quite literally disappears into thin air. 

For local communities, the strain is already noticeable. In San Pedro, an estimated 49% of residents don’t have access to running water, says journalist Ernesto Picco. In one town — the ironically named Santiago del Rio Grande — Picco has reported, 100% of residents have no access to water. 

It's not only humans who are being affected. The water scarcity has modified the breeding and feeding habits of alpaca populations, a local llama herder in neighboring Toconao, Hugo Flores, told me. A river used to run through San Pedro. On one of my days in town, I climbed down a ladder and walked across the dried up stream to get a better view of the distant Licancabur Volcano. The caked ground chipped under my sandals.

“We’re sitting on a watershed, and yet there is water scarcity,” Chocobar explains. “We’re being conquered, in a sense — commercially, economically. It is a natural laboratory that is being destroyed.” 

Lithium hasn’t always been so coveted.

When it comes to minerals, in Chile, copper was for a long time — and still is, to a certain extent —king. Since its discovery in the 1880s, the South American country has been one of the world’s largest exporters of copper, which is drilled out of open pit mines in the Gran Norte region. From the window of a taxi in the port city of Antofagasta the day before, I had admired the massive telescopic loading chutes that transport the mineral directly into the hull of boats, releasing brown-gold particles into the air that settles on surfaces — park benches, balconies, cars — across the city.

It wasn't until the 1960s that the Chilean government began to recognize the benefits of lithium after accidentally discovering it buried in salt brine during an exploration aimed at identifying additional water sources for copper mining. The timing couldn’t have been better. “After World War II, there was a lot of speculative value in lithium as a nuclear material,” James J. A. Blair, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has published several papers on lithium mining in Chile, explained over a recent video call. 

In 1979, about six years into his 17-year iron reign and following the lead of the United States, which had done the same, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet declared lithium a “strategic resource” reserved exclusively for the state — not on account of its economic potential, which was at the time unknown, but as a national security stockpile. 

This seemingly small linguistic tweak has had long-lasting effects. 

After Pinochet’s decree, lithium extraction came under the auspices of Chile’s State Development Agency, CORFO, which started to ink contracts with private firms for further exploration. A year later, CORFO partnered with U.S.-based Foote Minerals to form the Chilean Lithium Company (SCL), in which the state held a 45% stake. 

What began as a Cold War precaution would quietly harden into one of the most unusual resource regimes in the world. By carving lithium out from the standard mining code, written in the 1930s, the Chilean state created a hybrid model. Lithium was not exactly nationalized, but neither was it fully privatized. “Lithium sits in a legal gray zone in Chile,” Blair told me. “It’s formally non-concessionable — meaning private actors can’t just stake a claim the way they would for copper — but in practice, the state has delegated extraction through long-term agreements that are incredibly favorable to a small number of firms.”

During the dictatorship’s wave of privatizations in the 1980s, control over key lithium assets was transferred to a small circle of politically connected actors. Among them: Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law, who would go on to run SQM, now one of the world’s dominant lithium producers.

“Decisions were made in a highly centralized and opaque way,” researcher Gonzalo Gutiérrez told me over cafeteria food at the University of Chile, in Santiago. “By the time lithium became economically important, the institutional framework was already locked in.”

That framework has proven to be remarkably durable. Even as Chile transitioned back to democracy in the 1990s and expanded its role as a global mining powerhouse, lithium remained an exception — governed not through open concessions but through a handful of contracts administered by CORFO. 

In her 2025 book “Extraction,” researcher Thea Riofrancos notes that even today, two firms — SQM and Albemarle — effectively operate as a “a legally sanctioned private duopoly.” Control over lithium, she writes, is a tightrope between “the palpable potential of public control and the reality of corporate dominance.” 

For Ramón Balcázar, the founder of the San Pedro-based nonprofit, Fundacion Tantí, this legal exceptionalism has had profound consequences on the ground. “The state claims ownership, but the impacts are local,” he said. “Communities were never meaningfully included in the design of these contracts, yet they are the ones living with the depletion of water and the transformation of their ecosystems.”

Balcazar’s nonprofit sits on a side street in San Pedro, across from a trendy French bakery called La Franchuteria that sells iced lattes at European prices. 

Since its founding in 2016, Fundacion Tanti’s small team of researchers has studied the effects of lithium mining on indigenous communities in the Atacama desert. The period has coincided with nothing less than an explosion in the demand for Chilean lithium. 

The growth has mostly been tied to a dramatic rise in demand for electric vehicle batteries. Between 2015 and 2024, global lithium demand grew roughly sixfold, largely driven by EV batteries. The boom has fundamentally reshaped lithium markets: whereas EV batteries accounted for only about 15% of lithium demand in 2017, they made up roughly 85% by 2023. In Chile, arguably the world’s lithium breadbasket, raw materials are mined for export but rarely do its benefits trickle back down to communities.

“Where is the lithium going? To Elon Musk?” Daniela Rodriguez, a local journalist and activist I spoke with in San Pedro, asked. “To send rockets into space, to power electric cars that you never even see around here?” 

In 2021, Balcazar and fellow researchers came up with a neat term for this phenomenon: “green extractivism.” “What we are seeing is not an energy transition — it’s an expansion of the extractive frontier under a green label,” he told me. 

Faced with increasing demand for lithium to fuel the “green revolution,” the Chilean state has tried to thread the needle. In 2019, after a wave of mass protests against neoliberal inequality known as “el estallido social” (the social uprising), Chileans elected Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed reformer who promised to, among other things, reassert state control over the lithium supply chain to redistribute its value. 

“Lithium is the mineral of the future,” Boric said on the campaign trail. “Chile can’t make the historic mistake of privatizing resources again.” His government promised a paradigm shift: more community involvement, more protection of wetlands, greener methods of extraction. Lithium, he seemed to say, would benefit Chileans across the whole supply chain and not just a select few at the top.

In April 2023, the government announced its National Lithium Strategy. The policy sought to expand production while increasing state control through public-private partnerships, renegotiate the contract with SQM (the same private company once headed by Pinochet’s son-in-law) and include community and indigenous participation in future lithium exploration decisions. 

In all, Boric’s government identified 68 salt flats that could be opened to mining exploration, but also 27 wetlands to be protected, Riofrancos, the author of “Extraction,” notes in her book. 

“The national lithium strategy is Boric's most successful policy,” Nicolas Grau, Boric’s former finance minister, told me over the phone. “It will allow Chile to industrialize through lithium — growing the economy while also protecting the environment.” After years of passive control, the state would finally take a more “protagonistic role” in managing the resource, Grau said, without nationalizing it.

To Riofrancos, the juggling act under Boric was typical of what happens when a state tries to pry some space in a market where extractivism has long been left unchecked. “Boric’s blueprint cited Allende as an inspiration, but his approach was more conciliatory toward extractive capital than anything Allende had proposed,” she writes. 

Local communities in San Pedro felt similarly. “The only thing politicians care about is being in power,” Chocobar said in San Pedro. “For all intents and purposes, we might as well not exist.” 

Boric’s successor, Kast has quickly rolled back environmental protections, fulfilling his campaign promises of commercializing mining and partnering with the U.S. regardless of the environmental impacts on the salt flats. 

Jorge Heine, a former Chilean diplomat and expert on international relations, argues that Kast is more constrained than it might appear. “People tend to overestimate how much a single administration can reshape lithium policy,” Heine explained. “This is a sector governed by long-term contracts, by international commitments, and by a legal framework that has proven remarkably resilient. Kast can tweak, accelerate, or slow things down, but dismantling the model entirely would come at a significant political and economic cost.”

But huge costs are already being paid, costs that communities in San Pedro have been living with for decades. Could Kast’s attempts to liberalize lithium mining and potentially exacerbate inequalities and environmental damage galvanize resistance?

For now, the signs of that resistance are still weak: graffiti scrawled on the side of the road, a grandmother walking along a highway with a cardboard sign, four panels of wood hung in a town square. But like lithium itself, transformations tend to take place very slowly at first — millennia of build-up in the brine — until suddenly they happen very fast. From Santiago to Atacama, protesters have been taking to the streets. In June, broader protests against Kast’s dismantling of social programs and services turned violent. 

At some point, austerity for the people contrasted with largesse for mining companies, technology companies and acquisitive foreign powers becomes hard for even a government elected in a landslide to defend.

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In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. 

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor. A smattering of social media provocateurs (Candace Owens) and politicians (Bernie Sanders) round out the roster, but the aggregate effect is indisputable: Thiel’s animus was about journalism all along. Indeed, the Objection.ai team couldn't be clearer about that.

“Gawker was not unique,” writes D’Souza on the company’s website. “It was simply the first large media company to be tested against reality in the age of clicks, outrage, and algorithmic amplification. Since then, the same structural failure has spread everywhere.”

“Peter Thiel and I … did not just fight Gawker,” he goes on. “ — We demonstrated that facts still mattered if someone was willing to enforce them.”

This is worse than revisionism. D’Souza is banking on everyone having forgotten that the Hulk Hogan case had nothing to do with “reality.” It was undisputed that the sex tape published by Gawker was real. The original suit, which failed, was for copyright infringement and the ultimate $140 million award that bankrupted the company was for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional harm. 

This foundational lie is important, because it is a warning against the temptation to engage Objection.ai on the merits. It would be easy enough to conduct a good faith debate to take at face value D’Souza’s argument that tech platforms and algorithms amplify false claims to millions, that courts are expensive and slow, media ombuds toothless, and fact-checkers partisan. And it would not be hard to demonstrate that he is harnessing widely shared concerns about a disordered information environment to mobilize support for an AI powered justice system controlled by a hyperpartisan private company with a track record of attacking the very institutions that are holding the line on consensus reality.

It would also be a mistake. There is nothing good faith about this effort. Rather, it is classic Thiel: an attempt to hack the principles of accountability, and turn them against journalism. Leave it to his less sophisticated Silicon Valley peers to rail against the media, create in house news outlets or buy them. The PayPal co-founder is going for the heart of the system, and financing infrastructure that will enable anyone who can afford a used Honda Civic to launch a harassment campaign, cloaked in the language of legitimate investigation. James O’Keefe, but with the judicial rather than journalistic process as its governing metaphor.

It will be tempting, too, to question the likely financial sustainability of Objection. That will be the least of its founders' concerns. The for-profit structure supports a story about the company’s purpose. It may work, or not, but its goals are nonfinancial. We reached out to Thiel for comment on Objection.ai before publication and will update this article as soon as he responds.

Providing funding, alongside Thiel, is Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and author of “The Network State,” a book about social networks with “a sense of national consciousness” replacing the nation state. He once outlined an early version of the Objection.ai model in an email to the far right theorist Curtis Yarvin about dealing with critical coverage. "If things get hot,” he suggested “it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts."

These men understand the limits of the Gawker verdict’s impact. It bankrupted the company, a personal victory for Thiel, but perhaps the least important outcome of the case. At a more systemic level, it struck fear into the hearts of media insurers and newsroom counsel, focusing attention on third party litigation finance as potential threat. 

If people with limitless resources could sponsor litigation against news organizations they disliked, constitutional protections would be no match for the sheer cost and complexity of defense.

Now, they’ve found an AI-assisted way to supercharge those effects. 

The Gawker case routed around the First Amendment by relying on a privacy claim. Objection.ai does so by building a hallucination of the legal process. Any journalist foolish enough to agree to binding arbitration by the company probably deserves what they get, but that will be a vanishingly small minority. For those who don’t, a phone call, or a knock on the door from a former FBI agent, or defense intelligence operative, will be chilling, and an ex-parte verdict rendered by Thiel’s custom-tuned AI will act as a cudgel on social media and via traditional PR. Journalists will be assigned a “trust score” to act as an additional goad.

In an environment of less peril for press freedom, it might be easy to laugh off Objection.ai as the confection of a thin-skinned millenarian. Right now, with the crony capture of broadcast news far advanced, swathes of the tech community openly hostile to journalism, and the White House onside, it would be wise to take it seriously. That starts with seeing it for what it is, and refusing to engage with a process which, unlike the real courts, Peter Thiel has no legal power to compel. 

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Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, faces an election dogfight. Behind in the polls, he has been effectively endorsed by both the Kremlin and the White House, and a host of conservative world leaders. As wars in Iran and Ukraine exacerbate the fissures that have weakened NATO, as well as the U.S.’s relationship with the European Union, this is an election that is being followed with bated breath in Washington, Moscow, Kyiv and Brussels. 

Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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“The impunity of the giants must end,” posted Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez on X. His government has instructed the public prosecutor to “investigate the crimes that X, Meta and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI.” Sánchez has said the state “cannot allow” platforms to affect the “mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters.” But Republican legislators, seemingly in response, released Part II of a report, titled ‘The Foreign Censorship Threat’, in which it accuses the European Commission of “directly infringing on Americans’ online speech.”

Almost simultaneously, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission launched an investigation into Grok, X’s generative AI chatbot, for producing sexualized deepfakes which might have included personal data of Europeans, including children. Even British prime minister Keir Starmer, who has signed a sweeping “Technology Prosperity Deal” with the U.S. has, spoken about the need to “protect children’s wellbeing” from Grok. And earlier this month, French police searched the Paris offices of X as part of a process that X described as a “politicized criminal investigation.” 

With Australia having set a precedent for “age-gating” the Internet through legislation, France’s under-15 ban is now due to come into force in September. The UK already requires age verification for certain content via the Online Safety Act, and Spain, Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, and Greece are among those considering similar measures. ​​The social and political consensus is striking. A 30-country Ipsos survey found strong majorities in every country supporting bans for under-14s.

Elon Musk responded to the Spanish prime minister’s comments about social media being essentially a failed state, rife with criminality and a disregard for law, by calling him “a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain.” The U.S. government has only been marginally more restrained. The House Judiciary Committee’s report accused Europe of mounting a decade-long campaign to “censor the global internet.” 

The involvement of the U.S. government, and its consistent defence of U.S. tech companies, means the battle is increasingly less about European regulators and Silicon Valley and more about what appears to be a profound ideological mismatch. “Though often framed as combating so-called ‘hate speech’ or ‘disinformation’,” said the Republican legislators’ report, the EU was working to “censor true information and political speech about some of the most important policy debates in recent history — including the Covid-19 pandemic, mass migration, and transgender issues.” Meanwhile, a recently published report in Europe shows how Silicon Valley companies spent 151 million euros lobbying far right European parliamentarians in 2025 to water down regulations. 

Big Tech forging links to the European far right dovetails with a Trump administration in which senior figures, including Donald Trump himself, endorse certain candidates in elections and routinely repeat far right talking points as part of an “unapologetic defense of Western civilization.” And now the U.S. State Department has openly touted the building of a “freedom.gov” portal that enables people to access restricted content, even if it contravenes local laws in sovereign countries.

But European regulations are not the only challenge to the impunity with which social media platforms seem to be able to act. As momentum builds to hold social media platforms to account in Europe, in the U.S. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg has been defending Instagram in a Los Angeles courtroom. He was testifying in a lawsuit, one of several hundred filed in U.S. civil courts, alleging that social media platforms are addictive, harm the mental health of children and that platforms are aware of these effects but do little to safeguard teenage users from harm. 

The lawsuits have the effect of making the Australian, European, and perhaps global attempt to ban teens from setting up social media accounts appear necessary. But Paige Collings, a digital policy expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and board member at European Digital Rights, said that bans are politically attractive precisely because they are simple. “Complex problems require complex solutions,” she said. “It’s more expensive. It’s longer-term. It can’t just be implemented overnight. But blocking under-16s from social media — that is something you can implement overnight.” 

Collings is among a growing chorus of experts that are cautious about embracing bans as a comprehensive solution. For instance, she explains, to ban children, platforms first need to know who is a child. This relies on national digital ID systems, facial recognition, and third-party age verification. In all scenarios, Collings said, “we are trusting that these services and platforms are not storing this information, not selling the information,” often without meaningful guardrails to ensure that is the case. 

When the UK introduced age restrictions last summer, searches for VPNs surged as users of all ages tried to avoid giving away personal information. Now the government has floated expanding restrictions to VPN usage to plug enforcement gaps. The purpose of a VPN itself is to preserve the privacy of its user, however imperfectly. VPNs are essential tools for businesses to secure communications, for journalists to protect sources, and for citizens in restrictive environments to access independent information. Forcing identification to use them fundamentally undermines their purpose. And when the argument for banning them is framed around the protection of children, it reinstates the urgency of an entire infrastructure required to keep children off the internet and risks normalizing identity checks as conditions for access to online spaces. In a digital economy where personal data is highly valuable, such measures raise the question of who ultimately benefits.Beyond privacy concerns, Collings points out that age-gating can become “a fantastic tool for censorship with no accountability or remedy.” It does, in fact, do in part what the U.S. government and Silicon Valley companies say it does, which is restrict speech. At an AI summit in Delhi, French president Emmanuel Macron dismissed Silicon Valley’s invocation of censorship as a defense against European regulation. “Free speech,” he said, “is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided through this… having no clue about how the algorithm is made, how it is tested and where it will guide you — the democratic biases of this could be huge.” But, forcing accountability and improving safety would perhaps be better than a blanket ban where the cutoff is 14 or 16, leaving everyone else to take cover as best they can in a “digital Wild West,” to borrow the Spanish prime minister’s phrase.

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The post Europe vs Big Tech: A battle for democracy? appeared first on Coda Story.