Preserving the past

January 17, 2026
by Bobbie Johnson
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Work

For Dweb Digest I wrote a short profile of the archivist Rick Prelinger, and his work to create decentralized copies of vast tranches of archival data alongside his friends and partners at the Internet Archive.

It was a lot of fun driving over to their East Bay warehouse and sitting down to talk to him and his team about how they find, clean, capture and share vast amounts of video taken from almost anywhere you can imagine. And particularly important given the Trump regime’s attempts to erase the past and rewrite the history books.

One of the issues both teams face is scale. The Prelinger Archives collection stands at maybe 40,000 videos (on top of 60,000 that were already donated to the Library of Congress), and it’s producing around 18 terabytes of video each week — too much for their current unoptimized decentralizing process. So right now, the team is producing smaller, more usable files for decentralization and keeping the higher-resolution originals elsewhere.
—Preserving the Past on a Decentralized Future

Fun fact: the same location was home to the Democracy’s Library attempt to scan in huge amounts of government information before it was disappeared, which you may have seen via a live video feed. It was interesting to see them in the flesh!

David Baron: The Martians used to be the good guys

December 30, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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books

December’s Curious Reading Club book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by former NPR science editor David Baron—a rollicking read about the gilded age’s obsession with aliens, and the space-obsessed Boston brahmin Percival Lowell who made it happen.

David’s book looks at how the craze took hold, what it meant, and how it fell apart… and why we’re still obsessed anyway.

I was particularly taken by the concept of Mars as a planet full of benevolent, evolved beings—something we discussed during our chat.

One of my great finds when I was studying newspapers is this article from 1909 that I quote in my book that was headlined “Questions Mars Might Answer”. There was all this discussion about different ways you might communicate with the Martians. And what were the questions people had for Mars? Well, you would think it would be “how do you dig canals efficiently?” or “what's the best way to build a flying machine?”

No. The questions for Mars were the deepest, most existential questions: Where does the soul go when you die? What is the meaning of life? How can we prevent human suffering? These were the questions for the Martians. So, you know, it didn't surprise me that you know that people really wanted the Martians to exist because they might come save us.

... That totally surprised me, because the most famous piece of fiction to come out of that whole craze was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which was published in magazines in 1897, and came out as a book in 1898—although most a lot of people are more familiar with the Orson Welles radio adaptation from 1938.

He [H.G. Wells] imagined the Martians coming here to take over our planet and to prey on us. And so I imagined that people must have been really scared of the Martians, and that this reflected some widespread view—but absolutely not. I found very, very few comments in the papers of people being afraid of the Martians. 99.9% were looking at the Martians as at least benign, if not actively a force for good here on Earth.
–David Baron

It was a really interesting conversation!

Tania Branigan: “Everybody thinks they would have been in the Resistance in wartime.”

November 24, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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interviews

This month’s Curious Reading Club pick is Tania Branigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution (WW Norton, 2023). It’s an absolutely fascinating look at people’s memories of this turbulent, horrific period of recent Chinese history, and how people wrestle with what they have done and what they didn’t do.

Tania is an old colleague of mine from the Guardian: I once visited her in Beijing while I was on assignment for this Wired story about Chinese hardware pirates. I’d spent the last couple of weeks in Shenzhen and Shanghai, which were strange in their own ways, but Beijing felt like another level of strange: an overwhelmingly large, smoggy, oddly circular city, full of construction sites and hidden alleyways, and far more alien to me than I expected.

My language was non-existent, so I’d gotten lots of things written down as a way of navigating the city—but when I showed the taxi driver the address of Tania’s place, he shrugged. It was clear that he didn’t know where to go.

I eventually ended up drawing a picture of the distinctive building, which the driver recognized after I attempted some cajoling and wild hand movements: his thick eyebrows leapt suddenly up and his crooked smile emerged as he realized exactly where this dumb Englishman was trying to go.

Anyway, I had a really great conversation with Tania about her book, about individual and collective memory, about how people censor their own memories as a way of coping with what’s happened. 

When I began the book, I thought it was going to be much more about official suppression. And sometimes it was. But as I wrote, I realized more than more that, actually, a lot of it was about people wanting to not address it for very personal reasons, not just because they were scared of what the authorities might do. Often it was simply too painful to talk about, or they felt guilt in talking about it, or their version of what had happened was very different to the memories of other people around at that time.
—Tania Branigan

We also discussed what lessons there are for today, and how people imagine they’d act differently in times of strife. The evidence I see around me is that while everybody thinks they’d resist an authoritarian purge, or would refuse to take part in struggle sessions, many more people would become willing collaborators than they realize.

In the NYT: AI crosses the deepfake rubicon

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Work
Soup cans in the style of Andy Warhol labelled "AI Slop" illustration by Allie Sullberg

I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today about my extreme distaste for Sora, the new social video app from OpenAI that was built to create and share fake videos.

“At a time when we are surrounded by fakes and fabrications, Sora seems precisely designed to further erode the idea of objective truth. It is a jackhammer that demolishes the barrier between the real and the unreal. No new product has ever left me feeling so pessimistic.”

This article started because a friend showed me Sora 2 and it immediately generated an extreme and visceral reaction in me that I hadn’t experienced before. 

I’ve seen many terrible technologies and dumb products over the course of my career, and met many objectionable people too. But watching Sora in action created a very specific sense of sadness and disgust that genuinely surprised me, and I wanted to understand more about it. And I know many other folks have struggled to pin down the disquieting, upsetting feeling that AI tools can generate, and so wanted to attempt to capture what it was that left me so hollow.

(If you want a more fun exploration of the same topic, may I recommend The Oatmeal’s view on AI art?)

As is always the case when you’re under editorial constraints like time and space, there’s so much more I wanted to say in the Times essay. But the essential point is there: Whether intentional or not, it is a malicious act to build a system that is designed to inject deepfakes into the body politic. 

(This is especially unpleasant when you combine it with a worryingly minimalist approach to safety. The irony of OpenAI calling its post about guardrails “launching Sora responsibly” at the same time it’s letting people generate deepfakes of everyone from Hitler to MLK was not lost on me.)

@thinkingsmarterwiser

These are the top 5 sora 2 mlk jr clips #fyp #top5 #sora2 #mlk #ranking

♬ original sound – SmarterWiserThinking

In the essay, I mention Stafford Beer’s dictum of “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Mentioning Beer, a somewhat peculiar British management professor from the 1950s, is the kind of thing that creates a certain response from some corners. It’s possible to nitpick or disagree with his approach or outlook, and I think his framework is extremely imperfect. But at its core, the lens is helpful: if a system keeps generating a particular outcome, it is essentially a system made to do that thing.

Cigarettes were once seen as a tasty indulgence; we now see them as cancer sticks. Modern political campaigns were ways to help affect wider societal change; now they basically are voracious, self-propelling engines for raising money. If Sora makes you second-guess what’s real and what’s not, that is in the most important way, what it is

.⌘

It’s worth saying in all this that I would not call myself stridently anti-AI. I tend to agree with the position outlined in Karen Hao’s excellent book Empire of AI, and recently outlined by Anil Dash in a shorter form: there are useful purposes for machine learning and deep neural networks, but this ain’t it. 

If you read Karen’s book, or Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, a searing overview of the thinking that drives many of these companies, you will get a detailed understanding of the negative costs of the current, hyperscale approach to these technologies. We know about the environmental and energy drains that huge new AI data processing facilities put on society. We know about the endless appetite for more input, with AI models gobbling up vast tracts of information and content, often illegally or against people’s expressed wishes. And we know about the exploitation of labor and traumatic experiences of staff who train these neural networks, essentially nudging it to produce something that is “right” only by themselves constantly watching things that are very, very wrong. 

And then, of course, there are the fundamental weaknesses of systems that don’t understand information but simply regurgitate it—machines that produce “hallucinations” and make factually incorrect statements with a glib and unearned confidence. 

My issue with Sora is that hallucinations aren’t a bug; they are the point. And so that’s why I was left so unmoored by watching it in action. 

You had all the power and the technology, and this is what you do with it?

⌘

One last note: I’m donating my fee for the article to the International Rescue Committee’s Gaza relief efforts. I admire a lot of what the Times does and many of the folks who work for it, but I also think it has taken the wrong stance on a number of important issues—not least the genocide against the Palestinian people. I don’t think a donation is really a satisfactory way to go about things, but it’s what I decided to do.

Podcast: North Korean sleeper cells

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Uncategorized

Change Agents is a podcast about terrorism, crime, intelligence, warfare and all manner of gnarly stuff, hosted by former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf. Let’s just say it’s not my normal audience!

But I joined Andy recently for a conversation about the North Korean pretender scam.

(See my recent story in Wired or read the background post for more context.)

I haven’t watch the whole thing back, but I think I did a pretty good job of explaining the way this attack works and its dangers.

Talking books, talking ideas

October 19, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Uncategorized
Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, during our talk about the book in June 2025

For those who aren’t following along, I run a small book subscription service called Curious Reading Club. It’s focused on sharing non-fiction books that I’ve enjoyed, often about science, technology, history and society—mostly new (but not always) and with a curveball memoir or handbook thrown in for fun now and then. 

The books I choose are generally written from a journalistic point of view, and I particularly try to find titles and authors that deserve a little more time in the spotlight… after all, the reality is that it’s really hard to promote new works, and most authors don’t get a ton of publicity and support from their publishers. 

We are closing in on 60 members who get a book each month, without any real promotion.

One of the added benefits for me is that the chance to interview the author of that month’s book. This happens often but not every time. We don’t actually have an interview this month—I was unable to make contact with Tim Clare, despite several attempts. But it did make me think about all the fun conversations I’ve had since starting this up. So I thought I’d share the interview archive here. 

Here they all are: I’ve grouped them by broad subject to help you see some common threads, although subject matter inevitably goes much further than these one liners can capture, and there are many more overlaps between the various interviews once you start digging in.

Our planet, past, present and future

Ferris Jabr on a holistic approach to earth science; Laura Poppick on the benefits of thinking about deep time; Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on maintaining hope in the face of environmental crisis.

The art of writing about history

Bonnie Tsui on mixing reporting and memoir; Carvell Wallace on the joys and difficulties of writing memoir; Adam Higginbotham on bringing history to life (part I, part II); Rebecca Nagle on digging up complicated stories. 

Technology and society

Alexis Madrigal on how the world has changed and what we can do about it; Karen Hao on what’s wrong with AI; Nicola Twilley on the way refrigeration has utterly changed our food and our lives; Henry Grabar on society’s terrible incentives around parking and cars.

Politics, policy and ethics

Annalee Newitz on propaganda and the culture wars; Nora Krug on illustrating a guide to resisting tyranny; Carl Elliott on whistleblowers; Lauren Markham on who benefits from the current migration system; Carly Anne York on the importance of engaging people about the value of scientific research.

Talking with these fantastic authors has been a real highlight of the last 18 months for me; I hope you get something out of these conversations too.

How a strange job interview turned into a journalistic investigation

May 6, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook
Simon Wijckmans, the CEO of web security company C.Side, wears a black baseball cap in a shadow profile photograph by Darrell Jackson

Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic.

On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined.

It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in fact gangs of cybercriminals working for the North Korean government who steal people’s identities and score high-paying remote IT jobs in the West and then send the money they earn (and data they steal) back to Pyongyang.

Seriously.

Security industry insiders knew about this, but the story hadn’t really reached the general public. And, at the same time, the problem is increasing. These fraudsters rely on tech, and they’re getting upgraded all the time: AI to cheat on coding tests; LLMs to fake the answers to interview questions; deepfake tech to get past ID verification; VPNs to dial in to work from overseas. But they also use old-school techniques, too, with accomplices who run their ground game for them—connecting their computers, filling in forms, sometimes even doing stuff like taking drug tests.

I figured this was a story that was so interesting I’d want to read more about it. Then I realized that I had the chance to actually write the story myself. So I embarked on a full investigation, and dug deeper. I talked to victims, experts, defectors. I even sat in on job interviews with North Koreans who were posing as Americans, using stolen identities and pretending they were in Ohio or Florida rather than China or Russia.

It touches on a topic that I’m fascinated by, which is the history of fakery—from the ancient world to the digital age.

The result was just published in Wired. Thanks to the team there, especially editors Sandra Upson and Rachel Morris—it was fun (and hard) to be out reporting again, and odd to be on the writer’s side of the desk rather than the editor’s. And lots of appreciation to everyone who was part of the story along the way.

Why I love rain

November 26, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Musings

If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you cold. You know about the sinister rain that comes before a thunderstorm, and the crackling kind that comes during one. You know rain because it is there, almost every day.

There are plenty of types of rain you’re not familiar with, of course. There is no monsoon and no typhoon. You don’t often get those driving, painful rods that come down for days. There is none of the swampy humid wet, not really, and there’s no place to find that steamy tropical drip that feels like being in a sauna.

But if you grow up in England, rain is just the thing.

They make jokes about it of course, but it’s one of those things that is worth joking about; the kind of thing that makes uncles lean over and say to you quietly: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

These days, living in San Francisco, rain doesn’t come very often. Yes, people always laugh about the city’s indecisive weather, its umpteen microclimates and the thick, sarcastic fog. And, yes, those things are real, but they are also a sleight of hand. San Francisco often gets wet, but it doesn’t rain much.

Sometimes “not much” means “not at all.” A few years ago we went without it for a long time. There were entire years of drought punctuated by incredible, angry rainfall that had no proper place to go and simply broke the dams and ran away back to the ocean. Drought is not so frequent right now, but the dry has retrained me. It’s made me forget—or at least lose any affection for—the endless days of foreboding skies, those weeks when you live your life under a heavy blanket.

These days I love a good heavy downpour, but I have grown distasteful of the little rains, that everyday kind. During the rainy season I’ll frown at the prospect of a chance of rainfall; once a year I’ll wonder if it’s time to buy Wellington boots. Where I used to go out without a coat, today I’ll throw on a waterproof coat at the merest sign of damp in the air.

It rained this weekend, real rain: an inch and a half on Friday alone.

We sat inside, enjoying the feeling of being locked in by the conditions. I thought about the smell of the wet leaves, of walking to school and pulling up my hood, of getting off the Tube feeling sweaty and cold at the same time. I remembered my grandfather in his old estate carving his way through huge roadside lakes to create arcs of water that cascaded onto the grass.

I stood in the garden tying back a branch of wisteria that had blown loose in the wind, my fingers frigid.

A flower in the garden of succulents outside the front of our house was coaxed out into the world, red and proud.

My shoes were muddy, and I felt like a kid again.

You had to be there

November 19, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media / Musings

The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November.

The news meant landed a little different for me, though: the start of a crashing wave of recollections—the kind of sudden, sharp memory zoom that leaves you a little disoriented.

Why was I thrown into this madeleine? Because I set up the Guardian’s first Twitter feeds approximately one billion years, two continents and many grey hairs ago. And I never thought shutting them down would be a news story in its own right.

They were simple things back in 2007, direct, unadorned and largely unsupported: a conveyer belt of headlines piped straight from the news feeds, built from unvarnished headlines and sometimes little comments. It took me just a few hours to set up the accounts and get them running, with some janky little logos and a very basic structure. There was @guardiannews, @guardiantech and a bunch more I think, and they gained followers rapidly: hundreds, thousands, millions in the end (although I’d handed over the keys long before.)

Like many things at the Guardian back then, the Technology desk was often the first place to try out new ideas. We ran with a nod from management, but felt like we were rogue operators. I was, perhaps, a sniffer dog looking for new platforms and ideas. Or—and this is more likely it seems now, with the benefit of perspective—a canary.

But it was fun.

The internet really was a wilder place then, less conforming, less sterile, more open and less abrasive. It felt beautifully unfinished. We didn’t know what was going to happen, and that was part of the attraction.

I’m currently reading Jeff Jarvis’s book The Web We Weave, which has some great examples of where we went wrong online, alongside a tub-thumping of what we can still get right. Its mixture of sadness and hope reminded me of an essay I helped edit back in 2015 maybe one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever worked on: The Web We Have To Save.

Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger better known by the nickname Hoder, had been in jail in Tehran for six years for things he’d written online. We’d met once I think before his arrest, and after he was released a friend put us back in touch. He had a raw piece of writing he’d carved out of his head when he got out and saw how screwed up the internet—this place that he loved so much, that he’d been incarcerated for—was.

The piece took a lot of work from both of us to bring around, but it stands up a decade later. (It’s ironic that the piece is behind a paywall now, perhaps, but here’s a readable version.)

"The Stream means you don’t need to open so many websites any more. You don’t need numerous tabs. You don’t even need a web browser. You open Twitter or Facebook on your smartphone and dive deep in. The mountain has come to you. Algorithms have picked everything for you. According to what you or your friends have read or seen before, they predict what you might like to see. It feels great not to waste time in finding interesting things on so many websites."

He was not wrong.

⌘

I still think about that story a lot, about what Hossein saw—what he knew—before the stream and after.

It’s all changed now, of course, changed even more than it had back then. Twitter long ago lost its shine for me, my posting slowed as the tone shifted; I stopped completely a few years ago when it was clear that things had taken a dramatic nosedive. And, as I said almost exactly year ago, I don’t intend to replace what I found on Twitter with something else.

Threads just seems like swapping one soul-sucking overlord for another. I remain skeptical of Bluesky for similar reasons, a Twitter alternative set up by people who were looking for a do-over because they screwed Twitter up in the first place (even if I understand that Jack Dorsey has perhaps nothing to do with it now.) Mastodon just feels like an ill-fitting pair of trousers, and LinkedIn is well, LinkedIn.

The Stream has me in its grasp, just like everybody else, but at least I don’t need to feed it any more. All I know is that we started a thing in 2007, and it lasted 17 years before somebody yanked its plug out of the wall. That’s pretty good going for a rainy afternoon’s work, I think.

Forensic storytelling

September 15, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Musings

Have you ever read an autopsy report? It’s brutal.

You peel a person apart, pick them over for information. You tour through their body, their organs, their selves like it’s the index to a book. In just a couple of pages of banal medical description, you are turned from an ordinary citizen into the holder of a dark secret.

The autopsy makes you a witness to somebody’s most intimate moments. You know them in a way that few other people understand, yet at the same time you don’t know them at all.

The descriptions are so minute, so detailed. The hair: how long is it and what color? The torso: is it fat or thin; does it have remarkable tattoos or scars or markings? The private parts: are they typical or somehow unusual?

Inside, there are reconstructions of the moment of death, and clues about how they died. An injury. Perhaps bruising or marking. Red eyes or broken teeth, a doctor divining the truth from the way the blood behaves.

There are other stories in the description, too: signs of somebody’s behavior, their past indiscretions, history evidenced through injuries and bones and the footprint of medical intervention or substance use.

Yet sometimes the things that we use to define us are entirely missing, uninteresting. Hair color might be noted, but the eyes? Their color is rarely important.

It’s even worse, somehow, when there’s a crime involved. A person dies once, usually suddenly and often unexpectedly, ripped out of existence by somebody else’s hand. Then somehow they are killed all over again by a doctor pillaging what’s left of them in the search for evidence.

I read an medical examiner’s report recently that broke me a little. A man, just a few years younger than I am, killed unexpectedly. There were twelve pages of information from the medical examiner, details of the autopsy and several paragraphs noting his injuries. The examination toured his body with the usual lack of emotion.

Parts of his body were deemed “unremarkable.” His hands, fingers, unremarkable. His feet, toes, toenails, unremarkable.

I thought about his toes in the ocean, wiggling as the cold water rushed over them. I thought about his hands touching a loved one, encouraging a child, consoling a friend. What’s unremarkable about that?

The mundane documents of science and bureaucracy have a way of flattening the most powerful things, reducing their dimensions. Being detached is their power, and their failure. If you look at research papers describing the most vile experiments, they seem barely different from the reports of an everyday scientist: Tuskegee explained in banal detail, thousands of men’s health and lives turned into data points. Or if you read court proceedings where officials are describing heinous acts committed against the most vulnerable, the forensic detail makes it seem almost commonplace, somehow inevitable.

I finished that autopsy report and sat for a few minutes, silent. What must life be like for the doctors and coroners and medical examiners? What does it do to a person to be so detached? How do we balance the important stories we can see from the meaningful ones we cannot?