We absolutely need to think of this company as a new form of empire and to look at these colonial dynamics in order to understand ultimately how to Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and as we get started on this new year, 26, we are revisiting

some of the important topics and issues that defined

last year in tech. So last week, we revisited an interview with Liz Peli looking at streaming

services as part of this broader kind of consideration of the way that we consume culture now,

the way that digital mediation and streaming has changed that, and where, you know,

we might go from here, right? The unavoidable story of last year was, of course, AI, this continued

push to adopt generative AI, the continued growth of Open AI in particular, and how that has

propelled the rest of the industry to basically glom onto this idea that Sam

Altman initially pushed with ChatGBT, BT, that so many other companies are now trying

to chase it on or trying to beat it on.

That has also resulted in the construction of so many data centers that have so many

physical implications on the world around us.

And so as we consider that issue and the role that it played last year,

but the broader impacts of generative AI in particular,

I think the interview that I did with Karen Howe is a great one to go back to as we start off this year.

And before we get into new you know, new original interviews for

2026 that will start next week. And of course, Karen is an award-winning journalist who has written

for many publications and also the author of Empire of AI, probably one of the best books that came

out last year, especially given the subject matter that it covered and how important that was for

the continued conversation around AI, around Sam Altman, and around Open AI in particular.

At this stage, it's really hard to say, you know, what role generative AI is still going to

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