<![CDATA[how to save the world]]>https://howtosaveworld.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EpiH!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6315eeed-904d-4368-b544-27f09a152fc3_400x400.pnghow to save the worldhttps://howtosaveworld.substack.comSubstackWed, 02 Sep 2026 19:42:25 GMT<![CDATA[Am I insane?]]>https://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/am-i-insanehttps://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/am-i-insaneSun, 16 Aug 2026 14:47:18 GMTI can’t help but feel how important all of this is. Often, I catch myself thinking: are you an insane person? You really think this is a problem in the world, while everyone else is just going out to get bread like it’s a normal Tuesday? Obviously, you are the insane one, you’re the minority! If it was a real problem, how has it reached this point? Everyone would have done something by now.

It doesn’t make sense that it has somehow become normal to be watched and tracked; to be turned into a sequence of graphs that can then be sold for profit, only to be turned into more profit by salesmen who have nothing to offer but an annoying doorbell, or maybe a scam. It doesn’t make sense that we accept all of this because, in exchange, we get a little app that does something vaguely useful - or worse, feeds a part of us that is best not being fed. It doesn’t make sense that we accept the abuse of art and expression by giant tech corporations, who feed it all into a machine in the hope they can recreate God - in what I can only guess is an attempt to fill the endless void where their souls were hoped to be. It doesn’t make sense, really. It just doesn’t make sense.

So I’ve personally resolved to make my own art - these videos, or writing - to express where my mind is through what feels like a turbulent time in history. A way to almost get it out of my system, hopefully turning it into something more useful than rattling screws inside my head. The ultimate aim is finding some sort of hope, and good amongst it all, in contrast to the bad.

Stretching it further, I’d love if it contributed to others as some sort of positive upward spiral, working through, rather than sitting in the bad.

In the video I recently posted, I break down my research on surveillance capitalism, and counter-technology that enables private communication on the internet, ultimately resolving in what, to me, is hope. Hope and peace, knowing that there is a way out, or at least I believe so - as long as we work together.

So why does this all matter?

Well until recently, surveillance capitalism felt ‘pretty bad they are doing that’, ‘how naughty’, ‘oh well! TikTok time’. Though, it becomes a large existential threat when you take this and pair it with new powerful technology: quantum computers, attempts at superintelligence, or whatever it is they say they’d like to spawn and potentially end the world.

Now, this surveillance machine starts to become a bit nastier when you imagine either 1) This same small group controlling this surveillance machine gains even more power to use it for greed or 2) they lose control completely, and the machine is suddenly controlled by a machine and things start looking like the hit classic blockbusters about the end of the world starring Arnold.

a picture of someone I don’t knows eyes with cursor arrows laid out like they’re crying at the pain of these potential realities in solidarity.

To me, this only makes finding the good tech, and the people building it, existentially important. One of the largest categories of technology I’ve found so far is cryptography, like that used in Nym, Tor and anything with the goal of being secure. Quantum computers may be able to break much of the encryption we rely on now, but post-quantum cryptography already exists and is designed to resist them. If machines become vastly more powerful, cryptography is still one of the few technologies that can let an individual put a proverbial mathematical wall between themselves and that power. It isn’t magic, and it cannot protect us from everything (despite mathematics sometimes feeling like magic), but it is very powerful for us as individuals, and collective individuals.

Encryption and cryptography can be our defence: both weapon and shield. Mathematical code that can be used by anybody with access to a computer to protect themselves, communicate and coordinate, without waiting for governments or giant technology companies to grant permission.

This access did not always exist - strong encryption was once categorised as a munition and vilified. Public access to these technologies exists now only because cypherpunks and other pioneers fought for it, and that did not come easily. It feels wrong to not seize this gift.

How convenient

It feels to me that this is not widely enough known and instead shrouded in lots of ‘it is a scam’, which I’ve started to feel is a very convenient public sentiment and suspicious. The one technology that can actually create constraints to this other all-powerful technology is positioned as a scam to the world at large? Convenient indeed.

I think we find ourselves again in a similar situation with technology - a swell of new power is being created, and with that, we need an opposite. We need both the same level of access to everyone but also a means to control this access safely. This at a time when companies and governments are trying to keep things contained for themselves, concentrating this significant power in one small place. History has generally shown this should be avoided.

So, yes - I’ve concluded so far, that I am not insane (not for this reason, at least), it all just doesn’t make sense. Cryptography gives us the ability to protect ourselves. This is technology that coordinates, not divides. Technology that empowers anyone that seeks it and even more those that seek it together. I hope we can change the narrative on what this technology can do for all of us. I’m confident we can.

Thanks for reading :) I’d love if you subscribed so I can send you the next one.

I also just published the full sources, and further reading to my latest video here, if you’re interested in reading/watching anything I consumed while making it.

]]><![CDATA[Is this the cure to internet surveillance? (sources)]]>https://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/is-this-the-cure-to-internet-surveillancehttps://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/is-this-the-cure-to-internet-surveillanceSun, 16 Aug 2026 14:31:37 GMTThis is my full sources, corrections and anything else for those interested for my video currently titled ‘Is this the cure to internet surveillance?’

If there is anything wrong, or corrections, please let me know!

Sources & reading list

Main references:

People featured:

Harry Halpin is a computer scientist, privacy activist and the co-founder and CEO of Nym. He previously worked at MIT, where he led the standardisation of the Web Cryptography API, and later left the W3C over its adoption of DRM. Nym

Edward Snowden is a former US intelligence officer and whistleblower whose 2013 disclosures exposed the scale of NSA mass surveillance. He now works on using technology to enforce human rights and sits on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Freedom of the Press Foundation

Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal and co-founder of the AI Now Institute. After more than a decade at Google, she helped organise the 2018 walkout of more than 20,000 workers and later left the company after saying she faced retaliation for her organising and AI ethics work. AI Now Institute

Roger Dingledine is the president, co-founder and an original developer of the Tor Project. He co-authored Tor’s design paper and has spent more than two decades developing anonymity systems that protect people from tracking, censorship and surveillance. The Tor Project

0:00 — when the system succeeds

  • The opening Edward Snowden line and the recurring Harry Halpin footage come from the Nym event linked above.

2:52 — The VPN problem

7:33 — Tor, the not so dark web

10:29 — the all-seeing eye

12:26 — Palantir

16:18 — Nym: the mixnet revolution

18:12 — anonymity loves company

20:17 — the last free generation

Cryptography and cypherpunks

A note on sources and corrections

Let me know if anything is wrong, I will happily correct. I am human, and always crosscheck, but inevitably, I will make mistakes and not find everything always.

Corrections: None at publication.

]]><![CDATA[Counting to 10,000]]>https://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/counting-to-10000https://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/counting-to-10000Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:52:20 GMTBehind the scenes of my next investigation into the surveillance machine, as I hit 10K subscribers on YouTube.

Skip to 2:50 for an edit preview.

My edit file is a bit wild, but it’s also my “field notes”, in a warped way. To say I have pulled a few threads is an understatement, and there might be a few more videos in this yet. If you have any thoughts, or ideas or things to add, let me know.

Thanks for supporting my work, truly!

]]><![CDATA[Palantir has a nemesis and I accidentally found him]]>https://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/palantir-has-a-nemesishttps://howtosaveworld.substack.com/p/palantir-has-a-nemesisTue, 21 Jul 2026 07:34:58 GMTI met a stranger 8 months ago at a privacy hackathon in Greenwich, and this was the last thing he said to me:

“We are entering a chaotic world. And for those people who prepare, chaos can be a ladder.”

It was on a sidewalk, outside, at dusk. The event had a comically large sign, and we were both trying to get a photo with it, so we took one of each other. Instead of parting ways, I thought he looked pretty cool and had a gut feeling he might have something interesting to say. So I asked if I could pull my camera out and ask some questions.

The stranger turned out to be Harry Halpin, a prolific philosopher, anarchist and technologist. PhD at Edinburgh, years at the W3C working on the standards the web runs on (Tim Berners-Lee... the, uh, inventor of the world wide web). Today he builds privacy technology designed to fight the surveillance machine. The image below is him on stage, with Edward Snowden, together. His project, Nym, also has Chelsea Manning as an advisor. He wasn’t just building the defense - he was at the frontier, leading it. I knew none of this at the time.

Harry on stage with Edward Snowden via video link, at a Nym event in Paris.

This chance conversation in Greenwich, where time itself was oriented for the world, ended up also orienting me on a path I never would have imagined.

A bold introduction

The conversation started boldly. Harry made three predictions.

“We’re facing a very geopolitically unstable world, and we’re going to see increases in surveillance, increases in asset seizures, and increased uses of AI. And without privacy, these technologies can be used against human freedom rather than for it.”

He was right on all three, starting with the country I’m from.

Australia’s under-16 social media ban went live in December, a world first. Underneath the child-safety framing, the mechanism is age checks run by each platform separately... everyone proving things about themselves to companies, in the country where Optus leaked over a million people’s identity documents. And the kids just got around it: of those who had accounts before the ban, roughly 2 in 3 still did a few months later, in eSafety’s own compliance update.

The UK also introduced the same rule, and the day its age checks went live, Proton VPN signups jumped more than 1,400 percent in an hour. The workaround became the next target: the Lords voted to bar VPN providers from serving under-18s. That amendment died before the final Act, but what survived is broader - powers to regulate children’s access to whatever internet services the government specifies later.

The surveillance increased, people found the workarounds, so they increased the surveillance and the restrictions. It’s a very brutal cycle that could technically just continue.

The machine’s silent control

I wanted to know why this matters. If governments and companies can link your ID to your online activity, does increased surveillance even mean anything? He didn’t answer with anything about data. He went straight to real life impact.

“If you’ve ever traveled to a different country and then your bank account stops working... imagine if that happened in your own country. Imagine that you were put on a list of undesirables for your political beliefs or, I don’t know, your way of life. And you just woke up one day, you couldn’t access your bank account. What would you do? Most people would have no options.”

Harry was grounding the cost, describing things in real world terms that he knew were already happening. One example I found from February 2022 - Canada froze the bank accounts of convoy protesters - more than 200 accounts, no court orders, and a court later found the banks had picked their targets with a “lack of rigour” from news and social media reports. A list of undesirables, assembled from posts, almost four years before he said those words to me.

And the lists are still being drafted. What puts you on them is constantly changing. Leaked DHS and FBI documents, obtained by Wired, describe a new category: “anti-tech violent extremism.” The reporting on those same documents says the government is monitoring AI criticism nationwide. Criticism. And who draws the line of what an opinion vs threat is? The surveillance machine.

Half of Americans already tell Pew they’re more concerned than excited about AI... that is a lot of people with an opinion. You connect these dots and the picture looks really grim very quickly.

Targeted by the machine

I then asked Harry why he personally cares about this, and he answered with upfront honesty, with a story from his own life.

As a grad student at Edinburgh, Harry was targeted by the Met over his climate activism. Visa pulled, blacklisted for about 10 years. The list has a name, by the way: the domestic extremism database. He took legal action, and he says the Met admitted they were wrong.

It goes deeper than he let on when we spoke. The officer who spied on Harry personally was Mark Kennedy, undercover name Mark Stone, the most infamous spycop in British history. Seven years undercover in the climate movement, a guest in Harry’s house, beside him on the road to Copenhagen in 2009, where Danish police beat Harry in mass arrests a court later ruled illegal.

“I was beaten. They broke my glasses.”

Kennedy was in the end outed by activists, not by police oversight. And he wasn’t one cop gone rogue. He came from a system of undercover squads, the first of which was created back in 1968 to spy on the Vietnam War protesters. His exposure became a public inquiry into all of it, still running today. The tactics it has been uncovering were very bad... bad to the point of building cover identities from the identities of dead children. These units went so much further than a “please don’t do this again” level of wrong.

Excerpt from Political Undercover Policing in Scotland, PILC (2019), p33

This all makes Harry’s fight for freedom against the machine hold a lot of weight. When I asked him on the street whether people’s opinions should ever be muzzled, this was his answer:

“I’m an American, so I tend to believe in freedom of speech. I think that the more voices we have, even if they disagree and they dissent from each other, the better... I think that technology is going to be increasingly important to preserve our democratic freedoms in an increasingly authoritarian environment. And I think on that level, myself and the British state can agree.”

Poison and the cure

The rabbit hole did eventually hit a bottom, and the bottom turned out to be the philosopher who mentored him: Bernard Stiegler. Harry wrote a tribute paper to him that opens:

“It is not every day that the world loses a philosopher at precisely the moment he is needed the most.”

Stiegler deserves a whole story of his own. He robbed banks and spent five years in prison for it, and in his cell he read his way into philosophy. Derrida supervised his doctorate. He became one of the most important thinkers about technology the world has produced.

His core ideas rewired my thinking. Humans are technical creatures - our memory lives outside our bodies, in clay, books, film, hard drives - every new technology remakes us. And every technology is a pharmakon: the poison and the cure, at once. Harry, in his own essay on Stiegler: “the selfsame toxin may also serve as its own cure.”

It is one of the oldest ideas we have about technology. Socrates worried writing would create forgetfulness (the word in that ancient passage is literally pharmakon) and the only reason we know is that Plato wrote it down. A beautiful irony demonstrating the philosophy itself at the root - while Socrates was right, writing gave us everything else.

The printing press spread religious war and mass literacy at once. In the 1950s General Electric was drawing the atom as a genie, destroyer or servant, the bomb and the power plant coming out of the same physics. Postman called every new technology a Faustian bargain, “technology giveth and technology taketh away”. In 1996 Barlow declared the internet independent of governments, two years after Netscape had quietly invented the browser cookie.

Humanity’s dance with technology as a pharmakon has happened for millennia.

two frames from the General Electric film explainer, A is for Atom, 1953 (that’s a genie..?)

For me, the pharmakon put feelings I’d been carrying for years into an actual framework to take action. Because which one wins, the poison or the cure, was never up to the technology. It comes down to the people building it, and what they’re building it for.

Mix the machine

That’s where Harry’s own action comes in, a cure to the poison of what the internet has become - a resistance against the surveillance machine. Nym, a new evolution of the VPN, called a decentralised mixnet. A VPN can be banned because a VPN is a company, and a single company is something a government can stop.

The mixnet idea is older than the web itself - David Chaum published it in 1981. Your traffic gets mixed between many machines with cover traffic and timing obfuscation so that, in Nym’s words, tracing becomes “nearly impossible”. There’s no company to ban and no switch to flip - it’s an entire network all over the world. How the tech works, and whether it holds up, is another deeper dive, and one I am researching heavily right now for a followup piece.

Differences in VPN, Tor and Nym, three evolutions of the technology

The future

In April this year, Harry published the Anti-Palantir Manifesto, a return serve to The Technological Republic, the manifesto Palantir CEO Alex Karp had published. Point 13 stood out to me, for this specific moment:

“We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control. Decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression.”

These words mean more to me, knowing Harry’s story, and why he cares. The state came after him personally, and his answer was not to give up, complain or just yell into the void, but to do something and build the resistance. In another interview I found later, he also expressed the urgency:

“We have a limited amount of time where the surveillance machine is not fully empowered yet, where we can build new technologies to prevent this rather dystopian future from happening. And I think we are accelerating towards that now.”

Technology is accelerating, which means the poison is accelerating, but so can the cure. We can be upset that technology is being used for bad things, do nothing but say how we don’t like it, or we can be like Harry, and do something, because it can be the cure... if we decide.

I’m glad I stopped for that photo with a comically large sign.

p.s

This story and video have gone on to outperform any other solo piece of content I have ever published, and I am so grateful for everyone’s support in getting this message through the glass ceiling of today’s algorithm - thank you. I hope this leads to me being able to put more energy into publishing many more.

More importantly, multiple comments have expressed how they’ve felt hope for the first time in years. I am grateful to be able to share a story that connects in this way, that Harry trusted me to tell it, and that it lit a spark for others in the same way that it did for me.

I do really think, unfortunately, the world is at a crossroads. The choices we make now will determine the outcome not just for us, but what the future looks like for those who inherit the world after us - whether that’s a dystopian horror film or a utopian fantasy novel. I, for one, refuse to just sit here and let hell unravel.

It feels to me as though a needed path to the latter is finding better ways to coordinate and communicate. We have the technology. We have the numbers. We just need to pull it all together, and I hope these stories can be a part of making that a reality.

The algorithm can be both our enemy and our ally.

Thanks for watching and reading.

Aaron Nev

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Find Harry's work: nym.com · The Anti-Palantir Manifesto · Harry on X: @harryhalpin

This story was originally published to YouTube on 10 July 2026 as a video.

Receipts & reading list

Let me know if I have anything wrong (or new leads), I will happily update.

The bans

The lists

Harry and the spycops

The philosopher

The cure

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