Gaby Hinsliff's Blog, page 2

‘If I felt Zuckerberg and Sandberg were monsters, I wouldn’t have worked at Meta’: Nick Clegg on tech bros, AI and Starmer’s half measures

When Britain’s former deputy PM took a job at Meta, nothing could have prepared him for the ‘cloying conformity’ of the tech world. So why does he still think social media is a force for good?

• Read an exclusive extract from Nick Clegg’s new book here

The rain is just starting to fall from a grey London sky as Sir Nick Clegg arrives, ducking through the traffic and carrying what looks like his laundry. Clean shirts for the photoshoot, he says, before apologetically wondering if he might possibly get a coffee. Within minutes he has further apologised for wanting to swap the leather club chair he is offered for a hard plastic one; and then, in horror, for any impression inadvertently given that my questions might send him to sleep.

Impeccable English manners should never be mistaken for diffidence – at 58, Clegg remains the only British political figure who could convincingly be played by the equally posh but self-effacing Colin Firth, whose old London home Clegg recently bought – but there are backbench nobodies more grandly self-important than the former deputy prime minister who became number two at the tech giant Meta. Which may be just as well, given rumours that his next supporting role may be to his lawyer wife Miriam González Durántez’s nascent political career in Spain. It turns out she “never really settled” in the land of the billionaire tech bro, one of many reasons the couple swapped poolside life in Palo Alto, California, for London almost three years before he left Meta, which owns and operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. “She’s fomenting insurrection in Spain now,” Clegg says of España Mejor, her non-profit aimed at bringing citizens into policymaking.

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How does woke start winning again? – from The Audio Long Read

British progressives have suffered major setbacks in recent years, in both public opinion and court rulings. Was a backlash inevitable, and are new tactics needed?

By Gaby Hinsliff. Read by Carlyss Peer

Find more from The Audio Long Read here

Read the text version here

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Remember when having women in power was supposed to change everything? | Gaby Hinsliff

The careers of Sturgeon, Merkel and Ardern show how foolish it is to idealise leaders just for being women

Nicola Sturgeon was always afraid of failure. But it was a very particular kind of failure she feared; one that follows a very particular kind of success. Living up to the fact of being Scotland’s first female first minister became, she writes in her new memoir, “almost an obsession”, which is arguably unhealthy but not unreasonable. To be the first woman (or indeed the first minority) in any field is to be uncomfortably aware of being on probation: the test case that sceptics will use to decide whether women in general can really hack it, but also the yardstick by which other women will judge whether representation actually makes a difference.

You daren’t betray anything that looks like a sign of weakness, yet at the same time you’re endlessly under pressure to spill your guts on all the intimate stuff – miscarriage and menopause in Sturgeon’s case, pregnancy in high office for New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, also the author of a recent memoir – lest other women feel you’re either holding out on useful information, making it all look too infuriatingly easy, or failing to do your bit to break some taboo. (Even Sturgeon, in an interview this week with the midlife women’s podcast The Shift, expressed surprise that, when she was figuring out how to manage menopausal symptoms in office, she couldn’t find anything to read about how other senior politicians had coped.) Suddenly, you’re not just a woman but an everywoman, supposed to magically embody every female voter who ever existed, even on issues where women in real life are impossibly divided – as they were over trans rights, the issue that ultimately holed Sturgeon’s premiership below the waterline.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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When a journalist uses AI to interview a dead child, isn’t it time to ask what the boundaries should be? | Gaby Hinsliff

The virtual world can bring a kind of friendship and a kind of connection, even to the grieving. But it can also facilitate exploitation of very human needs

Joaquin Oliver was 17 years old when he was shot in the hallway of his high school. An older teenager, expelled some months previously, had opened fire with a high-powered rifle on Valentine’s Day in what became America’s deadliest high school shooting. Seven years on, Joaquin says he thinks it’s important to talk about what happened on that day in Parkland, Florida, “so that we can create a safer future for everyone”.

But sadly, what happened to Joaquin that day is that he died. The oddly metallic voice speaking to the ex-CNN journalist Jim Acosta in an interview on Substack this week was actually that of a digital ghost: an AI, trained on the teenager’s old social media posts at the request of his parents, who are using it to bolster their campaign for tougher gun controls. Like many bereaved families, they have told their child’s story over and over again to heartbreakingly little avail. No wonder they’re pulling desperately at every possible lever now, wondering what it takes to get dead children heard in Washington.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Moral outrage over Bonnie Blue’s porn empire misses the point: this is hardcore economics | Gaby Hinsliff

A commercial instinct created her brand, a market sustains it and mainstream businesses profit. It’s a tale of very capitalist times

Bonnie Blue has sex with men on camera for money. Lots of men one after the other, to be precise, for lots and lots of money: the commercial niche she invented to distinguish herself from countless other amateur porn stars jostling desperately for attention on OnlyFans was inviting “barely legal” ordinary teenage boys (which in porn means 18-plus) to have sex with her on film, and flogging the results to paying subscribers for a fortune. Unusually, her model involves a woman making millions out of men generating content for free, which makes it slightly harder than usual to work out exactly who is exploiting whom if she turns up (as she did in Nottingham) at a university freshers’ week with a sign saying “bonk me and let me film it”.

But debating whether getting rich this way makes Bonnie personally “empowered” seems tired and pointless. It was with this old pseudo-feminist chestnut that Channel 4 justified last week’s ratings-chasing documentary on her attempt to sleep with 1,000 men in 12 hours, a film that finally brought her into the cultural mainstream. There’s more to this story than sex, gender politics or Bonnie herself, and whatever is driving her (which she swears isn’t past trauma, “daddy issues” over a biological father she never knew, or anything else you’re thinking: though she does say maybe her brain works differently from other people’s, given her curious ability to switch off her emotions). It’s at heart a story about money, the merging of the oldest trade in the world with a newer attention economy inexorably geared towards rewarding extremes, and what that does to the society that unwittingly produced it.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Reform’s tales of wasteland Britain won’t work. There’s a far larger market for hope | Gaby Hinsliff

Abundance is Rachel Reeves’s summer beach read, and with its optimistic ideas about energy and housing, it shows the left a possible way forward

Sheer joy. That’s how it felt watching England’s Lionesses romping gleefully across the pitch after their victory in Basel – not just because they won but because of the way they did it, with an exuberance and a resilience and an obvious love of playing together that makes them irresistible to watch. That 65,000 people came out in the drizzle for their homecoming parade down the Mall was testament not just to the deserved new popularity of women’s football but also to the longing for a national event that, even if only briefly, made us feel cheerful, expansive, as if all things were possible.

So it’s interesting that for her summer beach reading Rachel Reeves picked Abundance, the American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s blueprint for the more permanent rebuilding of hope and joy. It’s a pro-growth, techno-optimist rallying cry for progressives to reinvent themselves as purveyors of plenty and good times in contrast to the right’s crabby, mean-spirited “scarcity mindset” – which revolves around the belief that there isn’t enough good stuff to go round and therefore the priority is snatching it back off immigrants or the poor or whatever bewildered former ally Donald Trump accuses of ripping America off.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Summer riots: what have we learned a year on? – podcast

This week marks a year since the murder of three young girls in Southport became a catalyst for riots that spread to many parts of the UK. With scenes of unrest at hotels housing asylum seekers in recent weeks, have we learned anything from the events of last year?

John Harris is joined by Dame Sara Khan, the former counter-extremism commissioner and government adviser on social cohesion, and Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff to discuss how last summer’s violence exposed the fragility of many communities – and what can be done to tackle today’s rising tensions.

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There is a dangerous disconnect: on Gaza, politics no longer speaks for the people | Gaby Hinsliff

The government now faces a daunting task to show that society’s concerns can be reflected. It will need to do better than this

It was meant to be a cosy conversation about cooking and new motherhood.

But BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour took an unexpectedly bleak turn on Thursday morning, when the chef Yasmin Khan turned suddenly tearful in the middle of promoting her new cookbook, saying she couldn’t talk about her own struggles to breastfeed without mentioning the mothers in Gaza unable to provide for their literally starving babies.

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Who will pay for the failure of water bosses? Everyone but them | Gaby Hinsliff

A harder rain needs to fall on those responsible for the water crisis. Let Thames Water fail – it doesn’t deserve a bailout

In a bone dry summer, every drop of water counts. So, even though the rain is finally falling again now, it’s still hard to take it for granted, or to ignore the way that everything in the countryside still feels unnervingly out of rhythm: earth too cracked, grass too bleached, wheat harvest being brought in too early, rivers too low – and, knowing what Thames Water has been pumping into them, water quite possibly too dirty to cool off in.

In May, the company was fined £122.7m for the combined sins of sewage dumping and continuing to pay shareholder dividends despite its environmental failings. It responded by protesting that it might go bust if actually held accountable for its actions, a sentence that sums up everything people find infuriating about the water industry. Yet its resentful customers have no choice but to keep paying bills that are expected to rise by a third over the next five years – though Thames Water, inevitably, asked to be allowed to charge more – while wondering how we ever let a commodity this precious become so badly managed, heading into a volatile new era of summer drought and winter flood.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us | Gaby Hinsliff

If it’s not superinjunctions, it’s Epstein files or deepfakes. It’s hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when sometimes they really are out to get you

If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.

A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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