There is a thing in the bedroom now.

It talks back. It learns her voice. It is in litigation, this year, for the deaths of children.

Episode 6 of Sacred Space is about the AI companion industry, the Character.AI and OpenAI lawsuits, and the question almost nobody is asking. Not why the chatbots exist. What was here before them.

Julia Wolf in the headphones. Arlie Hochschild on emotional labour. Lauren Berlant on the attachment that diminishes you. Lola Olufemi on what feminist care infrastructure would actually look like. The Strong Black Woman trope and the labour that was always cheap. The £1.3 billion taken out of council youth services since 2010. The CAMHS waits the chatbot is filling.

The chatbot is not winning because the chatbot is good. The chatbot is winning because the chatbot is what is there.

Out now wherever you get your podcasts. Full essay on Substack, link in bio.

If you are in a moment of difficulty, Samaritans 116 123, free, 24 hours.

#sacredspace #podcast #feminism #aiaccountability #youthmentalhealth #characterai #chatbots #carework #blackfeminism

The pipeline does not announce itself. That is its job.
You scroll. You see something. You laugh. You scroll. You see something else. You laugh, slightly less. You scroll. The third thing is harder to laugh at, and somewhere in your gut, in a place older than language, your body registers that something has shifted. But you are tired. You are scrolling because you are tired. You keep going.

Six months later you are looking at content that is no longer funny and you cannot remember when it stopped being funny. You cannot remember the path you took to get here. The algorithm has been refining your taste so steadily, so quietly, so professionally, that the version of you who is now nodding at things would have been horrified, six months ago, by where you ended up.

That is the pipeline. That is what it is. That is what it does. And it is happening, right now, in the bedrooms of millions of teenage boys in this country, while we sit downstairs and reassure ourselves that we have raised them well.

What gets done to women's anger before we have a chance to use it. And what it means to keep yours.

I recorded this on my journey, can you guess where I'm going? I just need to get these thoughts out for you. Episode 2 of Sacred Space is out now. On prophecy as the oldest human desire, the priesthood we are building around the algorithms, and why Cassandra is the patron saint of the field I work in.

#SacredSpace #AI #AIEthics #Technology #Surveillance

Three women in this country will be killed by men this week. The UN says we will reach gender parity in 2158. The volume on the conversation has gone down, not up.

Sacred Space is back. Episode 2 is about the gap between what the data on violence against women is telling us and what the public conversation is willing to say.

Leah covers the 2158 projection and what 132 years actually means. Three women a week killed by men in the UK. 59.2% with evidence of overkill. 78% in their own homes. The names you have heard and the names you have not. The Pelicot case and what it proved about ordinary men. Sean Combs, Conor McGregor, the Andrew Tate ecosystem. The tradwife pipeline as reactionary politics with a Pinterest board. The Reform UK threat to existing VAWG infrastructure. The Caribbean feminist tradition that frames the season (Lorde, Wynter, Carby, Condé, Brodber, Breeze). And what to do now, given that we do not have that kind of time.

Specialist organisations referenced: Refuge, Women's Aid, Sistah Space, Southall Black Sisters, Imkaan, Karma Nirvana, Counting Dead Women, the Femicide Census.

Full written version and reading list on Substack - https://open.substack.com/pub/711eah/p/we-do-not-have-that-kind-of-time?r=4r8ies&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true .

Next week: Digital Divination. AI, prophecy, and the politics of prediction.