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Ich habe mich früher häufig gefragt, ob die Welt heute so wäre, wie sie ist, wenn es keine Sci‑Fi Filme gegeben hätte, oder ob vieles, was wir heute um uns haben, genau deshalb da ist, weil die Menschheit sich eben von jenen Filmen hat inspirieren lassen. DW geht genau jener Frage mal nach.

Before ‚Star Wars‘. Before ‚Blade Runner‘. Before every futuristic city, rogue android, or AI uprising you’ve ever seen, there was ‚Metropolis‘ (1927). This video dives deep into how Fritz Lang’s silent-era masterpiece built the visual language of modern sci-fi, shaped pop culture for a century, and predicted the world we live in today: AI, surveillance, mega-cities, class conflict, and the fear of machines taking over. We explore: The story of ‚Metropolis‘ and its groundbreaking themes, how Robot Maria became the blueprint for C-3PO, Ava in ‚Ex Machina‘, and every seductive android since and why ‚Metropolis‘ still shapes the future, nearly 100 years later.

(Direktlink, via Neatorama)

Over the course of a six hour long or so deposition, Justin Fox, a former investment banker turned DOGE bro, refused to define what he believes counts as DEI; admitted he used ChatGPT to scan government contracts for terms such as “Black” and “homosexual” but not “white” or “caucasian;” and said that one of the grants he helped slash was “not for the benefit of humankind” before walking that claim back.

I watched all of Fox’s deposition from start to finish. The terse exchanges, the circular arguments, the pregnant pauses, all of it. The videos, available publicly on YouTube, were released as part of a lawsuit by the Modern Language Association, American Council of Learned Societies, and American Historical Association. They provide fascinating, or perhaps horrifying, insight into the thinking of someone inside DOGE. Even with Fox’s inability to answer seemingly easy questions, the responses are still illustrative of the recklessness and hamfisted nature of a group of young, inexperienced people who caused massive damage across the U.S. government, leading to negative consequences outside of it. DOGE as an organization has been linked to 300,000 deaths due to its cuts and multiple significant data breaches. All the while, DOGE did not actually reduce the government’s deficit. 

Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.

“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need to act like a gay person,” he told me at a coworking space I met him at in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers, developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex. 

“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”

Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies. 

Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.  

These workers are required to stare at horrific content for many hours straight with few mental health resources, are largely managed by opaque algorithms, and, crucially, are the workers powering the runaway valuations of some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

“You can’t understand where you’re positioned if you don’t understand your history,” Angela, one of the day’s speakers, told the workers who had assembled there (many of the speakers at the event did not give their full names). “When you think of colonialism, we were under British Imperial East Africa Company […] so literally, we are working under a company. We are just products, part of their operation. Stakeholders, we can say, but we are at the bottom of the bottom.”

“These multinationals are coming to rule and dominate here,” she added. “It’s a very unfortunate supply chain, and my call today as data labelers is to build up on this—as we are fighting for labor rights, we are also fighting for the environment […] we are fighting big companies. We are fighting the British imperialist companies of today. It’s Apple, it’s Meta, it’s Gemini. Those are the ones we’re still fighting. It’s a call for solidarity and expanding our thinking beyond what we are doing, beyond our labor.”

In my few days in Kenya earlier this year, where I was traveling to speak at a conference about AI and journalism, it was immediately clear that data labelers make up a significant portion of the country’s tech workforce. Nearly everyone I spoke to there had either been a data labeler (or a content moderator) themselves or knows someone who has. Leaving the airport in Nairobi, you immediately drive by Sameer Business Park, an office complex that houses Sama, a San Francisco-headquartered “data annotation and labeling company” that has contracted with Meta, OpenAI, and many other tech giants. Sama has been sued repeatedly for its low pay and the fact that many of its workers suffer PTSD from repetitively looking at graphic content. For years, a giant sign outside its office read: “Samasource THE SOUL OF AI.” My Uber driver asked why I was going to a random office building in Nairobi’s Central Business District—I told her I was going to interview a data labeler. “Oh, I do data labeling too,” she said.

Two neighboring lots in North Vancouver, British Columbia, were combined into a single ground plane where a main residence, a pool house, and a greenhouse sit not as standalone buildings but as moments within one continuous landscape. Designed by Garret Cord Werner Architects with interiors by HB Design, landscape by Donohoe Living Landscapes, and built by Meister Construction, the project treats architecture, interiors, and terrain as a single continuous material argument – one where no element claims hierarchy over the others and every threshold between inside and outside is deliberately blurred.

Roughly 6,100 square feet of built space splits between a three-level main house at 4,235 square feet and a 1,870-square-foot pool house. No corridor or breezeway connects them – just an alley that the landscape plan turns into a real threshold, not an afterthought. Open the interior gates and a view corridor cuts clean through both properties. The greenhouse and vegetable planters face the public lane, and boulevard plantings spill past the property line. Ryan Donohoe, founder and principal landscape designer at Donohoe Living Landscapes, treated the boundary less like a fence and more like a civic gesture – pushing back against the fortress thinking that drives so much suburban residential work.

The modern farmhouse vocabulary of the architecture – brick, wood slat, and generous glazing – finds its counterpoint in HB Design’s interior material strategy. Shannon Bradner, partner at the studio, led the interior work alongside principal Jennifer Heffel, joining the project at a relatively advanced stage yet delivering a drawing package that the construction team at Meister found remarkably swift and coordinated. The palette reads neutral and earthy, pulled from the tones already present in the surroundings, but what actually sets the interiors apart is how familiar materials get reworked to sidestep their usual associations.

Porcelain tile, quartzite, and carefully chosen woods were selected as much for how they catch and shift light throughout the day as for their tonal fit with the architectural brick. Bradner’s approach layers varied textures against one another – softening the precision of the architecture and pulling warmth into rooms that could easily have gone cold. The sourcing alone took several months, a painstaking calibration of undertone and grain that speaks to the kind of material connoisseurship more commonly associated with high-end hospitality than single-family residential work.

View more information on HB Design’s website.

Photography by Ema Peter.