Review: Coda Story’s ‘Captured’ and the Tech Takeover We Can't Ignore
A gripping journey through Silicon Valley’s ambitions (missing only one piece of the puzzle)
I didn’t start my Substack to write reviews. That wasn’t the plan. But when Captured dropped - a podcast digging into the secretive world behind Silicon Valley’s AI takeover (and I binged the whole thing in one sitting), I knew I had to write something about it. Partly because it overlaps so much with the speculative fiction I’m working on. And partly because, well, I’m my own editor here. I get to do what I want.
Small disclaimer before I dive in: I used to work with Coda Story, a newsroom focusing on the ways technology, authoritarianism, and power intersect. Isobel Cockerell was one of my colleagues there, and I have huge respect for her as a journalist, as a storyteller, and as someone who never shies away from the hard, messy parts of a story. Once again, with Captured, she’s managed to tell a complicated, unsettling story exactly the way it needed to be told: sharp, human, and unafraid to sit with complexity.
With that said, I want to start with one of the reasons the series pulls you in so deeply. Because Captured isn’t just well-reported, it’s immersive. And a lot of that comes down to the pairing of Cockerell and Christopher Wylie. Wylie, who blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica, brings the insider’s view. The kind you only get by seeing how the system actually works from the inside. Cockerell brings the outsider’s perspective: focused, sharp, and willing to stay with the parts of the story that are harder to explain away. Their perspectives aren’t identical, and that’s part of the strength of the series. It feels less like a single narrative being handed down and more like a conversation unfolding across experiences.
You can feel it especially in moments like this: after attending a tech conference, Wylie tries to fly home, but a natural disaster has shut everything down. Instead of talking to Cockerell in person, he calls her and talks to her about how there is flooding, how infrastructure is falling apart. But just a few miles away, some of the same tech elite who spent the week talking about saving the world are throwing a blackout party. They’re paying enormous amounts of money to bring in generators, just to keep the music going, while the local population is left trying to survive the disaster around them.
And it was moments like this that are sharp, unforced, willing to sit with discomfort, that reminded me why I kept listening. Because to be honest, I was a little skeptical going in.
Not because I doubted the reporting skills behind it (I expected the story to be serious, complicated, in-depth, knowing Coda Story and Cockerell), but because after years of consuming tech reporting, both professionally and otherwise, it’s hard not to notice the gaps. And Captured doesn’t fall into that trap. If anything, it does the harder work of staying with the parts that don’t fit neatly into the standard tech story.
Silicon Valley’s Myths and the People Left Behind
I consume a lot of reporting about tech. I have for years. Partly because it’s a professional interest, partly because it’s been unavoidable. From the early days of crypto, when some of us still believed it might be a way out of capitalism, to helping build tools for activists and journalists trying to survive in surveillance states. I’ve seen how tech shifts: from potential to profit, from community to control. Maybe that’s why I usually approach new reporting on tech with a healthy dose of caution. Not cynicism, but not wide-eyed enthusiasm either. Too often, even good reporting misses the real stakes: the people already paying the price for the next "innovation," and the systems that were never designed to serve them in the first place.
From the start, Captured makes it clear that it’s not interested in Silicon Valley’s PR version of reality. It focuses on the people who aren’t at the conferences, the ones who are already living with the impact of AI systems that were built without them in mind.
From the start, Captured makes it clear that it’s not interested in Silicon Valley’s PR version of reality.
One of the strongest parts of the series focuses on hidden workers, the people training AI models for extremely low pay, dealing with real psychological damage, with little to no recognition that their labor exists at all. It’s a side of the AI story that gets buried under headlines about job losses and market shifts. Captured doesn’t treat this as a footnote. And that’s one of the things that makes it worth hearing.
Another thread that runs through the series, more quietly but just as consistently, is the idea of belief, in the way Silicon Valley has built its own mythology around progress and salvation through technology. If we just innovate faster, give up a little more control, wait a little longer, everything painful will eventually disappear. Listening to the interviews, it becomes clear how dangerous that belief can be. It demands sacrifices, and it rarely asks those making the promises to be the ones paying the cost.
One moment in particular stayed with me (not because it was shocking, but because it was so familiar). At one point, one of the people Cockerell interviews mentions that the EU is killing innovation. She pushes back, specifically, asking whether strong frameworks like those being developed by the EU might actually help prevent some of the worst-case scenarios tech is moving toward. The answer she gets is predictable. All those regulations are just slowing things down. But the truth is, when you build a world where innovation matters more than impact, it becomes almost impossible to imagine a different way. And what you start to see, listening to moments like this, or watching the blackout party unfold after a natural disaster, is the same thing: a deep disconnect between the world tech leaders imagine for themselves and the reality everyone else is forced to live in.
That disconnect isn’t new. But what Captured does so well is show how it’s no longer just a tech industry problem, but implying how it’s being dragged into government, too. The philosophy that Musk and others are pushing (break things first, fix them later if you can) isn’t just careless when it comes to companies anymore, it’s careless when it comes to democracy itself. And what gets broken in that process won’t always be fixable.
One of the other strengths of Captured is that it doesn’t just focus on individual bad actors, but it pulls the lens back to the systems that made them possible. The choices, or the lack of choices, that let a small group of people accumulate godlike power over technologies that touch every part of modern life. The early political decisions, especially in the US, to give tech companies massive freedom without serious accountability, under the assumption that innovation alone would steer us in the right direction.
The choices, or the lack of choices, that let a small group of people accumulate godlike power over technologies that touch every part of modern life.
But we are living with the consequences of those decisions now: polarization and inequality. The feeling that the future is being built by people who aren't especially interested in whether most of us survive it.
Captured doesn’t frame this as inevitable either. It asks the harder questions, the ones that ethicists like Timnit Gebru and others have been raising for years: Who should own and govern technology? Who gets to decide what risks are acceptable? And what would it look like if we had taken those questions seriously before the damage was already done?
How the Ultra-Conservative Playbook Found a Perfect Weapon
But if I have one critique, and it’s a small one (potentially cut from the original because it would demand a few more chapters), it’s that toward the end of the series, the frame narrows in a way that left me wanting more. As the story moves closer to the present, there’s a clear line drawn: how tech billionaires, who once leaned Democratic, shifted their support both financially and rhetorically to the far right. And how their influence helped shape the political climate that made the current U.S. election landscape possible.
The argument is persuasive: that without their support, the landscape might have looked different. That in chasing their own power, they helped accelerate the unraveling of democratic norms. And while I think there’s real truth in that, I also think it’s missing a few important layers.
One is that the tech billionaires themselves didn’t exist in a vacuum. The algorithms they designed, the ones that reward outrage, disinformation, division, shaped them, too. As Maria Ressa points out so clearly in the series, lies spread a hundred times faster than the truth.
And when your platforms, your data streams, your business models are built around engagement at any cost, it’s not surprising that the far right's rhetoric, more aggressive, more emotional, more absolute, started to dominate. Maybe it’s not just that tech bros wanted more power. Maybe it’s that they, too, were being shaped by the very systems they created.
And the second layer that felt missing to me is even older and even more intentional.
For decades, the ultra-conservative right has been building a coordinated international movement.
For decades, the ultra-conservative right has been building a coordinated international movement. I’ve reported on it myself: how they studied what narratives would land with centrists and how they adapted their language to win new audiences. Not by opposing LGBTQI rights outright, but by singling out trans people. Not by attacking IVF broadly, but by framing surrogacy as the new battleground. Not by confronting feminism head-on, but by co-opting its language to erode it from within. It wasn’t random. It was a long, careful campaign, one that laid the groundwork for exactly the kind of polarization we’re seeing now.
In that context, tech didn’t just fuel disinformation by accident, but it amplified a strategy that was already in place designed to infiltrate, to sow doubt, to chip away slowly until the political ground shifted. And while Captured hints at this at times, through the broader questions it asks about power and governance, I think it would have been even stronger if it had pulled that thread a little further.
Tech didn’t just fuel disinformation by accident, but it amplified a strategy that was already in place designed to infiltrate, to sow doubt, to chip away slowly until the political ground shifted.
Because when you look closely, there are a few different possibilities. Maybe some tech billionaires were genuinely pulled into far-right ideology. Not as a deliberate choice at first, but through years of exposure to the environments they helped build that reward outrage, division, and fear over nuance or collective responsibility. Or maybe they were already leaning that way, long before it became obvious. Maybe the libertarian streak that runs through so much of Silicon Valley culture (the obsession with deregulation, personal freedom above all else) was always going to push them closer to authoritarianism once it served their interests. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe they never cared much about ideology at all. Maybe wealth and power were always the priority, and when the far right offered a faster, easier path to protect their influence, they took it, without much concern for what would happen to the rest of us.
And honestly, it’s probably not one explanation. It’s probably all of them, overlapping and feeding each other.
Captured, even with the pieces I wished it had explored more, does an exceptional job of showing just how high the stakes really are.
Either way, the result is the same. The systems they built and the choices they made helped create the world we’re living in now. And Captured, even with the pieces I wished it had explored more, does an exceptional job of showing just how high the stakes really are.
Fiction Meets Reality: Why This Story Feels So Familiar
Maybe that’s part of why Captured hit me so hard. Because the questions it raises (about who builds the future, who gets sacrificed for it, and who gets left behind) are the same questions I keep circling back to in my fiction. In The Medusa Code, I explore a world where the collapse isn't sudden, but slow and deliberate, hidden under layers of corporate promises and political erosion. In The Midwife’s Code, the betrayal isn’t just personal, it’s systemic, woven into the way institutions pretend to protect while quietly dismantling the people they claim to serve. Even in my shorter essays, like The Last Seeds of Resistance, I keep coming back to the same tension: the lies we are sold about progress, and the quiet violence required to sustain them.
The questions Captured raises (about who builds the future, who gets sacrificed for it, and who gets left behind) are the same questions I keep circling back to in my fiction.
Listening to Captured felt like watching the nonfiction version of the world my characters are trying to survive. And that's why I think people should listen to it. Not because it offers easy answers, it doesn't. Not because it tells you exactly what to think, it refuses to. But because it forces you to sit with the discomfort. To see how the stories we tell ourselves about technology, innovation, and inevitability are shaped by power. And how easily those stories can slide into something much darker if we aren't paying attention.
Captured isn’t just a podcast about Silicon Valley. It’s a warning about who gets to imagine the future and who pays the price for it. And right now, I think we need that warning more than ever.
You can listen to it here:
If this resonated (if you’re interested in more reflections like this or want to read the worlds I’m building out of the same unease), you’re welcome to stick around. I write fiction and essays about collapse, survival, and the quiet ways we imagine something different. You can subscribe here if you’d like to follow along.