In December 2020, two years before ChatGPT, Maria Farrell handed me a name for a character who now seems to be everywhere.

The Prodigal Techbro.

He helps build the machine, cashes out, walks away, and then gets welcomed home as a hero for confessing. Book deals, keynotes, testimony before lawmakers. Meanwhile, the people who saw it coming years earlier are still waiting for someone to return their call.

Swap “social media” for #AI and tell me that isn’t the last three years.

Maria spent twenty years inside tech policy, from ICANN to the World Bank to teaching cybersecurity policy at Oxford, and her writing goes further than most people in that world are willing to go. Over 2.5 hours, we got into why China is selling autocracy as a service, what #feminism can teach us about our relationship with our smartphones, why the Tragedy of the Commons may be a story we were sold, and why the Agrarian Revolution might be history’s greatest fraud.

Then, near the end, she said something about who is coming to save us. I’m still chewing on it.

This one aged better than almost anything I recorded that year. #TechEthics.

Full conversation with Maria Farrell, video and audio: [ https://snglrty.co/4euIxdg](https://snglrty.co/4euIxdg)

Maria Farrell wrote my favorite op-ed pieces of 2020. Her writing is sharper, it penetrates deeper and she’s not afraid to go further. See her interview!