2025: The Year In Weird

O Come Alaa Ye Faithful, digital unfreedom, AI & FIMI, surveillance gets up in your face, the global war on dissent, Iran takes the cake, my two cents

Dec 30, 2025

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

First, an apology. You’ve heard less from me than usual these past couple of months due to some unexpected illness, but rest assured that I’m alive, mostly well, and still committed to bringing you regular updates on the latest dystopian trends. Sorry for the interruption to your regularly scheduled inboxification.

2025 is just over 24 hours from being over, and as the world prepares for another trip round the sun, I thought it might be ~~fun~~ suitable to cast a look backwards at how weird this year has been.

But before we look back, something too recent, too on-the-nose, and quite simply too delicious to ignore.

O Come, Alaa Ye Faithful

It all started on Boxing Day with a triumphant post on X by embattled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, currently taking serious fire specifically about antisemitism, immigration, speech policing, and violent crime.

Although the BBC reported in October 2025 that the “writer, intellectual and software developer” Fattah had been home for a month after “more than a decade in jail in Egypt”, Starmer’s post was picked up by the news cycle as something that had just happened.

In almost no time at all, it emerged that Fattah had previously been rather spicy in his social media pronouncements, saying that “police are not human”, “I’m a racist, I don’t like white people”, “killing any colonialists and specially zionists [is] heroic”, calling the British “dogs and monkeys”, and promising he’d only use a drone to “shoot zionist weddings”.

Furthermore, it turned out that Fattah, who is described in the media and on Wikipedia as “Egyptian-British”, and whose return to Britain was characterised by the government as unavoidable due to his rights as a British citizen, was granted British citizenship in absentia in 2021 (while he was in prison in Egypt) because his mother was born in London decades ago, despite his lack of any other meaningful connection to the country. His loudly shared vitriol towards white people, Jews, and the police was ignored when his case was processed because of “a 2019 decision by the then-Conservative government (with Labour backing) to “end a requirement for children of one British parent to show they were of "good character”, before they could be given nationality.”

A laundry list of celebrities had pleaded passionately for his release and entry into the UK: Olivia Colman, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Cynthia Nixon, Carey Mulligan, Dame Judi Dench, Joseph Fiennes, Mark Ruffalo, Riz Ahmed, Yanis Varoufakis, Bill Nighy, Dan Stevens, and Emily Watson, to name a few. Their response to the outing of their favoured cause as a self-described racist who openly advocated violence, and insulted the country that granted him citizenship and saved him from an Egyptian prison was, predictably, crickets.

In a chef’s kiss example of an “I’m sorry you feel that way” non-apology, Fattah issued a statement about his previous social media pronouncements: “I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologise.”

Starmer is having trouble shaking the nickname “Two-Tier Keir” exactly because of the optics of this kind of affair.

Lucy Connolly, a British woman of a similar age to Fattah, was sentenced to 31 months in prison for posting on social media that hotels housing migrants should be set on fire in the aftermath of the Southport murders.

The BBC described why Connolly’s crime merited investigation, prosecution, and incarceration, according to the law:

Crown Prosecution Service guidance explains that inciting racial hatred is a criminal offence in England and one of the limited circumstances to not be covered by freedom of expression through the European Convention on Human Rights.

No such prosecution of Fattah has been announced, despite his posts being similarly (even more?) targeted and vicious.1

So somehow the current British government managed to manufacture a scandal, right at the end of 2025, that perfectly encapsulated every major public outcry about their policies: An unvetted (or vetted but permitted) foreign extremist with the most tenuous of claims was granted British citizenship despite avowed hatred for Jews, white people, the police, and the British in general, got treated as a “top priority”, and has been allowed to proceed through his life in the UK unmolested by the authorities while less egregious speech by other Britons is punished by law.

The Crewkerne Gazette dropped a new music video satirising this latest foolishness to the tune of Lola by The Kinks.

Another, shorter video demonstrates the behaviour of Starmer and his government:

And now, let’s look back at 2025, a banner year for dystopian doings that can be roughly organised into the following shades of lame…

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Digital Unfreedom

“The internet is more controlled and more manipulated today than ever before.”

“Global internet freedom declined for the 15th consecutive year”, according to a new Freedom House report, with half of the 18 countries rated as ‘Free’ suffering declines in their scores in 2025.

28 out of the 72 countries measured got worse, while 17 countries got better overall. China and Myanmar remain the worst regimes for internet freedom (but also managed to get worse as well), and Iceland is still the best.

Kenya had “the most severe decline” after tax protests resulted in an internet shutdown and hundreds of arrests, followed by Venezuela and Georgia.

Pakistan is turning Chinese, with CEPA reporting that “Pakistani authorities had installed new censorship technology from a China-based firm that helps maintain that country’s vast system for controlling online information, known as the Great Firewall.”

Geedge Networks, a Chinese “network security” company founded by “the father of the Great Firewall” Fang Binxing, “conducts testing projects in various regions within China in Xinjiang, Fujian, and Jiangsu, to enhance its surveillance and censorship systems” and provides “censorship and surveillance systems to governments from autocratic regimes, including Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Kazakhstan”.

Cambodia has announced plans for a National Internet Gateway, “a single, government-controlled conduit for all incoming and outgoing domestic and international web traffic, facilitating censorship and surveillance”.

Russia “began throttling YouTube”, blocked the encrypted messaging app Signal, and, in May 2025, “began sporadically shutting down access to mobile internet service across the country”.

In Nicaragua, the government “revoked the .ni domain registrations of independent news websites” which effectively forced them out of business, and “amendments to the cybercrime law that were adopted in September 2024 increased criminal penalties for spreading information that the government deems to be false and empowered authorities to obtain user data from telecommunications firms without a court order.”

That last bit takes us to a more insidious element of deteriorating internet freedom. It’s not all about restriction - we are also facing pollution.

The “most consistent global decline over the past 15 years” has been due to “online sources of information [being] manipulated by the government or other powerful actors”.

“Information manipulation campaigns have reshaped online spaces, with common methods including paid commenters who masquerade as ordinary internet users, news sites mimicking trusted outlets, misleading content generated by artificial intelligence (AI), and prominent social media influencers who post progovernment content without clear or formal affiliation.”

No wonder governments around the world are more eager than ever to institute digital ID and online verification to “prevent misinformation”. They hate competition.

AI & FIMI

The global digital information sphere has become a contested geostrategic and ideological battleground.

With the above from Freedom House et al. in mind, FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) is the latest acronym to roll off the EU’s bureaucratic tongue. It is used, according to a March 2025 ‘threat report’, “to manipulate public opinion, fuel polarisation, and interfere with democratic processes within the EU and worldwide.”

The report features a foreword by High Representative2 for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas, who also moonlights as the Vice-President of the European Commission. We all know that being high can make you paranoid, so maybe take her with a pinch of salt when she says that, over the last year, “over eighty countries and over two hundred organisations were the targets of attacks from foreign information manipulation and interference”.

The report also announces a new tool, the FIMI Exposure Matrix, “an instrument to reveal the comprehensive and multi-layered digital architecture put into place by authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China to conduct their FIMI operations”.

A December 2025 ‘briefing’ published by the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) elaborates on how authoritarian actors “continue to fine-tune techniques to manipulate public opinion abroad, to undermine democratic societies and processes, all the while tightening control of the information sphere at home to further their own agenda.”

The EPRS further warns that “democracy is increasingly under pressure not only from traditional authoritarian governments, but also corporate actors who seek to further their interests.”

Naturally, “tightening control over the information sphere at home to further their own agenda” isn’t something any EU countries do, right?

Generative AI (or Gen AI) is a big part of the ramping up on online info-slop. “The broadening spectrum of different types of Gen AI-created disinformation and vehicles used include deceptive websites and deepfake videos and audio,” the EU warns. “Gen AI can also exacerbate other threats, such as gender-based online violence, extremist messaging and hate speech.”

In a telling choice of words, the briefing also describes the threat Gen AI poses to European economies: “The ability of Gen AI to perform human-level tasks and to disrupt the job market could exacerbate inequality and pose risks to tax systems worldwide.”

Leaving aside the well-worn and much-debunked canard that taxes pay for government spending, let’s marvel at how worried the Eurocrats are about their tax haul taking a hit. Strategic information control and tax revenue creep into the crosshairs of a new technology and wow do these folks suddenly get interested.

None of the hypocrisy means that there isn’t serious funk happening in the information space, though.

Between January and March 2025, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that a Russia aligned campaign, ‘Operation Overload’, impersonated over 80 different organisations, for example by using the logos of the organisations or manipulating the voices of staff.

The use of Gen AI to pollute the information space during elections is also well-documented in the briefing:

Moldova: A deepfake of Maia Sandu supporting a pro-Russian party.
Slovakia: Fake audio of “an opposition leader circulated on social media, purportedly discussing election fraud and raising beer prices.”
Global Investigative Journalism Network, based in Maryland, reported fake audio “in the context of elections in the US, India, the UK, Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia.”
European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) found “dozens of accounts publishing almost exclusively AI-generated content on TikTok in Moldova”, a campaign that “aimed to convince users that the EU is attacking the Orthodox religion, that elections would be cancelled, and that the state acts against its citizens.”
Iraq: Facebook failed to flag and remove “viral deepfake AI audio of Iraqi Kurdish politicians purportedly discussing election rigging”.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), “an independent, non-partisan think tank” based in Waterloo, Canada that is funded by “an endowment from founder Jim Balsillie and the Government of Canada, by the Government of Ontario, and by additional funding sources”, also weighed in on the dangers posed by AI, reporting that “in countries across Africa and Asia, political campaigners produced AI content, such as video deepfakes, of former US President Joe Biden and current US President Donald Trump endorsing local political parties and candidates.”

“AI is not a stand-alone disruptor but rather a powerful new layer in existing influence operations, with the potential to outpace rules and regulations if not managed appropriately,” writes Cameron McKay for CIGI.

As if politicians lying to their own people wasn’t enough of an issue, now there are fake videos of the liars lying about other things to other people too.

Surveillance Gets Up In Your Face

“If your credit card is stolen, the bank can give you a new code. But if your biometric identity is hacked, you cannot change your face.”

Biometrics, the personal and immutable markers unique to your body, like fingerprints, face, iris, and voice, are at the centre of the global push to institute digital ID.

Vietnam “wants all citizens served on digital platforms and has made 2026 the official target.” The aim is for everyone in the country to have a national digital ID through the government’s app, VNeID.
South Korea will mandate face biometrics for new phone numbers in 2026.
Wicket’s face biometric entry system is being used at the Alamo Bowl in Texas, drawing college football fans into the FaRT system.
The British government has announced a sweeping digital identity plan and, through its dangerously insecure OneLogin app, a national digital identity card. As ITV News reported this month, “One Login is failing to meet the mandatory, minimum government cybersecurity standards”, with “[p]eople without the expected level of security clearance…able to access the heart of the system, including staff in Romania”.
Laos began the rollout of its digital ID system on December 17: “The new digital identity card will replace the legacy paper-based system and serve as an official proof of identity throughout a citizen’s lifetime.”
Pakistan has ordered that “all ministries use shared national building blocks — digital ID, payments and data exchange — rather than creating siloed systems.”
Swiss citizens voted 50.4% to 49.6% in favour of a national digital ID system, in a referendum that does not appear to have been replicated in any of the countries frequently citing threats to democracy as a major issue.
The EU is following on from its many announcements and policy decisions in 2025, with the following countries rolling out digital ID in 2026.

Meanwhile, perhaps not coincidentally, facial recognition technology also had a banner year.

Amid widespread and growing concern over the deployment of live facial recognition by British law enforcement, the UK Home Office has launched an official consultation aiming “to ensure that the law keeps pace with technological developments and provides clear, consistent rules that the public can understand more easily, and that law enforcement can rely on as they increasingly use these technologies.” Cube Technology reports that, among the Home Office’s proposals, is “a national facial matching service, allowing officers to run searches against millions of custody images through one central system.”

In September, Le Monde published a detailed investigation into how “this highly sensitive technology is becoming commonplace in many countries and is making inroads across Europe.”

Here are some key takeaways from their investigation:

This is happening in Singapore, but also in China, the Gulf states and the United States. Whether in airports, transportation, border control, solving criminal cases and much more, facial recognition has, over the years, become increasingly normalized worldwide.

At its most extreme, this type of surveillance is embodied by China's system of social control, where facial recognition is extensively used in the streets. However, it is also creeping into Western countries, such as the United Kingdom…

In March, Hungary's parliament authorized the use of facial recognition technology to identify people organizing or attending the Pride March, which is now banned by law.

The European Commission’s October 2024 proposal for a “digital travel application” would allow “passengers to store passport or ID card information and a facial image on their mobile device.”

“This concerns us," said Ella Jakubowska, policy officer at the European Digital Rights network, which brings together digital rights advocacy groups. "This proposal would mean creating 27 new biometric databases containing the facial data of potentially all travelers, as well as a completely unprecedented form of processing sensitive data at European borders," she added, fearing possible data hacking risks.”

On May 23, the French Justice Minister a “working group” to develop a plan for the use of facial recognition in France’s public spaces and airports.

The aim is to "create a legal framework" to "introduce this measure into our legislation," even though it is currently forbidden to identify and track someone in real time.

Here’s a cheery infographic from Le Monde:

Dissenter? I Hardly Knew ‘Er

The repertoire of repression includes: i) enactments of new anti-protest laws; ii) creative and strategic use of existing legislation and legal processes; iii) police action, such as arrests, surveillance, harassment and other forms of police violence; iv) disappearances and killings; and v) vilification.

Cracking down on dissent, opposition, and protest isn’t new, but 2025 has had some notable special cases.

Georgia

The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) report that “the Georgian Dream party’s government has orchestrated a coordinated system to silence dissent, dismantle independent civil society organisations, and suppress human rights activism”, and “has built a machinery designed to stifle every independent voice”.

Among the most alarming developments are the adoption of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and the amendments to the Law on Grants, which prohibit or criminalise foreign-funded activities and compel organisations to disclose sensitive personal data of staff and beneficiaries. The arbitrary application of these and other laws, enforced by the government-controlled Anti-Corruption Bureau and courts, have already led to the freezing of NGO bank accounts, politically motivated criminal and administrative prosecutions, and the suspension of numerous human rights and media organisations.

Tunisia

In November, Amnesty International reported that “Tunisian authorities have increasingly escalated their crackdown on human rights defenders and independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) through arbitrary arrests, detention, asset freezes, bank restrictions and court-ordered suspensions, all under the pretext of fighting “suspicious” foreign funding and shielding “national interests”.

In the past four months alone, at least 14 Tunisian and international NGOs received court orders to suspend their activities for 30 days. This includes four prominent organizations in the past three weeks; the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD), the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights (FTDES), Nawaat and the Tunis branch of the World Organization against Torture (OMCT).

The Right To Protest

Oscar Berglund, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, gives examples of recent legislation that prevents or restricts previously lawful protest:

The UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022), for example, allows police to restrict protests’ starting and finishing times, as well as noise levels. Likewise, various state-level laws in Australia and the United States expand the definition of “critical infrastructure” and target popular activist tactics, such as lock-ons. Peru recently passed a law strengthening the ability of the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation to repress NGOs. It stipulates that if an NGO receives funding from abroad, it cannot contribute to the legal defense of activists without state approval through the agency.Many NGOs will now find it difficult to support those persecuted for widespread anti-mining activism in Peru.

The use of anti-terrorism laws against environmental activists is another worrying trend.

In the Philippines, authorities use a tactic called red-tagging to label activists as terrorists, thereby enabling more violent repression. In France, the government sought to dissolve the environmental collective Soulèvements de la Terre using anti-separatism legislation originally intended to police so-called Islamic extremist groups. In Germany and Spain, laws developed to deal with organized crime have been used against climate group Letzte Generation and vegan activist group Futuro Vegetal, respectively. In the UK, courts have limited both the kind of defenses defendants can use and the kind of evidence that can be taken into consideration. This has led to absurd situations where climate activists are on trial, but prohibited to speak about climate change.

There is more from Berglund et al on “the repertoire of repression” in this Environmental Politics article.

Despite all of the above, the inaugural and possibly annual Dystopian Cake-Taker Award goes to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Iran Takes The Cake

The very branch of government that oversees the committee responsible for filtering websites is itself exempt from its own draconian rules.

As reported by The Telegraph and others, a feature update on X that automatically displays a user’s location unexpectedly “exposed government ministers, state media figures, political officials and pro-regime accounts as having accessed the banned platform from within Iran using special white SIM cards.”

As described by Ali Shaker on Medium:

White SIM cards represent information feudalism. This goes beyond simple technological privilege. Society splits into two distinct classes. Digital lords enjoy free and fast internet because they are close to power. They view the white SIM card as a status symbol. It shows they are different. People joke about connections to higher-ups.
Digital serfs face a different reality. Filtering traps the masses. They pay for VPNs and endure slow speeds. Cyber insecurity causes heavy losses. The recent 12-day disruption proved this.
Governments are not the only ones filtering. Access to tools like Google’s Gemini Pro 3 is blocked. This creates a gap in knowledge. Holders of white SIM cards live in a different universe. They see the world as it is. Ordinary citizens experience the world through a narrow lens of restrictions.

Much like Kirby Dick proposed in his 2009 documentary Outrage, that there exists a significant overlap of US politicians who vote against gay rights and end up involved in scandals involving same-sex dalliances, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) point out how galling it is to see politicians committed to censorship swanning around the internet unfettered.

The list of those exposed using these privileged cards reads like a who’s who of the regime’s architects of censorship. Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani, who has categorically denied the existence of a “class-based internet,” was revealed to be using a White SIM. Similarly, Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi, who has publicly criticized the “pollution” of Iran’s internet by widespread filtering, enjoys unfiltered access himself.
Perhaps most galling is the inclusion of hardline members of parliament like Hamid Rasai, a fanatical supporter of internet restriction bills, and Gholam-Hossein Eje’i, the head of the judiciary. The very branch of government that oversees the committee responsible for filtering websites is itself exempt from its own draconian rules.

As the Telegraph reminds readers at the beginning of their article:

Ordinary Iranians face up to 10 years in prison or even execution if they use X to write anything the government deems critical.

Imagine that: You risk execution to learn what’s going on in the world, and then find out the politicians that will kill you for surfing the web and the journalists that defend that policy in print have special access to the reality they want to deny you.

The scandal even uncovered “controlled opposition”:

Also exposed were […] accounts that had claimed online to be opposition voices, including some monarchist and separatist pages operating from inside Iran with apparent government approval.
Analysts say it is meant to keep parts of the opposition narrative under the control of the clerical establishment.

As if this wasn’t all cynical enough, let’s recall that, as the proverb says, the fireman and the arsonist are natural allies. The Iranian regime ‘filters’ the internet, but citizens can pay (and risk their freedom and even their lives) to access the internet through a VPN. PMOI quote an Iranian member of parliament who asked a simple question two years ago: “How can a government that can filter, not be able to filter the sellers of VPNs?”

It turns out that was a very good question with a very depressing answer.

The IRGC, Khamenei’s personal army and the main tool for crushing dissent, is a key operator in this market. The profits fund the very apparatus that oppresses the Iranian people.
Alongside the IRGC is the Mostazafan Foundation, a massive parastatal conglomerate, controlled directly by Ali Khamenei. Investigations by regime-affiliated media have revealed that a subsidiary of this foundation, a company named Kar-a Qeshm Electronic Commerce, provides direct banking gateways for a majority of the websites selling VPNs in Iran. When former minister Jahromi sent a list of 28 VPN-selling companies to the judiciary, no action was taken, because these entities are pillars of the regime itself.

So the mullahs ban the internet for the average citizen, and then run a racket funding/protecting companies that sell VPN software that allows citizens to circumvent the restrictions put in place by the very people invested in profiting from the solution to the problem they created.

Or, as POMI put it:

The Iranian regime’s internet policy is a perfectly designed system of control and plunder. It uses censorship to suppress the population while simultaneously exploiting that same censorship to generate astronomical profits for its repressive apparatus. The White SIM card scandal is not an anomaly; it is a feature of a system built on deceit and discrimination.

To bring us all the way back round to the recurring theme of this Substack and the podcast, here’s a final quote from The Telegraph piece:

Journalist Yashar Soltani compared the situation to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He said: “When freedom is rationed it’s no longer freedom – it’s structural discrimination.”

My Two Cents

What do all of the above say about the world as it is and as it is shaping up to become?

The two following points come to mind.

Ongoing Epistemic Collapse

When nothing can be trusted, citizens are easier to manipulate. Apathy becomes a political asset. From Orwell to Arendt, this song has been sung repeatedly over the years. Trust in government, in the rule of law, in the likelihood of receiving justice, in the probability of hearing the truth from the ruling class and the media, the trust in one another as fellow humans of ultimately like mind and intent - take an axe to all that and you can forget about the tree, the whole forest comes down.

Tech Designed To Serve Power

Information technology is inherently centralised, centralisable, and centralising. Whether these systems are set up intentionally to increase power distance and opacity, or can be pushed by regulation and rhetoric into achieving those ends anyway, is in a sense irrelevant. Once facial recognition, digital ID, and biometric surveillance are commonplace, accepted, and institutionalised, social credit, neofeudalism, and technocratic repression are only the push of a button away. So many of the technology trends we see around us are the building blocks of turnkey tyranny. A major hallmark of authoritarianism in the past was its expense; once it is affordable or even cheaper, it would be both illogical and uneconomic to expect the powerful to preserve a more chaotic, less controllable society by protecting liberties they can rescind with the flick of a switch.

Worrying? I’d say so.

Inevitable? Perhaps, but in the uncertainty of that inevitability lies our best opportunity to preserve liberty.

May we use it wisely.

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