Show Notes
"Whenever you hear inevitability language, take a very close look at who benefits. And often that speaks to a more old fashioned type of power grab. There is nothing new here."
In the final episode of The Unseen, Claire Belhassine speaks with Baroness Beeban Kidron about Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back, her book on the political economy of Big Tech, written from her position as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and through the lens of her life as a film director.
Baroness Kidron traces her own path from directing feature films to campaigning for children's digital rights, describing how a moment of watching kids silently absorbed in their phones led her, layer by layer, to understand the commercial and political forces shaping the modern internet. She reflects on parliamentary battles fought and won, including one to criminalise AI models built to generate child sexual abuse material, and the campaign joined by figures across the arts to stop the government from giving away creative copyright to AI companies.
She closes by naming her own Godmother: the photographer Eve Arnold, the first woman admitted to the Magnum photo agency, who taught her that the job is never done until you decide it is.
IN THIS EPISODE
The dinner at Google in May 2015, celebrating Tim Berners-Lee on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the World Wide Web, the moment Beeban looked around the room and understood what was coming. Why the system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed. And who it was designed to serve. How children have become, in effect, the unpaid data workers keeping these systems profitable. The crisp packet argument: why a crisp packet carries more legal protection than the products being fed into the minds of children twenty-four hours a day. What the transfer of wealth to a handful of tech companies, now holding more capital than the entire global manufacturing sector, actually means for the rest of us. Why the promises of superintelligence are a cover story, and what the infrastructure being built in their name is actually for. The Five Rights framework for children in the digital world. The parliamentary battle to criminalise AI models built to generate child sexual abuse material, and the campaign to protect creative copyright from AI companies. The twelve-point programme for governments that closes the book, and why technology itself is not the enemy but the social and economic conditions allowed to control it are. Why whenever you hear inevitability language around technology, you should look very carefully at who benefits.
ABOUT BARONESS BEEBAN KIDRON Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE is a member of the House of Lords, a former award-winning film director, a leading voice on children's rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation. She sits as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords. She is Honorary President, founder and former Chair of the 5Rights Foundation, a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics where she chairs the Digital Futures for Children research centre. She holds several roles at the University of Oxford, including as an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI. Until 2024 she was an expert consultant to the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence. Before entering the Lords she was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2012.
Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back by Baroness Beeban Kidron. Published by Penguin, June 2026. Available now at penguin.co.uk and wherever books are sold. Links: beeban.com | 5rightsfoundation.com
This episode was produced and presented by Claire Belhassine for Godmothers Studio. Co-produced with Qays iNsaanja. Sound mix by Kit Proudfoot and music composed by Tara Lily.
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