In her final piece for the Observer, Carole Cadwalladr reveals what happened when she returned last week to give the opening speech at Ted, where she gave her first – life-changing – talk six years ago
To walk into the lion's den once might be considered foolhardy. To do so again after being mauled by the lion? It's what … ill-advised? Reckless? Suicidal? Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world's leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I'd learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving "broligarchy" – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics. But as I wrote several drafts in the week leading up to last week's talk in Vancouver, Canada, I had what felt like a slow-motion anxiety attack. One insistent question throbbed like toothache: why? Why, after everything that had happened last time, was I putting myself through it all over again? In 2019, my first Ted Talk, entitled "Facebook's role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy", sent a shock wave across the conference, then the internet and then my life. I ended up facing a defamation suit over 19 words contained in it, that ate up my time, energy and, as time went on, my sanity. And now here we are. In the first weeks of the second Trump presidency, with Elon Musk ripping up the US government. The power of the tech titans – the subject I've been investigating and reporting and talking about for the past nine years – is now finally front and centre. But now it all feels too late. My warning then – that democracy may not survive technology – was not heeded. I'd be speaking, again, directly to Silicon Valley, to the men – because it is men – who are building the…