Desinformación y la Manosfera Global, con Odanga Madung

KEVIN MALONEY: Today on the Values & Interests podcast I am joined by Kenyan journalist and researcher Odanga Madung. As a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and managing director of Odipo Dev, a Nairobi-based media advisory firm, Odanga is an expert on how the information landscape is chipping away at democracies around the world. We discussed the corrosive effects of misinformation and disinformation on open societies, the rise of the “manosphere” influencer in Kenya and the United States, and the power of narrative in shaping our collective future.

As always, be sure to subscribe to Carnegie Council on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Now let’s get into my conversation with Odanga.

Odanga and I actually met during the UN General Assembly (UNGA) a few weeks back in New York in this flurry where you go from meeting to meeting to meeting, and it is always interesting when I look at my notes year-in and year-out; there are the people you had the really interesting conversations with or loved their presentation, and Odanga was at the top of that list. Thanks so much for joining us today.

ODANGA MADUNG: Thanks a lot, Kevin. I am glad because I know how much of a flurry UNGA can be. I am not sure if I am on the top of it, but at least I am happy to have shown up on your list.

UNGA surprised me in terms of it being my first rodeo at UNGA. I did not know the amount of fitness it requires both mentally and physically with walking around New York. I was absolutely surprised and blown away by the experience.

KEVIN MALONEY: For our listeners, you mean fitness in a very literal sense, because for those who have not been to UNGA or are not based in New York, like I am, normally you can take a cab if you are late for a meeting, but the entire Midtown shuts down and you are much faster walking across Manhattan the whole time. There’s a little bit of inside information for those who have not been to the UN General Assembly before.

ODANGA MADUNG: You have to carry the right shoes. You meet people who come to UNGA for their first day and they are wearing their sharpshooters and their heels, and then they realize they can sit in a taxi for two hours and still have to walk 40 minutes across New York to get to their next meeting. I remember on several occasions bumping into people walking and we were just like, “Yeah, this thing is crazy.” It was a pleasure to meet you in New York. It was really cool.

KEVIN MALONEY: Odanga, what we do on the Values & Interests podcast is look at questions of morality and power within international relations, but values and your moral makeup—these institutions, these companies, these nonprofits are made up of individuals and individuals have value systems, and those value systems influence the institutions themselves—so I would love to start by hearing a bit about your personal background, your value system, and how that informs your work today.

ODANGA MADUNG: My personal background actually comes from maybe two things, which is that I run a company in Kenya called Odipo Dev, which largely focuses on carrying out market research and civic research with the aim of moving people toward action. My background in that sense is largely actually in advertising. In my heart, heart, heart I am an ad man. It is therefore not surprising that when you look at politics you see a lot of marketing and advertising thoughts in terms of trying to understand how to get people toward change in a scalable manner.

At the heart of it for me, one of the things that really counts, especially when it comes to doing my work, is that the work has to be a feeling. The work needs to move people and the work needs to reach as many people as possible, and those are some of the key values that I took up from working for years in the advertising world.

I began to establish myself as a journalist and have written for various publications. Actually the first publication I ever wrote for was BuzzFeed, which was of course an interesting experience, coming as an ad man and moving into BuzzFeed, where the ethos is essentially the same: “What we want to do is find out how exactly we move people.” I was under the tutelage of Craig Silverman for about a year, and he basically taught me a lot of the things I know about journalism today, particularly with regard to how aggressive you need to be in terms of the accountability approach that you need to take toward the work you are doing, that journalism is not here to pay lip service to people; journalism is here particularly for the purposes of accountability, and that is the framing you should be using.

You have every right to be as antagonistic as possible in journalism. To hell with the idea of “free and balanced.” Especially in this time when we are facing the rise of authoritarianism across the world, I think it is something that is becoming clearer and clearer in terms of the kind of positioning people in my sphere need to take in order to be effective with their work.

My value system is largely grounded in how do you move people to action with the principles of advertising largely working behind that, and how do we hold systems to account? That is largely how I think about my journalism as well. I believe leverage is there to be found in the pieces of work that they tend to occupy.

KEVIN MALONEY: Part of my research at the Council—and listeners will know this—is focused on geopolitical narratives that are specifically values-based. As I hear you talk through your own experience, starting as a journalist the value proposition in and of itself is to have a powerful narrative that people engage with, socialize, and share, etc. That has not been the case for many years in the halls of foreign policy or geopolitics, and you have had this ping-pong game back and forth between research and policy and research and policy.

In the last few years I argue that narrative is now more important than ever. We are going to get into why that is from a media ecosystem perspective, but with all of these principles of internationalism and democracy, I think people were asleep at the wheel for a while on the narrative side.

That is my thought of the current geopolitical moment and the importance of narratives. I want to get your response to that. Do you agree or disagree?

ODANGA MADUNG: I completely agree with regard to the aspect that, yes, you have policy and research and then narrative, and for the longest time—in fact, if you speak to a lot of people, they began getting worried about the narrative a very long time ago when you think about aspects, for example, such as the manosphere.

The manosphere predated the current world order we are in by maybe three to four years. It was one very significant shift where people began ringing alarm bells about it and saying, “Hey, there is something very serious going on here, and we need to start paying attention to it.” A large chunk of the significant shifts that have happened in the political world order, at least in the West, have largely also been driven by narrative.

Before now, we began to see a huge, huge, and fundamental anchor shift in terms of policy. At first we started seeing all these elections with weird political outcomes popping up across different countries across the world, and there has been a very significant investment within various political circles in narrative first, in framing first, and that is the primary place where the battle would happen, and then everything else would follow. I tend to agree with you in that respect.

You know how I had a feeling that Trump would win last year?

KEVIN MALONEY: I’m on the edge of my seat. Tell me.

ODANGA MADUNG: The return of Creed, the fact that Creed became popular again. I was like, “What?”

KEVIN MALONEY: For the listeners, Creed is an American band. You can google it, iTunes, Spotify, etc.

ODANGA MADUNG: Exactly. This hankering for nostalgia back to the era when Creed was popular and all of that kind of stuff, I was like: “That is a very strange thing. What are you guys pulling Creed out of the bag for?” I found that to be a very interesting thing.

I think my presentation at the convening where you saw me was about tracking pop culture as a narrative barometer, especially for politics. I specialize particularly in that. It is one of the barometers I tend to pay attention to, and I am trying to calibrate where Kenya is at and also where the world is that. I do tend to pay attention to a lot of those.

The Creed one was very interesting because, “Oh, I did not expect that.” It is one of the things I was like, “Hm. There is definitely something going on in America that we need to pay attention to.”

KEVIN MALONEY: Let’s push on that a little bit. In doing the analysis of soft-power collapse in the United States in the last few months—collapse applies inadvertent to a bit, but I will use the phrasing “strategic” collapse—with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Voice of America, all those things, one of the things we diagnosed was that the narrative was just failing outside of elite circles. People saw this in and of itself as valuable, ethical, and virtuous, so therefore the wheel was going to keep turning forever and the funding was going to keep turning forever.

I think that exposed an elitism in terms of trying to project a narrative to elites or project a narrative in a very elite, top-down way, and what you are focused on are these other signals in terms of political movements from the bottom up, culture being one of them. In your presentation you talked about how this is happening in Kenya around the political scene right now, so perhaps we could go there. Again, feel free to challenge my diagnosis in any way.

ODANGA MADUNG: That is the key thing. First of all, talking about USAID, and this is the weird thing about what we are talking about right now. If someone told me that I needed to pay attention to Creed in order to understand whether USAID would be here today or not, I don’t know what I would have told you.

Let me not lie to you. I have seen my neighbors move out and shift houses because they thought the aid wheels would keep turning, and they have had to shift house because they got laid off. Each block in my apartment house has people who have moved out. The death of that world order was coming, but people had seen it coming—there had been reductions in funding happening—but the extent to which the gutting of USAID occurred was quite unprecedented.

One of the key things in politics I always say is that you always want to understand what someone does first because what someone does first, especially what an administration does first, is what sends out the biggest message. To me, when we talk about narratives and values, the fact that they went after USAID first told me everything I needed to know about what the Trump administration was going to do.

I am going to say this. It is not that they are bad people; it is just the alignment of priorities. They are going to come at this business first, they are going to come at this trying to understand what they clearly have to gain from it, and they are going to come at this from the perspective of: “Look, we are not interested necessarily in being the watchdog of the world anymore. You guys are just going to have to understand that, and we are going to make it very clear what our interests are in this space, and that’s it.”

You have seen that rhetoric continue. It does not mean that they have closed themselves off to conversations. It just means that there has been a very clear realignment of that conversation, but, man, it has been so destructive I must say, and the lack of political response from our leaders on this side of the world is now what is leading to the kinds of change we are seeing.

You want to ask yourself the question—and this is correlation, not causation—in the year that USAID gets pulled out of several countries in the world we see the highest rise in this kind of youth uprisings across different parts of the world; is it a coincidence? I don’t know. I am not pulling on my Joe Rogan hat, the conspiracy theory side of things, but it was bound to have some form of political consequence, especially given the fact that the poor die in silence and that USAID was funding a lot of the things that the poor rely on, free HIV medicine, free malaria medicine, and antenatal care for mothers. Those were very, very important things, but unfortunately the privileged in the West might not have had a view of them, but it also is likely to have very serious political consequences in countries like ours.

KEVIN MALONEY: Let’s talk about the conditions in various countries happening parallel to things that are coming out of Washington, DC. You mentioned before the manosphere. There has always been this subculture of toxic masculinity in some form or another. It feels—and I have not looked at this empirically—like the percentage capture at least of new media is much more intense from a U.S. perspective. How is that impact happening in the Kenyan information ecosystem or citizenry in terms of the exportation of the manosphere? I know you have done some deep research there.

ODANGA MADUNG: I have done very deep work into examining the manosphere in Kenya in particular and publishing that research across various outlets. Unfortunately, I have had to do it under a pseudonym because backlash is a real thing.

The key aspect about it for me is that, one, what most people do not realize is that Kenya is the third highest country in the world in terms of manosphere activity online in an anglophone context—I am talking right behind the United Kingdom and the United States there is a country in Africa, at least on X as a platform.

That to me is one of the most astounding things about this aspect, which is, what leans a country like Kenya toward this particular problem, and you begin to realize it is very similar to what we see in the United States, where you have grievance as a very big aspect as to why these kinds of manosphere figures become very prominent within our online echo chambers.

A lot of young men in this country feel like they have been left behind. A lot of young men in this country perhaps feel like they do not have anybody to talk to about their problems. A lot of young men have economic grievances that have failed to be addressed by leaders, and then here come a few messiahs. It could be Andrew Tate.

In Kenya we have guys like Amerix, who are able to offer messages of hope to these young men, but at the same time paint their plight as a result of the empowerment of women. That is what the manosphere ends up becoming, then, because of the design of tech ecosystems and the pursuit of engagement it turns into a form of extremism.

For me, in terms of my work—I borrowed a lot of the literature for my work from actually examining fundamental extremists because the behavior patterns very much map over one another—one of the things I find and why I call it the “the exportation of the manosphere” is that you will notice that a lot of the big manosphere superstars here in Kenya hearken back to manosphere superstars from the United States and United Kingdom. Andrew Tate is a big figure here. You have people here in the manosphere that have their first name and then use “Tate” as their surname.

You have a lot of people modeling themselves on Kevin Samuels, who was a very big manosphere figure in the United States. You have influencers in the United States becoming very big Kenyan manosphere people. You have crossover podcasts of the manosphere happening between Kenya and the United States, so there is a very strong and very clear exchange that is going on. It is just one of those weird things, and you wonder why Kenya is somehow at the top of this and what aspects of our culture tend to lend themselves to this kind of behavior.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think you made a lot of interesting points, but a light bulb moment for me is that when you mentioned at the end of the day the narrative of the manosphere is one of hope. From somebody who has a deeply pluralistic value system and who sees the noise around the message as highly offensive and disconcerting, it is very difficult for me to look past what is the thing. It is not necessarily that people are just out to hate another group; it is that there is a pathway to a better life in there, however disconcerting that pathway might be to a large, select group of people.

I think that is very interesting from a narrative perspective. It is not a punishing narrative but is a pathway to hope at the end of the day.

ODANGA MADUNG: I look at it two ways: The hope is definitely there. I think the hope is something that counts a lot in terms of especially the behavior pathway that leads people down these types of routes.

When someone ends up in the manosphere, they actually don’t start there. They use the Internet for what most young men will use the Internet for, and this is why the questions around young men are so important. They use the Internet because they want to get buff, they want to get rich, they want to do know about sports, and sometimes, yes, maybe they are political junkies and want to know about politics. But the way these ecosystems are designed the recommendation algorithms and recommendation artificial intelligences (AIs) tend to favor manosphere-type language and highly recommend them toward a lot of the people who might have started off consuming this content innocently.

You find that a lot of manosphere influencers, for example—look at Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate is a cigar smoking, Muay Thai fighting, bench-pressing ultimate manosphere influencer. He presents himself as the ultimate man. The way he positions himself means that there are multiple ways that can lead down a pathway toward his message, and that is why the hope actually ends up counting.

If you are a man and are broke, don’t feel good about yourself, are trying to figure out the answers to your life, and you go in and search in Google about how to get this fast, chances are the first few pieces of information there might be okay, but eventually they will indeed go down that rabbit hole toward the manosphere, and that is where the hope counts.

I really stress that people should not forget about grievance. Grievance to me is actually the one that paints a bigger picture because grievance demands a political response. When you look at the politics of authoritarians across the world, the politics of grievance is something they are exceptionally good at on top of the politics of hope. If anything, it is grievance that is more effective in driving people to vote for them than even hope.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting to think hope might be more manifest after engaging with this content at the individual level. Like you said, “I’m going to get a six-pack, I’m going to get a girlfriend,” and then the into-the-streets spark is this collective grievance where you can go and blow off steam with another individual, which then leads to potentially very disturbing political actions or the ballot box going in a way that was not dreamed of five or ten years ago.

ODANGA MADUNG: Ninety percent of manosphere advice is how to deal with women. Ninety percent of manosphere advice and manosphere podcasts, the best and most effective of them, at least from what I see on the Kenyan side, is how do you handle women in a relationship? That is where people start from, and they have people who swear by them.

That is the key thing. They have people who swear by them, so when you are talking to people who have been converted in that way you cannot come to it from a deterministic mindset. I learned this from my work in misinformation and disinformation. You cannot go to someone, let’s say, who voted for Trump and tell them, “You know you voted because of misinformation.” They won’t listen to you. There are a lot of ways you have to pay attention to the nuances around that. The same thing applies to the manosphere as well.

KEVIN MALONEY: Certainly nobody wants to be told they’re stupid or wrong, and the implication is there.

One of the things you and I spoke about at the event where we met was a prescription to that, the prescription for democratic backsliding. There were a few people at the event who talked through case studies across the world. We had El Salvador, the Philippines, and Kenya. From a values perspective on the individual or cultural level, what narratives are there as a pushback, or are we still searching?

ODANGA MADUNG: The biggest narratives for me that work in terms of a slide toward authoritarianism, the first thing we must consider is that the biggest trend in authoritarianism right now is that it comes in through democracy. It comes out as a result of a democratic process, so it is quite possible to understand how those narratives evolve especially as these people come into power and how these people also use narratives to try to sustain power.

In Kenya right now I think the politics of grievance is largely tribal politics: “That tribe has been in favor for a long time, and it is our time to eat.” Grievance politics is one of the biggest aspects that a lot of Kenyan politics is shaped around.

It is largely also what Trump’s politics are about, that the blue-collar worker deserves to have their moment again, that, “These things have gone away from you for a long time, and I am the one who is going to bring them back.” The narratives around grievance and the timings around that are things I would be monitoring and mapping across the world and trying to figure out the methods by which we try to understand how to override some of those aspects. From my own observation I can pinpoint this and say this is a problem we need to be watching out for.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is probably another conversation. I want to dig deep into the literal tribal politics of Kenya versus the socioeconomic, racial, and religious fragmentation in the United States, but let’s maybe save that for a part two.

ODANGA MADUNG: I am actually working on a piece of research about that right now. When I release it I would love to share it with you because there are a lot of interesting aspects. Finally I have a context for how polarization and Big Tech are affecting Kenya which makes sense for me. I think there is a lot we can work with there, and there is a very long conversation to be had.

KEVIN MALONEY: A quick plug: A colleague of mine, Ruth Braunstein, who is at Johns Hopkins University, runs a great Substack called Democracy is Hard, and her research focuses on extremism within communities in the United States. Listeners should check that out, and I think you should too. It is a great resource.

ODANGA MADUNG: When it is ready I will definite share it and see if we can have as much of a conversation within the democracy community as we can about this. It is some very fresh data that is startling as well.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think a lot in terms of extremism and narratives. A lot of times in the rooms I go into the conversations are silo-ed in terms of a country or community-specific case study or from the geopolitical level across states. There is something there in terms of comparing the United States and Kenya as an exercise in and of itself in thinking about it across other places.

ODANGA MADUNG: I have a friend, John Githongo, who had a book written about him, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower, one of the best pieces of understanding grievance politics in general and a very good political read that I think is necessary for people to pay attention to.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have talked a lot about the variables happening at the grassroots level and at the political level, so now I want to pivot to talk about the information ecosystem itself, specifically tech companies and their role in the backsliding that is happening and the manosphere taking hold in certain areas.

In January 2023 you wrote a great piece for The Guardian. This was right after the attempted coup in Brazil. I am going to quote this, and we will be sure to link to it in the description for everybody who is listening: “It is becoming increasingly clear that technology platforms are playing a significant role in democracy’s downfall. The ability to incite insurrections and coups through these platforms has made a once difficult task alarmingly easy.”

That was almost three years ago. I want you to reflect on your own statement there and maybe bring us to where we are now so we can dive into the current ecosystem.

ODANGA MADUNG: Writing that in the context of someone who is now covering active attempts being pushed by young people who are largely internet-enabled to take down their own governments is very interesting to see.

I used to think it made it alarmingly easy, and then I realized, yes, that might be the case, but movements are still hard. It might be that easy to incite a very massive spark, but from what I have learned the truth is that at the end of the day movements are still hard, whichever side you are on. Whether it is pro- or anti-democracy at the end of the day, movements are still hard. That statement needs to be a bit more complete. I need to write a part two for that because at that time we were in a different world.

What I am seeing now is that whereas the will of the people might be trying to get exerted against authoritarians, who eventually manage to use these tech platforms—either through the money that funds them or through the ecosystems that are there, to get into power and people tend to challenge that—one of the things the research I am talking to you about right now is going to bring about is how technology favors the regaining of control of authoritarians and that tech platforms are the number-one enablers of this regaining of control either through the surveillance they enable or through the outright polarization they enable through the pursuit of engagement-based algorithms.

One of the things I see in my research right now, which will likely be published by next week, is, for example, in a country like Kenya where tribe has always been a big factor in our politics, Gen Z go into the streets to try to demand that they want their country back and have ideals of our country that should be largely tribeless because the politics of tribes has done so much pain to this country.

Then you see because of the nature of how platforms are designed to enable polarization a reversion to default settings. That is what some of the research we are doing is about. We are seeing a very quick reversion to default settings, and that is something that is concerning to a lot of people. I think a lot of people are also ignoring the fact that this is as a result of polarizing design, specific design choices that favor this kind of vitriol to blast through the system.

KEVIN MALONEY: There you go, polarization by design. That is either an article or a podcast.

ODANGA MADUNG: I need to write a part two for that because there is so much in there that needs to be considered, but like I said the truth about it is, as I mentioned in the talk, if we are to just look at it plainly, without taking sides, we are still largely living through the effects of COVID-19, and the online ecosystem was a large part of how COVID-19 shaped the world.

It is not a surprise that every year since the pandemic began in 2021, except for 2023, there have been multiple attempts at capturing the seat of power by some form of mass uprising. It started in the United States, went to Brazil and Sri Lanka, 2023 was somehow quiet, then 2024 happened with Bangladesh and Kenya, and then this year there is Togo—it just keeps increasing in number—Togo, Madagascar, Nepal, Peru, and Tunisia. It is just crazy, and that is not something to play around with.

KEVIN MALONEY: You mentioned Tunisia. I was having a conversation a few months back with a soft-power researcher who was actually in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, and the narrative that came out of these tech companies, and you can see it in op-eds popping up, even the most audacious things. There was an op-ed written in a U.S. newspaper that said, “The people of Tunisia should build a statue to Mark Zuckerberg because he brought freedom to them.”

This goes to a concept I have talked about a lot on the podcast, which is the “moral masking” of tech executives. When there is a liberal in power, it is all about civic spaces and democracy, and when there is an autocrat in power or we are leaning that way then it is about patriotism, defending the West, and democracy as a very different concept.

Maybe we could interrogate the arc from Arab Spring to today, what you are seeing narrative-wise from the top down, from the leaders of these companies, how they have changed, and how they are making the case for what they do as being critical to the citizenry.

ODANGA MADUNG: You raise such an important point because one of the things I remember covering in my research was how tech companies largely actually defined their identity with the Arab Spring. This whole idea of social media as the gateway to democracy was defined in the years between 2010 and 2011 during the Arab Spring, and that was largely what gave them that moral and largely political consensus as well because America once again had another tool to spread democracy around the world over and above its military. The idea of America and the spread of democracy was reignited through this.

KEVIN MALONEY: The liberal idealists were wide-eyed after they had been defeated in the Bush years.

ODANGA MADUNG: For me that is a key narrative we need to think about. I will fast-forward to today, where we begin to see truly what the perils of centralization and the perils of this kind of addictive design in our information ecosystems have been able to do. I prefer to think about some of these aspects from a consumer framing as opposed to necessarily a political one because I feel like consumer framings will get us bipartisan support when it comes to trying to figure out regulation and also provide some form of protections democratically.

The time framing is an interesting one when you think about where they have come from to where they are now, where they are trying to increasing take over every aspect of our lives. I think it demands a consumer framing first of all, because if we continue playing on the political framing I do not think we will win. They will always metamorphose into something else.

KEVIN MALONEY: I see that similarly from the U.S. perspective, where from the military-industrial complex post-World War II they got their claws in and now it is everywhere. Boeing is not going anywhere.

ODANGA MADUNG: Exactly. I think there is that aspect which if we keep thinking of them primarily as political agents we will lose the plot. The truth is that these people are here to make money, and the government is one way in which they will try to make money, but their true leverage is in what they are able to do with me and you.

That aspect of what they are able to do with me and you is primarily consumer framing, what they promise small businesses through advertising and how they affect people through scams. If you are thinking about how to try to understand their positioning, consumer framings will help over and above trying to understand them as people who need to bend toward a political will and what that political will enables them to do.

You have to understand, what that political will enables them to do is to get away with the shit show that they have been able to build because the entire premise of “move fast and break things” has essentially meant that they have stolen a lot of people’s work. The reason you run to the mafia boss is because you need protection because you have done something bad.

You have stolen a lot of people’s work. People are getting scammed because of your platforms because you are not necessarily carrying out the right kinds of “know your customer/client” or the people who do this, your quantum moderation or your moderation practices are putting a lot of workers across the world through hell, and you are consistently inflating results that you promise your customers. People should never forget that 30 percent of online advertising at a bare minimum is fraud. That means that 30 percent of all that advertising revenue that you see on Google is from fraud.

KEVIN MALONEY: From a social media perspective the wheels are turning for me on the reframing of consumerism, I think specifically if you look at what is a norm or what is acceptable within consumerism. Tylenol is a terrible example, right now because of what is happening, but say Tylenol caused teenagers to commit suicide at a much higher rate or body dysmorphia was running rampant, these things would not be acceptable. This somehow is some special carve-out from consumerism where, “Oh, the good outweighs the bad,” when the bad is pretty horrific.

ODANGA MADUNG: Exactly. I interpret it as corporations that are simply seeking protection from the mafia boss. That’s it, and this time the mafia boss realized: Wait a minute. I can come and collect, and that is what he has done. He has just said, “I am coming to collect,” and he has been collecting while telling them, “You can still go ahead and try to pitch for government contracts and all that, but there is something in it for me.”

For me you first of all have to understand why businessmen gravitate to politicians in the first place.

KEVIN MALONEY: Access to power.

ODANGA MADUNG: Exactly. What does access to power give me as a businessman? From there we interpret the rest of their actions. One thing people have said is that it has been interesting to watch Mark Zuckerberg learn the game. He has made a few mistakes here and there.

KEVIN MALONEY: The haircut, the gold chain, the jiu-jitsu, and the oversized tee-shirt. He is basically trying to be an executive embodiment of the thing that drives his product to be the most successful. I don’t know if it is more or less disturbing because it is so obvious, but it is quite a moment.

From a U.S. domestic perspective, it goes back to the split that I talked about before in terms of the moral masking around liberal administrations versus this slide to autocracy that we are seeing in the United States, and a perfect example of that is that fairly recently Marc Benioff, who is the CEO of Salesforce, gave an interview and said that Trump is a great president, but underneath that they were working with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to basically make them more efficient.

If there ever was a case study for moral masking around values and tech companies and you are just going to do what is in your best interests, ICE is now the third largest military in the world, if you compare its budget to those of militaries, the United States, China, and then ICE. There is obviously a lot of money to be made in working with ICE. I think that is a perfect example of a story recently where “Values be damned.” We are economic animals.

ODANGA MADUNG: And don’t forget Benioff owns Time.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is a whole other conversation in terms of what is happening there.

ODANGA MADUNG: When I was in the United States the most amazing and funny thing was the number of ICE ads targeted at me. I was like, “Wow, this is so fascinating.” I would never have imagined. How long before Hollywood starts making movies about an ICE agent trapped in a Mexican prison or some shit like that? It is going to be really funny.

One thing that is very important about ICE as it relates to this conversation is how ICE uses masculinity to advertise itself to young men. There is some very interesting research coming out around that which I find worth thinking about.

KEVIN MALONEY: We have explored a lot of areas that we could talk about for hours, but before I open the floor to you I want to wrap up moving back to this moral power/geopolitical level that we think deeply about here at Carnegie Council, and it is the question of what tech companies, what the social media ecosystem, is doing to these principles that we thought deeply about post-World War II. For all of its imperfections, there were some principles at the United Nations that things were built around. One of them was state sovereignty and another was universality of the human experience, the moral equal worth of every human being.

From your perspective how are these things being rattled right now? Do you have any positive thoughts for our listeners?

ODANGA MADUNG: In terms of Big Tech and the various tools they have at their disposal—not just counting social media as being one of these things, companies like Uber, a whole host of things—it is about the reconfiguration of trust, and we had an event about this at UNGA as well. I think this is one of the central questions we need to pay attention to.

Let’s move away from the consumer aspect and look at it in a political context. The fact is that the goods that tech companies have been able to create have fundamentally disrupted the institutions that enabled those post-World War II values to hold true. Disrupting how the free press makes its money is a big deal, how the free press reaches people, and what the free press competes against.

I keep telling people—and this is why it is so important to have advertising values at your heart—you have to understand that your story is going to compete with a cat video for someone’s attention and they are going to be put in the same place. There is no press stand anymore where you can be held on a pedestal. No, you are competing with a cat video, a baby video, a video of some guy doing some stupid shit, and then your serious-ass story comes next.

That is what we are really competing with. Those are not the ideals on which the values of a post-World War II West or a post-World War II Africa were built on.

There is a good friend of mine, Marcos Peña, a former chief of staff of the president of Argentina, the guys who were kicked out by Javier Milei. His fundamental thesis is that the hardware and software of politics are fundamentally at odds with each other and that is part of the reason why you are seeing a lot of these kinds of upheavals happening across the world because the software, which is in people’s heads, is clashing against the hardware of how politics actually happens.

KEVIN MALONEY: We’ve got to get him on the podcast.

ODANGA MADUNG: I can definitely ask him to come; he is a very, very interesting guy. He is currently on his book tour as well.

That aspect of what this version of the industrial revolution does to the institutions that hold up the values that we try to espouse is something people fundamentally need to ask themselves, what it does to the free press, what it does to the nature of politicians, and what it does to our information ecosystems because I like to tell people that politics is information first and that if you reorganize the information environment you reorganize politics. When you think about those aspects, I think this is where people are failing to think about these things when it comes to first principles.

KEVIN MALONEY: Very interesting. We are quite aligned with the information-first thesis there.

We have covered a lot, and this has been amazing. Thank you so much for the time.

I want to end giving you an open floor. Is there anything I didn’t ask about that for the Carnegie Council listener, the person who is interested in questions of values and morality within a realist framing, within the real world, is there anything you want to leave them with?

ODANGA MADUNG: For anybody who is thinking about values and value framing I think the best example to look into is the relationship between Raila Odinga and Kenya. To the outside world Raila Odinga’s death is going to look like the death of an icon, but Kenyans had a very complicated relationship with the man. The kind of outpouring that happened once he died was such a confusing moment to a lot of people, especially with regard to his politics and what his politics meant.

In African politics we don’t have a left-and-right structure. What we have is political convenience, the politics of survival. We will shift allegiances when we need to shift allegiances, and we do not care what your ideology is or anything like that.

If you get a chance to get a Kenyan to tell you about the relationship that they had with Raila Odinga, they will tell you a very interesting political story that you do not get to hear around the world, and I think that is something unique and very interesting to hear about.

KEVIN MALONEY: Thank you so much for joining us today. It is a lot for me to digest personally.

ODANGA MADUNG: Thank you for having me. I hope I can come back.