Each week the college hosts a community dinner called Ration Club. It's open to anyone who'd like to find out more about the college and its work. To find out more or if you'd like to attend, please register.

Join us for a short presentation and discussion about Team Mirai, a new political party in Japan focused on digital democracy and civic tech. In July, Team Mirai won their first seat in parliament, less than three months after being formed as a party.

​We will be joined by Leo Nelki, a filmmaker who is developing a documentary about Team Mirai, who will give a brief overview of the history of the party, the political context and the tools that they have created. These tools include:

• The “Idobata System”: This is an AI-powered platform designed to facilitate “broad listening” and create an “interactive manifesto.” The system allows citizens to directly ask an AI questions about policy content and engage in discussions. It can even generate proposals for policy changes based on user input, which are then automatically sent to Team Mirai’s policy team for review. This creates a direct, scalable feedback loop between the public and the party.
• AI Avatars for Voter Engagement: During founder Takahiro Anno’s run for Tokyo governor, his campaign launched “AI Anno,” an AI-powered avatar of the candidate. The avatar fielded questions from the public 24/7 on a YouTube livestream, answering questions on policy constantly.
• PoliMoney: A platform to make political funding transparent. It turns complex financial reports from politicians into easy-to-search, visual dashboards so the public can see where money comes from and how it’s spent.
• Kouchou AI: Meaning “Public Hearing AI,” this system is for “broad listening.” It analyzes thousands of public comments on policy issues, identifying key themes and opinions to make large-scale citizen feedback understandable and actionable

​Calling all academics, researchers, web3 developers, and those who are curious about science! Science is broken and we think DeSci can fix it!

Join us for our monthly DeSci London meetup. Everyone is welcome 😊😊😊 don’t worry if you are a newcomer, most people are!

​​​​​​Agenda:
- 18:30: Drinks and networking
- 19:00: Talk
- 19:45: More networking!

​​​​​​​​If you’re new to DeSci, check out these introduction articles:

• https://future.com/what-is-decentralized-science-aka-desci/
• https://medium.com/coinmonks/what-is-desci-and-why-it-is-important-d635a3184039

​​​​​​​​Make sure you join our Telegram Group and follow us on Twitter!

This session is open to the public, however spaces are limited. Registration includes a suggested contribution towards Jethro’s time.

A workshop to get beginners coding with AI tools in an afternoon.

​By the end, you’ll be able to:

• Host your own website with access to a database and chat feature
• Analyse data and produce beautiful charts

​The workshop is led by Newspeak House Fellow Jethro Reeve. He started using AI to code in October 2023, building tools for campaignlab.uk. He’s now a full-time software developer at coefficient.ai.

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

​A chance for Newspeak House faculty to break bread together before the start of the teaching year.

​A chance for incoming fellowship candidates to break bread with faculty before the year begins.

​A weekend to introduce our new fellowship candidates to the year ahead:

Saturday Morning: Introduction to Political Technology
Saturday Afternoon: Overview of Core Modules
Saturday Evening: Fellows’ Dinner (please register)

​Sunday Morning: Overview of Advanced Modules
Sunday Afternoon: Group Exercise

​Calling all fellows of Newspeak House!

​Please come together for our annual gathering to see the graduation of fellows from 2024 and to welcome new fellowship candidates for 2025. Eat, drink, see some old faces, and hear updates from the college.

An unofficial launch party for the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, which details the potential threats posed to humanity by artificial superintelligence.

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next.

For decades, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us—and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn’t even be close.

How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive.

​Join PauseAI for a celebration of the new book that is finally getting powerful people to take seriously the risk that AI will cause human extinction.

There will be a public recitation of the 13th chapter of the book, which discusses the actions that people can take to help improve the situation. This will be followed by general merriment where you can meet others concerned by AI risk.

• 18:00 - Doors open
• 19:00 - Public reading of chapter 13
• 20:00 - Socialising

​If everyone reads it, no one dies.

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, but is open to the public.

​This is a lecture on distributed ledgers and databases. We’ll talk about:

• How do blockchains work?
• Are they helpful in governance?
• Are they actually helpful in governance?
• Are they helpful in other domains of human life?
• Bitcoin
• Ethereum and its L2s
• pod
• DAOs
• aragon.org
• mantle.xyz

​To mark our first decade, Newspeak House presents a series of talks and workshops from fellows and faculty across a full weekend conference. Keep up with the latest developments in the field, meet faces new and old, relax on our terrace, enjoy an all day buffet, and socialise late into the evening. Full programme TBA.

17:00-23:00 Friday 10 October
10:00-23:00 Saturday 11 October
10:00-22:00 Sunday 12 October

Newspeak House 10th Anniversary: a decade of Political Technology

The tenth anniversary of Newspeak House marks a decade shaped by profound political and technological change.

Smartphones. Group chats. Attention algorithms. Crowdfunding. Language models. Cryptocurrencies. Collaborative documents. Streaming. Emoji reacts. Privacy laws. The gig economy. Six UK elections. Brexit. Covid. Momentum. Ukraine. Reform. Gaza. Trump (twice). Cambridge Analytica. The birth and collapse of Buzzfeed, Vice, Gawker. Wikidata from zero to a hundred million items.

In that time Newspeak House has hosted thousands of events, launched twenty books, and graduated over a hundred fellows, many now in senior positions across a spectrum of key institutions.

We have supported fledgling movements that are now part of the furniture: impact evaluation, open data, service design, election tech, existential risk, community strategy, campaign innovation, decentralised social media, digital democracy, cognitive security, prediction markets, data journalism, and many more.

Furthermore, Newspeak House has become home for the London College of Political Technology, offering a formal one year programme with a homegrown faculty and original curriculum, with a dedicated classroom and a majority of non-resident students.

To mark our first decade, Newspeak House presents a series of talks and workshops from fellows and faculty across a full weekend conference. Keep up with the latest developments in the field, meet faces new and old, relax on our terrace, enjoy our all day buffet, and socialise late into the evening.

Fundraiser: for the next ten years

If you don’t support your civic institutions, they go away. As well as a conference and celebration, this event is also a fundraiser to secure the future of the college and its role as a community space.

Newspeak House has weathered a series of serious challenges, not least the pandemic and its aftermath. This event is to celebrate overcoming those challenges, becoming one of the very few autonomous and independent third spaces to still be opening its doors. However, these challenges have demolished financial reserves that are difficult to rebuild beyond the college’s normal activities.

It is with this in mind that we have set our prices for this landmark celebration. Your ticket contributes to the ongoing financial health of Newspeak House, as well as scholarships for students in future years. We are extremely grateful for all of your support.

If you’ve enjoyed the programming and facilitation of Newspeak House over the last ten years, now is the time to show your support. If you can’t attend the event, you can still donate or become a member!