How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for the public trust on AI.

The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it closed its archive in March 2019. Eleven weeks later, on 29 May 2019, it released what would become the final batch of documents from the archive. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document from the Snowden archive.

J'ai franchement autre chose à faire que d'insulter publiquement des ministres et n'en tire ni gloire ni satisfaction mais il y a juste un moment où ce n'est plus possible autrement quoi. Là nous sommes en 2026, et c'est donc Philippe Baptiste qui est actuellement ministre de l'enseignement supérieur. (...) Et il dit : si le budget n'est pas voté, bah pouf, on ne pourra plus proposer le repas à un euro à tous les étudiants.