The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has initiated the rollout of its upgraded 3.0 digital platform to modernise India's retirement savings framework.

He said that the money will go toward clearing debts, securing his children's future, and also to fulfil some of his personal wishes.

Drawing from his experiences in Berlin, Panja said he has witnessed numerous Indian students struggling to survive while juggling long hours of delivery, restaurant, and gig work.

It starts with a simple search term in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. “Blue eyes.” Hundreds of results. Jeffrey Epstein’s international trafficking agents send him pictures and descriptions of blue-eyed young girls: potential victims to be dispatched to his various homes. “I spotted two skinny blond blue eyes 21 years old ladies in Monaco last weekend and asked them for CVs,” one agent, whose name has been redacted, wrote. “Trying her best to move from her small town to Moscow; English isn't great. Could be fun for Paris, blue eyes,” wrote another. “Can't understand if her breast is real. Otherwise very pretty and sweet…Very blue eyes as we like.” 

One of Epstein’s victims wrote of being chosen for her eye color in a journal entry later shared with federal prosecutors. "Superior gene pool?!? Why me?" she wrote, describing Epstein's worldview as "Nazi like." "It makes no sense. Why my hair color and eye color?" 

Epstein — himself blue-eyed — seemed to prefer both his victims, and the people he bankrolled, to have blue eyes. “All of my fundees have blue eyes,” he boasted in one email. In the entryway of his Manhattan townhouse, he displayed dozens of prosthetic eyeballs in a frame. Epstein made notes and sent article links to his contacts asking if having blue eyes meant you were more intelligent or a “genius”. He even had a list of scientists and tech leaders with blue eyes — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Google’s Ray Kurzweil. “Total — 70 people Blue eyes — 41 Unclear (might be blue, but not 100% sure)” the list says. Appearing in the files — whether on this list or elsewhere in Epstein's records — does not connote legal wrongdoing.

Going deeper into the files, Epstein and his network of contacts discussed beliefs about how physical characteristics and race might denote intelligence. They exchanged emails about population control. They spoke of engineering women’s sex drives, building designer babies, and living in a world full of superintelligent humans that could merge with robots. They spoke of getting rid of the elderly, the infirm, and the poor.

The files offer a glimpse into a world where ideas about eugenics and race science have never gone away. On the contrary, they run through our elite universities, through the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, and through the tech industry itself. Epstein’s was an exclusive club that counted among its members people who harbor dreams of re-engineering human minds and bodies, seizing control of our collective future, and building technology that, they hope, will one day merge with — or even replace — all of us.

In 2002, two decades before the launch of ChatGPT, Epstein hosted an Artificial Intelligence summit on his Caribbean island. In the years that followed, he cultivated close, regular contact with a network of  (predominantly male) scientists, researchers, academics and tech leaders working at the vanguard of AI, biotech, genetics and cognitive science, meeting them at universities like Harvard and at his various homes. 

In August 2018, a year before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, he was in email correspondence with software consultant and bitcoin investor Bryan Bishop about funding a project to create “designer babies” — children with genes cherrypicked for their looks, health, strength, immune systems, sleep needs and even, in Bishop’s imaginings, abilities to live on a different planet. 

  “Attached is the doc you requested, it's the "use of funds" spreadsheet for the designer baby and human cloning company,” Bishop wrote to Epstein. “This gets us out of our self-funded ‘garage biology’ phase to the first live birth of a human designer baby, and possibly a human clone, within 5 years. Once we reach the first birth, everything changes and the world will never be the same again.”

Bishop went on to discuss how his ultimate ambition was to make “practically unlimited modifications to the cells before generating an embryo.”

In response to a request for comment, Bishop sent Coda a publicly available set of answers to frequently asked questions about designer babies.

“The reason people have an aversion to eugenics, and rightfully so, is because countries used genocide and sterilization to prevent reproduction by populations that they didn’t like. We have no intention of doing anything of the sort,” Bishop writes in the public FAQ. “‘Designer baby’ simply describes a child whose genome has been intentionally altered or chosen by their parents, rather than left entirely to the genetic lottery of natural conception.”

“It’s such a great subject,” Epstein responded after he read Bishop’s proposal. “We need to get a read on legal. Can’t do anything where US rules apply to US citizens regardless of where [they are].” 

Building a super-race of humans, and parachuting humanity into a different evolutionary era — or even obsoleting the human race as we know it — is a running theme in the Epstein files, and an increasingly prominent ambition for tech evangelists today.

“It’s eugenics all the way down,” said Jacob Metcalf, a founding partner at Ethical Resolve, a consulting firm working with tech companies to develop their ethics protocols. A common fantasy in tech circles, he said, is “to essentially control human destiny. And a lot of the times that human destiny is for humans to be replaced. That's the really bleak thing here. What could be more eugenic than getting rid of humans.”

In 2008, Epstein began conversations with the computer scientist Ben Goertzel. Over the years, Epstein would send Goertzel more than $360,000 to fund the researcher’s plans to build towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a term Goertzel himself popularized.

“I remain eager to move forward on working together to accelerate progress toward a human-obsoleting thinking machine,” Goertzel wrote to Epstein in May 2008. Eighteen years on, and the idea of obsoleting humans with artificial intelligence is widely discussed in the tech world.

When asked to comment on his exchange with Epstein, Goertzel told Coda: “I do think we will create forms of transhuman intelligence going beyond the scope of humanity as we know it, but I also very much hope and envision a strong role for humans even after this happens.”

Goertzel went on to describe a future where the world reaches the “Singularity” — a Silicon Valley buzzword signifying a tipping point where AI surpasses human intelligence. “I do think AI will eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy, but I think this can happen in a way that respects and nourishes human life rather than being harmful to it,” he said. “Epstein and I discussed this face to face a few times and indeed I was a bigger fan of the human species than he was, and more optimistic about its flourishing post-Singularity.” 

In an email to Epstein, Goertzel laid out a scenario where AI systems would start running their own economic activity. He envisioned this Artificial Intelligence economy acting as a “parasite to overcome the regular human economy” that would eventually “gain its own superhuman autonomy.” The ideas Epstein and Goertzel exchanged mirror a broader conversation unfolding in the tech world that imagines a future where ultimately, human labour could be rendered superfluous, and ultimately be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots.

Together, Goertzel and Epstein also discussed modifying human brains — a concept popular in Silicon Valley today, where numerous brain-computer projects are researching ways to cognitively enhance the human brain, and alter human personality, memory, and mental capabilities.

In 2008, when Epstein told Goertzel he was “off to jail” for a year, after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, Goertzel suggested the solution to his problems might one day be solved if human brains could be re-programmed.

“According to my understanding, the girls you were involved with were old enough to know what they were doing, so society really has no ‘moral right’ to lock you up,” Goertzel wrote to Epstein. “This is a fucked-up society we live in. But past ones have really been no better -- the fault is really w/ the human brain architecture, which is precisely what I'm aiming to supercede in my AGI work.”

When asked to comment on these remarks — and in particular the implication that Epstein’s problems might be solved if his accusers' brains were one day re-engineered — Goertzel told Coda: “This was a general observation that the messed-up nature of our society generally is rooted in the way our brains have evolved... and that advanced tech will let us modify our brains to make ourselves and thus our society better.  There was no implication intended (nor stated) that women’s brains are any more or less messed up or in need of improvement than men’s.”

Goertzel reflected that his comments on Epstein’s victims being “old enough” were “regrettable and unfortunate in hindsight,” adding that his impression was that Epstein had been involved with adult women, not “disgustingly curating high school students for sexual purposes. I should have paid more attention.” 

In 2013, three and a half years after Epstein was released from jail, Goertzel approached Epstein for funding to build a “toddler robot”. Given Epstein’s criminal history of abusing minors, this has inevitably attracted attention online. “When we were discussing measuring the IQ of robot toddlers, the topic was never sexualized in any way,” Goertzel told Coda when asked about the project. “While I had nothing to do with Epstein's perverse sexual tastes or abuse of women, what I have read about his awful doings in the newspapers relates to his interest in teenage girls not toddlers.”

Epstein was particularly interested in funding projects that built — like Goertzel’s –- on transhumanist theories. Transhumanism is a worldview that captivates many of the most prominent tech leaders in Silicon Valley today. It believes in a future when the human body can be endlessly altered, genetically engineered, and ultimately fused with artificial intelligence. 

“Transhumanism is a much more radical concept than eugenics,” explained Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and researcher who has written extensively about eugenicist ideas within artificial intelligence. “In eugenics, you're trying to create a more superior human by breeding humans through generations. In transhumanism, you're trying to get rid of humans altogether.”

For transhumanists, she added, “their idea is to get rid of any undesirable properties they see with humans."

Perhaps the most well-known proponent of transhumanism in the Epstein files is Peter Thiel.

“I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?” New York Times journalist Ross Douthat asked Thiel last year. “Uh—,” Thiel said. “This is a long hesitation!” Douthat said. “Should the human race survive?” “Yes, but I would like us to radically solve these problems,” Thiel said. “We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”

Thiel’s name appears in the files more than 2000 times, and Epstein reportedly invested some $40 million into Valar Ventures, a firm co-founded by Thiel. The two spoke of building secret societies and shared an interest in transhumanism and cryogenics — Epstein wanted to freeze his brain and penis when he died, so that one day he could be revived, while Thiel has also stated his body will be frozen after his death. 

They also appeared to share an interest in bringing an end to the democratic systems of today, imagining a different system altogether. Epstein, for his part, spent his life puppeteering the most powerful people in the world and undermining democratic systems. Thiel, meanwhile, first expressed his own anti-democratic views in 2009 when he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” adding that since women were allowed to vote, the notion of a capitalist democracy became impossible. When the Brexit vote came through, Epstein wrote to Thiel: “Brexit, just the beginning.” Thiel asked — “of what”; Epstein said – “Return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances.” 

Globalization — and the idea of internationally powerful governing bodies — is a worldview that both Epstein and Thiel seemed to distrust. In March, in a palazzo in Rome, a stone’s throw from the Vatican, Thiel gave one of his infamous lectures in which he espoused his views about an “antichrist” that gets in the way of technological progress. This antichrist, he suggested, could be an internationally powerful body; the product of globalization. I stood outside the palace as attendees — priests, students, researchers — mutely hurried out, refusing to speak to the cluster of reporters waiting for Thiel’s black Mercedes. 

“He has a totally irrational side, which lives on fear, of what danger might happen,” one audience member told me of Thiel on condition of anonymity, recalling how, up close, Thiel looked haunted and ill. “His head is full of future scenarios, which is what’s killing him. I think he’s scared.”

Thiel did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Epstein didn’t confine himself to lofty conversations about a future collapse of the global order or re-engineering humanity. He also had ambitions for his own personal eugenics project. In 2019, it emerged that he wanted to seed the world with his DNA — and reportedly have 20 women impregnated at a time at Zorro ranch, his New Mexico property.

Epstein tried to recruit Virginia Giuffre for this very project. He “fantasized about improving the human race by fathering children who carried his superior genes,” she recounted in her memoir, published posthumously late last year.  “He’d talk about using his Zorro ranch as a literal breeding ground to propagate babies.” When Giuffre was 18 years old, she recalled, Epstein asked if she would carry his child and hand over all legal rights to it – “like a modern-day handmaid.”

In a haunting diary entry from another Epstein victim, written between the ages of 16 and 17 and shared with federal prosecutors, a girl describes being told she will be sent to Zorro ranch — possibly to participate in the very same project. “Go to New Mexico? What in the hell? This makes no sense. What about school?” she writes, describing how Epstein chose her for her hair color and eye color, and tried to convince her she would create “perfect offspring.”

The teenager chronicles her pregnancy, pasting a sonogram into the scrapbook, before giving a traumatic account of giving birth with Ghislaine Maxwell beside her. “Ghislaine said to push all the pain away. I don't understand. Blood and water all over the bed.” As the baby was born, she writes, Maxwell covered her eyes. “I saw between her fingers this tiny head and body in the doctors hands.”

The girl describes hearing the baby’s “tiny cries” before “they took her.”

“I’m nothing but your property and incubator,” the teenager writes of Epstein. The diary is a terrifying piece of evidence that appears to link to Epstein’s longstanding fixation with creating genetically bespoke humans. The diary author’s lawyers, Wigdor LLP, declined to comment.   

Epstein’s fever-dreams of creating an army of children carrying specific genes reflect a broader trend of “pronatalism” — a movement historically tied to eugenics — that’s thriving in Silicon Valley.

 Millions of dollars of funding are currently being poured into projects creating “superbabies,” while billionaire tech oligarchs including Elon Musk — whose name appears more than 1000 times in the files — reportedly want to use surrogates “to reach legion-level before the apocalypse.” Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

In the files, women appear either as victims, as objects, or as vessels for genetic engineering experiments. They are an inconvenient reality, people to be controlled and re-booted. Epstein wrote a 2013 email implying that women “are like shrimp. You throw away the head and keep the body.” 

“The obsession with "artificial" life appears tied to a masculine desire to try control the production of life – ultimately ridding themselves of their dependency on women," said Gabriella Razzano, Co-Founder of OpenUp, a social impact tech lab based in Cape Town, who is also a senior advisor at the African AI Observatory. “I think there is important work to be done on tying the narratives that are very revealing in the Epstein files to understand how, and why, technology is being developed as it is.” 

The trading of ideas about intelligence — both artificial and human — takes a particularly sinister turn in a 2016 exchange between Epstein and the cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach, whose research Epstein funded to the tune of $300,000.

Bach writes to Epstein about a study claiming that “black children outperform white children in motor development, even in very poor and socially disadvantaged households, but they lag behind (and never catch up) in cognitive development even after controlling for family income.”

Epstein responds with racist ideas about his notion of how to “make blacks smarter”, adding — “maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation. The Earth’s forest fire. Potentially a good thing for the species,” before contemplating a world with “too many people,” where “many mass executions of the elderly and infirm make sense.” 

Epstein then imagines creating a future “Übermensch” — a superior human with cherry-picked attributes. “What I like is the idea that ubermensch could be the melding of humans, put together in one brain,” Epstein writes. This bespoke human, he suggests, would include traits from marginalized groups, who he appears to believe have a stronger awareness of how to navigate power structures because of their historical exclusion. “An increased motor system, an increased awareness, an increased status calculator (Blacks, jews, women). Ubermensch could be the combination of the best of humans, not the best of a specific race or gender. Fun idea.” 

Bach told Coda in a statement: “I was summarizing a scientific study in a private email. Studies like this get often abused in ideological discourse to justify discrimination, which I strongly oppose and condemn.”

“I am firmly opposed to any form of racial discrimination, and I reject the use of group-level statistical claims to make judgments about individuals or to justify unequal treatment.” 

He continued: “It goes without saying that if global warming were to lead to a reduction in the human population, it would be accompanied by immeasurable suffering. Our civilization would break down, leading to a return to dark ages, in which the elderly and infirm were often killed, because people could not support them, and often did not care about supporting them. Every reasonable person understands that this is horrible and not desirable in any way.”

Epstein “was often callous about human suffering in a way that I found disturbing but worth understanding, as a window into the perspectives of the rich and powerful,” Bach added. 

Alongside Epstein’s conversations about mass executions for the old and and the sick, he was also interested in Silicon Valley’s dream concept of living forever — he had numerous email conversations with the longevity guru Peter Attia about prolonging his own lifespan, and funded a Harvard project geared towards “the end of aging.” In an email to Attia, Epstein mused: “I’m not sure why women live past reproductive age at all.” Attia, who published a statement about his relationship to Epstein, did not respond to requests for comment. 

This interest in “longevity” — living for as long as possible, even living forever, is popular among the elite precisely because they find themselves in an elite class, says David Robert Grimes, a scientist and disinformation expert who has written about longevity and race science in Silicon Valley. “They're both sides of the same coin — the Silicon Valley eugenics, and also the longevity stuff. They promote an idea that ‘we are exclusive and we are special',” he said. "It helps them to justify deep social inequality."

The tech elite did not inherit this ideology by accident. Stanford University, the intellectual heart of Silicon Valley, was once a major hub for the American eugenics movement, which later helped to inspire Nazi race laws. Stanford’s founding president, David Starr Jordan, was a prominent eugenicist, campaigning for forced sterilization of people with undesirable genetic traits. The university removed his name from its buildings in 2020 — but in Palo Alto, his beliefs did not disappear with the nameplate.

"Instead of eugenics we just call it longevity or biohacking," Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who has spent years investigating Silicon Valley's belief systems, said on a panel with me at a journalism conference last year. "It's the same."

The ideology Epstein bankrolled in private is being built in public. It’s a vision of the future in which a select few get to upgrade and extend their lives, while tightening their grip on the systems that determine which humans are worth investing in — and which are not.

It sounds like a dark sci-fi fantasy, except, as the files show, that fantasy is being funded and pushed into reality. Most of us will never be in the rooms where these ideas are discussed. All of us will live with the results.

The post “All my fundees have blue eyes.” Epstein and the tech world’s dark ideology appeared first on Coda Story.

“They’re shooting smoke at protesters.”

“They broke doors.”

“They brought an armored vehicle.”

In Aarhus, Denmark, Hemad Nazari lay in bed, refreshing his phone.

It was early evening in Iran on January 8, when the messages began arriving from Rasht, the northern city where he grew up.

Nearly two hours later, another message appeared: “We are trapped in our home.”

Then the messages stopped.

For the next eight days, Hemad heard nothing from his family.

He wasn’t the only one. Several million Iranians are part of an educated, relatively prosperous diaspora spread across the world, particularly North America and Europe, a diaspora that grew from the mass emigration of professionals and intellectuals after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Nazari lives in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. He works for a real estate company. He’s a photographer, an active part of the local climbing community, and over the past year, he has been cycling across the world with his girlfriend.

It looks and feels like freedom. And in many ways, it is.

But Nazari hasn’t set foot in Iran for eight years. In that time, he has met his parents three times — twice in Turkey, once in Nepal.

As for now, with a nationwide internet blackout still in effect amid a flickering, faltering peace process, he can, like everyone else around the world, only watch — and wait.

Hemad Nazari left Iran in 2016, at 27. He was not at the time a political exile. He was a civil engineer with a steady job and a passport that made most borders difficult to cross. He wanted to travel. To see the world. To live somewhere else for a while.

The sanction-ridden Iranian economy was in a state of collapse. Nazari’s salary, once worth a few hundred dollars a month, shrank rapidly as the currency fell. Saving money became meaningless. Planning a future felt abstract — a concept more than a tangible goal.

So he left. He went to Vietnam first. Then Nepal, Georgia, Turkey. What began as travel, slowly turned into something more permanent.

“I didn’t leave because I thought Iran would change,” he told me. “I left because I could see that it wouldn’t.”

And it wasn’t because people were satisfied, or afraid of change. The January protests, in which many thousands of Iranians were killed, were no eruption, no sudden flaring of anger.

Since 2019, Iran has experienced three major waves of mass protest. That year, demonstrations sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices spread rapidly across the country. The response was immediate. There was, typically, a near-total internet shutdown and, according to a Reuters investigation, as many as 1,500 people may have been killed during the crackdown. Human rights groups said more than 10,000 people were arrested during and after the protests, with many of them held incommunicado and at risk of being tortured or facing capital punishment.

The demonstrations ultimately collapsed under isolation and fear.

For Nazari, whose travels had enabled him to put distance between himself and his homeland, the 2019 protests made it apparent that Iran was no longer an option for him, no longer a place he wanted to call home. He was not a persona non grata. There was no letter. No summons. No official declaration. Nothing that could be quoted or appealed.

Instead, he had changed.

When the internet inside Iran is shut down, information can only escape through fragments: phone calls, short videos, people with rare access still intact. From abroad, Iranians like Nazari become intermediaries by default. He translated. Shared. Verified. Some of his posts were picked up by Persian-language television channels broadcasting from outside Iran, including BBC Persian and Iran International. Channels watched closely by the authorities.

Nazari did not think much of it at first. He was not an activist by profession. He did not belong to an organization. He was simply using his name, his language, his access. But others who had said less had been detained on arrival in Iran. Cartoonists. Writers. Ordinary social media users. Some disappeared into prison for years. Some emerged broken. Some did not emerge at all.

“You don’t need to be told,” Hemad says about knowing he couldn’t go back. “You understand.”

In early 2020, after Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane and initially denied responsibility, crowds returned to the streets. Once again, arrests followed. So did the silence.

Hemad Nazari’s activity increased again. His real name was public. His face was visible; he didn’t hide. It was a choice he made despite the risk not just to himself, but to his family. “If they can’t get to you,” he told me, “they get to the people around you.”

Since then, eight years have passed.

“It’s not that I chose not to go to Iran,” he says. “It’s that every time I tried, the door closed again.” He does not refer to it as exile. But, in a manner of speaking, he had been made stateless, effectively stopped from going home, from seeing his family, from resuming the life he knew.

By  late December 2025, daily life in Iran once again became untenable. Food prices surged, paychecks were worth less every day, and families thought only about short term survival, unable to think even a month ahead.

According to Nazari, official inflation figures — though already extremely high — failed to capture the reality on the ground. By February, he told me, the cost of basic goods rivaled those in Denmark. Wages, he said, stagnated “at around $110 or $120 a month, with many people earning much less than that.” The minimum wage, the official figures from Iran’s Supreme Labor Council show, increased by 45% and still only reached $110 per month.

“The protests were fuelled by the economy,” Hemad says. “When shopkeepers and traders joined, it was a sign that frustration had reached a boiling point. But people don’t just want better prices. They want freedom. They want new leadership.”

In Rasht, his hometown in northern Iran, even families with children took to the streets in protest. “In my city, a lot of mosques are gone,” he says. “They burned them down. That tells you something.” What struck Nazari most, though, was not only who was protesting, but what they were saying, what they appeared to want. 

“For the first time, the main chant on the street was the name of the prince,” he told me. “The son of the former shah: Reza Pahlavi.” Nazari is quick to stress that he himself is “principally a believer in democracy.” But the chants were telling. 

“For 40 years, only loyalists dared utter the name Pahlavi. Now it’s spoken openly across all layers of society,” It was not about restoring the past. Instead, suggests Nazari, “for the first time, we had a plan.” People, he says, “were asking, ‘what happens if the regime collapses?’ And for the first time, there was an answer.”

In January, there was, as Nazari describes it, a rare sense of readiness among people he knew inside Iran. Friends who had never protested before were sending messages saying they would go. Family members spoke with a kind of cautious hope. This time, it felt different. It felt like change was possible.

Two days earlier, the son of the former shah had issued a public call for people to take to the streets on January 8 and 9 — not to follow a detailed program, but to say openly what they had long been afraid to say. 

From Denmark, Nazari watched the buildup hour by hour. On January 8, as protests reached their peak, the internet went dark. The blackout was not unprecedented. Iran’s authorities had used these tactics before. Inevitably, as access disappeared, reports of mass arrests and the use of live ammunition to dispel crowds spread through the few remaining channels still connected to the outside world. 

In Rasht, Nazari’s close friends sent him a video from their apartment window. Smoke drifted through the street. Shouting echoed between buildings. Gunfire cut through the noise.

During the blackout, Nazari continued to receive fragments of information — through people with Starlink terminals, through friends who still had limited access. By January 10, the informal network of activists and diaspora Iranians he was part of believed that at least 2,000 people had been killed.

Eventually, his mother managed to call him. “We’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. With international charges for calls piling up every second, they had been trying to call him for days. Since that brief call, contact has been sporadic. A snatched few minutes. And then silence again.

“People showed everything they had,” Nazari says of the protests. “They did what they could do.” He’s trying not to romanticize what happened in January, he tells me. He’s not saying, he insists, that the protests were heroic. “Iranians,” he says, “are just desperate.” As for Nazari, he tells me up until the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, he was “constantly debating whether to go home.” Right now, he adds, “it could have severe consequences, potentially a death sentence.” But, he pauses, “if it comes to civil war, I will go. My life doesn’t matter.”

For years, Nazari believed — as many Iranians did — that pressure, negotiations, sanctions, or appeals to international institutions might eventually force the regime to change. Over time, that belief had eroded. By January, he says, “it was gone.” It’s why he supported the attacks on Iran by Israel and the U.S., the execution of Ayatollah Khamenei and key regime figures.

“I’ve been saying for years that they are not going to leave peacefully,” he says. “They will fight. If the choice is that many people die, including me and my family, but the country becomes free — and then in 10 years we are back as a people, it will be worth it.”

He stops himself.

“I don’t say this because I like death, I say it because I don’t see another way. There is no peaceful path left.”

But  the hope Nazari felt when Donald Trump said the United States would respond forcefully if Iranian authorities continued killing their own people, has also now died.

On February 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership and critical infrastructure began, some diaspora Iranians gathered to celebrate what they saw as the fall of a regime figurehead they had opposed for decades. Others responded with shock, caution, or grief, warning of what might follow.

In Denmark, where roughly 25,000 people of Iranian origin live, that divide played out in public. In Aarhus, several hundred Iranian Danes gathered in the city center with flags, music and open calls for regime change. Some thanked the U.S. and Israel for the strikes. At the same time, a pro-regime memorial for Ayatollah Khamenei in Copenhagen drew around 200 participants.

Their response to U.S. actions were playing out in a country where the broad view of the U.S. as a friend and force for good in the world had shifted sharply. In Denmark, as war in Iran broke out, people were still thinking of Greenland and Trump’s threats to annex the territory. In a January 2026 poll, 60% of Danes said they now see the U.S. as an opponent rather than an ally, while just 17% still considered it an ally.

Among Iranians, inside Denmark as in the wider diaspora, this ambivalence towards the U.S. is all too familiar. In a recent article in the Dagbladet Information, Iranian-born activist Nahid Riazi warned against celebrating a war that seemed to have little to do with emancipation for Iranians.

“Who says that war brings freedom?” she wrote. “It is us who are being hit. It is our children who are being destroyed.” 

Nezari says he has heard this argument. He does not dismiss it. But, he asks, “what is the alternative?” If the war stops, he says, “and the regime stays, how do you guarantee they won’t keep killing people like they have since 1979? How do you guarantee they won’t start the street executions again?”

Trump, despite the failure of the first 21 hours of peace talks in Pakistan, continues to say the war is “very close to over,” that the Iranian government wants to make a deal. A deal, presumably, that enables them to stay in power.

The Islamic Republic may have been dealt a devastating blow, but it remains intact. Its leadership structure has shifted but not collapsed. To Nazari, that does not show resilience so much as the nature of the system itself.

He rejects the idea that the Islamic Republic functions like a government in any conventional sense. It behaves, he says, more like a cartel or an armed network — something held together not by institutions, but by force and succession. Too many powerful men remain alive, still able to operate. And a system like this, he argues, does not surrender because its center has been hit. It keeps going until every center is removed.

“Not until all the heads are cut off,” he says.

But U.S. attempts to bully the world into joining a war where the goals remain so varied and nebulous have been unsuccessful. The popularity of the war inside the U.S., even among Trump supporters, is low. The uncomfortable question now is what comes next — and whether anything has truly changed.

Still, Nazari argues that the current state of purgatory, in which the war is neither ongoing nor over, is not evidence of failure, but of what was always going to happen.

“We were not living in Iran,” he says. “We were living in a military compound with cities in between.” Even if negotiations resume, he believes something irreversible has already happened. The fact that the regime’s leaders now have to hide underground means, to him, that there is no real return to the old order.

“There’s no going back to how it was,” he says. But for now, Nazari is still in Denmark. His family is still in Iran. He still holds his phone close, hoping for news. Any news. Like Iranian exiles everywhere, and like the war itself, he is trapped in stasis, caught between distance and a sense of responsibility to his homeland — deeply involved, fundamentally powerless, yet unable to look away.

The post An endless purgatory: How an exiled Iranian waits and watches appeared first on Coda Story.

On the night of January 16, 2024, Egana Djabbarova was awoken by her wife and told that she needed to leave the country immediately. Djabbarova, her wife said, had been denounced by pro-war activists and framed as an enemy of the country. She had recently published her novel, “My Dreadful Body,” with a small, indie press that had been praised by mainstream critics, unexpectedly propelling her into the public eye. One of the book's central themes is surveillance: growing up in a community with strict behavioural codes, the protagonist's every move is under scrutiny.

In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”

She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.” 

More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door. 

But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”

This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”

The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.” 

Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain. 

In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply. 

Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.” 

We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”

The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.

Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal. 

“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth." 

At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language. 

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In the flatlands of Italy’s Po Valley, the decommissioned Caorso nuclear power plant can be seen for miles, the reactor looming into the sky. When Alessandro Maffini, now an assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan, was growing up in the 1990s, the plant's distant silhouette captured his imagination. “The physical presence of that thing was so significant to me as a child. It was a very visible, tangible, concrete presence,” Maffini remembers. “It was like a white Duomo, there on the horizon, always in the background.” For many others, though, it was a specter of disaster, a ghost nuclear plant — shuttered, alongside all of Italy’s nuclear power stations, in the wake of the Chernobyl accident.

 “If that plant explodes, we’re all dead,” Maffini’s mother used to intone, looking out at the defunct Caorso station, once the largest in Italy. As Maffini rode his bike six miles across the countryside to get a closer look at the plant from a nearby overpass, his mother’s doom-laden words rang in his ears. Her warning scared him. It also made him want to learn more. When he left home to go to university, Maffini decided to work in nuclear physics. “Radioactivity is a strange thing,” he says. “You can’t see it, you can't hear it, you can't smell it. It leaves a lot of room for imagination, for speculation, for fear.”

Four decades on from Chernobyl, and Italy has some of the highest energy bills in Europe. The country is scrambling to disentangle itself from its dependence on Russian gas in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and build out its energy sovereignty. War in Iran, and a growing European consensus that turning away from nuclear power was, in the words of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, a “strategic mistake,” has given more impetus to the Italian government’s argument that the country needs to move past its qualms.

Last year, the Italian cabinet approved a new draft law reintroducing the prospect of returning to nuclear power. “The government has approved another important measure to ensure clean, safe, low-cost energy that can guarantee energy security and strategic independence,” the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced. 

Italy is already surrounded on all sides by nuclear power plants: Slovenia’s Krsko plant is 90 miles away from the border, and there are four French nuclear power plants within 110 miles. Italy is the world’s second-largest importer of electricity, with nuclear power, largely imported from France, making up 5% of its energy basket. Italy also plays host to more U.S. nuclear warheads than any other European country. An estimated 35 thermonuclear gravity bombs are stored at two NATO airbases in northern Italy, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. 

Now, as data centers spring up in Italy’s industrial north, the country’s energy needs are expected to increase exponentially and the government is turning, albeit cautiously, to a long-held Italian taboo. Since the spring of 1986, when the most serious accident in nuclear history unfolded in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine, the Italian population has lived in fear of nuclear energy. It voted to shutter its once-burgeoning nuclear industry in 1987, and in 2011, after the Fukushima nuclear accident, when 94% of voters rejected government plans to revive the industry. 

It is a fear that has transformed Italy’s energy fortunes, making it reliant on imports and vulnerable to volatility and price shocks. 

“The international crises of recent years have clearly demonstrated the risk of excessive dependence on imported fossil fuels or vulnerable supply chains,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “The government approaches this issue with great respect for the country's history and the democratic choices expressed by citizens. The 1987 and 2011 referendums profoundly impacted the national energy strategy at very different historical moments. Precisely for this reason, the point is not to ignore those choices, but to acknowledge that today's technological, climatic, industrial, and geopolitical context has radically changed.”

For Meloni’s government, the argument is not so much whether Italy needs to revive its nuclear industry, it’s whether the country is ready to shake its demons, to shake the cultural memory of what happened at Chernobyl forty years ago, a thousand miles away from Rome. 

In the early hours of April 28, 1986, in the control room of the Latina nuclear power plant south of Rome, a young technician called Ruggero Dell’Aquila was working the night shift. “Everything was perfectly quiet,” he recalled. As morning broke, teletype messages from Northern Europe began to rattle in. A clerk came down from the control room with reports from the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. Their monitoring stations were registering radiation spikes far above background levels, and no one knew why. 

That evening, nuclear physicist Sergio Malossi, a director at the Latina plant responsible for monitoring radioactive risk, drove home. His mind was turning over what the clerks had been reporting. “He came in extremely agitated,” remembers his daughter, Roberta Malossi, who was 16 at the time. “We knew he was worried about something going wrong at the facility, but we didn’t understand.” Malossi says that her father’s first paranoid thought was that there had been a malfunction in his own plant, that radiation was leaching into the air, and that it was somehow his fault. 

At 9 p.m. Moscow time — aperitivo hour in Latina — the Soviet Union announced there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. In the ensuing days, Italian news was full of dire warnings. 

“Television was showing these clouds that would soon reach Italy. Everyone was terrified. The only information we got was from state TV, and the news was shocking,” said Monica Tommasi, President of Friends of the Earth Italy, who was a child at the time. Radiation, the news said, would rain down on the population. “The fear from the sky,” ran one La Repubblica headline. “The cloud above us, the doubt within us,” ran another.

On the night of April 30, 1986, Italy’s nuclear monitoring stations began recording increases in radioactivity. The cloud moved over the Valley of the Po, and while the government called for calm, the country began to descend into panic. In the minds of the Italian people, the worst had happened, explained Luca Romano, a writer and activist campaigning for the return of nuclear power in Italy. “Nuclear annihilation, death by radiation, the radioactive cloud and the nuclear holocaust, had arrived,” he said. Nuclear armageddon was a fear that had gripped the West for decades. This was not a nuclear war, but in the Italian collective consciousness, that didn’t make a difference. 

The reality was, says Barbara Curli, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Turin, that “Italy was only marginally affected by the cloud.”

The cloud in northern Italy meant radioactivity levels peaked briefly, but ten days later they had fallen dramatically back down. Because this spike was short-lived, the total radiation exposure remained low. A United Nations committee report recorded that northern Italy received an additional radiation dose of about 380 microsieverts in the year following Chernobyl — less than a fifth of the normal background radiation humans absorb in a year; equivalent to taking about six transatlantic flights. It was much smaller than the doses received by neighboring countries like Bulgaria, Austria and Greece, and in the south of Italy the dose was lower still. 

Down by the Latina power plant, though, the community was shaken by events in Chernobyl, and rumors and misinformation began to spread about the fallout. The friends and family of the technician, Ruggero Dell’Aquila, started asking him if a Chernobyl-style disaster could happen at Latina, too. “Everyone was afraid, asking — ‘can it explode, can it explode?’” he recalled. 

The reality was, a Chernobyl-style explosion was not possible at Latina, because its reactor lacked the unstable characteristics of the Soviet design. But this was not such an easy concept to explain. 

“The problem was that a slew of journalists took over, telling lies,” Malossi said, recalling paranoid rumours about radioactivity causing mutations in nature. People started telling stories, Malossi said, about “frogs with three heads, animals and fish with four tails. Strange things. When in fact absolutely nothing like that was happening.”

The government advised people to avoid fresh vegetables and dairy products, particularly for children. Farmers destroyed crops and poured away milk. Sergio Malossi ignored the warnings, having measured radiation levels in the air himself. “My father and others from the plant brought the vegetables home and we ate them,” his daughter recalled.

It was these warnings — delivered amid a lack of clear information — that shifted public attitudes toward nuclear energy, said Renzo Colombo, 65, who was just beginning a career in nuclear engineering when the explosion happened. Now a member of Nucleare e Ragione, a nonprofit that promotes a rational approach to nuclear energy in Italy, he recalls how quickly fear took hold. “A real phobia was born, a panic about radioactivity,” he said. “And this panic marked the next 25 years.”

The months after the accident were a shadowy, uncertain period for Italians working in the nuclear industry. “I have to be honest, I felt a little guilty,” said Colombo. “As a nuclear engineer, I thought ‘what have we done?’ My colleagues and I always thought we were designing something useful for humanity. And at that moment we felt betrayed by our own profession.”

Outside Italy’s nuclear plants, crowds began to gather. A coalition of environmental groups and political parties started pushing for people to vote against nuclear power in an upcoming referendum.

This movement was not new. “Many years before Chernobyl, an environmentalist culture was born — and it didn’t just concern nuclear power, but risky industry in general,” explained Curli, the Turin historian. The anti-nuclear environmental movement, which spread across Europe in the 1970s, was particularly potent in Italy — a country rocked by violent political turmoil, organized crime, and corruption scandals. Public fears, explained Curli, were sharpened by the Seveso disaster, an accident at an industrial plant in the north of Italy in 1976 that exposed tens of thousands of people to a toxic cloud of chemicals. Nuclear power, she said, “was not perceived by public opinion as a credible policy because there's this underlying distrust in institutions.” 

In 1977, almost a decade before Chernobyl, a 10,000-strong crowd of protesters showed up at Montalto di Castro, to protest against a large new nuclear plant that was planned. A Time magazine correspondent described the activists as “an improbable mix of elegant members of the Italian nobility, radical students in American Indian garb, middle-class citizens and Christian Democratic and Communist politicians.”

In the wake of Chernobyl, Renzo Colombo was working at that very same plant, helping to build the thermohydraulic cycle. By then, the station was nearly complete. “It was a beautiful plant,” Colombo said. “I loved working there.”

In November 1987, 18 months after the Chernobyl accident, the Italian government held a referendum on nuclear energy. Nearly 80% of Italians voted in favor of measures that would end the country’s use of atomic energy.

One morning, following the referendum, the Montalto di Castro plant’s director called the workers to a meeting. Colombo remembers him saying: “‘Ragazzi, gather round, I need to talk to you. I’ve just been to the ministry, and Italy has decided that we are closing all nuclear activity and will focus on coal and gas instead.’” The room went silent. “I was young,” said Colombo. “But there were people there who were older and had devoted years of their life to the nuclear field. There was just this urge to cry.” 

The effect of the referendum was all-encompassing: construction was halted, and over the next three years Italy’s nuclear plants were shut down for good; its nuclear engineers scattered — many going to work abroad, or, like Colombo, re-training to work in other industries. 

It was hailed as a victory for Italian environmentalism, says Curli. But the result was that there was a push to “gasify” Italy. That is, she says, “to choose the gas route — less expensive, and less demanding than nuclear power. But this made Italy almost completely dependent on Russian gas, Libyan gas, Algerian gas.” The Montalto di Castro site was converted into a fossil-fuel powered plant, running on gas and fuel oil.

Decades on from that post-Chernobyl referendum — and a second referendum in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 — Italy remains in the process of dismantling its nuclear power stations, even as it now contemplates a return to nuclear power.

Watching them work is Enrico Bastianini, director of operations at the Latina plant. As I walk with Bastianini through the plant, we come to the old control room. When it first opened in 1963, the Latina plant was the largest nuclear power station in Europe — a feat of Italian and British engineering (the reactor was of UK design) and a symbol of Italy’s post-war industrial growth. 

“We were emerging from the destruction of the war, and this was progress. And it was what allowed us to escape the economic hardships of war, and have low-cost energy,” Bastianini says.

Now, over 60 years on from when the plant opened, more than half of its existence has been spent being taken apart. Critics of nuclear power often focus on precisely this point: the long and complex process of dismantling nuclear plants, and the problem of managing radioactive waste, some of which takes millennia to decay. 

There are two phases to the process of taking apart the plant. “The first phase allows us to dismantle everything that’s nuclear except the reactor. That’s because the reactor contains a huge amount of graphite,” Bastianini explains. “When we have a national repository, it can be removed. But for now, it’s safest if it stays in the first phase.”

Bastianini leads me into a deposit room where radioactive material is being stored in steel containers, inside an earthquake-resistant facility. These containers are only for temporary storage.

There were attempts in the early 2000s to establish a national nuclear waste repository at a salt mine in Basilicata in southern Italy, but huge protests forced the government to abandon its plans. Today, SOGIN, the state-owned Italian company in charge of decommissioning nuclear sites, is still actively searching for a suitable location for a permanent repository and faces considerable opposition. 

Rumours and anxiety swirl around the Latina plant itself — just as they did in the 1980s, when Malossi heard stories of radioactive fish with four tails. Last April, an article by the Italian magazine L’Espresso published claims that the Latina plant could leach radioactive material into the soil. The plant vigorously denies these claims — a spokesperson for SOGIN said the company periodically checks the quality of vegetables, milk and fodder as well as air, soil and groundwater for radiation and that “as always, the results of the analyses confirm radiologically negligible environmental impacts.”

In the gloaming of a summer evening in Umbria, Monica Tommasi drives me through the twilight-darkened hills surrounding the medieval city of Orvieto. This land is rich in archeological and ecological heritage — filled with ancient tunnels, Etruscan caves, untapped archeological sites, wild places where wolves and boar roam. Tommasi is the President of Amici Della Terra — "Friends of the Earth" in Italian — an organization that was once the Italian chapter of the international Friends of the Earth network before breaking away in 2014. "We left, because we argued a lot," she said of the split, describing how the network "wanted to put turbines and panels everywhere, and we couldn't be in favour of that approach." 

The International Friends of the Earth association was born from the anti-nuclear movement in America, where the group successfully lobbied to shut down two reactors, and has since 1969 made anti-nuclear campaigning a core part of its identity.

But Tommasi remembers precisely when she first began to reconsider nuclear power. “I started thinking about it in 2011, when I began to see that the government was investing heavily in solar and wind power, which would invade and industrialize the natural landscape,” she recalled. Many of these green transition projects have been fraught with problems in Italy — wind farm companies accused of corruption and profiteering, of erecting wind farms in areas where there’s little wind, and laying waste to nature. 

For the first time, Tommasi began to think about ways to decarbonize “that don’t destroy the environment where people live and the landscape around them.”. She became intrigued by the nuclear option. “We needed to start reasoning and changing our minds,” she said. 

Tommasi now advocates for a national conversation about nuclear power. “This choice must be accompanied by a public debate,” she told me, “but it isn’t happening because everyone is still afraid.” 

“The future of Italy's energy sector must lie in nuclear,” she said, adding that if Italy was to continue pursuing solar and wind energy alone, “it means destroying all the natural areas that are still left.”

I asked the government to respond to allegations about how criminality, speculation and land-grabs in the renewable energy sector might be affecting Italians’ opinions on nuclear power. 

“We do not believe it is appropriate to frame the energy debate by ideologically pitting nuclear power against renewables, nor should we use any administrative or criminal issues in certain sectors to discredit a technology as a whole,” said Fiorella Corrado, communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “Nuclear power is not an alternative to renewables, but their best ally,” she said. 

On a warm autumn day in Rome, several thousand people gathered for an annual “climate pride” march. They brandished homemade cardboard wind turbines that spun in the breeze. Vincenzo Migliucci, 83, was among them. He worked for more than three decades for ENEL, Italy’s energy corporation, and he’s been anti-nuclear for much of his life. After the Chernobyl accident, he protested outside the nuclear plant under construction in Montalto di Castro almost every day, picketing the workers as they went through the gates.

“The wrath of God happened,” he said, referring to Chernobyl. “And when a true estimate is made, we’ll one day see how many disasters Chernobyl caused.” 

Migliucci is against nuclear power plants of all types — arguing for solar panels instead — and is particularly concerned about what happens to the plants after they become obsolete and must, like the Latina plant, be slowly dismantled over decades. “The decommissioning costs a fortune; the nuclear waste repositories cost a fortune,” he said.

He began telling me some of the stories that surround Italy’s shuttered nuclear plants. “Near the Garigliano power plant,” he told me, “a child was born with only one eye.” His own eyes widened as he pressed a finger into the middle of my forehead. “Sheep and cattle,” he said, “were born with six legs, or entirely red in colour. It’s not a myth, it’s real.” 

Younger generations of Italians don’t have the same collective impressions around nuclear power, nor around Chernobyl or its aftermath, explained Luca Romano, a young pro-nuclear influencer with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. Romano makes videos with his partner, Luiza Munteanu, about the advantages of nuclear power. The main problem he runs up against, he says, is that “we have a very low scientific literacy, the level of debate is abysmal.” And culturally, he adds, “Italy has always been a country that looks backwards rather than forwards.”

In May, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Italy’s Lombardy region, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the governor to cooperate on applying nuclear science for development across the region. The choice of Lombardy was significant. It is home to Milan, and is at the heart of Italy’s digital infrastructure. Speckled with no fewer than 60 data centers, with more cropping up, Lombardy has opened itself up to Silicon Valley. Microsoft is investing billions in the area to boost its AI and cloud computing infrastructure. Amazon Web Services has committed to spending over $1 billion to expand its data center operations around Milan.

How northern Italy’s growing AI infrastructure will be powered, though, is still a problem to be solved — one that cuts to the heart of Italy’s energy dependence. Since Giorgia Meloni became prime minister in October 2022 — which coincided with the launch of ChatGPT a month later — the Italian government has been broaching the topic of nuclear power as essential to Italy's energy future. “World population and economic growth will significantly increase energy demand,” Meloni said at a sustainability summit in Abu Dhabi. “Not least due to the growing requirements arising from the development of generative artificial intelligence.” 

Artificial intelligence is a “highly relevant topic,” said Corrado, the communications chief at Italy’s environment and energy ministry. “As more things run on electricity, the economy goes digital, and data centers and AI expand, demand for steady, low-emissions power will rise. Nuclear energy can help as a reliable, controllable source that works alongside renewables.” 

In August, it emerged that the government had set aside €7.5 million purely for pro-nuclear communication and information campaigns directed at regions where new plants may be built. One focus of the Meloni administration is on the prospect of building small modular reactors, sometimes called “mini nukes.” They are compact fission plants, a fraction of the size of the traditional, cathedral-like nuclear power stations. They have a smaller core, and proponents argue their safety features mean there’s minimal chance of an epic, Chernobyl-scale nuclear disaster, something the government is keen to get across to voters. 

Currently, only China and Russia have these small reactors up and running, but mini nuclear plants have attracted significant attention in Silicon Valley. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was chairman of Oklo, a nuclear startup focused on SMRs, while U.S. nuclear startup Kairos has signed an agreement with Google to develop these reactors to power its data centers. This month, the European Commission unveiled a strategy for rolling out small modular reactors and bringing them “online” by the 2030s.

Soon, Italy may take the first steps towards the reconstruction of a nuclear industry that has been abandoned for decades. “I believe it won't be easy to relaunch nuclear energy,” said Barbara Curli, the Turin historian. “Knowing a little about the history of nuclear power in Italy and its political dimension, I'd be quite skeptical about the possibility of relaunching nuclear power here in Italy — but let’s see.” 

A little under 1,500 miles away, in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, among wild boar, birds, and deer, radiation levels in some areas have dipped below around 0.3 microsieverts per hour, lower than background radiation levels in many European cities. Not least the eternal city of Rome.

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Julia E, an 18-year-old influencer from Germany, was hanging out with her family on the Palm Jumeirah beach when she heard a blast and saw a fireball erupt into the sky. She knew tension was mounting following the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran the previous day, but she didn’t imagine Dubai would be on the frontline. “I was a little scared,” she says. “Usually you just read about it in the newspapers, you see it online, but when you see it in front of you, it’s a different feeling — like your heart just drops.”

The fear was not an emotion she expressed on Instagram. Julia’s family moved to Dubai from Germany in 2024, tempted by the business potential of an emirate that aggressively marketed itself as the influencer capital of the world — a digital utopia carved out of the desert, with its gleaming skyscrapers and Insta-ready waterfronts. Dubai’s state-backed Creator HQ offers content creators long-term residencies, legal support, networking opportunities, training and an environment geared towards digital entrepreneurship. Influencers need a permit to legally operate in Dubai but taxes are negligible — 5% VAT on taxable income from clients in the UAE over AED 375,000 (about $102,000), and a flat 9% corporate tax on income exceeding AED 1,000,000 (about $272,000). It has attracted over 50,000 content creators to Dubai, which has a population of about 4 million.

With 60,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, Julia is looking to build her own marketing company in Dubai. In an effort, she says, to comfort her younger brother, she recorded a video shortly after witnessing the explosion. It showed Julia, a palm tree and the glittering night skyline behind her, with the caption: “You live in Dubai, aren’t you scared?” The video cuts to a montage of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other Emirati sheikhs: “No, because I know who protects us.” The short video is set to an AI-generated rendition of the Belgian singer Stromae’s ‘Papaoutai’, a song that laments the loss of a father.

According to Julia, she was the first content creator to post an ‘Are you safe?’-style video, a now viral trend across the Gulf as influencers counter the narrative of a region in turmoil. 

“I decided to make that video,” she says, “because I did feel safe. And I wanted to spread some positivity and my perspective that we are still being protected and we still have someone behind us here.” As Iranian drones hit the Gulf, including luxury tourist hotels destinations like Fairmont, The Palm hotel and the Burj Al Arab hotel, there was a wave of schadenfreude online. Some users outside Dubai could not contain their glee that the city’s glossy surface, its influencer-curated image of sunkissed luxury, had been ripped apart. The distress of those who spend their working hours flaunting luxury and throwing shade at the cities they come from, were, it has to be admitted, amusing to many.

But Dubai’s influencers doubled down, as the war spiralled and airports shut down, stressing the city’s safety, walking around in crowded public spaces, praising “the best air defense systems” and the men behind it: a reaction so seemingly choreographed that people questioned whether it was part of a government PR campaign. 

On March 3, the UAE’s president and crown prince were conspicuously filmed on a stroll through a Dubai mall, reassuring bewildered shoppers. It was eerily reminiscent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s “The President is here” video from four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Vogue Arabia, headquartered in the UAE, praised Gulf leaders and wrote about the influencer campaigns and the people’s “unwavering faith in their nation’s leadership and its steadfast commitment to protecting those who call it home.” 

As inviting as Dubai is to influencers, they must acquire advertiser permits that can cost up to $4,000 and are told to respect the state and avoid circulating rumors and unverified information or any content that can harm the UAE’s foreign relations or “offend or compromise national unity or social cohesion.” In the wake of Iran’s strikes, the UAE’s Public Prosecution announced that "anyone who shares or republishes content from unknown sources may face legal accountability under the country’s applicable laws, even if they are not the original creator of the content.”

There is a sense of vulnerability among Dubai’s influencers, says Zoe Hurley, associate professor of media at the American University of Sharjah and author of the 2023 book ‘Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition’. “They haven't necessarily been trained professionally. They don't have institutional guardrails protecting them, or any formal buffer zones that might have protected people who are putting themselves out there.” she said. Hurley made a distinction between “influencers who are here on holiday who don't live here and who are followed by, say, people in the UK” and homegrown ones, representing diasporas in Dubai — from South Asia, the Levant and Europe — “who people are turning to because they're the thought leaders in their communities.”

None of the influencers we contacted in Dubai or across the Gulf confirmed ever being prompted or paid to post positive content. The German NTV network, however, reported concerns voiced by German influencers: "I don't know what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say," one posted, "We're not allowed to post anything!” said another. These stories and reels have since been deleted.

Julia made another video, responding to the accusations that influencers were essentially providing a PR service for Dubai. “I will tell you exactly how much I got paid,” she says. “Dubai pays me in business… in safety… in connections… with weather.” She adds that, unlike in Dubai, she would never venture outside alone in her native Germany after 8 at night.

This point about Dubai’s safety — leaving things in the car without being scared to be robbed, or walking alone at night — is echoed widely among European expatriates in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia who compare it to the relative anxiety they feel in Europe. Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov recently made the same point: “Unfortunately, I had to leave Dubai for Europe a week ago — so I’m not only missing the free fireworks from Iran, but also exposing myself to greater risk. Given Europe’s crime rates, Dubai is statistically safer even with missiles flying.” Elon Musk shared the sentiment, writing that “No country is perfect, but Dubai and UAE broadly are objectively safer and better run than many areas of Europe.” Notorius influencer and ‘manosphere’ icon, Andrew Tate, still facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania, posted a video of himself dancing on a yacht “as bombs fall.” His brother Tristan Tate chimed in, comparing air attacks in Dubai to stabbings in London. 

What these influencers don’t discuss is Dubai’s underbelly, an invisible city occupied by an underpaid migrant workforce, their treatment explained away on the grounds that they make more money in Dubai than they would in the poor countries in South Asia and Africa that they come from. While the influencers enjoy government-sponsored benefits and status, these other migrant workers remain bound under the kafala (sponsorship) system that binds their residency status to their employer. Despite reforms, under the system their status remains uncertain, their earnings precarious, and imprisonment or fines for relatively minor offences is common. There are no golden visas for laborers and maids, never mind darker reports about human trafficking and sexual and physical abuse. 

London-based barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher described the UAE’s exploitation of migrant workers as a “grubby reality, with rampant human rights abuses.” She said she had “acted for people prosecuted and jailed in the UAE for daring to work with human rights organisations or criticise the authorities,” referring to the mass trial in 2024, when 43 people, among them human rights activists, had been “subjected to enforced disappearance, solitary confinement and incommunicado detention.” 

The contrast between the city that influencers show their followers and the city built on the abuse of migrant labor is one that governments across the Gulf want to bury. The UAE’s 2031 vision sees creative industries contributing up to 5% of the country’s GDP. 

For decades now, the UAE has been trying to diversify its economy, to pivot away from its reliance on hydrocarbons. It is betting on the digital economy and tourism to be the cornerstones of economic growth. 

But for all the bravado on display, rich people and Western influencers are fleeing the Gulf, as war with Iran continues. Influencers unable or unwilling to leave, must keep grinding. Narcissus could not stop staring at his reflection even as he was dying. Will Dubai’s influencers be allowed to look away from their reflections in the city’s famous mirrored skyscrapers?

The post The influencer bubble: Can content creators continue to airbrush the Gulf? appeared first on Coda Story.

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