The new samizdat

Sections:

While much of the media industry focused on the churn of headlines, we became increasingly interested in the undercurrents beneath them : the hidden systems, infrastructures and ideologies shaping events across borders and over time.

Again and again, our reporting led us back to the same realization: for a long time, the struggle over information was understood primarily as a question of censorship or access. Who controls information? Who gets to publish? Who gets silenced?

Those questions still matter. But they no longer fully describe the world we live in.

Today, the struggle over information is about who builds the systems through which reality is organized, distributed and trusted. From state propaganda to algorithmic feeds, from platform monopolies to AI-generated noise, the battle is not over facts. It is over the infrastructures that determine which narratives spread, which voices are amplified and which communities remain connected.

Over the past year, these questions led to a collaboration between Coda and The Continent , the pan-African newspaper founded in Johannesburg by Simon Allison and Sipho Kings. Although our reporting emerges from very different histories and geographies, we found ourselves arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about power, fragmentation and the future of journalism in an age of informational instability.

This two-chapter essay is the beginning of that collaboration, and marks the start of a new project called The Atlas . Pilot edition is available here — please feel free to share with friends, family and colleagues, preferably in its entirety.

In Chapter One , I return to the world of my Soviet childhood: propaganda, samizdat and the search for trustworthy signals through noise.

In Chapter Two , The Continent co-founder Simon Allison presents the Parable of Sinn Sisamouth: the story of how some of the greatest songs ever written were nearly lost, and then found, and then lost again.

Taken together, these essays ask what journalism becomes in a world where information is no longer organized primarily to inform, but to capture attention, manufacture reaction and shape perception at planetary scale.

The Atlas grows out of that question.

Chapter One: Through the Static

Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on the cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of civil war. We didn’t use the term back then, but fake news was all we got through official channels. Real news — coming from the West — felt like a lifeline. I was in awe of the crackling radio that held my mother’s full attention. I wanted to become that voice.

Years later, I got my dream job at the BBC and spent much of my adult life moving between wars, uprisings and authoritarian states. Again and again, I found myself in places where truth was contested terrain: Baghdad, Damascus, Donetsk, Sana’a. But over time I realized something fundamental had changed. Modern authoritarianism no longer relied primarily on suppressing information. It had discovered something more effective.

Information could simply be drowned out by static.

That realization became stark for me in eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014. I arrived in a field of bright yellow sunflowers where the bodies from Flight MH17 still lay scattered across the ground. A Russian missile had blown the passenger plane out of the sky, killing all 298 people on board. Yet almost immediately, the Kremlin flooded the information space with competing explanations. It was a Ukrainian fighter jet. A failed assassination attempt on Putin. The plane had been filled with corpses before takeoff. Each theory contradicted the next, but that hardly mattered. The point was not to persuade, it was to exhaust. It was to create so much noise that truth itself began to feel unstable.

Over the following years, I watched versions of the same logic spread far beyond Russia. Social platforms transformed public conversation into a permanent stream of outrage, performance and distraction, collapsing vastly different kinds of information into the same endless feed. War footage, propaganda, conspiracy theories, journalism and gossip all began competing inside systems designed not to inform people but to capture and hold attention.

Noise became the new censorship.

And increasingly, I found myself thinking about the world of my childhood again. Not because history was repeating itself neatly, but because the emotional landscape felt strangely familiar: confusion, exhaustion, distrust, the constant sense that reality itself was becoming slippery. Back then, people searched desperately for clear signals through the static of Soviet propaganda. Today, we are drowning in a different kind of static, but the instinct, the search for clarity feels remarkably similar.

I…