In 1984, Orwell knew that you don't need to silence people if you can shrink the words they have to think with.

Technology has its own vocabulary, and it was never neutral. "Weakest link." "Insider threat." "Zero trust." Cybersecurity spent decades building a language that cast ordinary people as the risk, made institutions disappear from the story, and decided who got blamed when things went wrong.

Now AI is inheriting that vocabulary, and adding to it. Models don't make mistakes, they "hallucinate". Systems built by companies are "autonomous". Human decisions vanish behind words like "alignment" and "black box". And when a government can simply rename the technology itself, from AI to "SI", we're watching naming turn into policy in real time.

So who gets to name the future?

Drawing on digital anthropology, cybersecurity and AI governance, Lianne Potter traces how the powerful have always shaped language to shape what we can see, question and regulate. From doublespeak and Newspeak to the militarised metaphors of cyber and the emerging vocabulary of AI, this is a talk about who gets to name technology, and who pays when the names are wrong.

Because the legacy of technology isn't only the systems we leave behind. It's the words we leave behind to explain them, and whoever writes the dictionary gets to write the rules.