Dinidh O'Brien

I have spent my career at the intersection of data, privacy and technology. I founded and launched multiple ethical data and AI startups, and I advised the European Commission on the AI Act, the Data Governance Act and the European Health Data Space. I have also sat across the table from OpenAI and Anthropic and told them, directly, that they were failing to protect ordinary citizens. I asked them how they would protect our most sensitive data and images - I wasn't impressed at the response. That is the through line in my work: speaking truth to power, whether that power is an official writing the law, a religious institution doing damage to bodies and minds, or a corporation that has decided growth matters more than the people it affects.

The same instinct is what pulls me towards the work I am doing now. I write and speak under my own name about sex positivity, body positivity and sexual liberation, and specifically about what a healthy version of those conversations looks like. For a decade I have also photographed myself as Intrepid Libertine, and I am a published photographer and exhibited model. I was not raised religious. I was pulled in at eighteen, an impressionable and undiagnosed neurodivergent kid who found a framework that offered certainty and belonging, and which treated the body and sexuality as inherently dangerous. Leaving took years. Unlearning it took longer.

My work goes deeper than helping people to feel comfortable in their bodies. It explores why so many men, and increasingly younger men, are being funnelled towards status anxiety and looksmaxxing content instead of anything that actually helps them relate to their bodies, their partners or their own desire honestly. It is about how religious and cultural trauma shapes adult sexuality long after someone has left the belief system that caused it. And it is about what it takes to build a sex-positive, body-positive culture that is about liberation rather than performance.

I bring the same standards to this that I brought to policy work. I do not say things I cannot back up, I am comfortable with pushback and nuance, and I am interested in the mechanism behind a claim rather than the soundbite. I am happy to go deep on the data, privacy and AI side, on the sex positivity, body positivity and religious trauma side, or on how the two inform each other, which is the more interesting conversation and the one I rarely get to have.