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Arikia Millikan.

Our editorial adviser. A journalist and engineer who has spent a decade arguing that the people who make journalism should own it, and who is now building the thing that would let them.

Why she is on this page.

She shapes how this archive asks questions and what it does with the answers. That is abstract until you hear her, so this collects what we have filmed with her, points at the rest of her work, and sets out what she actually argues, in her words rather than ours.

She founded CTRL+X in Berlin in 2022, after a career that ran through WIRED, VICE, The Verge and The Atlantic. She says she had the idea on 13 October 2015, pitched it to journalism foundations in New York, and was told she was ten years too early.

What she argues.

Journalism got distribution, but the ownership and monetization layer was never built.

CTRL+X

An AI company trains its model on every word you have ever written, sells access to that model to your competitors, then you find out about it on X.

CTRL+X

If we do not enable journalists to protect their assets now, they will either rot or be stolen.

the Keep Going podcast, 30 April 2025

Journalists work tirelessly to construct complete stories, only to lose control over their intellectual property.

Blockchain: The Defibrillator Journalism Needs, 20 January 2025

I was not in a position, financially or morally, to work for free.

LadyBits’ First and Last Year on Medium, 31 May 2014

Her own archive is disappearing while she says this.

This is not a point scored against her. It is the argument, happening.

Haiti Rewired, the project she built at WIRED, no longer resolves. Neither does the Motherboard domain that carried nine of her articles. The Decentralized Media Summit, where she spoke twice in 2025, has no surviving event site at all: a YouTube playlist is the only evidence left that it happened. Her own link-in-bio points at a page that has moved.

A journalist who has spent ten years warning that the record rots is watching her own record rot, in public, faster than she can write about it. Checked 11 September 2026.

What we have filmed with her.

  1. New dark ages for journalism | Arikia Millikan CTRL+X | NYC

    2026-08-30

  2. Micropayments vs paywalls | Arikia Millikan CTRL+X | NYC

    2026-08-30

  3. Peer-to-peer journalism | Arikia Millikan on eliminating publishers | NYC

    2026-08-26

  4. AI companies stealing content | Arikia Millikan on author control | NYC

    2026-08-26

  5. Publications collapsing | Arikia Millikan on saving journalist archives | NYC

    2026-08-26

  6. CTRL+X: Peer-to-Peer Journalism Micropayments | NYC

    2026-08-26 · 2,198 words, transcribed

Watch her elsewhere.

Links, not copies. Her work stays where she put it.

Read her.

Her personal blog, twelve years of it, is deliberately closed to crawlers and search engines. She explained why when she stopped writing there in 2020: the words, she said, deserve much better than to be crawled by the spiders of the all-seeing eyes. We have not linked into it here for that reason.

What we have not done.

We have not transcribed her talks. We could: several are published under a licence that would allow it, and not one of her recorded talks has a published transcript anywhere, including a 24 minute one with no captions at all. We have asked her first, because a woman who builds licensing infrastructure for journalists should be the one who sets the terms on which her own words are copied. When she answers, this page will say so.

Keep this going

0/150 street interviews in for One Question, which closes Wed 4 November. Independent media, funded by the people who watch it: 15 supporters at $162 a month, on the way to $1,000.

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