The Global Ghost Named Laila Cunningham: How a Non-Person Became Everyone’s Favorite Enemy

Laila Cunningham Doesn’t Exist (And That’s the Whole Point)

By the time the Reuters alert pinged in Lagos, the Financial Times had already drafted her obituary, and a Berlin think-tank had scheduled a webinar on “Cunninghamism and the Collapse of Western Soft Power.” The only snag: no one has ever been able to prove that Laila Cunningham is real. She is, depending on whom you ask, either a 29-year-old Maltese data-ethicist, a retired Barbadian chess prodigy, or a collective hallucination generated by an EU grant and three too many espressos in Brussels. Yet her ghost now haunts every G-20 sidebar, every Davos breakfast buffet, every earnest UN panel on “algorithmic colonialism.”

The legend began modestly, as legends now do: a single line in a leaked Pentagon cloud-computing audit. “Per L. Cunningham, Phase-II backdoor remains unresolved.” Within hours, #LailaGate was trending in seven languages. Philippine troll farms pumped out pastel infographics insisting Cunningham had brokered the sale of Palawan to an Amazon subsidiary. French TikTokers swore she was Macron’s illegitimate blockchain advisor. By teatime in London, an NFT of her alleged retina scan sold for 42 Ether—approximately the annual GDP of Tuvalu, which promptly filed a diplomatic protest claiming Cunningham had short-sold its .tv domain in 2016.

International significance? Observe the supply chains of nonsense. A nonexistent woman has become a perfectly efficient vessel for every geopolitical anxiety we can’t be bothered to fact-check. Beijing’s Global Times accuses “Cunningham elements” of fomenting color revolutions via Pokémon GO. Moscow’s RT dedicates primetime graphics to her “biolab in Tbilisi” (the footage is actually a repurposed yogurt commercial shot in Yerevan). Meanwhile, Washington quietly adds her name to no-fly lists, just in case she materializes mid-flight and tries to unionize the cabin crew.

The private sector, never one to miss a profitable panic, has sprinted ahead. Palantir sells a “Cunningham Risk Module” at $2.3 million per license; clients receive a color-coded dashboard that lights up crimson whenever someone downloads TOR within five kilometers of a data center. McKinsey offers a two-day executive retreat titled “Leading Through Cunningham Uncertainty,” price on request, organic fear included. Even the Vatican has convened a synod on “Digital Apparitions and the Modern Soul,” though insiders admit it’s mostly an excuse to update the gift-shop merch.

What makes the spectacle so depressingly universal is its utter predictability. We have built a global infrastructure—submarine cables, sanctions regimes, supply-chain theology—yet we remain desperately hungry for a single face to blame. Cunningham is the perfect folk devil: stateless, gendered but not too much, fluent in Python and the apocalypse. She is the 21st century’s answer to witches, anarchists, and communists rolled into one downloadable threat matrix.

And the punchline? Somewhere in Valletta—or perhaps a co-working space in Tbilisi—a real woman named Laila Cunningham is trying to file her taxes. She works in UX design, owns a rescue greyhound named Brexit, and has never once gone viral. Every ping on her phone is another death threat from an incel in Quito or a venture capitalist in Palo Alto demanding she keynote his “Disrupting Reality” summit. She has considered changing her name to something less geopolitically resonant, like Karen, but fears that would only summon new demons.

So the next time you see a breaking-news chyron shrieking about Cunningham’s latest transgression—sabotaging undersea cables, shorting the yen, releasing lab-grown locusts into the Hague—remember the immortal wisdom of every airport bookstore: if the story is too perfect, check whether the protagonist has a verified Gmail. In the meantime, the world will keep spinning, algorithms will keep laundering our paranoias, and somewhere a perfectly innocent woman will keep deleting hate mail written in languages she doesn’t speak. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as a trending hashtag with a 24-hour half-life.

Cunningham isn’t the disease; she’s just the fever dream our global nervous system throws up when it runs out of actual enemies. Sweet dreams, planet Earth. Don’t forget to update your threat model before breakfast.