Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Guarding the gatekeepers
WARS OFTEN RAGE behind the estimated ten million Wikipedia pages: edit wars, where editors repeatedly override each other’s contributions...
The hydrogen economy
BEFORE THERE WAS Matt Damon in the film adaptation of The Martian, there was Cyrus Harding in Jules Verne’s...
Reading in the dark
I WAS WITH friends, high up on a range looking west and down through a long and beautiful valley...
On becoming posthuman
YOUR 185-MILLIONTH GREAT grandparents were fish. Your descendants will not be human forever. In a world of climate change,...
Clean sweep
IT IS SUPPOSED to be test of character. An A+ student sits down to the final exam of his...
The network versus the hierarchy
‘IT IS EASIER to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.’ So wrote...
Rebooting the sharing economy
IN LATE OCTOBER 2010, I found myself in the city of San Francisco for the first time. I was...
Sortition
ANY DEMOCRACY WORTHY of the name must be an ongoing experiment in institutional design: there must be a willingness...
Disrupting the master narrative
MY INTEREST IN Indigenous people’s use of social media began while I was completing a PhD on the politics...
Keeping faith with words
FOR MOST OF us who care to think about such things, the teenager was invented by JD Salinger in...
First life, second death
IN 2011, AS a researcher interested in death and mourning, I decided to explore the now ‘mature’ virtual social...
The search for ET
OUR WORLD WAS made by a million geniuses. Just switching on a light invokes a chain of historical brilliance...
