ON THE SURFACE, the global digital rights landscape is a depressing and forbidding place. US technology giants have commodified the whole field of human social interactions and are performing large-scale extractive operations on their user bases. The phrase ‘data is the new oil’ captures this ethic perfectly: our collective private lives are now assets to... Read more
WARS OFTEN RAGE behind the estimated ten million Wikipedia pages: edit wars, where editors repeatedly override each other’s contributions to a page and cannot reach consensus about what the final content should be. This can extend to many thousands of edits. While some of the most famous edit wars have been about classically nerdy topics –... Read more
THE WORD ‘CONSERVATIVE’ is frequently applied to classical music because the artistic gatekeepers of radio, television and the concert hall predominantly emphasise orchestral blockbusters and chamber gems by compositional giants from the past: so-called ‘museum music’ by Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mahler and Tchaikovsky, for example. Ironically, classical composers have embraced today’s digital technologies – the most... Read more
A system that cannot deliver the wellbeing of people and nature is in deep trouble. It invites ideas and actions that are transformative. James Gustav Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability[i]
IN AN ARTICLE in The London Review of Books from September 2017,... Read more
