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
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
IT WOULD BE hard to hear a louder warning bell than the 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The report delivers the stark message that global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees by around 2030 if emissions... Read more
