Have you ever been called a Luddite? We have – usually as an insult, rooted in a popular misconception that Luddites are anti-progress fanatics. Nothing could be further from the truth. The original 19th century Luddites weren’t against technology. Rather, they resisted its oppressive use. Their rebellion was violently suppressed. But their core critique lives...
Category: Politics
The Twitter Surveillance State
When Justine Sacco, who in 2013, before a flight to South Africa, tweeted a joke about getting AIDS on Twitter it blew up, as did her life.
The Analog City and the Digital City
Since the advent of the Internet roughly a half century ago, digital media has been heralded as an agent of empowerment and democratic liberation. Along the Information Superhighway lay peace, progress, and prosperity. There were critics along the way, of course, but their warnings were for the most part dismissed or ignored. As late as...
Why a decentralized Internet is important for Businesses
The Internet’s first two decades, roughly from the 1980s to the early 2000s, was built on open protocols and managed by the community. This allowed people and organizations to grow their Internet presence while knowing that the rules would not change in the future. This first Internet era saw the creation of huge web platforms...
Remote and hybrid Work in 2022 – Trends and Predictions
Companies that refuse to accept the new reality of remote and hybrid work (without good reasons) will start to look out of date, especially as the benefits for diversity, recruitment, and work-life balance increase. But hybrid work experiences still friction. While 2021 was about getting bosses to allow people to choose where they want to...
The New Net Delusion
In June 2009, large protests broke out in Iran in the wake of a disputed election result. The unrest did not differ all that much from comparable episodes that had occurred elsewhere in the world over the preceding decades, but many Western observers became convinced that new digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook were propelling...
People are learning the wrong lessons from the Facebook Papers
Recent Facebook leaks have prompted an avalanche of suggestions for fixing social media’s negative effects on society. These include demands for increased oversight by executives and boards of companies, regulators, or both. However, these proposals do not address the main problem of the attention-economy, which cannot be fixed by top-down control. The problem lies at...
How to Fix Social Media
Around two o’clock in the afternoon on October 30, 1973, a disc jockey at the New York City radio station WBAI played a track called “Filthy Words” from comedian George Carlin’s latest album. “I was thinking one night about the words you couldn’t say on the public airwaves,” Carlin began. He then rattled off seven...
Google Is Letting People Find Invites to Some Private WhatsApp Groups – VICE
Whatsapp users have been able to invite other users to a group chat using a link. If you open a link invitation, you will automatically be added to the group. As Vice reports, until recently those links were anything but private – if you search Google for the right URL, thousands of invitation links can...
Personal Data Is Valuable. Give Pricing Power to the People | WIRED
Wired article by Olaf Groth, Tobias Straube and Dan Zehr discussing a market that establishes a price for privacy-assured data and returns a fair share of that value to the people: Today, people fuel the digital economy with vast streams of data but have virtually no power to demand fair compensation for it. The companies...
