For a world that is seemingly obsessed with the agency of the individual, it’s strange that the concept is absent from the way we think about politics, technology, and the future.
And (perhaps relatedly) it’s strange that, for all the tech industry’s talk of ‘empowering’ the world – making them smarter, more creative, collaborative, and productive – we live in a time when powerlessness is the definitive feeling of so many lives. From economic precarity to growing rates of mental illness, the empty rhetoric of techno-optimism has become louder as the world has got harder and more challenging for many people.
This is the reality that The Cookie was created to address. It is intended to help people think differently about technology and the way it defines both the material and imaginative reality of our lives. It’s also intended to amplify the ideas of many thinkers and writers who have helped to develop a critical vocabulary long before the term ‘techlash’ found its way into mainstream news outlets.
The Cookie’s approach
While it’s tempting to follow the tech press and chase the current interest in topics such as artificial intelligence and fake news, The Cookie is adopting a different approach. Although these issues will be covered, The Cookie is starting out by framing them in four distinct categories:
- Ideas – ways of thinking about how and why technology shapes how we live.
- Inventions – Stuff that emerges from the ether of investment (we decided to specifically not call this ‘innovations’).
- People – the people influencing the future.
- Policy – the ideas put into practice by governments and organizations and their effects.
The very best insights and ideas about the way technology is shaping the horizons of our political and social imagination can be found in a huge range of places, such as academic journals, books, tweets, podcasts, and newsletters. The Cookie aims to be a place where people can become more familiar with some of those ideas before venturing further. It also aims to provide another perspective on key tech stories that are sometimes missed in more mainstream publications.
Change has been the mantra of late capitalism, but the Coronavirus pandemic has called its bluff after years which have, in reality, been politically and economically stagnant. Change is urgent, but it needs to be better – and this is only really achievable if we can restore some sense of agency to how people experience the world. That’s precisely what The Cookie will try and do.
– Richard Gall, Founder and Editor in Chief