Ideas

The ideas that are shaping the future, and helping us to better understand it.

Types of guys: the production of a folk taxonomy of masculinity

If you’ve spent time within a particular type of online space in recent years you might be familiar with the…

December 7, 2021 8:45 pm

Bureaucratic technology and the limits of solutionism at Cop26

In The Utopia of Rules the late David Graeber argues that we have moved from poetic to bureaucratic technologies (2016).…

December 7, 2021 6:39 pm

The world on a grid: Accidentally Wes Anderson and empty aesthetics

'Accidentally Wes Anderson' is a social media phenomenon. Starting life as an Instagram account which curates photographs - produced by…

November 27, 2021 5:04 pm

The pleasures of surveillance: Re-reading Marwick through Foucault

Alice Marwick’s conception of social surveillance (Marwick, 2012) builds heavily on Foucault’s notion of “capillaries of power” in which power…

November 18, 2021 5:36 pm

The future of observability: smarter troubleshooting with change intelligence

Sponsored by 10KMedia. Trends like observability have underlined that one of the key challenges facing engineering teams in the last…

September 23, 2021 9:01 am

Substation: how an open source alternative to Substack could help us rediscover a more independent and adventurous culture

“If I get really excited about licensing schemes, kill me,” software developer Jesse von Doom says. We’re talking about open…

May 13, 2021 11:49 am

Can we build a better content ecosystem without making big tech the discourse police? [Interview with Jillian York]

The apparent simplicity of our digital lives, governed by a revolving series of platforms on which the same content continually…

April 23, 2021 11:56 am

Tech for good is a con trick – it’s time to demand better from the industry

'Tech for good' isn’t really a movement. It’s more of a posture - one that merely signals good intentions. While…

January 21, 2021 5:21 pm

Stop using social media as an easy explanation for the violence at the Capitol

Barely hours after crowds rioters left the Capitol, commentators began formulating their responses to the extraordinary events of January 6th.…

January 9, 2021 1:59 pm

Science and intimacy: The troubling relationship between data surveillance and care

At the end of November, The Daily Mail published details of an investigation into how UK councils are working with…

December 15, 2020 11:57 am

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