Almost four decades after Public Enemy’s Chuck D first said that rap was ‘the black CNN’, music still acts as a conduit for truths marginalised or even actively suppressed in mainstream discourse. This mission has never been more urgent than in the dire circumstances of Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine. The stark divide between the […]
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For the British novelist Alexander Baron, who died in 1999, chance was everything. The greyhound that crosses the line first on a chilly East End track, the squaddie that survives shelling, those sent to camps in the darkest horrors of the twentieth century, and the sheer luck that pinballs the life of a writer were […]
Neoliberal ideology is often associated with certain think tanks and university departments. And rightly so: most neoliberal ideas were first given shape by thinkers at institutions like the LSE, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia — and then formulated into policy by free-market think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs, the […]
For many Britons, 1966 was a year of renewed national optimism and purpose. England’s FIFA World Cup victory sparked widespread celebration; the Beatles’ release of Revolver pushed popular music into new sonic territory; and Harold Wilson’s government continued to press its modernising agenda. Buoyed by the sense of having finally outgrown the years of post-war […]
One winter’s night in 1902, in a tenement building in Vilnius (then under imperialist rule, now the capital city of Lithuania), the Russian Jewish politician Vladimir Medem found himself in a makeshift meeting. Dozens of workers sat around on benches and overturned crates. Tailors, cobblers, chandlers, tanners, and coopers were all present, many of whom […]
When Islamophobic rioting engulfed Britain in the summer of 2024, Tariq Mehmood was in Manchester, where he now lives. Though the city didn’t see unrest on the scale of nearby Southport and Liverpool, there was enough to cause serious anxiety. Roving gangs of racists marauded through Muslim neighbourhoods with makeshift weapons, vandalising mosques with the […]
There was a time when approximately one-third of the globe was shaded pink, signifying lands that were part of the British Empire. Of course, some people claim that the Empire was a civilising force — a vehicle for spreading democracy and embodying a kind of moral crusade. However, one should always be drawn back to […]
Ever since the Cold War, we’ve been living in a world dominated by one superpower: the United States. The US is home to the world’s most formidable military, serves as the headquarters of finance, and writes the rules of international trade — all premised upon its control over our most critical technologies. But this unipolar […]
W.E. B. Du Bois once agreed that the Englishman Cecil Rhodes — whom the British Queen Mother had called great — was great indeed. Rhodes, wrote Du Bois, possessed elements of grandeur: ‘He set the modern world on a path of lying, stealing, and killing as a form of progress.’ His methods were conquest and […]
An old order is dying and a new one is struggling to be born. The century-old governing duopoly of Tories and Labour — mostly Tories — is collapsing. Very soon, the local elections in England and polls for the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales will mark a milestone on the road to a different […]
After a gunman tried to kill him in a campaign rally in July 2024, US President Donald Trump claimed to have taken ‘a bullet for democracy’. In a similar vein, when he resumed presidential office at the start of 2025, Trump announced that his election was a chance to reverse a ‘horrible betrayal’ and give […]
Few pilgrims visit St Katharine Cree, a church in the City of London, one block east of The Gherkin, with no parish and no fixed congregation. Some drop by to inspect a model of the RMS Lancastria, others come to ring its six bells; a few wander in simply because it survived both the Great […]
In a bright office in Jakarta, a TikTok content moderator watches a livestream shift from ordinary to traumatic within seconds. A car crashes into another. The sound overwhelms the feed. Blood covers the ground while a woman kneels beside someone who no longer moves. For moderators working on live content, decisions must be made in […]
Unassuming as he is, in person and in prose, Carl Benedikt Frey will forever be associated with the great efflorescence of ‘crisis writing’ that emerged in the mid-2010s, in the long wake of the GFC. Though no proselytiser for radical change in the mould of Wolfgang Streeck or David Harvey, his 2013 paper ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?’, authored with his Oxford colleague Michael Osborne, became part of the mood music of ‘the long interregnum’ – the sense that capitalism was either breaking down completely or approaching an inflection point whose navigation would mean untold disruption.
I first heard Peter Singer speak at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in the summer of 2009. The subject was the ethics of what we eat, and the tone of the talk was open and generous. Some in the audience were hardcore animal-rights people, as one would expect at a Singer gig. But the philosopher’s message was that ethical eating is, in fact, a pretty complex matter, bearing not only on animal welfare but also on economic justice and the environmental impact of agriculture, and that what counted as ethical behaviour in one sphere was often difficult to reconcile with ethical behaviour in others. His advice was therefore to do what we could, advice I for one resolved to follow before hogging into the free wine and nibbles around the Beaux-Arts-style reflecting pool.
When Tessa MacKay first got in touch to suggest that we meet for a coffee and a chat, I did what everybody does these days and immediately fed her name into Google. What I discovered were some remarkable paintings, but also – and less remarkably – a creation entitled ‘Tessa Mackay’ whose talents, successes, ambitions and interests had been (to some extent) curated in the ‘experience machine’ that is the Worldwide Web.
As far as I can recall, the audience laughed just three times at the Perth preview of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5: once when the cinema manager, introducing the film, almost said ‘Enjoy!’, before correcting course and wishing us ‘a meaningful experience’; once on hearing Orwell confess his desire to give Sartre ‘a kick up the arse’ in his review of Antisemite and Jew; and once at some footage of a Trump supporter batting away a reporter’s questions on the basis that any criticism of her President was fake news.
As neologisms go, ‘enshittification’ is not the most efficient specimen. Unlike, say, ‘nearlywed’ or ‘broligarch’, it is neither wholly self-defining nor reminiscent of some other word to which it is related in meaning. Clearly the term has struck a chord: both the American Dialect Society and Macquarie Dictionary have bestowed word-of-the-year status on it in recent times. But what, specifically, is going to shit, and what are the processes by which it does so?
Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some “older” published projects. This post is closely …
Continue reading "What makes online groups vulnerable to governance capture?"
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 22, 2026 by Tony Wikrent Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision Josh Marshall, February 20, 2026 [Talking Points Memo] The depth of the Supreme Court’s corruption has forced us to find new language to describe its actions. Today’s decision, undoing Trump’s massive array of tariffs that […]
The justice’s tariff-decision concurrence underscores a broader truth: The Supreme Court is no less political — or conniving — than everyone else in power.
Epstein whistleblowers, Olympic vultures, and more from The Lever this week.
According to Financial Times, Amazon Web Services experienced at least two minor outages in the final few months of last year, all caused by their internal “AI” tooling malfunctions. The article quoted one senior AWS employee describing them as “entirely foreseeable”.
Amazon is going hard on slop generators. LLMs are extremely complex systems. And complexity creates real risk. I recently wrote about how the real danger of LLM-based tools is less about “autonomous” attacks, and more about introducing massive additional complexity, and thus additional risk, into existing systems.
These outages are a great example of exactly that.
Kiro AI
Based on FT’s reporting, one specific outage in December was directly caused by Amazon’s tool called Kiro AI, which unexpectedly deleted and re-created a whole environment from scratch.