Tech regulation raises some of the thorniest questions of our time — about free speech versus hate speech, copyright versus fair use, truth versus manipulation. Yet these debates are increasingly irrelevant unless states can first establish digital sovereignty. Without the will to enforce laws on multinational corporations, “tech regulation” is a dead letter. Both the […]
Academia
At the Sydney Gleebooks launch of Graeme Turner’s new book Broken, an audience member said: I spend more time on admin than doing my job. I raised the microphone to my mouth to say ‘that is because of moral deskilling’. But it was not my gig, so I didn’t. It would have been very inappropriate. […]
The New York Times recently published a letter from me responding to a guest essay (op-ed) by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, with whom I’ve been engaging on the question of pro-natalism. As a colleague who had such a letter published a few years ago observed, this will probably get more readers than any journal […]
… as long as they are healthy, well fed and well educated Much of the panic about falling birth rates can be dispelled once we realise that (barring catastrophe) there will almost certainly be more people alive in 2100 than there were in 2000. But what about the distant future? Dean Spears, co-author of After […]
A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, […]
Now that the Trump government is relentlessly attacking higher education and abusing its power at the border to arbitrarily refuse entry to scholars, many academics wonder whether it’s still possible to travel to the US for conferences or other research purposes, especially if they have publicly criticized the Trump government or its allies. But where […]