Much of the research currently being conducted into digital technology, online platforms, large language models, algorithms, and the like is devoted to documenting how these digital wonders are transforming our relationships with the things we take for granted. Daniel Cohen, in his consideration of…

It’s the enduring irony of our current moment: we live in an increasingly datafied society, and yet the exact nature of the foundational element of this society – data – remains shrouded in mystery for many people. In his (deservedly) award-winning book, Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for…

One of the most fascinating things about the current explosion of interest in artificial intelligence – the term that’s been adopted to describe any number of automated and generative digital processes, despite long-standing warnings that it’s as much a marketing term as anything else – is the…

Like most people in and around tech, I’ve got ChatGPT on the brain, trying to figure out its implications for everything from search to education, to the fate of science itself. ChatGPT may have caught the public surprise, but this month’s newsletter reminds us that people have been thinking about…

Pharmakon. It’s not exactly a commonly used word in most circles. I’d never come across it before reading Alessandro Sbordin’s wide-ranging interview with Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink that, among other things, invites readers to think about what the next phase of the internet might look like.…

If the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica revelations led to a popular “techlash,” the past 12 months can be seen as the year of tech’s reckoning. Meta/Facebook’s collapse in value was a humbling comedown for a company that was previously seen as an unstoppable global force; the cryptocurrency…