Offering a critical history of Charles Babbage's proto-Taylorist ideas on how to discipline workers – ideas embedded in the calculating engines that were his life's work, and ideas which themselves were first developed to control enslaved and racialized people.

Bitcoin and the magical currencies of the Internet have aroused fervor, often tinged with fanaticism, but also mistrust and even rejection. To shed critical light on the cryptocurrency phenomenon, this book travels the globe, from the Californian Cypherpunks, Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, the Bitcoin mines of Kazakhstan and Texas, to the crypto offensives in El Salvador, Puerto Rico and Africa. He lifts the veil on the economic failures of an industry that has spawned numerous scandals, as well as on the ecological aberration it represents.

Despite multiple legislative and grassroots efforts, many platform workers are still working under precarious conditions. What pressing issues do platform workers and Trade Unions continue to face today, and how might we learn from the ways in which different countries are trying to address these issues?

Europe has raced ahead to draft comprehensive legislation, the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), to oversee these technologies and systems. What has motivated the EU to pursue this approach? And how will this effort influence AI norms globally? This paper describes how Europe’s AI norm-building process represents an effort to ensure EU priorities are reflected in the AI governance landscape. Europe’s approach faces uncertainty. While it is likely that the AIA will meaningfully influence global AI norms, several factors may hinder its global diffusion and adoption.

An attempt to survey all non-western AI ethics guidelines that are available either in English or in Thai was made to find out whether there are any cultural elements within them that could shed light on how we understand their backgrounds and how these elements could advance the discussion on intercultural ethics of technology. This analysis leads to a normative argument that what is understood to be universal in intercultural ethics is in fact based on the desire of many cultures to live and work together, and not, as ethical universalists seem to argue, on some culture-transcendent standard of morality.

Even as they adopt a more muscular stance toward prosecuting Big Tech firms for antitrust violations in the courts, enforcement agencies are using other levers to make changes in the here and now. The changes afoot will necessarily be slow, and will likely involve political losses: antitrust cases take years to move through the courts, and take significant investments of resources and time from the agencies that pursue them. But these changes will be well worth the fight.

A person's predictive privacy is violated when personal information about them is predicted without their knowledge and against their will based on the data of many other people. Predictive privacy is then formulated as a protected good and improvements to data protection with regard to the regulation of predictive analytics are proposed. Finally, this article points out that the goal of data protection in the context of predictive analytics is the regulation of ‘prediction power’, which is a new manifestation of informational power asymmetry between platform companies and society.

This paper argues that Internet access should be recognized as a human right because it has become practically indispensable for having adequate opportunities to realize our socio-economic human rights. Accepting a human right to Internet access minimally requires guaranteeing access for everyone and protecting Internet access and use from certain objectionable interferences (e.g. surveillance, censorship, online abuse). Realizing this right thus requires creating an Internet that is crucially different from the one we currently have.

The Bank of Canada is wading into the fraught and controversial world of digital currencies, launching public consultations this week into how Canadians might use a digital dollar. And yet the bank maintains there is neither a need nor a plan to launch a digital loonie. An analysis on the benefits and disadvantages of digital currency.

The story of a new law that seeks to give Canadian artists a leg up online has left many influencers and tech giants alike seeing red.