This article looks at an urban social movement, the 2019-2020 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests, as an alternative to traditional smart cities. It shows how the communications system used in the protests enabled coordination while also remaining open to grassroots decision-making, creating an ‘insurgent smart city’ which inverted top-down visions of a total urban information system. This offers a new sociotechnical imaginary of what smart cities could be and suggests an ‘insurgent digital citizenship’ as an alternative to traditional models.

The applications of AI for military use have led to discussion as to the potential implications of these technologies, with anxiety over its potential to lead to increased oppression. To this end, states met in February 2020 to discuss the responsible use of AI for military purposes, and the US issued a political declaration of principles to guide development. Yet these advances are merely the latest steps in the automation of state violence. The real danger lies not in the capabilities of AI, but in how humans interact with it, and awareness should be raised about the implications of its use.

This article explores algorithmically created personalized wages: what they are, what they mean, and what we can do about them. First, it establishes a taxonomy of five different forms of algorithmic wage differentiation. Second, it argues that the spread of these techniques has democratic implications. They will increase economic and racial inequality. They will harm labor solidarity. Perhaps most importantly, they put workers in a profoundly humiliating position in relationship to their boss, one where speech and autonomy are discouraged because they can lead to lowered pay. Finally, it argues that we should understand these developments as innovations in power and domination and use old antimonopoly strategies as ways to limit the democratic downsides of these tools. We should explore bans or limits on first-degree labor pricing discrimination and enhanced antitrust enforcement.

The guest argues that open access today is not a novelty but continuous with earlier developments in which artists and thinkers were ‘workers for hire’, who were compensated for their creative and scholarly labor. In the same vein, university professors are paid to produce scholarship which should incline them to accept open access.

Subsea cables are essential for the global internet infrastructure, connecting the world with high-speed transmission of data. These cables are incredibly low-tech, yet still vulnerable to threats such as sabotage, fishing equipment, and natural disasters. Governments are taking action to protect these cables, while tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google run the internet's brains and nervous system between continents. This advancement has enabled us to view live concerts in London from our homes in Atlanta, while also providing economic benefits to even the most remote places.

Automated decision-making and artificial intelligence have emerged as an area of major regulatory activity. Governments are rushing to introduce laws and policies to address possible harms, but to date the focus has mainly been on protecting society from runaway Tesla cars and the use of AI in automated assessments (like credit scores). This is starting to change following the rise of generative AI, and more attention is being paid to possible risks across the news and media sector. However, interventions in this area are still at an early stage.

The increasingly pervasive use and abuse of spyware by governments around the world has led to calls for regulation and even outright bans. How should these technologies be controlled? According to the guest, the best path forward is an international agreement that would regulate, but not outlaw, these important national security and crime-fighting tools.

Algorithms, data extraction, digital marketers monetizing "eyeballs": these all seem like such recent features of our lives. Explaining how marketers have brandished the tools of automation and management science to exploit new profit opportunities, the guest traces data-driven surveillance all the way back to the 1950s, when the computerization of the advertising business began to blend science, technology, and calculative cultures in an ideology of optimization. With that ideology came adtech, a major infrastructure of digital capitalism.

The short-term let industry was originally a way for people to rent out their spare rooms or houses to intrepid travellers who wanted to stay somewhere more authentic than a hotel.But once real estate investors started to see the success of companies like Airbnb, they were soon buying up housing stock to cash in. Are local communities now suffering as a result?

This paper examines ‘open’ AI in the context of recent attention to open and open source AI systems. The authors find that the terms ‘open’ and ‘open source’ are used in confusing and diverse ways, often constituting more aspiration or marketing than technical descriptor, and frequently blending concepts from both open source software and open science. This complicates an already complex landscape, in which there is currently no agreed on definition of ‘open’ in the context of AI, and as such the term is being applied to widely divergent offerings with little reference to a stable descriptor.