David Clark remembers the moment the Internet’s Pandora’s box creaked open and said, “Hello, world.” It was 2 November 1988, and the Morris Worm was slithering its way through cyberspace like a python on speed. Designed with the innocence of a curious grad student and the destruction of a cyber sledgehammer, it crashed some 6,000 machines, roughly one-tenth of the Internet at the time. Not bad for an opening act. ...
The Weimar Republic, that plucky little democratic experiment that popped up in Germany after the Kaiser buggered off (finally, some good news) and everyone else was too busy starving to argue. It’s become the go-to historical analogy for every hand-wringer who spots a far-right meme in Brussels or a political tantrum in the US and immediately declares, “We’re doomed, repeat of the 1930s!” Really? Let’s pause a second: history doesn’t repeat. At best, it stumbles drunkenly into the same pub, orders the same terrible lager, and then vomits on the carpet, same general pattern, slightly different carpet, maybe a new stain this time. ...
Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022. Obliviousness and congruence Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved, just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most digital scenarios consistently overlook is the actual state of the world. You know, finite planet, finite resources, that sort of inconvenient reality. Likely effects Economic development might slow down, unless you’re a transnational behemoth with a flair for tax evasion and a fondness for shareholder value. Employees are already being told to “make do with less”, which in practice means being set up to fail and then blamed for it. Burnout, frustration, and plunging performance are the inevitable side effects of pretending scarcity isn’t a thing. ...
Sometimes, you’re trundling along through the digital forest, trying to navigate terms of service longer than Dostoevsky’s back catalogue, when suddenly… there’s a Larch. Unexpected. Tall. Mildly majestic. And utterly irrelevant to the rest of what’s about to happen. The Google fonts fiasco: Helvetica, but make it litigious In a plot twist worthy of Kafka, a German court (Landgericht München, civil chamber number three, for those playing Regulation Bingo at home) ruled that simply including a Google-hosted font on your website amounts to illegally handing over users’ IP addresses to Google. No consent. No justification. No shady disclaimer hidden in 6pt grey-on-grey legalese. ...
Roughly five centuries ago, indigenous peoples across the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa began to encounter a particularly aggressive form of “European hospitality.” Not content with simply saying hello, Europeans arrived with flags, firearms, and a staggering sense of entitlement, swiftly laying claim to other people’s lands and resources. Resistance was typically met with massacres, yes, including women and children, because apparently conquest was a family affair. Survivors were often rewarded with disease, chains, or both. Charming. ...
I created accounts on GitHub, Gitlab and Bitbucket. In Github and GitLab we set our email addresses to private to have the warehouses generate a commit email address. Gitconfig We cannot configure git globally with two different email addresses at the same time (mutually exclusive). We can either configure each github or gitlab repository locally with whichever commit email address applies OR we can create, github, gitlab and bitbucket folders in a Development folder for the respective repositories and put in the user’s root folder a .gitconfig: ...
The human mind is a marvel of evolution – capable of breathtaking creativity, yet equally adept at constructing elaborate prisons of its own making. At the heart of this paradox lies our mindset, that curious mental lens through which we interpret everything from our abilities to impending apocalypses. Psychologists, in their infinite wisdom, have identified two particularly telling varieties: the fixed mindset and its more adaptable cousin, the growth mindset. The former operates on the charming assumption that talent is innate and unchangeable, a belief system particularly popular among those who enjoy explaining why they’ve never quite lived up to their potential. The latter, far more inconveniently, suggests we might actually have to work at things – a notion as unsettling as it is demonstrably true. ...
Let’s talk about the time the United Nations, guardian of international human rights, global peacekeeper, moral compass for the post-war world, shared biometric data of Rohingya refugees with the government they were fleeing from. Yes, you read that right. Without informed consent. The very people who fled genocidal violence in Myanmar, who put their trust in the UN for protection, were quietly catalogued and handed back, data-first, under the noble banner of “registration”. ...
There’s a certain charm to grey areas. They’re neither here nor there, like a politician’s promise or a cookie consent banner. Let’s have a wander through three choice examples of how law, tech, and coercion intersect in a fog of plausible deniability. We’ll start where the term “consent” first gained cultural weight, sexual consent, and then follow its cheerful migration into digital life, courtesy of everyone’s favourite data vampires. 1. Sexual consent: A legal fiction? Let’s be honest. “Sexual consent” exists mostly as a legal construct. It’s the tidy phrase we reach for when courts, lawyers, and HR departments need to put human messiness into bullet points. ...
You’d think something called the General Data Protection Regulation might actually protect data. You’d be wrong. Along with its elder cousin, the ICCPR, GDPR was hailed as the Great Hope™, a beacon of digital dignity in a world run by surveillance capitalists. But instead of taming the beast, it handed it a clipboard and told it to tick some boxes. The GDPR officially kicked in at the stroke of midnight on 25 May 2018, like some sort of data privacy Cinderella. It was meant to give users the sacred gift of choice, to say yes or no to having their personal lives vacuumed up, analysed, monetised, and passed around like cheap party favours. What we actually got was an avalanche of “consent” banners and passive-aggressive pop-ups saying: “Agree or get lost.” ...