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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. 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. ...

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”. ...

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.” ...

The elephant in the room, the one everyone recognises, is overt bias: those charmingly blatant attitudes and prejudices someone proudly wears on their sleeve. It’s delightfully obvious and enables some truly impressive mental gymnastics. Then there’s the other elephant, the one lurking in the shadows, rarely discussed. This is unconscious bias: our hidden preferences for or against a person, thing, or group, neatly tucked away where even we can’t see them. Despite our best efforts to be impeccably fair-minded, we might harbour deep-seated resistance to differences, race, gender, physical traits, personality types, sexual orientation, you name it. How embarrassing. ...

That fine, silken cloak draped over the naked emperor of power, carefully stitched with phrases like “you ought to”, “you must”, or the always-a-red-flag “we are required to”. One might almost think these words were woven by bureaucrats with a thesaurus in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other. At its core, legitimate power is the quiet agreement that some people get to tell others what to do, not because they’re better, brighter, or morally upright, but because we’ve all tacitly accepted a hierarchy that says, “Yes, you get the chair at the head of the table… and I’ll just sit over here by the bin, cheers.” ...

We’ve got two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical. The left one? Brilliant at building bridges, splitting atoms, counting beans. It’s been instrumental in all that humankind has achieved. Unfortunately, it’s also a terrible driver of the human experience. A wonderful servant, yes, but an appalling master. The right hemisphere, though not dependent on the left in the same way, needs it to achieve its full potential, to be its wild, flowing, metaphor-loving self. But the left? Oh no, it pretends it doesn’t need the right at all. Denial, thy name is cortex. ...

In Governmental Ghost Stories, the chills don’t come from creaking doors or sudden screams, but from the slow, clammy realisation that your digital life has more uninvited guests than a haunted manor on All Hallows’ Eve. It’s less The Conjuring and more Yes, Minister meets Dr. Strangelove in a dimly lit GCHQ break room. The UK Investigatory Powers Act (IPA): Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the snooper’s charter ...

Space, the final frontier, the great beyond, the… shockingly cluttered dumping ground for humanity’s discarded space toys. Forget the romantic image of a pristine cosmic void; what we’ve actually created is a high-altitude landfill, where decades of forgotten satellites, exploded rocket stages, and even rogue flecks of paint whiz around at speeds that could turn a pebble into a shotgun blast. Back in the glory days of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union treated space like a shooting range, gleefully blowing up satellites just to prove they could. And why not? It’s not like anyone would have to clean up the mess, except, well, everyone launching anything into orbit for the next few centuries. Fast forward to today, and we’ve got everything from frozen clouds of rocket pee (yes, really) to shards of shrapnel zipping around up there, turning what could be a celestial highway into a demolition derby. ...