If it’s important, you can depend on Google to act as censor

We know Meta’s not on the side of justice or democracy, as it shows over and over again, and OnlyKlans’ fascist leanings are obvious. Google pretends that it’s all about the algorithms when we know it’s not: for years it would censor anything critical of itself when I posted to my old Google Plus account. […]

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Why ad tracking is bad: it puts democracy in jeopardy

An excellent reminder from Don Marti on just why ad tracking is bad on the web: The tracking is not there to identify the individual (the data doesn’t have to be accurate) but to enable getting the highest-priced ad onto the cheapest possible site Cross-context tracking puts higher value and lower value sites into competition […]

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Go for it, Harry

Say what you will about Prince Harry making millions from his book and TV appearances. What if it’s to help fund the destruction of one Keith Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and save the very fabric of democracy itself in the UK? It’s not going to be cheap, but the dude is out for blood. […]

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Where democratizing technology got the better of us

From the start, I’ve been a supporter of the democratization of design. Everyone has the right to access it, because fundamentally good design is something that makes the world a better place. A lot of websites are founded on this, such as Shopify, which has enough flexibility to give most of the stores we visit […]

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Like communist dictatorships, Google and Facebook threaten Australia

You know the US tech giants have way too much power, unencumbered by their own government and their own country’s laws, when they think they can strong-arm another nation.    From Reuter: Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Friday it would block its search engine in Australia if the government proceeds with a new code that […]

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Back on RNZ’s The Panel: on Hong Kong’s new national security legislation

Public domain/Pxhere What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. I’ve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to […]

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Capitalism falls down when it’s rigged

Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years.    He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is ‘rigged’; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle […]

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We need to change how we consume and share media as Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns us about privacy and ‘fake news’

Paul Clarke/CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37435469 Above: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Earlier this month, Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote an open letter expressing his concerns about the evolution of his invention, the World Wide Web. (Interestingly, he writes the term all in lowercase.)    It wasn’t just about ‘fake news’, which […]

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An expatriate’s view of Occupy Central and what Hong Kong wants

Equal access: an audio recording of this blog post can be found here. I know I’m not alone among expats watching the Occupy Central movements in Hong Kong. More than the handover in 1997, it’s been making very compelling live television, because this isn’t about politicians and royalty, but about everyday Hong Kong people.   […]

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Fighting the politics of division

Loving this excerpt from Nancy J. Adler’s ‘Leading Beautifully: the Creative Economy and Beyond’ in the Journal of Management Inquiry, vol. 20, pp. 208–22, at p. 211, which my fellow Medinge Group director Nicholas Ind referred to me: McGill University strategy professor Henry Mintzberg asked the people in his native Quebec to see the world […]

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