Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
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More Klingon than Starfleet
A Musk spaceship will be a Musk workplace — FURTHER UPDATE 13 January 2025. It’s difficult to know where this will end. Musk – a foreigner, remember – now has…
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Bureacracy in deep space
If you want to understand the state of the art in space-age capitalism you must visit the HR department — Everyone knows that it’s in Human Resources that you’ll find…
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Smart technologies for disciplining the poor
There are millions of energy prepayment meters in Britain. They’re supposed to liberate customers from financial worry. They do the exact opposite. — (I updated this post on 5 January…
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Reverse redistribution
During the pandemic, innovators and opportunists improvised bold new ways to move money from the state into private hands – it was like the seizure of assets in a socialist…
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Defending the indefensible
This is a guest post from the nice people at Radlett Wire, a local blog that, having spent ten years providing, let’s face it, mostly quite boring information about the…
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From the other end of the modern
Italo Svevo and Adam Tooze (and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng) — So, this post originally started with a bit about how I’d read about Svevo in Franco Moretti’s The…
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Seeing Vincent
Tate Britain, London, 2019.
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Ten times the Labour party stood behind workers in Britain
Actually, there aren’t any. Sorry. — The conventional wisdom is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour—every other important party—in…
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What was it about the urgency of protecting your profits through the carbon transition that first attracted you to the wonder-fuel Hydrogen?
It’s easy to check if a proposed tech solution to the climate crisis is legit or not. Examine the solution; if it looks like it might have been designed to…
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We’re hypnotised by the social media giants. We’ve convinced ourselves they’re impossible to deal with. They’re not.
The more frantic we become about the wickedness and power of the platforms, the more we confirm that power. The more action we demand of police and legislators, the more…
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Let’s rebuild the internet and make it much more awkward. More like Bluetooth in fact. Seriously.
Everybody knows now, we built the wrong internet. Instead of a democratic, participatory playground we seem to have built something predatory and exploitive. The solution—bear with me—is more awkwardness, more…