Tag: technology

  • On the beach after the gold rush – annotated

    I wrote this article for Mark Ellen at The Word fourteen years ago (I hope he won’t mind my putting it up here). The events described – my stupid progress…

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  • Paragraphs about AI

    All these thoughts I keep having about AI, I’m going to put them here… — Jared Bush, writer/codirector of Zootopia 2 and Chief Creative Officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios,…

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  • Learning from old movies

    GROSS is my first Substack thing. It’s film reviews, which I hope are funny and interesting and unpretentious. — It’s also my personal low-effort way to learn about the whole…

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  • This review turned into a disquisition on underwater storytelling

    This adaptation of Jules Verne’s great submarine romance was the top-grossing film of 1916 – and it wasn’t even the first movie version — 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, STUART…

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  • The BBC common platform debate

    Last Wednesday’s common platform debate at Broadcasting House was a hit. We talked for nearly three hours plus time in the pub afterwards. Mike covered it (live) over at Techcrunch…

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  • Making homes smart

    Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and top researcher at Intel, was star turn at a fascinating seminar run by the iSociety research group at the Work Foundation. The topic was ‘the smart…

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  • Anti-singularists

    Singularities and other tech-determinist fantasies are shown the door in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information. This is the sanest, most humane book I’ve read…

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  • Docherty repulsed!

    I can’t help but warm to David Docherty’s image of greedy Cookie Monsters spoiling the broadband party for the unfortunate content creators. The geeks, in particular, never warmed to David…

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  • A too-careful commentary

    The soon-to-be-abolished ITC’s contribution to the imminent Commons debate on the Communications Bill is a book of essays by The Great and The Good (G&G henceforth) from the media and…

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