Technology: Weapon of the People

In an essay titled “Looking forward, looking backward,’ philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg writes (in Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity, The MIT Press, 2010, p. 61; my emphasis, B.O.): 

The utopian and dystopian visions of the …

Welcome to the stagnation nation

Fifteen years after the great financial crisis blew Britain’s economic settlement apart, we’re still scrabbling around for a replacement. The staggering scale of our problems was revealed yesterday in Jeremy Hunt’s thoroughly depressing budget statement. Despite heavy doses of magical …

The EU’s American Queen

Ask most Europeans what they think about the EU, and they’ll tell you it’s relentlessly dull. It’s all bureaucrats in statement eyewear overseeing arcane regulations about the curvature of cucumbers; impenetrable corridors in the staid outposts of Luxembourg and Strasbourg; …

Big Tech has stolen our children

“Internet addiction” has lived a strange life since the Nineties. In 1995, a New York psychiatrist introduced the term, not to describe a real affliction of internet users, but to parody certain diagnostic tendencies in his field. Then other people, …