Everyone has said things that, in hindsight, they regret. For Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal and US IT giant Palantir, it might have been his claim this year that the NHS makes people sick. Or that the British …
The new world war on free speech
The war on free speech is hardly a novel phenomenon, instead mutating over the centuries. What is new, however, is its global aspirations: today, the conflict takes the form of a world war.
You can see its shadow in every …
The truth about Musk’s X app
Perhaps Elon Musk has no idea what he’s doing. That is the possibility that has dawned on many, since the angel investor took the reins of Twitter (including the platform’s founder Jack Dorsey). Musk’s $44 billion acquisition was greeted with …
Big Tech’s welfare dystopia
On December 10, 2020, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a $15 million donation for a policy pilot across several American cities. About seven months earlier, America’s economy had cratered amid the Covid pandemic, leaving behind a workforce desperate for funds. …
Can Britain resist AI communism?
Can anyone compete with China’s Artificial Intelligence super-system? Sleepy government bureaucracies the world over are finally waking up to the hard reality that they have virtually no chance. China is galloping ahead. Only last month, it unveiled its latest rival …
Why Progress isn’t feminist
It’s now an open secret that most Instagram influencers edit their images: smoothing skin, whitening teeth and plumping curves. Last year, OnlyFans content creator Diana Deets, also known as “Coconutkitty”, was castigated for making her NSFW images and videos seem …
The truth about eco-fascism
By now, you have probably heard about the rising threat of “eco-fascism”. If you haven’t, you soon will, because the number of people warning about this new danger to civilisation seems to be growing exponentially. In publications Right and Left …
How Turbo-Wokism broke America
American history can best be understood not as a single continuum but as a series of Republics, each arising from the ashes of its predecessor. The First Republic, born of the American Revolution, ended with Andrew Jackson’s Trumpian assault on …
Gen Z’s worship of the Unabomber
“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn …
The Lord of the Daily Mail
Lord Northcliffe — founder of the Daily Mail, inventor of tabloid journalism, the most significant media innovator of the early 20th century — ended up in Hell. At least this was where Ezra Pound put him in his Cantos, “broken/ …
Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress
You can tell a bit about someone based on their preconceptions about Peter Thiel. Whether the reflexive response to the name is “malign far-Right plutocrat”, “philanthropic saviour of all that is good” or “who?” is a reasonably reliable guide to …
Jihadi John created online censorship
It’s unclear how far Elon Musk’s pledge to restore free speech to Twitter will go; it wasn’t long ago that you could easily stumble upon entire ecosystems of online jihadis and their fanboys on the site. As one surrealist Twitter …
How the elites lost the Twitter war
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a litmus test of where you stand in the online ecosystem. To some, it means a dawn of “free speech” on a platform that has increasingly cracked down on unwanted views. To others, it …
You can’t police offence
In virtue of my heretically archaic views about biology and the importance of women’s rights, I’m the target of quite a lot of rude online behaviour. The other day, for instance, I learnt I was lucky I hadn’t been hanged …
The myth of online misinformation
Just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine consumed the media, New York Times columnist Jay Caspian Kang and Substacker Matthew Yglesias published near-simultaneous critiques of the notions of “disinformation” and “misinformation”. This convergence among prominent liberals was significant. These and …
