/ / News, Podcast

Grant Burningham interviewed me for his Bots and Ballots podcast (MP3), covering a bunch of extremely timely tech-politics issues: Facebook and the impact of commercial surveillance on democratic elections; Alex Jones, censorship and market concentration; and monopolism and the future of the internet.

/ / News, Podcast

I’m on the latest episode of Torrentfreak’s Steal This Show podcast (MP3), where I talk with host Jamie King about “Whether file-sharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the ‘copyfight’ is still important; how the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants; and why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet — and a society — we can all live with.”

/ / News, Podcast


Here’s my reading (MP3) of Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags, a Locus Magazine column about the corruption implicit in surveillance capitalism, which creates giant risks to users by collecting sensitive information about them in order to eke out tiny gains in the efficacy of targeted advertising. The commercial surveillance industry may not be very good at selling us fridges, but they’re very good at locating racists and thugs and getting them to support violent political movements.

MP3

/ / News, Podcast


Here’s my reading (MP3) of Let’s get better at demanding better from tech, a Locus Magazine column about the need to enlist moral, ethical technologists in the fight for a better technological future. It was written before the death of EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, whose life’s work was devoted to this proposition, and before the Google uprising over Project Maven, in which technologists killed millions in military contracts by refusing to build AI systems for the Pentagon’s drones.

MP3

/ / News, Podcast


Here’s the fourth and final part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two, part three), a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem.

MP3

/ / News, Podcast


Here’s the third part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one, part two), a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem.

MP3