Now that I’m doing a certain amount of academic writing, I’ve had to start using a citations manager. Manually adding 100+ footnotes per document, correctly formatted to the dot in the relatively obscure citation style (OSCOLA) which my university uses, is genuinely not possible.
(Well, I mean you could do it manually, but you’d go mad, you’d double the amount of time you spend on the piece, and you’d lose your writing flow 100+ times in the process.)
Obviously there have been many editorial changes at the formerly venerable Washington Post, a tawdry saga which I don’t intend to recap here.
What I do want to share is this, which I spotted yesterday during research.
Someone recently told me that I would get along great with Eric Goldman. This happened after I discussed his “segregate and suppress” model in a talk, but with a twist.
I found some notes I jotted last year after a now-deleted exchange on ex-birdsite, with Rachel Coldicutt, where we were discussing the UK OSA (as usual).
She had said:
Index on Censorship reminds me that it’s Banned Books Week. That is nothing to celebrate, nor brush off as someone else’s problem across the ocean: it is very much here too.
Nevertheless, to help (?) Index kick off the week, I wanted to share some wonders I spotted this summer on an academic retreat: the original Christo-authoritarian government censorship which resulted in banned books, the jawboning of the means of production, and the persecution of those seeking to share those ideas, all the way back in the 16th century.
How very 2025.
What you will see here is a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun. We just keep fighting the same fights, century after century.
The Dog that Caught the Car: Britain’s ‘World-Leading’ Internet
Once again I’ve written for my favourite weekly newsletter, Internet Exchange, on something which has struck me as quite odd over recent weeks. The UK Online Safety Act’s origins were grounded not in child safety, but in the authoritarian fantasies of the affluent white English right wing. Six years later, they’ve got everything they ever wanted. So why aren’t they over the moon about it?
When during the UN meetings the Iranian gov affiliates were challenged over censorship, they’d say UK does it too. every time we mentioned the problems, people told us but we are democratic, we smell better. Well here, read this incredible piece by Burns: internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that…
— Farzaneh Bad (@farzdusa.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 2:04 PM
There is a CCTV security camera, one specific camera in a planet full of them, that I keep thinking about.
Who’s at stake? The (non)performativity of “stakeholders” in UK tech policy
I’ve written far more than I should have had to on the performative inclusion of “stakeholders” in post-2016 tech policymaking. This meant being invited into meetings with government and decision-makers, being told to “assume positive intent” as all manipulative types like to insist, only to find that your presence was strictly performative. You were either there so that they could tick the box of saying they had engaged with you, before proceeding to do what they were going to do anyway, or you were there so that they could spin your presence as an endorsement of what they were going to do anyway.
Turns out it wasn’t just me – the behaviour was so widespread that some academics have now done a study into how UKGov wields “stakeholder” engagement.
They conclude:
These findings show that the use of stakeholder tends to performatively entrench the existing power of “industry stakeholders” or nameless but clearly already engaged and empowered “key stakeholders”. Meanwhile, they also construct a false sense of inclusion through the non-performative use of generic or “other stakeholders”. This creates significant risk of a veil of accountability, and raises significant questions over established processes such as consultation. When it is unclear who is influencing policy, whose voices and interests are being represented, then the indicators from specific uses suggest that the stakeholder becomes a foil for amplifying historical power and privilege, often on political and/or economic lines, and in doing so excludes the needs of those most affected by technologies who already suffer a lack of agency in how data, AI, platforms and other areas are used to shape their lives.
No shit Sherlock.
Around this time last year, I was reading in my garden when I got a ping from Guido Noto la Diega at the University of Strathclyde here in Glasgow. I’d messaged him to ask him what the closing date was for applications for Strath’s newly revived techlaw programme, because I was thinking of applying for it, but I needed to figure out how a skint freelancer was going to come up with a full tuition payment upfront. Guido replied by dangling the prospect of a full scholarship at me.
I somehow managed to not fling myself off my chair.
Whenever advancements have been made socially, there is pushback. Freedom, justice, democracy: these things are not definitively achieved – they must be constantly fought for. I have found myself wondering what’s best to do. My mind kept returning to the story of Moses. The religious implications are not important. He was born and placed in a basket, sent down the Nile and was found and raised by Pharaoh’s daughter.
I kept thinking about the person who made the basket.
This was in a tumultuous period of massive social unrest. The Israelites were being persecuted, hunted and killed. The community would have been desperately trying to survive, resist, find freedom and justice. I could imagine members of the community looking at this basket-maker and saying, “Why aren’t you protesting? Why aren’t you tweeting? Why are you just sitting there making baskets?” And yet that basket was made well enough that the child who was placed in it survived and became one of the most influential agents of social change.
We each have the potential to effect real positive social change. If the basketmaker hadn’t made it with absolute focus and commitment, human history would have been very different.
So I say, make your basket, or whatever it may be.-actor Giles Terera, speaking to Index on Censorship
And… one more art musing from my recent wanders, before normal blog service resumes (whatever that is). This one hits the sweet spot of me being in my happy place, and me just asking the questions that I ask for a living. As I do.
Yesterday I enjoyed sharing an unexpected art discovery from my recent wanders, so here’s another one, which was also something I quite accidentally wandered into on one of those perfect days which, for many reasons, I didn’t want to end.