And here we are again: another year, another list. Previous years are in the category tag.
2025’s best reads
My top achievement for 2025
‘Tis the season where we look back on our professional achievements for the past twelve months, and for 2025, only one incident stands out. It was unexpected, it was chaos, it was drama, and it was, in a perverse way, quite funny.
Yes, you all know what I’m talking about.
Throwing the Flying Spaghetti Monster at the Wall
Ben Whitelaw and Mike Masnick have an excellent weekly podcast for policy wonks, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, where they review the latest news in online speech. Given my MPhil research interests, something in their 6 November episode caught my attention. To most listeners and perhaps even the hosts, it was just another news story within our enthusiastic if wonky niche. But to me, it was one of the dangers I’ve seen coming down the road for a good while, finally arriving, and announcing that it is here to stay.
(I have a ten-year track record of “success” on pointing at obvious/ominous things and saying “here it comes”, as some of you may be aware. Some of you more than others…)
Time to start de-Appling
I‘ve done such a thorough job of de-Googling that I forgot to show up for a meeting with someone, because I hadn’t checked my Google calendar in ages. (No, they were not amused.) In my defense, I proceeded to explain to them that having de-Googled, I was also in the process of de-Appling, which is a special bonus level that those of us in the UK have unlocked.
If you’re reading this in the sunlit uplands, you need to start that too.
Footnote privacy? Footnote privacy!
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.)
Democracy and the open internet die in daylight
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.
Surveil and segregate and suppress and snitch
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.
Speculative Legislation
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:
Banned Books Week 2025 / nothing new under the sun
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
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
The littlest eye
There is a CCTV security camera, one specific camera in a planet full of them, that I keep thinking about.
You have a stake in reading this
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.