In May 2021, I co-authored a post with Sahdya Darr titled “Is government preparing to censor discussions about migration?”, where we fleshed out how the then-Home Secretary was leveraging the draft Online Safety Bill for explicitly political purposes.
Not all of my work ages well, but I gotta say, she and I nailed that one.
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Digital Planet, the BBC World Service’s podcast about global technology and the internet, is a wonderful thing. It’s a weekly reminder that the world is a lot more than the global north, and a lot more than a handful of American companies. It’s also a stream of positive inspiration about the best of technology and what it can do: rays of sunshine in a world that seems awfully dark. Put it in your podcast app of choice.
Here’s an example, from a recent episode, about how the global perspective shared on the show can help you think about things much closer to home.
Normally, by this time of year, I’ve been sent down several delightful rabbit holes created by good folks’ end-of-year reading lists. (Morten’s 2021 list alone cost me a fortune, for which serious thanks pal.) I’ve not seen those lists circulating so far this year, though, so I might as well get the ball rolling.
New from me at Smashing Magazine:
To mark the publication of the hard copies of my book, I penned a few words on foundational privacy, or lack thereof; developer education, or lack thereof; and the grandstanding policymakers (and CEOs) looking for easy targets for blame.
Now tie that all together.
artist unknown.
“Getting rid of public policy people when you’re claiming to do ‘real free speech’ is the stupidest move ever.”
Audrey Herblin-Stoop,
ex-Twitter France public policy
If you’ve been reading my book, and it hasn’t made you lose the will to live, you can thank Owen Gregory for that.
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I only choose friends who are brilliant, badasses, or brilliant badasses. You may have reached the part in my book where I exalt the deeds of one of them. This week I’ve had cause to exalt her again, but not for any reason she would have chosen.
I am completely focused on the imminent release of my book, and more than a little bit giddy about it. The ebook version is coming out this month, and the hard copy will follow in December at the speed of print logistics. It’s not too late to pre-order, if you haven’t already.
Writing a book – a proper, printed, published and edited book – is a completely different experience to anything else you will ever do. The emotional commitment, and the ups and downs, are just a small part of that. But me being me, there have been a few things which happened since the day I signed the contract that, well, are the kind of things that only happen to me. The kind that even if I tell you, you’re going to think “oh no way, she’s making that up”, because that’s easier to believe than the notion that they actually happened.
Here’s a little story about one of those, um, adventures. There are witnesses who were there, and who have their own stories to tell.
And oh, those stories will be far worse. Read More
Author’s note, December 2022:
In recent weeks this post has gone viral through several newsletters and aggregator sites, for all the wrong reasons. It has been rather bizarre to see people taking a post which is, and only ever was, about specific issues involving UK digital regulation and surveillance capitalism in the UK’s specific political and cultural context, and projecting their own issues and aspirations onto it, misrepresenting it into something it is not. I’ve seen this post discussed in the context of every form of bollocks imaginable from behavioral science to American politics to aspirational self-help psychobabble, all of which didn’t so much miss the point but bypass it entirely.
Anyone who has interpreted this post as being about anything other than the explicit topic it was written about, which is to say, specific issues involving UK digital regulation and surveillance capitalism in the UK’s specific political and cultural context, got that wrong.
Laughably wrong.
And anyone who has chosen to deliberately misinterpret this post for their own interests, including self-promotion of their own “thought leadership”, has spoken only for their own motivations in doing so rather than my motivations in writing it.
If there is a lesson from that, it may be about seeing what you want to see, hearing what you want to hear, or reading what you want to read, all of which are the consequences of centering yourself in other people’s experiences, rather than upholding them in the context which they were lived through and documented.
I have no interest in teaching it.
Here we go with the second of three posts on potential paths forward for the UK’s Online Safety Bill. This one will cover what needs to be cleared out of the way before the Bill can progress, regardless of who takes over that work next month.
That means a series of questions which need answers.
Any one of these questions would be a deal-breaker in a normal political environment. But we have four of them, in as abnormal a political environment as it’s possible to endure.
Like most of the policy world, the UK’s Online Safety Bill is currently having a lie down in a darkened room for the duration of the summer recess. It will return, in one form or another, in September, where a third Prime Minister and a seventh Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport will take charge of it. Lucky them! As for whether they will choose to put the Bill through a fourth year of revisions, tweaks, and discussions, or put it out of its misery once and for all, that remains to be seen.