The Waving Cat

What if we have been reading the Musk story wrong? What if the story of Musk isn’t an economic — or to some, an innovation — story at all? What if it isn’t a story about entrepreneurship or vision or personal failings at all? What if, instead, it’s a story about the potential of a full-scale action against a democratic nation-state? These thoughts are still very much developing, but let me lay out a few considerations: We have the richest man in the world engaging very openly in politics, or…

A short while ago, there was a now-infamous incident over at OpenAI: One of their AI models, during security testing, escaped and launched an attack on HuggingFace, an online platform for AI researchers to share information and collaborate. The AI security researchers over at METR have published a thorough investigation which is quite the read. Now first of all, this cyber attack became best known as the Hugging Face incident or Hugging face attack, which frankly is such a great example of the…

There Used To Be A Time (TM) where discussions on social media, especially on Twitter, were indicative of relevance — at least of relevance within certain communities: If things trended on Twitter, there was a plausible chance that the topic discussed had some salience in that very Twitter-specific mix of audiences comprised of media and tech and politics people. Today, that is very different. Looking at how algorithms have taken over content recommendation and distribution, and the rise of the…

In a connected world, digital sovereignty is a spectrum, not an end state. It can – and should – be a guiding principle rather than a checklist. At a very basic level, digital sovereignty means being able to decide about how your digital infrastructure and services are designed, implemented, used. It means having some level of control — enough so that no external entity can just flip the on/off switch or use your own infrastructure to spy on you or otherwise weaken you. How we can move towards…

I just wrapped up writing a longer-form publication, maybe best described as a collection of short essays: Reflections on Public Interest Technology from someone with a governance / policy / power dynamics perspective. You can read and/or download it here: The Little Book of Public Interest Technology. It’s a short distillation of my work around public interest technology: As vaguely defined this space might be, I think it’s more than worth engaging with technologies that serve first and…

Germany is debating a social media ban for young people. However, the debate is woefully under-informed. Recently, German chancellor Friedrich Merz proclaimed (translated): “If kids today at the…