Last week’s letter from UK, US and Australian governments is a sensible call for rethink on end-to-end encryption. This is a good example of where the technical capability to do something has accelerated beyond the ethical, legal and political ability to decide whether it should be done. Only a few…

Anyone who has worked for or with me will tell you that I like good to-do list. I like to create structure that gives meaning and drives useful activity. But this week, several things have highlighted the dark side of reducing everything to a task on a list. I was…

Last week, I took my kids to see the ‘live action’ version of the Lion King. It was superb, the detail, the lavish scenery and the naturalistic movement of the creatures was a triumph of technology. But of course, it was not ‘live action’ in any meaningful way. Every single…

Facts Tell — Stories Sell: But what does this mean for B2B narratives? — I came across the phrase ‘Facts tell- Stories Sell’ a few weeks ago. It’s not a new phrase, but it resonated for me. After all, this is what I help tech leaders to, transform complex messages into compelling narratives that reach and influence key audiences. …

Future-worlds dominated and directed by super-corporations, benign or otherwise, have been a trope of science fiction for decades. The fear that democratic government will fall to techno-corporatism has been a driving factor in many dystopian visions — but are we now on the cusp of seeing it in reality? The…

In an age of digital democracy are we suffering from too many voices and too few coherent arguments? Last week, BBC Media correspondent Amol Rajan called out the ongoing struggle between technology and democracy in his report on the UK Government’s Online Harms White Paper. I was surprised by this comment. It is increasingly common to worry about the impact of technology on today’s society, and many (including…

We can no longer deny the significant dark side of social media — The horrific events in New Zealand on March 15 have once again put social media, and Facebook in particular, under intense (and deserved) scrutiny. The mass shooter who killed 50 people was trying not only to inflict death and injury to as many as possible, but to achieve notoriety via…