A meander through the biggest question facing humanity — In my book, End State, I explore nine big social problems and nine radical ideas to put things right. …

Beyond technocratic policy-making. Or what Blair got wrong. — A few weeks ago I attended a conference run by the Tony Blair Institute and at the end of the day Blair was interviewed by John Sopel. Blair’s argument was basically the one you’d expect; we need a more energetic centrist politics to take on the extremes of left and…

This week I thought I’d use Langdon Winner’s 1980 article, Do Artefacts Have Politics?, to explore the idea that technology is political. I came across Winner’s article after reading his 1977 book, Autonomous Technology, which I’ll write more about soon because it’s one of the most thought-provoking things I’ve read…

Announcing a new project and a chance to relearn policymaking — A few weeks ago I wrote about the task of building a new institutional settlement for a digital society. I teed up some new work that I’m now pleased to say I’ll be doing in collaboration with Joseph Rowntree Foundation. We’re calling the project Social Justice in a Digital Age…

Society doesn’t work like it used to. But what if, just maybe, it’s better? — Uneasy, anxious, precarious. Whatever word we use to describe our historical moment, I suspect we can agree: things aren’t going well. In this post I want to mull on why that is. What is it that makes our times feel so dicey? And what distinguishes times like these from halcyon…

Should the state copy big tech — or should we invent something new? — There’s a moment in Peter Drucker’s 1970 book, Technology, Management and Society, where he discusses what we can learn from business management for the way public bodies are run. Drucker writes that we can’t just transfer all the lessons of business management and apply them to the way we run…

A few reflections from a talk I gave recently about End State. The audience were policy experts so I rattled through the intro to spend time on the implications for policy-making. More interesting than my comments were the audience’s questions. I found these really thought-provoking so I’m sharing them here…

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the history of conceptions of equality and I summed up some thoughts in this thread: This might sound like a distraction from the theme of this blog, which is the question of how we reform the state for digital capitalism, so I…