Now Any Government Can Buy China’s Tools for Censoring the Internet

Beijing’s ‘autocracy as a service’ is becoming the top choice for governments that want to control the internet

In 2010, Uganda passed a law that expanded the legal justifications for intercepting citizens’ communications. Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni had begun to see the internet as a real threat, and after the 2016 election and protests the following year, he turned to foreign companies like Germany’s FinFisher to monitor the…

The Internet Must Be More Than Facebook

If Big Tech becomes synonymous with the internet, we could lose free choice, democracy, and even the ability to imagine a different world

A closeup of the reaction icons on Facebook statuses. — Photo: SOPA Images/Getty Images

Big Tech wants to be the totality of what we see and do online. From Apple’s carefully curated user experience to the sprawling empires of Google/Alphabet and Facebook, the tech firms’ ultimate goal is to own everything we do up and down the technological stack. And if they win, we’ll…

Do Tech Slogans Really ‘Make the World a Better Place’?

The simple deception of Big Tech’s aspirations

Bringing people together.
Changing the world.
Making the world a better place.

There’s a reason so many tech company slogans sound similar. It’s not just that they’re all trying to do the same thing — commodify human experience, sell it back to us, and pipe the tax-free profits offshore. It’s…

How to Build A.I. We Can Relate to

Writers are the key to creating a frictionless future worth having

The brainphone. Image credit: Elizabeth Mahoney.

My dog loves to play with his toy snake by repeatedly breaking its neck. He prefers traveling on the top of London buses so he can see what’s happening in the world, and he obsessively checks pee-mails and sex-messages from other dogs as we walk around the neighborhood.

His seriousness…

How to Cope with the End of the World

The worst thing we can do is collectively lose faith in our future

I’m writing this on a train. Looking out the window, I reflexively scout for raised, defensible structures away from main roads. I’ve done this since I was 10, planning for when the time came. I thought a lot, then, about when the time came. I planned how, when the nuclear…

If We Remember How Unity Feels, We Can Save Democracy

It only takes 10% of your time to inspire change

The year I turned 10, Ireland had two general elections. Every day after school, a bunch of us walked the town, leafleting and running errands for canvassers. We were fearless. We owned the place. Think Lyra Belacqua racing round an Oxford no adult even suspects exists. …

One Hell of a To-Do List for Saving Democracy

Here’s how we defeat economic inequality and political alienation

French economist Thomas Piketty used a century’s worth of data to show two terrifying things:

The return on capital is higher than overall economic growth, so the rich tend to get richer and society becomes increasingly unequal over time.
Only one thing quickly and reliably reduces inequality: war (or its…

Even the World’s Biggest Problems Aren’t Hopeless

Lessons from history’s most intractable challenges

There’s a point at which disasters compound and multiply, when the worse it gets, the worse it gets.

Motivations thicken. Events accelerate. The gunman’s shadow looms in the doorway as children hide uselessly under desks. The din of drones whining around the windowless apartment block kicks up half an octave…

Even at the End of the World, There’s Still a Duty of Hope

We need to fix what we can and set fire to the rest — without a revolution.

What if we were to look right in the eye of the scary truth that even if most of us survive 2018, human civilization as we know it is about to squeeze through a decisive couple of decades and may not make it?

What if we looked our potential extinction…