Technology – The Junction

On Regulation

Last week Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon is preparing draft legislation to present to the US Congress on how to regulate its own facial recognition software. Thanks to the work of numerous academics and activists, issues around surveillance technology are increasingly infiltrating the mainstream political debate. Too often however, the fallback approach of politicians is […]

by Aaron White

Why we need to build an alternative online infrastructure

We are living in an age with unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power. From the prevalence of drone warfare, the corporate coup d’état of our executive, or the incredible aggregation of personal data held by the wealthiest companies in the world – one of the fundamental struggles of our time will consider what role the superintendents […]

by Freddie Stuart

Marcuse and ‘Technological Rationality’

As we move into an era of unchartered technological growth, it is helpful to revisit the theoretical framework of Herbert Marcuse, who posits that any debates around the organisation of technical resources must be prefaced with an acceptance that technology is simply the tool of ideology, whether established or revolutionary. Born in Berlin in 1898, and […]

by Freddie Stuart

An Era of Mass Automation

A report from Price Waterhouse and Coopers (PWC) divides the impact of modern technology on the labour market into three distinct temporal sections. Firstly, the Algorithmic Wave, between our current moment and the ‘early 2020s’. This will see the ‘automation of simple computational tasks’ and will mainly impact ‘data-driven sectors such as financial services’ . […]

by Freddie Stuart

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

“We need a shift to a new system that will allow us to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet, that will live within planetary means, that will be fairer, and that will be focused as its key goal not on growth per se, but on maximising human well-being. History tells us […]