Activity

Well, I originally regarded myself as in the pragmatic centre of the spectrum, more or less social democratic in outlook. My reorientation came with an expansion of the kind of questions I was prepared to accept as legitimate. So whereas five years ago or so, I would be content to search for better…

[...] Google and Facebook are based on what seem to be natural monopolies. Feeble calls in Europe to weaken or break them up lack any alternative vision, economically, politically, or ecologically.

[...]

The continual demand by local politicians to launch a European Google, and most of the ot…

‘Big data’ isn’t something unique to the last few years. To understand what’s driving this data collection, you need to forget Internet debates and start focusing on the data banks selling information on the secondary market—companies like Axiom and Epsilon. Who are they selling their data to? To b…

[...] companies now reject any analogy with utilities, since that might open up the possibility of a publicly run, publicly controlled infrastructure.

[...] So if you wanted to provide education to students in Africa, you’d be better off doing it through Facebook, because they wouldn’t have to pay for it. You would then end up with a situation where data about what people learn is collected by a private company and used for advertising for the re…