Category: Technology

  • Ad nausea

    Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning. It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter…

  • A fountain of fakes

    The hype around artificial intelligence tends to focus on extreme scenarios of Terminator-related apocalypse, but there’s a very worrying kind of AI that’s already causing a lot of trouble. It’s the use of AI tools to create realistic fakes. The same tech that makes Johnny Cash sing Taylor Swift, that pulls John Lennon’s voice out…

  • Dead cats

    In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy. There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true,…

  • AI won’t save publishing

    A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI.…

  • eXodus

    I’m technically still a Twitter/X user, because I maintain an account there. But if you want to chat with me on social media, that’s no longer the place to do it. I’ve unfollowed absolutely everybody and deleted all my personalisation data so I’m not tempted to use it. It’s interesting to see what happens to…

  • Flickring out

    I joined the photo sharing site Flickr in the early 2000s and closed my account this week, nearly two decades later. I’d have closed it a couple of years ago but I’d forgotten all about it: the only reason I still had an account was to share photos with my mum, who at the time…

  • Eat your vegetables

    There’s a great piece by Parker Molloy about the “eat your vegetables” argument over social media: the idea that if you use social media, you should be compelled to read or hear views you disagree with. Like Molloy, I disagree. People get to pick what they watch on TV, right? And they get to decide…

  • Expecting the expected

    With Twitter doing its best impression of the Titan submersible, the race is on to find the next big social network. Previous contender Mastodon missed its opportunity the last time there was a Twitter exodus (I saw it described today as puritan, inward-looking and Protestant, which I think is very accurate), so the current favourite…

  • The hate factory

    In news that’ll surprise nobody, Elon Musk’s Twitter has become a hate factory. Hate speech on Twitter has existed for a long time, but it was previously considered a problem; now, it’s a feature. A new report shows that if you pay for a Twitter Blue subscription, you get a free pass for hate speech.…

  • The Girl Who Lost Her Glasses

    Thanks to my friend and colleague Craig Grannell, I’ve been reminded of a short story I wrote for tech site Wareable.com in (I think) 2016. I can’t find it online any more so I’m reposting it here. It’s called The Girl Who Lost Her Glasses. Kara didn’t notice at first. The apartment temperature was just…