A Musk spaceship will be a Musk workplace I suppose if you went to Mars on one of Musk’s starships — at least on one of the first few missions — you’d probably be an employee of a government agency so the prevailing human resources model would be the faux-nurturing bureaucratic norm of the major Western corporation —…

There are millions of energy prepayment meters in Britain. Over three million households with prepayment meters were cut off at least once last year. 18% of prepayment customers were cut off for two days or more. Meanwhile, the number of people being forced to switch to prepayment because they’ve run…

During the pandemic in the UK, innovators and opportunists improvised bold new ways to move money from the state into private hands—it was like the seizure of assets in a socialist state—only backwards. We know that in emergencies governments turn to compulsion to get things done. In wartime manufacturing capacity will be requisitioned, farmers told what to grow, broadcasters switched to propaganda. We expect this—and we’re ready to accept sometimes drastic variations in the rules to speed things up, to save lives, (to…

Italo Svevo and Adam Tooze (and Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng) So, in his book about the real hero of modern literature, historian Franco Moretti put me on to Italo Svevo’s 1922 novel Zeno’s Conscience. It’s a brilliant and prophetic book. With our hero, businessman Zeno Cosini, we walk the streets of Trieste, a port city at the edge of a…

Less than half of gen-z in Britain thinks we should keep the monarchy. But what do republicans think about the monarchy? Seems obvious, right? Off with their heads! But no, there’s some complexity here and it connects closely with the weird (almost unique on planet earth) constitutional arrangements that persist here in the archipelago. On the left and amongst republicans, there are basically…

Actually, there aren’t any. Sorry. — The story is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour — every other important party — from the DSA to the SPD to the PS and the JSP — was the product of an actual revolution or of a popular…

The more frantic we become about the wickedness and power of the platforms, the more we confirm that power. The more action we demand of police and legislators, the more we confirm their exceptional status, their untouchability. The standard position now — in the mainstream anyway — is that the…

We built the wrong internet — instead of a democratic, participatory playground we built something predatory and exploitive. The solution is awkwardness, friction — Bluetooth! (Listen, do not @ me about this. I know everything evil about the current internet could ultimately be reproduced in a more constrained environment, I know Bluetooth is probably not the actual model for a post-predatory internet (are there other models? Name them in a comment) and I know Bluetooth…

I learn that Photoshop is thirty. The small revelation that goes with this information is that I’ve been using Photoshop for thirty years. — That’s more than half of my life so far. I began using it in my twenties, at the other end of the 1990s, under Margaret Thatcher, under George H.W. Bush, before the first Gulf War, before the Internet had escaped from the Universities (before the web had escaped from that…