As incoming nominees of a future Biden administration have stopped short in naming a culprit in the SolarWinds hack, the media – playing judge, jury and executioner – has levelled blame on the usual suspect. Did anyone actually believe that Russia would escape a major US election season without a ceremonial tarring and feathering by…
The world is entering an era of undeniable change that will be defined by our collective response to the human and economic devastation left by the pandemic. As Covid-19 continues to spread across the globe, Amazon´s rise to the top of the winner-take-all economy is a call to action to progressive forces who still believe in the politics of the common good and are willing to fight for the affirmation of the dignity of work….
“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 It had the potential for disaster. Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services…
The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives. Durand places the Digital Age in the…
Russian state-owned bank Sberbank’s ambitious plans to become a ubiquitous force in all aspects of life through its recently unveiled e-commerce strategy raise hope for the Eurasian Great Power’s technological future and could ultimately come to represent the economic dimension of President Putin’s Populist Statism model, which might in turn might make his country a…
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” — Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out…
