On 3 March 2001, around ten people in a Milan hacklab assembled a server from hardware a bank was getting rid of and scavenged parts. The least experienced person present was put at the keyboard so that everyone would understand what was being built. The machine was named Paranoia. On its second day, an inverted firewa…
An enterprise document agent gets priced as a reader. A licence per seat, ingestion per gigabyte, an integration project, perhaps a governance workshop to reassure the records manager. What it changes, though, is not the reading; it is the nature of the estate. A document estate was never only storage. It was a system …
The agent has been doing this for eight months. It reads approved tickets, renders them into firewall configuration, verifies the result against intent, and closes the loop. It is good at the job: faster than the network team it replaced, and it does not mistype an address at the end of a long shift. A change ticket ar…
Across many mature organisations, the same phrases seem to keep coming back, like “Aligned with best practice”, “The control is in place”, and “We followed the framework”. They survive failure. They survive scandal. They survive the people who used them last time. The question worth asking is perhaps not whether they a…
The internet is fundamentally broken. The question now is: what can we do? The answer is messy, expensive, and occasionally involves telling very powerful people that their business model is morally questionable. Accepting the obvious First, acknowledge the unpleasant truth: there is no quick fix. Security is not a fea…
Once upon a time, the internet was described as an “information superhighway”. In truth, it more closely resembles the back alley behind a funfair: noisy, sticky underfoot, and populated by people selling things you probably do not want but will end up buying anyway. It is not defendable in any serious sense, and the e…
As AI systems gallop into the mainstream, humanity is left staggering somewhere behind, still deciding whether it is riding a horse or being trampled by one. The outcomes are not fixed. But the trajectories are becoming harder to ignore. We explored some speculative futures within the box, Human-AI symbiosis, Turbulent…
Elijah never quite knew how to answer the question, “So, what do you do?” He could say AI liaison, but that sounded pompous and vaguely sinister. He could say digital compliance coordinator, but even his mother snorted at that one. In truth, he spent most of his days arguing with regulatory software about whether the h…
We often think of democratic deficits as abstract, something that lives in Brussels conference rooms and academic papers. But in practice, power without accountability isn’t just theoretical. It shows up in the bills you pay, the apps you use, the water you drink, and the politicians you never seem to be able to reach.…
Europe does not lack power. It lacks responsibility. From national governments to supranational institutions, boardrooms to bureaucracies, decisions are made daily that affect millions. And yet, ask the average citizen who actually decided to privatise their rail service, greenlight a mega-merger, or rubber-stamp a con…
David Clark remembers the moment the Internet’s Pandora’s box creaked open and said, “Hello, world.” It was 2 November 1988, and the Morris Worm was slithering its way through cyberspace like a python on speed. Designed with the innocence of a curious grad student and the destruction of a cyber sledgehammer, it crashed…