Is it possible for tech innovators to reimagine themselves as social entrepreneurs? If the digital economy is evolving towards the platform, can the platforms be democratised – co-owned by those who work for them and those who use them? An article for norDEV Magazine.
Writing in the midst of Europe’s interwar turbulence, the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci observed that ‘the old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.’ Though contemporary parallels with Gramsci’s troubled world can be overplayed, these transitional times have spawned, if not monsters, an impressive array of fabulous beasts.
How did an economic model patched together 40 years ago by Deng Xiaoping with the assistance of a well-thumbed copy of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme – and not much else – prove so effective for China, an economy which has grown fifty-fold since 1978?
Helvetica may still be the only typeface to have starred in a movie. But another great European font, which turned 90 this year, has had a still more profound impact on the world’s visual culture. An excerpt from a feature on the cultural history of the typeface Futura I wrote for The New European.
Might it be possible to design some form of confederacy preserving Israeli and Palestinian nationhood while granting mutual access to the same territory? I look at the ‘parallel states solution’ in light of the White House’s decision to unilaterally recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
An article for The Norwich Radical exploring China’s design for enforcing ‘trustworthiness’: the Social Credit System.
The 2000th anniversary of the Roman poet Ovid’s death, far from home on the shores of the Black Sea, prompted some thoughts on the condition of exile, as experienced then and now.