683 views 9 mins 0 comments

Anything-as-a-Service (AaaS)

Institute for Human Obsolescence

I first saw Manuel Beltrán brilliantly present the Institute of Human Obsolescence at a Tactical Tech Info-Activism exhibition in London in late 2017.

His big idea was that we should all be paid from any money made off our data.

I suspect it’s called the Institute of Human Obsolescence because, increasingly, humanity, to tech companies, is an irrelevance.

Standards in Public Life

Anyway, it was nice to just scroll into Manuel’s latest tweet:

Manuel retweeted this a couple of days ago:

Exploitation of EU & non-EU Workers

UK-based EU-focused Data Journalist Crina Boros told me about her recent Sweatshops on Wheels project on EU-based Truckers exploited under the Posted Workers directive.

International Transport Workers’ Federation

Jeremy Anderson of the International Transport Workers Federation recently told me about his work to support transport workers globally and some of the boardroom campaigns currently being waged by Trade Union Pension funds to protect standards for workers.

Petty Theft & Shop-Lyfting

Lyft, which just floated in the US, is going to be subject to plenty of boardroom conflict.

 

Rise of the Working Class Shareholder

We’ll be looking at David Webber‘s: The Rise of the Working Class Shareholder at the Heretical Finance Reading Group in London tomorrow. It was this book that first alerted me to trade union shareholder activism in boardroom campaigns to protect workers’ interests.

Janet Williamson of the TUC was one of the co-ordinators of the boardroom campaign to get Sports Direct to improve workers conditions:

#MeToo actions have been fought through boardrooms too:

Share Action, formerly Fair Pensions, also do great AGM Activism.

In the last book club we looked at Cathy O’Neill‘s Weapons of Math Destruction.

A brilliant book which concludes with recommendations that we AUDIT ALGORITHMS.

Sadly, Cathy is not impressed with Tech’s proposals to Audit AI

King Zuck is now calling for Regulation of Social Media, whatever that means!

All Access AI

Before Book Club, at Goldsmiths, there is also a workshop on AI:

Green New Deal

 

And in Parliament a New Economics Foundation event on how to finance the Green New Deal:

Here was a recent NEF podcast:

Back to Apps, I just saw a BBC report on Trim It:

 

Not sure why the BBC have to put such a massive emphasis on race.

The conflation of identity politics with environmentalism, culture, philosophy and economics leads to some seriously sloppy thinking in my book.

Though I probably agree on most things with the virtue signalling left, I find their general close mindedness and latent racism more than a little off-putting.

NEF in particular are a nasty bunch, but they do some good work, so I will continue to share some of it.

IEA mix culture, deregulation, the promotion of fossil fuels and are obviously very attractive to white racists.

They have Darren Grimes, who was involved in the most egregious election fraud in recent times, and Matt Ridley, a climate denying Tory Lord on this podcast.

 

Time to reshare the Tufton Street video I made with Real Media last year:

Compare with the far more compromised BBC video from a few weeks ago:

Nice to have been ahead of the curve.

Here is Adam Ramsay going a little deeper:

Adam on the reason why Climate Reporting in the media is so terrible:

On Cambridge Analytica and Mercenaries:

Peter Jukes on How Bannon Bought Brexit:

More on Bannon, Putin and Young British Conservative:

It’s great to have been involved in these projects.

Hopefully more interesting stuff to come.