About 20 years ago, I co-wrote with a bunch of Cisco colleagues a short monograph called The Connected Republic. The basic thesis was simple. We argued that it was time to escape the limits of the language of “e-government” and “digital transformation” and recognise that technology had graduated from “enabler” to something altogether bigger. Even […]
Manifestos, policy and who owns the future: a brief tale of power and imagination
Manifestos are a form of manipulation, either (traditionally) from a position of no power or, more recently and especially in the context of AI’s febrile clatter into the future (think Dario Amodei, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen), a great deal of power. Policy making, on the other hand, is a form of more […]
The care economy, productivity and the role and impact of AI: a tale of hope and expectation
I’ve been involved in two discussions recently which have collided, for me at least, in a mix of hope and expectation. Discussion#1 goes something like this. Is the care economy a thing? And if it is a thing, is it a thing whose defining characteristic, fairly or not, is its stubborn resistance to many of […]
The Third Stack: Epistemic Discretion and the Power to Decide
“By contributing to an open-source, transnational effort that aligns with its own industrial priorities, Vietnam inserts itself not as a peripheral adopter but as a co-author of global AI infrastructure. This is asymmetry as strategy: composing relevance not by competing at the centre, but by accruing influence at the edge.” I’ve now read this essay […]
This is why you need to study ancient history: we’ve been here before
I’m obsessed with the idea of just how much our current global moment of transition resonates with the transition in ancient China from the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE) to the Warring States period (475 to 221BCE). More accurately, my obsession is with this recent essay from Noema by Shanghai-based Chinese scholar […]
The Road to Relational [Part 2]
This is the second of two posts reflecting on recent conversations I’ve been involved with about relational care and how more effectively its reflexes and practices might become more embedded in our care systems. The focus is especially on out of home care as a particular domain in which its absence is widely recognised as […]
