Permission taken

Well worth listening or watching this talk from Dan Gillmor: Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an online surveillance state. In many cases, however, we’re letting it happen, by trading freedom for … Keep reading

Our regressive web

Ryan Holiday writes in Our Regressive Web: We’re regressing because we’re so focused on the new that we forgot the importance of the old. The tech press is too busy chattering about other “innovations” like retargeting, paywalls, native advertising. Except those changes are at the margins—at best. And because of that distraction or lack of understanding of the bigger … Keep reading

The dream is fading fast

John Naughton: Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re heading in a very different direction — towards an online world dominated by huge, primarily … Keep reading