One of my favourite phrases from Gabriel García Márquez can be found in The Autumn of the Patriarch, and reads: “El día que la mierda tenga algún valor, los pobres nacerán sin culo.” (The day shit has any value, the poor will be born without an ass”. I was reminded Read more…
The events of last week require no introduction. The world looked in shock as the QAnon-MAGA mob stormed the US Capitol, disrupting the certification process for the US election. Disbelief, anger, sadness, in some circles. In others glee at the decay of a once great democracy. For me it felt Read more…
If you are paying attention to technology news, you may have come across deepfakes. In case you haven’t, a deepfake has become an umbrella term for various types of image and video manipulation in which a realistic computer rendering of a person can be constructed, seemingly looking and sounding exactly Read more…
After the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the entire world changed the way in which airport security was conducted. Some of the features made sense: sturdier metal detectors and more baggage scanners. But we also started seeing an increase in often useless and baseless measures designed to look good Read more…
During my university years in Costa Rica, I used to be quite involved in student politics. You know, the usual stuff, marches, protesting, political parties, advocacy, but mostly sitting around talking about politics at the Law School’s cafeteria. I used to have quite a good collection of t-shirts, some with Read more…
So, I am a patient of what they are calling Long-Covid, I’m a long-hauler. If you follow some of my social media, this will not come as a surprise, but I haven’t been posting too much about my condition lately other than to provide a status check that I am Read more…
I’ll get to the Bitcoin bit soon, but first let me explain what prompted this idea. Thanks to a Twitter thread by Cory Doctorow (archived here), I’ve been listening to this great interview with Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. In the video, Varoufakis explains the historic decoupling between stock markets and the Read more…
On July 15, 2020, a remarkable hacking attack took place. The Twitter accounts of prominent public figures such as Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Bill Gates, amongst many others, started to transmit a message stating that if a person deposited some Bitcoin to a wallet, it Read more…
By now you may have heard that there’s a new sheriff in town: K-pop fans, they’re are here to save the day! An army of online fans of Korean bands, particularly BTS, have been getting organised to lend their social media reach to tackle several problems. By now you may Read more…
It’s difficult to take anything coming out of Elon Musk’s Twitter account seriously, and I say this as a person who is quite fond of a bit of eccentricity online. Since the pandemic began, Musk has been trying to keep the attention of a bored world squarely on him. He Read more…