Last week I read a very interesting Twitter thread by Jack Edwards in which he made a subject data request to Spotify. Amongst all the data about your listening habits there’s a file called inferences.json, which contains a trove of inferences about you as a consumer. Inspired by the thread Read more…
On March 23, the technology sections of several news websites reported the same story. “Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet sells for $2.9m” said the BBC. “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sells first tweet as an NFT for $2.9M”, wrote CNET. The Wall Street Journal went with a similar headline, as well Read more…
“I am now the person who is alert to every twinge or mark anywhere on me. I am getting to know this person. This is not me This is me” Michael Rosen, Going Home I never thought that I would be writing this today. Firstly, I never thought that this Read more…
Here we go again. I was seriously planning not to blog again about non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and instead concentrate on writing a full academic paper about the subject, but events have overtaken us, and it seems like a day in NFT-land is like a month in the real world, much Read more…
If you have been reading any technology and art news in the last week, you may have come across the newest hype in the world of distributed ledgers and cryptocurrencies, and it is the sudden rise of the non-fungible token (NFT). The breakthrough for this technology came in the shape Read more…
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…