Overview: Politics

Snapchat on Thursday launched a new political campaign show on its “Discover” page... ‘Good Luck America’ is geared toward young viewers

the rise of Trump using language of how we talk about startups that become black swans.

The potential outcomes are bad for the party and its adherents—but even worse for the rest of America.

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…

As a believer in the 80/20 principle, whenever I list out the key players involved in deciding on any piece of EU law, I come to around 500 men and women across Europe. Over time, around 100 of them are more heavily involved and influential, and the vital decisions are taken by about 20...

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

I've been invited to prepare a "Technology Buyer Challenge" on Hashtag Platform for the Language Technology Industry Summit this May. (Update, 31/3/16: this project was covered, among many other things, in an interview with professional EU interpreter Alexander Drechsel in his podcast Demos ex machina? Multilingual communication wit…

[leaders are] usually busy furiously making believe that there is no decline. Instead of leading societies out of decline (which is what they should be doing), they’re working night and day manufacturing (or luxuriously reclining in) what I’ll call Unreality Bubbles... intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their positi…

"So you think “President Trump” is the worst case scenario?" - Some thoughts, originally on my oldblog and then updated on Medium:

So you think "President Trump" is the worst case scenario? The rise of American authoritarianism provides the best article I've read explaining the Rise of Trump, even if it's a bit longer than previous favourites. It covers psychological research into authoritarianism, the profile characterized by a desire for order and a fear…

A short post on the financial costs of not having a European Public Sphere.

if he tried to make ads that were beautiful and perfect, it wouldn’t work and his fans would know... his work routinely pulls in millions of views because he’s transparent with his audience... mostly teenage boys know when they’re being peddled a product.

building community means intentionally creating a culture, every step of the way... It’s hard to overstate the importance of community guidelines... members ... didn’t want to be a part of a community where people were fighting all the time, but had been afraid to speak up in the discussion, lest they get dragged into the fray. with every post, e…

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? ... his support seems to cross demographic lines ... does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast o…

many marketers spend their resources on talking at people, not listening. The key is to find the space between what you want to talk about as a marketer and what they want to talk about as a consumer. That small slice is the opportunity for true engagement and will shift the conversation from monologue to dialogue. Attention is a gift, and what yo…

My sadly underwhelmed response to @sidewireinc’s gr8 “Today’s Internet is Optimized for Noise”

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

The afternoon session at Future Media Lab 2016 showed that while European media are warming to the idea of using advanced language technologies to share content across borders, their audiences are already well ahead of them.

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

We first noticed how Trump stories drove traffic—and thus revenue—at TheStreet.com last summer... if a website earns $20 for every thousand page views, it can make, say, $20,000 on a Trump story, but only $2,000 on an article about Cruz, Clinton, Sanders or Rubio... giving him even greater leverage over the media... even the smallest items of Tru…

Algorithms quietly make a myriad decisions for us each day... Perhaps most importantly, these algorithms decide what we see online and how much we are aware of what is going on in the world around us... Today's digital assistants are designed to abstract ever further away from pages of links towards synthesizing information on our behalf... What …

Tap into the wisdom of your citizensYour city platform for citizensourcing

With independent journalism increasingly looking like an endangered species, a EU communication strategy that helped European media build the European Public Sphere would be a smarter longterm move than propaganda and brochureware

The European Political Strategy Centre gathered a select group of leading international academics to provide input to the ongoing public consultation on a regulatory environment for online platforms.

the federal government hopes to unveil a "model state policy" on self-driving cars that would offer "a path to consistent national policy,"

The job of politics... finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction... I blame the internet ... You can’t take on inequality and injustice with a coalition of people who use the same slang, listen to the same music, and post the same emojis that you do.You have to be willing t…

Plebiscite-pushers have got Europe's voters hooked on the cheap rush of direct democracy

The loss of state control, the fragility of EU institutions, and the rise of populism could bring about a disintegration process in Schengen, the eurozone or "even the Single Market", according to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2016.

The future of the EU is interesting, because it cannot make any significant decisions now, and it cannot decide to dissolve. What will happen is what is happening now: less and less does Europe make decisions, and when it does, European states pay less and less attention to them... Buildings in Brussels continue to issue edicts, and everybody else…

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.