Chris Lintott’s chronicle of the booming citizen-science project Zooniverse is inspirational, finds Michael West. The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Chris Lintott Oxford University Press (2019) Citizen science is booming. Today, anyone with a computer or a smartphone can participate in research in astronomy, oceanography, medicine, zoology and beyond. With such studies no longer […]
Work as forming the future, work as art
What if we left behind the mirror metaphor in trying to make sense of the world? What if we closed our eyes for a moment and began to imagine what does not yet exist? What kind of a world we would really want to create? It would mean an approach to sense making in which […]
The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution
Commercial platforms cannot prioritise the ideals of a liberal public sphere, much less the principle of popular sovereignty, over the profit motive. Introduction The information technology sector broadly defined is now at the leading edge of the capitalist system. Material production and distribution, enterprise and professional management, finance, insurance and real estate are all increasingly […]
A Handful of Super-Corporations Control The Fate of The World, Chilling Report Shows
This is a vital signal for anyone concerned with economic justice, democracy and the rule of laws of-for-by democratically determined societies. “TNCs have become a defining feature of the interconnected planet of people and nature, with humans as a hyper-dominant species in the biosphere affecting global patterns of ecological change.” A small group of super-powerful […]
James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues
Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body of writing. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock Allen Lane (2019) [He developed] a sustained and developing argument, in the face of sometimes dismissive criticism, that recast Earth as, in effect, a superorganism. Lovelock’s Gaia theory states that, for much of the past 3.8 billion years, a […]