• Should children be banned from social media?

    Earlier this week, Meta announced it would block Instagram and Facebook for users under 16 in Australia in advance of the 10 December deadline set by the federal legislation designed to reduce children’s exposure to social media. Although this will … Continued

  • National Champions Redux

    As discussed in class, national champions have been receiving renewed attention from virtually all corners in the context of global competition, especially in the tech sector. In just the past few months, China has tried to encourage mergers in its … Continued

  • Is there still a role for collaborative, open-source efforts like Wikipedia?

    There have long been debates as to whether Wikipedia is a trustworthy source, whether there were Western, male, English-speaking, and/or liberal biases in its 65 million pages, or how Wikipedia resolves conflicts (or does not!). There is even a site that lets you see which topics … Continued

  • Reflections on Bletchley Park

    Taking a break from the week’s relentless tech news (including Nvidia becoming the publicly traded company to be valued at $5tn, a global Microsoft outage, and OpenAI’s shift to becoming a fully for-profit firm), I thought it wise to step … Continued

  • Technology or Politics?

    Earlier this week, Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT that contrary to the dominant current ‘discourse’, in fact, “public life, not private innovation, has supplied the drama of our times”. In his view, even the tech elite recognise that ultimately … Continued

  • Cultures of Innovation and Creative Destruction

    Since this week’s Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences was awarded “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth” it seemed the obvious choice as the subject for this week’s blog. The prize was split equally for contributions to endogenous growth … Continued