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In 1995 Will Self published a short story about the fantastic morphine-induced hallucinations of a divorcee living beside a model village who loses his sense of proportion. As his reverie descends through 50 pages the notion of scale itself fragments and dissolves into a morass of homonyms – the scales on a reptile, the scale Read more
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“I know 97% of my programmatic ad budget is wasted, I just don’t know which 97%” is the genius alternative headline of Bob Hoffman’s new year blogpost, which somehow manages to be at once compelling and flippant. While he doesn’t mention the Digital Services Act, Hoffman provides essential background reading as we enter the business Read more
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Too near the ancient troughs of blood Innocence is no earthly weapon. Geoffrey Hill, Ovid in the Third Reich The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum possesses a photograph of a line of Helferinnen, racially pure auxiliaries made available for the delectation of SS guards in search of a mate. A genial SS officer offers Read more
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On GDPR Day, 25 May 2018, he was invited to attend a meeting of the directors-general of the European Commission. Selmayr sat him to his right, and welcomed the elite throng of white, grizzled, po-faces arrayed around an elliptical table to a rare audience with ‘the most senior independent official in the EU’. Nice bit Read more
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Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. Read more
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This is a draft article due to appear soon in the European Law Journal. ‘A State in the disguise of a Merchant’: Tech Leviathans and the rule of law Abstract The rule of law is an ancient, global and malleable tenet of political morality. As a check on power, it requires equal subjection of everyone Read more
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I had not clocked Spaced until a beer blogger wrote a couple of years ago about the evolution of the function of pubs as you grow older in London, coinciding with chronic decline due to wider socio-economic trends. ‘The specific pub culture depicted has already begun to fade out of existence,’ blogged Boak & Bailey, Read more
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For a while now the most interesting discussions about tech and privacy have been happening in the United States. In politics, the US Congress in 2018-2020 was awash with proposals for a federal privacy law. Privacy academia is also in full spate, and there are few more incisive and erudite contributors than Julie Cohen, who Read more
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Autumn, 2010 We are used to rain on All Saints’ Day. Half the leaves litter the floor and the other half cling to their branches until the next big gust of wind. Here comes winter. On Wednesday we should, but might not, know the outcome of the US Presidential Elections. The prospects this decade for Read more
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This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what Read more
rooting around for grubs in diverse soils
ofthewedge 