ofthewedge

rooting around for grubs in diverse soils

  • All that is solid…

    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

  • The age of (trying to regulate) surveillance capitalism

    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

  • The GDPR was the most lobbied law in EU history. DSA: Hold my beer

    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

  • Angels of history

    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

  • Un omaggio

    This reflection on the life of my boss, Giovanni Buttarelli, was originally posted on https://iapp.org/resources/article/memoriam-giovanni-buttarelli/ and has been repatriated here, a year to the day since he passed away. I don’t have many photos of me and Giovanni. Just as well, because his svelte poise only threw into ever-starker relief the balding squatness of my… Read more

  • Beyond the new Five Evils: Imagining a post-pandemic democracy

    This is a sketch of an idea for a possible way ahead. Any comments are more than welcome so this post can be improved. The global disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic is on a scale not seen since World War II. The pandemic has made the air cleaner, the streets safer, and forced us… Read more

  • Work-life imbalance

    This COVID Spring is replete with pathetic fallacies. You can hear the birds, streets are safer for walkers and cyclists, the sky is no longer striated by aircraft fumes. In New Delhi children have seen a blue sky for the first time in their lives. Human have been forced to leave nature alone and the… Read more

  • Privacy in the time of Corona

    ‘History is bunk’ – so said Henry Ford, allegedly. He was wrong. Privacy is not ‘bunk’ either, but its debased currency in public policy debates certainly is. The current unfolding catastrophe has the rights to privacy and data protection under siege (or in lockdown, if you prefer) because, of course, all problems in the world… Read more

  • The Hours

    Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers: bleak hill-sides soften and fall in. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf was living in Rodmell, West Sussex when, on an early spring day during Britain’s… Read more

  • In memoriam to Clive James

    On WH Auden’s ‘The Cultural Presupposition’. ‘Happy the hare at morning’ – is a fine beginning to a poem.  And the ‘rampant suffering suffocating jelly’ sounds like the sort of pointless insult Boris Johnson would fling at Jeremy Corbyn. The poet surveys the inevitable decay and demise of all things. Art is humans flicking the… Read more