Dr Laura James's writings

Today, the  Digital Life Collective  is seeking cofounding members — the first 150 people who will kickstart  a co-operative movement to build tech we trust. I’m both a cofounding member, and I’m stepping up to be one of the directors of the initial UK-based co-operative which is a necessary piece of the support. Why am I doing this? I’m keen to see a future where we have  ethical, responsible technology which works for everyone .  To reach this, we need new ways to build this technology, new models which are sustainable and can offer secure, resilient systems. The Digital Life Collective stands a good chance of doing this, and is setting out in a sensible direction. The Collective community already has folks who aren’t from technical backgrounds, which is important — we need marketing and community and legal expertise too, and we have those involved. We’ll need to be more than a haven for geeks building for geeks, partly because we’ll need to be able to ...

I’m at the  Power Switch  conference in Cambridge, exploring how power is changing in a networked world. I’ll be updating this post through the day with notes from the sessions. John Naughton and David Runciman introduced the  day , from the  Technology and Democracy project  at Cambridge. David: Power is a slippery concept. It’s tempting to think we know what it is and that we recognise it when we see it, but this can lead to difficulties. Cass Sunstein’s latest book includes: “people’s growing power to filter what they say, and others power to choose what we see” — but those are two very different kinds of power. Political scientists might wish for a taxonomy of power, but that’s confusing too. So today we want to interrogate what it is, so we’ll know it when we see it, without getting bogged down in definitions. There’s nothing new about most of the kinds of power we’ll hear about today (except, perhaps, the session on algorithmic power). Th...