Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo has today announced she is leaving Twitter/X (her announcement in Le Monde here, news story from Politico here). I think she rather overdoes the rhetoric, but that’s not the central point – she is an important politician deciding to abandon the platform, and that is […]
I somehow stumbled across this 2016 piece by Giles Wilkes last week. The economic blogosphere, he writes, is like “eavesdropping on clever people arguing”. Those words are perfect, and if you can get past the paywall, the whole piece is worth reading. It might have been the very worst of […]
Yesterday a post popped up on my timeline on Twitter alternative Bluesky purporting to be from European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton. I was immediately sceptical – would a Commissioner (and indeed a French Commissioner!) put “EU Commissioner. Digital enforcer. Father.” as his biography? Turns out my scepticism […]
Change, it had to come We knew it all along We were liberated from the fold, that’s all And the world looks just the same And history ain’t changed […] We don’t get fooled again So the classic lines by The Who. Enjoy the full 8:33 of the song here. […]
15 years ago The Common Craft Show did this little explainer about Twitter: What strikes me above all is how personal all of this is. The essence of this has been on my mind for the past few weeks, as we try and try again to find something to replace […]
When I was growing up you didn’t vacuum clean the house, you hoovered it. More recently, to google something was synonymous with the internet search engine. And – like it or not – Twitter had its whole own vocabulary synonymous with the service. “She tweeted it!” is a lot better […]
For years I have been fighting a losing battle with friends – trying to make them see that the choices of the tech they use should be similar to how they choose what food to buy, or how to travel – namely that there are ethical values bound up in […]
Back in the summer of 2011 I had a bit a tricky conundrum. I needed to get from Bow in East London to Camden in North London avoiding the riots that were happening at that time. And ideally I needed to make the trip by bike. And a community had […]
When Twitter pulled out of the EU’s voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton of course took to Twitter to respond: Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain. You can run but you can’t hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, […]
Out of the window of the train just north of Brussels you can see the poster pictured here – Niet panikeren, organiseren it says. Don’t panic, organise in English. The past few days a slightly alternative slogan has been on my mind. Don’t whine, organise! We’ve had Sarah Manavis writing for The New Statesman […]
Looking back it was a pretty good dozen years in many ways. From when I started using Twitter for EU political purposes early in 2009 until it all started to go wrong throughout 2022 I managed to achieve a hell of a lot on that platform. But it was based […]
This blog has been running 17 years, and a good 14 of those the blog has been powered by WordPress. But in that time not only how I write has changed, but the way WordPress organises everything has changed a fair bit too. Back in 2008 I was coding the […]
