Is there Hope Yet for the Rainbow Nation?

Reading Time: 9 minutesSouth Africa might be seen as a microcosm of the “globalised” world itself. Home to people of African, European, Indian, Asian, and mixed descent, it nevertheless attempts to find some unity of purpose in its diversity. To this end, in 1994 with the end of white minority rule, it styled itself as the “Rainbow Nation”: the idea that the country’s many racial and ethnic parts can make up a beautiful whole. But rainbows are also elusive, as anyone who has ever tried […]

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Are Cryptocurrencies Truly the New Monetary Paradigm?

Reading Time: 2 minutesThe rule in journalism is that any question you can ask in a headline can invariably answered “No”. Sadly for cryto enthusiasts, that holds true in this case as well. In all fairness, the bubble has not burst yet, in spite of experts and media pundits all clamouring that it’s about to. The breathlessness with which mainstream outlets. which formally left electronic money to nice sites with coin in their name […]

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Google versus Amazon: Whoever Wins, Consumers Lose

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe internet has always been defined by struggles between the titans. Just think of the Browser Wars – first fought between Internet Explorer and Netscape, and later Firefox, Chrome, and Explorer. They were sources of great innovation, certainly – looking back at a browser from even the mid 2000s is like dealing with alien technology […]

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Hired Hands and Corporate Spies: The Pinkertons Ride Again

Reading Time: 3 minutesIt’s nearly two years since the protests against a then hypothetical Dakota Access Pipe Line (DAPL for short) began. They made good sense: oil pipelines have a somewhat dubious safety record, and DAPL seemed to go out of its way to heighten an already grim situation for North Dakota. According to The New York Times, the state has seen in the region of 18 million gallons of oils […]

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Britain First: Smoke, Mirrors, and A Lot of Hate

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhilst it’s Europe and America that we tend to think about when it comes to far-right extremists, Britain First has long been the UK’s fastest growing political party, on Facebook. This was not originally a cause for alarm: a large part of that early success was down to an almost genius campaign of using highly emotive, apolitical images (often to do with animal cruelty) to get users to sign up, artificially inflating their numbers […]

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Not another collaboration.

Reading Time: 2 minutesDefining collaboration in today’s world. Feature update from Cronycle about how the product is adapting to these changes. “We all have the same amount of time in a day, and there is no way to get more of it. It doesn’t matter how successful or wealthy one is – we are all capped at 24 hours per day.” [..]

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BailBloc: A Lesson in Cryptocurrencies’ Constraints?

Reading Time: 2 minutesCharity is not the most obvious use of cryptocurrencies. In fact, it might be fair to say that most anecdotes involving blockchain-derived monetary systems are about conmen and almost criminally gullible suckers. Between ridiculous Initial Coin Offerings, with proposals as wild as reshaping the dental sector, the association with petty criminals and the far-right, and […]

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Is the Indo-Pacific Here to Stay?

Reading Time: 3 minutesCoverage of Trump’s recent tour of Asia has tended to focus on a few areas. There were his readiness to speak kindly of China, in spite of earlier campaign promises. Then there was the continuing war of words with North Korea, which has reached farcical levels. And finally, the obligatory snaps of Putin and Trump […]

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The (In)justice of Algorithms

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn 1956, when Philip K. Dick wrote The Minority Report, the internet wasn’t around. In fact, the internet’s forbears wouldn’t appear until the next decade. But whilst the detection of ‘precrime’ in Dick’s short story was through the power of unfortunate mutants, we are rapidly moving into a present where the power of big data and […]

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Alt-Left vs. Alt-Right

Reading Time: 8 minutes[Note: In this essay, I only discuss the cultural aspects of the left-right divide, and leave the economic aspects to others who have a far better grasp of these. Of course, culture and economics are not entirely separable, and I regret any blind spots that may result from this.] What has been called the “alt-right” is only the mirror […]

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