Month: November 2025

Platform City People

Finally published! I have a chapter, ‘Platform City People’, out in this fully *open access* book, Being Human in the Digital World, edited by Val Steeves and Beate Roessler, from Cambridge. Please read everything in it.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/being-human-in-the-digital-world/platform-city-people/00049338349668A16F48038DDCC42769

It’s a piece about how the developers and promoters of what we might call post-smart cities, platform cities or AI cities see the putative inhabitants of these exclusive and exclusionary places. I wrote this quite a while ago now, and in a deliberately accessible style, and more than a little bit polemical, satirical and sarcastic in its tone. I think it still stands up well.

The whole book is here, and it also includes great things from the likes of Frank Pasquale, Julie Cohen and Azadeh Akbari amongst many others…

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/being-human-in-the-digital-world/D8CC33CF026507F324AF00CEEC7C894C

Ambient Government Revisited

A few years ago I was talking around the place about surveillance, security and “ambient government” (or “ambient governance”), but it turned out that so were plenty of other people and no one person really has a claim on this phrase or others like it. It was, somewhat appropriate, in the academic air at the time… and it still should be!

Looking back on it, I don’t think I’ve bettered how I discussed this back then, and I never fully published what I was talking about. So here is the vastly underwatched talk I gave in Victoria back in 2014. If you have 45 minutes to spare, I think it’s worth a watch. Plus, I look so young!