My world on the web
As though the news cycle wasn’t bad enough, that brief moment when our leaders seemed to make decisions in the broad public interest is over, writes Laura Tingle.
Ultimately, then, we’re going to need a whole new politics and social contract after the pandemic. I sincerely hope we manage to grasp the nettle and do something radically different. I’m not sure how we’ll all survive if the rich, once again, come out of all this even richer than before.
My generation was the dominant voice for sixty years. A voice that worried about the next 24 hours, not the next 24 years. That’s about to shift, regardless of what year you were born.
New technologies were supposed to open societies and empower individuals. Instead, they’ve given despots the upper hand.
Larding big platforms with public duties like these — the sort of thing that costs tens or hundreds of millions to accomplish — also ensures that we will never be able to cut them down to size and break up their monopolies. Once you deputize Big Tech with tasks that no small tech can perform, you also foreclose on any measure that might make Big Tech any smaller.