12 posts tagged with "tech-politics"

Talofa reader,

I had an encounter the other week, with a smart, very capable young Pasifika person on my Discord who said they're not political because they're "either not interested in it or ... too busy living life and having fun to do anything about it".

And I went, "ooh, that's quite the take", and we went back and forth a few times, but ultimately we just parked it. I had to sit with it for a little while after, to figure out why that encounter really rubbed me the wrong way.

This isn't about this young Pasifika person, not at all. Everyone's free to their opinions and to live their own lives, 100%. So, given that, why did this irk me so much?

Talofa reader,

In 2001, a guy named Marc Prensky published an essay that shaped education policy for a decade. "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." The argument was: kids who grew up with computers think differently. They're wired for technology. They don't need to be taught how to use it — they already know.

Complete rubbish.

Talofa reader,

Anthropic dropped $8 million on a Super Bowl ad to tell you Claude is ad-free. I posted this about it the other week. The internet immediately started debating whether that's sustainable.

Anthropic pulls $4.5B from enterprise. OpenAI gets 75% from consumers. Both are burning billions. Which model wins?

I got into a thread about this on LinkedIn and someone brought up an interesting angle — what about companies that let you monetise your OWN data? What if the consumer gets a cut?

Which led me to River.

Talofa reader,

The argument that "AI is inevitable" has been accepted by tech and non-tech professionals alike, largely with muted reservation rather than loud proclamation. I've led workshops on generative AI, and the feeling from participants is that AI is a foregone conclusion:

"If you don't keep up, you'll be left behind."

They're not saying it because they're convinced about the technology, but because of how it feels to be surrounded by it.

And that's the problem. This is a claim that needs to be scrutinised, because you may have more optionality than you're led to believe.

Talofa reader,

To say 2025 was a 'challenging year' would be the understatement of understatements. No, it wasn't challenging—it was full-on "masks off": power consolidation and imperial impunity on full display.

Yes, it's going to be one of those newsletters.

It's that wonderful, magical time of year where we get to reflect on everything that happened for us this year. The highs, the lows, the lessons learned and friends we made along the way. But in my heart of hearts, or at least if I'm getting it one hundred, I don't feel that way. At all.

Talofa reader,

I know it's been some time between posts, but thanks for making the move with me from Substack to Beehiiv.

Talofa reader,

The world is in a big mess right now, and it's hard to just potter on, talking about AI and technology. The reality of democracy and Western civilisation is being shown for the lies and hypocrisy it truly is, and it seems to be getting worse by the day.

The recent student protests that kicked off at Columbia University quickly spread around the world. They are in support of a free Palestine and aim to stop the genocide in Gaza this week.

These events have filled my timeline and my conscience, so I felt compelled to write it out.

I know I addressed the situation in Gaza in a few newsletters ago in:

The image of the West as the "shining light on the hill" started unraveling in a very public way since October the 7th.

This situation just reminds me this is not the first time Western civilisation has been shown to be the imperialist hegemony it really is.

As we saw with Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless wars, WikiLeaks and wiki pages later revealed U.S. and European war crimes and atrocities.

Usually, this stuff gets hushed up.

The media are able to facilitate the laundering of Western-backed genocides while Western governments are being trigger-happy on putting sanctions on countries.

They influence other countries to do the same (or else), or they just straight up “regime change” these sovereign nations, to better pillage that country's resources.

I don't know why, but it feels different this time - and not in a good way1…

Maybe it's because of phrases like"the first genocide where victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real-time."that describe just how connected we are due to technology, and that we can now get the real, raw,on-the-ground devastationin real time.

I don't want to vent (much) about geopolitics and history.

I'm not an expert in those fields. I know what I've read and picked up, bits and pieces here and there.

I wanted to look at how something can go from being a great idea - like liberty, freedom, and free speech - to something that's oppressive, tyrannical, and must be resisted.

That's essentially the first part of the opening quote - if you want bad things, want all you want, it's got nothing to do with me.

But, and it's a massive "but", if the person has the***"power"***to bring about those bad things, upon me - that is 100% every single part, my problem.

It’s about power.

Talofa reader,

I often tell the story of what first got me into thinking about tech, so for this edition, I thought I’d dive deep into what made it such a life-changing point in my life.

Without a doubt, it was getting "hacked" by a high school friend over ICQ late one night while chatting.

That opened my eyes to what was possible with a little knowledge and skill with tech.

From then on, I was hooked.

I couldn’t wait to get my course costs from my university loan to buy my own, very first computer, an Acer laptop.

Real hackers run Linux, so I installed RedHat 5.2—no dual boot, just deleted Windows.

Linux straight, no chaser.

For the next, what seemed like ‘always’, I would battle it out with device drivers, getting my sound card to work, getting my video card to work, learning how to configure, compile and install my own kernels to ensure things worked.

My obsession with getting really good at wielding the power of computing, networking, and programming drove me to learn anything and everything from the hardware up through all 7 OSI layers.

I can’t even hazard a guess at how many hours all up I spent on learning, breaking, and fixing computers, how many all-nighters, weekends, and public holidays I spent just hacking on things.

I thought I just wanted to be a 31337 hax0r, and that was my obsession…

But it wasn’t until I came across a piece of writing, iconic in hacking culture, that I realised hacking was more than computer tricks for me…

That piece of writing was the hacker's manifesto.

TheHackers Manifesto1is a short essay written Lloyd Blankenship aka"The Mentor"of the infamous hacker group"Legion of Doom".

It featured in Issue 7, of equally infamous Hacker Magazine “Phrack” in 1986, and has been cited in popular culture, like the movie Hackers, The Social Network and in Edward Snowden’s autobiography.

You can read it yourself, but it’s the perspective of a smart kid, misunderstood and dismissed by his teachers, bored and unchallenged at school, who finds a world that challenges and teaches him, whereinformation is free.

Sure- if you're familiar with the manifesto- you might think it's cheesy, a bit cringe, “of it’s time” etc.

But I can’t deny the sentiment of"The Mentor"vibed somewhere deep in me.

Why?

Good question.

The manifesto sounded like it was written by a palagi kid, from the U.S., I’m going to go out on a limb here and say probably from a decent home (one that had a computer at least).

So what did we have in common?2

Talofa Reader,

In my career and in life, the following statements I've heard repeatedly make me want to headbutt a brick wall to save me from a lawsuit:

1. "Don't bring politics into x, y, z!"

2. "I don't do office politics."

3. "I don't care about politics, I just want to write code!"

Sure, they're all worded differently but essentially all say the same thing, which is, "I don't understand how society and human beings work and I'm basically an underdeveloped human being."

I mean, even look at the recent uproar over a women's rugby team doing a Haka that was critical of the government.

"Keep politics out of sports," scream the same crowd that tells everyone else to "harden up, change the channel if you don't like it".

Weakest demographic of human beings to ever exist.

Politics is in everything because people are in everything and people are inherently political beings shaped by the ideologies, values, and power structures around them.

This is just a fundamental understanding ofpeople, so it pains me to think this is missing from anyone's consciousness.

In terms of technology - not just the way people who work in tech think about politics, but just how anyone views technology, the most dangerous misunderstanding about technology is thatit's not political.

People think the technology is objective; it's just doing what it's programmed to do, abdicating it of any responsibility.

But the truth of the matter is, technology is very much political - in how it's created, developed, by whom, for whom, and why?

Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum.

It's developed within socio-political contexts that influence how it's designed, where it's deployed, and how it's used.

A great example of this is the development and debate around encryption technologies.

You have governments and law enforcement agencies on one side arguing that encryption helps criminals and that there should exist backdoors in the technology.

On the other side, you have privacy advocates and technologists counter that backdoors in encryption technologies inherently compromise the security of the technology, thereby making them vulnerable not just to law enforcement agenciesbut to malicious actors as well.

Here we’re talking about the mathematical algorithms that encrypt and secure data, how it's developed (with or without backdoors) and who it's developed for and against.

It’s very much the proverbial football being kicked between two sets of political ideologies.

The encryption debate has raged on for a long time now, but a lot has developed and evolved for tech over the years, and in the exact same way, the same political vulnerabilities for encryption are there for these new topics as well.

Let’s have a look at some of these topics shall we?