Top Highlights

• feel claustrophobia when we notice this tightening web. I shudder at adverts that showcase the convenience of products that will later attempt to study and steer my behaviour.
• Technology is double-sided. We experience it as empowering, and yet it increases our dependency. The external gadgets that support us come to mould our actions and thoughts, as innovations that are initially received as new options but go on to become mandatory necessities.
• Google (Alphabet), Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft (and in China, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu) – are embedding themselves as the connective digital tissue through which we all engage with the market. The position enables them to harvest enormous amounts of data, which they then use to train their artificial intelligences – AIs.
• It might have begun as an imagined antithesis to Big Finance and Big Tech, but in reality a synthesis is emerging, and one that is just as likely to further dystopian trends as it is to combat them.
• the taller your building is, the less down-to-earth a mindset you must have. Nobody uses a thirty-fifth floor office to hand-make bread from stone-ground flour, for example, but they will use it to write mega-bets on the global price of wheat,