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The political and policy forces shaping technology. Capital, regulation, geopolitics, surveillance, antitrust, and the politics of innovation.
Politics
Across 37,073 European Research Council applications, the same proposal scored higher with reviewers who shared the applicant's citizenship and country of work — and that match moved the score about seven times as much as a shared gender did
Two economists contracted by the ERC's own executive agency compared how a single proposal was scored by reviewers who matched the applicant and reviewers who did not. Sharing both citizenship and country of work moved the first-stage project score by 0.164 of a point on a five-point scale. The link to actual funding decisions is weaker, and correlational.
More in Politics
The problem with being anti-woke is less about the concerns it raises, some of them serious, than about the label: a stance defined against a word that now stretches to mean almost anything inherits that word's vagueness, and the same charge lands on being woke
Europe's AI watermarking rules are now live, but visible labels, hidden machine-readable marks and editorial review apply to different companies, content and moments under Article 50
No service can delete your digital footprint. The honest numbers, from independent testing rather than marketing copy, run from 27 to 70 percent — and even that requires checking back every few months as data brokers refresh their databases
Trump refused to sign the housing bill Congress sent him in June, holding out for an unrelated voter ID measure
France passed the first law protecting an employee's right to ignore work messages outside contracted hours in 2017, and by 2026 more than fifteen countries have followed, though the EU itself still hasn't passed a single directive covering all of them
The company behind Singha beer removed one of its heirs from every executive role days after an abuse allegation went public — a reckoning Asian family dynasties usually avoid
Singapore's millionaire density hit 1 in 6 households — and the mental health data is telling a very different story about what that wealth is buying
South Korea approved single-stock leveraged ETFs, then banned new ones two months later — inside the margin unwind that pushed forced selling to seven times last year's pace
Antonio Damasio's 'somatic marker' theory argued that bodily signals help guide decisions before conscious reasoning, and patients with damaged emotional circuits showed why intellect alone may not be enough
The EU’s AI Act starts requiring chatbot and deepfake labels on August 2 — while its tougher rules on hiring, biometrics and migration are pushed back to December 2027
The EU says Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design likely breaks its rules — and it wants autoplay and infinite scroll off by default
