Top 10 technology and ethics stories of 2020
Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 technology and ethics stories of 2020
Share this item with your network: By Published: 31 Dec 2020 9:00
The year 2020 has been shaped by the global pandemic and international outcry over institutional racism and white supremacy.
A number of technology companies, for example, came under sustained scrutiny for their ties to law enforcement and how, despite their proclamations of using “tech for good”, their products are used to further entrench racist policing practices.
Facial recognition was another major focus of Computer Weekly’s 2020 coverage. On the one hand, police use of the technology in south Wales has been found unlawful, while on the other, both public and private sector bodies are racing to develop facial recognition that can work on people wearing masks or other face coverings, which could severely limit people’s ability to protest or even exercise their basic privacy ri
Welcome to Fifth Estate’s
Anarchist Review of Books, edited by a collective based in Austin, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Oakland and Seattle. ARB brings you intelligent, subversive, non–dogmatic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective.
We put this issue out at a time of grave concern in American publishing. A deadening combination of corporate consolidation and academic professionalization of writing has produced decades of embarrassing, dull work and uninspired critique that stands as a record of cowardice and complicity in literature; a one-two punch that has brought wily, vibrant work to its knees.
For more than twenty years success in American publishing has been determined by a handful of literary finishing schools an aptly named terminal degree, a contract with a house (owned by one of just four corporations) that professes to care about good writing not politics and an implicit understanding politics never refers to class.
New Book Highlights Need for Solidarity for Humans to Survive Global Collapse Protesters block an entrance to Ineos plant on BoâNess Road on on October 23, 2020, in Grangemouth, Scotland.
Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images
By
Is this the end? The end of capitalism? The end of the human species?
Anyone who has closely observed developments of the last 10 years can be forgiven a quick affirmative response. In a decade that has seen startling discoveries in climate science (none positive), unprecedented fires, and increasingly frequent and far more destructive tropical storms and hurricanes, the evidence is clearer than ever that our economic plunder of the planetâs natural bounty has gone too far. Add to that the emergence of a deadly worldwide pandemic with devastating economic consequences, and the question does seem to answer itself.