Problems follow Western Australia’s mining successes
Published in the Guardian Weekly, 13 December. Just down the road from the boomtown of Karratha is Roebourne, home to an impoverished Aboriginal community. It’s 11am on a Saturday and Sholl Street, Roebourne, shows few signs of life, aside from scores of empty beer bottles that have festooned the fence of a boarded-up shack. A man...
Spawning Anonymous: Inside the world of 4chan
Published on the Kill Your Darlings blog, August 8. I learned about 4chan the hard way. Many moons ago, a friend of mine emailed me while on vacation in Tripoli, saying that he’d attached a photo that I might enjoy. And lo and behold: the photo, innocuously titled maindrag.jpg, was not of a bustling street,...
For everything else there’s Mastercard: Anonymous & 21st-century hacktivism
Published in Kill Your Darlings, edition 6. Recently Anonymous, a decentralised collective of hackers and activists, has been everywhere – getting headlines for crashing the websites of governments and corporations alike – but alsonowhere. Like an insouciant wart on the foot of institutional power, Anonymous can be irritating, occasionally painful and primed for repeat visits....
Bits and bob
Co-written with J.P, technology editor at The Economist, on June 13. MILTON FRIEDMAN famously called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, which he thought ought to be replaced by an automated system which would increase the money supply at a steady, predetermined rate. This, he argued, would put a lid on inflation, setting...
Fukushima crisis fails to dampen Indonesia’s nuclear ambitions
Published in The Guardian, 12 April 2011 The government is talking up the country’s nuclear future, but progress may be hamstrung by characteristic indecision. Japan has raised the level of its nuclear crisis to the same as Chernobyl 25 years ago. Yet the reverberations of the crises at Fukushima have scarcely cast a ripple in Indonesia‘s...
4chan Creator Doubles Down on Web Anonymity with Canvas
Published in The Atlantic, 21 March 2011 When 23-year-old Christopher “moot” Poole revealed Canvas at SXSW last week, he was not afraid to fire a none-too-subtle salvo at the overarching dominance of identity-driven social media. To borrow from the patois of Poole’s first cultural phenomenon, 4chan, he was adamant that Facebook and Twitter were doing it wrong. He...
From lulz to labor unions: the evolution of Anonymous
Published in The Atlantic, 4 March 2011 It wasn’t so long ago that Anonymous staked its identity on relentlessly subverting culture for the lulz. The group became renowned for its mockery of egregious displays of political correctness, hypocrisy, social conservatism and lameness by way of constructing humorous memes, or by mythologizing these flaws in their...
Comment is free: Indonesia is no longer a poster child for pluralism
Published in The Guardian, 18 February 2011 The first week of February marked the annual celebration of World Interfaith Harmony Week, a UN resolution that aimed to promote religious and cultural understanding among people of different faiths. But proceedings were marred by the cruellest of events in Indonesia, with celebrations tarnished by a string of vicious...
Indonesia’s Looming AIDS Crisis
Published in The Diplomat, 3 Feb 2011 Social stigma, cash-strapped NGOs, and moralising politicians are stopping Indonesia taking necessary action to prevent an epidemic. Moral outrage is a staple of Indonesian politics, which makes for entertaining—if somewhat predictable—political theatre. So it hasn’t been any surprise to see the majority of Indonesian politicians trying to score...
Austerity: more than just a buzz word
Published in ABC Unleashed, 21 Jan 2011 As the UK’s debt crisis teeters precariously on the edge of implosion, the Conservative-led government has heralded in a new dawn of economic austerity that is the harshest in living history. At a time when the unemployment rate in the UK is nervously inching past 8 per cent...
Henry Ford’s legacy endures in a divisive new economic vision
Published in Arena, Dec/Jan. The curious task of economics is to explain to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. Frederich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit In 1927 Henry Ford had designs on society. Determined to shatter the Dutch and British cartels’ duopoly on rubber, Ford decided to import the value...
Jakarta’s Urban Nightmare
Published in Foreign Policy, 9 Nov 2010 JAKARTA — Even on an ordinary day, a commute down one of Jakarta’s major thoroughfares can feel like traveling a road to nowhere. In Indonesia’s bustling capital, traffic routinely sits at a standstill for hours — government statistics recently revealed that the average traveling speed is 5.2 miles per...
