Author: KB
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TEDx Again | On Hope | 50 Years on from the Summer of Love
Really honoured to be asked to do another TED talk, back at the UK’s premier TEDx event in Exeter. I spoke there on piracy and the renewal of the commons back in 2013 and – though performing without notes is terrifying – absolutely loved the whole thing. This year’s event is around the theme of…
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A chilly morning for Plato…
Been beautiful in London this week… these both taken on my walk to work through the remnants of the Crystal Palace… though let’s not pretend that the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets aren’t a function of air pollution 🙁
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Inaugurate Something… and Make Trump Irrelevant Again
My suggestion for marking Trump’s inauguration would be to inaugurate some amazing thing, some small seed of action that’ll build bridges and tear down prejudice. At the moment, the three most troubling words I know are ‘God,’ ‘bless,’ and ‘America,’ and every time I hear them in sequence part of my brain freezes. Can anyone tell…
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Enjoy the last day on vaguely sane politics for 4 years…
…though my hunch is that it won’t be 4 years. He’ll get bored. Or impeached. Or get bored and get himself impeached. Enjoy the last few hours!
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‘Free’ Markets
“So it appears that #Brexit means closing our borders to people, but opening them to the free movement of capital.” Precisely this. Capitalism loves the free movement of everything except the poor. Money must be free to move. The cheap labour that creates it must not. This, apparently, is what we mean by a ‘free market.’ I…
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7-11… 9/11… 18th Century… Europe… | On History
Today I overheard two people talking, one of whom seemed to be (not the first time I’d heard this) conflating 7-Eleven and 9/11. ‘Wait,’ she said when brought up on this. ‘They’re not the same thing?’ No. One is a chain of convenience stores, the other a major terrorist attack and one of the defining moments…