Author: Toby Shapshak

Last year I went camping with my six-year-old son. We both loved it. My parents loved the outdoors, and we always went camping. I hiked and camped until my late 20s, after which I could afford to, well, stay indoors. So, when my son’s school had a dads and lads weekend, I was arguably more enthusiastic than he was – until a friend offered us his tent and we set it up in our garden a week before to check it had all the poles and gear. But before my friend’s helpful offer – including the most important new upgrade, sleeping…

Would you pay a monthly fee for your smartphone software? More specifically, would you pay $15 a month so Android doesn’t track you and send all of that data back to Google? Most of us would probably say no fairly immediately. Why pay R300/m when Android comes “free” on your phone, most might reply. Except it isn’t “free” by any definition. Consumers are paying with their personal privacy and data. Google, which is the very definition of surveillance capitalism, makes money from tracking you and what you do on the internet. Google is guilty of “deceiving and manipulating consumers to…

For many years, right after returning from the Dezemba holidays, relaxed, I would haul myself into a small metal tube and schlep halfway around the world to Las Vegas. In the first week of January, this year the second, the technology industry all heads to Vegas – a mindboggling 30-hour-ish flight — for the gadget spectacle that is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). For a young South African tech journalist (when I first went), it was glorious. It’s easily the largest consumer electronics show in the world, showing off a veritable wonder of shiny things in cavernous halls, filled with…

Towards the end of last year, a major bank gave each lunch guest a bag of presents made in South Africa bearing the label “buy local”. It would be wonderful if that applied to more of the South African economy. The label suggests that consumers should buy from a local greengrocer or retailer — and imagine if we used only local digital services. But while the operating costs of these services benefit the economy, the profits go into a bank account in Ireland, where most US tech firms are based because of its lax corporate tax regulations. The media plays…

Substack has missed the point. Preventing Nazis from spewing venomous hate speech is not censorship. This is not a conversation about free speech – and framing it as such is intellectually lazy and just plain wrong. Nazism is an evil, genocidal ideology that killed 6 million Jews and between 35 million and 60 million people in World War 2. The evil man espousing it, Adolf Hitler, caused a brutal war that dragged the whole world into it. It not only decimated Europe for decades but caused economic destruction that had decades-long effects for hundreds of millions of people around the…

In a portent of things to come in 2024, Google lost the first of many major antitrust lawsuits on 11 December 2023. After a month in a San Francisco courtroom, Google was found guilty of all 11 counts of anticompetitive behaviour by a jury, in a case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games. Further arguments will be made this month but that decision is likely to have a major – potentially existential – impact on Google’s Android business. It charges app developers a 30% fee for sales through its Play store for mobile apps – something that the jury found had…

Cambridge Dictionary picked “hallucinate” as its word of the year for 2023. It’s not a throwback to the acid-popping sixties, but the bizarre choice for when this new generation of AI chatbots, well, makes shit up. But, as Naomi Klein wrote in May, “Why call the errors ‘hallucinations’ at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches?” I can‘t agree more. Talk about cultural appropriation. The hippies would sue if they, well, like, were able to get it together after all these years. Hallucination, says Klein, refers to the “mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not…

After whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed how Facebook, now Meta, knew about the dangers to teenager’s mental health using Instagram, it continued to “prioritise profit over safety”. The social media giant claimed otherwise, and that these results in the picture-sharing app were unintentional. But several new court cases filed by the US government, and more explosive whistleblower testimony to US Congress, argue that Facebook “intentionally” designed “manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem”. The latest revelations follow the latest court case brought by the US government to hold Meta accountable for knowingly harming the mental…

Google pays Apple a whopping 36% of the advertising revenue it generates from its deal as the exclusive search engine for Safari. This gobsmacking revelation was made last month in the US government’s anti-monopoly court case against Google – which both Apple and Google have tried to keep from going public. University of Chicago economics professor Kevin Murphy, called by Google as its main economics expert, made the shock admission – over which the search giants’ lawyer John Schmidtlein was seen cringing. Oh dear, the cat is truly out of the bag now. “Probably the biggest slip of the entire…

Not since the valiant Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island swore at a Russian warship, has the phrase “go fuck yourself” reverberated so loudly around the world. This time, it was Twitter/X.com owner Elon Musk saying it – not to a warship that threatened to bomb the soldiers (who it turns out were taken hostage) – but to the source of his business’s revenue. As a way to draw attention to himself and make him the centre of that attention – like going to Israel to the site of a massacre, but not apologising for an antisemitic tweet – it has…