Editorial: Taking Control of Technology
Technology is a weapon that enables a tightly ordered system of control. Inverting it depends on struggle in which technology can be an aid but never an agent.
Issue 141
Aug – Sept 2024
Download PDFTechnology is a weapon that enables a tightly ordered system of control. Inverting it depends on struggle in which technology can be an aid but never an agent.
There can be no just transition without challenging the AI apparatus that is accelerating the social and environmental crisis, writes Dan McQuillan.
Kate McCurdy explores how LLMs do and don’t threaten workers in the here and now.
Technologies are reshaping economic activity, as they always have done. Stephen Boyd offers five approaches the Scottish Government should take towards technological change.
Unions have a struggle on their hands to reverse the privatising, AI–driven, centralising trends in Scotland's NHS, writes Drew Gilchrist.
General Secretary of PCS Fran Heathcote sets out the union’s bargaining position as the new government comes to power.
With a solid collective bargaining strategy in place, workers would be prepared to do what it takes to de-privatise the Scottish care sector, writes Robyn Martin.
The Scottish construction sector needs an overhaul and unions have to do the heavy lifting, writes Davy Brockett.
The further cuts announced to teacher numbers will leave staff with no chance of meeting students’ needs, writes Jane Gow.
Scotland does not value the college sector, and that needs to change. That is the conclusion of a new paper from the Jimmy Reid Foundation on Further Education in Scotland, by John Kelly and Dave Watson.
The left coalition in France has demonstrated a capacity to compromise, sticking to its fundamental commitments and rejecting Macron’s Machiavellian moves. Fraser McQueen asks, can it holds its ground for the long term?
Jennifer Clapham reports on how the Kurdish Democratic Union Party draws its strength from the people.
There are dangerous parallels between Britain’s support for Israel and its war-mongering stance ahead of the 1914 war, writes Chris Sutherland.
Xabier Villares reviews Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, by Yanis Varoufakis (Penguin, 2023).
Coll McCail reviews If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins.
Ronan Scott reviews The Workers’ Committee: An Outline of its Principles and Structure, by J. T. Murphy.