"Who watches the watchers?" is a phrase we hear a great deal but, in these dystopian times, one to which we should perhaps pay more heed
Who Is Watching You?
Companies and institutions track us almost indiscriminately. Is this the world we want to live in?
Surveillance and the Internet of Things | Hacker News
As Bruce says, the real issue now is not surveillance or even information, but power. Who gets to watch whom, and (of course) who watches the watchers?
Pluralistic: Surveillance is inequality’s stabilizer (26 Jun 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The "dictator's dilemma" pits a dictator's desire to create social stability by censoring public communications in order to prevent the spread of anti-regime messages with the dictator's need to know whether powerful elites are becoming restless and plotting a coup:
Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are
Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.
England 'divided into readers and watchers'
England is a nation divided into readers and watchers, a report on adult literacy says.
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The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind
Longlisted for the 2024 Financial Times Book of the Year. How life and the economy became a black box—a collection of systems no one understands, producing outcomes no one likes. Passengers get bumped from flights. Phone menus disconnect. Automated financial trades produce market collapse. Of all the challenges in modern life, some of the most vexing come from our relationships with automation: a large system does us wrong, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The problem, economist Dan Davies shows, is accountability sinks: systems in which decisions are delegated to a complex rule book or set of standard procedures, making it impossible to identify the source of mistakes when they happen. In our increasingly unhuman world—lives dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence, and large organizations—these accountability sinks produce more than just aggravation. They make life and economy unknowable—a black box for no reason. In The Unaccountability Machine, Davies lays bare how markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that no one—not even those involved in making them—seems to want. Since the earliest days of the computer age, theorists have foreseen the dangers of complex systems without personal accountability. In response, British business scholar Stafford Beer developed an accountability-first approach to management called “cybernetics,” which might have taken off had his biggest client (the Chilean government) not fallen to a bloody coup in 1973. With his signature blend of economic and journalistic rigor, Davies examines what’s gone wrong since Beer, including what might have been had the world embraced cybernetics when it had the chance. The Unaccountability Machine is a revelatory and resonant account of how modern life became predisposed to dysfunction.
The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com
Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.
The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com
Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.
Cop unions put GPS monitors on politician's cars to frame them.
4.2K votes, 935 comments. 32M subscribers in the news community. The place for news articles about current events in the United States and the rest…
The high price of speaking out in Ottawa: Editorial
The Harper government stifles or removes government watchdogs who get in its way.
PalantirWatch — Tracking Palantir Technologies
Independent watchdog tracking Palantir's contracts, executives, lobbying, legal exposure, and global footprint.
What the Anthropic fight says about AI regulation
Fables of the deconstruction of American power
Labelwatch
Bluesky doesn’t have a single moderation team deciding what you see. Instead, it has labelers — and nobody’s watching the watchers. Labelwatch monitors every public labeler: who’s labeling, what they’re labeling, and whether their behavior is stable, bursty, or going dark.
Spenders and savers, tightwads and spendthrifts: Individual correlates of personal ratings of being a spender or a saver.
Who Decides Who Decides? - Sociocracy For All
Who Decides Who Decides is a book for starting groups with sociocracy - a guide for governance and decision-making that's clear and inclusive.
