• The letter some Facebook employees sent to Mark Zuckerberg about his decision not to ban misleading or untrue political ads It’s a great letter. Which of course is why he won’t do anything.
• Renee DiResta’s landmark essay on “The Digital Maginot Line” Wise, superbly informed, troubling. Democracies are busy fighting the last war.
• Mark Zuckerberg Is Totally Out of His Depth Yep. Cathy O’Neil’s Bloomberg column nails it.
• Ten reasons why you should drop ‘www’ from your site’s URL

• The Micromobility Mirage Wonderful blast of common sense by Frederic Filloux.
• Handel and the Bank of England He was a shrewd investor, but it was the Messiah that made him rich.
• The Places Where the Recession Never Ended Interesting interview with Tara Westover. And if you haven’t heard of her then you should read her book
• This marketing blog does not exist Really interesting. A blog entirely created by AI. Could you tell the difference between it and a human-created one?

• Malfunctioning Sex Robot Wonderful, long, long essay by Patricia Lockwood on the experience of reading her way through the entire oeuvre of John Updike. As good as David Foster Wallace, and that’s saying something.
• The Museum of Neoliberalism Truly wonderful. I only wish its subject was a thing of the past.
• Facebook Claims We’re ‘Clickbait.’ And It Won’t Explain Why. Seems that Facebook sometimes accuses fact-checking sites with producing clickbait. But when they ask for an explanation… well, you can guess the rest. This is what unaccountable power looks like.
• With no laws to stop them, defense firms are on track to make killer robots a reality As far as anyone knows, militaries have not yet deployed killer robots on the battlefield. But the Dutch NGO Pax has identified at least 30 arms manufacturers that don’t have policies against developing these kinds of weapons systems, and are reportedly doing so at a rate that is outpacing regulation. The problem is — as one of my graduate students has shown — that getting an international arms-control treaty to control the technology looks difficult in the current climate.

• YouTube Is Experimenting With Ways to Make Its Algorithm Even More Addictive
• Academics protest as Cambridge fellow told to leave Britain
• Boris Johnson’s Conservative party has received cash from 9 Russian donors named in a suppressed intelligence report Funny, that. The Tories used to be the anti-Russia party. Corbyn was supposed to be Putin’s stooge. How times change.
• Three Eras of Digital Governance Useful essay by the Harvard scholar Jonathan Zittrain summarising how we’ve got to our current impasse about Internet regulation.

• From Pseudoevents to Pseudorealities Marvellous lecture by Renee DiResta on propaganda from Walter Lippmann’s time to the present. Puts ‘fake news’ into an intelligent historical context.
• I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb Fascinating account of a large-scale scam and on Airbnb’s strange inability to deal with it.
• WhatsApp sues Israeli firm, accusing it of hacking activists’ phones Interesting lawsuit against the Israeli company NSO. The suit is funded by Facebook, which has deep enough pockets to see it through.
• This Is No Ordinary Impeachment Terrific column by Andrew Sullivan about what’s at stake in the Impeachment hearings.

• Three Chinese lessons Riveting account of what it’s like to work in a Chinese tech company.
• Can Big Tech Be Tamed? Wonderful, long, essay by Gary Kamiya on what the tech industry has done to San Francisco. Best thing about it: he doesn’t go for simplistic answers.
• Unearthed photos reveal what happened to those who dared to flee through the Berlin Wall On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the short film The Escape Agents is based a cache of photographs from security service records of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Good way of marking the anniversary (which is today, by the way).
• The frat-boy lunacy behind the WeWork shambles

• Who owns Silicon Valley? Apart from Stanford, that is?
• An interview with Stuart Russell on Artificial Intelligence Audio plus transcript. Russell’s book, Human Compatible is thoughtful and accessible. My review of it for the Literary Review is here.
• The Myth of the Nazi War Machine Amazing piece of factual research. Looks as though almost everything we thought we knew about German (and Japanese) military and industrial might is wrong. [See footnote]
• Former Twitter Employees Charged With Spying for Saudi Arabia Wonder how many Saudi moles there are in Facebook and YouTube.

Footnote A reader writes that my claim that “everything we thought we knew about German (and Japanese military and industrial might is wrong” applies only to those who haven’t read Adam Tooze’s * The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy*. I stand corrected.

• Inside Amazon’s plan for Alexa to run your entire life The re-engineering of humanity continues apace.
• List of the international brands that have apologised to China Hypocrisy or pragmatism? Is there any difference?
• Artificial Intelligence: How to get it right Terrific report, full of good sense.
• Down the Hunger Spiral: Pathways to the Disintegration of the Global Food System Nothing but alarming news: for a precarious global agricultural system with powerful feedback loops, business as usual means widespread hunger and embedded systemic risk. We kind-of realised that. But this is a very informed and systemic analysis.

• What’s behind a scary number? Nice analysis by Quentin Stafford-Fraser of alarming estimates about the electricity-generation implications of electric cars.
• The Market for Bulletproof Vehicles Is Skyrocketing Hmmm… I wonder why? Could it be anything to do with the fears of the super-rich about the consequences of rising inequality? These vehicles will essentially be mobile gated communities.
• The internet is getting less free Election interference and government surveillance on social media are hurting internet freedoms.
• Human Rights and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Expert critique by Aoife Nolan.

• A Simple Combinatorial Model of World Economic History I bet that W. Brian Arthur will not be surprised.
• Queen’s dresser tells all Including what she said to Daniel Craig.
• The best books on Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance Chosen by Jonathan Fenby, who was once my Editor on the Observer.
• Technology and rock-climbing Or, the importance of rubber. Fascinating, even to those of us who suffer from vertigo.