Humanity will remember 2020 as the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is the year that people were expected to move their lives online and technology became the main outlet for connection outside the home. This made life more complicated as individuals and institutions had to quickly adapt to new online programs, navigating their personal and professional relationships through digital portals. As the ability to choose what day-to-day interactions looked like became more limited, women felt the strains of the pandemic in highly gendered ways. Many lost their jobs because their work could not be adapted to online work-from-home positions, or had to reduce their time at work in order…

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating global digital transformation and the adoption of digital technologies. It is also enacting a political and cultural shift toward a quantified society: a society in which measurement and predictive modelling dominate (political) decision making, and where surveillance is expansive and pervasive. While viruses and disease have always been with us, what’s changing is our ability to measure and understand them. This ability comes at a time when globalization (and, by extension, climate change) has transformed the kinds of viruses and diseases we will face. The knowledge of what can kill us — or is killing us — compels governments and health authorities to both take…

Last year, more people started to ask the right questions of platforms. Beyond the questions of who should set what terms of online speech and how, lay another important question — when should that someone set the terms. The deceptively simple issue of timing has laid bare the inconsistencies in platforms’ policies and the harm that they can wreak. We have seen this play out in three dimensions over the past year: political violence, voting and vaccines. Since 2016, it was clear that Donald Trump would undermine election results if he did not win. The problem was merely delayed by his victory in November 2016. In summer 2020, a high-level…

The goal is to end the pandemic, and this goal cannot be achieved if a vaccine is not available to everyone sooner rather than later, including — and especially — those in the poorer countries of the world. The world is rightly celebrating the unprecedented speed with which vaccines for COVID-19, the novel coronavirus, are approaching manufacture and distribution stages. When COVID-19 vaccines become widely available, millions of lives can be saved, and the loss of US $375 billion to the global economy every month can be prevented. Yet, while billions of people worldwide await their doses of the new vaccines, many countries are also courting “the tragedy of vaccine…