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…

Like many parents during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have spent the past month at home, with my son. We cancelled a larger family Christmas, Zoomed with grandparents and hunkered down at home. Having spent the better part of the past year living in rural British Columbia, we were well prepared. Over this period of isolation it has been remarkable to observe how our son has developed hobbies, like magic, sketching, Rubik’s Cubing and, most obsessively, origami. Since these interests are definitively not hereditary, we first turned to books to feed his insatiable new curiosity. But the limits to this pedagogical approach quickly became apparent: his paper folding was considerably more…

By almost any conceivable measure, 2020 was an extremely difficult year. Nowhere is this more apparent than in hospitals around the globe. That’s why, when the first reports emerged that hospitals and laboratories were being targeted by both cybercriminals and adversarial state actors, it created a collective, almost visceral sense of outrage. How could people be so morally bankrupt that they would pursue these cyberattacks during a pandemic? And how could governments allow these attacks to occur? For some cybercriminals, the answer is simple: it’s about money. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that victims of the attacks deploying Ryuk (a form of ransomware) paid out more than…

From contact-tracing apps to telemedicine, digital health innovations that can help tackle coronavirus have been adopted swiftly during the pandemic. Lagging far behind, however, are any investigations of their reliability and the implications for privacy and human rights. In the wake of this surge in “techno-solutionism”, the world needs a new era of data diplomacy to catch up. Big data holds great promise in improving health outcomes. But it requires norms and standards to govern collection, storage and use, for which there is no global consensus.  The world broadly comprises four data zones — China, the US, the EU and the remainder. The state-centric China zone, where individuals have no…

When the sea is tranquil and peaceful, mesmerizingly shining in all its glory, life is just grand. Who needs to persevere when everything is smooth? The sun is shining, birds chirping; you sail right through, hair swaying in the calm breeze. But it doesn’t show one’s skill. When one is truly happy and everything is mellow, there is no need to strive. No need to push through. However, you see one of them, the construction workers who carry heavy sacks and an even heavier burden of life on them, the smile on their faces when they get to have a meal with their family. You see those people who struggled,…