Ian Silvera

Edit Tech, Power & Media 🤖📰, looking at tech innovation, its impact on media and politics, and how policy-makers deal with it all. #PUSB

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Articles

Taxed more, served less: Time to redefine the social role of business

1 month ago | secnewgate.co.uk | Ian Silvera

Pay more tax, get less services. This is the new penny-pinching routine haunting Western democracies. Central and local governments have found themselves heavily indebted following the pandemic, with debt-to-GDP levels reaching record highs. So good luck getting substantial help on childcare, social care or even getting your bins emptied, as has been the case in England’s second city, Birmingham (link).
Why EVs just can't catch a break

2 months ago | secnewgate.co.uk | Ian Silvera

It was a moment of marketing genius. Amid the financial crash of 2008, Elon Musk had no business selling expensive cars. But one inherent feature of the electric-powered drive-train put it over with one of America’s most influential TV personalities. Driving side-by-side with a ‘normal’ vehicle, Jay Leno showed how Tesla’s first production car was “eerily quiet” but exhibited rapid acceleration, leaving internal combustion-powered rivals in the dust.
Fading headlines: The struggle of newsagents in a changing market

Mar 4, 2025 | secnewgate.co.uk | Ian Silvera

Chocolate raisins, The Sunday Times and a 50p bet. It’s a tradition I still relive when I visit my parents. The bookies still might be popular, but the newspapers are thinning out at the offie. It's a trend I first reported on more than five years ago, with more and more newsagents actively avoiding stocking papers and magazines. Why?
AI biases and Grok launch

Feb 20, 2025 | secnewgate.co.uk | Ian Silvera

One of the ‘easy wins’ of LLMs is their content creation abilities. It’s already transforming social media platforms, and I’ve even spotted an MP or two using AI image generators. The professional services and creative industries are also adopting these tools to improve business efficiencies and, ultimately, to deliver better results for consumers and clients. A good example would be The Brutalist, which used touches of generative AI to create unique yet realistic-looking architectural designs.
What Is The ‘Manosphere’ Anyway?

Feb 9, 2025 | news-future.com | Ian Silvera |Dominic Cummings

"Perfected cocoa for health and strength," exclaimed a series of advertisements in The Times of London during the early 20th Century. They were the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, otherwise known as Eugen Sandow. The Prussian showman is now regarded as the father of modern bodybuilding. But Sandow’s legend really started when he first came to London in 1889 to show-off his physical prowess.
Trump, The JFK Files and The 'Wilson Plot' (Part One)

Dec 10, 2024 | news-future.com | Ian Silvera

For journalists and academics who cover the secret world in the UK, it’s long been known that the US system is far more open than the British state and its archives have subsequently proven to bear more fruits. America has stronger freedom of information rules and the country’s culture (see my essay on the First Amendment here) lends to a more transparent approach. But any nation faces natural limits on the information it can disclose publicly. That is until something extraordinary happens.
How Elon Musk Won The US Election

Nov 6, 2024 | news-future.com | Ian Silvera

So why did Harris lose/how did Trump win the US election? It was all in the data, folks:Harris didn't campaign heavily enough on jobs and the economy She was too close to Biden, whose government ranked poorly with voters Harris’ team also got the ground-game wrong, including overcommitting in North Carolina What's extraordinary is that Trump effectively outsourced his canvassing to America PAC and Elon Musk, whilst having an extremely low social media campaign spend compared to Harris.
How does your AI assistant vote?

Nov 5, 2024 | secnewgate.co.uk | Ian Silvera

‘A bit left-wing’. That’s increasingly how some researchers are describing large-language models (LLMs), the technological model behind the rise of generative AI. Perhaps because of the data that the models have trained on and then the coding decisions that followed, 23 out of 24 LLMs tested by New Zealand-based academic David Rozado were found to have a political bias.
US Election Data Dump: GOTV, Gender Splits and Google Trends

Nov 4, 2024 | open.substack.com | Ian Silvera

Discover more from Tech, Power & MediaIan Silvera's analysis on the relationship between technology, power and media in the modern age. So can Google Trends predict the election? No, but it can certainly help gauge the mood of US voters. One of the big takeaways on the eve of the final vote is that crime and wages, two big topics for Trump, have cooled over the past few days. Harris’ campaign and celebrity endorsements have put abortion near the top of the agenda (more on gender splits below).
FMCG YouTube and The Cult of Optimisation

Nov 3, 2024 | news-future.com | Ian Silvera

“Do it for yourself, be your own customer. Do it for yourself, ignore everybody.” – Tony Wilson on his approach to the music industry. “Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.” – Michael Oakeshott on political ideologues.