The essay below was in the Globe and Mail on April 10th. On Jan. 28, 2011, in the middle of a popular uprising, the president of Egypt turned off the Internet. This striking display of state power is well known. Less well known is how the Internet was turned back
Continue readingAuthor: Taylor Owen
TaylorOwen.com: Disruptive Power Book Site
I have a new site up for the book, with details on events, reviews, media and articles. It’s at: www.disruptive-power.com/
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Disruptive Power Book Website
I have a new site up with all of the book information, event details, writing and media: www.disruptive-power.com
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: The promise and peril of digital diplomacy
The following oped was in the Globe and Mail last Friday. It is a response to the news of a new digital diplomacy initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs funded by the Canadian Government. While i think the intention of the program and likely many of the initiatives
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Disruptive Power
The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age Anonymous. WikiLeaks. The Syrian Electronic Army. Edward Snowden. Bitcoin. The Arab Spring. Digital communication technologies have thrust the calculus of global political power into a period of unprecedented complexity. In every aspect of international affairs, digitally enabled actors are changing
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Disruptive Power
My forthcoming book, Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Official launch is March 1, and will be touring internationally throughout March and April. Lots more details soon. Blurb from OUP is below: Anonymous. WikiLeaks. The Syrian Electronic Army.
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: New Virtual Reality Journalism Project
Cross posted on www.towcenter.org Long a figment of technophile imagination, a confluence of technological advances has finally placed in-home virtual reality on the cusp of mainstream adoption. Media attention and developer interest have surged, powered by the release of the Oculus Rift to developers, the anticipated launch of Samsung’s Gear VR, rumored headsets from Sony and Apple, and a cheeky intervention from
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Twitter as public space, and related problems
Last weekend, the Globe and Mail published two articles on Twitter, both of which were dismissive of the platform and were written by authors who do not actively use it. In short, “What Twitter is, and isn’t,” and “Will Twitter Change Politics?” by Konrad Yakabuski and Tom Flanagan respectively, informed us that Twitter
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: The OpenGlobal Show #1
This week, in partnership with Google, we launched a new feature on OpenCanada.org called the OpenGlobal Show. Each episode, I will connect with a panel of friends/colleagues/experts on international affairs through Google Hangout. For the first episode, the panelists were: Ivan Sigal, Executive Director, Global Voices Joshua Foust, International affairs writer, analyst,
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Buzz Kill: The psychological impact of living under drones
Imagine that you are living somewhere in Pakistan, Yemen, or Gaza where the U.S. suspects a terrorist presence. Day and night, you hear a constant buzzing in the sky. Like a lawnmower. You know that this flying robot is watching everything you do. You can always hear it. Sometimes, it
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Two books on Human Security
I have two books on human security coming out this year, which have both just gone to production. The first is a Sage Major work on Human Security, which is a four volume best-of the human security literature. I choose 75 articles that I think should define the field, and prefaced
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: What the Tesla Affair Tells us About Data Journalism
Consider for a moment two scenarios. One, a malicious energy reporter tasked with reviewing an electric car decides he is going to fake the review. Part of this fictional narrative, is that the car needs to run out of battery power sometime in the review. He arrives at one of
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: The Surveillance Arms Race
There is a new arms race emerging between people who want to communicate freely and securely and governments that want to monitor and limit this communication. In democratic countries, this government interference ranges from the mass monitoring of telecoms to flirtations with cutting off social media flows and shutting down
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Crisis Mappers ignite talk
Here is a video of an Ignite talk I did at the International Crisis Mappers Conference in DC. It is a short summary of the historical mapping research that I have done on the US bombing of Cambodia. This Walrus magazine article provides some further background to the project.
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Liberal Baggage
David Eaves and I have a review of Peter C Neman’s When the Gods Changed, in this month’s Literary Review of Canada. We use it to continue to explore the theme of progressive politics that has now been the basis of many joint articles, opeds and a forthcoming book. Our
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: For the Liberals, it’s time for the path not taken
A short essay for the Ottawa Citizen a few weeks ago: Before becoming leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair wrote a pamphlet for the august thinktank of the British left, The Fabian Society, in which he questioned the socialist pillar of his party’s constitution. Adopted in 1918, Clause IV
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Conferencing in Halifax while Rome Burns?
Cross-posted on CIC Dispatch Blog Billed as the Davos for Security, the Halifax International Security Forum – funded by the Department of National Defence (DND) – sought and accomplished to court the security elite. Last weekend’s lavish affair was attended by nearly 20 defence ministers, top global security analysts, beltway security consultants, international affairs journalists, and a handful
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: The Risks of Building the Afghan Army
Below is an oped that appeared in the Globe and Mail. The regional military training centre in Herat is a desolate and harsh place. On the outskirts of an Afghan city bustling with commerce and construction, the vast training grounds extend out into the desert and high into the mountains. We were at
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: How the New Yorker Goes Viral
Crossposted at opencanada.org’s Dispatch blog For years I have read The New Yorker as a non-US print subscriber. This meant that somewhere between a few days and a week after an issue was published, it arrived in the mail. The uncertainty of its arrival is fun, and the novelty of flipping through the Goings on […]
Continue readingTaylorOwen.com: Have the Taliban Changed their Tune on Women’s Rights?
Crossposted at opencanada.org’s Dispatch blog I find that the subject of women’s rights in Afghanistan is a difficult one to engage with. To some, the shocking standard to which women were treated under the Taliban represents a key reason for our presence there. To others, the goal of gender equality is a PR front for […]
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