Tony's retro homepage

You can find me on various public/social media. For example, on Mastodon, on Twitter , on my blog, on openDemocracy (where I used to be editor-in-chief) and on LinkedIn.

By the way, there is a ponzi/crypto outfit out there that is also using the name metakarma. If you're looking for them, can I advise you read some of the great Izabella Kaminska's work Or if you are with those people using the metakarma name, perhaps you'd like to buy this domain from me. I am open to offers (and not ones in your own currency).

Other things I am involved in:

• I convene the Humanity in Cyberspace seminar
• I am a member of the board of the UK's Gas and Electricity Markets Authority
• I chair Bags of Taste, a really amazing social entreprise founded and led by Alicia Weston
• I chair the Meanwhile Gardens Community Association, a local charity & community garden
• I serve as a non-exec director of DotDotDot Property Guardians, a great socia entreprise founded and led by Kath Hibbert
• I sail Boutny

Some recent blog posts:

• How does enshittification come to LLMs and how to stop it?
• How far can LLMs automate triage decisions of the UK's merger control authority?
• The antitrust cycle of destructive destruction, the First AI-Agent Wars and how we should remedy the Google monopoly problem
• Boiling frogs and corporate power: how we got into the collective trap of social media and how to jump out again
• What does the AI bubble tell us about the antitrust challenges ahead?
• 2 Cheers for the UK Government's Petrol Station Smart Data Proposals.
• Why advertising in cyberspace is bad for us and what to do about it.
• Market power and product design. The infuriating case of Android Chrome News Discovery
• What should Elon do?
• The CMA is losing at the tech antitrust game because it’s playing with a large and unnecessary handicap
• Big Data powered by AI transforms fundamental economic processes and will require a new approach to State/Economy relations (2018 essay)
• Happy Midas and the economic nub of the data problem
• Competition Policy is Industrial Policy - that’s why antitrust authorities shouldn’t be in charge of it
• Reverse Turing tests, 'Arcana' and my game with ChatGPT
• Roosterism is a Boosterism - review of Jerusalem

Some older things that I like:

• Using co-evolutionary programming to simulate strategic behaviour in markets ... my 1997 paper that used a technique pretty similar to adverserial learning - it was amazing to see the machine being quite so good at solving games you threw at it back then
• White God / Black Dog My review of Kornell Mandruczo's and Kata Weber's film, White God about Hungary, mongrols and authoritariansim. Perhaps even nicer, becasue it gives Kata and Kornell some time to speak, is my interview with them based on that review. Kornell and Kata liked this reading of their film and pulled me in to offer advice on their next one, Jupiter's Moon, earning me my one film credit

Some things that might be useful to others

• I often enjoy listening to Alain Finkilekraut in his conversation prgramme, Replique ... but have found that the France Culture site is really bad for searching. So here is a spreadsheet with all the programmes (up to Jan 2024) and their summaries off the France Culture website.