On 22 September 2026, Computer Weekly turns 60. To mark the milestone, we asked some of our friends – experts, parliamentarians, IT leaders and suppliers – for their perspectives on how tech has changed their lives over six decades. What’s changed the most for you since then?
Acab – the long-standing anti-authoritarian acronym used to denote opposition to the police – is a funny term, provoking every reaction from quiet approval to pure disdain.
Although often used in a tongue-in-cheek manner by adherents, the slogan is making a point – All Cops Are, in fact, Bastards, whether or not that particular individual cop is a bastard, because they systemically contribute to and help maintain an institution that is fundamentally designed for coercive social control in the service of narrow economic interests.
Since the slave patrols and strike breakers of the early 1700s, modern policing has been a blunt weapon to be wielded by the powerful against the weak. Any other benefits one may ascribe to the existence of police, I believe, are ancillary, and not the point.
But utter the phrase Acab in “polite” company, and people will look at you like you just kicked their dog or spat on their mum.
To that, I say – grow up. Just because your dad signed up to threaten and inflict the violence capital requires doesn’t change the fundamental role of police in society.
Anyway, about computers…
Startups suck
I joined Computer Weekly in October 2018, with no real interest in technology whatsoever. Sure, I recognised it was important and shaped the contours of our lives, but I never gave it too much of a thought. I just needed a job.
I was initially hired to write about tech startups, but quickly found that bouncing around speaking to various companies about the next World-Changing Thing™ they were making was terribly repetitive and boring.
I remember thinking, quite often, “I wish this AI shit was actually good enough to just take my job…”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that, and the dynamic I’ve noticed is that the technologies designed to save us time and labour make us end up working more because bosses can’t have people sat there doing nothing. The economy won’t grow itself, after all.
So, bored and increasingly irate at startup culture (no, I’m not your PR), I figured I’d just start looking into and writing about things that I found personally interesting, on top of my startup beat. So, police technology seemed like a good place to start.
This quickly came to spark an interest in the wider socio-technical aspects of technology, and made me realise how deeply entwined technology is with the exercise of power – who gets to make the decisions, who does it benefit, who does it hurt, who is included and excluded, and why?
‘All my homies hate the Home Office’
A good example of this is the Home Office’s error-prone electronic visa (eVisa) system, which replaced the physical immigration documents of millions of people living in the UK with a real-time, online-only immigration status at the end of 2024.
The eVisa system – which trawls more than 90 disparate government databases to generate and determine someone’s immigration status every single time they log in – is the only means by which people can prove their lawful residence in the UK, as well as evidence their associated rights and entitlements.
Given more than 13 million people currently in the UK were born overseas and are now required to prove their immigration status via the system, even a 1% error rate would mean tens of thousands of people are affected at the very least. This includes some of my friends and relatives, who are not British citizens.
“I’m exactly half the age of Computer Weekly. Whatever the promise of technology may have been for previous generations, the promise of technology for me and the friends I grew up with is very different”
Sebastian Klovig Skelton
While the Home Office says there are benefits in terms of convenience and managing the immigration system, in what world is it acceptable to plunge the lives of potentially tens of thousands of people – whose only fault is that they dared to be born somewhere else on a floating space rock – into “anxiety-inducing” chaos?
You can make the utilitarian argument that millions will face no problems, but those that do are real people – your family, friends and neighbours – on the sharp end of a callous, uncaring bureaucracy, that I assure you will not think twice about them.
Like policing then, technology serves to structurally benefit the already powerful. It is developed, designed and deployed in the service of particular interests. If it ends up hurting people, so be it – move out the way or be crushed by the wheels of progress.
Cancelling the future
I’m exactly half the age of Computer Weekly, and although I’m aware that previous generations had much more reverence for technology and the possible futures it could usher in, this is something I personally cannot relate to.
Whatever the promise of technology may have been for previous generations, the promise of technology for me and the friends I grew up with is very different.
There are no more dreams of flying cars or replicators. There are no more promises of 15-hour work weeks, let alone freedom from toil and drudgery that past generations hoped for and predicted.
There is no utopia to be found in constant surveillance, an ”enshittified” and enclosed internet, the algorithmic intensification of work, indiscriminate data harvesting, or a planet pillaged by the insatiable energy demands of AI and automation.
Not to mention the human cost of modern technologies – King Leopold’s ghost still haunts the Congo, where children are being killed and maimed digging up the minerals needed to power everything from smartphones to semiconductors, while millions of precaritised workers across the globe perform hidden, low-paid labour to train, refine, and maintain so-called artificial “intelligence” systems.
We’re essentially bleeding the Earth dry while exploiting some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, so everyone can be even more isolated, atomised and busy, not to mention increasingly stupid and lazy.
And for what? So the economy can keep paying out to a single trillionaire and the nearly 3,500 billionaires in existence?
In the era of the digital panopticon and the live-streamed genocide, what is the promise of technology supposed to be? Do you feel like we’re experiencing Progress?
All hail King Ludd
No points for stating the obvious, but technologies are a reflection of the society that creates them, shaped by the political, economic, environmental, and cultural currents within.
The technopolitical reality of modern states under capitalism is prefigured by institutions – whether private or public – that are top-down, hierarchical, and steeped in centuries of racist colonialism and misogyny. These tendencies are then baked into the technologies we produce.
AI, for example, is a highly concentrated, hierarchical technology of categorisation and austerity, because the society deploying it is defined by substantial power concentrations that cater to a vanishingly narrow set of interests. This, in turn, leads to even greater centralisation and a deeper embedding of those existing – and indefensible – hierarchies that wield the capital, infrastructure and data to run it in the first place.
And those at the apex of these hierarchies wield that power because the structure of the global economy – borne out of Empire and domination – means they can continue to plunder and exploit to their hearts content.
All Computers Are Bastards, because like the police, their existence and purpose is intimately and systemically defined by the coercive power relations that characterise the wider society.
And since the advent of industrial society at least, people’s lives have been increasingly dominated by centralised, hierarchal power structures.
If there is one thing that the US and USSR agreed on during the Cold War it was the need for Taylorism in all its technologically determinist, authoritarian glory.
In the same way modern policing has been about creating social conditions favourable to nation states and industrialists, modern technology still largely serves these same interests by removing people from their labour, cutting people out in ways that disempower and disenfranchise them, and dictating the rhythm and pace of life to satisfy the unattainable promise of endless economic growth.
In resisting the asymmetric imposition of new technology from above, the Luddites really were on to something all the way back in 1812.
In the end, I still think that I am fundamentally uninterested in technology, at least in a purely technical sense. What is interesting, though, is its effect on people, politics, and the social fabric of our lives.
As it stands, though, most technology works to serve the interests of soulless corporate entities and shortsighted politicians who are more concerned with maintaining the status quo than making sure their own children and grandchildren have a habitable planet to live on.
Walking the left-hand path
But this future is not inevitable, and there are viable alternatives: technological conviviality, degrowth, decomputing, permacomputing, and various strategies of outright refusal, to name just a few.
Adopting more “convivial” approaches to technology, for example, could help ensure a more sustainable and cooperative future, while also giving ordinary people greater control over how new technologies are developed and ultimately deployed.
Concerned with the “technocratic disaster” of modern industrial society, Austrian philosopher and educational activist Ivan Illich proposed an alternative vision of a “convivial society” defined by “survival, justice, and self-defined work,” and the use of “responsibly limited” technology.
Writing in 1973, he argued in Tools for conviviality that “the increasing demand for products has come to define society’s process” at the expense of the environment and people’s autonomy.
For Illich then, “Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision,” something that cannot happen under current social arrangements where the development and use of technology is dictated by states and corporations “vested in the maintenance of the growth-oriented structures.”
If AI, to give an example, is to become a convivial tool, it should be opposed until its globally destructive consequences have been addressed, and until its complexity and infrastructural needs are reduced so that it is no longer the preserve of a tiny technocratic elite.
In designing and implementing new tools, some notion of conviviality should be what we are striving for, centring values and structures of care, mutual aid, autonomy and cooperation that sit outside the profit imperative of private companies and the centralising or authoritarian impulses of states.
But as long as these power structures remain in place, and technology continues to be foisted upon people from above by the High Priests of Progress in Silicon Valley, all computers are very much bastards.
In the meantime, destroy the machines that kill the forests.