Beth was great value and gave me the show title while describing her approach to building democratic power from the ground up. Her book is a whirlwind tour of the possible with some great examples of citizen’s deploying tech for a voice and some examples ‘avatar mayors’ where I remain less than convinced. You can explore Beth’s book and broader work here.
Beth is here as a Fellow of the Australian Resilient Democracy Network, of which I am part. Their substack houses a bunch of interesting papers all investigating around ways of deeply understanding the way democracy works in practise and how people like Beth are challenging us to do it better.
Beth will be holding public talks over the next month:
at the ANU in Canberra on August 10
in Adelaide as part of the Democracy innovation Festival August 17-18
and at UTS in Sydney on August 27
On this episode we also explore:
Anthropic’s rare book-breaking binge. Lizzie bought to light the practise of hyper-scalers buying rare books, ripping the pages out and scanning them to train its models. I find it such a sad thought, our heritage being culled like an intellectual abattoir.
Here’s Stephanie Convery’s piece in Guardian Australia that sparked b ought the issue home.
Interesting how the issue is covered by the Chinese tech website 36kr .
It comes on the back of some great writing and discussion exploring the importance of reading in a scrolling world including this discussion on ABC’s The Minefield
Backlash over the surveillance of open models – This is one that stretches my understanding of the relative merits of open and closed-models, but Dan is hot under the collar about the way Anthropic is using safety as a ruse to capture the IP of startups like his.
This piece from the Wall Street journal (paywalled) frames the issue -
This rant from Palantir’s Alex Karp finds Dan in a moment of agreement -
And this open letter from global tech leaders makes the case for why open models are important -
Jensen Huang@JensenHuang
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @nvidia signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
1:18 PM · Jul 24, 2026 · 65.2M Views
16.2K Replies · 29.8K Reposts · 173K Likes
Can we regulate perv glasses? Finally, I explore the limited options of dealing with Meta’s connected glasses as it becomes a tool for pick-up artists and other creeps.
Here is Josh Taylor’s Guardian Australia report that set off the current – and totally justified – panic after K-Mart claimed it was selling out of cheap knock-offs .
This a media release from Digital Rights Watch lays out the breadth of privacy concerns.
Meanwhile, this piece from Futurism looks at how the technology brings the worst out in the glass-holes.
The week ahead:
For those that enjoy the discussion with Beth, What’s Your Poison will be sharing a drink with Caroline and Danielle from The Westminster Tradition podcast where we explore the mutual love-hate relationship between bureaucrats and political staffers.
I’ll be in Canberra Monday for the Tech Policy Design Institute workshop on the nascent Digital Duty of Care. A little knowledge could go a long way!
Next week we will be catching up with Miah Hammond-Errey who among many things hosts the Technology and Security podcast -
Finally, the patron saint of the analogue Glen Hansard was this week farewelled in Dublin after his tragic death with this rousing rendition of Bob Dylan’s Forever Young. If you see a busker this week, follow Bono’s advice and drop a coin in their guitar case and think of the sanctity of human creativity (and hard currency!).
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