Jan 14, 2026 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the market for artificial intelligence and its associated industries are over inflated. In 2025, just five hyperscalers—Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle—accounted for a capital...
Oct 17, 2025 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea In August of 2024, which perhaps feels like more than a lifetime ago for observers of American politics, Judge Amit P. Mehta found Google to be in breach of U.S. antitrust law. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness...
Oct 13, 2025 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash AI has been pitched as the great solution of the modern age – but the unfettered growth of this new technology could come at the expense of everything we hold dear. In recent years, Artificial...
Apr 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
By Samantha Floreani and Lizzie O’Shea Photograph: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock There are once again calls for the government to Do Something about misinformation online, following the recent stabbings at Bondi Junction and the immediate...
Feb 27, 2023 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea ‘It’s moving to hear,’ writes Jennifer Mills recently for this publication regarding the new national cultural policy and the place of artists in it, ‘that we are essential workers… [that w]e want to know our work is meaningful, that...
Nov 21, 2022 | Uncategorized
BY Lizzie O’Shea Image: Denys Nevozhai When we talk about the influence of Silicon Valley, we often imagine how the design culture and business models influence our communities and identities in online spaces. In Paris Marx’s new book, Road to...
Nov 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea and Lilly Ryan Image: Esther Vargas At the risk of giving Elon Musk any more of what he wants—for people to talk about Elon Musk—his purchase of Twitter provides an opportunity to reflect upon the governance of online spaces. As yet another...
Feb 17, 2022 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea and Samantha Floreani Image: Flickr When Labor announced a commitment to a ‘pen licence for the digital age’ for young people, it’s easy to see why it led to round mocking going on across social media. The idea sounded like it had been...
Sep 1, 2021 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea and Mark Andrejevic It is now six months since Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code was passed into law, and it presents an opportunity to assess the impact of this controversial piece of legislation. The Code entrenches large tech companies...
Jul 15, 2021 | Uncategorized
By Lizzie O’Shea and Susie Allanson Twenty years ago this week, security guard Steve Rogers was shot and killed inside the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne. Abortion rights campaigner, Dr Bertram Wainer, had established the clinic in 1973 to provide...
May 15, 2021 | Uncategorized
Just over a year ago, international borders closed as part of the unprecedented emergency response to the pandemic. Governments began to experiment with technological solutions to managing the movement of people, specifically at borders, but also more broadly for the...
May 13, 2021 | Uncategorized
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron and collaborator with mechanical computer pioneer Charles Babbage, is credited with being the world’s first computer programmer. Lawyer and writer Lizzie O’Shea thinks Lovelace has lessons for us today about we deal with...
Mar 14, 2021 | Uncategorized
Published in the Overland Sunday, 14 March, 2021. By Lizzie O’Shea, Rebecca Giblin, Kate Seear and Alexandra Dane. Promising Young Woman boldly examines male entitlement and female rage from a woman’s perspective. By which we mean: it’s not simply a story about...
Feb 12, 2021 | Uncategorized
As published in Nikkei Asia on Friday, February 12, 2021. Lizzie O’Shea is a human rights lawyer. She is author of “Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us about Digital Technology.” The experience of online...
May 31, 2019 | Uncategorized
The rhetoric at Facebook—the largest social media platform in the world—is changing. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” Today, the same man is asserting that “the future is private.” This was the buzz phrase at the company’s...
May 22, 2018 | Uncategorized
Women’s reproductive rights have been ill-served by top-down politics. The campaign to repeal the eighth should inspire us all No matter what happens in Ireland’s abortion referendum on Friday, the campaign should serve as an inspiration. For too long, women in...
Apr 16, 2018 | Uncategorized
I look at my algorithm-generated ‘Recommendations for Lizzie’, and I don’t like that person – or the control involved in the process Each time I scroll down to Netflix’s “Recommendations for Lizzie” feed, my heart sinks in shame. Like a house of black mirrors from a...
Mar 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
The Facebook scandal shows that the rules of the internet need to be written by ordinary people, not corporations Facebook’s reckless vanity has made the headlines again, with the revelation that data it held on about 50 million users was exploited commercially...
Mar 10, 2018 | Uncategorized
We’re always told to diet and tone – to take up less space, rather than more. Now I’m pumping iron and proud to be expanding I remember the first time I tried to pull a bar off the floor loaded with two big weights. Unease pooled in my stomach. My trainer was patient,...
Nov 24, 2017 | Uncategorized
Workers in the US tech sector are organising. They, not their billionaire bosses, provide hope that technology will improve the lives of the many De-industrialisation and the Reagan-Thatcher years made trade unions seem like a 20th-century artefact. But evidence of a...
