About plus/minus

I’m Josh Cowls, and plus/minus is the place that I put my writing on subjects that interest me.

My main interest is digital technology, and the many important things with which, for better or worse, it interacts—including politics, culture, and the natural world.

I have a wider set of interests that I like to write about as well, including food, sport, music and film. I throw these thoughts into a separate vertical that I call the weekender.

Why plus/minus?

I’ve researched the political, ethical, and social impact of digital technology for over a decade. In that time, I’ve witnessed spurts of both high hope and great (sometimes “existential”) fear about various technological breakthroughs. Usually, once the haze clears and the dust settles, the actual impact of digital technology is revealed to lie somewhere in between. So plus/minus is a shorthand way of signalling that you won’t find either utopian proclamations or apocalyptic claims about AI, social media, biotechnology, or any of the other facets of digital technology that I cover here.

plus/minus is also a reference to the concept of the margin of error in statistics. I’m not a statistician—but loosely, a margin of error is a way of expressing uncertainty about a prediction or finding, and appears everywhere from the results of an opinion poll to the projected path of a cricket ball. However, the uncertainty represented by the margin of error tends to be in short supply in other walks of life, not least on social media. So plus/minus is also a reminder (to myself, as much as anyone else) that predictions about the future—or even confident statements about the here-and-now—are always subject to uncertainty.

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Writing about digital technology and its impacts on politics, culture, and sustainability.

People

I've recently finished a PhD on platform governance at the Oxford Internet Institute and I co-host the podcast skeptechs.