Watchdog no. 171 (May 2026)
Medieval Innovations In Sustainability
Annette Kehnel, Profile Books (2024, $41)
This is my book of the year. It’s a pleasure to read the relaxed style of Kehnel, who originally wrote the book in German. Equally, it’s a pleasure to read such an optimistic book, which draws on a wide variety of European scholarship to re-examine the Middle Ages, finding surprising stories of sharing, simple living, recycling, microfinance, and female autonomy. We’ve been brought up to think of this period as a time of wars and survival, before we were saved by great leaps forward in innovation and industrialisation. The real story turns out to be much more complex and interesting.
Today, in an era of climate anxiety, resource depletion, and disconnection from community and nature, we are again being told that the solution lies in innovation; we must look to technocrats and venture capitalists to invent our way out of these crises. Kehnel uses her examples from the past to argue for society’s capacity to reinvent itself along far more positive pathways. First up, she argues that sustainability is not a modern invention. Long before the Industrial Revolution, communities had sophisticated systems for managing resources, sharing risk, and ensuring long-term survival. People did live in a world of material scarcity, but out of that necessity they built cultures of sufficiency, cooperation, and recycling.
Kehnel uses the example of alpine pasture management in Switzerland to debunk the modern economic orthodoxy of “the tragedy of the commons”, which argues that shared resources will always be overexploited. There, villages collectively managed grazing land for centuries. They developed intricate systems of rules, monitoring, and graduated sanctions to ensure the pasture's long-term health, because they understood that their survival depended on it. Unfortunately, today, a great many people don’t have a clue about the world they live in, and not because they are stupid but because reality is deliberately distorted for profit.
All Kehnel’s stories from the medieval economy are well told, fleshed out with detail and vivid characters; and more than that, they are thought provoking. For example, even fancy garments from the rich would still be resold and remade multiple times down through the classes, finally becoming the rags required for papermaking. Compare this to our modern addiction for fast fashion and acceptance of planned obsolescence.
I particularly enjoyed the section on Beguines, female-only districts which provided a secure environment for single women and were supported by town and city governments. There, a range of women with different levels of wealth could run businesses, loan money, organise and work in gardens, schools, charities and hospitals. These were examples of sharing communities which gave greater freedom than living and working on your own, as well as surprising examples of early support for independent women.
The book also tackles the tricky topic of economic growth and its alternatives. Kehnel delves into the history of medieval monasteries, many of which became centres of innovation and relative wealth, while remaining clear that their goal was sufficiency, not endless accumulation. In her conclusion, she has this to say: “Paradoxically, we want things to improve, yet stay the same. Why change is so difficult remains a mystery, especially given that humans are, historically speaking, such experts in it. We can do things differently. We’re brilliant at it, in fact. But we only rarely do so of our own accord.” Then she asks: “Do you want to leave your change management up to crises?”
Encounters With The Autocrats And Tech Billionaires Taking Over The World
Giuliano da Empoli, Pushkin Press (2025, $25)
In this short and colourful book, Giuliano da Empoli, a professor and former advisor to the Italian Prime Minister, delivers what you’ve been missing - an analysis of the far-Right that doesn’t pull any punches. He describes today’s world as a power struggle among a loose alliance, with “the new American President at the head of a motley procession of shameless autocrats, tech conquistadors, reactionaries and conspiracy theorists, all spoiling for a fight. An era of limitless violence lies ahead of us, and the defenders of freedom seem singularly unprepared for the battle to come”.
He knows this because he’s met them. And after the success of his fictionalised but fact-based story “The Wizard Of The Kremlin”, he can say what he wants without losing his job. Da Empoli started writing his second book as a novel too but found reality kept outpacing the plot, so he switched to sharing his real-world insider stores. I don’t want to spoil the book, because it’s short, cheap and very readable, so I recommend you buy and read it! But three examples will give you the flavour of “The Hour of the Predator”:
Early on, da Empoli describes a debate at the United Nations, where the French President is talking with his diplomats about the risk of an ineffective speech, of powerless diplomacy. The words chosen are: “We urge Israel to cease escalation in Lebanon, and for Hezbollah to cease missile launches towards Israel. We urge all those who provide them with the means to cease doing so” – and a buzz goes through the chamber; the United States has been named, but also not named. This is what power in the UN looks like. Powerlessness.
He follows this with the story of the charming-in-public young Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) invitation to 300 of the Saudi elite to the palace, where they were separated from their security and transferred to the Ritz-Carlton hotel, commandeered as their prison. There, Blackwater security services assisted MBS’s bodyguards through a three-month interrogation. Each prisoner left only after admitting their corrupt actions, with a new understanding of who ruled Saudi Arabia. The head of the National Guard was dismissed. Prince Al-Waleed was relieved of $US6 billion after waterboarding.
Third, in 2024 the head of Germany’s Centrist pro-business Free Democrats Party (FDP) posted an invitation to Elon Musk on social media to meet and discuss “what the FDP stands for” and noting the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) which Musk had supported “stands against freedom and business”. The world’s richest man responded simply: “The traditional political parties in Germany have utterly failed the people, AfD is the only hope for Germany”. The techbros have one aim above all others; the removal of any regulatory limits.
Da Empoli is unusually blunt on the role of modern Governments in this mess. They are a powerless elite, dependent on Big Tech support to stay in power. Their main function is overpaid salesmen for the global predators. This book was the first time I read the full story of a Google team’s dedication to getting Obama elected, and in two weeks the anti-trust committee closed its case against Google. Regulation of Big Tech by the Democrats, the party of lawyers, was over.
And I particularly appreciated his rebrand of AI as Authoritarian Intelligence, the toolset of choice for these new conquistadors. Here is someone who understands the new world we’re racing towards. First, the predators have mastered the art of the outrageous claim. In today’s opaque media landscape, where most people have no idea how information is being served up to them, the rules have changed. It is no longer about being right, but about being loud, first, and memorable. A well-timed insult or a simplistic claim will always travel faster than proper analysis. And second, it takes money to buy Internet visibility. They have the money to make the outrageous the new normal.
Here’s his summing up of this new world. “Until now, the economic elites – the financiers, entrepreneurs and chief executive officers (CEOs) – have relied on a political class of technocrats from the Right and the Left: moderate, boring, all more or less the same. This was the Davos consensus. In the hour of the predator, this equilibrium has been blown to pieces. The new technological elites – the Musks and the Zucks – have nothing in common with the technocrats of Davos”.
“Their philosophy of life is founded on an urge to disrupt and cause havoc. They live in a world where profit trumps truth and where speed serves the strongest. The re-election of Trump marks a tipping point because now, for the first time, the tech conquistadors feel powerful enough to declare war on the old elites”. This is not a perfectly written book – there’s parts of this story you’d like to hear a lot more about - but da Empoli provides more than enough to give us an overdue wake-up call.
How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype And Create The Future We Want
Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, Penguin (2025, $46)
When I first started searching for books on artificial intelligence (AI) I found 30 books, and back then this was the only one which wasn’t a cheerleader for the coming robotic utopia. Its message is simple: These companies lie all the time, we need to a) make fun of the nonsense they spout, and b) figure out what’s really going on. It’s a practical book, exploring the immense environmental cost of building and running massive data centres, the exploitation of global labour forces to filter toxic content and label data to make the models "safe," the relentless theft of creative work to train commercial products without consent or compensation, and the theft and resale of our personal data.
The rest of the book is dedicated to "fighting the con". The authors advocate for a ban on the use of predictive AI in high-stakes domains like criminal justice, for strong data privacy laws that limit the free fuel for these models, for robust antitrust enforcement to break up the monopolies that control the infrastructure. They want to open eyes, educate, and shift the conversation from "what will AI do to us?" to "what do we want technology to do for us?"
“The current hype cycle will end, and this bubble will burst, with luck sooner rather than later. But history shows it’s unlikely to be the last time. The next time you see a news headline about a new, revolutionary AI agent that will serve as your personal assistant, stop, breathe, and laugh at the foolishness. The only way we build tech that works for us is to see past the façade and ask what kind of future we want to create, together”.
Why And How You Should Take Back Control Of Your Data
Carissa Véliz, Penguin (2020, $39)
Most of us are willing to trade our personal information for the convenience of a free email service or personalised news. Carissa Véliz writes to give us all a wake-up call, arguing that privacy is the essential foundation for a free, just, and democratic society. She wants us to rethink privacy as a form of power - a space that allows us to think freely, make mistakes, form our views, and dissent without fear of reprisal. When we lose control of our data, we cede power to corporations and Governments who use that information to manipulate and control us.
Véliz explains how targeted advertising has evolved from suggesting products to influencing our emotions, our political beliefs, and our sense of self-worth. The business model of the Internet is fundamentally extractive and colonial: companies take our personal data as a raw resource, refine it into predictive algorithms, and sell access to our attention and our decision-making processes. And she links these modern trends to the history of totalitarianism, where growing surveillance is always a precursor to control.
The second half of the book offers practical solutions to fight back. Search engines are a glimpse into your thoughts, so stop using Google as your main search engine and change to privacy-friendly alternatives like DuckDuckGo or Qwant for most searches. Make Brave your browser because it was built with privacy in mind. Change your app settings so they’re privacy friendly. Add privacy extensions like ad-blockers. Take a "privacy-first" approach, asking if a service is truly worth the data it demands. Buy a newspaper!
This book also outlines the policy changes needed to create a safer digital world, including comprehensive data protection laws, antitrust action against data monopolies, and banning surveillance-based business models altogether. Véliz doesn’t admit it, but these are steps which America is never going to take. It’s up to the rest of us. “It might seem radical to call for the end of the data economy. But it’s not. It’s just the status quo that makes it seem that way. What is extreme is having a business model that depends on the mass violation of rights. Widespread surveillance is incompatible with free, democratic, and liberal societies in which human rights are respected. It has to go”.
How I Made News For Dictators, Tycoons And Politicians
Phil Elwood, Allen & Unwin (2024, $30)
Elwood points out in his tell-all tale that “300,000 people are employed by the public relations (PR) industry in the United States, compared to an estimated 40,000 journalists”. You’ll like them even less if you read his story of how they get false stories placed and the behaviour of those who employ them. He makes his excuses early, explaining his bipolar personality and dependence on heavy drinking: “More important than the money is the thrill of the work and treating my depression with risk-taking behaviour”. Elwood’s career started with Washington DC lobbying, then he stepped up to the even more lucrative world of international crisis management, jetting off to exotic locales to spin narratives for clients accused of human rights abuses, corruption, and financial fraud.
He takes us behind the scenes as he tries to manage the fallout for a dysfunctional African dictator, navigates the egos of the Mercer family (the billionaire backers of Trump and Brexit), and dishes out bags of cash to manage the misbehaviour of Mutassim Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, while he holidays in Las Vegas. Elwood’s depiction of the "reputation laundering" industry shows how money and power can buy a veneer of respectability. Dictators don't just hire a PR firm to issue statements; they hire them to place op-eds in major newspapers, arrange meetings with former presidents, and get them invited to exclusive conferences in Davos. It is a sophisticated ecosystem where influence is for sale, and the public is fed nonsense. I can’t honestly recommend reading this discouraging book, but it was certainly an eye opener.
Watchdog 171 -- May 2026
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