By giving the most insipid music the biggest platform—not because it’s what listeners want, but because it’s one of the ways they can most easily fatten their profit margins—Spotify is reducing music to a kind of aural wallpaper, and marginalising if not erasing the work of actual musicians in the process.

These industries lack the capacity (and inclination) to focus on human flourishing, and have actively skirted accountability for design decisions. Through this book, the social structures that have shaped our lived environment are not just rendered visible, they become hard to unsee. Road to Nowhere pulls the mind of the reader towards the myriad of possibilities that come into view if we think of our world without the car.

As much as I still rely on Twitter, using the site has also trained me to think of the whole practice of social media as cynical and corrupt, something that could only persist in a commercially incentivised form or as a bad habit.

There is a dystopic implication in the current shift towards online platforms—a kind of standardised production that constitutes the backbone of today’s institutionally-endorsed ‘culture’. It’s not all bad news though; after all, the failure of online platforms as a worthy substitute for a meaningful social life is a success for culture itself.

In crisis-managing the critique of unlimited growth, neoliberal environmental initiatives orient us away from the possibilities of alternative political worlds to capitalism. Instead, using the flattened discourse of sustainability and the utopic imaginary of speculative aesthetics, they promote another iteration of capitalism—this time predicated on the interdisciplinary potential of nature and capital.

People who rely on the ability to be anonymous or use pseudonyms online are not bad people, or ‘cowards’, as the prime minister would have us believe. The reality is that anyone seeking community or connection online without the risk of attracting stigma or discrimination in their day-to-day life offline might choose to be anonymous at some point—and they should be allowed to do so.

By inviting news providers to join the platforms they cannot beat, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code effectively commercialises all news content. Even public service content is now reliant on the attention it can generate on platforms like Facebook and Google News to reach an audience.

The Facebook news ban in Australia was a brief skirmish in the longer war to control private and unregulated domination of our public spaces and libraries. It will take global coordination and willingness to wrest these spaces into public hands to serve our world community, support the essential role that journalism plays in our societies and not feed the domination fantasies of tech bro billionaires.

In case it still wasn’t clear: Facebook is not a public service. Today, it has shown it by taking an unforgivably heavy hand to banning content – targeting everything from the Bureau of Meteorology to the Australian Council of Trade Unions. In doing so, it continues to show us what the company is really like: it’s time we finally believe them.

With the defeat of Donald Trump, we face a critical moment for users of technology and citizens of the digital world. An appetite among the public for reform is about to face off against a well-resourced industry that is looking for ways to contain the regulatory impulse.

It also shined a light on the existence of the leftist nerd: a common type of nerd (especially in trans communities) whose presence is continually overshadowed by the louder voices of reactionary gamers and pseudo-rationalist centrists claiming to be apolitical, even as they enthusiastically support the status quo.

We all know the feeling of being stuck on Netflix. Exhausted by the day we had today. Exhausted by the day we’ll have tomorrow. Stalled, browsing, waiting for something to crest above the threshold of boredom so that we’ll click; vainly hoping that we’ll find something good enough to entertain, but maybe not too good that we come out further fatigued.

Online, 7pm Thursday 1 November Join Overland's resident tech-genius and poet Benjamin Laird, experimental storyteller Mez Breeze, and writer and VR enthusiast Mark Riboldi to boldly go where no writers have gone before: a panel examining the history and present of VR taking place in virtual space! This is a free event.

Sci-fi has depoliticised. Spectacle has replaced critique. Most sci-fi today just isn’t about very much, nor does it have much feeling to it: the feeling of not knowing who you are, like Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner; of longing for someone you’ve lost, like Kris Kelvin in Solaris; the feeling of fear for your life, as in Alien; of pure awe and wonder as in Close Encounters with the Third Kind.

The University of South Australia’s recently opened MOD. (Museum of Discovery) is self-described as ‘Australia's leading future-focused museum, provoking new ideas at the intersection of science, art and innovation.’ Yet this intersection gives little heed to disability. Science, art and innovation cannot replace accessibility and while visiting the gallery, a lack of warning to an exhibit’s content meant that a seizure was triggered.

I lost my voice in my mid-teens after a brainstem aneurysm. While my string of doctors were preoccupied with my damaged nerves and uncooperative limbs, I was worried about my paralysed vocal cord and rapidly atrophying tongue. I couldn’t hold any air in my lungs or make the right shapes with my mouth to form words. For months, the most I could manage was a faltering hiss as I re-learnt how to walk, eat, hold a pen.