Does a ‘digital duty of care’ threaten free speech?

Evidence has been mounting for more than a decade that social media tears away at the fabric of democratic life by eroding the conditions of deliberation, shared understanding and mutual trust; that it is the conduit of widespread misinformation, disinformation and malicious conspiracy theories; that it is a driver of hate, sexism and prejudice and has been used to incite violence; that its addictive design and prolonged exposure to harmful content has had egregious damage to the mental health and emotional wellbeing of adolescents.Until recently, the size of tech companies responsible for the social media platforms, the speed with which new technologies are being deployed and the scale at which they are being adopted has meant the companies have managed to stay several steps ahead of attempts to impose effective regulation and demand accountability.But a combination of the law catching up and a sharp turn in public sentiment against the companies themselves has led to a series of legislative responses around the world intended to mitigate the harms social media platforms cause.Last week, the federal government released the exposure draft of its Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026. First floated in 2024, this is the third such measure the Albanese government has introduced — the others being its abandoned Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 and its world-leading Online Safety (Age-Restricted Social Media Platforms) Rules 2025.Alongside specific provisions to remove harmful content (such as AI generated “fake nude material”), the proposed legislation is notable in its adoption of more preventative measures, including requiring companies to conduct regular risk assessments in order to “proactively identify harmful content”. While this is a measure already in effect in the UK and parts of the EU, perhaps the more notable provision in the proposed legislation is giving social media users the ability to “opt out” of or “turn off” the algorithm that recommends content other than those accounts they follow on the basis of the activity on the platforms.The Prime Minister has insisted this measure is “not about censorship. It’s about giving people control themselves over what they see.” But that has not prevented his political opponents from accusing the government of of attempting to “censor and silence Australians” (Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson) or of “building the Orwellian machinery” for censorship (One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson). As Nationals Leader Matt Canavan said to the ABC:“I’m deeply sceptical of giving any government, whether I was in charge, or Anika Wells is in charge, I’m deeply sceptical of giving any government the power to decide what you read on your phone.”Particular concerns have been raised about the discretionary power accorded to the Minister responsible under section 25C of the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 to “determine material or conduct, or a combination of material and conduct, that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm”. In 2021, similar concerns were expressed in response to the UK government’s own Online Safety Bill, which likewise proposed to legislate a digital duty of care. The Carnegie Trust, which helped develop the “duty of care” framework the government would adopt, articulated its worry that the draft legislation “takes too many powers” for the minister/secretary and advised that, in order to meet “international commitments on free speech”, there should be “a separation of powers between the executive and a communications regulator”.How much credence should be given to complaints that further regulating social media content poses a threat to freedom of speech in a country like Australia, which already has comparatively weak free-speech protections? Are these complaints merely self-interested, given that movements and populist parties on the political extremes have tended to benefit from the algorithmic “outrage machine”?More broadly, given the “opt out” function already exists on most of the platforms and these companies’ predilection for “malicious compliance” (technically abiding by the legislation, but making it unreasonably difficult for users and/or the experience on the platforms significantly worse as a result), what would happen if the overwhelming majority of users simply opt back in to the algorithmically determined feed? Does user consent mitigate the harms?READING:Jay Daniel Thompson, “‘Giving people control’: Do the proposed digital duty of care laws pose a threat to free speech?” (ABC Religion and Ethics, 14 September 2026)Lisa Given, “‘Digital duty of care’ laws will force tech platforms to look after users” (The Conversation, 8 September 2026)Rob Nicholls, “Australians may soon be able to switch off social media algorithms. Is that censorship?” (The Conversation, 9 September 2026)Guest: Jay Daniel Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne.

It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond — and use them to describe purely commercial or easily exploitable forms of behaviour, thereby stripping those words of what made them valuable in the first place.Consider what the word “share” meant before the advent of social media platforms: it encompassed such activities as partaking in a common meal, defusing interpersonal conflict by making a small sacrifice, and having a confiding, perhaps even intimate, conversation with another person. After the introduction of the “Share” button and its use as a way of measuring user “engagement”, the personal aspect that made the word appealing is lost within the sterility of forwarding a bit of content to somebody else. The same goes for the word “friend”.In the modern era, the template for the misuse of morally laden words for commercial purposes was established by the decision of marketing agencies in the 1940s to adopt the term “loyalty” as a way of describing the kind of customer behaviour they wanted to cultivate — namely, an “attitudinal and affective attachment that keeps the customer coming back regardless of convenience or changes in features or price relative to the competition”.But, of course, it could be argued that there is something about “loyalty” that lends itself to such use (in which case, can it really be called a perversion of the term?). Loyalty tends to be associated with two attributes: stickiness and solidarity. The former signals a determination to stand by a family member or acquaintance or organisation facing difficulties (this would represent the opposite of being a “fair weather friend”); the later suggests a desire to protect one’s “own” from either external attack or reputational damage. It is for this reason that hierarchical organisations and nations tend to prize loyalty above all else, and punish “disloyalty” accordingly. (Would it be too much to say that non-disclosure agreements are legally coercive means of achieving the protections loyalty is meant to afford?)And yet loyalty — the unwillingness to weaken or bring one’s own side into disrepute — can often come at the expense of both truthfulness and self-criticism. For this reason, moral philosophers and virtue theorists have been reluctant to call loyalty a “virtue”, because its virtuousness does not reside in the action itself but in the integrity and underlying commitments of that to which one is loyal. Which means that one can be loyal to the founding principles of an organisation by criticising the failure of that organisation to live up to those principles. What is civil disobedience other than a form of loyal dissent?If part of the power of the appeal to “loyalty” is the sense of morally that hangs around it — as Farid Zaid puts it, one of the things that “makes loyalty so dangerous is not only the hard that it does, but the goodness it mimics while doing it” — would it be better to use terms such as “fidelity” or “faithfulness” as a way of preserving what goodness we are hoping to preserve? To cite Zaid once again:“Faithfulness is not simply standing by a person or group because they are ours. It is answerability to the truth and meaning of a relationship, a promise, a vocation, an ideal. A faithful spouse is not merely one who remains aligned with the marriage in some external sense, but one who remains answerable to what marriage actually asks. A faithful citizen is not one who shields the nation from criticism, but one who remains answerable to the ideals by which the nation claims it should live.”Then, perhaps, we can leave talk of loyalty to insecure organisations and corporate rewards programs.READING:Farid Zaid, “What makes loyalty dangerous is not only the harm it does, but the goodness it mimics while doing it” (ABC Religion and Ethics, 20 April 2026)Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” (The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1984)Guest: Farid Zaid is a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at Monash University.

It is suitably ironic that one of the most poignant, and pertinent, moments in Homer’s The Odyssey was airbrushed out of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation. The first time we meet Odysseus, the endlessly resourceful architect of the fall of Troy, he is indeed weeping on the shores of the nymph Kalypso’s island. But it is not due to the unrelieved guilt he feels from his war crimes; rather, we are told, “his tears never did dry, since the sweetness of life was trickling away / As he grieved for his return home” (Book V.153).For the immortal goddess had kept the mortal Odysseus for seven years, not in a prison, but in a paradise, an Eden-like cave warmed by fire, lined with fragrant trees, filled with carnal delights.Each night, Kalypso — unageing and beautiful, whose figure is described as “being in full bloom” — would sleep with Odysseus (“he unwilling, she all too willing”) and promise him at once agelessness and unending pleasure if he would but remain with her in her cave. Depart for Ithaca, “the land of your fathers”, she warns, and not only will he have an inferior wife awaiting him, but he will endure unimaginable hardship on his journey home. Since we are given a god’s-eye tour of Kalypso’s cave before we learn of the choice being put to Odysseus, surely the unequivocal nature of his response is meant to surprise — even though without it, there would be no story!Given the choice between immortality and solidarity with the hardships and daily joys of the world, Odysseus chooses the world, and death with it. “Such simple greatness is foreign to our minds today”, writes Albert Camus; “we simply lack the pride of the man who is faithful to his limitations — that is, the clairvoyant love of the human condition.”Increasing numbers of us seem prepared to turn our backs on the world in order to remain in Kalypso’s cave. Sometimes, this takes the form of attempts to so optimise the body that it defies, or indefinitely postpones, ageing and death (Bryan Johnson has become the face of this fanatical project, suspended as it is between ascetic self-discipline and transhumanist experimentation). For others, the more modest gains in longevity and good health into our eighties and nineties have made us more determined to hold onto power (here Rupert Murdoch would be one of any number of octogenarians who refuse “succession”).For all the ambition and self-importance that both tendencies project, there is something rather small, even petty, about the fear of accepting one’s limits, of ceding one’s power. By denying death and grasping tightly to what we’ve accumulated, we hope to remain significant. It is a human impulse immediately recognisable from Shakespeare’s Lear, and should invite our pity if its consequences for our common life weren’t so dire.As Samuel Moyn and Lucinda Holdforth have both argued, the refusal of human limits expressed in this determination to extend our lives and our influence comes at the expense of the young. Not only is their disenfranchisement fuelling a certain generational resentment, it may also represent a deformed moral conception of the proper end (telos) of human life. To adopt an old Rabbinical analogy, is our life meant to be a sponge that absorbs as much as possible, or a watering can that progressively pours itself out for the sake of others?This is no argument to consign the old to a state of “uselessness”, to collectively deem them at a certain age as surplus to requirement. (The monstrous vision of Christopher Buckley’s satirical 2007 novel Boomsday was that government incentives should be given to Baby Boomers to kill themselves once they reach 75.) But perhaps the sense of importance, of usefulness, can be reimagined by learning how to be faithful to our limits, by acquiring Odysseus’s “clairvoyant love of the human condition”.Guest: Lucinda Holdforth is a former speech writer and adviser to senior leaders across government and business. As an author, her work has increasingly focused on what makes good societies flourish. Her most recent book is Going On and On: Why Our Longevity Threatens the Future — you can read an edited extract on ABC Religion & Ethics.PLEASE NOTE: This episode of The Minefield contains discussion of death and dying.

It is hard to imagine a series of events more tragic, more unseemly, more emblematic of the performativity and polarisation that dominate our time, than the premature rise, sudden fall and untimely death of Jason Arday.In 2023, the University of Cambridge announced that it had appointed Arday — a 37-year-old son of Ghanaian immigrants, who grew up in public housing in south London and only “began to read and write in his late teens” due to his autism diagnosis — to the position of Professor of Sociology of Education. Not only was he the youngest black professor in the university’s history, but he was promoted by Cambridge as an individual whose life story epitomises “the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers” in the academy.Arday was thus held up as a living proof that Cambridge was taking seriously the criticism, frequently voiced during the #BlackLivesMatter ferment, that there was a conspicuous lack of “black professors, and lecturers and senior lecturers and academics and researchers” at the university. He also represented a kind of downpayment on a larger promise to promote “greater inclusivity” among Cambridge’s otherwise exclusive academic community.Paradoxically, Cambridge even mentioned Arday’s struggle as a young academic to get published as uniquely qualifying him for the role of “helping as many ethnic minority and under-represented people as possible gain access to opportunities within the sector”: “When I started writing academic papers, I had no idea what I was doing … I did not have a mentor and no-one ever showed me how to write. Everything I submitted got violently rejected. The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it.”It would become part of the Arday-mystique that he published his first peer-reviewed paper in 2018, after which he secured university posts at Roehampton, Durham, Glasgow and, finally, Cambridge just five years later. By any measure, this was a miraculous ascent to the pinnacle of academic prestige and influence. Before long Arday was fêted as a kind of celebrity in his own right — a philanthropist, an activist, above all, an inspiration in the aftermath of a bruising cultural reckoning with racial injustice.Within months of his appointment, however, the first allegations of academic misconduct were put to Cambridge: that Arday had failed to properly cite or adequately acknowledge earlier research in his 2018 paper. In 2025, a journalist at Times Higher Education, Jack Grove, undertook an investigation into further allegations of plagiarism in Arday’s PhD thesis and irregularities in his data in the 2018 paper. This then expanded into wider scrutiny of a number of Arday’s claims about his own biography and individual accomplishments.Grove submitted nearly 100 pages of evidence of academic misconduct to both Cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores University (which had awarded Arday his PhD). But while extensive corrections were made to his 2018 paper, Arday was cleared of plagiarising his PhD thesis and Cambridge reiterated its determination to “take a stand and speak out against the systematic attempts to erase Black scholarship”. Arday went on to file a police complaint against Jack Grove, alleging harassment, while a notorious law firm, Carter-Ruck, threatened Times Higher Education with defamation proceedings on his behalf if they published Grove’s investigation. It never ran.The issue largely receded from public view until late-July 2026, just weeks before the publication of Jason Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. Having been denied a more legitimate and perhaps measured outlet in Times Higher Education, the full gamut of allegations — fabrications, embellishments, plagiarism, errors in published research and so on — appeared in the Substack post of a former Cambridge researcher who has been described as “a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ”.This post set off what can reasonably be called a “feeding frenzy”. Some of the coverage bore no evident animus toward Arday himself, but diligently subjected his claims to proper scrutiny (here the work of Lanre Bakare is exemplary); other outlets went after Arday with a barely disguised glee, treating him as “exhibit A” of DEI’s illegitimacy and low standards. Arday’s supporters, meanwhile, did the man no favours by minimising the severity of the allegations of academic misconduct, claiming Arday was guilty of nothing more than the crime of “being successful while Black”.Over the course of the next three weeks, Cambridge University announced it was conducting an investigation into Arday’s qualifications and appointments, Arday announced his resignation (“the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”) and was subsequently found dead at a residence in south London.All of a sudden, online persecution became performative mourning. Self-righteousness was countered with fierce recrimination. Jason Arday became a kind of cultural Rorschach test. But not only does the entire tragedy expose the limits of our prevailing political allegiances; it also demonstrates what happens when shared institutions which may be relied upon as impartial arbiters, as custodians of something like a shared reality, are implicated in partisan suspicion.Now that a coronial inquest has begun into the death of Jason Arday, it is incumbent on us to conduct our own moral reckoning.Guest: Bernard Baffour is an Associate Professor in the School of Demography and the Associate Dean of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, the Australian National University.Suggested reading:Bernard Baffour, “Could Jason Arday’s legacy ultimately be to make us better humans?” (ABC Religion & Ethics, 17 August 2026)Lanre Bakare, “Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor” (The Guardian, 1 August 2026)Jack Grove, “I was reported to police over the Arday case. I was just doing my job” (Time Higher Education, 5 August 2026)Mara Hvistendahl, Megan Specia, Leo Sands, Ali Watkins and Susan Dominus, “Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring” (The New York Times, 15 August 2026)Helen Lewis, “The Jason Arday Truthers: The concerted effort to airbrush the late fabulist’s life” (The Atlantic, 26 August 2026)Tyler Austin Harper, “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday: Systemic, ritualized dishonesty undid the Cambridge professor” (The Atlantic, 15 August 2026)Daniel Engber, “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge: The Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s unlikely ascent has come to a tragic end” (The Atlantic, 6 August 2026)If you or someone you know needs help, call:Police: 000 (Triple Zero) in an emergencyLifeline: 13 11 14MensLine Australia: 1300 789 978Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636SANE: 1800 187 263

At a time of profound polarisation, when the fracturing of media ecosystems has been so complete that any agreement on threats to our common life seems impossible, an issue has emerged capable of bringing voters of every political persuasion together.Over the last year, popular opposition to the construction of the data centres in the United States has risen dramatically. According to a Gallup poll from May 2026, more than seventy per cent of Americans are opposed to the construction of a data centre in their area. In June, a Heatmap poll got the same result, and found that over fifty per cent of respondents said they favoured a ban on new data centres altogether. Meanwhile, fifteen states are considering, have introduced or already passed legislation temporarily banning data centre development.Something similar is happening in the UK and Australia, where government eagerness to attract vast investment from AI companies has encountered strident opposition from local communities and electorates. The Australian Greens have called for a moratorium on data centres, while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party is urging stronger government regulation on AI. The South Australian state government has tried to get out ahead of electoral anxieties by announcing a royal commission into AI.The proximate reasons for this opposition are straightforward enough. They primarily have to do with the effect of data centres on the environment, water and energy usage, utility costs, the amenity of adjacent communities and noise pollution. Lurking behind these concrete concerns is the more visceral alarm over the sheer speed of advances in AI over the last three years, along with the gargantuan sums of money frontier labs have spent in their pursuit of ever more “compute” and sources of data for training their models, as well as the out-sized influence that this new generation of tech oligarchs have had on government decision making.Behind it all, there are the deep-seated worries about what this will mean for human beings: whether workers will be sacrificed on the altar of the quest for artificial general intelligence; whether human labour will come to play a subordinate role to the efficient operations of machines (which is to say, whether we will be reduced to “reverse centaurs”, as Cory Doctorow puts it); whether work itself will lose its meaning.But does the way this popular opposition to data centres has coalesced into a broad-based if inchoate movement mark a productive development in modern democratic politics — say, the resurgence of “class” as a potent political force — or is this simply an extension of the pathologies that have eaten away at democratic politics for the better part of the last decade-and-a-half, including: what Pierre Rosanvallon calls the “negative sovereignty” of aggregated disaffection (which can unite around a common “no”, but cannot come together for a shared political project); populist antipathy toward monied and political elites alike; pervasive distrust that veers into unfalsifiable conspiracy theories.There are plenty of good reasons to be politically and ethically suspicious of AI, about the resources it demands, the benefits it promises and the distorting effects it has on the economy. But perhaps the most pressing question of all is whether opposition to data centres can turn into a way of making AI democratically accountable, and whether the limits erected by popular consultation and consent can translate into a deeper form of political empowerment — an affirmation of the importance of cooperation and deliberation for the flourishing of our communities?Guest: Craig Calhoun is University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. He is in Australia to deliver the 2026 Thesis Eleven Annual Lecture on the decline of Western democracy, in Melbourne on 25 August 2026.

The widespread availability of GLP-1 based drugs has been lauded as a “revolution in weight loss” and as inaugurating the “end of obesity”. As we’ve discussed previously, health benefits aside, there are concerns that such weight-loss drugs don’t just leave certain cultural assumptions about beauty and body size unchallenged, but in fact reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy — elevating slimness to the level of a kind of moral demand (with the opprobrium that accompanies failure to live by it).Those concerns remain. But the uptake of use of GLP-1 drugs in places like the United States — where 11 per cent use drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, according to Gallup — has intersected with a parallel cultural phenomenon in interesting and rather morbid ways. What happens when the demand to be slim encounters the idealisation of body shapes: fuller curves, more defined muscles, plumper lips, tighter skin, sharper cheeks?Not long after GLP-1 based drugs were made more widely available to the public for the purposes of weight loss, a series of fat-based fillers were made available to certain plastic surgeons who were experienced in working with fat. But unlike the more common procedure of autologous fat grafting — the process whereby the person’s own fat is removed by means of liposuction and injected into another part of the person’s body — these fat-based fillers are harvested from cadavers. The fat is then treated, bottled and injected into target areas in order to achieve the desired look. Though the treatment is expensive, it is becoming increasingly popular due to the “chunkier” and more “natural” look of the filler, and because the procedure doesn’t require either general anaesthesia or an extended recovery time.Most people will instinctively recoil from the prospect of injecting cadaver fat — parts of human bodies that have been reduced to “biological material” — into one’s own body for the purposes of cosmetic improvement. There is a certain moral intuition (is there not?) that goes deeper than the mere “ick factor” and approaches the sense that this is simply too superficial a use for human bodies to be put. Organ donations and transplant feel different to us — that the “gift” of an organ from a deceased body gives life to another. The harvesting and use of fat in the service of achieving an ideal body shape feels vulgar.But is this moral intuition fair? There are live questions about whether the family of the deceased know the uses to which the donated bodies of their loved ones are being put. Moreover, given the altruism of the act of donation itself, there is something ethically problematic about companies wanting to profit on the use of those bodies. But leave the question of consent to the side — or assume that consent was given for fat from the dead body to be used in this way — does that alleviate the ethical problems at play? Or does it merely deepen some of the concerns about the darker side of the current obsession with the aesthetics of the body?Renae Fomiatti examines the ways we are pushing ethical boundaries in our pursuit of aesthetic self-improvement, on ABC Religion and Ethics (12 August 2026).Leah Dolan reports on the use of cadaver fat to mould bodies that have experienced GLP-1 assisted rapid weight loss, for CNN (13 July 2026). Guest: Renae Fomiatti is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University.

Ever since Aristotle, it has been recognised that money poses a particular threat to the integrity of political office. Ever the realist, Aristotle knew that those who seek political office are invariably motivated by a certain ambition (philótimo). Though not problematic in itself, but when combined with avarice (philochrematía) it can give rise to a form of corruption as corrosive as the unconstrained exercise of political power.For as Aristotle would put it, one who accepts gifts (katadōrodokoúmenos) will also be one who shows favouritism (katacharizómenos). He holds up as an example the council of “elders” (gérontas) in Sparta, who were “well known to have taken bribes and to have been guilty of partiality in public affairs” (Politics II.1271). The fault of the Spartan system, he concluded, the source of its underlying political rot, was a kind of pervasive unaccountability (aneuthúnos), such that citizens no longer had a reasonable expectation of impartial treatment from lawmakers — which is to say, they could no longer expect justice.The suspicion of hidden influence and the fear of special consideration undermine the faith of citizens in our shared institutions to behave justly. Even when these institutions are conducting themselves equitably and representatives are making decisions on principled grounds, the ubiquity of money in politics breeds mistrust and ensures that suspicion lingers just below the surface of democratic life.This is why any healthy political order depends on trust and is sustained through rigorous forms of public accountability. For once democratic faith is lost or significantly damaged, it lends credence to the claims of populist entrepreneurs and charlatans that politics per se is corrupt and that anti-democratic means are the only way to fix an untenable status quo.Concerns around overt political corruption and undue influence being exerted by oligarchs and billionaires over government policy have reached endemic levels in places like the United States, the UK and France over the last decade. And while Australia has been spared the luridness and eyewatering sums of political “donations” now commonplace in US politics, public faith in this country has nonetheless been challenged, to say the least, over the last month by a series of political scandals from across the political spectrumIn each case, the question of money in politics goes deeper than what is legal — it goes to what corrupts public perception of, and faith in, democratic politics itself. Is that criterion best served through aggressive anti-corruption bodies? Or is there a case for something more thoroughgoing: not just caps on donations or a prohibition on donations from certain sectors, but a ban on private donations altogether?Guest: Yee-Fui Ng is an Associate Professor of Law at Monash University, where she specialises in the areas of public law and political integrity. Her most recent books are Combatting the Code: Regulating Automated Government Decision-Making in Comparative Context and The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System.

According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fifteen years. Whether it be for enjoyment or edification, reading books is no longer something many of us choose to do. As Rose Horowitch writes in her recent cover story for The Atlantic, “The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women, and college graduates — have seen a collapse.”This isn’t to say we don’t read. Indeed, the paradox is that this crisis of literacy comes at a time when we are inundated with words. The incessant production and circulation of texts constitute our cultural milieu, to the point that we could say these messages are our medium.But isn’t there is a vast difference between merely looking at or reacting to or skimming words on a screen, and the kind of sustained attentiveness or self-forgetting patience that is demanded by the commitment to immerse oneself in a book? Just as there is a vast difference between expressing oneself in writing and supplying prompts to a chatbot. It is not merely that the activity is different; so too is the effect the activities have on our inner life.When he was trying to make sense of the peculiar process involved in reading-with-understanding, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it this way: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling [mit Empfindung], surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines [die Zeilen … überfliege] for information.”How are we to account for this difference? And how does it relate to the “something” that Wittgenstein refers to? The size of the text has something to do with it. Both Søren Kierkegaard in 1846 and Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, warned against the effect of the ever-increasing abbreviation of our modes of writing on our interior lives. Bradbury’s nefarious Captain Beatty thus anticipated the trajectory that would lead to the advent of social media with remarkable precision:“Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending … Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”But, as they say, size isn’t everything. Big books are not necessarily “good” or “serious” or “weighty” books, and there is an infinite distance between a well-wrought poem and a tweet. Rather, what seems to matter is the time that is involved, and the intensity or focus of the inner labour that the text demands. Which is to say, what matters is our exposure to the moral reality of another as it presents itself to us in that text.This brings us to the other paradox of our moment. The proliferation of modes of communication and expressions of opinion has not brought about greater exposure to the moral reality of others. Through the speed, the superficiality and the algorithmic selectivity of our rapid-fire systems of hypercommunication, we have effectively walled ourselves off from the strange, the other. As the Korean-German philosopher Byung Chul Han has argued, the “digital web inhabited by the ego has lost all that is foreign … we operate in the numerical space of the Same”. He continues: “Literature and art are on the way to the Other. The desire for the Other is their essential trait.” But today, “the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same. The literary crisis ultimately stems from the expulsion of the Other.”In some religious traditions, there are habits that are instilled to prepare readers for encounter with the absolutely “Other” — which is to say, the sacred — in certain texts. By means of these habits, the ego is set aside, or rather, is put in its place, by means of the disciplining of time and the cultivation of what Simone Weil would call the “unmixed attention” she would equate with prayer. Such reading is meant to be a form of ecstasy, in the sense of being drawn outside of one’s self. Today, however, as Han writes, “the economy of attention”, oriented as it is to the fleeting satisfactions of the self, “overgrows both the poetics and the ethics of attentiveness”.Is there a connection, then, between our prevailing condition of contempt for others, our habits of moral grandstanding and of antidemocratic impatience, and the decline in our willingness to read books? Ought we to begin thinking of the skills required to read well — “with feeling”, as Wittgenstein put it — as a kind of preparation for moral encounter with others?Further reading:Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”, The Atlantic (1 October 2024)Rose Horowitch, “The End of Reading Is Here”, The Atlantic (8 July 2026)Sophie Gee, “Inventing Devotion: How Books Taught Us to Feel with One Another”, ABC Religion and Ethics (30 June 2026)Maryanne Wolf, “How Do We Cultivate Deep Reading Processes in a Digital Age?”, ABC Religion and Ethics (20 February 2023)Guest: Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University and the inaugural Vice-Chancellor Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney. She is the co-host, with Jonty Claypole, of the Secret Life of Books podcast, and the author, most recently, of The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World.You can listen to the first episode of the Secret Life of Books podcast series on George Eliot’s Middlemarch here.

Even for those who don’t gamble, the exponential growth of online sports betting since 2018 has made it impossible to avoid. Not only have odds and ads been seamlessly integrated into sports broadcasts, but the language of betting has now become pervasive in sports commentary. Thanks to ease of access through mobile technology and their relative value as ready-made “content”, speculation and predictions are the air that sports fans now breathe.It is into this cultural environment that prediction markets have recently exploded. Prediction markets are online platforms that accept wagers on whether relatively specific events will occur by a certain date, whose payout is determined by the likelihood of that event occurring. These zero-sum “event contracts” can cover everything from geopolitics to popular culture. Real examples include: will Justin Bieber perform during the World Cup final half-time show; what will the high temperature be in New York City on a particular day; will Nicolás Maduro still be the president of Venezuela at the end of 2025; will Trump use specific words during the State of the Union; will the second coming of Jesus Christ take place before 2027.Like sports betting, prediction markets have grown rapidly in both value and reach over the last two years. The odds of one platform accompanied the broadcast of the 2026 Golden Globe Awards, and at the end of 2025 media companies like The Wall Street Journal, CNN and CNBC announced partnerships with prediction markets to integrate their data directly into news coverage.Advocates for prediction markets insist they represent a sophisticated form of “crowd sourcing” and that, in a world of unaccountable punditry and rampant misinformation, the financial incentive is a way of getting people to “put their money where their mouth is”. (A similar rationale has been given for the superiority of calculated sports bets over irrational fandom.) We could think of this as a kind of corruption of Karl Marx’s famous aphorism from the Communist Manifesto: analysts have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to profit from it.Such high-minded epistemological justifications notwithstanding, we have already begun to witness the ethically problematic uses to which prediction markets can be put. In January 2026, one platform allowed users to bet on whether Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be ousted by 1 March (though the company subsequently issued refunds and refused to honour what amounts to a “death contract”). There has also been a predominance of perfectly timed bets on covert military operations involving Venezuela and Iran, leading the Anti-Corruption Data Collective to conclude “that certain categories of political prediction markets, especially those tied to military activity, display signs of asymmetric information and potential insider trading”.Such concerns over corruption have led both to the prosecution of a member of the US military and the passage of the Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions (BETS OFF) Act by the US Senate, prohibiting politicians and staff from trading on prediction markets.This raises a number of pertinent questions. Do the epistemological claims offered by prediction markets hold up — or do they not only incentivise corrupt behaviour but, thereby, signal a pervasive distrust in more ethically credible sources of knowledge and expertise? In countries where prediction markets are not legal, like Australia, what does the habit of viewing the world through the predictive lens — which treats the trivial and the tragic alike as fodder for speculation and profit making — do to our sense of justice, legitimacy and decency?Guest: Adam Piovarchy is a Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is a lead investigator on a research project examining the ethics and politics of prediction markets.

It’s no mystery why David Frankel’s 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada was a hit. The movie had all the ingredients of a certain kind of success. Take a bestselling novel (by Lauren Weisberger) about a midwestern girl trying to make it in the big city, place it in the hands of a screenwriter known for broadly appealing rom-coms (Aline Brosh McKenna), cast a much-loved screen legend in an uncharacteristically villainous role (Meryl Streep) and put her alongside a doe-eyed starlet on her way to becoming a superstar (Anne Hathaway) … then set the plot in the rarefied world of haute couture and divide it between New York and Paris — what’s not to love?What is a little surprising is that The Devil Wears Prada should have achieved the quality of a certain timelessness (despite being released a year before the now ubiquitous iPhone). It is a cinema classic whose enduring appeal and pop cultural resonance have been demonstrated by the global success of a sequel, two decades on.But does the film’s success point to narrative and thematic elements that run much deeper than the appeal of the glossy surface?Take, for instance, the obvious Faustian connection, evoked both in the title of the film and the blunt words of Emily (played by Emily Blunt) to Andrea Sachs (Hathaway): “You sold your soul the day you put on your first pair of Jimmy Choos.” The narrative arc of the film is, broadly, the naïve Andy’s “descent” into the world of high fashion, cultural influence and sterile, superficial beauty, only to step back from the hellmouth of corruptibility at the end, lest she too share Miranda Priestly’s (Streep) unhappy fate. Does this mean that Andy also shares in Faust’s culpability, less a victim than a participant in his own damnation?Who, then, plays the role of the seducer? Who is the film’s Mephistopheles, also trapped in a hell of diabolical design? Is it Emily — starved, harried, contemptuous, miserable? Is it Christian Thompson (Simon Baker) — urbane, erudite, well-connected, corrupting, and ultimately impotent? Surely it is Nigel (Stanley Tucci) — personable, appealing, but a slave to Miranda’s imperious demands, and a prisoner to a corrupted vision of beauty (“size six is the new fourteen”). And to what extent does Andy escape unscathed, given her string of broken relationships?The Devil Wears Prada also draws deeply on those specifically New York stories of tragic or monstrous success. Stories like Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success (with imperious newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker playing the Miranda Priestly role) and Darren Aronofsky’s 2011 Black Swan, or John Badham’s 1977 Saturday Night Fever and Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho, or Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street and Taylor Hackford’s 1997 The Devil’s Advocate. Is New York really a place of opportunity, or is it the kind of environment in which the price of success is one’s own soul?The transformation that Andy Sachs undergoes in the first half of the film initially looks like an external accommodation to a class or caste of society where one wants to belong — a sartorial equivalent of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, though with Nigel in the role of Henry Higgins. But if there is any lesson from the film, it is this: in a culture where appearance is essence — which is to say, how you look is who you are — the change of appearance rarely remains skin deep.Finally, The Devil Wears Prada trades on, and in no way resolves, one of the central contradictions in modern democracies — one that is explored at length by Elizabeth Anderson: in political cultures that prize agency and democratic self-determination, many workplaces are tyrannies, and bosses despots. The glimpses we get of Miranda’s unhappy home life, however sympathy inducing they are, does not reduce our sense that she presides over a domain in which she has no equals, no one to whom she is morally answerable. All there is, is the standard of aesthetic perfection and cultural sway to which she has sacrificed everything (apart from, of course, her Harry Potter-devouring twin daughters).It is therefore diabolically fitting that, at the film’s end, Nigel’s ambitions for professional self-determination and Emily’s momentary escape into the world of bread rolls and chocolate pudding are both frustrated. They end the film, presumably, where they began — namely, imprisoned and mendicant.The question is: where does the film leave its audience? Are we left longing for the world of glamour that had seduced Andy — and us, vicariously — or are we content with the nobility of a job reporting for a modest newspaper that would soon be swallowed by the advent of social mediaGuest: Clare Bowditch is an Australian musician, broadcaster, author and actress.