Writer at Silicon Canals

Cabinet

Contributor

Cabinet is Silicon Canals' column on the political and policy forces shaping technology — regulation, capital, geopolitics, antitrust, and surveillance. Articles under this column are produced by our editorial team under the direction of the Chief Publisher.

Politics

Across 37,073 European Research Council applications, the same proposal scored higher with reviewers who shared the applicant’s citizenship and country of work — and that match moved the score about seven times as much as a shared gender did

Two economists contracted by the ERC's own executive agency compared how a single proposal was scored by reviewers who matched the applicant and reviewers who did not. Sharing both citizenship and country of work moved the first-stage project score by 0.164 of a point on a five-point scale. The link to actual funding decisions is weaker, and correlational.

Aug 22, 2026

Politics

Europe’s AI watermarking rules are now live, but visible labels, hidden machine-readable marks and editorial review apply to different companies, content and moments under Article 50

A confusing patchwork of disclosure rules is now binding on AI companies across Europe, but compliance depends on what you build, who uses it, and what it creates.

Aug 12, 2026

Politics

No service can delete your digital footprint. The honest numbers, from independent testing rather than marketing copy, run from 27 to 70 percent — and even that requires checking back every few months as data brokers refresh their databases

The privacy industry promises erasure, but independent testing reveals most data-removal services scrub less than three-quarters of your digital traces—and vigilant manual effort beats them all.

Aug 12, 2026

Politics

Trump refused to sign the housing bill Congress sent him in June, holding out for an unrelated voter ID measure

A president's silence can reshape legislation just as surely as his signature, especially when political leverage is at stake.

Aug 11, 2026

Politics

The company behind Singha beer removed one of its heirs from every executive role days after an abuse allegation went public — a reckoning Asian family dynasties usually avoid

When Boonrawd Brewery cut ties with Sunit Scott, it did in public what family conglomerates in the region almost always handle in private. The speed and visibility of that decision is its own story.

Jul 25, 2026

Politics

South Korea approved single-stock leveraged ETFs, then banned new ones two months later — inside the margin unwind that pushed forced selling to seven times last year’s pace

Regulators tripled minimum deposits and halted new leveraged ETF listings after the Kospi's slide from a June record. The official data shows a leverage problem that built for months — and the loudest number in the story isn't official at all.

Jul 22, 2026

Politics

The EU’s AI Act starts requiring chatbot and deepfake labels on August 2 — while its tougher rules on hiring, biometrics and migration are pushed back to December 2027

The transparency obligations are the cheap ones to meet. The expensive, rights-protective rules are the ones that just got more time.

Jul 18, 2026

Politics

The EU says Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design likely breaks its rules — and it wants autoplay and infinite scroll off by default

Brussels’ preliminary finding could eventually cost Meta up to 6% of its global revenue. But Meta gets to argue back first, and nothing has been decided yet.

Jul 17, 2026

Technology

Agility Robotics is going public at $2.5B while Figure AI sits at $39B on less proven ground — and the gap between those two numbers is the entire humanoid robotics thesis in one line

Agility Robotics is heading to the public markets at a valuation notable less for its size than for its restraint.

Jul 7, 2026

Technology

Ford rehired the engineers it replaced with AI — and reclaimed its first JD Power top ranking since 2010

Ford has rehired roughly 350 veteran engineers after automated quality systems and AI-driven inspection tools failed to deliver expected manufacturing standards.

Jul 1, 2026

Politics

Europe’s new tech-sovereignty plan doesn’t ban U.S. cloud giants — it sets four levels of “sovereignty” for sensitive government data, and an American law makes the top levels nearly impossible for them to reach

On June 3, 2026, the European Commission proposed a set of rules that would change how European governments buy cloud computing for their most sensitive data.

Jun 30, 2026

Technology

Stockholm’s Fika Jobs just raised $4M to kill the resume with AI video interviews — and the part nobody is pricing in is what happens when employers see your face before your skills

Stockholm-based Fika Jobs has raised a $4 million pre-seed round to build what it describes as a video-first hiring platform, where candidates are interviewed by an AI agent rather than screened through resumes, as reported by TechCrunch . The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo behind Candy Crush.

Jun 24, 2026