Category: Misc

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My wife and I have spent a number of years travelling to Perugia, a small town in Umbria, just a couple of hours north of Rome, for the fantastic journalism festival that is put on there by our friends Arianna and Christopher (Arianna was adamant that it not be called a conference when they started it). We haven’t been for the past couple of years for a number of reasons, but this was the 20th anniversary of the festival, so we had to go — and it was our 10th visit; we went for the first time in 2013 (in addition to the past couple of years when we didn’t attend, we missed a couple due to COVID). It was great to be back in the old city, which dates back to the Etruscan empire in the year 300 or so. One of the things we make sure to visit every year is a fascinating circular church that was originally a pagan temple, built in about 500 AD or so. You can just walk in and look around whenever you want — it is still used as a church — and nearby is an ancient tower from the same period that has a small museum you can visit as well.

Across from the main conference hotel there’s an escalator that goes down into the ruins of an ancient palace known as the Rocco Paolina, named for Pope Paul III, who built it in the 1500s after he took control of the city following the great Salt War. It seems that the new pope decided to levy a new tax on salt, which enraged the Perugians — according to legend, traditional Perugian bread is baked without salt, in memory of this grudge from 500 years ago. The pope squashed the rebellion with his armies, and took control of the city, and it remained under papal control until Italy was unified in 1860. Also, from what I understand, a guy named Frank from Assisi was injured in a war between Perugia and Assisi (which is about a two-hour drive away across a valley) in the year 1200 or so, and later got really religious and decided to become a monk, and eventually became Saint Francis of Assisi. The murals in his cathedral are truly spectacular.

I recently wrote a feature piece for a new Canadian-owned media outlet called Be Giant about Gander Social, a new Canadian-owned and operated social-media app that is still in beta testing, and the broader debate around what some call “digital sovereignty.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Over the past few decades, the vast majority of our essential communications infrastructure has become entirely American. From the Slack messages we send at work to our X posts and our Instagram stories and Facebook Reels to the search engines and shopping platforms we use: all American. Even the undersea cables over which our digital communications flow were built by U.S. companies. That reality has become a lot more uncomfortable of late, and many Canadians are now thinking about what’s come to be called “digital sovereignty.” Should we have our own homegrown services? Is that even possible at this point? And if we had Canadian alternatives, would anyone use them?

You can read the rest here: https://www.begiant.ca/stories/ideas/canada-digital-sovereignty-gander-social

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