About this blog

There is a lot going on at the point where new technology meets food, farming and the climate – more than any one news cycle can hold. A gene-editing rule changes in Brussels, a seed merger closes, a start-up promises to cool the planet with sulphur, a tractor maker locks farmers out of their own machines. Each story arrives on its own. The connections between them – who owns the tool, who carries the risk, who gets to say no – usually arrive late or not at all.

etc blog is an attempt to keep those connections in view. The name is the joke and the method: technology, food, climate and corporate power, et cetera – and all the other things that turn out to matter once you follow a story past the press release.

What we write about

• Technology & society – artificial intelligence, data, nanomaterials and the converging technologies that tend to arrive faster than the rules for them.
• Food & farming – seeds and the laws around them, smallholder agriculture, agroecology, and the companies that sell farmers their inputs.
• Biotech & synthetic biology – GM crops, gene editing, gene drives, synthetic cells and lab-grown food: the science, the claims and the regulation.
• Climate & geoengineering – the negotiations, the carbon markets, and the proposals to engineer the climate itself.
• Corporate power & economy – mergers, market shares, patents and the business models behind all of the above.

We also keep two broader shelves – Science and Opinion & analysis – for explainers and arguments that don't fit neatly elsewhere.

How we work

Posts here are written to be useful a year after they appear. That usually means going back to the start of a debate, explaining what was promised, checking what actually happened, and saying plainly what is still unknown. We link to primary sources where we can, we say so when evidence is thin, and we don't invent certainty to make a better headline.

We are sceptical by temperament, not by default. New tools sometimes deliver; sometimes the people warning about them are wrong. The question we keep asking is the same either way: who decides, and on whose behalf?

Corrections. If we get something wrong, tell us through the contact page. Factual corrections are made in the post itself, with a note at the end saying what changed and when.

Independence. etc blog is an independent publication. It is not connected to ETC Group (etcgroup.org) or to any organisation or person that published on this web address before 2024, and nothing here speaks for them. We don't take money from the companies we write about, and posts are never paid placements.

Where to start

The archive lists every post, newest first, and the sidebar lets you browse by month or by category. If you'd rather read other people – we certainly do – the links page collects the sources and newsletters we rely on.