About me

My work explores the impact of technology on what it means to be human. My focus is human agency: our capacity to think for ourselves, make conscious choices and influence the course of our lives.

I’ve looked at this question from lots of angles. I have been a media lawyer (Mishcon de Reya), a content regulator (BBFC), a campaigner for children's rights in the digital world (5Rights Foundation) and a safety expert inside one of the world's largest tech companies (TikTok).

Each role showed me a different face of the same problem: digital products shape what we think, feel and do, and the people most affected rarely get a say in how. I’ve worked alongside brilliant people to design products more responsibly, to raise public understanding of how technology shapes us, and to secure real regulatory oversight of tech companies.

In 2025 I began writing about a second generation of behavioural technology, powered by GenAI and designed to create emotional reliance, and what it means for our agency. In the same year I co-authored the Children and AI Design Code, a blueprint for the responsible design of AI systems that impact children, and Advancing Trust & Safety, an examination of the incentives driving decision-making inside tech companies, written with practitioners and whistleblowers.

Today I am an external advisor to Ofcom on media literacy and to the BBC's Editorial Standards Committee. I also write The Human Agency on Substack.

My interest in agency isn’t only professional. While working at TikTok I burnt out. As I tried to make sense of the experience, I discovered Boethius, a statesman writing from a prison cell fifteen hundred years ago. He taught me that we can’t control what life throws at us, but we always choose how we respond. Rebuilding my sense of agency rebuilt me. If I had to rank the things I need to survive and flourish, agency would sit somewhere near oxygen.

I have come to the conclusion that our fundamental need for agency is poorly understood and therefore neglected. The bad news is that integrating generative AI into our homes and offices will further compromise our sense of agency. The good news is that whilst agency can be lost, it can also be found. There’s plenty that individuals, governments and business leaders can do to nurture and protect human agency, and when universal need is met, humans and society flourish.