Could we really call it British ingenuity if our best new factories make parcels, not PCs? Tech Brief 25 November 2025 runs from Midlands robots and digital sovereignty questions to the messy origins of the internet. Whether you cheer for new feats or miss the whiff of old solder, there’s something here to prod your nostalgia circuit.
Missed yesterday’s Tech Brief? Catch up here before diving in.
Inside Amazon’s EMA4: Robots and Humans Remake the Midlands
“Efficiency and business technology at its peak” is how Amazon’s Sutton Coldfield hub has been described, but the story’s much older. This EMA4 centre spreads across the heartland where machine tools once reigned. Today, floor after floor is filled with robots, warehouse management systems, and Midlands workers adapting their hands-on skills to tablet screens and conveyor belts.
Automatic guided vehicles ferry thousands of parcels every hour. Every item is tracked, sorted, and dispatched with software doing the orchestration. Gone are the days of rebuilding gearboxes. Now expertise is shown through troubleshooting sensor glitches over Wi-Fi, or managing queues of orange, box-carrying robots that beep, not bellow. For readers with memories of industrial job losses and manufacturing pride, this is a new act. Some say tech jobs lack the craft of a spanner and soldering iron, but Amazon’s Midlands empire is impossible to ignore.
Will this ecosystem ever breed its own kind of tinkerers, or only produce logistics managers?
Britain: The Economic Colony of Silicon Valley?
Is Britain now an economic colony, but this time for American tech? A new Guardian essay draws blood, arguing that our digital economy runs on platforms and data centres built by Google, Amazon, Meta, and friends. Where once we wrote BASIC on our bedroom Spectrums, BBC Micros, Amstrad CPCs, or Acorns, we now host our emails and files in Californian data vaults.
The internet was sold in the 90s as a garden of innovation and choice. Instead, policy drift and corporate consolidation mean that the giants have set up shop, and we buy their tools, follow their rules, and hope for digital independence in PowerPoint slides. It’s a sharp break from the days of British micro pioneers: Acorn, ICL, Amstrad. These companies sought to build a truly local tech ecosystem.
If you’ve ever wondered what happened to all that optimism, maybe you never left the terminal in the first place.
Google Secures NATO’s Sovereign Cloud; But Where’s the Sovereignty?
New week, same winner: Google has landed a major contract to provide so-called “sovereign” cloud services to NATO and the MOD. The irony? Britain’s most sensitive military data will now be housed within an American tech behemoth’s infrastructure. Cloud services promise control and resilience, yet control is up for debate when critical data flows through foreign-owned platforms.
Cloud sovereignty has been a talking point for a decade. In this case, sovereignty seems to mean “we get to shake Google’s hand and hope they follow our laws.” Anyone who watched last century’s debates about who built the microchips in British systems might sense a familiar anxiety. This calls back to the earlier story on digital colonialism, neatly showing that the move from hardware to cloud hasn’t changed the biggest questions one bit.
What’s left? Outsourcing your firewall to Seattle?
Doctorow and ‘Enshittification’: When Platforms Betray Their Users
Cory Doctorow has named it “enshittification” – that slow rot where beloved online platforms become clever traps for users and cash cows for shareholders. The clever bits of the early web, pieced together with html, modems, and a little nerve, have become marketplaces with every move tracked, every visit monetised.
He points at Amazon and Instagram to illustrate how services started user-friendly then switched. Lock-in, algorithmic feeds, and rent-seeking behaviours are everywhere. Anyone running a personal website or still clinging to actual RSS feeds will feel the resonance here. Doctorow’s argument, blunt as ever, is that users need to reclaim and rebuild. Sometimes you have to unplug or at least change your default browser.
Will the old web wildness ever return, or is it vintage tech on a shelf now?
From the Wayback Machine
On This Day: 1974 – TCP Specification Published
Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn published “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” in May 1974, introducing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP’s design enabled different networks and computers to talk to each other in packets. This break from proprietary network silos made global interconnection possible, paving the way for today’s internet. The first implementations ran on ARPANET, then spread rapidly, empowering homebrew experimenters and professional engineers alike. If your old modem ever talked to something it shouldn’t, thank TCP.
Today’s Big Question
Tech Brief 25 November 2025 leaves a simple dilemma: are we caretakers of the future, or just tourists in someone else’s digital empire? The call to reclaim, rewire, and question remains as pressing as it did in any 8-bit bedroom workspace.
keep tinkering, keep questioning, and always have a screwdriver within reach (even if you only use it for the biscuit tin).
Missed yesterday’s Tech Brief? Catch up here
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