In 2013, soon after joining NYU Sydney to teach Global Media as a founding instructor, Sacha Molitorisz began his PhD in media and philosophy. Last week he signed a publishing deal with New South Press to turn the now-completed PhD into a book

“The provisional title is Panopticon 2.0,” says Sacha, who has been teaching Global Media since 2012, when he put a full stop on his career as a newspaper journalist. “It’s about the ethics of internet privacy, and basically it applies Kantian theory to the internet.

“The idea, taken from Kant’s categorical imperative, is that people should never be used ‘merely as a means’. It took me about 100,000 words to apply that single phrase to internet privacy. And the good news is that an ethical principle from 1785 turns out to be a really good fit for a medium invented nearly 200 years later.”

The publication date is pencilled in for February 2019, and New South Press will seek an academic co-publisher for a US release.

“I’m thrilled New South Press are publishing. They straddle that middle ground between academia and the mainstream. That really suits my approach. Now that I’ve shifted from journalism to academia, I’d like to blend the best of both: the accessibility of journalism with the substance and rigour of academia.

“Actually, I think that sums up the NYU Sydney approach too. Everyone makes an effort to be both approachable and substantial. And it turned out to be a really good place to teach while I was wrestling with Kant and privacy.”

This post comes to us from Mark Eels, Operations & Communications Coordinator at NYU Sydney