#AI#Algorithms#DSA#OSA#AlgorithmicAudits#Law#PoliticalEconomy: "Accepted in the Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. For almost a decade now, scholarship in and beyond the ACM FAccT community has been focusing on novel and innovative ways and methodologies to audit the functioning of algorithmic systems. Over the years, this research idea and technical project has matured enough to become a regulatory mandate. Today, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Online Safety Act (OSA) have established the framework within which technology corporations and (traditional) auditors will develop the ‘practice’ of algorithmic auditing thereby presaging how this ‘ecosystem’ will develop. In this paper, we systematically review the auditing provisions in the DSA and the OSA in light of observations from the emerging industry of algorithmic auditing. Who is likely to occupy this space? What are some political and ethical tensions that are likely to arise? How are the mandates of ‘independent auditing’ or ‘the evaluation of the societal context of an algorithmic function’ likely to play out in practice? By shaping the picture of the emerging political economy of algorithmic auditing, we draw attention to strategies and cultures of traditional auditors that risk eroding important regulatory pillars of the DSA and the OSA. Importantly, we warn that ambitious research ideas and technical projects of/for algorithmic auditing may end up crashed by the standardising grip of traditional auditors and/or diluted within a complex web of (sub-)contractual arrangements, diverse portfolios, and tight timelines."
#Neoliberalism#Economy#PoliticalEconomy#Freedom: "As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.
Adopting this framework in “The Road to Freedom,” Stiglitz reserves his harshest criticisms for the free-market economists, conservative politicians, and business lobbying groups, who, over the past couple of generations, have used arguments about expanding freedom to promote policies that have benefitted rich and powerful interests at the expense of society at large. These policies have included giving tax cuts to wealthy individuals and big corporations, cutting social programs, starving public projects of investment, and liberating industrial and financial corporations from regulatory oversight. Among the ills that have resulted from this conservative agenda, Stiglitz identifies soaring inequality, environmental degradation, the entrenchment of corporate monopolies, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of dangerous right-wing populists like Donald Trump. These baleful outcomes weren’t ordained by any laws of nature or laws of economics, he says. Rather, they were “a matter of choice, a result of the rules and regulations that had governed our economy. They had been shaped by decades of neoliberalism, and it was neoliberalism that was at fault.”"
#ML#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#FoundationModels#PoliticalEconomy: "A recent innovation in the field of machine learning has been the creation of very large pre-trained models, also referred to as ‘foundation models’, that draw on much larger and broader sets of data than typical deep learning systems and can be applied to a wide variety of tasks. Underpinning text-based systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and image generators such as Midjourney, these models have received extraordinary amounts of public attention, in part due to their reliance on prompting as the main technique to direct and apply them. This paper thus uses prompting as an entry point into the critical study of foundation models and their implications. The paper proceeds as follows: In the first section, we introduce foundation models in more detail, outline some of the main critiques, and present our general approach. We then discuss prompting as an algorithmic technique, show how it makes foundation models programmable, and explain how it enables different audiences to use these models as (computational) platforms. In the third section, we link the material properties of the technologies under scrutiny to questions of political economy, discussing, in turn, deep user interactions, reordered cost structures, and centralization and lock-in. We conclude by arguing that foundation models and prompting further strengthen Big Tech's dominance over the field of computing and, through their broad applicability, many other economic sectors, challenging our capacities for critical appraisal and regulatory response." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20539517241247839
#Marx#Marxism#CriticalTheory#PoliticalEconomy#Capitalism: "Ultimately, Bonefeld masterfully interweaves the best of critical theory, placing the critique of the capitalist form of wealth at its heart. In doing so, he has succeeded in producing a book that is sure to illuminate and provoke in equal measure. Some readers may be left despairing having had their hopes shattered. Such an outcome, though, may not be so bad. Bonefeld’s critical theory, much like Adorno’s, does not shy away from despair. The power of critical theory in its despairing mode lies in its evocation of the necessity for another world. One must recognise just how bad things are to pull the handbrake. Perhaps here we should invert the oft-quoted Raymond Williams’ line. To be truly radical is to make despair possible rather than false hopes convincing. In this, Bonefeld has surely succeeded." https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21476_a-critical-theory-of-economic-compulsion-wealth-suffering-negation-by-werner-bonefeld-reviewed-by-ross-sparkes/
#Surveillance#PoliticalEconomy#AI#SyntheticData: "Surveillance of human subjects is how data-intensive companies obtain much of their data, yet surveillance increasingly meets with social and regulatory resistance. Data-intensive companies are thus seeking other ways to meet their data needs. This article explores one of these: the creation of synthetic data, or data produced artificially as an alternative to real-world data. I show that capital is already heavily invested in synthetic data. I argue that its appeal goes beyond circumventing surveillance to accord with a structural tendency within capitalism toward the autonomization of the circuit of capital. By severing data from human subjectivity, synthetic data contributes to the automation of the production of automation technologies like machine learning. A shift from surveillance to synthesis, I argue, has epistemological, ontological, and political economic consequences for a society increasingly structured around data-intensive capital." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448221099217
#Capitalism#Markets#PoliticalEconomy#ClimateChange#GlobalWarming: "Capitalism in this nakedly ‘antimarket’ form is beyond justification. At various points since the global financial crisis, leaders on the political left have attempted to point this out. Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders used their respective platforms to name and denounce a system that extracts without promising anything in return. Ed Miliband hung his 2011 Labour Party Conference speech on a Braudelian distinction between economic ‘predators’ and ‘producers’, which proved too much for Britain’s predator-aligned newspapers, and too nuanced to survive very long in the Westminster hubbub. He remains the last outpost of this kind of critical thinking in the shadow cabinet (following Starmer’s U-turn on his £28 billion a year decarbonisation spending commitment, a Conservative Party website led with the taunt ‘Where’s Ed?’), and the one front-bench politician who is receptive to analyses such as Christophers’s, which continue to be funnelled in his direction by the post-Corbynite think tank Common Wealth.
One curiosity of this critique is how much it owes to Keynes, and how little to Marx. It is precisely the lack of industrial exploitation of labour, and the absence of technological innovation, that are considered the central defects of contemporary capitalism. Instead, capitalism appears dominated by financial expertise, which floods and reconfigures everything from housebuilding to universities, public infrastructure investment to healthcare. The productive economy stagnates, while profits are wrung out of every available social and public utility by alliances of elite legal and financial services firms, sweating assets and expanding property rights. Liberal economists and pundits have latched on to the idea that Western capitalism is beset by ‘secular stagnation’, but Christophers goes further in setting out the way capitalism still manages to thrive..." https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/william-davies/antimarket
#ISDS#PoliticalEconomy#Capitalism#Neoliberalism#Globalization: "ISDS settlements are truly grotesque: they're not just a matter of buying out existing investments made by foreign companies and refunding them money spent on them. ISDS tribunals routinely order governments to pay foreign corporations all the profits they might have made from those investments.
(...)
Governments, both left and right, grew steadily more outraged that ISDSes tied the hands of democratically elected lawmakers and subordinated their national sovereignty to corporate sovereignty. By 2023, nine EU countries were ready to pull out of the ECT.
But the ECT had another trick up its sleeve: a 20-year "sunset" clause that bound countries to go on enforcing the ECT's provisions – including ISDS rulings – for two decades after pulling out of the treaty. This prompted European governments to hit on the strategy of a simultaneous, mass withdrawal from the ECT, which would prevent companies registered in any of the ex-ECT countries from suing under the ECT.
It will not surprise you to learn that the UK did not join this pan-European coalition to wriggle out of the ECT. On the one hand, there's the Tories' commitment to markets above all else (as the Trashfuture podcast often points out, the UK government is the only neoliberal state so committed to austerity that it's actually dismantling its own police force). On the other hand, there's Rishi Sunak's planet-immolating promise to "max out North Sea oil."
But as the rest of the world transitions to renewables, different blocs in the UK – from unions to Tory MPs – are realizing that the country's membership in ECT and its fossil fuel commitment is going to make it a world leader in an increasingly irrelevant boondoggle – and so now the UK is also planning to pull out of the ECT."
#PEC#PoliticalEconomy#MediaStudies: "Vincent Mosco (1948-2024) grounded and advanced the approach of the Political Economy of Communication (PEC). This paper discusses some aspects of his Critical-Humanist approach to the Political Economy of Communication. It engages with the foundations of Vincent Mosco’s thought; the roles that labour and communication play in it; his focus on Karl Marx and Marxian scholarship, culture, ideology critique, the digital sublime, democracy, the media, and the public good. Vincent Mosco’s life and work will be remembered. His approach will shape future generations of activist-scholars."
The United States remains the top destination for top-tier AI talent to work. Within US institutions, researchers of American and Chinese origin (based on undergraduate degrees) comprise 75% of the top-tier AI talent, up from 58% in 2019. Moreover, the United States remains far and away the leading destination for the world’s most elite AI talent (top ~2%) and remains home to 60% of top AI institutions.
Beyond the United States and China, the United Kingdom and South Korea, along with continental Europe, have slightly raised their game as destinations for top AI researchers to work. When it comes to AI researcher origin (based on undergraduate degrees), India and Canada have seen relative declines.
Meanwhile, China has expanded its domestic AI talent pool over the last few years to meet the demands of its own growing AI industry. Because China produces a sizable portion of the world’s top AI researchers—rising from 29% in 2019 to 47% in 2022—it is no surprise that more Chinese talent are working in domestic industry"
In July, when Clare Lombardelli joins the BoE #interestrates setting group, the MPC, it will for the first time become majority #female... there is a long tradition in critical political economy, arguing that women can & would do #economics differently, so now we may have a real world experiment to see if that is really the case.... after all they can now outvote the men on interest rates.
#Property#Philosophy#GermanIdealism#PoliticalEconomy#PoliticalPhilosophy: "This book provides a detailed account of the role of property in German Idealism. It puts the concept of property in the center of the philosophical systems of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel and shows how property remains tied to their conceptions of freedom, right, and recognition.
The book begins with a critical genealogy of the concept of property in modern legal philosophy, followed by a reconstruction of the theory of property in Kant’s Doctrine of Right, Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right, and Hegel’s Jena Realphilosophie. By turning to the tradition of German Rechtsphilosophie as opposed to the more standard libertarian and utilitarian frameworks of property, it explores the metaphysical, normative, political, and material questions that make property intelligible as a social relation. The book formulates a normative theory of property rooted in practical reason, mutual recognition, and social freedom. This relational theory of property, inspired by German Idealism, brings a fresh angle to contemporary property theory. Additionally, it provides crucial philosophical background to 19th-century debates on private property, inequality, labor, socialism, capitalism, and the state.
The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in 19th-century German philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, political theory, and political economy."
Two Interdisciplinary PhD positions @ Young Academy Groningen 2024 for the project "Academia in a bind: Data surveillance practices in scholarly publishing."
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Why Nations Fail *answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?
#SuperApps#PoliticalEconomy#Conglomeration#DigitalEconomy: "‘Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’, showcasing different patterns and dynamics of conglomeration: ‘Swiss-Army Knife’ apps that consolidate services in one app, ‘Family’ apps that expand through subsidiaries, and ‘Host’ and ‘Hub’-style apps that leverage external developers. This typology offers a comprehensive understanding of the conglomeration patterns underpinning the rise of super apps, involving corporate, development and international expansion strategies. Ultimately, super-appification represents an intensified form of ‘appification’, as these apps increasingly pervade and commodify various aspects of everyday life, such as payment, insurance, grocery delivery, mobility and travel, with significant sociopolitical implications."
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#BigTech#Language#Politics#PoliticalEconomy: "...[D]ecisions about the social vision that language models articulate are in the hands of a few companies that are not subject to democratic control and are accountable to no one but their shareholders. They thus become, to misappropriate a term by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, “private government.”
Their product is the main resource that makes for a vital democracy: the language to negotiate political alternatives at the only level where this is possible – the political public sphere. Instead of debating what kind of world we want to live in, that decision is already made even before a single word has been exchanged, because the language at one’s disposal has itself already been subjected to a preliminary political decision."
The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States
At the intersection of the warmth of hearth and home and the dangers of the street lies the tenuous position of women engaged in reproductive labour, those involved in the sex trade and those in domestic positions.
#InternetGovernance#InternetStandards#PoliticalEconomy#Decentralization#OpenWeb: "Standards development is one of those esoteric, hugely important activities that almost no one knows anything about. Good standards are key to an open, free internet, and as governments around the world grapple with Big Tech monopolies, their plans often include a block that basically reads "insert good standard here."
As exciting as the EU's Digital Markets Act and US proposals like the ACCESS Act are, the "insert good standard here" stuff is wildly underspecified and undertheorized. Making a good standard – one that is robust, flexible and secure – is hard enough even under competitive competitions where the SDO can play independent referee, more powerful than the participants. But making good standards under monopolistic conditions is really hard.
And yet, it happens! Look at the Fediverse, powered by Mastodon and its adaptation of a W3C standard called ActivityPub. The Fediverse has done more for an interoperable, decentralized web than all the other projects of the past decade combined:"
📖 Ricardo Noronha published a paper on the political economy of the Portuguese Revolution, where he analyses “the plans and strategies devised to ensure a socialist transition in the semiperiphery of the capitalist world-system during the 1970s.”
Tomorrow, I will play around with the notion of stand-ins, a project that might become my habilitation and a book. But I still feel it's a risky bet. Well, let's see. 👇
> I will draw on multi-sited ethnographic research to explore what it means to stay in limbo or move forward to becoming more or less relevant in global economies, amid energy transitions.
#Internet#Infrastructure#Geopolitics#PoliticalEconomy: "Rather than, or perhaps in addition to, concerns rooted in data collection and predicting behavior, we should focus on making internet infrastructure providers further visible as a central force of political power. To do so, I edited a book called Eaten by the Internet published by Meatspace Press. This book focuses on the internet and how the companies providing its technical backbone are transforming our world, from the bottom up. The book includes fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. These include the President of the Signal Foundation Meredith Whittaker, renowned misinformation scholar Joan Donovan, legal scholar Jenna Ruddock, digital rights and EU policy expert Michael Veale, and the founders of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam–Niels ten Oever, Maxigas, and Fieke Jansen, and Oxford University’s expert of interstellar internet politics Yung Au—to name a few.
The authors carefully articulate the changing politics, and political economy, of internet infrastructure. In doing so, they are building on, and beyond, pioneering academic work in this field. This book considers how market power in the tech sector is rebuilding around the internet’s material infrastructure. Emphasizing the theme of continuity, Suzanne van Geuns draws a connection between the present-day ‘pipelines’ of internet infrastructure and the online forums that employ them for propagating hate, and the longstanding infrastructure associated with American imperialism in Asia. Indian technologist Gurshabad Grover, in their chapter, contends that there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of the contemporary and emerging infrastructural mechanisms of government control in Asia, as a means of resistance." https://techpolicy.press/eaten-by-the-internet-putting-internet-infrastructure-power-on-your-radar/