Is the world being taken over by bigoted algorithms? Pasquale cites a 2013 study, “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery,” in which Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney found that black-identified names (including her own) frequently generated Google ads like “Lakisha Simmons, Arrested?” while white-identified names did not. More on Frank Pasquale’s ‘Black Box Society’ here.
At foreignpolicy.com, Charlie Stross considers generations, loyalty, work and surveillance: Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than their great-grandparents’ post-Westphalian nation-state. The machineries of the…
In his ‘Theory of Economic Development’ (1911), Joseph Schumpeter notes the importance of innovation and the role of the entrepreneur in economic growth. Specifically, the importance of carrying out ‘new combinations’ is emphasised, yet whilst the innovative entrepreneur has a creative role here, Schumpeter notes in later work that, I have always emphasized that the…
As the riff from ‘Celebrity Skin’ starts up after Courtney Love shocks the establishment prudes in her recent e-cigarette commercial, thoughts naturally turn to some other work from the late 1990s – Thomas Frank’s ‘Commodify Your Dissent’: Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival,…
At thetangential.com, Jay Gabler responds to the recent n+1 editorial ‘Too Much Sociology’: …sociology has provided many explanations for the rise of sociology, among them Émile Durkheim’s theory of functional differentiation and Max Weber’s theory of rationalization. Durkheim and Weber both predicted that as a society, we would increasingly come to see ourselves in rational—that…
Over at normblog, Norman Geras and Mark Harvey question Marx’s theories regarding where value arises within capitalist systems: Labour-power, cornerstone of his theory of value and exploitation, is not amenable to being described or theorized by reference to some standard, universalizable labouring-situation, which might then be captured in a mathematically expressible schema. For there is…
Richard Florida strongly reasserts commitment to his ideas about a ‘creative class’ after Joel Kotkin’s assessment that “the experiment appears to have failed” : As in all economic transformations, the invisible hand of the market can only take us so far. The rest is up to us. This is not a time to complain about…
A detailed blog post on the philosophy of Ayn Rand at the Rotman Institute: For many on the left, the sub-prime meltdown, financial crisis, and ongoing recession are proof positive that the laissez-faire, deregulatory approach is dead in the water. Rand’s followers have drawn the opposite conclusion: the crisis is the result of too much…
In his seminal ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin writes: To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes…
In 1899, Thorstein Veblen wrote ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions’, Chapter 7 of which was entitled ‘Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture’ and contained the following text: …Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only be expensive, but it should also make…