Political Economy of Technology – LPE Project

The Role of Technology in Political Economy: Part 3

Kate Redburn — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 13:17:33 +0000

In the prior two posts in this set I described how the leading mainstream economic explanation of rising inequality and its primary critique treat technology. Here, what I’ll try to do is synthesize out of the work of many of us in the field an understanding of a political economy of technology that gives technology a meaningful role in the dynamic, but integrates it with institutions and ideology such that it becomes an appropriate site of struggle over the pattern of social relations, rather than either a distraction or a source of legitimation.

The Role of Technology in Political Economy: Part 2

Kate Redburn — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 13:11:34 +0000

Yesterday, I outlined the ways in which the dominant “skills-biased technical change” and “winner-take-all economics” explanations of inequality share an idealized view of both markets and technology as natural and necessary. Today I’ll write about the most influential criticism of these dominant stories that have been developed by labor economists. These focus on the central role that institutional choices played in shaping bargaining power, and through it, the ability of the managerial class and shareholders to cause stagnating wages for the median worker and the great extraction by the 1%.

The Role of Technology in Political Economy: Part 1

Kate Redburn — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 13:03:02 +0000

If we think that that platforms and robots, ubiquitous sensors and algorithms do exert a real influence on the pattern of social relations that make up the economy, but we doubt that technology causes inequality by a “natural” process driven by its own intrinsic affordances and constraints interacting with markets, then we owe ourselves a clearer story than we have given to this point. In today’s post, I’ll describe the limits of the mainstream economists’ answer, which lies at the foundation of “the robots will take all the jobs” and the legitimation of winner-take-all markets.

Accountability for the Internet of Torts

Kate Redburn — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 08:44:50 +0000

The concept of ultrahazardous activities, the creation of no-fault workers’ compensation and motor vehicle insurance, and the rise of mass tort litigation can all be partially traced to underlying technological changes and accompanying social shifts. In this post, I will use prior tort law revolutions as a springboard to discuss how new products liability law and fiduciary duties could be used to rectify this new power imbalance and ensure that IoT companies are held accountable for the harms they foreseeably cause.

Introducing the Internet of Torts

Kate Redburn — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 11:41:06 +0000

Once upon a time, missing a payment on your leased car would be the first of a multi-step negotiation between you and a car dealership, bounded by contract law and consumer protection rules, mediated and ultimately enforced by the government. You might have to pay a late fee, or negotiate a loan deferment, but usually a company would not repossess your car until after two or even three consecutive skipped payments. Today, however, car companies are using starter interrupt devices to remotely “boot” cars just days after a payment is missed. In this post I’ll elaborate on how IoT devices empower companies at the expense of consumers and how extant law shields industry from liability.

Worker Surveillance and Class Power

Kate Redburn — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 11:30:27 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the political economy of technology. Read the entire series here. *** Companies around the world are dreaming up a new generation of technologies designed to monitor their workers—from Amazon’s new employee wristbands, to Uber’s recording whether its drivers are holding their phones rather than mounting them, to “Worksmart,” a new productivity tool that takes...

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The Political Economy of Freedom of Speech in the Second Gilded Age

Kate Redburn — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 12:39:11 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the political economy of technology. Read the entire series here. *** We are now well into America’s Second Gilded Age. The First Gilded Age was the era of industrial capitalism that begins in the 1870s and 1880s and continued through the first years of the 20th century, ultimately giving way to the reforms of the Progressive Era. The First Gilded Age produced...

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Rule-Making as Structural Violence: From a Taxi to Uber Economy in San Francisco

Kate Redburn — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:41:42 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the political economy of technology. Read the entire series here. *** Between 2012 and 2014, California regulators made critical decisions that ultimately restructured political economies of mobility around the world. In municipal and then state regulatory bodies, policy-makers refused to enforce existing taxi laws and regulations against so-called “ridesharing”...

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Data Nationalization in the Shadow of Social Credit Systems

Kate Redburn — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 13:00:58 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the Political Economy of Technology Read the rest of the posts here. The political economy of digitization is a fraught topic. Scholars and policymakers have disputed the relative merits of centralization and decentralization. Do we want to encourage massive firms to become even bigger, so they can accelerate AI via increasingly comprehensive data collection...

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Artificial Sovereigns: A Quasi-Constitutional Moment for Tech?

Kate Redburn — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 10:00:59 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the Political Economy of Technology Read the rest of the posts here. Consider the following developments: There has been a growing sense of concern about the twin crises of twenty-first-century democracy on the one hand and of the growing problems of inequality and insecurity on the other. Technological change is at the heart of both of these transformations.

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