Political Economy, Political Technology – LPE Project

An Algorithmic Bon Marché? Platform Governance in Urban Spaces

Sam Aber — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The last few decades have been characterized by the return of market fundamentalism: the belief that society can and should be organized through the institutional mechanism of “self-regulating markets.” Many expected that the 2008 financial crisis might constitute a blow to pervasive market expansion and a check on global dominance of private corporations. Not so. Instead, it may have entailed a...

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Law, Metrics, and the Scholarly Economy

Sam Aber — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

As markets began to usurp other forms of social regulation throughout the 20th century, metrics became increasingly central to the coordination of new spheres of market-mediated relations. More recently, digital metrics have been operationalized to facilitate the platformization of those domains. Platforms use automated scoring systems to rank content and actors across the markets they mediate. Search engines, e-commerce sites, and social media feeds all have ways to rank material and deliver it to users according to their calculation of “relevance.” This post explores metrics and gatekeeper power through the Google Scholar platform and its intermediation of the “scholarly economy”—the domain in which research is produced, consumed, bought and sold.

Algorithmic Imaginaries: The Political Limits of Legal and Computational Reasoning

Sam Aber — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

The United States is home to overlapping crises of social, economic, and political inequality. As debates about how to promote a more egalitarian society have become increasingly salient, one approach that has gained traction is to inform socially consequential policy decisions using algorithms—in particular, machine learning systems that infer patterns from historical data to make predictions...

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Ferment is Abroad: Techlash, Legal Institutions, and the Limits of Lawfulness

Sam Aber — Tue, 20 Apr 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Technological and legal institutions are facing twin moments of reckoning. On the one hand, we have the “techlash.” Over the past several years, enthusiasm for Silicon Valley’s California Ideology as a source of hope and vigor for the Western capitalist imaginary has begun to fade. No longer does the tech industry enjoy unquestioned goodwill and enthusiastic popular support for their narratives of...

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