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"Economists, for obvious reasons, can’t be completely oblivious to the role of banks, but they have spent much of the twentieth century arguing about what actually happens when someone applies for a loan. One school insists that banks transfer existing funds from their reserves, another that they produce new money,
The one thing it never seemed to occur to anyone to do was to get a job at a bank, and find out what actually happens when someone asks to borrow money. In 2014 a German economist named Richard Werner did exactly that, and discovered that, in fact, loan officers ...Read More
Rachel Rabbit White interview with Sophia Giovannitti for the Brooklyn Rail.
Porn Carnival is Rachel’s first full-length book of poetry, an expansive meditation on both the exhaustion of selling erotic labor under capitalism, and the joyful possibilities of world-building outside of the confines of heteronormative society. She engages with the trap of proximity to money, when access to that money is ...Read More
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Editorial by one of the two scientists who first discovered that CRISPR could be used for genome editing.
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The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising
Jesse Frederik, Maurits Martijn • thecorrespondent.com ↗︎
In 2018, 273$B was burned on digital ads... due to magical thinking.
In this interview, editor Nora Khan spoke to media theorist Fred Turner about the tech industry’s frontier puritanism, the myth of “neutrality,” and the idealist art on Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. Here are excerpts:
"But something has changed since then: Individualism and attention to identity are sources of elite power right now. Facebook’s mission is entirely consonant with identity politics. It precisely helped people break apart identities and become even more factional in identity. They give clear terms for this expression, they just market ...Read More
It seems clear that what we have come to think of as “late capitalism” — that is, not just the economic system, but all its attendant inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities — has become hostile to reproduction. Around the world, economic, social and environmental conditions function as a diffuse, barely ...Read More
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"The platforms on which much of this disinformation is being spread are not owned by Kenyans, are not controlled by Kenyans. So what does accountability for political misinformation look like when a British company uses an American platform to influence political discourse in a Kenyan election, [and] that results in ...Read More
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"On 10 December 2013, four shipping containers arrived at the headquarters of the nonprofit Internet Archive in Richmond, California. They had travelled by truck from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, carrying a cargo of historical treasure on its way to be digitized: over 70,000 VHS and Betamax video cassettes, containing 400,000 hours of
The collection was the life’s work of Marion Stokes, an activist and television producer who had died almost a year to the day earlier, at 83. ‘She was obsessed with the mediation of media,’ said her son, Michael Metelits. His mother wanted to track how news stories changed as they ...Read More
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The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
Jonathan Haidt, Tobias Rose-Stockwell • theatlantic.com ↗︎
Not sure about the bandaid solutions provided in this article. Hiding likes may obfuscate our attraction to outrage but it doesn’t do anything to undermine the attention metrics that these platforms run on. As long as info is personalized and promoted according to what the algorithm thinks we are most ...Read More
‘We never surrender’: inside a Hong Kong campus occupation
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From the AI community: A panorama of AI/ML applications in green-tech, it's dense, interactive summary at: https://www.climatechange.ai/summaries
Contains a nice impact-taxonomy for green-tech solutionism: ...Read More
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"When Morales started working for Ecuador, he was a small contractor with big ambitions. It was precisely the presence of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy that offered him the chance to develop his business. Witnesses reconstructed how Morales put himself at the service of American intelligence to spy on
...Read More
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Freelance workers, known informally as turkers, race to grab and do the tasks, providing what Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, once called “artificial artificial intelligence.”
"Most tasks pay a dime or less, and there is a daily churn of tasks that pay only a penny. ...Read More
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"The 2020s are set to be a decade of dramatic economic and social upheaval, reversing many of the trends of the past 40 years, according to one of the world's largest banks.
Key points: ...Read More
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"A decade ago, South Dakotan trust companies held $57.3bn in assets. By the end of 2020, that total will have risen to $355.2bn. Those hundreds of billions of dollars are being regulated by a state with a population smaller than Norfolk, a part-time legislature heavily lobbied by trust lawyers, and
At the heart of South Dakota’s business success is a crucial but overlooked fact: globalisation is incomplete. In our modern financial system, money travels where its owners like, but laws are still made at a local level. So money inevitably flows to the places where governments offer the lowest taxes ...Read More