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    Category: Big Data

    • Did Big Data Create President Trump?

      One of the more perplexing things about the Trump presidency is why it exists in the first place: he took office having lost the popular vote by a wide margin, and with one of the smaller electoral college margins in memory.  The win also defied virtually all of the pre-election polling and commentary: almost no…

    • Shameless Self-Promotion Dept: Papers on Foucault, and on Spinoza

      I've just uploaded a (relatively minor) revision of my SPEP paper from this fall in Salt Lake City to SSRN.  The paper is ""Confessing Preferences: What Foucault’s Government of the Living can tell us about Neoliberalism and Big Data," and the abstract is: Foucault’s 1979-80 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living,…

    • The Internet of Nature

      Big Data theorists have, for a while, been warily eyeing the growth of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which is when “smart” technology is integrated into ordinary household devices like refrigerators and toasters.  New fridges all have warning lights that remind you to change the water filter; IoT fridges will order the new filter for…

    • Big Data, Commodification and Original Accumulation

      In an interesting new piece, Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan and Dillonn Mahmoudi propose that big data functions in the context of capital as “accumulation by dispossession,” which is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” the process by which capital adds to its wealth by taking goods from others and adding them to…

    • Foucault, Descartes and Monastic Subjectivity

      By Gordon Hull We’ve known for a while, thanks to work by scholars such as Stephen Menn, that Descartes was in many ways a deeply religious and conservative thinker, one who took great care to try to align his work with Church doctrine, and who engaged scholastic thought with a good deal more precision than…

    • The Offensive Stupidity Of The No-Fly List

      By: Samir Chopra Last Friday (July 31st) my wife, my daughter, and I were to fly back from Vancouver to New York City after our vacation in Canada's Jasper and Banff National Parks. On arrival at Vancouver Airport, we began the usual check-in, got groped in security, and filled out customs forms. The US conducts all customs and passport…

    • Facebook and the Ideology of Big Data Neutrality

      It must be summer: Facebook has released a controversial study of its users.  Last year, it was the demonstration that the emotional contagion effect did not require direct contact, and could in fact spread across social networks without direct, face-to-face contact (the controversy wasn’t in the result, it was in the fact that FB did…

    • Big Data and the Hyper-Reserve Army

      By Gordon Hull At the end of my time in high school, I worked part-time bagging groceries.  There was some modest union influence on the job, and its scheduling was pretty predictable: the longer you’d been there, the better schedule you’d get.  Your first few weeks, you knew you’d be working late into the evening,…

    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad…

    • Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

      by Gordon Hull Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online – poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s…