Category: Neoliberalism
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By Gordon Hull As one knows, online privacy policies (and access to the Internet in general) are generally conditioned on a user’s acceptance of some sort of boilerplate terms of service. Lots of people (myself included) have complained about this state of affairs as attempting to get users to consent to all sorts of practices…
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I'm very pleased to announce that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, is now out in print/electronically on Cambridge UP. Here's a blurb: "Intellectual property is power, but what kind of power is it, and what does it do? Building on the work of Michel Foucault, this study examines different ways of understanding…
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Per an investigative report in the Washington Post, growing numbers of colleges are using cookies and other website tracking devices to profile potential students and selectively recruit, including sometimes by income level (there’s a long discussion of how Mississippi State appears to be doing this). And of course they do so by spending lots of…
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By Gordon Hull Surely one of the more striking features of the rise of data science is how readily it can be incorporated into processes of capitalist valuation, to the point that data may not just be a commodity – it may also be capital. At one level, this sounds intuitive enough: one might suggest…
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By Gordon Hull In a new paper in Big Data and Society, Jathan Sadowski argues for a shift in how we conceive data. Typically, it’s viewed as a commodity. Better, Sadowski argues, to view it as capital. Following Marx (who offers a basic formula for capital) and Bourdieu (who extends it to cultural and social…
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If you're raising kids now, this won't surprise you. But it's still depressing. Basically, the more income inequality a country has, the more intensive parenting is – the more kids are taught that "hard work" is important, and the less that they are taught that "imagination" is. This holds true between countries (the U.S. and…
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By Gordon Hull In Sleights of Reason, Mary Beth Mader makes the point that there is an ontological distinction between the members of a normalized “population” and the individuals they represent. Mader is talking about statistics and bell curves; as she summarizes the part of her argument that’s relevant here, “statistical social measurement is ontologically…
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By Gordon Hull It’s not news that Facebook generates a lot of privacy concerns. But it’s nonetheless worth keeping up a little, just to indicate how seriously we need to be concerned about the connection between Facebook and data analytics. We’ve known for a while that automated analysis of Facebook likes can predict basic personality…
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By Gordon Hull I mean the title of this post literally. A recent study that surveyed global neurological disease incidence concluded that neurological disorders now are the leading global cause of disability, and that their rates are rapidly rising. A substantial portion of this is due to increasing rates of Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s and other…
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