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    Category: Political Economy

    • Marx explains how AI systems exploit workers (Part 1)

      By Gordon Hull “Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (Marx, Capital I [Penguin Ed.], 548). A recent piece by Josh Dzieza in the Verge about…

    • On the Political Economy of Social Media: Dispossession of the Other

      By Gordon Hull   The Washington Post has a disturbing story about how “lies become truth in online America.”  It narrates the story of two individuals.  One spends his time in Maine, dishing out deliberately fake news stories designed to troll those on the right by saying completely absurd things and then watching them blindly…

    • Facebook and the Dispossession of Preferences

      By Gordon Hull A little more than a year ago, I floated a version of the thesis that Big Data functions as a form of capitalist accumulation by dispossession.  “Accumulation by Dispossession” is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” and the basic idea is that capital has to extract value from individuals…

    • Hostile Information Architecture

      By Gordon Hull Surprise! Facebook is back in the news and the doghouse, this time for allowing vast amounts of user data to find its way to Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to try to elect Donald Trump.  The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.  I’ll review why that is first, then offer…

    • Net Neutrality, Bears Ears and Primitive Accumulation

      By Gordon Hull Ajit Pai is the Marie Antoinette of the Trump Administration.  How else can you explain his decision to do a little skit last week, in which he pretends that his chairmanship of the FCC is a part of a plot by his former employer, Verizon, to ensure full regulatory capture of the…

    • Foucault and Marx: on Subjectification and Exhaustion

      By Gordon Hull I have been circling around the relation between Marx and Foucault for a while, and thinking in  particular about the ways that they can be viewed as productively engaged, particularly at the intersection of primitive accumulation and subjectification (e.g., here, here and here)  This of course flies in the face of Foucault’s…

    • More self-promotion: “Toward a critical theory of corporate wellness”

      By Gordon Hull Frank Pasquale and I have a new paper forthcoming in Biosocieties, "Toward a critical theory of corporate wellness."  Here is the abstract: In the U.S., “employee wellness” programs are increasingly attached to employer-provided health insurance.  These programs attempt to nudge employees, sometimes quite forcefully, into healthy behaviors such as smoking cessation and…

    • 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…

    • Fairness vs. Welfare: What if people like fairness?

      I’m currently teaching an ethics and public policy course, and for this week we read Kaplow and Shavell’s Fairness vs. Welfare (actually, we read the first 70 pages of the NBER paper that became the much bigger book). Their central claim is that to pick fairness as the dominant principle in policy-making is by definition…

    • Why the Politics of Internet Flags Matters

      By Gordon Hull We don’t access the internet directly – it’s always through some sort of intermediary software.  For that reason, it matters – a lot – what the intermediary does, and what kind of interactivity it promotes.  Concern about this dates at least to a 1996 (published finally in 2000) paper by Lucas Introna…