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    Category: Political Economy

    • Waiting on Ferguson

      by Leigh M. Johnson We continue awaiting the decision of a grand jury on whether or not to indict Darren Wilson, a white police officer, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, exactly 15 weeks ago today on a suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri. News reporters from across the globe have been camped…

    • The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way to “Take Up Arms”

      As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I've nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…

    • Join, or Die: Neoliberalism, Epistemontology, Social Harmony and the (Invisible) Invisible Hand

      There's been a good bit conversation recently about the merits and demerits of "public philosophy" and, as someone who considers herself committed to public philosophy (whatever that is). I'm always happy to stumble across a piece of remarkably insightful philosophical work in the public realm.  Case in point:  Robin James (Philosophy, UNC-Charlotte) posted a really…

    • Yo, Baudrillard and Rockets

      “Yo” Is an App that doesn’t let you do much: it just lets you send or receive a “Yo” message to/from another subscriber.  Purists might insist on this being content, but it really is pretty de minimis,  which lets you ask the obvious question: why on earth would a communication technology that doesn’t really let…

    • Hobby Lobby at SCOTUS today

      The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, in which the craft store chain is suing for exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate.  According to Hobby Lobby, it has religious objections to certain forms of contraception, and so should be exempt from the mandate on First Amendment grounds.  According…

    • Bad Economics/Economists: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

      My friend Alan Nelson recently posted a link on facebook to the following article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/business/economic-view-when-the-scientist-is-also-a-philosopher.html with an appropriately snarky note that the author, N. Gregory Mankiw (the Chair of the econ department at Harvard, natch), seemed to be arguing that the only changes to the status quo permissible are those that are verifiably Perato efficient…

    • Commonalities: A review of Jeremy Gilbert’s Common Ground

      Full disclosure: I met Jeremy Gilbert at a Deleuze conference in Wales in the summer of 2008. He gave an interesting paper on Deleuze, Guattari, and Gramsci and I ended up talking to him at pub. The conversation was one of shared interests that went beyond Deleuze, it was a Deleuze conference after all, to…

    • Privacy and Big Data III: When Security beats Privacy

      In a second court ruling on the NSA’s metadata collection program, Judge Pauley rejected virtually all of the arguments raised by the ACLU and other plaintiffs against the program.  This opinion thus stands opposed to Judge Leon’s ruling of a few weeks before (my analysis of that is here).  Here I want to look at…

    • Ideology at work (literally)

      As a card-carrying Deleuzean, I'm supposed to be scornful of the concept of "ideology."* But it does have its uses, and here's a great example of ideology qua naturalizing the social. Fatal traffic accidents occurred in New York, Michigan, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. Authorities said a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease froze to death after…

    • Privacy and Big Data II: NSA Metadata between Juridical Power and Biopower

      In a previous post, I suggested that the concept of privacy is going to prove inadequate as a protection against big data.  This is the case for structural reasons: the concept of privacy is designed to protect information (generally, either information that is thought to be inherently intimate, or in the sense of control over…