David Graeber reviews Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their […]
The rise of microchipping: are we ready for technology to get under the skin?
As implants grow more common, experts fear surveillance and exploitation of workers. Advocates say the concerns are irrational “It was like my body was online,” he said. “It was my very own Johnny Mnemonic moment.” On 1 August 2017, workers at Three Square Market, a Wisconsin-based company specializing in vending machines, lined up in the office cafeteria to be […]
Putting the ‘I’ in science
Chris Lintott’s chronicle of the booming citizen-science project Zooniverse is inspirational, finds Michael West. The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Chris Lintott Oxford University Press (2019) Citizen science is booming. Today, anyone with a computer or a smartphone can participate in research in astronomy, oceanography, medicine, zoology and beyond. With such studies no longer […]
The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution
Commercial platforms cannot prioritise the ideals of a liberal public sphere, much less the principle of popular sovereignty, over the profit motive. Introduction The information technology sector broadly defined is now at the leading edge of the capitalist system. Material production and distribution, enterprise and professional management, finance, insurance and real estate are all increasingly […]
Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance
The Lauderdale Paradox first articulated by James Maitland holds that an increase in “private riches” is achieved bychoking off “public wealth”. This is done not only in order to acquire free value from the commons but also, I argue, in order to create an “artificial scarcity” that generates pressuresfor competitive productivity. Degrowth seeks to invert […]