Archive
EssayPublic Writing
How Civil Society Can Beat Trumpism: NYT
“The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends ...
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EssayPublic Writing
The Weaponized World Economy: Cover story for Foreign Affairs
When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not ...
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EssayPublic Writing
The Enshittification of American Power
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off ...
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Academic ArticleAcademic Writing
AI as Governance
Political scientists have had remarkably little to say about artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps because they are dissuaded by its technical complexity and by current debates ...
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Essay
Crypto is a threat to the US Financial System
With Dan Davies – for the New York Times This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a ...
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Essay
The Abundance Debate We’re Not Having
The best way to read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book is to take the authors at their word. Abundance is what is usually called a ...
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EssayPublic Writing
Reining in Our Tech God-Emperors
What happens to politics when the voice of the people blurs together with the voices of self-appointed god-emperors like Elon Musk? We are about to ...
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Essay
The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War
How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By ...
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Essay
The Reactionary Right is Not a Monolith
[new at Inside Story] Just over a week ago, Vance gave a speech at the “American Dynamism Summit,” which made the contradiction clear. As with any politician’s ...
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Academic Article
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past By Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, ...
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Interview
The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz
Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in ...
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Essay
Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come ...
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Essay
This Is How Trump Will Smash the Machine of U.S. Economic Power
Economic security officials worked across administrations, gradually developing grand ambitions of a global order founded on financial sanctions, export controls and development of crucial technologies. ...
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Essay
Count the Costs of Cutting Technological Ties with China
The result of all this is that policy discourse about the United States, China,and technology has careened from one pathology to another: The cheeryglobalism of ...
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Academic Article
AI as Governance
Henry Farrell, “AI as Governance,” Annual Review of Political Science, forthcoming.
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Essay
America Should Think Twice Before Replacing Sanctions with Tariffs – with Abraham Newman
Donald Trump complains that they are undermining the supremacy of the dollar. Access the full article here. Henry Farrell (and Abraham Newman), “America Should Think ...
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Essay
Large Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals – with Marion Fourcade
ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of ...
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Essay
No Exit Opportunities: Business Models and Political Thought in Silicon Valley
It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym ...
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Academic Article
Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson
Henry Farrell and Kim Stanley Robinson (2024), “Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson,” Vector, 299. Henry Farrell teaches democracy and international affairs at Johns ...
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Essay
Consulting Firms Have Stumbled Into a Geopolitical Minefield – with Abraham Newman
Earlier this year, McKinsey executives found themselves in serious political trouble. The Financial Times reported that their China branch had boasted in 2019 of its ...
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Academic Article
Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity – with Cosma Shalizi
Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi (2024), “Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity,” Communications of the ACM, preprint, 67,4:25-28. U.S. political discourse ...
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Essay
Canada Needs to Start Preparing for Trump – and Getting Other Allies Involved – with Abraham Newman
If Donald Trump wins the presidential elections in November, even Canadians could be blocked from their bank accounts. In our recent book… Henry Farrell and ...
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Academic Article
The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism – with Marion Fourcade
This short piece compares 21st century machine learning to 19th and 20th century bureaucracy – we hope to write more. While people in and around ...
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Essay
Can Big Tech Serve Democracy? – with Glen Weyl
New tools and technology policy might help, but politics come first. Two new books about technology and the fate of democracy begin by describing the ...
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Essay
AI’s Big Rift is Like a Religious Schism
TWO CENTURIES ago Henri de Saint-Simon, a French utopian, proposed a new religion, worshipping the godlike force of progress, with Isaac Newton as its chief ...
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