Henry Farrell

Interview with economist Tyler Cowen on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas

Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or the EU courts asserting that countries can force Facebook to take down content globally, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion.

Tyler and Henry discuss these issues and more, including what a big tech breakup would mean for security and privacy, why political economics suggests Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t work, what Italy might reveal about China’s feature, his family connection to Joyce, his undying affection for My Bloody Valentine, why Philip K. Dick would have reveled in QAnon, why Twitter seems left-wing, and being a first generation academic blogger.

Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas (Ep. 78, Conversations with Tyler podcast)

Learn more on the Conversations with Tyler Podcast website.

Other Writing:

Essay

The New Economy’s Old Business Model is Dead

July 13, 2018 Foreign Policy
The titans of the new economy are different from their predecessors in one very important way: They aren’t job creators — at least not on a scale to match their dizzying growth in value. General Motors, at its peak in 1979, had some 618,000 employees in the United States and 853,000 worldwide. Facebook had just ...
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Essay

Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions

February 21, 2025 Bloomberg featured pin
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 to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message ...
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