Public Writing
Featured Essays:
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 making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too. People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what ...
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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 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 to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
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Academic ArticleEssay Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman
Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, ...
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Public Writing Archives
Featured Interviews:
Interview “Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne
A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape? “The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. ...
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Interview 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 ...
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Interviews
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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Interview with Sean Carroll on “Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism”, Mindscape
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas, Episode 148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism Democracy posits the radical ...
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Interview with Sophie Roell on “The Best Books on the Politics of Information”
“Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose ...
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Essays
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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