Public Writing
Featured Essays:
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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Essay The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman
For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there ...
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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
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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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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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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Binance and the End of Crypto’s Dream to Escape From Government – with Abraham Newman
On Nov. 21, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, pleaded guilty to breaking U.S. anti-money-laundering laws. Its CEO has stepped down, and the company will ...
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The New Economic Security State: How De-Risking Will Remake Geopolitics – with Abraham Newman
In April 2023, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan begged his listeners’ indulgence for straying out of his lane by delivering a major address about ...
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What If These Economic Weapons Fall into Trump’s Hands? – with Abraham Newman
The Biden administration has built an unprecedented machine for economic and technological coercion. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies cut off ...
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What Happens When Tech Bros Run National Security? – with Abraham Newman
It’s September 2023, and markets have become battlefields, as economics and geopolitics become ever more closely intertwined. Many think that we are returning to the ...
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How a Single Hard-Charging CEO Helped the US Dollar Take Over the World – with Abraham Newman
Walter Wriston was once one of the most powerful people on the planet. The chairman of the financial giant Citibank and its parent corporation, Citicorp, ...
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How the U.S. Stumbled Into Using Chips as a Weapon Against China – with Abraham Newman
Last October, the Biden administration unleashed one of its biggest countermeasures to date against China’s military ambitions: export controls on, among other things, cutting-edge semiconductors ...
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American Influence: Ireland Must Focus on Economic Security as Arena of Vulnerability
After decades of neglect, Ireland is finally debating national security. Unfortunately, we don’t just need to catch up with the rest of the world, but ...
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