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
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Essays
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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Behold the AI shoggoth – with Cosma Shalizi
Artificial intelligence is a familiar-looking monster The academics argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies An internet meme keeps on ...
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How Artificial Intelligence Can Aid Democracy – with Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders
There’s good reason to fear that A.I. systems like ChatGPT and GPT4 will harm democracy. Public debate may be overwhelmed by industrial quantities of autogenerated ...
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The New Libertarian Elitists – with Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg
What’s behind the dangerous new notion that democracy should be left to the well-educated. It’s been a rough ten years for democracy. It isn’t just ...
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El Comercio como Arma: Europa entre Estados Unidos y China
Estados Unidos ha bloqueado la exportación de semiconductores sofisticados a China. Esto demuestra cómo ha cambiado fundamentalmente su actitud hacia el comercio. Hace una década, ...
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Tornado Cash Is Not Free Speech. It’s a Golem – with Bruce Schneier
In August, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, a virtual currency “mixer” designed to make it ...
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Spirals of Delusion: How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous – with Abraham Newman and Jeremy Wallace
In policy circles, discussions about artificial intelligence invariably pit China against the United States in a race for technological supremacy. If the key resource is ...
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The Modern History of Economic Sanctions
Nicholas Mulder’s new book, “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War,” remakes debates over European history between the two ...
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