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
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Essays
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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Joe Biden’s Foreign Foray is All About Shoring Up Democracy – In the US
During his first trip abroad as US president last week, Joe Biden kept telling Europe that “the US is back”. Before the G7 meeting, Biden ...
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Rechanneling Beliefs: How Information Flows Help or Hinder Democracy with Bruce Schneier
This year, we need to start fixing American democracy. On the technical level, 2020 saw exceptionally successful elections under exceptionally difficult circumstances. People voted in ...
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Grassroots’ Bot Campaigns are Coming. Governments Don’t Have a Plan to Stop Them with Bruce Schneier
This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another ...
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The New Age of Protectionism – with Abraham Newman
Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned of an impending “coronavirus vaccine war” that pits the United Kingdom against Europe. Days earlier, the EU ...
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A Cynical Election Ploy Like Hawley and Cruz’s Looks Harmless. Until It Isn’t with Elizabeth Saunders
Washington generally shrugs at cynical theatrical gestures like the GOP Senate effort, led by Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), to object to the ...
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What Makes Trump’s Subversion Efforts So Alarming? His Collaborators – with Bruce Schneier
Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. ...
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This Is What the Future of Globalization Will Look Like – with Abraham Newman
A pair of sentences, published on April 17, show us how strange globalization has become: “Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us ...
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The Folly of Decoupling From China – with Abraham Newman
On May 14, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to break the United States’ economic relationship with China. “There are many things we could do,” he ...
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