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
Privacy in Europe Suffers in Terror War
The editor of the New York Times has claimed for his part that government surveillance programs are effectively out of control. American Access the full ...
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Remaking Fantasy: China Miéville’s New Crobuzon Novels
Some months ago, Jennifer Howard used a critical review of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to argue that fantasy should be about “high ...
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The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas
In July 2004 an anonymous blogger revealed his identity when he allowed his photograph to be taken at the Democratic National Convention. “Atrios,” the writer ...
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Web of Influence – with Daniel W. Drezner
Every day, millions of online diarists, or “bloggers,” share their opinions with a global audience. Drawing upon the content of the international media and the ...
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The Invisible Transformation of the Co-decision Procedure: Problems of Democratic Legitimacy. – with Adrienne Hèritier
The relationship between Council and Parliament within the codecision procedure involves a plethora of informal and semi-formal meetings in which many of the real decisions ...
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