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Human life as terra nullius: socially blind engineering in Facebook’s foundational technologies
No full textCritical platform scholars have long suggested, if indirectly, that social media power is somehow akin to social engineering. This article argues that the parallel is analytically productive, but for reasons that are more complex than has previously been appreciated. By examining Facebook’s foundational technologies, as described in patents that sought to protect the company’s early innovations, we argue that, unlike previous technocratic attempts to reconstruct society, the platform’s equally consequential rendering of social reality into a legible and controllable social graph involved no substantive vision of the social world at all. Rather, the company engaged in a form of socially blind engineering, misrecognizing the actual social world as a terra nullius, as if it had no inhabitants who needed to be taken into account, and so was a domain from which profit could be extracted with relative impunity. In so doing, we develop a conceptual vocabulary to understand the widely-criticised recklessness that, notwithstanding some more charitable recent readings, marked the early Facebook – and that might still influence the tech sector as a whole
Beyond enclosure: the role of estate management in transforming the Corbet Estates in North Shropshire, 1740-1840
No full textThe cause of England’s agricultural transformation and subsequent escape from Malthusian constraints remains a subject of significant debate in economic and agricultural historiography. This study challenges conventional narratives by examining the Corbet estates in old-enclosed Shropshire between 1740 and 1840 to assess whether shifts associated with ‘agricultural revolution’, such as farm engrossment and rising rents, emerged in the absence of parliamentary enclosure. By considering an area where traditional views on parliamentary enclosure are less applicable, this research provides a nuanced understanding of agricultural shifts in a regional context. Using the Corbet family rentals and estate surveys, this study tracks changes in land distribution, tenure security, and rents over the period. This is then combined with a thorough analysis of parish records and contemporary accounts to consider the motivations behind the observed shifts. Such a multifaceted approach aims to determine whether these shifts can be attributed to productivity growth, as traditional narratives suggest, or whether deliberate estate management decisions played a more significant role. The results indicate that an agricultural transformation was occurring on the Corbet estates, but that there is little evidence to suggest a link to productivity growth. Therefore, it is likely that the estate management philosophy of the Corbet family, particularly following their descent into debt after 1783, was a central driver of the observed shifts. Ultimately, this research provides insight into how rural transformation operated across diverse regional contexts in the Early Modern period, challenging traditional narratives that are centred around enclosure
Increasing inequality in agri-food value chains: global trends from 1995-2020
No full textAgri-food systems are increasingly globalised. In the last three decades, as national food systems have become more interdependent, the distribution of productive activities and economic value between different actors and countries has changed. Prior research on domestic agri-food value chains has shown that the farm share of food-system income has declined consistently, while post-farmgate sectors capture the majority of income. Market concentration in post-farmgate sectors is high in industrialised economies and is driving food-system transformations in developing economies. Here, we extend this analysis to assess the global distributional consequences of food-system transformations for the first time. We use multi-regional input-output data to disaggregate food expenditures between different countries and sectors across agri-food value chains, from 1995 to 2020. We arrive at several main findings: 1) agricultural production for food and industrial inputs has increasingly shifted to the global South, 2) global food-system income is increasingly captured by post-farm activities in the global North, and 3) a substantial share of food-system income is captured in low-tax jurisdictions with low agricultural production. These findings demonstrate that the contemporary agri-food system and agricultural trade are skewing the distribution of economic returns away from agricultural producers in the global South
How to maximise potential when introducing mandatory Paris-aligned transition plans in the UK
No full textClear policies on corporate transition plan ambition could support much needed green, private-sector investment and the UK Government’s growth ambitions, writes Ira Poensgen
Waiting for the people: the idea of democracy in Indian anticolonial thought
No full textWaiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought. By Nazmul Sultan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780674290372
The triple migration of the “cyber-pets” embodied digital labour and multisensory experiences of female live streamers in urban China
No full textThis article examines the triple migration of young female live streamers performing street entertainment in Shenzhen, China. These second-generation rural-to-urban migrants navigate three intersecting trajectories: spatial mobility to urban centres, digital migration onto live-streaming platforms as precarious workplaces, and embodied negotiation of liminality where their bodily experiences blur online-offline boundaries. Drawing on multisensory ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores how sensory experiences, platform governance and systemic inequalities shape these women's precarious livelihoods. Beneath their public performances lie burnout, stigma and hidden injuries of inequality. By situating these women's experiences at the intersection of class, gender, rural-urban migration and platform capitalism, this research uncovers the intimate cost of precarious digital labour. It also highlights their resilience and creativity in navigating structural barriers. This study contributes to empirical and theoretical discussions on gendered labour, digital precarity and affective politics of precarity in contemporary urban China
Automated regime classification in multidimensional time series data using sliced Wasserstein k-means clustering
No full textRecent work has proposed Wasserstein k-means (Wk-means) clustering as a powerful method to classify regimes in time series data, and one-dimensional asset returns in particular. In this paper, we begin by studying in detail the behaviour of the Wasserstein k-means clustering algorithm applied to synthetic one-dimensional time series data. We extend the previous work by studying, in detail, the dynamics of the clustering algorithm and how varying the hyperparameters impacts the performance over different random initialisations. We compute simple metrics that we find to be useful in identifying high-quality clusterings. We then extend the technique of Wasserstein k-means clustering to multidimensional time series data by approximating the multidimensional Wasserstein distance as a sliced Wasserstein distance, resulting in a method we call 'sliced Wasserstein k-means (sWk-means) clustering'. We apply the sWk-means clustering method to the problem of automated regime classification in multidimensional time series data, using synthetic data to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the approach. Finally, we show that the sWk-means method is able to identify distinct market regimes in real multidimensional financial time series, using publicly available foreign exchange spot rate data as a case study. We conclude with remarks about some limitations of our approach and potential complementary or alternative approaches
Matrix-valued factor model with time-varying main effects
No full textWe introduce the matrix-valued time-varying Main Effects Factor Model (MEFM). MEFM is a generalization to the traditional matrix-valued factor model (FM). We give rigorous definitions of MEFM and its identifications, and propose estimators for the time-varying grand mean, row and column main effects, and the row and column factor loading matrices for the common component. Rates of convergence for different estimators are spelt out, with asymptotic normality shown. The core rank estimator for the common component is also proposed, with consistency of the estimators presented. As time series, the row and column main effects { α t } and { β t } can be non-stationary without affecting the estimation accuracy of our estimators. The number of main effects factors contributing to row or column main effects is also consistently estimated by our proposed estimators. We propose a test for testing if FM is sufficient against the alternative that MEFM is necessary, and demonstrate the power of such a test in various simulation settings. We also demonstrate numerically the accuracy of our estimators in extended simulation experiments. A set of NYC Taxi traffic data is analyzed and our test suggests that MEFM is indeed necessary for analyzing the data against a traditional FM
Housing quality and suitability and older people's use of formal and unpaid care
No full textGood quality housing is an important part of supporting people with care needs and improving lives but not much is known about how care use (formal and/or unpaid) might be related to housing, especially non-specialized housing where most older people live. Our study aimed to explore this relationship. Methods comprised secondary analysis of quantitative data from a large representative sample, the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2012/2013 to 2018/2019), and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 72 people aged 65 and older with care needs and/or their unpaid carers living in five localities in England. We found that poor quality or unsuitable housing affected care use indirectly through increasing or precipitating care needs thus necessitating care and support, and directly through being a barrier to receiving care; the latter sometimes resulting in unmet need for support. Our paper thus contributes to the understanding of the relationship between non-specialized housing and care use and of the wider factors shaping unmet need for care
Factors influencing involvement in cyber-frauds in West Africa and the implications for policy
No full textCyber-frauds and scams have become a major problem in the Global North, and there is evidence that a significant volume of it emanates from West African countries, such as Nigeria and Ghana. This paper offers rare and original insights into the scale of active fraudsters and their wider support in Ghana and Nigeria, based on 36 interviews with active fraudsters, law enforcement officials, government officials, and NGOs from these countries, as well as the victim countries. In doing so, it maps the many factors pushing young males into these crimes, including the status of scams; the attitudes of parents, friends and family; spiritual rationalisations, role models, popular culture, confraternities, combined with a lack of formal social control: all of which is underpinned by economic pressures. Consequently, it argues in some areas of West Africa, involvement in fraud in some communities has become normalised and is considered a normal vocation, which, as a consequence, has significant implications for policies to combat fraud. The article ends with a discussion of some of the policy options for tackling this problem and some of the challenges of pursuing them in an era where some governments, like the US and UK, are cutting aid to these and other countries. The paper also argues for more economic aid to create better opportunities for the youth in these countries, more education about these crimes to young people and more enforcement activity, among other