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The Algorithm Society and Its Discontents

Modern civilization was built by adding markets and bureaucracy to other, much older modes of human organization: redistribution, reciprocity, and democracy. But the rapid rise of governance by algorithms could represent another epochal shift – and it will not be for the better.

BERKELEY – In my view, the most profound and insightful work of political economy written in the 2010s was neither a journal article nor a monograph nor a book in the traditional sense. Rather, it was an online symposium. In Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber Book Event, scholars and intellectuals, convened by political scientist Henry Farrell, used a new mode of print-communication to react to Francis Spufford’s very interesting book Red Plenty.

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