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.
Spufford had analyzed the Soviet Union’s stunningly unsuccessful attempt to use bureaucracy and mathematics to build a better society than could be achieved using markets. Yet every time I return to Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber Book Event, I am struck by its contributors’ insights into the insurmountable dilemmas generated by the modern market economy itself. I am also still struck by how successful the “book event” was in using new technologies to drive a qualitative shift in how we communicate and come to understand the world together.
I have been thinking about these issues because Farrell recently published a new article, “The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism.” He and the sociologist Marion Fourcade argue that the internet and its progeny (what they call “high-tech modernism”) are changing the world in ways that are as profound as the rise of the market economy and the bureaucratization of society under the modern state.
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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.
Spufford had analyzed the Soviet Union’s stunningly unsuccessful attempt to use bureaucracy and mathematics to build a better society than could be achieved using markets. Yet every time I return to Red Plenty: A Crooked Timber Book Event, I am struck by its contributors’ insights into the insurmountable dilemmas generated by the modern market economy itself. I am also still struck by how successful the “book event” was in using new technologies to drive a qualitative shift in how we communicate and come to understand the world together.
I have been thinking about these issues because Farrell recently published a new article, “The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism.” He and the sociologist Marion Fourcade argue that the internet and its progeny (what they call “high-tech modernism”) are changing the world in ways that are as profound as the rise of the market economy and the bureaucratization of society under the modern state.
To continue reading, register now.
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