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There has been increasing interest and debate in recent years on the instituted nature of economic processes in general and the related ideas of the market and the competitive process in particular. This debate lies at the interface between two largely independent disciplines, economics and sociology, and reflects an attempt to bring the two fields of discourse more closely together. This book explores this interface in a number of ways, looking at the competitive process and market relations from a number of different perspectives. It considers the social role of economic institutions in society and examines the various meanings embedded in the word 'markets', as well as developing arguments on the nature of competition as an instituted economic process. The close of the twentieth century saw a virtual canonisation of markets as the best, indeed the only really effective, way to govern an economic system. The market organisation being canonised was simple and pure, along the lines of the standard textbook model in economics. The book discusses the concepts of polysemy , idealism, cognition, materiality and cultural economy. Michael Best provides an account of regional economic adaptation to changed market circumstances. This is the story of the dynamics of capitalism focused on the resurgence of the Route 128 region around Boston following its decline in the mid-1980s in the face of competition from Silicon Valley. The book also addresses the question of how this resurgence was achieved.
powerful promise of online work to offer an alternative source of income was forced to consider local informal work and insecure entrepreneurship as the primary outcome. A Forced Shift: Moving from Online Work to Local Markets The programme was initially intended to harness the wealth of opportunities provided through WFP’s Innovation Accelerator’s contacts and the wider digital economy. The visit of Carlo Almendral from Silicon Valley to
, necessary ignorance. Unfortunately for post-humanitarianism, however, it has little to offer in return – other, that is, than timely value-added information such that the precariat can positively enjoy the experience of its own abjection. Notes 1 While important, current concerns over data privacy and the power of Silicon Valley are secondary to these paradigmatic changes. Things like privacy can be addressed. Changes in the way the world is understood, experienced and interrogated represent a greater political and
frame developed by thinkers like Manuel Castells, who wrote a multi-volume celebration of the post-industrial networked society. Wired ran a cover, proclaiming: ‘We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?’ This vision of the future of capitalism being frictionless, post-industrial and based on knowledge, information and post-scarcity desires, was not just dominant in tech magazines and in Silicon Valley. The Chair of the American Federal Reserve at the time, Alan Greenspan, was one of the
, suggested that industry in Massachusetts was in terminal decline. Combined with the setbacks in these major markets was the emerging prominence of Silicon Valley, which was fostering and commercialising innovations much faster than was Route 128, and often in the same technologies. Clearly, few were willing to bet on the resurgence of Route 128. Nevertheless, the predictions of industrial gloom turned out to be wrong, or at least premature. A return to growth beginning in 1992 long surpassed the ‘Massachusetts’ Miracle’.2 Why the rise, the crash, and the rise again
, social media platforms are frequently used both as an alternative news platform and as an organising tool. In the absence of accessible, legal means for people to seek protection, migrants and their supporters were left to rely on platforms such as Facebook or WhatsApp – in some cases literally for their lives, with the indices of the sharing economy as the only measure of trustworthiness. Social media platforms have been controversial recently for their role in data mining, fake news and undermining democratic processes. They are also owned by Silicon Valley tech
ethics may suggest ethics has been co-opted as a feature of humanitarian extractivism. Such a view resonates with recent frustration with ‘ethics washing’ and ‘ethics shopping’ by Big Tech. I argue that a bottom-up perspective on humanitarian innovation ethics adds a different dimension to our understanding of extractivism: the innovation paradigm, with its Silicon Valley approach and language, gives
trace the lines between island actions and Silicon Valley ideas. Over the last five years, in sync with global currents, the community has been growing, powered by an ecosystem of training programmes, competitions and incubators that now dot the Caribbean. The data metaphors, however silly they might seem, draw attention to the anticipatory and revolutionary representations of technology and its development within these spaces. Earlier treatments of the arrival and use of the internet in Trinidad and Tobago (Miller and Slater 2000) and the cellphone in Jamaica (Horst
capabilities to enhance their military power. In response to Chinese strategic interests in AI, for example, DoD's DIUx prepared a report proposing greater scrutiny and restrictions on Chinese investment in Silicon Valley companies. 60 The US alarmist tone and draconian policy responses to the perceived threat posed by China's bid for technological leadership reveals the following. When we compare the public narratives surrounding the ‘new multipolarity’ thesis
disintegration of the remaining collective outlets needed to share, expiate, and, to some extent, relieve the cumulative guilt and anxiety of capitalist life. Intensified death denial in the contemporary era finds its most spectacular manifestation in Silicon Valley’s quest for literal immortality. This privatised immortality project is a morbid escapism intended to hive the ruling class off from the