The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing Facebook for “illegal monopolization”, alleging that Facebook has pursued a multi-year strategy undermining competition as a way to cement its social network monopoly. The FTC points to the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 as key examples of this…

Originally published at https://discoversociety.org on January 8, 2020. Kean Birch It’s interesting living in Toronto right now. It feels like we’re at the epicentre of global debate about the purpose and value of technological innovation, what with SideWalk Labs trying — but seemingly failing — to turn large parts of…

Originally published at https://theconversation.com on November 5, 2019. My recent research increasingly focuses on how individuals can and do manipulate, or “game,” contemporary capitalism. It involves what social scientists call reflexivity and physicists call the observer effect. Reflexivity can be summed up as the way our knowledge claims end up…

Review of Steve Fuller (2016) “Academic Caesar”, London: Sage. — Academic Caesar starts with an outline of the threats to the university in our neoliberal times, although Fuller avoids taking an easy pot(-shot) at neoliberalism as the cause of all our scholarly suffering. Fuller points out that the changing political economy of the last few decades has left the university…

Originally published at https://theconversation.com on November 2, 2017. I struggle with neoliberalism — as a problematic economic system we might want to change — and as an analytical term people increasingly use to describe that system. I’ve been reading and writing about the concept for more than a decade. But…

Originally published at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk on January 29, 2016. Kean Birch reflects on a classroom exercise introducing students to the reach of market-driven actions in everyday life. He finds the exercise is also helpful for his own engagement with an intellectual tradition with which he disagrees. According to Hayek, Friedman and…

Originally published at http://politicaleconomyoftechnoscience.wordpress.com on January 19, 2015. Lets Plays on YouTube I came across LPs a few years back — I think it was in 2009 or 2010. I was either ill or hungover and was thinking about playing Deus Ex again but wasn’t sure if it’s was worth the time. I looked…