Category: globalisation

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Investigating Google’s revolving door with governments – Tactical Tech Collective

Some really interesting work from the Tactical Team looking at the ways in which different people and their skills and knowledges move in and out of government and the ‘Alphabet empire’. Worth a full read, but here’s a snippet to whet the appetite…

The Alphabet Empire by Tactical Tech and La Loma as shown in The Glass Room in New York. Based on openly available information, this 3-D infographic combines a quote from its chairman, Eric Schmidt, with a mapping of its acquisitions and investments.
By Google’s own admission, the company, like many others, cultivates close relationships with governmental bodies and public officials. Google disclosed that in 2015 it spent over €4 million on lobbying the European Union – considerably more than the €1 million on lobbying spent just three years previously in 2012.

But some of Google’s relationships with public bodies and officials come with a smaller price tag: Over the past ten years at least 80 people have been identified to have moved jobs between Google and European governments.

It’s this “revolving door” that formed the basis of our investigation. We started out with a number of questions: who were these people who had moved from Google to government or vice versa? Where exactly did they move from and to, and when? And most importantly how many of these questions could we find answers to using open, publicly-available information?

Here’s what we learned, and how we did it.

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Planetary technics? “Technosphere”, HKW

Via: EnemyIndustry

The always interesting HKW and a project relevant to lots of geographers…

Technosphere

Research Project 2015–2018

The twentieth-century celebrated technology as a way to achieve planetary unity and control. Yet today technics, nature, and human activity seem to combine in increasingly disorienting, uncontrolled compositions in which once-reliable distinctions lose their stability. How did we end up in this world of technological vertigo, this Mobius strip of world and planetary technics, wherein cause and effect, local and global factors, human and non-human agency, perpetually confuse and confound one another’s borders? What governs this constitution (or collision) of forces? And what are the contingent, strategic, or historical events and networks that form durable apparatuses among them?

This dilemma of global technology and its identity will be the main theme of Technosphere (2015-18), a research project investigating origins and future itineraries of this technical world within a larger series of international events, performances, seminars, and conferences that will take place at HKW over the next four years.

Scientists and thinkers have introduced the term technosphere to describe the mobilization and hybridization of energy, material, and environments into a planetary system on par with other spheres such as the atmosphere or biosphere. The term emphasizes the leading role of the technological within this global system. At the same time this term encompasses the enclosure of human populations, forests, cities, seas, and other traditionally non-technical entities within systems of technical management and productivity. But where is that ominous technosphere to be found? How does it impact the everyday passions and experiences of humans, animals, a nation, or an ecosphere?

The coining of the term technosphere announces a conceptual innovation as well as a political challenge. As a conceptual innovation, the notion of the technosphere invites us to recognize and confront the reality of technical systems whose unintended consequences and internal dynamics have accumulated into a quasi-autonomous global force in the world today. Moreover, the very naming of these forces constitutes the posing of new political and social challenges that, though already widely felt, remain largely misunderstood. Their description and study will entail inquiries into physical and political science, but also topics as diverse as aesthetics, waste management, international law, social media, financial markets, animal studies, immigration, and colonialism.

From 2015 to 2018 the Technosphere project will host public events and seminars that explore the potential of this concept to coordinate conversations among scientists, artists, and the general public. It will explore the events, structures, and mechanisms by which the twentieth-century dreams of global unity and human hegemony morphed into disorienting compositions of technics and nature, of human and non-human actors. These investigative and experimental exchanges will ask how the technosphere operates today and endeavor to imagine alternative futures. The result will be a tentative vision of communities and understanding equal to the challenges of our world today.

Under the title The Technosphere, Now a daylong series of conversations and presentations that reveal the infrastructures and operations today will inaugurate the project on Friday, 2 October. Interwoven streams will address the infrastructural exploitation of earthly resources, how data monitors technical and social systems, and how the trauma maps out the dynamics of the technosphere on individual human bodies. The event is part of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s opening weekend of 100 Years of Now, taking place from September 30th to October 4th 2015.

Concept and Realisation: Katrin Klingan, Bernard Geoghegan, Christoph Rosol, and Janek Müller

“Technosphere” takes place as part of the HKW series 100 Years of Now.

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David Harvey on post-neoliberalism, Trump, infrastructure, sharing economy, smart city

Via Deterritorial Investigations Unit.

David Harvey talking to Evgeny Morozov, in the first few minutes he addresses the issue of the claims being made about the end of globalisation/neoliberalism. The conversation then quickly ranges over the gig economy and what Guy Standing calls the ‘precariat’ (it’d be interesting to stage that conversation!) and then a brief statement question about ‘smart’ cities (Harvey is dismissive). Worth watching.

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Where’s the geography in the ‘end of globalisation’ trope pushed by the commentariat?

[T]here are abundant signs that localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of quest for security that place always offers in the midst of all the shifting that [globalisation] implies – The Condition of Postmodernity (adapted), David Harvey, p. 306.

Globalisation as ‘…a hegemonic ideology supporting the necessity and inevitability of the free movement of capital and goods, helped to create the institutional conditions which then contributed to making the free movement of capital and goods a reality’ – Paul Hirst “The global economy – myths and realities.” (1999), p. 424.

Actually existing globalisation is not the globalisation of neoliberal visions, the Utopia of friction-free global markets or Internet-driven virtual worlds, but the contingent and unsteady symbiosis of imperfectly transnational networks, institutions and firms, and the ‘ramshackle diversity’ of international bureaucracies, states, police, mafias and other sources of power struggling for shifting territorial authority in the post-cold war world. – Gerard Ó Tuathail “Political geography III: dealing with deterritorialization.” (1998) p. 87.

An all-to-brief and idle thought: Whatever happened to critique of ‘globalisation’? There was a time not long ago when commentators would’ve been on the side of those they seek to blame for voting for Brexit and Trump… the apparent ‘losers’ in the last thirty-odd years of ‘globalisation’ (or, perhaps, more specifically what Peter Dicken called a new international division of labour in his “Global Production Networks” framework in Global Shift).

When critical discussion of globalisation was a thing in geography people like David Harvey and Doreen Massey had something to say about this… indeed, this used to be a staple of a geography sylabus. I can’t help wondering what Massey would say about the last six months… Nevertheless, I haven’t seen any kind of comment by Harvey (if there has been, please point to what I’ve missed in the comments below).

Critical reflections on the rise of economic globalisation, the rise of TNCs, global commodity chains, off-shoring and so on brought about a critical discourse of globalisation that seems to be missing from the current commentary. Instead, we seem to see a conflation of a generalised (to the point of being unclear) idea of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’ and, depending on your standpoint, the recent popular vote for Brexit in the UK and the narrow victory of Trump are meant to signify a backlash to this. Perhaps because of the toxic racist and misogynistic undertones of the ‘Leave’ and Trump campaigns, some commentators seem to be implying that actually the status quo of economic globalisation and ‘neoliberalism’ should’ve been retained (i.e. vote of ‘remain’ & Clinton, resulting in TTIP etc ). Maybe (I hope) I’m misreading the arguments (I’m not getting much sleep due to baby/child sleeplessness!), maybe this is a plea for global solidarity, but maybe, also, the rush to get into print is leading to forms of scapegoating too…

Either way, it seems to me that it might be prudent for more of us to revisit ‘globalisation’ in our research and teaching (I have no doubt that there is some great work going on that I don’t know about here).