Category: social networks

Facebook, Legitimacy, social networks

Facebook: The Legitimacy of a Nation State
The Oversight Board: An abstract name for a group charged with making stuff right.

The analogy has been drawn before – that Facebook is like a country. As far back as 2010, The Economist suggested that Facebook was beginning to look like a nation state, comparing a meeting between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the new Prime Minister of the UK David Cameron as ‘more like diplomacy’. In 2014 the Financial Times quoted Zuckerberg as saying to a new hire ‘[t]he best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company.’ In 2018, Vox declared Facebook a Monarchy. But its most recent challenges and changes – specifically the establishment of a new ‘oversight’ board – have been towards addressing a fundamentally political challenge: establishing Facebook’s legitimacy.

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Donald J Trump, social networks, Technology

Technopolitics

Twitter, Facebook and Google this week finally landed in exactly the position they have been resisting for ten years: front-row politics. In deciding to ban Donald Trump from their platforms, they have made a decision to decisively intervene in the US Presidency, denying one side its voice and making a judgement on the legitimacy or righteousness of that position. It’s really important to take a breath now, and understand just what this moment means.

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Alienation, Anarchism, History, Human Rights, Identity, Karl Marx, neoliberalism, Philosophy, Piketty, political philosophy, Reich, social media, social networks, Wittgenstein

Alien Technology

Things are pretty strange, it’s got to be said. But are they actually alien? (image credit Kim Hunter)

The question of technology and our relationship to it is one that has preoccupied me for some time now. It is separate from us as a concept – technology is not, so to speak, human – and yet it is deeply intimate in so many ways, so much as to make us think that our existence is dependent on it, as is our identity; Winner’s formulation of technology as a Wittgensteinian form of life (as I wrote about in my recent thesis) appears to me to be an appropriate joining of the human being and our technology, like Kevin Kelly’s ‘technium’, a kind of skin. But just as it becomes more deeply insinuated into our lives, there is something discomfiting about it, something unnatural, something foreign. Something alien, perhaps.

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Big Data, Capital, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Google, Informal Economy, internet, Karl Marx, law, Multi-National Corporation, Rule of Law, social networks

The Data Commodity: Fetish or Fiction?

Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School

Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘Big Other’ and ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ as Future Economic Models

Shoshana Zuboff’s recently published article on what she has termed Information Civilization is a compact and helpful analysis of the kind of internet economies that are emerging in the early twenty-first century. This blog post is a commentary on that text. She takes Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian as her foil, referencing his two articles Computer Mediated Transactions (2010) and Beyond Big Data (2013).

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constitution, Democracy, Electoral System, Identity, internet, National Identity, Platformification, social networks

The Platformification of The State

big-brother-1984
Well, there is that.

Here at StateLegitimacy.com, we’re interested in two things. First, how we measure legitimacy, and how legitimacy is constructed, and second, how technology impacts on legitimacy. We’re going to ask the question: could Rousseau’s Social Contract be implemented in technology?  What if the state became a platform?

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Coca Cola, Identity, MNC, Multi-National Corporation, National Identity, Nike, social media, social networks, Sports

Social Networks, MNC Legitimacy, and Brand Power

I linked yesterday to Ann-Marie Slaughter‘s excellent presentation to PopTech on International Relations and the non-state actors that influence and even dictate so much development in the world.  Watching it again this morning (and it’s worth watching twice) a number of questions crossed my mind.  First, she talks about social actors and ad hoc networks, but never quite gets to social networks.  Just as ad-hoc supra-national organisations are bringing together strange bedfellows, and getting ahead of the State actors in driving change, people are developing connections and social networks beyond traditional family and even cultural groups; one could argue that technological change is facilitating the re-structuring of the DNA of culture.  Kin, geography, language, religion and race remain important, but they are no longer the exclusive determinants of social alignment.  People connect now through trade, sports, entertainment, hobbies, and other interests, forming close relationships.  People’s identity – closely tied to these relationships – is changing.  National identity is less relevant.

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