Research | Platypus

Democratizing Credit: An Interview with Historian Josh Lauer

 Adam Webb-Orenstein  September 25, 2017

Since the consumer credit reporting agency Equifax revealed on September 7th that the personal information of 143 million Americans had been compromised in an attack by hackers, leaving more than forty percent of the population vulnerable to identity theft and damaged credit scores, questions about the responsibilities and accountability of the credit bureaus, the fairness of the credit rating system, and the vulnerability of consumers’ data have reached a new level of urgency. While Equifax has been widely criticized for its incompetent, and maybe even criminal, response to a disaster that quite possibly could have been prevented, what is at issue are not just the security practices and corporate ethics of a single company, but also, more generally, the structure and viability of the credit rating system itself. No one is in a better position to help us make sense of how the Equifax breach fits into the history of American capitalism than Josh Lauer, associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire. His book, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, which was published in July, is the first to tell the story of credit reporting in the United States, tracing its evolution from its 19th century beginnings to the regime of commercial surveillance and algorithmic calculation that tracks us today. (read more...)

Order and Adat in the Forests of West Papua

 Jonathan McLeod  September 12, 2017

Papua is Indonesia’s poorest and least populated region, but, as they say, rich in natural resources. It is developing quickly in the era of pemekaran, an Indonesian word that literally translates as “blossoming,” or “subdivision”. It describes the rapid proliferation of local government institutions that is happening throughout Indonesia, penetrating regions that just a decade ago were totally bereft of infrastructure or public services (McWilliam 2011). Even in the few months that I have spent researching in the district of Tambrauw, on the Bird’s Head of New Guinea, I’ve watched the pipes being laid and the roads being built, slowly reaching out from the main coastal town to the mountainous interior. Throughout the rural regions of Papua, development and pemekaran are more or less synonymous, people seem to want it, and it’s happening quickly. (read more...)

No Limits

 Joseph Klein  August 17, 2017

Many people panic the first time they are hooked up to an underwater breathing machine; to inhale below the chop of the waves feels like the pinnacle of self-destruction, and sometimes, it is. The rush of adrenaline can cause novice scuba divers to blow through a whole tank of gas in what feels like minutes, sucking down breath after unassured breath. The deeper you are, the faster the tank empties: at 30 meters, the pressure is equivalent to four of earth’s atmospheres and you need four times the air to fill your lungs. For every 10 meters, add the weight of another sky. (read more...)

Infrastructure as New Life?

 Bilge Firat  July 18, 2017

Today, logistics as the science and industry of cross-border transportation of mainly industrial products drives “revolutions” from energy to retail. As most world economies continue to accelerate their involvement with economic globalization, logistics continue to take over local economies in many regions around the world. Paradoxically, many states and sovereigns around the world are also looking (back) to logistics infrastructure as a panacea to curb the half-century-long devastating effects of deregulation of trade, finance and services on nation-state-centric political economies. One can observe this move both in countries of North America and Europe, where the post-1950s deterioration of public infrastructures has long been a problem. The Right’s recognition of this deterioration was at least partly responsible for carrying it into power, for example, in the U.S., although the Left has also occasionally touted this kind of infrastructure politics. In places like China, or Turkey, a country with which I am more familiar, economic development based on the infrastructure, transport, and construction sectors is much newer. This move toward infrastructure, though, at the same time may reflect the end of sovereign state authority, at least as we know it, and the beginning of a new kind of statecraft. (read more...)

The Nerd is Dead, Long Live the Nerd!

 Lina Eklund  June 27, 2017

Editor’s note: This is a co-authored post by Lina Eklund and Evan Conaway. On the internet, a war for identity is being fought in the previously hidden depths of nerd subcultures. In this post we offer a view from the trenches, examining the rise of a new nerd as different opposing sides embrace the networked structure of online social life. We propose that shifting nerd identities offer new venues for thinking through how technology shapes and is shaped by culture. During the last half-decade, “alt-righters” (we are using the term loosely) and so-called “social justice warriors” (or SJWs) have exchanged blows on social media networks, forums, news-sites, etc. Seemingly everywhere on the internet the right to define oneself as a nerd is being contested at institutional, commercial, technical, and social levels. Originally the preoccupation of a select group of white men, being a nerd is now available to everyone, everywhere as subcultures expand into mainstream culture. (read more...)

Lists, Indices and the Ownership of Biodiversity Conservation

 Peter Taber  June 20, 2017

Prior to the emergence of “biodiversity loss” as a ubiquitous way of talking about species extinctions in the 1990s, taxonomic biology was considered a dying field. The physical inspection of specimens to assign them to biological categories had long had a reputation as a hobby for “crusty old men and their dusty shelves”, as one botanist joked during my research in Ecuador. Biology’s cutting edge was genomics. But with an explosion of concern for a global extinction crisis, taxonomically-trained biologists and their cheap, low-tech methods occupied a central role in 1990s Latin American conservation efforts (e.g. Raven and Wilson 1991). In this post, I briefly consider how taxonomically-oriented field biology relates to other, typically quantitative ways of evaluating biodiversity. Taxonomy played an important role in establishing where conservation should focus its efforts. An increased emphasis on quantitatively linking biodiversity to other environmental problems has meant an increased role for other kinds of expertise (Gabrys 2016). It has also meant a return to the margins for taxonomic expertise. Examining the tools used to evaluate the biotic environment sheds light, both on the different kinds of questions that can be asked about it, and on the shifting place of different kinds of expertise in environmental governance. (read more...)

The Heliopolitics of Data Center Security

 A.R.E. Taylor  June 6, 2017

From Cyberattack to Solar Attack The small-scale cyberattack, characteristic of the late-twentieth century, has long dominated discourses and practices of data center security. Lately, however, these fears are increasingly giving way to concerns over large-scale, existential risks posed by solar activity. Increasing numbers of data centers are going to extreme measures to protect their facilities from solar flares, solar energetic particles and Coronal Mass Ejections – collectively referred to as “space weather”. As data centers are put into circulation with what Georges Bataille famously called the sun’s “superabundance of energy” (1991:29), the act of protecting digital-industrial infrastructure takes on strangely mythical dimensions. In this post, I would like to briefly explore the business end of the mythical dispositif that arises from the surreal and distinctly Bataillean meeting of data centers and the sun. (read more...)

Trolling and the Alt-Right in Japan (Part 1)

 Elizabeth Rodwell  May 23, 2017

I was only a couple of months into my fieldwork when I met Masa. I had been focusing my attention on innovation and politics within the major Japanese TV networks, but he drew my attention to a different kind of media organization: The Free Press Association of Japan, now defunct. At the time, he identified with its founder, Takashi Uesugi, who had made a name for himself as one of the country’s most prominent crusaders for Japanese journalism reform. Masa liked anyone who flouted convention, and the mainstream media’s disparagement of Uesugi for not having attended a high-ranked university only served to endear him further to Masa, who himself had not attended college. It was from Masa that I first heard about chemtrails (kemutoreiru) – the notion that the white trails that aircraft leave in their wake represent a chemical form of meteorological or biological manipulation. He began forwarding me articles and links to documentaries exposing Japanese and American government cover-ups. Unemployed, he spent most of his days on the Japanese bulletin board, 2ch (ni chan). He was my first encounter with the Japanese internet alt-right (the netto uyoku), the beginning of an inadvertent deep-dive into one of the most vocal factions in the Japanese internet. (read more...)