Category Archives: Political economy and visibility

The marketplace scam as paradigm

Good article by Zoe Schiffer in The Verge on Instagram scams. In thinking about trust and its abuse it is important to remember how general the problem is, especially in marketplace interactions, and what institutional boundaries have evolved in all societies over the ages to police it. Thinking about misleading commercial behavior can be a useful baseline in modelling issues of trustworthiness in many digital domains (such as surveillance, algorithmic decision-making, platform content moderation, electoral disinformation, and so forth) where interactions do not immediately and obviously entail an exchange of goods and services in the market.