Tag Archives: Scandal

Digital Welfare Systems

An extremely interesting series of talks hosted by the Digital Freedom Fund: the automation of welfare system decisons is where the neoliberal agenda and digitalization intersect in the most socially explosive fashion. All six events look good, but I am particularly looking forward to the discussion of the Dutch System Risk Indication (SyRI) scandal on Oct. 27th. More info and free registration on the DFF’s website.

A global take on the mistrust moment

My forthcoming piece on Ethan Zuckerman’s Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them for the Italian Political Science Review.

Routinization of influence, exacerbation of outrageousness

How is the influencer ecosystem evolving? Opposing forces are in play.

On the one hand, a NYT story describes symptoms of consolidation in the large-organic-online-following-to-brand-ambassadorship pathway. As influencing becomes a day job that is inserted in a stable fashion in the consumer-brand/advertising nexus, the type of informal, supposedly unmediated communication over social media becomes quickly unwieldy for business negotiations: at scale, professional intermediaries are necessary to manage transactions between the holders of social media capital/cred and the business interests wishing to leverage it. A rather more disenchanted and normalized workaday image of influencer life thereby emerges.

On the other hand, a Vulture profile of an influencer whose personal magnetism is matched only by her ability to offend (warning: NSFW) signals that normalization may ultimately be self-defeating. The intense and disturbing personal trajectory of Trisha Paytas suggests that the taming of internet celebrity for commercial purposes is by definition a neverending Sisyphean endeavor, for the currency involved is authenticity, whose seal of approval lies outside market transactions. The biggest crowds on the internet are still drawn by titillation of outrage, although their enactors may not thereby be suited to sell much of anything, except themselves.

Cyberwarfare articles

A couple of scholarly articles read today on cyberwarfare. The first, a long piece by James Shires in the Texas National Security Review, speaks to a long-term thread of interest for me, namely the (imperfect) mapping of real-world alliances with operations in the cyber domain: the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, although strategic partners of the US in the Gulf region, nonetheless targeted Hack-and-leak (HLO) operations at the US.

Shires underscores the patina of authenticity that leaks hold, and does a good job of showing how HLOs connect them with Bruce Schneier’s concept of “organizational doxxing”. In describing these HLOs as “simulations of scandal “, he leverages theoretical understandings of the phenomenon such as that of Jean Baudrillard. Standards of truth emerge as a major object of manipulation, but the key stake is whether the public will focus on the hack or the leak as the essence of the story.

The second article, by Kristen Eichensehr at justsecurity.org, reflects on the technical and legal process of attribution of cyberattacks. It argues in favor of the creation of a norm of customary international law obliging States to provide evidence when they attribute acts of cyberwarfare to a State or non-State actor. How to guarantee the credibility of the evidence and of the entity providing it (whether a centralized international body, a government agency, or a think-tank, academic institution, or private company) remains somewhat vague under her proposal.