[iDC] Introductions

Thu Jul 3 13:49:54 UTC 2014

Hello all,

Apologies for the delay here. Fieldwork has left me terribly behind on
correspondence this summer.

I'm Dan Greene, a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of
Maryland. My dissertation focuses on the hope that access to ICT and
ICT-related industries will help individuals, cities, and countries lift
themselves up by their own bootstraps. The Clinton administration built
this belief into a common sense as they steered the US into a supposedly
New Economy, deregulated the telecommunications industry, and replaced
welfare with workfare. Today it manifests on the one hand as a mission to
close the so-called digital divide, and on the other as an effort to
recruit or cultivate Richard Florida's creative class and save desperate
cities. The dissertation first traces the roots of this common sense to the
neoliberal political economy of the 1990s and the framing of the 'digital
divide' as a problem of getting computers to poor people rather than ending
poverty per se, and then tracks how this common sense moves across three
interconnected field sites in Washington, DC: tech start-ups, public
libraries, and tech-focused charter schools. I then explore how the city
includes these different communities, or not, in its vision of the
information economy and the resulting reconstruction of technological
infrastructure, urban real estate, and cultural branding.

But I'll be seeing you all in the fall to talk about something different.

My colleague Daniel Joseph and I are currently writing an article
theorizing the specific ways digital economic geographies (i.e., social
media and virtual worlds sure, but also the infrastructure supporting them)
can displace or accelerate capitalism's crisis tendencies. This expands on
David Harvey's theory of the spatial fix: The idea that capital, as value
in motion, must be fixed in place to become productive but that this fixity
eventually becomes an impediment to high profit rates in the future, and so
there arises an addictive search for the next fix. We look to sites such
the free labor of social media, the microsecond transactions of high
frequency trading, and the in-game sale of virtual land as laboratories for
accumulation crises.

So we convened a roundtable with some brilliant colleagues (Karen Gregory,
Matthew Tiessen, Austin Walker, and Audrey Watters) and asked them to
discuss a space of digital crisis in their own fields of study. Daniel
Joseph will briefly review our work, I'll facilitate, and we'll compare the
unfolding of economic crises across different digital spaces, including
games, finance, and online education. The goal is a dynamic discussion of
the crisis tendencies and crisis responses afforded by digital spaces, with
perspectives from a variety of theoretical, empirical, and professional
backgrounds.

See you then. Best wishes in the meantime.

Cheers,
Dan

On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 8:00 AM, <idc-request at mailman.thing.net> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: The Sharing Economy (Denise Cheng)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 10:12:53 -0700
> From: Denise Cheng <convos at hiDenise.com>
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: Re: [iDC] The Sharing Economy
> Message-ID:
>         <CAJ6+M9_FaJ50sPju5oYWcR_M+_6+9A6FH4badaymBWzJH=
> kwAA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi, everyone--
>
> I just graduated from MIT with a Masters in Comparative Media Studies,
> where I researched the peer economy from a labor perspective
> <
> http://hidenise.com/post/54356670782/mit-thesis-reading-between-the-lines-blueprints
> >.
> I've
> been following the regulatory efforts around Uber, Airbnb, Lyft closely
> over the last two years (reading the bills, exchanges, etc.) and have been
> in conversation with providers across those platforms as well as policy
> directors for those companies. I've also spoken publicly about this subject
> <http://hidenise.com/post/52612284106/visibility>.
>
> Trebor beautifully fleshes out a hurdle in this area, which is the poor
> terminology and how that skewers the conversation. This has real world
> implications; I elaborated on these implications in a lightning talk at a
> "sharing economy" conference, and it might be helpful in framing our
> conversation here:
>
>
> http://civic.mit.edu/blog/hidenise/peer-economy-keep-it-real-to-catalyze-the-sharing-economy
>
> Anyhow, am happy to talk about the peer economy anytime. I recently
> received a gift from Microsoft Research
> <
> http://blog.fuselabs.org/post/89276576126/announcing-the-peer-economy-research-projects-receiving
> >
> to
> do more ethnographic fieldwork in the area, and am locating the cadre of
> scholars interested in the p2p marketplace side of things.
>
>
> --
> Denise Cheng
> Twitter: @hiDenise <http://twitter.com/hiDenise>
>
> hiDenise.com <http://hidenise.com/>
>
>
> *From: *Trebor Scholz <scholzt at newschool.edu>
> > *Subject: *
> > *[iDC] The Sharing Economy**Date: *June 30, 2014 at 1:22:20 PM EDT
> > *To: *"idc at mailman.thing.net" <idc at mailman.thing.net>
>
>
> > Greetings from balmy New York City. It has been exciting to read through
> > all of your proposals and now the introductions, and posts to the mailing
> > list.
>
>
> > This is just as good a time as any to jump in and say hello, starting
> with
> > a reference to a short intervention that I just wrote for Public Seminar,
> > trying to decompress my thoughts about the so-called "sharing economy." I
> > will just leave it at that and see if there is anybody on the list who
> has
> > followed the protests against Uber, and the regulatory efforts concerning
> > Airbnb.
>
>
> >
> >
> http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/06/the-politics-of-the-sharing-economy/#.U7FkPaiXvjA
> >
>
>
> > ~ Trebor
>
>
> > =============
> > R. Trebor Scholz
> > Associate Professor
> > Culture & Media Department
> > THE NEW SCHOOL
> > 65 West 11th Street
> > New York, NY 10011
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> End of iDC Digest, Vol 92, Issue 3
> **********************************
>

-- 
Daniel Greene

University Flagship Fellow
PhD candidate
Department of American Studies
University of Maryland, College Park
Email: dan.greene10 at gmail.com
Twitter: @Greene_DM <https://twitter.com/Greene_DM>
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