Geopolitical Structuring in the Age of Information: Imagining Order, Understanding Change
Ordering principles, both explicit and implicit, have provided some of the central threads for theoretical contestation in the discipline of international relations. The protagonists predominantly coalesce around principles of survival, a state of nature, or a fundamental economic logic. Through an analysis of the globalization of a logic of the private right to intellectual property, this article attempts to expose a powerful, and at times under recognized, structuring movement within a global geopolitical space that is ever increasingly shaped by the “information age.” In doing so, the aim is to problematize and suggest an alternative way of approaching ordering principles as theoretical prisms for interpreting action and actors in global politics.
Whose Data? Problematizing the ‘Gift’ of Social Labour
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, Founder and Director of Google Ideas, contend that ‘for governments and companies’, the user-generated content that constitutes big data is ‘a gift, enabling them to better respond to citizen and customer concerns, and, within the emergent field of predictive analysis, to predict what the future will hold’. In this article, I interrogate what it means for data from our social lives to be interpreted as a ‘gift’ by private enterprises such as Google. Who is giving what to whom? What is the nature of the transaction? Whose property is this data? By putting into conversation Schmidt and Cohen’s gift thesis with an analysis of the ‘value’ of participation in digital communication networks, this article seeks to uncover an intellectual property conundrum that legitimizes the rise of new kinds of labour vulnerabilities in the digital age; intensifying the extension of the logic of privatization into our digital social lives; and, in doing so, the importance of intellectual property as a language of critique and resistance.
The TRIPS Agreement: Challenges and Possibilities in the Negotiation of Justice at the Transnational Level
This article explores the relationship between the ideal of justice and institutional ‘structures’ administering justice/injustice within the contemporary international system through a study of the Trade Related Aspects of Property Right agreement specific focus is the question of ‘who counts’ in the negotiation of global justice, and the relationships between those affected by the global economic, political and social forces emanating from the agreement. The article problematises the territorial boundedness of questions of justice within a Westphalian horizon of political community. It also seeks to address the challenges that emerge through the example of the TRIPS agreement, and the possible trajectory of political community in a post-Westphalian world.
“Good” and “Bad” Actors in Digital Space: The Un/Making of a Digital Citizen
There has been a firestorm of moral outrage regarding the collection and misuse of personal information by data-informed digital companies. In framing their actions we often make a distinction between “good” and “bad” actors. I investigate the hidden presupposition that informs this dichotomy, by using the figure of the citizen to reveal an underlying structural transformation in the fog of our times. I ask, what can we reverse engineer from this historical phenomenon to derive a meaning of the political project defining the making of “digital space,” which shares meaning with the supposed inherent characteristics of the age, and its relationship to the production, validation, and dissemination of information? I’ll present a case for how an atomization of affinity and failure maps and draws energy from a broader historical agenda of social, political, and economic deregulation. On this basis I ask, what are the implications for understanding the figure of the digital citizen?
focuses on critical tensions at the heart of an Information Age—a world of massive data collection and computational synthesis. He has examined the economies of big data, the social human basis of artificial intelligence, and how developments in these domains manifest in the politics of intellectual property.