Goldsmiths Press / PERC Papers – serie

A critical and evidence-based account of the COVID-19 pandemic as a political–economic rupture, exposing underlying power struggles and social injustices.The dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic represented an exceptional interruption in the routines of work, financial markets, movement across borders and education. The policies introduced in response were said to be unprecedented—but the distribution of risks and rewards was anything but. While asset-owners, outsourcers, platforms and those in spacious homes prospered, others faced new hardships and dangers.   Unprecedented? explores the events of 2020-21, as they afflicted the UK economy, as a means to grasp the underlying dynamics of contemporary capitalism, which are too often obscured from view. It traces the political and cultural contours of a "rentier nationalism," that was lurking prior to the pandemic, but was accelerated and illuminated by COVID-19. But it also pinpoints the contradictions and weaknesses of this capitalist model, and the new sources of opposition that it meets.   An empirical, accessible and critical analysis of the COVID economy, Unprecedented? is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the political and economic turbulence of the pandemic’s first eighteen months.

This book explores online reputation conflicts, by thinking through how they extend and 'evolve' the complex histories of credit, status, deference and battle that have long inflected how platformed reputations move and matter. It unpacks four online reputation regimes, intersections between the general opinion and conflicts over reputational value informed by long histories of capitalist reputation management. The crowd-sourced credibility regime extends consumer credit scoring histories, inviting online users to think of platformed liking and rating as steps in a crowd-sourced credit scoring algorithm. The microcelebrity regime governs status in the lives of online cultural producers, such as aspiring YouTube stars. It operationalizes status metrics, such as subscriber counts, to distinguish between paid and unpaid online cultural labour. The identity regime extends racial and patriarchal capitalisms, by ascribing users different reputational rewards, costs and risks according to identity categories. The campaigning regime describes the pervasive sense that online reputation must be fought for - whether through acts of online electioneering, public relations efforts, influencer marketing, or everyday social media posts subtly inflected with these protocols. Together, these regimes comprise a widespread state of reputation warfare, in which seemingly trivial battles over status, credibility and influence play a crucial role in shaping politics and public life.

An innovative new anthology exploring how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics.From the libertarian economics of Ayn Rand to Aldous Huxley's consumerist dystopias, economics and science fiction have often orbited each other. In Economic Science Fictions, editor William Davies has deliberately merged the two worlds, asking how we might harness the power of the utopian imagination to revitalize economic thinking.Rooted in the sense that our current economic reality is no longer credible or viable, this collection treats our economy as a series of fictions and science fiction as a means of anticipating different economic futures. It asks how science fiction can motivate new approaches to economics and provides surprising new syntheses, merging social science with fiction, design with politics, scholarship with experimental forms. With an opening chapter from Ha-Joon Chang as well as theory, short stories, and reflections on design, this book from Goldsmiths Press challenges and changes the notion that economics and science fiction are worlds apart. The result is a wealth of fresh and unusual perspectives for anyone who believes the economy is too important to be left solely to economists.ContributorsAUDINT, Khairani Barokka, Carina Brand, Ha-Joon Chang, Miriam Cherry, William Davies, Mark Fisher, Dan Gavshon-Brady and James Pockson, Owen Hatherley, Laura Horn, Tim Jackson, Mark Johnson, Bastien Kerspern, Nora O Murchú, Tobias Revell et al., Judy Thorne, Sherryl Vint, Joseph Walton, Brian Willems

A provocative analysis of market-based interventions into public problems and the consequences.Market-based interventions have been used in attempts to solve numerous public problems, from education to healthcare and from climate change to privacy. Scholars have responded persuasively through critiques of neoliberalism. In Can Markets Solve Problems? Daniel Neyland, Véra Ehrenstein, and Sveta Milyaeva propose a different route forward.There is no single entity knowable as “the market,” the authors argue. Instead, they examine in detail the devices, relations, and practices that underpin these market-based interventions. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies (STS), each chapter focuses on a different intervention and critically explores the market sensibility around which it is organized. Trade and exchange, competition, property and ownership, and investment and return all become the focus of a thorough exploration of what it means to intervene in public problems, how problems are composed, and how solutions are continually reworked.Can Markets Solve Problems? offers the first book-length STS enquiry into markets and public problems. Weaving together rich empirical descriptions and conceptual discussions, the book provides in-depth insights into the workings of these markets, their continuous evolution, and the consequences. The result is a new avenue of critical inquiry that moves between the details of specific policies and the always-emerging, collective features of this landscape of intervention.

The account of an influential 2001 project in technology design documents the development of key concepts that have since become standard practice.The influential Presence Project brought together an international group of collaborators in 2001 to investigate how technology can be used to increase the presence of older people in their local communities. This became a groundbreaking project for practice-based design research, exploring approaches and methods that have resonated since. The design team rejected a problem-solving approach, focusing instead on creating new and unusual situations for communication and insight. They introduced cutting-edge methods and developed challenging designs that they tested in the communities themselves. This book documents the Presence Project's development of key concepts in contemporary technology design, including cultural probes, design workbooks, and speculative design. Original Presence Project participants may have been surprised that the methods they invented became standard practice; the theme of the project was to break out of conventional approaches and try something radically new. With a new preface by Bill Gaver and an introduction by Phoebe Sengers, this reissue of The Presence Project gives readers a glimpse into the thinking behind this influential project and ideas about how to bring it to bear on today's design problems.

A proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including "the futilitarian condition," "homo futilitus," and "semio-futility"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.