Liberal goods are good

One sign of societal decadence is shying away from clear explanations because they are too easy. So here we go: American universities do well because they have a lot of intellectual and practical resources. British universities perform round about what you would expect for a country of that size and resource level, maybe a bit better. Both societies benefit from liberal goods – positive immigration, individual competition and institutional cooperation, societal tolerance, rule of law, relatively free discourse and the rest. However these kind of explanations do not confer status advantage on the person hewing to them. That is why there are incentives on the right to explain the track record of these socities on complex cultural explanations and on the left to look to historical injustice. The reality is just not interesting enought to be diverting to participants in the The Discourse.

You do not gain kudos by stating the obvious – UK society is fairly tolerant, especially compared to most of Europe, and we all benefit from it. We have problems with economic growth and productivity, to which the solutions are also fairly clear – build more houses and infrastructure, get hold of reasonably cheap energy, make good things like investment cheaper. But that scripture does not help anyone differentiate themselves in the political marketplace, unless there are votes in sounding like a General Dynamics programmed spad-bot 2.0. You gain kudos from saying that liberal tolerance is mask for structural racism or the globalist whittling down of our national uniqueness. Hyperbole is part of the attraction.

The more these goods are attacked as manipulative, unjust or irrelevant, the more they fray and will disappear. It is parochial to think that because the UK has been relatively rich up to now, it will be always be so. It would be psychologically satisfying to say these goods are under attack by both right and left, but they are under attack by the centre as well.

Bad  ideas survive. We were told that Russia was a great power. It isn’t. We were told that Russia had clear red lines and breaking them would lead to nuclear catastrophe. It didn’t. That France and Germany were a bridge to Russia. They aren’t. The failure and complacency of Western analysis is nearly catastrophic for NATO. I want to consider that as an aspect of a common occurrence. Bad ideas continue despite repeated failure. There are businessmen whose refusal to pay their debts is effectively part of the business model. Yet banks and private equity continue to lend them money, in defiance of all microeconomic theory. Why is that? If I don’t lend them money, someone else will.

How long does it take debunked ideas to be removed from the curriculum? It should be immediate. Something we are not good at. Mostly we are encouraged to focus on one idea and reiterate that for the rest of our careers. We are not rewarded for removing bad ideas from the curriculum. Doing so introduces professorial panic. What shall I put it in its place?

Tasks to set students studying illicit markets and organised crime

I am sharing some plans for how I introduce topics to students. I would like other teachers to use them freely.

From my course ‘Illicit Markets, Criminal Organizations’

Crime is fundamentally an instance of human insecurity. We need to know what systems create security and insecurity, how and for whom, and the way in which harms are made and distributed.

Crime is increasingly carried out by organised groupings, and like social and economic life generally, is mediated through markets and by digital means. Developments in social media, micro-work platforms, cryptocurrencies, AI and anonymising technology have produced new opportunities for illegal activity and new ways of studying it. These developments challenge criminology and sociology. We need to change our understanding of what a criminal activity or deviant identity is. The existing template used to understand organised crime is becoming out of date.

This course is a critical investigation of criminal markets and organisations that can link their organisation and functioning to developments in digitally driven, capitalist societies. It draws on insights and data from sociology, economics, criminology, computer sciences, organisational studies and other disciplines.

The course invites you investigate questions relevant to this topic. You will join a research seminar and focus on various topical problems and live, real world research scenarios related to global crime. You will have the opportunity to apply your own thinking to real world data and cases. We will examine the management structure used by the American Mafia, problems of redundant Yakuza members, how cybercrime groups make their business models and how drug gangs establish competition and moderate risk. We will study how they recruit, control and manage members. We will explore the problems people running online illicit markets have in trusting the individuals they need to interact with. We will put crime in a global context and critically examine the divide between the West and the rest of the world.

1 – The social and economic organisation of crime

 We will discuss contrasting material on the technologies, politics, ethics and social structure of illegal markets and organisations. The session addresses the following questions:

  • What is crime’s social and economic organisation and why does it matter?
  • What can sociology, economics, computer sciences and criminology add to the discussion of crime?
  • What are illicit markets and organisations?
  • How should we define organised crime?
  • How has the development of globalised, turbo charged capitalism changed crime and the motivations of criminals?
  • What explains recent changes in the pattern of criminal activity?

Tasks:

    1. To prepare for the first half of the seminar write down your answers to the following:
      • What do you look forward to learning about/what do you hope to get out of the class?
      • What will/or does help you and your friends learn in and outside the class?
      • Is there anything that gets in the way of your learning?
      • We will use your answers to discuss in the seminar how best to learn effectively about these topics.
    2. To prepare for the second half of the seminar, read chapter 2 from Allum F and Gilmour S (2021) The Routledge Handbook of Transnational Organized Crime. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003044703 and also pick out a case or theme from it using any chapter from 5 onwards.
    3. Prepare answers to these questions:
        • Selection: what interested you in this particular chapter?
        • Taxonomy: what is organised crime? What are its characteristics?
        • Type: What kinds of crime are discussed in the chapter and how are they carried out?
        • Trends: what trends and changes are discusses in the reading?

      Hypothesise: what might explain the observed trends?

      2 – The social evolution of drug crime and gang organisation

      In this session we examine how criminal organisations govern, control and support their members. We ask:

  • How does criminal organisation regulate crime and participants in crime?
  • How do illicit markets regulate risk?
  • How is risk and harm distributed by criminal organisations and public institutions?
  • To do this we use the key case of County Lines operations and gang identifiers
  • This Week…

    We will undertake a critical reading of this documentary on the Yakuza so read one or both of:

    and watch this:

    Consider:
    • What is the Yakuza? What does it do?
    • How did it emerge as a group historically?
    • Why might it have or have had legitimacy in Japanese society?
    • What concepts of honour and status are used in it?
    • How are members bound into the Yakuza?
    • What other features matter? Consider the relationship between Japanese society and the Yakuza’s structure and operation
    • Using the Alkemade reading to comment on themes are missing or not stated in this documentary

    3 – Deviant Global Flows

    Sociologically, we are interested in both how common or rare some kinds of crime are within a population, what we can say about the population and what elements of social structure explain vulnerabilities, victimisation, harms and propensity to engage in crime. Beyond that we examine the concepts used to explain global crime patterns such as ‘flow’ and ‘blackspots’. These all imply a relationship between nation-state borders, global trade and the movement of people, and geopolitics.

    We examine:

      • Does deviant globalisation follow or lead formal globalisation?
      • What is the intersection between nation states, borders and illicit flows of people and goods?
      • Is crime a political choice?

    Task

The focus is on the decisions and constraints made in an illicit flow, as shaped by gender, race and other contextual factors. We will be using an excerpt from: Fleetwood J (2011) Women in the international cocaine trade: Gender, choice and agency in context. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
The excerpt is from Jennifer Fleetwood’s research in men’s and womens prison’s in Ecuador.
Review the excerpt and read Singer M, Tootle W and Messerschmidt J (2013) Living in an Illegal Economy: The Small Lives that Create Big Bucks in the Global Drug Trade. SAIS Review of International Affairs 33(1): 123–135. DOI: 10.1353/sais.2013.0010.
Struture your reading with the following questions
  • What is a drug mule? Referring back to the lecture, how does the drug mule fit into the wider global flow of illicit drugs?
  • What status do they have in the global drug trade? What characteristics shape their involvement – geographical, economic and so on?
  • What are the motives for involvment in it? How are mules attracted into it?
  • What trajectory do the two women follow?
  • What ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors draw them in?
  • Can you identify any contasts between the men (Frank, Graham, Michael) and women (Marta, Angela, Sharon, Anika, Amanda, Mandalina, Tanya)?
If you want to read more see:
Fleetwood J (2014) Drug Mules: Women in the International Cocaine Trade. Springer. and Fleetwood J (2015) A narrative approach to women’s lawbreaking. Feminist Criminology 10(4). SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: 368–388.

4 – The Crime Career and the Deviant Entrepreneur

We examine the paradigm of the crime career and professional criminal and its application in the digital crime era.

We ask:
  • What attributes make for a professional criminal?
  • Is there professionalisation in criminal activity? What forms does it take?
  • Why do some criminals specialise?
    In the seminar we examine criminal careers as lived and embedded.
    We will discuss the below prison writing excerpts by Vance Phillips and Raymond James Hoslett, kindly shared by them through the American Prison Writing Archive
    • Describe the criminal career the writers follow
    • What is the ‘hustle’ in the prison? How do they learn it?
    • What personal relationships matter to them and why?
    • What kind of skills and aptitudes do they use?
    • For Raymond, what keeps him in the crime lifestyle?
    For your reading I want us to discuss the methods used to research the topic, so read
    • Brotherton DC (2022) Studying the Gang through Critical Ethnography. In: Bucerius SM, Haggerty KD, and Berardi L (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press, pp. 227–245. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190904500.013.11&.

     5 – Crime scripts, crime contexts and routine activities theory

    This session introduces you to two forensic methods: crime script analysis and routine activities theory and assesses how useful they are in understanding criminal activity. We take up the theme of rationality in crime and the benefits and limits of understanding crime as rational and to some extent normal and expected. The session invites you to create your own crime script from existing data.

    (All links will open in a new window)
    Review the process of creating a crime script used in:
    Review the data posted . In class we will assemble these into a script for counterfeit currency operators.

    6 – Digital organised crime and platform criminality

    Introduction – From cybercrime to digital crime

    This week introduces the context of cybercrime and global illicit markets. We discuss key concepts in the field, such as what cybercrime is and the history of cybercrime. We ask whether digital crime is a better frame for capturing what we are interested in. We look at some key areas of crime and crime control, from the darknet to white collar fraud.

    This week…

    For this session I would like us to think critically about technology and risk in relation to crime, how that is understood societally through a Europol report, and the ways in which cybercrime groups are evolving using research from Lusthaus and Varese.

    To start, read:

    To start, read: Europol (2021) Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment The Hague.

    and also

    Lusthaus J and Varese F (2018) Offline and Local: The Hidden Face of Cybercrime. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice.

    Focus around these questions:

    Drawing on Europol and your own experience, what are the greatest risks from cybercrime? What qualities does cybercrime have that matter?

    What kind of imagery is Europol using to represent a) crime and b) criminals?

    What are Europol’s priorites, in terms of what crimes does it regard with the greatest seriousness?

    What does Europol have to say about people’s motives for being involved, and why they end up being victims?

    What do they understand by ‘technology’? What kind of technologies would be used by crime groups?

    Using the Lusthaus and Varese article in what senses is cybercrime ‘offline’ and ‘local’?

    In what ways do their findings contrast with the Europol document?

    7 – Trust, social ties and market rationality

    Introduction

    We examine how some kinds of criminal activity are legitimised and normalised, and how trust between people involved in criminal activity is made and broken. We ask:

    What is the relationship between trust and economic instruments such as credit and exchange?

    What are the difficulties in forming trust in criminal markets and online settings?

    What kind of criminal organisations rely more on trust?

    What legitimates criminal activity?

    What is the relationship between technology and trust?

    Task

    The aim of this seminar is to examine trust as an interactional quality and consider how it manifests and is manipulated in various settings, digital and real world and the vulnerabilities involved.

    To start, read Gambetta’s theory of trust signalling

    Gambetta D (2009) Signaling. In: The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. Oxford University Press Oxford, pp. 168–194.

    https://academic-oup-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/edited-volume/38173/chapter/333032955

    Prepare around the following questions

    Thinking about your own use of digital systems, how is trust signalled between yourself and others, and by the platforms being used?

    In what ways is trust needed in: darknet cryptomarkets, street drug exchanges, and ransomware outfits?

    What technologies and techniques support trust?

    Using Gambetta, what methods do cybercriminal operators and others use to establish trust?

    How might trust be used to undermine or attack cryptomarkets or other criminal operations? Should it be?

    8 – Business and cultural models in organised crime economies

    Introduction

    This session looks in more depth at the kinds of cooperation and performance by people involved in organised crime and illicit economies. What princples of organisation are used, what codes of practice and honour are deployed, and how do people stabilise their organisations and networks? We look at how these understandings are shared and gain force culturally, and also what the limits of that are. We look at emotional performance as one way of structuring and regulating interaction in these environments.

    Task

    This seminar will examine performance, codes of the street and the gentrification hypothesis, using Curtis R, Wendel T and Spunt B (2002) We Deliver: The Gentrification of Drug Markets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side: Rockville, MD: National Institute of Justice. Though quote old this report prefigures themes that have become much more common in illicit market research now.

    Reading the report we will discuss:

    What does gentrification mean in the context of drug markets?

    How does gentrification manifest? What signals are used? What kinds of performance are involved?

    What technological and organisational innovations support it?

    Critically link the hypothesis to themes of surveillance, racialisation, and displacement. Is gentrification simply a one-way street? What assumptions are made in the hypothesis about ethnicity and social class for example?

    Could you apply the same hypothesis to other types of organised and market crime we have discussed, for example, sex work?

    For a more up to date example see

    Martin J (2018) Cryptomarkets, systemic violence and the’gentrification hypothesis’. Addiction 113(5). Wiley-Blackwell, Wiley: 797–798.

    9 – Community Impacts and Crimes of Power

    This session examines the community impacts of organised crime and illicit markets. It discusses the interplay of racialisation, state violence, and corruption in different settings. It asks if theoretical constructs and concepts have centred the West in a way that has limited our analysis and understanding.

    Task

    We will be discussing how studying the community impact of organised crime and illicit markets would benefit from a de-centred perspective.

    Is Europe and North America ‘centred’ in the cases we have discussed in the course? What are the implications of that?

    How might it be de-centred? What could a Southern criminology perspective show about globalisation and crime organisation?

    Can we move past methodological and theoretical nationalism in crime research?

    For the seminar, use:

    Winton A (2014) Gangs in global perspective. Environment and Urbanization 26(2). SAGE Publications Ltd: 401–416. DOI: 10.1177/0956247814544572.

    and Panfil VR (2017) The Gang’s All Queer: The Lives of Gay Gang Members. NYU Press. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1ggjjrn. Chapter 3 ‘Gay Gangs Becoming “Known”: Respect, Violence, and Chosen Family’ and Chapter 7 ‘Tired of Being Stereotyped” Urban Gay Men in Underground Economies’

    There is quite lot of homophobic language in the Panfil reading.

    10 – Control and Simulation Exercise

    We discuss enforcement activity against illicit markets and organisations.

    We ask:

    What are the politics of crime control?

    How can we evaluate the success of disruption efforts?

    How do law enforcement and other agencies set their priorities for targeting criminal activity?

    How should they?

    The class will be divided into two teams. One will design an organised crime group, the other will try and disrupt it at each stage.

    Both teams can use the UK Police College’s Disrupting Serious and Organised Criminals Menu of Tactics (edited version below)

    The simulation will follow these stages:

          • Organised crime team Disruption team
            1. Choose a crime activity, aim or method. For example, if you were importing something, how would you do that? Select a disruption priority – prevention, pursuit, or protection. What will the focus of disruption be?
            2. Outline your organisation and where/how it will be operating. How will you coordinate, for example? How would you replace your leader, if there is one? Outline your response tactics and how effective you think it would be
            3 Say how you would change in response to interventions. Discuss the principles involved and what you have leaned

    Continue reading “Tasks to set students studying illicit markets and organised crime”

    Football and alcohol, the political carnival

    Colleagues and myself have studied football fandom and alcohol in terms of what is called the carnivalesque.(Bandura et al. 2023). This is an idea that has been applied quite a bit in alcohol studies. A lot of theories of the carnival have relied on Bakhtin (1984) and the idea that the social order is inverted, with a focus on this spectacular. The model here is the mediaeval festival. The idea is that the carnival involved the suspension of some hierarchies, the inversion of others, and the focus on the baudy and foul language ofbillingsgate. This is a development of the drinking as time out idea with a focus on extreme intoxication.

    Intoxication is the practice of learning to separate the individual from their everyday self. Both football and alcohol consumption create a similar social space with qualities of collective effervescence, inversion and so on – and also, following from what Haydock says, this is both validated and seen as a problem in capitalist leisure society. This might explain the tension between football as a form of entertainment and football as a carnival. I’d also use that to highlight our methodological approach – we see supporters as being actively involved rather than passive consumers of the sport, and part of this is the way they gather and celebrate/commiserate.

    The relationship between alcohol and football is pulled in three directions: political; commercial; and popular. A sign of the politics of alcohol and football : Alcohol consumption is treated as a health issue, but only outside of football and public space, where it becomes a public order issue. In popular terms football is part of the carnival of social life. It brings people together on an occasion where some rules and norms are suspended. However the carnival can also be quite habitual and mundane. Going to a football match can feel just like a regular habit. The value of it is a renewal of central bonds and identity.

    A football match is a great collective act of will. That’s why the worse your team does, the more stubborn your support. The worse your team is doing the greater the will, the greater the belief, the greater the bond between supporters. I know enough Jambos to know the perverse satisfaction that comes through your team once again falling over itself to put the ball in the back of its own net. In that way, fandom them has something in common with gambling. Gamblers do not like winning streak to go on pretty long. Winning is a new experience that is risky and generates uncertainty. It disrupts the pleasure of the zone.

    In commercial terms both alcohol and football are great commercial enterprises. They do have some features in common. They both draw on this idea of the carnival but also helpful to the mundane spaces of life. Drinking in a pub might be like going to your living room. Drinking at home might be taking that pleasure back into the domestic space. The commercialised image of alcohol consumption is of spectacular joy when most alcohol consumption is day-to-day. Likewise the image  of football might be all massive commercialised cups and expensive stadiums, but on that is built a pyramid of every day practice. Saturdays and Sundays on the bus. Midweek queuing  in the cold. Now you might think, well one of those is more authentic than the other. But I think both need each other and benefit from each other. The real needs the fake like a gambler needs losing.

    Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
    Bandura, Comille Tapiwa, Richard Giulianotti, Jack G Martin, Angus Bancroft, Stephen Morrow, Kate Hunt, and Richard I Purves. ‘Alcohol Consumption among UK Football Supporters: Investigating the Contested Field of the Football’, 2023
    Haydock, William. 2016. ‘The Consumption, Production and Regulation of Alcohol in the UK: The Relevance of the Ambivalence of the Carnivalesque’. Sociology 50(6):1056–71. doi: 10.1177/0038038515588460.

     

    The gentrification of suffering

    Gentrification has three meanings. All refer to a kind of relentless nicening, the civilizing process at work. First a process whereby by affluent, middle classes take over a previously working class area or occupation, as in the gentrification of Leith or of football. Estate agents think it is a good thing. So do most residents. I like nice  cafes and cute bookshops. Some activists criticize it for pricing out locals and fraying neighborhood relationships. I think that matters how the process increases wages and the variety of relationships and networks that are formed. It can be quite varied. It is often caricatured as Middle Eastern sheiks and Russian oligarchs buying up London, while Google employees buy up San Francisco. The broad evidence is that gentrification does benefit the original residents as well. On the other hand, if I lived in San Francisco, London, or parts of New York, I might feel very differently.

    Second, the substitution of previously violent or otherwise coercive interpersonal exchange relations with contract and market-based ones, as in drug market gentrification. Although often associated with the rise of mobile telephony, and especially digital-based dealing that is not determinative. The existence of County Lines operations shows that remote relationships can be quite coercive and exploiting.

    Finally, the process where a human problem becomes represented by those most able to articulate it. Disability, addiction, poverty have all been gentrified in that sense. In turn suffering becomes rationalised as a source of identity, distinction and difference. Whether drug addiction problem gambling or any kind of oppression. A much rehearsed example is autism which has come to be treated as something close to a superpower rather than a spectrum disorder which causes a range of difficulties.. This process is especially apparent when there is a resource to be gained such as the favour of states or corporations. A variant of this is articulating other people’s suffering, as in when a tragic death, suicide or murder is used to back up one’s own arguments. Another variant is sanewashing where an extremist group’s aims are explained as being ‘really about’ what the observer cares about.

    One of the reasons I am wary of the gentrification of suffering is, it denies the reality of social suffering and the agency and choice of people involved. An example comes from the work of Alice Goffman.Her excellent ethnography focused on people she said were criminalised and who were definitely involved in shady dealings. But in the area she worked in, as she notes there are plenty of people who live different lives, who avoided drugs, who stayed in school. The temptation with the gentrification of suffering is to articulate those who are at the most extremes. It is a problem for theory that does not account for the middle range.

    Goffman, Alice. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. University of Chicago Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226136851.

    Smells like 极 客精神

    One theme of mine is territorialization of the digital world, and the tight relationship between cyber criminals and their governments. Sometimes this is practical, as in the fact that Russian cybercriminals can operate freely as long as they do not target Russian /CIS citizens. Sometimes it is felt nationalism as with the patriotism of Chinese hackers. National hacking cultures are a combination of ways of organizing, expectations on participants and the wider digital and state structure in which they are held. Because everything digital is local,, they emerged from the historical evolution of skillbase, opportunity and political economy. It marks the particular division of labour, types of criminal activity and organisational practice that we see in national hacking forums.

    极 客精神 is geek spirit (deSombre and Byrnes 2018), the ethos  and obligation of community among Chinese pro-government digital activists, hackers and crime entrepreneurs. For Chinese and Russian-speaking cybercriminals the 21st century viewed an evolving relationship between cybercrime, patriotism and nationalism. The authors of this highly informative report say there was a tight relationship between Chinese hackers and patriotic fervour early on. In contrast with the well-known links between the Kremlin and Russian-speaking cyber criminals, that relationship developed as Russian foreign policy evolved in a much more aggressive direction. Chinese hacker patriotism seems to be more organic in form and origin. Starting with first protests in the form of attacks and web defacements against the Indonesian and the U.S. governments. Later, Chinese hackers set up their own companies and contracted services to the Chinese government.

    This review of hacker entrepreneurs shows each adheres to a different national culture. This is the case of both mode of practice and overall aims and targets. Something I and others noted with the different interactional ethics in Russian compared to English language hacking forums. English language ones were far more chatty. As the report also confirms, Russian forums emphasize business, not community. Professional in this setting means the cash nexus and the art of the deal, customer care and rewards for loyalty. Social punishments are meted out for weaker and less competent members. Chinese forums are more nurturing. Some hackers run paid apprenticeship programs. It seems there are both civilizational hacking cultures and national ones. Russian hacking sometimes includes the wider ruusky mir. This is not equal. Chinese, of course, participate in English and Russian forums.The reverse is not true. English and Russian speakers do not enter Chinese forums.

    Russians and East Europeans saw a criminal market dominated by Americans. They wanted some of that. The report highlights how important Ukraine, especially its Russian-speaking areas pre-war was to the development of a Russian language cyber crime underground. CarderPlanet was formed from a meeting in Odesa in 2000. it was crazy and direct response to the English-speaking Carder group Counterfeit Library. the Russian language for was highly structured and deliberately professionalized in comparison to the anarchic English language one. The harm was significant, costing financial institutions hundreds of millions. As these organizations evolved so did the close links between Russian government and elite cyber criminals. The Russian-Georgian War showed close cooperation in military aims with cyber criminals. The Russian state has been adept at maintaining its cybercriminal capacity.It is hard to maintain the sociological concept of deviance as an explanation for criminal activity in situations where criminal activity is co-opted by the state, where criminals are highly skilled and well rewarded for crime is patriotic.

    DeSombre, Winnona, and Dan Byrnes. 2018. Thieves and Geeks: Russian and Chinese Hacking Communities. Recorded Future.

    Harm reduction is not the point, what is useful is what happens around it

    Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is.

    I was reminded reading Nicholls et al (2022) report on drug consumption rooms of the critique of them as ‘not a silver bullet’. This term means a dependable solution to a otherwise tricky problem . It put me in mind of a meeting with MPs where I and others had explained that they were useful, but not in themselves a solution to Scotland’s drug problem. I said that harm reduction services like DCRs are never an end in themselves. The ‘service’ you want to offer is not providing a safe environment for drug consumption. It is having a contact point for users who have particularly disrupted lives where you can talk about other services that they need – welfare, housing, psychological, health etc.  What matters is what happens when you provide that service. Later I heard, ‘they are not a silver bullet’. Does anybody think they are? As Nicholls et al outline, everyone involved thinks they have to defeat this strawman argument first of all.

    We should make ourselves aware of why this argument exists in the first place. Nobody used it for Scotland’s needle exchange policy which was vital in fighting the HIV epidemic. Objections then were moral as it was seen as a moral and a technical project. It has come about because our harm reduction thinking has become increasingly technically focused in practice evidence and justification. This is just perfectly reasonable. We could work together with very different moral and political views  to agree on the technical benefits of needle exchange. It was quite remarkable that conservative, and liberal, politicians could agree on this approach.

    The problem of relying on the technologically justified approach is that it can ossify over time and displace the wider moral claim you’re making. Everyone starts to expect naloxone to act in this way. We know it is its most effective when it is part of a toolkit owned by users – meaning not a magic bullet.

    So we can perhaps work with some different means of understanding:

    What kinds of conversations and communities are created and supported through it?

    What kind of knowledge came from it?

    Does it connect different elements of a wicked problem?

    and so on

    Nothing is a silver bullet. Except when it is. There are plenty of technological solutions. HIV is now a disease to live with, not die of. Obesity may be preventable. Semaglutide might treat addiction. Yet many campaigns reject silver bullets on principle because the real aim is different – usually to end capitalism in some form. Imagine a party campaigning against child poverty. They are offered a solution – eg here’s a ton of cash. They reject it. ‘No to solutions that do not change society’. We would think them disgraceful, immoral. Certainly we would assume they were not really opposed to child poverty. But that is exactly what happens.

    In the social sciences, we have been sometimes reluctant to accept that there can be magic bullets, technological solutions, because we are a bit in love with our wicked problems. If some of these problems have simple technical solutions like the weight loss pill, then it reduces our role to technical administrators. Similarly we refuse the great man idea of history because it gets in the way of our ability to theorise. It is a bit hard to argue now that individuals do not influence history.

    Nicholls, James, Wulf Livingston, Andy Perkins, Beth Cairns, Rebecca Foster, Kirsten M. A. Trayner, Harry R. Sumnall, Tracey Price, Paul Cairney, Josh Dumbrell, and Tessa Parkes. 2022. ‘Drug Consumption Rooms and Public Health Policy: Perspectives of Scottish Strategic Decision-Makers’. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19(11):6575. doi: 10.3390/ijerph19116575.

    Trump is a turf warrior: crypto as a digital territory.

    Nobody talks much about capillary power these days. Probably because we have too many lessons in actual power. This was a predominant concept for many decades in social theory. Derived from Michel Foucault who held that power was not held by individuals or organizations, but spread through society. Every act of definition creates it. Every act of resistance renews it. It is hard to say as Foucault did, ‘Power is everywhere and nowhere’ when you can easily point to where power actually is. It is a pity as the persistent performance of power can bind us to its more subtle features. We can see is how much power is mythical, performative, rhetorical and psychological. Tone and texture matter. The  main problem I have with the idea of disciplinary power is that often what he is describing is not power. It is more like bureaucratic busywork. What we are seeing is power becoming more personal and ‘hot’, losing its bloodlessness and focus on the normal in favour of the pathological. The world is re-enchanted.

    As with his origin story in Manhattan real estate, Trump thinks in terms of turf, as in controllable territory. Turf is a common concept in organized crime. In Mexico it is called plaza. The dense network of relationships that matter. Controlling the political power in a territory is more important than having formal ownership. Turf is the thicket of political, familial, clannish and neighbourhood relationships that make power happen. Organized crime is a frequent mediator of this relationship. Turf also needs some measure of consent.Just as the British police often say they’re policing by consent, so organised crime also often does crime with consent. Or at least acquiescence.

    One area where turf wars had become less consequential is face-to-face drug dealing. The popularity of the mobile phone seriously reduced turf conflicts (Edlund and Machado 2019). However, this belongs to an older era of digital life. Increasingly, we see digital space and resources foreclosed. The digital is a much more territorial space and has become like a limited territorial resource. The growing interest of organized crime in crypto is part of that. They do not have a lot of interest in resources that are widely networked and easily accessed. Their interest lies in resources where they can control and limit access and charge significant rents.

    This also explains Trump’s approach to politics, finance, and the digital sphere shows that his most recent embrace of crypto is significant here. Crypto is by design a digital turf. By that I mean it is deliberately a restricted resource that cannot be scaled and instead must be controlled.