There is a spike in exports of household white goods and consumer electornics to former Soviet Central Asia and the neighbourhood. Why is that? The assumption is they are headed by hook and by crook to Russia. What for? It is claimed they are needed for the war. There is something in them Russia needs. Metal for MiGs? Batteries for the drones? Neither. Semiconductors are in desparate need as the war machine expends its guided missles and drones over Ukraine. Russia is importing washing machines, refrigerators and other items via places like Kazakhstan in order to get their mitts on the microchips. I was interested in this example of a rapidly emerging illicit trade.

It is a nice story about an everyday item suddenly becoming vital due to the bitter war. But as reporting by Tegler shows, not likely not to be true, or if true, not very significant. Drones, missiles and other items being expended in the war create a thirst for microchips. However the kind of chips you get in household items are not critical to these weapons, and though they are useful they are of a kind that is widely available. Higher imports might just be due to good old fashioned need, as domestic industry is throttled or forced to turn to war production. There is however a trade in far more useful microchips being washed through third countries. China is likely a big supplier.

What sanctions have done is highlighted how so many aspects of life in a modern economy rely on microchips. Want to shift to a non-Western payment system? You will need lots and lots of microhips. So household appliances are vital to the war because households rely on them, not because they are a form of secondary war production.

It is difficult to understand the appeal of Ardern, Sturgeon, Trump and Johnson without recognising that politics is about providing psychological goods: the warm bath of a seratonin hit, with the odd excitement of a dopamine rush to break it up now and then. Western politicians have given up on fixing our declining productivity or taming capitalism. They now hope to provide reassuring narratives and national psychodramas. The language displays that. Commentary over Nicola Sturgeon’s rule mentioned how reassuring her presence was during COVID, and how pleasant her social democratic narrative was, while not pointing to any actual real world impact her policies had. Criticism of Trump during the same period tended to focus on his unwillingness to be reassuring in those terms. He is more on the dopamine based continuum I feel. It is not that Sturgeon had no policies, just that they exist purely as props in the psychological narrative being offered. Something she was very accomplished at. Opposition parties’ attempts to point to this or that inadequacy in policy delivery missed the point.

Security experts cal this ‘security theatre’, measures which have a relatively low immediate cost and which induce the sense of safety in the target without any measurable effect on actual safety. For example, the US TSA introduced strict checks on air passengers following the attacks on 11th September 2001. These measures had high externalities, and so put off passengers from travelling by air they had a measurable effect on road traffic accidents. The characteristic of security theatre measures is that their proponents refuse to factor in externalities and opportunity costs. They sometimes directly increase insecurity as to avoid too many false positives their operators hack them.

Security theatre is not a bad aim in itself. Sometimes trust has to be demonstrated and it might be as important to show people they are safer as much as making them actually safer. Politically it may be necessary to reassure high value clients so they have a sense that ‘something is being done’. Interface design embeds that. People take friendlier safety theatrics over alienating security reality any day. There are also significant problems stemming from people’s misperception of risk or safety. Fear of crime can be debilitating, isolating and wearing. A little risk is a good thing, for an individual and society.

Security in life and in politics creates a safety bubble (the serotonin bit) but also needs a hard, thrilling edge to show how miserable and dangerous life is outside (the dopamine bit). Also known as ‘England’, for viewers in Scotland. So what? One of the reasons we have such a strong focus on narrative in politics is that there are social facts which are unavoidable but nobody has the will or desire to do anything about. Number one is that inequality tends to increase, absent war or revolution. Narrative is a cheap-ish way of softening the edges and a good way of convincing the middle class that the state spending they benefit from is good in principle as well as happily coincident with their interests. On a micro-level, social media is designed around dopamine, providing the happy little hits that drive interaction and turning us all into a ore to be deep mined.

What to do? Realty always comes a-knockin’ of course, but it takes its time. The main problem is that by design our political system gives politicians very little to actually do. Decisions are farmed out to abstract entities or contracted companies and arms length agencies. There is no real fix for that. Maybe we could make all children raised by wolves, as most Boomers claim to have been.

The value of social research methods is that it produces independent evidence on the nature of society, social-economic problems and challenges, and potentially agreed ways of reaching effective solutions. There are two challenges to social research methods: one is the epistemic fracture of societies, where awkward evidence is mistrusted or denied. The other is the technocratic assumption that all will be resolved by data, and that theory-less, structure-less, data will answer all questions. These are challenges are all the more serious because they have something to them. Social research, like any other institutional practice, can be governed by agendas that are hidden or unquestioned, or partial. Much effective research takes place outside of institutions, and platform data provides more data than we can seriously use without developing our computational skills and tools. 

We have to get these challenges in context first of all. Despite the image of an atomised, divided country living solely on the warmth of social media rage, people in Britain are fairly trusting. They just do not trust central government that much. There is epistemic fracture though. Trust in established new sources is not strong across the board and has exhibited a growing vertical and horizontal epistemic fracture.  There are many features to this epistemic fracture, showing the evolution of public debate and the social sorting of society into a self referential, credentialed class and the rest.

One that has gathered a lot of interest has been the operation of malicious disinformation operations. Thomas Rid (2020) has written an accessible history and theoretical study of information operations. As he shows overall disinformation operations are about the intent, rather than the form, of the operation. For that reason tactical moves like disclosing a campaign’s existence can be effective if the aim is to generate uncertainty. According to Rid (2020) what they do is attack the liberal epistemic order. This order has some features: that facts have their own life, independent of values and interests: that expertise should be independent of immediate political and strategic interest.

That institutions should be built around those principles – a relatively impartial media, quiescent trade unions, universities, even churches and other private institutions, are part of the epistemic matrix undergirding liberalism. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this order has been eroded from multiple angles over the past decades by processes that have nothing to do with information operations. Independent media institutions like established newspapers have become uneconomic and replaced with a click-driven, rage fuelled, tribalist media. Increasingly the old institutions mimic the new. The independence universities and the professions has been similarly eroded by the imposition of market driven governance on higher education, the NHS, and other bodies. This isn’t a call to all just get along because that is part of the problem: we are not grasping the power of vertical integration of self, context and information spheres. Disinformation can be a red herring and an excuse for the failure of institutions to operate in the public interest, and to understand why this is the case. 

The horizontal aspect of this is that people with high social and economic capital have more trust in institutions. The vertical aspect is that in some societies trust is politically divided and people only trust news sources that represent their ‘side’. These two dimensions overlay each other. We should not be too surprised. People whose lives were easily adapted to COVID lockdown because they had secure housing, could work from home easily, and did not have their children’s education much disrupted are more trusting of institutions and establishment media sources. This aspect of epistemic fracture was hidden from sight, and instead mistrust in COVID messaging was often attributed to disinformation and malicious actors. There are plenty of disinformation operations but their effectiveness is questionable. Social research should provide a framework to move beyond panicked responses that seek to close down the public sphere. 

Historical research and media analysis also helps us put these problems in context. It also does not take a genius to note that the liberal epistemic order was always less than it was cracked up to be, as studied in the work of the Glasgow University Media Group among others. If we look at the history of trade union politics in France and Italy to take two cases we see a fractured information order without a public square consensus.

We can use critical digital analysis to point to some specific developments more recently: the financialisation and datafication of disinformation markets, and the vertical integration of political power with distributed media which makes use of of a distributed labour infrastructure which is agile and available. It is noticeable that they use some of the same infrastructure of doubt and uncertainty which is employed by spam and ransomware operations.  They deploy sophisticated, data informed semiotic tools. The recent history of disinformation strikes at a number of question at the intersection of information science, sociology of markets, sociology of technology and the philosophy of knowledge: how can disinformation be defined, recognised and how can systems be made resilient against it. There are several thorny ontological and epistemological questions e.g. between the politics of knowledge, preference falsification, technical and social verification. 

One way of doing that is to reframe the issue in a way supported by social research methods. It cannot be about pure information (no such thing) or uncontested knowledge (undesirable) but creating local, critical spaces where communities can decide on the informational priorities that matter to them. Returning to my starting point, we need to understand an epistemic contradiction: the most liberal viewpoints demand the most closure when they attempt to grasp the motives of others. People who voted for Britain leaving the EU have a much more accurate understanding of the Remain side’s motives than Remainers do of theirs. They are epistemically privileged, if socially marginalised. My hypothesis is that epistemic gap is due to the Remain side having a much more socially integrated multi layered knowledge structure which operates through everyday spaces (work, university, neighbourhood) in ways that the Leave side does not. The reason the EU vote was a surprise to many was that this conceptual integration around Leave is more fragmented, less socially/culturally powerful, but is still there.

What we should establish is the role of social research in the creation of an information moral economy. People who answer surveys, fill in census forms, and put up with us when we interview them or hang out in their spaces, are participating in a moral economic that recognises some civic commonality and public good coming from research. The moral economy is instrumental and emotionally bound, and recognising it means we need to understand our duties towards norms of reciprocity and the public good, the role our work has in vital questions of the distribution of economic and social resources.

Rid T (2020) Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Crime is designed in. Organised crime is intertwined in society and its institutions, its character reflects them, and it uses society’s technical affordances. Digital capitalism provides tools to increase the reach and impact of criminal activity Risks are distributed along with social vulnerabilities. Some crime is required and necessary because many people cannot turn to the state for help. If the only source of order is the local gangster, the only source of liquid capital the local loan shark/drug lord, the only way to secure status or survival is through gang membership, if social cohesion relies on gang influence, if social order relies on the underworld,  if an economy relies on a supply of illicit labour, if it depends on minerals produced in defiance of environmental regulations, if the most productive and highly capitalised sector of the economy ignores regulatory compliance; if survival depends on it, we can talk of crime as necessary. As an example, the Yakuza have at times been the most flexible and adaptable sector of the Japanese economy.

Technical and social networks are crucial to the development of criminal capacity to organise effectively. Mafia organisations benefit from ‘rents’ (ie charging to non interfere with everyday business) and ‘protection’ (obtaining control over resources, labour and skills, rather than producing those things). Most capitalist activity comes from that. Social media obtains extractive control over personal data. Amazon uses economic privileges awarded by the courts to charge a rent from sellers and book publishers. These aren’t even the nastiest examples.

The capacity to create hybrid systems in terms of state-crime relations, legal-illegal and organisational-platform/infrastructure is central. The infrastructure allows participants to manage and broker risk. On a national and global level state formation and deformation leads to the creation of conflict zones and black spots. At one time criminologists hypothesised that people became labelled as deviant and adopted a deviant identity. Crime existed in the left over grey spaces of the licit world, the abode of the righteous dopefiend. Now, we see crime designed into systems, and crime that creates its own context, its own technology and architecture. As an example, telemarketing fraud practitioners who have entirely no sympathy at all for their victims (Shover, Coffey and Hobbs, 2003). They view themselves as entrepreneurs taking money from the foolish who are complicit in their own victimisation.

There was a parallel between the tele-fraudsters’ own lifestyles and the way they characterise their victims. They saw their victims as reckless gamblers eager to give their own money away. The fraudsters’ own lifestyles often involved high stakes gambling and plenty of splashing the cash, so they seemed to think that their victims wanted to be like them but couldn’t. Those running the tele business engaged in the usual distancing involved in white-collar crime. Those who ran the business blamed their salesmen for going too far. Salesmen blamed their bosses for giving them incentives to illegal behaviour.  The fraudsters thought they merited a lavish lifestyle but were unable to obtain it by mainstream means. Telefraud offered them large amounts of ready cash for little expenditure of effort. There is nothing these convicted criminals say or do that wouldn’t fit very well with a company operating legally but at the margins of personal morality. They rely on the same systems, the same data, the same language.

Illicit markets face problems with valuation, coordination and cooperation (Beckert and Wehinger, 2012) and cannot rely on institutions of of law and state to fix these problems for them. Therefore they turn to other mechanisms – interpersonal trust, reliance on corrupt state and policing actors for enforcement, and sometimes complex dispute resolution systems in digital settings. With my colleagues Maja Sawicka and Irene Rafanell we are examining the role of emotional regulation in managing members. Studies in criminology have been dominated by those experienced by victims and communities, unsurprisingly. Fear of crime is a significant feature of how people live their lives in real and virtual spaces, and the psychological costs of crime victimisation are significant personally and at a population level.

But what of how emotions structure offender behaviour? Emotions are critical to boundary setting, offender motive and the regulation of their behaviour during the criminal activity. Emotions both enable and place limits on offending, setting boundaries that will not be crossed. For offenders, emotions can manifest in offenders in terms of the thrills and effervescence of the ‘crime moment’, the seductions of transgression (Katz, 1988) and the emotional rewards of status performance (Holt, 2020). I am defining emotions here as a partly involuntary mental state attaching to and justifying action and experience.

Emotions are also critical to how technology is designed and used. Digital technology affordances invite and promote particular behaviours, emotional engagements and performance, including in illicit contexts (Goldsmith and Wall, 2019). Affordances are behavioural features of the technology which invoke emotional responses. The emotional structure of illicit contexts also acts as an affordance, inviting and promoting particular behaviours and functioning to increase the coordination and effectiveness of the cybercriminal cooperation. There is a balance and sometimes a tension between affordances that are seductive (immediate, stimulating) and those that promote a calculative rationality (comparative, reviewing). An anonymous message board and a review site encourage different performances.

Increasingly cybercriminal activity consists of coordinated activity among disparate networks of individuals using a range of digital infrastructures and market systems to create and support revenue generating opportunities. These networks must regulate their members without easy access to in person modes of coercion, persuasion or trust building, and where retaliation against bad actors is difficult or impossible. Collective emotional regulation plays a critical part both in creating an incentive/reward structure, channeling and giving valence to communication, and signalling hierarchy. Therefore these dynamics can be studied through discourse analysis of cybercriminal interactions.

US president Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex’ (MIC). The idea that there is a grouping of lobbyists and industry desperate to suborn public money for their agenda is a persistent one in Western political discourse. It is suspected that the MIC rigs public discourse and provokes the odd minor war or two to shift the units. It is a handily portable quote, so we have references to the pharma-industrial complex, data-industrial complex, the woke-industrial complex and on and on. There is probably an industrial complex-industrial complex. The term usually implies something malevolent, systematised, and unneeded, constantly creating non-solutions for non-problems. OTOH Ukraine is fast running out of weapons to defend itself. Maybe it’s time for the MIC to step up?

Though it captures some real dynamics – regulatory capture and so on – the specific claim is wrong in its context and more generally. Historically, most developments attributed to the MIC have come from political competition, external to the MIC itself. To take one core example, the ‘missile gap’ myth was promoted by president to be John F Kennedy. He used it to build his career as a US Senator and made the basis for a successful run for US President. Yes, lovely JFK was a total warmonger. Supposedly the Soviet Union had an edge in the effectiveness and quantity of their nuclear missiles and this needed to be matched by the USA. The missile gap did not in fact exist, and JFK probably knew that. He also knew that his opponent could not disprove it without looking weak and also sharing classified information. The MIC was the instrument, not the prime mover, of this particular addition to the arms race.

Coming back from that divergence, metaphors spread widely in social science, sometimes because they are more effective rhetorically than analytically. MIC succeeds because it is an effective metaphor. We see a lot of metaphorisation of our discourse. Type ‘uberisation’ into Google Scholar. Most of social life is being uberised apparently.  Before it was Googlization, and before that McDonaldization. I regret to inform you that Education 3.0 is now also a thing. The metaphors are handy but like any figure of speech might conceal as they reveal. For example, focusing on how work is being made casual and algorithmically governed is important but also tends towards presentism. We forget the tools that helped us in the past understand and sometimes fight against these tendencies.

Metaphors are useful little packages of meaning and I have used a few already (eg. ‘arms race’). They are different from reusable analytic concepts. In contrast, the concept of weapons of the weak is one that has been widely reapplied and while malleable is also coherent and internally consistent. It is also rhetorically powerful and persuasive. It is perhaps not possible to separate a concept’s rhetorical power from its empirical traction but the latter should lead. The nature of competition in social science means that we can end up pursuing beguiling rhetoric at the expense of the work needed to bring it down to earth.

If you want to read further the CIA (yes, THE C I A), has a great collection of documents on the missile gap. They are a fascinating study of evolving intelligence capabilities and concerns. Top marks if you write ‘weapons of the week’ like it’s an offer at Tesco.

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Sage, 2013.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. Yale university Press, 2008.

Don’t hate us because we are an island, there are much better reasons.

Just one of those odd details of life. A funny little quirk of urban left wing discourse that goes way back, why my child even to the days before Twitter, is they have a reflex resentment about Britain being an island. They really, really hate that fact, and often repeat tropes about the insular country they are unlucky enough to be living in. Geography really has it in for them. Being an island is just one more horrible aspect of life in Britain they have to put up with, poor lambs. A Scottish nationalist twist is about being forced to share an island with the English. Today you see never-ending tweet streams about life in ‘perfectly normal island’ – BUT NO IT ISN’T REALLY LMAOOOO🙈😜. Maybe if we were located where Indonesia is it would be a reference to ‘totes okay archipelago’.

It appears not to mean anything beyond the metro British left’s performative self loathing – we have the worst food! The worst constitution! That is usually combined with ignorance of the countries they say they wish to emulate. But it does mean more than that. The over-schooled act in complete ignorance of what our geography means, of our maritime history and and traditions simply because the class it stems from does. To live on an island and not to be aware of that is a serious oversight, but is not anybody’s fault. The seas and oceans to so many are just blanks on the map, annoying channels and washes they have to fly over to get to the places with the tasty food and the carefully spelt out constitutional arrangements that they think so well of.

It is not anybody’s fault, nor even deliberate. That separation from the maritime is the culmination of globalisation, the hollowing out of dockland and fishing communities, and the shrivelling of the merchant marine. Human interest and political debate has moved to other power centres and areas of concerns. It is natural that political discourse has followed suit. But this is a merely temporary state of affairs. Turn off the easy, cheap gas and oil. Watch as your soils are depleted and modern agriculture starts to unwind. Suddenly the sea becomes what it always was. A hard but necessary route for travel and trade, a hard won resource, a cruel and fatal mistress.