Drones have had a bit of a moment with Ukraine, where they are presented as evening up the fight, providing a cheap way of countering Ukraine’s disadvantages in remote strike capability. I was thinking of the shift in how drones are normally seen in liberal Western circles, as weapons that confer unlimited killing power and which allow the US military to dish out death with impunity anywhere in the world. Usually these critiques imagine nobody else has them or is capable of the meld of surveillance and analysis that makes US drones so utterly lethal. Military drones are presented as dangerous technology which can bring war into anyone’s living room. The are melded with targeting and data analytic assemblages into a sinister combination of fuzzy but deadly power.

This shift from drones as buzzing terrors to drones as legitimate military tech was cemented when I came across Neha Ansari (2022) writing in War on the Rocks on support for drones among the people of North West Pakistan. She reported that US military drones far from being instruments of imperialism cooking up the next generation of jihadis are locally popular. In contrast to the legacy imagination prevalent in the West, they are seen as targeted taker outers of bad folk. Locals who spoke positively about the effect of drone strikes said they were targeted, with limited civilian casualties, and preferable to the alternatives. The positive response to drones comes from improved targeting and rules of engagement which have seriously reduced the harm they cause. Effective use of drones disrupted the Pakistani Taliban’s ability to wield power locally.

The improved effectiveness and reception of drone strikes does not mean we can leave aside questions about ‘necro-politics’ (Allinson, 2015), states’ ability to decide who lives and who dies which are funnelled through drone tech. It does show that the effects of drones can be calibrated, and that they can be seen as working for or against the interests of people in whose territories they operate. The picture is more complex than drones being another round of colonial pacification. Improved targeting is possible and desirable.

This has fairly inverted my thinking about what military drones are as effective technologies, and on other technologies closer to my work, and the capacity for technology to be refined effectively in the interests of people. It makes me rethink sociology’s default critical analysis which tends to see technology in sinister terms rather than engaging with the range of effects it has and responses to it. From a critical perspective you could see it as an effective legitimation strategy. We tend to emphasise failure rather than change and adaptation. The US military proved to be fairly good at intelligence led adaption. Intelligence led policing has also been effective, for example, in the defeat of the IRA. We tend to resist these facts because they do not fit the grand narrative of a failing liberal order, and they suggest that self-correction and effective policing are possible solutions to terrorism.

‘If you want a picture of the future, Winston, imagine a coddled manbaby dancing at his wedding to his sixth babymamma … forever.’

There is a very short video making the rounds of Finnish PM Sanna Marin dancing in a friend’s apartment. Somehow this has become a news item. Reporting on this is out of all proportion to any conceivable public interest. It made it onto Radio 4’s flagship PM broadcast.  The formally articulated agenda by which the focus is justified is:

• She is partying too much and not focused on governing. Putin could roll his tanks over the border while she’s lipsyncing to Kelis.
• Finnish Prime Ministers should observe some decorum, because we complain politicians are not like us, and then insist they behave… not like us. We are complex.
• Maybe someone alluded to drugs and drugs are bad, because we cannot understand that someone might use the word #jauhojengi in jest

The fact that this story made it into the foreign-policy averse British media tells you the newsiness of it is nothing to do with that, and as for the idea that PMs should exhibit the dignity of the office … There is always an unspoken element to any news agenda.

The unspoken element to the reporting on this one is:

• She is a young, attractive woman
• She is in power
• She seems to be aware of, or not ashamed of and trying to actively hide, fact number 1

It is that last one that really does for her. In our society this is pretty damning and really not seemly at all. Women are permitted to: be attractive; be in power; enjoy themselves. They are not allowed to do any 2 or more of these things at once. Attractive must be mitigated by being competitive with other women and a bit broken (Love Island). Powerful must be mitigated by being repellent (Cersei Lannister) or murdered by your sulky bidey in (Khaleesi). It would be simple if this unspoken element was articulated so we know where we stand. Notably none of the reporting on Marin mentions her politics or anything that would normally make a politician newsworthy, or which might matter to listeners in the UK. ‘Marin, who brought her country into NATO at a time of unprecedented crisis, overturning 70 years of Finnish policy, has enjoyed a drink in private with some friends’. The punishment for any editor insisting the last bit of that is what should be on the news agenda should be being forced to watch Boris dancing at his wedding on repeat until the end of time.

One of the predictions made in global health was that as low/mid income countries became wealthier, their populations would adopt the illnesses characteristic of high income counties. Causes of death would shift away from neonatal conditions, violence and communicable disease to obesity, heart disease, stroke, cancer and other what are often called lifestyle conditions.These were called diseases of affluence. Then we learnt better.

The great disease shift has largely been borne out – many countries have overcome these causes of death. As lifespan increases and consumption and living patterns change we see some of the expected disease pattern where most diseases are those of old age. But we have another problem: that many of these conditions are now detached from affluence. They are concentrated in lower income groups within higher income countries. They spread throughout the globe and are most prevalent where countries are most connected into the global economic and cultural system. Chronic mental health problems, problems of long term addiction, and chronic life diseases are not diseases of affluence. Hence concepts like affluenza do not really capture the processes at work. While these inequalities are a result of the operation of the global economy, they affect those who are most disadvantaged by it, whose communities are most hollowed out by it.

When the whole world has been opened to capital, there is nowhere to expand into. There are no more sources of cheap labour or raw materials, and no more ways to mechanise complex tasks. You can only expand inward, through every more fiendish financial engineering, engineered solutions to non-problems such as WeWork, and to what are effectively non-places like space tourism. Cypto is an example of this failure mode. It has not lead to the development of any new technologies, or ways of doing things, that have had any positive impact on human affairs. It will leave nothing behind. It sucks in human and financial capital and destroys it. The other main stumble is the loss of any understanding of what progress means. Progress used to mean increasing the material capacities of humanity, creating solidarity between peoples, ensuring the fruits of the economy were distributed fairly. The demands made of capitalism were to do that better. Now it means stopping people doing or saying things. It is highly risk avoidant.

The main problems are:

1. The shift to asset and credential capital over income locks in middle class/Boomer douchebaggery.
2. Migration has ceased to be a source of social mobility and change but is now used for inter-elite circulation or to service global centres.
3. Social sorting means networks are increasingly homogenous
4. Local communities have no power
5. We no longer generate energy
6. The welfare state now serves the needs of the middle class and well off older groups.

Proposals:

1. Build a lot of houses. Like, a lot – upwards of two million a year. Get rid of the Town and Country Planning Act, reinstate council house building, and build some new cities while you are at it. This will seriously annoy everyone who has locked in their wealth into overvalued housing stock, so win-win.
2. End fractional reserve banking. This will reduce misallocation of capital. Reintroduce building societies.
3. Replaces middle class welfare with a single payment to every person in the country.
4. Start fracking and restart nuclear.
5. Require local ownership of utilities.
6. Accept failure as a part of growth

I want to engage with a type of argument that is self-undermining. The months after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 birthed an immoral decision. The USA at the highest level began publicly legitimising torture as a means to an end in the War on Terror. As opposed to having the decency to pretend not to. Opponents would often use a two step argument. First they would lay out why torture was repugnant. It harms the tortured, stains the torturer, and degrades the society that permits it. Second, they would add as a final flourish ‘torture doesn’t even work!’. Torture produces bad, unreliable intel. That’s lucky, I thought. What if it did work? Any argument where morality is reliant on pragmatism is going to risk the equation changing against it. Where do you stand then?

The same argument tends to bubble up over AI. In my work outlandish claims are often made about police AI by those developing the systems. These are private solutions offered by companies promising to use data integration to be able to predict where crime will happen so that police resources can be distributed accordingly. In response critics rehearse the damage to democracy when decisions are taken beyond any possible oversight, the danger to human autonomy, and then we say, ‘And it doesn’t even work’! Critics are usually right. These systems over promise and deliver little more than a beat cop’s common sense (crime happens where lots of young males hang out, where there are targets, and little oversight). We also point to the biases being worked in here so that systems without any explicit racial categorisation element will still faithfully reproduce racial biases in their effects.

If someone then designed a workable pre-crime system, one that did not simply replicate existing biases in the datasets, then what? These arguments do not go away, and we should continue to critique the effect as well as the principle, but the problem is that the pragmatic argument is a dodge. It is a way of avoiding the claim morality places on us, that we have to take decisions against our own interests and convenience. That there are paths we should not follow. A workable pre-crime system is something that should never be developed because it removes any notion of culpability and effectively end runs due process. Systems cease to have any hope of having democratic oversight, and they shift power from communities to states and remote techbrotopia corporations.

On the other hand that argument might be too purist. It is through their practical effects that we approach technologies and policies, and therefore leading with the in-context pragmatism is not a bad move to make. Further, we should not assume pragmatism is downstream of morality. Mostly we reason in the other direction. We say ‘how does this affect me … how does it affect my context … and maybe after a bit, how does it affect the world I will come to live in’. The two are more closely bound in than presented as we see in eg the ‘effects’ of bitcoin. Therefore the role of sociology is to interject at that point, where human visions of a moral life intersect with human realities about how once can live well.

One of the annoying things academic competition does is push us to develop elaborate ways of not quite saying what is staring us in the face. There is a tendency to produce theoretical solutions to problems that only exist because there is something we want to avoid saying, in this case, that some entities are objectively real, graspable and obdurate. Assemblage theory is one of these. We known that social constructionism is not satisfactory, because material reality makes a mockery of it. So we have to come up with a way of accepting the predominant fact of material reality without saying so, by arguing that things are actants in networks.

To roll back a bit. Social constructionism is seen as old hat and research concluding that ‘phenomena x is a social construct’ is not going to be seen as very interesting. Like, duh! You have to say it is rhizomatic or somesuch. Social constructionism itself has been flattened into something bland and common sensical. To say something is socially constructed means making a set of claims which are not the same. There is a spectrum of social construction from at the one end identifying constructs that are active, and somewhat conspiratorial , to the other those that are practiced and are about the way of life we have in common.

On the active end the best example is the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 20212). The upshot of those studies was that states create public rituals to bind the communities they claim to represent. Perfect examples are those ‘ancient’ traditions securing the British monarchy, which turn out to be modern inventions which were deliberately put in place to support the legitimacy of the house of Hanover and by extension the new British state. Race science is another good one. All the stuff that goes on in the House of Commons did not emerge from a mystical past but were created for a purpose, usually to say: we are here, we mean to stay, and we are so powerful we can call someone Black Rod and you have to pretend that is not  an extremely funny job title. In them have a direct connection to power’s shifting claims upon our minds.

At the other end we have ground level constructs which are diffused throughout society, are are about how we live and what we value.  They draw on some of these more active constructs but are combined and reworked with others. They are less intentional. The reason that social constructionism is unsatisfactory here is that we have to understand not just that they exist, but what they are doing. For example, we can hypothesis that the heterosexual family that came into being in the form it did to service the demands of the capitalist labour market. In the early capitalist period, the family would be a group hire – factories employed whole families as labour groups. Later comes a stronger domestic/public division in some places, for some of the labour aristocracy and the middle class. Different family forms for different times, and more variation in practice than you would think from looking at common cultural representations. But the next step is to ask why a family exists at all as a social form, one that is recognisable between these very different periods. If your immediate answer is ‘it’s the best way to bring up children’, then that is a perfectly plausible but not a social constructionist explanation.

We have to pay attention to that last/first step because answers to other questions matter or make more sense in the light of it. Factory owners might have got more productivity from their employees if they just stuck them all in big dormitories. Some tried. They found that things generally did not work as they hoped. Intensive, industrial work is only bearable if people have a life away from it. Families exist because society cannot work without them. Society cannot work without them because there is no other reliable way to secure reproduction, and the human organism collapses or endures great damage without intensive personal contact. The human organism needs intensive personal contact because we need to cooperate in any resource constrained environment. We need to cooperate because we need to reproduce. Therefore the constructs we identify – the particular arrangements of people, things and habits – only make sense as answers to that deeper question, of how to live fruitfully.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

…really just one social fact

Crime is behaviour that is intentional, measurable and directly harmful. The only reason to care about crime is that it gets in the way of the good life. Ignore anything about obeying the law for its own sake because otherwise our moral sphere will crumble. Unless the person proposing that position really does never get drunk in a pub. Also when considering this contextual dimension, please ignore any pleas in mitigation that reduce the moral agency of the person doing the deed. Helps nobody.

A lot of people get punished for behaviour that is not crime in that sense, like girls and women seeking abortion, or in the UK folk posting rap lyrics containing the n-word on social media or in Scotland, football fans singing football songs perceived as likely to rile the opposition (I thought that was what football chants were for).  And a lot of people never get punished for behaviour that is within that definition, such as invading and mangling sovereign nations, toxifying drinking water and encouraging others to do harm. All the legal ins and outs – the learned exhuming of precedent, the self satisfied blather about a rules based international order or European solidarity – merely describes temporary states of convenience that match what some people and states want. The Republican Party in the USA did not want to overturn Roe because it disagrees with the Warren Court’s interpretation of the 14th or because it has a weird need to control ‘pregnant people’. It wants women to be prevented from having abortions.

So the context of crime is targeted harm. There are many factors involved which I say can be boiled down to a small set of five underlying, partly hierarchal realities – its social facts.  Here they are. Top one comes first and last:

1. Some people are literally psychopathic and are able to act accordingly. They will never stop and they need either watching or consequences. There are not many but the harm they cause is vastly disproportionate to their numbers.
2. Some people are poorly socialised/well socialised into a harmful moral universe. You can design out some of this crime with changes to incentives.
3. Some people live in a context where it is impossible to avoid morally gray behaviour. You can design out some of this crime by shifting the opportunity structure and giving people better options.
4. Some people get excitement from transgression. You can ensure crime is mostly dull and unrewarding through target hardening.
5. People gather in ways that increase opportunities for crime. This can be resolved by increasing guardianship.
6. There is an oversupply of young males. Give them something to do or get them paired off or in a monastery. That fact should give you a clue to the characteristics of the ‘people’ mentioned in the first five factors.

Crime is mostly a male problem. At heart every aspect of criminology boils down to this seldom spoken biological fact. It holds true across culture and history. Grappling with this we often frame it in terms of masculinity as a construct, which is relevant but also avoids the issue of why we have to start there in the first place.

Men might be more risk taking, might be socialised into a harmful masculine role, might be more inclined to use violence to secure status-dominance, but they are these things as men. Culture mediates biology. The problem then becomes what we mean by biology. There are plenty of biological factors at play which can be isolated: resting heart rate, testosterone levels and the rest, but they are not causes, and do not explain what biology is and why it would be linked to crime, a fundamentally social act.

Perhaps it is simply that the relative capacity to do harm gives a proportion of men the power to do that. However that does not quite do it. Men certainly have the physical and psychological capacity to harm women, boys and girls, more than the reverse, but we also have the capacity to harm each other, which is well used. Men do not act as a class interest in that sense (Filser at al 2020). In some cases I suspect the harm men cause to women is an offshoot of inter-male competition. That does not bring us closer to a mechanism or a sense of why it matters in the way it does. We must look at why men have this capacity at all.

Edlund, Lena & Li, Hongbin & Yi, Junjian & Zhang, Junsen, 2007. “Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China’s One-Child Policy,” IZA Discussion Papers 3214, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

Never ask me ‘do you think this is fence electrified? Are these berries poisonous? Is this knife super-sharp?’ Or somesuch. I know only one path to knowledge and am the sort of person who likes to find out what something is by jabbing it with my finger/licking or eating it or otherwise interacting in the way most likely to lead to immediate and non reversible consequences. An empiricist. We need to be governed by the research ethics process because we are very murky people indeed.

Research ethics is frequently presented as evolving due to a sequence of errors, cruelties and catastrophic misjudgements. Social researchers look with wistful envy … er, abject horror, back to a time when you could lock a bunch of students up, tell some of them they were ‘warders’ and some ‘prisoners’ and see if the former decided to beat the daylights out of the latter. Ethics is frequently and effectively taught as of a series of pitfalls to avoid which are wholly tied to questions of empirical research because that is where the pain is.

However, there is another kind of scholar. These people, wordcels and shape rotators both, stare unblinking at the sun of pure thought. They can work effects out from first principles. They use the British Library. They are theorists, and research ethics does not touch them. We seldom ask if you need ethical approval for a non-empirical study. Indeed how very dare you, sir, for proposing that question. Only vulgar empiricists who would gull their subjects into pretend electric shock experiments given half a chance need the stern oversight of the ethics board. Theory takes place in the realm of pure ideas, each one as unsullied as a summer’s day of childhood memory. The thought experiment is their realm. These are imaginative stories which you will often see philosophers, scientists and theorists deploy to work out some problem or illustrate an argument. They are often mocked as the ‘we have chosen to assume that each horse is a perfect circle’ response to some real world problem. Thought experiments get a bad name but they have their uses.

Types of thought experiment, of varying usefulness:

1. Let’s see if we can break our theory, or someone else’s. Maxwell’s Demon and that quantum-cat box thing that does not mean what everyone thinks.
2. Explain how we got here. The tragedy of the commons, most origin stories in mainstream economics – it’s worse than the MCU for multiple competing origin stories.
3. This is how humans work, other things being equal. Malthusian resource dilemma (we are pretty much screwed). Habermas’ social configurations and communicative rationality (no we are not). People who don’t play enough Civilization.

The ones about resource competition are often rhetorically persuasive but ineffective because they are about how we think things work rather than how they really work. The tragedy of the commons is the claim that if you have any communal property, it becomes over fished, over grazed, or over used to depletion because everyone has an incentive to maximise what they take from it. Hence, private property and land enclosure to the rescue. A scan of the historical record shows it does not work like that at all.  Enclosure of common land was a state-driven process enacted in order to serve the interests of landowners. It was not some naturally occurring event. Overexploitation was regulated because other people would notice if it was happening. The malthusian population growth crisis never happened. Communicative rationality turns out to be a cover for serving our interests while feeling smug about it.  Useless thought experiments have become real world common sense and they have damaging real world consequences.

On the other hand, some of these thought experiments show the power of thinking where some observations might take you. Free thought is dangerous to power, which is why in the current environment several governments are trying so hard to regulate it and punish people for erring, usually in the name of something nice. Perhaps thought experiments should also be governed. Theorists could be required to submit an ethical review before starting any thinking. The danger is that ideas could easily leak from the University’s containment field into real life where they can cause untold harm. The University could become liable if any of this thinking has damaging effects, such as causing people to act in unpredictable ways, question their social roles or despair at the futility of existence. A simple form would suffice. We could ask: will you be thinking about vulnerable groups and sensitive topics? E.g. University vice chancellors and principals and government policies. What steps have you taken to ensure they are not harmed by your thinking? That should tie up the pesky cogitators and leave the field open to us morlocks.

This post is inspired by an invitation from Andreas Hackl to a workshop organised by himself and Margie Cheesman on The risks of working online: refugees in the internet economy, supported by the UNHCR.

The digital society has various used for refugees beyond the usual. Digital traces might be used to support an asylum claim. Money transfers, distance communications and work opportunities become especially salient, and especially vulnerable. Trust technology could be used to distribute aid and track support needs. A number of risks are apparent. Hostile state and non-state actors can use the surveillance opportunities to target the person seeking asylum and their friends, family and loved ones. Digital verification can close the useful ambiguous spaces and conditions that refugees sometimes have to make use of. The UK Home Office’s hostile environment policy is an example here. The move away from cash payments increases some opportunities but also increases surveillance and tracing threats. Refugees often have to choose between adherence to the law and survival. They may be particularly vulnerable to cyberthreats and cybercrime.

There are many contexts in which refugees might face threats and barriers to digital inclusion. Work with Alex Wafer of Wits University in South Africa has looked at how migrants use digital labour in informal economies. Many are forced to use unreliable and insecure methods of payment and have to use platforms like Uber as jury-rigged trust technologies. This is in the context of significant unemployment and political racism directed at them.

So let’s sort out some principles and see how we can think about how to create resilience:

Continuity and capacity: there are many domains where continuity is disrupted and where digital means can help support it. I work in education so my mind immediately went to how refugees can be integrated into education and credentialing systems. There are loads of places where that might break down and impose extra costs. How can language qualifications be recognised? How do credentials maintain validity for employment or study? Are there challenges posed by different academic cultures? Various capacities are limited by the digital divide – different kinds of literacy might come into play alongside access.

Connectivity and convergence: the mobile internet is a vital resource, and existing and new infrastructures can be investigated for the support they provide, from Starlink to cafe wifi. Various risks arise from this such as the need to share insecure connections or devices. Some risks are baked into the design. For example, iOS devices do not normally allow multiple user accounts making privacy harder to maintain. These simple features or lack of them have iterative effects in terms of risk. We should also not lose sight of the way in which existing risks or disadvantages are made sharper or mitigated, for example, gender and ethnic vulnerabilities play out in very different ways in precarious situations. Refugees are a financial resource subject to a process of data extractive capitalism, technological/system experimentation and convergence (Madianou, 2019). That has effects on their autonomy and agency in the face of powerful humanitarian bodies and state agencies.

A counterpoint is that several of these principles might be inherently risky, or at least in tension, in the lives of refugees, especially that of continuity. Strategic opacity might be a useful goal, and this is where the possibilities of hidden hosting and communications, and decentralised payments could come into play. Generally for each technical solution proposed however there is also the corresponding problem of how to maintain it within a viable community. Nothing is automatic, and crypto et al does not work without a significant investment of time and labour. Therefore we might want to look first not directly at how refugees’ trajectories might be supported, but at how supportive networks can be brought into being and maintained using some of these security and trust technologies. The real questions then are the big ones of what principles inform our software and hardware design, how design can be community led and ethically protective.

Questions remain about the affordances of particular combinations of technology and the way in particular technological solutions are likely to evolve (Cheesman, 2022b). Something we should consider in future is the effect of the fracturing internet and the emergency of distinct and sometimes hostile digital infrastructures. An ethnography of infrastructure approach could work here (Leigh Starr, 1999). Refugees must move across and within these infrastructures, interleave different platforms, and balance the need for opacity with the need to maintain a digital identity and keep contact with home and receiving communities. Cheesman (2022a)  frames these challenges and tensions in dimensions of subjectivities, timescapes and materialities. We should always be aware of the uses of tech for social closure and exclusion, and the political risk facing refugees from new xenophobic movements as we see in South Africa and elsewhere at the moment.