Category: turbulence

When nationalism, cybercrime, organized crime, geopolitics, and territory meet.

Angus Bancroft/ / turbulence

Some themes to apply to current times.

Solid times 

One of the themes of mine  is the return of various concepts, institutions and practices that were thought to be obsolete, or that some institutions tried to make so. The return of cash money or its nearest digital equivalent, the return of arctic conflict, telephony, the middleman, the nation-state. Sweden recently “In Case of Crisis or War” advised its citizens to have cash on hand in case of a national emergency. It is a country that prided itself when moving away from cash during the 2010s. More than the specific element, it is the desire for qualities of enchantment, firmness, centralisation, authority, the opposite of social liquidity.  

Frame loss

Much what we call a crisis is just the sharp realization of events causing frame loss. Concepts that helped us make sense of the world are redundant. An example is neoliberalism, which has not been applicable for decades, but survived as a zombie idea. Neoliberalism in the sense of public austerity, tax cutting, reducing  public spending, and allowing the business cycle to work uninterrupted. It is hard to see in the policies of governments since the financial crisis and before then, still less in the USA decisively abandoning globalization. The result is the end of all of those conceptual frames, such as neoliberalism, antiracism, and decolonization which which have been the background noise of social critique for decades. 

De-competition 

The promise of capitalism is that you stand or fall on your talents. Learning to risk is vital to that, at a personal and institutional level. We no longer have that. We decided on the end of risk, now collectively owned. Society no longer distributes risk.

Meanwhile, the U.S. actively tries to move down the global value chain and outclass Vietnam in t-shirt manufacturing.

Narco-states to state narcos

Cartels have neither capacity nor desire  to replace the state. Nobody goes into a life-of-crime because they want to be in charge of bin day . State-criminal collaboration is the norm, called , grey conflict or geocriminality {Thorley, 2024}. To some extent, this goes back to the Second World War when the Soviets collaborated with organized crime groups on provisioning {Belton, 2021}. The difference now is that they collaborate on geopolitical aims.

Turf and territory 

The role of digital technology has flipped. It was naive to imagine tech like Ai is somehow resistant and liberating.

Techno Localisation. Digital drug sales are going through a time of decomposition. Markets are more localised, using image boards to create contacts between people. The time of the big integrated, sophisticated systems appears to be past. These systems create centralised vulnerabilities and people like to avoid that. The Russian darknet market Hydra was a model of integration – drug sales, distribution, testing and enforcement were brought together in one system.

Back to the middleman 

The middleman has a role in sociological theory as functionally mediating social and economic processes and sometimes being the scapegoat of them {Bonacich, 1973}. For example, a society that abhors money lending and anathematizes it still needs credit. Christ may have boosted the moneylenders from the Temple but someone needs to front up the promise of some readies. Therefore, medieval European Christianity effectively licensed the Jews in this role. As in that case, ethnic groups often fill the role. They are typically outside the status hierarchy and so able to trade, rent, lend and conduct necessary but taboo activities. One function is to mediate elite/mass relations. Middlemen ethnic minorities – Chinese in many territories , Koreans in Los Angeles , etc – take on this risky role where they become the focus of popular resentment. This is sometimes quite intentional – Soviet policy effectively did so, using ethnic middleman to soak up grudges.

The internet was supposed to have eliminated middlemen but it had initially just the opposite effect. The middleman – the company that buys from a producer and sells to a buyer – should in theory become unnecessary. Every so often someone tries to do this: we can sell our own houses, we can become our own hoteliers, bankers, lenders etc. But middlemen exist for a reason, and the various roles characterised as middlemen perform a range of social and economic functions. Populism leverages suspicions of the middleman. Direct democracy and direct economics are favoured, as are media that speak directly to you.

Psychological quakes 

Above all, this is a mental, psychological shift, just as supposed neoliberalism was {Sharma, 2024}.

The importance of psychology in politics comes out. In group identification, rage at loss and a vicarious desire to get one’s own back. We can see that in the addition of various types of masculinity in Donald Trump’s political coalition from geeks to incels. Personally matters in the sense that Trump is an avatar of these desires.  The prevalence of conspiracy thinking at a high level  is noticeable as are actual conspiracies. Scientists, public officials and major digital companies conspired  to play down a plausible laboratory origin of Covid describing people who did pay credence to that being as being conspiracy theorists themselves. Some conspiracies take place surprisingly in the open, for example the Kinahan cartel that operate in plain sight in Dubai. 

In these days power matters more than economics.

There is some hope in the return of concepts like pluralism and a firm liberalism.

Belton, Catherine. Putin’s People. 1st edition. London: William Collins, 2021.

Bonacich, Edna. “A theory of middleman minorities.” American sociological review (1973): 583-594.

Sharma, R. What Went Wrong with Capitalism, 2024. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/What-Went-Wrong-with-Capitalism/Ruchir-Sharma/9781668008263.
Thorley, M. A Changing Landscape Landscape: China’s New Model Of Global Governance And Its Impact On The Fight Against Organized Crime. The Global Initiative Against Transnational and Organized Crime, 2024. https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/china-new-model-of-global-governance-and-its-impact-on-the-fight-against-organized-crime/.

The gentrification of suffering

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

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

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

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.

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

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

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.

 

 

A positive case for AI from the perspective of being disabled.

Angus Bancroft/ / A life with motor neuron disease., Research, turbulence

AI has become something of a bogeyman and it is not helpful to view the technology in this way. It is indeed often hyped up junk, as when Apple’s AI helpfully prioritizes spam email as ‘urgent’ for me. Yet as with any other technology it brings change and benefits and problems. I use AI-enabled tools every day. It concerns me that a negative narrative has emerged, which purely focuses on AI as a threat to individual human creativity and to the environment. This is a one-sided and rather  hoary and dated critique that rests largely on an assumption that we cannot possibly integrate these technologies into our lives.Techno fear is as bad as techno hype and just because it feels good doesn’t mean you should do it.

My existence would be much diminished without AI tools. I am unable to use a keyboard or other input device. Most of my voice has gone. The only dictation support that works is an AI driven one called MacWhisper, which uses the Whisper LLM. This is the only transcription software that can make sense of my much diminished voice. It is far superior to the solutions offered by others. And to be clear, it is actually the commercial software that is best.You know that horrible integration that Apple does and that the EU wants to end and loads of tech critics complain about. The one where everything works together. Well, it’s the best thing I can have. Using macOS and an iPhone, I can take advantage of my existing contacts and software and integrate accessible workarounds and solutions into my existing workflow. I can use iPhone mirroring to access my phone directly from the desktop.This means I can continue to work and communicate with friends in a more seamless way.

This is far better than the clunky, awkward and disheartening solutions offered as part of specialist support for the disabled. On the one hand you need to have reliable solutions which necessarily are not going to be as pretty. On the other these all kind of assume that you’ve already given up on life. As an example, there is a system that will allow me to make calls using a head mouse tracker. But, you have to type in each phone number manually, like it was 1998 or something. I literally cannot remember the last time I manually entered a phone number. There is no possibility of integration with my existing, well, existence, my existing way of working, communicating with friends and loved ones. It’s just one example. The other solutions being offered are much the same. I can laboriously type out an email in a Windows pad. Or I can use my existing computer, which I can use a head tracking mouse with, and use voice control and dictation to send an email that way, in a way that I need to because I’m a professional still. This means I can continue to work and communicate in a seamless way. I can also control my phone directly from the desktop. Despite my situation, I am still writing books and papers. I am still making plans with friends and family.

As a researcher and a teacher, I have a complex workflow built up over many years that uses customised tools and complex data sets. I need these kind of data, this kind of information, this kind of multiple tools at my fingertips in a way I can use for my work and in fact for my pleasure. It is absolutely infuriating to be told that I can switch on my TV with the system as if that’s all I should have as a disabled person. My lot in life is just to sit in front of the telly all day. Well I can already put my Apple TV on with my Apple computer or my Apple iPad and using that I can watch all kinds of TV from around the world which is what I do. Everything about these tools is focused on the lowest common denominator passive consumer. That’s not who I am, or anyone is. We are still in our lives.

If we do not highlight these positive use cases for AI, then they will be regulated out of existence or their development will be limited and I will be a lot worse off and my life will be much reduced. Likewise, a new era of domestic robotics cannot come soon enough.

More generally, I find the way that AI is used as this kind of scare figure quite frustrating. It blocks analysis and evaluation. For example, the University proposes for its ethical investment strategy it will not invest in companies that produce AI-enabled weaponry, As if this is somehow more nefarious than just plain old artillery shells and such. No explanation is given as to why AI weaponry is so much worse than just lobbing a RPG at someone.. If an ally like Ukraine is using AI to target incoming missiles to support its air defence and for its own targeting, why is that a bad thing? It might actually save lives if it improves their air defence capability and makes their targeting more effective. It might shorten the war and in any case allies should have access to the means to defend themselves against one of the greatest threats to civilization of our time. If Ukraine is able to use autonomous weaponry to make up for its manpower deficiencies, then I do not see that as being a problem.

The distinction between AI and non-AI is dissolving anyway. For example, artillery shells can be networked to work cooperatively.

That does not mean that AI is always the right solution or even a working solution. It still needs to be treated with critical reasoning. There are plenty of sins to recount. It continues to occupy the place that ‘data’ did about ten years ago in the minds of venture capitalists, as some magic dust to sprinkle upon a business plan. It will never understand irony, which makes parsing British communications very difficult. A lot of these sins, however, lie in the credulity of the beholder. For me, the bigger problem lies in the human willingness to give up our autonomy, to the group or to a convenient technology or to the state, an NGO or trade union. AI is just one insidious way in which this can happen, and people can farm out significant choices to a system that allows them to pretend they have no choice at all. But there are many other systems that do that, that we need to be alert to.

The compliance script in hybrid fraud

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

It helps a scammer if the victim thinks they would never be the kind of person who falls for scams. Successful fraud depends on the fraudster generating compliance by imposing their definition of the situation on their target. Erving Goffman (1952) outlines the process of ‘cooling the mark out’ – ensuring the mark finds it harder to say ‘no’. He used the case of the fixed game. The mark is convinced that his new friends have developed a way of rigging betting odds in their favour. They might do this for example by saying they have advanced information of the winner of the horse race. Bets can be placed before others know.

The mark is convinced by placing a few low stakes beats and winning. He then has the opportunity to make a bigger investment. At which point the system no longer works. There might be a further attempt where the con artists convince him that he can win the money back with a further large investment. At this point the mark can be convinced of his need to recover his social status. He wants to recover not just his money but his sense that he is an individual who would not be victimised in this way. Goffman shows the ceremonial aspect of the final blow off: ‘An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is cooled out, given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.’ (Goffman, 1952). As Goffman portrays it, the fraud is aspirational. The mark is suckered in because he now has a chance to show his true inner self, to match his being to his self-concept.

The need to preserve one’s self-concept can be turned against the victim. A hybrid fraud is one that combines in person and remote elements. Charlotte Cowles (2024) recounts a victimisation that began one day with a call purporting to be from Amazon informing her of misuse of her account and ended with her throwing a shoebox containing $50,000 – most of her savings – into the back of an anonymous SUV. The scam used a compelling narrative to convince her she was the victim of identity theft and that as a result there were warrants out for her arrest. The only way for her to protect herself and her family was to comply. One of the scammers, claiming to be a CIA agent named ‘Michael Sarano’, told her ‘“If you talk to an attorney, I cannot help you anymore … You will be considered noncooperative. Your home will be raided, and your assets will be seized. You may be arrested. It’s your choice.” (Cowles, 2024). This was the only way to predict her money. Where Goffman’s scammers convinced the mark they were doing a lucrative wrong thing, these fraudsters convinced Cowles she was doing a protective right thing.

The hybrid fraud is hybrid in another sense. Goffman differentiated the con from white collar crime. A white collar criminal abuses position of trust. The conman is entirely invested in developing bonds with other people solely for misuse. The hybrid fraud combines elements of these two. It does not depend on the victim’s greed, put on their fear of status loss. This includes loss their freedom, as Cowles was threatened with.

If you are a victim of a complex fraud as Cowles was it might feel like it was a one off, custom designed for you. Typically though these are gangs running many attempts simultaneously. They use well-developed scripts which are designed to funnel potential marks into a fewer viable targets that can be worked on more intensely. Each contact point is a compliance moment. Accepting the initial call from ‘Amazon’, calling the person claiming to be from the FTC back. These are key moments where the person themselves is exercising their agency or feel themselves to be doing that. These are designed to ensure they think they are in charge.

The techniques Cowles were subject to are well familiar from studies of fraud scripts. In many ways they share a lot in common with abuse tactics. They make sure the target is isolated. In Cowles’ case she was alone at home, having dropped her young child at school. This also restricts their freedom. She can just walk away when she had someone to care for.

There is also gaslighting. The fraud creates a sense of unreality were the victim adopts the reality defined by the attacker. “It didn’t really feel like he was asking” as Cowles recounts. There is a process of boiling the frog slowly. Each step the victim takes move them into the world as defined by the fraud. Because of that they can end up doing something like hunting over a very large sum of money in cash all the oven in the world to complete stranger by the end of the day, something they would never do proposed without this intense psychological work being applied for in advance. A sense of crisis is created to lock the victim into handing their money over.

Goffman suggested part of the reason people comply is they are committed to repair work. We might not think of ourselves as they kind of people who are victimised in this way. We have a commitment to maintaining the situation, repairing our sense of self. Once the victim has outlived their usefulness, or has got wise to the scam, they are left to do this repair alone. The ceremonial element Goffman emphasised is gone. Sometimes the repair work sets them up for the next scam. Rather like how people respond to their interests being betrayed by a powerful figure they trust.

Cowles, Charlotte. 2024. ‘How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000’. New York Magazine.

Goffman, Erving. 1952. ‘On Cooling the Mark out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure’. Psychiatry 15(4):451–63.

Radicalisation or self discovery? Desire in a turbulent world

Angus Bancroft/ / turbulence

There has been a lot of recent conversation about radicalisation through different forms. Mumsnet has been blamed for radicalising its participants. There is an implied theory of change here. It is that radicalisation works something like environmental exposure. Radicalisation is like pollution in the info sphere. Exposure to small doses leads to exposure much bigger doses. I am cagey about this, because when you strip out the content, a lot of the concern aboutlooks like concerns about communist influence in the Cold War era. We would recognise that people involved in the communist parties in Europe were often motivated by socially desirable goals, even as they support a totalitarian movement set on destroying everything we hold dear.

There are some well rehearsed problems with that. For one, it tends to downplay agency. Another is that it is content free in theory, but not in practice. So, in theory, it does not consider what attracts people in, or why they might consider the particular goals of the radicalised movement to be ones that speak to them. In practice, however when we look at what topics are focused on as problems of radicalisation it is clear we are being very selective about them. I do not think that is entirely helpful because we really need to be explicit about the qualities that we are concerned about. We also need to understand a lot more about what motivates people and what they think they are doing when they participate in radicalised activity. Writing it off as “hate“ does not really grasp what is going on.

There are some background assumptions that people who supporting populist movements or disappear into conspiracies, are clearly wrong. So obviously wrong that we do not really need to talk about the content of what they believe. We should be doing that even from as simple idea sphere perspective. We would want to examine how these‘s ideas, evolve and are coherent in some sense. and we should examine if they are true, or reasonable. Now fair enough, I do not think that Donald Trump is really fighting a paedophile conspiracy. But I do think is a reasonable question to ask if Covid lockdowns were a proportionate response, and if they were successful in their own terms.

The point being, you’re not going to oppose these ideas very well if you do not recognise their nature. What I want to say, here is that radicalisation is an aspect of quite a natural process of self development. You see something wrong with an idea. No one in your tribe or team is talking about it. So you look elsewhere for people who are doing that. When you join them, what they are saying, makes more sense than others. I would call that self-discovery or evolution not radicalisation. A QAnon person is moving into a new state of being. The attraction is that you think they have the goods on everyone else. That justifies the frequent isolation that is involved, and which causes distress to their loved ones. What follows from that is radicalisation is about desire. As MacDougall (2018) shows, a burning need for justice and sensitivity to injustice and status can drive people forward. As we would recognise from long experience with various social movements, people can use it desire for social justice as a way of obtaining personal status.

Macdougall, Alex I., et al. “Different strokes for different folks: The role of psychological needs and other risk factors in early radicalisation.” International Journal of Developmental Science12.1-2 (2018): 37-50.

AI assumptions to be wary of

Angus Bancroft/ / Research, turbulence

Tech doesn’t kill people, over capitalised techbros kill people.

We are in the tail end of the AI hype/panic cycle. We are all well beyond noting that LLMs can reproduce human failings. It is vital that if we are to use  a tool like ChatGPT or any generative AI to note some assumptions or myths that go along with it. These are:

The assumption of neutrality (responses do not reflect an identifiable ideology)

The assumption of ethics (response are tailored to do no harm, for example, not affirming suicidal ideation)

The assumption of stability (answers are consistent)

The assumption of competence and understanding (responses draw on a curated store of human knowledge and it will not for example misadvise on an interlocutor’s rights and liabilities)

The conversational assumption (interactions are private and responsive).

Underlying that is an anthropomorphic bias. On both sides, techno panic and technical love, there is a tendency to impute anthropomorphised qualities or to get frustrated when those qualities are not there. When the machine reveals itself as it is, not as we were all like it. Personally I prefer it when the machine is clearly a machine, clearly a tool that I can use. What I mean by a tool is a system with clearly defined characteristics that are reasonably predictable. I found it much better to use AI as a device in that way. So even if I use it as my robot companion at least I know what it is being used for. If I use it to create a digest of reports on a topic and I know its limits and that is an effective use case. Any critical perspective on technology is going to have to interrogate these assumptions. But that also means interrogating the reverse. For example any assumption that particular technology is inherently harmful.

Critical thinking, what even is that? Advice from Thanos

Angus Bancroft/ / Teaching, turbulence

That thing we tell you to do, and never show you how to do it? Critical thinking is all about context. For example, take the Marvel cinematic universe. I promise I’m not obsessed about this even though I’ve mentioned it quite a lot. Critical thinking starts with a ‘what is’ question. What is Marvel Studios? It is in a basic sense just a successful film and TV production studio with some really good IP. Simple. But that does not explain its dominance and reach. I hope I am not being unfair when I say that impacts can not be justified by the artistic quality of the work. I enjoyed many of the films and TV shows, however a fair assessment would be that their succession depends on qualities beyond artistic elan and the craftsmanship on display.

Why do I say that harsh thing? I feel I am justified because the most critically well received elements of the MCU are not necessarily its most commercially successful. So we have a puzzle. Maybe the critics are wrong and they miss the appeal. Or, the audience is wrong. Am I out of touch? No: it’s the public who are at fault. Or, we have to look at other qualities that drive the success of the MCU. Critical and commercial success could be not only decoupled, but in opposition. Many commentators have made the point I’m going to make.

I believe that the impact of it relies on its very successful integration of storied IP, regular pace of output, and output tailored to the widest demographic, which produces an unrivalled capacity to shape its own audience and taste culture. When you look at how it works though, it is really a massive and well honed content generation system. We can pull out the significant qualities here. One that is integrated across different media – TV, games, other tie-ins. That explains a lot about the content producers. The films have to make a lot of money back. So we have to appeal to an audience beyond fans of the comic characters.

Whenever I watch one I’m always confused about who is doing what. Why is Thanos angry? The films are designed so that does not matter so much. You can still enjoy Thor or Wonder Woman without knowing very much about the backstory. Good guy/gal thumps bad guy, but in a knowing way. They also include enough so that if you do care about the backstory you will enjoy the fan service going on. Some of the TV shows are meant to be more niche. If you care about Loki then you will be satisfied with his own spinoff show. That is why the films always full of supporting characters and jokes regularly every few minutes. They are entertainment, of a particular type.

Maybe I am wrong about that and in fact once you reach a certain level of a success the product is so much in the cultural atmosphere that you do not have to worry about backstory. I think that the interesting question is how did we get from a situation where comic books and Spider-Man and so on were seen as rather childish, nerdy and a bit weird. Consider the character of Comic Book Guy in the Simpsons. We are meant to find his obsessions a bit sad and funny. Now they are accepted as part of the culture. They are cultural events in themselves. They are so accepted that to look down on them is seen as a dreadful faux pas.

It is notable that this is very different in terms of cultural product from those examined by Bourdieu in his work on taste. There is little in the way of class distinction or self positioning to be drawn by liking or not liking The Avengers. The CGI-led films are well beyond such considerations. And if you critique the current content of one you are pretty much critiquing the content of all of them. It explains why for example the gender politics of them are rather bland and agreeable, and why there is little geopolitical content.

Compare the 1990s films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those films were heavily invested in the geopolitical context of the time. They featured Middle Eastern terrorists, and a genuine clear sense of what masculinity was in opposition to feminine qualities. Non-American characters tended to appear only as sweaty-ass terrorists. I mean literally. They were always covered in sweat to make them look more shifty. As if the filmmakers were not confident that we might as an audience get the sense that they were bad guys just because they were terrorists and needed extra guidance in that.

Why does the MCU not do the same thing and have The Avengers solving the Middle East crisis or bumping Putin on the head?

The reason is that if you take sides in any sense in these contemporary conflicts you’re losing your audience. And also the audience does not really want to be reminded of these intractable and difficult human conflicts. The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it count on us quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films The MCU cannot tell us much about taste culture it can’t always quite a bit about the cultural moment we are in. As an aside I didn’t want to make too much of this distinction. Schwarzenegger did not always play it straight and plenty of his films have a raised eyebrow and self-awareness. Perhaps for the same reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons the MCU does. I want to say here there appears to be an inverse relationship between artistic quality and scale. My very favourite Schwarzenegger film is The Terminator, a fairly small budget and quite dark film about a robot assassin and a feature apocalypse. Terminator 2: This Time It’s CGI is a much bigger film and was rather more cheery about the future, and also please to a wider demographic. The first film was very adult, the second much more youth and child or young adult focused.

We have established that Hollywood studios productions relates to the cultural moment and the audience. However the MCU is a good study because it does not just reach its demographic, it shapes and moulds it. The MCU generates taste. It does not simply respond to them out, it makes it. Some of that is in a very straightforward material way. Ensuring most cinema screens are booked out for your big launch means there isn’t much else to say. Another is creating an identity for you audience. When the Terminator was released there was no concept of a young adult audience. Now however there are films, books and much more aimed at a young adult audience. The Hunger Games is a fantastic example of what that is like when it’s very successful in its own terms. There might be another argument related to the turbulent times we live in. And it is that this is what audiences want. Perhaps a break from intractable political polarisation into a self-contained universe where the baddies get repeatedly punched in the face, but not too seriously, is very very welcome. And I can hardly blame anyone for that.

A further critical point that we can draw on here is about how academics talk about consumption of culture we tend to look at why culture is consumed, but not the content. Which is maybe a bit strange. We act as if distinction and other judgements are content independent. So say the audience that consumes opera could just as easily be concerning basketball. I do not think that is true. The MCU is a great example of how cultural functions and taste culture and content work together.

 

Institutions have duties beyond themselves and the cultural moment

Angus Bancroft/ / turbulence

… Otherwise they would not actually be institutions at all. That is basically what an institution is, as opposed to a temporary association or social movement.

I was trying to think through some irritation at the tendency of leaderships to just make changes that are very in the moment and focused on firefighting political controversies. I work in an ancient Scottish university and feel we have obligations to preserve the spirit and sacred traditions handed down to us, those of the Scottish Enlightenment. So I wanted to work through my sense of why this is an issue for me.

There has been a tendency recently for institutions to simply respond to the cultural moment rather than look beyond it. To some extent this is quite natural because, as I keep trying to remind everyone, institutions are just people. When people complain about the media or about social media or about Westminster or Hollyrood or the university it is good to bear that in mind. The University is just us. Elites are just folk, but with special, lizardy qualities.

Yet institutions are still something more than that, through the processes, cultures and practices that they embed. Many of the people occupying institutions are quite practised and skilled but naturally they are going to have blindspots. We can examine these topics systematically using Weber’s theories of bureaucracy. So although we can say that institutions are composed of people, they are not people who have entirely free latitude to do what ever they wan. Systems are built to create sanctions, rewards and status. We cannot break the rules willy-nilly. When we do as we find out the reasons why people would want it the rules in place. For example consistency could be valued over individual flexibility. One would probably want that in and airline, or an army. Rather more flexibility could be hoped for in a GP. But not too much. We can also point to their problems that we know emerge in any institution. There are problems of perverse incentives, ends-means displacement and other well-known problems of bureaucracies.

The popularity of algorithmic governance has meant that some of these qualities are now universal in the data infrastructure. For example the problem of performativity, where is the model becomes the aim. But this should not be treated as mysterious. In the case of Facebook the problems identified in terms of polarisation are parts of the business model. They are not a great mystery and we can mislead ourselves with an in-the-moment focus on the technology rather than the human-level decisions taken about the business it undergirds.

But the whole reason for being part of an institution is it gives you access to collective resources beyond yourselves. The reason we sometimes get a little bit testy about this tradition is that our traditions and maybe be hidebound and dated, or they may be part of this collective resources. You cannot always tell. Our ability to tell which is which is inversely related to our confidence in the doing that. So we need to have a learning process that is fairly reliable and self-correcting. Otherwise another problem sets in, that of path dependence. When you start going in one direction it is very hard to turn off.