Amazon will know I'm interested in this area because I ordered it from them. My usual local indie bookstore somehow has difficulties with university press books, or at least HUP.
I won't be reviewing it
But, but ... your Klout Score.
But Coyle did at least provide a pithily dismissive mini-review within her review.
This makes it orders of magnitude more persuasive than the dreadful but influential Age of Surveillance Capitalism of Shoshana Zuboff.
Unfogged's participation in this is I guess the occasional geographically far-flung comment spam that appears here? There must be sellers of moleskine notebooks and good pens or vintage cameras or something who would be interested in the archives.
Really looking forward to reading this book.
It sounds very like "Seeing Like A State" but I wonder to what extent it is pretending that something that is as old as civilisation is somehow new and awful because digital.
"The classification of individuals and association of these categories with profits created rankings of people which almost unavoidably turned into appraisal of relative moral worth."
Moral worth? No. "Assessment of reliability in a business context" would be a better phrase. Or just call it "reputation". And having that sort of thing hanging around you is not a development of the digital age.
The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people's life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score.
But there's never been a general carefree willingness to do business with, or put your life in the hands of, someone with no known reputation. Even taxi drivers - that is what a taxi permit is for. It's a statement that the London Transport Corporation, or whoever, guarantees the probity and skill of the chap driving this taxi. In other countries you don't have that formal system, but your driver will be a cousin of a neighbour of your landlord, or the brother of the guy who cleans your office, or something - personal connection takes the place of reputation.
The development of a modern economy is very largely the development of very fast, reliable, secure networks through which people can exchange thoughts on the reliability of other people. That's what Bloomberg is, largely, and that's what Reuters has been since the 19th century, and before that it was networks of cousins in Antwerp and Leipzig and London writing to each other that Messer Questoquello was well spoken of by his fellow merchants and it was probably safe for the family to lend him a bucket of ducats to fund his cargo of timber or whatever.
Or in between then and now, banks hiring Pinkertons to snooping on someone to see if they were adulterous before issuing them a business loan.
Although I'm open to believing the automation and extraction of responsibility from the process makes a qualitative difference.
7: yes. And you could even argue that the automation improves things by forcing a degree of transparency around the inputs. We know what affects a credit score, and the inputs can be listed. If it's a human-driven process, the decision can be affected opaquely by things like "I don't like his manners" or "I suspect he's a heretic" or "he went to my old school" - and there's no way of showing that because it's all happening inside the head of the person making the decision. The algorithm would have to have an explicit input that is like "Swarthy/not swarthy? Please click whichever applies".
Nanni would like a word
Exactly! If Ea-Nasir had been around today he would have had a one-star rating on Amazon.com (or, I suppose, Euphrates.com) and Nanni would have known not to do business with him.
Unfortunately he'd probably also have a noisy fanbase on twitter.
10: At its best, yes. I don't think that's how implementation of credit scores works in practice. (Though I admit I now have access to an app that shows me at least categorical reasons why my credit score went up or down.)
8. That's another one I'm looking forward to reading.
Reliability in a business context is pretty elastic-- Twitter's remaining employees are probably extremely reliable, because there's a visa status that disallows changing employers. The ease with which such systems can be manipulated for advantage by the people who control the codebase is new, or if not new a hard -to detect variant of insider trading.
2: Oddly, bookshop.org has it at $54, but Harvard University Press at $45, and amazon a few dollars less than that. I'm surprised by an "above sticker" price for bookshop -- they've been my amazon alternative, but if they're going to charge $9 above MSRP, I'll just gift that directly to a local bookshop instead.
Henry Farrell last week interviewed Francis Spufford at the Santa Fe institute about tangentially related topics ( AI, social control). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Hghul4oEI
15: I've used them occasionally but they do seem to impose a pretty significant markup on a lot of books, perhaps figuring they can get away with it due to their (ahem) reputation for virtue.
Particularly amusing is the floating click-on thing-a-majig at the web page with Coyle's review that includes an Accept button for the text "By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information" It strikes me as so apropos, as though someone did this deliberately for giggles.
I wanted to know more about the line in 4.
I wanted to know more about the line in 4.
I'm just going to imagine reading The Ordinal Society alongside The Audit Society and then continue my recent trend of not reading books.
Have you tried buying new books and rereading either A Presumption of Death or The Complete Walker again?
Amazon is listing it as #1 in "Credit Ratings and Repair," which is probably not what the authors would have preferred to be listed in.
Reliability in a business context is pretty elastic-- Twitter's remaining employees are probably extremely reliable, because there's a visa status that disallows changing employers.
That is not really the kind of reliability I was talking about. I'm talking about "likelihood that they will fulfil their contractual obligations" and an employee who hands in his three months' notice tomorrow and leaves three months later is entirely reliable in that sense.
Somewhat on topic: at the end of the month I'm being promoted to a position at my financial services firm where I will primarily be investigating reports of fraudulent activity -- some coming from individual transactions reported by clients and staff, and some from computer generated reports of sus transactions. Primarily these are scams at the level of gangsters cheating old people out of their life savings, so I'm not anticipating a lot of moral gray areas. Some of the stories I used to hear when I was a phone rep taking the initial reports of such scams were really heartbreaking, so I'm hoping to actually prevent or at least ameliorate the effects of such. There's even a chance that I can catch corrupt stockbrokers ripping off their clients on occasion! (Although most of the ways we do that are completely legal and SOP.) So yay data-mining! I love Big Brother!
Congratulations. Good luck with reverse Glengarry Glen Ross.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/frigid I seem to remember someone here suggesting a remake of The Lion King from the point of view of the hyaenas...
The coffee is for closers of the door on those who defraud retired workers.
