Inter-infrastructural cascades may be more granular with respect to duration and open to management than assumed in formal modeling and some planning. Certainly, interviewees in our recent research on a Magnitude 9 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest described major emergencies as more punctuated than as single headlong rush of disasters.

Rapid infrastructure cascades can, of course, happen and were observed in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina and, later, in northern Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Yet cascade models by and large assume an unmanaged, near-immediate escalation in failure probabilities and consequences across interconnected systems. Really-existing infrastructures, like water, electricity and telecommunications, are however managed. Individual infrastructures do not generally fail instantaneously (brownouts may precede blackouts, levees may seep long before failing), and the transition from normal operations to failure across systems can be a punctuated duration.

This means there is a granularity in both space and time between infrastructures in which reliability management can make a difference in the probability of failure of an individual infrastructure and failure across infrastructures. To put the point from the opposite direction, some of the recorded near misses and close calls demonstrate that operators have the time, albeit sometimes just in time, to prevent (significantly more) knock-on effects from initial disruptions or outright failures.

This means that any assumption that infrastructures are not managed in failure is highly misleading. In many cases neither infrastructure control rooms nor their reliability contributions disappear during or after a large system failure. This also means disaster response actually begins in the infrastructures.

It begins before the formal activation of the emergency management infrastructure with its Incident Command System (ICS), such as incident management teams (IMTs) and emergency operations centers (EOCs). “When the M9 hits,” said a city water distribution manager, “my group, we’re going to be the first in. . .We’re the first responders for the water system. I may even have to call someone who lives nearby and tell them to drive up to our major water tank and close the shut-off valve.”

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Sources: The above is a slightly edited consolidated extract from:

1. E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf).
2. E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2016). Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Infrastructures. Stanford Business Books: Stanford CA.

I

Operators of large-scale infrastructure are never safe from the disciplinary and interdisciplinary assaults of economists, civil engineers, ecologists, risk managers, political scientists, anthropologists and more, who claim to know better and have a special purchase that demands all our attention.

A less banal observation is the cross-cutting fault-line once each discipline’s poses its “big picture”: Some ratchet up analysis to the global, others dig down into the granular. We’re told that further analysis necessarily entails resorting to understanding the wider contexts (political, social, cultural. . .) or to understanding the more fine-grained practices, processes and interactions.

We’re told, by way of example, that the study of digital archives is first and foremost “deeply rooted in the history of infrastructure policy”. But you have a choice in describing that policy–up or down:

In our attempt to understand contemporary archival politics, it would seem much more beneficial to pay attention to the concrete political issues in which community digital archives are involved, such as, for example, armed conflict and civil unrest (e.g. The Mosireen Collective 2024; Syrian Archive 2024; Ukraine War Archive 2024), gender queerness (e.g. Australian Queer Archives 2024; Digitial Transgender Archive 2024; Queer Digital History Project 2024), forced migration (e.g. The Amplification Project 2024; Archivio Memorie Migranti 2024; Living Refugee Archive 2024), post-colonialism (e.g. Talking Objects Lab 2024), rights of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Archivo Digital Indigena 2024; Digital Sami Archives 2024; Mukurtu 2024), racial discrimination (e.g. The Black Archives 2024; Black Digital Archiving 2024), or feminism (e.g. Féminicides (2024); Feminist Archive North 2024, Rise Up 2024).

You many wonder at the methodological finesse in this passage, namely: equating the concrete with the abstract. It’s not really-existing archival practices the author describes, but rather “the politics of digital archival practice.” Instead of the case-specific, these politics face outward and upward. They’re “political agendas”. Such is why the author can write he is “attending to the politics of digital archives at the level of concrete archival practices,” while in no way differentiating the practices, processes and interactions of each of the bolded categories in the quoted passage and how they work themselves out, case by case and over time.

II

I however come from profession, policy analysis, whose disposition is to dig down rather than ratchet up, especially when it comes Infrastructure Studies. Here, the “big picture” each discipline gives us is too important for them alone to determine how to move the analysis toward policy relevance.

In the infrastructure case of digital archives, I suspend judgment over the author’s conclusion precisely because no concrete practices of digital archiving are detailed over a range of different cases. Please note: He may well have them at hand and to be clear, I am happy to search out practices that float something in and through passages such as:

Similarly, the temporality of community-based digital archival enterprises seems neither ephemeral nor unfathomable. Rather, it plays a crucial role in rearticulating the historical subjectivities of various Queer, Indigenous, post-colonial, and other marginalized communities. And indeed, such enterprises and the rise of participatory and collaborative archiving can surely also be seen as examples of ‘collectivization’ and ‘socialization’ or even of ‘the dialectics between the individual and the society’–the very conditions of politics and historicity that Étienne Balibar (2024) sees ‘the digital’ as precluding.

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Source.

Goran Gaber (2025): “Mind the Gap. On archival politics and historical theory in the digital age,” Rethinking History, (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2025.2545029)

The “wake-up call” in emergency management, while never guaranteed, may be a series of events and not just one. The point is that this sequence/event triggers new insights by the emergency managers and infrastructure operators that other things are going on by way of needed response.

We were told in our Pacific Northwest research that, generally speaking, ice storms, fires and floods had been predictable with respect to times of onsets as well as with wind force and precipitation estimates. A senior engineer in a major power transmission company noted, “I would say we lose 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 towers a year due to wind, ice, trees. . .We see lots of those [kinds of] events”. Emergency management planners could reasonably expect to provide public warnings beforehand and many emergency protocols to be in effect. Emergency responders can also reasonably expect their own buildings and facilities to remain intact with emergency power and some telecommunications during seasonal ice storms, flooding and wildfires.

But the frequency and combination of events started changing. “2020 was of course nothing like they’d seen before [when it came to wildfires],” said one state-level manager. A single 2017 winter event of freeze-thaw-freeze majorly affected Portland’s above- and below-ground infrastructure, roads and water. Two back-to-back floods in one day were reported for a Washington State city in 2019, affecting multiple infrastructures. An Oregon interviewee spoke of 2019 witnessing flooding, drought and snow “all in the same space”.

Then came “the wake-up call” on top of all this: the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “We have wind events, we have fire events, we have power events, then the biggest event of all, COVID,” said a senior city public works official. No one predicted the pandemic’s very real impacts for the wide swath of local, state and federal emergency managers and infrastructure operators. “COVID had catastrophic effects on everybody, including critical infrastructures,” said a state emergency preparedness manager with long experience, adding the response was “unparalleled”.

The pandemic meant many emergency staff had to work virtually via internet from home during the 2020 Labor Day fires. A heat dome emergency required a treatment plant’s staff not to work outside, but in so doing created COVID-19 distancing issues inside. The intersection of lockdowns and winter ice storms increased restoration times of some electrical crews, reported a state director of emergency management for energy. A vaccination mandate on city staff added uncertainty over personnel available for line services. Who gets to work at home and who gets to work in the physical plant created issues. “We struggled with working with contractors and vendors” over the vaccine mandate, said a state emergency manager for roads.

But just what was the “wake-up call” with respect to? In the view of a very experienced emergency management expert, “the one thing that the pandemic is bringing out is a higher definition of how these things are interconnected and they’re not totally visible”. COVID-19 response made clearer that backbone infrastructures, especially electricity, are “extremely dated and fragile” in the view of experienced interviewees (e.g. in Oregon). The pandemic also put a brake on infrastructure and emergency management initiatives already in the pipeline (e.g., preventative maintenance), according to multiple respondents.

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Source: The above is a slightly edited extract from E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2025). The Centrality of Restoration Resilience Across Interconnected Critical Infrastructures for Emergency Management: A Framework and Key Implications. Oregon Research Institute: Springfield, OR (accessed online at https://www.ori.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/FinalReport_10Aug2025.pdf). Research design, references and other particulars can be found there.

I

Consider the following:

The EU cannot finance its budget through debt, but the EU Treaties do not prohibit the issuance of EU-27-backed securities or bonds for off-budget operations, as long as they are approved by the Council. The largest collective borrowing operation in EU history so far was the temporary Covid-19 recovery program NextGenerationEU (NGEU), which received 90 per cent of its financing through the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) for which the European Commission borrowed €807 billion on behalf of the EU-27 by issuing green bonds. NGEU presents itself as a green industrial investment program for the benefit of future generations, but it is pervaded by a fundamental contradiction: the repayment involves an intergenerational debt transfer, burdening future generations with €30 billion in annual debt servicing , starting in 2028 and ending in 2058.

Angela Wigger (2025). “Behind InvestEU’s Trojan Logic: Public Guarantees, Private Gains, and the Illusion of Climate Action,” accessed online at https://www.somo.nl/behind-investeus-trojan-logic/

I’d like you to focus on the bolded terms: off-budget operations and intergenerational debt transfer.

First, that notion of off-budget. Here a familiar adage is nowhere truer: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Once upon a time, the basic idea of a system budget was to be comprehensive. There’s nothing “off-budget” if the objective is constrained maximization of system benefits and costs. Of course, that hasn’t stopped all manner of moves to sequester below-line expenses as if they weren’t subject to budget constraints. Statements like

Technocrats’ creative reinterpretation of their own authority and governments’ creative fiscal accounting via off-budget financing vehicles can improve fiscal-monetary coordination and create significant fiscal space (van ’t Klooster, 2022; Guter-Sandu and Murau, 2022). However, the hidden and interim nature of these solutions preempts. . .

(accessed online at https://scispace.com/pdf/green-macrofinancial-regimes-2o45dbuoim.pdf)

. . .and in the process referring to articles with titles like “The Eurozone’s Evolving Fiscal Ecosystem: Mitigating Fiscal Discipline by Governing Through Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies,” give the game away.

Nor does the old-fashioned riposte work: Future generations will have more income than we to cover these debts. We’re in times of decreasing per-capita incomes and near-zero discount rates, where the generations ahead are to be treated just as alive as we are.

If however you really do believe the latter, then the wider declension narratives at work–apocalypse, catastrophe, polycrisis–undermine the very persistence of concepts, like government budgets, intergenerational debt and future generations.

So what? What’s to be done? Well, one question and answer suggests itself: What life-worlds already exist that do not rely on these terms, budgets, debt and generations; apocalypse, catastrophe and polycrisis?

II

Are there, more specifically, the equivalent of free ports out there? “Free ports”?! Where did that come from? You can thank complexity for all manner of novel analogies.

Current free ports are to be found in places like Singapore, Luxembourg, and Geneva, and it is reported that the largest of them, Geneva Freeport, houses about 1.2 million artworks, some six times that of New York City’s MOMA. By extension, if “all painting is nothing but make-up, that it is part of its essence to deceive,” then are there equivalent free ports of such diverse testimonies as to offer far more and different metaphors than present-day reductionism provides? As in: realities are metaphors that last longer.

The analogy of free ports would, however, seem to take us right back to the heart of capitalism, with its Special Economic Zones (SEZ) and such. But we would be wrong. The authors of a recent global study of free ports, Koen Stapelbroek and Corey Tazzara (2023), stress their own version of “off-balance sheet”. “Free ports offered essential services that the prevailing system of political economy scarcely allowed.” More specifically:

Rather than treating free ports as intrinsically liberal or illiberal, it is better to see them as controlled breaches in the prevailing political economy, whether that be of a state or of an entire trading system. With respect to national political economy the breach is obvious, since by definition a free port policy entailed a relaxation of ordinary controls over trade and often other parameters such as immigration. The extent of control varied for reasons ranging from technology to the fiscal trade-offs unavoidable in any customs policy. The underlying strategy varied, too – in some cases, free ports served to stabilise a state’s political economy (as in Genoa), in other cases as a forerunner to transform the interior economy (as in the Caribbean). The free port shows that the modern state has never endorsed homogeneous space: there have always been breaches, sometimes of great importance.

Koen Stapelbroek & Corey Tazzara (2023) The Global History of the Free Port, Global Intellectual History, 8:6, 661-699, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2280091

That is, in addition to the always-on search for alternative social movements, we are looking for these breaches in political economies, state controls or not; that is, we are looking for heterogeneities–early commercial, mercantilist, capitalist, hybrid–that displace, re-situate or unaccent the terms that now leave us nowhere to go on their own.

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Other sources

https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/06/26/an-aesthetic-autonomy-rebuilding-the-art-world-after-its-neoliberal-degradation/

https://academic.oup.com/fh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fh/craf018/8202932

“In the run-up to the 2008 election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney advanced an assault on Barack Obama’s healthcare coverage program, which the former derisively labeled ‘Obamacare’. Eighteen days before the election, Obama advanced a rhetorical counter-offensive that effectively reframed the whole parameters of the discussion. Invoking the presumable medical condition of ‘Romnesia’, Obama cited, in the most simplistic and nonchalant way, all of Romney’s policy flip-flops: ‘Mr. Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said the last year […] We’ve gotta name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called Romnesia […] I’m not a medical doctor, but I do wanna go over some of the symptoms with ya, because I wanna make sure nobody else catches it’. He proceeds:

If you say you’re for equal pay for equal work, but you keep refusing to say whether or not you’d sign a bill that protects equal pay for equal work, you might have Romnesia […] If you say you’ll protect a woman’s right to choose but you standup in a primary debate and said that you’d be delighted to sign a law outlawing that right to choose in all cases, man, you’ve definitely got Romnesia. . . .

“Extending the rhetorical logic to a series of other examples, Obama reached his rhetorical apex by reclaiming the term ‘Obamacare’ in the most effective way possible, while shattering Romney’s offensive without making any factual references to his healthcare coverage program: ‘And if you come down with a case of Romnesia and you can’t seem to remember the policies that are still on your website, or the promises you’ve made over the six years you’ve been running for president, here’s the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions!’ (Obama, 2008). Irrespective of whether one is in agreement or not with Obama’s policies, one cannot deny his mastery of political rhetoric, which to a considerable extent facilitated his (out of nowhere) rise to power.”

Michaelangelo Anastasiou, slightly edited and accessed online on September 9 2025 at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01914537251374951.

A common diagnosis across critical theories of contemporary society is that it has lost the capacity to imagine a better future. As early as 1985, Habermas voiced the concern that utopian energies were exhausted (Habermas 1985), and variations of this sentiment are often echoed in reference to the neoliberal mantra that ‘there is no alternative’. . . .

Against this backdrop, I propose the following starting definition of the role of imagination in critical theory: It is presented as a capacity that, at once, cannot be cut off from the social order (i.e., it is potentially ideological or delusional) while being often referred to as an element within the human psychodynamic that leaves open the possibility for transcending the social order. . . .

To be clear: The resulting claim—that critical theory presents imagination as a part of the human psychodynamic that is not fully corruptible— is not intended as a reason for optimism. Given the current state of the world, with progressive politics largely confined to rearguard actions (or worse), such a picture would be strange to endorse. Quite the opposite: In the context I discuss here, imagination is presented more or less as an almost transcendental capacity (i.e., a condition of possibility) for transcending the social order—which, given the current state of affairs, may only serve to highlight that no real alternatives are in sight.

Which however means. . .

Following that, imagination is essentially framed as the element within the human psychodynamic that makes complete identification with a social whole impossible. In this sense, it serves as a category introducing contingencies into a social theory deeply centered on the concept of the “totality” of a social order. . . .

If there truly were a totality of the social order that inscribed itself perfectly into the psyche of every individual, not only would emancipatory change be impossible, but any form of change at all would be precluded— an evidently absurd notion. I rather think that attributing the possibility of change (i.e., contingencies in the social order) to an individual capacity implies that there are no social processes on the horizon for a critical theory to cling to (such as theorems like the diminishing rate of profit, etc.). In a sense, this way of thinking about imagination suggests that a better future is possible against all odds.

Gante, M. (2025). “Imagination in Critical Theory: Utopia, Ideology, Aesthetics” Constellations, pp. 1 – 10 (accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.70009)

The substantial point beneath a frivolous comparison of worthless TV in 2025 to worthless 19th century military painting is that the content of every cultural edifice has been ground to dust. Salon painting at least had its pretensions and standards, no matter how conservative and tasteless its judges might be. Manet still wanted the Salon’s approval in spite of everything, and that desire for social achievement is a valuable motivator, which is not to suggest we can or should return to that model. The implications are much broader than academic painting; the library or the museum would never be invented today because those institutions are founded on ideas of cultural edification that are now entirely foreign to society at large. The assumptions of the End of History from the 1990s until roughly 2016 led the cultural sphere to assume it would proceed by its own momentum, reinventing itself boundlessly with no need for maintenance. That may have worked for a time, but the internet, social media, the rising cost of living, and so on, has since stripped culture for parts. Social media kills the social, dispersing in-person groups that used to be called countercultures and subcultures, and monetization optimizes the attention economy into a self-regulating system of everyone selling out to the algorithm. As usual, what at first seems liberatory is a crack in culture that more capitalism seeps into. The humanities and education in general, let alone the art world or popular media, are no longer able to maintain standards of development or basic competence, and it seems impossible to recover them from their current state.

But this is pessimism, not fatalistic cynicism. As Adorno has it: “All specifically modern art can be regarded as an attempt to keep the dynamic of history alive through magic, or to increase the horror at the stasis to shock, or to portray the catastrophe in which the ahistorical suddenly begins to look archaic.” (“Spengler After the Decline,” Prisms, p. 58.) We don’t need cultural institutions to keep the dynamic of history alive or portray our catastrophe, and in all likelihood those edifices have been more of a hindrance than an aid for some time. This can be framed as a freeing from institutional indoctrination, but this is a high price to pay and a challenging imposition on the individual. The internet certainly indoctrinates the general public far more crudely and insidiously than institutions, and this is far from optimistic; rather than an excitement at new tools, the collapse of institutionality forces us to find alternatives on our back foot. The internet may have killed culture, but its barrage of information revived the possibility of history by giving us immediate access to vast amounts of media of the past, and this access can, possibly, act as a trapdoor to outmaneuver the end of the world for the few that care to put in the effort.

By the internet I don’t mean its very contemporary experience, of course, that flood of frivolous content optimized to command and envelop our attention. I mean the Internet Archive, Newspapers.com, JSTOR, Libgen, torrents, online catalogue raisonnés, untapped research archives in raw HTML, even Wikipedia rabbit holes, means of accessing vast stores of information far larger than any physical archive that are sitting and waiting to be utilized. Most of these are relics from the ‘90s when people could still see the internet as an unprecedented practical resource, an idea that’s so hard to remember now.

Sean Tatol (2025) “After the End of the World” (accessed online at https://tripleampersand.org/after-the-end-of-the-world/; my bolding)

I. So what?

In a world where gender, race and class are the de rigueur differentiators, it’s too easy to conclude: Structural problems require structural solutions. That proposition is grotesquely premature and lethal to any first-round respect for heterogeneity and complexity.

What the sample below illustrates is that the only place structural solutions thrive is in theory. Which means: The only place really-existing heterogeneities are found is in the many–and many more–empirical analyses like those below.

II. Ten illustrative examples

1. Structural racism

This is the case, for instance, with broad-brush rhetorical attacks on ‘structural racism in criminal justice’ that confuse the different scales of the American penal state (federal, state, county and city), overlook the hyperlocalism and administrative fragmentation of a criminal justice system that is not a system, and amalgamate the different practices of legislating, policing, pretrial detention, prosecution, public defence, plea negotiation and litigation, sentencing, supervising, court-mandated programming, incarceration, and sentence administration, each of which has layers of internal complexity, and may or may not produce looping ethnoracial disparities. . . .[“Structural racism”] replaces meticulous study with facile sloganeering, and pinpoint remedial action with vague calls for systemic changes that are unlikely to come about or to produce their expected results. In so doing, this vogue word betrays its ostensive purpose: to excavate the social conditions of possibility of ethnoracial justice.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/loic-wacquant-resolving-the-trouble-with-race

2. Class structure

The structural primacy of class is not due to it alone governing people’s material wellbeing, since other social structures do as well, but is based instead on it being endogenously dynamic such that it generates differentiation of interests within and between class and non-class groups. . . .

[T]he structural primacy of class does not necessarily entail its political primacy, in the sense of making the abstract category of “worker” the immediate and exclusive subjective basis for class formation specifically and socialist politics more broadly. On the contrary, under certain conditions ratcheting up class struggle on the vertical dimension, i.e., scaling up class struggle beyond a segment of the working class in a single workplace to the level of politics, may require the mobilization of people on the basis of non- class subjectivities if those subjectivities are most salient conjuncturally. Building cultures of solidarity is indeed essential to class formation. But given a working class that is already highly differentiated, it is forms of solidarity that cut across differentiations within the working class on both the vertical and horizontal levels that are the building blocks for class formation that can move from the economic to the political.

—https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/fy5xu

3. Capitalism

a. State capitalism

The heterogeneous literature on the ‘new state capitalism’ has provoked considerable academic and popular interest in recent years, but also critique regarding how to analytically bolster the concept and enhance empirical understanding.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0308518X221083986

b. Platform capitalism

With dominant perspectives towards globalized platform power and control, we argue that there has been limited analysis of platform variation. Studies of platform capitalism tend to underplay differences – in the form of governance, practice and agency across space. This leads to risks of undeveloped perspectives of unfolding platform capitalism, especially when studies seek to analyse uneven global relations. . . .

Over-globalized accounts risk underplaying the variations that occur that are essential to how platforms operate and expand across space (Wood et al., 2019). Specifically, as platforms expand across spaces and sectors, it is important to examine how they cohere with existing institutions and regulatory environments within diverse capitalist systems (Thelen, 2018). This is particularly important when analysing platforms, practices and labour outside the economies of the global north (Foster & Bentley, 2022; Panimbang, 2021), with the risk that notions of platform may ” … universalize Western platform capitalism and the ideological and cultural forces that underpin its development” (Davis & Xiao, 2021, p. 104). Global accounts of platform expansion may also overplay the power and control platform leaders actually have across all spaces and sectors. It is important to allow consideration of potential tensions, alternatives, cleavages and agency by which more diverse and inclusive forms of digital capitalism or alternative forms of economy might emerge (Arvidsson, 2019).

—https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2306694

4. Heterogeneous income inequalities

Our results suggest that while a positive and statistically significant relationship exists between economic complexity and inequality globally, heterogeneity emerges when analysing countries by income level. Specifically, the relationship is reversed for high-income countries: the more complex the production structure, the lower the income inequality level (as found by Hartmann et al. 2017). In addition, when exploring non-linearity, results suggests a diminishing positive effect of economic complexity on inequality, resembling an inverted U-pattern. As complexity increases, the positive impact on inequality diminishes, but turning negative only at very high levels of complexity. . . .One key conclusion from our analysis is the existence of a heterogeneous relationship between economic complexity and income inequality, which underscores the importance of considering country-specific contexts.

—https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592624002364?via%3Dihub

5. Authoritarian regimes

An important simplification of the discussion presented above is that it treats the authoritarian regime as a homogenous entity, keen on achieving one goal – its self- preservation, maximization of power and rent-seeking. Although this picture of authoritarianism is very widespread in modern scholarship (ironically, very much in the writing of academic economists), in reality, regimes are highly heterogeneous and include groups with different interests and ideas. Some of them may be stronger supporters of particularism and rejection of the West; some may embrace integration of their country into the Western world; and some may see their country as an opponent of the West but at the same time be willing to learn from the West to become more competitive. These positions can be associated with economic and political interests or with firm beliefs.

—https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13507486.2025.2526055

6. Automating immigration and asylum controls

Overall, the wide range of applications for new technologies [in migration and asylum governance in Europe] implies that each one should be investigated independently, taking into consideration its development context and the unique requirements of the stakeholders who develop and use them. This report, therefore, debunks a totalising, black-and-white perception of the uses of new technologies. New technologies can be used for various purposes ranging from including migrants’ and refugees’ preferences in their settlement processes (as in the case of some preference matching tools) to profiling them through risk assessments or monitoring them through invasive tools such as electronic monitoring. While the former can benefit migrants by having a say in their migration and settlement trajectory, the latter can have extremely harmful impacts on them. It is, therefore, crucial to examine each use of new technology in its own right, considering its design and implementation processes and their legal and social impacts.

https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/automating-immigration-and-asylum-the-uses-of-new-technologies-in-migration-and-asylum-governance-in-europe

7. Household macroeconomic narratives

The large extent of heterogeneity and fragmentation in households’ narratives has important consequences for the formation of economic expectations. Households are not only imperfectly informed about the current state of the economy (Coibion and Gorodnichenko, 2012; Mankiw and Reis, 2002; Reis, 2006) but they also systematically disagree about why the current state has been reached. Heterogeneity in narratives thus contributes to the widely-documented disagreement in macroeconomic expectations (Coibion and Gorodnichenko, 2015a; Dovern et al., 2012; Giglio et al., 2021; Link et al., 2023b; Mankiw et al., 2003). One important question for future research is to better understand the origins of the substantial heterogeneity in household narratives. While differential media exposure is likely to drive some of the heterogeneity, our experiment with exogenous variation in media exposure suggests (as discussed in Appendix 1) that traditional news media is only part of the story. A related open question revolves around the social processes that make some narratives go viral (Graeber et al., 2024c; Shiller, 2017). For instance, narratives involving corporate greed and price gouging are common among households but are neither endorsed by experts nor prominently featured in the news media, suggesting that social interactions are important.

—https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3974993

8. Gig economy

More specifically, I argue that the combination of the technological structure of gig work (nearly automatic, open-access employment, algorithm-driven work process) plus workers’ ability to choose schedules and hours yields an unusually heterogeneous labor force on a range of dimensions, especially patterns of work in other jobs and portfolios of household incomes. As a result, worker experiences are also more heterogeneous than in conventional workplaces.

https://digitalage.berlin/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Brief-3_Schor_final.pdf

9. COVID-19

a. Preparedness and response

However, these general trends mask significant heterogeneity in responses as countries neither entered nor went through the crisis alike. . . .Overall, the pre-pandemic global outlook was heterogeneous across different geographies. . .

https://www.esm.europa.eu/publications/regional-responses-covid-19-crisis-comparative-study-economic-policy-and-institutiona

b. Worker protests

Finally, the dataset reveals significant variation between countries and regions. Political, economic, and institutional contexts clearly matter in shaping patterns of protest. Nevertheless, over-generalisation about the role of national institutional factors should be resisted, given the huge differences we found within countries. For example, a comparatively large volume of protest were identified in healthcare in India but very little in retail, and the same can be said of Nigeria; we therefore examine reports from these country cases in more detail below. Moreover, among the handful of countries reporting no protests, there is no consistent economic or institutional profile. Hence, we suggest that spikes in protest in particular sectors and countries are likely to reflect not only the national institutional context, but also contingent factors and strategic decisions made by the actors involved. To illustrate this point, we examine in more detail reports from the five countries with the highest levels of protest in the two sectors: France, India and Nigeria for healthcare, and the United States and Argentina for retail.

https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—inst/documents/publication/wcms_860587.pdf

10. Chinese development finance [CDF] to Africa

We contend that the impact of CDF on policy space cannot be generalised as either wholly expansive or restrictive. Instead, policy space is shaped more significantly by the internal political economies of recipient states, historical legacies, their global economic positioning and the interplay of these elements with the external financing environment. We find that, for example, countries with strong state capacity may strategically leverage CDF to implement incremental policy innovations, while more aid-dependent states often face greater constraints. Notwithstanding these general reflections, our framework and findings challenge uniform assumptions about CDF’s influence on policy space: neither divergence nor convergence between Northern and Chinese approaches results in wholesale shifts in policy autonomy. Rather, the development financing landscape, characterised by heterogeneity and ambiguity, creates opportunities for modest but meaningful policy experimentation. However, these manifest in an indeterminate way.

—https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jid.3996

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NB. In some cases, footnote/endnote numbers have been deleted for ease of reading.

To end, I consider the objection that my view, insofar as it sees ecological sustainability as a constraint on a people’s self-determination, could license green colonialism on the basis that new settlers could ecologically sustain a territory better than Indigenous peoples. First, according to my view, the duty of ecological sustainability is sufficientarian and tied to maintaining the material prerequisites for human life, political society, and a people’s capacities to exercise its self-determination. Thus, an outside group cannot violate a people’s self-determination on the basis that it could better ecologically sustain that territory so long as the people meet this baseline. Second, many Indigenous peoples have historically in fact met this threshold by developing effective cultural and political systems to adapt and sustain their ways of life in the ecosystems they have inhabited (Whyte, 2018b). Where Indigenous peoples struggle to ecologically sustain their territories today is generally itself due to colonialism, which would explain why colonialism is wrong and not why green colonialism is justified. [my bold]

The reference to “Whyte, 2018b” is to Kyle Whyte’s “On resilient parasitisms, or why I’m skeptical of Indigenous/settler reconciliation” in the Journal of Global Ethics (accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2018.1516693).

Here, however, is another reference to Whyte with an altogether different implication for whose sustainability in the end really matters:

Indigenous ways of knowing and living have never in the history of the planet supported more than fifty million human beings at once; to envision humanity “becoming indigenous” in any real way would mean returning to primary oral societies with low global population density, lacking complex industrial technology, and relying primarily on human, animal, and plant life for energy. . . .

It means “not just our energy use . . . our modes of governance, ongoing racial injustice, and our understandings of ourselves as human”—not only the roots of plantation logic in forced literacy, centralized agriculture, and private property—not only the possibility that it may be “too late for indigenous climate justice,” in the words of Kyle Whyte. . .Thus while pre-modern indigenous social formations are doubtlessly more ecologically sound than the ones offered by progressivist capitalism, the only path to reach them lies through the end of the world. And as much as we may be obliged to accept and even embrace such an inevitability, committing ourselves to bringing it about is another question entirely.

(accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/latest/apocalypse-24-7-scranton