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While sparsely occupied ultra-thin “pencil towers” develop in our cities, functioning as speculative wealth storage for the superrich and cavernous “iceberg” homes extend architectural assets many stories below street level, communities around the globe are blighted by zombie and ghost urbanism, marked by unoccupied neighbourhoods and abandoned housing developments

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Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person’s trustworthiness

The festival’s rallying cry was that time had come to discuss the economy without inviting the economists to the table. The videos of the keynotes are online and i’d like to highlight 2 of them: Frank Trentmann‘s chronicle of the consumerist society and Geerat Vermeij‘s theory about how a closer study of biological ecosystems can teach us more about the economy than we might suspect

A new variety of capitalism is currently taking form on the African continent. States are being remade under the pressures of rapid demographic growth, conflicts over boundaries, security demands, and the offerings of multi-lateral donors and data-processing corporations. Much of this turns to enhanced forms of state surveillance that is common to societies across the globe, but the economic and institutional forms on the African continent are unusual

Jennifer Lyn Morone has turned herself into a corporation and collection of marketable goods and services. Everything she is biologically and intellectually, everything she does, learns and creates has the potential to be turned into profits. Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc is a graduation project in Design Interactions but as Jennifer underlines, this is not a speculative project

Virtually every stage in oil’s production process, from discovery to consumption, is greased by secret connections, corruption, and violence, even if little of that is visible to the public. The energy industry, to cite just one measure, violates the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act more often than any other economic sector, even weapons. This book sets out to tell the story of this largely hidden world

Historian Garrick Hileman, sociologist Nigel Dodd and financial activist Brett Scott reflected on the question “Is Bitcoin the new gold?” Shaking up online and offline worlds, the online currency Bitcoin has increased its ‘value’ at immense speed in the last year. Being immune from government interference and private manipulations, it has been celebrated as a new alternative currency by some and condemned as source of unpredictable risk by others