Journey to the centre of the world: Google Maps and the abstraction of cybernetic capitalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-579
Author(s):  
Timothy Erik Ström
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Human History ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Google Maps ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Representation ◽  
Capitalist World

Across human history, many cultures have produced different ‘centres of the world’, with cartography often being bound up in the construction and representations of this axis mundi. A contemporary manifestation of these ancient phenomena can be seen in Google Maps, the most popular world-map ever made. Google use surveillance to present various types of customized centres-of-the-world, with their global representation being automatically tailored for specific subjects. This study uses engaged theory to analytically separate the levels of abstraction inherent in these processes, connecting empiric observations with large-scale historic transformations, with a focus on subjective and material changes in relation to the capitalist world-system. It is argued that the automated, atomizing processes bound up in Google Maps serve to projects intensifying abstractions into everyday social practice, thus reconstituting how space and time are experienced, as well as being intimately bound up with intensifying processes of capital accumulation and social control.

Market Commodities and Poor Relief: The World Bank Proposal for Health

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa Cristina Laurell ◽  
Oliva López Arellano
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
World Bank ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
Health Related

Investing in Health is the World Bank's blueprint for a new health policy within the context of structural adjustment. While this document includes a broad range of arguments, its implicit premises are neoliberal as can be deduced from its “agenda for action.” Health is defined as a private responsibility and health care as a private good. This leads to a health policy based on two complementary principles: the reduction of state intervention and public responsibility, and the promotion of diversity and competition (i.e., privatization). Thus, public institutions should provide only a limited number of public goods and narrowly defined, cost-efficient forms of relief for the poor. All other health-related activities are considered private duties, to be resolved by the market, NGOs, or families. The World Bank policy provides a pragmatic contribution to efforts to achieve fiscal balance. However, it also pushes to recommodify health care and to turn health into a terrain for capital accumulation through the selective privatization of health-related financial and “discretionary” services. The proposal implies large-scale experimentation and dismantling of public institutions which are the only alternative now accessible to the majority. It rejects health as a human need and a social right, and violates basic values by claiming that life and death decisions can be justly made by the market or through a cost-effectiveness formula.

scholarly journals International Inequality in the Age of Globalization: Japanese Economic Ascent and the Restructuring of the Capitalist World-Economy

2002 ◽  
pp. 62-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Ciccantell ◽  
Stephen Bunker
Keyword(s):  
Joint Ventures ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Transnational Corporations ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

This paper shows how Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state constructed a development model based on the steel industry as a generative sector that drove Japan’s economic ascent in the world-historical context of U.S. hegemony. We make three arguments in this paper. First, there is a new model of capital accumulation that does create new forms of social inequality by redistributing costs and bene?ts in very di?erent ways than earlier models. Second, Japanese ?rms and the Japanese state created this new model of capital accumulation and social inequality via mechanisms including joint ventures, long term contracts, and other forms of international trade and investment, not U.S.-based transnational corporations, as is usually assumed. Third, world-systems theory reconstructed through the lens of the new historical materialism explains this restructuring of the capitalist world-economy as the outcome of Japan’s economic ascent over the last ?fty years. Further, we argue that this new model of capital accumulation has had similar impacts on redistributing the costs and bene?ts of development between core and peripheral regions of the capitalist world-economy in a wide range of global industries. These strategies created a tightly linked set of technological and organizational innovations to overcome the natural and social obstacles to Japanese development, dramatically increase Japan’s international economic competitiveness by lowering production costs in all sectors of the economy, turn Japan into the world’s largest exporter of manufactured products, restructure a range of global industries, and recreate the world-system hierarchy in support of Japanese development. In particular, organizational inno-vations in the use of long term contracts and joint ventures in raw materials industries to foster global excess capacity and lower rents to resource extracting ?rms and states reallocated the costs of providing the material building blocks of Japanese development to the states and ?rms of its new raw materials periphery. This competitive advantage drove Japanese capital accumulation and economic ascent, and simultaneously drove underdevelopment in Japan’s periphery. These Japanese innovations became key elements of globalization as U.S. and European transnational corporations and states sought to compete with Japan. Joint ventures, long-term contracts, and other forms of inter?rm cooperation have replaced vertically integrated foreign direct investment, the earlier U.S. model of capital accumulation and international economic linkage, as the model for global industries.

Peraq Api Tradition n Lombok: A Bourdieu Perspective Review

Humaniora ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Nur Azizah Zuhriah ◽  
Warto Warto ◽  
Titis Srimuda Pitana
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
General View ◽  
Human History ◽  
Social Practice Theory ◽  
Descriptive Data ◽  
Analysis Techniques ◽  
The World ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach

The research aimed to dismantle the meaning of peraq api in its social practices involving habitus and the field in Sasak cosmology. Pierre Bourdieu’s social practice theory was used as an analysis to uncover the meanings built in the tradition of the peraq api. The meaning of peraq api in its social practice was discussed using qualitative methods, interpretative descriptive data analysis techniques, and using a hermeneutic approach. The results of indicate that the tradition of peraq api is a manifestation of life that represents the creation of beings. This happens because the attitude and perspective of Sasak society about nature originated from the monotheism’s cosmology. This perspective gives rise to behavior to maintain the cosmological balance. Tawhid is a general view of reality, truth, the world, space and time, and human history, which is represented through the tradition of the peraq api. 

Capital Accumulation and Debt Colonialism After Rosa Luxemburg

2018 ◽  
Vol 94 (94) ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
Stephen Morton
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
The World ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Blind Spots ◽  
Rosa Luxemburg

In The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Rosa Luxemburg offers a sophisticated account of the foundational role of colonialism in the development and expansion of the capitalist world system. By interrogating the blind spots in Marx's account of capitalist political economy, Luxemburg emphasises the importance of 'non-capitalist strata and countries' in the production of surplus value. Crucial to Luxemburg's re-thinking of capitalist political economy, in other words, was the accumulation and dispossession of non-capitalist societies on the periphery of the world economy. Beginning with an assessment of Luxemburg's central thesis in The Accumulation of Capital , this article proceeds to suggest that Luxemburg's analysis of imperialism has important and far-reaching consequences for understanding contemporary formations of capital accumulation and debt colonialism in the postcolonial world. What's more, Luxemburg's reflections on primitive communism and the challenge this posed to the universalising historical narrative of bourgeois political economy offer an important counterpoint to the predominant conceptualisation of the world as an abstract space for the uneven and unequal circulation of capital and commodities. By reading Luxemburg's writings on primitive communism against the grain of her writings on imperialism and debt colonialism in The Accumulation of Capital, I suggest in conclusion that Luxemburg's writing offers a valuable contribution to contemporary accounts of the commons.

TO THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR TORTURE IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-106
Author(s):  
ASTEMIR ZHURTOV ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Life ◽  
International Standards ◽  
World Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
The Russian Federation

Cruel and inhumane acts that harm human life and health, as well as humiliate the dignity, are prohibited in most countries of the world, and Russia is no exception in this issue. The article presents an analysis of the institution of responsibility for torture in the Russian Federation. The author comes to the conclusion that the current criminal law of Russia superficially and fragmentally regulates liability for torture, in connection with which the author formulated the proposals to define such act as an independent crime. In the frame of modern globalization, the world community pays special attention to the protection of human rights, in connection with which large-scale international standards have been created a long time ago. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international acts enshrine prohibitions of cruel and inhumane acts that harm human life and health, as well as degrade the dignity.Considering the historical experience of the past, these standards focus on the prohibition of any kind of torture, regardless of the purpose of their implementation.

Coal's Persistence in the Capitalist World-Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. Gellert ◽  
Paul S. Ciccantell
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Coal Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

Predominant analyses of energy offer insufficient theoretical and political-economic insight into the persistence of coal and other fossil fuels. The dominant narrative of coal powering the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain's world dominance in the nineteenth century giving way to a U.S.- and oil-dominated twentieth century, is marred by teleological assumptions. The key assumption that a complete energy “transition” will occur leads some to conceive of a renewable-energy-dominated twenty-first century led by China. After critiquing the teleological assumptions of modernization, ecological modernization, energetics, and even world-systems analysis of energy “transition,” this paper offers a world-systems perspective on the “raw” materialism of coal. Examining the material characteristics of coal and the unequal structure of the world-economy, the paper uses long-term data from governmental and private sources to reveal the lack of transition as new sources of energy are added. The increases in coal consumption in China and India as they have ascended in the capitalist world-economy have more than offset the leveling-off and decline in some core nations. A true global peak and decline (let alone full substitution) in energy generally and coal specifically has never happened. The future need not repeat the past, but technical, policy, and movement approaches will not get far without addressing the structural imperatives of capitalist growth and the uneven power structures and processes of long-term change of the world-system.

The Unified World Order

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Bakare Adewale Muteeu
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
World Peace ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Open World ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich

In pursuit of a capitalist world configuration, the causal phenomenon of globalization spread its cultural values in the built international system, as evidenced by the dichotomy between the rich North and the poor South. This era of cultural globalization is predominantly characterized by social inequality, economic inequality and instability, political instability, social injustice, and environmental change. Consequently, the world is empirically infected by divergent global inequalities among nations and people, as evidenced by the numerous problems plaguing humanity. This article seeks to understand Islam from the viewpoint of technological determinism in attempt to offset these diverging global inequalities for its “sociopolitical economy”1existence, as well as the stabilization of the interconnected world. Based upon the unifying view of microIslamics, the meaning of Islam and its globalizing perspectives are deciphered on a built micro-religious platform. Finally, the world is rebuilt via the Open World Peace (OWP) paradigm, from which the fluidity of open globalization is derived as a future causal phenomenon for seamlessly bridging (or contracting) the gaps between the rich-rich, rich-poor, poor-rich and poor-poor nations and people based on common civilization fronts.

Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Its Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Way

In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those who are criminalized, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume brings together fourteen essays that examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders. Neatly organized in four parts, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging are excavated throughout the chapters presented in the book, thereby transforming the way we think about migration.

scholarly journals A Large-Scale COVID-19 Twitter Chatter Dataset for Open Scientific Research—An International Collaboration

Epidemiologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-324
Author(s):  
Juan M. Banda ◽  
Ramya Tekumalla ◽  
Guanyu Wang ◽  
Jingyuan Yu ◽  
Tuo Liu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Additional Data ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
The World ◽  
Data Source

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread worldwide, an unprecedented amount of open data is being generated for medical, genetics, and epidemiological research. The unparalleled rate at which many research groups around the world are releasing data and publications on the ongoing pandemic is allowing other scientists to learn from local experiences and data generated on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is a need to integrate additional data sources that map and measure the role of social dynamics of such a unique worldwide event in biomedical, biological, and epidemiological analyses. For this purpose, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 1.12 billion tweets, growing daily, related to COVID-19 chatter generated from 1 January 2020 to 27 June 2021 at the time of writing. This data source provides a freely available additional data source for researchers worldwide to conduct a wide and diverse number of research projects, such as epidemiological analyses, emotional and mental responses to social distancing measures, the identification of sources of misinformation, stratified measurement of sentiment towards the pandemic in near real time, among many others.

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