Despite its professed commitment to radical libertarianism and a non-state theory of money, the crypto industry is actively cultivating government intervention in markets on its behalf. From recruiting states to accept cryptocurrency for tax payments to pushing for the establishment of a Bitcoin reserve, crypto interests are partnering with the government to craft demand for currencies that hardly anyone uses.
The story of crypto’s transformation from cypherpunk experiment to Wall Street darling is bleak, but it was not preordained. Where did the left go wrong, and how can it reassert itself in shaping the future of money?
While some have cast the U.S. government’s $8.9 billion equity stake in Intel as the first step on the road to socialism, upon closer examination it looks more like a distinctive form of American state capitalism: one that entrenches corporate power while foreclosing more democratic and effective alternatives.
From lending to stock trading to crypto, leading fintech companies have gained an edge not through actual technological innovation, but by using tech-driven narratives to obscure how they profit from bending and breaking financial regulations. What makes this especially troubling is that the public is propping up these firms by subsidizing Silicon Valley’s VC industry.
New Uber-style firms like CareRev and Clipboard Health use algorithmic scheduling, staffing, and management technologies to match understaffed medical facilities with nearby nurses and nursing assistants looking for work. These companies, while promising flexibility, are facilitating a race to the bottom among healthcare workers and contributing to the erosion of America’s already-strained health care system.
Tech elite’s turn towards far-right politics should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress collective power and worker activism. Organized labor is crucial to challenging the influence tech oligarchs wield across society and within the tech industry.
With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship? As always, the Blog has you covered with our biannual roundup of some of our favorite forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles.
The tech arm of Trump 2.0 isn’t just reshaping government — it’s consolidating control over the data infrastructure that makes modern governance possible. By centralizing data flows and gutting public information systems, DOGE is building the machinery for a new era of authoritarianism.
Silicon Valley tech bosses often promote Universal Basic Income as a progressive solution to job losses caused by automation. However, by portraying such displacement as inevitable rather than socially determined, these proposals obscure the critical role that power structures and market dynamics play in shaping technological innovation. They also fail to address how automation further concentrates control over technology, production, and data.
While debate over AI regulation in the United States has largely focused on safety, the future of AI progress will also be determined by market structure. To ensure continued innovation, policymakers must use antitrust tools to protect competition at all levels of the supply chain — from hardware and cloud infrastructure to models hubs and consumer applications.
By exploiting their monopolies and control over rate-setting processes, utility companies are shifting the costs of Big Tech’s voracious energy consumption onto an unwitting public.
The Supreme Court’s unanimous affirmation of the TikTok Ban reveals a dangerous weakness in the First Amendment: its failure to protect against government repression that targets the economic infrastructure of speech, rather than speech itself — precisely the kind of repression that is likely to be a hallmark of the second Trump presidency.
To accompany your new holiday gizmos and gadgets, we reach into the vault and highlight some of our favorite posts on technology, featuring Salomé Viljoen, Veena Dubal, Frank Pasquale, Yochai Benkler, Raúl Carrillo, Meredith Whittaker, Genevieve Lakier & Nelson Tebbe, Matthew Bodie, Elizabeth Joh, and Julie Cohen.
New research reveals that more than two-thirds of U.S. workers are subject to electronic monitoring, and that more intensive productivity monitoring is associated with higher levels of anxiety, needing to work at unsafe speeds, and a higher likelihood of serious injury.
The LPE Blog goes worldwide, bringing you some of our favorite global LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship from 2024.
