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LPE Originals

Algorithmic Imaginaries: The Political Limits of Legal and Computational Reasoning

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As law and political economy scholars take aim at the deficiencies of dominant modes of legal thought and chart a path for law to promote a more just and egalitarian society, they must also attend to the role of algorithmic systems and algorithmic thought in shaping political imaginations. By the same token, computer and information scientists interested in computation’s role in social reforms would do well to learn from the critiques and proposals of the LPE community.
LPE Originals

Ferment is Abroad: Techlash, Legal Institutions, and the Limits of Lawfulness

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Both law and technology have played a foundational role in constructing, maintaining, and extending neoliberal modes of governance. Technological implementations have given new life to the longstanding neoliberal separation of economic and political domains, and legal methods that have facilitated the neoliberal political economy have also enabled new technologies. As critiques of the centrality of neoliberal economic logic gain traction, we must take care that such work does not simply clear the path for an emerging hegemony of neoliberal computational logic. Instead, we must be attentive to proponents of the epistemic and political dominance of computational mechanisms, and we must critique them on similar grounds and with similar urgency. In addition, theories of the legal programs and methods required to democratize the economy must not ignore the role digital technologies may play in achieving these goals.
LPE Originals

Critiquing Legal Futurism and Imagining a Radical, Emancipatory Legal Liberalism

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The exact trajectory predictive legal analytics will take in the coming years is really anyone’s guess, but we can be fairly sure that the discourse of cost cutting and increased rationality via technology will be coming for the legal system, piece by piece. As such, it is worthwhile for left legal theory to take legal futurism, and even the idea of a legal singularity, seriously. Doing so, even for critics of liberalism, requires revisiting the liberal principle of the rule of law.
LPE Originals

Learning Like a State: Statecraft in the Digital Age

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Like all modern organizations, modern states are subject to a “data imperative”: a mandate to mine data and to decide what to manage based on what can be measured. In service of data-hungry machine learning techniques, the state (and its contractors) find themselves compelled not only to seek and demand new kinds of data, but also to mine it in a somewhat agnostic fashion to find the relations that stick. It is no longer necessary to flatten society to make it legible (as high modernism required); instead, ubiquitous data capture means that categories emerge inductively from regularities observed in the data.

LPE Originals

The Algorithmic Capture of Employment and the Tertius Bifrons

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Automated hiring systems are paradoxical. Although often the stated reason for adopting them is to curtail human bias, they frequently end up exacerbating the biases they’re meant to correct. Even as employment discrimination continues to morph with the introduction of new technologies, so, too, should the law change to meet it head to head.
LPE Originals

Are We Prisoners of Technological Fate?

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The Meritocracy Trap’s account of the relationships among elite education, skill-biased technical change, and rising economic inequality is, in my mind, one of the book’s most important arguments, even as it is undoubtedly one of the least discussed. I’m therefore delighted and grateful that Gordon chose to focus his attention on these matters.
LPE Originals

In Praise of Blindspots

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Economic models produce blindspots, compressing qualitative differences into quantitative measures. Yet, this vice is also the source of their power.
LPE Originals

The Second Wave of Algorithmic Accountability

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Over the past decade, algorithmic accountability has become an important concern for social scientists, computer scientists, journalists, and lawyers. Exposés have sparked vibrant debates about algorithmic sentencing. Researchers have exposed tech giants showing women ads for lower-paying jobs, discriminating against the aged, deploying deceptive dark patterns to trick consumers into buying things, and manipulating users toward rabbit holes of extremist…
LPE Originals

Reclaiming the Right to Future Tense

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By now, many of the societal, political, and distributive harms caused by large technology companies and so-called “social” media companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.) have been surfaced.  They invade our privacy, decrease market competition, erode our sense of self and, despite their euphemistic label, our sense of community.  Shoshana Zuboff’s new book—The Age of Surveillance…