It’s a small, small, small world: The Icesave dispute and global orders of difference

Drawing on Roy and Ong’s work on worlding, this article introduces the concept of orders of difference to analyze the selective incorporation of the nation-state into supranational political and economic systems. I argue that attending to orders of difference is necessary to better understand the ways that imagined equality is mobilized to reproduce global injustice. I do so through a combined examination of the liberal globalism of the iconic “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney theme parks and Iceland's role in the Icesave dispute—a key struggle of the 2007–8 financial crisis. The design of the Small World 1 ride effects a form of worlding by ordering differences into those that are similar enough to be permitted and those that are too different to be incorporated. In the process, the ride invokes a small world 2 that precisely encapsulates the more complex globalisms that inform the organizational structure of supranational bodies like the European Union and European Economic Area. Global finance is said to be one of the world’s most seamless supranational systems, but one of its many seams was made visible during the Icesave dispute as two orders of difference came into conflict: European Economic Area membership and Icelandic politics. Representatives of the Netherlands and the UK argued that Iceland’s membership in the European Economic Area meant that Iceland was fully the same as other member nations, while those from Iceland successfully argued that its domestic and international economies were irreducibly different. The dispute thus hinged upon a debate over how differences are ordered within and between nations, including the number of permissible orders and the precise extent to which member nations are or should be made commensurable through supranational geopolitics

Building Better Ecological Machines: Complexity Theory and Alternative Economic Models

Computer models of the economy are regularly used to predict economic phenomena and set financial policy. However, the conventional macroeconomic models are currently being reimagined after they failed to foresee the current economic crisis, the outlines of which began to be understood only in 2007-2008. In this article we analyze the most prominent of this reimagining: Agent-Based models (ABMs). ABMs are an influential alternative to standard economic models, and they are one focus of complexity theory, a discipline that is a more open successor to the conventional chaos and fractal modeling of the 1990s. The modelers who create ABMs claim that their models depict markets as ecologies, and that they are more responsive than conventional models that depict markets as machines. We challenge this presentation, arguing instead that recent modeling efforts amount to the creation of models as ecological machines. Our paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the organizing metaphors of macroeconomic models, which we argue is relevant conceptually and politically, e.g., when models are used for regulatory purposes

Algorithms as Folding: Reframing the Analytical Focus. 6(2): 1-12.

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding—proximation, universalisation and normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations

Palestinian State Maps and Imperial Technologies of Staying Put

Maps are considered to be an ultimate expression of modernity. Empirical cartography plays a central role in daily governance, and it also has a long history of furthering displacement and erasure. In this article I argue that the landscapes of historic British colonialism and the ongoing Israeli occupation influence the digital maps made by the Palestinian Authority. Through an investigation into the borders, roads, and urban areas of one such map and its related scientific practices, I analyze how knowledge of the occupation is shaped by the occupation. Drawing upon widespread Palestinian efforts to strengthen sumud (steadfastness), I develop the concept of stasis as the ability to remain in place. Researchers have rightly pointed to restrictions on Palestinians’ movements, but greater attention should be paid to attempts to limit stasis, both within and beyond the West Bank. The detailed study of mobility and stasis, as well as other material asymmetries of research, can enable more imaginative maps and more heterogeneous passages for the production of knowledge