<MoneyLab> Lana Swarz on The Work of Scams.

[Geert Lovink]

Subject:	[Labor Tech] Lana Swarz @ Next Speaker Series, Fri March 3 11AM-1PM
Date: 	Sun, 26 Feb 2023 12:08:19 -0800
From: 	Kathleen Pine <khpine at asu.edu> <mailto:khpine at asu.edu>
To: 	labor-tech at googlegroups.com <mailto:labor-tech at googlegroups.com>
Next Speaker Series event will be Friday March 3rd, at 11:00am - 1:00pm Eastern US. If you can’t make it, no worries. The audio recording will be in our dropbox for two weeks, until the next meeting. The Zoom link is below.

We will have a talk and discussion from Lana Swarz, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia  on The Work of Scams.

TALK DESCRIPTION:

In this talk, I draw from my on-going project about “scams” in the digital economy to inquire after the work of scams.  Scams are "work" in several ways. First, scams are a fundamental aspect of technological change. Each innovation creates new opportunities for innovative exploitation.  Scams work by pushing up against and discovering the limits of technical, economic, and social systems. In turn, scams invite the work of scam prevention: Like all undesired behavior, shape the norms and rules of communication systems. Scams, then, tell us something about the important socio-technical vulnerabilities in the economy and in communication ecosystems. The category of “scams” and the work of “fraud prevention” authorize surveillance and other forms of platform power. Scams also are a form of labor. I theorize “scams,” therefore, as capitalism out of place: what we call a scam is used to perform boundary work that delegitimates certain forms of economic activity (and exploitation) and legitimates others.  Scams are particularly important to understand now because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism seem to be in flux. In part, this is due to the larger turn away from traditional institutions of the capitalist economy and of its twin, consumer protection. We are told that nearly everything—the college degree, the 9-5 job, the promise of retirement, the entire market-democratic system—is a scam. This may be true, but the claims are almost always an advertisement for something even more ambiguous, multivalent, and, in a word, scammy. And most of the time, these new scammy opportunities are both a reaction to the precarity produced by the withering of institutions and a deepening of it: multilevel marketing direct selling companies (MLMs) that thrive on social media, retail investing as exemplified by crypto pump and dumps the 2021 GameStop rally through platforms like Robinhood, work in the pyramid-shaped attention economy through platforms ranging from OnlyFans to Substack.

How do scams put into relief and function to legitimize the exploitative, vaporous, and, indeed, often quite scamful business models of the mainstream Silicon Valley tech industry itself? While the withering of institutions and the rise of the scam economy feels like a crisis, it likely only understood that way because this structure of feeling has moved from the fringes—poor women, Black and Brown people—to the core of white America. There are many people for whom institutional promises have never worked, for whom hustling was always a way to get by, for whom respectability was always a risky strategy. But as the “hustle”—once racially coded—becomes more mainstream, I am wrestling with how to understand its liberatory potential. In age where mainstream white supremacist movements in the United States are saliently marked by grift, it’s easy to see that scammy populism is far from inclusive.

There is an optional reading -- "Theorizing the 2017 blockchain ICO bubble as a network scam" -- attached to this email and in the LaborTech dropbox. 

BIO:
I am an associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Most of my research is about money and other communication technologies.

My book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media was released from Yale University Press in August 2020. My co-edited book, Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff  was published by MIT Press in April 2017. 

I recently released a major research report on the warning signs and ways forward for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which was conducted in collaboration with the MIT Digital Currency Initiative and fudned by the Gates Foundation. I am also writing a book about scams.

I was a 2020-2021 Berggruen Fellow, 2021 Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advance Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Previously, I was a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I received a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California and an SM in Comparative Media Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
ZOOM INFO:
Join Zoom Meeting:  https://wustl.zoom.us/j/2485280833
Meeting ID: 248 528 0833




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/moneylab_listcultures.org/attachments/20230227/3d50a449/attachment-0002.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: preprint_swartz_nms_ico.pdf.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 178385 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/moneylab_listcultures.org/attachments/20230227/3d50a449/attachment-0001.pdf>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/moneylab_listcultures.org/attachments/20230227/3d50a449/attachment-0003.html>