Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2021), “The Janus Face of the Liberal International Information Order: When Global Institutions are Self-Undermining,” International Organization Vol 75, No.2:333-58 (75th anniversary special issue). Scholars and policymakers long believed that norms of global information openness and private-sector governance helped to sustain and promote liberalism. These norms are being increasingly contested ...| Henry Farrell
When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was […]| Henry Farrell
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the […]| Henry Farrell
Political scientists have had remarkably little to say about artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps because they are dissuaded by its technical complexity and by current debates about whether AI might emulate, outstrip, or replace individual human intelligence. They ought to consider AI in terms of its relationship with governance. Existing large-scale systems of governance such as […]| Henry Farrell
With Dan Davies – for the New York Times This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate, and on Thursday, President Trump held a gala dinner for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin. That doesn’t mean […]| Henry Farrell
The best way to read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book is to take the authors at their word. Abundance is what is usually called a “policy book,” but Klein and Thompson don’t quite offer a traditional policy agenda. Instead, the authors begin and end with a question that is also a concentrating lens. “Can we […]| Henry Farrell
What happens to politics when the voice of the people blurs together with the voices of self-appointed god-emperors like Elon Musk? We are about to find out. More at Democracy Journal.| Henry Farrell
How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe. More at Foreign Affairs| Henry Farrell
[new at Inside Story] Just over a week ago, Vance gave a speech at the “American Dynamism Summit,” which made the contradiction clear. As with any politician’s speech, it is anyone’s guess how much is Vance himself, and how much his speechwriter. But the speech was very clearly all about the awkward relationship between Common Good Conservatism and Let […]| Henry Farrell
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past By Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans As per Science’s rules, I hereby am making it clear that the below is the author’s version of the work. It is posted by permission […]| Henry Farrell
Much recent international relations scholarship has argued that states are unable to control e-commerce, so that private actors are coming to play a dominant role. However, this body of literature fails to account for emerging “hybrid institutions,” in which states create general frameworks of rules, which are then implemented by private actors. This article examines ...| Henry Farrell
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