Bøger af Kean Birch

This book focuses on our increasing dependence upon Big Tech to live, manage, and enjoy our lives. The author examines how we freely exchange our personal data for access to online platforms, services, and devices without proper consideration of the implications of this trade. Our personal data is the defining resource of the emerging digital economy, and it is increasingly concentrated in a few data enclaves controlled by Big Tech firms, cementing an increasingly parasitic form of technoscientific innovation. Big Tech controls access to these data, dictates the terms of our use of their services and products, and controls the future development of key technologies like artificial intelligence. The contention of this book is that we need to rethink our political and policy approach to data governance and to do so requires unpacking the peculiarities of personal data and how personal data are transformed into a valuable asset.

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the Atlantic Heartland. However, if we look at the history of the Heartland economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and neoliberal practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a manifesto for a doomed youth in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

In this book, Kean Birch analyses the co-construction of markets and natures in the emerging bio-economy as a policy response to global environmental change. In addressing this question, Kean Birch draws on over ten years of research on the bio-economy around the world, but especially in North America.

In this book, Kean Birch analyses the co-construction of markets and natures in the emerging bio-economy as a policy response to global environmental change. In addressing this question, Kean Birch draws on over ten years of research on the bio-economy around the world, but especially in North America.