Open lecture with Juan M. del Nido on "New technologies and their moral economy of knowledge"
- Date: 4 April 2023, 10:15–11:30
- Location: Blåsenhus, Bertil Hammer-salen, 24:K104
- Type: Lecture
- Lecturer: Juan M. del Nido, Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Max Cam Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change.
- Organiser: Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
- Contact person: Susann Baez Ullberg
How do we come to know each other through the affordances new technologies? Uber’s arrival in Argentina brought a way of knowing premised on five star ratings. As we enfold more of our relations within these logics of feedback, this talk will argue that we are living in a hardening moral economy of knowledge that is increasingly making us unintelligible to each other.
Project 1: New technologies and their moral economy of knowledge
How do we come to know each other through the affordances new technologies? Using the ethnographic example of ways of knowing taxi drivers’ bodies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I will argue we used to know our social relations through hierarchies of values that are recognisable and broadly shared, even when disagreed with and challenged. Uber’s arrival, halfway through my fieldwork, brought a way of knowing premised on five star ratings, akin to what Mirowski calls “radical populism”, sustained by a rhetoric of empowerment and democratisation of knowledge.
A strong body of research already shows the biases and distortions that occur through ratings and feedback logics, yet an issue seldom picked up is the epistemological impossibility of these rankings to ever actually mean anything, or convey actual knowledge about something. As we enfold more and more of our relations – transportation, policing, health, education, nutrition – within these logics of feedback, this talk will argue that beyond Uber, or beyond platforms at large, we are living in a hardening moral economy of knowledge that is increasingly making us, and the relations we entertain, unintelligible to each other.
Please note: this will be an entirely different talk to the one given at Stockholm University Monday 3, April 2023.
Juan M. del Nido, originally trained as an economist, he worked as a political consultant in Buenos Aires before turning to social anthropology to study political and economic reasoning and the ethics of new technologies.
His work has been awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Sutasoma Award for Research of Outstanding Merit and has been published by Economic Anthropology, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, The Anthropology of Work Review, and Hipertextos. He has produced policy recommendations for the Argentine Congress and the British Parliament and written opinion columns for Argentina’s national daily La Nacion. His book Taxis vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires, (Stanford U. Press, 2021) examining the conflict around Uber’s arrival in Argentina was awarded the Carol R. Ember Book Prize by the Society for Anthropological Sciences.