The Brave New World of Big Data

The Brave New World of Big Data

Current Issue | Vol 21, No 1 | November 2019 | Download (PDF)
Akos Rona-Tas
This issue is organized around the theme of Big Data as our new social world, one that has been taking shape thanks to three important recent advances in information technology, all accelerated in the last few years.
Reetika Khera
On 28 January 2009, the Government of India constituted the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) through a Gazette notification. The main aim was to “generate and assign UID to residents”, where UID refers to “Unique Identity”. The brand name “Aadhaar” (meaning “foundation” in some Indian languages) and a logo followed. The Aadhaar project came to be seen as one of the flagship schemes of the second United Progressive Alliance (UPA-2) government (2009–2014).
Ursula Rao
Across the globe, India’s new digital identification system is celebrated as a brave attempt to revolutionise identification procedures. The new system launched in 2009 is called Aadhaar, which literally means “foundation”.
Chuncheng Liu
In 2014, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (State Council) issued a blueprint, the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014–2020)” (Planning Outline), aiming to build a national social credit system (SCS) in six years. The Planning Outline claimed that many of society’s current social problems, from food safety accidents to academic dishonesty, result from the lack of trust and strict regulation of those people who break social trust (xinyong).
Barbara Kiviat
Credit scoring is the paradigmatic example of algorithmic governance (Fourcade and Healy 2017; Pasquale 2015). Corporations take information about thousands of individuals, data mine it for patterns that predict people not repaying their loans, and then make decisions about future lending—who gets money, how much interest they pay—based on variables that predicted default in the past.
Karoline Krenn
At the core of early privacy debates were state records, corporate records or survey data. The advancement of information technologies extended the availability of data. New technologies mediate many aspects of modern life and, thereby, enable data to be circulated. They provide access to very different types of data from very different sources.
Jenny Andersson
In Nathaniel Rich's novel Odds Against Tomorrow, a futurist by the name of Mitchell Zukor is born from the ashes of Seattle, the city devastated by fire. In the wake of the Seattle disaster, American corporations turn to a new industry, the future industry, no longer in the realm of assuring financial futures but in the business of insuring social and economic futures in the face of impending climate apocolypse.
Torben Iversen and David Soskice · 2019
Democracy and Prosperity. Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Reviewer: Timur Ergen

Sriya Iyer · 2018
The Economics of Religion in India
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Reviewer: Josef Hien

Matthias Thiemann · 2018
The Growth of Shadow Banking: A Comparative Institutional Analysis
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Reviewer: Dylan Cassar



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