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[...] So if you wanted to provide education to students in Africa, you’d be better off doing it through Facebook, because they wouldn’t have to pay for it. You would then end up with a situation where data about what people learn is collected by a private company and used for advertising for the re…

This is where we need to be explicit about the normative benchmarks by which we want to assess the situation. If the question is just privacy, then of course open-source is far better. But that doesn’t resolve the issue of whether we want a company like Google that already has access to an enormous…

[...] certain aspects of digital technologies are conducive to social mobilization, and others to suppression of mobilization—which of these tendencies predominates largely depends on the political dynamics in a country. I also wanted to make clear that popular discourse about these technologies wa…

What of the state-owned enterprises themselves? [...] Theoretically they belonged to the abstract collective of all citizens of the People’s Republic, and the state only ran them on behalf of the people. Nowadays they are known simply as firms owned by the state. Any link to the people, however nom…

Faced with continuous difficulties in urban and industrial reform after 1989, the country’s official media spent virtually a whole decade denouncing the ‘iron rice bowl’—secure employment and a steady wage—of workers in state-owned enterprises as an insurmountable obstacle to improvements in produc…