Suchergebnisse

Georg Simmel depicts money as an evolving entity that will continue to evolve to a state of 'perfect money' disconnected from any external guarantor of value. This article examines some of the different approaches to substantial value underpinning money, suggesting that they represent different types of fictional underwriting. Money is then contrasted with cryptocurrency, suggesting that their respective value is not only derived from different fictions but from different standards of value as major and minor currency. This analysis suggests that far from evolving into a fully abstract and functional instrument for creating stable social relationships, the divergence in currencies and currency fictions is a force for overturning such 'expedient' stability.

This paper investigates the UKIP Breaking Point advertisement, which appeared prominently during the Brexit referendum campaign and used a documentary photograph of Syrian refugees, implying that they were migrating to Britain. We chart the assemblage through which the transformation of the image occurred: starting as Jeffrey Mitchell's documentary photograph, charting news of the journey of a group of refugees, but becoming appropriated as an advertising image and ultimately an expression of political notoriety. The controversy generated by the advertisement serves as an example of advertising's meaning becoming a source of unpredictable contestation as different interests clash to define the image's 'real' meaning. Rather than take advertising as a managed process, with meaning directly encoded and carefully crafted by producers, a cultural politics of advertising perceives advertisements as comprised of raw material whose meanings are ambiguous, negotiable and politically charged. Through this lens, advertising images are contextualized by a process of production and consumption, partly shaped by the producers of the advertisement, but also largely mediated by responses of the wider public, creative fields from where the original image was produced, and by unforeseen factors, such as when texts become overtaken by events and appropriated by intermediaries. Breaking Point, in other words, presents a perfect example to illustrate that advertising is not merely a passive channel that represents but is instead an assemblage able to shape engagement and (coercively) infer meanings and draw distorted patterns from different social worlds.

This article examines the tension between the democratic right of public participation on specific environmental issues, guaranteed by European Law, and the degree to which it is being challenged in the UK as a consequence of recent approaches to energy infrastructure planning. Recent trends in UK government policy frameworks seem both to threaten effective public participation and challenge EU planning strategy, in particular those outlined in the Aarhus convention. The research outlined in this study involves an assessment of the changing context of planning and energy policy, in addition to recent changes in legislation formulation in the UK. The research findings, derived from an extensive interview process of elite stakeholders engaged in policy and legislation formulation in the UK and the EU provide a new categorisation system of stakeholders in energy policy that can be utilised in future research. The article concludes with a second order analysis of the interviewee data and provides solutions to increase public participation in the planning of energy infrastructure that emerge from the different perspectives.

This paper is placed in the context of a growing number of social and political critiques of blockchain technologies. We focus on the supposed potential of blockchain technologies to transform political institutions that are central to contemporary human societies, such as money, property rights regimes, and systems of democratic governance. Our aim is to examine the way blockchain technologies canbring about - and justify - new models of governance. To do so, we draw on the philosophical works of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Rawls, analyzing blockchain governance in terms of contrasting social contract theories. We begin by comparing the justifications of blockchain governance offered by members of the blockchain developers' community with the justifications of governance presented within social contract theories. We then examine the extent to which the model of governance offered by blockchain technologies reflects key governance themes and assumptions located within social contract theories, focusing on the notions of sovereignty, the initial situation, decentralization and distributive justice.