![\"Hoverfly](\"https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/628027712/original.jpg\"/)
\nMelangyna pavlovskyi, 2026.iii.22, Zeddam, The Netherlands
The release of version 0.9.0 of Citation.js comes shortly after the release of version 0.8.0. This is in part because v0.8.0 was released shortly before Node.js v20 went End Of Life, which led to a lot of (developmental) dependencies to dropping support for it. An added benefit though is that v22.12.0 of Node.js finally added support for CommonJS modules (require() syntax) to import most ESM modules (import/export syntax). This allowed me to stop using the @larsgw/wikibase-sdk fork of wikibase-sdk.
\nMelangyna pavlovskyi, 2026.iii.22, Zeddam, The Netherlands
In short:
\nnode-fetch was replaced with the built-in version of the Fetch API (based on undici); similarly sync-fetch was replaced with sync-fetch-undici.@larsgw/wikibase-sdk was replaced with the upstream wikibase-sdk.citation-js package, until Babelify is updated upstream.Co-Authored-By tags in their commit messages for advertising purposes (i.e. LLMs).Another major change is the addition of TypeScript types, which people have been asking for, for some time. I have attempted to create type definitions that are actually useful, which proved difficult given the convoluted plugin system. In the process, I learnt some interesting features of TypeScript, like module augmentation and some pretty nice generic functions.
\nThe way to register a plugin with Citation.js is to import or require() it. The first step was to employ module augmentation to add these overloads, like below. (Note that some formats have multiple return types, meaning the overload also depends on the second argument; this will come back later!)
// node_modules/@citation-js/core/index.d.ts\nexport class Cite {\n // ...\n\n\tformat (format: 'data', options?: { format?: 'text', version: string }): string\n\tformat (format: 'data', options: { format: 'object', version: string }): Array<CSL>\n\tformat (format: 'label'): Record<string, string>\n}\n\n// node_modules/@citation-js/plugin-csl/index.d.ts\nimport '@citation-js/core'\n\ndeclare module '@citation-js/core' {\n class Cite {\n format (format: 'bibliography', options?: { /* ... */ }): string\n // ...\n }\n}\n\n// index.ts\nimport { Cite } from '@citation-js/core'\nimport from '@citation-js/plugin-csl'\n\nconst a = (new Cite()).format('bibliography')\n// typeof a === string\nThis is for plugins with output formatting features, for input parsing features and plugin configuration something similar is possible. However, formatting features not only affect the possible overloads of the Cite#format() function, but also the plugins.output.format() function. This would mean repeating all the overloads.
Additionally, if the typing of a call to Cite#format() is wrong, the error is actually not very helpful. TypeScript will only show how the last overload of a function does not match. There is another way, though.
With generic functions for Cite#format() and plugins.output.format() we can reuse the same output formatter signatures for both functions. This was achieved by exporting an interface type with the signatures.
interface Formats {\n data:\n | ((options?: { format?: 'text', version?: string }) => string)\n | ((options: { format: 'object', version?: string }) => Array<CSL>)\n label: () => Record<string, string>\n}\nThis interface can be extended by plugins as well, so adding signatures is simple. The generic function is not so simple; I started with the following:
\nexport class Cite {\n format<\n Format extends keyof Formats,\n Options extends Parameters<Formats[Format]>\n > (format: Format, ...options: Options): ReturnType<Formats[Format]>\n}\nHowever, because the 'data' output format can have multiple return types depending on the second argument, the return type would be string | Array. I instead ended up with
export class Cite {\n format<\n Format extends keyof Formats,\n Options extends Parameters<Formats[Format]>,\n Result extends ReturnType<Extract<Formats[Format], (...args: Options) => any>>\n > (format: Format, ...options: Options): Result\n}\nBecause of Extract the correct return type is selected and the overloads work as expected. This works wonders with autocomplete, and gives appropriate errors. And, although the resulting code looks pretty simple, it took a while to get there in practice.
In total, the index.d.ts type definitions for a typical plugin looks like this:
import type { CSL } from '@citation-js/core'\n\ninterface Entry {\n title: string\n // ...\n}\n\ninterface Config {\n stringConstants: Record<string, string>\n}\n\ndeclare module '@citation-js/core' {\n namespace plugins {\n namespace input {\n interface Formats {\n '@foo/file': (input: string) => Array<Entry>\n '@foo/record': (input: Entry) => CSL\n }\n }\n\n namespace output {\n interface Formats {\n foo:\n | ((options: { format: 'object', spec?: number }) => Array<Entry>)\n | ((options?: { format?: 'text', spec?: number }) => string)\n }\n }\n\n namespace config {\n function get ('@foo'): Config\n }\n }\n}\nThis is implemented for all plugins included in citation-js (though that package does not have TypeScript types itself), and I will slowly roll this out for other plugins. Any feedback is welcome!
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/bti_cover.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1\")
\n
'Industry' and 'business' \u2026 are not synonyms \u2026
\nthey are opposing realms of human activity.
A defining feature of neoclassical economics is that it treats 'business' and 'industry' as synonyms. As such, mainstream economists assume that a firm's business income reveals its industrial output
\nTo arrive at this convenient equivalence, economists pretend that in a competitive market, commodity prices reveal the production of consumer 'utility'. So when economists speak of 'output', they mean the creation of paid-for satisfaction. But since this 'utility' goes perpetually unmeasured, the whole operation represents an act of faith \u2014 no different than the imagined equivalence between the father, the son, and the holy ghost.
\nLooking at this act of ideological faith, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler find little reason to believe. Instead, they take the heretical view, first articulated by Thorstein Veblen, that 'industry' and 'business' are opposing activities.
\nLet me explain their thinking.
\nIn the Veblenian sense, the human capacity to be 'industrious' predates capitalism; indeed, it predates humanity. All living things are 'industrious' in the sense that they pursue activities that help them survive and reproduce in the natural world. So when humans farm corn, we are manifesting a deep biological urge to exploit the natural world in ways that benefit us.
\nEnter capitalism. In capitalism, human industriousness gets controlled by a paywall. Thus, when a capitalist farmer grows corn, he does so not to feed himself (directly), but to make a profit. As such, farming becomes a 'business' activity marked by the use of property rights to extract income.
\nThis use of property rights, in turn, gives rise to a complicated relation between human 'industry' and capitalist 'business'. Sometimes, what is good for business is good for industry. For example, when a farmer buys a larger tractor, he can grow more corn, and therefore, receive more income. But other times, business benefit comes at the expense of industry. For example, if a farmer monopolizes the corn market, he can extract more income by restricting corn production and raising corn prices. The point is that outside of neoclassical fantasies, 'industry' and 'business' have a complex relationship that cannot be deduced from armchair theory. To understand how the real world works, we need to get our boots muddy with actual data.
\nEnter the business-to-industry index. This is a metric that I devised while thinking about the business of the US Pentagon (and its surprising inability to wage war). In this essay, I explore how the business-to-industry index can be used to study the broader history and geography of capitalism.
\nHere's the basic math that I'll apply. The business-to-industry index consists of a double ratio. For a given entity, we calculate the business-to-industry index by dividing the entity's share of world income by its share of world energy use:
\nIn this metric, the numerator is a measure of business success. (Since the goal of business is to extract income, we can measure its success in terms of an income share \u2014 the most general being the share of world income.) In contrast, the denominator is a measure of relative industrial capacity, as measured by the ability to harness energy. (I focus on energy because it's the universe's natural currency \u2014 the fundamental quanta that makes stuff 'go'.)
\nLooking ahead, I get the analysis rolling by studying the long-term history of capitalism, as captured by the rise (and fall) of three hegemons: Britain, the United States, and China. In all three cases, I find that these hegemons went through a period of industrial 'disruption', during which the business-to-industry index fell, followed by a period of 'monetization', during which the business-to-industry index rose. One of the most startling conclusions is that when it comes to setting the stage for business monetization, communism may be the best game in town.
\nNext, I switch gears and look at the geography of modern capitalism. Taking a nod from world-systems theory, I search for the 'core' of global capitalism by looking for the regions that are most business dominated. That leads me down a tangent on US politics, followed by a return to the world stage.
\nAll in all, I hope to convince you that the business-to-industry index is useful for understanding the structure of global capitalism. Consider it an unpaywalled tool for studying the world's business paywalls.
\nHistory, one might say, is a book about the past that is written with the present in mind. As such, writing a coherent history of capitalism requires understanding this system as it exists today.
\nWorking during the most frenzied period of the British industrial revolution, Karl Marx saw capitalism as a 'mode of production' with capitalists at the reins. This vision was not a bad description of 19th-century British industrialism; it is, however, a terrible description of 21st-century capitalism \u2014 a system that is plainly dominated by finance and its abstract manipulation of property rights.
\nSadly, Marx's 19th-century vision has come to dominate contemporary histories of capitalism, making them feel frustratingly incomplete. Giovanni Arrighi's seminal book The Long Twentieth Century is a good example. The book sketches the history of capitalism by charting the rise and fall of four world hegemons (Genoa, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States). So far so good. Unfortunately, Arrighi then tries to study the financial nature of capitalism while simultaneously holding onto Marxist baggage about 'modes of production'. The results are (in my mind) both confusing and disappointing.
\nStill, Arrighi's analysis of hegemonic cycles represents one of the most compelling ways to study the history of capitalism. By applying the business-to-industry index to this topic, not only can we uncover the changing currents of global capitalism, we can also understand why Marx thought the way he did.
\nFor Arrighi, the history of capitalism unfolded through four waves of hegemony: the first wave came with the 16th-century expansion of Genoa, the second with 17th-century Dutch conquest, the third with the 19th-century British empire, and the fourth with the 20th-century United States. Of these four waves of global power, we can construct the business-to-industry index for the latter two. Let's get started by using the business-to-industry index to chart the rise and fall of British power.
\nFigure\u00a01 shows two views of British hegemony. The blue curve shows the 'business view' \u2014 the British share of world income. And the red curve shows the 'industry view' \u2014 the British share of world energy use. In broad terms, these two views of British hegemony are similar, which is expected. But what interests me here is the relation between the business view and the industry view. To capture this relation, Figure\u00a02 shows the long-term history of the British business-to-industry index.1
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/britain_two_views.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/britain_bti.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Before diving into the evidence in Figure\u00a02, let me pause to define some terms. When a region has a business-to-industry index that is greater than one, I say that this region is 'business dominated' \u2014 it receives more income than is warranted by its share of world energy use. Similarly, when a region has a business-to-industry index that is less than one, I say that this region is 'industry dominated' \u2014 it consumes more energy than is warranted by its share of world income.
\nNext, when the business-to-industry index drops over time, I call this a period of disruption. And when the business-to-industry index rises over time, I call this a period of monetization. Note that I've chosen this language to echo the jargon used by Silicon Valley startups, because I think their ethos mimics larger currents in capitalism.
\nIn Silicon Valley, 'disruption' is code for technological innovation mixed with low prices that are designed to capture market share. To see this strategy in action, just look to the unfolding AI boom. Not only are AI companies rushing to push out a new technology, they're dumping their product at prices so low that we need knew adjectives to describe the scale of their losses. Of course, everyone knows that this disruption can't last. But for the AI companies playing this game, the hope is to capture enough market share that they can eventually flip on the monetization switch, hike prices, and rake in money.
\nReturning to the history of the British business-to-industry index (in Figure\u00a02), it seems that capitalist empires may play a similar game, albeit one that is unplanned. When our data begins at the turn of the 18th century, Britain was already a major world power, having been propelled to global dominance by its naval prowess. Now as a rule, centers of power are places that are business dominated (they have a share of world income that far surpasses their share of world energy use). So given Britain's 18th-century status as an established imperial power, it's unsurprising that we find the place to be business dominated. What is surprising is the period of disruption that followed.
\nSince the dawn of civilization, empires have waxed and waned; they have conquered new territory and then relinquished it. But before Britain, no empire had harnessed the industrial power of fossil fuels. When Britain began to exploit its coal reserves in the 19th century, the industrial disruption that followed caused the British business-to-industry index to plummet. Yes, Britain as a whole got richer, but at a pace that was slower than its frenzied energy burn. By the late 1800s, Britain had become the world's factory, dumping manufactured goods onto the world stage at bargain-basement prices.
\nOf course, this period of disruption did not last forever. By the early 20th century, British capitalists had begun to monetize, causing the business-to-industry index to rise steadily. But before we get to this period of monetization, it's worth dwelling on the period of British industrial disruption.
\nAs we'll soon seen, both the US and China saw their business-to-industry indexes drop steadily during their most intense periods of industrialization. Based on this evidence, it seems plausible that rapid industrialization is associated with a falling business-to-industry index. Again, the startup mantra shows why. If you want to gain industrial dominance, your product must be competitively priced, even to the point of business loss.
\nOf course, I'm not saying that during the 19th century, British capitalists decided to under-price their commodities so that they could later monetize their property rights. Surely, there was no such foresight. What I am saying is that when an industrial build-out occurs, it's likely created by a social environment that encourages technological innovation yet suppresses workers' income.
\nThinking about this environment, the work of Karl Marx is informative, because he studied during the most intense period of British industrial disruption. Note four features of Marx's thinking.
\nFirst, Marx legitimately admired the productivity of British capitalism \u2014 indeed, he thought capitalism was so productive that it would set the material stage for socialism. (In hindsight, the reverse was true; wherever it existed, state communism set the stage for capitalism. More on this reversal when we look at the rise of China.)
\nSecond, Marx was critical of the poor wages paid to 19th-century factory workers. He did not foresee the affluent salaried class that would emerge during later stages of capitalism.
\nThird, Marx was obsessed with so-called 'real capital' \u2014 the ownership of machines and factories. He dismissed finance as 'fictitious capital'. Of course, after Marx died, it became obvious that finance was a rather unfictitious form of power.
\nFourth, Marx thought that capitalism's key failing was that in a competitive market, the rate of profit tended to fall.2 Thus, capitalists would slowly compete themselves into oblivion, paving the way for a socialist utopia. Marx clearly failed to anticipate the power of oligarchy and its ability to profit from institutionalized exclusion.
\nNow, my point is not (solely) to criticize Marx, but to observe that he was a man of his time. He wrote about the social tendencies that existed during an intense period of industrial disruption. He erred not in describing these tendencies, but in thinking they were permanent features of capitalism. They were not.
\nFor the 21st century observer, the trends that followed need no introduction. As British wages rose, British capitalists realized that so long as property rights were enforced internationally, they could offshore their factories while continuing to onshore their profits. And so the manufacturing bustle of 19th-century London was replaced by the white-collar hustle of global finance. To be specific, the ship-building yards closed, but the shipping insurance business (Lloyds of London) flourished.
\nFor their part, modern Marxists look at this transformation and see pathology. However, a more apt description is that under capitalism, monetization is what naturally follows an industrial build out. The build out creates transitory technological superiority, which allows elites to ensconce more enduring forms of institutional power. What follows is the mature stage of capitalism, in which elites monetize the long tail of their declining institutional power. Sure, this behavior creates all forms of cravenness; but for the late-stage capitalist, it is rational calculus. It is more profitable to toll than to build.
\nTraveling across the Atlantic, let's now look at the history of the business-to-industry index in the United States. Figure\u00a03 shows the business and industry views of US hegemony, both of which rose until 1950 and fell thereafter. Meanwhile, Figure\u00a04 combines these two views to calculate the US business-to-industry index.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/us_two_views.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/us_bti.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Looking at Figure\u00a04, let's discuss the business-to-industry trends. Unlike Britain, which entered our historical record as an imperial power, the United States enters our record (in 1790) as a colonial periphery, having freshly won independence from the British crown. As a periphery in the capitalist system, we find that the early US was industry dominated \u2014 its share of world income was dwarfed by its share of world energy use. But as the former colony gained power (driven in no small part by slave labor), its business-to-industry index steadily rose.
\nNote that this early period of US expansion was a standard story of imperial conquest. European settlers came to the New World where they first expunged the natives and then exploited the land for themselves. As this expansion unfolded, US coastal cities became centers of business. In the annals of human history, such conquest is standard practice. But what came next was more abnormal.
\nBy the late 19th century, the US entered a fifty-year period of industrial disruption marked by a steady stream of technological innovation. In 1882, Thomas Edison built his first commercial electric power plant. In 1886, Carnegie Steel built the world's largest open hearth furnace. In 1892, John Froelich built the first viable gas-powered tractor. In 1896, Henry Ford built his first automobile. And in 1903, the Wright brothers built the first airplane. By the end of World War I, this run of technological innovation had allowed the US to surpassed Britain as the world's factory.
\nAs in Britain, the era of American disruption was formative not just for industrialism, but also for political economy. In 1899, John Bates Clark published his wildly influential book The Distribution of Wealth, which expounded the neoclassical theory of income distribution. And in 1910, Irving Fisher wrote his seminal neoclassical textbook Introduction to Economic Science. Collectively, James Tobin later noted, the two men helped erect the 'temple' of American neoclassical economics.
\nIn this temple, capitalism is theorized as a competitive market in which firms are unwittingly forced to maximize social welfare. Of course, for those who stared closely at this theory, it was always a fairy tale. But at the turn of the 20th century, it was at least a mildly believable story. Although the robber barons actively stymied competition, these men were still titans of industry; they built real factories and real infrastructure.
\nToday, neoclassical textbooks continue to wax about the market production of 'stuff' (i.e.\u00a0'widgets'). But in the mean time, American capitalists have offshored their factories, leaving the dirty work of making things to others. That's because the real money is made by monetizing the institutional vestiges of American power.
\nOf course, legions of political economists have commented on the 'de-industrialization' and 'financialization' of American capitalism. In this light, the rising business-to-industry index of the last half century simply provides another way to quantify an otherwise widely-recognized pattern. That said, the long-term trend in the business-to-industry index also shows something new. When it comes to capitalism, neoclassical economics takes the state of industrial disruption as 'normal'. But in hindsight, Britain and the United States have both spent far more time in periods of monetization \u2014 periods when capitalists inflated their assets without building much of physical substance.
\nIf one presumes, as Nitzan and Bichler do, that capital is finance and finance alone, then this prolonged state of monetization is unsurprising. Instead, what's remarkable is that periods of industrial disruption occur at all. Indeed, it takes a special set of circumstance to prod owners to build rather than to simply toll. Looking ahead, the irony is that perhaps the most fertile environment for industrial disruption is created not by the market, but by state communism.
\nWhen Marx envisioned a future socialist utopia, he thought that it would spring from the ashes of capitalism. Let capitalists create the pistons of industry, Marx declared. Then let workers seize the controls and run the machine for themselves. Unfortunately, things did not work out as Marx planned.
\nIn reality (as Branko Milanovi\u0107 often notes), communism turned out to be an alternative path to capitalism.3 Or more specifically, state communism was a potent tool for industrial disruption \u2014 a way to rapidly build industrial infrastructure by letting government run the show. Once this build out matured, however, communist control invariably gave way (either by evolution or revolution) to monetized capitalism.
\nModern China offers an excellent case study of this transformation. With communist disruption (and capitalist monetization) in mind, let's turn to Figures\u00a05 and 6. Figure\u00a05 shows both the business view and the industry view of rising Chinese hegemony. Meanwhile, Figure\u00a06 combines these two views to measure China's business-to-industry-index.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/china_two_views.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/china_bti.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Before I discuss the evidence, let's review some history. When the data for China's business-to-industry index begins (in 1953), the country was four years into its communist revolution. Mao was firmly in control, and his government was busy forcing peasants off the land and into newly constructed factories. To be sure, Mao's policies were in many ways disastrous; after all, they prompted what is perhaps the most catastrophic famine in human history. But in a sense, the trauma is the point. That's because Maoist China was an industrial disruption machine. During Mao's tenure (which ended in 1976), China's business-to-industry index dropped like a stone.
\nHere's why this cliff makes sense.
\nAt its root, industrial disruption requires the construction of industrial infrastructure at the same time that peoples' incomes are suppressed. Almost by definition, such an experience is unpleasant. In capitalism, owners have a limited ability to command, and so are forced to disrupt with both the stick and the carrot. For example, Henry Ford was a ruthless businessman who nonetheless paid his workers fairly well. This carrot makes the industrial disruption more palatable, but also weakens its pace.
\nUnder communist governance, the state's enormous stick means that there is little need for the carrot. A communist regime can build heavy industry that is every bit as productive as its capitalist equivalent. Yet the communist factory need not pay ample wages. Indeed, the communist manager can feed his workers bland rations and house them in stark barracks.
\nOf course, the problem with communist disruption is that it is self limiting. At some point, workers begin to resent living in a sprawling industrial environment that provides them little benefit. It's at this point that communism runs its course, for by definition, it cannot monetize. So in hindsight, Milanovi\u0107 is right; in practice, communism proved to be a temporary strategy for fostering industrial disruption \u2014 a way to propel backwards regions onto the industrial world stage.
\nIn China, communist policies were slowly abandoned after Mao's 1976 death, with market reform accelerating during the 1990s. As we might expect, this transformation marked the end of China's period of industrial disruption, and prompted the transition to a period of monetization. From the mid 1990s onward, China's business-to-industry index rose steadily.
\nToday, China is the undisputed center of world industry. But it has yet to become the center of global capitalism. That will surely come. If history teaches us anything, it's that rewiring the circuits of global capital takes longer than resituating industrial capacity. Long after factories fled the shores of London and New York, bankers there continued to monetize the long tail of Western power. Looking to the future, the financiers of Shanghai can almost certainly look forward to similar glory.
\nSo far I've studied capitalist history through the lens of hegemony. But of course, there can be no hegemony in isolation, just as there can be no rulers without followers. In the language of world-systems theory, I've captured the history of the capitalist 'core'. But what of the capitalist 'periphery'? For that matter, what does it mean to be in the 'core' or the 'periphery' of the capitalist system?
\nHere, it's worth a brief digression to discuss the failure of Marxist theory, of which world-systems theory is an extension. For Marx, the key feature of capitalism was the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Workers produce 'surplus value', which is then appropriated by capitalists. Looking at international relations, world-systems theorists extend this idea to regions and countries. As they see it, the 'periphery' of the capitalist system produces surplus value that is then expropriated by the capitalist 'core'.
\nAs with Marx's original thinking, this world-systems extension is seductive but vacuous. The problem comes down to measurement. Marx claimed to explain profit in terms of 'surplus value', but provided no independent way to measure the latter quantity. Likewise, world-systems theorists would like to locate the 'core' of global capitalism by identifying the flow of surplus value, but have no way of doing so. Hence, in practice Marxists simply point to what we already know and apply different verbiage. They look at profit and claim to see 'surplus value'. Meanwhile, world-systems theorists look at international income disparities and infer a regime of exploitation. But without independent measurement, why should we believe either claim?4
\nHere is where the business-to-industry index can (in my opinion) improve world-systems theory. The key insight behind this index \u2014 an insight that originates with Veblen and was later elaborated by Nitzan and Bichler \u2014 is that human industry is a separate beast from capitalist business. Human industry consists of the physical manipulation of the natural world, and can be organized using many different social systems. Capitalist 'business', in contrast, is an ideological practice that monetizes control over property rights. Yes, capitalist control has tended to coincide with industrial development. But we must take care to study these two tendencies separately.
\nWith the business-industry distinction in mind, I propose the following revision of world-systems theory: what defines the 'core' of the capitalist system is not monetary wealth itself, but monetary wealth in the absence of industry. Such a dichotomy is the signature mark of finance \u2014 of monetized control over abstract property rights. Likewise, what defines the 'periphery' of global capitalism is not the lack of monetary wealth, but rather, the lack of monetary wealth in relation to the scale of industry. In other words, places in the capitalist 'periphery' engage in industry that is outside the control of global finance.
\nWith this revision of world-systems theory in hand, let's turn to the global empirical evidence. Widespread international data for the business-to-industry index becomes available only in 1990. Fortunately, this year is significant, as it marked the date when the Soviet Union began to collapse. Figure\u00a07 shows the business-to-industry picture at that moment.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/world_map_1990.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Looking at this data, we find that the 'core' of the capitalist system resides largely in the collective 'West' (Europe, North America, and Australia), exactly where we expect. Still, there are some surprises. For example, it appears that in 1990, Western Europe was more central to global capitalism than was the United States. Is that really true? Kind of. What the data is actually telling us is that when it comes to business dominance, the United States is not really one country. More on this disunity in a moment.
\nBy 2023, the capitalist world system had changed appreciably. Some of this change is discernible by eyeballing the 2023 business-to-industry data, shown in Figure\u00a08. But in my mind, the degree of global change is best captured by Figure\u00a09, which plots the percentage change in each country's business-to-industry index between 1990 and 2023.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/world_map_2023.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/world_map_change.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
When we stare at this data, it becomes clear that after 500 years of Western hegemony, the center of global capital is shifting eastward. It's future home will almost certainly be in China. Yes, the US and Western Europe continue to ride the long coat-tails of their imperial power. But expect this advantage to wane. When Shanghai becomes the center of global capital, those who keep financial tollbooths in New York and London will probably find that their business runs dry.
\nGiven that the United States is the waning global hegemon, much of the world remains glued to the intricacies of US politics. Of course, most of the unfolding US drama is pure idiocy that's not worth discussing. But beyond the drivel issued by individual politicians, there is a comprehensible structure to US politics \u2014 one that paints a picture of growing disunity. True, the rise of stark American partisanship is well recognized. But what's less understood is the fact that the US partisan divide now plays out along a structural schism in US capitalism.
\nLet me make the case. In Figure\u00a010 I've mapped the business-to-industry index among US states in 2023. My choice of colors and scale is designed to evoke a fairly startling conclusion: across states, the business-to-industry index seems to align with partisan politics. To convince ourselves that this relation is no trick of the eye, Figure\u00a011 shows how each state's business-to-industry index relates to the results of the 2024 presidential election. It seems that the more business-dominated the state, the more it swung for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/state_map_2023.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/prez.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
What should we make of this structural schism? For starters, the geographic shape of US capitalism is nothing new. That is, US coastal regions have long been places of business, while the interior of the country has traditionally been a place of industry. Instead, what's new is the fact that partisan politics have become divided along capitalism's structural lines. This was not always so.
\nFigure\u00a012 shows the evolving relation between partisanship in US state legislatures and the state business-to-industry index. Back in 1960, the relationship was muddy but slightly reversed from today. More business-dominated states tended to vote Republican, while more industry-dominated states (traditionally in the South) tended to vote Democrat. However, over the ensuing decades, this relation slowly reversed and then tightened in the opposite direction. Today, more business-dominated states overwhelmingly vote Democrat, while more industry-dominated states are staunchly Republican.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/leg_scatter.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
So what does this geographic schism tell us? Well, it suggests that in political terms, the US is no longer one country. The business-dominated coasts of the US remain committed to the cosmopolitan ideals that invariably exist at the core of empire. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has rejected these ideals and turned increasingly to (let's face it) American-flavored fascism.
\nHow does this schism play out? Well, it either gets worse, leading to the fracture of the union and potential civil war, or it gets better, leading to renewed national unity. For his part, Trump is pushing the country towards dissolution. (He relishes attacking blue states.) Meanwhile, a determined group of leftists are trying to wrench the Democratic party from its corporate overlords so that they can push mildly socialist policies (that are wildly popular). If these leftists succeed, it's possible that unity could return to US politics. In either case, watch this space.
\nNow that you've indulged my tangent on American politics, let me return to my original reason for calculating the business-to-industry index across US states. Back in Figures\u00a07 and 8, the international data indicated that Western Europe was more business dominated than the United States. This is true but misleading \u2014 an artifact of aggregation.
\nWhen we disaggregate the US into its constituent states, we get the more satisfying picture of the capitalist world system, shown in Figure\u00a013. In 2023, the core of global capitalism was located in Western Europe and along both seaboards of the United States. These are the most business-dominated places on Earth.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/world_map_us_states.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Continuing the analysis, Figure\u00a014 eschews maps for a quantitative summary of business dominance. Overall, this list of the twenty most business-dominated regions is composed largely of US states and Western European countries.
\nWashington DC, the center of US power, tops the list \u2014 a fitting nod to the fact that business success is forged in large part by state power. Moving down the list we find Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Malta \u2014 all notable hubs of finance and tax evasion. Continuing down the list, we get the US coastal states, along with familiar powers of Western Europe. The colonial state of Israel also comes along for the ride, as does the infamous tax haven of Panama. All in all, these business-dominated regions are places of white-collar activity, just as we'd expect. To do 'business' in the Veblenian sense is not to run machines or to build factories; to do 'business' is to manipulate property rights from inside a downtown office.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/top_combine.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Now, before we make too much of this business-dominated list, it's important to recognize that political boundaries necessarily affect the analysis. In terms of physical geography, cities are the locus of business power. So if we draw a political boundary around a city (as with Washington DC), its business-to-industry index will tend to be higher than if we extend the boundary into the industrial hinterland.
\nBecause of this issue, the best way to study the business-to-industry index would be to calculate it for units of constant geographic area. Unfortunately, the requisite statistical data (particularly data for energy consumption) is usually restricted to large-scale political boundaries. So while we might like to know the business-to-industry index of Shanghai or Lower Manhattan, such fine-grain data will likely remain difficult to come by.
\nIn the same vein, large countries like China almost certainly have business-to-industry schisms similar to what's found across the United States (Figure\u00a010). Untangling these divisions is an important job for the future. (Quantitative researchers, take note!)
\nIf you ask a New York financier why their income is so fat, they'll probably echo some neoclassical trope about having 'generated' their earnings through skill and hard work. Likewise, if you asked a feudal lord why they control so many serfs, they'd respond that doing so is their god-given birthright. In both cases, the response has an obvious purpose: to provide an ideological justification for (otherwise arbitrary) power and privilege.
\nFor critics of social injustice, the temptation is to subvert these dominant ideologies by appealing to some (but not all) of their basic tenets. Thus, the critic of feudalism might accept that god gave rights to men, but claim that these rights are distributed equally. Likewise, the critic of capitalism might accept that value is 'produced', but propose that elites are appropriating value created by others. Such arguments make for good rhetoric because they retain enough of the dominant ideology that they remain comprehensible to the indoctrinated mind. Still, these arguments are a scientific dead end; they gain rhetorical power by conceding basic untruths. We humans make our own rights, just as we impose onto the world our own abstract quantities of monetary value.
\nTo scientifically study a social order, I think it is essential to eschew rhetorical tricks and instead adopt some form of dual measurement that contrasts the dominant accounting scheme with an alternative way of measuring the world. In capitalism, the dominant accounting scheme is, of course, money. In contrast, the alternative account could be anything non-monetary (provided that thing is objectively measurable). That said, energy consumption is particularly meaningful because of its biophysical significance. Energy is what keeps life from devolving into a pool of entropic mud. Energy is the 'go of things' \u2026 the 'master resource'.
\nReturning to the notion of 'justness', when we contrast monetary value with energy consumption, it's conceivable that we might find a picture that's balanced. Imagine, if you will, the world of Isaac Asimov's 'spacers' \u2014 future humans who are dispersed on plantation-like compounds in which armies of robots do virtually all the work. Supposing that these spacer compounds exchanged money, we might find that the business-to-industry index was fairly balanced among them.
\nOf course, the real world of 21st century capitalism looks rather different. In our world, places of 'business' are not dispersed plantations manned by robots. They are not even factories manned by ordinary humans. No, places of 'business' consist of shining office towers inside which humans buy, sell, and manage property rights. Places of 'business' are invariably places of finance. Because of this reality, it follows that the geography of capitalism cannot be 'balanced'. By definition, centers of finance are hubs of exclusion \u2014 places that exist because only the few can inhabit them.
\nTestifying to this exclusion, when we run the numbers on the population-weighted distribution of the business-to-industry index, we find that less than a quarter of the world's population inhabit business dominated regions. What's more, less than 1% of the population live in regions where the business-to-industry index exceeds four (the territory of financial hubs like Hong Kong, Switzerland and Ireland, and government hubs like Washington DC). Meanwhile, more than three quarters of the world's population live in places of industry dominance. Figure\u00a015 paints this picture of our bottom-heavy world.
\n\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/bti_population.png?w=723&ssl=1\"/)
Let me summarize the main message. In real-world capitalism, the 'normal' human experience is to work hard for little financial gain. Only the lucky few rake in money with their feet up. Here, it's tempting to imagine some unseen flow of value that gets sent from the hard workers to the leisure class. But no such flow exists. The exploitation in capitalism (if it exists) lies in the nature of property rights themselves \u2014 rights which allow the hoarding of monetized institutional power. Industry for the many. Business for the few.
\nHi folks, Blair Fix here. I'm a crowdfunded scientist who shares all of my (painstaking) research for free. If you think my work has value, consider becoming a supporter. You'll help me continue to share data-driven science with a world that needs less opinion and more facts.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. You can use/share it anyway you want, provided you attribute it to me (Blair Fix) and link to Economics from the Top Down.
Want to have a closer look at my business-to-industry data? You can download it here.
\nI measure world income in terms of world nominal GDP, denominated in US dollars. Data from 1960 onward is (relatively) unproblematic and comes from the World Bank, series NY.GDP.MKTP.CD \u2014 GDP in current US dollars. Note that the measure of nominal world GDP is influenced by the exchange rate for local currencies. This is a desired effect. To isolate Veblenian 'business', we want a pure measure of financial income, one that makes no attempt to 'correct' for local currency value (and its associated local purchasing power).
\nAs we attempt to measure nominal world GDP for earlier periods, things become more difficult. First, there are some fundamental conceptual problems. For example, prior to the American Revolution (which began in 1775) there was no such thing as an 'American dollar'. Hence, calculating nominal GDP in US dollars involves assuming some currency value for a currency that did not actually exist. Typically, that's done by fixing (and projecting back in time) later exchange rates that do exist.
\nSecond, economic historians tend to be disinterested in nominal incomes. Instead, they use incomes and prices to estimate living standards. Case in point, the Maddison project (an extension of the historian Angus Maddison's seminal work) has extensive data for historical GDP, but it is measured in terms of purchasing power parity. The idea is that across countries, one measures GDP relative to a price index calculated from the same basket of goods.
\nNow in theory, if researchers published their purchasing power indexes for each country, one could use these indexes to 'undo' their inflation adjustment. By doing so, we could recomputed a satisfying measure of world nominal GDP. Unfortunately, the Maddison project does not (to my knowledge) publish its internal data for purchasing power parity. As such, we must hack our way to a measure of nominal world GDP.
\nThe way I create this hack is by first calculating a time series for the US GDP deflator using the following data:
\nNext, I take the US GDP deflator data and use it to convert Maddison's global 'real GDP' data into nominal dollars. I use the following Maddison GDP data:
\nFinally, I splice the nominalized Maddison data backwards from the modern World Bank GDP data. Because this historical data involves a rather heavy-handed hack, one should treat it with appropriate uncertainty.
\nData for British income is calculated using nominal GDP data from Measuring Worth. I use what they call the 'consistent series', which presumes consistent political boundaries for the 'United Kingdom'. This data is denominated in British pounds. I convert the GDP data to US dollars using Measuring Worth data for the dollar-pound exchange rate. For data prior to 1791, I fixed the dollar-pound exchange rate at its 1791 value (4.55 dollars per pound).
\nData for US income (nominal GDP) is calculated using the following sources:
\nData for Chinese income (nominal GDP) is from China's National Bureau of Statistics, using the series marked \"Gross Domestic Product (100 million yuan)\". I convert yuan into dollars using exchange rate data from the IMF, series CHN.USD_XDC.PA_RT.A.
\nTo create the global maps of the business-to-industry index (Figures\u00a07, 8 9, 13) I use nominal GDP data from the World Bank, series NY.GDP.MKTP.CD (GDP in current US dollars).
\nState income (nominal GDP) is from the following source:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nTo create the global maps of the business-to-industry index (Figures\u00a07, 8 9, 13) I use per capita energy use data from World Bank (series EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE, kg of oil equivalent per capita) multiplied by World Bank population data (series SP.POP.TOTL). From these results, I exclude nonsensical data where per capita daily energy use is less than the basic food-energy requirement of 2000 kilocalories per day.
\nUS state energy use data is from the Energy Information Agency, State Energy Data System, series TETCB.
\nState voting outcomes are from BallotWire.
\nData for the composition of US state legislatures sums seats in both houses and excludes Nebraska (whose legislature is officially non-partisan). Data comes from the following sources:
\nMy calculations in Figure\u00a015 are based on the international business-to-industry data plotted in Figure\u00a013, which disaggregates the US into its constituent states. To weight by population, I use country population data from the World Bank (series SP.POP.TOTL) and US state population from FRED. The weighted distribution can be conveniently calculated in one line with R's density function, which includes a term for weights.
![\"\u21a9\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/72x72/21a9.png\")
\ufe0e\nIf we look at the stock of capital that capitalists themselves care about \u2014 market capitalization \u2014 the rate of profit has not fallen. And that's by design; profit is what owners use to perform their ritual of capitalization. If instead we impute a more expansive concept of 'capital' that somehow aggregates across all capital goods, well there we run into trouble. First, owners don't actually care about this form of 'capital', so it's unclear why it matters. Second, aggregating capital goods is a fools errand, since it depends circularly on prices, as the Cambridge capital controversy revealed. (For a nice demonstration of this aggregation problem, see Nitzan and Bichler's discussion in Chapter 8 of Capital as Power.)\ufe0e\n
\ufe0e\nSetting aside the unmeasurable notion of 'labor value', there are many measurable ways in which core-periphery trade is unequal. Alf Hornborg has done much of the seminal work here. For example, his paper 'Footprints in the cotton fields' shows how during the early 19th century, British colonial trade was unequal in terms of the exchange of embodied land and embodied labor time (measured in simple hourly terms). More recently, Jason Hickel and colleagues have found similar unequal patterns in modern world trade.
\nWhile I laud this sort of empirical work, there's a sense in it concedes too much to neoclassical economics. What I mean is that by stressing 'unequal' trade, the analysis presumes that monetary exchange could (and perhaps should) be equal. But this is never true. Instead, the belief in equivalent exchange is the central tenet of capitalist ideology. That is, capitalism consists of an ideology in which property rights are denominated in units of money. It follows, therefore, that monetary exchange is ideologically defined to be equal. So by definition, when I pay $100 for something, I get back $100 worth of property. But since this numerical agreement is an ideological construct, we expect that it is the only part of the exchange that is equal. Every other measurable quantity will be unequal (to differing degrees). So in capitalism, unequal exchange is the norm.
\nNow, there's a sense in which the quantitative nature of capitalism masks the ubiquity of unequal exchange. Things become more obvious when the ideology is qualitative. For examples, Catholics agree that during communion, a blessed wafer becomes 'the Body of Christ'. But suppose that a devout Catholic becomes convinced that a blessed Corvette is also 'the Body of Christ'. This fellow might then exchange a Corvette for a wafer, thinking the exchange 'equal'. But of course, that's absurd. The 'equivalence' is an ideological agreement. Everything else about the exchange is unequal.
\nSo yes, world-systems theorists are correct that trade between the 'core' and the 'periphery' is unequal, in the same way that when a CEO hires a cleaner, a tiny portion of his annual salary buys a whole year of the cleaner's time. That's an unequal exchange of labor time. But then again, this is a rather laborious way to restate what we already know: the CEO's hourly income is much greater than the cleaner's.
\n(Sidenote: This tendency to laboriously restate what stares us in the face is one of Marx's worst legacies. Marx got the ball rolling by defining worker's value-creating ability as the sum of their embodied commodity consumption, which is a laborious way of recalculating wages, which we already knew.)
\nIn a more general sense, the notion of 'unequal exchange' is useful if we focus on commodity trade. However, it becomes unwieldy when we focus on the flow of assets. For example, when Apple shifts its profits to Ireland by selling (dubious) intellectual property to an Irish subsidiary, there is nothing of substance being 'traded'. Instead, Apple is simply moving assets around to juice its US tax return. From these transactions, Irish lawyers and accountants then make a killing.
\nTo call these shenanigans an 'unequal exchange' is to remain stuck in Marx's 19th-century world of commodity production. Indeed, it is to concede too much to neoclassical ideology, which frames market transactions as an extension of simple barter. For capitalists, monetary transactions are not a tool for 'exchange'. They are a tool for organizing power through the purchase and sale of property rights. Or put another way, unequal commodity exchange is a tiny subset of the wider world of unequal power.\ufe0e\n
\n
\nArrighi, G. (1994). The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times. Verso.\n
\n\nFix, B. (2021). The ritual of capitalization. Real-World Economics Review, (97), 78\u201395.\n
\n\nMilanovic, B. (2019). Capitalism, alone: The future of the system that rules the world. Harvard University Press.\n
\n\nNitzan, J., & Bichler, S. (2009). Capital as power: A study of order and creorder. New York: Routledge.\n
\n\nVeblen, T. (1923). Absentee ownership: Business enterprise in recent times: The case of America. Transaction Pub.\n
\n\nWallerstein, I. (2020). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press.\n
\nThe post The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a041p-74c68","guid":"https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/?p=15626","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789776000,"rid":"08vre-23926","summary":"Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO 'Industry' and 'business' \u2026 are not synonyms \u2026 they are opposing realms of human activity . \u2014 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler A defining feature of neoclassical economics is that it treats 'business' and 'industry' as synonyms.","tags":["Business-to-industry Index","Capital As Power","Communism","Empire","Energy"],"title":"The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism","updated_at":1789889407,"url":"https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2026/09/19/the-business-to-industry-index-and-the-geography-of-global-capitalism/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Public Knowledge Project"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Alperin","given":"Juan Pablo","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9344-7439"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1789598624,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"As we recently wrote, there is really no agreed-upon definition of what a preprint is. And even if we could agree, it would not settle the question of what constitutes a preprint server. As we have been looking to study preprints and their role in scholarly communications, we have been looking to generate a directory of servers that, even if flawed or limited, can give us a common starting point for examining preprints and the culture around them.\u00a0
\nUnsurprisingly, we are not alone in this. ASAPbio, an organization dedicated to promoting the use of preprints, is looking to update their directory of preprints. We shared some of our insights with them, and thought some of our feedback might also be more useful to the broader community.\u00a0
\n![\"\"](\"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/4.png\")
Most importantly, any directory will need to operationalize their definition of what constitutes a preprint server.\u00a0
\nOur own attempts at constructing a list of preprint servers indicates a wide range of platforms and publishers allow authors to post preprints, but whether these should be called \"preprint servers\" is far from settled. Researchers can post preprints to venues dedicated exclusively to preprints; publish/review/curate platforms; journal-based platforms that publish both preprints and peer-reviewed articles; general repositories that accept preprints among other types of research outputs; and the list goes on.\u00a0
\nWhile there may not be a single or right answer to \"what is a preprint server,\" a directory cannot function as a meaningful community resource without\u00a0 a clear operational definition. Its creators must explain what is included, what is excluded, and why.
\nA useful directory needs more than just a list of venues and services\u2014it requires descriptive information that lets users filter and understand the landscape. The challenge lies in how one captures that information. When assessing whether a server has a particular policy, a simple “yes\" or \"no\" indicating whether a policy is “clear” tells only part of the story. A policy can be clear without being specific, and policies that appear similarly clear can differ substantially in their actual terms.
\nIn our own analysis, we encountered exactly this problem. Instead of forcing policies into binary categories, directories should specify which characteristics matter for each policy area, then document those details explicitly. For example, rather than simply recording whether a server has a withdrawal policy, a directory should indicate who can request a withdrawal, under what circumstances, and how the withdrawal is reflected in the scholarly record. Leave fields blank where no clear policy exists\u2014but do the work of showing what the policy actually says.
\nBuilding a useful directory of preprint servers is more complex than it might initially seem. It requires not just listing which servers exist, but making deliberate choices about which definitions to use and then describing policies with enough nuance that researchers and other stakeholders can actually make informed decisions. Without this intentionality\u2014both in definition and in detail\u2014directories risk becoming incomplete or misleading resources. The good news is that the current moment offers an opportunity to get this right.
\nDOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/zqh03-rx293
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/zqh03-rx293","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=6277","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/4.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789516800,"rid":"ysgyz-n4s56","summary":"As we recently wrote, there is really no agreed-upon definition of what a preprint is. And even if we could [\u2026]","tags":["Research","Preprints"],"title":"Advice for a Preprint Services Directory","updated_at":1789797827,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2026/09/16/advice-for-a-preprint-services-directory/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/03wc8by49","name":"Posit Software, PBC (United States)"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Clawson","given":"James","url":"https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6756-0607"},{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Kaczmarek","given":"Ursula"},{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/019jywm96","name":"rOpenSci"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Ross","given":"Noam","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2136-0000"},{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Delaney","given":"Scott","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0813-018X"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"3446712e-ab03-4bb7-8641-571dcda8d8cd","created":1787702400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Tracking disruptions to U.S. federal science funding, grant by grant.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grantwitness","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/3446712e-ab03-4bb7-8641-571dcda8d8cd/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grantwitness.org/updates/rogue-scholar.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://grantwitness.org/updates?type=updates","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grantwitness","status":"active","subfield":"3321","title":"Grant Witness","updated":1789516800,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Grant Witness","blog_slug":"grantwitness","content_html":"Together with our partner States United Democracy Center, Grant Witness today launched Lost Funds, an interactive tracker that provides a holistic look at federal grants that have been canceled, frozen, delayed, or otherwise interrupted since Trump took office in January 2025. The tool documents $177 billion in federal funding disruptions across all 50 states and Washington D.C., spanning 17 policy sectors, and examines impacts in communities across the country.
\n\"By bringing thousands of funding disruptions from the Trump administration together in one, centralized website, the Lost Funds Tracker puts the magnitude of their impact on full display,\" said Scott Delaney, Co-Founder of Grant Witness. \"The impact of funding cuts at this scale cannot be overstated. These disruptions touch everything from health care and disaster relief to technology and agriculture. The data tells a story about the consequences communities face as a result of the cuts, and the resources they're fighting relentlessly to preserve.\"
\n\"Many states have been fighting the impacts of federal funding disruptions one grant at a time ever since Trump took office,\" said Kelly Rader, Research Director at the States United Democracy Center. \"This is funding for states that has already been approved by Congress. But the Trump administration is trying to take unliteral action to stop that money from reaching the communities it's meant for. Lost Funds illustrates just how widespread these funding cuts are, the scale of the harm they've caused, and how states are once again on the front lines protecting their residents.\"
\nLost Funds provides a comprehensive overview of funding disruptions from the past 20 months, covering the Trump administration's attempt to freeze funding during his first week in office and each subsequent disruption across health care, education, transportation, disaster relief, science and technology, and more. It includes an overview of state efforts to challenge the disruptions and the funding they've restored for their communities.
\nKey takeaways from the Lost Funds national landscape:
\nExplore the national picture and drill down by state, program, sector, and grant recipient here.
\nThe Lost Funds Tracker will be updated regularly as the Trump administration takes new actions to disrupt funding, state lawsuits move through the courts, and stories of consequences in communities are told.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/y27rm-4dq03","guid":"https://doi.org/10.59350/y27rm-4dq03","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789516800,"rid":"126yg-ben14","summary":"Together with our partner States United Democracy Center, Grant Witness today launched Lost Funds, an interactive tracker that provides a holistic look at federal grants that have been canceled, frozen, delayed, or otherwise interrupted since Trump took office in January 2025.","title":"Tracking $177 Billion in Disrupted Federal Grants with the Lost Funds Project","updated_at":1789797806,"url":"https://grantwitness.org/updates/tracking-177-billion-in-disrupted-federal-grants-with-the-lost-funds-project","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Open Humans Foundation"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Greshake Tzovaras","given":"Bastian","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9925-9623"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"c1baf1e7-80ce-43eb-bc1c-a978dd7d62c9","created":1712793600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is an open/citizen science activist and researcher with a background in biology and bioinformatics. He worked as a senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute and Inserm. In 2011, he founded openSNP. He was awarded a PhD","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tzovar","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/c1baf1e7-80ce-43eb-bc1c-a978dd7d62c9/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tzovar.as/feed.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Jekyll","home_page_url":"https://tzovar.as/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tzovar","status":"active","subfield":"3305","title":"Bastian Greshake Tzovaras |","updated":1789562700,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Bastian Greshake Tzovaras |","blog_slug":"tzovar","content_html":"\nHow we politicize technology in service of a better world is an open and contested question.\nA few days ago I shared a piece on historicising enshittification. \nIn it, Arvind L. U. explores the limits of how Doctorow's framing around that term is both ahistorical, in that it limits itself to a view that ignores the realities of the global south, and lacking imagination for not even considering a real alternative political economy of the internet.\nIn response, Henrik shared a quote out of Digital Solidarity \u2013 a new book by Aline Blankertz and Malte Engeler \u2013 which similarly considers the enshittification framing to conceal the fact that it's the pinnacle of capitalism and not an aberration.
\nIntrigued by this, I really wanted to read the whole, longer argument that Aline & Malte are making in their book.\nLuckily, I managed to score a review copy of it, which I went through over the weekend.\nAs the book is unfortunately right now only available in German, I thought I'd at least attempt to give a small review and summary of why I'm glad I read it.
\nStructurally, the book is divided into two parts:\nThe first half analyses the status quo of capitalist digitization.\nHow does the spread of digital technologies help legitimize and drive capitalism and authoritarian structures? \nThe second half then dives into their counter proposal of digital solidarity and how digital technologies could be used in an emancipatory way.\nJointly, both halves explore which technologies can be appropriated for progressive causes (and how), and which ones are irredeemable.
\nThe first half of the book starts off very strong.\nIt outlines well how society has \u2013 at least in parts intentionally \u2013 been shaped to a certain level of apathy about the future, in which societal progress for many has been reduced to the production cycles of new devices and software.\nAnd in which collective imaginaries make the existing capitalist appear natural, where people might consider rejecting discrimination based on race, but not overcoming class society.
\nLaunching from this, the book also provides a great exploration of how & why much of contemporary tech critique is failing by not focusing on the underlying capitalist structures that work as expected.\nWhether that's Zuboffs surveillance capitalism that appeals to the managerial class to please implement ethical business practices, technofeudalism or the above mentioned enshittification by Doctorow, which proposes the solution in enforcing more market competition and regulation.\nThey all locate the solution to existing problems with technology by making minor tweaks to the dominant economic dynamics, which not only do not question the reign of capitalism overall but risk reinforcing it.
\nThe meat of the critical analysis that follows consists of countering three of the big myths that surround digital technologies and the internet. Namely, that digitization is progress, that the internet democratizes and that open source can offer a counter to capitalist logics. \nOn the first point, Aline and Malte do a great job of exploring how the myth of digitally mediated progress takes the shape of a cyber-libertarianism that rejects the collective in favor of the individual, their responsibility and market forces.\nThis includes how the common ideas that degoogling, self-hosting, and a focus on privacy can end up not being emancipatory praxis, but libertarian isolation that in turn promotes technologies like cryptocurrencies and culminates in fascist ideals.
\nThese tendencies are tied neatly into the review of the democratizing potential of digital technology, which draws from the same cyber-libertarian framing\u2014and has mostly led to a concentration of power. \nPlatforms like Spotify, Airbnb, Uber etc. by no means have driven democratization, but have helped concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the platforms.\nAnalogous to how the push for generative 'AI' is working towards ensuring that creative activities will have to rely on renting AI-assistance.
\nI particularly enjoyed the last myth, on open source as counter culture, as it hits very close to home.\nFraming open source as the electric car of digital politics is in equal parts hilarious and fitting \u2013 especially in the context of German car culture:\nJust as the electric car is a step up over the internal combustion engine but doesn't challenge the car-centrism, open source software (OSS) has benefits over proprietary software but doesn't very little if anything to challenge the extractive nature of big technology corporations, which themselves profit tremendously from OSS.1
\nSuch extractivism is a tendency that is now even indirectly promoted through companies and civil society organisations alike2, by using labels such as digital public goods or digital public infrastructures, which contribute to concealing the ways in which the value from unpaid volunteer labor flows into corporations all while enshrining the offering of digital services as a task for society.\nAlong those lines, much of OSS also at least implicitly reproduces the dominant thinking and technological affordances of big technology companies and thus giving credence to them.
\nBut an emancipatory alternative to e.g. corporate-controlled social media needs to be more than just Twitter but open source.\nWhich OSS often falls short of, thanks to top-down control structures which are most often under the hegemony of an homogeneous (white, cis, male) elite.
\nAs already briefly mentioned above, the way that privacy is also used as a common concept by cyber-libertarians who focus on the creation of a hyper-individualist is getting some well deserved attention as well.\nThe EU's GDPR privacy regulations are equally the focus of a critical discussion, highlighting the explicitly colonial aspects of the regulation (by having a global ambition of forcing the rest of the world to adapt those rules as well) as well as the capitalist logic it operates in (by reinforcing that profit motives decide when & how personal data is used).
\nAnd lastly, there is of course the tight coupling between the technologies pushed by technology corporations and their relationship to authoritarianism, the military industrial complex, and eugenics, etc\u2026\nAll while society glorifies tech managers for bringing salvation progress, helping foster fascist praise for strong leaders.3
After all that critical analysis, the change of pace to envisioning a positive alternative was more than welcome.\nAnd Malte & Aline contrast their vision of digital solidarity very nicely with the currently trendy digital sovereignty.\nFaced with the political and economic violence touted by the United States, the European Union and many of their member states are touting the latter as an alternative.4\nWhile it might sound catchy, it generally falls squarely into the same nationalistic tropes of just needing an EU-based competitor to US big-tech instead of actively bringing about change.5
\nIn contrast, digital solidarity touches on the emancipation of the people using technology.\nHighlighting the original demands of the luddites \u2013 wanting a say in which technology is used and how \u2013 it explores how the digital could be different.\nOne bit I found particularly interesting was the framework by Andrea Vetter, which I didn't know before. Building on Illich's Tools for Conviviality, her work outlines 5 dimensions to assess technologies for their conviviality: Their impact on (human) connections, their accessibility, their interactions with the living world and their appropriateness in terms of resource input and output.
\nBased on their own luddite-informed model, and taking Vetter into account, Aline and Malte build their own criteria for an emancipatory technology critique:
\nBased on these three criteria, they outline nicely why 'AI' can not be used by the left as an emancipatory tool, for failing on all three counts:\nBy its very nature, it's a technology that does not harmonize abilities but concentrates power in the hands of the few, due to the requirements for large amounts of capital and training data, its inherent force for removing individual agency that removes collective action and the biases encoded in all training data.\nIt also is explicitly a technology that is created and marketed as \"all-purpose\", failing the question of excluding unwanted uses.\nAnd with respect to its appropriateness, the ecological, economical and societal damages have been documented extensively, for example due to resource use (water, fossil fuels, rare earth minerals mined in the global south\u2026) for 'AI' data centers.
\nIn the following chapters, the book goes on to outline a more positive view of how digital solidarity can form a counter model to the predominant discourses that suck up a lot of oxygen, without offering transformative options.\nActs of resistance, individual ones such as algorithmic sabotage, robot vandalism against (allegedly) self-driving cars, or the hacking of nazi dating platforms or collective ones such as group efforts against data centers can be one tool.\nAnd so can positive interventions such as repair-cafes, if they are sufficiently politicized to move beyond just the individual benefit.
\nThe bigger step and challenge proposed is about the ownership of the digital platforms.\nIn their current configurations, the harms created by them are a direct consequence of the extractivist profit logics they operate under:\nReal estate platforms deploy data science methods to help landlords to extract the maximum possible rents (and thus also maximize their own income).\nAnd the same applies to digital streaming services, and basic digital infrastructures like data centers in the hands of corporations.
\nUltimately, the book makes a convincing argument how shifting the control from private ownership into the collective would allow designing technologies that benefit everyone instead.\nWithout falling prey to tinkering on the margins by asking for interoperability, open source/data, it centers on envisioning technology that serves the public benefit and breaks with the capitalist logics.\nBuilding on Graeber & Wengrow, it shows how democratic control of the digital \u2013 that includes the freedom to leave, no obey and to build new social systems \u2013 can offer an alternative to the existing tech authoritarianism.
\nJointly, Aline & Malte make a great contribution to envision fights for digital technologies \u2013 and societies \u2013 that are anti-authoritarian, post-capitalist, and emancipatory.\nIf you read German, Digital Solidarity makes a great read to sharpen your thinking about how to approach the critique of digital technologies and gives a lot of food for thought on how to approach your own activism to overcome the status quo.\nAnd if you don't read German, my hope is that some of you are now at least curious about the concept.\nMaybe even enough to ask your favorite lefty publisher for suggesting putting out a translated version? ;-)
\nThere is also a good bit about the Open Source Initiative's open-washing of 'AI' through their misguided definition of 'open source AI', which explicitly does not require opening up training data and thus is mostly a push to legitimize these corporations' open-washing by giving an official label.\u00a0\u21a9
\nI'm glad to see more people critically evaluating civil society associations and other NGOs for their role in legitimizing existing power structures in their continuous quest for funding of full-time positions.\u00a0\u21a9
\nAs the book outlines, fascists profiting and putting technology into their service is not new, as IBM and the Holocaust demonstrates so well.\u00a0\u21a9
\nAlso here the role of civil society actors is highlighted for good reason: In their quest for funding and influence, many of them are uncritically jumping on that bandwagon as well.\u00a0\u21a9
\nAs an aside: The director general of the French National Institute for Geography tried to reframe sovereignty in an imho interesting way during his closing remarks of the State of the Map conference: The lesson from the commons is that sovereignty is not only about control. Sovereignty is not about closing doors, closing frontiers. You can also build sovereignty thanks to openness, [\u2026] thanks to cooperation. Thanks Marcos, for the transcription.\u00a0\u21a9
\n[From Arfon]
\nEarlier this year I announced that I was stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of JOSS after ten years in the role, and we put out a call for a new EiC. Today I'm delighted to announce that Daniel S. Katz is taking over as Editor-in-Chief, effective 18 September 2026.
\nDan was one of the people who helped shape JOSS before it even existed. He was part of the small group who helped refine what JOSS should be (and shouldn't be) in the months before we launched in May 2016. He went on to become one of our most active Associate Editors-in-Chief, and has been deeply involved in every significant editorial decision the journal has made over the past decade. I can't think of anyone better placed to lead JOSS into its next chapter.
\nDan and I will be working together over the coming weeks to transition EiC responsibilities.
\n[From Dan]
\nWhen Arfon first told me he was thinking of stepping down, back in 2019 while we were at Murrayfield Rugby Stadium (for a conference of course), I wondered if and how JOSS would survive. Fortunately, in the seven years since then, JOSS continued to thrive and grow, overcoming obstacles like the initial Covid period and then the increased impact of generative AI.
\nBy the time Arfon started talking about stepping down again last year, I had become confident that the JOSS community of associate-editors-in-chief (AEiCs) and editors would be able to keep the journal going. So when I applied to be EiC, I had a mix of feelings that included satisfaction about what we have done so far, confidence about the future and that our community could handle it, and some remaining fear about what I didn't know and wouldn't find out until I started.
\nNow, on the cusp of this transition, I'm really looking forward to working with the full JOSS community, including AEiCs and editors who have ideas about how we can improve the journal and its processes, other community members who continue to submit software and papers and to review them, and of course, Arfon, who we will continue to rely on as both the past/founding EiC and the continuing JOSS tech lead.
\nJOSS, as a developer-friendly diamond open access journal for research software packages that itself runs like an open source project and is a member of the open source community, isn't changing, and we'll continue to work collectively to improve research software and its recognition, and to provide scholarly credit for its developers and maintainers. Please join us by submitting or volunteering to review, and keep an eye out for other opportunities to contribute.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59349/pzaq7-0aq48","guid":"https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/09/daniel-katz-new-editor-in-chief","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789689600,"rid":"zrh9j-8v522","summary":"[From Arfon] Earlier this year I announced that I was stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of JOSS after ten years in the role, and we put out a call for a new EiC. Today I'm delighted to announce that Daniel S. Katz is taking over as Editor-in-Chief, effective 18 September 2026. Dan was one of the people who helped shape JOSS before it even existed.","tags":["Announcements"],"title":"Daniel S. Katz is the new Editor-in-Chief of JOSS","updated_at":1789749931,"url":"https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/09/daniel-katz-new-editor-in-chief","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1789810393,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Moli\u00e8re's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny!
\n\nIt is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to \"Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom them from the age of four and keep them imprisoned so they become perfect submissives.\"
\n\nIs the fear of cuckoldry funny? Is it OK to laugh at a jealous rage which leads to controlling behaviour? Should we find joy in the emotional torment of our characters?
\n\nYes! Yes! And yes!
\n\nThe cast squeeze every last drop of humour from the script, the direction is nimble, and the play has been edited down to a more manageable 75ish minutes (plus extra time for corpsing and applause).
\n\nA simply joyous production which left us grinning throughout.
\n\nYou can see all their upcoming shows - which are very reasonably priced.
\n\nI'm a believer in making the entire visit to the theatre a special experience. Riverside Studio, Hammersmith is a great venue with generous foyer space and more than adequate toilet provision. Not a given in London theatres!
\n\nThe theatre programme is digital and provided via QR code. No \u00a36 rip off for a booklet full of adverts here.
\n\nAs we walked in, the cast were dotted around the stage an in the auditorium doing various bits of business which made for a jolly start.
\n\nPost curtain call there was a lovely speech from the cast thanking us for attending and letting us know about their future projects. Nothing wrong with a piece of shameless advertising to a captive audience \ud83d\ude04
\n\nOverall an excellent theatrical experience.
![](\"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/themes/edent-wordpress-theme/info/okgo.php?ID=75485&HTTP_REFERER=JSON\"){kind=small}
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/r0cff-96c14","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=75485","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/wives.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789689600,"rid":"33070-9q085","summary":"The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Moli\u00e8re's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to \"Women!","tags":["/etc/","Theatre Review"],"title":"Theatre Review: The School for Wives - at Riverside Studios","updated_at":1789731310,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/theatre-review-the-school-for-wives/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin, Open Research Office Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Duine","given":"Maaike","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3412-7192"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1789648456,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"Faires, wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung, nicht zuletzt durch die Priorisierungsagenda der BUA-Einrichtungen zur Umsetzung des Open-Science-Leitbilds und das Positionspapier zu Open Research der Berliner Landesinitiative. Doch welche Alternativen zu etablierten, oft kommerziellen Publikationswegen gibt es eigentlich, und wie funktionieren sie?
\nIn diesem einst\u00fcndigen Lunch Meeting stellen wir Ihnen ausgew\u00e4hlte Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales Publizieren vor, von fachspezifischen Verlagen wie SciPost oder Open Library of Humanities bis hin zu neuen Publishing-Tools wie Octopus. Ein Praxisbericht von Forschenden erg\u00e4nzt die Vorstellung der Publishing-Tools. Dar\u00fcber hinaus geben wir Einblick in die Angebote von Berlin Universities Publishing. Im Anschluss bleibt ausreichend Zeit f\u00fcr Fragen und Diskussion.
\nDas Meeting findet im Rahmen der internationalen Open Access Week statt und richtet sich an alle Forschenden, die mehr \u00fcber faire und offene Publikationsm\u00f6glichkeiten erfahren m\u00f6chten. Das Thema der diesj\u00e4hrigen Open Access Week lautet \"The Cost of Knowledge\": Entsprechend nehmen wir das Motto zum Anlass, um Alternativen zu kommerziell ausgerichteten Publikationsm\u00f6glichkeiten vorzustellen.
\nOffen und fair Publizieren: Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales, nicht-kommerzielles Publizieren\n-Wann: Montag, 19.10.2026, 13:00-14:00 Uhr\n-Wo: Online\n-Registrierung: Anmeldung per Webex\n
Organisiert von:
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/xcjqw-q0t82","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=4343","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789603200,"rid":"99595-v5p57","summary":"Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales, nicht-kommerzielles Publizieren Faires, wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung, nicht zuletzt durch die Priorisierungsagenda der BUA-Einrichtungen zur Umsetzung des Open-Science-Leitbilds und das Positionspapier zu Open Research der Berliner Landesinitiative.","tags":["Allgemein","Aktuelles","Berlin","Bibliotheken","Open Access"],"title":"Online Lunch Meeting: Offen und fair Publizieren","updated_at":1789716613,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2026/09/17/online-lunch-meeting-offen-und-fair-publizieren/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/041qv0h25","name":"Deutsches Arch\u00e4ologisches Institut, Zentrale"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"von Schr\u00f6der","given":"Asta","url":"https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5852-771X"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"d21c5e78-88bc-432c-a20b-4e8a8ead1693","created":1752796800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Wissenslabor f\u00fcr naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen und objektzentrierte Daten","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/winoda","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/d21c5e78-88bc-432c-a20b-4e8a8ead1693/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://winoda.de/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://winoda.de","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"winoda","status":"active","subfield":"1209","title":"WiNoDa Knowledge Lab","updated":1789654043,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"WiNoDa Knowledge Lab","blog_slug":"winoda","content_html":"\n
Was lange w\u00e4hrt, wird endlich gut \u2013 oder so hei\u00dft es.
Mit dem Start des Wintersemesters geht das WiNoDa Knowledge Lab noch einmal richtig in die Vollen: BYOD data clinic am 6. und 9. Oktober 2026, Finale des WiNoDa Hackathon am 14./15. Oktober 2026, WiNoDa Konferenz am 21. Oktober 2026 \u2013 und auch unsere Selbstlernkurse wollen wir noch einmal \"richtig\" gl\u00e4nzen lassen.
Deshalb laden wir alle Interessierten ein, teilzunehmen an unserer WiNoDa Data Expedition: F\u00fcnf Wochen begleitetes Selbststudium rund um Forschungsdaten, Sammlungen und digitale Methoden \u2013 nat\u00fcrlich kostenfrei auf https://moodle.winoda.de/!
Wenn Ihr Euren Lernplan lieber selbst gestalten m\u00f6chtet, aber den Austausch mit anderen nicht missen wollt\u2013 dann ist die WiNoDa Data Expedition genau richtig! Ihr k\u00f6nnt Euch mit den Kursentwicklern austauschen, Eure Fragen stellen und gemeinsam \u00fcberlegen, wie sich das Gelernte konkret anwenden l\u00e4sst. Und Ihr trefft Menschen wieder, denen Ihr vielleicht schon bei einem Webinar oder Workshop begegnet seid\u2013 jetzt habt Ihr endlich Zeit, Euch n\u00e4her kennenzulernen.
\n![\"Social-Media-Bild](\"https://winoda.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Data-Expedition.png\")
Wir starten alle gemeinsam am
\nDirekt danach beginnt Eure
\n![\"\ud83d\ude2f\"](\"https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/72x72/1f62f.png\")
) unsere Kurse absolvieren wollt, bleibt Eurer Entscheidung \u00fcberlassen. F\u00fcr jeden absolvierten Kurs erhaltet Ihr einen Badge und ein Zertifikat.Zum Abschluss treffen wir uns noch einmal alle gemeinsam am
\nAlle unsere Selbstlernkurse sind auf englisch. Die Fertigstellung eines jeden Kurses wird mit einem Zertifikat bescheinigt.
\nDie Registrierung bleibt w\u00e4hrend der gesamten Data Expedition ge\u00f6ffnet \u2013 Nachz\u00fcgler sind jederzeit willkommen!
\nKursangebot","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/w6zk6-8pb65","guid":"https://winoda.de/?p=15680","image":"https://winoda.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Data-Expedition.png","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789603200,"rid":"nbgw5-3tm14","summary":"Was lange w\u00e4hrt, wird endlich gut \u2013 oder so hei\u00dft es.Mit dem Start des Wintersemesters geht das WiNoDa Knowledge Lab noch einmal richtig in die Vollen: BYOD data clinic am [\u2026]","tags":["WiNoDa Knowledge Lab Journal","CfP","Datenkompetenz","FDM","OER"],"title":"Call for Participants: WiNoDa Data Expedition, 01.10.-05.11.2026. F\u00fcnf Wochen begleitetes Selbststudium rund um Forschungsdaten, Sammlungen und digitale Methoden.","updated_at":1789716613,"url":"https://winoda.de/2026/09/17/call-for-participants-winoda-data-expedition-01-10-05-11-2026-fuenf-wochen-begleitetes-selbststudium-rund-um-forschungsdaten-sammlungen-und-digitale-methoden/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1789648456,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"
- RRP - Reusability and its relevance (Basic, ca. 40 minutes)
- RRP - Reusing object-related research data (Basic, ca. 1.5 hours)
- RDM - Core concepts of data quality in research data management (Intermediate, ca. 1,5 hours)
- RDM - Data Governance. Strategies for quality improvement in collection data (Intermediate, ca. 2 hours)
- Regulatory Frameworks for Data Acquisition in Fieldwork (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
- ATR 1 - Introduction: Basic concepts, terminology and workflow of Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) (Basic, ca. 2 hours)
- ATR 2 - Deep Dive: Preprocessing and software selection (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
- ATR 3 \u2013 Deep Dive: Transcription and semantic enrichment (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
- ATR 4 - Deep Dive: Model Training and Publishing (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
Weitere Kurse sind noch in der Entwicklung und werden zu Moodle hinzugef\u00fcgt, sobald sie fertig sind.
Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research.
\nAnmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf unseren Partnereinrichtungen und auf Veranstaltungen, die sich an die \u00d6ffentlichkeit richten bzw. die offen sind f\u00fcr Angeh\u00f6rige der Wissenschafts- und Kulturerbeeinrichtungen in Berlin. Wir erg\u00e4nzen diese Liste gerne (Info bitte via Mail ans OROB).\n\n
Wie gehen Einrichtungen des Kulturerbes mit den Zeugnissen der Vergangenheit um? Nutzen sie diese, um bestimmte Sichtweisen historischer Entwicklungen zu st\u00fctzen, oder \u00fcberlassen sie die Bewertung den Nutzenden und erm\u00f6glichen vor allem den Zugang zu den Quellen? W\u00e4hrend Museen mit kuratierten Ausstellungen h\u00e4ufig st\u00e4rker interpretierend arbeiten, verstehen sich Archive und Bibliotheken traditionell eher als Einrichtungen, die sich auf den Zugang zu ihren Best\u00e4nden konzentrieren. Diese Rollenverteilung ger\u00e4t jedoch unter Druck, wenn es um ein schwieriges Erbe \u2013 etwa rassistische oder antisemitische Zeugnisse \u2013 geht: Archive werden kritisiert, wenn sie scheinbar ungefilterten Zugang gew\u00e4hren, w\u00e4hrend zugleich geschichtspolitische Eingriffe in Kulturerbeeinrichtungen kontrovers diskutiert werden.
\n2026 findet die dritte Ausgabe des gro\u00dfen OER-Fachtags von ORCA.nrw statt. Freuen Sie sich \u00fcber den Tag hinweg auf eine spannende Keynote, Projektvorstellungen, Workshops und viel Austausch & Vernetzung!
\nIm Vortrag wird, ankn\u00fcpfend an das Blockchain-Projekt f\u00fcr digitale Zeugnisse, die EUDI-Wallet thematisiert. Die Historie der Entwicklung dieser digitalen Brieftasche auf EU-Ebene wird vorgestellt und die Funktionen und M\u00f6glichkeiten sowie Detailinformationen zur Sicherheit werden erl\u00e4utert. Der aktuelle Stand der Entwicklung wird betrachtet und in Form einer Demo wird die Nutzung an einem konkreten Beispiel veranschaulicht. Nach einem Blick auf zuk\u00fcnftige Entwicklungen im Bereich \"Digitaler Identit\u00e4ten\", wie z. B. Post-Quanten-Verschl\u00fcsselung oder Alternative Biometrische Identifikationsverfahren (AuBi) schlie\u00dft der Abend mit Raum f\u00fcr Diskussionen \u00fcber die Technologie und deren Nutzung.
\nDer Einsatz von KI Technologien erstreckt sich zunehmend auf zentrale Bereiche politischer Steuerung, von der \u00f6ffentlichen Verwaltung und der Umweltpolitik bis hin zu Grenzregimen und wirtschaftlicher Regulierung. Dabei ver\u00e4ndern sie nicht nur Verfahren; es verschieben sich Machtkonstellationen, Verantwortung und politische Handlungsspielr\u00e4ume. Das Symposium mit \u00f6ffentlicher Paneldiskussion diskutiert KI als systemische Herausforderung f\u00fcr Demokratie und Rechtsstaat. Die Veranstaltung bietet kurze Einf\u00fchrungen in verschiedene Schwerpunkte unserer Forschung und erm\u00f6glicht eine kollaborative Plattform zur Diskussion der systemischen Kosten algorithmischer Governance f\u00fcr demokratische Strukturen. Dies schafft einen offenen Raum f\u00fcr Austausch mit politischen Entscheidungstr\u00e4ger*innen, Vertreter*innen von NGOs, Forschenden sowie allen, die an der Zukunft einer digitalen Gesellschaft interessiert sind.
\nDas Digitale ist ein gro\u00dfes Versprechen: Physische R\u00e4ume und pers\u00f6nliche Speichermedien scheinen ganz \u00fcberfl\u00fcssig zu werden, die Cloud soll ortsunabh\u00e4ngigen, schnellen Zugriff und unbegrenzten Speicherplatz erm\u00f6glichen. Aber was kostet das, welche L\u00f6sungen sind sicher und umweltvertr\u00e4glich?\u00a0Gemeinsam mit bestandserhaltenden Einrichtungen und Vertreter:innen aus Wissenschaft und Forschung wollen wir das Versprechen des Digitalen \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und konstruktive Vorschl\u00e4ge zur longue dur\u00e9e des digitalen Erbes entwickeln. Es sprechen u.v. a.: Frank Scholze (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), Richard Ovenden (Bodleian Library Oxford) und Petra Gehring (Rat f\u00fcr Informationsinfrastrukturen).
\nDas Open Science Forum Mitteldeutschland 2026 bringt am 5. Oktober Interessierte zu einem offenen Austausch \u00fcber Open Science als Gestaltungsaufgabe zusammen. Wir widmen uns der Frage, welche Rolle wissenschaftsunterst\u00fctzende Einrichtungen spielen, wenn es um neue Ans\u00e4tze in der Forschungsbewertung, nachhaltige Infrastrukturen und digitale Souver\u00e4nit\u00e4t im Spannungsfeld geopolitischer Entwicklungen geht.
\nIn Archiven, Bibliotheken und anderen Ged\u00e4chtniseinrichtungen lagern bundesweit gef\u00e4hrdete Originale, die Meinungsvielfalt, Rechtsordnungen, historische Entwicklungen und politisches Handeln dokumentieren. Der Erhalt dieser \u00dcberlieferungen ist Grundvoraussetzung f\u00fcr eine quellen- und faktenbasierte Forschung, eine historische Aufarbeitung sowie die Sichtbarmachung gesellschaftlicher Mehrstimmigkeit und Diskurse. Originalerhalt ist grundlegender Bestandteil der Informationssicherung und ein wichtiger Beitrag zu einer lebendigen, urteilsf\u00e4higen und wehrhaften Demokratie \u2013 insbesondere angesichts der zunehmenden Bedrohung durch hybride Desinformation und andere demokratiegef\u00e4hrdende Entwicklungen.
\nDie FDM-Sprechstunde Humanities@NFDI ist eine Online-Beratung f\u00fcr Studierende, Forschende oder Mitarbeitende aus Forschungs- und Sammlungsinstitutionen zu allen Fragen rund um das Forschungsdatenmanagement. Expert:innen aus den geisteswissenschaftlichen NFDI-Konsortien NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Objects und Text+ stehen f\u00fcr Ihre Fragen zu allen Themen rund ums Forschungsdatenmanagement bereit. Bei Bedarf k\u00f6nnen Einzelgespr\u00e4che in Breakoutr\u00e4umen vertieft werden.
\nIncreasing consolidation and commercial control over all aspects of knowledge comes at a cost. This year's theme challenges us to consider the financial, human, and environmental costs of creating, sharing, and sustaining knowledge\u2014particularly when these costs are driven by private rather than public interests. Last year's theme of \"Who owns our knowledge?\" reflected on the reality of commercial ownership of knowledge. This year's theme will reckon with the costs of that reality and avenues for reclaiming control of these systems meant to serve the public interest.
\nIn diesem Workshop lernen die Teilnehmenden datenschutzkonforme KI-Anwendungen und Einsatzm\u00f6glichkeiten kennen, die neue Wege f\u00fcr die Nachnutzung von Forschungsdaten erm\u00f6glichen und zur Verbesserung von Datenqualit\u00e4t, Metadatenverf\u00fcgbarkeit und Zug\u00e4nglichkeit beitragen. Mithilfe konkreter Anwendungsf\u00e4lle aus der Forschung werden die rechtssicheren Einsatzm\u00f6glichkeiten der KI im Datenlebenzyklus vorgestellt.
\nFaires, wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung, nicht zuletzt durch die Priorisierungsagenda der BUA-Einrichtungen zur Umsetzung des Open-Science-Leitbilds und das Positionspapier zu Open Research der Berliner Landesinitiative. Doch welche Alternativen zu etablierten, oft kommerziellen Publikationswegen gibt es eigentlich, und wie funktionieren sie? In diesem einst\u00fcndigen Lunch Meeting stellen wir Ihnen ausgew\u00e4hlte Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales Publizieren vor.
\nDer Workshop f\u00fchrt in die Grundfunktionen von OpenRefine ein und zeigt an konkreten Anwendungsf\u00e4llen, wie Forschende tabellarische Datens\u00e4tze bereinigen, strukturieren und anreichern k\u00f6nnen. Dabei werden auch geskriptete Bearbeitungsschritte sowie der Import und Export verschiedener Datenformate (CSV, XML, JSON) behandelt. OpenRefine erm\u00f6glicht nicht nur einen schnellen \u00dcberblick \u00fcber gro\u00dfe Datens\u00e4tze, sondern hilft vor allem bei heterogenen und historisch gewachsenen Datens\u00e4tze, die oft inkonsistente Metadaten aufweisen.
\nDer Workshop gibt einen \u00dcberblick \u00fcber ELN-Konzepte, zeigt relevante Forschungsdatenmanagement-Aspekte auf und bietet eine praktische Einf\u00fchrung.
\nDer Aktionstag \"Forschungsdaten@BUA\" l\u00e4dt erstmals Forschende der Berlin University Alliance herzlich ein, \u00fcber den Umgang mit Forschungsdaten ins Gespr\u00e4ch zu kommen, sich auszutauschen und zu vernetzen. Ziel ist es, Best Practices sichtbar zu machen, Erfahrungen auszutauschen und den Dialog \u00fcber den Umgang mit Forschungsdaten \u00fcber die vier BUA-H\u00e4user hinweg auszubauen.
\nIm Rahmen dieses Hands-on-Workshops werden Konzepte zum effizienten, reproduzierbaren und nachvollziehbaren Arbeiten mit Forschungsdaten vermittelt. Ziel ist es, die Teilnehmenden mit verschiedenen Werkzeugen vertraut zu machen und das Bewusstsein f\u00fcr Computational Thinking, Automatisierung sowie die Optimierung eigener Arbeitsprozesse zu sch\u00e4rfen.
\nIm Forschungsalltag stehen Forschende regelm\u00e4\u00dfig vor urheberrechtlichen Fragen: Welche Inhalte darf ich in meiner Arbeit verwenden? Unter welchen Bedingungen kann ich Daten und Materialien offen teilen? Wie gehe ich mit KI-Tools und deren Trainingsdaten rechtssicher um? Dieser Workshop bietet praxisnahe Orientierung f\u00fcr den sicheren Umgang mit gesch\u00fctzten Inhalten und Lizenzen in der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit.
\nIn our three-part workshop series, we explore the relationship between the technical aspects, practical applications and critical reflection of the use of AI in research data management. Participants will learn about various AI tools and use cases for research data management, test, and develop criteria for the meaningful and responsible use of AI in their own work.
\nweiter zu November 2026 [in K\u00fcrze]
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/pzvzm-f9w08","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=4297","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1788220800,"rid":"208kg-aed59","summary":"Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research. Anmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen.","tags":["Veranstaltungshinweise"],"title":"Veranstaltungshinweise Oktober 2026","updated_at":1789716611,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2026/09/01/veranstaltungshinweise-oktober-2026/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/016xsfp80","name":"Radboud University Nijmegen"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Willighagen","given":"Lars","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4751-4637"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"e0509c2b-3c92-4e55-a306-bb03ddf5f7c8","created":1673136000,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Thoughts about bibliographic metadata, programming, statistics, taxonomy, and biology.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/syntaxus_baccata","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/e0509c2b-3c92-4e55-a306-bb03ddf5f7c8/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://larsgw.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default","filter":null,"generator":"Blogger","home_page_url":"https://larsgw.blogspot.com/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"syntaxus_baccata","status":"active","subfield":"1110","title":"Syntaxus baccata","updated":1789863616,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Syntaxus baccata","blog_slug":"syntaxus_baccata","content_html":"The release of version 0.9.0 of Citation.js comes shortly after the release of version 0.8.0. This is in part because v0.8.0 was released shortly before Node.js v20 went End Of Life, which led to a lot of (developmental) dependencies to dropping support for it. An added benefit though is that v22.12.0 of Node.js finally added support for CommonJS modules (require() syntax) to import most ESM modules (import/export syntax). This allowed me to stop using the @larsgw/wikibase-sdk fork of wikibase-sdk.
\nMelangyna pavlovskyi, 2026.iii.22, Zeddam, The Netherlands
In short:
\n![\"the](\"https://tzovar.as/assets/images/2026-09-16-digital-solidarity.jpg\")
\nnode-fetch was replaced with the built-in version of the Fetch API (based on undici); similarly sync-fetch was replaced with sync-fetch-undici.@larsgw/wikibase-sdk was replaced with the upstream wikibase-sdk.citation-js package, until Babelify is updated upstream.Co-Authored-By tags in their commit messages for advertising purposes (i.e. LLMs).Another major change is the addition of TypeScript types, which people have been asking for, for some time. I have attempted to create type definitions that are actually useful, which proved difficult given the convoluted plugin system. In the process, I learnt some interesting features of TypeScript, like module augmentation and some pretty nice generic functions.
\nThe way to register a plugin with Citation.js is to import or require() it. The first step was to employ module augmentation to add these overloads, like below. (Note that some formats have multiple return types, meaning the overload also depends on the second argument; this will come back later!)
// node_modules/@citation-js/core/index.d.ts\nexport class Cite {\n // ...\n\n\tformat (format: 'data', options?: { format?: 'text', version: string }): string\n\tformat (format: 'data', options: { format: 'object', version: string }): Array<CSL>\n\tformat (format: 'label'): Record<string, string>\n}\n\n// node_modules/@citation-js/plugin-csl/index.d.ts\nimport '@citation-js/core'\n\ndeclare module '@citation-js/core' {\n class Cite {\n format (format: 'bibliography', options?: { /* ... */ }): string\n // ...\n }\n}\n\n// index.ts\nimport { Cite } from '@citation-js/core'\nimport from '@citation-js/plugin-csl'\n\nconst a = (new Cite()).format('bibliography')\n// typeof a === string\nThis is for plugins with output formatting features, for input parsing features and plugin configuration something similar is possible. However, formatting features not only affect the possible overloads of the Cite#format() function, but also the plugins.output.format() function. This would mean repeating all the overloads.
Additionally, if the typing of a call to Cite#format() is wrong, the error is actually not very helpful. TypeScript will only show how the last overload of a function does not match. There is another way, though.
With generic functions for Cite#format() and plugins.output.format() we can reuse the same output formatter signatures for both functions. This was achieved by exporting an interface type with the signatures.
interface Formats {\n data:\n | ((options?: { format?: 'text', version?: string }) => string)\n | ((options: { format: 'object', version?: string }) => Array<CSL>)\n label: () => Record<string, string>\n}\nThis interface can be extended by plugins as well, so adding signatures is simple. The generic function is not so simple; I started with the following:
\nexport class Cite {\n format<\n Format extends keyof Formats,\n Options extends Parameters<Formats[Format]>\n > (format: Format, ...options: Options): ReturnType<Formats[Format]>\n}\nHowever, because the 'data' output format can have multiple return types depending on the second argument, the return type would be string | Array. I instead ended up with
export class Cite {\n format<\n Format extends keyof Formats,\n Options extends Parameters<Formats[Format]>,\n Result extends ReturnType<Extract<Formats[Format], (...args: Options) => any>>\n > (format: Format, ...options: Options): Result\n}\nBecause of Extract the correct return type is selected and the overloads work as expected. This works wonders with autocomplete, and gives appropriate errors. And, although the resulting code looks pretty simple, it took a while to get there in practice.
In total, the index.d.ts type definitions for a typical plugin looks like this:
import type { CSL } from '@citation-js/core'\n\ninterface Entry {\n title: string\n // ...\n}\n\ninterface Config {\n stringConstants: Record<string, string>\n}\n\ndeclare module '@citation-js/core' {\n namespace plugins {\n namespace input {\n interface Formats {\n '@foo/file': (input: string) => Array<Entry>\n '@foo/record': (input: Entry) => CSL\n }\n }\n\n namespace output {\n interface Formats {\n foo:\n | ((options: { format: 'object', spec?: number }) => Array<Entry>)\n | ((options?: { format?: 'text', spec?: number }) => string)\n }\n }\n\n namespace config {\n function get ('@foo'): Config\n }\n }\n}\nThis is implemented for all plugins included in citation-js (though that package does not have TypeScript types itself), and I will slowly roll this out for other plugins. Any feedback is welcome!
\n
'Industry' and 'business' \u2026 are not synonyms \u2026
\nthey are opposing realms of human activity.
A defining feature of neoclassical economics is that it treats 'business' and 'industry' as synonyms. As such, mainstream economists assume that a firm's business income reveals its industrial output
\nTo arrive at this convenient equivalence, economists pretend that in a competitive market, commodity prices reveal the production of consumer 'utility'. So when economists speak of 'output', they mean the creation of paid-for satisfaction. But since this 'utility' goes perpetually unmeasured, the whole operation represents an act of faith \u2014 no different than the imagined equivalence between the father, the son, and the holy ghost.
\nLooking at this act of ideological faith, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler find little reason to believe. Instead, they take the heretical view, first articulated by Thorstein Veblen, that 'industry' and 'business' are opposing activities.
\nLet me explain their thinking.
\nIn the Veblenian sense, the human capacity to be 'industrious' predates capitalism; indeed, it predates humanity. All living things are 'industrious' in the sense that they pursue activities that help them survive and reproduce in the natural world. So when humans farm corn, we are manifesting a deep biological urge to exploit the natural world in ways that benefit us.
\nEnter capitalism. In capitalism, human industriousness gets controlled by a paywall. Thus, when a capitalist farmer grows corn, he does so not to feed himself (directly), but to make a profit. As such, farming becomes a 'business' activity marked by the use of property rights to extract income.
\nThis use of property rights, in turn, gives rise to a complicated relation between human 'industry' and capitalist 'business'. Sometimes, what is good for business is good for industry. For example, when a farmer buys a larger tractor, he can grow more corn, and therefore, receive more income. But other times, business benefit comes at the expense of industry. For example, if a farmer monopolizes the corn market, he can extract more income by restricting corn production and raising corn prices. The point is that outside of neoclassical fantasies, 'industry' and 'business' have a complex relationship that cannot be deduced from armchair theory. To understand how the real world works, we need to get our boots muddy with actual data.
\nEnter the business-to-industry index. This is a metric that I devised while thinking about the business of the US Pentagon (and its surprising inability to wage war). In this essay, I explore how the business-to-industry index can be used to study the broader history and geography of capitalism.
\nHere's the basic math that I'll apply. The business-to-industry index consists of a double ratio. For a given entity, we calculate the business-to-industry index by dividing the entity's share of world income by its share of world energy use:
\nIn this metric, the numerator is a measure of business success. (Since the goal of business is to extract income, we can measure its success in terms of an income share \u2014 the most general being the share of world income.) In contrast, the denominator is a measure of relative industrial capacity, as measured by the ability to harness energy. (I focus on energy because it's the universe's natural currency \u2014 the fundamental quanta that makes stuff 'go'.)
\nLooking ahead, I get the analysis rolling by studying the long-term history of capitalism, as captured by the rise (and fall) of three hegemons: Britain, the United States, and China. In all three cases, I find that these hegemons went through a period of industrial 'disruption', during which the business-to-industry index fell, followed by a period of 'monetization', during which the business-to-industry index rose. One of the most startling conclusions is that when it comes to setting the stage for business monetization, communism may be the best game in town.
\nNext, I switch gears and look at the geography of modern capitalism. Taking a nod from world-systems theory, I search for the 'core' of global capitalism by looking for the regions that are most business dominated. That leads me down a tangent on US politics, followed by a return to the world stage.
\nAll in all, I hope to convince you that the business-to-industry index is useful for understanding the structure of global capitalism. Consider it an unpaywalled tool for studying the world's business paywalls.
\nHistory, one might say, is a book about the past that is written with the present in mind. As such, writing a coherent history of capitalism requires understanding this system as it exists today.
\nWorking during the most frenzied period of the British industrial revolution, Karl Marx saw capitalism as a 'mode of production' with capitalists at the reins. This vision was not a bad description of 19th-century British industrialism; it is, however, a terrible description of 21st-century capitalism \u2014 a system that is plainly dominated by finance and its abstract manipulation of property rights.
\nSadly, Marx's 19th-century vision has come to dominate contemporary histories of capitalism, making them feel frustratingly incomplete. Giovanni Arrighi's seminal book The Long Twentieth Century is a good example. The book sketches the history of capitalism by charting the rise and fall of four world hegemons (Genoa, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States). So far so good. Unfortunately, Arrighi then tries to study the financial nature of capitalism while simultaneously holding onto Marxist baggage about 'modes of production'. The results are (in my mind) both confusing and disappointing.
\nStill, Arrighi's analysis of hegemonic cycles represents one of the most compelling ways to study the history of capitalism. By applying the business-to-industry index to this topic, not only can we uncover the changing currents of global capitalism, we can also understand why Marx thought the way he did.
\nFor Arrighi, the history of capitalism unfolded through four waves of hegemony: the first wave came with the 16th-century expansion of Genoa, the second with 17th-century Dutch conquest, the third with the 19th-century British empire, and the fourth with the 20th-century United States. Of these four waves of global power, we can construct the business-to-industry index for the latter two. Let's get started by using the business-to-industry index to chart the rise and fall of British power.
\nFigure\u00a01 shows two views of British hegemony. The blue curve shows the 'business view' \u2014 the British share of world income. And the red curve shows the 'industry view' \u2014 the British share of world energy use. In broad terms, these two views of British hegemony are similar, which is expected. But what interests me here is the relation between the business view and the industry view. To capture this relation, Figure\u00a02 shows the long-term history of the British business-to-industry index.1
\n\nBefore diving into the evidence in Figure\u00a02, let me pause to define some terms. When a region has a business-to-industry index that is greater than one, I say that this region is 'business dominated' \u2014 it receives more income than is warranted by its share of world energy use. Similarly, when a region has a business-to-industry index that is less than one, I say that this region is 'industry dominated' \u2014 it consumes more energy than is warranted by its share of world income.
\nNext, when the business-to-industry index drops over time, I call this a period of disruption. And when the business-to-industry index rises over time, I call this a period of monetization. Note that I've chosen this language to echo the jargon used by Silicon Valley startups, because I think their ethos mimics larger currents in capitalism.
\nIn Silicon Valley, 'disruption' is code for technological innovation mixed with low prices that are designed to capture market share. To see this strategy in action, just look to the unfolding AI boom. Not only are AI companies rushing to push out a new technology, they're dumping their product at prices so low that we need knew adjectives to describe the scale of their losses. Of course, everyone knows that this disruption can't last. But for the AI companies playing this game, the hope is to capture enough market share that they can eventually flip on the monetization switch, hike prices, and rake in money.
\nReturning to the history of the British business-to-industry index (in Figure\u00a02), it seems that capitalist empires may play a similar game, albeit one that is unplanned. When our data begins at the turn of the 18th century, Britain was already a major world power, having been propelled to global dominance by its naval prowess. Now as a rule, centers of power are places that are business dominated (they have a share of world income that far surpasses their share of world energy use). So given Britain's 18th-century status as an established imperial power, it's unsurprising that we find the place to be business dominated. What is surprising is the period of disruption that followed.
\nSince the dawn of civilization, empires have waxed and waned; they have conquered new territory and then relinquished it. But before Britain, no empire had harnessed the industrial power of fossil fuels. When Britain began to exploit its coal reserves in the 19th century, the industrial disruption that followed caused the British business-to-industry index to plummet. Yes, Britain as a whole got richer, but at a pace that was slower than its frenzied energy burn. By the late 1800s, Britain had become the world's factory, dumping manufactured goods onto the world stage at bargain-basement prices.
\nOf course, this period of disruption did not last forever. By the early 20th century, British capitalists had begun to monetize, causing the business-to-industry index to rise steadily. But before we get to this period of monetization, it's worth dwelling on the period of British industrial disruption.
\nAs we'll soon seen, both the US and China saw their business-to-industry indexes drop steadily during their most intense periods of industrialization. Based on this evidence, it seems plausible that rapid industrialization is associated with a falling business-to-industry index. Again, the startup mantra shows why. If you want to gain industrial dominance, your product must be competitively priced, even to the point of business loss.
\nOf course, I'm not saying that during the 19th century, British capitalists decided to under-price their commodities so that they could later monetize their property rights. Surely, there was no such foresight. What I am saying is that when an industrial build-out occurs, it's likely created by a social environment that encourages technological innovation yet suppresses workers' income.
\nThinking about this environment, the work of Karl Marx is informative, because he studied during the most intense period of British industrial disruption. Note four features of Marx's thinking.
\nFirst, Marx legitimately admired the productivity of British capitalism \u2014 indeed, he thought capitalism was so productive that it would set the material stage for socialism. (In hindsight, the reverse was true; wherever it existed, state communism set the stage for capitalism. More on this reversal when we look at the rise of China.)
\nSecond, Marx was critical of the poor wages paid to 19th-century factory workers. He did not foresee the affluent salaried class that would emerge during later stages of capitalism.
\nThird, Marx was obsessed with so-called 'real capital' \u2014 the ownership of machines and factories. He dismissed finance as 'fictitious capital'. Of course, after Marx died, it became obvious that finance was a rather unfictitious form of power.
\nFourth, Marx thought that capitalism's key failing was that in a competitive market, the rate of profit tended to fall.2 Thus, capitalists would slowly compete themselves into oblivion, paving the way for a socialist utopia. Marx clearly failed to anticipate the power of oligarchy and its ability to profit from institutionalized exclusion.
\nNow, my point is not (solely) to criticize Marx, but to observe that he was a man of his time. He wrote about the social tendencies that existed during an intense period of industrial disruption. He erred not in describing these tendencies, but in thinking they were permanent features of capitalism. They were not.
\nFor the 21st century observer, the trends that followed need no introduction. As British wages rose, British capitalists realized that so long as property rights were enforced internationally, they could offshore their factories while continuing to onshore their profits. And so the manufacturing bustle of 19th-century London was replaced by the white-collar hustle of global finance. To be specific, the ship-building yards closed, but the shipping insurance business (Lloyds of London) flourished.
\nFor their part, modern Marxists look at this transformation and see pathology. However, a more apt description is that under capitalism, monetization is what naturally follows an industrial build out. The build out creates transitory technological superiority, which allows elites to ensconce more enduring forms of institutional power. What follows is the mature stage of capitalism, in which elites monetize the long tail of their declining institutional power. Sure, this behavior creates all forms of cravenness; but for the late-stage capitalist, it is rational calculus. It is more profitable to toll than to build.
\nTraveling across the Atlantic, let's now look at the history of the business-to-industry index in the United States. Figure\u00a03 shows the business and industry views of US hegemony, both of which rose until 1950 and fell thereafter. Meanwhile, Figure\u00a04 combines these two views to calculate the US business-to-industry index.
\n\nLooking at Figure\u00a04, let's discuss the business-to-industry trends. Unlike Britain, which entered our historical record as an imperial power, the United States enters our record (in 1790) as a colonial periphery, having freshly won independence from the British crown. As a periphery in the capitalist system, we find that the early US was industry dominated \u2014 its share of world income was dwarfed by its share of world energy use. But as the former colony gained power (driven in no small part by slave labor), its business-to-industry index steadily rose.
\nNote that this early period of US expansion was a standard story of imperial conquest. European settlers came to the New World where they first expunged the natives and then exploited the land for themselves. As this expansion unfolded, US coastal cities became centers of business. In the annals of human history, such conquest is standard practice. But what came next was more abnormal.
\nBy the late 19th century, the US entered a fifty-year period of industrial disruption marked by a steady stream of technological innovation. In 1882, Thomas Edison built his first commercial electric power plant. In 1886, Carnegie Steel built the world's largest open hearth furnace. In 1892, John Froelich built the first viable gas-powered tractor. In 1896, Henry Ford built his first automobile. And in 1903, the Wright brothers built the first airplane. By the end of World War I, this run of technological innovation had allowed the US to surpassed Britain as the world's factory.
\nAs in Britain, the era of American disruption was formative not just for industrialism, but also for political economy. In 1899, John Bates Clark published his wildly influential book The Distribution of Wealth, which expounded the neoclassical theory of income distribution. And in 1910, Irving Fisher wrote his seminal neoclassical textbook Introduction to Economic Science. Collectively, James Tobin later noted, the two men helped erect the 'temple' of American neoclassical economics.
\nIn this temple, capitalism is theorized as a competitive market in which firms are unwittingly forced to maximize social welfare. Of course, for those who stared closely at this theory, it was always a fairy tale. But at the turn of the 20th century, it was at least a mildly believable story. Although the robber barons actively stymied competition, these men were still titans of industry; they built real factories and real infrastructure.
\nToday, neoclassical textbooks continue to wax about the market production of 'stuff' (i.e.\u00a0'widgets'). But in the mean time, American capitalists have offshored their factories, leaving the dirty work of making things to others. That's because the real money is made by monetizing the institutional vestiges of American power.
\nOf course, legions of political economists have commented on the 'de-industrialization' and 'financialization' of American capitalism. In this light, the rising business-to-industry index of the last half century simply provides another way to quantify an otherwise widely-recognized pattern. That said, the long-term trend in the business-to-industry index also shows something new. When it comes to capitalism, neoclassical economics takes the state of industrial disruption as 'normal'. But in hindsight, Britain and the United States have both spent far more time in periods of monetization \u2014 periods when capitalists inflated their assets without building much of physical substance.
\nIf one presumes, as Nitzan and Bichler do, that capital is finance and finance alone, then this prolonged state of monetization is unsurprising. Instead, what's remarkable is that periods of industrial disruption occur at all. Indeed, it takes a special set of circumstance to prod owners to build rather than to simply toll. Looking ahead, the irony is that perhaps the most fertile environment for industrial disruption is created not by the market, but by state communism.
\nWhen Marx envisioned a future socialist utopia, he thought that it would spring from the ashes of capitalism. Let capitalists create the pistons of industry, Marx declared. Then let workers seize the controls and run the machine for themselves. Unfortunately, things did not work out as Marx planned.
\nIn reality (as Branko Milanovi\u0107 often notes), communism turned out to be an alternative path to capitalism.3 Or more specifically, state communism was a potent tool for industrial disruption \u2014 a way to rapidly build industrial infrastructure by letting government run the show. Once this build out matured, however, communist control invariably gave way (either by evolution or revolution) to monetized capitalism.
\nModern China offers an excellent case study of this transformation. With communist disruption (and capitalist monetization) in mind, let's turn to Figures\u00a05 and 6. Figure\u00a05 shows both the business view and the industry view of rising Chinese hegemony. Meanwhile, Figure\u00a06 combines these two views to measure China's business-to-industry-index.
\n\nBefore I discuss the evidence, let's review some history. When the data for China's business-to-industry index begins (in 1953), the country was four years into its communist revolution. Mao was firmly in control, and his government was busy forcing peasants off the land and into newly constructed factories. To be sure, Mao's policies were in many ways disastrous; after all, they prompted what is perhaps the most catastrophic famine in human history. But in a sense, the trauma is the point. That's because Maoist China was an industrial disruption machine. During Mao's tenure (which ended in 1976), China's business-to-industry index dropped like a stone.
\nHere's why this cliff makes sense.
\nAt its root, industrial disruption requires the construction of industrial infrastructure at the same time that peoples' incomes are suppressed. Almost by definition, such an experience is unpleasant. In capitalism, owners have a limited ability to command, and so are forced to disrupt with both the stick and the carrot. For example, Henry Ford was a ruthless businessman who nonetheless paid his workers fairly well. This carrot makes the industrial disruption more palatable, but also weakens its pace.
\nUnder communist governance, the state's enormous stick means that there is little need for the carrot. A communist regime can build heavy industry that is every bit as productive as its capitalist equivalent. Yet the communist factory need not pay ample wages. Indeed, the communist manager can feed his workers bland rations and house them in stark barracks.
\nOf course, the problem with communist disruption is that it is self limiting. At some point, workers begin to resent living in a sprawling industrial environment that provides them little benefit. It's at this point that communism runs its course, for by definition, it cannot monetize. So in hindsight, Milanovi\u0107 is right; in practice, communism proved to be a temporary strategy for fostering industrial disruption \u2014 a way to propel backwards regions onto the industrial world stage.
\nIn China, communist policies were slowly abandoned after Mao's 1976 death, with market reform accelerating during the 1990s. As we might expect, this transformation marked the end of China's period of industrial disruption, and prompted the transition to a period of monetization. From the mid 1990s onward, China's business-to-industry index rose steadily.
\nToday, China is the undisputed center of world industry. But it has yet to become the center of global capitalism. That will surely come. If history teaches us anything, it's that rewiring the circuits of global capital takes longer than resituating industrial capacity. Long after factories fled the shores of London and New York, bankers there continued to monetize the long tail of Western power. Looking to the future, the financiers of Shanghai can almost certainly look forward to similar glory.
\nSo far I've studied capitalist history through the lens of hegemony. But of course, there can be no hegemony in isolation, just as there can be no rulers without followers. In the language of world-systems theory, I've captured the history of the capitalist 'core'. But what of the capitalist 'periphery'? For that matter, what does it mean to be in the 'core' or the 'periphery' of the capitalist system?
\nHere, it's worth a brief digression to discuss the failure of Marxist theory, of which world-systems theory is an extension. For Marx, the key feature of capitalism was the exploitation of workers by capitalists. Workers produce 'surplus value', which is then appropriated by capitalists. Looking at international relations, world-systems theorists extend this idea to regions and countries. As they see it, the 'periphery' of the capitalist system produces surplus value that is then expropriated by the capitalist 'core'.
\nAs with Marx's original thinking, this world-systems extension is seductive but vacuous. The problem comes down to measurement. Marx claimed to explain profit in terms of 'surplus value', but provided no independent way to measure the latter quantity. Likewise, world-systems theorists would like to locate the 'core' of global capitalism by identifying the flow of surplus value, but have no way of doing so. Hence, in practice Marxists simply point to what we already know and apply different verbiage. They look at profit and claim to see 'surplus value'. Meanwhile, world-systems theorists look at international income disparities and infer a regime of exploitation. But without independent measurement, why should we believe either claim?4
\nHere is where the business-to-industry index can (in my opinion) improve world-systems theory. The key insight behind this index \u2014 an insight that originates with Veblen and was later elaborated by Nitzan and Bichler \u2014 is that human industry is a separate beast from capitalist business. Human industry consists of the physical manipulation of the natural world, and can be organized using many different social systems. Capitalist 'business', in contrast, is an ideological practice that monetizes control over property rights. Yes, capitalist control has tended to coincide with industrial development. But we must take care to study these two tendencies separately.
\nWith the business-industry distinction in mind, I propose the following revision of world-systems theory: what defines the 'core' of the capitalist system is not monetary wealth itself, but monetary wealth in the absence of industry. Such a dichotomy is the signature mark of finance \u2014 of monetized control over abstract property rights. Likewise, what defines the 'periphery' of global capitalism is not the lack of monetary wealth, but rather, the lack of monetary wealth in relation to the scale of industry. In other words, places in the capitalist 'periphery' engage in industry that is outside the control of global finance.
\nWith this revision of world-systems theory in hand, let's turn to the global empirical evidence. Widespread international data for the business-to-industry index becomes available only in 1990. Fortunately, this year is significant, as it marked the date when the Soviet Union began to collapse. Figure\u00a07 shows the business-to-industry picture at that moment.
\n\nLooking at this data, we find that the 'core' of the capitalist system resides largely in the collective 'West' (Europe, North America, and Australia), exactly where we expect. Still, there are some surprises. For example, it appears that in 1990, Western Europe was more central to global capitalism than was the United States. Is that really true? Kind of. What the data is actually telling us is that when it comes to business dominance, the United States is not really one country. More on this disunity in a moment.
\nBy 2023, the capitalist world system had changed appreciably. Some of this change is discernible by eyeballing the 2023 business-to-industry data, shown in Figure\u00a08. But in my mind, the degree of global change is best captured by Figure\u00a09, which plots the percentage change in each country's business-to-industry index between 1990 and 2023.
\n\nWhen we stare at this data, it becomes clear that after 500 years of Western hegemony, the center of global capital is shifting eastward. It's future home will almost certainly be in China. Yes, the US and Western Europe continue to ride the long coat-tails of their imperial power. But expect this advantage to wane. When Shanghai becomes the center of global capital, those who keep financial tollbooths in New York and London will probably find that their business runs dry.
\nGiven that the United States is the waning global hegemon, much of the world remains glued to the intricacies of US politics. Of course, most of the unfolding US drama is pure idiocy that's not worth discussing. But beyond the drivel issued by individual politicians, there is a comprehensible structure to US politics \u2014 one that paints a picture of growing disunity. True, the rise of stark American partisanship is well recognized. But what's less understood is the fact that the US partisan divide now plays out along a structural schism in US capitalism.
\nLet me make the case. In Figure\u00a010 I've mapped the business-to-industry index among US states in 2023. My choice of colors and scale is designed to evoke a fairly startling conclusion: across states, the business-to-industry index seems to align with partisan politics. To convince ourselves that this relation is no trick of the eye, Figure\u00a011 shows how each state's business-to-industry index relates to the results of the 2024 presidential election. It seems that the more business-dominated the state, the more it swung for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.
\n\nWhat should we make of this structural schism? For starters, the geographic shape of US capitalism is nothing new. That is, US coastal regions have long been places of business, while the interior of the country has traditionally been a place of industry. Instead, what's new is the fact that partisan politics have become divided along capitalism's structural lines. This was not always so.
\nFigure\u00a012 shows the evolving relation between partisanship in US state legislatures and the state business-to-industry index. Back in 1960, the relationship was muddy but slightly reversed from today. More business-dominated states tended to vote Republican, while more industry-dominated states (traditionally in the South) tended to vote Democrat. However, over the ensuing decades, this relation slowly reversed and then tightened in the opposite direction. Today, more business-dominated states overwhelmingly vote Democrat, while more industry-dominated states are staunchly Republican.
\n\nSo what does this geographic schism tell us? Well, it suggests that in political terms, the US is no longer one country. The business-dominated coasts of the US remain committed to the cosmopolitan ideals that invariably exist at the core of empire. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has rejected these ideals and turned increasingly to (let's face it) American-flavored fascism.
\nHow does this schism play out? Well, it either gets worse, leading to the fracture of the union and potential civil war, or it gets better, leading to renewed national unity. For his part, Trump is pushing the country towards dissolution. (He relishes attacking blue states.) Meanwhile, a determined group of leftists are trying to wrench the Democratic party from its corporate overlords so that they can push mildly socialist policies (that are wildly popular). If these leftists succeed, it's possible that unity could return to US politics. In either case, watch this space.
\nNow that you've indulged my tangent on American politics, let me return to my original reason for calculating the business-to-industry index across US states. Back in Figures\u00a07 and 8, the international data indicated that Western Europe was more business dominated than the United States. This is true but misleading \u2014 an artifact of aggregation.
\nWhen we disaggregate the US into its constituent states, we get the more satisfying picture of the capitalist world system, shown in Figure\u00a013. In 2023, the core of global capitalism was located in Western Europe and along both seaboards of the United States. These are the most business-dominated places on Earth.
\n\nContinuing the analysis, Figure\u00a014 eschews maps for a quantitative summary of business dominance. Overall, this list of the twenty most business-dominated regions is composed largely of US states and Western European countries.
\nWashington DC, the center of US power, tops the list \u2014 a fitting nod to the fact that business success is forged in large part by state power. Moving down the list we find Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Malta \u2014 all notable hubs of finance and tax evasion. Continuing down the list, we get the US coastal states, along with familiar powers of Western Europe. The colonial state of Israel also comes along for the ride, as does the infamous tax haven of Panama. All in all, these business-dominated regions are places of white-collar activity, just as we'd expect. To do 'business' in the Veblenian sense is not to run machines or to build factories; to do 'business' is to manipulate property rights from inside a downtown office.
\n\nNow, before we make too much of this business-dominated list, it's important to recognize that political boundaries necessarily affect the analysis. In terms of physical geography, cities are the locus of business power. So if we draw a political boundary around a city (as with Washington DC), its business-to-industry index will tend to be higher than if we extend the boundary into the industrial hinterland.
\nBecause of this issue, the best way to study the business-to-industry index would be to calculate it for units of constant geographic area. Unfortunately, the requisite statistical data (particularly data for energy consumption) is usually restricted to large-scale political boundaries. So while we might like to know the business-to-industry index of Shanghai or Lower Manhattan, such fine-grain data will likely remain difficult to come by.
\nIn the same vein, large countries like China almost certainly have business-to-industry schisms similar to what's found across the United States (Figure\u00a010). Untangling these divisions is an important job for the future. (Quantitative researchers, take note!)
\nIf you ask a New York financier why their income is so fat, they'll probably echo some neoclassical trope about having 'generated' their earnings through skill and hard work. Likewise, if you asked a feudal lord why they control so many serfs, they'd respond that doing so is their god-given birthright. In both cases, the response has an obvious purpose: to provide an ideological justification for (otherwise arbitrary) power and privilege.
\nFor critics of social injustice, the temptation is to subvert these dominant ideologies by appealing to some (but not all) of their basic tenets. Thus, the critic of feudalism might accept that god gave rights to men, but claim that these rights are distributed equally. Likewise, the critic of capitalism might accept that value is 'produced', but propose that elites are appropriating value created by others. Such arguments make for good rhetoric because they retain enough of the dominant ideology that they remain comprehensible to the indoctrinated mind. Still, these arguments are a scientific dead end; they gain rhetorical power by conceding basic untruths. We humans make our own rights, just as we impose onto the world our own abstract quantities of monetary value.
\nTo scientifically study a social order, I think it is essential to eschew rhetorical tricks and instead adopt some form of dual measurement that contrasts the dominant accounting scheme with an alternative way of measuring the world. In capitalism, the dominant accounting scheme is, of course, money. In contrast, the alternative account could be anything non-monetary (provided that thing is objectively measurable). That said, energy consumption is particularly meaningful because of its biophysical significance. Energy is what keeps life from devolving into a pool of entropic mud. Energy is the 'go of things' \u2026 the 'master resource'.
\nReturning to the notion of 'justness', when we contrast monetary value with energy consumption, it's conceivable that we might find a picture that's balanced. Imagine, if you will, the world of Isaac Asimov's 'spacers' \u2014 future humans who are dispersed on plantation-like compounds in which armies of robots do virtually all the work. Supposing that these spacer compounds exchanged money, we might find that the business-to-industry index was fairly balanced among them.
\nOf course, the real world of 21st century capitalism looks rather different. In our world, places of 'business' are not dispersed plantations manned by robots. They are not even factories manned by ordinary humans. No, places of 'business' consist of shining office towers inside which humans buy, sell, and manage property rights. Places of 'business' are invariably places of finance. Because of this reality, it follows that the geography of capitalism cannot be 'balanced'. By definition, centers of finance are hubs of exclusion \u2014 places that exist because only the few can inhabit them.
\nTestifying to this exclusion, when we run the numbers on the population-weighted distribution of the business-to-industry index, we find that less than a quarter of the world's population inhabit business dominated regions. What's more, less than 1% of the population live in regions where the business-to-industry index exceeds four (the territory of financial hubs like Hong Kong, Switzerland and Ireland, and government hubs like Washington DC). Meanwhile, more than three quarters of the world's population live in places of industry dominance. Figure\u00a015 paints this picture of our bottom-heavy world.
\n\nLet me summarize the main message. In real-world capitalism, the 'normal' human experience is to work hard for little financial gain. Only the lucky few rake in money with their feet up. Here, it's tempting to imagine some unseen flow of value that gets sent from the hard workers to the leisure class. But no such flow exists. The exploitation in capitalism (if it exists) lies in the nature of property rights themselves \u2014 rights which allow the hoarding of monetized institutional power. Industry for the many. Business for the few.
\nHi folks, Blair Fix here. I'm a crowdfunded scientist who shares all of my (painstaking) research for free. If you think my work has value, consider becoming a supporter. You'll help me continue to share data-driven science with a world that needs less opinion and more facts.
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Want to have a closer look at my business-to-industry data? You can download it here.
\nI measure world income in terms of world nominal GDP, denominated in US dollars. Data from 1960 onward is (relatively) unproblematic and comes from the World Bank, series NY.GDP.MKTP.CD \u2014 GDP in current US dollars. Note that the measure of nominal world GDP is influenced by the exchange rate for local currencies. This is a desired effect. To isolate Veblenian 'business', we want a pure measure of financial income, one that makes no attempt to 'correct' for local currency value (and its associated local purchasing power).
\nAs we attempt to measure nominal world GDP for earlier periods, things become more difficult. First, there are some fundamental conceptual problems. For example, prior to the American Revolution (which began in 1775) there was no such thing as an 'American dollar'. Hence, calculating nominal GDP in US dollars involves assuming some currency value for a currency that did not actually exist. Typically, that's done by fixing (and projecting back in time) later exchange rates that do exist.
\nSecond, economic historians tend to be disinterested in nominal incomes. Instead, they use incomes and prices to estimate living standards. Case in point, the Maddison project (an extension of the historian Angus Maddison's seminal work) has extensive data for historical GDP, but it is measured in terms of purchasing power parity. The idea is that across countries, one measures GDP relative to a price index calculated from the same basket of goods.
\nNow in theory, if researchers published their purchasing power indexes for each country, one could use these indexes to 'undo' their inflation adjustment. By doing so, we could recomputed a satisfying measure of world nominal GDP. Unfortunately, the Maddison project does not (to my knowledge) publish its internal data for purchasing power parity. As such, we must hack our way to a measure of nominal world GDP.
\nThe way I create this hack is by first calculating a time series for the US GDP deflator using the following data:
\nNext, I take the US GDP deflator data and use it to convert Maddison's global 'real GDP' data into nominal dollars. I use the following Maddison GDP data:
\nFinally, I splice the nominalized Maddison data backwards from the modern World Bank GDP data. Because this historical data involves a rather heavy-handed hack, one should treat it with appropriate uncertainty.
\nData for British income is calculated using nominal GDP data from Measuring Worth. I use what they call the 'consistent series', which presumes consistent political boundaries for the 'United Kingdom'. This data is denominated in British pounds. I convert the GDP data to US dollars using Measuring Worth data for the dollar-pound exchange rate. For data prior to 1791, I fixed the dollar-pound exchange rate at its 1791 value (4.55 dollars per pound).
\nData for US income (nominal GDP) is calculated using the following sources:
\nData for Chinese income (nominal GDP) is from China's National Bureau of Statistics, using the series marked \"Gross Domestic Product (100 million yuan)\". I convert yuan into dollars using exchange rate data from the IMF, series CHN.USD_XDC.PA_RT.A.
\nTo create the global maps of the business-to-industry index (Figures\u00a07, 8 9, 13) I use nominal GDP data from the World Bank, series NY.GDP.MKTP.CD (GDP in current US dollars).
\nState income (nominal GDP) is from the following source:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nData is from the following sources:
\nTo create the global maps of the business-to-industry index (Figures\u00a07, 8 9, 13) I use per capita energy use data from World Bank (series EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE, kg of oil equivalent per capita) multiplied by World Bank population data (series SP.POP.TOTL). From these results, I exclude nonsensical data where per capita daily energy use is less than the basic food-energy requirement of 2000 kilocalories per day.
\nUS state energy use data is from the Energy Information Agency, State Energy Data System, series TETCB.
\nState voting outcomes are from BallotWire.
\nData for the composition of US state legislatures sums seats in both houses and excludes Nebraska (whose legislature is officially non-partisan). Data comes from the following sources:
\nMy calculations in Figure\u00a015 are based on the international business-to-industry data plotted in Figure\u00a013, which disaggregates the US into its constituent states. To weight by population, I use country population data from the World Bank (series SP.POP.TOTL) and US state population from FRED. The weighted distribution can be conveniently calculated in one line with R's density function, which includes a term for weights.
\ufe0e\nIf we look at the stock of capital that capitalists themselves care about \u2014 market capitalization \u2014 the rate of profit has not fallen. And that's by design; profit is what owners use to perform their ritual of capitalization. If instead we impute a more expansive concept of 'capital' that somehow aggregates across all capital goods, well there we run into trouble. First, owners don't actually care about this form of 'capital', so it's unclear why it matters. Second, aggregating capital goods is a fools errand, since it depends circularly on prices, as the Cambridge capital controversy revealed. (For a nice demonstration of this aggregation problem, see Nitzan and Bichler's discussion in Chapter 8 of Capital as Power.)\ufe0e\n
\ufe0e\nSetting aside the unmeasurable notion of 'labor value', there are many measurable ways in which core-periphery trade is unequal. Alf Hornborg has done much of the seminal work here. For example, his paper 'Footprints in the cotton fields' shows how during the early 19th century, British colonial trade was unequal in terms of the exchange of embodied land and embodied labor time (measured in simple hourly terms). More recently, Jason Hickel and colleagues have found similar unequal patterns in modern world trade.
\nWhile I laud this sort of empirical work, there's a sense in it concedes too much to neoclassical economics. What I mean is that by stressing 'unequal' trade, the analysis presumes that monetary exchange could (and perhaps should) be equal. But this is never true. Instead, the belief in equivalent exchange is the central tenet of capitalist ideology. That is, capitalism consists of an ideology in which property rights are denominated in units of money. It follows, therefore, that monetary exchange is ideologically defined to be equal. So by definition, when I pay $100 for something, I get back $100 worth of property. But since this numerical agreement is an ideological construct, we expect that it is the only part of the exchange that is equal. Every other measurable quantity will be unequal (to differing degrees). So in capitalism, unequal exchange is the norm.
\nNow, there's a sense in which the quantitative nature of capitalism masks the ubiquity of unequal exchange. Things become more obvious when the ideology is qualitative. For examples, Catholics agree that during communion, a blessed wafer becomes 'the Body of Christ'. But suppose that a devout Catholic becomes convinced that a blessed Corvette is also 'the Body of Christ'. This fellow might then exchange a Corvette for a wafer, thinking the exchange 'equal'. But of course, that's absurd. The 'equivalence' is an ideological agreement. Everything else about the exchange is unequal.
\nSo yes, world-systems theorists are correct that trade between the 'core' and the 'periphery' is unequal, in the same way that when a CEO hires a cleaner, a tiny portion of his annual salary buys a whole year of the cleaner's time. That's an unequal exchange of labor time. But then again, this is a rather laborious way to restate what we already know: the CEO's hourly income is much greater than the cleaner's.
\n(Sidenote: This tendency to laboriously restate what stares us in the face is one of Marx's worst legacies. Marx got the ball rolling by defining worker's value-creating ability as the sum of their embodied commodity consumption, which is a laborious way of recalculating wages, which we already knew.)
\nIn a more general sense, the notion of 'unequal exchange' is useful if we focus on commodity trade. However, it becomes unwieldy when we focus on the flow of assets. For example, when Apple shifts its profits to Ireland by selling (dubious) intellectual property to an Irish subsidiary, there is nothing of substance being 'traded'. Instead, Apple is simply moving assets around to juice its US tax return. From these transactions, Irish lawyers and accountants then make a killing.
\nTo call these shenanigans an 'unequal exchange' is to remain stuck in Marx's 19th-century world of commodity production. Indeed, it is to concede too much to neoclassical ideology, which frames market transactions as an extension of simple barter. For capitalists, monetary transactions are not a tool for 'exchange'. They are a tool for organizing power through the purchase and sale of property rights. Or put another way, unequal commodity exchange is a tiny subset of the wider world of unequal power.\ufe0e\n
\n
\nArrighi, G. (1994). The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times. Verso.\n
\n\nFix, B. (2021). The ritual of capitalization. Real-World Economics Review, (97), 78\u201395.\n
\n\nMilanovic, B. (2019). Capitalism, alone: The future of the system that rules the world. Harvard University Press.\n
\n\nNitzan, J., & Bichler, S. (2009). Capital as power: A study of order and creorder. New York: Routledge.\n
\n\nVeblen, T. (1923). Absentee ownership: Business enterprise in recent times: The case of America. Transaction Pub.\n
\n\nWallerstein, I. (2020). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press.\n
\nThe post The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a041p-74c68","guid":"https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/?p=15626","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789776000,"rid":"08vre-23926","summary":"Your browser does not support the audio tag. Download: PDF | EPUB | MP3 | WATCH VIDEO 'Industry' and 'business' \u2026 are not synonyms \u2026 they are opposing realms of human activity . \u2014 Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler A defining feature of neoclassical economics is that it treats 'business' and 'industry' as synonyms.","tags":["Business-to-industry Index","Capital As Power","Communism","Empire","Energy"],"title":"The Business-to-Industry Index and the Geography of Global Capitalism","updated_at":1789889407,"url":"https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2026/09/19/the-business-to-industry-index-and-the-geography-of-global-capitalism/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Public Knowledge Project"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Alperin","given":"Juan Pablo","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9344-7439"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4","created":1690675200,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/1b84e1b5-c7ff-432d-844f-32e175e0f7c4/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"scholcommlab","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","updated":1789598624,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Scholarly Communications Lab | ScholCommLab","blog_slug":"scholcommlab","content_html":"As we recently wrote, there is really no agreed-upon definition of what a preprint is. And even if we could agree, it would not settle the question of what constitutes a preprint server. As we have been looking to study preprints and their role in scholarly communications, we have been looking to generate a directory of servers that, even if flawed or limited, can give us a common starting point for examining preprints and the culture around them.\u00a0
\nUnsurprisingly, we are not alone in this. ASAPbio, an organization dedicated to promoting the use of preprints, is looking to update their directory of preprints. We shared some of our insights with them, and thought some of our feedback might also be more useful to the broader community.\u00a0
\nMost importantly, any directory will need to operationalize their definition of what constitutes a preprint server.\u00a0
\nOur own attempts at constructing a list of preprint servers indicates a wide range of platforms and publishers allow authors to post preprints, but whether these should be called \"preprint servers\" is far from settled. Researchers can post preprints to venues dedicated exclusively to preprints; publish/review/curate platforms; journal-based platforms that publish both preprints and peer-reviewed articles; general repositories that accept preprints among other types of research outputs; and the list goes on.\u00a0
\nWhile there may not be a single or right answer to \"what is a preprint server,\" a directory cannot function as a meaningful community resource without\u00a0 a clear operational definition. Its creators must explain what is included, what is excluded, and why.
\nA useful directory needs more than just a list of venues and services\u2014it requires descriptive information that lets users filter and understand the landscape. The challenge lies in how one captures that information. When assessing whether a server has a particular policy, a simple “yes\" or \"no\" indicating whether a policy is “clear” tells only part of the story. A policy can be clear without being specific, and policies that appear similarly clear can differ substantially in their actual terms.
\nIn our own analysis, we encountered exactly this problem. Instead of forcing policies into binary categories, directories should specify which characteristics matter for each policy area, then document those details explicitly. For example, rather than simply recording whether a server has a withdrawal policy, a directory should indicate who can request a withdrawal, under what circumstances, and how the withdrawal is reflected in the scholarly record. Leave fields blank where no clear policy exists\u2014but do the work of showing what the policy actually says.
\nBuilding a useful directory of preprint servers is more complex than it might initially seem. It requires not just listing which servers exist, but making deliberate choices about which definitions to use and then describing policies with enough nuance that researchers and other stakeholders can actually make informed decisions. Without this intentionality\u2014both in definition and in detail\u2014directories risk becoming incomplete or misleading resources. The good news is that the current moment offers an opportunity to get this right.
\nDOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/zqh03-rx293
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/zqh03-rx293","guid":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/?p=6277","image":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/4.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789516800,"rid":"ysgyz-n4s56","summary":"As we recently wrote, there is really no agreed-upon definition of what a preprint is. And even if we could [\u2026]","tags":["Research","Preprints"],"title":"Advice for a Preprint Services Directory","updated_at":1789797827,"url":"https://www.scholcommlab.ca/2026/09/16/advice-for-a-preprint-services-directory/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/03wc8by49","name":"Posit Software, PBC (United States)"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Clawson","given":"James","url":"https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6756-0607"},{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Kaczmarek","given":"Ursula"},{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/019jywm96","name":"rOpenSci"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Ross","given":"Noam","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2136-0000"},{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Delaney","given":"Scott","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0813-018X"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"3446712e-ab03-4bb7-8641-571dcda8d8cd","created":1787702400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Tracking disruptions to U.S. federal science funding, grant by grant.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grantwitness","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/3446712e-ab03-4bb7-8641-571dcda8d8cd/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grantwitness.org/updates/rogue-scholar.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Other","home_page_url":"https://grantwitness.org/updates?type=updates","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grantwitness","status":"active","subfield":"3321","title":"Grant Witness","updated":1789516800,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Grant Witness","blog_slug":"grantwitness","content_html":"Together with our partner States United Democracy Center, Grant Witness today launched Lost Funds, an interactive tracker that provides a holistic look at federal grants that have been canceled, frozen, delayed, or otherwise interrupted since Trump took office in January 2025. The tool documents $177 billion in federal funding disruptions across all 50 states and Washington D.C., spanning 17 policy sectors, and examines impacts in communities across the country.
\n\"By bringing thousands of funding disruptions from the Trump administration together in one, centralized website, the Lost Funds Tracker puts the magnitude of their impact on full display,\" said Scott Delaney, Co-Founder of Grant Witness. \"The impact of funding cuts at this scale cannot be overstated. These disruptions touch everything from health care and disaster relief to technology and agriculture. The data tells a story about the consequences communities face as a result of the cuts, and the resources they're fighting relentlessly to preserve.\"
\n\"Many states have been fighting the impacts of federal funding disruptions one grant at a time ever since Trump took office,\" said Kelly Rader, Research Director at the States United Democracy Center. \"This is funding for states that has already been approved by Congress. But the Trump administration is trying to take unliteral action to stop that money from reaching the communities it's meant for. Lost Funds illustrates just how widespread these funding cuts are, the scale of the harm they've caused, and how states are once again on the front lines protecting their residents.\"
\nLost Funds provides a comprehensive overview of funding disruptions from the past 20 months, covering the Trump administration's attempt to freeze funding during his first week in office and each subsequent disruption across health care, education, transportation, disaster relief, science and technology, and more. It includes an overview of state efforts to challenge the disruptions and the funding they've restored for their communities.
\nKey takeaways from the Lost Funds national landscape:
\nExplore the national picture and drill down by state, program, sector, and grant recipient here.
\nThe Lost Funds Tracker will be updated regularly as the Trump administration takes new actions to disrupt funding, state lawsuits move through the courts, and stories of consequences in communities are told.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/y27rm-4dq03","guid":"https://doi.org/10.59350/y27rm-4dq03","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789516800,"rid":"126yg-ben14","summary":"Together with our partner States United Democracy Center, Grant Witness today launched Lost Funds, an interactive tracker that provides a holistic look at federal grants that have been canceled, frozen, delayed, or otherwise interrupted since Trump took office in January 2025.","title":"Tracking $177 Billion in Disrupted Federal Grants with the Lost Funds Project","updated_at":1789797806,"url":"https://grantwitness.org/updates/tracking-177-billion-in-disrupted-federal-grants-with-the-lost-funds-project","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Open Humans Foundation"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Greshake Tzovaras","given":"Bastian","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9925-9623"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"c1baf1e7-80ce-43eb-bc1c-a978dd7d62c9","created":1712793600,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Bastian Greshake Tzovaras is an open/citizen science activist and researcher with a background in biology and bioinformatics. He worked as a senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute and Inserm. In 2011, he founded openSNP. He was awarded a PhD","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/tzovar","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/c1baf1e7-80ce-43eb-bc1c-a978dd7d62c9/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://tzovar.as/feed.xml","filter":null,"generator":"Jekyll","home_page_url":"https://tzovar.as/","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"tzovar","status":"active","subfield":"3305","title":"Bastian Greshake Tzovaras |","updated":1789562700,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Bastian Greshake Tzovaras |","blog_slug":"tzovar","content_html":"\nHow we politicize technology in service of a better world is an open and contested question.\nA few days ago I shared a piece on historicising enshittification. \nIn it, Arvind L. U. explores the limits of how Doctorow's framing around that term is both ahistorical, in that it limits itself to a view that ignores the realities of the global south, and lacking imagination for not even considering a real alternative political economy of the internet.\nIn response, Henrik shared a quote out of Digital Solidarity \u2013 a new book by Aline Blankertz and Malte Engeler \u2013 which similarly considers the enshittification framing to conceal the fact that it's the pinnacle of capitalism and not an aberration.
\nIntrigued by this, I really wanted to read the whole, longer argument that Aline & Malte are making in their book.\nLuckily, I managed to score a review copy of it, which I went through over the weekend.\nAs the book is unfortunately right now only available in German, I thought I'd at least attempt to give a small review and summary of why I'm glad I read it.
\nStructurally, the book is divided into two parts:\nThe first half analyses the status quo of capitalist digitization.\nHow does the spread of digital technologies help legitimize and drive capitalism and authoritarian structures? \nThe second half then dives into their counter proposal of digital solidarity and how digital technologies could be used in an emancipatory way.\nJointly, both halves explore which technologies can be appropriated for progressive causes (and how), and which ones are irredeemable.
\nThe first half of the book starts off very strong.\nIt outlines well how society has \u2013 at least in parts intentionally \u2013 been shaped to a certain level of apathy about the future, in which societal progress for many has been reduced to the production cycles of new devices and software.\nAnd in which collective imaginaries make the existing capitalist appear natural, where people might consider rejecting discrimination based on race, but not overcoming class society.
\nLaunching from this, the book also provides a great exploration of how & why much of contemporary tech critique is failing by not focusing on the underlying capitalist structures that work as expected.\nWhether that's Zuboffs surveillance capitalism that appeals to the managerial class to please implement ethical business practices, technofeudalism or the above mentioned enshittification by Doctorow, which proposes the solution in enforcing more market competition and regulation.\nThey all locate the solution to existing problems with technology by making minor tweaks to the dominant economic dynamics, which not only do not question the reign of capitalism overall but risk reinforcing it.
\nThe meat of the critical analysis that follows consists of countering three of the big myths that surround digital technologies and the internet. Namely, that digitization is progress, that the internet democratizes and that open source can offer a counter to capitalist logics. \nOn the first point, Aline and Malte do a great job of exploring how the myth of digitally mediated progress takes the shape of a cyber-libertarianism that rejects the collective in favor of the individual, their responsibility and market forces.\nThis includes how the common ideas that degoogling, self-hosting, and a focus on privacy can end up not being emancipatory praxis, but libertarian isolation that in turn promotes technologies like cryptocurrencies and culminates in fascist ideals.
\nThese tendencies are tied neatly into the review of the democratizing potential of digital technology, which draws from the same cyber-libertarian framing\u2014and has mostly led to a concentration of power. \nPlatforms like Spotify, Airbnb, Uber etc. by no means have driven democratization, but have helped concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the platforms.\nAnalogous to how the push for generative 'AI' is working towards ensuring that creative activities will have to rely on renting AI-assistance.
\nI particularly enjoyed the last myth, on open source as counter culture, as it hits very close to home.\nFraming open source as the electric car of digital politics is in equal parts hilarious and fitting \u2013 especially in the context of German car culture:\nJust as the electric car is a step up over the internal combustion engine but doesn't challenge the car-centrism, open source software (OSS) has benefits over proprietary software but doesn't very little if anything to challenge the extractive nature of big technology corporations, which themselves profit tremendously from OSS.1
\nSuch extractivism is a tendency that is now even indirectly promoted through companies and civil society organisations alike2, by using labels such as digital public goods or digital public infrastructures, which contribute to concealing the ways in which the value from unpaid volunteer labor flows into corporations all while enshrining the offering of digital services as a task for society.\nAlong those lines, much of OSS also at least implicitly reproduces the dominant thinking and technological affordances of big technology companies and thus giving credence to them.
\nBut an emancipatory alternative to e.g. corporate-controlled social media needs to be more than just Twitter but open source.\nWhich OSS often falls short of, thanks to top-down control structures which are most often under the hegemony of an homogeneous (white, cis, male) elite.
\nAs already briefly mentioned above, the way that privacy is also used as a common concept by cyber-libertarians who focus on the creation of a hyper-individualist is getting some well deserved attention as well.\nThe EU's GDPR privacy regulations are equally the focus of a critical discussion, highlighting the explicitly colonial aspects of the regulation (by having a global ambition of forcing the rest of the world to adapt those rules as well) as well as the capitalist logic it operates in (by reinforcing that profit motives decide when & how personal data is used).
\nAnd lastly, there is of course the tight coupling between the technologies pushed by technology corporations and their relationship to authoritarianism, the military industrial complex, and eugenics, etc\u2026\nAll while society glorifies tech managers for bringing salvation progress, helping foster fascist praise for strong leaders.3
After all that critical analysis, the change of pace to envisioning a positive alternative was more than welcome.\nAnd Malte & Aline contrast their vision of digital solidarity very nicely with the currently trendy digital sovereignty.\nFaced with the political and economic violence touted by the United States, the European Union and many of their member states are touting the latter as an alternative.4\nWhile it might sound catchy, it generally falls squarely into the same nationalistic tropes of just needing an EU-based competitor to US big-tech instead of actively bringing about change.5
\nIn contrast, digital solidarity touches on the emancipation of the people using technology.\nHighlighting the original demands of the luddites \u2013 wanting a say in which technology is used and how \u2013 it explores how the digital could be different.\nOne bit I found particularly interesting was the framework by Andrea Vetter, which I didn't know before. Building on Illich's Tools for Conviviality, her work outlines 5 dimensions to assess technologies for their conviviality: Their impact on (human) connections, their accessibility, their interactions with the living world and their appropriateness in terms of resource input and output.
\nBased on their own luddite-informed model, and taking Vetter into account, Aline and Malte build their own criteria for an emancipatory technology critique:
\nBased on these three criteria, they outline nicely why 'AI' can not be used by the left as an emancipatory tool, for failing on all three counts:\nBy its very nature, it's a technology that does not harmonize abilities but concentrates power in the hands of the few, due to the requirements for large amounts of capital and training data, its inherent force for removing individual agency that removes collective action and the biases encoded in all training data.\nIt also is explicitly a technology that is created and marketed as \"all-purpose\", failing the question of excluding unwanted uses.\nAnd with respect to its appropriateness, the ecological, economical and societal damages have been documented extensively, for example due to resource use (water, fossil fuels, rare earth minerals mined in the global south\u2026) for 'AI' data centers.
\nIn the following chapters, the book goes on to outline a more positive view of how digital solidarity can form a counter model to the predominant discourses that suck up a lot of oxygen, without offering transformative options.\nActs of resistance, individual ones such as algorithmic sabotage, robot vandalism against (allegedly) self-driving cars, or the hacking of nazi dating platforms or collective ones such as group efforts against data centers can be one tool.\nAnd so can positive interventions such as repair-cafes, if they are sufficiently politicized to move beyond just the individual benefit.
\nThe bigger step and challenge proposed is about the ownership of the digital platforms.\nIn their current configurations, the harms created by them are a direct consequence of the extractivist profit logics they operate under:\nReal estate platforms deploy data science methods to help landlords to extract the maximum possible rents (and thus also maximize their own income).\nAnd the same applies to digital streaming services, and basic digital infrastructures like data centers in the hands of corporations.
\nUltimately, the book makes a convincing argument how shifting the control from private ownership into the collective would allow designing technologies that benefit everyone instead.\nWithout falling prey to tinkering on the margins by asking for interoperability, open source/data, it centers on envisioning technology that serves the public benefit and breaks with the capitalist logics.\nBuilding on Graeber & Wengrow, it shows how democratic control of the digital \u2013 that includes the freedom to leave, no obey and to build new social systems \u2013 can offer an alternative to the existing tech authoritarianism.
\nJointly, Aline & Malte make a great contribution to envision fights for digital technologies \u2013 and societies \u2013 that are anti-authoritarian, post-capitalist, and emancipatory.\nIf you read German, Digital Solidarity makes a great read to sharpen your thinking about how to approach the critique of digital technologies and gives a lot of food for thought on how to approach your own activism to overcome the status quo.\nAnd if you don't read German, my hope is that some of you are now at least curious about the concept.\nMaybe even enough to ask your favorite lefty publisher for suggesting putting out a translated version? ;-)
\nThere is also a good bit about the Open Source Initiative's open-washing of 'AI' through their misguided definition of 'open source AI', which explicitly does not require opening up training data and thus is mostly a push to legitimize these corporations' open-washing by giving an official label.\u00a0\u21a9
\nI'm glad to see more people critically evaluating civil society associations and other NGOs for their role in legitimizing existing power structures in their continuous quest for funding of full-time positions.\u00a0\u21a9
\nAs the book outlines, fascists profiting and putting technology into their service is not new, as IBM and the Holocaust demonstrates so well.\u00a0\u21a9
\nAlso here the role of civil society actors is highlighted for good reason: In their quest for funding and influence, many of them are uncritically jumping on that bandwagon as well.\u00a0\u21a9
\nAs an aside: The director general of the French National Institute for Geography tried to reframe sovereignty in an imho interesting way during his closing remarks of the State of the Map conference: The lesson from the commons is that sovereignty is not only about control. Sovereignty is not about closing doors, closing frontiers. You can also build sovereignty thanks to openness, [\u2026] thanks to cooperation. Thanks Marcos, for the transcription.\u00a0\u21a9
\n[From Arfon]
\nEarlier this year I announced that I was stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of JOSS after ten years in the role, and we put out a call for a new EiC. Today I'm delighted to announce that Daniel S. Katz is taking over as Editor-in-Chief, effective 18 September 2026.
\nDan was one of the people who helped shape JOSS before it even existed. He was part of the small group who helped refine what JOSS should be (and shouldn't be) in the months before we launched in May 2016. He went on to become one of our most active Associate Editors-in-Chief, and has been deeply involved in every significant editorial decision the journal has made over the past decade. I can't think of anyone better placed to lead JOSS into its next chapter.
\nDan and I will be working together over the coming weeks to transition EiC responsibilities.
\n[From Dan]
\nWhen Arfon first told me he was thinking of stepping down, back in 2019 while we were at Murrayfield Rugby Stadium (for a conference of course), I wondered if and how JOSS would survive. Fortunately, in the seven years since then, JOSS continued to thrive and grow, overcoming obstacles like the initial Covid period and then the increased impact of generative AI.
\nBy the time Arfon started talking about stepping down again last year, I had become confident that the JOSS community of associate-editors-in-chief (AEiCs) and editors would be able to keep the journal going. So when I applied to be EiC, I had a mix of feelings that included satisfaction about what we have done so far, confidence about the future and that our community could handle it, and some remaining fear about what I didn't know and wouldn't find out until I started.
\nNow, on the cusp of this transition, I'm really looking forward to working with the full JOSS community, including AEiCs and editors who have ideas about how we can improve the journal and its processes, other community members who continue to submit software and papers and to review them, and of course, Arfon, who we will continue to rely on as both the past/founding EiC and the continuing JOSS tech lead.
\nJOSS, as a developer-friendly diamond open access journal for research software packages that itself runs like an open source project and is a member of the open source community, isn't changing, and we'll continue to work collectively to improve research software and its recognition, and to provide scholarly credit for its developers and maintainers. Please join us by submitting or volunteering to review, and keep an eye out for other opportunities to contribute.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59349/pzaq7-0aq48","guid":"https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/09/daniel-katz-new-editor-in-chief","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789689600,"rid":"zrh9j-8v522","summary":"[From Arfon] Earlier this year I announced that I was stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of JOSS after ten years in the role, and we put out a call for a new EiC. Today I'm delighted to announce that Daniel S. Katz is taking over as Editor-in-Chief, effective 18 September 2026. Dan was one of the people who helped shape JOSS before it even existed.","tags":["Announcements"],"title":"Daniel S. Katz is the new Editor-in-Chief of JOSS","updated_at":1789749931,"url":"https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/09/daniel-katz-new-editor-in-chief","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Eden","given":"Terence","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9265-9069"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc","created":1788652800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Regular nonsense about tech and its effects \ud83d\ude43","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/shkspr","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/61ce553a-bafd-4aba-a952-d3bab5e85bcc/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/feed/DOI","filter":"category:-1982","generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog","issn":"2753-1570","language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"shkspr","status":"active","subfield":"1712","title":"Terence Eden's Blog","updated":1789810393,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Terence Eden's Blog","blog_slug":"shkspr","content_html":"The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Moli\u00e8re's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny!
\n\nIt is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to \"Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom them from the age of four and keep them imprisoned so they become perfect submissives.\"
\n\nIs the fear of cuckoldry funny? Is it OK to laugh at a jealous rage which leads to controlling behaviour? Should we find joy in the emotional torment of our characters?
\n\nYes! Yes! And yes!
\n\nThe cast squeeze every last drop of humour from the script, the direction is nimble, and the play has been edited down to a more manageable 75ish minutes (plus extra time for corpsing and applause).
\n\nA simply joyous production which left us grinning throughout.
\n\nYou can see all their upcoming shows - which are very reasonably priced.
\n\nI'm a believer in making the entire visit to the theatre a special experience. Riverside Studio, Hammersmith is a great venue with generous foyer space and more than adequate toilet provision. Not a given in London theatres!
\n\nThe theatre programme is digital and provided via QR code. No \u00a36 rip off for a booklet full of adverts here.
\n\nAs we walked in, the cast were dotted around the stage an in the auditorium doing various bits of business which made for a jolly start.
\n\nPost curtain call there was a lovely speech from the cast thanking us for attending and letting us know about their future projects. Nothing wrong with a piece of shameless advertising to a captive audience \ud83d\ude04
\n\nOverall an excellent theatrical experience.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/r0cff-96c14","guid":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=75485","image":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/wives.webp","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789689600,"rid":"33070-9q085","summary":"The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Moli\u00e8re's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to \"Women!","tags":["/etc/","Theatre Review"],"title":"Theatre Review: The School for Wives - at Riverside Studios","updated_at":1789731310,"url":"https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/theatre-review-the-school-for-wives/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin, Open Research Office Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Duine","given":"Maaike","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3412-7192"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1789648456,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"Faires, wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung, nicht zuletzt durch die Priorisierungsagenda der BUA-Einrichtungen zur Umsetzung des Open-Science-Leitbilds und das Positionspapier zu Open Research der Berliner Landesinitiative. Doch welche Alternativen zu etablierten, oft kommerziellen Publikationswegen gibt es eigentlich, und wie funktionieren sie?
\nIn diesem einst\u00fcndigen Lunch Meeting stellen wir Ihnen ausgew\u00e4hlte Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales Publizieren vor, von fachspezifischen Verlagen wie SciPost oder Open Library of Humanities bis hin zu neuen Publishing-Tools wie Octopus. Ein Praxisbericht von Forschenden erg\u00e4nzt die Vorstellung der Publishing-Tools. Dar\u00fcber hinaus geben wir Einblick in die Angebote von Berlin Universities Publishing. Im Anschluss bleibt ausreichend Zeit f\u00fcr Fragen und Diskussion.
\nDas Meeting findet im Rahmen der internationalen Open Access Week statt und richtet sich an alle Forschenden, die mehr \u00fcber faire und offene Publikationsm\u00f6glichkeiten erfahren m\u00f6chten. Das Thema der diesj\u00e4hrigen Open Access Week lautet \"The Cost of Knowledge\": Entsprechend nehmen wir das Motto zum Anlass, um Alternativen zu kommerziell ausgerichteten Publikationsm\u00f6glichkeiten vorzustellen.
\nOffen und fair Publizieren: Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales, nicht-kommerzielles Publizieren\n-Wann: Montag, 19.10.2026, 13:00-14:00 Uhr\n-Wo: Online\n-Registrierung: Anmeldung per Webex\n
Organisiert von:
\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/xcjqw-q0t82","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=4343","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789603200,"rid":"99595-v5p57","summary":"Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales, nicht-kommerzielles Publizieren Faires, wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung, nicht zuletzt durch die Priorisierungsagenda der BUA-Einrichtungen zur Umsetzung des Open-Science-Leitbilds und das Positionspapier zu Open Research der Berliner Landesinitiative.","tags":["Allgemein","Aktuelles","Berlin","Bibliotheken","Open Access"],"title":"Online Lunch Meeting: Offen und fair Publizieren","updated_at":1789716613,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2026/09/17/online-lunch-meeting-offen-und-fair-publizieren/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/041qv0h25","name":"Deutsches Arch\u00e4ologisches Institut, Zentrale"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"von Schr\u00f6der","given":"Asta","url":"https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5852-771X"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"d21c5e78-88bc-432c-a20b-4e8a8ead1693","created":1752796800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Wissenslabor f\u00fcr naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen und objektzentrierte Daten","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/winoda","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/d21c5e78-88bc-432c-a20b-4e8a8ead1693/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://winoda.de/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://winoda.de","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"winoda","status":"active","subfield":"1209","title":"WiNoDa Knowledge Lab","updated":1789654043,"use_api":false},"blog_name":"WiNoDa Knowledge Lab","blog_slug":"winoda","content_html":"\n
Was lange w\u00e4hrt, wird endlich gut \u2013 oder so hei\u00dft es.
Mit dem Start des Wintersemesters geht das WiNoDa Knowledge Lab noch einmal richtig in die Vollen: BYOD data clinic am 6. und 9. Oktober 2026, Finale des WiNoDa Hackathon am 14./15. Oktober 2026, WiNoDa Konferenz am 21. Oktober 2026 \u2013 und auch unsere Selbstlernkurse wollen wir noch einmal \"richtig\" gl\u00e4nzen lassen.
Deshalb laden wir alle Interessierten ein, teilzunehmen an unserer WiNoDa Data Expedition: F\u00fcnf Wochen begleitetes Selbststudium rund um Forschungsdaten, Sammlungen und digitale Methoden \u2013 nat\u00fcrlich kostenfrei auf https://moodle.winoda.de/!
Wenn Ihr Euren Lernplan lieber selbst gestalten m\u00f6chtet, aber den Austausch mit anderen nicht missen wollt\u2013 dann ist die WiNoDa Data Expedition genau richtig! Ihr k\u00f6nnt Euch mit den Kursentwicklern austauschen, Eure Fragen stellen und gemeinsam \u00fcberlegen, wie sich das Gelernte konkret anwenden l\u00e4sst. Und Ihr trefft Menschen wieder, denen Ihr vielleicht schon bei einem Webinar oder Workshop begegnet seid\u2013 jetzt habt Ihr endlich Zeit, Euch n\u00e4her kennenzulernen.
\nWir starten alle gemeinsam am
\nDirekt danach beginnt Eure
\n) unsere Kurse absolvieren wollt, bleibt Eurer Entscheidung \u00fcberlassen. F\u00fcr jeden absolvierten Kurs erhaltet Ihr einen Badge und ein Zertifikat.Zum Abschluss treffen wir uns noch einmal alle gemeinsam am
\nAlle unsere Selbstlernkurse sind auf englisch. Die Fertigstellung eines jeden Kurses wird mit einem Zertifikat bescheinigt.
\nDie Registrierung bleibt w\u00e4hrend der gesamten Data Expedition ge\u00f6ffnet \u2013 Nachz\u00fcgler sind jederzeit willkommen!
\nKursangebot","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/w6zk6-8pb65","guid":"https://winoda.de/?p=15680","image":"https://winoda.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Data-Expedition.png","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1789603200,"rid":"nbgw5-3tm14","summary":"Was lange w\u00e4hrt, wird endlich gut \u2013 oder so hei\u00dft es.Mit dem Start des Wintersemesters geht das WiNoDa Knowledge Lab noch einmal richtig in die Vollen: BYOD data clinic am [\u2026]","tags":["WiNoDa Knowledge Lab Journal","CfP","Datenkompetenz","FDM","OER"],"title":"Call for Participants: WiNoDa Data Expedition, 01.10.-05.11.2026. F\u00fcnf Wochen begleitetes Selbststudium rund um Forschungsdaten, Sammlungen und digitale Methoden.","updated_at":1789716613,"url":"https://winoda.de/2026/09/17/call-for-participants-winoda-data-expedition-01-10-05-11-2026-fuenf-wochen-begleitetes-selbststudium-rund-um-forschungsdaten-sammlungen-und-digitale-methoden/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"affiliation":[{"id":"https://ror.org/046ak2485","name":"Freie Universit\u00e4t Berlin"}],"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Fischer","given":"Georg","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5620-5759"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2","created":1694476800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":null,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/oaberlin","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/52aefd81-f405-4349-b080-754395a5d8b2/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin","issn":null,"language":"deu","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"oaberlin","status":"active","subfield":"1802","title":"Open Research Blog Berlin","updated":1789648456,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Open Research Blog Berlin","blog_slug":"oaberlin","content_html":"
- RRP - Reusability and its relevance (Basic, ca. 40 minutes)
- RRP - Reusing object-related research data (Basic, ca. 1.5 hours)
- RDM - Core concepts of data quality in research data management (Intermediate, ca. 1,5 hours)
- RDM - Data Governance. Strategies for quality improvement in collection data (Intermediate, ca. 2 hours)
- Regulatory Frameworks for Data Acquisition in Fieldwork (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
- ATR 1 - Introduction: Basic concepts, terminology and workflow of Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) (Basic, ca. 2 hours)
- ATR 2 - Deep Dive: Preprocessing and software selection (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
- ATR 3 \u2013 Deep Dive: Transcription and semantic enrichment (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
- ATR 4 - Deep Dive: Model Training and Publishing (Basic, ca. 1 hour)
Weitere Kurse sind noch in der Entwicklung und werden zu Moodle hinzugef\u00fcgt, sobald sie fertig sind.
Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research.
\nAnmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf unseren Partnereinrichtungen und auf Veranstaltungen, die sich an die \u00d6ffentlichkeit richten bzw. die offen sind f\u00fcr Angeh\u00f6rige der Wissenschafts- und Kulturerbeeinrichtungen in Berlin. Wir erg\u00e4nzen diese Liste gerne (Info bitte via Mail ans OROB).\n\n
Wie gehen Einrichtungen des Kulturerbes mit den Zeugnissen der Vergangenheit um? Nutzen sie diese, um bestimmte Sichtweisen historischer Entwicklungen zu st\u00fctzen, oder \u00fcberlassen sie die Bewertung den Nutzenden und erm\u00f6glichen vor allem den Zugang zu den Quellen? W\u00e4hrend Museen mit kuratierten Ausstellungen h\u00e4ufig st\u00e4rker interpretierend arbeiten, verstehen sich Archive und Bibliotheken traditionell eher als Einrichtungen, die sich auf den Zugang zu ihren Best\u00e4nden konzentrieren. Diese Rollenverteilung ger\u00e4t jedoch unter Druck, wenn es um ein schwieriges Erbe \u2013 etwa rassistische oder antisemitische Zeugnisse \u2013 geht: Archive werden kritisiert, wenn sie scheinbar ungefilterten Zugang gew\u00e4hren, w\u00e4hrend zugleich geschichtspolitische Eingriffe in Kulturerbeeinrichtungen kontrovers diskutiert werden.
\n2026 findet die dritte Ausgabe des gro\u00dfen OER-Fachtags von ORCA.nrw statt. Freuen Sie sich \u00fcber den Tag hinweg auf eine spannende Keynote, Projektvorstellungen, Workshops und viel Austausch & Vernetzung!
\nIm Vortrag wird, ankn\u00fcpfend an das Blockchain-Projekt f\u00fcr digitale Zeugnisse, die EUDI-Wallet thematisiert. Die Historie der Entwicklung dieser digitalen Brieftasche auf EU-Ebene wird vorgestellt und die Funktionen und M\u00f6glichkeiten sowie Detailinformationen zur Sicherheit werden erl\u00e4utert. Der aktuelle Stand der Entwicklung wird betrachtet und in Form einer Demo wird die Nutzung an einem konkreten Beispiel veranschaulicht. Nach einem Blick auf zuk\u00fcnftige Entwicklungen im Bereich \"Digitaler Identit\u00e4ten\", wie z. B. Post-Quanten-Verschl\u00fcsselung oder Alternative Biometrische Identifikationsverfahren (AuBi) schlie\u00dft der Abend mit Raum f\u00fcr Diskussionen \u00fcber die Technologie und deren Nutzung.
\nDer Einsatz von KI Technologien erstreckt sich zunehmend auf zentrale Bereiche politischer Steuerung, von der \u00f6ffentlichen Verwaltung und der Umweltpolitik bis hin zu Grenzregimen und wirtschaftlicher Regulierung. Dabei ver\u00e4ndern sie nicht nur Verfahren; es verschieben sich Machtkonstellationen, Verantwortung und politische Handlungsspielr\u00e4ume. Das Symposium mit \u00f6ffentlicher Paneldiskussion diskutiert KI als systemische Herausforderung f\u00fcr Demokratie und Rechtsstaat. Die Veranstaltung bietet kurze Einf\u00fchrungen in verschiedene Schwerpunkte unserer Forschung und erm\u00f6glicht eine kollaborative Plattform zur Diskussion der systemischen Kosten algorithmischer Governance f\u00fcr demokratische Strukturen. Dies schafft einen offenen Raum f\u00fcr Austausch mit politischen Entscheidungstr\u00e4ger*innen, Vertreter*innen von NGOs, Forschenden sowie allen, die an der Zukunft einer digitalen Gesellschaft interessiert sind.
\nDas Digitale ist ein gro\u00dfes Versprechen: Physische R\u00e4ume und pers\u00f6nliche Speichermedien scheinen ganz \u00fcberfl\u00fcssig zu werden, die Cloud soll ortsunabh\u00e4ngigen, schnellen Zugriff und unbegrenzten Speicherplatz erm\u00f6glichen. Aber was kostet das, welche L\u00f6sungen sind sicher und umweltvertr\u00e4glich?\u00a0Gemeinsam mit bestandserhaltenden Einrichtungen und Vertreter:innen aus Wissenschaft und Forschung wollen wir das Versprechen des Digitalen \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und konstruktive Vorschl\u00e4ge zur longue dur\u00e9e des digitalen Erbes entwickeln. Es sprechen u.v. a.: Frank Scholze (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek), Richard Ovenden (Bodleian Library Oxford) und Petra Gehring (Rat f\u00fcr Informationsinfrastrukturen).
\nDas Open Science Forum Mitteldeutschland 2026 bringt am 5. Oktober Interessierte zu einem offenen Austausch \u00fcber Open Science als Gestaltungsaufgabe zusammen. Wir widmen uns der Frage, welche Rolle wissenschaftsunterst\u00fctzende Einrichtungen spielen, wenn es um neue Ans\u00e4tze in der Forschungsbewertung, nachhaltige Infrastrukturen und digitale Souver\u00e4nit\u00e4t im Spannungsfeld geopolitischer Entwicklungen geht.
\nIn Archiven, Bibliotheken und anderen Ged\u00e4chtniseinrichtungen lagern bundesweit gef\u00e4hrdete Originale, die Meinungsvielfalt, Rechtsordnungen, historische Entwicklungen und politisches Handeln dokumentieren. Der Erhalt dieser \u00dcberlieferungen ist Grundvoraussetzung f\u00fcr eine quellen- und faktenbasierte Forschung, eine historische Aufarbeitung sowie die Sichtbarmachung gesellschaftlicher Mehrstimmigkeit und Diskurse. Originalerhalt ist grundlegender Bestandteil der Informationssicherung und ein wichtiger Beitrag zu einer lebendigen, urteilsf\u00e4higen und wehrhaften Demokratie \u2013 insbesondere angesichts der zunehmenden Bedrohung durch hybride Desinformation und andere demokratiegef\u00e4hrdende Entwicklungen.
\nDie FDM-Sprechstunde Humanities@NFDI ist eine Online-Beratung f\u00fcr Studierende, Forschende oder Mitarbeitende aus Forschungs- und Sammlungsinstitutionen zu allen Fragen rund um das Forschungsdatenmanagement. Expert:innen aus den geisteswissenschaftlichen NFDI-Konsortien NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Objects und Text+ stehen f\u00fcr Ihre Fragen zu allen Themen rund ums Forschungsdatenmanagement bereit. Bei Bedarf k\u00f6nnen Einzelgespr\u00e4che in Breakoutr\u00e4umen vertieft werden.
\nIncreasing consolidation and commercial control over all aspects of knowledge comes at a cost. This year's theme challenges us to consider the financial, human, and environmental costs of creating, sharing, and sustaining knowledge\u2014particularly when these costs are driven by private rather than public interests. Last year's theme of \"Who owns our knowledge?\" reflected on the reality of commercial ownership of knowledge. This year's theme will reckon with the costs of that reality and avenues for reclaiming control of these systems meant to serve the public interest.
\nIn diesem Workshop lernen die Teilnehmenden datenschutzkonforme KI-Anwendungen und Einsatzm\u00f6glichkeiten kennen, die neue Wege f\u00fcr die Nachnutzung von Forschungsdaten erm\u00f6glichen und zur Verbesserung von Datenqualit\u00e4t, Metadatenverf\u00fcgbarkeit und Zug\u00e4nglichkeit beitragen. Mithilfe konkreter Anwendungsf\u00e4lle aus der Forschung werden die rechtssicheren Einsatzm\u00f6glichkeiten der KI im Datenlebenzyklus vorgestellt.
\nFaires, wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren gewinnt zunehmend an Bedeutung, nicht zuletzt durch die Priorisierungsagenda der BUA-Einrichtungen zur Umsetzung des Open-Science-Leitbilds und das Positionspapier zu Open Research der Berliner Landesinitiative. Doch welche Alternativen zu etablierten, oft kommerziellen Publikationswegen gibt es eigentlich, und wie funktionieren sie? In diesem einst\u00fcndigen Lunch Meeting stellen wir Ihnen ausgew\u00e4hlte Orte und Tools f\u00fcr digitales Publizieren vor.
\nDer Workshop f\u00fchrt in die Grundfunktionen von OpenRefine ein und zeigt an konkreten Anwendungsf\u00e4llen, wie Forschende tabellarische Datens\u00e4tze bereinigen, strukturieren und anreichern k\u00f6nnen. Dabei werden auch geskriptete Bearbeitungsschritte sowie der Import und Export verschiedener Datenformate (CSV, XML, JSON) behandelt. OpenRefine erm\u00f6glicht nicht nur einen schnellen \u00dcberblick \u00fcber gro\u00dfe Datens\u00e4tze, sondern hilft vor allem bei heterogenen und historisch gewachsenen Datens\u00e4tze, die oft inkonsistente Metadaten aufweisen.
\nDer Workshop gibt einen \u00dcberblick \u00fcber ELN-Konzepte, zeigt relevante Forschungsdatenmanagement-Aspekte auf und bietet eine praktische Einf\u00fchrung.
\nDer Aktionstag \"Forschungsdaten@BUA\" l\u00e4dt erstmals Forschende der Berlin University Alliance herzlich ein, \u00fcber den Umgang mit Forschungsdaten ins Gespr\u00e4ch zu kommen, sich auszutauschen und zu vernetzen. Ziel ist es, Best Practices sichtbar zu machen, Erfahrungen auszutauschen und den Dialog \u00fcber den Umgang mit Forschungsdaten \u00fcber die vier BUA-H\u00e4user hinweg auszubauen.
\nIm Rahmen dieses Hands-on-Workshops werden Konzepte zum effizienten, reproduzierbaren und nachvollziehbaren Arbeiten mit Forschungsdaten vermittelt. Ziel ist es, die Teilnehmenden mit verschiedenen Werkzeugen vertraut zu machen und das Bewusstsein f\u00fcr Computational Thinking, Automatisierung sowie die Optimierung eigener Arbeitsprozesse zu sch\u00e4rfen.
\nIm Forschungsalltag stehen Forschende regelm\u00e4\u00dfig vor urheberrechtlichen Fragen: Welche Inhalte darf ich in meiner Arbeit verwenden? Unter welchen Bedingungen kann ich Daten und Materialien offen teilen? Wie gehe ich mit KI-Tools und deren Trainingsdaten rechtssicher um? Dieser Workshop bietet praxisnahe Orientierung f\u00fcr den sicheren Umgang mit gesch\u00fctzten Inhalten und Lizenzen in der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit.
\nIn our three-part workshop series, we explore the relationship between the technical aspects, practical applications and critical reflection of the use of AI in research data management. Participants will learn about various AI tools and use cases for research data management, test, and develop criteria for the meaningful and responsible use of AI in their own work.
\nweiter zu November 2026 [in K\u00fcrze]
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/pzvzm-f9w08","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=4297","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1788220800,"rid":"208kg-aed59","summary":"Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research. Anmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen.","tags":["Veranstaltungshinweise"],"title":"Veranstaltungshinweise Oktober 2026","updated_at":1789716611,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2026/09/01/veranstaltungshinweise-oktober-2026/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":57622,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":57622}