An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Lana Swartz (University of Virginia and IASH-SSPS Research Fellow 2021):
Scam: Shadowing the Digital Economy
Abstract:
This work-in-progress paper presents thinking from my book project, which seeks to understand—and trouble—the cultural meaning of “scams” in the digital age. I theorize “scams” as capitalism out of place: what we call a scam is used to perform boundary work that delegitimates certain forms of economic activity (and exploitation) and legitimates others. Scams (and the idea of “scams”) are particularly important to understand at the present historical conjuncture because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate capitalism seem to be in flux. In part, this is due to a larger cultural turn away from traditional institutions of the capitalist economy and of its twin, consumer protection. In addition, the social web has proven to be fertile ground for both the cultivation of a world in which scams make sense and the diffusion of scams themselves. In the popular imagination as well as the academic literature, scams are seen as individualistic. A “confidence game” is usually imagined as one with two players, or at least two teams: the con artist and the mark. My research unsettles this, characterizing the “network scam,” decentralized and without a clear set of “perpetrators” or “victims,” a kind of shadow multitude.
Please contact iash@ed.ac.uk for a link to join the seminar. Please note this seminar begins at the later time of 16:00 BST.