CAMRI | Calendar

Digital platforms, redistribution and mutual aid @ University of Westminster

Feb 27 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with Dr Jonathan Paylor and Dr Rebecca Bramall (University of the Arts London), exploring crowdfunding’s possibilities and implications.

Details

Platform companies, policymakers and commentators claim that crowdfunding empowers citizens and makes finance more accessible and egalitarian. Critical scholars of crowdfunding such as Kenworthy (2024) cast doubt over such claims of democratisation, arguing that this platformized mode of voluntary transfer legitimates welfare state entrenchment, undermines tax-funded public services, entrenches inequalities and ultimately serves to maintain the neoliberal order. Such critical work offers a valuable corrective to celebratory accounts of crowdfunding, yet it tends to conceptualize crowdfunding and taxation as essentially rivalrous social mechanisms, overlooking the ‘heterogeneity and diversity of the economic modalities’ (Langley and Leyshon 2017) at play in fundraising settings. Drawing on an affordance analysis of the digital platform Open Collective and ethnographic fieldwork with a London-based mutual aid group, this presentation seeks to bring into focus practices that both trouble critical accounts of crowdfunding and its imbrication in the neoliberalisation of the state, and point to the limitations of existing ways of organising and financing collective welfare projects.

Biographies

Dr Rebecca Bramall is Reader in Cultural Politics at University of the Arts London, where she teaches and researches in the field of media, communications and cultural studies. Rebecca’s research focuses on the communicative dimensions of taxation, exploring the cultural frameworks that enable people to make sense of tax, public spending, and their taxpaying identities. From 2022-25, Rebecca is Project Leader and Principal Investigator for Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (ReDigIm), a research and knowledge exchange project investigating meanings and practices of redistribution in Europe. Rebecca is also deputy editor of the journal New Formations and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Dr Jonathan Paylor is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of the Arts London. Jonathan’s background spans the fields of cultural studies and policy studies, and his research interests are centred around the intersection of media and collective life. He is working with Dr Rebecca Bramall on Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitalization, culture and prosocial contribution (ReDigIm).

Categories: CAMRI Seminars

Mar

Tue

Critical Media Theory Reading Group – Political Economy of Music AI @ Copland 1.112 at the University of Westminster's Cavendish Campus

Tickets

Mar 4 @ 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm

Thanks to those of you who came along to the first session of our new reading group in critical media theory, it was a great session.

Our next meeting will be on March 4^th at 3.30pm in Copland 1.112 at the University of Westminster’s Cavendish Campus. If you’re not a Westminster student or faculty member then you’ll need to sign it at reception.

This will be a special session as we’ll be discussing a paper by Prof Eric Drott (University of Texas at Austin) on the political economy of music AI, with Prof. Drott in attendance.

An abstract of Prof. Drott’s draft paper is below and will shared with those who confirm their attendance via email (P.Rekret@westminster.ac.uk).

Four Conditions (and a Contradiction) in the Political Economy of Commercial Music AI

Eric Drott

This paper examines four conditions and a contradiction shaping the recent boom in commercial music AI (and AI more generally). The conditions include the “cheap money” regime pursued by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks following the 2008-9 financial crisis; the long-term secular decline in productivity across the global economy that AI will allegedly remedy; the growing importance that assets, assetization, and rent extraction have assumed as strategies of accumulation; and the post-pandemic reckoning with material constraints, seen in both the tightening of monetary policy and the growing recognition of the intense demands that large AI models make on a number of resources (energy, water, compute, data). The contradiction that haunts commercial music AI stems from the tension between the prerogatives of private ownership and the social character of the training data that fuels machine learning. Such data are social not simply because they embody prior cultural knowledge, or because they are typically the byproduct of digitally-mediated interactions; rather, data are social in a more profound sense, inasmuch as their utility hinges on the patterns they form with other data. Data’s value, in other words, is an emergent quality—or surplus—born of their multiple relationalities. Among other things, this contradiction hints at an alternative economy for music AI: one that sees its dependence on the sociality immanent to music and music data as an incitement for AI’s socialization, with generative and predictive systems not treated as a source of privatized riches, but as an expression of public wealth.

Categories: Reading Group

February – March 2025 Feb – Mar 2025