Fabio Mattioli
I am a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences and Associated Researcher at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics. My research analyzes how society is shaped by new economic and technological innovations. In most of my work, I intersect analyses of political and economic trends with the views and practices of my participants, which I gather by participating in their daily life—a kind of ethnographic approach I call organic political economy.
My forthcoming book (Dark Finance, Stanford 2020) describes how financial expansion affected democracy during the global financial crisis, focusing on the case study of North Macedonia. Since then, I have started to expand my work to other spaces of innovation, focusing on social, political, and economic context that frames startups, social media algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
1) Innovation and Digital Economies. Increasingly, our societies are asked to innovate by creating “innovation ecosystems,” i.e. networks of programs that support startup companies. But is this form of innovation socially sustainable? I am leading a team that is conducting an ethnographic study of startup accelerators in Melbourne, focusing on how entrepreneurs navigate the demands of financial markets.
2) The Production of Fake News. The cycle of polarizing news that we consume during social during major political events highlights the tremendous impact of social media algorithms. But how do humans and algorithms collaborate to produce newsfeeds? What economic factors shape them? Working with a group of Macedonian “trolls,” this research maps the cultural ideas and economic relations that make social media algorithm amplify polarizing news.
3) The Human Context of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the next frontier of innovation. But can humans and AI coexist? I am developing several ethnographic projects to understand how to improve the integration between AI systems and humans. One utilizes a machine learning tool to stress-test autopiloting systems based on airplane pilots’ handling preferences. The other studies how airplane pilots interact with non-cockpit technologies in their daily life to understand how to minimize the cognitive challenges caused by unexpected autopilots failures.
My forthcoming book (Dark Finance, Stanford 2020) describes how financial expansion affected democracy during the global financial crisis, focusing on the case study of North Macedonia. Since then, I have started to expand my work to other spaces of innovation, focusing on social, political, and economic context that frames startups, social media algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
1) Innovation and Digital Economies. Increasingly, our societies are asked to innovate by creating “innovation ecosystems,” i.e. networks of programs that support startup companies. But is this form of innovation socially sustainable? I am leading a team that is conducting an ethnographic study of startup accelerators in Melbourne, focusing on how entrepreneurs navigate the demands of financial markets.
2) The Production of Fake News. The cycle of polarizing news that we consume during social during major political events highlights the tremendous impact of social media algorithms. But how do humans and algorithms collaborate to produce newsfeeds? What economic factors shape them? Working with a group of Macedonian “trolls,” this research maps the cultural ideas and economic relations that make social media algorithm amplify polarizing news.
3) The Human Context of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the next frontier of innovation. But can humans and AI coexist? I am developing several ethnographic projects to understand how to improve the integration between AI systems and humans. One utilizes a machine learning tool to stress-test autopiloting systems based on airplane pilots’ handling preferences. The other studies how airplane pilots interact with non-cockpit technologies in their daily life to understand how to minimize the cognitive challenges caused by unexpected autopilots failures.
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Political Economy of Finance by Fabio Mattioli
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30690 MATTIOLI20
See also International Distributor discount link: https://combined-academic.myshopify.com/products/dark-finance CSV2020DF
ABSTRACT: Dark Finance offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations.
The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Mattioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse.
REVIEWS:
"As financialization and populism reshape the world, Fabio Mattioli's rich and timely analysis traces the intersection of finance-fueled construction and authoritarian rule in Macedonia. It critically highlights the illiberal politics that drive financialization and urban development, while carefully attending to the everyday lives of construction workers who are building Skopje's new skyline."
—Sohini Kar, London School of Economics and Political Science
"Dark Finance offers fresh insight on contemporary populism in Europe and fine-grained descriptions of how illiquidity functions. This is the most compelling, persuasive, and chilling analysis of North Macedonia's place in the global economy, and the cynical exploitation of a people by their elected government, that I have read in the past decade."
—Keith Brown, Arizona State University
"Dark Finance takes the anthropology of financialization to the next level. From gender relations and exploitation to the volatile politics of popular desires and authoritarianism in North Macedonia in the years after the global financial crisis, Fabio Mattioli's holistic and relational take on the contradictions of global finance in the postsocialist periphery is pathbreaking."
—Don Kalb, University of Bergen and Utrecht University
After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in‐kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non‐monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in‐kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an oppressive set of relations whereby companies are forced to provide monetary credit to the regime by accepting payment in goods that lose value over time. The article describes the conditions that shape financialization at the periphery of Europe, and identifies in value conversions a crucial variable for understanding the interconnection between politics and finance.
Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE secured 51 of the 120 total seats, two more than Zaev’s SDSM. Just as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was voted into office despite (or because of) his threats to jail his political adversary, his payment of $25 million to settle a fraud lawsuit, and his bragging about nonconsensual sex on tape, so Gruevski was able to win a plurality of votes despite being mired in scandals, protests, and charges of fraud. Trump’s election has sent shock waves around the world, triggering a chaotic search for answers to how he was elected, what his policies will be, and how the opposition can regain its footing. Short of psychic powers, the best way to analyze the possibilities of a Trump presidency is through an examination of comparable leaders. And Macedonia’s Gruevski may prove an instructive example.
Innovation, Speculation, and Startups by Fabio Mattioli
Urban Anthropology by Fabio Mattioli
Papers by Fabio Mattioli
BOOK REVIEWS by Fabio Mattioli
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30690 MATTIOLI20
See also International Distributor discount link: https://combined-academic.myshopify.com/products/dark-finance CSV2020DF
ABSTRACT: Dark Finance offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations.
The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Mattioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse.
REVIEWS:
"As financialization and populism reshape the world, Fabio Mattioli's rich and timely analysis traces the intersection of finance-fueled construction and authoritarian rule in Macedonia. It critically highlights the illiberal politics that drive financialization and urban development, while carefully attending to the everyday lives of construction workers who are building Skopje's new skyline."
—Sohini Kar, London School of Economics and Political Science
"Dark Finance offers fresh insight on contemporary populism in Europe and fine-grained descriptions of how illiquidity functions. This is the most compelling, persuasive, and chilling analysis of North Macedonia's place in the global economy, and the cynical exploitation of a people by their elected government, that I have read in the past decade."
—Keith Brown, Arizona State University
"Dark Finance takes the anthropology of financialization to the next level. From gender relations and exploitation to the volatile politics of popular desires and authoritarianism in North Macedonia in the years after the global financial crisis, Fabio Mattioli's holistic and relational take on the contradictions of global finance in the postsocialist periphery is pathbreaking."
—Don Kalb, University of Bergen and Utrecht University
After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in‐kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non‐monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in‐kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an oppressive set of relations whereby companies are forced to provide monetary credit to the regime by accepting payment in goods that lose value over time. The article describes the conditions that shape financialization at the periphery of Europe, and identifies in value conversions a crucial variable for understanding the interconnection between politics and finance.
Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE secured 51 of the 120 total seats, two more than Zaev’s SDSM. Just as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump was voted into office despite (or because of) his threats to jail his political adversary, his payment of $25 million to settle a fraud lawsuit, and his bragging about nonconsensual sex on tape, so Gruevski was able to win a plurality of votes despite being mired in scandals, protests, and charges of fraud. Trump’s election has sent shock waves around the world, triggering a chaotic search for answers to how he was elected, what his policies will be, and how the opposition can regain its footing. Short of psychic powers, the best way to analyze the possibilities of a Trump presidency is through an examination of comparable leaders. And Macedonia’s Gruevski may prove an instructive example.