Da Vinci Medal Address: Material Political Economy

Abstract

On the occasion of the award of the author's da Vinci Medal in 2022, this article sketches a perspective, material political economy, employed by the author, explaining it by drawing on Marc Bloch's classic account of the dispute in European feudalism between milling grain on watermills or windmills controlled by feudal superiors, who could exact fees, and common people's use of hand mills. It considers the material political economy aspects of two modern technologies. The first is automated high-frequency trading in finance, where there are typically conflicts with incumbents and material efforts to favor "market-making" over "aggressive" algorithms. The second is the automated auctioning of digital display advertising opportunities, showing tension between two forms of these auctions' material organization: centralized auctioning via Google's systems and decentralized "header bidding."