School of Social and Political Science

Description

Controversies in the Data Society 2026 series - Session 5

This session will include: 

• A presentation by Professor Liz McFall on The big shed economy: Hyperscale data centre investment (or what happens when the world’s dullest industry gets very exciting)
• A presentation by Dr Lana Swartz on Financial Wellness and the fight against the online scam economy

About this session

Professor McFall will discuss: In the three years since ChatGPT launched, private credit investors, enmeshed with insurers and reinsurers as subsidiaries, partners, affiliates, competitors and clients, have been clambering over each other in a rush for deals to provide big tech hyperscalers with the billions needed to finance the new generation of water-and-energy -guzzling data centres required for generative AI. Given how exposed insurers and reinsurers are to climate risk, in both their core and investment business, and given how financially dominant the tech sector is, the logic of this is not immediately obvious. It makes sense only when put in the context of the arcane contemporary distribution of financial and environmental risk beyond more traditionally structured private insurance companies, practices and instruments to the shadow ‘non-banking financial intermediaries’ (NBFI) of private credit.

About the speakers

Professor Liz McFall is Personal Chair in the Sociology of Markets and Director of EFI Data Civics Observatory. She is a sociologist of markets with a particular interest in dull or difficult market propositions. In the past, this has involved research on the historical practices of advertising and marketing, particularly of doorstep financial products targeted at the poor, especially industrial life insurance. More recently, she has worked on big data-driven innovations in insurance and insurtech, cities and civic planning, and especially the connections between the two. She has published several articles in journals including Economy and Society; Sociological Review; Science, Technology and Human Value; and Big Data and Society. Books include Markets and the Arts of Attachment (2017), co-edited with Franck Cochoy and Joe Deville, and the monographs Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending (2014), and Advertising: a cultural economy (2004).

Lana Swartz is an associate professor of Media Studies and Shannon Mid-career. She studies social and cultural aspects of money to understand the future of financial technology, livelihoods, financial literacy, and consumer protection in the digital economy. She is currently writing a book on scams, which will be about all of that, as well her upbringing on a boat in Miami. She is also working on a major project focused on youth financial wellness in the digital economy, funded by TYDE. 

Her book, New Money: How Payment Became Social Media was released by Yale University Press in 2020. It was named #12 on a list of greatest tech books of all time by The Verge. Her co-edited book Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff was published by MIT Press in April 2017. In 2023, she released a major research research report on the warning signs and ways forward for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which was conducted in collaboration with the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. Her co-authored 2013 article on bitcoin was the first socio-cultural analysis of cryptocurrency. Her 2018 follow-up article has also been influential among policymakers and academics working to understand the significance of new money forms. She has also published on topics ranging from the Diners Club Card to ICO scams to blockchain dreams. 

Lana is visiting the University of Edinburgh for Spring 2026