Donald MacKenzie

Donald MacKenzie, a sociologist of science and technology, is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets was published by Princeton in 2021.

Playing​ Candy Crush Saga on your phone involves moving brightly coloured sweets around to the sound of cheerful music. Get three or more identical sweets into a line, and they gently explode and disappear. Your score ticks up, and a cascade of further sweets refills the screen. If all goes well, you’ll soon complete a level. A warm, disembodied, male voice offers encouragement:...

Short Cuts: A Puff of Carbon Dioxide

Donald MacKenzie, 19 January 2023

Dozens,​ hundreds, perhaps even thousands of online ads flash before your eyes every day, so many that you probably don’t even notice most of them. Generating the electricity to get just one ad to appear on your screen can produce a puff of carbon dioxide sufficiently large that, if it were cigarette smoke, you would be able to see it. Showing a single digital ad to a single user...

Blink, Bid, Buy

Donald MacKenzie, 12 May 2022

Click​ on a link to an article on a news website. If you have a fast internet connection, you’ll see the article almost immediately, but the slots for adverts will usually remain empty for another second or two. The ads which then appear aren’t generally chosen in advance. Instead, a near instantaneous, automated auction of each slot goes on behind the scenes to determine which ad you will be shown. Your phone or laptop may itself be gathering bids for the auction. Sometimes, an enigmatic pattern or grey rectangle will appear instead of an ad. What goes on during those few seconds is vital to the economics of journalism and is the subject of sharp, subterranean conflict among news publishers, the big online platforms (especially Google), and independent providers of ‘AdTech’, the technology of digital advertising. Sales of print newspapers have been falling for years, and revenues from online subscriptions alone are generally insufficient to support large-scale news reporting. So advertising income matters.

Cookies, Pixels and Fingerprints

Donald MacKenzie, 1 April 2021

Data protection measures and policies designed to enhance competition are often implicitly at odds. It isn’t so very painful for a big corporation to implement a data protection regime that requires it to get its users’ permission for what it does with their data, because its data transfers will often be entirely internal; such a corporation may even welcome rules that stop it sharing data with other companies.

Pick a nonce and try a hash: On Bitcoin

Donald MacKenzie, 18 April 2019

Every time​ a bitcoin ‘miner’ is successful they create for themselves 12.5 new bitcoins, currently worth around $60,000. If they don’t succeed, they can have another go roughly ten minutes later – all day, every day. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that despite the sharp fall in bitcoin’s dollar price in 2018 there is still a lot of mining going on. You...

Hereditary Genius

A.W.F. Edwards, 6 August 1981

We are all prisoners of our backgrounds as well as slaves to our genes, and no field of science is riper for sociological investigation based on this premise than the development of biometry, and...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences