 I'm excited to get to introduce actually the next two presentations, the first by Diego. I'll just say I think, I think Diego is doing such interesting work. And we really first kind of encountered each other as thinkers last year in my network culture seminar and I really started to see Diego just pick up in really interesting ways on intersections of disciplines, you know, sort of on the one hand a little bit being inspired by some STS stuff but thinking through kind of, in other ways kind of classic media studies questions so I'm really excited about this thesis because I think it pulls together several really interesting threads in a really unique way so I hope you enjoy it and I will turn it over to you Diego. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction. Let me share my screen. Can everyone see it. Thank you. Yeah. Well, so this is the, the title of my thesis. And as the title says, it's basically about the intersection of like media and like a little bit of like STS and also probably economic sociology or something like that so I will take you through this journey so please bear with me. So, to begin with, what is the premium miracle so the program miracle as it has been defined by economists is like this period of GDP growth between 2002 and 2012 that it was the largest commodity GDP growth per capita in a century in the country. So, what I'm basically referring to is this, the line of, you can see in this chart, right is like this, like really pronounced growth of the GDP per capita in the country. So, why am, why am integrating this and why am doing this from like a media perspective. There are there are two important facts here and the first one is that some people have been critiquing this idea of like the miracle actually happening. There are different types of critiques, but I will like narrow it down to like they, these critiques take this idea as something that is monolithic and this is like almost hegemonic narrative of we are like growing and everything is going great, but this is not the true but like since this narrative is everywhere we are like practically being dominated by this idea. Of course this has come into question with COVID-19 and the pandemic, but this the, I'm suggesting here that we can notice this before the pandemic, right, we can notice this before this crisis. And, and what I'm basing what I'm taking as a base to argue this is that through the last four or five years we have noticed that there were some features in the last two, in the last two governments. So, what am I doing exactly is kind of like a detailed description of how this economic narrative is basically entangled with politics and these are really two different. These are not two different things that go each one in their way, but these are two different, these are two aspects of the same of the same coin, two faces of the same coin if you want to use that term. And when we noticed that we can notice that the strength of the narrative of a miracle is not that great or is not as solid as it has been argued that it is. And actually, if we take a step back and start to question the strength of the narrative, we can see some cracks and we can see some features between actors that supposedly were on the same side of like arguing that everything is going great and etc. So, and what I am not doing is trying to see the miracle really existed, because I'm not into like fact checking or anything like that. I'm also not trying to say that economics is only like a mask for politics or it's only like an, like, like, like a facade of politics. I'm arguing that economics and politics are entangled and kind of like technical on the social angle, and I'm not also trying to like make an interpretation of this or like I'm building an ideology. So, and this is kind of like what am I arguing about like, of course, if now we are seeing that the pandemic crisis has struck Peru like really, really hard with like the highest excess of the per million or like the largest global economic crash and like with the political and economic instability. Of course, seeing that you can, you can say, of course, this was never, this was never real and you can see people disputing these facts in Peru in media. But what I'm suggesting is that if we go back, we can see that even in media you can see that the narrative of the miracle was never that solid. So, I go back to the context and the origins of the miracle. And I, what I do first in my thesis is to trace back the miracle but I don't, I don't go to the, to the, to the 2002 or like the beginning of the GDP growth, but I go back to the 90s. And that's because it's in the 90s where the free market principles of the permanent economy were installed during the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori, and, and this is, and this is when you can find kind of like the origins of the miracle in like international media making association between like the catastrophic state of the permanent economy coming out of the 80s and these reforms of this free market principles reform, like kind of like making a miraculous recovery of the, of the economic miracle. And I'm concentrating in international media because a lot of the talk in Peru about like the permanent economy being a miracle draws from like external sources saying like, Oh, here, look how people like economists that that appeared in like magazines like the economies or newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, etc. Look at how they see us look how they talk about us. And they see this like a source of legitimacy for what they are arguing. So basically what I do at the beginning is like, how, how do we get from from the 90s from the, from the start of the Alberto Fujimori regime. And like this story of success and, and like kind of like they're this rack to reaches the story as this, this says. So, I will not go through all the, the story because that would take a lot of time, but this this were the findings of my like this exploration of this 22 years of coverage of like the Peruvian miracle in in American media. First of all is like there is a narrative that talks about a subordination of politics to economics and what I mean by this is that when Alberto Fujimori takes power, he is portray as somebody with a lot of like power to like enact certain changes in, in the, in the Peruvian economy and make these free market reforms. And by making these free market reforms, he kind of like installs that even after he leaves is the, these reforms are not then change in the subsequent governments. And even though the subsequent, the subsequent governments were like people that were opposed to Fujimori's government and that's why I talk about like a subordination of politics to economics and like politics can be like changing and everything, but the narrative says that these, all these political changes are subordinated to the economic order. And, and this is what I mean when I talk about like a consensus over a decade like the government of Alberto Fujimori lasted 10 years and over, over these 10 years, there was, it was a consensus was built about what is the correct way of, of managing the economy. And these economic principles got entrenched and and they were not longer like a possible way of, of like going out of these economic principles and and even though when there were, there were political moments of political destabilization. There were moments that were described by this narrative as this is stabilizing for the economy, not like for the, how the population perceive or how the population thought about their own well being but all this like if there were political disruptions if they were disrupted for the economy so there is always like a, like a, like a dominance of what we are like, what we, what these, what the economy is doing for, sorry for what the politics are doing for the economy. So, like being said that then the, the, the next step is the, what theoretical framework I use to approach controversies in media because what I, what I want to do is that, okay, we have this narrative about like how there is this predominance of, of economics over politics. Let's see how that reflects on like actual controversies in, in perium media and because if, like, if one takes this narrative as face value, if you move to meet the media and see controversies about the economy. One will see one should see that, like, there are two clear sides and people are the lead have like a solid argument that they don't make disputes, or they don't have fights between each other, but they have like a coherent discourse about like what is what is right what is wrong and what should be rejected or what should not have a space in, in the economic narrative. So to approach the controversies that I analyze in my thesis, I have like this is a large theoretical work that I use, but I want to focus on two points. The first one is the economy as a socio technical construction. And what one important thing to notice is that when we talk about the economy, we, we mostly talk about GDP. And this is something that has been studied by a lot of people, but I take the approach by Timothy Mitchell that talks about how GDP made possible to actually talk about the economy. Like, it gave me, like, turn it into a discursive object, he argues, like, when we talk about the economy when we talk about the economy growing or the economy decreasing we actually talking about like how GDP, that is this really number that has its audience in like England and the United States in the middle of the, in the interwar and the Second World War period, then is used, how this object then is used to talk about the economy in every other country in the success in the subsequent decades. Right. And by, and by talking about the economy. One introduces the future as a tool of current because we always talks about GDP growing GDP decreasing and GDP being kind of like this tool of common of like, okay, if we, if we take this action so we take these measures, then like the economy is going to be in the future, bad or the future in which it would be better. Right. So this this focus on numbers introduces narratives in in in our way of life about what how we understand they are not just numbers purely rational numbers but they are as I said like they introduce the estimation or how do we project our future is going to be and this is something that Michelle Murphy calls a phantagrasm and like how these quantitative practices are imbued by ethic and how we many times project our fears and and our expectations and into what these numbers tell us about our future for example in the case of GDP. And second point that I want to make is about the relationship between media and and expertise. And there is there are there is a bunch of literature of talking about this but I want to focus on like the role of expertise and numbers and I think we have to understand numbers also as ways of interbeing in the public sphere, not not just like by actual interventions but just as producing numbers that are going, they are going to be public are also ways of producing numbers apart from like of course op-eds and interviews, etc. So, and, and also when experts do actual interventions like in media, etc. These are interventions that are not just a no through but they are made by experts that are given floor by by certain media but in certain places right it's not just, it's not just economic expertise being dominant by itself is like certain economic expertise being dominant in certain media, and this is certain expertise that is very specific so in this process of like total economization of our lives has to be taken with more carefully I argue. So, the methodology or framework that I use for these controversies are basically based in STS and science and sociology of science studies, and I basically, I basically, I think like an agnostic approach to this controversy so I don't like a priority assume that there is a right and a wrong side but I think I want to see how their arguments take traction and how they gain traction and how their arguments are finally, if we can use this word successful for the purposes of the actors that are trying to mobilize them in media, right? And, and by analyzing the arguments that these experts and economists are making, I use, to analyze this I use the framework or a theory known as actor-neighbor theory in which I see how I try to see how these economists enroll allies that and by, and by allies I don't mean like just citing another economist but how do they enroll for example a chart or for example a number. These are not actors, we don't have to understand actors just as human actors but also as known human actors. And, well, and why I try, why I'm doing this, like why I'm like trying to see if, if, if the, if this is in any sense meaningful is because there is, there is kind of like an abundant talk about the economy or the economy or the stories of economic success of stories of economic miracles in economic literature. But in the other hand, studies about how economic miracles are portrayed in non-fiction media are really scanned. And this is, this is something that has been noticed but people doing history of social science and, and, and in their, and they, they themselves recognize that in some cases people doing history of social science tend to like understand really well like academic debates, debates happening in journals for example, or like people in, in certain institutions like, but there is not enough attention to what economics is doing in action and in like, in a wider sense, right, and, and this is something that for example Diego Mata argues that to understand economics and in action we have to study media. And so I don't, I won't go through each of the controversies because that will take too much time. But I would just describe some conclusions and I will take samples from the controversies. The first controversy takes place from 2016 to 2017. And I, in this first controversy I asked how do we, how does media allows political confrontations to take a technical turn. In the second controversy from January, 2018 to March, 2018. My main question is how media separates expertise into some somehow valid expertise and invalid expertise but this valid or invalid nation are not just based on technical and technical notions. And in, in 2019. This is the shortest controversy. I tried to see how controversies actually reach a closure because in the previous two ones that controversies do not reach one in the third one is actually a controversy that happens not between economic experts but kind of like journalists and business, business persons that actually reaches a closure. So to jump to the conclusions and lessons because, as I said, I will not go through each of the controversy that will take too much time. But one of the conclusions that I take after doing this analysis of these controversies is that the role of media in learning these controversies is, in studying these controversies is like huge. And actually this kind of like goes back to the point of made by telemedia that to understand economics in action we have to see how, how moves, how argument economic arguments are being mobilized to the medium. And, and by media I don't mean just kind of like the technical structures but I take this kind of like inspiration. If you want to, if we want to use a word from this, this assignment that media is like technical for it's also associated protocols. And, for example, in the case of protocols, there is kind of like this discretionary, techno political filtering of expertise that I was referring previously, in which is not exercising but media, the materiality of media itself, but like by the actors are that he floor or that allow certain expertise to be or not be in media. Right. So, media does not media as general does not privilege economic expertise or quantitative expertise. Like, in general, it, it, it, it gives preference to certain economic expertise and to certain economic experts, but very specific reasons right. And in the, in the, in the other side of talking about like technological forms. I want to emphasize the importance of the speed of media and like the role of media in this controversy is is really, it couldn't have happened the way it happened, unless it happened in this actual media ecosystem. And I will, I will, I will point, I will use an example to illustrate this. So, for example, in one of the episodes of the of the of one controversy, we can see that what one of one of the minister of economy was using a chart and, and that was trying to portray how deficit was growing from month to month and and that in the following day. The other economist that was the former minister of economy who was being responsible eyes by this deficit growing and was making an argument about how this chart was wrong. And by the moment he was making that argument, one, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the viewers treated at the chart that was used by the previous by the, in the previous intervention but by the other economists, saying like, Oh, you should say that this chart is wrong. Right. And, and the, and the former, the former minister of economy that was being interviewed live. He said like, Oh, okay, like, leave that chart there. I will explain why that chart is wrong. Right. And, and he proceed to explain what this chart is wrong. But I, with this example I want to illustrate that this kind of like exchange between markets and charts and like artifacts could not have happened if there wasn't like people watching this 24 hours news channel that has like a Twitter account that receives the input from people viewing the, the discussions and with all this kind of like accelerated media, media ecosystem. Actually, I argue in my thesis that brings numbers and these facts to real to give them enough realness. And what I use, I use this concept that I take from your law that by, by making certain certain appearances and gaining certain speed these numbers and facts actually gain enough realness to, to, to, and to be used as some as a justification for certain economic policies. So for the next lesson and and this is kind of like an important one. It's like I'm trying to conceive the miracle as a sociotechnical narrative. And what I'm trying to say with this is that this are not lies or like kind of like just something that we have, right, that just like gains a speed and gains realness to circulation in media. But what I'm trying to argue with this is that there, these are actually like entities that require technical knowledge, technical work, and that are created with the involvement of an assemblage of like persons and techniques and materiality and that they are portrayed and they circulate through actual technological networks. And this is, this is for this is all to say that did I conceive them as sociotechnical non fictions at something that is not like real as the reflection of what is out there but they are neither fiction as like something that is not real like just meet up. Actually, these are something in between in the transition in the transition from one state to another, to put it in a certain way. And by saying this is that one important consequence of saying this is that if Mitchell was saying that introducing these sociotechnical non fictions to government is actually introducing the future as government. I mean, actually, it actually also introduces, I argue, effective states as a school of government, because our, our, our hopes are our, our, our dreams if you will, and our, our fears about like why it's going to happen with the economy in the future are also affected but by this kind of technical no fictions that are, that are constructed by this larger processes of circulation of, of information. And, and here's another example of this is, and it may look like really can be looted but the these are typical material that happened to appear in this type of me in this type of publications of business. That are actually projections and there's so there is a lot of talk about projections and estimations. And, but these estimations and projections are not just made following a pure calculation, but they are actually, they are actually bets and they are actually kind of like hopes of also of the, of the people making them and, and, and I'm not like just making this up and this is actually what these people said like people say like my projection is this because I'm betting that this is going to happen because I'm betting that this is going to happen, or because I am hoping that this is not going to, to, to take place, right and, for example, in one of the projections in the top was was made by hoping that in 2017 there was not going to be floods in Peru. And what happened there were the largest floods in like three decades. So, and, and also like there was a projection later in another moment there was a prediction of. A prediction of what is going to, of what GDP growth is going to be, if the president is not in pitch, what happened then the president was in pitch, and then the next president, two years later was also in pitch. So, and so all this, all this, all this is to say, oh well, and then there is also this polls that also always measure the optimism of the people kind of like the mood of the economy of the economy. I don't want to call it that way, that are not actually, like, I'm not actually based in something real, like in the sense of like something that is other bodies actually the fears or the concerns that people have, right. So, but these are actually taking into account by other people to make projections. So what I'm trying to say with this is that we should be careful of like assigning a technique adjust a technical power to, to the, to these actors that use these and we should, we should be aware that they are, they are kind of like using what I call like a techno social Greek lash of like something that involves calculations but also that involves fears, concerns, etc. And the third conclusion lesson is that this talks about like assigning power to certain actors and, and as observed through the lens of media, these economic experts appear to be in this array like they are disputing each other they are fighting each other every time and they are not like a monolithic collective or monolithic consensus of like people having the very same narrative about what is happening right, even if they are supposedly just facts and supposedly just technical details. And so, so I'm trying to say with this is like, as researchers we should have to be, we should acknowledge how, how the, how we conceive the objects of our interrogation and a priori assuming certain certain like strengths or say a certain level of like power in people or in actors. It's not only kind of like from a political standpoint of course deficit deficits, but, but it also kind of like demonstrates that perhaps we are not being like we are not intervening this object or these narratives like in a more detailed way, right, so and this is something that has been argued like for, for, for decades is not something that I just made up and, and one way to escape this is as column Michelle column of my tour argue is that we should probably situate ourselves as researchers, not like, and just in the level of macro social of like just like ideologies and narratives, and like institutions, and but neither at the level of just actors, because, like, institutions actually exist and they have consequences right, but we should be should be aware of like how this processes from jet from from of movements of like from macro social to micro social have. And, and this is this is, for example, why this is the last example, concrete example that I have. And this happened in one of the in one of the controversies that I analyzed. And the minister of economy in that time in 2016, kind of like spread some rumors about his predecessor. And when he was confronted, he instead of like, instead of like, going outside and like I don't know, giving him a formal communication. He, he made a Facebook status in his personal Facebook account. And then this was a screenshot it and then was posted in the official Twitter account of the ministry of of economy. And then there was like this large Twitter threat, just like posting threats from the personal profile from this person, like, say, apologizing or it was a very bad apology. But by doing this kind of like, all the, all the kind of like power of like this institution, the minister of economy that was conceived as this very powerful entity that like put like really well defined economic rules and economic order in the country, sort of like falls apart. And you can see that actually is a really precarious entity in the sense of that this this mystical veil of like power is not that real and it's actually kind of like in the hands of people that are willing to to use it for personal reasons, right. So in this sense, the people that were being accused of the rumors point about like his predecessors installing people by just not following technical criteria but by by political orders following political orders, kind of like reverse and the people that that were making the accusations that we're using rumors actually were kind of like more in the political side, rather than the technical side that actually in the past fall with kind of like this mystique of like of the narrative of the economic miracle. And as a final, this is my final lesson conclusion. And this is relates to the previous one is about the power of the economy and talking about the economy as something that hasn't power for explanatory force kind of like includes certain actions and forces that take place between actors. And, and, and here I'm quoting Bruno natural by saying that maybe it's not that we should kind of like use power as an explanatory force, but we should probably try to explain how power is supposed to be like by following these processes of like how actors invoke the power of like institutions, or how they invoke the power of certain forces and by making by tracing these movements of like from macro social to what they call translation is what how we should probably give a better explanation than just than just like turning to like power or like ideology or or certain other objects that are usually found in social science research. And this is actually kind of like also goes in hand with Murphy, Michelle's Murphy explanation that Michelle's Murphy argument that the economy is not that what should do what should the economy is that which must be explained is not which that's this thing. And, and that's all that's that's all I have. Thank you. And let's open it for questions. Yeah, William. Yeah, so Diego thanks that's, that's exciting and I mean I your last slide is like totally on the money. How economists have been able to sort of stand outside as a as a as a priesthood and exempt themselves from like everything that's happening in social science is beyond my comprehension, and they do it. And I guess it's because when you think about what the value of a Bitcoin is or what the value of your retirement portfolio in stocks is it's quantified belief, it's nothing more or less than quantified belief, you know to the second or third futures are nothing but that kind of hope and belief. So, so just to say a big, a big yes, I put a note in there that you were talking about the in the 90s the shift from a kind of the way in which economic discourse over road or a political, there's a political shift but the same kind of economy, economic logic, the truth of numbers prevails, and made a note that said yeah there seems to be a shift from from words the power of words to the power of numbers. And just to think through this techno social ensemble. It's also like the 90s when the internet becomes kind of actualize I mean it's around before obviously has a deep history but but really kind of pervasive. And with that spread. My guess and this is pure conjecture my guess is that, you know, the multinational finance firms, the notions of expertise really goes global fast, and that discourse of numbers and that disaggregation of a kind of priesthood of from the, the political engagement with, you know, whatever whatever passes his truth in their world. That's, I think is writ large across the planet, we see the same thing happening in the US in the switch from bush to to Clinton, where Clinton basically maintains shift and social policies for sure but the economic stance I mean Clinton could have been a Republican in a way. We see the same thing happening in Britain with Blair, when he follows up with john, the, the, the thatcher right john major thing where keeps that that you know we can. I look back I would call it neoliberalism, but in fact, maybe it's about a kind of expertise professionalization, a separation at that level. That's enabled by global flows of a very particular kind of knowledge, the ability to model this stuff on a fly because you can kick up the graphics right away. You know you're trading with kinds of information you never would have had in real time. Let's say in the 1980s. So I'm just wondering if that technology that particular to be very literal about it. If that kind of technology, the internet is a factor here. Yeah, I will, I will say that it has a lot of a lot of utility. So, I will say that the kind of like spreading or like putting notions in circulation wouldn't have happened without the power of like this economic network. And for example, there is a lot of like influence from like people doing this reforms in in certain places from. I believe universities, etc. Right and but this this in the past or probably in 80s 90s had to be like growth by certain actors specific actors right. So now what we have is like this, these numbers are these rankings actually rankings on ocean are also important here, just going straight from from from from from the north to the south like as soon as states, as soon as they are, they are out like, you name it is like the ranking of like which countries the more has the more free of the freer economy and as soon as you come out in North and you have it in Peru and consistently right. So I would say that, of course, that there is, as we become more connected in like in the world, literally in the world, the power of these numbers and these rankings and these notions, it's, because it's growing ever, it's ever growing at least that's that's my take and that's also I think something that we can actually take from my pieces. I don't make, I don't make that exact argument, because I don't make, I don't study the circulation. It's precisely in the internet, but I will say that as this networks become like ever growing in the the probably the probability is that these notions and these numbers become ever more powerful. Other questions to you. Okay, I, it's, I really love the ambition of this work Diego sorry the dog decided to come here. I really love the ambition of this work and trying to sort of bring together media studies with STS and so I have maybe a reductionistic question but I'm curious like, after going through this whole process. What do we gain by like maybe thinking in terms of the non human, these things as non humans, rather than just media representations like, is there something about that litorian STS language that you find you would sort of distill as particularly generative, or would you actually not use the non human language for for some of, for some of this stuff. I think one of the ways I tried to use the notion of the non human actors is that it's not only. It's not only other economies having authority outside that are brought into the descriptions, but actually numbers themselves and charts and all this like non human devices actually are being into into circulation and by, by, I don't, I don't want to say that by themselves because because they circulate through actually social technical assemblages is that there is this non human entities, gain power and gain traction. So, I will say that that's, that's the most kind of like how I approach to this, to this topic from that, from that perspective is that we probably should take into account the power of this social technical entities if we want to name it that way. As having, as having kind of like this as coming into reality, not necessarily by, because they are named by this really famous economies, specific economies in, in, like, in the over North country, but because they circulate through some networks. These networks are also an assemblages of like, not only human persons but also kind of like larger, larger networks of like enterprises and companies, and also, and also humans right so I will say that having this, this, this notion, is really present or having really into account. Actually, let us see that it this is, this is bigger than, or this is something else that just a discussion between just one person versus another person but this is like one person invoking a network of allies that probably are humans and probably are not. I'm other other actor invoking another network of allies kind of like going against each other. All right, thank you.