Publications

2025

Duke, Shaul A. (2025) "Hollow Infrastructures: The Case of Facebook and Israeli Civil Society", Telematics and Informatics 98, doi:10.1016/j.tele.2025.102246. Abstract▼          Recent scholarship has shown that digital infrastructures most often have a very slow demise and linger on for years after they start deteriorating. Moreover, this perplexing endurance comes despite apparent acts of erosion in the value they offer to groups of users. How can we understand the long tail of digital infrastructures in decline? How do digital infrastructures manage to retain groups of users despite deterioration in the utility that the platform provides them? This paper offers the term ‘hollow infrastructures’ as a partial explanation to these questions, and will suggest that certain groups of users and third parties are complicit in keeping a façade of functionality, and thus unintentionally confuse those who encounter these declining platforms. Yet the end result is a lack of efficiency and a drain on resources for those using these hollow infrastructures. This will be done by analyzing the case study of Facebook and Israeli civil society organizations. This analysis is based on a qualitative research project that included content analysis of website and Facebook pages, and 31 interviews.

2024

Frille, Armin, Jann Arends, Elisabetta M. Abenavoli, Shaul A. Duke, Daria Ferrara, Stefan Gruenert, Marcus Hacker, Swen Hesse, Lukas Hofmann, Sune H. Holm, Thomas B. Lund, Michael Rullmann, Peter Sandøe, Roberto Sciagrà, Lalith Kumar Shiyam Sundar, Anke Tönjes, Hubert Wirtz, Josef Yu, Osama Sabri, and Thomas Beyer (2024) "“Metabolic fingerprints” of cachexia in lung cancer patients", European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 21(3): 281-286, doi: 10.1007/s00259-024-06689-8.

2023

Duke, Shaul A. (2023) "AI and the Industrialization of Surveillance", Surveillance & Society 21(3): 281-286, doi: 10.24908/ss.v21i3.16086. Abstract▼          The shift to novel forms of artificial intelligence (such as machine learning) has also marked the shift to industrial-scale surveillance practices, due to these AI tools being extremely data-hungry. This piece examines the linkage between the two phenomena and charts the ethical consequences. It calls for a much more measured way of weighing the benefits of the development of AI tools, against their cost in the form of proliferation of both the means and products of surveillance.

2022

Duke, Shaul A. (2022) "Deny, Dismiss and Downplay: Developers’ Attitudes Towards Risk and Their Role in Risk Creation in the Field of Healthcare-AI", Ethics and Information Technology 24(1), doi: 10.1007/s10676-022-09627-0. Abstract▼          Developers are often the engine behind the creation and implementation of new technologies, including in the artificial intelligence surge that is currently underway. In many cases these new technologies introduce significant risk to affected stakeholders; risks that can be reduced and mitigated by such a dominant party. This is fully recognized by texts that analyze risks in the current AI transformation, which suggest voluntary adoption of ethical standards and imposing ethical standards via regulation and oversight as tools to compel developers to reduce such risks. However, what these texts usually sidestep is the question of how aware developers are to the risks they are creating with these new AI technologies, and what their attitudes are towards such risks. This paper asks to rectify this gap in research, by analyzing an ongoing case study. Focusing on six Israeli AI startups in the field of radiology, I carry out a content analysis of their online material in order to examine these companies’ stances towards the potential threat their automated tools pose to patient safety and to the work-standing of healthcare professionals. Results show that these developers are aware of the risks their AI products pose, but tend to deny their own role in the technological transformation and dismiss or downplay the risks to stakeholders. I conclude by tying these findings back to current risk-reduction recommendations with regards to advanced AI technologies, and suggest which of them hold more promise in light of developers’ attitudes.

Duke, Shaul A. (2022) "Review of Working with AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration. Davenport, T. H. & Miller, S. M., 2022, MIT Press", Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies 32(1), doi: 10.55613/jeet.v32i1.108.

Duke, Shaul A. (2022) "The Dynamics of Imposed Transparency and Its Role in Deep Social Conflicts", in Trust and Transparency in an Age of Surveillance edited by L. A. Viola and P. Laidler. London: Routledge, 65-84, doi: 10.4324/9781003120827-6. Abstract▼          The term transparency lives a double life. On the one hand it has the clean-cut image – of a universal standard of proper forms of operation in a free society – that seems to be accepted by most; yet on the other hand it has a rougher image of a power move that tries to expose its target to scrutiny and undermine some of its actions. My task in this paper is to differentiate between the two and to analyse the dynamics of the much less studied ‘imposed transparency’ strand, which comes into play in cases in which a pre-existing social conflict is present, which in turn dictates a low-level of trust between the relevant parties to begin with. In such situation, when the parties do not trust each other, transparency is almost always forced by one party on the other (via surveillance) and almost never willingly adopted by either party. Among other things I am interested in: the reasons why individuals/organizations turn to imposed transparency as a political strategy, the ways imposed transparency is carried out and the identity of those who tend to use it, the ways the targets of imposed transparency react to it, the degree these targets tend to accept imposed transparency or resist and evade it, the dynamics that mutual attempts of imposed transparency create, the role that power asymmetries and social domination have in such attempts, and the effectiveness of forcing transparency in order to achieve one’s goal.

Duke, Shaul A. (2022) "Review of Klimburg-Witjes, Poechhacker, and Bowker’s Sensing In/Securities: Sensors as Transnational Security Infrastructures", Surveillance & Society 20(1): 103-105, doi: 10.24908/ss.v20i1.15205.

2021

Duke, Shaul A. (2021) "Nontargets: Understanding the Apathy Towards the Israeli Security Agency’s COVID19 Surveillance", Surveillance & Society 19(1): 114-129, doi: 10.24908/ss.v19i1.14271. Abstract▼          This article tackles one of the latest—but nonetheless baffling—displays of public apathy towards surveillance: that of much of the Israeli public towards the decision to recruit the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) to do COVID-19 contact tracing during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The case of a secretive state agency being authorized to do surveillance on its citizens for a strictly non-security-related matter seems to realize many of the dangers that surveillance/privacy scholars warn about with regards to surveillance expansion, function creep, and the creation of a surveillance state. I contribute to existing literature about apathy towards surveillance and the privacy paradox by offering the term “nontargets” as an explanation. This term suggests that, alongside social groups that are likely to be targeted by a given surveillance application, there are certain recognizable nontargets that most likely will not bear the brunt of the surveillance, at least not in the short- and medium-term, and thus do not fear it. In the case at hand, which is examined using a qualitative context-bound study, I suggest that Jewish-Israelis are such a nontarget group with regards to this novel Shin Bet surveillance, which explains a significant part of their apathy towards it.

Duke, Shaul A. (2021) "Review of Trottier, Daniel, Gabdulhakov, Rashid and Huang, Qian [Eds.]. 2020. Introducing Vigilant Audiences Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.", Surveillance & Society 19(1): 130-131, doi: 10.24908/ss.v19i1.14477.

2019

Duke, Shaul A. (2019) "Database-Driven Empowering Surveillance: Definition and Assessment of Effectiveness", Surveillance & Society 17(3/4): 499-516, doi: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.10877. Abstract▼          This article offers a definition and explores the dynamics of database-driven empowering surveillance. That is, it focuses on surveillance from below that is directed at powerful institutions or groups for the benefit of the marginalized, using a database as its main facilitator. By examining six Israeli NGOs working for the protection of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I am able to break down the database-driven empowering surveillance process of amassing and disseminating information, to identify its mechanism of action, and to highlight its limiting and enabling factors. This scrutiny in turn helps shed light on the capacity of NGOs to effectively monitor powerful institutions: to surveil from below in spaces with pervasive top-down surveillance; to surveil in territories under the control of the surveillance subjects; to impact policy on polarized issues; and to enforce human rights. Empowering surveillance emerges from this article as a process that requires those carrying it out to maintain a delicate balance between using a forceful mechanism against those monitored, and being highly dependent on third parties with coercive power – often from the same organizations being monitored – to exact the desired deterring effect.

2018

Duke, Shaul A. (2018) "Classical Sociology Meets Technology: Doing Independent Large-Scope Research", Current Sociology 66(7): 977-994, doi: 10.1177/0011392117702428. Abstract▼          During his short-lived but highly productive career, C. Wright Mills put forth a vision for how sociology should be done. Two central directives can be gleaned from this vision: to tackle macro social theory issues by doing large-scope research; to achieve scholastic independence by doing non-administrative research. One might ask if Mills is sending scholars on a mission impossible. Analysing these two concepts in terms of both their merits and applicability, the present article indeed identifies a conflict between them, highlighted by what emerges as Mills' own failure to realize this vision. After deeming these directives worthy goals, the article seeks to determine whether technological advances in the social sciences have the potential to allow both directives to be fulfilled at once. What is shown is that while the technology is ripe to enable autonomous big studies, its implementation by institutional and individual agents severely impedes the vision's realization.

2017

Duke, Shaul A. (2017) The Stratifying Trade Union: The Case of Ethnic and Gender Inequality in Palestine, 1920-1948, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke. ISBN: 978-3-319-65099-9. Preview. Abstract▼          This book examines a basic assumption behind most of the critical, progressive thinking of our times: that trade unions are necessarily tools for solidarity and are integral to a more equal and just society. Shaul A. Duke assesses the trade union's potential to promote equality in ethnically and racially diverse societies by offering an in-depth look into how unions operate; how power flows between union levels; where inequality originates; and the role of union members in union dynamics. By analyzing the trade union's effects on working-class inequality in Palestine during 1920-1948, this book shifts the conventional emphasis on worker-employer relations to that of worker-worker relations. It offers a conceptualization of how strong union members directed union policy from below in order to eliminate competition, often by excluding marginalized groups. The comparison of the union experiences of Palestinian-Arabs, Jewish-Yemeni immigrants, and Jewish women offers a fresh look into the labor history of Palestine and its social stratification.

2016

Duke, Shaul A. (2016) "Repressive-Responsiveness and Its Applicability to Ethnic Majoritarian Rule: A Historical Case Study", Critical Sociology 42(2): 249-267 doi: 10.1177/0896920514526622. Abstract▼          Contemporary sociology seems to have extreme reservations about the significance of vote-motivated responsiveness – ordinary people’s reputed influence on policy in democratic settings – both in general and especially when it comes to the masses’ role in endorsing policies with repressive outcomes. Those texts that do acknowledge the masses’ role in policymaking deal almost exclusively with the struggle of the lower-classes for emancipation/equalization, and rarely delve into broad social groups’ contribution to repressive policies. The repressive-responsiveness hypothesis suggested here is used to reexamine the case of internal Jewish ethnic politics in Mandatory Palestine. I argue that ethnic politics of this period can only be thoroughly understood once responsiveness to the majoritarian Ashkenazi workers’ interests is incorporated, thus suggesting that the use of democratic procedures was central to Mizrahi marginalization in that period.