I found it interesting how it discusses how technology is making it increasingly easy for scams to permiate throughout our lives. There is a quote that discusses "copies without originals." In the case of AESes, we noticed a few things that allowed for their claims to be PECO employees to be debunked (old, poorly laminated IDs, stained clothing etc.)
I wonder if this is done on purpose, to lure those in who would ignore those things.
I think that focussing on trust as a sort of "infrastructure" is something interesting for our work that can be derived from this article. The authors point out that frauds/fakes/scams have, at least to some degree, always been a problem, and are therefore not what makes our current "post-truth" era significant. Instead, they argue "it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the fraudulent and the trustworthy, between fake and genuine" (426).
On the notion that "trust-practices" are equally, and perhaps even more important than frauds, I am in general agreement. However, I have some minor qualms with the frame that "frauds/fakes/scams" are sort of a constant across space and time. Which, this isn't a generous interpretation of their article; the authors are more nuanced than this. But, in general, their critical lens seems to be towards the idea that "faruds" have been either "more" or "less" present in certain societies or at certain points of history, instead of troubling the category of "fraud" itself as universal or transcendent category of human action. That is, the way in which the article is written (i.e. citing odysseus as "the first of many trickster figures in the Global North," treating these categories as unproblematically transposable across cultures) seems to propose that there is something constant about "frauds/fakes/scams" that transcends the conditions that make these categories meaningful... I think it's more useful to think about how this single category does not stand up to (historical/cross-cultural) scrutiny, how no too instances or strategies of frauds are actually the same, in their motivation, implementation, or (and especially) their consequence.
By that, I mean that it's not only practices of trustworthyness and practices of fraud that are of concern here, but also their development within precise (yet evershifting) relations of power that open up their potential, and in/through which they take their effects. And I think that our current society, the current "diagram" of power relations has opened up an unprecedented amount of interstices for specific kinds of fraudulent/dishonest practices and actors to thrive. There is something unique to our era, where power relations are shifting from productino to anti-production, from control to paralysis, from articulation to disarticulation and dispersion, and this has coincided a certain tactic/strategy of "fraud/dishonesty" that both reflects and reproduces this strategy of power which is particularly "toxic"! And I think that this is kind of lost in the article, but it's so important to our dataset.
See more here: https://www.centerforethnography.org/content/static-toxic-knowledge-poli...
"Preoccupation with defrauding and faking is not new. Rather, there is a new anxiety about the increasing difficulty of identifying trustworthy, genuine interactions" --> Because vulnerable communities have been subject to unjust treatment historically by actors in power, skepticism and distrust of AES is a response to this historic treatment. This, coupled with experiences of neighbors and families that have been misinformed about the product that they are signing up for through AES', perpetuates this anxeity of identifying trustworthy and genuine interactions, which has the potential to deter communities from engaging with renewable energy systems moving forward.
"which portrays trust as emerging out of transparent procedures" --> Procedures for identifying communities and the development of marketing strategies employed by AES are unclear, but assumed to be profit motivated and least concerned with impacts on LMI consumers. Trust could begin to built if there were resources available that explain what these procedures are.
"At the same time, it is questionable whether their interactions are insightful because they are, as Ogino puts it, ‘not bound by conventional morality’. Fraudsters depend on convincingly performing this ‘conventional morality’ and (partially) acting according to it. Their performance of ‘conventional morality’ merits closer investigation because it provides social scientists with a unique vantage point to learn about establishing and maintaining trust relations or performing roles." --> Is role performance something that sales persons at AES' are trained for in their position (in all sales positions)? Sales persons at AES' are given a product to sell, and it's likely that some know more about the product and how it relates to and impacts vulernable households more than others. If a sales person is knowing of how it can negatively impact a vulnerable household, then role performance of conventional morality is at play. Alternatively in other situations I'm sure there is ignorance both of these impacts on a vulnerable household and also of a household's economic and social postioning so that role performance of conventional morality isn't at play.