by
Lee McGuigan
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[...] the personal data economy, as a site for capital investment and accumulation, amplifies myths about the emancipatory and/or empowering nature of digital prosumption (e.g., Google, Facebook, and Apple).
citing a 2012 WEF report called "Rethinking Personal Data" (saying it's a key economic resource)
nothing really new but possibly worth citing (and the description of it as a "site" is intriguing)
The audience commodity is not a material thing, but an abstraction that gains a reality in the commercial organization of media systems. It is an abstraction produced by the logic of acceleration inherent in capitalism's sphere of circulation. Following economic historian Karl Polanyi (2001), the audience commodity might be considered an "essential element of industry" and a central "organizing principle" of communication media (76). Just as land, labor and money are "obviously not commodities" in an "empirical sense" (76), the audience commodity is a fictitious commodity that serves a logistical and acceleratory function in reproducing capital both generally and specifically. [...] Mirroring the sale of labor as "labor power" in the sphere of production, the abstraction of the audience commodity allows the sale of "audience power" in the sphere of circulation.
the "acceleratory function" bit is fascinating. need to think more about what that means and how that concept could be translated into other domains
In the cut-throat competition for the scarcest of scarce resources--the attention of would-be consumers--the suppliers of would-be consumer goods, including purveyors of information, desperately search for the scrap of the consumers' time still lying fallow, for the tiniest gaps between moments of consumption which could still be stuffed with more information
great quote. p40 of Consuming Life
[...] By promising people that it is possible to buy their way out of trouble with purchasable solutions to personal and social problems, the animating ideology of consumerism cancels the collective responsibilities traditionally embedded in the identities of the worker and the citizen. Understanding how this commercial enclosure of everyday activity and imagination operates through the promotion of commodities is an essential starting point for any effort to retrieve a conception of citizenship that speaks to the internal complexities of contemporary societies and the shared challenges that transcend national borders.
not at all relevant to diss but quite nice on individual vs collective responsibility
[...] More generally, post-Fordist capitalism and the neoliberal policies shaping it reflect and have generated a more competitive world economy in which various fractions of organized labor have been gutted. [...]
just good phrasing
When Google makes money, Stanford makes money. Like most research universities, it holds patents for inventions conceived on campus; the university has brought in more than $300 million in royalties from Google’s PageRank tool, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin patented at the engineering school in 1996. Down the street at the business school, change lives posters hang from lampposts outside buildings named for prominent hedge-fund managers and finance executives. Stanford would seem to have a financial incentive to encourage students to join the biggest tech companies, investment banks, and management consulting firms. A Stanford spokesman said via email, “We want our alumni to find satisfaction and success—however they may define that—regardless of the path they choose when they graduate."
As graduation approached, Niu and her colleagues found themselves gravitating toward for-profit companies. [...] At Microsoft, Chopra is focused on using technology to address poverty. Murata told me, “If we can get people at big tech companies—including within branches that are not social-good-related—to become more thoughtful about how their work impacts society, then that’s a tremendous net-positive impact for the industry.” And it’s hard to fault students for prioritizing lucrative career paths, especially given the fact that the median monthly rent in the Bay Area is over $1,500.
[...] Ultimately, she hopes to use her technical expertise to solve a social problem. For now, she’ll make a living.
accurate (if incomplete) on the structural factors
[...] In 2012, new start-ups were flush with money and the tech sphere was overwhelmed by ardent media coverage; the verb disrupt was elbowing its way into vernacular prominence and had not yet become a cliché. Facebook’s IPO was not only record-setting but a flag in the ground, and the West Coast seemed a hopeful counternarrative in an otherwise flailing economy. Stories about Silicon Valley were imbued with a certain awe that, today, is starting to fade.
Since the genre’s takeoff in the late 1990s, during the first dot-com boom, writing about the tech industry has traditionally fallen into a few limited camps: buzzy and breathless blog posts pegged to product announcements, suspiciously redolent of press releases; technophobic and scolding accounts heralding the downfall of society via smartphone; dry business reporting; and lifestyle coverage zeroing in on the trappings, trends, and celebrities of the tech scene. In different ways, each neglects to examine the industry’s cultural clout and political economy. This tendency is shifting, as the line between “tech company” and “regular company” continues to blur (even Walmart has an innovation lab in the Bay Area). Founders and their publicists would have you believe that this is a world of pioneers and utopians, cowboy coders and hero programmers. But as tech becomes more pervasive, coverage that unquestioningly echoes the mythologizing impulse is falling out of fashion.
[...] Portraying Silicon Valley’s powerful as “uber-nerds” who struck it rich is as reductive and unhelpful as referring to technology that integrates personal payment information and location tracking as “little buttons.” The effect is not only to protect them behind the shield of presumed harmlessness, but also to exempt them from the scrutiny that their economic and political power should invite.
useful for my tech hubris piece
If technology belongs to the people only insofar as the people are consumers, we beneficiaries had better believe that luminaries and pioneers did something so outrageously, so individually innovative that the concentration of capital at the top is deserved. When founders pitch their companies, or inscribe their origin stories into the annals of TechCrunch, they neglect to mention some of the most important variables of success: luck, timing, connections, and those who set the foundation for them. The industry isn’t terribly in touch with its own history. It clings tight to a faith in meritocracy: This is a spaceship, and we built it by ourselves.