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But the driving assumption was that (a) contrary to both SBTC and its neighbors and Polanyi, technology was very much a function of institutions; (b) cutting edge innovation did not have to follow one narrow “most-efficiency creating” path, but that there was meaningful choice in how innovation progressed; and (c) contrary to the primary explanations of inequality as a function of institutions (deunionization; erosion of minimum wage, etc.), technology had a significant independent role in structuring social relations in the economy, such that winning battles over the dominant designs of the technology could be independently more powerful at structuring social relations than winning political battles or institutional changes that directly regulate those social relations. In its most ambitious version, it could mean that winning political battles over free software or open source hardware could make people better able to live independent lives than winning political battles over labor or employment law. The past decade has led me to be more skeptical of this stronger claim on behalf of technology [...]
"technology could be independently more powerful at structuring social relations than winning political battles or institutional changes that directly regulate those social relations" is a good thing to cite (possibly in reference to techno-utopians)
In the meantime, the most intensive efforts to promote and experiment with practical post-capitalist alternatives are coming from those on the left who are intensely focused on technology. Efforts that came out of the Free Culture movement were primary elements of Podemos, and have combined with other social activists to form the Barcelona en Comu party at the municipal level—perhaps the most comprehensive government-backed effort to create a social and solidarity economy that is distinctly different from capitalism as we know it. [...] Harnessing that intensive experimentation and practical utopianism of online communities, and avoiding the twin errors of treating technology as an exogenous force or as strictly dominated by institutional factors is the biggest payoff of the effort to integrate technology and law into the field of political economy. Only if we understand how institutions and ideology shape and interact with the economy, polity, and technology can we develop such a coherent program; and only such a coherent program can be broad and systematic enough to change the course of the economy that neoliberals have built for us in the past forty years.
There are numerous other important direct and indirect subsidies that the government provides commercial media [...] First, advertising is condoned and encouraged by government policies and regulations. Allowing businesses to write off their advertising expenditures as a business expense on their tax returns not only costs the government tens of billions annually in revenues, but also encourages ever greater commercialism in our culture. by performing only lax regulation of advertising content, even as permitted by the law, the floodgates to commercialism are kept wide open. [...]
Second, and by far the most important for entertainment media, is copyright. Media products have always been a fundamental problem for capitalist economics, going back to the advent of the book. Without direct government intervention, the marketplace would barely exist as we have come to know it. The problem is that a person’s use of information, unlike tangible goods and services, does not prohibit others from using it. (In economic terms, it is nonrivalrous and nonexclusionary.) [...]
allowing (encouraging) advertising and supporting restrictive copyright regimes
The tremendous promise of the digital revolution has been compromised by capitalist appropriation and development of the Internet. In the great conflict between openness and a closed system of corporate profitability, the forces of capital have triumphed whenever an issue mattered to them. The Internet has been subjected to the capital-accumulation process, which has a clear logic of its own, inimical to much of the democratic potential of digital communication. What seemed to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets. The extent of this capitalist colonization of the Internet has not been as obtrusive as it might have been, because the vast reaches of cyberspace have continued to permit noncommercial utilization, although increasingly on the margins.
In this chapter I assess how capitalism conquered the Internet—an institution that was singularly noncommercial, even anticommercial, for its first two decades—in the 1990s and what the consequences have been subsequently. by capitalism I mean the really existing capitalism of large corporations, monopolistic markets, advertising, public relations, and close, collegial, important, necessary, and often corrupt relationships with the government and the military [...]
Political economy—an understanding of capitalism and its relationship to democracy—can provide a rudder as we make sense of the Internet. [...]
[...] the profitability of the digital giants is centered on establishing proprietary systems for which they control access and the terms of the relationship [...]
A key development that accompanies and enables proprietary systems is cloud computing, wherein each of the giants stores vast amounts of material on their battalions of servers. users do not need to have massive computer memories to store their own material; they can—indeed, must—access everything they have from a small device just by gaining access to the cloud. There are still “little guys” who offer hosting services, and that is a constructive activity. At the other end of the spectrum, though, the digital monopolists, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, have all invested to build enormous private clouds. Cloud computing is a brilliant way to make the Internet more efficient and less expensive to users and society, but whether having the preponderance of cloud capacity in the hands of a few giant firms is a wise policy is another matter altogether. The clouds can be a treasure chest full of valuable data for the giants to exploit.
In combination, these factors demonstrate how absurd are the claims by
giants like Microsoft and Google that “competition is a click away” and that
they are in mortal fear for their very survival if someone were to develop a
better algorithm in her garage. Amazon, too, is more than an algorithm
and a stack of patents. It has sixty-nine data and fulfillment centers in the
united States, seventeen of which were built since 2011, with plans for more
to come. It has a nonunion workforce [...]
Our theoretical point of departure lies in the tradition of autonomist Marxism, so called because of its emphasis on workers’ power to challenge and break their subordination to capital (Cleaver 1979; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Eden 2012). In this tradition analysis starts with class struggles, ‘their content, their direction, how they develop and how they circulate’ (Zerowork Collective 1975).
It was therefore a surprise when in 2000 one of the leading operaismo theorists, Antonio Negri, with co-author Michael Hardt, proposed a dramatic reinterpretation of social conflict in a digital era. Their Empire (2000) suggested that a fully global capital now confronted not so much a working class as a ‘multitude’ immersed in ‘immaterial labour’ involving the communicational and affective dimensions of networked production. Attuned to the excitement of the World Wide Web, open source software, and music piracy, and echoing the earlier work of Donna Haraway (1985), who had shaken feminist techno-pessimism by insisting on radical ‘cyborg’ potentials, Hardt and Negri, rather than emphasizing capital’s cybernetic domination, declared the possibility of its digital subversion and supersession.