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[...] The pivotal significance of Tiananmen, I would argue, lay in this: it relieved the burden of debt that Deng had owed to popular support since 1976. He could now proceed with a programme of reform that would pose no challenge to the party’s authority—especially not on the terrain of socialist principles. Tiananmen thus paved the way for China’s integration into the global capitalist system.
By contrast, in putting economic reform first (and last), the Chinese leadership focused on reducing the burdens of the state, breaking without any compunction the moral-political promises of the People’s Republic to its labouring classes and to society as a whole. Well before the inflation of 1988, at a time when Deng was cooperating amicably with Zhao, the central government was already drafting bankruptcy legislation, and schemes to marketize labour and housing, without worrying about popular opinion.
contrasting to the USSR--even after it collapsed, some social welfare programs remained
Faced with continuous difficulties in urban and industrial reform after 1989, the country’s official media spent virtually a whole decade denouncing the ‘iron rice bowl’—secure employment and a steady wage—of workers in state-owned enterprises as an insurmountable obstacle to improvements in productivity. Under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, lifetime employment was wiped out by mass dismissals and limited-term contracts, with no compensating pensions, in one sector after another—manufacturing, energy, construction—leaving only party cadres and government personnel (whose ranks multiplied) untouched. Huge numbers in the urban population lost their jobs and wages, without the state so much as starting to think about—let alone deliver—a minimal safety net of social security for them. Layoffs amounted to more than 20 million in the 1990s. Over thirty years, an entire generation—or two—of China’s industrial working class was made victim to the reform process. For them, the net effect was no better than that of ‘shock therapy’ in Russia.
What of the state-owned enterprises themselves? [...] Theoretically they belonged to the abstract collective of all citizens of the People’s Republic, and the state only ran them on behalf of the people. Nowadays they are known simply as firms owned by the state. Any link to the people, however nominal, has been severed. Many of the resultant SOEs have been sold at a vast discount to their managers or speculators [...]
[...] certain aspects of digital technologies are conducive to social mobilization, and others to suppression of mobilization—which of these tendencies predominates largely depends on the political dynamics in a country. I also wanted to make clear that popular discourse about these technologies was completely disconnected from three realities: that they are operated by private companies interested, above all else, in making money; that slogans like ‘Internet freedom’ have not made old-style foreign policy considerations suddenly disappear (American fascination with them has its roots in the Cold War); and that their utopian appeal cannot be squared with most of the things (cyber-attacks, surveillance, spin) the US government itself was doing online.
This is where we need to be explicit about the normative benchmarks by which we want to assess the situation. If the question is just privacy, then of course open-source is far better. But that doesn’t resolve the issue of whether we want a company like Google that already has access to an enormous reservoir of personal information to continue its expansion and become the default provider of infrastructure—in health, education and everything else—for the twenty-first century. The fact that some of its services are a bit better protected from spying than Apple counterparts doesn’t address that concern. I’m no longer persuaded by the idea that open-source software offers a kind of transnational way of escaping the grip of the American behemoths. Though I would still encourage other countries or governments to start thinking about ways in which they can build their own, less compromised alternatives to them.
Since Snowden, a lot of hackers are especially concerned with government spying. For them, that’s the problem. They’re civil libertarians, and they don’t problematize the market. Many others are concerned with censorship. For them, the freedom to express what they want to say is crucial, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s expressed on corporate platforms. I admire what Snowden did, but he is basically fine with Silicon Valley so long as we eliminate firms that have weak security practices and install far better, tighter supervision at the NSA, with more levels of transparent control and accountability. I find this agenda—and it’s shared by many American liberals—very hard to swallow, as it seems to miss the encroachment of capital into everyday life by means of Silicon Valley, which I think is probably more consequential than the encroachment of the NSA into our civil liberties. [...]
These debates don’t touch on issues of ownership or bigger political questions about the market. [...] The data extracted from us has a giant value that is reflected in the balance sheets of Google, Apple and other companies. Where does this value come from, in a Marxist sense? Who is working for whom when you view an ad? Why should Google or Apple be the default owners? To what extent are we being pushed to monitor, gather and sell this data? How far is this becoming a new frontier in the financialization of everyday life? You can’t address such matters in terms of civil liberties.
cite "the encroachment of capital into everyday life by means of Silicon Valley"
[...] So if you wanted to provide education to students in Africa, you’d be better off doing it through Facebook, because they wouldn’t have to pay for it. You would then end up with a situation where data about what people learn is collected by a private company and used for advertising for the rest of their lives. A relationship previously mediated only in a limited sense by market forces is suddenly captured by a global American corporation, for the sole reason that Facebook became the provider of infrastructure through which people access everything else. But the case to be made here is not just against Facebook; it’s a case against neoliberalism. A lot of the Silicon Valley-bashing that is currently so popular treats the Valley as if it was its own historical force, completely unconnected from everything else. In Europe, many of those attacking Silicon Valley just represent older kinds of capitalism: publishing firms, banks etc.
on Facebook's mobile operator partners in developing countries.
very into the idea that Silicon Valley isn't just the product of parthogenesis
[...] companies now reject any analogy with utilities, since that might open up the possibility of a publicly run, publicly controlled infrastructure.
oshit
‘Big data’ isn’t something unique to the last few years. To understand what’s driving this data collection, you need to forget Internet debates and start focusing on the data banks selling information on the secondary market—companies like Axiom and Epsilon. Who are they selling their data to? To banks, insurance companies, private investigators and so on. There was a debate in the late sixties about the role and potential abuse of data banks in America, which was not all that different from the big data debates today. At stake was whether the US should run national data banks and aggregate all the information collected by federal agencies into one giant database accessible to every single agency and every single university. It was a huge debate, including on a Congressional level. In the end the idea was killed because of privacy concerns. But a lot of scientists and companies made a case that since the data had been collected, it ought to be made accessible to other researchers, because it might help us to cure cancer—exactly the sort of rhetoric you hear now with Big Data. Nowadays the information can be produced far more easily because everything we do is tracked by phone, smart gadget, or computer, and this amplifies its volume. So much is now gathered that you can argue it deserves a new name. But these Internet debates tend to operate with a kind of amnesia, narrating everything in a kind of abstracted history of technology.
[...] Now that ‘the Internet’ is spreading into everything—education, healthcare (with the ‘quantified self’), and all the rest—we’re in danger of ending up with a kind of idiot history, in which everything starts in Silicon Valley, and there are no other forces or causes.
so weird to see this world (i.e., ad/marketing tech) I've been immersed in for the last few years discussed from a Marxist context, which is something I knew pretty much nothing about until recently
[...] Google and Facebook are based on what seem to be natural monopolies. Feeble calls in Europe to weaken or break them up lack any alternative vision, economically, politically, or ecologically.
[...]
The continual demand by local politicians to launch a European Google, and most of the other proposals coming out of Brussels or Berlin, are either misguided or half-baked. [...] Google will remain dominant as long as its challengers do not have the same underlying user data it controls. Better algorithms won’t suffice.
For Europe to remain relevant, it would have to confront the fact that data, and the infrastructure (sensors, mobile phones, and so on) which produce them, are going to be the key to most domains of economic activity. It’s a shame that Google has been allowed to move in and grab all this in exchange for some free services. If Europe were really serious, it would need to establish a different legal regime around data, perhaps ensuring that they cannot be sold at all, and then get smaller enterprises to develop solutions (from search to email) on top of data so protected.