by
Jacobin
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The Brazilian delegate to the committee summarized the group’s position: “It does not seem justifiable ... that space activities ... should evolve in a climate of total laissez-faire, which would conceal under the cloak of rationality new ways for an abusive exercise of power by those who exert control over technology.” Despite opposition from both the Soviet Union and the United States, the final draft of this new outer space agreement included a version of the “common heritage of mankind” doctrine.
the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, 1973
ofc the US did not agree
However, discussions of the peddling of digital selves by gray-market data companies and Silicon Valley giants are usually separate from conversations about increasingly exploitative working conditions or the burgeoning market for precarious, degrading work. But these are not separate phenomena — they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism.
[...]
But the degradation of work is not a given. Increasing exploitation and immiseration are tendencies, not fixed outcomes ordained by the rules of capitalism. They are the result of battles lost by workers and won by capitalists. The ubiquitous use of smartphones to extend the workday and expand the market for shit jobs is a result of the weakness of both workers and working-class movements. The compulsion and willingness of increasing numbers of workers to engage with their employers through their phones normalizes and justifies the use of smartphones as a tool of exploitation, and solidifies constant availability as a requirement for earning a wage.
[...]
The smartphone is central to this process. It provides a physical mechanism to allow constant access to our digital selves and opens a nearly uncharted frontier of commodification.
Individuals don’t get paid in wages for creating and maintaining digital selves — they get paid in the satisfaction of participating in rituals, and the control afforded them over their social interactions. They get paid in the feeling of floating in the vast virtual connectivity, even as their hand machines mediate social bonds, helping people imagine togetherness while keeping them separate as distinct productive entities. The voluntary nature of these new rituals does not make them any less important, or less profitable for capital.
"they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism" similar to what I say in my tech dev for the many piece
The destructive effects examined above are not necessary features of technological change; they are necessary features of technological change in capitalism. Overcoming them requires overcoming capitalism, even if we only have a provisional sense of what that might mean.
The pernicious tendencies associated with technological change in capitalist workplaces are rooted in a structure where managers are agents of the owners of the firm’s assets, with a fiduciary duty to further their private interests. But a society’s means of production are not goods for personal consumption, like a toothbrush. The material reproduction of society is an inherently public matter, as the technological development of capitalism itself, resting on public funds, confirms. Capital markets, where private claims to productive resources are bought and sold, treat public power as if it were just another item for personal use. They can, and should, be totally done away with.
basically my dissertation lol
[...] I'm all on board for Paul Mason's and Kathi Weeks' visions for a post-capitalist, post-work future [...] the chances for this scenario becoming a reality over the next two years are not high. The question then becomes what we can do right now, with and for the most precarious among the contingent third of the American workforce [...]
[...] why does a village in Denmark [...] have to generate profits for some fifty people in Silicon Valley if they can create their own version of Airbnb? Instead of trying to be the next Silicon Valley, generating profits for a few, these cities could mandate the use of a cooperative platform, which could maximise use value for the community.
[...] Ordinary people have already made the Internet their own with their hacks, their memes, their protests, and their dreams. The cost of forfeiting control over these things is too high, and too mysterious. We need to expect better, to demand more. It's time that we own and govern what is ours already.
[...] Those funders then run the show. Satisfied with nothing less than 100x returns on their money, they push the founders to "pivot" the business toward outlandish, "home run" outcomes. The object of the game is not to create a successful business, but to "exit" through an IPO or acquisition before the business fails. In spite of their abuse of the environmentalist's lexicon, they do not create sustainable "ecosystems" at all, but scorched-earth monopolies through which no one--no one-- gets to create or exchange value.
That doesn't really matter. All they have to do is extract enough value from people and places in order to sell themselves to someone else--or leverage their monopoly in one market [...] to another one [...]
Looked at from a digital perspective, these companies are really just software, optimized to extract as much value as they can from the real world, and convert it into share price for their investors. They take real, working, circulating currency, and turn it into frozen, static, useless capital. [...]
this is so eerily similar to what I wrote for my gig economy piece lol (and what I feel in general)
on silicon valley funding
[...] the big companies no longer actually make their products. That can be contracted out to a competing mass of capitalist suppliers. What the vectoralist firm owns and controls is brands, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, or it controls the networks, clouds, and infrastructures, along which such information might move.
The rise of the so-called sharing economy is really just a logical extension of this contracting out of actual material services and labor by firms that control unequal flow of information. [...]
Silicon Valley is redesigning the corporation itself. These gig companies are little more than a website and an app, with a small number of executives and regular employees who oversee an army of freelancers, temps, and contractors. In the vision of the techno gurus and their Ayn Rand libertarianism, CEOs want a labor force they can turn off and on like the latest Netflix movie.
I like my EC2 analogy better but I still haven't found a good outlet for it :(
Third, we need a legal framework for a new regime of accumulation. This takes vision; it's today's equivalent of what a social democratic or socialist economic policy used to be. It means bringing state back in, not only as neutral gatekeepers of economic fair play but as a volonté générale that gives the economy a social purpose and a base in democratic values. There is nothing neutral about the actual economy. It is a complicated, systematized effort to reconcile productivity with the privilege of powerful elites, dominant social groups, and global coalitions. [...] This might mean public investment, public co-ownership and strong incentives for social enterprises.
Some of this might sound slightly awkward to us, since we haven't discussed it for a long time. But we have to have this conversation if we want to implement cooperativism. [...]
this is good