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What is sold is advertisement, thus the paying customers are the advertisers, and what is being sold are the users themselves, not their content.
This means that the source of value that becomes Facebook's profits is the work done by the workers in the global fields and factories, who are producing the commodities being advertised to Facebook's audience.
The profits of the media monopolies are formed after surplus value has already been extracted. Their users are not exploited, but subjected, captured as an audience, and instrumentalized to extract surplus profits from other sectors of the ownership class.
Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own no vehicles or real-estate, capture profits from the operators of the cars and apartments for which they provide the marketplace.
Neither of these business models is very new. [...]
Rather than subvert capitalism, "sharing" platforms have been captured by it.
excellent take
The time is right for platform co-ops [...] As Silicon Valley's supremacy falters, platform co-ops purveying new tech are well-poised to offer a better kind of web, one that works more equitably for the people that create and use it because it promotes social justice rather than heralds dystopia [...]
given devaluations, benefit squeezes etc
But the apps are not only platforms for consumption. They are quickly becoming entry points for work, gateways to people's livelihoods. In this sense, whether or not platform creators like it or realize it, they are engaging in another kind of design--socioeconomic design. This involves the design of how people structure their work, earnings, and daily schedules. [...]
[...] a chief ambition of fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value, which is now feeding speculative capital, and re-invest it in the development of open, ethical productive communities. [...] Platform cooperatives must not merely replicate false scarcities and unnecessary waste; they must become open.
after all, closed business models are based on "artificial scarcity to extract rents" (p164), either legally or technologically
[...] technology is not the barrier to making a platform; if anything, the advances in technology have made platform-building easier. The barrier is finance. How else but with mountains of money, could a few unelected men [...] command hundreds of programmers and thousands of marketers and lawyers to build a platform they alone own and which millions depend on? It is the platform of finance, and the intensely unequal control of that platform in our world today, upon which so many other unequal platforms have been built.
very good point
[...] While coding may sound like a solution to current market woes, in truth, it will only delay the eventual degradation of such digital labor. When everyone can code, those jobs too will go the way of other forms of work--outsourced, undervalued, underpaid, or automated. However, a digital skills curriculum anchored in labor theory and labor history--a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of collectivities, organizing, and worker agency--has the potential not only to generate a new app or platform, but to reconfigure how digital labor is brought into being and how we imagine continuing to live in and through digital platforms, networks, and infrastructures.
I feel vindicated by this, after what I said in my Liam Byrne piece
The blockchain is what we call a "trustless" architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust [...] proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. [...] we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.
This assumption [...] betrays a worrying politics--or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. [...] The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.
Roger seemed eager to charm, but I was not charmed. I felt spotlighted by his attentiveness, his anticipation of what I might want—another helping of fava bean salad, more water, an extra napkin when I dropped a chunk of braised pork on my skirt. I would say something self-deprecating, and he’d regard me steadily and assure me that I was a wonderful person, deserving of all I wanted from life, which wasn’t what I’d been asking for. Roger didn’t know me and wasn’t a credible judge of my worth—unless his position was that all people had worth, which made him no judge at all. When I shifted the subject to him, he supplied a backstory that seemed pre-written.
love this
In the past I had approached dating with the typical fervor of an addict. I’d worked independently to construct the scaffolding of a relationship, then waited for the man I was seeing to step into the blank space I’d retained in his form. Inevitably, he would either balk at the role I’d assigned him, or accede to my formidable will, at which point I’d realize I didn’t really want him as my boyfriend anyway. With Sam, I resolved to do nothing. I would root myself in the present moment, accepting the man before me without judgment. I allowed Sam to set the pace of our dating, waiting for him to initiate contact and propose when we should hang out next.
On our third date, I invited him back to my apartment after dinner, and we had sex. Sam handled my body thoughtfully, like a new pair of shoes he would break in and wear often. It was not mind-blowing, but early sex rarely was. It wasn’t horrifyingly bad, and in this I glimpsed limitless potential. He was careful with his weight and with where he placed his knees. I liked how, as he hovered his body above mine, he cupped the side of my face in his hand.
“It’s so nice here,” I whispered. Sam didn’t know it, but this was my final attempt. I was giving him one last chance to reveal some soft part of himself he’d kept hidden.
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