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[...] 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.
[...] The tech industry owes a huge debt to the financial sector. Wolfe is eager to depict Silicon Valley as the new New York, but much of the money that funds venture-capital firms comes from investors who made their fortunes on Wall Street. (The tech industry also owes a great debt to “Main Street”: Private-equity funds regularly include allocations from public pension plans and universities.) [...]
[...] Our hometowns become a kind of permission and hideaway, a place where we don’t have to be ourselves, where our actions don’t count and we get to be briefly less visible than we are in the adult homes we’ve made for ourselves elsewhere, the places where we expect ourselves to take action and achieve things and move upward through each day. For many of us, hometowns allow the luxury of a brief period of stasis, a rare few days of doing nothing.
[...] Institutions are habituated ways of thinking and acting, structured within formal organizations or informal culture patterns (Berger and Luckann 1966). As mediators of social interaction, institutions are biased or coercive toward certain processes and outcomes. They tune consciousness--what we attend to or ignore--toward certain emphases, and they afford certain interests access to levers of power [...]
could be useful, idk
Having the manufacture of commodity audiences as an organizing principle for a system of communication presupposes and reproduces institutional arrangements that empower industrial capitalists, advertisers, market researchers, and audience surveillance firms and impose constraints over the range of values and ideas conveyed, lionized, or dismissed [...]
simple yet elegant
[...] audiences, commodified as ratings, do not exist objectively in media use, but rather emerge from a tension between ways of defining valuable audiences and the formal procedures for manufacturing them as standardized commodities [...] the commodity audience is not naturally occurring, like a tree; it is a construction, like a toothpick, shaped by business exigencies and an unequal political economy. Indeed, the very concept of the audience "was hatched largely out of the marketing departments of companies with a stake in selling products through the media (Mosco and Kaye 2000, 32). [...]
I like the phrase "business exigencies"
[...] The work of the audience for advertisers and media organizations is more concrete now than in Smythe's day (Napoli 2010), and the production of commodity audiences further precedes the free lunch in the sphere of digital publishing, as automated advertising exchanges and programmatic buying practices divert subsidies from journalism and function almost exclusively to satisfy advertiser demand for particular demographics [...]
potential citation
Dan Schiller (1999a) historicises the corporate seizure of computing networks that form the infrastructure for a global market sytem. "At stake in this unprecedented transition to neoliberal or market-driven telecommunications," Schiller argues, "are nothing less than the production base and control structure of an emerging digital capitalism" [...]
just nice language
[...] The work which audience members perform for the advertisers to whom they have been sold is to learn to buy particular "brands" of consumer goods, and to spend their income accordingly. In short, they work to create the demand for advertised goods which is the purpose of the monopoly capitalist advertisers. While doing this, audience members are simultaneously reproducing their own labour power. [...] As the Chinese emphasized during the Cultural Revolution, if people are spending their time catering to their individual interests and sensitivities, they cannot be using the same time to also overthrow capitalist influence and to build socialism.